A good rule of thumb for the long offseason stretch: if ESPN dispatches sideline princess Erin Andrews, it counts as ratings bait a sport. And one area girl could probably teach Michael Beasley a thing or two about performing under pressure.
13-year-old homeschooler Serena Skye Laine-Lobsinger of West Palm Beach made it as far as the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night, presumably because her parents named her Serena Skye Laine-Lobsinger, so she's been practicing since birth. Far exceeding her goal of getting just one word right on national television, and from a record prelims pool of 293 kids from more than two dozen countries, Serena made it to 10th place -- where she was finally felled by "conchyliated" (obtained from a mollusk, and don't even pretend you knew that).
A favorite of Bee liveblogger Dan Steinberg of the venerable D.C. Sports Bog, the wise-cracking Serena rocked sparkly Chuck Taylors and at least four different colors of nail polish. Sort of the Dennis Rodman of the spelling bee set, if you will. The hardest word she had all day? When Steinberg asked if she could spell a typical wail from her favorite musical genre, "screamo."
There's even the Shaq equivalent: after displaying some flair by whipping out his glasses mid-spell, tiny Kennyi Kwaku Aouad confessed, with a little swagger, "I was trying to get the crowd into it. I'm a speller first, then an entertainer."
And that's why the Bee gets so much crossover love from sports fans: it's got all the makings of a big game, minus only athleticism. It's as tense as the Magic-Cavs series, and as full of dull pauses as televised baseball. It has the sweat, toil, and pressure of a Super Bowl (stocked with sugared-up 12-year-olds). Chris McKendry is reporting live updates on SportsCenter as if million-dollar contracts are at stake. And the competitors are as assortedly entertaining as the 8 personalities of Clinton Portis.
Not to mention all the heroic moments. Remember LeBron James' buzzer beater from last week, or Curt Schilling's bloody sock? Clutch, to be sure. But we'd like to see them receive a word, faint dead away, and then pop up and spell it correctly.
Sports
Now that's game.
Janie Campbell once mispelled "rock" in the regional bee because she spaced out and forgot what word she'd been spelling. Her work has appeared in irreverent sports sites around the Internet.
