There’s a good read on the Tacoma News Tribune site about former Washington State University football player Junior Tupuola, who enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 46 where he serves as a chaplain in Iraq.

Tupuola came to WSU as a freshman in 1980. He’s led an interesting life since then capped so far by joining the Army in late 2008 at age 46.

Listening to radio and television personality Tony Kornheiser is my guilty pleasure. I’m not one of his slathering minions who bow and scrape and attack anyone who dares say a word against him. But I do listen weekdays to his Washington, D.C.-based radio show and to his ESPN TV show “Pardon the Interruption,” both by podcast a day late. I’ve been listening to his various radio shows since he did a national show on ESPN radio years ago.

ESPN slapped Kornheiser with a two-week suspension from their airwaves (and thus, from PTI) for daring, on his morning radio show, to criticize what SportsCenter anchor Hannah Storm looked like.

That he says things like this surprises no one who listens to him regularly. He’s not a nice man. He’s critical and obnoxious and, by his own admission on radio, has quite a temper when he’s angry. (He was filled with remorse one morning not long ago as he recounted throwing a tray in anger in his home.)

In the studio where he does his radio show, there’s a TV or TVs tuned to the NBC affiliate or to ESPN. Often someone will catch his eye on the screen and he’ll go into a rant describing how ridiculous the person looks. He makes particularly savage comments about people who are overweight, ripping into any football coach or former player or television personality or just regular joe who isn’t fit and trim. (I often wonder what friends and co-hosts like Joe Barber, Tracee Hamilton and Charles Barkley think when he goes on these anti-fat screeds while they’re right there either in studio or on the phone. None of those folks is small.)

Tony usually has the fourth hour of the “Today Show” on and regularly savagely rips into anchor Hoda Kotb for continuing to wear sleeveless outfits on air throughout winter. But Thursday, the TV was tuned to ESPN, Hannah Storm was on, wearing an outfit that looked ridiculous, and Tony cut loose.

ESPN didn’t care what he said about Kotb (or any of the others), but since Storm works at ESPN, them were fightin’ words. They suspended him from appearing on PTI for two weeks.

ESPN is being ridiculous here. The company released a written statement that said, in part, ” ‘Hurtful and personal comments such as these are not acceptable and have significant consequences,’ said John Skipper, ESPN’s vice president for content.”

Really? He’s long been ripping people with “hurtful and personal comments such as these” daily on his radio show but only when he hits Storm (and to a lesser extent ESPN superstar Chris Berman), does it become an offense worthy of suspension?

Kornheiser is a jerk. Everyone knows it. (I did say listening to him is my guilty pleasure. I probably shouldn’t, but I do.)

But ESPN does itself no favors reacting like they did. Get over it.

Here’s Tiger Woods’ 14-minute statement. I think five minutes would have been plenty, considering how dry and rehearsed the speech was.

What do you think?

I wondered at the wisdom of planning a Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I never thought of it as a particularly wintry place. I grew up in the Puget Sound area and I assumed the climate in Vancouver was a lot the same: drizzly in February and not exactly a winter mecca.

This clever column (the first line is a treasure) by Tracee Hamilton in the Washington Post today points up some of the disorganization and poor decisions made by the organizers, including awarding the games to Vancouver in the first place. She notes, “… Whistler has long had a dicey reputation. World Cup events scheduled there were canceled for three consecutive years because of snow and fog.”

But at least Hamilton is there in Vancouver where, I assume, she can see a lot of the competition. Pity we in the Pacific Time Zone (you know, the same one Vancouver is in) having to deal with NBC’s ridiculous, careful spoon-feeding of taped television coverage. In the early evening, we know athletes are competing but we can’t watch it live. That’s for the East Coast, dontcha know.

We in the West have to wait until 8 p.m. to even begin getting coverage and then it’s chopped up into teensy bits (a couple of lugers here, a snowboard cross there and maybe a couple of figure skaters thrown in for good measure, all broken up by the sight of Bob Costas grinning from his easy chair back in “the studio.”) and portioned out to us in easy-to-digest measures which drag on until midnight. None of it’s exciting in the least because all the competitions have actually been decided much earlier. By the time NBC decided to show me the semifinals of the women’s snowboard cross, I had known for hours that Lindsey Jacobellis fell once again and was out of the medals.

Ho-hum.

Washington Post sports reporter and columnist John Feinstein has a column in Sunday’s Post about former Washington State University men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett and how things are going for him so far in his first season coaching the University of Virginia Cavaliers. Read it here.

Here’s a bit from Feinstein’s column:

“I knew there hadn’t been a lot of recent success, but I also knew the tradition,” Bennett said. “I’m well aware of what the ACC is about and what kind of a challenge it is to get to the top of this league on a consistent basis. But I think Virginia’s a special place. If we succeed, we have a chance to prove there are places where you can combine quality education with quality basketball. There are other places like that, I know that, and they’re the ones that are about the right things in college basketball. I loved Washington State. But this was a challenge I thought I had to take a shot at.”