Motivation

Brian Price, once a wrecking ball on UCLA's defensive line, has beaten long odds to return to the NFL after two off-season surgeries aimed at keeping his hamstrings attached to his pelvis, rather than breaking loose and coiling down the backs of his thighs. For Price, who will start at defensive tackle Sunday for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his excruciating recovery was a 10-step process. Meaning just two months ago, he could run only 10 steps. "You have these doubts in your head at times," said Price, a second-round pick of the Buccaneers in 2010 who, because of his congenitally malformed pelvis, spent the last half of his rookie season on injured reserve.

A suspect has been detained in the fatal shooting of a Metro bus driver Sunday morning in West Hollywood, authorities said. Shortly after 9 a.m. the 51-year old bus driver on Route 105 was leaving an MTA layover area near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and West Knoll Drive when the shooting occurred, said MTA spokesman Rick Jager. The driver was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and died at 9:30 a.m. The name of the driver, a five-year veteran of the agency, has not been released.

Leave it to science to take all the fun out of something as cosmically pure as love. Theories about love's purpose range from the biologically practical to the biologically complicated. Anthropologists have said it helps ensure reproduction of the species; attachment theorists maintain it's a byproduct of our relationship with our childhood caregivers. And now researchers are exploring what happens physiologically as a romantic relationship progresses. The more we understand it, they say, the better our chances of making love last and of harnessing its potential to improve our emotional and physical well-being.

Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?" The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" he had just bought from a used-book store.

Anyone seen actor Jonah Hill lately? We did a double-take at the newsstand the other day when we spied the current issue of New York magazine featuring Brad Pitt and some other good-looking guy. Upon closer inspection, said guy was actually Hill, minus about a million pounds. The former chubster has slimmed down considerably. He allegedly did it the old-fashioned way: diet and exercise. He follows in the footsteps of funny former male fatties such as Seth Rogan, Horatio Sanz and George Lopez, who have all noticeably trimmed their waistlines.

On Sunday, more than 24,000 people will run the 26.2 miles of the L.A. Marathon from Dodger Stadium to Santa Monica — a good chunk of them first-timers. Without knowing quite what they were getting into, they've trained for weeks and pushed their bodies to the limit. Their reasons are as varied as L.A.'s neighborhoods. Some have had the race on their bucket list; others will run in remembrance of a loved one, as a weight-loss regimen or to fulfill a bet. Does the inspiration matter?

When I was 16 and struggling with a vicious eating disorder in a hospital inpatient program, different patients had different reasons for nursing themselves back to health. Unfortunately, most anorexics don't use health itself as a motivator: The reasons ranged from going back to college or to please a boyfriend or family member. But my own personal incentive to get well was inspired by my longtime desire to have children one day. After severely weakening my body and inflicting amenorrhea on it through my best attempts to starve myself to skeletal proportions, I knew that I would need to get healthy myself before I began thinking about having a healthy child.

As the president of the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ruth Ryon for the very fine article (Dec. 1) on the apartment community infamously known as "The Jungle." This article has had a provocative impact on the community, and has served as a source of motivation to many who now want to get involved. Again, Ruth, thank you for your very fair and well-balanced reporting, and hopefully your efforts in cleaning up "The Jungle" will serve to make you proud as well.

"If I kick my dog (from the front or the back), he will move. And when I want him to move again what must I do? I must kick him again," psychologist Frederick Herzberg wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 1968. But that kind of management produces movement, not motivation, he said. Daniel Pink's new book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," published by Riverhead, contains no mention of Herzberg, and that rings an alarm bell. Not that it has any shortage of references to psychological and other academic research.

A raise that's hard to justify," Opinion, Jan. 4 How can Scott Baker conclude that judges making far less than their private practice peers are nonetheless provably just as qualified? What evidence proves that lower-paid judges have the same legal quality as higher-paid judges? As judicial salaries fail to keep pace with private attorney salaries, there is an obvious financial motivation for more successful attorneys to avoid judicial service. The baseball umpire analogy is unhelpful.

The Lakers-Oklahoma City series was already going to be rollicking, a classic case of young versus old. Then came the bonuses from the basketball lords the last two months. Derek Fisher ended up with the Thunder after being traded by the Lakers in March. James Harden took an elbow to the side of the head from Metta World Peace last month. Welcome to the newly refurbished Western Conference semifinals. The Thunder has awaited this matchup longer than the nine days since its first-round sweep of Dallas.

The mean streets of South El Monte aren't so mean any more as they are tired and sometimes desperate. The tiny bedroom community, which sprouts from the junction of the Pomona and San Gabriel River freeways, was once plagued by crime and gang activity. Now many of its residents are more troubled by poverty and unemployment. "The last three years have been hard, you know what I mean?" sighs Joseph Diaz, an out-of-work truck driver married to a secretary who also lost her full-time job. "Things can't get any worse.

Shaquille O'Neal's presence in the NBA playoffs remains large. The center who led the Lakers to three consecutive NBA titles (2000-02), feuded with Kobe Bryant, then paired to win a ring with Miami's Dwyane Wade in 2006 before retiring last year is now an analyst on TNT's Emmy-winning "Inside the NBA. " With TNT providing blanket playoff coverage, including the Clippers-Memphis game Monday, O'Neal, who works along with Charles Barkley, Kenny...

Philadelphia 76ers Coach/psychologist Doug Collins talked about handling a team with young players. "The one thing about players today is that they're very sensitive and very fragile. They didn't grow up with tough coaches," he said. "I treat this team very much with kid gloves; I really do. And I'm still looked at as an ogre. It's terrible. I find myself during the games looking at a coach and saying, 'Was I all right during that timeout? Did I hurt anybody's feelings? Was I OK?

Two men arrested in connection with a shooting rampage that terrorized the black community in Tulsa, Okla., over the weekend have confessed, police said Monday, and officials continued to investigate whether the crimes were racially motivated. Police arrest reports obtained by The Times say Alvin Watts, 32, confessed to shooting two people and Jake England, 19, confessed to shooting three. Three victims died and two were seriously wounded. England's arrest report says he drove during the shootings early Friday and later led police to the weapon.

Two men were arrested Sunday in connection with the shootings of five black people in Tulsa, Okla., and authorities were investigating their backgrounds and Facebook pages to try to determine whether the attacks were racially motivated. Three of the shooting victims died. Police described the suspects as white, but a family friend said one was Cherokee. Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, both of Tulsa, were arrested after an anonymous tip about 2 a.m. north of the city, near where the shootings occurred, Tulsa Police Department spokesman Jason Willingham said.

The concussions were scary for Ben Leard, and the back surgery and separated shoulder were certainly no fun. But what really hurt him was an all-out booing blitz from his team's fans on an October day in 1998. "Hearing all those boos in my direction, I was embarrassed," Auburn's senior quarterback said. "It's something I never wanted to hear again. It's been a motivating thing for me. It's something I'd never experienced and never wanted to again."

Investigators were probing the backgrounds and Facebook pages of two white men arrested early Sunday in connection with a series of fatal shootings in Tulsa that may have targeted blacks. Police responding to an anonymous tip arrested Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, both of Tulsa, about 2 a.m. outside a home north of the city, near where the shootings had occurred, Tulsa Police spokesman Jason Willingham told The Times. The pair were unarmed and cooperated with arresting officers, Willingham said.

SAN JOSE -- Kings Coach Darryl Sutter started off his morning session with reporters here by saying he was thinking more about next week's events than Saturday's regular-season finale. Then he proved it. Sutter, cagily, found a way to issue a motivational (playoff) challenge for his No. 1 goalie Jonathan Quick, who has received a ton of recent and well-deserved notice as a potential Vezina Trophy winner with 35 victories and a goals-against average of 1.93. It started with discussion about Quick's rare minor penalty, for interference late in the second period with the Kings leading 3-1, causing a massive momentum swing when the Sharks scored on the ensuing power play.