Sports Illustrated

It looks like Kate Upton is set for a while: In addition to landing the cover of the 2012 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the model of the moment is also gracing the new advertisements for Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. The day after Upton was unveiled on "Late Show With David Letterman" as the bikini-clad star of the sports magazine's famous annual issue, CKE Restaurants released saucy behind-the-scenes footage from her commercials for its fast-food chains. Upton filmed her role for the Carl's Jr. and Hardee's Southwest Patty Melt on Jan. 31 clad in a polka-dot dress on a hilltop overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

The footage is grainy, obviously transferred from videotape to YouTube, but it's still possible to see Darvin Ham flying toward the basket, grabbing a rebound and shattering the backboard with a dunk. The play has followed him throughout his life, helping Texas Tech beat North Carolina in the second round of the 1996 NCAA tournament, landing him on the cover of Sports Illustrated next to the title "Smashing!" and serving as the most entrancing part of a basketball career that included eight NBA seasons.

Art Rogers, an award-winning former longtime Los Angeles Times photographer best known for his sports coverage, has died. He was 93. Rogers, who suffered a heart attack Dec. 16, died Tuesday in a skilled nursing facility near his home in Morro Bay, Calif., said his grandson, Jerry Rogers. In a more than 40-year career with The Times that began in 1940 and included general assignment and feature photography, Rogers won the National Headliner Award, two Eclipse awards and a Look magazine award, among many others.

Davey Moore may be gone, but he's not forgotten. Longtime boxing fans remember him as a featherweight champion who fell into a coma shortly after losing his title in a bout at Dodger Stadium in March 1963, and died three days later. Pop music fans remember him as the ghostly presence in Bob Dylan's anti-boxing harangue, "Who Killed Davey Moore?" And Moore's 75-year-old widow, Geraldine, remembers him as a hardworking provider and loving husband and father. "We got along famously," she says.

Former UCLA assistant men's basketball coach Scott Duncan may have committed a secondary NCAA violation in December by making on-the-record comments to a reporter about a player the Bruins were recruiting. According to a Sports Illustrated article published this week, Duncan discussed with reporter Bruce Schoenfeld the prospect of landing Jordan Tebbutt, a 6-foot-5 junior swingman from Tualatin, Ore. "I can't do a lot with Jordan Tebbutt at this tournament — just make sure he sees me at the game, wave to his dad and mom, and that's it," Duncan told the reporter.

Sports holds many truths to be self-evident: Defense wins championships. It's smart strategy to bench a player who is in foul trouble. Teams perform better at home than on the road. When a basketball player gets a hot hand, it's best to feed that shooter. But how many of these axioms stand up to exhaustive statistical scrutiny? Two boyhood pals ? Toby Moskowitz, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, and Jon Wertheim, a writer at Sports Illustrated ? set out to separate myth from reality, poring over mountains of statistics for a book with an unfortunate title, "Scorecasting.

Even those who cursed his name in the 1970s would empathize with Conrad Dobler in his current plight. The man Sports Illustrated once dubbed "pro football's dirtiest player" -- on its cover, no less -- Dobler lives a life of not-so-quiet desperation, "a never-ending series of setbacks and worst-case scenarios," as one writer aptly described it. Not quite 60 years old, his body ravaged by a decade in the NFL trenches, the three-time Pro...

I have no time or patience for sentiment. But it occurs to me that there's a little 6-year-old in all sports fans -- or at least there should be. Six-year-olds don't worry about drug tests or collective-bargaining agreements. They don't care about Scott Boras' counteroffer, or what the presiding officer has to say about blood-alcohol levels. Six-year-olds just want to win, baby. Here, according to a 6-year-old boy I know, is how various sports would differ if you turned them over to the kids.

It's a feud that has a hint of Shaq and Kobe to it. Galaxy forward Landon Donovan rekindled images of that squabble when he blasted teammate David Beckham in Grant Wahl's upcoming book, "The Beckham Experiment," scheduled for a July 14 release.

Edwin "Bud" Shrake, an author and journalist who co-wrote the bestselling golf book "Harvey Penick's Little Red Book," died Friday. He was 77. He died of lung cancer at a hospital in Austin, Texas, son Ben Shrake said. Shrake wrote 11 novels, including "Blessed McGill" in 1968, "Strange Peaches" in 1972 and "Custer's Brother's Horse" in 2007.