This column has never met Milwaukee Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun, but can say one thing about the 2007 National League Rookie of the Year: He's not an optimist.

The second-year slugger signed an eight-year, $45 million contract extension Thursday that will keep him in a Brewers uniform through the 2015 season, which would have been his second year of free agency. The new deal includes this year's $455,000 salary, so it's really a seven-year, $44.545 million extension. That's an average salary of about $6.36 million over those seven years.

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It sounds like the setup of some oddball espionage flick: On consecutive days, the world's top-ranked women's golf and tennis players announce their retirement. Who is retiring the great female sports stars of the world?

Annika Sorenstam said Tuesday that she'll be ending her career at the end of the golf season. On Wednesday, in a much bigger shocker, world No. 1 tennis player Justine Henin, two weeks shy of her 26th birthday and not injured, said she's walking away from the game effective immediately. She's the first player ever to quit at No. 1.

Imagine if Tiger Woods and Roger Federer had announced their retirements on consecutive days. They'd knock the NBA and NHL playoffs off the front pages for a week.

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I'm not saying Hank Steinbrenner is a ridiculous boob, but he needs to be less of a ridiculous boob.

The New York Yankees co-Prince Regent has delivered more boorish Boss-isms in the last year than his pops, George, had in the last decade, including his latest rant, when he told the New York Post's Kevin Kernan, "The bottom line is that the team is not playing the way it is capable of playing."

Steinbrenner addressed the fourth-place Yankees' 19-20 record before they went out and lost 2-1 in 11 innings to the Tampa Bay Rays. "These players are being paid a lot of money and they had better decide for themselves to earn that money," he said. And my favorite: "I'm not saying they are not giving the effort, but they need to be playing harder."

As long as you're not saying they're not giving the effort.

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There it was again: The third quarter.

For the third time in three home games, the New Orleans Hornets blew the San Antonio Spurs out of the gym in the third stanza Tuesday night, turning a tense, exciting, close game into a 101-79 seal-clubbing and a 3-2 lead in the Western Conference semifinals.

The Spurs took the defensive tack of letting the Hornets have David West and shutting down everything else. It worked to a point in the first half. It couldn't have been part of the plan for West to respond with a career night, torching the Spurs for 22 of his eventual 38 points by the break, but San Antonio still went in with a 47-44 lead.

It didn't take long in the third quarter for the Hornets to take control. New Orleans shot 41 percent in the first half, one tick better than San Antonio, but now the shots were falling. Seven of 11 went in, including three of four 3-pointers, during a decisive 21-10 run that took up most of the quarter.

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Matt Walsh, the former New England Patriots video assistant who has already worn out his welcome on the world stage, met with commissioner Roger Goodell Tuesday to talk about the famous tapes of other teams' coaching signals, and the word from Goodell was that he learned nothing new.

Again. The main NFL headline has been "No new info in 'Spygate'" for about six weeks running, except for the minor interruption of the draft.

Goodell said that Walsh was in the stadium when the St. Louis Rams did their pre-Super Bowl walkthrough in February 2002, and that he reported what he saw, including information about how the Rams were lining up, to Patriots coaches. But there is no videotape of the walk-through, as had been known since last week. The Boston Herald reported in February that such a video exists.

Walsh was off Tuesday afternoon to talk to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., so we'll really get to the bottom of this thing now. Specter is the senior Republican on the Senate Pointless Grandstanding About NFL Issues Committee.

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Kevin Harlan of TNT wins the prize with his description of LeBron James' thundering dunk with 1:45 to go in the Cleveland Cavaliers' 88-77 win over the Boston Celtics Tuesday night.

Mother dear, LeBron said in so many words, kindly return to your assigned seat

"LeBron James, with no regard for human life, has given the Cavaliers their biggest lead tonight!"

Wow! There wouldn't have been many ways to achieve hyperbole in describing James' windmill dunk, which was really a dagger, but Harlan managed it. Nice work. The Cavs tied the series 2-2 and made it 15-1 for home teams in this round of the playoffs.

James wins the prize for the most revealing comment about family dynamics that could be lip-read by millions of people on TV. After Paul Pierce bear-hugged James for a hard foul, the two stumbled into the first few rows of spectators, right near where James' mother, Gloria James, was standing. Gloria James poked her nose into the mini-shoving match among her son, Pierce and Kevin Garnett, who had come over to try to separate the other two players.

Garnett gently put his arm around Gloria James' waist and said something to her, but she kept jawing and James, walking back out to the court, turned and shouted at her, "Sit your ass down!"

"I told her to sit down, in some language I shouldn't have used," he said after the game. "Thank God today wasn't Mother's Day."

No regard for human life is a statistic. No regard for momma is a tragedy.

It's a pretty good indication that whatever program you're operating isn't working the way it's supposed to when, in response to it, Dick Vitale, the world's foremost promoter of the idea that college basketball represents all that is good and pure about young people, goes off on a rant about the concept of the "student-athlete" being a fraud.

USA Today quotes ESPN's star college hoops analyst as he turns all kinds of colors over reports that USC freshman phenom O.J. Mayo -- I hope you're sitting down, because this is shocking -- accepted cash and other gifts for three years as a high schooler and in his one season at Southern Cal.

Those gifts would be against the rules of both high school athletics and the NCAA, of course. Mayo has announced he'll skip his sophomore season, not to mention the second semester of his freshman year, to enter the NBA draft.

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There's an important lesson those who would join the sports chattering classes must take to heart. Few of us ever learn it, and once we do, we make a habit of forgetting it. But here it is: What's happening now won't necessarily keep happening. That is, past performance does not predict future returns.

The NBA conference semifinals have been a festival of past performance not predicting future returns.

The New Orleans Hornets are the new breed! The San Antonio Spurs are old and slow! That was the lesson from the first two games of that series, Hornets wins in New Orleans. Separate e-mailers called this column "delusional" and "insane" for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the Spurs weren't quite dead yet.

Two Texas routs later, that series is tied.

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TNT announcers Marv Albert and Reggie Miller had some fun Sunday night with the fact that they appear in the background behind Chris Paul and Tony Parker on the cover of the current Sports Illustrated. They're at the table with the blue cloth under Paul's right arm in the photo. That's Albert standing in the blue shirt, the head of the seated, leaning Miller in front of him.

Miller joked that he was now afraid of the famous Sports Illustrated cover curse, figuring something terrible would befall them this week. Albert asked Miller if he'd ever been on the cover and Miller said no.

That surprised me, but a quick check of the highly addictive S.I. Vault bears him out. Miller has been mentioned in the magazine 107 times, from a college "Player of the Week" citation in February 1986 to a "For the Record" note last August that he was being wooed to come out of retirement by the Boston Celtics. But no covers.

You could probably win some bar bets with that one. Who's been on the cover of Sports Illustrated more: Ernie Grunfeld or Reggie Miller? Rumeal Robinson or Reggie Miller? Joseph Cameron Alston or Reggie Miller?

Joseph Cameron Alston? Badminton.

Richie Sexson of the Seattle Mariners sparked a bench-clearing brawl Thursday when he charged Texas Rangers pitcher Kason Gabbard after Gabbard threw a pitch that was ...

High.

Mariners pitcher Felix Hernandez had hit Ian Kinsler with a pitch in the top of the fourth inning following Kinsler's home run in the second. According to baseball's weird unwritten rulebook, that's OK. Guy hits a homer off you, go ahead and plunk him. Kinsler dutifully took his base.

Then, and this makes a little more sense, it became Kinsler's pitcher's duty to hit a guy on the other team. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because if everyone on both teams agrees that it's somehow OK to plunk a guy for hitting a home run, why is it then necessary to retaliate for that plunking? It's either OK or it's not, right?

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