Baxter Holmes

"I would block a guy's shot and say ... 'And if you come back again, we'll do it another time. So you'll have to find something else to do.' "

-- Bill Russell

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It's the early 1990s. Dikembe Mutombo is walking around Georgetown, where he once blocked 12 shots in a game, with Bill Russell. The retired Boston Celtics star tells Mutombo that he could become a great shot-blocker in the NBA, even better than he was.

LOS ANGELES -- This was supposed to be Rancho San Diego's year, the summer its league reached youth baseball's mecca, the Little League World Series.

The majority of its major division All-Star team -- consisting of players 12 years old or younger as of April 30 of this year -- had won consecutive state titles in younger age groups the previous two years.

The next step on the Little League ladder was expected to come in a leap, those same talented and now playoff-tested boys poised to shine under the lights of large, filled stadiums and in the glare of cameras beaming their games to a national television audience.

LOS ANGELES -- Joe Bryant is going to drag his spry 6-foot-9 frame out of a one-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife near downtown Los Angeles, head down the stairs to the full-length basketball court on the second floor and start shooting.

He has to make 120 shots, 60 on each end: 20 from the left side, 20 from the right, 20 down the middle.

LOS ANGELES -- The NBA players' union and the team owners are far apart in their labor dispute, having failed to strike a compromise in two years of on-and-off bargaining.

Their latest meeting, a two-hour session Friday afternoon at a Beverly Hills hotel, was the first since November. It appeared to produce no meaningful progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement that would prevent a potential lockout after the old one expires June 30.

"I'm going to tell my guys to prepare for a lockout," Billy Hunter, executive director of the NBA Players Association, said at a news conference later in the day in downtown Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES -- It's the author of the most infamous pitch in Dodgers history, and a reporter, sitting at a Beverly Hills deli around 9 a.m. And just after the pitcher orders breakfast -- an omelet, bagel and hot tea -- Larry King walks over.

BOSTON -- To Manny Ramirez, Dodgers left fielder and former Boston Red Sox slugger, who in a few days is scheduled to revisit Fenway Park for the first time since he left in 2008:

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- In an impossible instant, wild exuberance became implausible heartbreak Saturday, as what many in baseball had never seen but feared could someday happen, happened.