David Wharton

Long plane flights and cramped hotel rooms. Strange food and no familiar faces.

This country's top beach volleyball talent has faced some challenges on the way to the 2012 London Olympics.

LOS ANGELES -- The game ran late, as night games sometimes do, so it was nearly 11 p.m. when the Dodgers finally cleared out of their locker room.

With the final players heading for home, clubhouse attendants began gathering crumpled uniforms in a cart. They started two big washing machines going in a room beside the showers.

It is probably better that most people overlooked Eugenio Velez's last at-bat of the baseball season.

Television sportscasters all but ignored the saga of the Dodgers utility player. His name appeared in a few news stories the next day, mostly near the end.

The focus instead was on Matt Kemp's attempt to become the fifth player in baseball history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in a season.

LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood loves a feel-good story, so it makes sense that Pacific 12 Conference officials have chosen the Fox Studio lot for their annual football media day.

Commissioner Larry Scott can stand before the cameras this morning and talk about a record-setting $3 billion television deal. He can remind everyone about bringing Colorado and Utah into the fold and establishing a conference championship game.

"I feel very good about the last year," Scott said. "There's just a lot that is exciting."

When the news broke earlier this week that Texas Tech had fired its basketball coach, Joey Meyer felt a special kind of sympathy.

It wasn't just that Meyer is a coach, too, and knows what it feels like to get the ax.

In this case, he and the man who got dismissed, Pat Knight, have something else in common -- both followed in the footsteps of legendary fathers.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- It was late last year and Brian Kelly had just taken over as the Notre Dame football coach.

With the season still months away, Kelly showed up at halftime of an Irish basketball game to meet his new fans. Grabbing a microphone, he stirred thunderous applause with talk of quickly jump-starting a fallen program.

LOS ANGELES -- The two coaches have made a ritual of chatting over the phone, once a week or so, talking mostly football. They often give each other advice, but this time might be different.