Choice sporting observations, from my internet farm fresh to your table. No particular order.

• Goddamn! A Steelers fan has his drink poisoned and is thus blinded by Bears fans at a bar in Chicago? Jesus fucking Christ. File under “What Part of the Game is That?” and check out the quotes:

Heddinger said he doesn’t remember exactly what happened, except that he accepted a drink from a Bears fan after an argument.

“Basically, I guess, my buddies had gotten into an altercation and they offered a drink as a peacemaker from what I understand,” Heddinger told ABC 4 Pittsburgh.

Not long after, he says, his friends had to rush him to the hospital. Heddinger could not see and his heart stopped and had to be restarted four times.

At first, doctors thought he had had too much to drink, but eventually they feared something more nefarious was at work, perhaps antifreeze or toxic grain alcohol.

[...]

Heddinger has hired an attorney but is waiting for the police to conclude their investigation before deciding what more to do, Fox Chicago reports.

“I don’t think they tried to kill me,” Heddinger said. “I think they tried to hurt me, but the killing came pretty close.”

Wow. Bet it was antifreeze. I hope they catch the evil fuck who slipped it to him. Can you imagine that shit? What a fucked-up sequence of events that must have been: Waking up and heading to the bar to watch the Bears; getting real, real drunk; pushing around some Steelers fans; drunkenly deciding that slipping one of em ANTIFREEZE would be funny and appropriate; watching him be rushed out of the bar; realizing what you’ve done; wondering if you killed him; keeping quiet as the news hits local TV.

Incidentally, I harvested this ugly story from the Huffington Post’s newly-launched sports section, which seems kinda dicey but if it can deliver like this I won’t be mad.

• Check out designer Ken Carbone’s conceptual NFL helmet redesigns. (Redskins one is pictured above. Obviously.) Interesting and well-intentioned, sure – and I would have liked to see a whole set – but ultimately not really that cool to me. Carbone goes after certain helmets on account of blandness, and maybe that’s fair – but to me, that critique kinda misses the point. Helmet designs don’t have to be visual firecrackers; they’re meant to look kinda tough and kinda proud, sorta old-timey and battle-tested. And one person’s “bland” is another’s “iconic” – for exhibit A, consider the Packers’ sturdy old “G.” I hate the Patriots’ current flying Elvis as much as anyone, but Carbone’s redesign makes it look stunningly elegant and understated by comparison.

• Speaking of football – Jets fans, what the hell happened to your team? Last time I talked football in this space, the Jets were flying high, talking shit and swaggering around the division, thinking Super Bowl thoughts. Now they’ve lost four of their last five to dip below .500 and Rex is crying in the locker room.  Damn – it was all good just six weeks ago. There’s a lot of football left to play, etc. etc., but it won’t be easy for the Jets to get back to that early season altitude. For starters, a pissed-off New England team is waiting in Foxborough this Sunday, sharpening knives and thinking revenge. My predictions here have been laughable – just check out my NHL season preview, a fantasy world where the Leafs and Canes make the playoffs – but I’m gonna dig the hole deeper and say this Jets team ends up at 7-9.

And look, from my painful perspective as a Buffalo Bills lifer, 7-9 would be a major accomplishment. We just fired our zombie of a coach yesterday and it was the happiest I’ve been since Week 2. Watching the Cleveland Browns stumble around on Monday night in their shutout home loss to Baltimore, I was relieved that at least I wasn’t a Browns fan – and then I remembered the Browns have beat the Bills three times in the last three years. Decade of fail, indeed.

• While I’m thinking about failure… how about them Knicks? Might as well snatch up Iverson and at least make losing more entertaining, cause this season already looks like a wash and 2010 can’t get here fast enough. Least they’re not the Nets, though, right? 0-11… ouch.

• World Cup brackets (is that what they’re called? no – “groups,” right?) are getting closer locked for South Africa 2010. My favorite entrant so far is New Zealand, who haven’t been to the tournament since 1982. My mom’s from NZ, which means I get to read articles with titles like “Kiwis have earned a crack at the Socceroos“  and feel some sense of pride. Kinda fucked up that the team’s called the “All Whites,” whereas the rugby team is the “All Blacks,” but I’ll check my American sense of racial politics at the door – obviously out-of-context and inapplicable here – and cheer for the squad next summer. Let’s close this edition out with an All Blacks haka:

- Caps