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Each goes by the name Mr. Irrelevant, but no two are alike.

So when Irrelevant Week is held annually in Newport Beach, Calif., to honor the last player taken in the NFL draft, many of the activities are tailored to fit the guest of honor.

While all participate in the Arrival Party and Lowsman Banquet -- where each receives the opposite-of-the-Heisman Lowsman Trophy (depicting a player in mid-fumble) -- players can decide what else they want to do.

One asked to go clubbing in Los Angeles with Paris Hilton. Another chose to spend time with his family and sleep extra hours in his soft hotel bed. Others, who’d never been to California, wanted to go Jet Skiing or sailing, play golf on a course overlooking the Pacific or meet their sports heroes.

In 2008, David Vobora, a linebacker from Idaho chosen by the Rams, wanted to see the Playboy Mansion and meet the women from “The Girls Next Door” reality TV series. After an evening that included dinner with Hugh Hefner, hanging with “The Girls,” getting a tour of the mansion and sharing Hef’s movie night, Vobora told one reporter it was “a slice of heaven.”

And that’s pretty much been the goal of Irrelevant Week since it began in 1976: to treat the last as if he were first.

Each April, when Mr. Irrelevant is drafted in New York, Irrelevant Week CEO Melanie Salata Fitch is right there to get his requests for Irrelevant Week (usually is held in June).

“I say, ‘Hey, congratulations’ and 'What do you like?' and 'What do you eat?' and 'What have you always dreamed about?' and I start designing events,” she says.

After 37 Irrelevant Weeks, she’s confident the players have had a great time. How could they not? Her mission is to treat each “like a king.”

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After bogeying his first-ever Masters hole Thursday, 22-year-old British Amateur champion Alan Dunbar approached the second tee with a chance to regain his confidence.

Instead, things got ugly.

His tee shot on the par-5, 575-yard hole hooked left into the trees. When he found his ball, it was unplayable. On his penalty drop the ball hit a branch and rolled into another bad spot, and by the time Dunbar reached the fairway he had taken 5 strokes en route to a triple-bogey 8.

Suddenly, the rising star from Northern Ireland was 4 over after two holes en route to a 10-over front nine, his tournament dreams squashed.

“You don’t wish that on anyone, but we all have our bad days when nothing goes right,” fellow Northern Irishman Graeme McDowell told reporters. In the same round, former Masters champ Craig Stadler took an 8 on the par-4 10th, and in Round 2 Ben Crenshaw, another former winner, scored a 7 on the par-3 fourth -- taking three shots to escape a bunker -- and Japan’s Hiroyuki Fujita had a 9 on the par-5 13th.

As bad as those blow-ups were, however, they’re just cherry bombs in comparison with some of the nuclear explosions in the history of the PGA Tour and golf’s four majors.

Since 1983, when the tour began recording double-digit single-hole scores, there have been 367 of 10 or more strokes*.

*For years, the worst of all has been reported to be a 23 made by the great Tommy Armour in the second round of the 1927 Shawnee Open in Pennsylvania. There, a week after winning the U.S. Open, Armour was said to have been 18 over par on No. 17, a par-5.

But a report in PGA Magazine from July of that year provided by PGA Philadelphia Section historian Pete Trenham says the Silver Scot made only a sextuple bogey.

Here are the best of the worst on the PGA Tour and major stages, holes on which one bad shot begat another, and another and another.

Ray Ainsley (19)

When/where: 1938 U.S. Open, Cherry Hills Country Club, Denver

Hole: No. 16, par 4, 397 yards

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Each year, during the first round of the NFL draft, Roger Goodell welcomes every player in attendance with a bear hug, slaps on the back and a personal message delivered lips-to-ear from close range.

It's the one day the league's commissioner becomes the Sensitive Male (at least in public), so a simple handshake or half bro-hug won't do. This is a full-frontal hugfest, the type of display impossible to imagine from Bud Selig, David Stern, Gary Bettman or Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue.

Yet for Goodell, who became commissioner in 2006, his annual hugathon has been semi-embraced, so to speak, as part of his persona. He might be the hard-line commish when it comes to suspensions and fines, but when this year's draft begins at 8 p.m. ET April 25 at Radio City Music Hall, he'll be Mr. Softy.

But it wasn't always this way.

•  •  •
The origin: When Goodell began presiding over the draft in 2007, No. 1 overall pick JaMarcus Russell got a handshake and a quick, one-armed, lean-in grab. Same with No. 2 choice Calvin Johnson.

Through the drafts of 2008 and ’09, Goodell went with the flow, offering hugs and half-hugs to some, handshakes to others. No. 1 overall pick Matthew Stafford of the Lions in 2009 got just a handshake and a pat on the shoulder.

In 2010, however, Goodell got his hug on. After Sam Bradford went No. 1 (back pat, slight hug) and Ndamukong Suh No. 2 (handshake, arm pat), the Buccaneers selected Gerald McCoy from Oklahoma.

As McCoy strolled across the stage toward Goodell, the commissioner extended his hand for a shake. But the grinning, 6-foot-4, 300-pound McCoy spread his arms wide, ignoring the hand, and enveloped Goodell in a hug that lasted six seconds.

It was a moment of joy for McCoy, and he had to show it.

“The day before, Mr. Goodell, we were sitting in his office and nobody was talking,” McCoy said of a visit with the commissioner by soon-to-be-drafted players. “We were just sitting there in silence. I’m like, ‘Well this ain’t me, so I’m going to speak up.’ So I started to talk about random stuff and I asked him if we’d get in trouble or fined if we do something crazy on stage or whatever, and he was like, ‘Obviously man, you get this one time, it’s your one day you need to show emotion and show your feelings and show how excited you are. I wouldn’t mind that at all.’

“I was like, ‘Aiight,’ just because I didn’t know what I was going to do. But once I got out there, you know, it was just my reaction. I knew the Bucs had picked me, let me play for them, but Mr. Goodell just called my name, so I guess he got to feel all the love,” he adds, laughing.

“I was just overwhelmed with emotion and it all came out in that big hug. That hug was like a thank you for allowing me to be in the league, everything. It all came out. He just happened to be the one to receive it.”

But McCoy had opened the hug gates. Trent Williams, picked by Washington at No. 4, got an enthusiastic embrace from Goodell, and the hugs kept coming through the first round -- and beyond into 2011 and 2012.

Though Goodell declined through a spokesman to talk about his draft-day hugs for this story, he told Sports Business Daily last year that McCoy was the spark.

“It’s funny. I meet with all the draft-eligible players the day before,” he said. “They always ask, What’s that moment like? These kids have been dreaming about this and working toward this. This is their moment. They’ve finally made it into the NFL.

“There was no surprise for Andrew [Luck]. He knew the Colts were taking him. But when he walked out on the stage, it was that moment of achievement and triumph. For me to be part of that is a cool thing.

“But these guys, they wrap you up. The first guy that did it to me was Gerald McCoy a few years ago. He hit me so hard I thought I was going off the stage.”

McCoy remembers.

“When I was hugging him, he said, like, ‘You’re crushing me right now’ and he kind of gasped for air like I was squeezing the life out of him, which I was,” says McCoy. “I was just excited.”

McCoy claims credit for being a trailblazer.

“Yeah, I take pride in it, as far as draft-day trends,” he says. “Why not?”

•  •  •
The players’ view: When South Carolina linebacker Melvin Ingram was taken by the Chargers with the 18th selection in the 2012 draft, he added a flourish to Hug Day.

Wearing a pinstripe suit and a Chargers cap, Ingram approached Goodell with a smile and a question: “You ready?”

The two then went through an elaborate handshake that was followed by a long, rocking embrace.

Ingram says he worked out the routine with Goodell before the draft.

“He was all, ‘If anybody wants to do anything,’ to let him know and all that, so I was like, ‘I want to do a handshake,’ and we did it,” says Ingram. “It really didn’t take that long. I just showed him the handshake, we practiced a couple of times, but he messed it up when we practiced. But when we did it on draft day, he did it perfect.”

So far, Ingram is the only player to up the ante on the hug with a shake, but it wasn’t the only memorable interaction with Goodell from the 2012 draft.

The photo of Goodell nose-to-nose in an embrace with 6-foot-3, 350-pound Chiefs nose tackle Dontari Poe won the Awkward Award, and Buffalo Bills draftee Stephon Gilmore had a cheek-to-cheek scene. Then there was Goodell’s nearly eight-second embrace with 6-foot-4, 298-pound defensive tackle Fletcher Cox of the Eagles.

“Cox engulfed Goodell like a Kodiak bear devouring a tasty salmon,” wrote Mike Tanier of The New York Times, who added that Goodell “rarely projects an air of cuddliness, but when it came time to introduce first-round picks, he brought the bromance to Radio City Music Hall.”

As he waited backstage for his name to be called, Gilmore wasn’t sure what to expect.

“I knew he was going to shake my hand, but I didn’t know he was going to actually hug me that long,” he says. “It was just a great moment. Growing up, from a little kid and seeing it on TV and actually going through the situation.”

So what does Goodell say when he’s in man-hug mode?

Gilmore: “He said that I’d love Buffalo and there’s great people there, great fans and hopefully we get it turned around, and good luck with my career.”

Ingram: “He just said congratulations and good luck and if you ever need anything to let him know.”

Is the commissioner strong?

Gilmore: “Oh, naah (laughing). He’s not very strong.”

McCoy: “He had a pretty good hug himself. I’m a big guy, so of course he didn’t faze me none.”

Ingram: “Yes sir.”

And how about his aftershave? Do they remember what the most powerful man in American sports smells like?

Gilmore: “I don’t know (laughing). I didn’t hug him that hard. I don’t really know what he smells like.”

McCoy: “I don’t remember none of that, man (laughing).”

Ingram: “No, no sir.”

When Gilmore thinks back on it, the moments on stage are a bit of a blur.

“There’s so much going on in your head at the moment and you can be emotional one moment and happy and it’s a lot of things,” he said. “It’s a great experience, but it’s also overwhelming.”

Since that draft day in 2010, McCoy and Goodell have met many times -- at the Super Bowl, the rookie symposium, in the offseason and even during the lockout -- and the greetings have been the same.

“It’s an unwritten rule that we don’t shake hands,” he says. “All we do is give each other hugs. It’s like a tradition now.”

•  •  •
The body language: Patti Wood is a body language expert. She has done extensive research on greeting behavior and says she’s fascinated by hugging, which is a big part of her latest book, “SNAP: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma.”

Wood has seen the video of Goodell’s draft-day hugs and says one thing is apparent: He’s enjoying himself.

“I really studied his smile at the end of the hugs, to look specifically at how relaxed his mouth is," she says. "He is. It’s sincere. It’s real and he’s enjoying it.”

What else does she see?

“He tries -- he’s not super-tall compared to the players -- he tries to get that right arm on top, around the neck of the player. And that does a couple of things. It shows his power over them. ... It also allows him to kind of control the hug and bring them in closer, so if they had any desire to kind of [reduce] the space in between the two of them, he’s saying, ‘No, this is going to be a real hug, real close, and I’m in control.’

“The other thing I think is really significant is he has a ritual of doing a double pat at the end of the hug, almost a signal that says, ‘OK, I’m done now.'"

“The rocking is a comforting cue,” she says of some of the hugs. “That to me does a couple of things. ... It comforts, but it also makes the hug OK to linger in, because now you’re saying, ‘I’m the parent and you’re the child.’”

Wood adds that Goodell’s willingness for physical closeness with the players is “what’s cool to me” because front-to-front hugging makes people feel vulnerable, yet she says both Goodell and the players indicate through the hugs that they trust one another.

•  •  •
The old friend: Jim Roberson was a teammate of Roger Goodell’s at Bronxville High in New York.

Goodell was a team captain in football, basketball and baseball at Bronxville and was selected the school’s athlete of the year in 1977, the same year Roberson transferred in and was his teammate.

When he sees Goodell hugging athletes on draft day, he sees the Goodell he knew back then, not the corporate NFL czar.

“He’s good people, man,” says Roberson, who has coached football and now lives in Great Britain. “So the hugging bit, I think, you know, he was always a bit of a practical joker, you see, so to me the hugging bit is the real opportunity he gets to maybe let a little bit of that out in the job because maybe he doesn’t get a chance to do too much of that.”

Roberson, who said he was the first African-American athlete at Bronxville, says he remembers Goodell as friendly and always smiling.

Though he doesn’t remember Goodell as a hugger -- “we’d be emotional, man, but we were in high school and I don’t know how much hugging we did” -- it seems in character with the guy he played with and worked with for two summers.

“What you see on draft day, I think that’s like him, man,” he says. “I think maybe that’s his couple of days to appreciate the fact that these guys are going to get an opportunity to do something fantastic with their lives. They’re going to make some money. For him to show some appreciation, and the fact he’s the commissioner of the league and they’re coming into it, he wants to welcome you.”

Roger Goodell: Commissioner, hugger ... and prankster?

“Dude left me up a ladder one time,” says Roberson, laughing. “He’s quite a practical joker. Painted my shoes blue. ... Cool people, man. But I’m his friend.”

So too are all the first-round draftees in attendance each April who get the Goodell Squeeze.

At the end of a long, emotional day Monday, Paul Shorthose was watching television coverage of the bombing at the Boston Marathon when he saw a scene from New York that he will long remember.

Projected onto the side of the Brooklyn Academy of Music was a giant, blue image of “NY [hearts] B,” using the logos of the Yankees and Red Sox.

“It kind of chokes you up a little bit,” says Shorthose, a longtime Red Sox fan and president of the team’s booster group, the BoSox Club, who lives in Needham, Mass. “That sort of thing puts things in perspective.

“Back after 9/11 it was a similar thing. … Boston reached out to New York. These things bring people together. Sports become a part of the healing process instead of a rivalry.”

All across New York this week, fans who often can be bitter, abusive or profane in their attitudes toward New England’s teams cast away those feelings and embraced their Boston counterparts.

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This story has been corrected. Read below

Jim Hoff has been in professional baseball for 46 years, but he has never seen anyone have a season like the one Gary Redus had in 1978.

Thirty-five years later, Hoff still has trouble finding just the right way to describe what Redus did in hitting .462 for the Billings Mustangs.

In the span of 15 seconds, Hoff goes through “impressive,” “unbelievable,” “phenomenal” and “incredible.”

“It defies the imagination almost that you could put something together like that,” says Hoff, 67, who managed Billings and is now the minor league field coordinator for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Not only did he hit over .400, but it ranks as the highest average ever in American professional baseball, according to Minor League Baseball. One of Redus’ bats from that season is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., with “.462” in large red lettering next to it.

Redus’ .462 average in his first season of professional baseball is just one of many statistics that seem like something out of a slow-pitch league.

In the short-season, rookie-level Pioneer League, Redus played in all 68 games, had 117 hits in 253 at-bats, scored 100 runs and drove in 62, hit 17 home runs, stole 42 bases and walked twice as many times as he struck out (62 to 31). His slugging average was .787, his on-base average .559 and his OPS (on-base plus slugging) was 1.346, which puts him in the same ballpark as Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds.

“You just knew he was going to get a hit every time he came to bat,” says Lew Morris, who was the team’s general manager and still lives in Billings, Mont. “He was just one of those guys, just unbelievable. It just seemed like every time he came to bat he was going to get a hit. A line-drive hitter.”

Redus, who had been drafted in the 15th round that June out of Athens State in Alabama, went straight to Billings after collecting a reported $3,000 signing bonus and immediately began hitting. In June he hit .500 (19-for-38). He had 36 multihit games, had a 16-game hitting streak, at one point was 16-for-19 and failed to reach base in only three games.

At 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, the right-handed hitter was described at the time by former Dodger Jim Lefebvre -- who was managing at Lethbridge, Alberta -- as “the finest young hitter I’ve ever seen at that stage.”

Said Hoff: “He had all the physical tools that you could possibly have and I kept saying to myself, ‘How could this guy get drafted, I don’t know, 16th round or 15th round, something like that?’ How could somebody like that get drafted so low, because he was absolutely phenomenal.”

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This season, the West Michigan Whitecaps will be serving the Baco, a taco with a shell made of bacon.

Back east, the Aberdeen IronBirds in Maryland have offered the Funnel Cake Baconator that comes with maple syrup, bacon and chocolate sauce.

In the heartland, the Gateway Grizzlies of Illinois serve Baseball’s Best Burger, a cheeseburger with bacon between slices of a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

Down south, the Charleston RiverDogs sell the Pig on a Stick, a deep-fried, bacon-wrapped corn dog.

And out west in Tucson, fans can chow on a Sonoran Dog, a bacon-wrapped hot dog smothered in cheese, salsa, onions and beans.

Sense a theme? At minor league ballparks from rookie ball to Triple-A, it’s bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon and more bacon, a revved-up game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (hold the Kevin, but never the Bacon).

In the quest to lure fans to ballparks where players come and go and atmosphere and ambiance are more important than winning and losing, minor league teams have tapped into the power of pork.

“We’re in the entertainment business,” said Noel Blaha, the director of promotions for the Class A RiverDogs. “Especially our level of minor league ball. Every year -- more like month to month -- our roster is fluctuating. So we’re not selling tickets based on who’s on our team, we’re selling an outing, an evening at the ballpark, and a huge part of that experience is the smells and tastes and the food.”

And what food packs more of a sensory punch than bacon?

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The image is indelible and the words simple.

Six-foot-four David Thompson is in full flight, his hand more than a foot above the rim as he tips the basketball over the long reach and leap of 6-foot-11 Bill Walton.

The cover of the April 1, 1974 Sports Illustrated is a freeze-framed moment in time when North Carolina State leaped over the giants of college basketball.

The headline: “End of an era. N.C. State stops UCLA.”

The Bruins had won seven straight NCAA championships, nine of the previous 10 and would rebound in 1975 to win again.

But on March 25, 1974, in a Final Four semifinal in Greensboro, N.C., North Carolina State rallied to come from seven points down late in the second overtime to beat the seemingly unbeatable Bruins, 80-77. Two days later the Wolfpack topped Marquette in an almost anticlimactic final, 76-64.

It was a far different time in college basketball, before the 3-point line and one-and-done teenagers opting for the NBA. Dunking in games was outlawed and only conference champions advanced to the tournament field of 25 teams.

But nearly four decades later, coach Norm Sloan’s team ranks among the best in NCAA tournament history. In all-time ratings, the 1973-74 NC State team is usually in the top 10 and sometimes in the top five.

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Whittier College is just a faint blip on the radar of big-time college football.

The little private school east of Los Angeles, founded in 1887 and named after Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, has 1,500 students, offers no athletic scholarships and plays in the NCAA’s Division III.

The Poets’ best-known player achieved fame not for his athletic ability, but for the fact he became president of the United States in 1969. Richard Nixon, who once was described by a former teammate as a terrible athlete but a great debater, wore a leather helmet for the Poets in the early 1930s.

Yet football helped shape his life, and Nixon credited his coach at Whittier, Wallace “Chief” Newman, as having a lasting impact on his career.

Today, Newman and another longtime coach at Whittier, John “Tiger” Godfrey, hold a special place in the school’s football lore for their longtime success. The team plays on Newman Field at Memorial Stadium, and a nearby monument was dedicated this past September to Godfrey, the program’s winningest coach.

Together, they are considered the deans of Whittier football.

Yet two other men, among the most dynamic ever to blow a whistle, coached at Whittier. Outside the little school, they are the unknown Poets.

George Allen, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, was head coach at Whittier from 1951 to '56. When he left, he was replaced by Don Coryell, the first man ever to win 100 games in both college and the NFL and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

Whittier may not exactly be the Cradle of Coaches, but as a tiny school its claim of two coaching heavyweights is tough to top. Throw in Jerry Burns, an assistant to Allen in 1952 who went on to become an NFL head coach in Minnesota (taking the Vikings to the NFC Championship Game), and it’s a trio.

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The motto on the St. Francis College website claims the school is "The Small College of Big Dreams."

One of those big dreams is to play in the NCAA basketball tournament.

The Terriers of Brooklyn Heights have been playing intercollegiate basketball since 1901 and have been a Division I program since the 1947-48 season, when the NCAA established divisions. And, in the 1940s and '50s, St. Francis was a hoops hotbed, with a national ranking and 18 straight wins in 1955-56.

Yet St. Francis is one of only five of those original 160 Division I schools that has never gone to the tournament.

As the tourney prepares for its 75th tip-off this month, the Terriers and their four mates -- Northwestern, Army, The Citadel and William & Mary -- have had 75 chances, but are a combined 0-for-375.

Though the tournament has expanded from eight teams in its inaugural year of 1939 to 68 today, the un-Fab Five are the only original Division I teams left out of step with the Big Dance.

For St. Francis, finally earning an invitation would be a golden ticket. Few in New York remember the school's glory years.

"A lot of people don't realize we're Division I," said David Gansell, director of athletic communications. "We've never been in the national limelight, never been talked about. We've never been in bracket pools around the country. People don't know anything about us."

Each team has come close. All five have their tales of near misses, twists of fate or being on the bubble … but watching it go pop. One of the five actually was invited to the NCAA tournament, but opted for the NIT instead.

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There are times when Long Beach State baseball coach Troy Buckley is in a recruit's home, making his best pitch, when the player's mom breaks in with some questions:

"Why is your team called the Dirtbags?" she'll ask. "And what exactly does the name mean?"

The answer to "why?" goes back to 1989, when a ragtag team under first-year coach Dave Snow found itself without a home park, had to take regular infield practice on an all-dirt Pony League field that left it filthy and bloodied -- yet advanced against all odds to the College World Series.

It was a storyline that blended elements of "The Bad News Bears" and Peanuts' Pig-Pen. In an us-against-the-world esprit de corps, players proudly embraced the label hung on them by assistant coach Dave Malpass based on their post-practice appearance: Dirtbags.

As for what the name means, the answer is a bit more complicated.

Twenty-four years later, Long Beach State has a fine home field, has produced a parade of major leaguers (such as Evan Longoria, Jered Weaver, Troy Tulowitzki and Jason Giambi) and gone to the College World Series three more times. Since '89, Long Beach State has been a top program on the West Coast.

Yet the Dirtbags live on.

Today, a banner at the entrance to Blair Field hails the stadium as "Home of Dirtbags baseball" and the baseball team's nickname officially is Dirtbags (while every other school team is the 49ers).

To Buckley, it's a matter of pride in a gritty past.

"Oh, big-time," he says. "The history, because of what it is. It's a mentality. It's a quality statement of how you go about your work, how you go about your game. It's really a badge of honor, if you will, because there have been so many great players who have come through here that have created what that name means.

"It's an earned [thing]. It's not a right, it's a privilege, and everybody needs to earn it every single day. … You're not playing for yourself. You're playing for a great tradition."

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The Guardian newspaper in Great Britain once opened up its online "Notes and Queries" feature to allow readers to make their claims as to when fans first did The Wave at a sports event.

The answers:

• At the World Cup in Mexico in 1986.

• At a University of Washington football game in 1981.

• At the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

• At an Oakland A's baseball game in 1981.

• At a soccer game in Monterrey, Mexico, in the 1970s.

• At the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.

• At an NHL game in Canada in the 1970s.

• At games of the Vancouver Whitecaps and Seattle Sounders of the old North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

One reader claimed he'd first done it alone in his living room in 1954, while another swore it was started in 1945 by four people at a youth softball game in Canada.

And, wrote another, "The wave was started by Native Americans on the great plains. They would line up and raise spears in order to get the bison running in a certain direction and eventually over a cliff to their death. It's documented in the famous Sioux City cave drawings, which include star charts dating it to 215 B.C. by current calendars."

Still others say The Wave was started by a cheerleader at a Pacific Lutheran basketball game in the early 1960s, at events of the Montreal Olympics in 1976, at a University of Michigan basketball game in 1977-78 or at an unnamed event in Spain in the 1930s. (Could it have been Hemingway at the running of the bulls?)

In other words, the origin stories of The Wave are as prevalent and well documented as Sasquatch sightings.

In the U.K. and the rest of the world The Wave is called the "Mexican Wave" because viewers across the globe first noticed it in televised games of the 1986 World Cup from Mexico. Clearly, however, The Wave was born earlier.

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Josh Hamilton struck out 162 times last season, so he knows something about swinging and missing.

But his latest whiff, with the fans who cheered and supported him through five seasons with the Texas Rangers, might be the longest lasting.

In an interview Sunday, Hamilton -- who left Texas for a $125 million, five-year deal with the Los Angeles Angels -- said the Rangers don’t play in “a true baseball town.”

It was as if he’d made fun of Willie Nelson and Texas barbecue while wearing a Sooners hat. Fans in the Dallas-Fort Worth area -- who turned out almost 3.5 million strong at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington last season -- now have a Texas-sized beef with their former basher.

Since his comments, fans have ripped him over social media and Metroplex columnists have wondered what he was thinking.

Now, a 15-year-old student from Birdville High in North Richland Hills, Texas, is campaigning to let Hamilton know how his former fans feel about him.

On Tuesday, Brandon Holmes launched a Twitter account called Silence4Josh, urging a special greeting for Hamilton when he arrives for the Rangers’ season-opening home series April 5-7 against the Angels.

“On Opening Day, do not boo Josh,” Holmes wrote. “He wants it. He craves the attention. Don’t give it to him. RT to spread the word!”

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If Kyle Dake were playing basketball for Kentucky or football for Alabama, his name would be known from Hartford to Honolulu.

In his sport, Dake is excellence personified, a three-time national champion who would achieve legendary status with a fourth title in March.

But Dake's sport is wrestling, so even though he's undefeated over two seasons, has a 127-4 career record and has been compared to the best collegians of all time, Dake is mostly in the dark.

The media spotlight shines on sky-walking dunks and breakaway touchdown runs, not on sweaty guys in skimpy singlets wearing little hubcaps over their ears.

"It would be really cool to get a ton of national media and get a segmented time on ESPN and stuff like that, but it's never been like that," says Dake, a senior at Cornell. "Right now it's not the way the cards fell, and I'm not too worried about it. I'll shine in March."

That's when Dake will attempt to win a fourth straight title, something that's been done only twice in Division I wrestling, which dates to 1928. And Dake would be the first to do it without a redshirt year.

Already, Dake has gone where no other grappler has gone before, winning three championships in three weight classes -- 141 pounds as a freshman, 149 as a sophomore and 157 as a junior -- and is ranked No. 1 at 165 pounds this season.

But those are all just the numbers.

It's how he's achieved them that is much more interesting.

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When she was a teenager in the early 1960s, Mickey Marvins would go with her mother to Houston’s Colt Stadium to watch the Colt .45s.

“I think Wednesday night was Ladies’ Night,” she recalls. “We’d go sit out in the heat and humidity and mosquitoes and watch baseball.”

Marvins, 66, is an Astros fan to her core. She rooted for the Houston Buffaloes’ minor league team before the city’s National League expansion franchise was born in 1962, and remembers going to games at the brand-new Astrodome in 1965, when the team changed its name from the Colt .45s.

Nothing will ever stop her from cheering for her Astros.

Yet from the moment she learned Houston would become a member of the American League West this season, Marvins was steamed.

“Oh, very,” she says. “The term down here is ‘high pissed.’ ”

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Long before superstars took over the Super Bowl halftime show, there was Up With People.

Between the marching bands of the earliest games and Michael Jackson’s appearance in January 1993, four halftimes were filled with hundreds of energetic, clean-cut kids who danced, sang and had smiles so perfect they could make a dentist weep.

It was a four-scoop helping of wholesomeness before the era of big acts and (sometimes) big headaches.

There were no wardrobe malfunctions, middle-finger salutes, phallic shadows, bleeped-out lyrics or homemade American flag ponchos. Just a legion of well-choreographed teens and 20-somethings singing tunes for that year’s Super Bowl theme.

Over an 11-year period, from 1976 to ’86, Up With People was the headline act at Super Bowls X, XIV, XVI and XX. The group has more Super Bowl halftime appearances than any other act. Including its pregame performance at the 1991 game, Up With People has played five Super Bowls, more than all but five NFL teams.

But each year about this time, Eric Lentz starts seeing “the lists.”

Before every Super Bowl, writers revisit every aspect of the game’s history, with top 10s of the best and worst games, plays, venues, commercials ... and halftime shows. Each year, it seems, Up With People takes a beating.

Fortunately Lentz, Up With People’s senior vice president and executive producer, has a thick skin.

“We see the pundits and we see the top 10s and the bottom 10s, and we show up on all sorts of lists,” he said recently from the organization’s offices in Denver.

More often, the “pundits” aren’t kind.

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