Those of you who swore to hold your breath until the Florida Marlins, New Orleans Saints or Pittsburgh Penguins decided to move to our fair city might as well exhale.

However, in our eternal quest to serve the loyal readership, we have found the ideal league for San Antonio. It wouldn't require a new arena or stadium, no tax-increment fund or tax abatement. Just maybe a sin tax.

It's a league owned by the players, for the players. Unlike the prudes at the NFL (who market sex and beer but try to disguise it as football), it unashamedly markets sex and beer. Its team nicknames include the Hot Rod Honeys and the Hell Marys, and its players are known by catchy pseudonyms like Deadly Cyn and Bunny Rabid. Rock and roll bands play (loudly, we suspect) at every contest.

Unlike the Missions, Rampage or Silver Stars, this league might even attract some interest from the local television stations. Apparently, it's a favorite with the cameras in Capitol City — one member of the Hustlers, Dinah-Mite, was the News 8 Austin Athlete of the Week earlier this year.

And all the "fans" who ignore those local teams because they play on school nights or when it's too hot outside or when it's too cold outside can rest assured that Texas Rollergirls has a schedule for you. They play March to September, on the first Sunday of every month, so there's plenty of time to have a member of the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers fall in your lap and spill your beer, then get the kids home in time for bed.

Even if you're not ready to call Nelson Wolff or Phil Hardberger to lobby for the league to expand to San Antonio, there's still plenty of entertainment online. Check out the "Scrapebook" of archived photos, or just laugh at the campy "life stories" of all the players.

The weekly highlight is a commentary by Frank Deford, officially known as a "senior contributing writer" at Sports Illustrated but better known as one of the bigger curmudgeons in U.S. sports. Everything, at some level or another, makes Deford grumpy. And when a guy as smart as Deford gets grumpy, the results are usually drive-off-the-road funny as well as right on the mark.

And you don't have to get up before the sun to listen to him, either. You can put Deford on your iPod (or, if the teenager has co-opted the iPod, listen on your computer's speakers) by going to NPR's podcasts page at .

He competes in the wildest, goofiest, most-watchable sport at the Games, short-track speed skating, where competitors can cross the finish line sliding on their bellies — and win.

Oh yes, and he's also a thoroughly good guy. He advocates sportsmanship and drug-free competition on his Web site, , and he's also one of the best sportsmen in any sport anywhere (it's a long story, but it involves lots of death threats from Korean fans following a spill in Salt Lake City four years ago).

His exploits, answers to questions, video and photo galleries are online, too. Be sure to check out photos from the post-Oscars party from 2003, when he was on the "A" list (at least some people's "A" lists — Harrison Ford looks like he's saying "Who is this guy?" in their photo together).

With apologies to our resident Poker Guy — and by that, we mean the guy around the Word Factory here who plays and writes about poker, not the pyromaniac with the fireplace implement who used to live next door — the thought of listening to people talk about poker is about as exciting as watching people play it on television (after five minutes, we're craving the dramatic tension of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee).

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