Exciting New Sports Publication

It's Monday and per usual I'm sitting at the kitchen table perusing our nation's leading newspapers -- The National Enquirer, Star Magazine, Weekly World News, Globe -- when I experience a moment that Einstein or Galileo or Edison must have felt at the first glimmering of his greatest discovery.

Why not, I thought, publish a sports tabloid? Sports journalism is 99 percent there already...why not kick it over the line?

To show you what a natural this is, follows are excerpts from this week's mainstream tabloids mixed together with excerpts from my proposed weekly tabloid, Sports Stars' Slimeball Secrets. Can you tell which is which?

#1. JESSE'S DESPERATE HOUSE HUNT -- It looks like Desperate Housewives star Jesse Metcalfe, 27, and his girlfriend, Girls Aloud star Nadine Coyle, will soon be creating a happy home together. The couple...was spotted checking out homes together in Hollywood Hills this week.

#2. LANCE ARMSTRONG IS A JUNKIE -- According to sources, Lance Armstrong was videotaped at the Brown Rat Pawn Shop pawning seven yellow jerseys and a dinged Trek bicycle frame. Sources say a surveillance camera caught Armstrong drooling gobs of yellow spittle and mumbling to himself, "I'll get a job tomorrow."

#3. SOPHIA LOREN TO POSE FOR PIRELLI CALENDAR -- Legendary movie star Sophia Loren is posing for the 2007 cover of the Pirelli Calendar. At 71 years old, Sophia will be the oldest model to grace the pages of the famous calendar, published by the tire company with the same name.

#4. TIGER WOODS HAS LOVE CHILD LIVING ON MARS -- Sources report that Woods was abducted in 1993, right after he won the last of his three United States Junior Amateur Golf Championships. The child golfing phenom was transported to an alien mothership hovering over the Imperial Beach Border Patrol station, where a team of alien doctors probed his orifices and extracted DNA samples, which, when combined with DNA extracted from a previous abductee, Sophia Loren, produced a zero-gravity love child who is now a teenager growing up on Mars and dreaming of a future in forestry.

#5. PARIS SCORES A GOALIE & WRECKS HIS HAPPY HOME -- Paris Hilton is being branded a homewrecker after she scored a goal with hockey hunk Jose Theodore behind the back of his longtime girlfriend and mother of his child, say sources.

A camera-wielding partygoer caught Hilton, 25, and 29-year-old Theodore at the Courthouse bar, and the couple were also spotted together at another late-night hotspot, Club Ultra, before going back to her hotel, say sources.

#6. KOBE BRYANT RAPED BY HIGH SCHOOL COED -- Sources say that a sobbing Kobe Bryant walked into the Hallelujah, Utah, police station and reported that his manhood had been repeatedly violated by a 17-year-old Ken Lay High School home economics student. According to sources, Bryant said he was lured into a classroom kitchen after school hours by an underage female who claimed she needed "a big strong man" to help her "grate nutmeg," for a quiche au saumon et epinnards.

#7. KATHARINE MCPHEE HAS LARYNGITIS -- American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee was sidelined from the summer "Idols Live" tour due to severe bronchitis and laryngitis. "I need to follow my doctor's orders to recuperate and reunite with the rest of the idols," Kat said in a statement.

#8. OBSCURE SPORTS STAR HAS BORING MORNING -- Neil Quisling, a substitute defender on the United States National Korball Team, told reporters, "There was nothing on TV, and I didn't feel like making a nice lunch."

#9. HOW TO TELL IF YOU'VE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS -- You're drunk a lot. Aliens take advantage of boozers because they're used to forgetting huge blocks of time. You are mentally ill. No one believes a psycho when he says he was in a spaceship. During an X-ray, your doctor discovers you are missing an internal organ you know you were born with. You cut yourself and your blood is green. You suddenly discover you are missing a limb.

#10. MIKE PIAZZA IS ONE OF THE "INVISIBLE PEOPLE" -- The national epidemic of citizens spontaneously becoming invisible has touched the San Diego Padres. According to Elron Hinkely, invisible people investigator, many humans cannot tell when they've become an invisible person. Frequently, the first transformation occurs in a department store when the clerk waits on the person next to you, leaving you to stand around with nothing to do. Actually, the clerk did not see you because you were invisible. Another typical transformation occurs when you're waiting for a stoplight to turn green. The light changes, yet the car in front of you continues to sit there. This means that you and your automobile have spontaneously turned invisible. Hinkely said Piazza has been invisible since the last Padres/Giants series.