Danny Groner

Receiver Mohamed Sanu was the victim of a practical joke on Thursday night when someone called him pretending to be from the Cincinnati Bengals intending to draft him with the 27th pick. The Bengals wound up taking the Rutgers product in the third round and there were no hard feelings toward the kid who had pranked Sanu. But Sanu isn’t the first athlete to be the target of a hoax.

Tennis star Caroline Wozniacki released a pop song titled ‘Oxygen’ for charity that has amazed audiences with just how bad it is. The video, also, leaves much to be desired.

“Success in the NBA is more about the players, and less about the coach, than any league, pro or amateur, in U.S. sports,” wrote Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports in 1999. “More and more, superstars call the shots,” said Sports Illustrated’s five years prior. Each year that goes by seems to give the players more power and make coaches more vulnerable.

The former basketball player and outspoken media personality, Charles Barkley, delighted sports fans with a pitch-perfect parody of Shaquille O’Neal on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Almost as entertaining, though, was when he got a taste of his own medicine.

Oklahoma State, which dealt with the tragic deaths of 10 people in a 2001 plane crash, including some men’s basketball players, is reeling from another crash that took the lives of women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and an assistant coach, Miranda Serna.

Rapper and businessman Jay-Z has announced that he’ll be doing a series of concerts next fall at the new arena where the NBA’s Nets will soon call home. Jay-Z, of course, is part owner of the team. An all-access pass to events at The Barclays Center will go for up to $15,400 per season. It’s set to open on Sept. 28, 2012.

Joe McGinniss’ new book about Sarah Palin,‘The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin,’ doesn’t hit stores until next week, but explosive new revelations are already trickling out, courtesy of The National Enquirer. McGinniss reports that the former Alaskan governor and VP candidate slept with former NBA All-Star Glen Rice, used cocaine, and cheated on her husband, Todd, with one of his busines

A lengthy piece in the upcoming issue of GQ highlights Michael Vick’s mindset past and present and the aftermath of the dogfighting scandal that sent him to prison for two years. How’d he handle the sentencing and subsequent backlash? “For a while, it was all ‘Scold Mike Vick, scold Mike Vick, just talk bad about him, like he’s not a person,’” he said. “It’s almost as if everyone wanted to hate