Sports world celebrates Valentine's Day
By By Tony Krausz/assistant sports editor
February 14, 2004
Welcome to the best-placed holiday on the calender.
While most men cringe at the mere mention of Valentine's Day, at least, whoever came up with the candy, flowers and card-driven holiday placed it smack dab in the middle of February.
The second month of the year has long been the hibernation period for the sports fan.
The Super Bowl has been played, viewers slept through the Pro Bowl, the end of the NBA and NHL seasons are still too far away to get overly pumped up for, it is too early to start working on your March college basketball brackets and pitchers and catchers reporting to the warm climates in Florida and Arizona aren't exactly headline makers.
So on this day of chalky, little hearts with loving sentiments written on them, we decided it was as good a time as any to look at love in the world of sports.
Going the distance
A rule of thumb most people preach to couples is to find a common interest.
Well, a pair of professional boxers in Russia seem to have take this nugget of Dr. Ruth-like advice to the extreme.
Nikolai Kibkalo and Natalya Karpovich exchanged vows in the center of a boxing ring in St. Petersburg recently.
After tying the knot, decked out in traditional wedding garb, the bride and groom strapped on a pair of gloves and went at it for a couple of rounds.
No winner was reported in the post-nuptial match.
Heartbreaker
Of course, not all love stories can end happily or with a spit bucket in the corner.
Beautiful Girls and High Fidelity screenwriter Scott Rosenberg found that out the hard way when Super Bowl MVP and NFL heart throb Tom Brady started making eyes at Rosenberg's girlfriend for three years, model-actress Bridget Moynahan.
Moynahan, who has appeared in such movies as The Recruit and The Sum of All Fears, hooked up with the Patriots quarterback after being introduced to him by their mutual endorsement agent.
Brady flew the actress, who played Big's wife, Natasha, on HBO's Sex in the City, into the Super Bowl, insisting that she was his lucky charm.
Moynahan's presence may not have been the reason the Patriots' ended another Super Bowl with a storybook ending, New England defeated Carolina 32-29, but it couldn't have hurt.
As for Rosenberg, "You'd think 20 years after high school you'd be safe from losing your girl to the quarterback," the screenwriter sniffed to the New York Post.
Power couple
Few things lift the hearts of fans more than when two star athletes tie the knot, and it gets even more exciting when the couple haschildren.
Enter tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. The two wonders of the tennis world married in Las Vegas in October 2001. The two sweetened the pot even more with the birth of their first child, Jaden Gil.
Both are multiple grand slam winners on their respected tours and have long been fan favorites.
While Graf hasn't played since winning the French Open in 1999, her tennis genes combined with Agassi, who is the oldest player ever to earn the world No. 1 ranking, allows for the mind to go wild when thinking about what their son may do one day on the tennis courts.
Crossing over
As exciting as Agassi's and Graf's tennis union may be, the marriage of Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra and soccer star Mia Hamm is the main event in the world of sports love.
The pair tied the knot in a ceremony labeled "A marriage in sports heaven" last November on an ocean-view hill side in California.
Garciaparra and Hamm have long been the talk of sports coupling, since the two met after a charity event in 1998 and started dating last Thanksgiving.
Now if these two conceive a child, we may not be talking about the next great sports star these two may actually produce an entirely different species.
Think about the child of a two-time American League batting champion and the top soccer player in women's history, this is going to be a wonder
-kid.
Ah, love and sports. It may only worked once a year, and today is the day.
