Gendy Alimurung

The Los Angeles Speed Project runners gather at the Santa Monica pier.

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*A Celebration of Boston, in a Santa Monica Bar

To the young men who bombed the Boston Marathon: You picked the wrong people to fuck with. Or so say the members of the Los Angeles Speed Project runners group.

It's the crack of dawn two days after the April 15 bombing, and they and about a hundred other marathoners are at the Santa Monica Pier stretching and hydrating and jogging in place and otherwise getting ready to do what they do best: run.

"Marathoners are warriors. They don't quit. Their spirits aren't exactly easily broken," Blue Benadum declares. He's team captain of Los Angeles Speed Project, which organized today's impromptu tribute run.

The project comprises six extreme runners — "extreme," of course, being a relative term. To these six athletes, it means both distance and speed. It means running 300 miles through the desert — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — as fast as you can. It means running and running until every ounce of fat has melted from your body, and then running some more.

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Bianca Lapin

The Servideo brothers, who helped organized the event, outside the bar

When I was 16 years old, about a week or two after the planes crashed into the twin towers in 2001, I went to a Red Sox game with my father and my little brother. My father refused to give the tickets away, even though the Sox weren't playing well and fear was high.

On Yawkey Way, the famous street outside of Fenway Park, I watched Massholes in Nomar jerseys, chomping down Italian sausages and washing them down with wicked cold beers. It just seemed so easy, then, for a man wearing a vest filled with explosives to blow us all to smithereens. That day, I had never seen Fenway so empty or heard such a small amount of cursing. During the third inning, my father got up to go to the bathroom, and he whispered to me: "If anything happens, run with your brother onto the field. Everyone will be running the opposite direction."

Last Monday, when the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, it was the realization of a terror I had expected, really, since 2002. But this time, I was so far away from my hometown in Worcester County, living in Los Angeles. And I wanted to know how Bostonians were dealing with the recent events. I wanted to feel a part of my community. And I wanted to know if anything has changed.

So on Sunday, I went down to Sonny McLean's Irish Pub -- a Boston bar -- in Santa Monica for the Rally for Boston. It was a party. When I walked into the bar, it was as if I had been transported back to the East Coast: The Sox game was on almost every television, a band was leading the bar through Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline, and the bartenders were passing out beers and shots of whiskey as if it was the end of prohibition.

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Harrison Ford dons a different fedora as Branch Rickey in 42

"Opening Day," says Harrison Ford's Branch Rickey in the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, "is all future. The past is wiped away. It's a clean slate." It's a nice little platitude to mutter in the locker room, but both on the baseball field and in the real world, it's the kind of starry-eyed naive optimism that is likely to blow up in your face if you believe in it too much.

Of course a new season carries with it the promise of unlimited potential, in the same way that each morning grants us a new life, the freedom to do anything we want. But that limitless opportunity is almost immediately checked by the obligations created by our past. Either Rickey is delusional, or, more likely, the screenwriter wanted to try to say something about life, America, and baseball.

What's weird about this sentiment is that it fights, tooth and nail, the main appeal of baseball as an American pastime. Baseball lives for nostalgia, for echoes of past glory, and for an ongoing narrative. Without the past, professional baseball is as meaningless as any pick-up game played in the park on a hot summer day. It lives in both the anecdote, and the historical statistic; fans, players, and reporters alike all fawn over every detail of a player's career, both on the field and off.

Most versions of Robinson's story, including 42, dwell on the 1947 baseball season, in which Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey promoted Jackie Robinson to the starting squad, making him the first black player in major league baseball (at least, the first since the 1880s) and forever shattering the color barrier that divided the National and American leagues from the so-called Negro Leagues. Few deal with his time with the Kansas City Monarchs, an all-black barnstorming team that appears for one scene in the new film, before being relegated to the annals of history for the more palatable story of Robinson's rise to greatness.

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Wikimedia Commons

Tyson

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*Mike Tyson's One-Man Show at the Pantages Theater Is Surprisingly Good

Mike Tyson's much-hyped one man Broadway show (and Spike Lee joint) Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth came to L.A. for just a few performances this past weekend. In it he apparently comes clean about his past by admitting that he has one, in that he is bound by the physical laws of space-time. Though we have to wonder. No really, we are actually obligated to wonder because we had to stay home and wash our remaining hair follicles, thus missing the whole show. You know how it is.

But, we got to thinking, what if other prize fighters had their own one-person shows? Let's take a look at how they'd play out:

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Courtesy of Zogsports

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*10 Places in L.A. to Draw Nude Models
*Top 10 Gyms in L.A.
*Top 10 Bars With the Hottest Women in L.A.

For all those sick of the gym but who are still holding tight to their New Year's resolution to get in shape, there's Zogsports. The social sports organization that brings together young professionals in places like New York and San Francisco basketball, bowling, soccer and other recreational sports and is launching March 17 in Los Angeles.

Founded in New York by Rob Herzog after he narrowly missed the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, Zogsports' focus is heavy on the first word in "social sports leagues". Each game ends at a bar for drinks and networking and there are organized group outings to wine tastings and river rafting, says ZogSportsLA General Manager Matt Worley. And, Worley says, Zogsports also focuses on giving back to the community.

"Charity is tied into everything," says Worley. "Each team chooses a charity to play for each season ... and the winner of your division gets a large check sent to the charity. We also have other ways to earn money for your charity with what we call Off Field Awards, so [awards for] best team name," and others.

The costs to join the Zogsports leagues depend on the specific sport's length and location.

The Los Angeles Zogsports (#6) will launch in March with co-ed touch football, the organization's most popular activity, in Culver City, and plans to expand to other areas and activities based on need. Find out more at their launch party, happening from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. tonight at Rush Street in Culver City.

But, of course, Zogsports isn't the only social sports league in Los Angeles. Here are five others to consider:

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Sara Gershfeld

Left to right: Co-Founder Rick De Oliveira, Director of Operations Aryn Glass and Co-Founder and CEO Bobby Heyward

Get a book. Collect a stack. Raise the stakes. Repeat.

That's the objective of bourré, the underground card game popular with the pro athlete set. Chances are you've heard about it and didn't even know it. Remember when Taft High School alum and ex-NBAer Gilbert Arenas pulled a gun on his then–Washington Wizards teammate in the locker room back in 2009? That was because Arenas owed an inordinate amount of money after losses in‚ you guessed it, bourré.

What started as a Louisiana trick card game has become the game for deep-pocketed athletes enduring cross-country travel and long nights in hotel rooms. Now, with a push from an ambitious 28-year-old from Malibu, Bobby Heyward, the game is poised to go mainstream with a new professional league, à la World Series of Poker.

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Douglas Campbell

Rick Santati vs Jason "Mayhem" Miller

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*Chessboxing Comes To Downtown Los Angeles
*50 Reasons Los Angeles Is the Best City in America
*Top 10 Weirdest Stores in L.A.

Last night, in a downtown warehouse, pugilists and pawns united to raise money for a worthy cause. The unorthodox fundraising organization Tuxedo Tyrants teamed up with the LA Chessboxing Club to present Brain Meets Brawn, a charity event showcasing the nascent sport of chessboxing. All proceeds contribute to The Tiziano Project, which teaches citizen journalism in war-torn regions of the world.

The concept is simple: Two combatants play a 3-minute round of chess, immediately followed by a 3-minute round of boxing. This pattern is repeated until one of the competitors either checkmates or defeats his opponent in the ring.

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ILLUSTRATION BY NOAH PATRICK PFARR

A black Stetson pulled down low over his forehead, Dugan Kelly walks with a cowboy swagger as he leads his horses to their trailer. As the animals rest under the bright lights of Las Vegas, nothing about Kelly's demeanor suggests that tonight's competition — the first night of the National Finals Rodeo — went badly; he cracks jokes in a country drawl and punctuates his sentences by spitting dip onto the ground.

But things definitely didn't go as planned. Kelly and his partner were trying to rope a calf, something Kelly has been training to do since he was 12. At the last minute, his partner made a basic mistake.

"He dropped his rope," Kelly says.

On any other night, the mistake would be an annoyance. But beginning this evening and over the next 10 days —in events that conjure old Western legends: riding bucking bulls and horses, lassoing steers and calves, wrestling cattle to the ground — Kelly and 120 other athletes are vying for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How they perform determines how much they win.

Kelly, 35, was born in Los Angeles and raised in Paso Robles. He still lives in the same town where he grew up, with his wife of six years, their two dogs and their horses, and he describes learning his sport the same way other athletes describe hitting a baseball for the first time.

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Photo: David Crotty/Patrick McMullan

BACK ROW: Franklin Sirmans, Ed Schad, Claude Collins-Stracensky, Patrick Vallaincourt, Dashiell Manley. 4TH ROW: Vince Szarek, Henry Vincent, Jim Deutch, Fredreich Kunath,Stas Orlovski, Shana Lutker, Gerard O'Brien, Dan Cameron, Andy Moses, David Erikson. 3RD ROW: Jason Yates, Charlotte Eyerman, Amanda Hunt, Brian Moss, Charles Gaines, Jonmarc Edwards, David Buckingham, Jolie Godoy, Owen Kydd, Lucas Blalock, Lita Albuquerque, Jessica Trent. 2ND ROW: Angel Chen, Mary Anna Pomonis, Jody Zellen, Shamim Momin. FRONT ROW: Nikhil Murthy, Justin Stadel, Drew Heitzler, Gustavo Godoy, Karl Haendel.

This past Saturday, despite the threat and eventual onslaught of late-autumn rain, about 100 art-world players (tennis and otherwise) gathered at the posh and uber-private Los Angeles Tennis Club for the FRAME (French Regional American Museum Exchange) benefit tennis tournament, in an inspired partnership with LACMA's current and soon-to-travel exhibition, "Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy."

The partnership made sense, and not only because something like half of the works in the exhibition are on loan from institutions in the FRAME network. And not only because evening tennis is a spectacle of bodies and shadows. It also coincides with the kick-off of the months-long Ceci n'est pas... program of city-wide events and exhibitions celebrating the love affair between Paris and Los Angeles.

Truthfully, no one knew what to expect from the mash-up of art, sport and cocktails. Would it be like The Great Gatsby, players in dress shoes with a racket in one hand and a dry martini in the other? Or would it be more like that scene in Hair when Berger shows up at Sheila's country club?

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Courtesy of Karla Pineda

Can you tell they're fans of David Beckham?

Is Major League Soccer the league where great players go to retire? That's the question that arose Saturday afternoon before the league final between the L.A. Galaxy and Houston Dynamo, a rematch of last year's final. The Galaxy beat its opponents 3-1 for its first back-to-back Cup win in its history but the celebration was bittersweet as it was celebrity midfielder David Beckham's final game with the Galaxy and with the league, not to mention that midfielder Landon Donovan's future with the team and the league remains in limbo.

Galaxy and Club America fan Oscar Pineda brought this question up with his friend and fellow football fanatic Fernando Palacios as they celebrated at one of the many picnic/tailgate parties outside the game at the Home Depot Center. Palacios believes that Donovan will return to England to play for Everton, where he was on loan to before retiring in two years. "But MLS is the retiring center right here," responded Pineda. "Shouldn't he be over there in England playing then come to MLS and retire?"

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