As a tyke growing up in Marietta, Ga., Melanie Oudin would watch Venus and Serena Williams on TV and tell anyone who would listen that she was going to play at Wimbledon, too, one day.
Who knew she’d be right? And do so well, so quickly?
Making her Wimbledon debut at age 17 after getting through qualifying, the 124th-ranked Oudin joined the Williams sisters in the fourth round at the All England Club by beating former No. 1 Jelena Jankovic 6-7 (8), 7-5, 6-2 Saturday in the most startling result of the tournament’s opening week.
“Was just thinking that she was any other player, and this was any other match, and I was at any other tournament — you know, not, like, on the biggest stage, at Wimbledon, playing my first top-10 player,” Oudin said.
“I mean, I go into every match the exact same, you know, like, no matter who I play. It’s not, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m playing the No. 1 player in the world.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Ruth Madoff, the wife of epic swindler Bernard Madoff who reaped billions and a lavish family lifestyle, will be left with $2.5 million and have to look for a new home as she forfeits claim to some $80 million in assets.
Documents filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday night showed that Ruth Madoff, 68, who has said nothing in public about her jailed husband’s crimes in the six months since his arrest, had come to an agreement with U.S. prosecutors.
“In compromise of claims Ruth Madoff would have pursued, the Office (U.S. Attorney) will not contest claim to a sum of money equal to $2,500,000, which sum the Office shall cause to be tendered to Ruth Madoff promptly after she vacates the real property and surrenders all personal property,” the court order said.
Ruth Madoff has not been charged with any crimes but she has been widely vilified by defrauded investors, shunned by people she once knew and pursued by the New York press. Under the agreement she could still be liable to civil claims. Read the rest of this entry »
The most famous picture from that poolside shoot is sun-drenched and innocent, yet also revealing for its time. It depicts Fawcett, seated, one hand caressing her blond mane.
Fawcett had done her own hair that morning (rollers, for 15 minutes), and blonde ringlets tousled naturally over her shoulder.
Her broad smile reveals 32 California-white teeth. A gold necklace disappears into her colletage. The Indian blanket backdrop in the poster was from McBroom’s ‘37 Chevy pickup.
The poster was a hit inside gym lockers and on the bedroom walls of teen boys across the country, helping to define an era, the way images of Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe had in the decades before. Some 12 million copies were reportedly sold in the first four days. Read the rest of this entry »
Anaheim Ducks draft pick Peter Holland puts on his new jersey as general manager Bob Murray, right, looks on.
Murray worked the best deal of the draft when he acquired two players and a slew of draft picks for All-Star defenseman Chris Pronger.
USA TODAY’s Kevin Allen offers a ranking of notable personnell performances at this weekend’s NHL draft in Montreal: Read the rest of this entry »
Actress Farrah Fawcett-Majors is shown in Mission Viejo, Ca., taking part in a celebrity tennis match in a television taping of “Challenge of the Network Stars.” (AP photo / April 4, 1977)
LOS ANGELES — The slightly soft-porn Wella Balsam ads notwithstanding, the infamous appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman” aside, it is impossible to overstate the cultural influence of Farrah Fawcett.
With her practice-makes-perfect blue-eyed smile and doomed marriage to “The Six Million Dollar Man” Lee Majors, she was Princess Di before there was a Princess Di, a photogenic icon who just seemed nice.
With her determination to show that she could play against image and defy expectations (”The Burning Bed,” “Extremities”), she was a role model for every actor who has been typecast, every star whose talent has been questioned.
Yes, by giving millions of American females an alternative to the severe Dorothy Hamill bob, she single-handedly established the blow-dryer and curling-iron industries and created the whole career-path-through hairstyle phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »
Hailing the House, President Barack Obama put pressure on senators Saturday to follow its lead and pass legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions, helping usher the U.S. into a new age of energy efficiency.
“Now my call to every senator, as well as to every American, is this: We cannot be afraid of the future.
And we must not be prisoners of the past,” the president said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
“Don’t believe the misinformation out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and economic growth. It’s just not true.”
The legislation, which the House narrowly approved Friday night, would place the first national limits on emissions of greenhouse gases from major sources — such as power plants, factories and oil refineries — to reduce the gases linked to global climate change. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Jackson’s family wants a private autopsy of the pop icon because of unanswered questions about how he died and the doctor who was with him, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Saturday.
“They are grief-stricken. They’re hurt because they lost a son. But the wound is now being kept open by the mystery and unanswered questions of the cause of death,” Jackson said in Chicago the day after visiting the Jackson family in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles County medical examiners completed an autopsy Friday and said there was no indication of trauma or foul play. Coroner’s officials said an official cause of death could take weeks because of other tests.
The coroner’s office released the body to Jackson’s family Friday night. There was no immediate word on who would perform the second autopsy or where it might take place.
Two days after Jackson died at a Los Angeles hospital, his most famous sister, Janet, arrived at the mansion Jackson had been renting. She drove up in a Bentley and left without addressing reporters. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Jackson would think about – and discuss – his death sometimes, his ex Lisa Marie Presley writes in a candid new entry on her MySpace blog.
“Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general,” Presley, 41, writes.
“He stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like [Elvis Presley], the way he did.’
I promptly tried to deter him from the idea, at which point he just shrugged his shoulders and nodded almost matter of fact as if to let me know, he knew what he knew and that was kind of that.”
Presley, who vehemently denies claims that their marriage was “a sham,” describes their marriage as “unusual.”
“I do believe he loved me as much as he could love anyone and I loved him very much,” she writes of their 20 month union. (The two wed in the Dominican Republic in May 1994 and divorced in Jan. 1996.) Read the rest of this entry »
