On The Sidelines

In A swipe at the market leader's annual special, American sports magazine the Sporting News has just produced an anti-swimsuit edition timed to hit news-stands across the Atlantic on the same day as their rival's publication.

The News's version bears a picture of an outsize American football player wearing a bikini and the headline "Swimsuits don't fit us". Sports Illustrated's cover carries a picture of German model Heidi Klum in swimwear which doesn't appear to fit much better.

The stunt is part of Sporting News's re-launch with the magazine switching from a tabloid to a magazine format. But editor John Rawlings says that it is also an attempt to drive home the point that most sports fans, as their market research showed, don't want the swimsuit issues which Sport and Inside Sport also publish annually.

"The research we've done has shown that real sports fans don't want swimsuits, even in the dead of winter," said Rawlings who added that many people had expressed concern about some of the content in the specials.

Not surprisingly, Sports Illustrated disagreed. Spokeswoman Robin Shallow (that's really her name) claimed that 55 millions readers can't be wrong - 55 million, including 19 million women, being the number of people who read the annual edition.

"Everybody who is looking for sports coverage is still going to get it," says Shallow. "We're definitely serving our sports fans' interest."

Previously in this column we brought you news of the world-beating seminarians from Maynooth who returned from last year's international football championships for trainee priests after coasting through to glory in the final.

Now, courtesy of the London Times, we pass on the tale of the football-playing Benedictine nuns on the Bayswater Road in London who, in between six hours of prayer and three and a half hours of work in the kitchens or laundry a day, squeeze in one hour of the beautiful game.

Obliged by the Order's rules to speak only "from charity or necessity" the vow of silence goes out the window during the daily hour of six-a-side action in which a lack of skill and finesse is more than compensated by the 110 per cent given by every player.

An enclosed order, members rarely leave the convent which is close to the site of a gallows at Marble Arch where more than 100 Catholics were martyred in the 16th and 17th centuries. But the nature of some of the excursions has changed somewhat of late with one player recalling that "the doctor couldn't believe it when he found out that the gash on a nun's foot was a football injury."

Several participants have previous experience of the game. Sister Petra played with the kids she taught in Slovakia and Mother Simeon was a devoted fan of Kilmarnock for 20 years before giving up her job as a civil servant and embarking on her new life.

"I went to all the home and away matches - I never missed a match," she said. However, she admits she was changed her footballing ways too and she now supports Celtic. "Kilmarnock don't get as much publicity as Celtic. I hardly know anything about them now. I look for Celtic's results every week."

Congratulations to Jim White, the presenter of Scotsport, for the outstanding way in which he conducted himself during the recent draw between Rangers and Dunfermline.

Walter Smith's side trailed for much of the game and scored an equaliser late on. When it came, remembering his professional duty to remain neutral and the fact that a good proportion of his listeners had been desperately willing the underdogs to hold out, White greeted the goal coolly, remarking that "Yeessss, that's a great goal for Rangers. Let's hope they can score three or four before full-time." Nice one Jim.

Where oh where would we be here on the sidelines without the world of professional boxing. Week in, week out word reaches us of some manager or promoter who ripped off all his fighters, some 50year-old who reckons he's got too many brain cells left and wants to give the game one more go or some former pro who just couldn't take no for an answer and decided to fall back on the tried and tested method which had in an earlier life brought so much success: brute force.

This week's man of the moment is former junior welterweight world champion Antonio Cervantes, a man scheduled to be inducted into the boxing Hall Of Fame in New York later this year but one who may have some difficulty making it to the ceremony.

Cervantes, it seems, is currently behind bars in Colombia after an incident at a party in which he is alleged to have stabbed a woman and then beat up a man who came to her aid. Now 56, the former fighter, who retired in 1983 after a 19-year career, is expected to go on trial accused of attempted murder.

Why did he supposedly attacked the woman? She refused to dance with him.

From time to time, it seems, a manufacturer will go with an advertising campaign which it is obvious will cause offence and be immediately withdrawn. Somebody, somewhere just reckons the whole thing is such a laugh that it's worth all the hassle.

News of the latest such event arrives from Norway where SABA Molynlycke have reportedly apologised for an advertisement carried in national papers for one of their brands of sanitary towel. They have also, after strong protests by officials at the Japanese embassy, given a firm undertaking not to run the advertisement again.

"This so-called advertisement showed a white sanitary towel with a bright red circle of blood in the middle," said diplomat Keisuke Ikegami. "And it had the words `we wish the female participants luck in the Winter Olympics in Nagano' written in Japanese-style script underneath."

The advertisement , he pointed out, "contains the unmistakable image of our national flag and is an outrageous insult to the people of Japan."