Courtesy of Studio 314

To know what it feels like to win the United States Chess Championship, earn $40,000 and reconfirm your status as the No. 1 chess player in the country -- and as the most promising American player since Bobby Fischer -- look no further than the Twitter status of the man who just did all of these things.

Twenty-four-year-year-old grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura talks regularly about life and the game in 140 characters or less, and his fans were not disappointed when, after his tenth round ended in an explosive endgame and eventual win against No. 2 Gata Kamsky, Nakamura aired his reaction online Friday night. So how does he feel? "LIKE. A. BOSS."

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LFLus.com

The Lingerie Football League is all about the football, man.

The Lingerie Football League yesterday announced that St. Louis has been awarded an expansion team for the 2013 season. As the name of the league implies, the game is full-contact football played by women wearing lingerie, shoulder pads and helmets. The team, which has no name at the moment, will play home games at the St. Charles Family Arena. Tryouts have yet to be scheduled.

But if you're hankering for some hard-hitting women's football, the St. Louis Slam is right smack in the middle of their season.
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hotcarstv.blogspot.com

St. Louis tax collectors and exotic car dealers are going to miss this guy.

A lot has been made about Albert Pujols' struggles at the plate this year. After 28 games as a member of the Los Angeles Angels, Pujols is hitting just .196 with seven RBI's. (He did hit a home run yesterday, ending his longest drought without a homer.)

Still the questions persist: Is Pujols putting too much pressure on himself after signing a $240-million contract with the Angels? Or is Southern California not a good fit, especially with his family still back in St. Louis? Or maybe it's the climate -- the sea breeze and day after day of sunny skies and 80-degree temps -- that have Pujols off this year?

Whatever the case, we know of one part of Albert Pujols that is definitely better suited for Southern California: his fleet of luxury cars.
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Writer Jeremy Repanich has an interesting piece about his time working for the Seattle Sonics over at Deadspin this afternoon. Included in his account of the team's final years in the Emerald City is an insider's view of then-owner Howard Schultz's unsuccessful quest to force the public to build a new stadium for the team. Repanich states the reasons for stadium upgrades in a way that is particularly germane to our current situation with the Rams.
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Stan Musial and Biggie's is no longer, but mementos such as this menu from stlouismemorabilia.com abound online. (None featuring a likeness of Wilt the Stilt.)

Sports Illustrated this week features a fantastic recollection of the early days of the NBA as excerpted from Frank Deford's new book, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter.

The entire article is worth the read, but it's the very beginning of the story that's most interesting for St. Louis readers. Deford writes how the early days of the NBA were free of pageantry. Evidence of that was a trade he witnessed following the 1965 All-Star Game in St. Louis.

The journalist writes that he was attending a reception at one of the old Stan Musial and Biggie's restaurants when a referee he knew pointed to the bottom of the stairs and said, "You know, they're trading Wilt down there."
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Congrats to Susan Polgar, the incoming coach of Webster University's new chess team, for her sidebar article, "Winning Gambit," inside the current issue of Sports Illustrated (NFL Draft cover).

We first introduced Polgar back in February. The Budapest native, former world champion and, until recently, coach of Texas Tech University's national championship squad, was prepping her eventual move to Webster, with nearly half of her Texas Tech players accompanying her.

Polgar's strategic move to St. Louis has now captured the attention of a national audience. Writes SI:

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Tim Parker Photo

The "Completely Sauced" team at the start of this year's race.

Judging by the number of beer-centric relay names that popped up in Sunday's GO! St. Louis Marathon, deciding to run as a foursome and coming up with a clever team name must be what particularly motivated people do after a weekend bender: e.g., Team Temporarily Impaired, Thought This Was a Beer Pong Tournament, Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time.

Because we're somewhat more adept at writing poetry in meter than we are running in meters -- which is to say, not very -- here's a sort-of rhyming summary culled from the 500 teams of four who entered. (Click here for complete relay-team race results.) And hey, Post-Dispatch staff (we know that's you, teams Deadliners and Headliners): Journalists don't run, so knock it off. You're making us look bad over here. Though dibs on "Flatliners" for RFT's team name next year.

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Derrick Johnson, the profile subject of our March 22 feature, He Ain't Heavy, continued his media rounds yesterday, appearing on Sports Mayhem USA With "The Coach" John Parker -- an online talk show airing weekdays on iwatchradio.com -- to discuss his recent firing from Lindenwood University, where he'd been serving as head coach of the Olympic weightlifting team.

During the interview, host Parker questioned Johnson about possible racial motivations behind the firing and whether or not he planed to sue.

"Do you think there's some political implications out there or -- and dare I say it folks, I'm going to go there -- do you think there's a racial undertone behind all of this?" Parker asked.

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www.slubillikens.com

It's already been a pretty good year for the Saint Louis University Billikens. For the first time since 2000 the basketball team made a trip to the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men's Division I National Championship tournament and, for good measure, upset Memphis in the first round. Now that the hoops hoopla has subsided, could another SLU team stand poised to step up to the national spotlight? And could that team be ... the baseball squad?

Well,Collegiate Baseball Newspaper has just come out with its newest national rankings, and the editors ranked the Billikens No. 30 in the nation -- about the same ranking that the basketball team enjoyed for much of the season (judging by points received among non-Top 25 schools.)

So far this season the Billikens are 19-5 overall, and 3-0 in the Atlantic 10 Conference.

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This week's Riverfront Times cover boy Derrick Johnson, one of the nation's top-raked Olympic-style weightlifters and the subject of our March 22 feature profile "He Ain't Heavy," appeared this morning on Fox 2's "Tim Ezell at 9 a.m."

Johnson, who recently got fired from his head coaching job at Lindenwood University (as we chronicle in our feature story), shows he's still got the itch for coaching. In the clip below he instructs Ezell on how to properly execute a snatch. (Spoiler alert, Johnson snatches a lot more than Ezell, despite the stimulants the energetic TV host appears to have swallowed shortly before the program.)