Hopefully you find this cool and not offensive, but at the gym I look at fit women, a lot. The gaze is something between scientific interest and horny lookyloo.

I'm fascinated by the ways women work out: what they perceive to be their "trouble spots" and secret medical histories. In my quarter century of working out in gyms of all sizes - on both coasts - the definition of a big booty has, um, deepened.

Shit, the overall sense of what's fit and what's fat has devolved, become complicated. These things color the mood I fall into upon seeing stripper titties at the gym.

Stripper titties are about the only things that get me judgmental. When two beautiful lunkheads meet and bond happily over sweat fumes and dippy workout talk, I think, Aww. Kind of nice. That 300-pound woman in the XXL sweatsuit? The one who looks like she just pulled her face from a trough of Flaming Hot Cheetoos? She and I are pretty cool. But hot girls with plastic knockers? I'm, um, not especially feeling them.

They're just too heart-breaking, the real fake boobs. The heartbreak of stripper titties. You know what I mean, right? The ones that have nipples tipped back on the breasts like skyward trucker cap bills. They're saying, "Hi," always, looking up to Daddy. Disturbing in a way that boobs never should be. God would never make something like this. So stripper titties show us that there is no God.

There's a petite, strong woman whose workout time generally coincides with mine. (Or perhaps she just never leaves.) At first, I was blown away by how she exercises. The perspiration and hours - she always seems to have just finished challenging herself - signified drive and character, right out of the gate. Then I became entranced by her headlights.

Now, I don't know her life story, but I do feel hip to what matters most in her life. The woman's knockers speak volumes. Her misplaced nipples - she nods too hard and she's chinning them - shout that pure health and beauty are not the aim of her effort. They tell me that a commercial transaction is at the heart of her whole game. Mami's spine is crying from a decade down the road.

The language of the gym is familiar in that it's the language of the world - loaded up with hormones. The locker room guy who constantly brags about the preceding night's female conquest probably never gets laid and this room full of naked guys is the most action he's seen in ages. And stripper titties speak of misplaced ambitions and twisted self-conceptions, of kamikaze paths to prosperity. On a budget. They are the only boobies that can make me sad.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.

Out in L.A., they are calling Elton Brand "Anakin Skywalker". Since the Clippers' charismatic power forward walked out on a deal everyone in the city press thought he and the Clips were gonna make - and signing with Philadelphia - the locals have assigned truly evil motives to the one-time golden boy. Los Angeles is in a hissing mood. Which is encouraging, in a way. At least we now know there's something that might get these punk-ass fans out of their seats.

But this is not about evil. This is about a deal. To be precise, it's about Brand's agent David Falk being an East Coast guy who knows the world's not seeing nearly enough of Brand. The Clips are more local than Tommy's and the media centers of New York, Boston, and Philly would be sleeping through through his late-starting games - even if the the Clips were worth a shit. Although EB has inroads in the film biz, he lost tens of millions in easy money endorsements. Nobody saw Elton Brand in Kobe-focused L.A.

Plus, more significantly, the Clippers suck. Owner Donald Sterling is an empty suit. His second, Elgin Baylor, is asleep. Anytime something good happens for the Clips, it's an accident of fate. The Clippers suck, and Elton's an operator. A player, if you will. Philly's gonna eat him up.

Working in the his side hustle of movie production improved EB's savvy, but Brand had for a long time stopped being some innocent kid. EB's cool, but he's not the sort of rube who gives up $20 million dollars in salary for quaint notions of teammate bonding.

While I scribbled for a sports magazine in 1999, someone shipped me an e-mail containing what proported to be an Elton Brand e-mail. It was very hot shit. Here was the Peekskills kid delivering real, unmediated talk about how he felt at his elite athletic program. Clearly, this first Duke baller to exit early had chafed at his classmates' put-down attitudes. (The e-mail came across  kinda edgy. And its voice made me wanna follow up. The mag that employed me? Not so much.)

I love both EB and his game, Regardless, I'm not naive enough to think that, like other Angeleno imported from somewhere else, his roots only crazy deep. Baron Davis (of Compton/Santa Monica) doesn't deserve to be abandoned here; he's a swell guy. I hope Davis gets Josh Smith. If so, circle the Sixers-Clippers game on your calendar. And Brand will get booed like Darth Vader.

One other thing: I'm working on a blog about women's bodies, for next week. As a means of pre-empting outraged posts, I'd like you to please see this article on what naked girls used to look like.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.

It might not be obvious, based on my ongoing critique, but I'm actually kinda into American life.

Don't think me a player hater for revisiting this. Listen: baseball's awesome. I can remember chilling with Prince Fielder, Johnny Damon, and rising Milwaukee Brewers star Seth McClung in South Beach on Super Bowl Weekend '07 and thinking: These cats are living the life. They're among the world's best at the game most men would die to play for a living.

But would every kid want to play it? Today's kids? Ya gotta wonder if tomorrow's youngsters will be into baseball at a level that matches 20th century interest. Never mind that baseball plays out as challengingly deliberate for anyone under 20, the sport has become perversely expensive.

My last Dodger game played out as the same amazing live event I've dug almost all of my life. Cliff Lee was the same beastly hurler he's been all season. Closer Takashi Saito displayed the unpredictability that's given Joe Torre headaches all season. It's a nutty, up-and-down game, and the fans still feel it.

But the expense of going to the ballpark has become damn-near prohibitive. My crew's four seats were worth $160. Parking another $15. Unremarkable food ran $60 and my single large, domestic beer ran $11.50. A bottle of water was $5.75. A week later, I saw Gilberto Gil and Devendra Banhart at the Hollywood Bowl. It unnerved me that beer was relatively cheap at $7.50 and water $3.

Now, MLB apologists will at this point say that  the Hollywood Bowl gets help in keeping its prices down. But owners get corporate welfare and that all-important anti-trust exemption is nothing like a burden, either. Still, baseball's overlords can't figure a way to get a family of four in and out of their entertainment product for under two-and-a-half bills? Are you shitting me?

Pardon me if I think of baseball as an enterprise that targets elites. As Reagan McMahon pointed out in her innovative book Revolution in the Bleachers, the cost of all-important camps and club teams has risen so that the best American can't even consider the game a realistic option.

Anyone who watched the College Baseball World Series saw how the the diamond's throwback exclusive ways are playing out. Anyone who's watched how the Dodgers' "bargain" plan, its $35 all-you-can-eat bleachers ticket, knows that it amounts to a bunch of poor Mexicans penned up just beyond the outfield. On this fourth of July weekend, while MLB prepares for Mark McGuire's dodgy return to the game, maybe you should consider just how far the national pastime has gotten from its origins in the hardscrabble fields of an America the game hardly seems to recognize anymore.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.

This week's new ESPN slow summer buzz-phrase, right on the heels of "Tell me how my ass tastes," turned to "Fresno State is the Turkey of the College World Series." And deep in the second half of Wednesday's Euro Cup semi-final match I hoped not. The college that unleashed me and the birthplace of my fiancée, seemed tethered. Even though Turkey had not surrendered the goal that would take it out of the running for Euro Cup title contention I sensed the worst was coming. Germany's aggressive offense and the Turks' shortage of players due to injury and suspension gave every reason to expect defeat.

With the final game of the Fresno State-Georgia College World Series Final only hours away, my future and past felt inextricably connected. "Respiration" played over an eclectic mix tape while Germans on TV celebrated in a circumspect fashion.

I know, from both literature and personal experience, that the Turkish are something like comfortable with melancholy, so I didn't trip a bunch off the loss. I felt grateful, actually. The Cup has finally made me something like comfortable with international football. As a child I played a little, and I had a wormhole experience with the game in college, working as a sports correspondent for the Fresno Bee: A girls playoff game, in Bakersfield, ran late. This was in, like, the winter of 1988, before cell phones and laptops and all that good shit. The game ran late, I phoned my editor from a Carl's Jr. along Highway 99. "You got 20 minutes!" said Jerry, my editor, and I scribbled out a story in my reporter's notebook before dictating it back to the sports desk. The resulting narrative ended up being one of my better clips from the school years. That was great, but it's not the same as having a visceral connection to the sport. Now I got that. Gimme Spain to take the whole thing.

Thank you, Turkey for delivering the good hurt.

My Fresno experience was, overall, something like liberation through pain. And if you were going to buy into this great moment in amateur athletics, you were gonna have to accept that part of it sucked. The ping of aluminum bats in college baseball can be hella unnerving, at first. The its pitching is so erratic that no game is ever over until the last out is rung up. (Take it easy and you can roll with that; it can work.) And if you're like me, being champion of a conference that's called the WAC is a mixed blessing.

It's fitting then that the Bulldogs' unlikely run came from such a flawed place. Fresno, invited to the tourney like the wallflower you invite to a party only because he has a great punch bowl, turned out the show as if that punch bowl wallflower rocked the mic and then made all the ladies orgasm. Total leftfield hit.

Like Turkey, Fresno State had been wracked by injury. But on the 10th anniversary of the school's only other national championship, in women's softball, its baseball team persevered. And I loved it. These Bulldogs are so white as to serve as tangible evidence that MLB has done little to foment interest in the game among people of color. But so what, for now. I know Terry Pendleton was amped.

Truth is, I always regretted going to Fresno State, chalked up my attendance there to self-esteem so poor that I wouldn't give UC Berkeley a chance. But on Wednesday, listening to all those crappy little towns like Clovis and Visalia, 'burgs I spent way too much time tooling around in search of sex and fast food, I felt great for my old school. In Fresno State's fervent search for recognition in athletics, it had found mostly off-the-charts shame, especially in the well-funded basketball department. That one of the money-losing sports finally brought the university glory was fitting. So, when Clayton Allison got the last Georgia hitter to line out to right, I was as proud as if my old school and I were a tight and friendly fit. Proud as if I had actually graduated.

Steve Detwiler, Fatih Terim - hats off to you. Thanks for the awesome memories on a slow summer day. Here's hoping Turkey gets into the EU and Fresno escapes the clutches of the anti-immigrant, God-obsessed, guided-by-talk-radio right.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.