Sport and Cinema.com

The rollercoaster that is college basketball will surely toss a few twists and turns that will derail some heavy favorites over the next few months, but here goes our predictions of the Elite Eight who will be there in March.

Jimmie Johnson showed his mettle by moving up and finishing fifth over the weekend at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, when 25th place would have still clinched the championship – his fourth straight.

Earlier this week the last qualifying games in a two-year campaign concluded with the 32 teams now set for next summer’s World Cup in South Africa.

With the grouping to be conducted December 4th, here are the qualifiers by region:

North and Central America and Caribbean: Honduras, Mexico, United States

Written and directed by John Lee Hancock (“The Rookie”) this is the story of a young black teen Michael Oher and his unusual path to success on the gridiron and a better life when he is taken in by an upper class white family after growing up virtually abandoned in the poverty-stricken projects of Memphis where he had few options and even fewer opportunities.

In one of his earliest starring roles, Robert Redford gives a memorable portrait of an inarticulate, self-absorbed, but gifted world class skier obsessed with being the best, no matter the cost.
Taking on the sport’s best downhillers on the circuits of Europe with dreams of Olympic glory, David Chappellet’s (Redford) selfish clashes with his U.S. national team coach (Gene Hackman) can be summed up when he tells him, “I ski fast and that’s all there is to it”.

This beautifully-packaged, digitally preserved celebration of the Fall Classic is a magnificent collection of all the drama and unforgettable moments of the World Series.

Encased in a hardcover book that includes a 58-page pictorial retrospective going back to the event’s origins in 1903, are 65 films on 20 DVDs representing nearly 50 hours of restored and newly digitized masters going back to 1943.

Glen Macnow has been a popular sports-radio talk-show host at Philadelphia’s 610-WIP for over 14 years, following an award-winning career as a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press. He is the author of three best-selling sports books, and is a frequent guest on local and national television sports shows. He lives outside Philadelphia.

The world’s best players have just tipped off another season of the National Basketball Association. In a case where the rich have gotten richer as the league’s best teams got stronger, this could be the most exciting title chase in some time, but it is a long way from October to June.

Here’s a quick look at each of the teams culminating in a fearless prediction of who will face each other in the NBA Finals nearly nine months from now.

Now playing in theaters throughout America is a story about a British “soccer” coach, but while the backdrop of the mid-seventies football scene in England may be largely unfamiliar to the American audience, this is really a universal look at ego, ambition, power and personality.