September 29, 2007

Arenas offers to preserve HR ball
MOSLEY ADMITS TAKING BALCO DRUGS
By staff and wire reports

If Gilbert Arenas has his way, the baseball Barry Bonds hit for his record-breaking 756th career homer will never be branded with an asterisk.

Fashion designer Marc Ecko bought the ball in an online auction, then set up a Web site so people could vote to determine its fate. Ecko announced the winning choice this week: branding the ball with an asterisk before it's sent to the Hall of Fame.

Arenas posted an entry on his blog Friday saying he wanted to buy the ball to preserve it.

"I'll buy the ball from you Ecko for $800,000. If Barry Bonds is found guilty, I'll give it back to you. I'm not going to let you go around like some little superhero," the blog says. Boxing

Shane Mosley said that he inadvertently took two designer steroids - "the cream" and "the clear" - before his championship fight against Oscar De La Hoya in 2003 after he was misled by Balco founder Victor Conte about what he was actually taking.

"We were misled (by Conte)," Mosley told the New York Daily News. "I guess I got the clear and the cream."

Conte said in an e-mail to the Mercury News: "I have never misled or deceived any athlete. I have always been a man of full disclosure."

According SI.com, Mosley used the two types of designer steroids, as well as EPO, two months before the junior middleweight championship fight.

Area colleges

Tina Estrada scored twice as top-ranked Santa Clara routed Cal Poly SLO 4-0 in women's soccer.

In other women's matches:

Shari Summer had two goals to lead No. 4 Stanford to a 3-1 victory over University of San Francisco. . . . Cal State Fullerton got a goal in double overtime to hand San Jose State a 1-0 defeat and Alex Morgan had three goals to lead Cal past St. Mary's 4-0.

• Goalkeeper Andrew Kartunen got his third shut out of the season as Stanford tied College of Charleston 0-0 in a men's soccer match.

• Alix Klineman had 19 kills as No. 2 Stanford swept No. 5 UCLA 3-0 in Pac-10 women's volleyball action.

Miscellany

Tina Thompson scored 14 points as the United States routed Canada 85-37 and will play Argentina tonight in the semifinals of the FIBA Americas tournament in Chile.

• Russian Dmitry Tursunov said he was approached several times with offers of bribes to fix matches, the newspaper Izvestia reported. • Jimmie Johnson earned the pole for Sunday's Lifelock 400 at Kansas Speedway, his second consecutive pole in the Nextel Cup series.