NAKED SPORTSCENTER? Sure, Jim Edmonds makes those running, over-the-shoulder grabs that wow crowds and commentators alike. But I like to think there's no way he could have pulled off what I did this morning:

I'm in the shower, the soap loosely formed into my right hand. I reach up and over my right shoulder with it to scrub my upper back. Oh no! The soap comes loose and hurtles end-over-end towards the tiled floor, the drain, defeat. Someplace in the body a signal is sent to my left hand: Down! Down! Down! My left hand rockets from its resting point near my belly, inverting itself on the axis of my wrist and elbow. The hand burrows as if submerging, as if playing an acrobatic puppet performing a flip, and blindly navigates around my hip and down past my lower back, my buttocks, and my hamstring. Just as thought awakens -- I've dropped the soap! -- the hand opens and closes like a beak around a fish, cradling the errant soap with just the right pressure so that it's safe again, at rest. Had there been spectators to this grand event, they might have observed a tremor of sorts. Perhaps he caught a chill, they might surmise. But no, no. He caught the soap. Made quite a grab, actually. A blind, over-the-shoulder snatch of a slippery bar of soap. Anyone can catch a dry baseball, he thinks. But what I've just done is truly sporting.

Edmonds, Schmedmonds.