Real men play tackle football

David Beckham has arrived to try his hand at our true national sport -- being a celebrity.

Meanwhile, with all the setbacks we’ve had in basketball and baseball in recent years, we’re looking for a game where we can still be big, bruising Americans.

Enter good old American football, long a laggard on the international sporting scene.

The U.S. is making its first appearance in the World Championship of American Football, an event being held for only the third time.

So far, Team USA has defeated Korea, 77-0, and Germany, 33-7, with a squad coached by John Mackovic and made up mostly of players from smaller college programs.

The U.S. meets Japan for the title Sunday in Kawasaki, Japan.

Let’s just hope we don’t have to call in the pros in a few years.

Trivia time

Ichiro Suzuki’s inside-the-park home run Tuesday was the first in All-Star game history.

What player set the major league record for inside-the-park home runs in a season with 12 in 1901?

Couldn’t help but notice

The initials on some gear for the David Beckham Academy, those youth soccer camps being offered in Carson, are DBA ... also the acronym for Doing Business As.

Hackers and thieves

This month, someone stole about 4,800 golf balls from Sunflower Hills Golf Course in Bonner Springs, Kan., outside Kansas City, probably with the help of accomplices.

Head golf pro Jeff Johnson figured the thieves would try to sell the fluorescent yellow balls -- complete with telltale range stripes -- that were left scattered on the driving range after being hit earlier that night.

“That, or they are some really bad golfers who need some range balls to practice with -- a lot to practice with,” he told the Kansas City Star.

With the balls valued at about $2,700, the perpetrators would be guilty of a felony, police said.

We’re just wondering if the thieves had help. Like maybe a getaway driver.

Golf of Tonkin

Package golf vacations are being promoted for a seven-course tour in Vietnam that has been named ... brace yourself ... the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, reports Golf World magazine.

“Although the coupling of Ho Chi Minh and golf smacks of an oxymoron ... there’s nothing oxymoronic about it,” the magazine quotes from the tour’s promotional site. “For starters, although Ho Chi Minh was a communist, he was first and foremost a nationalist, not an ideologue. We doubt he’d object to the flowering of a game that is a rising byproduct of Vietnam’s prosperity.”

We’re not sure whether Vietnam vets would consider the tour nostalgic.

Maybe promoters should offer golfers a choice: green jacket, or full metal jacket?

Time-saving device

At SI.com, fans are being asked to rate their hometown NFL stadiums by responding to a list of 17 questions, including the estimated wait to use the restroom, the traffic situation and the cost of concessions.

Enjoy the extra 15 minutes of your life, Angelenos. And you too, Orange County fans.

Trivia answer

Sam Crawford, then with Cincinnati.

The Hall of Fame outfielder also played for Detroit, where he was a teammate of Ty Cobb’s, and finished his career with 51 inside-the-park homers, a record that still stands.

And finally

Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals tried to put to rest the controversy over his manager, Tony La Russa, leaving him on the bench in the All-Star game.

“People can talk and waste their saliva, I guess, because they’re not going to get me angry or Tony angry,” Pujols said.

Guess he’s not spitting mad anymore.

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