Charlie Manuel says he doesn't want you to boo his team.

He says he was kidding.

He said, "I definitely didn't mean it." He was referring to something he said to reporters before Tuesday night's game. They were asking him why the team wasn't playing well at home and, at one point, he said, "Maybe (the fans) should get on us a little."

Now, after hearing the reaction to his comment, Manuel says he was "just being kind of off-the-wall, kind of. Maybe I was trying to be funny."

Apparently it wasn't, though. And after Wednesday night's loss, he was asked about losing at home and took an opportunity to take another swing at the topic.

"I was just throwing something out there, that maybe you wanted to laugh or that you thought was funny or whatever," Manuel said. "I won't do it anymore...I'll just answer yes and no. But believe me, I didn't mean (anything) about the fans...I love the fans. The fans shouldn't have to motivate our team."

The reactions continued to pour in on the untimely passing of former Flyer Peter Zezel. Zezel died Tuesday from a rare blood disorder at the age of 44 in Toronto.

RICK TOCCHET: “It is a sad day. Obviously, as a former teammate, it is a sad loss. I know he touched a lot of lives. Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Peter the last few years. We kind of went our separate ways in the hockey world. In talking recently with some of his friends regarding the stuff he was doing with the youth hockey he had been involved with back in Toronto, I am sure he will be leaving behind a legacy. He was just a great guy.

“In the time that we were teammates in Philadelphia, he was probably one of the most popular guys, not just with the Flyers, but among all sports figures in Philadelphia. He was probably one of the top three athletes in Philadelphia at that time. Everybody recognized him on and off the ice. As far as his play was concerned, he was one of the best draw guys in the league and one of the best passers. I know his rookie year he had a bunch of assists. He had really good chemistry with Timmy Kerr on the power play. He was just a guy you could count on. He was a guy you couldn’t knock off the puck. He was a big part of our team.

“Peter was a matinee idol. He was one of those guys who were infectious. When you went out with him, the girls just really liked him. He had a fan base of girls that in all the years I’ve played in the NHL, I have never seen a guy that had so many girls flock to him. He was very fan friendly. I never saw him turn down signing an autograph. The public relations department loved him because he never turned down hospital or school visits. Mr. Snider will even probably tell you that Peter was one of the most accessible Flyers who ever played the game.”

BOB CLARKE: “It obviously is way too early for a man to die at 44 years old. The tragedy surrounding it is just horrific for any of us who knew Peter. Peter was a pretty good hockey player. When he turned pro in Philadelphia, which was my first year (as management), he was an instant favorite with the fans, particularly the young girls. He could play hockey. He was a tank on skates. He could hit and hit very hard. He was terrific on face-offs. He was very skilled with his feet, with the puck and actually very skilled with his stick setting up plays. He was a really good young player who quite possibly had a shot a being a lot better.”

KJELL SAMUELSSON: “I am very sad and very surprised. I knew he was a little bit sick but I didn’t know it was this serious. He was a great guy. I played with him for two years in the Flyers organization. As a player he was very strong on face-offs and a good offensive player. I know when he was here there were guys like Derrick Smith, Rick Tocchet and him. There were a lot of girls, a lot of young girls, wearing Pete Zezel, Rick Tocchet and Derrick Smith jerseys. I do remember that. He was a good teammate. He was kind of a low-key, quiet type. You had to get to know him before he opened up to you.”

CRAIG BERUBE: “Obviously, it is very upsetting. He was a great guy. He was a great teammate. He always had a smile on his face. He came to the rink always happy. He was fun to be around and was a good hockey player for a long time. He played hard.”
 

According to a published report, the Eagles are bringing in a combination kicker/punter for a tryout on Wednesday.

The kid's name is Zach Thiry, and he is out of someplace called Carroll College, an NAIA powerhouse that has won five national championships. Thiry apparently wants to concentrate mostly on punts and kickoffs -- he was a national leader in punting at one point in his college career -- but the idea seems to be that he wants to try to do everything as a means of spelling both David Akers and Sav Rocca this summer, and then impress people any way he can. A tryout on Wednesday would be the first step.

The Eagles have already brought in free agent Sam Swank out of Wake Forest as a camp kicker.

Terrible news out of Toronto: Former Flyer Peter Zezel has died in a hospital as a result of a rare blood disorder.

Multiple reports indicate that Zezel had fought the disorder, hemolytic anemia, for the last decade, but that he was thought to be coping well in recent years. His family made the decision to turn off life support this afternoon.

Zezel was drafted by the Flyers in 1983 and was a very popular player, especially among the females in the stands, when he played here from 1984 to 1989. In that time, he and his young teammates made two trips to the Stanley Cup finals under coach Mike Keenan. He was one of the faces of that popular young group that never was quite able to knock down the door.

The end of Zezel's career told you something about the man. He was in Vancouver and requested a deadline trade to the East so that he could be near a young niece who was dying of cancer. Instead, he was traded to Anaheim and promptly retired.

Now, this.  Zezel was only 44 years old.

Sonia Sotomayor, announced as President Obama's choice to succeed the retiring David Souter on the Supreme Court, has been involved in two huge sports cases over the years.

In one, during the baseball strike of 1994-95, she ruled in favor of the players over the owners, effectively ending the owners' ability to impose a tough contract on the players and start the season with scab replacement players in an effort to force them to agree. The ruling pointed out, in painstaking detail, the serial ineptitude of commissioner Bud Selig and his lieutenants as they presided over this mess. It was Selig's worst moment as commissioner and there wasn't a close second.

A decade later, Sotomayor ruled for a league over a player when, as an appeals court judge, she wrote the ruling that overturned a lower court decision that would have allowed Maurice Clarett to enter the NFL draft despite the age restriction that the union had collectively bargained.

The similarity in both cases, it seems, is a respect for the collective-bargaining process and the place of unions in the corporate world. In the baseball case, Sotomayor backed the National Labor Relations Board and slammed baseball for unfair labor practices. In the NFL case, she (and the justices who supported her position on the appeals court) supported the notion that labor law should trump anti-trust law in the Clarett case, and the idea that a union had the right to collectively bargain such an age restriction with an employer.

In other sporting news, Sotomayor apparently is a Yankees fan. Now that Jimmy Rollins has sort of predicted a Yankees-Phillies World Series, it would make for nothing if not an interesting opportunity for a wager if Sotomayor and Justice Samuel Alito -- an avowed Phillies fan -- would serve on the court together.

Loser wears the other team's cap during oral arguments one day. What do you say?

Here is the real news from the Eagles' roster:

Macho Harris is his name. Not Victor. Macho.

It says so, right there on the Eagles' website. And the change was confirmed by the club. The cornerback from Virginia Tech whom the Eagles drafted in the fifth round last month has a real first name on his birth certificate, name of Victor, but that's done. The preference now, on first reference, is to use the nickname that his family gave him as a young child. Macho Harris.

The Eagles have done this before. This club has endured more name changes in the last couple of years than the Wachovia Center.  Tra/William/Tra Thomas was one. Will Peterson/William James was another one. Juqua Thomas/Juqua Parker was still another one. Then there is Tank Daniels, who is really Torrance Daniels, except that he is now Tank Daniels. Got all that?

As you are no doubt aware, the NFL can get a little persnickety about all of this when it starts to touch the revenue stream, as it did in the case of the Bengals' Chad Johnson, who wants to be known as Chad Ocho Cinco. The league fought him on this for a while, mostly because of all the jerseys in stores with "Johnson" on the back of them. Now the NFL has relented -- except that, because of the manner in which the official paperwork was filled out, the league is insisting that the official name is "Ochocinco" and not "Ocho Cinco."

But if you want to change your first name, the league apparently doesn't care so much. There aren't any legal documents consulted or anything like that. You want to change your first name, you just change it. In fact, if Macho Harris wanted to change his name again, he could.

Machocinco is still available, for instance.

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Click here for an earlier post about the NFL and the labor hammer is now wields.

The news was in The New York Times the other day. At the NFL owners' meeting, as a result of making a deal with Comcast on carrying the NFL Network, the league's deals with CBS and Fox were renegotiated as well. The key point, though, is that the owners will get the network cash even if the league were to lock out the players in a labor dispute in 2011.

From the Times report:

The N.F.L. will receive a 1 to 2 percent increase over the previous contracts that averaged $712 million a year from Fox and $622 million a year from CBS. According to two people with knowledge of the deal who were not authorized to speak about it, the N.F.L. will get that money even if games are not played in 2011. (The networks will receive credits for the payments in following years.)

This is news but it isn't news. As far as I know, every NFL television contract in the modern era has included a clause that calls for payment in the event of a work stoppage, and this clause has affected every labor negotiation the league has ever had. The reason is obvious enough: during a work stoppage, the teams would lose ticket revenue and other sponsorship revenue, but they would continue to receive the TV money, which is about two-thirds of what comes in every season, while not having to pay the players.

In other words, the owners will continue to be able to operate indefinitely while the players lose 100 percent of their income. The players already have short, tenuous careers as it is. It is obvious why these television contracts are such a hammer in any negotiation.

This is not good for the players but it is probably good for the rest of us. Why? Because it would be suicide for the union to allow this thing to get to a work stoppage situation.  The union got a small victory in the last negotiation, which was held in a unique circumstance as former commissioner Paul Tagliabue was taking a valedictory lap. But it was not a huge win, even as the owners complain about the deal, and nobody is worried about anybody's legacy anymore.

The union has one hammer of its own: the Federal court system. The only time it ever won anything that mattered against the league, it was because the union disbanded and sued the NFL for free-agency rights. The current system was birthed out of the union's victory in that lawsuit in the famous case where Reggie White agreed to be listed as the main plaintiff.

It is becoming more and more clear that the union will have to accept some concessions at the bargaining table or head to court before the NFL locks out the players. Maybe that threat of a court fight will give the players a bit of a hammer of their own. We'll see.

But a work stoppage? I don't think so, especially now that the networks have again agreed to bankroll the owners.

Michael Vick is out of jail.

Now, the maneuvering begins.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is playing this very cozy. He said he is looking for Vick to show proper remorse before reinstating him, all of which is fine. But what nobody is really saying out loud, but which everybody knows in their heart, is that no NFL team is going to touch Vick -- even after serving his debt to society in this despicable dog-fighting business -- unless there is some reasonable certainty that the resulting publicity firestorm will blow over fairly quickly. That is, no one will want to deal with PETA picketing their games and their practice facilities and their sponsors for months on end.

This is all about PETA right now, and PETA does not appear to be placated. There is talk that Vick and the Humane Society might be getting into bed together, but PETA? Not yet.

In January, PETA said that it could not support Vick's return unless he underwent psychiatric testing, including a brain scan, to determine if he is likely to get involved in animal cruelty again. This is a bit, uh, intrusive -- and it goes against the whole paid-his-debt ethos to which most people in this country subscribe -- but PETA is driving the bus here. Don't kid yourself on that one.

Anyway, according to a published report, here is the latest PETA statement:

In January, after a U.S. Department of Agriculture report on Vick's dogfighting activities revealed that Vick enjoyed placing family pets in the ring with fighting pit bulls, PETA called on NFL Commissioner Goodell to require that Vick undergo a full psychological evaluation before any decisions were made about the future of his football career.

Until Michael Vick undergoes the vigorous psychiatric tests now available to determine his ability to experience remorse, there’s no way to establish whether he will re-offend and he therefore has no business being primed to become a role model for children, which is what an NFL star is. PETA will not take anything off the table when it comes to any team or league that may sign Michael Vick.

In the meantime, other athletes are coming forward to speak out against dogfighting, including Houston Rockets forward Ron Artest, mixed martial arts fighter Tito Ortiz, and World Welterweight Champion "Sugar" Shane Mosley, who is shooting an anti-dogfighting ad for PETA this week.

The key phrase: "...will not take anything off the table when it comes to any team or league that may sign Michael Vick."

That is known as a threat, ladies and gentleman.

In other words, this might take a while.

This is awful, as anybody who knows Jim Johnson can tell you. Even if you only know of him, the news of his leave of absence to resume chemotherapy treatments just grabs the air out of your chest. This is a good man, and a tough man, and the idea that he is involved in this kind of a struggle is disheartening. If prayers and good wishes and hopeful thoughts matter, Johnson will get through this -- because his friends and admirers in a tough business are legion.

In the meantime, Sean McDermott runs the Eagles' defense. He is young, only just 35, but he has been in the building for 11 years now. He actually pre-dates Andy Reid, arriving as an assistant in the scouting department in 1998. When Reid got here, McDermott became assistant to the head coach. Those are great stepping-stone jobs in the NFL -- you see everything and learn everything and work your ass off, and then you work your way up from there. This is what McDermott has done, from quality-control coach (another work-your-ass-off/learn-the-business job), to coaching both the secondary and the linebackers with the Eagles.

Is McDermott ready? You never know until you know, obviously, but it is hard to believe somebody could be better prepared to run this system. And if track record matters, people named Leslie Frazier, Ron Rivera, Steve Spagnuolo and John Harbaugh (for a season) have all worked under Jim Johnson and all gone on to success in other places. We all have talked and written in the past about the connection Johnson has had with his players, but there is a clear connection with his coaches, too.

Again: you never know until you know. But as we wait and hope for Johnson's return, there is every reason to believe that Jim has taken care of the interim as he now takes care of himself.