SportsCenter, which my cable box tells me is "hip," doesn't show UFC highlights because the Worldwide Leader considers UFC "entertainment" but its flagship show had no problem doing a feature on chess boxing. Yes, chess boxing.

A day after Roger Clemens returned to the Yankees (meaningless signing) and in the midst of the NBA and NHL playoffs, not to mention NFL minicamps, a Sunday full of baseball, NASCAR, Tiger winning another tournament, the Kentucky Derby and an actual boxing match not involving board games, SportsCenter devoted several minutes of airtime to hype f-cking chess boxing. If you don't know, chess boxing combines chess and boxing and, yes, it is as stupid as you think.

I would have rather watched a five minute feature on why someone thought it was a good idea to add that asinine border on the right side of the screen to let the viewer know what's coming up on SportsCenter than sit through a paean to chess boxing. Or maybe a special report on why ESPN Deportes does highlights in English on the English-language version of SportsCenter in order to attract Spanish-seeking viewers to ESPN Deportes.

And in their haste to break the chess boxing story before Fox Sports created chess boxing robots, ESPN missed what is the most obvious angle to this story- what role did the Wu-Tang Clan play in the creation of chess boxing? The dorky Dutch creator of chess boxing says he was inspired by some dorky French comic book but I'm calling bullshit. If I'm Method Man or RZA or any other member of the Clan, I'm on the phone with my lawyers, getting ready to sue chess boxing for all it's worth. Which probably works out to about 28 Dutch guilders but it's the principle of it all.

And Wu-Tang Clan is nothing if not principled.