Second thoughts

NASCAR drivers Danica Patrick and Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who attended the championship round of the Winston-Salem Professional Bull Riders series last weekend in Winston-Salem, N.C., confirmed they are a couple Friday.
NASCAR drivers Danica Patrick and Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who attended the championship round of the Winston-Salem Professional Bull Riders series last weekend in Winston-Salem, N.C., confirmed they are a couple Friday.

— NASCAR chivalry put to true test

Danica Patrick’s admission Friday that she and fellow NASCAR driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. are a couple, had fellow drivers wondering how they would handle themselves on the racetrack.

“Who gets the [track] position getting into the corner?” NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer asked. “ ‘You go. No, you go. No, no, you go.’ Who gets that position?

There’s a lot of give and take in a relationship.”

“I think you’re going to have to wait about two weeks and ask them,” NASCAR driver Juan Pablo Montoya said.

Added defending IndyCar champion Ryan Hunter-Reay: “I wish them all the best. It’ll be an interesting side note to watch them compete against one another. If you’re boyfriend/girlfriend, there’s not even a variable out there. If you’re married, there might be some consequence when you come home. Two different boats.”

Stenhouse, from Olive, Miss., started his racing career on dirt tracks in Little Rock and West Memphis. Both he and Patrick are eligible for Rookie of the Year honors in the Sprint Cup Series, and insist their relationship will not affect how they drive or treat each other on the track.

But Patrick wrote on Twitter that “the bump drafting jokes are cracking me up!”

Despite all the joking, Bowyer would have preferred the couple had waited to break the news.

“Thanks a lot, Ricky,” Bowyer said. “I’m down here enjoying the sunny weather in Daytona [Fla.], at my first 24-hour race, and what do I get asked? About Ricky and Danica.”

No matching game

NBA Commissioner David Stern doesn’t necessarily agree with New Orleans owner Tom Benson that the franchise needed a nickname change from Hornets to Pelicans to better represent the area.

“I think everything sounds good,” Stern told USA Today after the Hornets announced the change. “I think Lakers, have you seen any lakes in Los Angeles?

“There’s the same amount of lakes in LA as there is jazz in Utah, or grizzlies in Memphis.”

Effort less

Houston running back Arian Foster says players are going to step up at the Pro Bowl on Sunday, but don’t expect 100percent effort.

Foster said Friday after practicing with his AFC teammates in Honolulu that it’s unrealistic to expect full effort from the NFL’s top athletes when they’re limited in the plays they’re able to run.

“This isn’t basketball - you can’t go play a pickup game of football,” Foster said.

Foster said if the NFL expects 100 percent effort from its stars and league officials are willing to cancel the game if they don’t see that, then the game will likely be scrapped.

“I think it’s an honor and a tradition, but for you to expect the best athletes in the NFL to come out and play a game 100 percent when you can’t game plan, you can’t blitz, you can’t do all these things, it’s not going to be competitive like everybody wants it to be,” Foster said.

Fellow running back Adrian Peterson said the players do have 50,000 reasons to play hard, though, since that’s how much more bonus money members of the winning team get than the losers.

“We get 50 more racks so we can give it to our mom, our dad, our family, or go buy a car.

There’s a lot you can do with 50,” the Minnesota Vikings star said.

Quote of the day

“I feel like just give us some time, and we’ll be in a position to play for something.” Arkansas forward Marshawn Powell

Sports, Pages 24 on 01/26/2013

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