7TH INNING STRETCH

Congrats to South Africa's Louis Oosthuizen on his breathtaking win on the Old Course over the weekend. He led for the final 48 holes, closed with a 1-under-par 71 on Sunday, and shot a 16-under 272 for the tournament.

Lee Westwood was the closest player to even getting a whiff of Oosthuizen, and he finished at 9-under.

And Oosthuizen wrapped up his win on Nelson Mandela's 92nd birthday, no less.

Not too shabby.

I can only hope The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" now and forever replaces the brain-piercing buzz of the vuvuzela as the unofficial soundtrack of South Africa.

Speaking of vuvuzelas, thumbs up to Spain for defeating the Netherlands to secure its first World Cup title. I still don't "get" soccer's global appeal, particularly after so much attention was given to the headscratching refereeing, the lip-service to rethinking the "possibility" of limited use of instant-replay, and the perpetual, near-Shakespearean flop-tacle that marred almost every game.

But what do I know? If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Billions the world over consider soccer the beautiful game. I can't wait to get my fill again.

In another four years.

Looks like the National League gets home field advantage in this year's World Series. After losing the previous 13 All Star games it must feel good for the Senior Circuit to finally be back on top. Like knowing you never have to hear another vuvuzela.

Ever.

Also in baseball, Fox analyst Tim McCarver took special exception to the prominence given to four-time World-Series-winning-manager Joe Torre in the new Yankee Stadium. More precisely, McCarver took special exception to the lack of prominence given to Torre in the House that George Built.

"You remember some of those despotic leaders in World War II, primarily in Russia and Germany, where they used to take those pictures that they had ... taken of former generals who were no longer alive, they had shot 'em," McCarver said. "They would airbrush the pictures, and airbrushed the generals out of the pictures. In a sense, that's what the Yankees have done with Joe Torre. They have airbrushed his legacy. I mean, there's no sign of Joe Torre at the stadium. And, that's ridiculous. I don't understand it."

Hmmm. Well, from what I've heard, and I fully admit I haven't yet been, there is, indeed, very little reference made to Torre, pictorial or otherwise, anywhere in the Stadium. Is that unfortunate? Absolutely. Petty. Definitely. No organization that famously dug up a section of its concrete foundation to remove a David Ortiz jersey could have simply forgotten to include some mention of the skipper who guided the Yankees to their greatest consistent successes during the Steinbrenner family's ownership. I'm not going out on a limb by saying that the Yankees wouldn't have collected all that hardware without Torre astutely pushing the buttons and pulling the levers that kept the Yankees Express on the tracks.

But to compare the current pettiness of Yankees' ownership, a group whose feelings were obviously deeply hurt by Torre's tell-all book, as clumsy an attempt to cash in and flip the bird all at the same time as I can remember in sports, to the leadership of World War Two-era Germany and Russia, to Hitler and Stalin, let's be clear, is way out of bounds.

McCarver had a point, even a good one, and it was obviously a point he'd been ruminating on for a while, but the manner in which he made it? Stupid and thoughtless.

Which is too bad, because McCarver, while many things, is neither of those.

Speaking of stupid and thoughtless, Dwyane Wade, the real winner of the LeBron James sweepstakes, climbed onto the open-mouth-insert-foot bandwagon when he said, "You all are going to make it seem like the World Trade is coming down again, but it's not going to be nothing but a couple of basketball games," while discussing the possibility of his Super Heat inevitably dropping two or three games in a row this upcoming season.

Really? People are going to compare a basketball losing-streak to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? I won't. Nobody I know is going to. As a matter of fact, I solemnly promise, now and before my dozens-strong readership, to personally take my trusty tack hammer to the forehead of the first dunce who does.

Again, Wade is smarter than this.

The last person on this special edition of "Wait, wait, you said what?!?" is verbal-grenade-tossing-veteran Jesse Jackson, who defended James's decision to bolt for the sandier, less tax-invasive pastures of South Beach and blasted Cleveland Cavalier's owner Dan Gilbert by saying, "[Gilbert's] feelings of betrayal personify a slave master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave." Really? I think Gilbert, whose open letter to James in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer was utterly bonkers, sees James as the girl who not only got away but broke the news from the arms of her new beau.

So Gilbert's sad and hacked and hurt.

But comparing him to a slave master?

Sadly, but alone in these three slips of the tongue, that's precisely what we've come to expect from Jackson, an otherwise noble man whose good intentions are too often overshadowed by his outlandish oratory.

Not unlike a vuvuzela.

Alex can be reached at cuda24@yahoo.com