Fame

ROGER CLEMENS said little publicly in the immediate aftermath of the Hall of Fame vote. More than a month later, he's willing to share his thoughts - but the 354-game winner is not about to start a lobbying campaign. "I'm not going to lose any sleep over it," Clemens said in Kissimmee, Fla. "If those guys feel I deserve to be there, then I deserve to be there. If they feel I don't, then that's OK, too. " Clemens was at spring training Monday as a special instructor for the Houston Astros, and he spoke for a bit with the team's pitchers about his mental approach to the game.

HOUSTON - Philadelphia native and five-time WNBA all-star Dawn Staley and former 76er Maurice Cheeks are among 12 finalists for election into the Basketball Hall of Fame. St. Joseph's Prep coach Speedy Morris was nominated but is not a finalist. Former Houston Cougars coach Guy Lewis has been chosen as a finalist for the first time since 2003. Current Louisville coach Rick Pitino and former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian also are finalists for the 2013 class. The others includes former NBA stars Gary Payton, Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Spencer Haywood, and Bernard King; longtime North Carolina women's coach Sylvia Hatchell; and Boston Celtics great Tom Heinsohn, already inducted as a player, is a finalist in the coaching category.

HOUSTON - Dikembe Mutombo thinks he deserves induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. The 7-2 Mutombo, the starting center on the Sixers team that played in the NBA Finals, will be eligible beginning in 2015 after his retirement following the 2008-09 season. He ranks second on the NBA's career blocked-shots list (3,256), behind only Hakeem Olajuwon (3,830) and he says surpassing every player but Olajuwon on that list should alone merit inclusion in the Hall. Mutombo was also a four-time defensive player of the year, an eight-time All-Star and twice the league's top rebounder (2000-01)

Larry Cardonick was an unlikely sort of special education teacher. When he walked into that first classroom in the late 1950s, he had just left the Canadian Football League, where, despite being under six feet tall and not particularly large, he played defense for the Sarnia Golden Bears on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario. That was until knee injuries caught up with him, and he returned to his native Philadelphia. Mr. Cardonick, 80, of Cherry Hill, died Friday, Feb. 8, at the Genesis Eldercare home in Voorhees after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

ONCE, WHEN the Internet was not as friendly and we sought to observe athletic greatness rather than quantify it, sports was a simpler world. You watched under well-lit skies and inside of electrified arenas and amid pivotal moments and you did not need to look anything up afterward to understand what you saw. There were numbers guys back then of course, keeping their own stats in notebooks, reciting them at the lunch table or later, at the end...

NEW ORLEANS - Of the seven men who were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, none was more emotional than Cris Carter, who took six years to get in despite putting up some of the best receiving numbers in NFL history. He broke down in tears but quickly pointed out "it's not because I'm sad. " Carter, who started his career with the Eagles, joined Bill Parcells, Warren Sapp, Jonathan Ogden, Larry Allen, Curly Culp, and Dave Robinson in the Hall's Class of 2013.

AS THE SPORTS information director at the University of Sciences and a member of the Philadelphia Area Small College Coaches Association, Bob Heller is familiar with coordinating the annual induction into the group's Hall of Fame. This time around, his only responsibility will be to sit back and wait for his name to be announced. Heller, who has been a member of the association's board for 13 seasons, will be inducted into the Philadelphia Small College Coaches Hall of Fame on March 18, alongside former Ursinus All-America basketball player Dennis Stanton and former Community College of Philadelphia basketball coach Robert "Dondi" DeShields.

NEW ORLEANS - Of the seven men who were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, none was more emotional than Cris Carter, who took six years to get in despite putting up some of the best receiving numbers in NFL history. He broke down in tears but quickly pointed out "it's not because I'm sad. " Carter, who started his career with the Eagles, joined Bill Parcells, Warren Sapp, Jonathan Ogden, Larry Allen, Curly Culp, and Dave Robinson in the Hall's Class of 2013.

The details of Dave Robinson's life were made for a Hall of Fame plaque. Superstar athlete. Racial pioneer. Engineering graduate. Character in a Broadway play. Number 1 NFL draft pick. Starter in Super Bowl I. He played for Vince Lombardi and a young Joe Paterno. Countless teammates won great fame (the legendary 1960s Green Bay Packers) and at least one earned eternal shame (Jerry Sandusky). But there are two discordant notes in the Mount Laurel native's story, notable holes in his heart and his resumé.

In 2009, Cole Hamels had a 3-0 lead over the New York Yankees in Game 3 of the World Series. In the fourth inning, Alex Rodriguez hit a two-run homer, igniting the Yankees offense and immolating Hamels' confidence for the rest of the Series. New York won the game, 8-5, taking a two-games-to-one lead on the way to a Series triumph in six games. If the report in the Miami weekly New Times is accurate, Rodriguez was using human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs during the 2009 season.