Sports

A FAIR FOUL

MONDAY night, veteran college basketball official Bob Donato had become the worst ref in the free world, a bum.

Overnight, bloggers, message-boarders and water-boarders were calling for Donato’s execution, at dawn.

But when dawn broke Tuesday, Bob Donato was among the very best refs in the land.

Odd how the pursuit of conclusive video evidence – the kind that often leads to knee-jerk adoptions of half-baked replay rules – often only leads to conclusive evidence that what seems so clear one minute looks to be clearly the opposite the next.

Monday night on ESPN, Villanova and Georgetown were tied, a few seconds left, when Villanova lost the ball deep in their forecourt. As Georgetown’s Jonathan Wallace dribbled to the near sideline, he was pressured by Corey Stokes, who was whistled for a foul – with, egads, one-tenth of a second left.

Donato’s call, as noted by ESPN commentators Sean McDonough, Bill Raftery and Jay Bilas, seemed absurd. At worst, and as seen in three replays, Stokes’ chest brushed Wallace. No doubt about it, just a rotten call at an even worse time. That Wallace would be sent to the line, where he won the game, was a travesty of basketball justice.

But Tuesday morning, as the same replays were presented, again on ESPN, there again was no doubt about it. But this time there was no doubt that Stokes bumped Wallace so significantly that a call, no matter how much time was left on the clock – and Donato couldn’t watch the clock and the game – was warranted. It was a legit call, a gutsy one, too. A foul is a foul.

So here’s to you, Bob Donato. We’ve got your back, even if it’s only to remove the darts.

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Some of the stuff from Wednesday’s Congressional hearing remains precious.

For example, some Congressional committee members thought it odd and suspicious that Brian McNamee saved gauze pads and syringes from his injections of Roger Clemens, six and seven years ago. Yet, saving such things seemed to make plenty of sense.

On the other hand, not one committee member seemed curious as to why Clemens kept a receipt from a round of golf he played when the Blue Jays were in Florida in 1998.

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As revolting as cockfighting strikes so many of us – to the surprise of Pedro Martinez, among others – it’s important to know that there’s plenty of surprise attached to its condemnation.

Organized bird fighting, for centuries and still rooted in gambling, is so historically and culturally ingrained in much of the world that what we might fully regard as animal abuse is fully regarded in some places to be legitimate sport.

Consider that many of us grew up watching cartoons on TV in which roosters wore boxing gloves and would begin to snap off jabs at the sound of a bell. That’s how synonymous roosters were, in this country, to organized bird fighting. Most of those American cartoons were made not all that long ago, in the 1940s and ’50s.

The boxing classification “bantamweight” is taken from bantam, a word for small and aggressive birds. Several American colleges long ago adopted fighting birds as their mascots, as did the famous English soccer team, Tottenham Hotspur. Tottenham’s logo includes the image of a cockerel with metal spurs attached to its lower legs, spurs designed to cut opposing birds.

And the notion that cockfighting now almost exclusively belongs to the Spanish-speaking world is just wrong. Cockfighting is found in Italy, India, Pakistan and France. Popular with Cajun and Creole traditionalists, cockfighting in Louisiana, the last state to allow it, will not become illegal until this August.

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As two of ESPN’s networks, ESPN and ESPNews, are solemnly immersed in baseball’s steroids scandal, a third Disney network, ESPN2, continues to air “World’s Strongest Man” competitions, events so steeped in steroid use that its competitors don’t even bother to deny it. Small wonder that WSM championships are now held in beyond-the-reach places such as China, Zambia and Malaysia.

And WSM’s primary enabler in the U.S. remains ESPN.

Last summer, when Jesse Marunde, a 27-year-old American with a gargantuan physique, two kids and a regular on the WSM/ESPN2 circuit, died of sudden heart failure, the sad news made for no news on “SportsCenter.”

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Sign of the Times: Golfweek magazine now annually lists its Top 25 courses – among those attached to U.S. casinos. . . . Lookalikes: Submitted by Mike Cesare of Copiague, L.I. – SNY and Sirius sportscaster Adam Schein and actor Bruce Mahler, who portrayed the monotone Rabbi Glickman on “Seinfeld.”

phil.mushnick@nypost.com