Three of my favorites

On his new blog, Joe Posnanski is asking people to write about their favorite athletes in 100 words or less.

I've already written about mine, Don Mattingly, in far more than 100 words, but I'll give it a shot with three others who are favorites both because of their greatness and because of the connections they have led to.

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Jerseys of two pretty good players ...  and Diana Taurasi

For me, Diana Taurasi is women's basketball.

I never followed it until I started dating the future Mrs. Last Honest, who is a massive Connecticut fan, and so it was that one of the first games I watched was the UConn-Tennessee game Dec. 31, 2000. when Taurasi, a freshman, sparked the Huskies off the bench.

It was love (basketball love, that is) at first sight.

And there's so much to love: her shooting, her passing, her fun, her devilish sense of humor. And by the good fortune of when I started dating my wife, I've been there from the start.

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Gilmour ... Dougie Gilmour

My junior and senior years in college, we only took breaks from hockey on the Sega for several things: classes, eating, sleeping, the radio station, going out occasionally ...

... and "Hockey Night in Canada."

One of the stations we got locally aired the CBC, which meant Saturday night hockey, which usually meant the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hard as it may be to believe, the Leafs were really good in those years, and Doug Gilmour was the leader of the pack, passing, scoring, hitting and throwing his body all over the ice.

Me and my boys couldn't get enough.

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I wish I could have seen more of these.

When I was growing up, my father and I watched baseball. As I got older, he drifted away from baseball and toward Michael Jordan, who I hated.

Then he got into NASCAR, and drew me into it. It gave us something to talk about, and since Dale Earnhardt was his favorite driver, he became mine. A thrill of my first NASCAR race in Dover was seeing Earnhardt come out for second-round qualifying, which he rarely did back then.

We didn't see him win like he did in his best days, but we had Bristol, Talladega and, of course, Daytona.