Another star added to lineup: Serena Williams, who once again is the world’s top ranked women’s tennis player, is set to participate in the Advanta WTT Smash Hits tennis event, set for Dec. 8. Billie Jean King, Lindsay Davenport, Andy Roddick, Anna Kournikova and Tommy Haas had agreed to participate in the event, a partnership between Sir Elton John’s AIDS Foundation and the Irene W. and C.B. Pennington Foundation. Smash Hits will be held at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. For information on the event, click here.
Only pay-per-view appearance: LSU’s Oct. 31 home football game against Tulane will kick off at 7 p.m. on the athletic department’s TigerVision in-house, pay-per-view network. This will be the Tigers’ only pay-per-view broadcast this season. Because of Southeastern Conference rules regarding pay-per-view broadcasts, TigerVision is available only in Louisiana. Meanwhile, the Tigers’ (5-1, 3-1 SEC) home game Saturday against Auburn (5-2, 2-2) will be televised by ESPN2. The kickoff previously had been announced for 6:30 p.m.
Preseason predictions: The LSU men’s basketball team has been picked fourth in SEC Western Division by a 25-member panel of regional and national media. The Tigers, who won the regular-season conference title last year in Trent Johnson’s first season as their coach, received 70 points, including one first-place vote. Mississippi State received 144 points and 22 first-place votes, Ole Miss 120 points and two first-place votes, Alabama 84 points, Arkansas 63 and Auburn 44. Kentucky, in its first season under Coach John Calipari, has been picked first in the SEC East with 148 points and 23 first-place votes, followed by Tennessee with 117 points and two first-place votes, Vanderbilt with 90 points, South Carolina 77, Florida 68 and Georgia 25. LSU returns two starters — point guard Bo Spencer and forward Tasmin Mitchell—from last year’s team, which went 27-8 overall and lost to eventual national champion North Carolina in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Mitchell was a second-team, all-conference pick.
