I love Candace Parker ... and I'll fight to the death for her

By Jacob E. Osterhout

Love is such a cruel game. I'm in love with the best women's college basketball player in the country, but she's seeing another man -- another very big man.

With looks like this, it's easy to see why Candace Parker (pictured here with Kevin Durant) is the apple of this writer's eye. AP

Candace Parker is the sexiest woman in basketball. Hands down. No other college basketball player made People's 100 Most Beautiful People list. She's six foot four inches of majestic hoops beauty. Tall enough to be a center and quick enough to be a guard, she's the all-around package. Her handle's hotter than a frying pan's and she's got more hops than a case of Budweiser.

Plus, Candace can dunk, and we all know there's nothing sexier than a girl who can dunk. She's the first female to dunk in an NCAA tournament game and is the only woman to ever dunk twice in the same college game. She dunks better than most guys. My baby won the slam dunk contest at the McDonald's High School All-Star Game. That's right, she beat both Josh Smith and J.R. Smith. Do you have a girlfriend who can do that?

Well, actually, I don't either. But that's only because the Landlord himself, Sheldon DeMar Williams, the former Duke center, is dating my hoops goddess.

How do I know they're seeing each other? I was at the NCAA women's finals in Cleveland, sitting on press row, when I looked up and saw Williams crammed into a seat eleven rows back, surrounded by hundreds of rabid Lady Vols fans. "What's the Landlord doing here?" I asked a reporter sitting next to me. "Oh," she responded. "He's dating Candace Parker."

No he's not, I thought, denial being the first stage of heartbreak. That's just a rumor. He's too old for her. (At the time she was only 20 and he was 23.) Models date models. Candace is a model. The Landlord is most certainly not. And he's too tall. She would never choose a man taller than her. She's got to jump just to give him a kiss -- although, she has no problem jumping...

I decided to get to the bottom of this rumor and find out from the Landlord himself if he was, in fact, dating the girl of my hoops dreams.

And sure enough, at halftime, he confirmed their romantic relationship. They met on her official visit to Duke, but didn't start dating until the 2006 ESPY Awards. That means they'd been going out for a little over a year. Apparently, they talk basketball while snuggling.

As you can imagine, I was crushed. Images of the Landlord boxing out my special lady friend flooded my head. I thought about taking him out right then and there, but I figured a broken heart was marginally better than a broken femur.

Not all was lost, though. If Candace liked the Landlord so much and they met on her official visit to Duke, why hadn't she chosen to attend Duke? And why, during the Lady Vols' championship game, when the rest of the crowd was decked out in bright orange, was the Landlord dressed in a drab yellow shirt?

Hope sprung anew. I believed that I could wait out their relationship. After all, she's still in college and he's on the road losing all the time. Plus, he's the backup center on the fourth-worst team in the NBA. (And the starting power forward is a former Tar Heel.) That can't be attractive.

And so I carried my bruised but unbroken heart around for a while, just waiting for Candace to drop the Landlord like she did Rutgers in the tournament finals. Then, as I was skimming the newspaper the other week, I came across an article that plunged the final dagger into my suffering heart. Sheldon Williams had proposed to Candace Parker and, get this, she said YES. Nike sources confirm it. My special someone now refers to the Landlord as her "fiancé".

The pain. The anguish. What's a defeated man like me to do? I guess I could sit around and watch reruns of Duke's loss to LSU in the 2006 tournament, or I could take a stand. After all, the wedding is on hold until Candace graduates.

So here's me taking a stand. Sheldon DeMar Williams, wherever you are, we've got a beef. You've stolen the woman of my dreams and I want her back. I challenge you to a three-point contest. Winner takes home the keys to Candace Parker's heart.

Jacob Osterhout is a freelance journalist who has been covering college sports ever since he was cut from his varsity basketball team.