Sports Beat

The death of TLC singer Lisa (Left Eye) Lopes struck a nerve in the sports world. Lopes, who was killed in a car crash in Honduras on April 25, was an on-again, off-again girlfriend of free-agent receiver Andre Rison. (Last summer Rison announced that he and Lopes were to be married, but it never happened.) Rison refuses to talk about Lopes's death. Also shaken was Dale Earnhardt Jr. The NASCAR star, who says he's been a fan of TLC since his teen years, became incensed when he heard that autopsy photos of Lopes's body were available on the Internet. For the last year Earnhardt and his family have been involved in a legal battle to keep similar pictures of Dale Earnhardt Sr. private. "Circulating pictures of [Lopes's] body on the Internet is just plain wrong," says Junior. "I know exactly what her family is going through." At Sunday's Pontiac Excitement 400 in Richmond, the members of Earnhardt's pit crew paid tribute to Lopes by wearing black stripes under their left eyes, and a black stripe was taped under the left headlight of Earnhardt's car.

?Attention prospective home buyers: There's a bargain to be had in the north Dallas area—if you're willing to take a place that's got a gaudy metal PRIME TIME sign on the front gate. Deion Sanders recently cut the asking price on his house in Piano, Texas, from $2.7 million to $2.25 million. Built in 1987, the sprawling 9,200-square-foot estate in the tony Willow Bend neighborhood features five bedrooms, seven baths, a tennis court, a pool, a separate guest house with a gym and movie theater, and an underground parking garage that can hold seven cars. Sanders originally put the place mi the market a year ago but found no takers,

?So how do you celebrate a four-homer day? If you're Mariners centerfielder Mike Cameron, you let your teammates stage a mock coronation. Cameron, who hit home runs in four consecutive at bats against the White Sox on Thursday, was stopped by left-fielder Mark McLemore before entering the Seattle clubhouse after the game. McLemore outfitted Cameron with a hastily constructed cardboard crown that read KING CAM 5-2-02 and a cape made of towels on which the number 4 had been written several times. Cameron was led into the clubhouse, where he walked through a gauntlet of cheering teammates who doused him with beer. "I had to walk the line like I was marrying the princess," says Cameron. "The guys made me feel like the king of the hill." No after-hours celebrating though—the team had to quickly get on a late flight to New York. By the time Cameron got to his hotel, it was well after 3 a.m. Not that Cameron missed out on any fun. "I was laughing as I went to sleep," he says. "And I woke up in the middle of the night laughing."

?DON'T MISS: Sports movie fans have two very different options to choose from this week. Opening on Friday is Ultimate X, an eye-popping IMAX documentary about the 2001 Summer X Games. Also debuting is the Oscar-nominated Lagaan, a drama from India that centers on a game of cricket between a group of British colonialists and a bunch of Indian farmers in 1893. Take your pick: radical nosegrinds or wicked googlies.