Sports Beat

Instead of the next Pel�, Mallory Snyder will try to become the next Puck. The 19-year-old daughter of former Falcons wide receiver Todd Snyder gave up a full soccer scholarship at Iowa State and left the school before this spring semester to become a cast member on the 13th season of MTV's The Real World, which began airing on June 3 and is set in Paris. (She's the inexperienced hottie who is holding off on sex until she finds true love.) Snyder, a midfielder who played in 12 games last year as a freshman for the Cyclones, told the Chicago Sun-Times, "I've been playing soccer for so long that it just got to the point where I wasn't sure if I could stick out. This was kind of an opportunity to set my life on a different path."

?German soccer god Franz Beckenbauer, 57, is expecting his fifth child and his second with Heidi Burmester, a former secretary at Bayern Munich, the soccer team for which Beckenbauer starred, and which he has been president of since 1994. Beckenbauer and Burmester have a two-year-old son, Joel Maximilian, and last year Beckenbauer left his wife of 12 years—Sybille, with whom he has three sons—to be with Burmester. "We have a big house, we still have plenty of space, even for a whole kindergarten," Beckenbauer told the German newspaper Bild.

?He's still perhaps best known as the fully Afroed Carver High hoops star James Hayward on the classic TV series The White Shadow, so maybe it's not surprising that director Thomas Carter (Save the Last Dance), 50, is heading back to the court. Carter is in negotiations with Paramount to direct Back in the Day, a film based on Richmond ( Calif.) High School basketball coach Ken Carter, who made national headlines in 1999 for locking his players out of practices and games when they failed to maintain a 2.3 GPA.

?Bend it like Farrell? Soccer fans no doubt gasped when Irish actor Colin Farrell grabbed the broken right wrist (it's in a cast) of presenter David Beckham while accepting the award for Best Transatlantic Breakthrough at the MTV Movie Awards. "Oh, f—-, what have I done?" Farrell blurted. Becks flinched, but he then assured Farrell that he was fine.... Rams coach Mike Martz held a barbecue at his split-level house outside St. Louis last Friday, and the 75 guests included ex-Cardinals Stan Musial and Whitey Herzog and SI's Peter King. Musial, 83, dressed in a sport coat and collared shirt, entertained the party with his harmonica, playing America the Beautiful, My Country 'Tis of Thee (which the 72-year-old Herzog sang loudly) and Wabash Cannonball. " Dizzy Dean taught me how to play that one," Musial said.... Do you believe in remakes? Twenty-two years after Karl Maiden played gruff hockey coach Herb Brooks, who led the 1980 U.S. team to Olympic gold, in the TV movie Miracle on Ice, Kurt Russell is tackling the same role in a movie of the same name. Disney will release the new Miracle in February.... The latest point of contention in Jeff Gordon's divorce case is whether the NASCAR star should be entitled to a larger-than-usual share of marital assets because his occupation requires him to risk his life. Lawyers for Gordon's wife, Brooke, submitted documents showing that race car driving is a safer trade than construction, transportation and commercial...fishing.