Sports Beat

The last time a horse won the Triple Crown, Bill Murray was a long way from New York's Belmont Park—way up in the woods of Ontario, in fact, filming the summer-camp comedy Meatballs. Last Saturday he was among the record crowd of 120,139 who crammed the track to cheer on Smarty Jones in the Belmont Stakes. Shortly before the big race, Murray mingled in the paddock with the family and friends of Smarty's sizable entourage, posing for pictures with everyone who asked. When asked whom he was rooting for, Murray declared, "Oh, I'm for Smarty Jones. Aren't you? You wanna fight?" Murray—who watched the race in a box with Penny Chenery, who owned Secretariat—took Smarty's loss hard, staring in stunned silence across the track after the race.

?Retired tennis temptress (and SI Swimsuit model) Anna Kournikova was able to keep her first marriage, to NHL hockey star Sergei Fedorov, a secret—perhaps because she didn't go around wearing a six-carat $5.4 million pink diamond. (The pair were briefly married in 2001.) But a bauble of that description was given to Kournikova, 23, by her boyfriend, crooner Enrique Iglesias, 29, in May, and it recently caught the eye of a fan who offered his congratulations to the couple on their engagement. Iglesias (above, with Kournikova) responded by saying, "That is old news. We were married five weeks ago." A rep for Kournikova denied the story, and she is now also denying speculation that she's pregnant, which began after she was seen having her stomach rubbed by a friend at a Los Angeles mall.

?No one is denying this engagement: ESPN hockey analyst and 18-year NHL veteran Ray Ferraro and U.S. national team captain Cammi Granato will wed in the fall. Ferraro popped the question during the Women's World Championships in Nova Scotia in April. The couple plans to ice the deal during a ceremony on Sept. 4.

? Comerica Park's singing hot dog vendor, Charley Marcuse, has been told to pipe down by Sport Service, the company that handles concessions at the Detroit stadium. In 1999 Marcuse worked a Three Tenors concert, which inspired him to operatically offer his franks, and he's been singing ever since. But some fans recently complained, so the company told him not to warble while he worked. (Marcuse, 22, had no comment on the situation.) But just as when Cracker Jack was banned from Yankee Stadium (page 20), fans opposed to the move have spoken out and, in this case, posted their grievances on a website. A petition at singinghotdogman.com states, "We believe in baseball. We believe in mustard on hot dogs. We believe in mom and apple pie. And we believe Charley the hot dog man should be allowed to sing at Comerica Park."

?If he wasn't a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm before, Juan Catalan certainly is now. The 26-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested last year on suspicion of murder. Catalan, who faced the death penalty, claimed he was at a Dodgers-Braves game on the evening of May 12, 2003, when the shooting took place 20 miles away. He had ticket stubs but no irrefutable proof that he had actually attended the game. Then in January, Catalan's lawyer discovered that on the same evening, Larry David had shot scenes at the ballpark for an episode of Curb. The case was dismissed, after Catalan had spent 5� months in jail, when the judge acknowledged unused footage showed the alleged perpetrator in the crowd. David told The New Yorker, "I tell people that I've now done one decent thing in my life, albeit inadvertently."