Leading off today: I had consciously decided earlier this month that I was going to avoid writing on this site about Allison Stokke.

   Yeah, I can be as lewd and as crude as anyone on a good (bad?) day, but this snowballing situation made even me uncomfortable and I was happy to pass up the opportunity to draw easy traffic to this site with a gratuitous mention. But once The Washington Post starts writing about her -- on Page 1 -- there's pretty much no sense in me ignoring the story.

   The genie is out of the bottle and I kind of shudder at the thought of what might happen next. That's because Stokke is just a pretty California teen athlete who didn't bring any of this upon herself like Jennifer Ringley did nearly a decade ago with her voyeuristic (and then pornographic and then explicit) Jennicam, which attracted a huge following of viewers -- some with impure thoughts and unhealthy fantasies.

   This whole Stokke affair is getting more messy by the minute. For the uninitiated, here's a summary of what's going on:

   Stokke lives in Newport Beach, Calif., and has a track and field scholarship awaiting her at the University of California. She was a state pole vault champion as a freshman and has even broken some national records.

   Then, early this month, a fairly innocuous portrait photo of the attractive senior was posted on several web sites, and suddenly her page on MySpace was swamped with messages. A video of her talking about pole vaulting found its way onto YouTube and became one of the most watched clips on the site.

   And then the level of attention spun completely out of control three weeks ago when WithLeather.com -- a sports blog oriented toward opinion and at times off-color comedy -- posted her picture and a four-paragraph blurb that The Washington Post summarized as "Meet pole vaulter Allison Stokke. . . . Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds."

   WithLeather.com traffic hit record levels and spawned another generation of web postings and copycat sites. Try searching for her name on Yahoo! and you get more than 180,000 results. (Jim Boeheim only gets 197,000.)

   Stokke told the newspaper that the attention has made her uncomfortable and she feels almost like a crime victim. As the newspaper accurately characterized it, "Her body had been stolen and turned into a public commodity, critiqued in fan forums devoted to everything from hip-hop to Hollywood."

   Said Stokke: "Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning. I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it's almost like that doesn't matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me."

   Texas steroids update: Public high school athletes would face mandatory random steroid testing under a bill given final approval Monday by the Texas Legislature and sent to Gov. Rick Perry.

   If Perry signs the bill, the state could begin work at the start of the coming football season on the largest high school steroids testing program in the country.

   The House of Representatives passed the bill, 140-4. It requires the state to pay for testing, rather than force schools to raise ticket prices to cover the cost. The University Interscholastic League, the state's governing body for public school sports, will run the program and will be empowered to determine penalties for failed tests.

   About 130 of Texas' 1,300 public high schools already test for steroids. New Jersey became the first state to start a statewide testing policy last year.

   Extra points: Grand Forks (N.D.) Red River's Liza Wischer defeated teammate Callie Ronkowski 6-2, 6-4 to win the girls' state tennis singles title ovr the weekend. She finishes her career with a 129-0 record and six state championships. She'll attend Iowa State next fall.

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