Bulls' Kyle Korver shows Kris Humphries how marriage is done

Did you know a tall NBA player married a very pretty 31-year-old performer in August – and the marriage still is going?

Ha! You were thinking of Nets forward Kri$ Humphrie$ and Kim Karda$hian, weren’t you? That’s the pair involved in the 72-day fraud wedding that did for the institution of marriage what Countrywide did for the institution of mortgage lending.

But I’m talking about Bulls swingman Kyle Korver and the lovely and statuesque former singer/songwriter Juliet Richardson, who were wed Aug. 10, 10 days before the Karda$hian Ka$h $how.

The new Mrs. Korver is a yoga instructor in Chicago, and she and her husband seem to be in love.

Day 87 already has come and gone. Congratulations, kids!

◆ ALAS, THERE ISN’T much NBA news these days. That’s why I end up analyzing Humphries’ statement that he was ‘‘devastated to learn [the shameless, talent-free, pudding-brained, surgically enhanced, money-sniffing creature known briefly as his wife] filed for divorce.”

Was anybody else?

I was ready for ‘‘The Kardashians Do the Lockout” or ‘‘My Stepdad Bruce Jenner Gives David Stern a Facelift.”

Still, there is no NBA season, and the prospects of it starting soon, with owners and agents locked down and unyielding, look grim.

The sad thing is we in Chicago are missing Derrick Rose’s 23rd year on Planet Basketball, the same year in which Michael Jordan averaged a career-high 37.1 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.6 assists.

◆ I MADE A COUPLE of mistakes recently in a column suggesting that the White Sox take on successful and just-retired Cardinals manager Tony La Russa in the front office, just to stick it to the Cubs.

I said that La Russa got his start as a manager when Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf hired him well into the 1979 season. Actually, Reinsdorf didn’t take over the team until 1981, though he kept La Russa as manager for five more years. La Russa first was hired by Bill Veeck and Roland Hemond.

Second, I didn’t mention the importance of steroids in La Russa’s success or his convenient blindness about the issue. Not that he used performance-enhancing drugs himself, but his first World Series-winning team, the 1989 Oakland Athletics featured a pair of sluggers named Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire.

La Russa always was dismissive of the steroid problem in baseball, even as the players grew immense, power numbers exploded and the media became more and more dubious.

When Associated Press writer Steve Wilstein saw and wrote about the bottle of androstenedione in McGwire’s locker during the inflated strongman’s 70-home-run season in 1998, the furious La Russa’s response was to ban Wilstein from the locker room. And there, for all to see, in the Cardinals’ most recent World Series championship was admitted steroid user and cheater McGwire, sitting in the dugout as La Russa’s handpicked batting coach.

Yes, Joe Torre and other managers benefitted by their know-nothing attitudes about steroids, too. But with La Russa, it wasn’t that he didn’t see anything in the bulging necks and forearms; it was that he seemed to like what he saw.

◆ ILLINOIS REP. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, has been known to say some pretty strong things. So when he started talking about the NCAA last week, basing his feelings on his recent experiences with the families of harmed Division I college athletes, you knew the sky was going to light up.

‘‘I think you would compare the NCAA to Al Capone and the Mafia,” Rush said while explaining the impact the organization has on big-time college athletes. ‘‘I think they’re just one of the most vicious, most ruthless organizations ever created by mankind.”

I wasn’t there, but I’ll bet the NCAA big shots kind of chuckled – or at least smirked.

‘‘Congressman Rush obviously doesn’t know the NCAA,” NCAA spokesman Bob Williams said in an e-mail to the media Tuesday.

Well, I do. And I haven’t seen any rubber-lipped, murderous cigar-chompers such as Capone in the organization.

But thanks for doing what you did, Rep. Rush.

The NCAA recently decided, under great anguish, to give some of its athletes – many of them poverty-stricken, socially unprepared-for-college minority kids – up to an extra $2,000 to help with the expenses beyond a scholarship, such as laundry, extra food, mittens for winter and the like.

The NCAA did it only to keep the feds from coming after it and its wild pursuit of (tax-exempt) TV revenue and, indeed, the complete professionalization of an ‘‘extracurricular activity” that has unpaid laborers at its foundation.

Who came up with the $2,000 figure, anyway?

Somebody needs to keep lobbing virtual firebombs at these pigs at the trough.

Just not real ones.