Philip Hochberg, the lawyer and longtime P.A. announcer profiled in Monday’s Maryland Lawyer, showed his true grit last weekend at the BB&T Classic basketball tournament in Washington, D.C.

(Hochberg, a sports lawyer, announced Redskins games for 38 years until 2001 and has announced George Washington University basketball games and University of Maryland football games for more than 30 years.)

While announcing the Maryland game against Virginia Commonwealth University Sunday night, Hochberg became an innocent bystander in a crash collision between Terp Bambale Osby and the scorer’s table. Hochberg put his left arm up when he saw the 6’8″, 250-pound center falling toward him, but it was clearly an unfair fight.

I’m sure the BB&T crowd would have forgiven the 65-year-old an “injury time out” from his announcing duties, but the old pro went right on calling the game while the medics bandaged up his swollen and bleeding hand. Talk about tough!

The Terps didn’t fare any better – they lost to VCU, 85-76. Hochberg reported Tuesday that his hand is still swollen but at least he’s getting a free DVD of the collision from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, which aired the game and replayed the scene on its sports show.

“It’s the first time in 50 years of doing basketball P.A. that that’s happened,” Hochberg wrote in an e-mail. “I’ll survive.”

Iíll bet you lawyers out there have some stories of your own about unusual injuries on the job – care to share?

-LIZ FARMER, Legal Affairs Writer

The National Zoo is touting the use of environmentally-friendly LED lights in its holiday displays. “Zoolights,” which runs through Dec. 30, has “larger-than-life displays” of many of the Zoo’s popular critters.

And (wee!) sponsor Pepco “will educate visitors about simple practices they can adopt in their households to save energy.”

Have you used these LED lights on your home or Christmas tree? How do they look?

National Geographic says that if everyone replaced their conventional holiday light strings with LEDs, at least two billion kilowatt-hours of electricity could be saved in a month – enough to power 200,000 homes for a year.

-JACKIE SAUTER, Multimedia Editor

As we reported Friday, the Appellate Judicial Nominating Commission whittled down the whopping list of candidates for the Court of Special Appeals to eight.

I’m wondering what everyone out there thinks of the names that were passed along to the gov. Anyone who applied and should’ve made the commission’s cut but didn’t? Anyone on the short list who doesn’t belong there?

It looks like O’Malley will have his work cut out for him because there are some very well-respected names on the list. O’Malley also has ample chance here to increase female representation on the court, which, as my colleague Brendan Kearney pointed out last month, is not proportional. I’ll also point out that the gov has a shot at appointing the first black woman judge on the Court of Special Appeals.

-CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer