Why You Should Root, Root, Root For The Home Team
My first protocol on rooting in sports is that you should stick with the teams that you grew up with. I know we're a transient society, but that's just it: Continuing to cheer for your original...
View ArticleKickers Are Taking The Kick Out Of Football
Of all the strained sports cliches, my favorite was "educated toe." Remember? An accomplished field goal kicker possessed an educated toe. I had a newspaper friend who wrote that a punter had an...
View ArticleBrooklyn Finally Nets A Team Of Its Own
It's largely forgotten now — but there was a time when the mere mention of Brooklyn would produce a cascade of laughs. It was like saying "woman driver"— surefire guffaws. Everybody from Brooklyn was...
View ArticleThe American Pastime Fades In Popularity
Jacques Barzun, the esteemed cultural historian, lived 104 years and wrote a multitude of words about the most important issues in society, but when he died last week, his one quote that was invariably...
View ArticleDear Sports Czars: Take Your Ball And Go Home
Czars.It was fun to call American sports commissioners czars, but once players started to have unions, a commissioner really became more like a majority leader in a legislature, trying to keep his...
View ArticleWhat's Good For The Goose Is Good For The Gander
A trivia question for you: Who today is the leading jockey who was born in the U.S.?The answer is Rosie Napravnik. Yes, of all our American jockeys, the one with the best record is a woman.Napravnik's...
View ArticleCollege Football: Pro and Con(servative) Views
What do anti-abortion beliefs, and patronizing Chick-fil-A, and a devotion to college sports have in common? Hmm.Well, according to Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state and U.S. Senate...
View ArticleNavel-Gazing: Why Golf Should Embrace Belly Putters
When did "issues" become such an all-purpose, often euphemistic word for anything disagreeable? We have issues now where we used to have problems, and concerns, and troubles, and hornet's nests.
View ArticleNHL Lockout Leaves Fans Out In The Cold
The entertainment industry seems to give us only three things: sex, Justin Bieber and boxing.Justin Bieber aside, don't producers know almost nobody cares anymore about boxing? But here we have...
View ArticleTime For Gun Owners To Be Good Sports About Gun Restrictions
I've never had any interest in hunting. Among other things, I'm a terrible shot, but I have friends who hunt, and it appears to me to be a perfectly reasonable sports hobby — certainly every bit as...
View ArticleNew Jersey Wants To Horn In On Nevada's Gambling Turf
For those dearly devoted of you who paid attention to me in September, I noted that the best bet in the NFL had proven to be whenever a West Coast team played an East Coast team at night, because the...
View ArticleSteroid Accusations Likely To Bench Baseball Hall Of Fame Candidates
The results of this year's baseball Hall of Fame voting will be revealed on Wednesday.Given the exit polling, it appears both Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, as well as other candidates stained by...
View ArticleLove Of Football May Kick America Down The Path Of Ruination
This may sound far-fetched, but football reminds me of Venice. Both are so tremendously popular, but it's the very things that made them so that could sow the seeds of their ruin.Venice, of course, is...
View ArticleSports Calendar's Black Hole Gives Us Time To Reflect On Sportswriters
Sports fans are jealous of sportswriters, because it's a dream job where you get to watch games free, which is, above all, what sports fans want.Once upon a time this was true. The sportswriters...
View ArticleHistory Joins The 49ers In Opposing Ray Lewis
When Secretariat won what was certified to be his last race, I went down onto the track at Woodbine, and gauging where he had crossed the finish line, snatched up the last grass that perhaps the...
View ArticleIt's The Dog Days For America's Sports Dynasties
Since that devilish little morality saga with Linda Evans and Joan Collins left television in 1989, there have been no dynasties in our world outside of sports.Today, nobody says that William and Kate...
View ArticleAn Oft-Told Tale: The Beauty Queen And The Quarterback
Gentlemen of a certain age might make a nostalgic note that today, Valentine's eve, is the 80th birthday of Kim Novak.One of Miss Novak's most famous movie roles was in Picnic, where she played the...
View ArticleReminders Flood In: Athletes Are People, Not Heroes
These have certainly been dispiriting times for those who admire athletes, who proclaim that sports build character. The horrendous shooting by Oscar Pistorius is of course, in a category mercifully...
View ArticleDear College Presidents: Break The NCAA's Vise Grip On Athletes
The great social quest in American sport is to have one prominent, active, gay male athlete step forward and identify himself.But I have a similar quest. I seek one prominent college president to say...
View ArticleCatholic Universities See True Path To Salvation: Basketball
I've always felt it's no coincidence that some basketball powerhouses — let us say, off the top of my head, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana — get a few better players because those hoop museums...
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