I believe Bob Bradley needs some help, and I’m here for him. What are my qualifications?  I coached AYSO teams at Division 7 (kindergarten) and Division 6 (6-7 year olds), and I might even have put in a season or two in Division 5. Plus, I believe I had a winning record at least once. […]

[Read more →]

Talk about a flashback. Watching the United State national team play El Salvador at Estadio Cuscatlan on Saturday was like going back 20 years. Or more. Imagine, if you will, my fellow sports scribes, past and present, an environment where all of the following are unavailable:

[Read more →]

If we mark this day from one second after midnight, I got quite a bit accomplished, because that was when I did much of my writing, including this U.S. national team folo/look-ahead for the New York Times. If we mark it from the point where my 90 minutes of “overnight sleep” ended with a wakeup […]

[Read more →]

Great atmosphere. Tremendous energy in the stadium, a packed-out old venue that looks as if it might fall over in the next earthquake. Or hard wind. And a crazy game. U.S. 2, El Salvador 2. The Salvadorans took a 2-0 lead while dominating the first 70-some minutes, but the home team tried to sit on […]

[Read more →]

Part 1 of the Latest Hare-Brained Scheme has worked out well enough. I got to San Salvador alive but groggy, at 5:30 a.m., took five cab rides and two bus rides today, saw a bit of the city, met the vice president of the country, experienced the near-gridlock rush-hour traffic conditions, interviewed three U.S. national […]

[Read more →]

Just because it is logistically possible to make a road trip … doesn’t mean you ought to. A couple of weeks ahead of that theoretically possible trip, I never remember that idea, above. A couple hours before I leave … then I remember, but the money has been spent and I’m committed and, well, here […]

[Read more →]

Certainly, the bottom has fallen out of the industry over the past year. To the point that some communities have no newspaper at all, and the surviving newspapers are greatly diminished, with shrunken staffs,  circumscribed reach and evaporating influence on contemporary civic debate, great or small. It was not so 10 years ago, when the […]

[Read more →]

Tommy Lasorda, gotta love him. Well, actually, you don’t. Even Dodgers fans I think find him a little over the top. I can tell you for certain that any journalist who covered the Dodgers during Lasorda’s two decades as manager … well, the “bleeding Dodger blue” and “the Big Dodger in the Sky” lost its […]

[Read more →]

Japan and South Korea in the championship game was perfect. We had two serious baseball countries who took the World Baseball Classic seriously, too. Maybe each side was missing a few of their major-leaguers, but the guys they had seemed utterly devoted to the concept and not dragging around a “we’re doing you a favor” […]

[Read more →]

The subtitle also could be … “watching tennis while trying not to choke on the dust from the sandstorm.” I covered the final day of the BNP Paribas Open for the New York Times,  and for those of you who don’t trawl nyt.com, here is the game story I wrote. This Nadal kid … pretty […]

[Read more →]