The only male American player of any import (unless you count James Blake) is Andy Roddick, and he was hoping to win the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells. He had a heck of a gantlet to run, however: World No. 3 Novak Djokovic, world No. 1 Rafael Nadal, then world Nos. 2 or 4 […]

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Gosh, that was ugly. But UCLA has been ugly before, this season. These Bruins never really dominated anyone important, and they never gave a sense of being able to become that team. No one paying any attention to this team ever could have thought they would get to the Final Four for the fourth consecutive […]

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President Obama did an NCAA bracket for ESPN. A bad idea, really. No possible political gain can come from it. Because eventually he’s predicting 64 teams will lose, and there will be fans and players at all those schools who will wonder why the president didn’t have enough faith in them. I imagine this is […]

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An update for the item below. Days at tennis tournaments can be so long … that you can’t even buy a beer in the state of California by the time they finish playing. The night session began late. And then top-seeded Dinara Safina and 19-year-old Victoria Azarenka played three sets. The last match, involving top-seeded […]

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Covering tennis is not like anything else in sports journalism. If it is a big tournament, and the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells is a big one, it can make for the longest days in the business. Like, 11 to 11. For more than a week. If you love tennis, then, this is a […]

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I suppose this falls into the category of random personal observation. More diary-worthy and less  blog-worthy. Or sponge-worthy. (Obscure reference!) I was out slogging around downtown Long Beach … and I found not one but two pennies lying in the street. Separate locations. One on Second Street. The other on First Street. And I thought […]

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A year ago, two, I would have been all over this. The first San Bernardino County high school basketball team to advance to a state championship game. That would be Eisenhower, of Rialto, a basketball power for most of the last 30 years but particularly effective under the guidance of coach Steve Johnson. Eisenhower won […]

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The Bruins and Trojans are in, as we knew they would be. UCLA for its body of work and USC for winning the Pac-10 tournament title, which we didn’t quite see coming. Nice. For Los Angeles-area college basketball (which also has Cal State Northridge in the tourney). But don’t expect any L.A. team to last […]

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I wrote most of this hours before leaving Hong Kong, back on Jan. 31. I just now finished touching it up. I’m leaving in the “I’m still in HK” references. But I am not. Here goes. I saved this for my last day in Hong Kong. So I would have the maximum exposure to the […]

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If you saw some of the stories a week or so ago about the imminent return of Landon Donovan from Bayern Munich of Germany to the Los Angeles Galaxy, perhaps you also saw some of the fan/reader comments on those stories. Most of them seemed to be in the vein of, “Next time, try a […]

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