Two guys I spent a fair amount of time with in press boxes/workrooms died in the past few days. Bob Oates, longtime pro football writer for the Los Angeles Times. David Poole, veteran NASCAR writer for the Charlotte Observer. Poole was something of a NASCAR legend. Oates wasn’t far behind, among NFL reporters. I wasn’t […]

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Now and then, people contact me about endorsing the idea, and spreading it, of pushing for this or that guy to get into a sports Hall of Fame. One particular baseball stat wonk is a Bert Blyleven enthusiast, and he has written me a time or three about voting for Bert for the baseball Hall […]

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It was a score that had to be a typo. A misprint. But there at the bottom of the television screen, Monday night, was this partial score: Denver 105, New Orleans 55. It was mind-boggling … and it was true. Final score: Denver 121, New Orleans 63. What makes this so hard to accept is […]

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Lakers fans have them in the NBA Finals. What we’re going through now are just the preliminaries before the big event. The Utah Jazz, then Houston or Portland, then probably Denver. Before what really matters: The Finals against LeBron and Cleveland — unless the Celtics somehow slip in there. Would it be boorish of me […]

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This, from ESPN.com’s NASCAR reporter, Terry Blount. The medical guy at the track says eight spectators were injured after Carl Edwards’ car got airborne near the finish line and ended up in the catchfence, shedding parts like a bomb sheds shrapnel. I’m not going to link to the story. I’m going to run the whole […]

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This was a classic NASCAR Knuckle-Dragger race. There will be X number of Sprint Cup fans — the knuckle-dragging majority, I fear — who will think this was just a great day for the sport. Two massive wrecks, involving something like a dozen cars each … a four-lap banzai charge to the checkered flag at […]

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Yes, I ranted about the NFL draft a year ago, and I am just so grateful I don’t have to pay any attention to this thing. That wasn’t the case for the first 17, 18 years of my journalism career, when Los Angeles had at least one NFL franchise (the Rams), and sometimes two (the […]

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Everyone who has seen this movie before, raise your hand. Wow. One hundred percent of you with your arms in the air. We couldn’t get 100 percent agreement that this is Friday. I feel badly for Milton Bradley because I really don’t believe he can control himself. I am convinced he has serious issues with […]

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I should have included this on my John Madden post, below … This is comedian Frank Caliendo on the Late Show with David Letterman, doing an entire “interview” in his John Madden persona … And try to tell me that isn’t how Madden actually sounded. And now I recall why Madden apparently didn’t think this […]

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I was reading David Sedaris in the New Yorker (how’s that for a snooty start to an item on a sports blog?), and he was writing about train travel a quarter-century ago and the cars in which people were allowed to smoke. And it brought to mind a memory I thought I may already have […]

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