For many American print journalists, it was a dream job destination. For many American travelers, it was the essential daily reading while working or touring in Europe. The International Herald Tribune, based in Paris. Now, after a slow fade over the past decade, it is gone, as a Paris-based entity. The Paris newsroom of the […]

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Americans sometimes are surprised that few other people in the world are interested in the NFL. They have heard of something called the Super Bowl, but they overwhelmingly do not follow the game nor know very much about it. It isn’t as puzzling as it was 20 years ago because the NFL launched the Europe-based […]

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We saw an odd road sign the other day at one of the entrances entering a nearby town. “! Chausee Glissant Vendange”. An exclamation point on any sign in France means “attention”! or “watch out”! And the three-word message below the exclamation?

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Wow. Hard to remember the last time a guy screwed up the greatest opportunity in his professional life as quickly as did Sam Allardyce. A year ago, he was an unemployed English soccer coach of middling reputation whose claim to celebrity, as far as it went, was “never being relegated” — a reputation he burnished […]

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Arnold Palmer was the most remote-in-plain-sight great sports figure of the 20th century. Not in a bad way. He was accessible and friendly and eternally polite, but I never felt as I had any real idea what he was about. Palmer died on Sunday at the age of 87. Which means he was younger than […]

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We usually encounter some sense of shock when a Major League Baseball player dies during his active career. Or, at least, we certainly do in the more modern history of the game, when players stopped dying from influenza, typhoid fever and tuberculosis. And when the player dies during the MLB season. A guy who was […]

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Final day of Vin Scully anecdotes. A few years back, a former colleague — and Dodgers writer — brought a batch of his wife’s molasses cookies to the ballpark and presented them to Vin. Just a way to say “thinking of you” to Vin, apparently. Maybe the best part of it, for my friend, was […]

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I was going to note other interactions in the press box with Vin Scully — a recent meme seems to be about reporters and bumping into Vin in the washroom and making small talk, and I’ve done that. Instead, I’m going to offer him an anecdote pertaining to an event to which he is deeply […]

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A couple of decades ago, maybe a month after having published a comment piece on Vin Scully (spoiler alert: I liked him), I was going through the letters to the sports editor at the San Bernardino Sun. It didn’t take long, I’m sure. We never got many letters … and that was back when some […]

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I was looking at the Dodgers media release tonight, pertaining to the upcoming Vin Scully weekend at Dodger Stadium. And for a moment I was thinking, “What is there left to say or do? Are we pushing this too far? Are the Dodgers taking it too far? Are we going to ruin the health of […]

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