How big is the English Premier League? So big that a French telecom is paying the world’s most popular soccer league 100-million euros per season, for this season and the next two, to show all of the Premier League’ games. In France. Did we make that clear? In France, which has its own soccer league, […]

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I never mind seeing the San Francisco Giants suffer. This is a deep-seated frame of mind, going back to my childhood and the annual Wars of Religion between the Giants and my team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Back to when Juan Marichal took a bat to John Roseboro’s head. Back to when the San Francisco […]

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The LA Galaxy has been around for 21 seasons now, but it struck me today that never in that time had the soccer club had to fight for attention in its hometown with a local National Football League team. The NFL abandoned the Los Angeles market after the 1994 season, when the Rams and Raiders […]

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For 26 seasons, the High Desert Mavericks were a constant in a rapidly evolving region of Southern California. Much of the Victor Valley portion of the Mojave Desert went from scrub and ranches to affordable housing tracts during the Mavericks’ tenure in the town of Adelanto, best known for a federal prison … and the […]

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Here is my take on the online fantasy sports sites: People who use them are gamblers, not sports fans. Real fans do not need the lure of winning money by defeating strangers in daily fantasy competitions sponsored by rapacious, apparently-not-quite-ethical companies.

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The LA Galaxy has concluded a silly but interesting promotion — the LA Galaxy Ridiculous Soccer Challenge. It involved four “games” pitting two Galaxy players against dozens of children on a training field at the club’s Carson home, the StubHub Center. The last matchup to be posted: Steven Gerrard and Robbie Keane against 30 eight-year-old […]

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Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros is the shortest everyday player in Major League Baseball, at 5-foot-6, his “official” height. (Some think he is closer to 5-5.) But one of the great things about baseball is that you don’t have to be unusually tall or wide to succeed, which Altuve has been demonstrating throughout his […]

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How hard is it on an NFL team to pick up and move? I was thinking about this after the Rams, having moved from St. Louis earlier this year, stunk it up in their second debut first as NFL representatives of “Los Angeles”. I had a memory of the Rams and Raiders having some difficult […]

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For the first time since 1994, the Rams played a game tonight with “Los Angeles” as part of their name. It went badly. Very badly. Final, from Santa Clara: San Francisco 49ers 28, Rams 0. And the scary thing is … the 49ers weren’t any good either, as some NFL writers noted. The Rams gained […]

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Where were you on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001? That probably was a common question, the first few years after the terror attacks of 9/11 that led to four hijacked planes crashed, the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York’s World Trade Center and nearly 2,700 dead. Most Americans over the age of 30 […]

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