Last November, slugger David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox said the 2016 Major League Baseball season would be his last. As the man who was a key contributor to the Decade of the Sox, which includes three World Series championships from 2004 to 2013, Ortiz has been feted repeatedly as he makes his final […]

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Much of France is in the grips of the most severe drought since 2005. No rain of any significance has fallen in the south of the country since October, and that has ramifications for brush fires and agriculture. Particularly in the vineyards. The vines are struggling, here in the Languedoc. Some appear to have fewer […]

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Trying to remember when it seemed as if Landon Donovan making a comeback on the pitch … pretty much had to happen. It couldn’t have been any later than the first month or two of the 2015 Major League Soccer season. Landon playing more games seemed inevitable, didn’t it? Two powerful currents pushed him in […]

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Megan Rapinoe plays for the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and a few weeks ago she was front and center in the condemnation of teammate Hope Solo. Solo, the veteran goalkeeper, whose description of the Swedish performance in a shootout victory over the U.S. in the Rio 2016 quarterfinals as “cowardly”, was strongly criticized by […]

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Some might opt for England’s Premier League. Others would nominate the Uefa Champions League or perhaps the World Cup or European Championship. But a strong case can be made that the greatest soccer competition is the quadrennial World Cup qualifying for South America’s 10-nation confederation, generally known as Conmebol. And a writer is making that […]

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The opening weeks of their second stay in Los Angeles may not be going quite as well as the Rams would have hoped. Remember how they traded up to get the No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft? Ahead of their first season back in Los Angeles? The dramatic move clearly was intended to create […]

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Only one sport really matters among the citizens of the United Arab Emirates. And, actually, it is a subset of one sport. The men’s national soccer team. Not necessarily the domestic soccer league those guys play in; Emirati fans are far more interested in club soccer in other countries, particularly in England and Spain. No, […]

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If it were not already time for this, it certainly is now: We no longer can consider USC a “football” school. Not after what Alabama did to the Trojans in their open tonight … a 52-6 blowout, nationally televised, that made the Trojans look like chumps. Not after compiling a overall record of 57-28 since […]

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I was reading a story about the planned Los Angeles bid to host the 2024 Summer Games, and that took me back to the 1984 L.A. Summer Games, and I was looking at the wiki page … and on the right side of the page it had a link to a snippet of the “L.A. […]

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The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world. Some suggest they are the tallest, citing an average male height of 6 feet. This is hard to be sure about. Poke around, and you can find web pages that insist Serbs and Croats are the tallest, others suggesting the Nilotic people (the Dinka, the […]

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