For the past seven years, I dreaded the winter solstice. Now, however, I am happy to see it, considering what it represents.

[Read more →]

We left Abu Dhabi a year ago today, and it seems more distant in time than that. Adapting to the south of France, buying a house, getting key renovations made, moving in … that seems like the effort of more than a year. Meantime, lots of things were going on back in the UAE, a […]

[Read more →]

I am a big fan of high-school football coaches. Starting with the guy (Jim Young) I played for in high school and continuing on through nearly every prep football coach I came in contact with during my four decades in sports journalism. I guessed, in this blog post, that I covered around 400 prep football […]

[Read more →]

Seems like every little town in this part of France has its own, slightly different holiday traditions. This one puts up lots of lights. That one has a big musical event in the church. The one over there has the Christmas Eve service and the trucked-in kiddie rides in the place. And lots of people […]

[Read more →]

If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade … I probably would have laughed at the idea. And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in […]

[Read more →]

The NFL has seen a surge of player jerseys with more than just one name above the big number on a guy’s back. I am perhaps late to noticing this because while living in Abu Dhabi the NFL was pretty much inaccessible. I missed about six years of developments while there. Including the arrival of […]

[Read more →]

Two remarkable events occurred this month involving major North American sports leagues. The NBA and Major League Baseball agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with their players. Before the old CBA ran out. No weeks or months of acrimony between deadlocked players and management. No games lost to a strike or a lockout. No seasons […]

[Read more →]

Like many notions that float through the mind of senior citizens, I have no idea where this came from. But, bang, there it was. A recollection of the opening of a television show that appeared 50 years ago, soon followed by a fairly accurate recitation of the lyrics to the theme song of that show. […]

[Read more →]

Ask American sports fans what he or she can tell you about the New York Cosmos … and I’m guessing 90 percent of them will say, “Zip. Nada”. Maybe 1 percent will say, “Cosmos? Did you mean Galaxy?” The Cosmos were the American soccer team that the rest of the world sorta cared about. Without […]

[Read more →]

Jeff Fisher was fired as coach of the Los Angeles Rams today, but he leaves the National Football League as No. 1 in one significant career statistic. His teams have lost 165 games. No coach in NFL history has lost more. Fisher shares the record for most defeats with Dan Reeves, but Reeves won 190 […]

[Read more →]