We return to the Wayback Machine of NCAA basketball today, recalling two close calls between my journalism self and the Final Four. It is the one annual sports event I regret never covering in my 40 years in print journalism. To be sure, there were other big events staged annually that I never covered. The […]

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On March 27, 1939, the University of Oregon won the first NCAA basketball championship — actually, the first NCAA team championship of any sort — 46-33 over Ohio State. That has been mentioned a time or two this week as the Ducks prepare for their Final Four game Saturday with North Carolina — 1939 being […]

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The Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders and Las Vegas. They deserve each other. This is the franchise that embraced a reputation as an outlaw NFL team … and a desert town that occasionally is still called Sin City. But then the Raiders missed out on the Great Los Angeles Migration (the Rams and Chargers beat them to […]

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As fans of the U.S. national team, we have skewed perceptions of what qualifies as hard times. As a fan of the UAE national team, I can vouch for that. For the Americans, World Cup qualifying losses to Mexico and Costa Rica, two of the top sides in the western hemisphere, ranks as a panic […]

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If you would have told me, in January of 1974, that UCLA’s basketball team needed to have its 88-game winning streak broken, as well as its run of seven consecutive NCAA championships … I might have punched you. UCLA winning seemingly “forever” was good because … well, because I was pulling for them. And so […]

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I’m not yet ready to explain why … but the Los Angeles Angels are horrible. Like, 72-90 horrible. How do I know this? From looking at their players, ahead of the fantasy draft. I play in a 12-team league in which we draft two-deep at every position on offense. That means 24 of the 30 […]

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Oh, wait. There is. Scads of it. In the NCAA Tournament, anyway. Talking the guys, here. The women might be doing it, too, but they aren’t televised where I live. I have been impressed … or at least seen this often enough over the past 10 days to take note, again … at how many […]

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Wow. It feels like the American soccer world emerged, in a span of 24 hours, from a dark and forlorn place and back onto the light and airy part of the global stage. A changing of the guard even as a veteran was back in the coaching box. … The goal-laden return of Clint Dempsey. […]

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Maybe serious fantasy baseball owners have known about this all along. I tumbled to it last year, and it saves a lot of time when you’re trying to figure out who does what in Major League bullpens. The Closer Monkey. That is the name of the website — closermonkey.com … where you can get the […]

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I follow two national soccer teams, the United States and the UAE. Both play twice in the coming week in crucial 2018 World Cup qualifiers. I don’t feel good about either national team’s chances. For reasons that apply to both — key injuries, the pressure to produce results and competent opponents. First, the U.S.

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