Two things we have learned over the first half of the 2018 Major League Soccer season: –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most exciting player in the league. –Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the most underpaid player in the league. Generic soccer fans probably knew about the first bit of information, and if they did not his three-goal match […]

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The Dodgers publicity release landed in my inbox earlier this week, and I was flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. Gobsmacked. Confused. The title of the email: “Matt Kemp Wins Los Angeles Dodgers Heart and Hustle Award” (Emphasis added.) My first thought was a silly one: Is there another Matt Kemp in baseball? There was a Steve Kemp, a […]

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No, this is not spam. Though it looks a bit like it. Hardly a day goes by that I do not get an email from a random person/machine offering to “fix” my website. Having worked in newspapers for most of four decades, even now my first reaction is to think of “errors” in a journalism […]

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No need to be an international NBA fan to guess the answer to that one. The top-two selling jerseys, at the least. That would be LeBron James, No. 1, as he should be, and Stephen Curry, three-time NBA champion. The NBA recently posted lists on the top 10 jerseys sold in Europe, during the 2017-18 […]

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The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

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Hmm. Not sure it was supposed to work out like this. Well, then again, maybe it was, once unrestricted free agent Paul George re-signed with Oklahoma City. If the Lakers were intent on providing LeBron James with a superstar-level wing man for his debut season in Los Angeles, and they were trying, it was going […]

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No one will ever accuse France of not sufficiently celebrating its second World Cup championship. Quicker than you can say “Kylian Mbappe”, every piece of national-team apparel seemed to have that second star on it. For those not familiar with the “star” system in international football, a team is entitled to wear on the jersey, […]

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Russia 2018 is over. It was France 4, Croatia 2 in the championship match, and the final whistle had barely been blown before some pundits were suggesting it was the best World Cup final in the history of the event. Granted, six goals is a good place to start. That is as many goals as […]

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A twist on a post from last week. I wanted a France-England final to the 2018 World Cup, and I think most soccer fans did, too, and I posted to that effect. The headline to that one was: Croatia Needs to Get Out of the Way Since I went unheeded by Croatia, which came back […]

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Most of the 2018 World Cup has been entertaining. Or at least interesting. Not often we get to see the likes of Iceland, Morocco, Egypt and Panama in the tournament, and see what they are all about. A case can be made that many of the traditional powers had crummy tournaments — and we are […]

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