The next-best thing to hearing/seeing a symphony orchestra perform … is to see/hear one rehearse. An experience I didn’t know was a “thing” until an in-law offered us two tickets to a practice session today by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles. And we said, “Sure!” Oh, and a key […]

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This goes back to the 1980s. Maybe a vacation in 1982. Certainly no later than 1985, when I know I was in London for two-plus weeks — because I covered the first Wimbledon championship that Boris Becker won. And, in short, it was this: Too much good stuff to read. And this was just the […]

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In 30 prep football seasons, through 2007, I reported on … I’m going to make an educated guess and say … 300 games. In the 11 seasons that followed, I reported on … zero prep football games. Not because I lost interest in the high school games, but because I was out of the business […]

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Those of us who grew up as fans of the Los Angeles Rams, over three decades, from 1960 to 1989 … we expected that if they won — and they tended to — it mostly would be about the team’s defense. The Rams offense tended to be vanilla, and not a quality vanilla. No, it […]

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A soccer-related item popped into my email in-box the other day, and in it a Spanish coach with lots of history with youth players made a fairly simple and probably undeniable statement: It is a waste of time for a coach to shout instructions at kiddie soccer players. I knew that because I saw the […]

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I saw the high school basketball debut of California native Tyson Chandler. Not many people can say that, because among the material I filed on deadline that night, December 2, 1997, is a note about how the Compton College gym was pretty much empty. Chandler was a 15-year-old freshman and, more importantly, already 6-foot-11. But […]

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At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918, World War I came to an end. That is, the long and bloody war ended at 11 a.m. on November 11. One hundred years later, France celebrated its century-old victory over Germany by instructing all churches to ring their bells for […]

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In the photo on the left, a young mustachioed French soldier from a century ago is dressed in his parade best as he stares coolly at the camera. His left hand is behind his back and his right rests on a table, near his red kepi and what might be a bayonet. It is the […]

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I was perhaps 9 or 10 when we visited some relatives of my mother’s in the Bay Area city of Richmond. Just across the water from San Francisco. We went there every few years, and I was always a little agitated by it, because I didn’t really know these people, not like my aunts, uncles […]

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Have I done this before? After 10-plus years I must have. But know what? I’m not going to check because the 10 teams I love to hate changes a bit, from year to year. This list would probably be unlike any other I might have done. For instance, most of my life I have wished […]

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