The dominoes are falling now. Nearly every day over the past two weeks has brought news of some other school or conference or league announcing reduced schedules, with the reductions going all the way down to not playing football this season. At all. Back in the spring, noted U.S. immunologist Anthony Fauci was asked about […]

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Baseball is on the way back, we were told this week. “Spring” training camps will open on July 1, a 60-game mini-regular-season will begin play on or about July 24, and the World Series will finish no later than October 28. The NBA’s plan for a return-to-play “bubble” in Orlando was made public on June […]

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First printed in the San Bernardino Sun, November 3, 2002. Twice in my life I have gone to a hospital emergency room as a patient. On both occasions it was after suffering a head injury on a kickoff at a high-school football game. And you thought freeway driving was dangerous. From where we sit, it’s […]

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At the highest levels — say, in the English Premier League — soccer is played on immaculately groomed fields of vibrant green. The reality is that you should not study the grass too closely unless you are a connoisseur of the dark art of spitting. Throughout the history of the game, players have been spewing […]

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Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on. Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

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The biggest story in world football since the most recent Champions League final (May, 2019) … was Liverpool’s dominance of European soccer. Before their game at Watford last night, Liverpool not only was being called “the best club football team in the world”, and they had some staggering numbers to back up that assessment. Unbeaten […]

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When the San Francisco 49ers secured a place in Super Bowl 54, to be played tomorrow in Miami, my brain banged out several memories of my two visits to Joe Robbie Stadium. The most recent was to see USC and Oklahoma in the college football national championship game in 2007. (USC 55, Oklahoma 10; later […]

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The last time the Kansas City Chiefs appeared in the Super Bowl? It was 50 years ago, on January 11, 1970. And I saw that game — because I have never missed a Super Bowl. Seen ’em all, if not in person (about a dozen of those as a sports journalist), then on TV. So, […]

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A clever headline tells a story … with a twist. I prefer to think everyone likes a clever headline, but I fear only people in the publishing business really appreciate a good “hed”. Like this one, from the Los Angeles Times 40 years ago. “Arrivederci Aroma: Rams Stink Up the Coliseum”

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Joe Namath has a new biography out, and in it the former New York Jets hero and leader of the great upset victory in Super Bowl III relates his spending Christmas alone, in December of 1979. The episode is outlined in this excerpt from “All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters.” And nearly any […]

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