“Germany 7, Brazil 1” likely will be the Brazil 2014 match that sticks in the mind. Ahead, even, of the final. Barring the bizarre, on Sunday. It prompted me to think about “big-game blowouts I have known” … and that took me almost directly to the Super Bowl, and its former (deserved) reputation for producing […]

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This comes up every four years. Or every four years after the U.S. national team has, at least, made the second round of a World Cup. Like this time around. “Is soccer about to make a breakthrough in the U.S.?” Will it be mentioned in the same breath as football and baseball and basketball? Or […]

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The Los Angeles Kings tonight wrapped up their second Stanley Cup championship in three years. And though I, like most native southern Californians, am not a hockey fan, we must concede this: Los Angeles would be confronting a potential championship drought, about now, if the Kings had not had not turned into world beaters.

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Came out of a middle-of-the-night coma long enough, here in the Land on the Other Side of the World, and saw all but 15 points of Super Bowl 48 on some once-only, no-cost streaming video from Fox. Pete Carroll coached the winning Seattle Seahawks team, and he bucked some actuarial odds, and also reached the […]

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This is kinda obnoxious, isn’t it. “Yeah, I’ve seen so many Super Bowls that I can do a list of my favorite five. That I saw. In person.” I have watched most of all of the 47 played so far. Which mostly means I’m old. I watched 35 of them on TV, but the other […]

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We are our own revisionists. What we know now as fact is something we would not have espoused a few years or months or weeks ago. We change our minds a lot; we don’t always remember we have done so. This is a particular problem for sports journalists. Given long enough, we embrace every side […]

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Marshawn Lynch is the star running back for the Seattle Seahawks who is making life difficult for himself in the days leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl. He is accomplishing this by refusing to carry out a contractual obligation to interact with the media assembled in New Jersey for Super Bowl 48. Lynch has spoken […]

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Which sport do Americans like most? It was the same in 2013 as it was in 1985, and every year since. The National Football League. Duh. We like our danger and violence, and we like our color and strategy and cheerleaders, and tidy three-hour blocs mapped out on Sundays and three nights a week. The […]

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* And my realization that the league has changed, probably forever. For various technical and ESPN-related issues (their abandonment of the Europe and Middle East markets during the summer), I had not seen an NFL game this season. Maybe a few seconds of video, here and there, but not one game from start to finish. […]

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My football career ended with a concussion. I was 17. For the next 30-plus years, I didn’t give much thought to long-term repercussions. But with the NFL now at a point where dazed players are immediately removed from a game, not to come back, I reflect back on my own brain trauma — and I […]

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