I graduated from Long Beach State. There. I said it. Not everyone is keen to let the world know they attended Long Beach State. It is a real school, for sure, with more than 31,000 undergrads. But it is not known for academic excellence. It is ranked 26th among “regional universities West” by U.S. News. […]

[Read more →]

This blog commenced on March 10, 2008. Ten years ago today. It was four days after I had been fired by the Los Angeles News Group, and I wanted to let co-workers and other journalists know what had happened, with as many specifics as I could recall pertaining to the (then mostly novel) concept of […]

[Read more →]

Here’s guessing that most American fans of the Winter Olympics watched pretty much anything that was put in front of them. Aside from curling. What is curling, anyway? Does it have lots of thrills and spills built in, like sledding or jumping or shooting? It is a high-aerobics sport where only the elite can survive, […]

[Read more →]

We are staying with relatives who are serious hockey fans. (Yes. In SoCal.) There was never any doubt over what was going up on the big-screen TV from 8:10 p.m. (PST): The women’s hockey gold-medal match pitting the United States and Canada at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. And there we sat for four-plus hours, increasingly […]

[Read more →]

Turns out, Tara Lipinski is a fine broadcast analyst at Olympic skating competition. But we might be looking at Michelle Kwan on NBC TV, instead of Lipinski, if the former had won an Olympics gold at some point in her long and productive career. As Lipinski did at Nagano 1998. Lipinski had a much shorter […]

[Read more →]

Not that it matters much anymore, with print journalism in collapse, but for fun we can revisit a topic that would have been of great interest to sports journalists of 10 or 20 years ago: Where is “home” to the latest great athlete? Like, say, Chloe Kim, snowboarding gold-medallist at the Pyeongchang Winter Games? Chloe […]

[Read more →]

I first interviewed Bonny Warner in February of 1984, a week before the Sarajevo Olympics. She grew up in Mount Baldy Village, a hamlet on the shoulder of the mountain, and went to school in San Bernardino County, where our newspaper circulated. So we snapped to attention when we realized that a college kid from […]

[Read more →]

It ought to be, right? Cold. Plenty cold. Unpleasantly cold. It’s the Winter Olympics and we have sports based on snow and ice. Opening Ceremonies for the Pyeongchang Games were held tonight, in South Korea, and it did not look like a shorts-and-T-shirt sort of event, no. Well, duh. It seems the current generation of […]

[Read more →]

The Winter Olympics is an acquired taste. Unless you grew up where winter dominates life. Say, Russia. Norway. Lapland. Buffalo. The Winter Games generally are held in a city/town that is hard to get to (from places where people actually live) and feature a lot of winding mounting roads that either are icy or slushy. […]

[Read more →]

The first paragraphs went like this: “He stands five feet tall. “He weighs 132 pounds. “He can lift 418 pounds over his head. “His name is Naim Suleymanoglu, from Turkey, and pound for pound he is the strongest man in the history of the world.” That was the opening of my story on the featherweight […]

[Read more →]