Where to begin? Don Markham. Rebel, loner, iconoclast. Admired, loved, loathed. One of the great football minds to stride across the sport’s stage in the history of Inland Empire prep football, as well as one of the most polarizing personalities. Markham died at age 78 yesterday, and anyone who saw his teams play will remember […]

[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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

We don’t see much college football, in France. Our TV package includes stations with college matchups, but the West Coast games rarely begin before 10 p.m., Paris time, ending at 2 a.m. or so … and night games on the West Coast? Well, it’s an up-all-night thing, over here. But we happened to find Army […]

[Read more →]

If Vin Scully had not followed the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles … Dick Enberg would be the best-known sports broadcaster in the history of Southern California. Rather than “the other really good guy in L.A., after Vinny.” This came to mind today after hearing that Enberg died in La Jolla at age 82.

[Read more →]

In conversations with journalists, over the years, I have found a common denominator: A significant percentage of them were thinking about journalism — and even practicing it — at a young age. This comes to mind after seeing a call from officials of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship, later this month in Abu Dhabi, for […]

[Read more →]

Eli Manning will not start for the New York Giants on Sunday, ending a streak of 210 consecutive starts at quarterback for the Giants, going back to 2004. However, the Giants are 2-9 and their playoffs hopes were buried weeks ago, and Eli will be 37 in five weeks and is not having a very […]

[Read more →]

It was a paragraph of the sort every sports journalist has written once, twice, a thousand times in describing athletes who turn out to be not as successful as others believed they would be. It went like this, on the New York Times website: The Minnesota Twins picked first at the 1999 Rule 5 draft […]

[Read more →]