The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

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Not many strong opinions here about the game of golf. I do wonder why so many people eagerly spend so much time and money playing a soul-crushing game. But some of us are Los Angeles Chargers fans, too. What I do object to is the Masters tournament — “A tradition like no other” — being […]

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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.

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Whoa, there, Rams fans. Your team is not going to sprint to the Super Bowl any time soon. That 7-2 start? Nice. But when the Rams stopped playing cupcakes and ran into another quality team, the Minnesota Vikings … well, it did not go well. To the tune of 24-7, with the “highest-scoring-team-in-the-league” Rams on […]

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For all I know, journalists covering major sports events these days have an ID chip in their arms. Nobody gets into the media areas unless the sensor picks up your biometric data. At minimum, credentials for an Olympics or World Cup  or French Open, over the past decade or two, have featured increasingly sophisticated and […]

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I worked with several Scots while in Abu Dhabi. One day I asked one of them why Scotland is so bad in cricket. He looked at me like I should already have known the answer. “Because we never get enough good weather to finish a match,” he said. The best golfers in the world got […]

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I was going to do this as a list. “The five dreariest assignments in sports journalism.” Down from the normal 10, when I do lists. (And I ought to do some sort of list soon, just cuz.) Then I realized I would have trouble coming up with even five events that felt like drudgery, while […]

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No one looks good in the “booking” mugshot. Well, except for this guy. The booking photo taken at the police station is the one you do not want anyone to see. As Tiger Woods can attest to, this week, after his arrest for “driving under the influence”, in Florida. It looks like he is having […]

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Arnold Palmer was the most remote-in-plain-sight great sports figure of the 20th century. Not in a bad way. He was accessible and friendly and eternally polite, but I never felt as I had any real idea what he was about. Palmer died on Sunday at the age of 87. Which means he was younger than […]

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In 2007, in a previous life, I wrote an opinion piece, on the second Sunday of April, about how Zach Johnson was not the right guy to win the Masters. My suggestion was that a Masters champion needs to be someone already famous. It was not a place for a guy to make a breakthrough; […]

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