Interesting day, Monday, on the Los Angeles pro sports scene. —Kobe Bryant sets a Madison Square Garden record by scoring 61 in the Lakers’ victory over the Knicks. —Manny Ramirez turns down the Dodgers and GM Ned Colletti and their offer of $25 million for one season. Turning point days, for the area’s most popular […]

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It’s already Dec. 26 here in Asia. In Hong Kong, it is Boxing Day, a holiday the Hongkongers picked up from the British. Mostly, it’s just an excuse for a semi-serious public holiday and a chance to do more shopping, as if not enough of that goes on around here. But it is a real […]

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I have gone over the availability of sports here, on Hong Kong cable TV. Fifteen-plus sports stations, and nothing to watch. Unless you love the English menu of sports — led by soccer, soccer and soccer and including rugby, cricket, Formula One and, yes, snooker. And I generally don’t love any of them. But I […]

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No list of “big winners” from the Beijing Olympics is complete unless it has the name “Kobe Bean Bryant” near the top of the list. Olympic gold usually isn’t something that defines an NBA player’s career. Since the pros began showing up at the Summer Games, in 1992, a gold medal was assumed, and having […]

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Interesting bit of silly drama. Shaquille O’Neal can say what he wants about Kobe Bryant. I have no problem with that. If he wants to stand up at what amounts to “open mike” night at a club in New York, well, get busy. (And you can read the news story and watch the bleeped-over video […]

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Are we all Lakered-out? Probably not. As I may have mentioned somewhere else, I realized 6-7 years ago that there is no such thing as “too much Lakers news.” Anyway, the other day, I got into an off-the-blog discussion with a former colleague, Damian Secore, about where the team should go next. Think of it […]

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You saw it. It was a trainwreck. The Lakers played about 1.25 good games in the NBA Finals, if you cobble together a quarter in Game 2, a half in Game 4, a quarter in Game 5 … It concluded with Boston winning the best-of-seven series in six games, the last in an embarrassing 131-92 […]

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“Quit” is the ugliest word in sports, but I don’t know how else you describe the Lakers’ pathetic “effort” in Game 6 of the NBA Finals. They quit. Mailed it in when it got tough. Folded the tents and started watching the clock wind down. If they could have left at halftime, I imagine they […]

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Doesn’t that headline seem almost laughable? As if Kobe needs defending? But, bizarrely enough, he does. I don’t know of any NBA player so routinely criticized. So subject to having his game so mercilessly parsed. No one so regularly attacked on a personal level. That whole “selfish”, “bad man”, “bad teammate”, “egomaniac”, “uncoachable” thing. And […]

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I’m lifting this out of this morning’s editions of the Los Angeles Times. From their “letters” to the sports editor feature on page 3 of the sports section. Just have to share. This is … inspired. I was thinking that if this guy can write stuff like this regularly (unless “Sal” is a woman) … […]

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