The great Gary Larson, creator of the incisive and usually funny-as-hell one-panel cartoon known as the Far Side, has often been on my mind, as the 2018 World Cup enters its second week. One cartoon, in particular. It shows several hugely obese people, relatives, I think we are meant to understand, sitting on a porch […]

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And it’s only Tuesday! It has been a rocky few days for Landon Donovan, maybe the greatest player in American soccer history and, at the moment, maybe the most controversial. On Saturday, came the  Twitter ad in which Landon is holding a green scarf with lettering that reads: “My other team is Mexico” … and […]

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Just saw a memorable match in the 2018 Russia World Cup. It may go largely unnoticed, given that earlier in the day Lionel Messi missed a penalty kick and Argentina was held to a draw by tiny (but doughty) Iceland, population 350,000 … and even earlier France fought off the gritty Aussies in a 2-1 […]

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This is as good as it gets, in world sports. More diverse than an Olympics. Far wider global interest than in cricket or rugby or basketball. The first two rounds of the Fifa World Cup soccer group stage. Eleven consecutive days, this time around, at the 2018 Russia World Cup, of 32 teams still with […]

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I find it nearly impossible to be a neutral observer in any competition. Give me five minutes in a game involving teams I don’t know … and I will have a favorite. It could be about geography or playing style or history, but I will have made a choice. A girlfriend from a long, long […]

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The tournament begins June 14 in Moscow, when host Russia faces Saudi Arabia in the opening match of the 2018 World Cup. So it is getting late to be talking about the U.S. failure to compete in the greatest competition in global sports. But I am going to do just that, one last time. (Well, […]

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Usually, the hare-brained schemes are mine. Or were. A night college football game followed by a 1 p.m. NFL kickoff the next day — in some other state — followed by a flight back to SoCal after filing. … The plan to drive from SoCal over the Rockies and to Denver in about 22 hours, […]

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So, four of us pilgrims set off on the Camino de Santiago this morning, marching 22 kilometers in about seven hours and 37,000 steps. In other news … the little Spanish town where we halted for the day went slightly crazy tonight as Real Madrid defeated Liverpool 3-1 in an eventful Uefa Champions League final. […]

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Sports injuries have become a “thing”. Seemingly not a day goes by without some fairly prominent athlete going down with a prominent injury. I remember when none of us were quite sure what an oblique was, but straining/tearing it would put a guy on the shelf for weeks. Those were the good old days. Now […]

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It is part of the original Major League Soccer playbook: When trying to gain attention, sign someone with a big name. And few names in soccer are bigger than Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the towering forward from Sweden and veteran of many of the biggest club sides in the world. He is a different sort of end-of-career […]

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