Asking sports stars of yesteryear what they think about the modern state of their game … more often than not leads to interesting reactions. My experience was that former greats often are eager to answer that question. As if it has been something they have been thinking about and are eager to share with someone […]

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I happened on a web entry recently that suggests the long history of sports reporters “sticking to sports” is over. We have entered an era, the author wrote, when your favorite sports correspondent should feel free to work into his or her Twitter feed his or her opinion on the political side of current events. […]

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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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I first traveled to Barcelona in the summer of 1992 to help cover the Summer Olympics for Gannett News Service. I was very impressed with the place. It had charm. It had class. It organized a very fine Olympics. It seemed like a city people would want to see, if they knew about it. And […]

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I am perversely proud of driving from Tijuana to Mexico City for the 2006 World Cup qualifying match of March 2005, at the Estadio Azteca. The report, below, recounts the final leg — from Guadalajara to the distrito federale. As it turned out, co-pilot Damian Secore and I encountered just about zero problems across a […]

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Another installment in the 2005 Tijuana-to-Mexico City road trip report on a 2006 World Cup qualifying match pitting the United States against Mexico. I had forgotten about spending time, the previous night, in steamy San Blas watching the festivities for Holy Week. It was Mexico at its most festive and friendly. The 425 miles to […]

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This was one of the more interesting legs of the 2005 road trip across Mexico to see the United States’ World Cup qualifier at Estadio Azteca. We had seen the map, and we knew we were leaving the desert, but we did not fully anticipate the massive shift in climates, once we entered Nayarit state. […]

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I spend a lot of time reading soccer stories. As one does, in Europe. It does not take long to become caught up in European clubs and European leagues, and especially with English football’s Premier League, the most competitive in the world by the accounting of its boosters. Reading about what happened (or what might […]

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It’s called the Five Stages of Grieving, and professional journalists by now know it by heart. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. An interesting development in the grim business of companies firing large numbers of journalists, which has been a primary characteristic of the profession for more than a decade now … is how those being […]

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The mystery of Tom Brady’s missing Super Bowl jersey has been solved as well as resolved. A Mexican national with a media credential apparently snatched the No. 12 Patriots jersey after New England’s dramatic 28-25 victory in Super Bowl 51, but the jersey is back in the U.S. along with what appears to be the […]

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