Oscar De La Hoya made official his retirement today. (See that story here.) Which triggers several thoughts. 1. Boxing is in trouble as a spectator sport. And now one of the last great public figures in the sport is done.  I suppose boxing can survive the end of DLH’s career, but it won’t be easy. […]

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A year ago, two, I would have been all over this. The first San Bernardino County high school basketball team to advance to a state championship game. That would be Eisenhower, of Rialto, a basketball power for most of the last 30 years but particularly effective under the guidance of coach Steve Johnson. Eisenhower won […]

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It will take a while for the surviving media pundits in downtown Los Angeles to notice … but the last serious player in Inland Empire sports journalism — and one of the final 3-4 in the entire Greater L.A. market — has given up its claim of “major league” status in the past 24 hours. […]

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I banged the drum for an arena in the Inland Empire for, oh, 20 years. OK, almost 30, while working as sports editor and columnist at The San Bernardino Sun. Going back almost to the day in 1981, I believe it was, when the pilot of a small plane had a heart attack while flying […]

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Guaranteed, this is not the first time someone has suggested that, if Karl Marx were alive today … he would be 190 years old, and doctors would be staring at him with mouths agape — like rubes at the carnival’s two-headed calf. As I was saying, if Karl Marx were alive today, he wouldn’t be […]

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Just heard this from the man himself. He was responding to my note wishing him good luck, because there were rumors around … But it was too late, he wrote back to me in a short note. Steve got a call last night from people in the L.A. Daily News office. He is out, and […]

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I’m not sure how many employees at what used to be the San Bernardino Sun-Ontario Bulletin-San Gabriel Valley Tribune were fired today, but it was more than one and … more than 10, even? A couple of things: 1. One of those fired was my friend and former colleague Doug Padilla. I can’t imagine Doug […]

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If I’m picking up on this correctly, from the other side of the ocean, 2008 can’t be over fast enough for a lot (most all?) of people. “People” meaning Americans. Or at least English-speakers. Like, everyone is all fixated on this “economy” thing … Letting it get them down. Hey, 2008 wasn’t that bad. Take […]

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Or, we could subtitle this post, “the numbers at Gannett leak out, and they reinforce what Gannett veterans already knew.” That is, Gannett never has owned newspapers. By its own preferred corporate-speak, it has owned “profit centers” — and the greedy bastards who ran the company were bold enough to call it just that. A […]

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I started this about a week ago, talking about/thinking about a couple of kids I knew from Redlands, during my time at the San Bernardino Sun … Landon Donovan and Ronnie Fouch. The item got so lengthy, though, that I stopped — after musing about Fouch — and promised to come back for Landon. So, […]

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