If you follow college basketball, you already know who LaVar Ball is, but his latest pronouncement might stun even those who have become accustomed to his bombastic assertions. This is about money. And it reinforces what already seemed like a father’s plan to run the careers/lives of his three sons. He wants a $1 billion […]

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This is a familial train wreck waiting to happen. LaVar Ball is the father of UCLA freshman guard Lonzo Ball, a likely lottery pick in the next NBA draft. LaVar Ball tends to say colorful things pertaining to his three sons and, in particular, Lonzo, the eldest. Up to this point a year ago, anything […]

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The upside to getting an English-language-based TV package, here in the south of France, is that it allows me to look at about 50 sports channels broadcast in a language I more fully comprehend. The downside is, when sports events are live in the U.S., it is some time after midnight in France. When, in […]

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If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade … I probably would have laughed at the idea. And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in […]

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The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world. Some suggest they are the tallest, citing an average male height of 6 feet. This is hard to be sure about. Poke around, and you can find web pages that insist Serbs and Croats are the tallest, others suggesting the Nilotic people (the Dinka, the […]

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When I left Southern California for Abu Dhabi, in October of 2009, UCLA’s basketball program wasn’t John Wooden-esque, but it was solid. Respectable. The Bruins had made the NCAA tournament 19 of the previous 21 seasons, and added their 11th national championship during that span. Wooden had won 10 championships in 12 seasons, ending in […]

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I am a fan, more or less, of the English Premier League club Arsenal and the American football team from UCLA. It occurred to me today why it is that I settled on each of them: My own appreciation of skill and style … ahead of the more significant essence of physical and mental toughness. […]

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Jerry Tarkanian died today at the age of 84, and the volume of pieces written about him by sports journalists has been impressive. Nearly all of it, however, focuses on his time at UNLV, which certainly was interesting, and lasted 19 seasons. For me, however, he will always be the coach who put Long Beach […]

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In a way, Peyton Manning and I go way back. To 1996, when I made the trip to Knoxville to see UCLA play Manning and No. 2-ranked Tennessee. We were in the same stadium, anyway. The two of us and 100,000-plus other people, most of them wearing orange. Tennessee won 35-20 before the usual Neyland […]

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Apparently, I have been gone so long that the notion of USC defeating Stanford, in the Coliseum, is such a surprise that fans flood the field. For most of my life, and we’re talking more than a few decades now, USC beating Stanford was How Things Worked. Football players attended Stanford to have some fun […]

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