Received an e-mail from the Los Angeles Galaxy today about roster moves the club has made. “LA Galaxy Acquire the Rights to Juan Pablo Angel and Frankie Hejduk” I know Juan Pablo Angel, a goalscoring machine, is supposed to be the big news here. Which is why he was listed first. But what I am […]

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I liked Kevin Love from the moment I saw him. A big lumpy kid who couldn’t be as good as everyone said he was … but was. As I mentioned just a few days ago, I saw a lot of the Bruins during that stretch of three-straight Final Fours … and Kevin Love played for […]

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Sometimes we “experts” in the world of sports journalism get one wrong. Way wrong. Russell Westbrook is a recent example. He is the second-best player for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team with Kevin Durant and a huge upside. Some of us same experts now believe OKC could finish the season with a better record […]

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As a kid, I preferred UCLA over USC. The Trojans were big and bad, but UCLA was little and lithe and a little smarter than your average oafs, and I liked that. Terry Donahue played defensive tackle at 205 pounds. Bob Stiles was 5-foot-9 and and 175 pounds, but he stopped Michigan State’s huge fullback […]

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Part 3 of the series in The National about the best sports venues in the world. Broken out by continent. In Monday’s editions: North America! Interesting, how the voting went. I will tell you who won: Augusta National. Even the Brits in the room know about “the course like no other” or whatever it is […]

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We again interrupt this travelogue to muse about sports events back home, this time the Day of Reckoning at the University of Southern California. Anyone who has been around the American college sports scene for any length of time could see this coming. To spend any time around Heritage Hall at USC was to pick […]

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After traveling all day down the mountain-spackled length of Italy — and no, you can’t find a dozen places flat enough to plow 40 acres anywhere south of Rome — finally some time to do my tiny bit on UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, the most important sports figure in Southern California over the last […]

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Well, good for him. I always liked Steve Lavin, and my opinion is, of course, the acid test for coaching hires. No. Really. He was a relentlessly pleasant guy, upbeat and optimistic, all that. He recruited like crazy. His UCLA teams had a habit of winning big games. He just had a habit of losing […]

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Well, yes. Looks like I’ll be filling one out. Even though I have paid less attention to this college basketball season than any since … well, maybe when I was10 years old — just before UCLA started winning NCAA championships. But newsrooms like to organize tournament pools, and one of the sporting guys on the […]

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A reality of blogging: It’s bloody difficult to do one item a day, every day, for two blogs. And hold a full-time job. Try it sometime, and a year later let me know how it’s going. The second blog is my quixotic World Cup Countdown blog. And part of that deal is a promise to […]

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