I believe it is time to give the National Basketball Association full credit for pulling off something no one was quite sure would work: The NBA Bubble. Twenty-two teams, dispatched to the ESPN/Disney enclosed sports pod in Orlando, and left to figure out the bottom of the standings, and then stage the whole of the […]

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Four months ago, I posted an item on this blog entitled “Pandemics and the Grandfather I Never Knew”. That grandfather was Alfred F. Oberjuerge, who died in 1940, 22 years after the Spanish flu nearly killed him in his 20s. Even before I had completed the Alfred entry, I knew I needed to circle back […]

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First printed in the San Bernardino Sun, November 3, 2002. Twice in my life I have gone to a hospital emergency room as a patient. On both occasions it was after suffering a head injury on a kickoff at a high-school football game. And you thought freeway driving was dangerous. From where we sit, it’s […]

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I have been away from this blog for more than a month, and before that I was posting infrequently. What I was doing, in retrospect, was waiting for a moment of relevance.  I found it with a man who died nearly 80 years ago. Meet Alfred F. Oberjuerge, the grandfather I never knew. He and […]

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This is another entry in the “Back in the Day” series, where we look back at a sports event I wrote about for the newspaper. In this case, the nearly forgotten 2008 mid-season trade of Shaquille O’Neal from the Miami Heat to the Phoenix Suns. The idea in Phoenix was that Shaq would be the […]

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“Blasts from the Past” is the idea. On days when I feel like writing but don’t feel like doing much research, I am going to revisit topics from my 40 years in journalism. This will be one of those. It is my take, from January of 2008, on Kobe Bryant’s chances of winning his first […]

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When the San Francisco 49ers secured a place in Super Bowl 54, to be played tomorrow in Miami, my brain banged out several memories of my two visits to Joe Robbie Stadium. The most recent was to see USC and Oklahoma in the college football national championship game in 2007. (USC 55, Oklahoma 10; later […]

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February 3, 2008. Super Bowl 42. New York Giants 17, New England Patriots 14. That would be the 12-point underdog Giants taking down the 18-0 Patriots, who were out to become the first 19-0 champs in NFL history. And I was there. How lucky was I? I covered what still is the most dramatic and […]

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A clever headline tells a story … with a twist. I prefer to think everyone likes a clever headline, but I fear only people in the publishing business really appreciate a good “hed”. Like this one, from the Los Angeles Times 40 years ago. “Arrivederci Aroma: Rams Stink Up the Coliseum”

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Joe Namath has a new biography out, and in it the former New York Jets hero and leader of the great upset victory in Super Bowl III relates his spending Christmas alone, in December of 1979. The episode is outlined in this excerpt from “All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters.” And nearly any […]

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