I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

[Read more →]

Here’s guessing that most American fans of the Winter Olympics watched pretty much anything that was put in front of them. Aside from curling. What is curling, anyway? Does it have lots of thrills and spills built in, like sledding or jumping or shooting? It is a high-aerobics sport where only the elite can survive, […]

[Read more →]

I first interviewed Bonny Warner in February of 1984, a week before the Sarajevo Olympics. She grew up in Mount Baldy Village, a hamlet on the shoulder of the mountain, and went to school in San Bernardino County, where our newspaper circulated. So we snapped to attention when we realized that a college kid from […]

[Read more →]

The World Cup without the U.S. national team? Those who consider it a disastrous setback for soccer in America are badly mistaken. It’s 2017, not 1998! Soccer in the U.S., at the club level, is in fine shape and trending upward. If anything, sitting out Russia 2018 can serve as a wake-up call for the […]

[Read more →]

I survived some ridiculous road trips as a professional journalist but nearly all of them were my own damn fault. The Saturday night/Sunday morning back-to-back football road games. (Tempe to Minneapolis by way of Dallas; Tuscaloosa to Houston by way of Atlanta.) Doable. Just. The 730-mile early January drive from San Bernardino to Grand Junction, […]

[Read more →]

For more than a decade, Michelle Kwan represented what we in the journalism call a “standing story”. A standing story is one that is news at any time. Work or play, good or bad, any developments warrant coverage and follow-up because we believe our audience has significant interest in the topic. Particularly so, in my […]

[Read more →]

This week, the National Hockey League announced it will not be taking a month off next season so its players can compete for their national teams in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. The first reaction from nearly everyone is … “what an awful decision”. The NHL’s players joined the Winter Games in 1998, […]

[Read more →]

We expect some chilly weather here, given that we are further north than 90 percent of the continental U.S. But this batch of weather has been the coldest we have seen in more than a year in the south of France. Tonight? A low of 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, below freezing. Tomorrow night? A forecast […]

[Read more →]

The Russia of Vladimir Putin is not a nice place. It may rival Soviet Russia as a bellicose polity that wants to make the world darker and dirtier … one that will stop at nothing to promoting itself and its agenda. In sports, that means drugs. Lots and lots of performing-enhancing drugs (PEDs) for their […]

[Read more →]

  It was about noon when the small, white flakes began to drift to the ground. I thought it was ash; maybe a fire somewhere near our little village, or neighbors using their fireplaces. One odd part of it was … the ash didn’t begin to accumulate on the ground. It hit the flag stones in […]

[Read more →]