Maybe all of you already know about this. The Josh Sacco version of the Herb Brooks speech from before the 1980 U.S. hockey game vs. the Soviet Union? It’s all you’re talking about over there? It must be a big deal if it’s penetrated into the no-Winter Olympics Zone that is the Arabian Peninsula. First, […]

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We had the 28th annual Sun Baseball League draft the other night. And before I go any further, I am reminded of a comment I overheard while covering the 2006 Winter Olympics at Turin — and may even have had on this blog somewhere, sometimes. I’m not exactly sure who said this, but I believe […]

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I may have written about this before. I don’t recall, and I’m not going to search my own site, because I feel like writing about it again. Or anew. Or with more emphasis. The latest round of print journalism layoffs prompted more thinking, and reminiscing, and I Came to A Conclusion that may not be […]

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Matt McHale was a near contemporary of mine. We got into sports journalism about the same time, and we left it within a week of each other, each laid off* by the L.A. News Group earlier this year. Matt died today in Connecticut. He had fallen ill in late May, three months or so after […]

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We are staying with relatives who are serious hockey fans. (Yes. In SoCal.) There was never any doubt over what was going up on the big-screen TV from 8:10 p.m. (PST): The women’s hockey gold-medal match pitting the United States and Canada at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. And there we sat for four-plus hours, increasingly […]

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Not that it matters much anymore, with print journalism in collapse, but for fun we can revisit a topic that would have been of great interest to sports journalists of 10 or 20 years ago: Where is “home” to the latest great athlete? Like, say, Chloe Kim, snowboarding gold-medallist at the Pyeongchang Winter Games? Chloe […]

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I was reading a story about the planned Los Angeles bid to host the 2024 Summer Games, and that took me back to the 1984 L.A. Summer Games, and I was looking at the wiki page … and on the right side of the page it had a link to a snippet of the “L.A. […]

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The most frustrating aspect of the nearly 40 years I spent in sports journalism was how the blight of doping always lurked in the rear-view mirror. We sped up, slowed down, turned left, turned right, and we could never shake the druggies. Eventually, we suspected nearly everyone — which was unfortunate because I’m pretty sure […]

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Omar Abdulrahman is the best soccer player in the UAE. He might be the best soccer player in the Middle East. He is good enough that whenever foreigners see him play, they inevitably ask: “When are you going to Europe?” Now and then, Omar has seemed vaguely interested in that concept. He trained for a […]

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The time difference between California and the UAE is 11 hours. In the winter, when California comes off daylight savings, the difference is 12 hours. Which means your body clock is turned upside down, when traveling from one to the other. As we did a week ago. I know what time it is, mentally. But […]

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