July 30, 2008
Dara Torres is Jewish. Who knew?
I certainly didn't; but it's true. Turns out her father was Jewish, and then she subsequently converted. (To my mind, this suggests that Torres strongly identifies as Jewish, as Reform Judaism accepts patrilineal descent for the purposes of determining who is Jewish). So there's someone who is Jewish but has a Latino surname. I can't possibly think of any bloggers...
June 15, 2008
June 04, 2008
Lakers v. Celtics: The Anticlimax?
I suppose that Hillary Clinton is doing us all a favor by waiting until Friday to declare her campaign suspended. That way, over the next 48 hours, we can focus on the real business at hand: the NBA Finals. I grew up in Los Angeles and have been a Lakers fan for as long as I can remember. The 1984...
April 21, 2008
April 09, 2008
March 19, 2008
February 24, 2008
The New Lakers
Obivously, it's been a few good weeks for the Lakers, including a fairly epic victory over Phoenix a couple of nights ago. Marc Stein suggests that they might now be the top-seeded team in the West, which is saying a lot. I certainly hope so. But I can't help thinking that this all could come crashing down at any minute....
February 16, 2008
December 29, 2007
How not to criticize a football coach
My and Mark's employer has a new football coach--Rick Neuheisel, a former Bruin quarterback who also coached Colorado and Washington. And thereby hangs a tale that makes no one look good. Neuheisel was fired from his last two jobs in circumstances that did not speak well of him. At Colorado, he committed a series of recruiting violations, mostly in terms...
October 28, 2007
Sox in 4
Well, that was not one of the great exciting contests in the summer game. It's conclusively the end of an era, though; with the second highest payroll in baseball and another championship, the Sox are at least decades away from being lovable underdogs again...if ever. If this is the start of a dynasty, it's going be really weird being a...
October 24, 2007
"By all good souls is he abhorred...
...who'd make a Babbitt of the Lord" is the moral of Thurber's fable, "The Bat Who Got the Hell Out". This story, about the revival-meeting atmosphere of the Colorado Rockies, is irritating to the point of creepiness, rolling up fatuous pietism, hypocrisy, and flat-out blasphemy, in a wrapper reeking of intolerance and pride, and generallly besmirching two institutions that deserve...
October 14, 2007
Class acts (or maybe not)
Joba Chamberlain, the Yankee whose fastball actually gets frayed stitching from air friction, and Jacoby Ellsbury, one of Boston's stellar rookies, are Native Americans. I'm quite curious to know how they take having the Indians' repulsive little logo put in their face in the playoffs. Come to think of it, aren't a lot of the Latino players throughout the majors...
September 22, 2007
The magic number is 6...
and so is the other magic number. It's a long shot, of course, but it might be well to prepare psychologically for a Chicago-Boston World Series. I have no personal thing for the Cubs, but given their history I would find it a poignant occasion for real ambivalence....
September 14, 2007
No, it's not just boxing and football
Soccer, especially heading the ball, seems to be bad for your brain.
August 26, 2007
A modest proposal
Now that we know how bad concussion is, especially for teenagers, how about not having high-school kids play sports with substantial concussion risk?
August 20, 2007
Say it ain't so, Mike
It's unbelievable, unimaginable, that a football player, or anyone associated with that noble sport, would be sullied with the savagery and cruelty of dog fighting. In dog fighting, players are raised and trained to attack other players on the principle that winning is the only thing. Successful fighters are given a luxurious life, with the best of food and comfortable...
June 26, 2007
...on the playing fields of somewhere-or-other
Football is a big, profitable sideline for my company, and lots of its competitors, and an even bigger business at the professional level. But this is not why we need football. We need football because it is in every way a moral beacon, demonstrating how a big team of managers, coaches, sponsors, agents, back-office drones, and the union that represents...
April 27, 2007
Yankees going down in flames
After my post last week gloating over the Fenway Sox-Yankees series I feel it necessary to report that I am no longer gloating, nor even enjoying the sight of New York going through the current valley of darkness, passing 0-7 and who knows how far away the exit is. Tonight Rivera got driven out of a ninth inning as the...
April 23, 2007
Does life hold anything more?
As a moment like this is unlikely to recur this season, or maybe millenium, let us wallow in it while we can: The Sox -took 3 out of 3 from New York -at Fenway Park -putting them four games ahead of the Yankees -hitting back to back to back to back (4 round trips in all) home runs in the...
February 03, 2007
The ideal issue
This week marked an odd intersection of two stories that seem completely unrelated but actually reflect a lot of light on each other. I'm referring to the New York Times' admirable series on NFL players' post-career physical trainwrecks, and the global warming issue. The players get a lot of money to amuse us with collisions between 300-lb armored projectiles. Half...
October 16, 2006
Why they hate us, part 23.b.6
Every great civilization has a characteristic sport by which its young men learn life skills, build character, and gain in moral standing. From Genghis Khan's polo to the cricket that made possible the British Empire's greatest era to go in Japan to the American present, where our great country learns its courage and principles from pro wrestling...wait a minute, that's...
August 17, 2006
Is Floyd Landis The Only Person Who Thinks He's Innocent?
For those who can't stand the suspense, the answer is yes. If our readers wish to take a look at something truly sad, scroll over to Floyd Landis' website, here. Landis states at the end of his August 15th posting that, "I am determined to show that I followed the rules and won fairly and cleanly. There is a greater...
July 14, 2006
Why is America the Best Country?
Piety, the Constitution, apple pie, our especially excellent mothers: all these gifts contribute to the overall wonderfulness of our country, but the underlying rock of greatness has to be big-time college sports, especially football. This industry builds balanced scholar-athletes, deep thinkers with finely-tuned, healthy bodies, prepared intellectually and morally for demanding careers. It legitimizes the effete and self-indulgent lives of...
July 12, 2006
Culturally Determined Insults
The controversy over what Marco Materrazi said to Zidane to cause him to go ballistic is just one step over tabloid-level debate. But that doesn't mean I'm not obsessed by it. Some people seem convinced that the subject was racial: he either called him an "Algerian terrorist" or used the phrase for a traitor in the Algerian civil war. Others...
July 11, 2006
Even More Football Rule-Tinkering
Judging by the comments on the football rule-tinkering discussion, there is a surprising amount of interest on this blog in the issue. Who knew? One reader pointed out that FIFA does allow for some variation, allowing club games to be played on fields with different dimensions than in high-level play. So it may be that changing the dimensions in professional...
Widen the Goal?
It is certainly the case that, as Mike points out below, scoring in World Cup games has gone down. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing, except that the game ends up getting settled by penalty kicks, which is better than flipping a coin or playing rock-paper-scissors, but not much. So there certainly does seem to be room for thinking...
July 09, 2006
The Zidane Tragedy
What can one say about the vicious Zidane head-butting incident that marred the final of the World Cup other than that it was tragic. Here was a man who would have—even in defeat—guaranteed himself an indelible place in the history of soccer. No one—not me, not anyone—believed that France had a chance to go as far as it did in...
World Cup and Doing the Right Thing
I wash my hands of World Cup soccer. Half the games from the quarterfinals on, including the championship, were decided by penalty kicks that have nothing to do with the game, mostly because with all its wonderful qualities, soccer has a fatal design defect: not enough scoring in regulation play. The result of this is that the game score has...
