I was raised on the baseball highlight reel. As a kid, SportsCenter was my breakfast. Eat a little Cinnamon Toast Crunch, watch a few dazzling catches, laugh at Craig Kilborn and Keith Olbermann, see Ken Griffey, Jr. hit another homerun—what a…

The Dilemmas of American Conservatism Edited by Kenneth L. Deutsch and Ethan Fishman (The University Press of Kentucky, 212 pages, $40) Order or Liberty. Tradition and Innovation. Every year young conservatives of an intellectual bent are introduced to the great…

Last May 12, I fell out of love with the NBA. The league that I had loved in the mid-nineties was gone. Bird and Magic were a distant memory, of course. But that era was full of surprises: Reggie Miller’s…

My name is Michael Brendan Dougherty and I have a problem. You see, spring training is over. The old songs and poems about baseball are dutifully repeated over AM sports radio stations. The grass is cut and smells fresh. At…

The place that invented the “Bronx cheer” doesn’t cotton to its baseball players easily. Yankees fans took years to warm up to the best player in the game, Alex Rodriguez. People still call up Mike and the Maddog on WFAN…

The Seattle SuperSonics have died. The team bequeathed one NBA championship title and several YouTube videos of Shawn Kemp dunks to their Starbucks-addicted fans. They are survived by the Seattle Storm, a WNBA franchise whose popularity ranks somewhere between venereal…

In pop culture, drag racing had given us idiotically romantic images like James Dean in his Porsche 356 Speedster bolting down an empty California Highway. And also cheeseball ones: think John Travolta driving his Greased Lightnin’. The reality is more…

Imagine sitting in front of Henry Waxman and explaining that the man who accuses you of taking an illicit substance — a demonstrably creepy man who was your trainer for years — is lying. Furthermore, imagine explaining that you didn’t…

One reel of film will be played thousands of times on ESPN this week to mark the surprise midseason retirement of Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight. In his white and black striped polo shirt, Knight stalks across the Hoosiers’…

On the morning of October 28, 1986, Darryl Strawberry knocked on his friend’s door. No answer. “Doc, c’mon.” Then he started pounding on it. Still no response. He shouted. Nothing. Later that day, Jay Horwitz, the team’s media relations man…