Baseball’s playoff period is a perfect time to reflect on how that sport’s institutional missteps reflect those of American society and politics. One of the game’s most wonderful attributes used to be its ability to bring people together, regardless of…
To measure the degree of the national obsession, consider that Monday watercooler discussion fixates not on the 174 people who died at one of their football matches on Saturday but on the one quarterback who suffered a concussion during one…
It’s been all over the sports news — an obsession, one might call it — for the past week: New York Yankee Aaron Judge’s quest to break Roger Maris’s American League record of home runs in a single season. Part…
The Brigham Young University volleyball story slid off the radar screen quickly, didn’t it? Once a final report was issued by the university last Friday that found no evidence that fans engaged in racial heckling or directed racial slurs toward…
Dallas Cowboys star quarterback Dak Prescott suffered a hand injury in Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He’ll likely be out four to six weeks, obliging the Cowboys to lean on backups Cooper Rush and Will Grier. Former Cowboy…
The inevitable happened last week in the world of college football. No, the big boys of the college game have not broken free of NCAA shackles to do their own highly profitable, self-governing thing. Not yet, anyway. The present inevitability…
Ahead two sets to one and 3-0 in the fourth, Rafael Nadal, four-time U.S. Open champion, struck himself in the schnoz with his racquet and stumbled to the sidelines as medics rushed on court. It is Arthur Ashe Stadium, the…
Maybe I’ve always fallen for connecting dots that bear no connecting, but it struck me as odd — not unfair, as that would be expressing a bias, which is a no-no to old-school fair-and-accurate types such as myself — that…
The National Basketball Association (NBA) announced that it was permanently retiring Boston Celtic legend Bill Russell’s No. 6 league-wide, which means that no future NBA players will ever wear that number. Russell, who died on July 31 at the age…
Saudi Arabia. Oil. Jamal Khashoggi. Human rights abuses. Donald Trump. Lingering 9/11 outrage. January 6. “Sports washing.” Department of Justice probe. Charles Barkley. And golf. It all fits, albeit uncomfortably, a big, bulging bundle of disparate parts lashed together by…