11th hole, Bandon Dunes, Oregon

Tee Time

The 2020s have been a lousy decade in many ways. For example, tomorrow is the third anniversary of the “racial reckoning”: How’s that working out anyway? But at least the Covid years have been good for the game of golf, a sociable outdoor sport that had been in a recession since the turn of the millennium. Last year, 26 million Americans played a ...


Courting Disaster

During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today (No. 4 among men and 6 among women). In 1957 the American ...

Order on the Court

With the NBA Finals coming up, retired black basketball stars are complaining about how racist the NBA is. On his ESPN show, Jalen Rose denounced the U.S. Olympic basketball team choice of white veteran Kevin Love, the nephew of Beach ...

Sir Stanley Matthews

Football Fancies

Sometimes I think of football (soccer), though I have no interest in it. This is because it obtrudes itself on me and is of great cultural significance. I once worked it out that so-called serious British newspapers devote more space to ...

Running With Masks

In ancient Greece glorious athletes competed naked, but in Tokyo they would have been forced to run the unhealthy marathon with a face mask. That would have been a rudeness of Olympic proportions that would make Baron de Coubertin’s ...

Ranking Ruth

I recently unfairly baited the great baseball statistics thinker Bill James into responding at vast length to one of my snarky tweets, which got me thinking about what we could learn from baseball history about how the media often gets ...

Tyson Fury

The Great Black Nope

Can a white man box a black man without making everything racial? Absolutely. It’s the black boxers who can’t seem to help themselves. On Saturday night in Las Vegas, two undefeated heavyweight boxers had a rematch to settle a ...

Kobe Bryant

When the Mighty Fall

We supposedly live in a secular and irreligious age. Man, however, is a religious creature prone to worship. This is never more apparent than when a figure from popular culture dies at a young age. Especially if their death is ...

Revenge of the Baseball Nerds

America has numerous problems in education, crime, and housing that might be helped by applying lessons that could be learned from big data analytics. Unfortunately, each of these topics threatens to get an audacious statistical ...

Female Inferiority in Sporting Events

We’re supposed to be excited that the American women’s soccer team recently won the World Cup. But just as very few people who aren’t Canadian care about Canada, very few people beyond women and a select few gelded males care ...


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