A game from my youth: NFL Strategy

It’s Championship Sunday in the National Football League, and it’s snowing heavily at home in New Jersey. Small wonder that I got the urge to pull out one of the tabletop games I played in my high school days during winters in snowy Cleveland — NFL Strategy. Introduced in 1970 by Tudor, the company that […]

Resurrecting the baseball solstice

Way back in December 2011, in a funk over the lack of baseball during a long winter, I dreamed up the baseball solstice. It would mark the midpoint between the end of the World Series and the first pitch of Spring training. It would also serve as a mid-winter reason to celebrate the game we […]

A gripping story of the Detroit Tigers and a 1930s wave of terror

I am forever on the hunt for baseball books, and by chance I discovered through an electronic library “Terror in the City of Champions.” The book, published in 2016, chronicles the exploits of the Detroit Tigers and other Motor City sports teams in the 1930s against a backdrop of violent crime perpetrated by a ruthless […]

Super Bowl omen: A bald eagle visits

Happy Super Bowl, everyone. I’m rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, and we just had what I consider a very good omen for the the team. As my wife and I were eating lunch, a bald eagle landed on the golf course that adjoins our lot. The eagle flew off, then came back to the course […]

Go Birds! The Super Bowl, the Eagles and the eagles

As the Philadelphia Eagles head to another Super Bowl, The Associated Press took that as a cue to write more broadly about how eagles — Philadelphia and bald — are “having a moment.” The football team’s good fortune is widely l known, and there’s also been a lot of good news lately about our national […]

A visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame

Driving to Cleveland for a high schoo reunion this weekend, I had time to stop in Canton and visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Even though I grew up about an hour away and had been in Canton a number of times, I’d never walked through the doors of this shrine to football in […]

Maybe, Just maybe, this is the browns’ year

I’ve been ruminating on the Cleveland Browns much of this NFL season, particularly since aging Joe Flacco stepped in as starting quarterback, leading the team to impressive late-season victories and securing a rare playoff spot. Then today I learned today that Frank Ryan, the Browns’ QB of my early fandom, has died. Could it be […]

Go birds! My Philadelphia Eagles cap always gets a reaction

Since moving into the Philadelphia area, I’ve bought and often wear Eagles-branded clothes. I have a Super Bowl LII T-shirt, an Eagles windbreaker and a cap, which I wear most often. Invariably, whether I’m out shopping, eating at a fast-food joint or even walking in the woods, somebody spots the cap and says, “Go birds!” […]

How to talk to your kids about Richard Sherman

While trying to keep an open mind, I’ve been watching the arguments unfold the past couple of days in the wake of Richard Sherman’s bombastic remarks after the Seahawks defeated the 49ers in the NFC championship game. Outrage was in abundance that night, with many football fans denouncing Sherman as an ungracious lout and vowing […]

Who’s the more aggrieved Bay Area athlete – Alex Smith or Brian Wilson?

There’s nothing “tender” in the dispensing of major league contracts to baseball players. San Francisco last week declined to offer a contract to Brian Wilson, the fierce and funky closer who in 2010 helped the Giants win their first World Series since the franchise bolted New York for the West Coast. Wilson has been rehabbing […]