Column Archive

"It's Bonds. Barry Bonds": The Return of Baseball's Invisible Man

In game one of the World Series, by chanting “Barry”, for starting pitcher Barry Zito, the fans actually forced the radio and television announcers to acknowledge “the last time a different Barry" heard his name echoed through the park.

The Recusal: Roger Goodell Just Had a Great Fall

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's efforts to be Rudyard Kipling spliced with Gordon Gekko looks like it’s on the road to failure. It's a failure for the owners but a victory of Fujita and the other players railroaded by the NFL’s discipline process.

Meet the Lockout Lawyers Destroying Sports

Currently the sports world is suffering its fourth lockout in the past fourteen months. On four occasions since August 2011, pro sports owners have locked their publicly subsidized stadium doors, sent stadium workers home and stopped play as usual. This is not coincidence or happenstance. It’s a coordinated management offensive that has reverberations far beyond the playing field. Let’s look at the facts.

Postmortem: The Now-Infamous and Indefensible Decision to Sit Stephen Strasburg

The Washington Nationals, after winning 100 games and having the best record in baseball, have been vanquished by the St. Louis Cardinals in five games in the opening round of Major League Baseball’s maddening postseason. It’s deeply embittering, not least of all because it didn’t have to happen.

The Smartest, or Dumbest, (or maybe Smartest) Tweet an Athlete Ever Sent

Many allegedly great minds from professors to school presidents have devoted peals of pages to the multi-billion dollar industry otherwise known as NCAA athletics. Yet no one has quite put their finger on the contradictions, frustrations, and tragicomedy of being the labor in this industry - a so-called student-athlete - quite like Ohio State's third string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones. On Friday Jones tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

Palestinian Soccer Player Mahmoud Sarsak Won't Play FC Barcelona's Game

Mahmoud Sarsak is in the news again after refusing an invitation sent by the legendary team FC Barcelona to attend its October Clasico match next week against Real Madrid. Sarsak will not make the trip because FC Barcelona wants him there to mute planned protests against the presence of another person invited to attend the match, former Israeli Defense Forces soldier Sergeant Major Gilad Shalit.

It's Over: The NFL's Union Referees Return to Work in Style

The NFL referee lockout is over and we now have an answer to the question, "What does it take to pierce the shame-free cocoon of unreality where NFL owners reside?" All you need, it seems, is condemnation across the political spectrum ranging from the President of the United States to small-town mayors, to even anti-union corporate lickspittles like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. All you need is one of your flagship teams, the Green Bay Packers, publicly threatening to strike or "take a knee on every play." All you need are your star quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees blasting your product. All you need are online petitions with miles of signatures and 70,000 fans calling the league offices in the 24 hours following the debacle of a Monday night game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers. All of this collective scorn finally punctured the owners' magical mental space, bringing them to the negotiating table to settle.

NFL Scab Referees and the Return of TV Bloopers

It’s time for NFL players to move toward a secondary-strike so we can quickly move beyond what is quickly becoming one of the darker chapters in NFL history. Please do it, before someone really gets hurt.

Letter From Rio: Save Armando's House From the Olympics

You can’t understand what the 2016 Olympics are going to do to Rio de Janeiro, unless you understand what went into building Armando’s house.

Two Lockouts, A Strike, and a Pizza

Referees, NHL players and Chicago Teachers are discovering that they may have a lot in common. They are playing a game where the rules are rigged.