Nature and Nurture in the NFL

This Sunday’s Super Bowl between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs includes a fun cast of characters, such as Christian McCaffrey, Patrick Mahomes, Nick Bosa, Travis Kelce, and Taylor Swift, straight out of countless posts I’ve done over the years about stereotypes, exceptions to the rules, and trendsetters. Granted, I’m probably about the 50 millionth biggest National Football League fan in the country (the NFL is popular), but even I’ve noticed a few things (with the help of my friend Charles Norman). For example, I’m always interested in exceptions to the rule ...

Soccer Talk

With the World Cup starting this Sunday, I realized that after decades of complaining, I’ve finally made my peace with soccer. Like many Americans, I always felt that the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dubious Domination

Why has the American national women’s soccer team won its version of the World Cup four times, while our national men’s team hasn’t made it past the quarterfinals since ...

I Get No Kick From Women’s Soccer

I happened to be in Paris when the final of the women’s World Cup (soccer) was played. Our little local restaurant, owned and run by Berbers, had a screen that relayed it, more ...

Colin Kaepernick

Same Old Slogan

The inspirational story of a backup NFL quarterback suddenly dominating headlines by championing black-power politics sounds like a dream you’d dream if you fell asleep during a ...


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