Are You Ready for Some Changes in Football?

With the 2025 Super Bowl eleven days away, much seems to be going well for the National Football League. For example, the current decline of wokeness reduces the concern aroused during the Colin Kaepernick era that this inherently conservative game would self-destruct over race. The NFL remains the most broadly popular sport, and perhaps institution, in diverse America. Whereas, say, the World Series, the Olympics, and the Academy Awards could once be compared in popular appeal with the Super Bowl, these days the Super Bowl stands alone at still unifying the attention of Americans, who are ...

Caitlin Clark

The Caitlin Conundrum

When thuggishness damaged the appeal of the National Basketball Association around the turn of the century, the executive leadership eventually took successful steps to rein it ...

A Matter of Course

The Masters tournament on the second weekend of April is the Rite of Spring for golfers in northern America. In places like Chicago, grass is finally turning green after the bleak ...

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, ...

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 ...

FIFA Fanaticism

“There is nothing either good or bad,” said Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I suppose the same could be said of importance: “There is nothing either important or ...

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 ...


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