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 ...

Tiger Woods

The Tiger Mother’s Son

A year ago, after a decade of worsening pain from swinging hard since infancy, Tiger Woods, perhaps the highest-paid athlete in history, appeared headed for the same fate as ...

Out of Bounds?

The young man at the supermarket checkout asked me if I would be watching the fight. “No,” I said, “more a media event than sport.” He wasn’t convinced. He would be ...

Fore Thought

The American victory in the Ryder Cup was convincing and thoroughly deserved. They played brilliantly, none more so than Patrick Reed and Phil Mickelson. Mickelson may spray his ...

A Silent Boo for the Good Professor

Sociologists often talk or write nonsense. Sometimes they dress up the bleeding obvious in pretentious language. Sometimes they merely seem determined to demonstrate that they are ...

Panathenaic Stadium, Athens

Losing Games

In the summer of 1992 BC (before Clinton) I was cruising in Greece with William F. Buckley and his wife, Pat, on board the boat I had just inherited from my father. It was a motor ...

Lance Armstrong

Coming Clean

I was watching the synchronized diving"€”one does odd things at Olympics time"€”and when Viktor Minibaev and Nikita Shleikher, the Russian competitors, stepped onto the ...

Rereading Pliny

I care nothing for football (soccer to Americans), but I was pleased when Portugal won the European Cup last Sunday. I would have preferred it to be Liechtenstein or San Marino, ...

Sanford Koufax

The Koufax Conundrum

"€œThree thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you"€™re goddamn right I"€™m living in the f—-ing past!"€ "€”Walter Sobchak in the ...

Too Many Champions

When I was a small boy I could name all of boxing's world champions, and I guess that anyone who followed the sport could do likewise. This was back in the immediate postwar ...

Why College Athletes Should Get Paid More Than Teachers

To say that college point guards should be paid more than middle school social-studies teachers might seem like a controversial statement, but it's essentially the same as saying ...

Cincinnati Bengals

Go, Vontaze!

Thirty years or so ago, I wrote an article about a mugging in New York's Central Park, one that today would have got me arrested for breaching PC rules, but back then was ...

Autumn of the Game

September means football, in high school, in prep school, and, of course, where it all began, in college. There is nothing that evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald times more than a crisp ...


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