Sports

Are You Ready for Some Football?

I've begun following FC Dallas, the Major League Soccer team originally known as the Dallas Burn, as part of my embrace of all things soccer in the run up to the World Cup. My friend Wade Duchene has been after me for years to start following international football, which he discovered while stationed overseas during the first Gulf War, and I run a sports community weblog that has attracted a bunch of Premiership fans. Resistance was futile. Soccer in Great Britain is as huge as any pro sport ... (read more)

2006/04/10

Watch Out for the Guns

The Jacksonville Barracudas hockey team has been run the last several years by Ron Duguay, the former New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings player. Duguay was a '70s heartthrob who skated without a helmet, relying on big hair to protect his head. In a story about Duguay stepping down from the team, the Florida Times-Union included a photo of Duguay in his office, where he hung a bare-chested poster of himself showing off Ron Burgundy-like guns and a total eclipse of the hair. If you'd like Ron ... (read more)

2006/04/10

The Dodgers Will Never Forget Hiroshima

I attended Sunday's spring training game between the Dodgers and Nationals at Vero Beach, the first time I've seen a game at the legendary Dodgertown. There are no bad seats, the atmosphere is completely laid back and you're right on top of the players. I sat so close to Eric Gagne warming up along the third base line I could've made a beer run for him. The history of Dodgertown dates back to the years the team played in Brooklyn, and I found a very unexpected relic from those days in the ... (read more)

2006/03/20

My Lunch With Tyson Tomko

When I took the kids to Chick-fil-a for lunch yesterday, we sat down next to this imposing looking man and his family. With his bald head, six-inch-long Fu Manchu goatee and bad-ass tattoos running from wrist to wrist over tree-trunk arms, I'm thinking he had to be one of three things: professional wrestler, rock musician or crazed South Floridian drug lord. The latter was admittedly a long shot -- my only experience with South Floridian drug lords comes from Miami Vice and he was eating with a ... (read more)

2006/02/01

Stone Cold Lock: Jacksonville Over New England

I'm one of the founders of SportsFilter, a 4,500-member sports community weblog built on the MetaFilter code base that's been football-crazed as the NFL playoffs begin. I wrote a column this afternoon on Saturday's Jaguars-Patriots wild card game: Before Super Bowl XX in 1986, all-pro defensive back Raymond Clayborn predicted that his New England Patriots would defeat the Chicago Bears. I don't know who Clayborn likes in Saturday's wild-card playoff between the Patriots and Jacksonville ... (read more)

2006/01/06

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school has dropped its football program midseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned 13 starters from last year's 0-11 team, still had the toughest part of the schedule to come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride. ... (read more)

2005/10/19

USA Today is running a cover story on Patrick Cobbs and Jamario Thomas of the University of North Texas Mean Green, the NCAA-leading rushers in 2003 and 2004. They'll become the first season leaders to ever share the same backfield when my alma mater loses by several touchdowns to LSU on Sept. 3. ... (read more)

2005/08/15

All Cheer the SuperJews

Jerry Springer has a fill-in host on Air America Radio, a Colorado talk show host named Jay Marvin who's vastly more listenable than the mumbly panderer. Today, a caller told Marvin about a bit of sports trivia that floored me: A European soccer team goes by the monicker "the Jews," which inspires some horrible taunts by rival fans. I dug up the details for a post today on SportsFilter: Cheering on the SuperJews Wonder what it would be like if a sports team used a Jewish mascot? For years, fans ... (read more)

2005/08/09

El Prodigio de Rafael Palmeiro

A commenter on SportsFilter echoes the sentiment of a lot of baseball fans, describing Rafael Palmeiro as "very good for a long time, but never great." There are two reasons Palmeiro's Hall of Fame credentials should be absolutely beyond question. Most consecutive 100-RBI, 35-home run seasons in Major League history: Jimmie Fox 9 Rafael Palmeiro 9 Players with at least 3,000 hits and 500 home runs: HR RBI Hank Aaron 755 3,771 Willie Mays 660 3,283 Rafael Palmeiro 566 3,001 Eddie Murray 504 ... (read more)

2005/07/17

Simple Syndication in Communist China

While researching the skateboard jump over the Great Wall of China, I found RSS in an unusual place: The English language edition of People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, offers 18 RSS 2.0 newsfeeds. In addition to feeds on current events in news, business, sports, and other areas, the paper devotes feeds to party leaders such as Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Outside observers of China often look to People's Daily for clues about the inner ... (read more)

2005/07/10

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