As college football’s “regular season” closes shop and the bowl season begins, there are many absurdities and idiocies to contemplate. As usual, they will be remarked upon by the fawning press and then passed over in favor of more serious issues, such as: Who will end up being the No. 1 team in the land? The [...]

“PRESIDENT PARDONS TURKEY.” This is the kind of headline that has appeared almost every Thanksgiving since President Truman allegedly started this silly practice some six decades ago. Modern times have added a relatively new wrinkle: online voting to name the reprieved gobblers. Only 28,000 voters were idiotic enough to participate (this year’s winner: the cringe-inducing “May” and [...]

There are times when it seems as if those people who live and work in and around baseball have developed flagellation into a high-art form. The reaction to the indictment of Barry Bonds has been an interesting mix of glee and lamentation — and even a slight note of shock expressed over these developments, which [...]

My, how time flies. It was seven months ago that Don Imus made his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team and found himself on the receiving end of a considerable amount of heat from a wide range of critics. Now Imus is returning to the airwaves Dec. 3 to do the morning drive time [...]

The newest revenue stream in college athletics appeared this year in the form of a life insurance scheme developed to generate a new source of revenue from dying boosters. Oklahoma State led the way, taking out $100,000 life insurance policies on major boosters. Other institutions of higher athletics have rushed to put such a program in [...]

Cubs fans are a hearty lot. Now only a year away from a “Century of Futility,” one gets the strange feeling that two historical forces will collide next baseball season and the result could be of cataclysmic dimensions. Will the Cubs continue in their futility, or will they trump their own futility in a transcendent [...]

I doubt that many people were watching late Sunday afternoon as the Atlanta Braves ended their disappointing season notching one final loss — and of those, only longtime Brave followers would have realized the significance of the moment. It was in fact the end of an era. Sunday marked the end of a 30-year run that [...]

After a break from writing this column for several weeks, I am at a loss as to where to begin. The last few weeks have been full of stories from the wacky world of sport and, with the beginning of college football, the number of stories of crime and corruption have increased geometrically, although in [...]

Does anyone believe that there is any mystery about what will be in the report of General David Petraeus on the troop surge in Iraq? This is the general who rose to his position as commander in Iraq through a combination of attrition and loyalty. While his predecessors in the Green Zone made the mistake [...]

In what can only be seen as an act of desperation, President Bush has appealed to history to justify his misbegotten war. For a man who has never shown any interest in nor understanding of history, except that he once may have thought it would be fun to participate in it, his latest appeal came [...]