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 [...]

The last few weeks for sports fans have been particularly difficult ones. The stories of corruption are so overwhelming that it is a wonder that anyone can keep their focus on sport. The biggest headlines and the shrillest comment in the United States have been elicited by the Michael Vick dog-fighting story. The allegations of mistreatment, [...]

After overcoming the initial “shock and awe” of the headline that announced that Dick “Mad Dog” Cheney would be president for a few hours on Saturday while President Bush was undergoing a colonoscopy, I contemplated these events a bit further and wondered why the President didn’t turn over his powers to “Vice” on Friday. Anyone who [...]

It has been a summer of milestone achievements in baseball, with the promise of more to come. Sammy Sosa reached the 600 home run mark two weeks ago, and Frank Thomas reached the 500 home run level this past week, on the same day that Craig Biggio reached 3,000 hits. Alex Rodriguez will reach 500 home [...]

Billy Donovan, who accepted the Orlando Magic head coaching position for the cool sum of $27.5 million last Friday, has backed out of his contract. Is there anything to learn from this not-that-unusual turn of events? The idea that Donovan has broken a contract carries very little meaning in sport — that is, if you are [...]

They call them revenue streams. You can fish in them but there are no fish to be caught, at least not the kind with gills and fins. Some athletic directors have nightmares in which the streams dry up. Others have dreams in which they discover new streams where no one has fished before. This is [...]