Hometown Heroes: The Best Athletes from White Plains

Former Washington Redskin and Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver Art Monk is the best athlete ever to come out of White Plains.
I was born and raised in White Plains, New York, 27 miles north of midtown Manhattan, the county seat of Westchester, famous for a Revolutionary War skirmish against the British in 1776. [...]

July 20, 1969: Man on The Moon, Baseball As Usual

Casey Stengel always said the Mets would win when they put a man on the Moon. Both miracles happened in 1969.
The whole world didn’t stop on July 20, 1969, when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon. It just seemed that way.
For even as astronaut Neil Armstrong was [...]

Arnie & Jack: Reliving Golf’s Greatest Rivalry

In an era dominated by Tiger Woods and a field of also-rans, it’s nice to recall a time when real, honest-to-goodness rivalries existed in golf.
And none of those rivalries came close to rivaling the one between Arnold Daniel Palmer and Jack William Nicklaus.
Ian O’Connor, columnist with the Bergen Record, chronicles the rivalry that put professional [...]

Sorry T.S., April Is The Best Month for Sports

T.S. Eliot knew how to write, but sports wasn’t his strong suit.
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. “
– T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot, the American-British poet, playwright and critic, may have been a member of the Literature Hall [...]

Separated at Birth

Golfer Craig Stadler and former Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren

Craig Stadler                                          Mike Holmgren

The Winter Hacker

I am the winter hacker, a golf rider on the storm.
When the days get short, the sky turns gray and the ground is frozen white, I make my move and hit the links.
Oh, I play some golf in the summer, when the sun shines and the grass is green. Just not very well.
I do [...]

Cover Up: SI Denies Yankees in Annual Sportsman Award

The SportsLifer has been a Sports Illustrated subscriber since his high school days in the 60s.
In other words, a loyal reader for more than 40 years.
And in all that time — and dating far beyond that first SI in 1954, a total of 55 awards — no New York Yankee has ever been named Sportsman [...]

Woodstock: Better Late Than Never

“The thing the sixties did was show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”
– John Lennon

Well, I finally made it to Woodstock, 39 years too late.
Back in the summer of ‘69, just out of high school, I was on [...]