Pete Carroll, The Jets, The Grateful Dead And USC Football

Things have worked out just fine for Pete Carroll at USC.
Nearly 15 years ago, I settled into a window seat on an American Airlines flight from JFK to San Francisco, one of a seemingly endless chain of business trips from New York to Silicon Valley.
I opened up my Sunday New York Times (which always makes [...]

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. [...]

Strange And Unusual Sports Facts That May Interest Only Me

Joe Pepitone and John Lennon had something in common – they were both born on October 9, 1940, Pepitone in Brooklyn and Lennon in Liverpool, England.
Ten strange and unusual sports factoids that may interest only me:

Former New York Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone was born on October 9, 1940, the same birthdate as late [...]

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 [...]

Lords of The Ringless: Wide Receiver Edition

That’s not a Super Bowl trophy Randy Moss is pointing to – he doesn’t own a ring.
Here’s the latest in the Lords of The Ringless series, a litany of losers featuring wide receivers who have never won a championship — Super Bowl, NFL or AFL.
The team nobody wants to join includes four Hall of Famers [...]

Read the Newspaper: Headlines Tell the Story

There are lots of reasons people should read the newspaper every day — news, editorials, the classifieds, movie listings,
Here’s another one: the creative headlines in the sports pages that reflect the athletic temperature of the American cities they represent.
On Sunday, for instance, we watched the NFL playoff races wind down. We saw the Dolphins complete [...]

The Best of Yankee Stadium: Everything But Baseball

Posted on August 19, 2008 by sportslifer | Edit
Soon we’ll be seeing all sorts of retrospective pieces on Yankee Stadium. Here we take an early look at the moments that shaped Yankee Stadium, New York and the world of sports.
Overall, there will be three categories — anything but baseball, baseball regular season, and baseball post-season.
This [...]

1958: One Golden Year

Fifty years ago, two events changed the landscape of professional sports in America forever.
In 1958, the Dodgers and the Giants left New York behind, kicking off baseball’s presence on the West Coast and ushering in an era of expansion in baseball and eventually other sports. Shock waves were felt from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and [...]

Matty And The Jinx

My friend Matty and I have known one another since the ’60s. We’ve gone to some great sports events together, including the Super Bowl, World Series and the Olympics.
For the most part , we cheer for the same New York teams. We’ve seen a few wins, but more often than not, we’ve seen the ugly [...]

Brett The Jet Faces Weight of History

Are the Jets a better team with Brett Favre at quarterback? Of course. But let’s not start printing Super Bowl tickets just yet.
In Green Bay, Favre had history on his side. Winning history. Not so with the Jets.
The Jets have gone this route before, with mixed results. They’ve had a history of picking up veteran [...]