The Score

Let's start with a few tennis notes. Word out from Martina Navratilova this week that she has come through the radiation treatments for her breast cancer just fine and considers this simply another chapter in her life of adventure. Well, that's a whopping understatement. I was emailing back and forth with Martina all through her radiation sessions in Paris. What she doesn't mention to the press is just how she went through the final, more painful stages of the treatments. First, she would ride her bicycle to the clinic. Come on, find me another individual who rides their bicycle to cancer radiation…

A week into the World Cup and you would think the unusual number of low-scoring games would be the bad rap so far. After all, at least for American sports fans, 90 minutes of running back and forth ending in a 0-0 tie, is precisely what has relegated soccer to the fringes of the mainstream and it's the event magnitude of the World Cup each four years that gives hope that the sport will at last draw that mainstream in....

In the 1980's I had the great fortune to work on a documentary in the interior rain forests of Borneo. We were to live for six weeks among the tribes of the Dayak Indians, formerly the famous and fierce headhunters of Borneo. At the time we arrived these were considered one of the last truly remote people on Earth. Except for one Englishman who had broken his leg hiking in the jungle, this particular tribe had never seen anybody but themselves...

It's perplexing. Last weekend Danica Patrick finishes a highly respectable sixth place in the not-so-long-ago All-Boys Indianapolis 500. Serena Williams as of just a couple of days ago is reported in the headlines of the world's sports pages as the Only American left in the French Open….not the only American woman, but the Only American, intimating that her stature allows her to represent all American tennis players, above Andy Roddick and the other ranked male players who were eliminated before her. Sixteen-year-old Australian Jessica Watson draws fascination from people of many nations as she singlehandedly circumnavigates the globe in her sailboat...

The announcement of future Super Bowl locales is usually pretty ho-hum. Miami again. New Orleans again. Maybe San Diego. Maybe Pasadena. But when the new Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, won the bid for Super Bowl 2014 this week, bloggers feverishly took to their keyboards...

It’s a big week for cycling in America. The most popular cycling race in U.S. history is mid-way, the Tour of California. The event has in only five years grown so much in stature that its organizers have this year made the brazen move of scheduling the eight-day race at the same time as the famous Giro d’Italia. Along with the Tour de France mid-summer, the Giro in the spring and the Vuelta a Espana in the fall are the top trio of the world’s elite races. To move the young Tour of California from its former February spot on the race calendar and pit it against the Giro, and successfully attract not only Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and the top American riders but several top foreigners, such as English sprinter Mark Cavendish as well, is a sign that the American race has quickly earned a valid place on the world stage of the sport.

One of the greatest players in football history, Lawrence Taylor, has been accused of raping a 16-year-old girl. L.T. has a well-known history of drug problems but his troubles never included rape. Should he be convicted, there are those calling for his removal from the Professional Football of Fame. I imagine those outraged people must be the same faction who have previously called for O.J. Simpson’s removal from that same Hall of Fame. It makes you wonder: When you saunter past the photos and memorabilia and bronze busts in Canton, Ohio, or the shrines to the baseball greats in Cooperstown, or any of the exhibits at any of the athletic Halls of Fame, you bear witness to the on-field superior records of these accomplished athletes, yet you are also led to believe that these individuals are beyond super athletes. Somehow you glean that they are exemplary human beings, by virtue of their honored stature as Hall of Famers.

Two mirror clichés, bandied about for so long now that we say them in automatic drone tones that really don’t have any truth behind them any more. The two clichés? Americans hate hockey. And….Americans hate soccer.

The Kentucky Derby, set to run this Saturday, as is the custom every first Saturday in May, is the oldest continuous sporting event in our country. Since the first settlers stepped onto the Bluegrass fields of Kentucky, horse racing…and horse breeding…have been the heart and soul of the region. If you have a chance to visit the bucolic rolling hills and majestic fenced horse farms that stretch for many miles toward every compass point from Lexington, you’ll quickly discover the central conversation, Derby time or otherwise, is bloodlines. More than the furlong track times, what’s crucial is which stallions are bred to which mares...

Players, their families and fans will be tuned in to the first round of the NFL draft tonight. Might be near to impossible for some of you to imagine how watching people sit in rooms, waiting for their names to be announced….or not…can make for good television, yet 39 million viewers tuned in last year. And, going prime time for the first time tonight, the audience will likely be even bigger this year...

ABC News has reported the sex crimes scandal of 36 USA Swimming coaches abusing their athletes over the last decade…and compares the crimes to those of the Catholic Church in that USA Swimming allegedly covered for the perpetrators and allowed them to keep coaching. I also am a victim of sexual abuse by my swim coach...

It happens that Americans working or studying abroad for an extended period of time sometimes turn to a major sporting event back home for a rekindling of the familiar. As much as one may appreciate a foreign culture, immersion in a strange land inevitably brings with it longing for a few of the comforting sights, smells, sounds from back home...

In the fifth inning on Tuesday, Pitcher CC Sabathia came out of one of the Yankees' last spring training games. Sabathia took a seat in the Yankee dugout and then witnessed something he had never seen before. Making his first appearance for the Yankees, a young Pat Venditte took the mound with a six-fingered glove, a slot at each side for each thumb. He threw four warm-up pitches with his right arm, then switched the glove to his right hand and threw four more warm-up pitches with his left arm. Venditte worked the next few batters, throwing to right-handed batters with his right and switching to his left arm for left-handed batters...

I'm an NFL junkie. Along with millions of others. From late Labor Day to the first week of February, I am hooked into the weekly dramas. There's no long prelude period, as in Major League Baseball where you could pretty much tune in come late July, early August and be right on track to the World Series. The first NFL kick-off ignites do-or-die significance across the league. And each subsequent week looms larger and larger in each team's march toward the biggest, baddest event in all of sports, the SuperBowl...

After five months of seclusion, Tiger's comeback at the famous Master's in three weeks is predicted to draw as many viewers as President Obama's inauguration. Augusta, Georgia, come April 7, won't merely be the site of one of golf's four Major events. Rabid curiosity is going to draw the public at large to watch the protagonist of America's biggest story in huge numbers. The Master's two broadcasters, ESPN the first two days, Thursday and Friday, and CBS the weekend, assuming Tiger makes the cut and plays the weekend, are licking their chops at the certainty of ratings hitting historic highs. But I'm sure there's a quandary there as well....