Nice Guys Finish First!

Well, there’s no avoiding it.  Each year, around this same time, the event returns, seemingly more glorified and glamorized than the prior year, if that’s even possible.  And each year I feel compelled to write about it, hopefully in an even more cynical way than the prior year, if that’s even possible.  Of course, I’m [...]

Matt Barkley is an impressive kid, by athletic standards.  In a country such as ours which sometimes values sports accomplishment to the point of worship and idolatry, a kid like Matt Barkley is destined to be a top news-maker for years to come. Barkley was the most heralded high school quarterback in the nation in [...]

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 75 million kids under the age of 18 running around our country.  Of course, they’re not always “running” per se, since the average kid spends about 28 hours a week in front of the TV and an equally impressive amount of hours on line or thumbing text messages.  But you [...]

I’m not sure if I should be proud or embarrassed to admit this, but I think I managed to watch at least six College football bowl games out of the 30+ games that were played and televised this past season.  By my own standards I’d like to think that qualifies me as a good sports fan, [...]

In the early 1900′s a Swiss psychologist named Hermann Rorschach developed a systematic approach for examining differences in personality characteristics and emotional functioning.  Borrowing from an idea which reportedly dated back to Leonardo da Vinci, Rorschach found that by exposing his psychology patients to a singular abstract image, he could tease out measurable nuances to their differing emotional states.  [...]

I sat down last night and tried to calculate how many total youth sports games I had attended for my three sons over the years.  I’m not sure why I did this.  Perhaps I was bored.  Or perhaps it was the realization that my youngest son was turning 13, and this phase of our lives would [...]

My favorite coach in all of sports – Tony Dungy – was recently invited to visit my favorite team in all of football – the New York Jets.  I would have considered this a fantastic event in the course of my sports fanaticism, if not for the auspicious circumstances that created this rendezvous.  Rather than having two football [...]

This is the time of year when youth sports gets its biggest steroid shot of national publicity and promotion.  It comes in the form of ESPN’s nationally televised coverage of the Little League World Series tournament.  Fans and supporters of this annual event say that the popular tournament celebrates all that is good about Little League [...]

It was the first time Rob Mills had actually stood on his town’s brand new multi-sports, artificial turf field.  He had heard about it, and seen it from afar.  It was the crown jewel of the small Rhode Island town’s recreation system and the center piece of their largest park.  Its enormous cost was easily justified by the number of town children [...]

For decades we’ve debated the merits of whether or not we should consider professional athletes to be role models.  The debate is really unavoidable; it’s thrust upon us – and upon the professional athletes - for one simple reason:  our kids just happen to idolize, emulate and identify with these popular characters moreso than any other group of people. In 1993 Charles [...]