Keith Strudler

One of the most unfortunate compliments in all of sport is to be called the best to never win a championship. You hear this a lot in team sports. Like Charles Barkley or Allen Iverson in basketball, or Dan Marino or Jim Kelly in the NFL.

Sometimes the hardest part about watching elite, Olympic level sports, especially in things like track and swimming, is the lingering doubt about whether athletes are competing clean.

These may be the halcyon days for the New York Knicks, who just swept the rival Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. So far they’ve only lost two out of 10 games in the NBA Playoffs by a collective two points and are now one series away from the Finals for the second consecutive year.

I can’t remember the specifics, but I remember seeing a poll a few years ago where an unusually high percentage of people believe that they could be professional athletes.

This is a true story. Names have been removed, but it did happen. In was the summer of 1995, and I was a graduate student living in Gainesville, Florida. We were exactly one year from the ‘96 Summer games in Atlanta, which meant I was going to be a five-hour drive from the center of the sporting universe and young and free enough to drop everything to drive north and crash on someone’s couch in between track and swimming and whatever else I could get to.

I’ll preface this by saying it would be hard for me to find a matchup of two college basketball teams that I like less than last Sunday’s Duke/UConn Elite Eight game.

It’s mid-March. Which, by all accounts means two things. One, we all think it should be warmer than it is by now. And two, it is time to fill out your NCAA Tournament brackets.

There was a point in not that distant NBA history where 83 points was a decent amount. Like pretty much the entire 90’s for the Knicks. That, of course, is for an entire team, for an entire game.

You can say that going to a Major League Baseball game can sometimes be boring. But you’ll no longer leave unsatisfied.

One of my favorite phrases is, “that’s why we can’t have nice things.” It sums up a lot in life, including pretty much every office policy about remote work. It seems it also applies to global sports, in particular the Olympic Games.