Keith Strudler

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.

I know a lot of Americans feel a little guilty right now about Canada, the fact that we seem to have taken a particularly antagonistic tenor toward our northern neighbor.

You will not find an elite level athlete who hasn’t at some point played hurt. Especially late in the season or when the stakes are high, you almost expect something of the walking wounded.

It’s Super Bowl week. Which means for a lot of people, this is the one week a year they pay attention to football, even if they haven’t watched all season. That’s kind of the American ritual, kind of like how people vote in Presidential elections but ignore politics for the four years prior.

By all accounts, Novak Djokovic was on his way home. Or at least thinking about it, what time the plane would leave, is there any food in the fridge.