Keith Strudler

This is not the first time I’ve talked about a college football coach getting a massive payment for effectively getting fired and asked to not coach his team anymore.

As a child of a certain era in Texas, I grew up on a certain brand of country music. Kenny Rogers, Alabama, the Oak Ridge Boys. I listened to Dolly Parton before she was retro cool.

It’s unfair to blame comedian Heather McMahan for the boorish and embarrassing behavior by American fans at last week’s Ryder Cup golf tournament on Bethpage, Long Island.

I’ve become a fan of Syracuse University athletics this year, which is something that happens when you send your kid and a whole lot of your savings up there.

Last week I was looking for something to watch, which usually means reruns of House Hunters or Magnum PI, and on the guide I came across what looked like the final stage of the Vuelta a Espana, the last of the year’s grand cycling tours – the Tour de France being the most well known.

I believe there are two kinds of people in this world. Folks who have caught a baseball at a fan at a game, and those that haven’t. I’ll actually expand that a bit to those who have caught anything from a player at a sporting event. Could be a tennis ball, a shirt thrown from a player, maybe a hockey puck.

There’s apparently a whole section at the University of North Carolina book store for shirts that without irony declare that UNC is now a football school. Sports fans recognize the twist, as Michael Jordan’s alma matter is historically known as one of the blue bloods of college basketball, along with places like Kansas and Kentucky, schools that expect to compete for basketball titles and hope for the best in the exorbitant world of big time college football.

So I was lucky to be at a five set match earlier this week at the US Open, one that was decided in a 10 point tiebreak that would determine who moved on to the second round and who went home.

It’s really hard to win a college football national championship. Now imagine winning four – all in one day. That’s technically what just happened for Auburn, who have just claimed four additional college football national titles, bringing their full total to nine. Not long ago, it was only considered two, in 1957 and 2010. In those years, the Tigers were ranked first by AP Poll and in the NCAA Record Book, in addition to the BCS in 2010.

I am going to fully admit that my knowledge of chess is fairly limited, beyond having played it as a kid and then again with my kids until they could beat me.