The best thing about sports is the sense of community and shared emotion it can create.

Mickey Mantle was baseball.

17 seconds from Game 7, or from Championship number 6,Jordan, open, Chicago with the lead. Time out Utah, 5.2 seconds left, Michael Jordan running on fumes with 45 points.

If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

If every university president said, 'The revenue producing sports: basketball, football - potentially revenue producing at most universities - maybe in a few cases women's basketball, if every one of them had a monitor that reported directly to the university president and no 'student-athlete' ever gets into this college or university who could not plausibly be admitted if we did not have a football or basketball team, end of problem. It won't happen because it's like unilaterally disarming. You know your opponent won't do it and then you'll get crushed in every game, but it's a simple thing.

If that's the last image of Michael Jordan...how magnificent is it!?

It doesn't seem that long ago to me that the word 'irreverent' seemed affixed to my name. 'Irreverent newcomer.' I went from irreverent to venerable in what seems to me like the blink of an eye.