I never learned the secret handshake. That may be one of the reasons I've grown to love English soccer.

I've always had an irrational fear - it's really not an irrational fear, I think - whenever I've been standing at a urinal at a bar, or Giants Stadium or Yankee Stadium. You've got a bunch of drunks behind you, often in a hostile, adrenalized environment like a football game. What's to prevent the guy behind me from slamming my head into the porcelain wall in front of me?

Summer runs out the way a centerfielder runs out of real estate - slowly at first, then all at once.

I had almost nothing published until I had something published in Sports Illustrated. I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.

Happy 110th birthday to Frank Zamboni, who left us in 1988 but still resurfaces periodically.

I never learned the secret handshake. That may be one of the reasons I've grown to love English soccer.

As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears.