My first interview at SI, I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.

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?

Moms are as relenless as the tides. They don`t just drive as to practice, they drive us to greatness

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

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

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.

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.