Zitat des Tages von George Vecsey:
The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford, who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21.
It is hard to imagine the World Series being held in the sweet hazy sunshine of late September rather than the sour night air of late October, but that is precisely what has transpired in baseball over the past 50 years, a deterioration from light to darkness.
Weary soccer players just cannot run anymore and must resort to shootouts after 120 minutes when a result is mandatory, but men on skates can go indefinitely, no matter how badly it disrupts the television network's schedule.
Night tennis began at the United States Open in 1975 with certain stars trying to beg out and certain patrons trying to dump unwanted tickets on scalpers.
Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.
Some of us love hockey not just for its ferocity and skill but for its underlying code of civility off the ice.
It is no fun lining up in your own building - as the hockey players say - and touching the hands of fellow stubbly louts who have just sent you off to the proverbial cabin on the lake.
This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.
Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.
Some religious guys in sports give the impression, 'I've got something you don't have.'
When Casey Stengel was putting his mark on all four New York baseball teams, he came off as many things. I have to admit I never thought of him as anybody's uncle.
For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.
No matter how many times it happens, the public always seems to be shocked when an athlete dies young, but the reality is, there are no promises.
Every spring, this happens: People discover hockey when daylight lasts longer and men grow beards and tie games do not end in shootouts but rather continue until a goal is scored. The seventh game only heightens the mood for players and fans alike.
Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
I've seen fire, and I've seen rain. I've also had to scramble over tundra to get to the Super Bowl and seen baseball turf fields that could fry a fielder's soles.
I know, I know - men have that extra hero gene in their foolish makeup; it's part of our charm. But I happen to know some women who have their inner sports hero, too.
Baseball cannot avoid conflicts. Games are played on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. On Oct. 2, 1978, they played on Rosh Hashana, and Bucky Dent hit one into the screen at Fenway Park. Supply your own moral.
Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.
War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.
To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
In 1949, I saw a World War II veteran named Lou Brissie, who had nearly lost a lower leg in combat, pitch in the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.
All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.
Hockey suffers from being compared to itself in ways that other sports are not. Every four years, some of us fawn over Olympic hockey, a great event with bigger rinks, minimal goonishness and national pride in addition to the heightened skills of veritable all-star squads.
There is only one thing wrong about the Flo Hyman Award: it came to be named for the Old Lady of Volleyball much too soon.
FIFA is a vuvuzela. It's in your ear, but you don't want to hear it, and then eventually it goes away.
I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.
I say the Islanders were the best team I ever covered because they had more so many stars who delivered with Canadian-Swedish-suburban modesty. And they won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 through 1983.
I love hockey because of the respect for history and for the game itself.
Fans all have their memories of pennant races, good memories, sick memories.
I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column.
One of the most beautiful sights in my neighborhood is on High Holy Days when people walk to temple. Not only does this bring the traditional legendary weather, but it gives off a psychic signal to slow down.
When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.
When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.
In the late '60s, Senator Charles E. Goodell, Republican of New York, spoke out against the Vietnam War, bringing on the wrath of the Nixon administration and, as it turned out, the disaffection of conservative voters.