Given that both of my parents are deceased, I have no way of learning more about the earliest part of my life. A pediatrician apparently thought I might have polio or another debilitating disease of the lower extremities, and so the decision...
More than 40 years after the demise of the American Basketball Association, you can still color me red, white and blue—as in the league’s rather garish ball. During my junior year of high school, I considered myself lucky to...
In one respect, I am unqualified to write this piece since I am 7,000 miles from the scene and have been living the expat life for almost a decade. Nevertheless, I am a graduate of the University of Texas, wrote three books on Longhorn sports...
I can hardly imagine why Dr. Norman Davies did not respond to my e-mail. I had written to him in Oxford, England after having completed his 1,200-page book on European history. I said nice words, of course, but I also gently asked why he had...
Here I am at age 64, and I’m learning as never before. I do so primarily as an autodidact, by reading nonfiction books (history, biography, sports and so on). The content comes first, but there are other benefits. It has been...
Exactly 50 years have passed since the 1967 college football season. I was a ninth-grader at Hill Junior High School in Dallas, growing up but still quite immature. That, I believe, helps explain why I was so enthralled with the showing of a...
My college days consisted of seven semesters at the University of Texas and one at Stephen F. Austin State University. During that time, I recall just one truly bad teacher—Dr. Herbert Hirsch, a bull-headed, left-wing government...
Tuesday, December 6, 2016. Tonight in New York City—the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, to be exact—14 former players will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, operated by the National Football...
Since I failed to get his name, let’s call him Mr. Park. He was a nice young (mid-30s) man who said he worked for a company in the R&D field. We were at adjoining tables in the Paris Baguette I have visited many times during my...
Here we are in the fall of 2016, half a century since Jerry LeVias’s sophomore season on the SMU football team. I have already written extensively about him, what he did and its significance, so I hesitate to retrace my steps...
The sports world did not exactly come to a halt when I announced my retirement from marathoning in March 2016. I thought the New York Times or at least the Billings Gazette or the Jackson Clarion-Ledger would have sent a reporter to do an...
My grandfather (“Pappaw”) was proud of a certificate that attested to him having put more than 100,000 miles on his Harley-Davidson, so he obviously liked riding motorcycles. And his son—my father—was much the same. He...
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