Mamba
The sports world is reeling after the death of Kobe Bryant in a Los Angeles-area helicopter crash Sunday morning. It is no surprise that this calamity has sparked intense media attention and over-the-top praise for Bryant, who lived just 41...
Alcindor / Abdul-Jabbar
I doubt there has ever been a more dramatic college basketball debut than what transpired in Los Angeles on December 3, 1966. Lew Alcindor, UCLA’s 7′2″ sophomore center, scored 56 points in a 105-90 defeat of cross-town rival Southern Cal. His...
Basketball Referees Need to Put the Kibosh on All This Traveling
The greatest benefit of having a press-row seat at University of Texas basketball games in the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons was that I got an up-close view of how the game was played (by 10 athletes) and called (by 3 men in black-and-white...
Bill Bradley Was a True Student−Athlete
I’m trying to think what I was doing in 1988. I was living on Lafayette Street in east Austin, working as a proofreader at G&S Typesetters, writing a weekly column for the American-Statesman and preparing to run my first marathon. It...
I Saw Doctor J when He Was Young
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...
The Pros and Cons (Mostly Cons) of the WNBA
In 2000, Roger Ebert wrote a book entitled I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, about films he had reviewed and found lacking. They got suitably bad ratings—from zero to 1.5 stars—and an emphatic thumbs-down. Ebert had quite a...