Zach dives into topics including doping practices gone awry, FIFA’s wake-up call, and snow sports in this week’s edition…

There was no way he was getting away with absolution, no way that this could be glossed over and cast aside as a fluke. When red flags go up in an anti-doping drug test, there is no margin for allowance when it comes to certain chemicals. So when we first learned of Alberto Contador’s positive [...]

Zach is back after a three-week absence with thoughts on the Australian Open, World Cup skiing and SI’s recent expose on Lance Armstrong…

The frantic scrambling of fingers over the tiny keys on a phone — a pocket computer, really, truth be told, as the thing hadn’t made an actual phone call in days — searching for scores, news, updates. On the bus, walking to work, in free moments and moments he should be working, the phone is [...]

I have found myself thinking about my writing an awful lot lately. Between trying my hand at a quick 50,000-word novel and preparing to spend the winter grappling with a Non-Traditional Sports Fan’s almanac/manifesto of 2010, I have a couple huge projects weighing on my mind simultaneously. And that goes without mentioning the pull to [...]

So I spent the weekend traveling into the land of the Giants. As Dickens said, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Hell, I’ve taken trips to Vegas that wound up being less eventful than this weekend. It was my first trip ever to San Francisco, coming three weeks on [...]

Look. I was all set to dive into another full week of news and notes in the 111th edition of this column. But things have been afoul with the cerebral vortex in the Bigalke household lately. It really started a month or so ago, when the high-speed internet we had been getting from Qwest lost [...]

The sports world is in another one of those moments in the year where everything begins to crunch together at once for fans in the United States. The NBA joined the NHL this week in starting its regular season. College football enters its stretch drive, while the NFL prepares for its second half of the [...]