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

I’ve been thinking the past few days about just how blessed I am as a sports fan. Perhaps it is just the glow after finishing the first draft of my first book, achieving the New Year’s resolution I set on the first of January 2010 of having this thing completed and ready to edit by [...]

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…

As the New Year nears, this is the time slot when I would normally be breaking down all the events of the year, the biggest people and places of the past 365 days. But I pretty much did that last month, when I declared that we really ought to push the concept of the “New [...]

It is something that so wholly encompasses the sports fan’s consciousness that it seems second nature. Yet it is one of those things that the fan rarely thinks about as he goes about his daily existence. Rooting for his team or teams, year after year, there are precious few occasions on which he finds himself [...]

Twenty-two men convened in Zurich to seal the fate of the world’s most popular sport for the next dozen years. The preceding weeks and months saw FIFA forced to investigate alleged corruption, the spectre of blatant vote-buying and potential collusion between bids in the two adjoining cycles. It was a risk they knew they would [...]

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 [...]