We’re mere hours from the start of the 2011 Australian Open. The preview is coming late, and this is the first time in four years that I’m not linked into cable television for the tournament. (For all my gripes about television, the main one is the cost — yet somehow it ended up that my [...]

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 [...]

The UConn women are going for their 89th straight victory tonight when they square off against Florida State. Should they win, they will pass John Wooden’s famous UCLA men’s teams of the 1970s that put together the 88-game win streak that served as the gold standard in college basketball before Geno Auriemma’s women began their [...]

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 [...]