Come mid-October, you won’t hear general manager Mark Shapiro talk about how well the Indians played the final month of the '09 season. For Shapiro will have bigger issues ahead to confront than trying to put a smiley face on...
Blog: Justice is Served: September 2009 Archives
Browns coach Eric Mangini has faced the one thing he started the 2009 season trying hard to avoid. He has a quarterback controversy on his hands. I can’t be hypercritical of his reluctance to entrust the job to anybody on...
Boxing is a dead sport walking, some people contend. And they might be right if they’re judging the sport on the men who lord over the heavyweight division. Quick, can you name any of the division’s No. 1 contenders? Only...
Cavaliers star Delonte West, a guitar case strapped to his back, was riding a Can-Am Spyder motorcycle on the Capital Beltway last Thursday when cops in Prince George County, Md., pulled him over for speeding. No surprise here that a...
He looks like the portrait of injustice. That’s about all you can say about Plaxico Burress as he walked into a New York courthouse Tuesday and prepared to begin his sentence of two years in state prison. Yeah, Burress broke...
You can only show compassion for so long, because at some point, compassion has to step aside and let pragmatism move into its breach. In Chicago, it did just that when the Cubs told Milton Bradley to take his baseball...
He used to be icon, a sports god of sorts. Coach Jim Tressel could have run for Ohio governor and won handily as a write-in candidate. But the only time people use the word "run" with Tressel's name now is...
It might not matter who coaches the Cleveland Browns these days, because the coach has absolutely nothing to work with. The team was closer to being decent when it returned to town 10 years ago than it is today....
I love watching artists perform. It doesn’t matter if it’s a jazz virtuoso like Joshua Redman or a singer with the operatic-like range of Aretha Franklin. I just wish I could have walked into Andy Warhol's or Jackson Pollock's art...
Don’t listen to Oscar De La Hoya. I’m not saying De La Hoya has lost his damn mind, but, well … if the man thinks Juan Manuel Marquez will beat Floyd Mayweather Jr., then the "Golden Boy" has taken a...
It was a small story, one that didn't lead the nightly newscast the other day, create giant headlines in daily newspapers or prompt much discussion. To some, it had grown long ago into a wearisome tale; it has mostly drawn...
One of my best friends lives in Kansas City. He's an aspiring sportswriter who bleeds Royal blue, so he might consider what I'm about to say as blasphemous. Yet what I have to say needs to be said: The Royals...
So, Brown fans waited for this?For two years, they have clamored for Brady Quinn to take the reins of the team’s offense. Quinn, a first-round refugee of the Phil Savage regime, had the pedigree: an Ohioan, a Notre Dame alum...
It wasn’t the death march to the gallows – not the slow, measured trek to a public execution -- that so many had predicted. In the end, the biggest game Saturday just concluded in another loss for Ohio State to...
Staying or going, I wish LeBron James would say. Those words will be pulling at James, as they did last season, deep into the coming NBA season like a tugboat. He keeps evading questions about what his intentions are...
Style doesn’t count. If it did, Ohio State coach Jim Tressel would be one of the most disagreeable men on the planet this week. The staid Tressel saw his Buckeyes, in a win last Saturday over Navy, perform like...
I watched on television in horror that Sept. 11 day in 2001 as the second of the Twin Towers crumbled onto the streets of Manhattan. The site of those falling buildings proved one of the darkest days in U.S....
I’m unsure Ichiro Suzuki is the right subject to address for a sportswriter whose attention is focused on players on teams with playoff aspirations.Not to say that Ichiro isn't worthy of my writing about him; he is worthy. But...
The seeds for “The Natural” were Bernard Malamud's, planted in his 1952 novel of the same name. The essence of Barry Levinson's film version is, however, pure Robert Redford. Levinson's version of “The Natural” turns 25 this year, but...
Muhammad Ali used to cut a handsome figure, standing tall and proud and often defiantly in the face of opposition that crushed lesser men’s spirit and will. Ali was "pretty," his body strong and sinewy and sleek. His charisma...
Two weeks seem just, and maybe that’s the first bit of justice Michael Vick has gotten since he put his reputation and his livelihood at risk by dogfighting Don’t look for a defense of Vick and his dogfighting. I offer...
I’m not sure what to say anymore. I’ve gotten so many calls and e-mails from people who are Indians fans the past few weeks that I’m utterly exhausted from talking about the team. I never figured out what to tell...
This is another misfortune in a lousy season for the New York Mets that keeps getting lousier: millions of dollars more on the disabled list. The latest millionaire to land there is left-hander Johan Santana, once the most dependable aces...
Eric Mangini must be out of his mind. Now, I'm not trying to tell the man how to coach the Browns. He's got the credentials for that job; I don't. But it doesn't take a doctorate in the art of...
The last thing Bengals coach Marvin Lewis needed is for his No. 1 pick to find his name on the injured list. Andre Smith, the 335-pound offensive tackle from Alabama, had ended his holdout two days ago, so what happened...
OK, so I was wrong. I didn’t believe CC Sabathia could hold up under the tabloid scrutiny and the fickleness of native New Yorkers. I thought laid-back Sabathia, cloistered during his career as an Indian, would wilt under the demands...
Pardon me if I need to put my journalistic instincts in mothballs for a four or five minutes. But hearing bad news about the University of Michigan is the reason. It makes me wanna holler: Hallelujah! Now, I don’t go...
For all the talk you hear about teams wanting to win a title, I found it curious that no contender ponied up the talent needed to acquire Roy Halladay, as good a pitcher as any in baseball. For if any...
They say reality bites, but I think they were actually talking about reality shows. No argument there if that's the point, because if people have watched Shaq O'Neal's reality show "Shaq Vs," they have but one conclusion to draw: The...
