by gordie | Dec 11, 2017 | Uncategorized
Phil Jasner was a sportswriter of another time and place. Yet the things he represented – thoroughness, fairness, decency – are worth remembering, worth preserving. His son Andy, himself a sportswriter, has done just that in a collection of Phil’s work called “On the...
by gordie | Nov 4, 2017 | Uncategorized
Destiny pivots on a pinhead. The tiniest of things – actions and reactions, decisions and moments of indecision – gather together like the flapping of so many butterflies’ wings to build a hurricane, pushing one this way or that. That’s true of great civilizations,...
by gordie | Oct 8, 2017 | Uncategorized
Before Joel Embiid was cleared to play five-on-five last Friday – some eight months after he tore the meniscus in his left knee and some six months after surgery – video surfaced of him playing tennis and jogging the streets of Philadelphia, both late at night. If...
by gordie | Sep 15, 2017 | Uncategorized
The latest indication of the buzz surrounding the 76ers came earlier this week, when Brett Brown held a coaches clinic in the team’s year-old practice facility in Camden, N.J. This was a Tuesday night in September, remember, about five weeks before Brown’s team would...
by gordie | Sep 11, 2017 | Uncategorized
His career has come to be defined by numbers. By the 94-by-50-foot rectangle upon which he has plied his trade for 46 seasons, with a 47th fast approaching. By 930 victories, more than any other Division III men’s basketball coach has ever accumulated. In June, while...
by gordie | Sep 2, 2017 | Uncategorized
As wrenching as others might have found the video coming out of Houston this week, it was just a little more so to Donnie Marsh. And as touching as others might have found some of the humanitarian gestures made in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, they hit far closer to...
by gordie | Aug 12, 2017 | Uncategorized
Early Wednesday afternoon Lyle Krall’s green SUV (vanity plate: “BASBALL”) was parked alongside Elco’s baseball field – a field that bears his name – and he was shuffling about the place, well aware how important it is for an 84-year-old to be up and moving. It’s hard...
by gordie | Aug 2, 2017 | Uncategorized
While Philadelphia sports fans have drawn their share of criticism over the years – and let’s face it, not without reason – it’s hard to envision a more shameful chapter in fandom than the treatment of one Steve Bartman by a certain segment of Chicago Cubs followers....
by gordie | Jul 28, 2017 | Uncategorized
In Ezra Edelman’s Academy Award-winning 2016 documentary, O.J.: Made in America, attorney Carl Douglas discusses O.J. Simpson’s 2008 conviction on armed robbery and kidnapping charges. And in doing so, he draws an analogy to high school football. Douglas, a member of...
by gordie | Jul 19, 2017 | Uncategorized
The photo below, from Fightonstate.com, confirms I was among the media members lurking about at Penn State’s Lift for Life last Saturday, where it was almost as impossible to avoid the optimism surrounding the upcoming season as it was the players engaged in one...
