by gordie | Oct 22, 2022 | NBA
Game point, Sixers down one. Final seconds melting away. James Harden with the ball in his hands, Jrue Holiday in a defensive stance. Such a delicious matchup, on so many levels. Harden is an elite scorer, Holiday an elite defender – “the head of our snake on...
by gordie | Aug 27, 2022 | College Basketball, High School Sports
There was reportedly a murder in January at California’s High Desert State Prison. And another in February. And another in July. There was also reportedly a riot there in April. “It can be dangerous, but I don’t look at it that way,” Dennis Hurd said recently over the...
by gordie | Aug 18, 2022 | NFL
Let the record show that even at age 10, Ray Didinger did his homework. Of course he did, just as he would years later, during his half-century covering pro football as a writer and broadcaster. So renowned for his tireless research that his retirement cake earlier...
by gordie | Aug 8, 2022 | NBA
In 1987, Bill Russell was not quite 20 years removed from his dominant days with the Boston Celtics when he embarked on an ill-fated 58-game run as coach of the Sacramento Kings. Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum came calling just as the season was getting under way,...
by gordie | Jun 20, 2022 | NBA
Pigeonholing Stephen Curry as a point guard seems foolhardy, a matter of placing limits on a basketball player who refuses to be limited, whether by his program height, the geometry of a game played on a 94-by-50-foot rectangle, 75 years of NBA history or, really,...
by gordie | May 29, 2022 | MLB, NBA, NFL
Roger Angell wrote long, long after it was fashionable to do so. Ray Didinger spoke evenly, even as hot takes became all the rage. You wanna call them dinosaurs, fine; have at it. I choose to believe that is true only in the sense that they have left (or are about to...
by gordie | May 14, 2022 | NBA, Philadelphia 76ers
One fine night in June 2013, reporters covering the Philadelphia 76ers gathered in the gym at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine to cover the NBA draft, confident the team would select some serviceable player (or not) and continue to bumble along, as...
by gordie | May 1, 2022 | College Football
Vacationed in Hawaii for the first time recently, with my wife and some friends. Did the luau thing, the whale-watch thing, the beach thing and the volcano thing, and one day did the Oahu thing, too. Flew there one morning from the Big Island and clambered aboard a...
by gordie | Apr 20, 2022 | NBA
Rare is the day when the 76ers don’t give us something to fret about, but here we are. And here they are, up 2-0 against Toronto in their first-round playoff series. Joel Embiid is playing Gulliver to the Raptors’ Lilliputians (while “respectfully” giving Nick Nurse...
by gordie | Mar 7, 2022 | High School Sports
NOTE: With Lampeter-Strasburg 27-0 heading into the PIAA Tournament, here is a look back at the only Lancaster County team to finish as an undefeated state champion — Lancaster Catholic’s 2002-03 club, which went 35-0. This piece originally ran Sunday on...
