On Politics and Sports
The NPR program Tell Me More’s section “Barbershop”, after discussing various political issues, switched over to football. Some commentator made the point that football, America’s most popular sport (the NFL ranks above Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer for most attendance among professional leagues), is the biggest thing Americans can agree on. This led me [...]
RI Baseballers Win International Competition
In a dramatic comeback victory, the Rhode Island Baseball Club Under 14 AAU team took the title at an international competition, the Cooperstown Baseball World Tournament, this week with an 8-7 win in the bottom of the seventh inning against a team from Indiana. After a scoreless first inning and giving up seven runs [...]
Chris Herren Talks About Substance Abuse Saturday
Former NBA player, Chris Herron, will be the guest speaker this Saturday (7/21) as Rhode Island Sports Heroes holds their annual Summer Outing Event at Camp Westwood in Coventry from 9 am-3:30 pm. More than 160 kids from various nonprofit groups throughout the state, including Big Sisters/Big Brothers, Seven Hills, Ocean Tides, Youth Rap, Adoption RI, [...]
Summer Is Here and So Are the Sailboats
Right on cue, Summer Solstice arrived on June 20 and ushered in temps well into the 90′s, providing the first blast of real heat for Southern New England this year. It was about time too, the choruses of “When is it going to warm up?” were getting a little stale. Well, warm up it did. [...]
How Sports Shapes Our Politics and Why it Matters
Still think sports and politics exist only in exclusive hemispheres? On Thursday, June 7, the Smith Street entrance to the Rhode Island Statehouse was dominated by a two-story Green Monster-green banner congratulating the Boston Red Sox on the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park. Inside, state officials were struggling to deal with the aftermath of that [...]
Race Cars and Revolution
In the introduction of my book, I confess embarrassment at the amount of sport stories I produced. Sport fascinates me. It arouses passions that let some sort of larger human narrative be told. Sport anthropomorphizes cultures; a mass of individuals expresses itself as a single person. And the more culturally complex the league is, the more [...]
Right to Work (for Less)
Waging war on public sector unionized employees last year, with Governors Walker, Kasich and LePage leading the charge, lawmakers are now gearing up to take on private sector employees in this year’s sessions in legislatures in states across this country. Indiana is in the forefront of the war against workers’ rights with its governor, Daniels, [...]
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