Daniel J. Flynn

The Philadelphia 76ers lost 26 games in a row this season. The team’s owner nevertheless labels the 2013-2014 season “a huge success.” Sure, a “success” like the Hindenburg or the time Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault. It reminds one of

Oscar Robertson famously averaged a triple-double during the 1961-62 season. Jason Collins finishes his much-celebrated 2014 campaign not even averaging a triple-single. The openly-gay center ranks 454 of 482 NBA players in scoring for the 2013-2014 season. He averaged just

A hefty bag of a stadium sounds nice this time of year to Minnesota Twins fans. Snow and freezing temperatures hit Target Field on Wednesday. The hockey weather caused the postponement of today’s baseball game. Even the heated turf couldn’t

Cuba paid Yasiel Puig $17 a month to play baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers pay him $6 million a year. Is it any wonder why he risked life, and literally limb, to escape the Communist prison state for the greener

Is it a crime to be fabulous?  “I am f—ing famous on the internet and they don’t understand,” Kayvon Edson announces in a bizarrely entertaining YouTube mini-movie. The man accused of placing a hoax device at the site of last

Final Four most outstanding player Shabazz Napier complained on the eve of UConn’s tournament win over Kentucky that he sometimes goes to bed “starving” as a student-athlete. The NCAA has heard the growls of Shabazz’s stomach. The NCAA announced that

Tax Day hits professional athletes harder than a Larry Robinson body check into the boards. Max Baer and Primo Carnera couldn’t knock Joe Louis down. But the IRS did–repeatedly. Joe Louis, a competitor not quite habituated to getting up off

That memory maytheir deed redeem/When, like our sires, our sons are gone/Spirit, that madethose heroes dare/To die, and leave their children free/Bid Time and Naturegently spare/The shaft we raise to them and thee –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”   Not

The Sports Hangover recovers from a Masters without Tiger, wonders if team mixed-martial arts represents a sign of the apocalypse, and thinks “what might have been” re: Manny v. Floyd. Bubba, Tiger, and the Ratings Collapse After ESPN’s coverage of

The new lawsuit filed against the National Hockey League alleges that scientists have proven that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease found in several dozen deceased contact-sports athletes, afflicts a great number of NHL retirees. But the leading CTE

Maybe it was the way yesterday’s class-action lawsuit against the National Hockey League misspells the name of Sidney Crosby, arguably the league’s best player. Or perhaps it was how it reported the death of a very-much alive Gordie Howe from

At UCLA, Jackie Robinson became an NCAA-champion long jumper, twice led the Pacific Coast Conference in scoring on the basketball court, and earned an All-American nod as a Bruins running back. He hit .097 playing baseball. Sixty-seven years after Jackie

Like a lot of people, the Ultimate Warrior’s greatest strength was his greatest weakness. The man simply had no governor between his thoughts and his words. In front of a conservative audience, he would drop f-bombs. In front of a

Michael Sam prefers football; his defenders, mental gymnastics. In February, the gay player’s proponents cried “bigot” when observers merely wondered aloud how he might impact the chemistry of an NFL locker room. Two months later, now that the cleat is

How many millions did Kunta Kinte sign for?  The New England Patriots awarded Brandon Spikes a $960,000 signing bonus upon reaching a deal with the linebacker four years ago. Now the new Buffalo Bills linebacker calls his time under coach

Whenever I indulge the delusion that I’m not living in the movie Idiocracy, I quickly turn on MTV to snap myself out of it. What’s Ridiculousness but an Ow My Balls! knockoff? A new sport (team mixed-martial arts) broadcast from

I remember hovering over the barbell most. In the basement of the Gold’s Gym on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC, the Ultimate Warrior told me to imagine my arms as hooks and my back muscles as arms lifting those hooks.

The Game of the Century, pitting Elvin Hayes versus Kareem Abdul Jabbar in the then state-of-the-art Astrodome, more than doubled the attendance record for a basketball game and became the first nationally-televised, regular-season, hardwood collegiate contest. By defeating UCLA 71-69,

Is Geno Smith behind the petition to ban Michael Vick from the New York Jets training camp?  A Change.org petition calls on SUNY-Cortland, home of the training camp of the New York Jets, to bar the team’s new quarterback from

The Sports Hangover recovers from last night’s national championship game, ponders the sanity of people who wagered on Wrestlemania, and compares Manny Pacquiao’s Saturday opponent Timothy Bradley’s strategy of not showering the week of the fight with Pacquiao rival Juan

Oddsmakers peg the Kentucky Wildcats as 2.5-point favorites over the Connecticut Huskies in tonight’s national championship game. But what do they know? The bookies, like the NCAA’s selection committee, have proven that they don’t know much. Or, perhaps more accurately,

Some athletes tell journalists of their belief in God. Larry Sanders of the Milwaukee Bucks proclaims his belief in ganja. “I believe in marijuana,” Sanders told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The NBA believes in suspending players who practice what they preach

John Wooden, readers learn in Seth Davis’s Wooden: A Coach’s Life, was a simple man overflowing with complex contrasts and contradictions. His teams embodied these divergences. One of the fascinating paradoxes that most displayed the intimidating dominance of Wooden’s UCLA

Ichiro Suzuki started the season in an unfamiliar place: the dugout. Healthy and eager, the future Hall of Famer nevertheless watched from the bench, warmed up in the clubhouse, but didn’t enter the game on Opening Day. He repeated the