by Steve Sparks
The new season opened last Friday evening with a return match against Drew High School of San Francisco who had visited Boonville this time last year when the home team Panthers managed to secure a narrow 3-2 victory. The team and coaches set off in two school vans at 2.30pm and had a fairly smooth [...]
by Todd Walton
“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.” — Christopher Lasch A few weeks before my second novel was to be published in 1980, I got a call from my editor at Simon & Schuster saying that Sales had decided my title wasn’t strong enough [...]
Sooner or later during any international football competition in which England features we are sure to hear some variation on “England expects,” the reference being to Admiral Nelson’s exhortation on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar, the battle that gave Britain effective control of the high seas and, for the next century-plus, the modern [...]
by Jim Gibbons
It was just me and my son Riley leading the 17th Annual Boontling Classic 5K runners west on Anderson Valley Way to the turnaround. As we hit the mile in 5:36, I said “Just like a training run”, and through heavy breathing he answered, “Yeah”. If he sounded insincere it was probably because our training [...]
The recent decision to retire the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux nickname has sent ripples across the national sports scene. Gerhard Krauthammer, general manager of the New Jersey Jumping Jews of the Eastern Basketball Association, expressed his concern in a press release last week: The sudden undemocratic decision by a handful of North Dakota [...]
My family was from New York and surrounding areas. I was born in Westchester County where my parents’ families lived and where they met and married. My aunts and uncles lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn. My father’s brother Bill was a customs agent and his wife operated a women’s clothing shop downstairs from their apartment [...]
by W.E. Reinka
During the first half of the twentieth century, Americans could count on death, taxes and the same sixteen teams in Major League Baseball. All sixteen teams huddled in the northeast quadrant of the country. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis hosted more than one team but only the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns [...]
There are certain moments which will always stand out in the mind of Minnesota Twins fans. Where were you when the Twins made it to the World Series in 1987 by beating the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs? I was in a cramped college apartment in Moorhead, watching the game on a tiny black and [...]
by Todd Walton
Something marvelously strange is going on with my San Francisco Giants. For the first time since the decline and fall of Barry Bonds, the dead wood has been greatly minimized, money is being spent to retain talent, and it appears management may actually try to win the whole enchilada. The odds are greatly against such [...]
The school gymnasium is just as you remember it: The smell of sweat, the smell of fear; the childhood anguish of an evil room where cross-armed coaches and lesbian gym teachers reside, shouting orders and demanding push-ups. An encaged clock rests on the wall near the scoreboard, stopped in time, reading 8:36, just a stone’s [...]
