Clark Booth on Sports

Notes from the passing parade while waiting for Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno to settle their differences with flintlocks from 20 paces along the East River at sunrise:
And to think some regard pro football as America’s premier blood-sport.... Read more

The immortal clash that yielded the only other playoff defeat on their home turf in the Patriots’ Foxborough incarnation is remembered especially well in this corner. It was the riotous conclusion of a season rife with the madcap misadventures then... Read more

Everything about “the hockey classic” down at the lyric little bandbox the other day was elegant and sweet except the curious notion that it took a gimmick concocted by a bevy of grasping Manhattan advertising hucksters conspiring with infamous... Read more

Once upon a time the business of tucking away another year obliged lengthy reviews of the highs and lows, winner and losers, heroes and goats. But that task now is too daunting. There’s just too much of the stuff.

The sports world is bloated... Read more

The machinations of the baseball off-season – worthy of the attentions of a Metternich or Talleyrand – grind on. The “Hot Stove” boileth over.

If all the seeds planted at the winter meetings in Indianapolis sprout, the boiling will rage... Read more

Dovetailing nicely with the holidays and very much in their spirit, we have the Baseball Hall of Fame elections upon us. Ballots have been posted. Electors are in place. Let the lobbying, posturing, and furious harangues begin.

For roughly a... Read more

Dovetailing nicely with the holidays and very much in their spirit, we have the Baseball Hall of Fame elections upon us. Ballots have been posted. Electors are in place. Let the lobbying, posturing, and furious harangues begin.

For roughly a... Read more

We have stray bits and holiday leftovers for you to chaw on, if you please:

The next time the wise guy next door tries to dismiss the game of soccer derisively remind him of how even the qualifying rounds of the brilliant quadrennial World Cup... Read more

November deepens. Skies turn gray. Frost covers the pumpkin field. Thanksgiving looms. One is at last ready for some serious football.
Back when there was an agreeable symmetry to the sporting seasons, you were locked onto the gridiron stuff by... Read more

On the morning of the day the Yankees would win yet another baseball championship, the New York Daily News ran a poll on the question: “Should Manager Joe Girardi be fired if the Yankees lose the World Series?”

Subsequent events... Read more

With another baseball season fading away with vast reluctance as Thanksgiving looms on the horizon, we have some bits and pieces and slices of this and that to share, footnotes on a long, long season lately threatening to become  eternal.

So... Read more

As I dimly recall, 1950 was a very good year. From the lofty perspective of Arlington Heights the world unfolded vast and wonderful. The possibilities were infinite for an 11-year-old hopelessly hooked on the game of baseball.

Back in those days... Read more

The regular baseball season ended this year on Sunday the fourth of October. That was as late as it gets, a silly situation necessitated by the so-called World Baseball Classic, which is yet another dumb idea conjured and fostered by the highly... Read more

Long widely and casually assumed, the concept of the Yankees’ hegemony and its sheer inevitability has been ravaged since the memorable autumn of ’04. So when the Bronx bullies ran roughshod over the Fenway pets the last couple of months it was... Read more

Rarely – maybe never – have the old world geo-politics crafted so brilliantly at the Congress of Vienna played a bigger role in a sporting issue than in the 2016 Olympic Games fiasco which, in the end, played the president of the United States, no... Read more

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