The scene:

A dimly-lit church basement. A long collapsible table is at the back of the room and on it is a coffee urn, a tall stack of Styrofoam cups, canisters of sugar and non-dairy creamer, and a half-eaten box of doughnuts. A group of people of various ages and social status are seated in a circle of folding chairs. A man who appears to be leading this meeting looks around the circle with a sense of expectancy.

“Would anyone else like to share?”

There is a prolonged silence, after which one man, upon glancing at his peers to either side of him, raises his hand.

“Hi. I’m Paul…and I’m an Atlanta Falcons fan.”

The group nods in supportive unison:

“Hi, Paul.”

A weight has been lifted and I feel heard, not judged. But the fact remains, I am that degraded, humbled specimen known as a Falcons fan. I have the unenviable burden of living and dying by the fortunes of the team that for the first 42 years of its existence failed to put together two winning seasons in a row. A team that when it went to its first Super Bowl 27 years ago, lost after one of their star players was arrested for solicitation the night before the game. A team that when it had a Super Bowl win in its sites, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and forever etched “28-3” into the lexicon of losers. Yes, on February 5, 2017 my Falcons had a 25-point lead midway through the third quarter and still managed to come up short in overtime. The memory still haunts me almost ten years later when I least expect it, launching me again into one of the seven stages of grief: anger. (I haven’t quite made it to acceptance.)

But I’m nothing if not loyal. A Falcon fan I have been since 1982 and always will be, despite my annually playing the part of Charlie Brown opposite Lucy and the football.

Will this season be any different? Let’s see…The quarterback we (yes, I still say “we”) drafted three drafts ago to be our play-caller of the future is recovering from his third ACL injury and isn’t ready physically or otherwise to play. Actually, he says he’s ready for anything except taking a hit, something that occasionally happens on a football field, or so I’ve been told. We drafted him after signing and paying an unprecedented and historically large sum of cash to an aging free agent who was recovering from a torn Achilles and who is, I hasten to add, no longer on the team. Neither is the general manager who concocted all that nonsense, nor the coach who tried to make the best of it.

Meanwhile, the man currently under center is a veteran with a long history of, what else, injury.

We finally found a defensive end who could sack opposing quarterbacks, but he’ll be serving an eight-game suspension to start the campaign for his off-season domestic violence arrest.

Oh, and our star linebacker got injured during training camp and won’t be back till 2027.

But at least the concessions at Arthur Blank’s pleasure palace known as Mercedez-Benz Stadium are still the second-cheapest in the league.

Thanks, but I’ll watch—and believe me, I really will keep watching and rooting for my adopted favorite team—from the comfort of my home in front of my 85-inch TV.

But I have a personal history of rooting for losing teams. I grew up in the Bay Area as a 49er’s fan before they became the team that went on to win five Super Bowls. Things changed.

My first job as a sports reporter 51 years ago was in Green Bay, Wisconsin where I covered the hapless Packers who were between Super Bowls. I would say wedged very deeply between those triumphs that had given Green Bay the moniker of Titletown, USA. They were 4-10 and 5-9 the two years I covered them. But things changed.

I moved to Atlanta in the early ’80, just as the Braves were transitioning from laughable to mediocre and back to laughable again. But then, yes, things changed. They went from worst to first in 1991 and didn’t stop winning division titles till 2006 when they started their slide back to mediocrity and unwatchability. But things changed again. They won the World Series in 2021 and are now perennial contenders for the crown.

It is of considerable comfort to remember that things change for sports fans such as myself. That doesn’t mean there isn’t heartbreak along the way, but let’s face it; at the end of every season, there can only be one team left standing. It’s just that it’s so rarely mine.

I explored that thought back in the late ’80s when I was at TBS. The major league baseball landscape was different than it was now—pitchers took their time on the mound, the DH was used only in the American League, extra-inning games were played with adult rules, and the umpire’s decisions were final—but there were still annual winners and losers. That hasn’t changed, but those winners and losers sure have.

When I decided to do a story on the advantages of rooting for losing teams, I chose one of the also-rans of their day, the Cleveland Guardians (nee Indians), who were in the midst of crafting a 101-loss season. (They now vie for their division title every year.) The winning team I chose to compare them with was the California Angels, as they called themselves then, who had just come off a season in which they had won their division. (They are now the dregs of baseball.)

So, I shuffled back and forth between the two cities to compare the advantages and disadvantages with which both fan bases were living, as a means of reminding hardcore fans to keep the faith because as history and those two teams have shown us…things change.

As a side note from this Atlanta sports fan with callouses encrusting my rooting heart for so many years, the 28-3 Super Bowl debacle was not the only humiliation our professional franchises have endured.

There were the 10 runs the Braves gave up in the top of the first inning in the deciding game of a playoff series in 2019.

There’s the loss to the Cowboys in the playoffs of 1980 when we held a 24-10 fourth-quarter lead and somehow gave it back.

And there are others, which I really don’t want to bring back into the light for fear of PTSD. Add the missteps of our college teams, and it’s almost funny. I said almost.

I was writing a post about the passing of Don Nelson last week, and when digging a little deeper into his life, I found an interesting accomplishment he had achieved in his long and brilliant coaching career. He was coaching the Milwaukee Bucks in a game against the Atlanta Hawks on the road. (It’s Atlanta, so you can see where this is going.) His Bucks were down by 29 points with 8:43 to play in the game. (The only thing keeping me from being pained to write this was that I wasn’t here then, and have no first-hand recollection of it.) Don’s team went on a 34-5 run and ended up winning 117-115, pulling off the greatest fourth-quarter comeback in NBA history. There should be an asterisk by that score to let readers know it happened against a team from Atlanta, so it wasn’t that unusual. The fact that it was done against a team from here only drives home the point that my fandom for the local teams I subject myself to comes with great pain and disappointment. But…things change. Right?

How about you? Any horror stories you care to share as way of making me feel better about my own? Let’s hear them in the comments. Don’t worry, you’re among friends.

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I started reporting on sports and interviewing its coaches and players more than 50 years ago. So, I’m not surprised when I hear of yet another one who shuffles off this mortal coil. No one lives forever. Denny Crum, Lou Holtz, Pete Rose, Pee Wee Reese, Bart Starr, just to name a few I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with, face to face, for extended interviews.

But it always haunts me when I think of what I could’ve asked them and didn’t. “Pee Wee, you saw Bobby Thomson’s famous home run in 1951 from your position at shortstop. Tell me what that was like? What did you do when the ball cleared the fence? And tell me about the train rides and the clubhouses in the ancient ballparks back in the day.” Or, “Bart, you called your own plays with the Packers and scored the winning touchdown in the famous Ice Bowl game. Walk me through that experience. And what was Vince Lombardi like away from the sidelines?”

Anyway, that’s just a thought I have when I hear that another great has moved on.

It happened again yesterday. Don Nelson. He was a five-time NBA champion as a player with the Boston Celtics, and a Hall of Fame coach, the second-winningest head coach of all time—another great I got to speak with on several occasions. I should’ve asked him about playing for Red Auerbach and with Bill Russell and about how different the NBA was back in the ‘60s. But I didn’t. Maybe someone else did and I can read about it from them. That’ll have to do.

What I remember about Don Nelson was his easy-going attitude and approachability. I first met him in 1976 when Larry Costello resigned as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks early in the season and Don, his assistant coach, replaced him. I was working in Green Bay at the time, and my boss sent me to Milwaukee with a film camera to follow the Bucks’ new coach around for a day or so, and report back on his first stint as a head coach. It still astounds me to think I would be sent on such an assignment. I had been in the business a little over a year, and my camera skills were about what you’d expect from an ambitious young reporter with visions of starring in front of the camera, not behind it. Remember, this was 16mm film, not a little video camera with which I could check my work to see if, you know, I had cut off his head or lost focus. That had to wait till I got back to Green Bay and the film got processed. But to the best of my recollection, it went well as I followed Nelson around, both of us still relatively new at our chosen professions.

Years later, now with TBS, I was in Charlotte for a Warriors-Hornets game and I ran into Don in the bowels of the arena. I reminded him of that memorable day I spent with him in Milwaukee in 1976. As big a deal as it was for me, it apparently didn’t have the same life-altering effect on Don, who had no recollection of our precious time together. At all. I seem to have made quite the impression.

I last saw Don when he was coaching the Golden State Warriors. I want to say it was around 1990. Now, when you interview someone, there’s generally a few minutes while the camera crew is setting up and the victim is being wired for sound, and it’s during those lulls when you make small talk. So, I was regaling Don with stories about my failures as a high school basketball player and how I was sitting in the locker room, pre-game, watching our coach diagram plays on the blackboard. I told Don that when I was listening to the coach, the thought that weighed most heavily on my brain was, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

Don, the master coach and motivator of professional basketball players, smiled and said, “I still have guys like that.”

In the late ‘80s, while at TBS, I did a series of reports on what NBA players did during their down time on the road. Real hard-hitting investigative stuff, exactly the kind of lighter-than-air reporting I loved and was good at. In Orlando, I found a little soul food restaurant called Johnson’s Diner, where NBA players were always welcome. It was right down the street from the arena. When the Warriors were in town, I managed to get them to show up at Orlando’s famous culinary landmark. I don’t know if it really was a regular stop on their tour through NBA cities, but they certainly seemed to enjoy it. And so did Don Nelson, who gave a great endorsement. Was it just for the camera? Who knows? But it made the piece that much more special and that much more amusing. And that’s how I’ve always remembered Don Nelson.

Unfortunately, if this piece has gotten you hankering for fried chicken and collard greens, you’re 16 years too late. Johnson’s Diner closed for good in the fall of 2010. And NBA teams are all the poorer for it.

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Hey, what are you doing between August 7 and 11? If you’re a kid in Georgia where I live—and if you’re a kid, you’re probably not reading this, let alone paying for it—then it’s back to school for you. Why the public school system sends their children back to the salt mines when summer is still torturing us up here on earth is anyone’s guess. (Actually, modern salt mines are cool, dry environments, so let’s look for another metaphor to describe a blazingly hot, muggy environment where there’s more water in the air than air. I know: Georgia. It’s all I can come up with. They don’t call my adopted hometown “Hotlanta” for nothing.)

Anyway, for those of you who don’t have classes to teach or carpools with which to clog up traffic, the Atlanta Braves website is offering an idea for an end-of-summer getaway. How would you like to go on a baseball vacation to four of their minor league towns and one big-league city, five games in five days? Neither would I. Stepping outside feels like you’re walking into a sauna…wearing a fur coat. And those games are all played outside.

I’m not making this about the weather because hellishly hot summers are here to stay and there’s not a lot I can do about it, short of moving to Maine. I can affect a cheerful disposition, wear shorts and a t-shirt every day, and bone up on new grilling recipes. But after three days of that, I’m back into my “I hate summer” disposition. Not that I won’t put up with certain meteorological pain if the reward is enticing enough. I’ve sat through a snowy Bears-Packers game during a Green Bay winter (albeit in the photo deck. But it was open to the elements, and I had to warm my hands over a space heater in the back of the room between plays.)

I’ve golfed in ridiculously hot weather and in rain, when I was forced to change gloves at the turn. And I’ve ridden my bike when I had to grip the handlebars extra tightly just to keep my sweaty hands from sliding off. But no matter how charming minor league baseball can be—and it is—I’m not sure I’d want to gas up for this intensely hot itinerary:

August 7, Columbus, Georgia: the Biloxi Shuckers vs. the Columbus Clingstones, 7:06 p.m. 93 degrees predicted for the heat of the day, “cooling down” into the 80’s by gametime. The game is played at Synovus Park, a three-hour drive from your next stop…

August 8, Rome, Georgia: the Rome Emperors vs. the Greensboro Grasshoppers, 6:45 p.m. Five of the Braves’ top prospects are playing there, so there’s that. It’ll be hot.

August 9, Lawrenceville, Georgia: the Gwinnett Stripers vs. the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, 4:05 p.m. Nothing like an afternoon game in the summer. This would be as close to seeing big-league players on this trip as you’d get except that the next day, August 10, you zip down I-85 and I-285 to see the Braves play the Mets at 7:10 p.m. Then it’s back to the bushes for you.

August 11, North Augusta, South Carolina: the Augusta Green Jackets vs. the Charleston River Dogs, 6:35 p.m. Warm conditions predicted.

There are no recommendations for places to stay on this journey from one small southeastern city to another; that’s up to you. But you do get to see future big leaguers in action before they hit the big-time. While I appreciate having the ability to say that I saw (insert Hall of Famer here) play when he was struggling to hit .250 for the Beloit Sky Carp or the Rocket City Trash Pandas or the Richmond Flying Squirrels (I’m not making up those names), I’d prefer to say I saw them when they’d already reached “The Show.” I like saying that in 1962 I saw Willie Mays in his prime, and that he hit a home run the very first time I saw him bat in person. I have no recollection of that at-bat, but thanks to Baseball Reference, I know that Willie had two hits that game and that Billy O’Dell pitched a complete game and hit a single to drive in two runs.

Anyway, I’m all in on baseball vacations. I wouldn’t dissuade you from hopping around the southeast or wherever you live to visit minor league ballparks and see the stars of the future. The small parks are charming and worth visiting, if even for one game. The seats are cheaper, the parking is more convenient, and there aren’t many bad seats in a park that small. It really is a great idea and sounds like a fun adventure. I just prefer, if I’m going to go to all that trouble, to make my baseball vacation one of the major league variety. In fact, I did that very thing in 1988.

Producer Rodney Triplett and I were working for one of TBS’ baseball post-game shows and thought it would be fun to take viewers on a baseball vacation, and even more fun to take one ourselves. Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago made up our ambitious itinerary. Naturally, having made that trek along the north coast so many years ago, none of the ballparks we visited have withstood the inevitable ravages of time and the desire on the part of team owners to have the latest and greatest in playgrounds.

We didn’t stay for the entire nine innings of each game, of course; we had a lot of late-night driving to do. But we attempted to get the unique flavor of what each ancient park had to offer. And now, after all these years, I can say, with some misplaced pride, that I saw Municipal Stadium, Tiger Stadium, County Stadium, and Comiskey Park before their descendants were built and then named after the highest bidders.

So, come along and see what baseball parks looked like before luxury boxes, protective netting, pitch clocks, launch angles along with pitch speeds and every other conceivable stat on scoreboards the size of a small European country.

And if you get inspired and do decide to brave the heat of a late summer in Georgia, head to Columbus this Friday. You won’t regret it. Make sure you AC is working.

And now, click here and let's go back to 1988!

Postscript: John Adams, the super fan banging the drum in Cleveland, really did have a following despite—or because of—the constant banging. So much so that his death three years ago rated an obituary in the national press from USA Today to the New York Times. This video piece from 19 News in Cleveland is worth a look, too.

Further postscript: As I recall, getting the 82-year-old gentleman in Chicago to lip sync my closing standup while I said the words off camera, was a job in itself. It required a few takes, if memory serves. Oh, and I literally gave him the shirt off my back and naturally, we let him keep it. What I did for a shirt the rest of the night is anyone’s guess.

Got any ideas for a baseball vacation of your own? I’d love to hear them.

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I read, with some sadness, that the Harry Wendelstedt Umpire School is closing its doors after having trained baseball’s arbiters since 1938. Before Harry took control of the school in 1976 American League umpire Bill McGowan had been training umpires, long before the very notion of an automated balls and strikes system was even an idea. A dumb one, if …

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I’ve been fired.

Hold on! Before you rend your garments and get fitted for sackcloth and ashes, I wasn’t fired from Substack. On this platform no one can fire me but me. If I want to move this witty and wordy work to another platform, I can do that. I’m a free agent. But I’ve not always been in this enviable position.

Like many of my colleagues who have s…

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Before we start, I’ve had some technical issues with the video on this post. If, for some reason, the video below doesn’t play on your device, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll continue trying to correct that. Now, on with the show!

I’ve wanted to be a writer since January 12, 1961. I pinpoint that date because of the long-lost manuscri…

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How fortunate was I? I was reporting for The Coors Sports Page on TBS in the ‘80s, back when it was fun to be a sports feature reporter. Maybe it’s still fun. I don’t know; it’s been decades since I was called upon to come up with story ideas and turn them into entertaining bits of television. It looks like a lot of work to me now. Lots of bells, lots o…

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I loved my childhood. I adored my parents and experienced many of the iconic rituals of childhood in the ‘60s: bike riding with my pals till dark, walking to school through an orchard, touch football on our suburban street, working at the mall. My dad took me to my first major league baseball game at the age of nine, and I can still remember, 63 years l…

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I was standing in line at Jersey Mike’s the other day when I checked my phone to see how my favorite golfer was faring at the Players Championship. I scrolled down the scoreboard and got all the way to the bottom without seeing Jason Day’s name. I was a little confused until I learned that Jason had withdrawn shortly before his tee time due to illness.

O…

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(Sorry if you’re getting this in your inbox twice. There were some technical issues with the video that I had to deal with. Just think of it as an extra Christmas present.)

2024 is coming to a close…thankfully. It’s not a fresh take on my part by any means, but I can’t remember a time when we have been so divided about absolutely everything. It’s as if w…

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I was as stunned as anyone when I heard that Pete Rose had died. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that every obit I read about him dwelled on the tawdry side of his complicated and troubled life. And, by all accounts, it was trouble of his own making.

The dirty laundry list is long: Betting on baseball, of course; his lifetime ban from the game he…

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I’ve decided to eliminate the word “just” from my vocabulary. Not as in “a just cause” or “just one more potato chip” or “just a single is all we need to win the game.”  I need to stop using the word “just” in ways that somehow diminish an otherwise worthy achievement. 

I get cast often in movies and TV shows as a news reporter or anchor. I get these gig…

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I was sorry to hear about the passing of Pat Williams last week. He was the mastermind behind bringing the NBA to Orlando, but that was just a small part of an amazing career.

He was a baseball man first, a catcher at Wake Forest before embarking on a short-lived minor league career. He soon moved into management with the Phillies organization before bra…

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They just don’t make the All-Stars like they used to. Or maybe because I’m the age I am, the stars look bigger in retrospect. But the sight of future Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax playing in the same game was a sight to behold. You knew, even then, that they were the greats whose all-star statu…

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I’ll be honest. There was a time not long ago when I thought Jim Otto had already died. He hadn’t. He passed away this past weekend at the age of 86. Why did I think he was already among the dearly departed? Because when I met him almost 40 years ago, I must have thought: How could anyone survive all he’d gone through?

Lightly regarded out of the University of Miami because of his size, he was passed over by the NFL and hooked up with the Oakland Raiders of the old AFL. He went on to play in every AFL regular-season game ever played. The two leagues merged in 1970 and Otto kept playing, earning induction into the Hall of Fame on his first try.

He was not only an ironman and the best center of his and probably anyone else’s generation, but a man who lived with pain on the field and off.

You know how when you go to the doctor for the first time and they ask for your medical history and your list of surgeries? Imagine being Jim Otto. You’d have to ask for more paper to document the 74 surgeries, 20 concussions, and an amputation. And that was just for starters.

He always insisted that had he stayed in his hometown of Wausau, Wisconsin, he’d spend his life as a welder. Which made all the pain and suffering worth it, in his eyes. Oh, and speaking of eyes, Otto said he had even suffered a detached retina while going up against the likes of Green Bay’s Ray Nitschke. yet kept on playing. His words in 2014: “Broke my cheekbone, and my zygomatic arch bone here, and detached my retina in my left eye…I was blind for six months in my left eye. It was really bad. It all swelled up, and I couldn’t see, but I kept playing. I never went out of the game.”

His autobiography was fittingly entitled “The Pain of Glory.”

He was both a decorated superstar athlete and the poster child for the toll a career in the trenches of professional football can take. on a man.

I’m not sure what prompted our 1985 visit to Jim at his home in Auburn, California. I was working at TBS and maybe it was just one of those “Where are they now?” pieces. He was 47 years old, ten years past his last game, and owned some Burger King franchises in Northern California. But I think more than anything, we were simply fascinated by a man who would endure so much pain, and still maintain that, given a chance, he’d do it all over again.

Here’s to the Original Raider. Rest in peace, Jim Otto.

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If you’ve opened up my Substack reports about Derby Week—and analytics indicates that about half of my subscribers do—you should have a clearer understanding that the Kentucky Derby is, to the good people of Louisville, more than a race to determine the fastest thoroughbred on his or her way to a possible Triple Crown of racing. It’s a time to party and…

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It had been seven and a half months since Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman piloted the Double Eagle II from Maine to France, the first crew to ever cross the Atlantic in a balloon. And here they were at the Kentucky Derby Festival, ready to make the 7th annual Great Balloon Race a truly star-studded affair. Unlike the horses, rats, and stea…

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Horses and rats aren’t the only ones competing on Derby Week. Since 1963, as a major part of the Kentucky Derby Festival, the Great Steamboat Race has taken center stage in the middle of the week. The 60th running of the big race gets underway at 6:00 this evening from downtown Louisville, if you happen to be in the area. Of course, if you are in the ar…

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It’s been called “the most exciting three seconds in sports.” The Trivial Pursuit game dubbed it “the fastest two seconds in sports.” Regardless of whose stopwatch you believe, you don’t want to get distracted while watching. Whatever. I guess I’d run my long skinny tail off too if it meant avoiding the lab assistant’s scalpel. Yeah, it’s not easy being…

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You don’t have to be from Louisville, Kentucky to be jazzed about the Kentucky Derby, the first leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown. Even here in Duluth, Georgia I’ve spotted at least one sign downtown calling for racing aficionados to gather together—I assume mint juleps will be involved—for the most exciting two minutes in sports.

I was fortunate enough…

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