The National Football League has started its second century as the gridiron world’s highest achievable professional level. Formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (APFA), it rebranded itself in 1922 as the NFL. Going back to the APFA’s birth, George Halas has been football’s most prominent and creative…

Althea Gibson represents to black professional tennis players what Jackie Robinson is to American blacks in Major League Baseball. Gibson, a 1950s era player, pioneered the way for Arthur Ashe, Zina Garrison and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. The difference between Gibson and Robinson is that most Americans instantly…

Midway during the Major League Baseball owners’ lockout of its players, I promised myself that I was done. No more universal DH, ghost runner, launch angles, tender limbs, watered down Hall of Fame standards and — most of all — no more haggling between the billionaire owners, the multimillionaire players…

The multi-billion-dollar NCAA football business begins on August 27 when 13 games will be nationally televised. Three PAC-12 schools are on the richest list: University of Southern California, University of Washington and the University of Oregon. Not all the preseason headlines, however, involve speculation about which teams might reach the…

After a 14-year delay, the Jackie Robinson Museum will open to the public in New York on September 5. For baseball fans, the 20,000 square foot museum will offer interactive exhibits including one of Ebbets Field, 4,500 rare artifacts, and other displays that evoke Robinson’s baseball and civil rights activist…

For number crunchers, July’s second week offered eyepopping data. To begin with, the consumer price index shot up to 9.1 percent year-over-year, the highest spike in four decades. Truth be told, consumers may be taking a bigger than 9.1 percent hit. The CPI is a controversial index which many economists…

In 1963, an All-Star game was played that few fans watched, and 59 years later, nobody remembers. The game, comprised exclusively of Latino players from the American and National Leagues, took place at the New York Giants’ historic Polo Grounds — the last game played at Coogan’s Bluff. The exhibition…

John Philip Sousa: Composer and Baseball Pitching ‘Ace’ In the mid-19th century, John Philip Sousa was one of America’s biggest base ball bugs, as fans were then called. In his autobiography, “Marching Along,” Sousa, born in 1854, described the joy base ball had imparted to him since way back to…

On Father’s Day, 1964, Philadelphia Phillies’ right-hander Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game against the New York Mets in Shea Stadium. Bunning’s two-hour, 10-minute masterpiece — 90 pitches, 10 strike outs — during a double-header’s first game had special significance. At the time, Bunning and his wife Mary Theis had…