“I’m in awe of Paul McCartney…..He can do it all and he’s never let up…. He’s got the gift for melody (and) rhythm. He can play any instrument. He can scream and shout as good as anybody and he can sing the ballad as good as anybody…And his melodies are…. effortless.… I’m in awe of […]
Author: admin
Categories
Hockey Broadcasting 101
Hockey ices the fastest game in Sports, combining speed with physicality and finesse. As such, hockey provides sportscasters the most challenging assignment—keeping pace with game itself. But all too often, those who call the action miss the mark as they lack an understanding of the basics of a good broadcast: A play-by-play man with good […]
Categories
Western Road Trip
The Road West: Can there be any other direction out of Missouri? The East has the history, the farms, the hardwood forests, the figurative and literal green. But the American West captures the nation’s imagination and momentum, its majesty and myth. More than a geographic place, the American West means the Great Wide Open. And […]
After years of riding the high tide of burgeoning revenues, the feudal lords of baseball find themselves at loggerheads with the serfs, their grandee ball playing field hands. After Covid, internal political turmoil and now inflation and the war in Ukraine, their timing could not be worse. Major League Baseball’s battle over the Game’s immense […]
Categories
The St. Louis Arena
The St. Louis Arena hosted its’ final feature on this day in 1999: Her own destruction. A series of rapid explosions, and the edifice collapsed. Afterwards, a dejected crowd who came to watch the dynamited demolition dispersed as though they had just witnessed the home team’s heartbreaking defeat. Only quieter. For several days afterwards, a […]
Categories
A Better Day for MLK
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived his life in accordance with his words, and his conscience when he said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” He was neither politic nor always […]
Santa has come and gone, having left behind his Christmas toys of forever joy. Cars and planes, games and trains; a princess and gnomes, with castles and homes for them to slumber; army men and guns to decimate our numbers; a thousands Lego blocks to trip over in blunder, making one fall hard asunder. Toys […]
Kyle Beach’s sexual assault and harassment charges for events that occurred 11 years ago led to the axe for Joel Quenneville, the second winningest coach in the history of the National Hockey League. Beach—a then 20 year-old professional hockey player—was called up from the minor leagues to serve on the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team’s ‘taxi […]
Categories
‘Gates’ To Amtrak
Ominous clouds hung over the grey November sky when the car stopped in front of the Kansas City train station. A wind gust off the Plains scattered leaves in a chaotic counter-clockwise swirl to the east, my direction home to St. Louis. My friend thought it natural to arrive an hour before the […]
Categories
1968 World Series
Baseball evolves at such a languid pace that a retrospective look at the sport 50 years later reveals a strikingly different game. In 1968, major league baseball consisted of only ten teams in both the American and National League vying for the pennant, with the team with the best record over 162 games earning […]