LinkS to my Published work

It’s the Saturday before Christmas. The first college football playoff game was played the night before in whatever the postseason process of selecting the national champion is called now. Today the sports calendar is packed: three more college football playoff games and two NFL games. The Terps played Syracuse in NYC. It wasn’t close; it’s cold outside but College Park’s reptiles blew out the Orange. Read more

I walked into my freshman homeroom on 12 January 1987 tired and grumpy.  I did not want to be there.  Not that I ever wanted to be there, you know, because it was school.  But this was next-level resistance.  The rude alarm, the morning preparation, the drive to school, the cold January weather – it all added to my irritation.  With zero effort to control my non-verbals, I plopped into my desk and pouted.  Read more

Hundreds of spectators shuffled around team tents, food trucks and the course.  With a ten-minute warning from the public address announcer, a noticeable concentration of humans began building near the starting line.  The opening lane of the cross country course parted in biblical fashion, revealing dozens of athletes going through final preparations.  The stretching was complete, pre-run jogs were wrapping up and team chants where echoing across the massive field.  Everyone was loose, lathered, hyped and ready to beat feet across the hinterland.   Read more

Pre-dawn alarms begin long high school days; daily practices follow that end at dusk.  Various artifacts of competition – smelly uniforms, sweaty socks, blood-stained shorts and muddy shoes, among other aromatic articles – line garage floors and laundry rooms.  Wash, dry, fold and repeat.  This is the evening’s drill – shocking at first, then, for the fully initiated, it is executed with precision and barely a conscious thought.   Read more

Where has the time gone, my fellow Southern Maryland dwellers?  This column first appeared in The County Times in early 2008.  How old were we back then, my dear readers?  Unnecessary details.  Let’s just call it “younger”, shall we?  Gray was a less prominent color in our lives.  Aches and pains were fewer.  More beer could be consumed without consequence.  But think of the wisdom gained since then.  A consolation prize, I suppose…   Read more

This “View” lands well before the 21st night of September, but hopefully it will as cool as a funky Earth, Wind & Fire beat.  Maggie, it’s not even late September and kids are already back to school.  “Wake me up, when September ends”: really Green Day, dudes?  You don’t want to sleep through this screed!   Read more

August 2024: There won’t be another like it until 2028.  Even then, only subject and structure will be the same; the location, participants, details and outcomes will be different.  For writers, a comparable won’t occur until 2026, in the dead of the northern hemisphere’s winter.  Such is the tempo of the Olympics.  Such is the joyous opportunity to write about them.  Read more

Mornings land a little harder now.  The night’s sleep isn’t as restful as it once was.  Feet still hit the floor, thankfully, but the morning stretch is labored and always includes the pops of aging joints readjusting to walking upright.  The image in the mirror is surreal – lines keeping history, three days of facial hair that reveals more gray than brown and a head of hair that offers a similar split.  An older, wiser man once said, “That’s not gray hair, it’s earned silver.”  I’ll roll with that description, for sure.  Read more

 July 4th: a day for chests to swell, let our American pride shine and stand in awe as Old Glory flies.  It is one of the precious few days on the calendar that transcends individual differences and focuses attention on a common history and cause. 

That all happened last week.  Fireworks were lit.  Hot dogs were grilled.  Rumor has it many, many beers were consumed.  But this 248th birthday for our great, powerful and fragile nation landed with a heavier-than-usual conscience.   Read more

Picture a quiet section in a stadium’s upper deck.  There’s a ball game being played far below but it’s the late innings and the lopsided score has minds drifting.  Is the beer guy ever coming back?  If he does, has my buzz faded too much?  Will another $15 beer just put me to sleep?  The t-shirt launcher stands no chance of blasting one this high – very unfortunate.  There hasn’t been foul ball hit up here since the Obama administration – even more unfortunate.   Read more

Life is an interesting scroll.  As a child, you observe people around you adulting to a phenomenal level.  How food appears on the table, clothes get washed and garbage doesn’t pile up so high as to create some disgusting ecosystem of micro-organisms and hatching insects is beyond your comprehension.  Then you have the really exciting things like mortgages, insurance and taxes; such things are just words in a child’s world, annoyances for another day, if the obvious mood drain they cause your parents is any guide.  Read more

As this “View” gets underway, an unencumbered journey into the world of sports has been interrupted by the site of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel.  This, of course, is fresh off Israeli-Hamas hostilities and occurs while war rages on in Ukraine, tensions remain high in the South China Sea and the future of Taiwan is very much uncertain.  As always, the world is a heavy place; jarring reminders are unnecessary, but, as history shows, they are inevitable.  Read more

Podcast-land is a vast landscape of diverse interests and budding obsessions.  Every media member, former athlete, B-list celebrity or grasping-for-fame influencer has one.  And much like a tour through any team roster, this massive ocean of multi-media content contains some standouts, a host of solid contributors and some unfortunate (that they exist) filler, sans any trace of killer. Read more

A modified bookshelf sits prominently in an inviting living room that is otherwise decorated with memorabilia spanning 40 years of D.C. sports history.  On the shelves are hundreds of vinyl records; some are new but most are old, several even older than their present owner.  Conditions vary from pristine (great survivors of an untold provenance) to the “well played”, the latter population delivering that warm, snap-crackle-pop through the speakers as they spin across a needle delicately navigating ancient surface grooves. Read more

The NFL was my first sports love.  As I was coming of age, my football team, the one in Washington D.C., was consistently among the best - even the very best, several times over.  It is hard to imagine now.  The relics I retain from that era seem as much magical fiction as historical fact.  But it all happened, “Once upon a time”, as all good stories begin.  Read more

Remember when humans made telemarketing calls?  The next-level annoyance of the computer voice on the other end of those calls now makes one nostalgic for the uninvited, person-to-person contact of yesteryear.  Or what about when phones couldn’t suggest finishing words to text messages?  Or when homes lacked voice-commanded doohickies that could change the television channel or settle a trivia argument with a spouse?  How about stubborn automated phone trees for everything from a doctor’s office to a credit card?  Good luck circumventing these tangled systems to reach a live human.  Read more

The local Doppler radar looked benign last Saturday morning.  Light rain bands passed through D.C. and others loomed across the northern neck of Virginia, but Southern Maryland was precipitation free.  This was a surprise, given the warnings and promised weather calamity from tropical storm Ophelia.  But the visual was deceptive.  Read more

 Hope is alive along the north shore of the Allegheny River.  The Pittsburgh Pirates recently selected Paul Skenes, a stud right-handed pitcher from LSU, with the top overall pick in the 2023 MLB draft.  Skenes has the kind of stuff to alter a franchise’s trajectory - in wins and losses, butts in seats and the national consciousness.  Of course, he’s a pitcher, a profoundly fickle and fragile position, so the dreams of Bucs fans are, as Elton John might suggest, a candle in the wind.  Nevertheless, the flame burns – for now.  Read more

Over the years, most of these bleacher musings have been drafted late at night.  With the sun long set and the day’s duties done, the body rests, the mind calms and the keys beckon.  Midnight often passes unnoticed; as a hard-wired night owl, the wee-est (a word?) hours of the morning provide the best inspiration.    Read more

His escape had been years in the making, accelerating when hope of a retrial was dashed with the execution of a fellow inmate who could have vouched for his innocence.  He used a simple rock hammer to painstakingly tunnel through a concrete wall softened by age and moisture.  The main weapon of this grand grasp at freedom and revenge was his tenacious, bold, clever and steadfast mind.   Read more

Days after the last “View from the Bleachers” rolled off the presses and hit local newsstands, a sports bombshell dropped.  Normally when a seismic event occurs in the world sports shortly after submitting a column, I cringe and lament the lost opportunity.  This time, I appreciated the breather; this was a lot to process.   Read more

My cousin, a dashing younger chap, is, like me, a sports junkie rooted in the 1980s and 1990s. As NBA fans – a bug easily caught growing up in the Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Dream Team era – we absorbed and regularly recount artifacts of that golden age. One personality that is permanently filed in our RAM for quick and frequent access is Marv Albert, a great voice of that period.   Read more

Oh yeah, back in the saddle…or the bleachers (sparsely populated for safety, of course).  It was swell of Uncle Duke to pinch hit and do his “nephew” a solid last week.  What a read!  Clearly he whipped himself into a familiar literary (and actual?) frenzy to rip off 700 words of, depending on the reader’s perspective, wisdom or irritating nonsense.  Where the individual reaction fell on the ledger was, as always, immaterial; what matters is you felt something – that is when words flirt with art.   Read more

Greetings and salutations good people of the world.  It has been a while – years even – since our paths have crossed in this here column.  Your regular writer is a blubbering pile of Coronamotions at present - so many life events have been altered or lost to the viral giant stampeding, again, throughout the country.  The aging, but still young lad (given my company anyway), asked for an assist from old Uncle Duke.  Wordless, I guess is how he found himself.  It happens, especially when improperly lubricated.  Stuck with me are thee.  Read more

The idea was simple: sports offered a continuous scroll of life lessons so vast and rich that it could, with adequate storytelling, support a regular column.  With that, “A View from the Bleachers” was born.  In the years since, athletes, coaches and teams, from various levels of athletics, have taken turns at the lectern.  The audience is us – the writer and the readers.  We consume initially as fans of competition and with a keen eye on the ultimate judge and jury – the scoreboard.  But beyond that final accounting is a transcendent meaning.  In the competition we see ourselves – as we are or want to be - and glimpse the world - as it is, as it could be or as it should be.  The experience can inspire a flood of conscience, hope, frustration or motivation – but always reflective thought that leaves residual wisdom on the human existence.   Read more

The texts and emails arrived in mass last week.  Daniel Snyder, overlord of the Washington Football Team, was back in the news – always a bad thing – and a volley of ill-intended friends of other NFL persuasions wanted to ensure that I, longtime fan of the team, was aware.  I was easy prey; it was a familiar wound to peck.  Read more

The Capitals won the Stanley Cup on June 8, 2018. I had waited for the moment for my entire life; being a long-suffering D.C. sports fan, it appropriately triggered a sports-based euphoria I had not experienced since the Maryland men’s basketball team won the national championship in 2002.

After a night of sweet dreams, I woke to this text from my daughter: “Dad, Anthony Bourdain died.”  Read more

This can’t be considered current content anymore, not in this age of 24/7 wire feeds.  Give me some latitude here – it’s an article I’ve written in my head countless times over the last 35 years. I’ve dreamt about it, wrote a fictional version for a high school assignment and flirted with it several times in this column.  And for my entire life, it’s been a recurring spring-time obsession, a time of year when it almost always had a chance of becoming reality, but never did – until last Thursday night.   Read more