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Stories by Patrick Daugherty

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Bowling as a Bottom of the Barrel Sporting Experience

A big hole in your television sports experience is about to be filled.

WNBA as Advertising Agency

WNBA president Laurel J. Richie made her career in advertising.

This Is A Wickedly Unfair World. Just ask Floyd Landis.

Bicyclist Floyd Landis retires in shame and Lance Armstrong rides rich into the sunset? Is that fair?

Wives, Mothers, and Sluts

Very little honor among certain sportsmen – looking at you (again), Tiger.

The Valhalla & Great Western Fantasy Baseball League: Now In Its 29th Year

Wives come and go, fantasy baseball endures.

Sports Inflation Comes Home

"That’s nuts." I’m on the phone with an old friend in Phoenix. We’ve been talking about her son who’s playing junior varsity baseball at a suburban high school. He wants to get (have Mom buy), ...

Tiger’s Back on Top, or So They Say

Here it is, Thursday, D-Day for the 2012 Masters. And here is Tiger Woods stepping up to the tee for his first drive. The man does have a hold on us. Only Tiger Woods could ...

Iron Mike Is Back!

Mike Tyson is opening his one-man Vegas act, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth — Live on Stage, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 13. It’s the same arena where he had an intimate encounter ...

The East Coast Sports Industrial Complex was right, the West Coast sucks

By Saturday afternoon it was over. Gonzaga lost to Ohio State and there was not a single West Coast team left in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Before we go on, I should tell you ...

Piano Found

To recap: the NFL released the following statement Friday afternoon, a traditional dump day for embarrassing news. “A lengthy investigation by the NFL’s security department has disclosed that between 22 and 27 defensive players on ...

San Diego Spartans

The sporting world awaits, on edge, for March 2 and the first public exhibition of Ultimate Tazer Ball (UTB). The contest will be held in Thailand. Our hometown San Diego Spartans will be tasering the ...

We Speak of Jeremy Lin

He’s been so everywhere, it’s hard to remember the lad has been under the big top for, as I write this, only 15 days. His first NBA game as a starter occurred on February 4, ...

Baseball Injury Report

And so, baseball. Padres pitchers and catchers report to Peoria on Sunday. Once again I have been suckered into a fantasy baseball league by quaffing one drink too many in the company of bad men. ...

Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent

I have Dewey Not-His-Real-Name Pienkey on the phone. He’s a Nevada friend from olden days. Third generation, born and raised in Searchlight, a town of 550, an hour’s drive south of Vegas, known for the ...

The Over/Under on Mid-Riff

Super Bowl Sunday is upon us. It’s the one time every year when gamblers come out of their closets, fling open their bedroom windows, and shout out, “Yes, neighbor. Yes, Mr. Policeman. Yes, Mr. Employer. ...

Fade In

EXT. A TELEPHONE BOOTH. BALTIMORE ALLEY. RAINY. LATE NIGHT. Baltimore head coach John Harbaugh is drunk, drool and spittle ooze from his mouth, flows down his chin and cheeks, then gathers itself and drips onto ...

Will Indianapolis Heal Madonna?

The 49ers beat New Orleans, and Alex Smith is redeemed. The San Francisco QB, in crunch-chomp time, game on the line, threw a touchdown pass, a 14-yarder to Vernon Davis, with nine seconds left in ...

Postseason Mashup

If you look you can find some San Diego in Saturday’s 49ers/New Orleans playoff game. This, by the way, is as close to the NFL playoffs as we’re likely to get as long as Norv, ...

Top Sports Stories of 2011

Depends where you live. If you live in Huntsville, Texas, the big story of 2011 is Sam Houston State University winning a championship at the College Finals Rodeo for the first time in 43 years. ...

College Football Has Become a Busy Brothel

Greed until somebody makes you stop. You see it in banking, drug cartels, and politics. It’s especially raw in college football. Big-league college football has become a busy brothel. University presidents glide into the front ...

The Colts' Luck

Six weeks ago I wrote a column about the Indianapolis Colts deliberately losing their games in order to guarantee owning the number 1 pick in April’s NFL draft. Said pick to be used to acquire ...

Super Bowl Count: Packers 13, Chargers 0

I’m assuming you’ve heard about the Green Bay Packers’ stock sale that began Tuesday. The defending Super Bowl champion and only publicly owned nonprofit franchise in SportsWorld, USA division, is offering 250,000 Green Bay Packers, ...

World Cup Fever

We have a sporting pause before the NFL playoffs and college conference football tournaments begin, before NCAA basketball is cranked up to speed, and well before the NBA resumes its struggle to make you give ...

Work 10 Weeks, Take 10 Months Off, Part 3

I’m at table with Ms. Abby in the tea room of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. My current girlfriend has dressed me with care (Harris Tweed sports coat, matching slacks, shoes, and tie), ...

Penn State Is a Plantation, and JoePa Was the Owner

There is a continental stench coming out of Penn State. Step back, consider yourself a neutral observer with no stake in the scandal. Let’s say you knew there was an eyewitness to the (alleged) rape ...

Work Ten Weeks, Take Ten Months Off, Part Two

Chapter TWO – “What pipeline?” I say.

And what in the fuck is it with me that I can’t roll a straight joint? Todd snorts. “The one from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. The one that’s gonna hire 20,000 people. The one that’s ...

Was Penn State a party to pedophilia?

Remembering that even this bastard is presumed innocent, it’s a quick transformation between a breaking news story and a corporate media storyline about said breaking news story. This is how torture becomes enhanced interrogation. You ...

To Tank Or Not To Tank

On the phone with a friend I’ll call Henry Hill. He’s a family man, casino consultant, degenerate gambler, and believer in conspiracy theories. Henry thinks the Indianapolis Colts are tanking the season. Conspiracy theories are ...

In Yachting News...

On Sunday, Ted Turner and 14 others were inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame at the San Diego Yacht Club. As long as you aren’t married to him or work for him, Ted ...

Occupy ESPN!

Mountain West, Big East, ACC, SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, Conference USA, Mid-America, et al. College conference realignment reminds me of the good old days, circa 2007, when Goldman Sachs sold worthless collateralized debt obligations ...

Hawk Hill. Part 2

So, I’m standing atop Hawk Hill, a 940-foot rise located on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge and lookout point for the largest known raptor migration path on the West Coast. This is ...

Hawk Hill. Part I

The first moment: at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex in Willows. Sound comes at you from the sunset, which is happening underneath the dome of an aqua-blue sky, banded on its low end by ...

Sports Poetry Issue

Thanks to Jim Behrie who writes “Football Picks Haikus” for theawl.com. Follows are two of his NFL Week 3 haikus: At Cincinnati -2.5 San Francisco Bengals aren’t doormats The 49ers play tough But I still ...

Sports Movie Issue

It is rare for a sports movie to be something more than a gritty underdog team or underdog person, who, against all odds, in the final seconds of the contest, wins the race or game ...

Midnight in Belize

On the phone with an old friend and Poway resident who I’ll call David Becker. I’m listening to David vs. the Power Outage. He’s saying, “It seems strange, after ten years and spending a billion ...

Chump Week

There is an ancient Division 1 athletic department tradition about opening the football season against certified wimps. The idea is to make sure you win the first game no matter how degrading it is to ...

Betty White in the Cage with Peyton Manning

How did this start? The first thing I remember is reading an ESPN.com item on Kobe Bryant questioning whether or not he’ll play in China this year. Which led to an article on another website, ...

Stops and Starts

Last week, my iMac’s hard drive died by way of self-immolation. I’ve had computers die before, saying goodbye with a blue screen of death. One laptop emitted puffs of smoke from underneath its keyboard. But, ...

End of Summer Issue. Two Weeks Until Lingerie Football Kicks Off.

Well, Blair Cannon, 40, finished his 21-mile Catalina to mainland swim. He shoved off from Catalina Friday midnight, 8 hours and 17 minutes later washed ashore at Palos Verdes, finishing with the third-fastest time ever ...

Dispatch from the Front

Next week, the Box will report what happened with Blair Cannon’s August 5 midnight swim from Catalina Island to the mainland and provide an update on Monarch School and what they plan to do with ...

Swimmer Guy

So, last week, the Box introduced Monarch School, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade public/private school (don’t ask) for homeless children and children affected by homelessness, located in downtown San Diego. This is the outfit Blair Cannon, aka swimmer ...

Good People

It’s going to take a little while to get there — “there” being the sports side of things. But, on the happy side of the street, we’re already two sentences closer. I’ll begin with Joel ...

Chase Catania Legends Before His Time

“My first race was at Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino. I was 15 and it was Legends cars.” El Cajon’s Chase Catania, now 20 years old, is talking into a tinny cell phone from ...

Summer Lull Roundup

As Tiger Woods will tell you, it doesn’t take long before nobody cares. Retired Boston/Toronto/Yankees/Houston/Yankees MLB pitcher “Rocket” Roger Clemens reached his scandal shelf life long ago, but his Washington DC baseball/steroids/lying trial begins Wednesday ...

San Diego Live-Aboard

Crabs, tuna and a guy named “Sharky”

It’s at the point of being rare, talking to a stranger in a bar and realizing, from the start, that you’re having an interesting conversation. I’m at the Harbor Bar (that’s Pillar Point Harbor to ...

NCAA, Omniscient Provider of Goodness

We’ll start with the University of Southern California (USC) bust. You remember the school criminals: O.J. Mayo (received improper benefits) played college basketball for one year, skipped to the NBA (Memphis Grizzlies), and made $4,456,000 ...

Casting Call for Good Guy

Even though we’re facing long odds, the NBA finals still have a shot at being good theater. As sports fans and drama students know, to be good theater you’ve got to have a good guy ...

All Tweet, No Action

In our busy-busy world, one must multitask. You can be homeless or you can work two jobs and live in debt for the rest of your life. That’s about the size of it. So, one ...

You Never See That on TV

Radio says they’re expecting 10,000 to 15,000 people here ­— here being Livermore, a town of 80,000 known to Bike World as Stage 4 start line in this year’s Tour of California. I’d been birding ...

Tiger...in the Rough Again?

Getting a bad feeling about how it’s going to end. People forget how long this has been going on. Follows is from a column written in December, 2009. “This morning’s count is 15 mistresses, no ...

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