Clark Booth on Sports

May. 16, 2013

One – again –approaches this subject warily. When sports columnists wander from their cage in the toy department to grapple with issues like health, medicine, and injury, they are instantly out of their depth.

Yet it has reached the point – nay...

May. 9, 2013

Here we are but a fortnight into playoff season and our field is already cut in half. The Celtics are gone. Might the Bruins soon follow? For the Celts, the beginning was an ending and how deeply that term obtains will be their off-season’s total pre-...

May. 2, 2013

It is Stanley Cup time, ever among the sporting calendar’s joyful interludes, and you’re excused if you find the sensation a bit bizarre this year.

Normally at this point in the season we’d be bouncing off the holidays and looking forward to...

Apr. 25, 2013

There has always been a bit of disconnect between the games we play and times of distress. Sports equate with “fun” and are classified as “entertainment.” So when bad things happen, ought the games to be stopped? Are they appropriate when their...

Apr. 18, 2013

Though he has been dead four decades now, there is again much ado about Jackie Robinson. Get used to it, for it has only just begun.

If throughout his rich after-life Robinson’s growth in stature has been spectacular, we may not have seen...

Apr. 11, 2013

Whatever good might have been done by the Bruins’ trade deadline moves – highly debatable, at best – was swiftly negated by an aimlessly errant elbow accidentally landed on the side of Patrice Bergeron’s head by the hulking Ottawa center Colin...

Apr. 4, 2013

No event on the sporting calendar resounds with more pomp and bombast while having less ultimate meaning than Opening Day in Baseball.

Our resident tabloid, the Herald, expressed the point with wonderful sarcasm some years ago. When the Red Sox...

Mar. 29, 2013

They’re back! Strike up the band! A tattered Nation flickers its star-crossed gaze upon you, Jackie Bradley.

Baseball returns with less pretense and bombast hereabouts than usual, there being less urgency in striving to rise from the cellar....

Mar. 20, 2013

America’s love affair with baseball is not absolute.  Consider, for example, that its college game gets barely a fraction of the attention so hugely lavished on football, basketball, even hockey (where it’s waged).

Yet in the end, despite that...

Mar. 14, 2013

Two months ago the puck-chasing world – or at least such of it still willing to be defined by the National Hockey League – was reeling from its desperately close encounter with total disaster while worrying if a 48-game schedule jammed into little...

Mar. 7, 2013

It’s all about the money. “Money, money, money makes the world go round,” intones the comic in the Broadway musical. Money counts! Always has. Always will.

“Follow the money!” That was Ben Bradlee’s marching order to his hotshot pair of rookie...

Feb. 28, 2013

Years ago, “Wide World of Sport,” a classy ABC concoction, struck quite a note on behalf of the value and wonder of international sport every week. Even earlier, there was a motion picture narrated by the incomparable Spencer Tracy entitled “It’s a...

Feb. 21, 2013

You know another baseball season is inching gingerly from its Sun Belt launch pad with customary glacial rapidity when early news out of Fort Myers reveals that five charter members of the local nine are already hors de combat before there’s been any...

Feb. 14, 2013

It’s charming to still think of spring training as the sweet and colorful sequel to “Song of the South” so celebrated back in the good old days of Norman Rockwell’s America when the lads would march off to the baseball camps every February whistling “...

Feb. 7, 2013

Long-term sufferers of this space may recognize this as a painful admission. But you have to hand it to those great Americans who annually deliver us the Super Bowl in all of its pre-fabricated glory. Just when you think they are out of tricks and...