Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.
George Vecsey
The Boys of Summer were heroes in Brooklyn for a full postwar decade partly because the players could not entertain higher offers.
Tom Seaver was let loose twice by the Mets and pitched a no-hitter for the Reds and won his 300th game for the White Sox, but he wears a Mets cap in the Hall of Fame as homage to the 1969 championship.
Youth sports could not exist without millions of volunteers and modestly paid coaches who teach our children how to skate and catch and dribble and also how to get along with others.
I love Major League Soccer, covered the first game in 1996 in a funky stadium in San Jose, and I applaud just about every move that its commissioners, Garber and Doug Logan, have made.
In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.
Into La Bombonera danced the most agile, rhythmic, beautiful, sensuous people I have ever seen. And that was just the fans.
In August 1945, a former Army pilot with an artificial leg pitched five and a third innings for Washington against Boston. This would turn out to be Bert Shepard's only major league game, and it remains one of the heartwarming moments in baseball history.
It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.
We all know the Red Sox did not win a World Series for 86 years after unloading Ruth, and the Cubs just might be carrying some heavy weight for past karmic transgressions.
Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States.
Personal honors never meant much to Bill Russell, one of America's most successful athletes with 2 college titles, 1 Olympic gold medal and 11 - count 'em, 11 - N.B.A. championships with the Boston Celtics.
Fans all have their memories of pennant races, good memories, sick memories.
FIFA is a vuvuzela. It's in your ear, but you don't want to hear it, and then eventually it goes away.
In 1949, I saw a World War II veteran named Lou Brissie, who had nearly lost a lower leg in combat, pitch in the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.
When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.
I know, I know - men have that extra hero gene in their foolish makeup; it's part of our charm. But I happen to know some women who have their inner sports hero, too.
What is there about basketball that makes Larry Bird or Lenny Wilkens want to coach after their playing careers are done?
Ball caps travel far and wide. They do far more than keep the sun out of your eyes or the cold off your head. Ball caps are a statement.
All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.
Sometimes, sport is just plain pleasing to the eye, like watching La Belle France flit by on television during the Tour de France. I can do that for hours.
Some of the most inspiring moments in sports have come from players with physical defects. Tom Dempsey, born without toes on his right foot, kicked a 63-yard field goal in 1970, using a straighter, wider shoe.
For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.
Sure, there were people from Missouri and Illinois who grew up Cardinals fans and migrated to New York for work or love. Cardinals fans congregate periodically at Foley's near Herald Square to root for the team of their childhood, up there on the TV screen.
Athletes are used to battling. The public would never learn their names if professional athletes had not shown courage at an early age. They learn they can overcome, but sometimes this becomes a false sense of security that leads them to the edge.
This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.
Lance Armstrong has joined the legion of the lost, the great athletes who were barred or exiled for sins admitted or charged or suspected.
Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.
It's a Stanley Cup thing. The boys mangle one another for a series, performing all kinds of nasty tricks, then they make nice, shaking soggy hands as the teams shuffle in opposite directions.
Some anthems are great for sports. You've got the Russian national anthem... 'O Canada,' how wonderful is that for hockey... but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I saw the Italians play four times, and they won all four times - they won the championship.
Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
It is no fun lining up in your own building - as the hockey players say - and touching the hands of fellow stubbly louts who have just sent you off to the proverbial cabin on the lake.
Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.
Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.
Night tennis began at the United States Open in 1975 with certain stars trying to beg out and certain patrons trying to dump unwanted tickets on scalpers.
We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl - 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.
I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.
When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.
Weary soccer players just cannot run anymore and must resort to shootouts after 120 minutes when a result is mandatory, but men on skates can go indefinitely, no matter how badly it disrupts the television network's schedule.
War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.
I never watch 'Sopranos' reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that's how it ended for me.
I've seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I've seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.
In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.
Stanley Cup hockey comes around every year, when games start to count in multiples of best-of-seven series, and the players seem to put more attention into every pass, every check, every annoying little trick.
Every spring, this happens: People discover hockey when daylight lasts longer and men grow beards and tie games do not end in shootouts but rather continue until a goal is scored. The seventh game only heightens the mood for players and fans alike.
There is always a group of death in any World Cup. And it's a complement in a way to be in a group of death because it means that you're a good team also.
What I like about it is the creativity. When I watch good soccer players - the way they have to make a play out of nothing.
I would never tell anybody to give up hockey - the great sports we have here - basketball, lacrosse - rugby coming into its own - we've got so many great team sports, and I say hold on to them.
