No matter who you pick in the upcoming NCAA tournaments, you can be sure of one thing: The winner will have to overcome adversity. Injuries, bad calls and momentum swings will test the will of all teams, and the one that responds best will win. It will take mental toughness to survive, which raises a […]
There’s no such thing as an overnight sensation. By the time a star has emerged before the public, he has put in thousands of hours of work behind the scenes. It was true in the case of the Beatles, who worked years in a night club in Germany. They honed their craft and by the […]
Sometimes a rule is more than a rule. The Boston Red Sox have banned beer in their clubhouse this year, and the edict reminds them that they have only one job: to win games. That’s something they neglected to do at the end of last year, when the team went missed the playoffs in what […]
Davey Johnson is at it again. Johnson, who told the 1986 New York Mets to go out and dominate the National League, is trying to put a manager’s imprint on this year’s Washington Nationals. He told Florida Today columnist John Torres he’s so impressed with his team that it has a chance to be better […]
Fifty years later, we have learned how dangerous John Glenn’s space flight really was. One expert says there was a one in six chance that Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, would die in the attempt. Glenn made it, but not before enduring a tense re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. “There were flaming chunks […]
Centuries before the hit-and-run, Aristotle said, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” Then came baseball, and then came Gary Carter. “Nobody loved the game of baseball more than Gary Carter,” New York Mets Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver said. “He wore his heart on his sleeve every inning he played.” Carter […]
Happy Galileo’s birthday! That kind of greeting may surprise you on a day when everyone else is saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” But Galileo, whose birthday is actually tomorrow, has more to do with love than you might think. His passion for study and observation earned him the title of “father of modern physics.” “I have […]
You never know where the train of thought will lead you. This one began when I read a quote attributed to Whitney Houston, presumably about a time and place when her gift revealed itself to those around her. “I was aware of people staring at me,” goes the quote. “No one moved. They seemed almost […]
For all his greatness, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t much of a prognosticator. Lincoln, born on this date in 1809, managed to give the worst prediction in the history of speechmaking when he said in the Gettysburg Address, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Today, that address ranks as one history’s […]
Charles Dickens, author of several literary classics, was born 200 years ago today. But it’s not his classics that should concern us, especially since Mark Twain once defined a classic as “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Instead, Dickens influenced us not just in the books that he wrote, […]