Despite the frustrating forecast and declining daylight, Diana remains a Believer that she'll soon make her Dream Swim a reality...

This year's NFL Draft holds the promise of teams licking their chops at mining a wealth of quarterback prospects. No matter how deep that list runs, one 6'6", 250-pound monster-armed talent stands head and shoulders above the rest. Auburn's quarterback Cam Newton was this year's stand-out college player. There was no debate. Scouts, coaches, pro players current and past resoundingly weighed in with kudos on the order of not having seen a monumental talent like Newton in quite some time...

Let's call this Ladies Day here on The Score. First, in Iowa, where wrestling is to the state as football is to Texas, a high school girl last week became the first in the 86-year history of the State tournament to win a match. The downside to Cassy Herkelman's victory is that it came on a default by a boy, the fifth-ranked wrestler in the state in the 112-pound division. Joel Northrop, home-schooled, his father a minister, cited the tenets of his faith, not believing boys should engage girls in the violent manner necessary in this sport, as the reason for his defaulting the match. His father, the pastor, had this comment: "We believe in the elevation and respect of women."

With the end of the NFL season comes a collective American depression. Millions of us are football junkies and the withdrawal, post Super Bowl, can be cruel.

Christina Aguilera’s flubbing of the National Anthem has drawn equal billing to any football news, post Super Bowl. OK, “the twilight’s last ‘reaming’” was perhaps egregious botching, compared to other Anthem gaffes, such as Robert Goulet, before a Muhammed Ali-Sonny Liston fight, singing “by the dawn’s early night”.

To paraphrase a feminist concept of male resistance to the growing power of women in our society, it has been said "the stronger women get, the more men love football." This to be interpreted that men love football, revere football, because it's seemingly the last all-male frontier...

This is the quintessential story that proves the enormous muscle of today's Social Media. O.K. Maybe Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg being named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, for influencing the lives of more than half a billion people, is the ultimate Social Media accolade. But the story of Ted Williams proves the proverbial Everyman's talents can be found by the wide-sweeping magic of the Internet.

Bud Greenspan, the award-winning Olympic filmmaker, died on Christmas Day. The eulogies and obituaries have poured forth. High praise for his many, beautiful works of art. Bud…I affectionately called him by his birth name, Jonah…was my long-time, dear friend. And he was far and away THE number one mentor in my career. Who among us doesn't swoon under the spell of the classic Greenspan minimalist wording, the cinematography that conjured up oil paintings?

The women's basketball team at the University of Connecticut now holds the longest streak of consecutive games won in the history of the sport. On Tuesday, the Huskies took their record to 89, passing the long-standing, historic record of 88 straight by revered Coach John Wooden's UCLA men's squad of the early 1970's. Many have argued this week that you simply can't compare this UConn streak to the Wooden glory days, in that the men's games were more competitive, their opponents deeper.... But one athlete doesn't often appear on our list of phenomenal streaks. So we pay homage to him today...

Pitcher Cliff Lee created headlines this week with his surprise choice of the Philadelphia Phillies as home for ostensibly the rest of his already stellar career. None other than the Yankees, used to getting pretty much every star they pursue with their open check-book policy, failed to woo Lee to the Bronx. And Lee chose Philly over his current Texas Rangers, also offering a multi-year, sweet deal. Much has been written about Lee’s unusual decision to leave the Yankees fatter contract, but those stratospheric numbers are hard for us regular folk to compute, similar to hearing how many trillions of light years a certain star is from Earth....

Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and Monday Night Football personality Don Meredith passed away this week. In remembering the likeable Dandy Don, his Texas twang, his snakeskin cowboy boots and his irreverence in literally drinking and smoking pot live in the broadcast booth, the tribute tracks back to the man who put Don on the air...

Editor’s note: This commentary published by KCRW includes arguments to exclude transgender athletes from participating in competition in accordance with their gender identity. As a matter of general practice and in the name of transparency, KCRW does not alter or remove past content, regardless of how public discourse has evolved around the subject matter. After backlash to these views in later years and in the lead up to the release of a 2023 Netflix biopic Nyad, commentator Diana Nyad publicly stated support for transgender athletes. 

As of this week, women's professional golf has changed its rule of gender qualification. One no longer needs to be born female to play LPGA tournament golf. The issue has been forced within the LPGA because of a lawsuit filed by a transgender woman, Lana Lawless, claiming the organization's previous exclusionary stance violated common civil rights...

I admit I'm not the boxing fan I used to be. Maybe you can relate. There was a time when I wouldn't miss a big fight. That was back in the day of Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, early Mike Tyson. One development that drove me away, for sure, was the proliferation of all these various organizations that give legitimate recognition to championship titles...

It was a mere three years ago that I promised myself I would never again be a Michael Vick fan, should he return to football after his prison sentence in Leavenworth. It was the reprehensible nature of his particular crime, killing innocent dogs with his bare hands. But I turned my back on the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback more due to his seeming lack of remorse, than the crimes themselves...

Hello, everybody. It's been a while. While I was down in Key West over the summer and into the fall, pursuing my lifelong Extreme Dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida, my buddies here at KCRW not only graciously gave me some time off from my weekly Score duties, but I'm sure you noticed that they reported my progress and the weekly drama of the endeavor with great enthusiasm...

Diana Nyad joins Matt Holzman back in the KCRW studios for a look at her big dream and her hopes for the future...

Will Paula keep Diana from her dream?

Will uncooperative temperatures throw cold water on Diana's dream?

After a year of preparation and arrangements, is the dream fading? With the weather and temperature uncooperative, is today the calm before the storm?

Diana learns patience as she waits out the weather and Cuban bureaucracy in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Weather and bureaucracy continue to frustrate Diana, who has celebrated her 61^st birthday with her crew. Must an alternate plan – a swim of an equal distance – replace her dream of swimming from Havana to Key West?

In Key West, Diana and 37 experts from around the world await word from Cuba.

Will a little slip of paper capsize Diana dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida?

Diana discusses conditioning, visas and home-remedies for encounters with marine life.

Matt offers an update on Diana Nyad, who continues preparations for her Florida-Cuba swim. Despite a personal tragedy, she is buoyed by successes, both political and practical.

A fit, tanned Dian Nyad discusses last week's 24-hour test swim, the challenge of securing permits, licenses and much needed funds. She also sings the praises of the many fans who've supported her, both emotionally and financially...

While Diana Nyad is deeply involved in preparations for her current expedition, in lieu of her regular commentary she will doing weekly QA updates with our own Matt Holzman. Today, she talks about the lessons learned from her 24 hour test swim...

Think of me this Saturday morning, in the early dawn hours, if you will. I'll be somewhere out in the ocean, about 45 miles south of Key West, beginning a 24-hour continual swim through the Gulf Stream, back toward the Florida coast. This is a full dress rehearsal for the Cuba-to-Florida swim I'll be attempting later in the summer...

First, there are the facts. The first three games the U.S. team played in South Africa drew television ratings at an average of a huge 66% higher than during the last World Cup, four years ago. The U.S. win over Algeria, which was significant in that it threw the Americans out of the first round where they often wallow and fade, pulled in 6.1 millions viewers. That's more than a respectable number. It's impressive, especially when you consider the game started at ten in the morning and viewers watching at their offices, on their computers, and in sports bars aren't counted...

Let's start with a few tennis notes. Word out from Martina Navratilova this week that she has come through the radiation treatments for her breast cancer just fine and considers this simply another chapter in her life of adventure. Well, that's a whopping understatement. I was emailing back and forth with Martina all through her radiation sessions in Paris. What she doesn't mention to the press is just how she went through the final, more painful stages of the treatments. First, she would ride her bicycle to the clinic. Come on, find me another individual who rides their bicycle to cancer radiation…

A week into the World Cup and you would think the unusual number of low-scoring games would be the bad rap so far. After all, at least for American sports fans, 90 minutes of running back and forth ending in a 0-0 tie, is precisely what has relegated soccer to the fringes of the mainstream and it's the event magnitude of the World Cup each four years that gives hope that the sport will at last draw that mainstream in....

In the 1980's I had the great fortune to work on a documentary in the interior rain forests of Borneo. We were to live for six weeks among the tribes of the Dayak Indians, formerly the famous and fierce headhunters of Borneo. At the time we arrived these were considered one of the last truly remote people on Earth. Except for one Englishman who had broken his leg hiking in the jungle, this particular tribe had never seen anybody but themselves...

It's perplexing. Last weekend Danica Patrick finishes a highly respectable sixth place in the not-so-long-ago All-Boys Indianapolis 500. Serena Williams as of just a couple of days ago is reported in the headlines of the world's sports pages as the Only American left in the French Open….not the only American woman, but the Only American, intimating that her stature allows her to represent all American tennis players, above Andy Roddick and the other ranked male players who were eliminated before her. Sixteen-year-old Australian Jessica Watson draws fascination from people of many nations as she singlehandedly circumnavigates the globe in her sailboat...

The announcement of future Super Bowl locales is usually pretty ho-hum. Miami again. New Orleans again. Maybe San Diego. Maybe Pasadena. But when the new Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, won the bid for Super Bowl 2014 this week, bloggers feverishly took to their keyboards...

It’s a big week for cycling in America. The most popular cycling race in U.S. history is mid-way, the Tour of California. The event has in only five years grown so much in stature that its organizers have this year made the brazen move of scheduling the eight-day race at the same time as the famous Giro d’Italia. Along with the Tour de France mid-summer, the Giro in the spring and the Vuelta a Espana in the fall are the top trio of the world’s elite races. To move the young Tour of California from its former February spot on the race calendar and pit it against the Giro, and successfully attract not only Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and the top American riders but several top foreigners, such as English sprinter Mark Cavendish as well, is a sign that the American race has quickly earned a valid place on the world stage of the sport.

One of the greatest players in football history, Lawrence Taylor, has been accused of raping a 16-year-old girl. L.T. has a well-known history of drug problems but his troubles never included rape. Should he be convicted, there are those calling for his removal from the Professional Football of Fame. I imagine those outraged people must be the same faction who have previously called for O.J. Simpson’s removal from that same Hall of Fame. It makes you wonder: When you saunter past the photos and memorabilia and bronze busts in Canton, Ohio, or the shrines to the baseball greats in Cooperstown, or any of the exhibits at any of the athletic Halls of Fame, you bear witness to the on-field superior records of these accomplished athletes, yet you are also led to believe that these individuals are beyond super athletes. Somehow you glean that they are exemplary human beings, by virtue of their honored stature as Hall of Famers.

Two mirror clichés, bandied about for so long now that we say them in automatic drone tones that really don’t have any truth behind them any more. The two clichés? Americans hate hockey. And….Americans hate soccer.

The Kentucky Derby, set to run this Saturday, as is the custom every first Saturday in May, is the oldest continuous sporting event in our country. Since the first settlers stepped onto the Bluegrass fields of Kentucky, horse racing…and horse breeding…have been the heart and soul of the region. If you have a chance to visit the bucolic rolling hills and majestic fenced horse farms that stretch for many miles toward every compass point from Lexington, you’ll quickly discover the central conversation, Derby time or otherwise, is bloodlines. More than the furlong track times, what’s crucial is which stallions are bred to which mares...

Players, their families and fans will be tuned in to the first round of the NFL draft tonight. Might be near to impossible for some of you to imagine how watching people sit in rooms, waiting for their names to be announced….or not…can make for good television, yet 39 million viewers tuned in last year. And, going prime time for the first time tonight, the audience will likely be even bigger this year...

ABC News has reported the sex crimes scandal of 36 USA Swimming coaches abusing their athletes over the last decade…and compares the crimes to those of the Catholic Church in that USA Swimming allegedly covered for the perpetrators and allowed them to keep coaching. I also am a victim of sexual abuse by my swim coach...

It happens that Americans working or studying abroad for an extended period of time sometimes turn to a major sporting event back home for a rekindling of the familiar. As much as one may appreciate a foreign culture, immersion in a strange land inevitably brings with it longing for a few of the comforting sights, smells, sounds from back home...

In the fifth inning on Tuesday, Pitcher CC Sabathia came out of one of the Yankees' last spring training games. Sabathia took a seat in the Yankee dugout and then witnessed something he had never seen before. Making his first appearance for the Yankees, a young Pat Venditte took the mound with a six-fingered glove, a slot at each side for each thumb. He threw four warm-up pitches with his right arm, then switched the glove to his right hand and threw four more warm-up pitches with his left arm. Venditte worked the next few batters, throwing to right-handed batters with his right and switching to his left arm for left-handed batters...

I'm an NFL junkie. Along with millions of others. From late Labor Day to the first week of February, I am hooked into the weekly dramas. There's no long prelude period, as in Major League Baseball where you could pretty much tune in come late July, early August and be right on track to the World Series. The first NFL kick-off ignites do-or-die significance across the league. And each subsequent week looms larger and larger in each team's march toward the biggest, baddest event in all of sports, the SuperBowl...

After five months of seclusion, Tiger's comeback at the famous Master's in three weeks is predicted to draw as many viewers as President Obama's inauguration. Augusta, Georgia, come April 7, won't merely be the site of one of golf's four Major events. Rabid curiosity is going to draw the public at large to watch the protagonist of America's biggest story in huge numbers. The Master's two broadcasters, ESPN the first two days, Thursday and Friday, and CBS the weekend, assuming Tiger makes the cut and plays the weekend, are licking their chops at the certainty of ratings hitting historic highs. But I'm sure there's a quandary there as well....

They're touted as a dynasty. One of the greatest teams of any sport, any era. That's women's basketball out of the University of Connecticut, currently on a tear of 72 consecutive unbeaten games. The Lady Huskies won their 16th Big East title last week, whooping West Virginia in a lop-sided score of 60-32. Also last week, #8 in the country Notre Dame went down to UConn by an embarrassing 25. On Sunday the Huskies crushed Syracuse 77-41. The best anybody's done against UConn this season has been the supposedly supreme squad out of Stanford, but the Cardinal's best only brought them to within 12 points of the dominant Huskies...

When we talk sports, it's assumed we're talking the crème de la crème, such as the Olympians in Vancouver. There are maybe a dozen figure skaters of each gender, maybe a dozen who can perform those outrageously difficult jumps and spins and execute them artfully. And so it goes with all the sports we watch and cover on a daily basis...

I don't get it. Speed skaters, as is true with Olympic swimming and Track Field, compete for medals at a wide range of distances, from the 500-meter sprint all the way up to the 10,000-meter endurance grind. Perhaps to the lay observer, it looks like they're doing the exact same thing at all these distances....

The skating and skiing of the Vancouver Winter Olympics begin this weekend. The two marquee names among the U.S. athletes in Canada are snowboarder Shaun “the flying tomato” White and downhill/slalom champion Lindsey Vonn. This is Vonn’s third Olympics but this time she’s at the top of her game and the pressure is great for her to achieve her potential of medals in all five of her events. Unfortunately, she sustained a deep shin bone contusion during a training run last week and is not 100% sure she’ll be able to go full throttle, especially in the slalom events where sharp curves around the markers require the boot to press heavily on the shin area....

Tim Tebow, University of Florida Heisman-winning quarterback, known as much if not more for his strong Christian faith as his world-class athletic status, will appear in a Superbowl ad that is stirring fervent debate. During her pregnancy with son Tim, in 1987, Pam Tebow was advised by doctors to consider aborting because of complications. She continued to full term and her fifth child, Tim, came into this world as a result of her decision...

This weekend, the drama of the last four NFL teams standing unfolds. By Sunday night, February 7's Superbowl will be set and there is no shortage of fans' hopeful predictions....

So now Mark McGwire has confessed. On one hand, his opening up seemed inevitable, hardly shocking news. We already knew he had used androstenedione, a steroid precursor with a molecular structure nearly identical to testosterone. We had already observed his bulky, typically steroidal physique. We had clearly read his body language when pleading the 5th Amendment during the 2005 Congressional Hearings. We the public had already felt duped by being swept up in McGwire's then-thrilling home run derby of 1998. And baseball insiders had already expressed their judgment in turning McGwire away from the Hall of Fame each year he has been eligible...

During tonight's National Championship college football game, Alabama versus Texas, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, you will notice as the cameras pan the sidelines two key players from these very same opponents way back 45 years ago. One is more famous, more recognizable, than the other. That's Joe Namath. He quarterbacked the Crimson Tide of Alabama that night in the Orange Bowl, nearly half a century ago. Going up against him was a tight end and linebacker for the University of Texas, Pete Lammons. Tonight Lammons will prowl behind the Longhorns bench while Namath will stick close to the boys of his alma mater, Bama...

It's that time of year when we kick around the biggest sports accomplishments of the year. And given that we're closing out 2009, this year the discussion broadens out to the top athlete of the decade. To my mind, there have been four athletes this first decade of the 21st century to have achieved such superlative careers that we could rightly describe each as one of those truly rare specimens who come along only once in a lifetime...

Truth be told, I didn't want to talk about Tiger today. As usual, there is a meaty array of sports subjects that would make fine fodder for commentary this week. But how can I just skip over the Tale of the Tiger and pretend the story doesn't continue to draw me in, draw you in? Dozens of texts to his various mistresses have now surfaced. The evidence is indisputable...

The shock waves emanating from this week's Tiger Woods fiasco are loud indeed...and growing. Tiger tried to retreat to silence so that only theoretical conjectures have swirled since he crashed his car last week, evidently after some sort of marital dispute with his wife. But when Tiger was backed into a fox hole yesterday, by the release of a voicemail message from a third woman he has been connected to sexually, he may not have issued a detailed confession to extramarital affairs, but on his website he issued a statement saying he regrets his “transgressions” with all his heart...

Boxing used to be a passion of mine. But it's been twenty years since I was constantly immersed in the fight game, since the glory days of Hagler, Hearns, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard. I've missed traveling or tuning in to the big bouts that drew worldwide interest beyond boxing purists. And I'm not the only one. And now I'm not the only one to be drawn back to the ring and the draw is a terribly exciting, magnetic, highly skilled Filipino named Manny Pacquiao...

Andre Agassi's autobiography came out early this week and the chapter that has drawn the most attention is his admission to using crystal meth through much of 1997, during a down-time in his career… and lying about it to tour officials. I've read the book, titled Open, and, for me, the crystal meth confession was the least revelatory of all the Agassi life stories...

As of last night, on a clear, chilly fall night in the Bronx, the Yankees became World Series champs for the 27th time in their storied history. How grand it was to see Mr. November, Derek Jeter, win his fifth ring. To stop worrying about Alex Rodriguez as he smashed his past of fading post-season. To admire the entirely likeable Andy Pettitte who commands the mound like a dependable, quiet giant. Matsui, Posada, Texeira, Damon. They're bursting with talent, brimming with heart, driven with focus. They're a heck of a team and it was a heck of a Series...