
Toto Schillaci è morto l'anno scorso dopo una lunga lotta contro il cancro. Quando gli ho chiesto che tipo di cancro stesse combattendo, ha riso e con un sorriso nel suo inglese stentato ha risposto ad alta voce: "Yerrikay! (la sua pronuncia di Eric) Non ho più il retto - questo lo so!". Il traduttore ha fatto la sua parte per il piccolo gruppo che voleva ascoltare, e tutti hanno riso: il fatto che Toto fosse Toto era sicuramente l'atmosfera giusta. Era una di quelle persone così carismatich...
Aug 22, 2025
1 hr 6 min

Toto Schillaci died last year after a long fight with cancer. When I asked him what kind of cancer he was battling, he laughed and with a smile in his broken English loudly replied – ‘Yerrikay! (his pronunciation of Eric) I no longer have a rectum - I know that much!’ The translator did his thing for the small group that wanted to listen in, and all laughed – just Toto being Toto was definitely the vibe. He was one of those people so charismatic that you could get away with that kind of...
Aug 22, 2025
58 min

As I talked to Steve Sampson, I was very much reminded of the coaches of my youth in the 80s and 90s. I smirked nostalgically as I heard words like: accountability, preparation, and culture. If you Google Steve Sampson, of the first 10 articles you see, 9 will be about one event he experienced - a moment where he was coaching the US National Team, prepping for the 1998 World Cup, and was faced with an impossible off-the-field situation. He handled it in his way, grounded in his own set ...
May 13, 2025
2 hr 20 min

Freeman Jones was a black, PhD-educated scientist in Jim Crow America, who was the lead of his team. However, when his company opened up the facility for tours for investors or the public, he was kindly asked by ownership to exit the facility and go wait in the yard with the other black employees, most of whom were part of the cleaning crew. Freeman would go onto marry Mada Myers, who had marched with Dr Martin Luther King in Mobile, Alabama, and was active in that legendary Civil Right...
Apr 2, 2025
1 hr 7 min

Gary Mabbutt is a real legend of that historic club – Tottenham Hotspur of North London – but Gary was quite lucky to get that far as he nearly died as a boy while at his youth club. He did not die of course, but was diagnosed with what was then a pretty unknown condition - that of type 1 diabetes – he was told by the doctor that his football career was over and he would have to take a lot of precautions and master his diet moving forward just to insure his life would not be cut short. ...
Mar 25, 2025
1 hr 14 min

2025 Season, here we go! A bit late, but hey - I'm a child of divorce. Dean Windass was never really an elite player at the top flight of English football. He is a legend of Hull City – that Yorkshire club with great history - but Hull rarely find themselves in the top flight of English football. He had many great moments at Hull – some of the best in that clubs history – and when Dean retired, they offered to build a statue of him in front of the stadium, but he declined th...
Feb 24, 2025
1 hr 14 min

I always smile big when I get to speak to an old US National Team guy – of all the players and characters from around the world that I’ve sat with - they are my favorite lot, because they did it here and they did it first. No player from any other country can honestly say: 'When I was a kid there really was no soccer in my country, there was no league, there was no national team, there were no heroes to look up to. But for Tab Ramos it was like this – being a professional soccer p...
Nov 26, 2024
1 hr 31 min

In 1984, John Fashanu, a black Englishman of Nigerian descent, signed with the British club: Millwall FC; an openly racist club at that time. The semi-official chant the supporters sing from the crowd is: ‘We are Millwall, No One Likes Us, No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care, We are Millwall, From the Den’. (The Den is the name of their home ground) The supporters hated him, they abused him, they threw bananas at him, they threatened his life if he dare stay. Somehow, as time progressed - th...
Nov 16, 2024
53 min

He was known as ‘the mayor of Rome’ – and he was such a great player that later in his career the great Pele would go on to say that he was the best player in the 1982 World Cup. But Bruno Conti had a very humble start – his home village of Nettuno was actually known as the baseball capital of Italy. It was the site of a major US Naval Base during World War 2 – and the Italian boys would watch in fascination as the American GI’s would play baseball on the beach. Eventually they st...
Aug 29, 2024
30 min

If you love sports and you love sports stories, then it is hard to do much better than Wes Morgan, and the absurd story of the 2015 Leicester City Silver Foxes. They were 5000-1 odds against winning the title. But it may as well have been 5 million. It was not going to happen, no way, an impossibility. To bet 10 bucks on it, was to throw 10 bucks away. They played Manchester City away late in that year. The cost for the starting 11 that Man City put on the field that day was: 477M...
Jun 21, 2024
1 hr 3 min
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