Bobby Hull died this week at 84. Besides being one of my childhood heroes, breaking hockey scoring records, inventing the curved stick, having a slap shot faster than Apollo 11, winning awards and a championship, he went on to break my heart by leaving my favorite team for a record…

One reason I wrote about living with physical pain is to help others develop a better relationship with it so they don’t succumb to it. Now, a new article in Scientific American shows more Americans are in persistent physical pain, handle it poorly, and ruin their lives. Here’s one crucial…

Yeah, my friends are gone and my hair is grey I ache in the places where I used to play Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song” There isn’t a morning I wake up and don’t hurt. It might be a knee — next day, a shoulder. Maybe my forehead or a…

Much is written about how humans express faith, love, and their search for meaning and happiness through literature, romance, art, music, and other intellectual exercises. My expressions sprouted while growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1960s. I wrote “The Ghost of Spook Rock” in kindergarten (rave reviews from Miss…

World Cup 2022: We Own The Game But We’re Letting FIFA Borrow It by Ken Schreiner Where and when will the biggest football match of the year be played? Qatar, December 18? No, November 4 in Duluth, Minnesota. Why not the World Cup 2022 final that will feature Messi, Ronaldo…

Apologies for not writing for so long — even though I’m not really sorry. Honestly, sitting and writing for just minutes makes my butt hurt. And among the many things I’ve discovered since making an inspired but perilous return to fußball, when I could be shopping online for rocking chairs…

This is a sequel to my essay about returning to soccer after 30 years at age 66. If life taught me anything before 2020, it’s that you don’t accomplish anything if you don’t try. One new thing I’m learning since then, in a dubious golden year of COVID-19, divorce, retirement…

A conservative, 6-person, middle-class home in a non-descript non-city is where I served my normal American childhood. Creativity was discouraged, conformity rewarded. So like other “boomers” born after World War 2, most of my cultural influences came from the glowing box god in the living room. One fateful day when…

When you move as many times as I have (more than 30 to 8 different states), you collect and dispose of arguably tons of stuff. The reasons I hold on to some things are more perplexing than why and how I originally got them. One such curio is a plastic…