EPISODE 144: Year-End Holiday Spectacular – With Paul Reeths & Andy Crossley

We put the wraps on an event-filled 2019 with our first-annual holiday roundtable spectacular featuring the return of fellow defunct sports enthusiasts Paul Reeths (OurSportsCentral.com, StatsCrew.com & Episode 46) and Andy Crossley (Fun While It Lasted & Episode 2) – for a spirited discussion about the past, present and potential future of “forgotten” pro sports teams and leagues.

It’s a no-holds-barred look back on some of the year’s most notable events and discoveries, including:

  • The short rise and quick demise of the Alliance of American Football;

  • Major League Soccer’s (unsustainable?) expansion to thirty teams;

  • The folding of the Arena Football League – again;

  • Major League Baseball’s minor league contraction plan; AND

  • Raiders NFL football moves on from Oakland for good.

As well as some predictions on what might transpire in 2020, as:

  • The second coming of Vince McMahon’s XFL kicks off in February;

  • Baseball celebrates the Negro Leagues’ 100th anniversary;

  • Las Vegas takes its biggest sports gamble yet with the Raiders;

  • The MLS Players’ Association flexes its pre-season bargaining muscles;

  • The Chargers and Clippers grapple with second-fiddle status in LA; AND

  • Mark Cuban’s Professional Futsal League . . . well, your guess is as good as ours!

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EPISODE 135: The Curse of the Clippers – With Mick Minas

We pick up where we left off in Episode #89 (The NBA Buffalo Braves – With Tim Wendel), with the continuing story of one of pro hoops’ most forlorn franchises – today known as the Los Angeles Clippers.

Author Mick Minas (The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers) joins the podcast from his home in Melbourne, Australia to help us go deep into the travails of a club labeled by many as the NBA’s most historically dysfunctional – and by some as simply cursed.

From its highly convoluted cross-country relocation to San Diego in 1978 to its still-chaotic life as Los Angeles’ “other” NBA team (and the Staples Center’s third-priority sports tenant) – the Clippers have had enough wayward turns of fate to fill an entire league, let alone a single franchise:

  • The high-profile 1979 coup of All-Star center (and San Diego native) Bill Walton, whose career literally and figuratively crumbled under the weight of chronic foot injuries;

  • League fines, investigations and lawsuits against team owner Donald Sterling – including the team’s unauthorized relocation to Los Angeles in 1984;

  • The “Clipper Triangle” of injuries to star players like Derek Smith, Norm Nixon, Marques Johnson, and Danny Manning – and league-record setting seasons of futility;

  • The disruption of the club’s first playoff appearance in 1992 by the Los Angeles riots;

  • Siren songs of Anaheim; AND

  • The sordid 2014 scandal that led to Sterling’s ouster and subsequent/still-in-process “rebirth” under new owner Steve Ballmer.

PLUS: Will the Clippers stay in LA?

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