By Lee A. Daniels
They’ve discovered – again – that baseball really is just like America.
That’s the meaning I took from Thursday’s New York Times story pointing out glaring racial disparity in the game between the positions of first-base and third-base coach. At the first-base position, twenty of the thirty coaches are of African-American, Latino-American or Asian descent. Of the thirty third-base coaches, twenty-three are white, three are black and four are Latino.

By Pamela Scully
On July 6, 2010, nearly a year after the first public questions were raised about her gender, the IAAF stated that it had determined that Semenya, is female, and can now compete in local and international competitions.

By Tarice L.S. Gray
While at a swim meet two weeks ago in Canada, World Record Holder and 2008 US Olympic Swimmer Cullen Jones got some heartbreaking news: Another child of color had drowned in his United States.

By Mark Lassiter
If you are stubbornly resisting the temptation to watch, or thinking about attending a viewing party with a group of total strangers who are living and dying with every goal, here are eleven tips from someone who dares you to hold your breath and say the word “goal!!!” for as long as you can hold it.

By Mark Lassiter
If Scott “Downtown” Brown and “The Big O” (with a sincere apology to Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson) consider practicing for their charity game together, they cannot violate party boundaries or be seen in public. Their clandestine practice session would sound something like this.

By Mark Lassiter
New Orleans radio announcer, Bernard “Buddy D” Dilberto, fueled a grass roots, populist movement in 1980. He implored frustrated football fans to attend games with brown paper grocery bags on their heads to protest the performance of the 0-14 hometown Saints. Buddy also said, “When you go to Heaven after you die, tell St. Peter you’re a Saints fan. He’ll say c’mon in, I don’t care what else you done, you suffered enough.”

By Janet Singleton
In my mind Tiger Woods is a multiethnic, polysyllabic, whatjamacallit, just as he said. “A Cablinasian.” He called himself that in a 1997 appearance on Oprah and disappointed some black people. But I have no problem with that, particularly now. It’s just that the controversial Vanity Fair magazine cover posing Tiger as “thuggish” and therefore presumably blacker, we are invited to consider that issue once again.

By Mark Lassiter
In September, Forbes announced that Tiger Woods had become the first athlete to earn one billion dollars over the course of his career. Now, just two months later, and approximately forty years after the setting for Mad Men, real life advertising executives at Nike, EA Sports, Gillette, Gatorade and AT&T have been carefully monitoring the sagging ratings for the soap opera being played in the national media with their superstar pitchman, Tiger Woods, in the role of leading man.

By TaRessa Stovall
In a victory not only for a gifted athlete, but for humanity as a whole, Caster Semenya, the gifted South African teen track star who was mired in controversy over confusion about her gender, was found “innocent of any wrong” doing by the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) and allowed to retain her 800m gold medal, title and prize money.

By Mark Lassiter
The National Football League (NFL) seems to be getting along quite well without recent almost-team-part-owner Rush Limbaugh. That blip came and went pretty quickly, but it’s still worth looking at, both as an example of how politics and race can play out on and off the field, and as an examination of sports as sanctuary.