GEORGE VECSEY

For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.

When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.

I love hockey because of the respect for history and for the game itself.

We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl - 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.

I never worried about getting stale because the news and the people induce freshness every working hour.

Title IX, whether voluntarily or via court cases, opened gymnasiums to women, produced uniforms and schedules and buses.

I would never tell anybody to give up hockey - the great sports we have here - basketball, lacrosse - rugby coming into its own - we've got so many great team sports, and I say hold on to them.

The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford, who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21.

Many American players - Paul Caligiuri, Claudio Reyna, Eric Wynalda, Kasey Keller, Tony Sanneh, Michael Bradley and Steve Cherundolo, just a partial list - have sought the income and challenge of Germany.

It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.

This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.

I say the Islanders were the best team I ever covered because they had more so many stars who delivered with Canadian-Swedish-suburban modesty. And they won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 through 1983.

What I like about it is the creativity. When I watch good soccer players - the way they have to make a play out of nothing.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.

For good reasons, there are no ties during the Stanley Cup season. Somebody needs to win so the lads can get out to their cottages on the lakes, where all hockey players spend their summers, or so I have been told.

I love Major League Soccer, covered the first game in 1996 in a funky stadium in San Jose, and I applaud just about every move that its commissioners, Garber and Doug Logan, have made.

War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.

Newspapers are the engines that drive the Web.

Athletes are used to battling. The public would never learn their names if professional athletes had not shown courage at an early age. They learn they can overcome, but sometimes this becomes a false sense of security that leads them to the edge.

All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.

Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.

I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.