8 a.m. Your alarm goes off, waking you to the old Hank Williams Jr. cry, "Are you ready for some football?" Of course you are. The NFL has made sure that you are always ready for some football, because the league is with you everywhere, all the time.…

Center Patrick Ewing vows the Knicks will win the championship this season, a declaration most Knicks fans regard as similar to a Manhattan cabbie's guarantee of a leisurely ride--it's nice to hear but hard to take seriously. Ewing's victory promises…

There are no small roles, only small actors. Rick Fox, the Lakers' swingman and a fledgling thespian, is obviously a believer in that show business adage because he turned down chances to be a leading man for several other teams and signed instead…

There was a brief time, decades ago when it was new to the Oakland cityscape, that people occasionally referred to it as the Jewel Box. But the nickname didn’t stick, probably because it was too flashy for a building that didn’t stand out or call…

The suddenly notorious Josh Hader’s first six games following the All-Star break will be at home in Milwaukee, and for that, the Brewers reliever should be grateful. After the discovery during Tuesday’s All-Star Game of the racist, homophobic and…

NBA commissioner Adam Silver has a remarkable ability to use language in a way that seems simultaneously quite specific yet somehow open to interpretation. That talent has been on display recently in talking about the Warriors, whom Silver considers…

Panda and The Freak. It is a measure of Pablo Sandoval and Tim Lincecum’s enduring popularity around these parts that neither one of them will ever need more identification than that. But they share more than a couple of catchy nicknames and…

A Bay Area basketball team just lost an elite player in free agency. (Relax, the Warriors’ roster is still intact.) The local star who’s leaving town is Stanford’s Reid Travis, the 6-foot-8, 245-pound power forward— emphasis on power — and two-time…

Somewhere along the road to three championships in four years the Warriors became a Rorschach test for the basketball world. Look at them and what do you see? A fun, lively group that carries itself with joy and flair on and off the court, or a…

The mourning continues. Dwight Clark’s death on Monday brought on a sorrow for everyone who knew him, loved him or just loved watching him that remains fresh and will not soon subside. Memories of “The Catch” and all it meant to the 49ers, to the Bay…

For all the talk of adjustments in every postseason series, it’s always hard to avoid the trap of overvaluing the last game in forecasting the next one. The tendency is to spot a trend and expect it to be repeated, and that’s an easy thing to do in…

Every team that wins as much as the Warriors have won over the last four years inevitably attracts more than a few buzzkills who want to diminish their accomplishments by attributing them to lucky breaks, biased officiating and/or preferential…

Today is an important day for Reuben Foster. By the end of it, his legal situation — and with it, his future as a 49er — could be a great deal closer to resolution. At a preliminary hearing scheduled for Thursday morning in a San Jose courtroom,…

So far, the playoffs have made good on much of the promise that we were all waiting for during the long, often tedious prelude of the NBA’s regular season. They have been intense at times — witness how testy things got between the Celtics and Sixers…

Another week, another ex-player-turned-television-talking-head picking a verbal fight with Draymond Green. During the Warriors’ first-round series against San Antonio, Green calmly brushed off Chris Webber’s head-scratching comment about how valuable…

If you spend roughly two and a half hours making quick, spur-of-the-moment comments about events that are unfolding in front of you at breakneck speed, it’s unlikely that your every utterance is going to be a pearl of wisdom. Some of what you say is…

It’s impossible not to love what the A’s did on Tuesday night, throwing open the doors of the Coliseum for free admission and parking for their game against the White Sox. It made for a beautiful baseball evening in the East Bay, with a near-capacity…

Down the stretch of the regular season, the Warriors never had the chance to get themselves ready for the playoffs the way that teams in their elite position usually do. Injuries kept them from playing a set rotation from game to game, and they had…

A good friend who is a Red Sox fan messaged me the other day to call my attention to this tweet: It’s been 32 years. I’m so ready for this. pic.twitter.com/eVxr5PFIEX The Red Sox and Mets having the two best records in baseball, even at this early…

We are only a few days away from finding out whether the switch that everyone is waiting for the Warriors to flip really exists. As they enter the playoffs this weekend they are much more of a question mark than any 58-win defending NBA champion…