Mark Wiedmer

It's every middle-aged couch potato's dream come true: Be richly rewarded for gaining 40 pounds while eating anything you want.

Befitting someone with 227 home runs and a .293 batting average for his career, Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman has been sending chills through major league pitching staffs for close to a decade.

There the Brothers Blaylock sat, all three of them perched near the top of the stairwell in their divorced mother Janelle's suburban Atlanta home. It provided them the perfect view to glimpse the new man in her life before the two adults headed out for a date night.

Maybe we've been going about the coronavirus pandemic thing all wrong. Maybe we should have started out with no expectations. Just operate on the assumption we're basically quarantined until further notice. Period.

For as long as I've been an adult, for more than 40 years now, it seems that somebody or some group has been threatening the state of Mississippi with one thing or another if it didn't remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag.

To become employed by the Chattanooga News-Free Press, as I first did in 1983, was to learn quite quickly that your archrival, if not your archenemy, was the Chattanooga Times.

Somebody in government should hire him to become Czar of the COVID-19 Mask.

Until the coronavirus pandemic ended competitive sports more than three months ago, June 24 was to be the day Baylor School rising senior Ellie Waldrep fulfilled a lifelong dream — competing in the United States Olympic Team Trials for swimming.

A friend phoned me with a novel idea on Monday, a suggestion that could surely take flight at 13 of the Southeastern Conference's 14 institutions of higher learning.

One night in 1981, brothers Grady and Steve Jacoway, both of them McCallie School graduates who were University of Tennessee students at the time, fell into a heated discussion at a Knoxville watering hole.

Jill Levine took the call a few weeks ago, not quite believing what she was hearing.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred must, at least this once, focus on the fans and what they've been through and are continuing to go through.

Befitting someone who has always encouraged folks to live in their hopes instead of their fears, University of Tennessee athletic director Phillip Fulmer sounded like a man whose cup runneth over with hope for the upcoming college football season during an interview last week with the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

Full disclosure: I've never been much of a NASCAR fan.

From George Floyd's horrible death, something has come to life in this country that we've never previously witnessed on such a grand scale regarding the desperate need to end systemic racism.

They're back.

When it comes to this ongoing battle between Major League Baseball's greedy owners and greedy players, three words are beginning to come to mind more and more: Enough. Of. This.

There stood Jeremy Pruitt, wearing a CDC-recommended mask and a University of Tennessee football shirt as he delivered the kind of message head coaches of major college programs rarely deliver.

Senior day. Wherever it happens, that last home game is quite often the emotional highlight of any student-athlete's college career.

In the long, largely proud history of University of Tennessee football, there never has been a fairy tale quite like that of John Terrill Majors — right up to the time it ended in a nightmare of a firing for all concerned when he was canned as UT's coach late in the 1992 season.