Kieran Mulvaney

Improbably, in 11 years of sitting ringside, I had never been to Atlantic City prior to this past weekend. Circumstances always conspired to prevent it, and I never pushed especially hard for the opportunity to lose my boardwalk virginity. Notwithstanding Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster, the place always struck me from afar as an especially sad and washed-up version of Las Vegas. And so, it turns out, it is: even more so these days than ever before, with shuttered casinos, closed shops, and an empty boardwalk. If I found myself nonetheless strangely comfortable there, it was probably the result of growing up in a similarly faded seaside resort.

I did not see either Mr. Lancaster or Ms. Sarandon. I did see Sergey Kovalev defeat Bernard Hopkins.





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"Hello, Agent Cooper. I'll see you again in 25 years ..."

There are a few things I want from my new house. I need it to be rustic and modern. Isolated but in close reach of an airport, restaurants and stores. Quiet, but with cable access and a washer/dryer hookup. Oh, and the nearest town needs to be small - and have angle parking on main street - but with most of what I need. And the house - it needs to be cozy but spacious, and cheap.

But Vermont. It definitely needs to be in Vermont. Read More 

On a shelf in my kitchen, there is a bottle with my name written upon it. The bottle contains olive oil, made from a batch of olives that I helped to pick in the Umbrian village of Paciano. An article I wrote on picking olives, making olive oil, Paciano, and friends of mine who have lived and died in the small-but-perfectly-formed medieval village is the cover story of this weekend's Washington Post Magazine Read More 

For six or so years I inflicted more-or-less weekly soliloquies on the world in the form of my ESPN 'Heavy Hitting Boxing Podcast.' All but a very few of the two hundred-plus episodes involved me pontificating at length on pugilistic matters, staring into space as I rambled into my Blue Snowball microphone.

After a while, it became a little tedious, and to be honest I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the format, which by its nature conferred on me an authority I felt I lacked. Around the time I began investigating the possibility of shaking that format up, ESPN pulled the plug on the podcast anyway. But I was not podcast-free for long; I now record one for HBO Boxing, with my friend and colleague Eric Raskin, and I have to say that Eric's mere presence makes the product a hundred times better than my solitary efforts for ESPN. Here's an example of what we do, in the form of our latest episode: an interview with the always excellent Jim Lampley.

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It would be an understatement to say that my friend Stephanie likes to run. It would be overstating the case to claim that she lives to run. The truth would be somewhere in between, as it is for a lot of runners. It isn't so much that running becomes a part of life, but more that it becomes something of an organizing principle of life. As it is for casual runners, so it is even more for ultra-runners, the small minority who will rip off a 10K for fun before spending six days running around an indoor track in Alaska. Those were the people who took part in Six Days in the Dome, an event to which Stephanie alerted me and which I knew instantly I needed to cover. The result was this piece for ESPN , which is accompanied by a terrific photo gallery by Jeffrey Genova. Read More 

Up until now, everything I knew about Omaha, Nebraska, I knew from watching 'The Big Bang Theory.' Next week, I get to go there for the first time. And I'm not even slightly freaked out by this.  Read More 

Draft submission day is just a few days away. It's going to be incredibly close. I wish I'd given myself a few days more. I wish I had been able to do more while I was in New York on HBO duty last week. I wish I hadn't been sick for the last couple of weeks. I wish I hadn't spent a week staring at the computer in a catatonic stupor. But it is what it is. I have no idea if I'll make the deadline. I have no idea, if I do make the deadline, whether what I submit will be any good (although I suspect strongly it won't be). Still ... onward. Read More 

Last week's Miguel Cotto-Sergio Martinez middleweight title fight in New York yielded, I believe, some of our best fight week videos so far.











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