Author Archives: Eli Karon

Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd, buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks … But wait! For Jews, peanuts and Cracker Jacks take a back seat to matzo and gefilte fish for eight days each spring during the Jewish holiday of Passover. Three thousand years ago, the Hebrew people […]

Five years ago, head coach Valorie Kondos Field invited the top five high school gymnasts in the country to visit UCLA to fill the five open scholarships on the gymnastics team. Five years later, the group known nationwide as the Fab Five has changed the face of UCLA gymnastics. As freshmen, Onnie Willis, Kristin Parker, […]

Some years ago my mother bought me a book of sayings, all of them related to fishing. It had the usual maxims of anglers worldwide, things like: “Old fishermen never die, they just smell that way,” “Work is for people who don’t know how to fish,” and “Better to be a master fisher than a […]

The No. 1 UCLA gymnastics team continued to dominate opponents at the NCAA South Central Regional in Missouri over the weekend, posting a 197.725 to advance to the NCAA championships in Nebraska. Iowa edged out Oregon State 195.875 to 195.85 for second place, earning a trip to Lincoln as well. UCLA led from the outset, […]

We are a strange lot, sports fans. We wear giant hunks of cheese and brown paper bags on our heads while cheering topless in subzero temperatures. The athletes we cheer are equally strange. But perhaps weirder than both groups is the law enforcement agency that unofficially governs the sports world. I’m talking about the Karma […]

What do Mark Few, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ben Howland and Pat Fibbitz have in common? They all are or have been candidates to fill the vacated head coaching position for the UCLA men’s basketball team. According to reliable sources, Fibbitz is the latest in a competitive field of qualified coaches to replace Steve Lavin. Reportedly, Fibbitz […]

Good teams fight through adversity, while great teams thrive on it. The UCLA gymnastics team proved its worth at the top of the national standings on Saturday by winning the 2003 Pac-10 team title with a Pac-10 record of 198.175. And it did it without its best gymnast. Junior Jamie Dantzscher did not compete, as […]