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This has been a breakthrough year for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mitt Romney captured the Republican presidential nomination. Manti Te'o led the Notre Dame football team to an undefeated regular season and a No. 1 ranking. And now the nation's top basketball prospect, Jabari Ali Parker, has taken a recruiting trip to Brigham Young University, the flagship school of the faith—because not only is he an athletic prodigy, he is a devout Mormon.
And Parker is black. According to survey data, worldwide black membership in the LDS is somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. Though the Mormon Church does not keep records based on race and ethnicity, one estimate is that out of 6.2 million Latter-Day Saints in the the U.S., only 186,000 are of African...
Tuesday night’s 88-56 rout of Samford will look in the box score like a get-well game for the University of Kentucky basketball team after arguably the worst week in four seasons under coach John Calipari. In reality, it was... more »
One night every December, students at tiny Taylor University pack the school's gymnasium and participate in a phenomenon that's completely out of place in modern sports: silence. The fans in the standing-room-only crowd are... more »
College basketball fans are sick of seeing great conferences torn apart in the name of big-time football. The Big East used to be hoops heaven. By next season, with SMU, Houston and other GPS-defying programs coming aboard, it... more »
Last week, we spent a few words lamenting the UCLA Bruins, whose mediocre start, punctuated by a dramatic come-from-ahead home loss to Cal Poly, caused them to rightly free-fall out of the Associated Press Top 25. (The coaches... more »
If you're a college basketball reporter of a certain age, you almost certainly have a go-to Rick Majerus story. Here's mine. It was the fall of 1996, barely a year after I got hired by Sports Illustrated. The magazine assigned... more »
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