Even if you're not a huge soccer fan, the World Cup offers many rich sources of entertainment. For one, Americans can use the month-long soccer tournament's six-hour time difference as a handy excuse to drink beer before noon. The Cup can also serve as the basis for pick-up chatter with hot international girls. But one hugely underappreciated source of World Cup jollies can be found in its ...

If you're as much of a sports fanatic as I am, you've no doubt wondered what it would be like to own your own franchise. As the former owner of a semi-semi-semi-semi-pro croquet team, I can tell you firsthand: It feels pretty good. OK, so not every sports-franchise ownership involves big money. But as I learned while writing my new book, "The Renegade Sportsman" -- an investigation into the ...

Eye-searing polyester. Haircuts the size of minor moons. Villainous facial plumage. Doomed wife-swapping experiments. No one ever gives the 1970s the credit they deserve. Those 10 hazy years between the hippie '60s and yuppie '80s may now be synonymous with disco, civilization-wide failure and shag carpeting, but the decade also bred a screwed-up genius of its own. Author and long-time ...