Dave Kindred is to The Sporting News what Rick Reilly is to Sports Illustrated: its leading columnist, occupying the back page. Kindred's writing might stand a half notch below Reilly's, but Kindred's left-leaning ideas are visible only between the lines, whereas Reilly wears his on the sleeve, so we prefer Kindred (just as we prefer The Sporting News, a magazine devoted to sports coverage, as opposed to SI, which is devoted to being cute).
Anyway, while catching up on TSN back issues, we ran across a neat column by Kindred about the poker craze. Link. Excerpt:
I called my man Chad, who is to poker what John Madden is to football, only funnier and with a mustache.
"Tell me about poker," I said.
"There's an onslaught and an avalanche," he said.
Causing me to duck under a chair.
"Especially among young people," he said.
Millions of Americans play. Chad wrote about the Vegas gathering of "poker pros, local heroes, gambling wannabes and dead-money drifters." The New York Times has hired a weekly poker columnist, James McManus, whose first published sentence was a paraphrase of Jacques Barzun's famous line on baseball: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker." The Travel Channel -- the Travel Channel -- covers poker.
