Golfer Seve Ballesteros' death was announced early Saturday, May 7, 2011. Although I only was able to watch Ballesteros on TV over the years and see him perform with excellence and grace under pressure in Ryder Cup matches, as well as major tournaments, I always admired him.

In fact, when...

The Hollywood-based film industry has changed significantly over the last few decades. It has gravitated toward financing films with the following attributes:

Ability to secure a global audience

Film studios have concluded that the majority of their target audiences are outside the U.S. The film genres they will finance are...

As we have gone through our process of preparing our film From the Rough for theatrical release, one question many people have asked is: why do a film about golf? Over 27 million Americans play golf, 1.3 million of them, African Americans. However, compared with the other issues African Americans...

Several events have caused me to think about creeping sports commercialization: the increasingly lucrative NCAA tournament and the increasing sense that college basketball is a one-year commercial way station for athletes on the way to professional basketball; Barry Bonds' perjury trial relative to his use of performance-enhancing drugs; business-sponsored teams...

On March 8, 2011, Gyre Entertainment, the film company we formed last year to create family-friendly films for the contemporary urban market, sponsored the NAACP Celebrity Image Awards Golf Challenge in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. One inspiring moment of a wonderful event was the introduction of a group of young...

I have lived 43 years in cities. Although Darien, Connecticut, where I have spent the last 19 years, has 22,000 residents, it has a pace of life, values and amenities resembling New York City, where many Darien residents work. Edward Glaeser recently published a great book entitled The Triumph...

Every sport imparts certain unique implicit values. For example, as we portray in From the Rough, in golf, a competitor plays with integrity and with what he's got. However, there are certain values associated with all sports. Those values help sports succeed for participants, spectators and investors. When...

Our tagline for From the Rough, the feature film my partner Pierre Bagley and I are producing, is "playing with what you've got." The tagline reminded me both of the fun of playing sports as a child and how youth sports today are severely lacking in fun. I particularly thought...

Growing up, my family felt unusual empathy with black people. Because my mother worked as a public health nurse's aide, we got to know her black professional nursing friends. I also grew watching incomprehensible brutality against well-behaved black people in the South on TV.

My parents had been direct victims...