The other day, a man with Christmas on his mind walked into a sporting goods store to buy a baseball mitt for his son. “I’d like to buy a baseball mitt for my son,” he told the clerk. “Oh, yeah?” the clerk answered, giving his customer a narrow-eyed gaze. “How…
When I was in middle and high school, there was a kid in my class named Dave Ringo, who, thanks to an unjust genetic mutation, was a gifted athlete in spite of himself. He spent the entire weekend and most of the week drinking and smoking in bad company. Yet…
While serving what he saw as a two-year sentence with the Colorado Rockies, pitcher Mike Hampton won 21 games and lost 28, complained endlessly about his misfortunes and collected more than $20 million from a team to which he contributed almost nothing. Now the pest has gotten his way and…
Mark Robbins is running a bit late, as usual, and he’s in a hurry to suit up. He hates to miss any of the action, even at his age. Still, there is a ritual, and it’s important he get it right. The first order of business is to dull yesterday’s…
Twenty Things to Do at a Denver Nuggets Game: 1. Contemplate Bad Omen No. 1. Before the season even started, star forward Juwan Howard, who is the league’s fourth-highest-paid player, at $20.6 million per year, was suspended for two games after going ballistic in a pre-season contest and trying to…
If you lived in upstate New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as I did, there was really only one sports story worth paying attention to. No, it wasn’t the Buffalo Bills, a team on the cusp of setting a record for Super Bowl futility, dumping four straight…
When I was a kid, my father had a friend named Morris Kleinman, an elegant, witty lawyer with a passion for tailor-made suits, Bombay martinis on the stem and the New York Yankees. Renowned as a tiger in the courtroom, Mr. Kleinman was an indulgent and generous man outside the…
One hundred seventy-five years after he should have died, Lance Grabowski is still here and looking as resplendent as ever. For this crisp fall day, he has selected a bear-claw-and-mink-fur necklace. He also sports a nineteenth-century do-rag, emblazoned with dozens of pins and medallions, as well as tanned, coffee-colored buckskin…
Their amazing quarterback stands 5′ 11″ and weighs 185 — which makes him three inches taller and ten pounds heavier than their top running back. They call older men “sir,” get straight A’s in calculus and would no sooner cheap-shot an opponent than fly a Mig for Iraq. In the…
The only sticking point in the romance, Andi remembers, occurred last spring when KC showed up in Moab with a brand-new cherry-red Avalanche. A Chevy Avalanche. “When I saw him show up with it, I thought it was a rental,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he’d buy a Chevy.” KC…
The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary — which should know better — defines “baseball” as “a game played with a wooden bat and a hard ball by two teams of nine players each…the object of the game being to make as many runs as possible within nine innings of…
“God made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”– Eric Liddell, 1924 Olympic sprinter, as quoted in Chariots of Fire, 1981 Oy. Here it is, the Days of Awe, the most important time on the Jewish calendar — a somber, introspective time when the faithful atone for…
Now that football season has kicked us in the butt and the state’s major teams, with the exception of Colorado’s Buffaloes, have jumped out to good starts, it’s time for readers to test their knowledge of local gridiron history — and to predict the future. Herewith the Official Colorado Football…
Here’s how you go about getting an interview with the nationally respected coach of the University of Colorado’s best hope for a national title this fall: Walk into his windowless ground-floor office, sit down on the only chair and say, “Hey, coach. What’s new?” Don’t be ridiculous: This isn’t the…
For true believers like Simon Hanley, the sting of burning methanol in the nostrils is akin to holy incense and the deafening screech of 800-horsepower engines is the music of the spheres. With the possible exception of bullfighting and warfare, no sport intoxicates its fans like big-time auto racing, and…
On a recent morning, Bill and two of his buddies make the drive from Littleton to Evergreen to do a little game harvesting — buffalo, to be specific. The shooter, Bill, arrives last. He walks down to the pen and peers inside the chain-link fence to scope out the quarry…
With the Rockies banging around in their familiar fourth-place hell and the bewildered Nuggets awaiting the Eye Chart Era (that’s B-Z-D-E-L-I-K, Doc, and let’s see here, looks like: T-S-K-I-T-S-H-V-I-L-I), local fans find themselves yearning for some real sport — the invasion of Iraq, say, or the start of football season…
Larry Butler is losing his chops. That’s bad. It was really a matter of timing more than anything else. In the summer of 2001, Fox TV called Larry at his Morrison home, practically begging him to compete in a televised tournament. “I was still ranked quite high,” he recalls. But…
In the tumult of an ugly and tragic year, the realm of public villainy has expanded to accommodate Arab terrorists with a lust for mass destruction, Catholic priests with a taste for little boys, and wealthy corporate swindlers with their manicured mitts in your bank account. There’s no end in…
It all started innocently enough– just another tale of youth, hockey and a pretty girl. Even now, it’s hard to know if the whole episode was just a series of coincidences, a piece of bad luck, or the simple unspooling of fate. Ryan Netzer had been living in Hawaii, whiling…
What a mess. It is taking the Denver Nuggets much longer to hire a new head coach than the Egyptians took to build the pyramids. While the search continues, here’s the inside story of the team’s painstaking selection process. You won’t read it anywhere else, simply because nobody else employs…
He has dominated his game like nobody before him, and, possibly, like no one ever again. He burst on the scene in the mid-1980s after a solid but unremarkable college career. After turning pro, he redefined the rules of his sport’s endorsement deals, and his image was omnipresent in the…
