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…
Look: The children are coming in from recess, and it’s clear that the fractious ten-year-old everyone calls Rockie needs more counseling — maybe even another personality transplant. Rockie still fails to heed his teachers. He doesn’t play well with others. As usual, the poor kid’s flunked his midterms and will…
Summer in Colorado means long, sunny — and sweaty — days in one of the fittest states in the country. Chiseled, sinewy men and women, with body-fat percentages roughly equivalent to the number of doughnuts consumed daily by the average Midwesterner, struggle to decide whether to go mountain biking, running,…
The crowd didn’t riot. No one set himself on fire in the parking lot. There wasn’t a speck of angry talk about hiring a hit man to whack out Claudio Reyna or Clint Mathis. In fact, as the biggest game in the history of U.S. men’s soccer came to its…
There’s an even-money chance that the next Oscar de la Hoya was somewhere in the building Monday night — shadow-boxing in a back hall, sleeping in the snack bar or telling his friends in the bleachers that his time had come, that he’s just gotta win the tournament this time…
Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) enter the Ames Billiard Hall, a seedy New York City pool establishment. Burns (reverently): It’s quiet. Felson: Yeah, like a church. Church of the Good Hustler. Burns: It looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs where…
If you’re in Manhattan feeling frisky and need a workout this Saturday morning, leave your empty beer glass on the mahogany in Martin’s and briskly walk the five furlongs to Penn Station. There. All done. Now board the 10:31 train, hunt for a cozy spot in the bar car and…
Unbeknownst to most of his acquaintances, Joe McCleary leads a double life. By day, his job is to lovingly tend 105 or so acres of the most green-velvety, luscious, ease-down-on-the-ground-and-take-a-nap-looking rye/Kentucky bluegrass hybrid this side of the Front Range. But at night, he heads for his suburban Aurora home, where…
The vast majority of American men have nothing more in common with major-league baseball players than an occasional hangnail and the right to a jury trial. Most of us couldn’t hit a beach ball thrown by an eight-year-old, much less Randy Johnson’s heater, and whenever we execute the hit-and-run, there’s…
“This is Howler,” Miles says. “He’s gonna ride down with us. Dinger’s got a game today, but Rocky will be there.” We head south in the Miles Mobile. The 2002 GMC Van — donated by John Elway, natch — is brightly painted, festooned with advertising. Pictures of an aggressive but…
Newsy Lalonde wouldn’t like it. Neither would Mud Bruneteau. Nor Odie Cleghorn. The Colorado Avalanche has once more shoved its bloody but proud face into the middle of the National Hockey League playoff picture, and so have teams from such distinctly non-Canadian, well-above-zero climes as San Jose, California, and St…
You feel like cussing? Want to toss off a few F-bombs, take the Lord’s name? Don’t do it on the HCF Flames Track and Field Club’s time. “Members (which includes both parents and athletes) are expected to act in an orderly and respectful manner, maintaining Christian standards of courtesy, kindness,…
1. Roses Are Red. But it wasn’t always so: In the initial runnings of the Kentucky Derby, which dates back to 1875, the winning horse wore a blanket of white carnations — now the symbol of victory at the Belmont Stakes. Early in the twentieth century, historians tell us, a…
A yellowing newspaper clipping from the Houston Chronicle hangs on the wall in Al Sanders’s home office in Fort Collins. The matted and framed article, dated January 27, 1964, is accompanied by a photograph of a five-year-old boy, identified as Austin Sanders III, sitting on his mother’s lap. He is…
This may be Cowtown, but that wasn’t Moooo! the Coors Field multitudes started yelling at the top of the third inning Monday afternoon. An eminently catchable fly ball had just dropped for a hit between outgoing shortstop Juan Uribe and incoming left-fielder Todd Hollandsworth, scoring Houston’s Craig Biggio, and 50,392…
