Turn on the television, open the paper or click on the radio, and you’d be hard pressed to avoid seeing/reading about/listening to some athlete selling something. Companies will use jocks to hawk just about anything these days (Ed McCaffrey is an expert on mattresses why?), no matter their age (Dick…
No wonder Nolan Ryan is doing painkiller commercials on the boob tube. He’s hurting. After all, in his waning playing days back in the 1980s, the poor guy had to scrape by on a couple million bucks a year and live in a place with just nine bedrooms. Think of…
First, the good news. This was the year Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open, the British Open, the PGA and seven other tournaments with the ease of a golfing god, then graciously praised the efforts of his merely mortal opponents. It was the year that Rulon Gardner, an unknown Greco-Roman…
College admissions directors are well aware of a phenomenon known as the “Flutie Effect.” The Flutie in question, of course, is Doug Flutie, the slippery bantam quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. (He also has his own breakfast cereal, Flutie Flakes, sold regionally, whose digestive “Flutie Effect” is another story.) The…
Just a wild surmise, but doesn’t it seem to you that in recent weeks Denverites have been far more concerned with the name of their new football stadium than with the name of their new president? Terrorists could blow up Boettcher Concert Hall in mid-Mozart, and not a soul would…
In épée, the most duel-like of the three events that make up fencing, the foot touch serves two purposes. The first, of course, is that it counts as a score. Unlike foil, in which a combatant must contact an opponent’s torso with his blade to score, or saber, for which…
You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst or a Pentagon code-breaker to understand the threat that Pat Bowlen issued last week. It was the ultimatum of an angry man, pure and simple. If the professional football team Bowlen owns and loves and realizes a handsome profit from doesn’t win its…
The good news was that the Pumpkin Satellite Project had just launched a one-gallon jug of water approximately twenty yards through the air — not a winning distance, certainly, but respectable for an early simulation of what might happen if you put a pumpkin in its place. The bad news,…
Americans don’t give a damn if Slobodan Milosevic goes nuts and murders half of Eastern Europe. They don’t care if bubonic plague decimates Philadelphia, Homer Simpson gets elected president as a write-in or Firestone starts putting its tires on baby strollers. No, what most of America really worries about is…
At the U.S. ski team’s summer training facility last month, Matt Chojnacki did something no freestyle skier had ever done before: He stepped into his skis, hurtled down a plastic-coated approach ramp at 35 miles an hour, shot up a steep, one-story jump, launched himself some sixty feet into the…
Behold the ancient rituals of autumn. The sting of just-rubbed wintergreen oil catches in the nostrils. Two tall quarterbacks kneel facing each other, soft-tossing spirals, while a lean wide receiver yanks on a pair of black Adidas sport gloves, then balls them into fists. Weariness mingles with anticipation as a…
When does an athlete stop being an athlete and simply start being a lunatic? The question of where to draw the line occurred to me a few weeks ago when a friend and I drove up to Leadville late on a Saturday night to watch the finish of the Leadville…
If Tiger Woods knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep an eye on the Wongluekiet twins. That’s because ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years from now, Aree Song Wongluekiet or his brother, Naree Song, might sneak up on Tiger and snatch away first-place money at, say, the $35 million Arnold Palmer…
To an outsider looking in, Shane Swartz was on top of the world in the spring of 1997. Twenty-one years-old, handsome, polite, a servant of God with a body as tight as a drum skin, he was living the life he’d always been instructed to envision for himself. He’d begun…
Itching for a fight? Put a pipefitter from the Bronx and a cabbie from San Francisco on adjacent bar stools and ask which team will win the World Series. Or get a couple of lifelong Broncos fans going about where the worm must turn this season — in Brian’s brain,…
In the nine and a half decades since Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Ford Model T was introduced, only two American men — both of whom, as it happens, live in Boulder — have won gold medals in international marathon competition. Most people, non-runners included, could peg the first…
When new Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke held Dan Issel’s big feet to the fire last week, any casual observer of Denver’s beleaguered NBA franchise had to wonder: What is Issel to do? Wave a wand and transform his motley collection of slew-footed children and graying journeymen into the Los Angeles…
Monty Doiel had his first inkling of trouble as he turned right at the end of Mercaderes Street onto Estafeta. The corner is hard and angular, difficult under the best of circumstances. Doiel had hoped his new black Nike Air ACG cross-trainers with the reverse-tread grip would provide an advantage…
Hall of Famer Robin Roberts was once asked to recall his greatest thrill in an All-Star game. The Phillies’ estimable right-hander answered immediately: “When Mickey Mantle bunted with the wind blowing out in Crosley Field.” Your Colorado Rockies should be so lucky. The recent eleven-game losing streak that likely spelled…
Olympic sports purists — i.e., those who stay up until 4 a.m. to watch the live telecasts of synchronized swimming, rhythm gymnastics, curling and badminton every four years — will be gratified to learn that plans are proceeding apace to include the game of contract bridge (and not contact bridge,…
It was with high hopes and a glowing sense of community purpose that Ryan Mullaney began this past high school baseball season as head coach of the woeful Evergreen Cougars. A former standout athlete himself — he’d dabbled with a pro football career before being cut by the Minnesota Vikings…
The Colorado Division of Wildlife recently announced that it will issue more elk tags this year than ever before. A spokesman for the agency says that 106,000 hunters — roughly one for every two elk in Colorado — will receive permission to hunt elk in the state in one of…
