Somewhere in there, in the dense limbo of the classified section, somewhere between “Beautiful Russian Ladies Want to Meet YOU!” and “Improve Your Sex Life With Penile Enlargement” and “Wendelstedt Umpire School,” you’ll almost always find the shimmering promise that you, too, can feel like a real major-leaguer. Or feel…
You know those moments when all your senses open like a flower? Picture this: West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium in mid-March, a tidy little ballpark, swept and green and balmy. Nolan Ryan is on the hill wearing that gruesome blaze of Astro orange and yellow across his chest, and he’s…
She’s loud. She’s brash. In the past, some of her teammates couldn’t stand her. While growing up poor in Triumph, Idaho, population fifty, she learned to scrap for the last pork chop on the platter. When the boys in town teased the freckle-faced girl with the funny name, her older…
When millionaire NHL celebrities like Adam Deadmarsh, Brett Hull and John Vanbiesbrouck take the ice this week wearing the colors of the United States, the media glare will be hot and the cheers deafening. But no U.S. Olympic hockey player will be prouder than an unknown, unpaid defenseman named Merz…
How bad have things gotten for the Denver Nuggets? Well, the loudest cheer at any Nuggets home game in the last two miserable seasons, one bemused fan reports, erupted the time Rocky the Mascot, the red-sneakered mountain lion with the jagged lightning bolt shooting from his butt, yanked spectator John…
Super Bowl, Stupor Bowl. I’m thinking ballpark. I’m thinking ballpark food. Baseball-park food. I’m thinking cornmeal-crusted red snapper on a pink plastic plate with the bulging eyes staring at you, and a huge heap of something unnamable piled next to him as a bonus. What are these things? Look like…
There was a day when working men in America carried hod or baked bread or laid bricks or descended into the hell of the mines to blacken their lungs and die young. In scant off time, such as it was, working men visited houses of worship and toted blocks of…
First and last, 1997 marked the golden anniversary of Jackie Robinson, hero. Otherwise, the sublime and the ridiculous kept bumping into each other. Tiger Woods, age 21, chewed up the Masters field by a record twelve strokes, while Mike Tyson chewed on Evander Holyfield’s ear. Jeff Gordon dominated the Winston…
The millions of working stiffs who fork over their hard-earned dollars for tickets to football, baseball, hockey and (in some cities) real, live NBA basketball games are justifiably fed up with the sour culture of American sports–in which spoiled athletes and high-handed owners pretend they’re rulers of some tinpot dictatorship…
To get a feel for this thing–for the magnitude–imagine that your Denver Broncos were to win consecutive playoff games against Pittsburgh, New England and Kansas City, all of them on the road. Then try to imagine Elway and company facing heavily favored Green Bay in the Super Bowl–on their fourth…
If we can believe Lawrence Funderburke, the Sacramento Kings’ resident apocalyptician, the world is coming to an end in the next five or six years. Funderburke bases his prediction on biblical prophecy and says his primary regret is that his career will be cut short. Meanwhile, NBA commish David Stern…
Heard the one about the rich car dealer who goes out and blows 89 million bucks on high-priced hookers? Well, needless to say, he has a pretty good time. So do the hookers. There are lots of them, and they all have talent, so nobody has to work very hard…
Andy MacKenzie, lean, blond and 23, goes back a long way. At 17 he was a fearless Vermonter ripping down the double-black-diamond steeps of Mount Snow with Nirvana blasting through his headphones. At 21 he was a streak of blue and white Gore-Tex bombing the scariest precipices of Vail and…
Let’s hear it for Don Baylor. The Rockies skipper has signed up for another two years’ worth of 15-13 games at Coors Field. He’s ready to endure another two years’ worth of ulcers whenever he looks down at the bullpen and sees the reluctant warriors huddled there, praying they won’t…
Don’t worry about a thing, Oklahoma. That 69-7 thumping Dr. Tom’s hard-running Cornhuskers laid on you Saturday afternoon was child’s play. Don’t sweat it, Central Michigan. Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators may have chomped on you 82-6 earlier this year, but that ain’t nothing. Don’t get too upset, East Carolina, Rutgers,…
To hear the assorted hairdos on the boob tube tell it, you would have thought getting the Broncos onto that snowbound plane to balmy Buffalo Saturday night was a social imperative akin to feeding malnourished babies or keeping nuclear terrorists out of the Pentagon lunchroom. Forget about the sleepless expectant…
Denver baseball fans find themselves nailed to the couch again this October, watching a pair of teams from distant cities contest the World Series. This is the way it’s been for five seasons, and likely the way it will remain for five or ten or who knows how many more…
When I first knew Grissom–it seems like a century ago now–he was like a lot of other well-heeled jock wannabes. He wanted sporting goods. All kinds of sporting goods, and nothing but the best. When Wilson came out with its top-of-the-line A-2000 outfielder’s glove, Grissom (a pseudonym) was the first…
Baseball’s ghost of honor this season was Jackie Robinson, and the hundreds of uplifting things the scores of speechmakers said in ballparks from coast to coast about his courage were long overdue. But they told only part of the story. Half a century after Robinson broke baseball’s color line, he…
Does the next Dawn Staley go to kindergarten in Brooklyn? Is the Rebecca Lobo of 2008 shooting jumpers right now on her driveway in Des Moines? Is a whole gym-load of pint-sized Cynthia Coopers and Debbie Blacks playing zone defense somewhere in Texas? Could be. In their rookie seasons, the…
Since the bombastic and curious 1997 baseball season got under way last April Fool’s Day, Mark McGwire has hit 54 home runs for two different teams in two different leagues. Larry Walker has put indisputable (but hypo-oxygenated) MVP numbers into the book that will probably fail to win him anything…
Every horse on the grounds comes equipped with four legs. It doesn’t really take Magellan’s navigational skills and two tanks of gas to get out there. The jockeys don’t lift your wallet in the parking lot, and anyone who brings three kids along is pretty likely to go home with…
