When baseball was the national pastime, the owners smoked two-dollar cigars and the players, even the underpaid ones, went to work with smiles on their faces. In the reserved grandstand (tickets three bucks), fans drank beer out of real bottles, and there was no need to cut them off in…
Soccer is the game nearly 83 Americans love. When the World Cup kicks off next week in nine far-flung U.S. cities, it might have trouble outpointing badminton, ice-fishing and furnace repair in the Nielsen ratings. Aside from a guy named Pele, who retired years ago, your average Yanqui imperialist cannot…
The latest wisdom among baseball pundits, most of whom have not swung a bat since Little League, holds that soon the game must produce the most appealing athlete in the country in order to regain its high perch as the national pastime, to restore the mythic dimension that faded away…
If you’d like a startling new insight into America’s strange love affair with the automobile, try standing beneath one of the underpasses at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while 230-mile-per-hour race cars scream over the pavement above your head. The sensation is not unlike cozying up to a roomful of tornadoes…
For a time this month, your Denver Nuggets became America’s Denver Nuggets–the fulfillment of underdog dreams, the hope of every factory worker who ever fantasized about playing in the bigs, wowing the Grand Ole Opry or sailing a yacht in Monte Carlo. Hey, nice piece in Sports Illustrated. Ain’t that…
Put down those peanuts and Cracker Jacks and pay attention: TPQ=HR/AB+TB/AB+RBI/AB=(HR+TB+RBI)/AB. And don’t you forget it. Okay, unfair. David Pietrusza cringes every time an outsider sees the Society for American Baseball Research as a collection of mere number-crunchers–as 6,300 squinty baseball nerds tripping over their wing tips en route to…
Big Bill Tilden’s shoulder was bothering him, and Don Budge was having dinner with President Roosevelt. Little matter. Pro tennis’s dinosaur division, the five-stop Advanta Tour, made its debut Thursday night at McNichols Sports Arena without a single visit by the paramedics. For a while there you needed No Doz–the…
The tulips are in bloom, and Bud Biegel is thinking comeback. Last June he tore a hamstring while diving for a foul pop, and before he could heal, some banjo hitter whacked him on his mitt hand with the bat. Busted index finger. Out for the year. So after getting…
What’s new? Put five circus midgets wearing swim fins on the floor and Your Denver Nuggets can find a way to lose to them. But if it’s the high-flying, trash-talking, world-beating Seattle Supersonics out there, or Hakeem the Dream and the Houston Rockets, Dan Issel’s problem children probably will kick…
October 18, 1994–Two days after the miracle, the stunned Montreal Expos are crying in their Beaujolais. Don Baylor is pinching himself. And Denver fans–all five million of them–can’t seem to sober up. The Colorado Rockies have amazed the world by winning the National League pennant in just their sophomore year,…
These are strange days in the arenas and on the playing fields, wouldn’t you say? The White Sox have sent nagging irritant Michael Jordan down to Single A, and the United States government is sending the Patriots to South Korea–probably because they haven’t won the AFC East in about a…
This March Madness thing now has two lunatic faces–one male and one female. It wasn’t always so. Just a generation ago, the only women you saw around college gyms in the spring were waving pompons or cheering for their boyfriends. Through no fault of its own, women’s basketball was cause…
Let’s tear ourselves away from the war in Bosnia and the Tonya Rodham Clinton scandal for a moment to discuss something important–starting pitching. If your Colorado Rockies are to (dare we whisper it?) contend in the Nouveau National League West this season, their starters will have to throw something smaller…
To answer the question on every citizen’s lips: Yes! The individual seats at Coors Field will be wider than those iron maidens crammed into Mile High Stadium. Not much wider, mind you. Your coveted season ticket won’t get you a La-Z-Boy or a BarcaLounger, and Marvin Davis still will have…
The winter Eleanor Engle signed as a shortstop with the Harrisburg Senators, Harry Truman was in the White House, Senator Joseph McCarthy was terrorizing Congress and on television My Little Margie was busy saving her rich, widowed father from a weekly parade of conniving females. In 1952, the National Pastime…
A handful of choirboys in North Dakota may have been surprised when Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan greeted each other in Lillehammer last week like a couple of old pals, then grinned like starlets from opposite ends of the team picture. But no one else even blinked–least of all the…
You can’t tell the players without an atlas. Or a body count. Since the 1988 Olympic Games, Germany has reunified and the Soviet Union has broken into fifteen pieces. Two Yemens have become one, while Czechoslovakia has split itself into Czechs and Slovaks. The city of Sarajevo, once famous for…
Throughout the colorful history of tennis–a game almost as old as war–only two men have won the Grand Slam. In 1938, the year Hitler decided he owned Austria, American Don Budge swept the Australian, French, British and U.S. Open tournaments–a feat as daunting as a pro golfer winning all four…
Michael Jordan has already tried to play major-league baseball. And failed. You can look it up. Back in 1890, The Baseball Encyclopedia informs us, one Michael Henry Jordan, the pride of Lawrence, Massachusetts, appeared in 37 games for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 125 at-bats, the 27-year-old outfielder managed to get…
First night on the new job, Calvin Natt called a couple of his guys by the wrong names, and he found himself constantly amazed. “I had no idea the kids had so much athletic talent,” he said the next day. “I’d only watched them on tape from the East game,…
Figure skating isn’t exactly a sport, and it isn’t Swan Lake. It is, rather, that frozen netherworld where community theater meets the double axel, in costumes on loan from the floor show at Caesar’s. It’s no wonder that the skaters themselves are often quivering bundles of nerves and that their…
Back in the Middle Ages, when the Miami Dolphins could still field eleven men on defense and Buddy Ryan was fighting in the Golden Gloves, I wrote in this space that the Dolphins would beat the San Francisco 49ers in this year’s Super Bowl. Sure, and the Germans will win…
