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…
Before last week, I regarded the game of cricket as a stodgy ancestor of our baseball — as a peculiar English obsession no less mystifying than the love sonnets of Sir John Suckling or those gray clots of mutton you sometimes find on your dinner plate in London. That has…
What disorder compels a man to neglect his accounts, shun his family, starve his dog and inflate his bar tab so that it looks like the U.S. defense budget? What terror binds the victim to couch or barstool, gazing at multiple boob tubes for twelve- or fourteen-hour stretches, day after…
“If I win, everybody will say, ‘Well, of course he won; he’s the top-ranked player.’ But if I lose…” “You won’t lose, Josh.” “What if I do?” “You won’t.” “I’m afraid I might.” — from Searching for Bobby Fischer On the seventeenth move of his sixth game in the final…
For every year they spend at altitude, baseball players and newspaper writers lose a couple of IQ points. But don’t let that stand in the way of a reckless prediction: The Colorado Rockies will return to the playoffs this year. That’s right, Cracker Jack. Despite a shrinking payroll, the absence…
The bumper sticker reads: “A bad day fishing is better than a good day at the office.” If you are Ted Takasaki, that is not technically true: A bad day fishing is pretty much a bad day at the office, too, because for him they are one and the same…
What everyone has been hoping for — at least when sports are not actually being contested on ice and snow — is an Olympics about as exciting as happy hour at the Mormon Tabernacle. So far, so goody-goody. Osama bin Laden didn’t show up with a bomb in his turban…
Mack Newton tells a story about Jay Novacek, the great NFL tight end. It was late 1989, and Novacek was teetering on the edge of a good, but not extraordinary, career. He had just been cut from the Arizona Cardinals after a series of injuries, and suddenly he found himself…
They grin like famished wolves. Their eyes grow big. Obviously, they love the one-on-one drill. Who wouldn’t? Who could resist a thing so nakedly elemental? Stealthily, a lone shooter glides in on the crouching goaltender. The shooter swerves, he feints, he flicks his wrist and flashes the puck into a…
Sunday afternoon, the phone rings. Troy Slinkard picks up the cordless. It’s David, calling from Lakewood. “I was wondering,” he says, already knowing the answer, “if me and Charles could come up for a while.” Troy, of course, says sure. “About a half-hour?” David asks. “Sure,” says Troy. A half-hour…
Let’s see: In the last two weeks, Steve Spurrier unexpectedly quit after twelve years as head football coach at the University of Florida because he wants to try the NFL. On the other hand, coach Chan Gailey left the pros for college, and Tyrone Willingham quit Stanford for Notre Dame,…
“In many ways, geese can be very smart,” notes Tom Remington, avian research leader for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. “For example, here in Fort Collins, when the students leave CSU for the holidays, the geese flock onto the campus. But when the students return, the geese leave.” On the…
The horror and sadness that gripped America after September 11 brought the sports world low, too, and weeklong suspensions of play in college and pro football, major-league baseball, stock-car racing and golf served as fitting tributes to the dead. So did the astonishing outburst of patriotism that rang through stadiums…
