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…
He’s sat here all afternoon, talking about an awful game; One boy will not be out till June, and then he may be always lame. Foot-ball! I’m sure I can’t see why a boy like Bob — so good and kind — Wishes to see poor fellows lie hurt on…
Don’t bother calling Ripley’s Believe It or Not or the supermarket tabloids, because they won’t believe it either. On Sunday afternoon, a crazed computer from Morristown, New Jersey, snuck up behind a buffalo in Boulder, Colorado, and forced nonconsensual sex on the hapless beast. That’s not all. It also proceeded…
His earthly triumphs interrupted by exhaustion and injury, home-run king Mark McGwire retired a couple of weeks ago. This came as unhappy news in baseball-savvy St. Louis, where the massive, red-headed slugger made home-run history in 1998, and in countless other precincts of the grand old game. It’s a good…
On a brilliant Indian-summer afternoon outside of Morrison, Gordon Grenfell unhoods his Barbary falcon. The bird rouses — shakes its feathers in preparation for flight — and then, suddenly, in a flurry of motion, swoops off Grenfell’s leather glove and over the field, skimming low across the brown grass. A…
Paul O’Neill, the dour, longtime New York Yankees outfielder, won a world championship with the Cincinnati Reds in 1990 and four more rings with the Yankees in the last six years. Suddenly, that’s not much of an achievement. It looks like the Arizona Diamondbacks will now get a shot at…
At 4:45 in the morning, the streets are empty. Devon Harris, captain of the original Jamaican bobsled team, and Rick Lunsford, Olympic coordinator for the city of Evanston, Wyoming, are racing down Speer Boulevard in a massive Ford SUV. The U-Haul in back holds a bobsled. Lunsford jams down the…
For as long as anyone in Golden can remember, there have been some surefire ways of knowing you are at a Colorado School of Mines football game. One: You pay six bucks and sit almost by yourself at 5,000-seat Brooks Field. Two: There are mules grazing in the corral beyond…
It was back in July 2000 when Pat Dobiash, who watched the herd for the Henrys, first noticed that one of the alpacas was missing. A full month passed before Dobiash found the animal, a young female: On August 26, he stumbled across its decomposing remains on a small island…
Have you heard? Barry Bonds is an arrogant egotist who has three lockers in the San Francisco Giants clubhouse but not three friends on the entire team. He’s a slugger who hit 73 home runs this season but wouldn’t score 23 points in a fan approval poll. He’s uncouth, ungrateful…
Albert Chopito’s grandmother died with gangrene, her feet blackened with infection, a gruesome consequence of her long fight with diabetes. Just a little over a year after starting junior college on a scholarship, Albert was forced to quit and return home to care for his parents. His father died in…
