With baseball starting, March Madness on deck and the NBA and NHL playoffs in the hole, one can be forgiven for not having contemplated the dire state of competitive distance swimming in this country. Fortunately, the towel wringers at USA Swimming are there to do it for you. Recently, the…
The stereotypical stock-car-racing fan is a 320-pound feed-store clerk from Gritsville, Alabama. Got the Stars and Bars flying from the double-wide. Wife also may be his first cousin, but that don’t mean he’s gonna share that plug of Red Man with her. Leastways, not ’til she changes out the U-joints…
One night last week, the Denver Nuggets and the New York Knicks played a professional basketball game in the Pepsi Center. At least that’s what the morning papers said. Beheld from our vantage point, in lofty section 369, the event might actually have been one of many things: a concert…
Time was, sports and recreation were something you did in your off-hours. Sure, there was always the company softball team. But at least you could choose who was on the squad. No geeks allowed — and that guy in sales and marketing who showers once every pay period? Forget it…
Given the exalted circumstances of today’s professional athletes and the inadequate appreciation most of them show for their good fortune, it’s always nice to find the rare individual who does the job without complaint, keeps his mouth shut and demands no special treatment…save for the occasional raw carrot. No thoroughbred…
Want to make your high-powered colleagues down at the club think you’ve lost your competitive edge and corporate marbles? Try out this pitch the next time you run into a couple of venture capitalists while sweating over your “friendly” game of lunchtime squash: “Boys, I’ve been an athlete all my…
The first thing — and possibly the last — you need to know about the new Extreme Football League is that Dick Butkus is the philosopher king of the rules committee. For those who don’t remember Butkus (which is to say, virtually every fan the XFL hopes to attract), this…
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,…
