Who can fathom the mystery of Michael Jordan? The man has enough National Basketball Association championship rings to open a chain of pawnshops. But the gold and the diamonds and everything they stand for are not enough. Millions of awestruck kids wear Jordan’s $150 sneakers, eat his Wheaties, slurp his…
But the one thing that O’Neal cannot do to save his life is shoot foul shots. While most professional players can make around 80 percent of their free throws — and some sink 90 percent or more — O’Neal is lucky to make half of his chances. This lousy record…
Race drivers combine the sleek daring of matadors with the bullheaded resolve of interior linemen. The average leadfoot would run his grandmother’s old Studebaker into a ditch if it meant getting to a checkered flag first. Race drivers don’t put much stock in sentiment; they’re going too fast to think…
Every year, the Colorado ski industry looks forward to the three-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in January as one of the busiest times of the year. But this past winter, on the Sunday of that holiday-enhanced weekend, the number of skiers on Vail Mountain exceeded even those eager expectations…
Someone must be tinkering with the human genome up in permafrost country. A professional wrestler with the brain of a hummingbird continues to serve as governor of Minnesota. The other day, a wheat farmer in neighboring North Dakota stood up on a chair in his local post office and announced…
The furies of the National Hockey League — 130-mile-an-hour slapshots, player salaries that would numb Bill Gates’s checkbook, blood-streaked goons exchanging insults in French and Russian — have once more drawn all of Denver under their spell. Since the Avs swept Vancouver, Cup craziness has spilled out of the sports…
On a recent evening at Archery Adventures, a bow-hunting store in an Aurora strip mall, Bob Cook was setting up his slide projector for a seminar on turkey calling. It was still a couple of weeks before the start of the spring turkey- hunting season, but that didn’t matter: Bob…
National Basketball Association players visiting town to abuse the Nuggets prefer to stay at the Westin Hotel downtown, from which they can easily walk to dinner at clubby restaurants such as Morton’s and the Denver ChopHouse & Brewery. Professional golfers on tour through Colorado usually pass time between rounds lounging…
In this era of obscene player salaries and disposable loyalties, assembling a baseball team is an agony of constant reinvention, incessant tinkering and, when the occasion calls for it, vain hope. Unless, of course, you’re the New York Yankees, who have no need for the usual wishful thinking, so inflated…
You want the love? Here is the love. On Monday and Wednesday nights, the forty or so players of the Gentlemen of Aspen Rugby Football Club show up at the Cory Point Riding Arena, a few miles down the Roaring Fork Valley. They wait while the horses are led away…
The best thing that ever happened to the PGA Tour, the sages of the fairway say, is Tiger Woods’s completely dominant performance in 2000 — nine PGA wins (including three majors), more than $9 million in earnings, and the lowest scoring average (68.17 per round) in history. Even wheat farmers…
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…
