Here, then, is the narrow ledge paced by all professional athletes. Fall off one side and you land in a pile of Monday Night fame, immortality and flattering TV graphics. Topple off the other and you sit in a small but neat white house with blue trim just off Five…
All right, then. Just how long has it been since your Denver Broncos rose from the slough of despond to win a pair of Super Bowls? A thousand days? How long since the icon John Elway hung up his cleats and Terrell Davis went into traction and Shannon Sharpe decided…
Kurt Warner may not know it, but Some Things Never Change. With six weeks left in the National Football League season, the perennially miserable Cincinnati Bengals are 1-10 and eager to clean out their lockers. The flightless Philadelphia Eagles are once more lolling in the NFC East basement with a…
As midnight draws near for the decade, the century and the millennium, humankind’s most powerful, most undeniable impulse is to make lists. By now, of course, most of the good lists are already taken. Chiseled in stone. Scotch-taped to David Letterman’s ego. Posted on the Internet. Magnetized to the refrigerator…
Buddy Bell had been in town all of five minutes when he started talking in riddles. “The situation here can be as perfect as a situation can be,” Bell explained at the October 20 press conference where he was installed as the Colorado Rockies’ new manager. “I understand that no…
For the last month or so, I’ve been shucking littlenecks from the supermarket, splashing them with a little Tabasco and eating dinner in front of the television set. One night before tuning in, I constructed a pastrami on rye the size of a housing project. Trapped in a couch dent,…
Dressed head to foot in orange and blue, the crazies stood and howled in the Denver night, their raucous cry of joy mingled with blood lust. Their team had just taken a late lead, and now no one could shut them up. They flapped orange pennants and waved blue caps…
The pictures, descriptions and accounts of Saturday evening’s debacle at Mile High Stadium are not pretty. But here goes. By the end of the fourth quarter, Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Mike Moschetti had thrown three interceptions, been sacked nine times and earned himself a bloody nose. Meanwhile, his team endured a…
Here’s to you, Mark McGwire. Thank you very much for thrilling us from the tips of our toes to the tops of our heads last summer with your home-run prowess. Thanks also for shining much-needed light on a game that’s threatened in recent seasons to wither in the darkness. That…
In a rare moment of privacy last Wednesday afternoon, Gary Barnett stood before a picture window in the dining room of the Dal Ward Athletic Center, gazing out at his world. Two stories below, the sunlit expanse of the Folsom Field gridiron stretched before him: an acre and a half…
Who’s the hip pick to win the American Football Conference title this year? Why, the Jacksonville Jaguars–who else? Led by quarterback Mark Brunell, the Jags are rich in veteran talent, and barring major injuries, their time is now. On the other hand, if you live in hype-saturated New York, the…
Pity poor Montreal. In that northern outpost, you can hear the vendors pouring Molsons up in the third deck while everyone waits for hockey season to begin. And Baltimore. On the shores of Chesapeake Bay, another expensive chemistry experiment has blown up in manager Ray Miller’s face. While Will Clark…
For the twentieth century, it’s suddenly the bottom of the ninth with two outs, and that fact has unleashed a wave of nostalgia in the nation’s baseball fans unmatched since, well, since Big Mac hit number 70. For instance. Prior to last week’s All-Star Game in Boston, current players from…
In the summer of 1991, the best-kept state secret in China had to be the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s 2-1 World Cup win over Norway. The tournament’s high scorer, Michelle Akers, booted the winning goal with just two minutes left in the final game at Guanzhou, and when time ran…
When a major bargain becomes available, it doesn’t take long for the sharpies to gather like vultures around carrion. Case in point: Now that disgruntled stockholders of the Ascent Entertainment Group have rejected a piddling $400 million offer for the Colorado Avalanche, the Denver Nuggets and the Can, their brand-new…
Growing older, you find yourself searching for the deeper meanings in things, for their essence, with an intensity that would have been unlikely, or impossible, earlier in life. Why, you may find yourself asking, did your strikingly beautiful, once-married aunt, a mysterious woman by any account, stay so long in…
Once upon a time there was a game called baseball. This game was played, at the highest professional level, by young men of normal height, weight and ambition, in large American cities situated next to significant bodies of water. The object of the game was to hit a white ball…
When it was over, the big, blue-eyed man wearing the beautifully tailored charcoal suit and the pale-gold necktie left a box of Kleenex untouched on the podium and followed his blocker, wife Janet, through one last Sunday-afternoon sea of photographers. They vanished through a side door of a hotel ballroom…
The day may dawn clear, but Saturday’s 125th Kentucky Derby will be run under a cloud–or rather, three or four clouds–that help explain the unhappy state of American horse racing. First, as twenty unpredictable three-year-olds go to the post at Churchill Downs, the memory of Charlie Whittingham is sure to…
In the sun-splashed fanfare of opening day at Coors Field, the impeccably tailored promotions manager from Louisville Slugger committed an unthinkable gaffe. Amid much ceremony and clicking of camera shutters, Chuck Schupp handed a gleaming silver bat symbolizing the 1998 National League batting title to some guy named Larry Walker…
By acclamation, April is the coolest month. Confident that last year’s ignominy will be transfigured into this year’s triumph, baseball players and full-grown fans enter this month with the wide-eyed wonder of children, fond dreams intact and energies aloft. In Pittsburgh’s April dawn, the Pirates win the pennant going away…
If Darryl Kile is conversant with the Navier-Stokes Equation or the Magnus Effect, he’s not letting on. The man who was supposed to reinvigorate the Colorado Rockies’ demoralized pitching staff last season and lead the club out of the doldrums wound up with a 13-17 record. At Coors Field, which…
