If you haven’t been to a Denver Nuggets game this season–and there’s no reason to go unless the warden’s offering a choice between that and lethal injection–here’s a report from the front. Let’s begin at the beginning. This year everybody on the team stands up for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Even…
Shopping for a used car? Don’t want to put up with the usual hassles? Curtis Mannisto is your man. Curtis doesn’t bend the truth, and he never high-pressures the customer. You can bargain with him–up to a point–and you can rest assured that every vehicle on his lot has been…
Is it too soon to speculate that Evander Holyfield’s eleventh-round TKO of Mike Tyson on November 9 was an outright fix? Nah. Probably not. In the dank sewer of professional boxing, you hardly ever go wrong supposing that chicanery is afoot–especially when the greedy, bellowing figure of promoter Don King…
If you can come up with one good reason why Bud Selig shouldn’t be publicly drawn and quartered and his parts scattered from Fond du Lac to Madison, let’s hear it. Want to bestow mercy on Chisox owner Jerry Reinsdorf? Fine. Give him a nice schooner of Old Style before…
It ain’t no bandwagon. Ralph and Jimmy Garcia remember the day the Broncos got rid of their vertical striped socks in a public burning at training camp. They recall Lionel Taylor’s 100 pass receptions in 1961 and the moment when Jeremiah Castille fell on The Fumble at the three-yard line…
Ex-altar boys built like beer trucks still go to Notre Dame. The future Nobel laureates are at Stanford, absorbing Plato. Those who crave ice cream and river rafting are bonding with Kid Rick up in Boulder–and calling home on the free telephones. Condominium-sized sprinters who live for the scent of…
Think Ross Perot is a long shot to win the White House a week from Tuesday? How about the Green Party candidate for president? Or the Libertarian? How about Mrs. Grundy of the Civic Purity League? Well, to tell the truth, they’ve all got a lot better chance in their…
In the Acme Oyster House on Iberville Street, three big fellows wearing muddy aprons and yellow rubber gloves were shucking as fast as they could. The Sunday afternoon hangover crowd was packed cheek-to-jowl inside the Acme, harbored now from a steady, gulf-blown rain, but not from the whips and jangles…
That sound you hear deep in the night is the Titanic hitting an iceberg. The passengers don’t know it yet, and the crew isn’t talking, but she’s going to the bottom. The worst-case scenario for major-league baseball is that the fans are finally so fed up with the loudmouthed martinets…
To the immutable rules of life mandating romantic fidelity, high-quality whiskey and early knowledge of the multiplication tables, it might be wise to attach the following: The moment you turn twelve, stop seeking autographs. This comes to mind in the wake of an announcement last week that Michael Lasky, founder…
How about a nice hand for Hideo Nomo? Better yet, how about skipping the usual courtesies and immediately installing Hideo Nomo in the Hall of Fame? On September 17 the Dodgers’ high-kicking, skyward-gazing right-hander waited out a two-hour pre-game rain delay, then threw the third no-hitter of the 1996 baseball…
Characters in soap operas have phony first names like Blake and Krystle and Fallon and Caress–names no one else has. Real people have real names like Sandis and Uwe and Sylvain–you know, everyday names. The characters in soap operas are always trying to screw other characters in the bedroom or…
Salt this name away, Rockies fans: Scott Randall. As the club’s fourth season winds down with an ineffectual bang (four Bombers with a hundred RBIs each–first time in the National League since 1929) and a resounding whimper (8 million bucks’ worth of Saberhagen and Swift still on the shelf), you…
Beyond the Gainesville city limits, cocky Steve Spurrier may be the least popular head coach in big-time college football. But even those who’d like to see the man vanish in the Everglades may have sympathized last January when his high-octane Florida Gators were blown out of the Fiesta Bowl, 62-24…
When Andre Dawson announced his retirement last week, a couple of astonished doctors pointed out that the great slugger had undergone twelve knee surgeries in his 21-year career–seven on the right knee, five on the left. Both ravaged knees, the Hawk allowed, are now creaking along “bone on bone.” That’s…
Now that Amy Van Dyken’s gold-medal perkiness is finally subsiding and your Colorado Rockies are on a road trip to respect, let’s turn our attention for a moment to the game with the big helmets. The National Football League pre-season is two weeks old, and on September 1–the same date…
While assorted waterbugs from Romania and Belarus and the suburbs of Cleveland bounded all over the mat and flung their tiny bodies back and forth between the uneven parallel bars, we had the whole thing explained to us on the boob tube by…John Tesh. Now it’s a good bet that…
All right, then. Stay home. Seriously. Don’t even bother with the road games. Forfeit the damn road games. That way, you guys will save the club a couple of million bucks in airplane tickets, and you’ll always be able to have your eggs cooked the way you like them. You…
Look at it this way. The average American working stiff makes $548 a week–before taxes. Michael Jordan makes $576,923 a week–before the sneaker company and the cereal maker and the burger chain and the people who provide his underwear can even line up to add their huge endorsement checks to…
Horseplayers and fight guys are carried through life by the same sweet torrent of optimism. Damn the facts. Sheer belief will get you back to the cashier’s window. Force of will can win the title. In the meantime, keep talking. Talking keeps the demons of doubt at bay. At the…
If the sign of a dysfunctional family is the inability to agree about anything, then I suppose that’s what we were. Every time we went out to a ballpark. Of course, no one in a ballpark ever used the word “dysfunctional.” But there were a lot of other, more colorful…
When they asked Ozzie Smith last week about the best plays of his career, it was a little like having Picasso pick out a couple of favorite pictures. Where do you start? Still, the slickest-fielding shortstop in the history of the game obliged his questioners. * On April 20, 1978,…
