Folks in blue-collar western Pennsylvania have loved football since Joe Namath weighed nine pounds and had both kneecaps. But they don’t have their heads in the clouds about it. Truth be told, there probably aren’t three Pittsburgh Steelers fans in ten who actually believe their club can upset the cocky,…
Why not journey up to lovely Cooperstown, New York, this summer and take in the sights? Babe Ruth’s bat. Norman Rockwell’s watercolor depicting a crew of umpires with their eyes turned upward and palms outstretched to a sky full of sprinkles, weighing the merits of a rain delay. The ball…
On race day, it is always the same. Aaron Harrison hangs Unruly Thomas’s muzzle over his crate, where he can see it, and talks soothingly to his charge in a voice dripping the rhythms of Muskogee, Oklahoma. At these signs, Thomas begins to get excited. And when Harrison shorts his…
Ever had the living daylights beaten out of you by an eleven-year-old? It’s not that bad if the eleven-year-old doing the beating is a kid as nice as Tab Habon and the damned fool grownup learns something in the process. Watch out, though: You may still have to eat 139…
All right, so where were you when O.J. walked? How about when Cigar ran? Or when the Big Cat struck out against Mark Wohlers? To say that 1995 was an astonishing year in sports is to understate the case. Consider. Tennis great Monica Seles emerged from a traumatic two-year retirement…
All right, dyed-in-the-wool college football fans. Here’s the get-a-life test. On the evening of December 30, which game are you going to watch? The Carquest Bowl, featuring North Carolina’s mighty Tarheels? Or the Peach Bowl, starring the tenacious Georgia Bulldogs? Please keep in mind that although intercollegiate football is an…
Like a lot of people living up here in Bronco Village, I used to be able to fit everything I knew about hockey on the top of an ice cube. One that had been sitting out in the July sun for a while. Listen, I’d long been trying to understand…
I don’t know what kind of pictures you’ve pasted into your book of golden memories in recent months, but you’re welcome to rest a while and look at mine: Here’s Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd trying to decapitate quarterback Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers. Here’s Greg Lloyd with…
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Larry King Live. I’m Larry King. But you already know that. You know it, Portland, Oregon. You know it, Bellevue, Washington. And you know it, Dunedin, Florida. You know that there’s nobody quite as important as Larry King. And that’s me. Larry…
It is 7 p.m., tail end of the rush hour, and a cold, hard rain is falling on Atlanta, Georgia. All along Peachtree Street you can make out fugitive figures with umbrellas unfurled and wind-bent, ducking into doorways, dodging out of the paths of their fellows in the nick of…
In the dead of winters to come, you can bet that John Elway’s long-battered knees will ache and that Dan Marino’s torn Achilles tendon–an injury some ironic classicist must have picked out for him–will start to act up. In winters to come, Warren Moon’s shoulder will surely pain him again…
Oh, what a beautiful morning. Mike Tyson’s thumb is busted, and Don King is on trial for wire fraud. But don’t ice down the champagne just yet, fight fans. The injury cancellation last week of the Saturday Night Charade that was to pit Tyson against Buster Mathis Jr., a second-generation…
Frankie Accardo, the philosopher, was continually baffled by people who diluted their whiskey with water. “That’s alcohol abuse,” he’d say. He also wondered about men wearing bright plaid sports jackets. (“What’d the guy do? Shoot a couch?”) And he had no use whatsoever for five-year-olds. “Everybody out here knows an…
St. Jude must be working overtime. First the patron of lost causes gets the Seattle Mariners into the playoff picture after nineteen seasons of rain-dampened futility and one collapsing stadium roof. Then he squeaks the M’s past the big, bad New York Yankees. As if that weren’t enough, our man…
The same day O.J. walked, John Vander Wal grounded into a double play. Then Andres Galarraga struck out. And that was the beginning of the end for the 1995 Colorado Rockies. Not even manager Don Baylor expected his overachieving club to take the dominant and confident Atlanta Braves (30-6 against…
Koy Detmer and Ki-Jana Carter probably don’t want to hear about it, but–yeah, sure, of course–there are plenty of good things to say about artificial turf: 1. It’s cheap–at least for team owners and college athletic departments. According to the manufacturer of AstroTurf, it costs about $5,000 a year to…
The rain falls cold and steady this afternoon, and the home nine are in far-off California, facing the test of their young lives. Still, it is nice to sit for half an hour or so in section 125, behind the Rockies dugout. In the flat light of the heaving storm,…
Hey, y’all. This here’s Jerry Jones, and I wanna tell you this afternoon ’bout a couple of changes to our fuhball team that’s gonna git us back in the Super Bowl faster’n a coyote goes in heat, I’m pretty sure. Now, some folks said the Dallas Cowboys were finished, that…
If you don’t watch where you walk–well, you know. Any time 400 dog lovers and their pets get together in one place, the footing can get hazardous. But that’s not the only thing. Confused Labrador retrievers sometimes leap over the rail and scamper up the backstretch in the wrong direction…
The canned crowd noise roaring through empty Folsom Field last Wednesday had a surreal ring to it. With the volume pumped way up to approximate the beer-fueled frenzy the team would face three days later in Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium, it’s a wonder CU center Bryan Stoltenberg could hear the…
That was no optical illusion. And it wasn’t fear playing mind tricks on mere mortals–although there was plenty of that to go around, too. Fact is, Monica Seles has grown another inch during her 28-month absence from tennis, and she’s gained six or seven pounds of sheer muscle. Up at…
From the beginning, that big white clock outside Coors Field has had a mind of its own. So at 3:54 last Thursday afternoon, this unreliable timepiece assured the gathering throngs on Blake Street that it was 3 p.m. By evening, 54 minutes were still missing in action and, for all…
