If major-league baseball players and owners want to know what’s good for them–they remain stubbornly in the dark about that–both sides would do well to lay down their golf clubs and set aside their disputes this month to finish school. The professor will be Ken Burns, the ground-breaking documentary filmmaker…
When they’re not preaching the Word of God or playing General MacArthur, football coaches are usually stewing in their juices. Is it seemly for grown men to worry quite so much about the efficacy of the all-out blitz or the state of mind in the Atlanta Falcons locker room? Probably…
Big-league baseball may be on strike, but Jack Rose plays on. And on. When the University of Denver baseball team opens its 127th season of play next February, its fearless leader won’t feel many butterflies. In 33 years as DU’s head coach, Rose has piled up 743 victories (fourth among…
Early in the second round, Jesse “The Boogieman” Ferguson, all 242 1/2 pounds of him, caught Larry Holmes with a monster left hook that buckled the ex-champ like a man hit in the shins with an ax handle. Deep in the fogs of Queer Street, Larry reeled, pawed the air…
At a time when baseball fans would rather be thinking about rally caps than salary caps, the Sultans of Snit and the robber barons who grudgingly pay them are taking the game from us. This will be the eighth interruption in twenty-two years. If present-day players were as good at…
That little punch-up the other night in Barcelona meant nothing, of course. Still, there were a few surprises: No one poisoned Al Davis’s paella. Denver’s defensive backs failed to plant a bomb on the Raiders’ team plane. The Raiders didn’t burn Denver deep on the second play of the game…
Amid the current outpouring of nostalgia about those American footprints in the lunar dust, the observations of former Apollo astronaut Alan Bean seem particularly apt. Bean recently told a magazine interviewer that whenever he looks at Norman Rockwell’s painting of Neil Armstrong’s small step/giant leap, it strikes him as a…
If the beach volleyball season gets wiped out, you won’t hear a peep out of me. If the monster-truck drivers decide to walk, so be it. Even if ice dancing melts down tomorrow morning, the pro bowlers pack up ball, bag and shoes at noon, and they cancel the rest…
When Brazil booted the U.S. soccer team out of the World Cup on the Fourth of July, you could feel the blow to our national psyche for almost five minutes. “Nice try,” America murmured in one voice, then got right back to flipping burgers on the grill, choosing up sides…
First, let us dispense with the obligatory political correctitudes. 1. Beating a woman, not to mention killing her, is wrong. Always was, always will be. Feminist agenda-setters and law enforcement types are not exactly thrilled about the flap out in La La Land, but they’ve taken the opportunity to put…
The next time some genius with five or six Miller Lites in him spins around on his barstool and starts regaling you with that old business about how sports reflect the agony and ecstasy of life, tell him to go home and put his head in the sink. Sports reflect…
When baseball was the national pastime, the owners smoked two-dollar cigars and the players, even the underpaid ones, went to work with smiles on their faces. In the reserved grandstand (tickets three bucks), fans drank beer out of real bottles, and there was no need to cut them off in…
Soccer is the game nearly 83 Americans love. When the World Cup kicks off next week in nine far-flung U.S. cities, it might have trouble outpointing badminton, ice-fishing and furnace repair in the Nielsen ratings. Aside from a guy named Pele, who retired years ago, your average Yanqui imperialist cannot…
The latest wisdom among baseball pundits, most of whom have not swung a bat since Little League, holds that soon the game must produce the most appealing athlete in the country in order to regain its high perch as the national pastime, to restore the mythic dimension that faded away…
If you’d like a startling new insight into America’s strange love affair with the automobile, try standing beneath one of the underpasses at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while 230-mile-per-hour race cars scream over the pavement above your head. The sensation is not unlike cozying up to a roomful of tornadoes…
For a time this month, your Denver Nuggets became America’s Denver Nuggets–the fulfillment of underdog dreams, the hope of every factory worker who ever fantasized about playing in the bigs, wowing the Grand Ole Opry or sailing a yacht in Monte Carlo. Hey, nice piece in Sports Illustrated. Ain’t that…
Put down those peanuts and Cracker Jacks and pay attention: TPQ=HR/AB+TB/AB+RBI/AB=(HR+TB+RBI)/AB. And don’t you forget it. Okay, unfair. David Pietrusza cringes every time an outsider sees the Society for American Baseball Research as a collection of mere number-crunchers–as 6,300 squinty baseball nerds tripping over their wing tips en route to…
Big Bill Tilden’s shoulder was bothering him, and Don Budge was having dinner with President Roosevelt. Little matter. Pro tennis’s dinosaur division, the five-stop Advanta Tour, made its debut Thursday night at McNichols Sports Arena without a single visit by the paramedics. For a while there you needed No Doz–the…
The tulips are in bloom, and Bud Biegel is thinking comeback. Last June he tore a hamstring while diving for a foul pop, and before he could heal, some banjo hitter whacked him on his mitt hand with the bat. Busted index finger. Out for the year. So after getting…
What’s new? Put five circus midgets wearing swim fins on the floor and Your Denver Nuggets can find a way to lose to them. But if it’s the high-flying, trash-talking, world-beating Seattle Supersonics out there, or Hakeem the Dream and the Houston Rockets, Dan Issel’s problem children probably will kick…
October 18, 1994–Two days after the miracle, the stunned Montreal Expos are crying in their Beaujolais. Don Baylor is pinching himself. And Denver fans–all five million of them–can’t seem to sober up. The Colorado Rockies have amazed the world by winning the National League pennant in just their sophomore year,…
These are strange days in the arenas and on the playing fields, wouldn’t you say? The White Sox have sent nagging irritant Michael Jordan down to Single A, and the United States government is sending the Patriots to South Korea–probably because they haven’t won the AFC East in about a…
