It all started innocently enough– just another tale of youth, hockey and a pretty girl. Even now, it’s hard to know if the whole episode was just a series of coincidences, a piece of bad luck, or the simple unspooling of fate. Ryan Netzer had been living in Hawaii, whiling…

He has dominated his game like nobody before him, and, possibly, like no one ever again. He burst on the scene in the mid-1980s after a solid but unremarkable college career. After turning pro, he redefined the rules of his sport’s endorsement deals, and his image was omnipresent in the…

Summer in Colorado means long, sunny — and sweaty — days in one of the fittest states in the country. Chiseled, sinewy men and women, with body-fat percentages roughly equivalent to the number of doughnuts consumed daily by the average Midwesterner, struggle to decide whether to go mountain biking, running,…

Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) enter the Ames Billiard Hall, a seedy New York City pool establishment. Burns (reverently): It’s quiet. Felson: Yeah, like a church. Church of the Good Hustler. Burns: It looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs where…

Unbeknownst to most of his acquaintances, Joe McCleary leads a double life. By day, his job is to lovingly tend 105 or so acres of the most green-velvety, luscious, ease-down-on-the-ground-and-take-a-nap-looking rye/Kentucky bluegrass hybrid this side of the Front Range. But at night, he heads for his suburban Aurora home, where…

“This is Howler,” Miles says. “He’s gonna ride down with us. Dinger’s got a game today, but Rocky will be there.” We head south in the Miles Mobile. The 2002 GMC Van — donated by John Elway, natch — is brightly painted, festooned with advertising. Pictures of an aggressive but…

You feel like cussing? Want to toss off a few F-bombs, take the Lord’s name? Don’t do it on the HCF Flames Track and Field Club’s time. “Members (which includes both parents and athletes) are expected to act in an orderly and respectful manner, maintaining Christian standards of courtesy, kindness,…

A yellowing newspaper clipping from the Houston Chronicle hangs on the wall in Al Sanders’s home office in Fort Collins. The matted and framed article, dated January 27, 1964, is accompanied by a photograph of a five-year-old boy, identified as Austin Sanders III, sitting on his mother’s lap. He is…

“If I win, everybody will say, ‘Well, of course he won; he’s the top-ranked player.’ But if I lose…” “You won’t lose, Josh.” “What if I do?” “You won’t.” “I’m afraid I might.” — from Searching for Bobby Fischer On the seventeenth move of his sixth game in the final…

The bumper sticker reads: “A bad day fishing is better than a good day at the office.” If you are Ted Takasaki, that is not technically true: A bad day fishing is pretty much a bad day at the office, too, because for him they are one and the same…

Mack Newton tells a story about Jay Novacek, the great NFL tight end. It was late 1989, and Novacek was teetering on the edge of a good, but not extraordinary, career. He had just been cut from the Arizona Cardinals after a series of injuries, and suddenly he found himself…

Sunday afternoon, the phone rings. Troy Slinkard picks up the cordless. It’s David, calling from Lakewood. “I was wondering,” he says, already knowing the answer, “if me and Charles could come up for a while.” Troy, of course, says sure. “About a half-hour?” David asks. “Sure,” says Troy. A half-hour…

“In many ways, geese can be very smart,” notes Tom Remington, avian research leader for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. “For example, here in Fort Collins, when the students leave CSU for the holidays, the geese flock onto the campus. But when the students return, the geese leave.” On the…

He’s sat here all afternoon, talking about an awful game; One boy will not be out till June, and then he may be always lame. Foot-ball! I’m sure I can’t see why a boy like Bob — so good and kind — Wishes to see poor fellows lie hurt on…

On a brilliant Indian-summer afternoon outside of Morrison, Gordon Grenfell unhoods his Barbary falcon. The bird rouses — shakes its feathers in preparation for flight — and then, suddenly, in a flurry of motion, swoops off Grenfell’s leather glove and over the field, skimming low across the brown grass. A…

At 4:45 in the morning, the streets are empty. Devon Harris, captain of the original Jamaican bobsled team, and Rick Lunsford, Olympic coordinator for the city of Evanston, Wyoming, are racing down Speer Boulevard in a massive Ford SUV. The U-Haul in back holds a bobsled. Lunsford jams down the…

It was back in July 2000 when Pat Dobiash, who watched the herd for the Henrys, first noticed that one of the alpacas was missing. A full month passed before Dobiash found the animal, a young female: On August 26, he stumbled across its decomposing remains on a small island…

Albert Chopito’s grandmother died with gangrene, her feet blackened with infection, a gruesome consequence of her long fight with diabetes. Just a little over a year after starting junior college on a scholarship, Albert was forced to quit and return home to care for his parents. His father died in…

In the days following the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the majority of the sporting world, a place defined by its motion, stood still. Major League Baseball suspended play for nearly a full week — 91 games in all. “Who cares about baseball right now?” Rockies…