As Pokey Reese can tell you, this is the year in which some of baseball’s most cherished records are likely to be demolished. Pokey himself got the ball rolling on opening day by committing four errors at shortstop in support of his Cincinnati Reds’ 10-2 loss to San Diego. There’s…
When Mike Tyson announced last week that he was willing to part with the unabridged, uncensored story of his life for, say, three or four million bucks, you can bet the Pulitzer Prize committee and the people who hand out the Nobels sat up and took notice. Listen. Solzhenitsyn may…
The most dangerous slugger in the major leagues is not Ken Griffey Jr., Larry Walker or Mark McGwire. He is a wrinkled, 67-year-old non-fan named Rupert Murdoch. And it’s painfully clear that the ruthless Australian media magnate means to swing the huge bat just put into his hands more like…
While the furniture-smashers of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team were returning to vain millionairehood in the NHL, and Latrell Sprewell was explaining to his adoring public that the really important lesson in the strangling of P.J. Carlesimo is the one that coaches should learn from it, and Chicago Bear…
Maybe Lawrence Eugene Doby was destined to be overshadowed. In the course of his thirteen-year major-league career, he batted .283, hit 253 home runs and led the American League in homers in 1952 and 1954. But because he played in the golden era of Mantle, Mays and Snider, Larry Doby’s…
That confidence wafting up from Tucson, Arizona, that unmistakable whiff of spring hope, might be real this year. A lot of baseball folk believe the Colorado Rockies improved their roster in the off-season more than any other team in the National League, and it’s hard to argue with them. I…
Somewhere in there, in the dense limbo of the classified section, somewhere between “Beautiful Russian Ladies Want to Meet YOU!” and “Improve Your Sex Life With Penile Enlargement” and “Wendelstedt Umpire School,” you’ll almost always find the shimmering promise that you, too, can feel like a real major-leaguer. Or feel…
You know those moments when all your senses open like a flower? Picture this: West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium in mid-March, a tidy little ballpark, swept and green and balmy. Nolan Ryan is on the hill wearing that gruesome blaze of Astro orange and yellow across his chest, and he’s…
She’s loud. She’s brash. In the past, some of her teammates couldn’t stand her. While growing up poor in Triumph, Idaho, population fifty, she learned to scrap for the last pork chop on the platter. When the boys in town teased the freckle-faced girl with the funny name, her older…
When millionaire NHL celebrities like Adam Deadmarsh, Brett Hull and John Vanbiesbrouck take the ice this week wearing the colors of the United States, the media glare will be hot and the cheers deafening. But no U.S. Olympic hockey player will be prouder than an unknown, unpaid defenseman named Merz…
How bad have things gotten for the Denver Nuggets? Well, the loudest cheer at any Nuggets home game in the last two miserable seasons, one bemused fan reports, erupted the time Rocky the Mascot, the red-sneakered mountain lion with the jagged lightning bolt shooting from his butt, yanked spectator John…
Super Bowl, Stupor Bowl. I’m thinking ballpark. I’m thinking ballpark food. Baseball-park food. I’m thinking cornmeal-crusted red snapper on a pink plastic plate with the bulging eyes staring at you, and a huge heap of something unnamable piled next to him as a bonus. What are these things? Look like…
There was a day when working men in America carried hod or baked bread or laid bricks or descended into the hell of the mines to blacken their lungs and die young. In scant off time, such as it was, working men visited houses of worship and toted blocks of…
First and last, 1997 marked the golden anniversary of Jackie Robinson, hero. Otherwise, the sublime and the ridiculous kept bumping into each other. Tiger Woods, age 21, chewed up the Masters field by a record twelve strokes, while Mike Tyson chewed on Evander Holyfield’s ear. Jeff Gordon dominated the Winston…
The millions of working stiffs who fork over their hard-earned dollars for tickets to football, baseball, hockey and (in some cities) real, live NBA basketball games are justifiably fed up with the sour culture of American sports–in which spoiled athletes and high-handed owners pretend they’re rulers of some tinpot dictatorship…
To get a feel for this thing–for the magnitude–imagine that your Denver Broncos were to win consecutive playoff games against Pittsburgh, New England and Kansas City, all of them on the road. Then try to imagine Elway and company facing heavily favored Green Bay in the Super Bowl–on their fourth…
If we can believe Lawrence Funderburke, the Sacramento Kings’ resident apocalyptician, the world is coming to an end in the next five or six years. Funderburke bases his prediction on biblical prophecy and says his primary regret is that his career will be cut short. Meanwhile, NBA commish David Stern…
Heard the one about the rich car dealer who goes out and blows 89 million bucks on high-priced hookers? Well, needless to say, he has a pretty good time. So do the hookers. There are lots of them, and they all have talent, so nobody has to work very hard…
Andy MacKenzie, lean, blond and 23, goes back a long way. At 17 he was a fearless Vermonter ripping down the double-black-diamond steeps of Mount Snow with Nirvana blasting through his headphones. At 21 he was a streak of blue and white Gore-Tex bombing the scariest precipices of Vail and…
Let’s hear it for Don Baylor. The Rockies skipper has signed up for another two years’ worth of 15-13 games at Coors Field. He’s ready to endure another two years’ worth of ulcers whenever he looks down at the bullpen and sees the reluctant warriors huddled there, praying they won’t…
Don’t worry about a thing, Oklahoma. That 69-7 thumping Dr. Tom’s hard-running Cornhuskers laid on you Saturday afternoon was child’s play. Don’t sweat it, Central Michigan. Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators may have chomped on you 82-6 earlier this year, but that ain’t nothing. Don’t get too upset, East Carolina, Rutgers,…
To hear the assorted hairdos on the boob tube tell it, you would have thought getting the Broncos onto that snowbound plane to balmy Buffalo Saturday night was a social imperative akin to feeding malnourished babies or keeping nuclear terrorists out of the Pentagon lunchroom. Forget about the sleepless expectant…
