Love on the Rocks

The only sticking point in the romance, Andi remembers, occurred last spring when KC showed up in Moab with a brand-new cherry-red Avalanche. A Chevy Avalanche. “When I saw him show up with it, I thought it was a rental,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he’d buy a Chevy.” KC…

Heaven Help Us

The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary — which should know better — defines “baseball” as “a game played with a wooden bat and a hard ball by two teams of nine players each…the object of the game being to make as many runs as possible within nine innings of…

The Spirit Moves Her

“God made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”– Eric Liddell, 1924 Olympic sprinter, as quoted in Chariots of Fire, 1981 Oy. Here it is, the Days of Awe, the most important time on the Jewish calendar — a somber, introspective time when the faithful atone for…

Football Fanatics, Arise

Now that football season has kicked us in the butt and the state’s major teams, with the exception of Colorado’s Buffaloes, have jumped out to good starts, it’s time for readers to test their knowledge of local gridiron history — and to predict the future. Herewith the Official Colorado Football…

Run, Buffs, Run

Here’s how you go about getting an interview with the nationally respected coach of the University of Colorado’s best hope for a national title this fall: Walk into his windowless ground-floor office, sit down on the only chair and say, “Hey, coach. What’s new?” Don’t be ridiculous: This isn’t the…

CART Blanch

For true believers like Simon Hanley, the sting of burning methanol in the nostrils is akin to holy incense and the deafening screech of 800-horsepower engines is the music of the spheres. With the possible exception of bullfighting and warfare, no sport intoxicates its fans like big-time auto racing, and…

Scattershot Logic

On a recent morning, Bill and two of his buddies make the drive from Littleton to Evergreen to do a little game harvesting — buffalo, to be specific. The shooter, Bill, arrives last. He walks down to the pen and peers inside the chain-link fence to scope out the quarry…

Long Bombs Away

With the Rockies banging around in their familiar fourth-place hell and the bewildered Nuggets awaiting the Eye Chart Era (that’s B-Z-D-E-L-I-K, Doc, and let’s see here, looks like: T-S-K-I-T-S-H-V-I-L-I), local fans find themselves yearning for some real sport — the invasion of Iraq, say, or the start of football season…

Still Hungry

Larry Butler is losing his chops. That’s bad. It was really a matter of timing more than anything else. In the summer of 2001, Fox TV called Larry at his Morrison home, practically begging him to compete in a televised tournament. “I was still ranked quite high,” he recalls. But…

Game’s Up

In the tumult of an ugly and tragic year, the realm of public villainy has expanded to accommodate Arab terrorists with a lust for mass destruction, Catholic priests with a taste for little boys, and wealthy corporate swindlers with their manicured mitts in your bank account. There’s no end in…

Puck Stop

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…

Kiki Calling

What a mess. It is taking the Denver Nuggets much longer to hire a new head coach than the Egyptians took to build the pyramids. While the search continues, here’s the inside story of the team’s painstaking selection process. You won’t read it anywhere else, simply because nobody else employs…

Fur Real

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…

Midterm Grade: F

Look: The children are coming in from recess, and it’s clear that the fractious ten-year-old everyone calls Rockie needs more counseling — maybe even another personality transplant. Rockie still fails to heed his teachers. He doesn’t play well with others. As usual, the poor kid’s flunked his midterms and will…

No Sweat

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,…

A New Day Dawns

The crowd didn’t riot. No one set himself on fire in the parking lot. There wasn’t a speck of angry talk about hiring a hit man to whack out Claudio Reyna or Clint Mathis. In fact, as the biggest game in the history of U.S. men’s soccer came to its…

Fist City

There’s an even-money chance that the next Oscar de la Hoya was somewhere in the building Monday night — shadow-boxing in a back hall, sleeping in the snack bar or telling his friends in the bleachers that his time had come, that he’s just gotta win the tournament this time…

Pool Party

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…

Going for Three

If you’re in Manhattan feeling frisky and need a workout this Saturday morning, leave your empty beer glass on the mahogany in Martin’s and briskly walk the five furlongs to Penn Station. There. All done. Now board the 10:31 train, hunt for a cozy spot in the bar car and…

Water Hazard

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…

Balls to the Wall

The vast majority of American men have nothing more in common with major-league baseball players than an occasional hangnail and the right to a jury trial. Most of us couldn’t hit a beach ball thrown by an eight-year-old, much less Randy Johnson’s heater, and whenever we execute the hit-and-run, there’s…

Fur Real

“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…