There are things you know — and then there are things you know. The difference is everything. In 1969, while he was in Germany attending his first international track-and-field competition, Frank Shorter roomed with a hammer-thrower, a man of immense proportions. One night the roommate began bouncing off the walls,…
How would this country’s motorheads react if the next three Daytona 500 winners were Romanians driving Russian race cars? What if an NFL expansion team from Amsterdam or Tokyo built a Super Bowl Dynasty? How many tickets would U.S. baseball nuts buy if the World Series featured the Toronto Blue…
It’s springtime in the Rockies, the time of year when a young first-term governor’s fancy turns to education reform, gun control through legitimate legislative means and…high-stakes pigeon racing. Or so I’d heard — about the pigeon racing, anyway (the other stuff seemed reasonably true). “That’s right,” says Richard Ott Sr.,…
The favorite in this Saturday’s Kentucky Derby is a regally bred but half-crazy colt named Fusaichi Pegasus, and if you can pronounce his name, you’re doing better than most of the bourbon-soaked horse gentry decorating the saloons of Louisville. To be sure, Foos-ey-EE-chee, American-bred and Japanese-owned, is quite a runner:…
If you look hard enough, there are plenty of similarities between a car dealership and a strip club. For starters, both rely heavily on sex to sell. (If you’ve ever been to an auto show, the comparison becomes even clearer.) You’ll probably find more pinkie rings per person in either…
In 2000, life among the Colorado Rockies remains a pennant or so short of bliss. National League batting champ Larry Walker recently went to Las Vegas, he reports, where he lost not only his money but his swing. Six games into the season he was hitting an un-Walkerlike .133. “Oh,…
Basketball players and boxers, in particular, like to talk about how they get no respect. What this usually means is that the athlete allegedly being disrespected (see also: “dissed”) feels his opponent is not showing proper regard for the dissee’s sporting skill. Denver-area curlers, though, have a much more basic…
Late in the second round Friday night, native son Stevie Johnston’s left eyelid was gushing a torrent. He knew it was time. Circling left, he caught Julio Alvarez with a stiff right hook that startled the Mexican, then shot a straight left to the chin that sealed Julio’s fate. “I…
Adherents of the long view can rattle on all they like about the grueling 162-game schedule and the notions that the real fight begins in late summer and authentic quality shows in October. Fact is, the Colorado Rockies’ reconstructed brain trust will learn a great deal about its reconstructed baseball…
So there she was, standing in the vast ballroom at the Las Vegas Riviera at the North American Eight Ball Championships last May, and Conifer resident Christine Honeman knew she was toast. She knew it with such certainty that she couldn’t even look at the table. The shots that were…
No question: Kids are different today, diluted versions of earlier specimens. At the Northglenn Judo Club, which meets Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Northglenn Community Center behind the Holiday Inn off 104th Street, the old-time instructors have had to adapt in a way that Bobby Knight should have and…
At the age of 27, Stevie “Li’l But Bad” Johnston has the aspect of an old warrior. The angry clots of scar tissue decorating his eyebrows frame a gaze as piercing as a jaguar’s. He speaks so quietly that you can sometimes barely hear him. But bring up the subject…
If you live in Colorado and follow basketball at all, you certainly know about Chauncey Billups, homegrown sporting legend, one of our finest success stories. You can survey his accomplishments on the official home page of the Denver Nuggets, the corporate division for which Billups currently works. He was a…
In case you missed it, Denver heavyweight Will Hinton fought former World Boxing Council champion and current contender Oliver McCall last month in a small arena at the Grand Casino in Tunica, Mississippi. To say the fight did not go well for Hinton would be like suggesting that Mike Tyson…
Here, then, is the narrow ledge paced by all professional athletes. Fall off one side and you land in a pile of Monday Night fame, immortality and flattering TV graphics. Topple off the other and you sit in a small but neat white house with blue trim just off Five…
All right, then. Just how long has it been since your Denver Broncos rose from the slough of despond to win a pair of Super Bowls? A thousand days? How long since the icon John Elway hung up his cleats and Terrell Davis went into traction and Shannon Sharpe decided…
Kurt Warner may not know it, but Some Things Never Change. With six weeks left in the National Football League season, the perennially miserable Cincinnati Bengals are 1-10 and eager to clean out their lockers. The flightless Philadelphia Eagles are once more lolling in the NFC East basement with a…
As midnight draws near for the decade, the century and the millennium, humankind’s most powerful, most undeniable impulse is to make lists. By now, of course, most of the good lists are already taken. Chiseled in stone. Scotch-taped to David Letterman’s ego. Posted on the Internet. Magnetized to the refrigerator…
Buddy Bell had been in town all of five minutes when he started talking in riddles. “The situation here can be as perfect as a situation can be,” Bell explained at the October 20 press conference where he was installed as the Colorado Rockies’ new manager. “I understand that no…
For the last month or so, I’ve been shucking littlenecks from the supermarket, splashing them with a little Tabasco and eating dinner in front of the television set. One night before tuning in, I constructed a pastrami on rye the size of a housing project. Trapped in a couch dent,…
Dressed head to foot in orange and blue, the crazies stood and howled in the Denver night, their raucous cry of joy mingled with blood lust. Their team had just taken a late lead, and now no one could shut them up. They flapped orange pennants and waved blue caps…
The pictures, descriptions and accounts of Saturday evening’s debacle at Mile High Stadium are not pretty. But here goes. By the end of the fourth quarter, Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Mike Moschetti had thrown three interceptions, been sacked nine times and earned himself a bloody nose. Meanwhile, his team endured a…
