The peculiarities of the national pastime are, at the present time, running amok, like drunks loose in the outfield. Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie media glutton who swallows newspapers, TV networks and movie studios the way fans at the ballpark eat peanuts, now proposes to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers and…
Having checked with the proprietors of Manhattan’s major nightclubs, opium dens and appliance-repair shops, we have some news: Deep Blue didn’t paint the town red after blowing away Garry Kasparov in the recent Super Bowl II of Chess. Blue didn’t call room service. Didn’t pop a magnum of Dom Perignon…
The St. Paul Saints are full of hope…and mischief. Before the first pitch is even thrown, the team mascot–a live, oinking pig named Tobias–waddles out to home plate carrying a supply of baseballs for the umpire. Up in the bleachers at tiny Midway Stadium, a Roman Catholic nun named Sister…
With twenty minutes to go in the first half, Rapid Man is hunting down the rowdiest fan in the west stands. Not to throw him out of the place. To reward him. The rowdiest fan in the west stands, who turns out to be a guy standing on his seat,…
The vast majority of football-crazy, hoops-happy, golf-goofy American sports fans give their attention to horse racing just one day a year now. It’s the first Saturday in May, when all eyes turn to Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Most people will want to get right back to their…
The seventh edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia (The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball) weighs six pounds and is stuffed with 2,875 pages of facts a lunatic can love. For instance. If you need to confirm (and who doesn’t?) that in May 1902, Cleveland traded Dummy Leitner to…
It’s a good bet that Messrs. Tinker, Evers and Chance, turning double plays in the Celestial League now, are looking forward to the sixteenth of June. That’s the day their Cubs get another shot at the White Stockings in a game that counts. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown will probably be…
On the bulletin board outside the Rockies’ clubhouse, some wit had posted a newspaper photo of Marshall Herff Applewhite, the late, lamented guru of the Heaven’s Gate cult–he of the astonished eyes. It’s astonishing, all right. As of Wednesday morning, seven games into the season, the Rox had won five…
It has been years now since the morning I woke up older than every player in the major leagues. What to do. What else? I poured myself a quadruple Scotch, drank it in my bathrobe and got on the hook to the parish priest. “Spare a minute today, Father? I’d…
For almost three decades, if you heard that the men’s basketball coach at the University of Colorado was going to hang around for another year, it was like learning that Captain Smith was still the skipper of the Titanic. In Boulder, basketball was a minor annoyance wedged between football season…
Bill Clinton, the new night clerk at Motel 6, decreed last week that for the foreseeable future, not one federal nickel will be spent on human cloning research. And he asked privately funded geneticists to voluntarily stop such tinkering down in the lab. What can the man be thinking? Just…
If the lords of baseball really want to clean up the awful mess they’ve made, they probably won’t be asking stormy Albert Belle to double as the game’s official spokesman. Mark McGwire, either. A huge slab of muscle who’s proven as fragile as a china figurine, McGwire has turned into…
That hint of springtime you feel in the air can mean only one thing. The attention of red-blooded sports fans in these parts will soon turn to the fluid dynamics of air flow, plausible stress-strain cycles at fixed impact velocities and (everybody’s favorite up in the Rockpile) the Navier-Stokes Equation…
He doesn’t remember much from that night at the Bossert Hotel, except that someone kept refilling his glass with champagne, and he could see from the windows that the whole length of Montague Street was clogged with delirious people. “We had to take turns going outside and waving to them,”…
MIAMI (October 3, 1997)–Say it loud, South Florida. The Marlins are going to the World Series. Playoff veteran Bobby Bonilla blasted a three-run homer off Mark Wohlers in the seventh inning at Joe Robbie Stadium last night, breaking a 2-2 deadlock with the favored Atlanta Braves. The Marlins went on…
Every time the University of Colorado men’s basketball team hosts the University of Kansas two hours before kickoff in the Super Bowl, you can count on an audience of, say, dozens. Street-corner preachers in sub-zero weather draw bigger crowds. So do doctors advertising specials on pre-frontal lobotomies. More Boulderites are…
You can take two million dollars out of Dennis Rodman’s checking account. While you’re at it, go ahead and set it on fire. With his endorsements, he’s paid seven times that. Every season. You can also take him off the floor and sit his crazy ass on the bench. Not…
If they look hard enough, Green Bay fans will be able to find bratwurst in New Orleans. When it comes to fulfilling desire, you can find anything in New Orleans. Of course, the Wisconsin snowfolk might do better to sample the piquant local sausage called andouille, which Cajun/Creole chefs put…
Let’s hope Daffy Duck buys the Los Angeles Dodgers. Or Boris Yeltsin. If the Bosnian government puts together an ownership group, writes a check for 300 million bucks and moves the team to burned-out Sarajevo, that will be fine. Maybe Madonna is interested. For all that it matters, she can…
Whooooops! Afterward, Lionel Washington couldn’t hold back the tears. A devastated Shannon Sharpe wondered aloud if he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror come Sunday morning. Or face John Elway. Sharpe predicted it would be “years until the Broncos get over this loss. Probably the next century.”…
Above all, 1996 was the year Denver wore the Scarlet Letter–that big red “A” at once symbolizing the city’s first professional sports championship and its shameless dalliance with the new kid in town. All hail immediate gratification: Marc Crawford’s beautifully coached, deeply talented Colorado Avalanche had scarcely forgotten the taste…
Here’s to you, Mister Robinson. Down in Ruston, Louisiana, the administration of Grambling State University and the same contingent of sour, win-crazy alumni you find at any losing school want to get rid of the head football coach. The coach wants one more year. One more chance to put an…
