SYDNEY, Australia -- Eight years ago, when NBA players arrived at the Barcelona Olympics, it was Moses at the Red Sea. Everything stopped. Everyone stared. The first game of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the Dream Team was an E-ticket ride, dignitaries, high rollers, impossible to get a seat.
INDIANAPOLIS -- When he couldn't fly, he fell. When he couldn't stand, he crawled. When he couldn't take the pain, he took it, because you only get one night like this in your life, if you're lucky, and you'll take a bullet in the leg if you can get back out there and win. Mateen Cleaves knew it. His Michigan State teammates knew it.
ANAHEIM, Calif. -- And that's that.No repeat title. No championship parade. No Colorado or Dallas. No May. No June. No anything, really -- which is what happens when you suffer the biggest no of all: no wins.Four times the Red Wings took their pride and power onto the ice against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a team with a laughable name and a nonexistent tradition, and four times they skated off humbled. Wednesday night was the final indignity, a night when the Wings vowed they would show what they were about.
SALT LAKE CITY -- I will never win an Olympic gold medal. But I did, last week, make an Olympic-sized mistake.I caught a flu. In the middle of these Olympics. OK. It happens. I was sneezing and wheezing and blowing my nose all over the Alpine world.One night I got back to my hotel room early, hoping for a long sleep to knock the bug from my body.I should correct something. I said "hotel room." This would suggest that I was staying in a hotel. In truth, it was a motel. In truth, it was the TraveLodge. And not the world's greatest TraveLodge.
First in a series on the challenges of state athletes and their families.There's something wrong with Thomas! It is the only sentence the coach really remembers. There's something wrong with Thomas! After that, things began to blur, kids and adults, doctors and nurses, belief and disbelief, life and death.
The anniversary came and went. There was little fanfare, at least compared to the same day six years ago, when everyone in America was saying, "Quick, turn on your TV set! O.J. Simpson is on the run!"
You've seen these bumper stickers. "My kid made the honor roll at blankety-blank school."I used to think they were harmless. A declaration of parental pride. Now, I'm not so sure. Parental pride, it seems, can get you killed.Earlier this month, in a Boston suburb, two fathers took their kids to hockey practice. One father never came home.
SYDNEY, Australia -- Women have always been smarter than men. I used to believe that. Now I'm not so sure.One thing that always made women smarter was their acceptance of things. Like weight. In prehistoric days, for example, a cavewoman would look at a rock and think, "Hmm, that rock looks heavy."Whereas a caveman would not only think the rock looked heavy, he would feel a compelling need to see HOW heavy, so he would grab the rock, raise it as far as his struggling muscles would allow, then drop it on his head.
First, they pulled him off the bus. Literally. Suspended him from the job he loved, accused him of stealing money, said his team of high school girls, looking anxiously out the bus windows, would have to play its championship game without him.Then, over the next 18 months, like crows plucking at a carcass, certain forces in the Southfield school system slowly took away everything else Ben Kelso had worked for.
SALT LAKE CITY -- I knew this would happen if we didn't change the borders. The American sports mentality has finally infected Canada."Other countries hate us," declared Wayne Gretzky, the man who put together Canada's Olympic hockey team, which plays Finland in the lose-and-you're-out round starting today. "Nobody wants us to win but the guys in our locker room."It sickens my stomach to turn the TV on and hear some of the things they're saying about us. They're loving us not doing well. It's a big story for them."
The trip began in the foggy mist of Sunday morning, when traffic was light as drips from a faucet.I had a computer bag in one hand and a large cup of coffee in the other. Settling into the back seat, I took a long sip and looked out the window.There were four of us in this silver van, heading to an NFL game in Cleveland: Gene, the sports editor of the Free Press; Bob, one of our copy editors (and a native of Ohio who still lives and dies with the Browns); Justin, a WJR radio producer, and me.I swigged more coffee. The van lurched forward.
Ageneral manager is not a player, nor a coach. He doesn't skate or knock pucks away, he doesn't blow a whistle.What he does, in a front office sort of way, is paint. He paints a portrait of a team he wants, he paints faces over each roster spot, and finally, when all the trading and cutting and buying is over, he leans back to examine his canvas.
