First of all, no more 1 o'clock games on Sunday, OK? Both teams looked half asleep when it started. There's a reason they call it "Hockey Night" in Canada, not "Hockey Brunch." You don't play the game with a bagel and a Sunday paper. Secondly, no more talk about the "new" NHL. So far in this Red Wings-Oilers series, it's the NHL playoffs as it always has been the NHL playoffs: funny-looking goals, trap defenses and a goalie you barely heard of suddenly becoming the story.
I was sitting at the Pistons game, fans screaming, giant men racing up the court, when Matt Dobek, the Pistons' PR vice president, pointed at a TV and said, "My god, did you see this?"There in the corner of the screen, was a "breaking news" alert: David Halberstam killed in a car crash.
They say the first stage of grief is denial. And at the funeral of the rapper Proof, some folks were apparently in severe denial - about what he contributed, the world he celebrated or their own part in the culture of violence that killed him.
Don't call it college. It's not college if you don't even declare a major. It's not college if you needn't bother finishing your second semester. It's not college if you spent most of your time in the gym, or on a plane, or being interviewed. It's not college just because you wore a uniform with the school's name on it.We are hearing lately about all these freshman basketball stars - Kevin Love of UCLA, O.J. Mayo of Southern Cal, Derrick Rose of Memphis, Michael Beasley of Kansas State - leaving college to jump to the NBA. Leaving college? Please. They were never really there.
"We're gonna get back to playing the way we're supposed to, or we'll get our butts kicked by a young, hungry team."- Lindsey Hunter, after the Pistons' 90-86 loss in their playoff openerSo here, in the final minute, was Jason Maxiell, stretched high as if on a rack. Remember, if Maxiell were a tube of toothpaste, he'd be squeezed from the bottom and all balled up near the top. Thick chested, broad shouldered, he is a mountain of a torso, and mountains are damn hard to move.
He gets the best parking spot. That's one perk. Over the years, he jokes, his space has moved "closer and closer" to the Joe Louis Arena door and now "I only get bumped for two people.""Mr. Ilitch being one?" I say."And his wife being the other," he laughs.
Don't try this at home. Ben Wallace takes his left wrist in his right hand and squeezes. The wrist shifts, making a soft cracking noise that sends a shiver down an observer's spine.And that's his good hand."That's what happens when I'm shooting free throws," he says, flopping the right hand now - the one that has been injured for years. "I can shoot 10 straight good ones. On the 11th, it just slips out. I don't know when it's gonna happen.""And you have to fix it," I ask, "right there on the free-throw line?""Yeah.""You just pop it back in?"
The day he signed here, as an NBA rookie fresh out of Duke, his father had to race off and purchase a razor and shaving cream to get rid of his son's "college peach fuzz." Grant Hill had never used a razor before - always used electric - and all through the news conference, "my face was killing me."
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
