The room is quiet. The lights are off."Anybody out there?" the puck says."I don't hear anything," says the stick.The lockers stand empty, side by side, collecting dust. The names are still there. "Yzerman" next to "Shanahan" next to "Joseph." The names are still there, but the players are not."Probably a traffic jam," the puck says."Yeah," says the stick. "You know construction this time of year."
Someone explain this to me. Enron, the seventh-biggest company in the nation, goes belly-up. It inflates its numbers, lies to its employees, avoids taxes, sets up dubious subsidiaries on tropical islands, then collapses under the weight of its own deceptions, leaving workers and stockholders holding an empty bag -- but only after Enron's top dogs have bailed out.Every day, there are new revelations of Enron lies and exceptions. Every day there is new talk of cheating, hiding and shredding any document that could be damning.
Ben Wallace wore his hair in the Afro, and when a man's hair rises, can the man do any less? So Wallace stood up Thursday night, nearly taking the game over, and Rasheed Wallace, bad foot and all, stood up, too, and Rip Hamilton stood up and Chauncey Billups stood up. They all stood up and stared into the snarling dragon of this Game 7, then they dropped baskets down its throat until it choked.
I have never won an Olympic gold medal, so it is not for me to tell someone what he should do with his. But certain "experts" last week didn't let that stop them. They strongly suggested Paul Hamm, the U.S. Olympic gymnast, should take his gold medal, press it into the chest of his South Korean competitor, and say, "Here, this is yours. You keep it."
EASTRUTHERFORD, N.J. -- On the bus ride to the stadium, the other Lions were exhorting him, saying, "This your kinda day, baby, look out there, baby, your kind of day!" James Stewart looked out the window, saw the dark winter clouds, the gushing rain, and he must have thought: Great. So now I'm a mudder?Well. If the cleat fits . . .
SAN DIEGO -- This is what I saw sitting across from me: Don King, the boxing promoter, with his frizzled gray hair and shaded glasses, grinning and yelling and mopping his brow with a napkin. He was mouthing on and on about his latest boxing promotion -- "Call your local cable operators! Call your local pay-per-view!" -- working himself into a real lather.
Amessage to Osama bin Laden on the one-year anniversary of his terror:You failed.If you are dead, you failed, because you are not in some blessed place, sitting under the Yum Yum tree. You are in a corner of hell reserved for murderers.And if you live on, you failed, too. Because you are hidden in some cave in a forsaken corner of the world, forced to recognize the truth: What you sought to weaken, you fortified. What you sought to terrorize, you emboldened.
There was a popular song during the first World War. Its title was "Over There." It encouraged young men to "get your gun" and "make your mother proud of you." It told the world "the Yanks are coming . . . and we won't come back till it's over over there."Today, for most of us, war is indeed, "over there." It arrives only in green-screen TV reports and controlled press briefings and presidential photo ops that say "Mission Accomplished." Some of us would like to keep it that way.So last week, when images of flag-draped coffins appeared on the Internet, many complained.
MITCH ALBOMSALT LAKE CITY -- He couldn't stop giggling. It kept gushing from his mouth, this high pitched "huh-huh-huh." As he held his skis aloft --"huh-huh-huh" -- as he hugged his coach -- "huh-huh-huh" -- as he waved to the crowd of screaming Swiss countrymen, waving flags and clanking cowbells."SI-MON! SI-MON!""Huh-huh-huh!"Up in the sky, just moments earlier, Simon Ammann had been huge, a giant, riding the wind for 436 glorious feet.Now, back on earth, he was Harry Potter.A giggling Harry Potter.
He waved to his wife and baby son, and headed for the airport.Fourteen years later, he still hasn't come home.The son is a teenager now, about to start a new school. The wife does the chores that her husband used to do. She takes care of the lawn. She fills the gas tank. She is hardened by her tears but strengthened by her faith.
IT'S Christmas, you've seen "It's A Wonderful Life" a million times, so you know the concept: Jimmy Stewart keeps trying to get out of his rut, but in the end, winds up back in the same old place.Who knew that movie was really about our football team?Bah, humbug. The Lions keep telling us they are not the same old Lions. Then, in the most important games of the year, they go out and play like ...the same old Lions. Oh, sure, Sunday's loss took some extra effort. There are blown games, there are blown seasons and there are works of art.
Magic Johnson was on the phone, talking about the differences between living in Michigan and living in Los Angeles."The biggest difference?" he said. "Hospitality. Just saying hello."Saying hello? How hard is that?"Do you know that in L.A. you can live for 20 years in the same house and not know your next-door neighbor?" Magic said. "Can you imagine that happening in Michigan? You'd know the whole neighborhood."We offer that up as Defense Exhibit A in what has been, to this point, a one-way spit-fest between La-La Land and the Motor City.
