LIKE I'VE BEEN saying for years, once the Lions dump that Sanders guy, they can win a few football games.Well. You got a better explanation? This is no longer the team you knew and loathed, Lions fans. That was clear at the start of the fourth quarter Sunday, in Game 2 of The Year of Living Barrylessly. The Lions (now known as "The Silver and Who?") lined up for a punt near their end zone. Everything went fine until the snapper actually snapped the ball, which subsequently flew over John Jett's head and landed somewhere in downtown Pontiac.
If home is where the heart is, then Brendan Shanahan once left his heart in St. Louis. He played there for four happy seasons, made friends, had good times, hosted a radio show, even purchased his first house. It's a big moment when you first sign a mortgage, it makes you feel rooted, grown-up. So the dismal day he was traded to Hartford, the Siberia of the NHL, Shanahan made a vow. He would not give up his house. They could take away his uniform, pluck him like a weed.But they couldn't take his roots.
AWORD here to Barry Sanders, and I choose it carefully, thoughtfully and after much consideration:SPEAK!Enough already with the silence thing. Barry is pushing goodwill to the edge of the cliff. He is making fools out of people who defend him. And his trademark love of quiet is starting to look more and more like a negotiating ploy.
Darren McCarty will never pay for a meal in this town again. In two explosive moments that embody all that is right with hockey and all that is wrong with it, McCarty made an unforgettable impression on this Detroit Red Wings season. In the first moment, he bloodied the game. In the second, he won it.Let us begin with the first, late in the opening period Wednesday night, when he spun away from a linesman and coldcocked Colorado's Claude Lemieux in the face.
They lined the streets in a hellish heat, on the darkest day in this city's recent history. And they were smiling.They couldn't wait to hand their money over.They sweated. They sat on the curb. They passed hour after hour in boring humidity, staring at a building, waiting for its doors to open.They couldn't wait to hand their money over.They weren't shopping. They weren't buying anything. They would not go home with a car, a new dress or even a bag of groceries. Most would go home with nothing more than emptier pockets. Still, they stayed.
ATLANTA -- As they say down in Georgia, whooooooeeeeeee, Bubba! It's time for the Olympic Games, where athletes from around the world gather for that one glorious, magical moment when they can be overshadowed by a Charles Barkley news conference.
It turned out the writers, critics, talk show hosts and fans were all worried about the wrong goaltender. The guys in red weren't the problem. It was the guy in blue, a young bearded Russian whose last name -- Khabibulin -- sounds likes something you receive in a blood transfusion. And fittingly, he pumped life into a team that was supposed to be dead, and a nervous shiver into a team that was supposed to be resting this morning."Take the best word you can think of," gushed Winnipeg's Keith Tkachuk, "and that's the word for what Nik did tonight!"
So much has been written, broadcast and debated about Brian Ellerbe -- the job he has done with Michigan basketball, good, bad, whether he should get to keep it -- and over and over, people keep missing the points.First of all, his biggest accomplishment was not winning over his players, it was winning over his assistant coaches.
The sticks played taps. Twenty-three sticks, lightly banging a wooden applause, as the banner began to rise to the rafters. This is how hockey players show respect and admiration. Tap the sticks. Curved wood against frozen ice. Louder now. Tap-tap-tap-tap.
This was the last magic trick, the final yank of the tablecloth. The Red Wings, just hours before the NHL trading deadline, burned up the phone lines, said "deal," "deal," "deal," "deal," and acquired four new players, three of them major personalities, in hopes of finally straightening the wheels on their wagon roll to a third straight Stanley Cup."I went to bed last night with a wish list," general manager Ken Holland said. "We had lots of irons in the fire. We had lots of lines in the lake."
NEW YORK -- The glittering stage above the mosh pit at the MTV Video Awards is a strange place to find a female U.S. Open tennis champion -- especially the night before a big match. But there was Monica Seles at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, live, in front of millions of viewers, giggling and reading off the cue cards. Seles, in her clipped English, announced the contenders for some award, "Hootie and the Blowfish" and "Michael and Janet Jackson" and then she came to a video with a rather strange name.
