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.
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.
