SINCE, LIKE a lot of people, I went to the Pistons' home opener Friday night, and since, like a lot of people, I don't know when I'll be back, I thought I'd get all my observations in this morning.First quarter* Nice crowd. Loudest cheer is for Mateen Cleaves.* Then again, he doesn't start, does he?* Chris Webber, who'll be a free agent at the end of this season, is Sacramento's biggest star. There are signs reading, "Webb! Come home! We need you!"* I'm not sure that's a confidence booster.* Go! Pistons ball....
Being president has its drawbacks. You could ask George W. Bush. But you could also ask Matt Millen, Joe Dumars or Dave Dombrowski. For the first time in memory, three of our team presidents are being hounded at the same time: Millen for losing his cool, Dumars for showing too much, and Dombrowski for not acquiring any.
This week, my nephews arrive from overseas. I will greet them with presents. I will whisk them to the new Harry Potter movie. I will take them shopping for books and will ask, as we ride in the car, if they want to stop for ice cream.The world will be theirs, if I have anything to do with it. During our Thanksgiving visit, I will be all over them. I will rub their hair, lift them up, and promise they are "my two favorite nephews."There are, of course, only two of them.
Someone had to go, or no one was gonna come. That's baseball in the Motor City in 2002. Fans don't care. The seats are mostly empty. The saddest part of Phil Garner and Randy Smith's getting the boot Monday wasn't that two nice guys couldn't get the job done.The saddest part was that it took their firing to let most Detroiters know the season had started."Whenever you start off 0-6 it is not pleasant," said Dave Dombrowski, the team president, in announcing the firing of his manager and general manager. "I think we're a better club than we've performed."
SEATTLE -- So I guess the winning streak is over?Then again, we saw that coming, as soon as we saw the plane on the runway. Football, coaches yell, is 60 minutes of war. Unless you are the Lions on the road, in which case, you start raising the white flag during the national anthem.
So now 12-year-old baseball players are thumping their chests and goose-stepping around the base paths with the same sneering, I'm-the-man attitude that already taints so many professional athletes.Great. We have cloned the monster, and it's pre-pubescent.
DENVER -- Last year, at about this time, Fredrik Olausson was in a hospital bed in Bern, Switzerland, with a ruptured spleen. The idea of scoring an overtime goal in the Western Conference finals was as likely as his getting up and doing the rumba.But time passes and things change, and here he was, one year later, on Wednesday night, in overtime, taking a pass in from Steve Yzerman and lining up a big slap shot that somehow did what all the other great Detroit shots could not do on this night -- got past Colorado's Patrick Roy.
On the morning of Oct. 12, a homeless man was pushing a shopping cart down Lincoln Street in Highland Park. He came upon a body, lying near the sidewalk. It was a slender body, tall, athletic, only a teen, wrapped in two T-shirts, jeans and black athletic shoes. The homeless man took a better look. Maybe it was sleeping. Then he backed away. There was a bullet hole in the rear of the teen's head and another in the front where the bullet exited -- police call that a "through and through" -- and this body wasn't sleeping and it wasn't waking up, not that morning, not ever.
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.
