Detroit Free Press

Ienter the Red Wings locker room and come to the head coach's office. I tense my shoulders. I clench my fists. I am prepared for a lecture. I am prepared for an argument. It is the new hockey season, and I am ready for whatever flames come flying from the famous coach's mouth.I poke my head in the door. I close my eyes.I open my eyes.Nobody here."No Scotty?" I say."No Scotty," someone says.

A few years ago, in writing the book "Fab Five," I discovered that Steve Fisher had paid a friend of Juwan Howard's a tidy sum to coach at Fisher's summer camp. This stunned me. Hiring this friend -- who then brought young Juwan to Ann Arbor as a camper -- and even interviewing this friend for a coaching position at the University of Michigan, was, to me, unseemly, and perhaps an NCAA violation.So one night, at Fisher's house, I confronted him about this incident. He was uncomfortable, admitted what he'd done, but said, "It happens all the time in college basketball."

SAN DIEGO -- There's a scene in the "Godfather" films where a member of Michael Corleone's Mafia family is about to confess to a Senate subcommittee. Michael arrives at the hearing with an older Italian man by his side, who turns out to be the would-be snitch's long-lost brother from Sicily. The snitch looks up, sees the old man, and immediately takes his whole story back, says he lied and made it up.Later, when Michael explains to his wife what happened, he says this: "It was between the brothers."

IDON'T STARE. I haven't in a long time. When you work as a sportswriter, you get used to seeing famous, large, muscular human beings entering your field of view. Staring is the worst option. Nothing says "outsider" more than a gape.Nonetheless, I stared when I met Wilt Chamberlain. Ogled him like a kid seeing his first Santa Claus. I knew better. Knew it was inappropriate. I still did it. He was that big. Bigger than the normal rules of behavior.

For the last few summers, you might have seen someone who looked like Joe Dumars playing in local tennis tournaments. He never registered under his own name -- he often used "Joe Dee" as a pseudonym -- but it was he all right. Joe Dumars. Captain of the Pistons. NBA All-Star. He wasn't the best one out there. Sometimes he got beat in the first round.But there he was, swinging away.

Here was the worst thing that ever happened to me on Halloween. I was 7 years old. I wanted to be a mummy. Since mummy costumes were hard to find, my mother cut white rags into narrow strips. Then she wrapped me from head to toe. To keep the rags tight, she safety-pinned them together. As ideas go, it was long on love and short on practicality.

You've heard about the loneliness of the long-distance runner. You never hear about the loneliness of the departed quarterback. But Brian Griese discovered who he was only when he was forced to be alone. Somewhere in the middle of running steps at the track stadium, in a self-imposed training torture, as his breath balled in his chest and sweat rolled down his temples, he could see, a half a mile away, the Michigan team that he no longer belonged to, working out together, having fun.And Griese heard his voice.This is what it said:

Lindsey Hunter tried. Man, he tried everything. He bumped him. He thumped him. He put a hand in his face, he put a hand near the ball. He pressured him and harassed him and breathed on him and forced him into the air in an awkward, falling-back fashion, the way a man is forced off a cliff.And it didn't matter.