LADIES AND gentlemen, kiss your sports fan good-bye.Check back in a week. Follow the trail of empty pop cans and pizza boxes. Listen for the sounds of a whimpering voice, hoarse from screaming. Sniff the aroma of unwashed jeans, dirty socks and ...OK, forget the sniffing part.You get the idea. We are about to enter the mother lode of sports hysteria. Seven days of playoffs without a break. Red Wings. Pistons. Red Wings. Pistons.Two sports. Two teams. Two playoff series.And -- get this -- alternate nights!
There were no warm-ups for Herman Moore. He began the week on crutches, and now, on Sunday morning, he took the first bus over to the stadium -- "The one with the players who like to get here and sleep," he would say later -- but he did not sleep. Nor did he stretch or even jog. He went straight to the trainer, Kent Falb, who hooked Herman's left foot to an electric stimulator: two pads, some conducting jelly and a flipped switch on a little black box.
MINNEAPOLIS -- With the sellout crowd roaring like an evil engine, and the Lions down to the last play that mattered, Charlie Batch took the snap, dropped back, looked desperately to the end zone -- and got absolutely flattened by John Randle.So there's one thing he and Scott Mitchell have in common.
It could have been a night to forgive the sins, to embrace boxing once again. Instead, when the decision was announced, you realized why you threw this dumb sport out of your house in the first place.
The first thing Darryl Towns did, after he was shot, was stagger toward his mother's bedroom. She wasn't home. He knew that. But bleeding from the chest, the life oozing out of him, he retreated to the safest place he could think of: Mama's room.He had always been his mother's son. How many times, as a little boy, had he tiptoed down this same short hallway, curled up at the foot of her bed, and watched TV with the volume low until she woke up?
Look, I have been humiliated before. Like the time when I was 16 and I was trying to impress a girl on a cruise ship and I walked over and said, with all the suave charm I could muster, "Hi, how ya do--'?" -- and I waved my hand and knocked a glass of milk into her lap.Took me years to get over that.
You're out for a family canoe trip. You have your two young children with you. You come around a bend, and there, in the water, is a soaking wet man who has just fallen out of his canoe. He is screaming mad. He is cursing. He uses the F-word, and he uses it again and again. You paddle past quickly, trying to cover your children's ears.You're upset. You worry for your kids.But do you have a lawsuit?
He slammed the ball between his legs, then bounced up and down, then whacked himself in the helmet with both hands, then shook his fists at the crowd. I guess this is what you'd call a touchdown dance. That, or he ate some really bad Mexican food before the game.
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.
