In defense of my friend and colleague Curt Sylvester -- who I understand is actually picking the Falcons (heh-heh) to win this Super Bowl -- now hear this: That was not Curt on South Beach Thursday night, with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, gold chains around his neck, a red rose in his thinning gray hair, doing the lambada and yelling at the bouncer, "LET ME IN! I KNOW DENNIS RODMAN! I REALLY DO!"It just looked like Curt.
MIAMI-- "When he arrived here, we're all like, 'We traded for him? He's going to be our quarterback?' " -- Jamal Anderson, Falcons running backFootball will forgive you many things. Fragility is not one of them.You can have a big mouth. You can oversleep. You can have a police record. But if you break too easily, they start looking elsewhere.
MIAMI-- Few reporters talk to offensive linemen. They are big, thick-necked creatures who toil anonymously in the mud and muck, so that a flashy, famous running back can zip through the holes they open and score touchdowns.Running backs, we want to talk to. Quarterbacks, we want to talk to. Receivers, we want to talk to.Offensive linemen? It's like interviewing Madonna's limo driver.The only thing you might ask a lineman is, "Pardon me, did you see the running back?"
This is what awaits the survivors.Joe Lelli gets out of the car and squints against the cold December wind. That's the lake, he says, the last place he remembers them all together, Jim, Jack, Graham and him. It was just before Christmas, the water was frozen over, hockey time, and he remembers the way they jostled for the puck. "We hit each other so hard we just started giggling," he says. "It was so much fun."
Second in a series on heartbreaks and hopes from the sports world.She came into this world with a mother and father, and for a short while, they were all together. She remembers a baseball game when she was small, sitting on her daddy's shoulders, hearing the crack of bats and the roar of a crowd. She remembers feeling happy and secure, the way a child needs to feel. That was a long time ago.
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.
