The Philadelphia Eagles made chopped liver out of the Lions in the playoffs last Saturday, but coach Ray Rhodes still hasn't eased up on Detroit.Rhodes couldn't help but get in one last dig on Lions tackle Lomas Brown's ill-fated victory guarantee."For a guy like myself, I like that kind of stuff," Rhodes said. "That was the missing ingredient that I needed."Rhodes wouldn't reveal what Brown said to him in their brief postgame conversation, but one Eagles assistant coach said Brown told Rhodes to keep him in mind when free-agency season begins.
She would not cry. She held back the tears as tightly as she once held her first basketball, cradling it all day, sleeping with it all night. Never mind this scary hospital, these sterile walls, these lousy blood tests; never mind what the doctor was telling her now, that she could die if she didn't have a bone-marrow transplant. She could die? But she was only 18! Never mind. Nekita Burnett, a college player the size of an eighth-grader, was used to laughing, clowning, cracking people up; she never was very good with the sad stuff.
You could hear him coming from miles away, the roar of his engine spitting down the gravel road. Noise meant speed, and to a supercharged, grease-under-the-fingernails racer like Chad Schlueter, speed was what life was all about. His family would listen from the kitchen and they'd hear his truck and its eight-cylinder thunder -- rrrrrrRRRRRRMMM! -- and they'd grin and say, "Chad's home." Some nights his sister Nicole, who adored him the way only a younger sister can, would lie awake until she heard his rumble. "Then I knew he was safe," she says, "and I could sleep."
* Detroit 28, Tampa Bay 10: The Bucs, having missed the playoffs, can't wait to end the season and get out in the sun. Wait a minute. They live in the sun. Pick vs. spread: Detroit.* San Diego 30, NY Giants 20: The Giants can't wait to finish this year and get the heck out of New York. But then, that goes for anyone who lives there. Pick vs. spread: San Diego.
First in a series on heartbreaks and hopes of unsung Detroit area athletes in 1995."A person like me needs all the support he can get, because of all the things that happen to me."-- From a 10th-grade English paper by Dewon Jones
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.
