Leigh Montville. "Triumph on Sacred Ground. Sports Illustrated, October 18, 1993.
You start with the graves. You have to start with the graves. You stand in the middle of the arid African landscape on a warm afternoon, surrounded by the thirty mounds of earth, not knowing where to look first. The dust blows into your face. The sun beats onto your head. You try to catalog all of the feelings, try to capture the sight and the emotions in words, but how can you do that? You stand and mostly you gape.
"This was the goaltender," a security guard says. "Efford Chabala. Oh, Chabala, he was very good. Very, very good."...
Steve Rushin. "The Caddie was a Reindeer." Sports Illustrated. August 4, 1997.
If you should ignore this cautionary tale and fly to Helsinki anyway, and from there clatter eight hours north by train, and from there drive 1,251 miles, deep into the Arctic Circle, in search of the northernmost golf course in the world, 3 a.m. tee times, caddying reindeer, tee boxes built atop saunas, the Swedish Loch Ness Monster, Santa Claus (jolly old St. Nicklaus) and an effective mosquito repellant, then at least promise me this: On the odd chance that you make it home alive, confirm to you friends that this story is true. Every word of it. Even the part about the Spice Girls. Tell them that there really is a place where a man can snap-hook his tee shot into another country--and play it from where it lays. Verify that one can indeed banana-slice a ball so badly that it not only travels backward but also travels back in time. There is no need to corroborate my claim that the yeti exists, for I have unimpeachable evidence on that count: scorecards full of abominable snowmen...
Steve Rushin. "1954-1994: How We Got Here." Sports Illustrated. April 16, 1994 (fifth of a five-part series).
In a painting, there's a spot at which the parallel lines--a river or a ribbon of road--appear to converge. Artists call this the vanishing point, that place in a drawing where things seem to disappear into the distance, often creating the illusion of a horizon. And so I find myself at the vanishing point of this story: I am standing, atremble, before the largest shopping mall in America. This is the horizon. All lines converge here.
So vast is the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, that the area in which I've parked is labeled P5-WEST-BLUE-NEVADA-D-6, a mantra I have desperately repeated since abandoning my rental car in the world's largest parking complex. Even by itself this would be the consummate postwar American dream: the 13,000-car garage. But the aptly named Mall of America says so much more than that about the desires of modern society...
For weeks I've been wondering how we got here in sports--from primitive to prime time, from the invention of the wheel to the invention of Shaquille--without pausing to ask, "Where are we, anyway?" But the information kiosks at the Mall of America make it perfectly clear. "You Are Here," all the map arrows say. "You Are Here."
Rick Reilly. "Shaq's World." Sports Illustrated. April 21, 1997.
Beverly and Robertson, West Hollywood
We are stopped, yet the can of Mountain Dew in the cup holder is doing the watusi. The windows are closed, yet my hair is doing a scene from Twister. The truck roof is bouncing up and down like popcorn in a pan.
Poltergeist? No, just Shaquille O'Neal turning up the 3,700-watt stereo system in his blue Ford Expedition until the sound is akin to what you would hear if you lived in a small compartment inside the engine of a DC-10...
"DO YOU ALWAYS PLAY IT THIS LOUD?" I inquire.
"WHAAAT?" he replies.
"DOES IT HAVE TO BE THIS LOUD?"
"NO, BRO, I HAVEN'T LOST ANY POUNDS."
Sigh. This is going to be a very tough interview...
My House, Denver
There is this ringing in my ears. No, hold on. That's the phone. It's my editor in New York.
"You're late on the Shaq piece," he says.
"WHAAAT?" I inquire.
"ARE YOU EVER SENDING IN THE SHAQ PIECE?"
"I CAN'T COME BACK EAST RIGHT NOW, I'M TRYING TO FINISH THE SHAQ PIECE!" Click.
This could get very convenient.
Mitch Albom. "A Tragedy Too Easy to Ignore." The Detroit Free Press. 1992.
The instructions are taped to the wall above his bed. They show diagrams of hands and feet, with arrows pointing left and right. His mothers pulls on his limp right arm, forward and backward, forward and backward, as if rowing a boat.
"He couldn't move nothing at first," she says. "Now he can do some on his own. Show him, Damon."
The young man in the blue pajamas turns his head and squints. He is nearly blind now. The room is dark, the air stale, the one window closed. The rails along his single bed keep him from falling out.
Now he looks at his arm and concentrates. It does nothing at first. Then, finally, it jerks in the air as if yanked by a puppeteer's string. It stays up for one second, two seconds, Damon Bailes, the most tragic currency in the city of Detroit, a young black male with a bullet hole in his head, smiles briefly, then lets go.
His arm drops, dead as air...
What are we supposed to do? The future of our city is being taken down, gangland style, one ambulance after another. We have to do something. Tonight is Christmas Eve, they are talking flurries, and that should make our suburbs pretty and white. But try to remember, while you open your presents, that somewhere, not far away, Damon Bailes is struggling to see the drawings on the wall, the ones teaching him how to walk again. For what, you keep asking yourself? For what? For what? For what?
For nothing.
And the snow falls.
Michael Farber. "Scotty's Icecapade." Sports Illustrated. December 29, 1997.
If the games can't make kids of us all, if under the layers of contracts and endorsements and other junk we no longer can locate the sweet core that got us to choose up sides and play in the first place, sports lose their meaning. In one incandescent moment, 63-year-old Scotty Bowman touched the heart of the matter...
Although Bowman has done it only once--and odds are he will not get another chance--his Stanley Cup skate late on a Saturday night can serve not only as a splendid shorthand for his career but also as a reminder to us all: In sports, our inner child should be allowed to stay up way past bedtime.
E.M. Swift. "Spin City." Sports Illustrated. February 23, 1998.
From a distance the White Ring, Nagano's skating venue, looks silver and plump and liquid, like a water droplet beading up on the broad, flat landscape. It's an apt image for figure skating, a sport of sweat, meltdowns and tears. Last Saturday night all these were in evidence in a men's competition that in the end will be remembered as the flight to stardom of a 20-year-old Russian bumblebee named Ilia Kulik...
Rick Reilly. "Driven Mad." Sports Illustrated. February 23, 1998.
You sure you want to read this? You sure you don't want to stop right now? Don't kid yourself--if you play golf, this could happen to you. If it could happen to a guy as talented and handsome and decent as Ian Baker-Finch, it could happen to you.
Seven years ago this July, Baker-Finch hit every fairway and every green, shot 66 and won the British Open at Royal Birkdale. He was handed the silver-claret jug. He kissed his gorgeous blonde wife and their two-year-old daughter, who though the microphone was an ice-cream cone and licked it. He was so overcome he couldn't speak. It was the day all his dreams came true.
It was the cruelest thing that ever happened to him...
Pico Iver. "Second Wind." Time. March 2, 1998.
The Olympics, to invoke a perhaps too-available and all-encompassing analogy, are much like the Titanic, both the movie and the ship. In other words, it's a grand, old-fashioned blockbuster that stirs you in some primal, half-forgotten place, however vigilant your defenses, throwing up simple human images of panic and delight and loss and a huge, showy, zillion-dollar model of the family of man that, for all its state-of-the-art grandeur and planning, cannot outswerve a block of ice...
Steve Rushin. "1997 Moments of Truth." Sports Illustrated. December 29, 1997.
If your memories of 1997 are neither warm nor fuzzy, blame it one sports, which were seldom warm and rarely fuzzy in the last 12 months. Ninety-seven was a bear. Ninety-seven had no hair (see Marv Albert). Fuzzy Zoeller wasn't fuzzy, was he? So rather than choose a favorite Moment of the Year, as other SI writers have done in the following pages, I have selected a Letter of the Year. Is that cheating--picking a unit of type, not a unit of time? I think not. In sports one small letter can make all the difference. Ask Johnnie Cochran: He defended O.J. but offended P.J. Of all the letter from A to Z (AZ being the postal abbreviation for Arizona, which won the NCAA basketball title), one clearly emerged as the winner in 1997. It was not L. L almost got the W. L had one 'elluva year, what with all the L's in Latrell Sprewell and Ernie Els's winning the U.S. Open and El Niño's elevating sales of L.L. Bean outerwear. But in the end 1997 belonged to E. E for E-4 (as Tony Fernandez will attest). Or E-vander. Without E, you can't get to F (which the Florida Marlins wore on their caps) or G (which the Green Bay Packers wore on their helmets). Ninety-seven gave us some remarkable champions, and '98 will have some size 15EEE shoes to fill. Indeed, the best E of the year was one that never even appeared. After Holyfield retained his heavyweight boxing title in June, this magazine ran a story on the bout's referee, Nevada judge Mills Lane. The headline read THE ULTIMATE ARBITER. Now put an E in front of arbiter. You have the headline for our next Mike Tyson story.
Tom Friend. "The Decision." ESPN The Magazine. June 29, 1998.
His jersey is on a hanger now, and his body has been through the wringer now, and he needs a minute -- okay, a summer -- to think this over.
His is the real Truman Show.
That's him on prime time every June, and that's a statue of him dunking, and that's his restaurant with the hour-long wait, and that's him shooting the money ball, and those are his fingerprints on the trophy, and maybe that's all, folks.
He has just spent the past 13 years eating room service, and carrying a league, and hiding his children and chewing his gum, and not one defender got close enough to know his flavor.
"Well, it's not Dentyne," he says.
That is not a bad legacy...
Edna Buchanan. The Miami Herald.
Gary Robinson died hungry. He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19. Drunk, loud, and obnoxious, he pushed ahead of seven customers on line at a fast-food chicken outlet. The counter girl told him that his behavior was impolite. She calmed him down with sweet talk and he agreed to step to the end of the line. His turn came just before closing time, just after the fried chicken ran out. He punched the counter girl so hard her ears rang, and the security guard shot him -- three times.
Gore Vidal.
Should the human race survive the twentieth of those wondrous centuries since shepherds quaked at the sight of God's birth in a Middle Eastern stable (all in all, a bad career move), our century will be noted more for what we managed to lose along the way than for what we acquired...
Andrew Ferguson. “The Art of Presidential Prevarication. Time, August 10, 1998.
“He’s just pleased that things are working out for her.”
-White House spokesman Mike McCurry on the President’s reaction to Monica Lewinsky’s immunity deal.
OK, just humor me now. Stick with me a second. I want to perform what eggheads call a “thought experiment.” Let’s supposed that Mike McCurry’s statement is not, technically speaking, accurate. Let’s suppose that the President was not really, truly pleased that “things are working out” for Monica Lewinsky, especially when “working out” in this instance means that she’s apparently about to tell the world that he’s a perjurer. Let’s suppose, by contrast, that the President was just the slightest bit depressed by the news. Let’s suppose, in other words, that McCurry’s statement is a lie.
The question then becomes, What kind of chumps do they take us for? And the answer is, World-class.
And not without reason
Rick Reilly. “Yo, Please Pass the Truth Serum.” Sports Illustrated, February 1999.
I’m 6'5" with blue eyes, bench 425 and often win prizes for my coq au vin. I was a valedictorian at Yale, can barrel roll an F/A-18 Hornet and dumped Elle Macpherson for hogging the covers.
True, I’m lying like Sam Donaldson’s rug, but I don’t care anymore. Lying is in. Lying is sweeping the nation. Everybody in America lied last week. Twice...
Mark Kriedler. "Memo to Kings fans -- just wait till next year." Sacramento Bee, February 7, 1999.
Let's see: At Phoenix, at Houston, at Utah, home to Boston, at Seattle, home to Charlotte, then a five-games-in-seven-nights road swing through Minnesota, Orlando, Philly, Washington, and Dallas. That's the rest of the month, beginning Tuesday.
Tell me again the part about the Kings in the playoffs.
Tell me again that improvement in the NBA occurs in a vacuum.
That the scheduling evens out.
That personality and chemistry are the same thing.
This is to say: Tell me what I want to hear.
Because the reality, it doesn't look so hot. ...
George Will. “A Man of Feeling.” Washington Post, March 4, 1999.
‘Poets,’ noted G.K.Chesterton, ‘have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.’ His point was that this was not mysterious: Chess is not the sort of subject that summons poetic thoughts.
Presidents have hitherto been mysteriously silent about child-safety seats. However, last Saturday President Clinton’s radio address concerned an improved fastening mechanism for child-safety seats in automobiles...
Mark Kriedler. “Hey, college fans, look in the mirror.” Sacramento Bee, March 14, 1999.
This is perfect. It's irritating, but it's perfect. It detonates the illusion, but it's perfect. It illustrates the hypocrisy, it illuminates the darkest corners of the NCAA's black-lit rooms, it's depressing as hell, and timing is everything.
Also, it's perfect. ...
Jack McCallum. “Sweet 'n Low.” Sports Illustrated, March 15, 1999.
It is time for the NCAA to extend a lifetime automatic bid to Homer Drew. That way the Valparaiso coach with the pressed white shirt and the beatific smile will be around every March to den-mother us through the tournament, pointing out the potholes and steering us gently to the sunny side of the street. For no matter how many smiley-face story lines emerged after last week's first two rounds -- you gotta love a Sweet 16 that includes five double digit seeds (the most ever), Bing Crosby's alma mater, a father-son coaching team right out of Hoosiers, a wondrous Wally and a concoction from an Alaskan medicine man -- harsh reality nibbled away a bit at the tournament's sweet underbelly. ...
Richard Hoffer. “Grand Larceny.” Sports Illustrated, March 15, 1999.
This time it was supposed to be different. That was the whole point of the promotion: Two vigorous heavyweights would step into the ring and, on the basis of their skill and courage alone, decide boxing's most important championship. So this was going to be unlike almost any other bout in recent history. It was without artifice, without intrigue, without any angle that played to our cynicism. No ex-con on the loose, no white hope, no bellowing publicity machine inflating a sorry event -- just two guys whose careers had led them to a logical and much anticipated conflict. ...
But one thing we've learned is that boxing is never really different. The sport, as it is today, will defeat the best intentions every time. Short of the on-the-spot surgery by Mike Tyson that gave boxing a black ear two years ago, last Saturday's title-unification bout, in which bizarre scoring turned a fairly one-sided fight into a draw, was as definitive a disappointment as is possible to deliver. ...
Mark Kriedler. “No! Don't! ... Yes! Typical '99 Kings.” Sacramento Bee, April 11, 1999.
The entire Kings season was congealing now into a single, gnarly, representative shot. Fittingly, it was being launched by Jason Williams.
Strategically, it was the wrong shot at the wrong instant.
Geographically, it was from a point not altogether on the map.
Tellingly, the thing went in.
We'll get to the details, but on a certain level they're almost irrelevant. ...
