One by one they came up to Chris Webber, smiling, batting eyelashes, bearing gifts. They gave him candy.Photographs. Phone numbers. Lots of phone numbers."Call me," a young woman cooed."Call me," rasped another.He smiled at them all. He took their numbers but lost them quickly after they'd gone. He stepped into the limo and marveled at the crowd as the car sped away."They don't even know me," he said, shaking his head. "Why would I call them?"
When an unemployed black man was stopped by police Thursday night and beaten to death for no apparent reason, many of us pointed angrily towards the police department.Why, we wondered, were two of these officers -- with a history of brutality charges -- still out on the streets? Where was the preventative action a police department is supposed to take?For answers, we can look at Brian Yinger.Yinger is a cop in Dearborn. Has been for 15 years. This week he was suspended, without pay, and ordered to undergo psychiatric tests.
She can put the chair away now. The one she jams under the bedroom doorknob whenever her husband is away. She feels safer when that chair is wedged in. She reads. She sews. She watches TV. Now and then she'll run the vacuum, because the whirring noise gives a buffer against the loneliness. And of course she has the radio. She can turn on the radio and have her husband nearby, or as near as a man can be when his life is broadcasting baseball.
MINNEAPOLIS -- Drop dead. I hope you die. You are trash. You are scum. I get letters like this all the time. So do most journalists I know. And most politicians, civil rights leaders, talk-show hosts, and movie stars. Just about anyone in the public eye can scoop through the mailbag and come up with a few juicy gems about how "your type of people" should take the next boat to Russia, Africa or hell -- depending on who was offended.
MINNEAPOLIS -- You can't smoke at your seat inside the Metrodome, only in the concrete corridors, and I swear halfway through the last game of maybe the best World Series every played, those corridors were stuffed with people too nervous to go without a drag, hundreds and hundreds of fans puffing away like expectant fathers, straining to see the TV sets, puffing some more, dying with every swing, puffing some more, waiting, waiting for the one crack in this choking drama that would give us a king of baseball for this wonderful crazy season.
CINCINNATI -- This has always been the way to beat Goliath: Take a stone and aim right for the forehead. Go for the brain. Hit him where he thinks. Two years ago, Kirk Gibson hobbled to the plate in the bottom of the ninth and sent a Dennis Eckersley pitch into the seats. It was the first game, but it won the World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not because it, by itself, was such a devastating blow. But because it stirred the brain cells. It made the Athletics, heavy favorites, feel vulnerable. They lost three of the next four; they went home scratching their heads.
THE LIVE ALBOM* Johnny came marching home Thursday morning -- John Salley, that is. A few choice thoughts from his morning repertoire at the Palace: * Q: John, how do you like Miami?
He was walking through the field to get to his father and suddenly, there it was. A big black snake."Were you scared?" the boy is asked. "No," he says now.The snake had a yellow belly. It was poisonous. The boy did what he was taught to do in his Guatemalan mountain village: he did not run. He watched the snake, saw it move towards him."Then what happened?" "Bit me," he says.
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.
