SYDNEY, Australia -- Let's get something straight, right from the start. Either you believe Olympic athletes use drugs, or you live on Mars.And if you believe Olympic athletes use drugs but American athletes don't -- then you also live on Mars.And if you believe American athletes use drugs, but when they're caught, they'll immediately fess up to it, then you really live on . . .Well, you get the point.
SALT LAKE CITY -- It is raining down in Birmingham, Ala., and the air is a balmy 69 degrees. Yolanda Cooper, a senior sprinter at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, excitedly picks up the phone. She spent the previous night with her teammates watching her track coach, Vonetta Flowers, become the first black gold medalist in the history of the Winter Olympics. Vonetta, the woman who clocks her lap times? Vonetta, who runs alongside her? That Vonetta? Won the Olympic bobsled?
The coach sits in a janitor's closet. Two mops rest in yellow buckets. A faucet and drain are in the corner. There are no windows. No desk. A telephone, tethered to the wall with a loose gray cord, sits on the floor."My office," Ben Kelso says with a chuckle.And you should see the gym.The gym is a tile floor, dirty white linoleum, with tape marking lanes from the 1950s, before Wilt Chamberlain forced them to be widened. There is one basket hanging loosely on a tin backboard. The whole "gym" is the size of a large classroom.
Millions of years from now, when all that is left of mankind are some dusty ruins and a tape of the Red Wings' 2004 playoffs, aliens will assume that the closing ritual of every NHL game was to have an opposing player skate toward the goalie, and casually -- some might even say matter-of-factly -- ram an elbow into his head.Which pretty much sums up Ville Nieminen's last few seconds Thursday night.
For the next few minutes, your name is John, OK? And you are a coach. And you have been losing. And you are walking off the court. And this is what you hear:"Hey, John! You suck!""Hey, John! I saw your wife last night and I --- her!""Hey, John! You can ---- my ---, you ---!"How do you like it? What are you thinking? Are you thinking, "I make a lot of money, so I don't hear any of this"? Or are you starting to seethe?"Hey, John! Your mother is a --- sack of ---!""Hey, John! You look like a --- load of ---!"
Twenty years ago last week, IBM gave birth to the home computer.It's been downhill ever since.Oh, sure, our speed is up. Our efficiency is up. We can talk to people in Thailand with just a few keystrokes. And any patient who has ever needed medical information will swear by computers and the Internet.But in so many ways, computers in our homes have changed us forever. The human price we have paid over 20 years?Let me count the ways.
ATLANTA -- I still remember my first ad. I was 6 years old, and my sister and I were selling lemonade on the curb in front of our house. In order to attract people driving by -- not that there were many driving by -- we needed a sign. So we got a piece of cardboard, a red Magic Marker and wrote the words, "Lemonade, 5 cents."Never mind that our letters were too big and that by the time we reached the "d," we were out of space. All in all, it was a good ad. Simple. Effective. Inexpensive. Reached the people.
Last in a series on the challenges of state athletes and their families.Gary Miller is not a famous athlete. But like a lot of us, he can chart his life by the sports he played and the uniforms he wore.He grew up in Detroit, during World War II, and played American Legion baseball on a sandlot behind a bowling alley. He wore a gray-and-red pinstripe jersey. His position was catcher.
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.
