WIMBLEDON, England -- God has been very involved with sports lately -- at least if you believe the newspapers here."God Had A Hand In This!" read one London headline after England lost in overtime to Argentina in the World Cup."Hand of God, II!" read another tabloid.And a British journalist actually penned the following: "This was football the way God invented it ..."
WIMBLEDON, England -- You can't play tennis against a mirror, so Steffi Graf must settle for the women they put in front of her. They are not as good as she is. They are not as haunting as her lonesome quest for perfection. They do not spook her, or cause her to lose sleep. She can beat them all, even when she stumbles.She stumbled often against Jana Novotna in Thursday's semifinal. Graf double-faulted. Graf foot-faulted. Graf hit long. Graf whiffed at Novotna's serve. Whiffed? As in "swing and a miss"?Yep. And she still won.
Ihave this vision. It is of a room. A large room. Lots of high-tech equipment inside. Levers. Buttons. Flashing lights.Entrance to this room is rare. A sign outside reads "AMERICAN BUZZ." The door is always locked.But a select few have the key. And those who do get to insert the topic they want the whole country to be talking about, pull the levers and watch their power work. In recent months, George Lucas and his "Star Wars" people were in there. So were the Kennedy family mythologists.
EAST LANSING -- No need to speak. No need to look. The great pairs just know each other's moves. Shawn Respert brings the Swizzlers. Eric Snow brings the Gummi Bears. So much for the snacks.And in the hotel room, Respert watches cartoons, until the soap operas come on and Snow gets the remote control. And when it's time for the team meetings? Snow wears the watch -- so Respert doesn't have to."If he wore it," Snow says, laughing, "we'd be late for everything."Side by side by Spartan.
Maybe if he didn't look so young. Maybe if we added crow's feet to his eyes, gave him scars, a receding hairline, a prescription for Viagra. Maybe then, people would take Chris Osgood more seriously."How about if you looked like Slava Fetisov?" I asked Osgood the other day."No thanks," he said, softly laughing.
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."
Wherever you go in football, fans stick up their fingers and yell, "We're No. 1." They wave at TV cameras, at passing cars, at each other. Over and over. Their favorite digit, high in the air. "We're No. 1!"
It began with my pockets.My pockets were always stuffed. My pockets bulged. The inside of my pockets looked like the bottom of an office trash basket. Small pieces of paper stuck to smaller pieces of paper. Receipts wrapped around notes folded into business cards -- all crushed into a shapeless wad that engorged my left and right pant legs. It looked as if I traveled with tuna sandwiches in my jeans.
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.
