by Mitch Albom | Apr 21, 2019 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
Admit it. You were smiling. Steve Yzerman was back. Storm clouds parted. Rainbows appeared. The Stanley Cup posters in your basement were vibrating. Somewhere, the band who did “Hey, Hey, Hockeytown!” was tuning up. Steve Yzerman will run the Detroit Red Wings. It’s...
by Mitch Albom | Mar 5, 2019 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
At the end of the season, if you’re the best player in the NHL, the trophy they give you is named after Ted Lindsay. That’s all you really need to know. He won four Stanley Cups and once led the league in scoring, was a Red Wings general manager and briefly their...
by Mitch Albom | Sep 16, 2018 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
That was no accident Friday. Hank Zetterberg said goodbye to an amazing hockey career exactly where he wanted to do it: Where it began. “Having a little media scrum in the corner, in a practice rink, in Traverse City, during training camp,” he admitted Saturday via...
by Mitch Albom | Apr 11, 2018 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
If you live long enough, movies start to look familiar. They call them “historical documentaries.” I call them memories. Tonight, the film “The Russian Five” debuts at the Freep Film Festival. It’s a sold-out event, befitting the subject, because the five hockey...
by Mitch Albom | Oct 6, 2017 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
On my way to the new building, I stopped at the old one. Joe Louis Arena sat alone in the autumn sun. I entered easily and walked down the mostly empty corridors, stacked with chairs, crates of paper, old banners and posters. It looked like someone was moving out....
by Mitch Albom | Mar 5, 2017 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
This is the first week of the rest of the Detroit Red Wings’ life. Their new life. As ground dwellers. They let go of the mountain last week, trading all easily movable players to stockpile draft picks. It is the kind of move teams make when they realize the...
by mitchalbom_webmaster | Feb 20, 2017 | News
Finalists were announced today in the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors 2016 newspaper contest. Two of Mitch Albom’s columns in the Detroit Free Press in 2016 were selected as finalists. Read them here: For Best Sports Story Pavel Datsyuk says he will...
by Mitch Albom | Feb 12, 2017 | Detroit Free Press, Comment
He was always more crust than sauce, a hardworking pizza magnate with a showman’s instincts and a shortstop’s energy, all tucked beneath a layer of shyness and wonder. No matter how rich he got, Mike Ilitch approached each new challenge like a kid spying a baseball...
by Mitch Albom | Oct 13, 2016 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
Hank Zetterberg is seeing ghosts. He sits in an empty Joe Louis Arena locker room and actually nods in their direction as he praises them — Steve Yzerman, who used to sit on his left, Nick Lidstrom, who sat a few stalls down on his right. “You do know they’re gone,” I...
by Mitch Albom | Apr 28, 2016 | Detroit Free Press, Sports
Tonight, Detroit Lions fans will gather for the NFL draft, in hopes that an unproven college kid may lead them to a higher plane. There’s no real harm in that, I guess, even though the draft has grown more bloated than a whale that swallowed a schooner. Three days? To...