Psycho Sid Vicious is the sort of case wrestling fans will point to if you insist to them that wrestling isn’t real; it may be scripted, they’ll say, but it is definitely real. Vicious was a 6-foot-9 blond World Championship Wrestling superstar built like El Capitan and given to powerbombing…
By their meager standards, the Colorado Rockies are having a decent year in the toughest division in baseball, but to this point in the season they’re best known for their aversion to grounds keeping. In Denver during the last game before the All-Star break, with the Rockies down 5-4 to…
Streetball tour remains the hoops version of reality TV – the appeal is in wondering how you would fare out there – and a decade after AND1 tied its fortunes to showboating amateurs, here now comes along Ball4Real (bypassing numerical possibilities such as Hoops2Live, BBall3D and Porou5Defen5e). The AND1 Mixtape…
Dolphins fans have never swallowed humility easily. By all rights, Fins fans should be some of the loudest Yankees-level gasbags in the country. Since 1970, when the American Football League merged with the National Football League to create the modern NFL, no team has won more games, and in all…
On a recent Tuesday, the air around Pompano Beach City Hall smelled of evaporated rain. It was the calm after one storm and before another. By 6 o’clock, people had begun to pool under an eave at the west side of the building, news crews were unspooling cables from their…
Two summers ago in Hollywood, helicopter cameras broadcast a snapshot of hell: a van in flames, vomiting smoke into the sky like a burning oil well as paramedics nearby loaded a man into an ambulance. Naked but for his shorts, he was strapped to a stretcher, immobilized except for his…
On a spring Thursday, the parking lot at Gulfstream Race Park appears as vast and unbroken as a salt flat, inviting a high-speed, line-cutting swoop to the front of the clubhouse. The racetrack has stood here in Hallandale Beach since 1939, virtually the dawn of time in South Florida years,…
At the end of the line of the Florida East Coast railroad is the Hialeah rail station yard, where a thousand cars a day sluice in and out, past scrubby grass and piles of old railroad ties piled like hurricane debris. On one lonely stretch of track sits a handful…
Jailbait is the first installment in “Perversion in Paradise,” a New Times Series Sex has come a long way since it was about a man climbing on top of his wife once a week. For some reason, in South Florida, the physical act of love in all its forms multiplies…
First thing to go wrong was the patriotic opening. The flag-waving DVD wouldn’t fire up on the projection screen above the arena; then the Hollywood Police Department’s Honor Guard came in too soon, plodding in through the wrong gate. Of course, it wasn’t like anyone would notice among the folks…
It was the kind of news story that merits only a few short sentences in the daily newspaper. Last month, a man had been killed trying to cross I-595 on foot. Both the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported the death of Jason Louis Livers as digest items, just…
The old man swings his dead right leg out of the car at the end of the cul-de-sac, grabs the cane with the carved tiger handle, and steadies himself under the shadow of a condominium at his back. The Symphony House reaches skyward 22 stories, handsomely terraced, tastefully bland in…
Beck’s 2005 Guero album, hailed as the folk-rock-rap-whatever successor to his ’96 landmark Odelay, reveled in the artist’s usual ironic self-awareness. The title, for one, translates to “white boy,” belying a record drizzled in country twang, Mexican slang, grungy hip-hop, orchestral bossa nova, and funky electronica. Now out of that…
For two weeks in 1994, after she crashed into a steel-and-concrete pole that pulverized her ’86 Celica and subsequently cracked her skull, the only word Ellen Georgieff had command of was banana. “It wasn’t that I was crazy or dangerous; it was just I had no memory,” she says in…
Joe Rodriguez was racing upriver in an aluminum skiff when he began to grasp the folly of hunting wild pig by moonlight in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest packing the fishing camp’s only .12-gauge shotgun shell. Joe is a fishing guide by trade, accustomed to handling sharks and rays in…
“Rap these days is like a pain up in the neck/Cornier and phonier than a play fight.” Seems Danger Doom’s mumble-mouthed MC MF Doom would turn back to some bygone, fantasy hip-hop era, evoking the age when he was in footie pajamas, munching cereal, rotting his brains on Scooby-Doo, G.I…
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Philip Freedman steps out of an elevator on the 39th floor of Broward County’s tallest building and into a condo fit for an episode of MTV Cribs. A dapper and affable salesman, Freedman cues Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” then walks…
The catfights begin around minute 14, when girls at a rock club pull hair, throw awkward punches, yell unintelligible threats, brandish chairs, slap bystanders, and, eventually, yes, pull down a tube top. There follows on the television screen a boobs-and-butts montage filmed mostly at car shows, wet bikini contests, and…
To hear the locals tell it, 10 p.m. on Fridays at Georgie’s Alibi is between shifts. The early birds — the after-work crowd — are in bed, either alone or not. The night owls are arriving in dribs and drabs and Hondas. The transition period sees a little of everything…
You’ve never smelled a funeral like this one. It’s pushing 100 degrees in the ravaged back stacks of All Books & Records in the Sears Town shopping plaza in Fort Lauderdale. All but one of the store’s seven huge, old air conditioners has gone out — one of the reasons…
Hey, remember Young Circle in downtown Hollywood? Sure was a swell little patch of earth, before the city’s grand planners envisioned something called an ArtsPark on the spot. It all started with a modest spruce-up. The county chipped in $5 million. Developers said they’d pony up hundreds of thousands of…
On a sweltering Saturday, Donald Tobkin suns himself poolside behind the pinky-peach monolith that is the Ramada Inn on Hollywood Beach. Children scamper and catapult themselves into the turquoise pool. Shore birds honk overhead. From this spot, perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the surf, the sea is smelled…
