A couple of hours before the Florida Marlins are to play the Colorado Rockies on a mild Friday evening at Dolphins Stadium, outfielder Juan Pierre stretches his hammy beside catcher Matt Treanor, himself mere minutes removed from watching TV in the clubhouse while pensively raking his goatee with a fork…
Chuck D. once said, “Move as a team, never move alone.” And that’s what musicians do, especially in hip-hop culture. Independent hip-hop heads argue over the merits of record labels the way everyone else charts the rise and fall of Def Jam and Cash Money Crew. These days, the hot…
Pembroke Pines foosball pro Adam Horowitz has a finishing move as cold and effective as a shiv to the ribs. It’s a recent Friday-night tournament, and the diminutive, bespectacled Everglades High School literature teacher skillfully controls the frenetic little soccer ball, tapping it back and forth in the trough between…
“I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to be positive about this subject. ” — Superhuman baseball-obliterating home run machine Mark McGwire, in a March 17 congressional hearing on the use of illegal steroids in baseball On this sunburnt Friday in March, as the Orioles of Baltimore…
Andy Young won the prize for being the first awake: At 2:30 a.m. the perennial chili cook-off competitor, nervous and unable to sleep, arose to download the theme song to Gilligan’s Island and burn it onto a CD. Next up was Ralph Kalar, a wiry hardass who took his first…
The musty sound booth affords Todd Sorensen a rare vantage on a fleeting sight. Twenty feet below the announcer, four men clad in Crayola-colored vests and helmets brandish cestas, the yard-long claw-baskets that jai-alai players strap to their right arms to catch and throw a ball against a 45-foot-high wall…
Robb Tiller spent the night of Hurricane Jeanne doing what he has done for most of his 62 years — trying not to lose his ass. Every hour, as 130-mph gusts raked the grassy shore of Lake Okeechobee where his three-decade-old, amphibious Lake LA-4 airplane was staked to the ground,…
On an objectively perfect weekday afternoon at Fort Lauderdale’s Swimming Hall of Fame aquatic complex, dozens of squirming teenagers take laps in the 50-meter pool. Jack Nelson, stout as a runt pumpkin, with a mall-Santa belly and the built-in smile befitting a grandfather of 13, strides across the deck and…
For a glimpse into the mind of Pompano Beach businessman and admitted felon Steven West, flip through his company policy manual, a document positively Dilbertian in its detachment from usual human comportment. Among its edicts: “If I am talking to someone else do not interrupt me in the middle of…
The shimmering circus that is Times Square oozes neon fingers through the front glass of ESPN Zone, a restaurant in which people watch 14 large televisions while they dine — and one small screen when they urinate. In a second-floor skybox overlooking this den of excess on an early July…
It’s the sort of place where people obey speed limits, keep their lawns lush, play catch with their kids in the front yard, and invite one another to barbecues on Friday and Saturday nights. Teenagers maneuver bikes, skateboards, and motorized scooters around the meandering streets, past the beat-up basketball hoops…
At the weigh-in before the big fight, Daniel Santos fills out forms with his address and medical history and promises not to sue if he dies in the ring. Then he waits. The Tampa hotel conference room buzzes with people who consider themselves raging badasses. And here, Santos is practically…
The Seminole Hard Rock casino in Tampa is a low-slung, vanilla-colored, 37-acre playpen with a 50-foot replica of a Paul McCartney electric guitar at the street entrance and an Elvis-autographed six-string inside. On Saturday night, it becomes a cross between an outlet mall, a meat market, and a nursing home…
Jarvis Francis, a broad man with sleepy eyes and a mop of black dreadlocks that looks like a petrified jellyfish, is penciling in a green grid to tally how badly his cricket team is getting shellacked. “Baby steps, Virgil!” the 34-year-old hollers across an Opa-locka schoolyard to teammate Virgil Francis,…
Mark Raczkowski makes an unassuming soldier in the war on terror. The 72-year-old Polish immigrant with aquamarine eyes and silver hair shuffles around his tidy Coconut Creek condo in slippers and a blue dress shirt with a gold watch worn outside the left cuff. On his small dining table are…
Just before it reaches Sunrise Boulevard from the south, Fort Lauderdale’s NW 19th Avenue shrivels into a forlorn road lined by the razor-wire-topped walls of a junkyard. At the end, oil-soaked asphalt gives way to tire tracks woven in mud. Then, a scrubby, sandy berm rises about three feet to…
The most curious thing you notice when cruising Fort Lauderdale with a 12-foot jury-rigged statue of George W. Bush on a trailer is that people delight in giving you the finger. Sometimes, they shout at the hulking, smoking giant, resplendent in a spray-silver flight suit topped by a sort of…
Ron Lawrence has paid $25 to a dump truck driver for a load of dirt that never appeared. He once reluctantly loaned $20 to a man who entered a pool hall swearing he needed to fill his diabetic mother’s prescription; the fellow disappeared. And once, after he noticed a guy…
Imagine the disappointment of Cory Brehm and David Turner, a couple of friends who had journeyed from Wilton Manors to Fort Lauderdale last week to see a smoochy, thong-poppin’ cheesecake brawl at Beach Bums, a beer-splattered hangout on A1A, and instead were subjected to some actual wrestling. “It could have…
