Our sports prodigies — those phenoms touted to be the next Michael Jordan, Willie Mays, Joe Montana or whomever — often fail, spectacularly. In the 1980s, Todd Marinovich's father engineered his son to be the second coming of Montana. After a brief NFL career, Marinovich struggled with drug problems. Jennifer Capriati turned pro when she was just 14. Yes, she won three Grand Slam titles, but she fought depression and addiction, and fell victim to burnout. The ...

It is Saturday night. A young Army officer and his wife welcome a small group of people to their comfortable split-level home, which stands amid the tidy landscaping of a housing development in Louisville. The guests — most of them dressed neatly in sports clothes — include a computer programmer, a store clerk, a dog trainer and a psychology major from the nearby University of Louisville. They all troop downstairs to a vinyl-floored recreation room. Is this a bridge ...

It's important in sports and it's important in entertainment to stand out. Randy knew that. Right away, he wanted to leave his mark, and to do that he was aware he had to make himself different from everyone else. One way he did this was concentrating on his outfits, those brightly colored costumes with foot-long fringe that became his trademark. He brought to wrestling a unique look and style. Randy, who died in a car crash May 20 at age ...

There are two things sports fans love to hate, and the first is the epidemic of selfishness and greed: ball-hogging superstars who care only about their stats and their paychecks, teams that don't play defense and don't play like teams, owners with no commitment to winning and no sense of loyalty. Fortunately, the National Basketball Association has a team that defies those stereotypes. Its superstars — as well as its role players — took pay cuts ...

When the economy ran out of gas a few years ago and Detroit went cap in hand to Washington, motor-sports leviathan Chevrolet cut all but two of its 13 racing programs. The first survivor, NASCAR, was expected to make the cut. The other, the much lesser known American Le Mans Series , not so much. But there was a solid rationale. "Corvette sales tracked directly to customer leads at ALMS races doubled from 2005 to 2009," says John Fitzpatrick, Chevrolet Performance ...

Picture this: You're a sports fan, even a casual one. You're walking down the street, and someone accidentally bumps into your shoulder. You turn. Holy s---, it's LeBron James! You're stunned, speechless, almost breathless. Or it's Peyton Manning. Maybe it's Rafael Nadal. It's an iconic face, someone who's on top of his sport and instantly recognizable. Now picture this: the current best player in baseball — a guy who has hit an outlandish 73 home runs ...

In a front-page story in the New York Times on Monday, May 16, Rick Welts, president and CEO of the Phoenix Suns, announced that he is gay. Welts is believed to be the first major American professional-sports-team executive to make such a declaration; no male athlete in major American pro team sports has come out during his playing career. A few hours after the news went public, Welts sat with TIME to talk about why he ...

The campaign leading to Singapore's May 7 general election had the trappings of a larger political drama. Before the thronged gates of a suburban sports stadium, where a rally for the opposition Workers' Party was under way one hot night, vendors hurriedly pressed ice-cream sandwiches into the hands of the thousands pouring inside. Encircling the lit stadium were high-rise public housing blocks, from whose open windows and crowded outdoor passageways hundreds more were listening to the boisterous ...

Sportsmen and sportswomen are skilled entertainers, and there's nothing wrong with that; they bring us joy, and by their derring-do fashion a time machine that takes us back to times when we were younger and more innocent and lived for play, not work. But every so often a sports personality comes along who does more than entertain, and the Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros, who has died, aged just 54, after a long battle with cancer, was one of ...

"Sugar" Shane Mosley, one of America's greatest active pugilists, lounges in his Big Bear, California, chalet and looks across a forest of wind-whipped pine trees "conjuring" how he will defeat Manny Pacquiao on Saturday in Las Vegas. Pacquiao, pound for pound the best fighter wearing gloves, is an 8-1 favorite while Mosley is an afterthought to many sports fans who are frustrated that the Filipino isn't fighting another American, Floyd Mayweather Jr., the best defensive fighter in ...