Steve Nash is pushing 38, and he’s been taking a particularly brutal physical beat-down this year on what is a lousy Phoenix Suns team. Still, he’s one of the all-time gamers, and rather than rest his aching leg against a truly pathetic New Orleans Hornets team, Nash played 29 wildly effective…
To get on the bad side of Hall of Fame rocker Alice Cooper, Mexican boxing idol Julio Cesar Chavez, and a man who scaled Mount Everest takes some doing. But Brian Weymouth, a veteran Valley restaurant manager/sports-entertainment agent who has hobnobbed and done business with those men, succeeded in doing…
We happened by the Old Courthouse on West Washington Street early this afternoon to pick up some documents, and were greeted at the front steps by a horde of black-robed Maricopa County Superior Court judges having a group photo taken. What a crew! Judge Michael Ryan hated this photo of…
Grant Goodman, a Phoenix (now suspended) attorney who had his 15 minutes of fame a few years ago as an alleged champion of local folks being abused by their legal guardians/conservators and by the Maricopa County Probate Court, has lost yet another case–his own. In a memorandum decision…
News out of Canada a few days ago about the first-degree murder convictions and life sentences of a man, his wife, and their 21-year-old son: Their victims were the parents’ three daughters, ages 19, 17, and 13, and the husband’s first wife. Authorities found the bodies of the four females submerged…
We first met Mike Ryan, who died suddenly earlier today at the age of 66, shortly after moving here to work at this paper in August 1985. Then, he was a prosecutor at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and one of that agency’s very best. He spent time with us…
Last night’s highlight of ASU’s basketball game against Washington at Wells Fargo Arena didn’t come during the 40 minutes of play, which should give readers an idea of the outcome. The best part of an otherwise forgettable evening came during halftime of the Sun Devils’ 60-54 loss to the Huskies…
So MVP Dirk Nowitzki is at some weight-loss farm near Dallas as his NBA world champion Mavericks try to pull it together in this strike-abbreviated season. Go figure, the desperately trying-to-pull-it-together Phoenix Suns visited Texas last night, and still lost a tough one to the Dirk-less Mavs, 93-87.It was a…
Late last year, we published a story about a guy known as “Raven,” a mentally ill man who had been living for more than a year in a central Phoenix park. The piece described how several of Raven’s “neighbors,” folks who live in the area around the big park, had…
Pierre Newton may have had a “career” game last night up in Boulder, hitting a late three-pointer for the ASU men’s basketball team near the end of a Pac-12 contest against Colorado. The problem for the Sun Devils was that Newton was in the game at all. He is a…
Sadly, many of us who followed Muhammad Ali’s (aka Cassius Clay) boxing career and life for about a half-century suspected that he wouldn’t see a 70th birthday. Surely, we told ourselves privately, he never would outlast his nemesis, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, the Philadelphia fury who died late last year. Ali fought 41…
Time was, when Rick Renzi was an up-and-comer in Arizona’s (even national) Republican circles, a staunch conservative from Flagstaff who first won election to Congress in 2002. These days, however, Renzi is just another schlub facing a big-time criminal corruption rap, in his case that he (among other charges) tried…
Arizona State’s men’s basketball team played well most of the way last night against a pretty tough Oregon team, but ended up on the short end of a 67-58 loss. The Sun Devils hung tough until the last few minutes of their first Pac-12 home game, but simply didn’t have…
The ASU Sun Devils play their first home game of the young Pac-12 season tonight in Tempe against the Oregon Ducks, a contest that will tell us a lot about what to expect for the rest of the season. The beleaguered Devils, who are 5-10 overall and 1-2 in the…
But none of the aforementioned great talkers could hold a candle to one Charles Barkley, one of the Phoenix Suns’ all-time greats both on the floor and in the interview room. There’s a reason why NBA beat writers put Sir Charles on their All-Interview team just about every year that he…
Not a week goes by that we don’t hear from someone around the nation about our story last year entitled “Lyme Aid,” (here it is). The piece concerned an ailing young Gilbert woman whose parents spent thousands of dollars at an East Valley health clinic, where the practitioners claimed she…
We’re not going too far out on a limb here by saying it’s going to be another long year for ASU’s men’s basketball team. The Sun Devils play hard for head coach (he of the recent contract extension) Herb Sendek–but the team is thin and the remaining players on the…
There’s a very sound reason we don’t engage in sports gambling but on the rare occasion: We learned the hard way a long time ago that we come too close too often to striking gold–but almost inevitably lose. We wrote yesterday that, in our imaginary betting world, we would take the…
Many moons ago, we did a piece (turned into a “series”) on a dirty big-time Mesa probate lawyer named Wayne Legg. Called “As Helpless As Children,” the 1993 story led to Mr. Legg’s grand-jury indictment and imprisonment for more than a decade after a jury convicted him of ripping off…
Time was, the annual trek to So-Cal by Arizona State and Arizona’s men’s basketball teams was something to fear. Actually, that would have been just a few years ago, when UCLA was oh-so-close to winning a national championship or two. But that (as the cliche goes) was then and this…
Just back from a fast-pitch softball tournament in, of all places, the wildly endless sprawl known as Sao Paulo, Brazil. They say that about 20 million people live in Sao Paulo, which makes it one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. During “down time” from the games, which was about 90…
The long goodbye finally ended last night up in Nevada, as Dennis Erickson coached his final game at Arizona State, a crushing 56-24 loss to a far-superior Boise State Team in the Las Vegas Bowl. ASU finished 6-7 after such a promising start to a season that was supposed to…
