What’s left to say? They were awful. Who else could I be talking about except the Phoenix Suns? There are times when a ball club meets defeat and you can take consolation in saying the players tried their best. Not this time. The Suns dogged it through all four games…
The white Acura pulled into my driveway and slammed to a halt. David Ramras, the lawyer, leaped from behind the wheel. “Here’s the tape,” Ramras said. “You’re going to be surprised how good this fight turned out to be.” Ramras, an extremely knowledgeable sports fan, was talking about the championship…
Don’t get me wrong. Don’t sit there and assume I’m astonished that the Phoenix Suns pay Tom Chambers $2,060,000 a year for halfheartedly bouncing and throwing a round ball. I’m not astonished by a salary that makes Chambers the most overpaid man in all of professional sports. I am amazed,…
“Criminals develop the panic disease,” Joseph Charles Stedino says. His remark is greeted by silence. Murray Miller, the criminal attorney representing ex-Senator Carolyn Walker, sits across the table from Stedino. Next to Miller sits Walker, facing Stedino. Their faces display no emotion. They are at the start of three days…
For the past two weeks, we’ve seen what is quite possibly the most magnificent hoax in Phoenix Suns history unfold. I refer, of course, to the mysterious ailments of three key players. These injuries were contracted with the statistical predictability of a triple lightning strike. They defy belief. Yet with…
Prior to the mysterious rash of injuries, “Your Phoenix Suns,” as announcer Al McCoy always calls them, were riding high. Before Kevin Johnson, Tom Chambers, and Dan Majerle were struck down by mysterious ailments, McCoy boasted that this was a team playing what he kept referring to as “Phoenix Suns…
For months we’ve been bombarded by puff pieces about General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf, the general with the 170 IQ, has been certified by the Newspaper Publishers of America as the hero of The War That Saved the Emir of Kuwait and his 350 Wives. After President Bush telephoned Schwarzkopf…
If three strikes are out, Arizona has finally touched the bottom of the barrel. First, there was Evan Mecham, whose eccentricities became such a cause celebre that the Arizona State Legislature voted him out of the governor’s office after a lengthy impeachment trial that enthralled the entire nation. Mecham was…
The terrible truth is that there can be no statute of limitations on moral crimes. Watch the final scene of the new film Guilty by Suspicion and you will understand. Robert De Niro strides from the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He has refused to name friends…
People keep asking me if I think Arizona’s two senators will get away with it. I tell them I don’t think so. Everyone tells me I’m wrong because by the time elections come around everyone will forget. But this time, I don’t think people will forget the strange alliance that…
They finally elected Bill Veeck to baseball’s Hall of Fame. I don’t pretend to know how that honor would sit with him, though. Even though he was an owner most of his years in the game, Veeck was always considered an iconoclast. While most owners have always thought a baseball…
The haunted face of Bob Simon, once a self-assured and cocky CBS correspondent, tells us all we need to know about the senseless cruelty of war. Simon and the members of his television crew appeared on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. They had just been released by the Iraqi army,…
On the morning after the indictments came out, Representative Jim Meredith came to his state capitol office at his usual time. He wore his newest three-piece suit and a cautious smile. He was determined to brazen it out. I was surprised to hear that Meredith had actually stopped briefly when…
Senator Carolyn Walker stuffs $5,600 in cash into her purse. She smiles. She rises from her chair and heads for the door. “Sorry I have to take your money and run,” Walker says. But there is not the slightest note of apology in Walker’s tone. Instead, she seems absolutely gleeful…
The battle over Peter Arnett and his reporting from Saddam Hussein’s capital of Baghdad will not go away. Turn on any local talk show these days and you will hear outraged citizens accusing Arnett and CNN of being naive dupes for the enemy line of propaganda. Some think Arnett has…
It’s odd about the people you remember best. I came into this business before Don Larsen pitched his perfect game for the New York Yankees and before John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I have encountered an uncommon assortment of characters, but I don’t stake any claim to fame…
Sue Appleberry waits anxiously. The war protest rally will begin in minutes. Never before has she made a speech in public. She feels her stomach tightening as her turn to take the microphone nears. Her speech had been carefully prepared the night before. But now she has been told there…
It took a war with Iraq to do it, but I’ve forgotten all about the sins of Senators Dennis DeConcini and John McCain. These days, I spend every spare moment staring into my television set, watching the war on CNN. “The War in the Gulf,” as television calls it, has…
It came so unexpectedly. Congress had been debating for three days. Now it was almost time for the final vote in the United States Senate. Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii was one of the last speakers. A camera poised high above Inouye picked him up as he strode wearily to…
Pete Rose deserves to be in baseball’s Hall of Fame. The preliminary committee which chooses the names to be placed on the ballot has decreed that Rose’s name will be kept off because he is still on baseball’s ineligible list. Rose was suspended for “life” by A. Bartlett Giamatti, the…
Two men from Harvard. Their names are Samuel P. Goddard III and J. Fife Symington III. Both seek to become the next governor of Arizona. How do we choose between them? What can we expect from either of them? Goddard, the son of ex-Arizona governor Sam Goddard, has never held…
Now, nearly fifteen years later, Don Devereux still remembers the empty feeling. He had just received word that Don Bolles, a reporter he much admired, had just been blown up in broad daylight by a bomb placed underneath his car. “I was working in Santa Fe on land-fraud cases,” Devereux…
