Word: sportingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...commercial begins. Asked what playing minor-league baseball did for him, he said, "It helped me realize what was important to me. It was like going to my guru." The reference, of course, was to the Gatorade ad in which a guru advises him, "Life is a sport. Drink it up." At $1 for a 12-oz. bottle in Plainfield, Indiana...
Actually, the guru is wrong. Sport is a parquet floor, with crossing patterns of excellence and exploitation. Tyson's story is perhaps the best example of that. When legendary boxing maestro Cus D'Amato discovered Tyson in an upstate New York reformatory, he was a bad kid from Brooklyn. D'Amato didn't exactly turn him into a saint, but he did channel Tyson's aggression into boxing. D'Amato died in 1985, but Tyson continued to improve as a fighter and as a human being. After he knocked out Pinklon Thomas in their 1987 championship fight, Tyson went over...
...will be hard to top last year's NCAA final, when Charlotte Smith of North Carolina hit a last-second three-pointer to beat Louisiana Tech and give her sport a huge boost, but Smith will be back to try to head off the Huskies before their anticipated rematch with Tennessee's Lady Vols. (Connecticut remained undefeated by beating Maine and Virginia Tech last week in the East regional, while Tennessee downed Florida A&M and Florida International in the Mideast.) Says Mel Greenberg, a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who is generally considered the authority on women's basketball...
...some ways, in fact, women's basketball is superior to men's. According to Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, "It's more of a team sport. You can watch the strategy evolve over the course of a game." Her players are far closer to the ideal of the student athlete. They have a 100% graduation rate since Summitt took over the program in 1975. The women are also more accessible to the public than are the men. And because the tickets are cheaper, crowds at women's basketball games tend to be more family oriented. "We have more gray hair...
Whatever the outcome of this year's tournament, the real winner is the sport, which--23 years after Title IX mandated equal opportunities for women--has come into its own without sacrificing ethics. "For years," says Greenberg, "I took a lot of ridicule for covering the women: 'Hey, Mel, what's it like in a girls' locker room?'- stupid stuff like that. But now my friends talk about Rebecca Lobo the way they did last year about Grant Hill. We're finally getting some respect here...