When Howard Cosell stepped down from his 35-year career as a radio sportscaster recently, his departure was barely mentioned. This was strange. In his best years, Cosell’s name was on everyone’s lips. He was the undoubted star of Monday Night Football when that show was one of the hottest on…
I have touched the highest point of my greatness; I haste now to my setting. I shall fall Like a Bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more. Shakespeare, Henry VIII For great professional athletes, the last act is the most difficult to perform with grace. It…
For two years, Valentin says, he was unable to remember his own name. While he had once been an accomplished musician, his musicality had apparently been beaten out of him-he could no longer hold melodies in his mind; they were suddenly slippery, evasive, lost. Other parts of his personality seemed…
Robinson also says he does not know why Weaver and Schilling were not notified prior to Brown’s release. He is sure, however, that the oversight wasn’t the police department’s fault: Such notification is the responsibility of the agency that’s holding the prisoner, in this case the sheriff’s department, he says…
A good way to hit the jackpot in the Arizona Lottery may not have anything to do with luck. According to some unhappy lawmakers and business people, all you have to do is make promises about creating jobs.” Apparently, it also helps if your business is fund raising. Stung by…
MILES AWAY FROM asphalt, in a secluded lodge north of Lake Pleasant, the Russian blusters and frets. Mad with dislocation, he drags his prison-damaged leg from room to room, bellowing for the interpreter, sounding like a wounded bear. Valentin Bodrov, the son of a traitor, has a child’s capacity for…
IF YOU LIVE in the inner city, it isn’t difficult to imagine that you will become the victim of a crime. At least, it hasn’t been difficult for Chris Schilling and Jeff Weaver to imagine it during the nearly three years that they’ve lived in the historic Story District, south…
And, of course, Victor was aware of the ice-pick assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940-lending grim veracity to Trotsky’s warning that “Stalin seeks to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.” Even so, Victor Kravchenko appeared before the committee, speaking in…
Big Brother is watching as you leave the Sky Harbor International Airport parking lot. This is not fiction. It’s fact. But why? High-flying speculation over that question has been circling the airport parking lot for some time now, ever since Sky Harbor inaugurated a practice that smacked of something right…
Agnes Lang sums up her first head-on collision with the legal system in her 79 years like this: “It was as much of a lemon as that car those people sold me.” The Tempe resident sued East Valley Jeep Eagle in 1989, claiming salesmen had hoodwinked her on the value…
Twelve-year-old John Johnson was playing with his buddy in a ditch behind his east Phoenix apartment earlier this month when he found a cardboard box stuffed with bloody needles. The seventh-grader raced home to show the discovery to his mother. “He was scared,” recalls his mother, Sarah Fluhardy. “I could…
You’re Mike Tyson. Many boxing fans predicted you would be the greatest heavyweight champion of all time. You had talent, speed and power. You displayed great courage in the ring. For a time, you dazzled crowds the way the young Muhammad Ali did. You were undefeated and people said you…
The other day I came across a fascinating mystery novel. If I am right, this book is not only going to sell big, but it could make a difference in the current industrial war being waged against us by Japan. Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun serves two purposes. On one level,…
Still, as the years went by and civil rights laws were passed and enforced, Mitchell sensed that racism was dying down in Arizona. After her kids grew up, Mitchell got a high school diploma and earned a social sciences degree from Phoenix College. In 1987, she landed what she thought…
When a position opened up in January 1989, she applied. She scored 90 out of 100 on a test to get her old job back. But she was told that now she needed a law enforcement background. Diggs filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging she…
For four years, Wilda Heil has been battling ovarian cancer, and at the same time battling to hold on to her medical insurance. Guess which fight she’s winning. Heil is one of an estimated 35,000 “medically uninsurable” Arizonans-those who either have been canceled or who can’t find an insurer. (That…
Poet, painter, actress, gangland den mother-perpetual publicity hound LIZ RENAY may well be the most colorful character ever to emerge from Mesa. In and out of the Valley since she won a 1949 beauty pageant sponsored by a national bra manufacturer, Renay began piling up headlines when she was grilled…
IT IS 1975. Sixteen years after it first appeared in France, the legendary book Hollywood Babylon rolls off the presses in its first authorized U.S. edition. While the rest of the nation gasps over Kenneth Anger’s juicy compendium of Tinseltown tattle, Phoenix yawns. For starters, we’d seen it all in…
MARTY GIFFIN SMILES over at her 11-year-old daughter Samantha, who is working on her homework at the kitchen counter. “I’m responsible for her, just me,” Marty says. “I haven’t gotten much help. The judge told my ex-husband when we got divorced in ’84 that he had to pay child support…
Remembered for his still-murky link to the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, Phoenix attorney Neal Roberts has long negotiated around legal-system land mines with stunning success. But now he’s in a pickle that should keep him behind bars for at least a short time. Phoenix police arrested…
MiAsia sat in a barber’s chair in a little shop in central Los Angeles. It was May 1983, and MiAsia, a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman, was looking for a dramatic change. The barber dyed MiAsia’s short, dark Afro auburn, but that wasn’t enough. She came back a week later, asking…
Abraham Cox, a precocious 7-year-old, attends a progressive school in Tempe. On this particular Friday evening, inside Tanner Chapel A.M.E., Abraham’s parents watch civil rights heroine Rosa Parks sign copies of her autobiography. Their son is devoting considerable energy to slipping artfully within range of the television cameras taping the…
