Don’t Falter. Don’t Judge.
LET ME TELL YOU about Kiril. He called one evening and said that he needed to see me right away. I lived in Moscow at the time, and phone calls of this nature were routine. In the dark and glamorous...
View ArticleFrom Russia with Love
HAMMERING SNOW, MOSCOW DARK, and I was making myself scarce in a casino basement. This was the only place in town showing Big Blue. They put the game on a screen overhanging the slot racks. I took a...
View ArticleHell on Wheels
YOU COME TO THE TLC with a name, you leave with a number. You no longer have a name.” This isn’t prison—this is the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) putting prospective cabdrivers in...
View ArticleOff the Record
By GABRIEL SNYDER July 2, 2001 Bob Guccione Jr. should have known something was amiss when he saw some strange guy assembling a tent in the hallway outside his Gear magazine offices. But Mr. Guccione...
View ArticleДва Выхода
НА ДНЯХ МОЙ ПРИЯТЕЛЬ Виталик несколько раздраженно спросил: “И чего это в ваших голливудских фильмах плохие парни непременно русские?” Я решил, что приятель шутит, ведь, конечно же, причина ему была...
View ArticleThe Blue Horizon
AT NORTH PHILLY’S JOE HAND GYM, there’s no sign that this fighting city has suffered a brutal blow. A featherweight in blue trunks slaps at the heavy bag. Another fighter skips rope. Two others...
View ArticleThe Cold War
FOR CASUAL SPORTS FANS, news of the plane crash that killed 36 members of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team last month was a grisly introduction to Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League. The NHL, on the...
View ArticlePast Forward
ON OCT. 8 AGAINST NORTHWESTERN, under the lights in Evanston, Ill., the only thing about Denard Robinson that screamed Michigan was the winged helmet. He threw three first-half interceptions,...
View ArticleThe Paranoia Hour: Mike Skinner and The Streets Take on America
THE CALL WENT out. “Oooo wants a graaam?” It was early days yet and Mike Skinner was already slashing his tongue around. Could have been that Birmingham accent of ‘is that made him sound half gone. It...
View ArticleOvechkin: “There will always be critics”
ESPN: I know you speak English very well. But I’d like to ask you questions in Russian. Alex Ovechkin: Oh. (Sighs) Excellent. ESPN: Have you ever thought about playing in the KHL? AO: In the league,...
View ArticleTrouble Man
SEVEN YEARS AGO, before he was a bouncer, Mark Ehr got into a bar fight and messed up a guy so badly that he drove home and shaved his head bald. “I didn’t want to be recognized,” Ehr says, taking is...
View ArticleThe Dying of the Light…Philly-Style
WE ROLLED UP TO THE VET with a busted-up car and hangovers that had us all jumpy. The worst kind. The night before, Pastor Steve and I had barely escaped death, locked in a high-speed chase around...
View ArticleWith Snoop Dogg and Girls Gone Wild at Mardi Gras
THERE WAS NO surprise when Snoop Dogg and the pimps wound up with the girls. There was frustration among the rest of us. But no surprise. That was just the nature of things. And at a Girls Gone Wild...
View ArticleThe Beauty Hunter
ANTON ALFER HAS A PROBLEM. Sunken into a red leather couch in a shopping mall in Kazan, 500 miles east of Moscow, he adjusts his eyes to the catwalk before him. He squints appraisingly at dozens of...
View ArticleEurope’s Little Piece of Brazil
IT IS A FACT SELDOM acknowledged that the shortest route from Eastern Europe to Western Europe runs through Brazil. This is the word in Donetsk, a Ukrainian coal-mining town whose surprising soccer...
View ArticleBullets, Blood, and Videotape in Russia’s Far East
YOU CAN’T HAVE fun when you’re famous. Behold Vitali Dyomochka, laid-back in a Land Cruiser, just trying to enjoy himself with a few close associates. It’s dead night in a dead end, and they’re waiting...
View ArticleRussia in the Boxing Ring
IT WAS LATE SATURDAY night by the time Evander Holyfield had showered, submitted to the press, and then wandered out of the Khodinka Ice Palace and on into the sleet-slush shadows of central Moscow....
View ArticleThe Reel Russia
DESPITE THE MOVIE business’s reputation for waste and excess, there are few places more ruthlessly scheduled, more efficiently choreographed than a film set. Unless that set happens to be in Russia. On...
View ArticleUkraine’s Orange Revolution Comes up Lemons
YULIA TYMOSHENKO’S MOTORCADE slices through Odessa, roof lights spinning, Klaxons barking. It’s campaign season again, and Ukraine’s “samurai in a skirt” is back in action, battling against the party...
View ArticleTrojan Force
ON JULY 24 IN LOS ANGELES, Lane Kiffin was suffering through the Pac-12’s preseason media conference, but his mind was elsewhere. The day before, the NCAA had penalized Penn State so severely that...
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