Word: sporting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Five years ago, Eric Rosen, the owner of Chris's, would have been shocked to witness such cuteness in a sport famous for fast-talking hustlers with monikers like Minnesota Fats and Cornbread Red. But as pool has exploded in popularity among upscale professionals, baby boomers and now children, Chris's has become one of a growing number of pool parlors to welcome the new breeds of players. To accommodate the steady influx of families, Rosen has installed video games and a jukebox, complete with Britney Spears and 'N Sync, in a family-friendly back room where families can have...
Driven by the low cost of play, the easy social interaction, the increase in the number of female players and the coverage of professional tournaments on ESPN, the sport has expanded, prompting not only a shift in many of the old halls but also the construction of a slew of new, pristine, family-friendly pool dens. Says Mike Aube, who opened up Suzie-Cue's Family Billiards in Palatine, Ill., four years ago, after his teenage daughters complained that they didn't have a place to play: "Today halls are welcoming. They're more like family restaurants...
...City, for example, Amsterdam Billiards is host to birthday parties for the younger set about once a week. At Reno's in Webster, Texas, only sanitized versions of pop songs are allowed on the popular karaoke machine before 10 p.m. At Slate Street Billiards in Vernon Hills, Ill., minors sport T shirts featuring a beer stein with a red circle and slash, indicating that alcohol is off-limits. And in Conway, Ark., where state law prohibits kids from playing in adult billiards-only halls, Paul Loyd and Judy Potts have opened P.D.'s Billiards & Game Room, offering kid-size pool...
...brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. Almost as old is the deadly plane crash: the first airplane fatality took place in 1908, claiming the life of an Army lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge. Somewhere between flying and crashing, and combining the thrills of both, lies the terrifyingly dangerous sport of competitive aerobatics...
...which he compares to aerial figure skating, with the following caveat: "When was the last time Kristy Yamaguchi burst into flames in the middle of a Salchow?" In No Visible Horizon (Simon & Schuster; 273 pages), Ramo, a former TIME editor, tells the story of his love affair with a sport that in a bad year, by his estimate, can kill 1 in 30 of its practitioners. Ramo buys a plane and learns to spin, loop, roll and do all three simultaneously at hundreds of miles per hour. He makes pilgrimages to obscure Midwestern airfields for aerobatics competitions, and he seeks...