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The World Series
If baseball were this great all the time, Bud Selig wouldn't be trying to shrink the league. With Manhattan smoldering, the Yankees bore the city's pain and pride to the Bronx and won three games there, snatching two with midnight dramatics. No sentimental ending, though. The Arizona Diamondbacks' spectacular pitching duo of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson numbed Yankee bats in Phoenix, while a seventh-game, bottom-of-the-ninth
rally provided a classic, and deserved, triumph for the home team. |
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Lance Armstrong
After spotting the competition an Alp or deux, Armstrong blew past them with a lung-searing, spirit-crushing sprint up Alpe d'Huez to set up his third straight Tour de France victory, all this after recovering from cancer. The U.S. Postal Service rider was 23rd at the beginning of the mountain stages, first at the end, pausing only long enough to look back at the vanquished. |
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Jennifer Capriati
A decade after teenage stardom and seven years after her arrested adolescence got her cited for shoplifting and busted for marijuana possession, a disciplined, fit Capriati smashed her way back to the top. She began the year with a stunning upset in the Australian Open and a few months later took the French Open. She also reached the semis at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in a year when women's tennis outshone the men's game in straight sets. |
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Barry Bonds
Home-run inflation robbed him of some of the attention he deserved, so let's refocus: his 73 dingers for the San Francisco Giants is one of the greatest performances in baseball's long history. He also set the record for walks and slugging percentage, held by one George Herman Ruth. With Mark McGwire retired, and the great Sammy Sosa stuck in the mid-60s, this home-run record won't be broken by anyone else anytime soon. |
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Mario Lemieux
First he bought the team out of bankruptcy, then he saved it. Owner Lemieux, a done-deal Hall of Famer and a cancer survivor with a bad back, came out of retirement to revive personally the sputtering Pittsburgh Penguins. Super Mario led them into the conference finals. Now that's management. |
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Dale Earnhardt Jr.
He got behind the wheel of a race car the week after his father—the NASCAR legend, the Intimidator—died in a crash that stunned the nation. Then, in July, he returned to the same Daytona speedway where the crash had occurred to win the first of three races on the year. "One day soon [my] team will headline this joint," noted Earnhardt Jr., sounding just like Pop. |
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Tiger Woods
He won "only" one of the Majors this year, outdueling David Duval and Phil Mickelson to take his second Masters title. That marked Woods' fourth consecutive victory in a Major—he won the U.S. and British Opens and PGA Championship last year—a string no other golfer has ever put together. |
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Erik Weihenmayer
There are no handicapped-parking zones on Mount Everest. Weihenmayer became the first sightless person to reach the 29,035-ft. (8,850-m) summit. A good athlete, he turned to climbing after losing his sight as a young teenager. The trek required him, with the help of his team, to negotiate ladder bridges over bottomless crevices and ascend a peak that kills even the most able mountaineers. |
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Baltimore Ravens
They surrendered points the way Florida did Gore votes. MVP Ray Lewis led a ferocious defense that stuffed the New York Giants in a Super Bowl rout, 34-7. That's the same kind of generosity the stingy Ravens showed the rest of league during the season. With their modest offense, they needed to keep other teams off the board, and they did, holding opponents to a record-low 165 points. |
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Football Fans
The XFL's spectacular failure was a victory for authentic sports and a warning to the WWF and NBC, its founding partners, that even bloodsport fans have standards. They promised us smashmouth football; we got trashmouth football narrated by Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and played by buffoons. Hooray for football fans who tackled this one for a loss. |
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