The coach of the Rochester RazorSharks, the city’s first-year expansion franchise in the American Basketball Association, paced back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, across the gym floor as his players hunched over and gasped for air. A couple of the players, it seems, were not finishing their wind sprints in the allotted 30 […]
Ryan Whirty
Posted inNews & Opinion
Drug money
Tony Zito had been battling long-term depression when he ran into trouble several months ago. Zito, 57, takes the anti-depressants Prozac and Wellbutrin but doesn’t have any health insurance. He was finding that he couldn’t afford to pay for his prescriptions, which cost hundreds of dollars a month out of pocket. “It would be [medications] […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
They’ll fight their hearts out
There’s a certain smell to freshly mowed grass on a high school football field, a mixture of chlorophyll and dew and mud that wafts into a player’s nose and triggers a release of adrenaline and testosterone that carries him through the picturesque violence that will consume his mind and body and soul for a quartet […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Keep it on ice
Not too many things have lasted for 50 years in Monroe County, but the Rochester Americans have. Since the Amerks were founded a half-century ago, the demographics of its hometown have completely changed, Kodak has withered away, and countless other American Hockey League teams have come and gone. In fact, the Amerks are one of […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Making soccer look slow, Gaelic style
A sweatshirt hood drawn over his head, his hands shoved in the sweatshirt’s pockets, Brendan Tunney scans the ragged practice field at Bishop Kearney High School. It’s a cold, gray, windy day in late May as the Rochester Erin’s Isle Gaelic football team takes to the pitch for another practice. Tunney, the squad’s founder, coach, […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
A major-league pipe dream?
Ridge Mahoney has been watching the development of Major League Soccer since its inception in 1996. As the senior editor of Soccer America magazine, he’s seen teams come into the league and succeed, and he’s seen other expansion teams suffer major flame-outs. So what does he think about Rochester’s chances of landing an MLS franchise? […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Can diversity save hockey?
On April 8, Binghamton Senators goon extraordinaire Brian McGrattan bragged before the B-Sens’ impending game with the Rochester Americans that he would break the American Hockey League’s single-season record for penalty minutes by immediately picking a fight with Amerks tough guy Sean McMorrow. McGrattan wasn’t bullshitting. About two minutes into the first period, McGrattan roped […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Pride dunks prejudice
Looking back, the Harlem Globetrotters did more harm to the cause of racial equality than good. True, over the last eight decades the Globetrotters became arguably the most famous professional sports team on the planet. But they did it by reducing themselves to clowning, by exploiting racial stereotypes. The Globetrotters essentially became the athletic equivalent […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
‘A total labor movement’
The status of minorities in the American labor movement became clear to Bill Fletcher Jr. while he was riding a Boston bus in 1985. Fletcher, a graduate of Harvard who went to work on the shipyards in Quincy, Massachusetts, had become a union organizer in the Beantown area. But his experience was spoiled by institutional […]
