Sport at the highest levels, whether labeled professional or merely operated that way, has always demanded of its followers a certain capacity for illusion. Exalting the athletes we pay to play for us over the ones they pay to play for them is tricky. It requires an ability to squint a little and forget... 

More than a decade after a heartbreaking last-second loss to North Carolina State cost them the NCAA title,Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon finally won a championship togetheras theHouston Rockets completed their unlikely championship runwith 113-101 victory over the Orlando Magic. With the four game... 

You can find it in a new Gibson guitar, in kiosks at the Nature Company stores and even in the Portland Trailblazers' practice court. It's wood harvested responsibly from an eco-friendly commercial forest, not timber stripped from a virgin rain forest. How do you know? The Forest Stewardship... 

When you get in trouble in your hometown, you move to New York City, where having a tough reputation can be a real asset. Hey, Hillary Clinton is shopping for New York real estate right now. So it makes sense that just a year after his unsuccessful (and not for lack of effort) attempt to unscrew his... 

Player haters. Maybe that's the deal. Jealous people are always player-hating the Williams sisters, calling them arrogant or aloof or unfocused on tennis. Maybe it's sexism, the resentment of a dominant pro athlete's braggadocio, seen as unseemly in a woman. Maybe it's simple racism.... 

In the late 1990s, sources estimated that some 60% to 70% of the NBA smoked pot. For a time, the offenders all seemed to play in Portland. "I'm not a chemistry major," former GM Bob Whitsitt quipped when questioned in 2001 about the composition of his roster. The motley bunch he stitched... 

The rock-'n'-roll generation: everybody grows up by staying young. Bruce Springsteen is onto this. In fact, he has written a song about it: I pushed B-52 and bombed 'em with the blues With my gear set stubborn on standing I broke all the rules, strafed my old high school Never once... 

Every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in Boulder, Colo., for an invitation-only workshop. Picture 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's... 

It sounds like a homework problem out of a high school math book: What is the probability of rolling a pair of dice 154 times continuously at a craps table, without throwing a seven? The answer is roughly 1 in 1.56 trillion, and on May 23, Patricia Demauro, a New Jersey grandmother, beat those odds... 

Route: Pier 84 to City Island Distance: 18 miles (29 km) The popular Hudson River Park bike path, which runs along Manhattan's west side, offers 13 miles (21 km) of continuous city sights on one side and the Hudson River and New Jersey on the other — and is absolutely worth its own...