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The irony of calling him Killer was brought up many times throughout his life, though it is also true that Harmon Killebrew was intentionally walked more times than any other American League player in the 1960s. The nickname isn’t that crazy. At the plate, he was a killer. His short, quick swing was the very image of power — so much so that for years it was said that the MLB logo was drawn in his image. The man who created the logo said that it was not Killebrew. But it looks like him. And it should be him.

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Minnesota’s unexpected mediocrity may have hobbled Bobby Cox on his way to becoming an All-America but he is still quite a football player. And, whatever happens, he will be the last to complain. A young man who grew up in a near slum, ran away from home when barely 14, worked at odd jobs for a living, survived a hasty teen-age marriage and divorce, and then verged upon tramp athleticism only to wind up as the hero of a great university with a beautiful wife, a host of friends and a rosy-hued future dead ahead does not complain of adversity.

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All the Texas high school coaches I meet shake your hand and say, ‘Boy, Coach, I really admire what you guys did.’ And under their breath, they’re going, ‘You dummies. This stuff has been going on for 70 years.’

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She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.
“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says. “If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.

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With more than four decades of evidence to back them up, economists almost uniformly agree that publicly financed stadiums rarely pay for themselves. The notable successes like Camden Yards in Baltimore often involve dedicated taxes or large infusions of private money. Even then, using one tax to finance a stadium can often steer spending away from other, perhaps worthier, projects.

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Today, at his kitchen table, Terry says he’d seen all three prizes before. The karaoke machine was $1,000. The pool table, depending on the model, he says, went for between $2,800 and $3,200. Terry went with $3,000. The rule of thumb for campers, he knew, was about $1,000 a foot, plus a little more; he says today he’d actually misheard the length of the trailer, thought Rich Fields had said it was nineteen feet long — so, $19,000. That gave him $23,000. And then, he says, he got lucky. He picked 743 because that was the number he and Linda had used for their PINs, their securitycodes, their bets: their wedding date, the seventh of April, and her birth month, March. Here’s their wedding certificate, he says, and here’s her passport: $23,743.

“Actual retail price, $23,743,” Drew Carey said. “You got it right on the nose. You win both Showcases.”

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Never has it been laid more bare, and never did it feel so empty. It felt like a break, the moment when the tide crested, when we looked at the games, and their players, and ourselves, and wondered: Why in the world are we watching these awful people? It was a question impossible to answer.