Sports

Troy Collins has a career strewn with successes. Junior tennis championships while growing up in South-Central Los Angeles. A full athletic scholarship to San Diego State. Fourteen years earning a living as a midlevel player on the professional tennis circuit. And, now, a job as a teaching pro at a private tennis club.

Troy Collins has a career strewn with successes. Junior tennis championships while growing up in South-Central Los Angeles. A full athletic scholarship to San Diego State. Fourteen years earning a living as a midlevel player on the professional tennis circuit. And now a job as a teaching pro at a private tennis club.

There will come a time when someone on Team Intrepid will want to stop. Maybe as they peddle their mountain bikes up an endless hill or paddle in kayaks across open water. Maybe as they stand on a cliff and prepare to rappel hundreds of feet. Or maybe in the early morning hours as sleep deprivation saps their will to compete. "You're going to be tired. You're going to be hurting," said Doug Wilde, a member of the San Fernando Valley-based squad. "You'll just want to sit down."

The Super Bowl, America's national day of prostration in front of the television set, will be played Sunday. Tickets to the game begin at $325, climbing to $400 for box and club seats. A week later, the XFL makes its debut, with thousands having ordered tickets to the made-for-TV football league.

Waves broke hard on the sand, thundering one after another, as teams of men and women rushed toward the sea with kayaks. Some boats knifed cleanly through the surf. Others capsized and were strewn like toothpicks in the roiled foam, the racers scrambling back to land shivering and bloody. Their hardship had only begun.

Nobody ever talks about the roses. Or the museums. Or the people who could have left, but chose to stay. By the time the news about the neighborhood surrounding the Los Angeles Coliseum travels to the world outside, all things beautiful have fallen away, like wilted petals. What remains is the thorny image of a gritty community wracked by social ills.

If the importance of sports in the entertainment business needed underlining, it came in Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner's repeated references to ESPN on Monday in his statements about Disney's $19-billion acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. Analysts say that one result of the combination may be the merged company's enhanced ability to package the sports programming of ESPN--Capital Cities' 80%-owned cable-TV sports network--with Disney's own sports and entertainment offerings.

Women's pro tennis is using a time-honored marketing weapon to revive interest in the once-popular sport among fans and corporate sponsors: sex appeal. On the court, stars such as Russian teen Anna Kournikova are shedding traditional tennis whites for revealing two-piece Lycra outfits.