November 15, 2014
Column: Colter vs. cancer? Nothing but net
Derrick Colter shoots over Bluefield State’s Avery Holliday on Saturday. — DAVE DeNOMA / DUQUESNE ATHLETICS
DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS
No sooner had the basketball been launched from Derrick Colter’s fingertips than he was hacked by Bluefield State’s Avery Holliday. Hard enough that Duquesne’s gifted junior guard fell back onto the A.J. Palumbo Center court and was wholly horizontal by the time that ball touched twine.
Even with the rest of his body prone, Colter’s arms shot up, raised in triumph.
Did he see the 3-pointer?
“Just kind of felt it,” he’d confess to me later with an aw-shucks grin. “All I saw was ceiling.”
Quite the raise-the-roof moment, if you will.
And no, not because played an infinitesimal part in the Dukes pounding a badly overmatched opponent, 91-51, in the university’s 99th season opener Saturday.
Not because it would be one of a career-high seven 3-pointers, one shy of the school record.
Not because he’d spike up to a career-high 26 points after averaging 9.3 last season.
Not even because the game of his life was occurring on this extraordinary young man’s official return from a five-month battle with cancer — non-Hodgkin lymphoma — that involved 20 consecutive days of radiation treatment.
“It was the shot. That’s it,” Colter said. “When I put up a shot, I want it to fall. So when it went down after I got knocked down, yeah, I enjoyed it a little.”
Believe it.
November 26, 2014
Column: A Thanksgiving appreciation in threes
by Dejan Kovacevic • Columns • Duquesne, Penguins, Pirates, Pitt, Riverhounds, Steelers
Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown celebrate a touchdown hookup earlier this season. — GETTY IMAGES
DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS
Feeling especially and personally thankful on this Thanksgiving eve …
• I’m thankful to cover professional sports in a town blessed by not one not two but three truly elite performers on each team, which I’m guessing is more than most would count into that category.
I’ll go Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell with the Steelers, each of whom can currently claim a legit argument for being the very best at his position in the NFL.
I’ll go Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and, yes, Marc-Andre Fleury with the Penguins. Because anyone who would discount the latter doesn’t fully appreciate what it meant Monday that he became the third-youngest goaltender in NHL history to 300 wins. And get this: Since making his debut Oct. 10, 2003, at the Civic Arena, Fleury has accounted for 69 percent of the Penguins’ 432 victories while sharing the crease with 15 other men.
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