The state of Alaska has never seen a football player quite like Anchorage’s Nick Mystrom. A Swiss-Army-Knife-type player at Colorado College, he turned his attention to kicking in 1995 when he signed with the Memphis Mad Dogs of the Canadian Football League. The Mad...
Before he became the first Alaskan to play Major League Baseball, Marshall Boze had a different claim to fame. He recorded 21 strikeouts, and amazingly lost the game. In 1988, the Kenai Twins' rocket right-hander threw a three-hitter in eight innings and broke the...
Five years before he became an Olympic downhill champion, Tommy Moe was a 19-year-old shouldering the weight of enormous expectations at the World Junior Alpine Ski Championships. The week-long race series was held at the Alyeska Ski Resort in April 1989, one of a...
Anchorage’s Anton Maxwell was simply sensational as a sophomore with the Oregon State University baseball team. The left-handed pitcher posted an 11-1 record in 17 appearances in 2005 as the No. 3 starter for the Pac-12 power that advanced to the College World Series....
No boxer from Alaska did more than Anchorage’s Cody Koch, whose rapid and remarkable rise to prominence in the 1990s was unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the sport. Koch broke into pro boxing in 1995 after winning a national Toughman Contest. He won his first 24...
Regg Simon wasn’t a particularly big winger, though not tiny, either – UAA’s 1999-2000 roster listed him at 5-foot-11, 190 pounds. He wasn’t particularly fast, or overly skilled. His skating was, uh, a work in progress. But no one ever doubted his work ethic, or...
Pavel Bure’s speed was so electrifying he became known as The Russian Rocket. Teemu Selanne’s speed and deadly shot were so explosive he became referenced as The Finnish Flash. Americans Jeremy Roenick and Mike Modano never got tagged with killer nicknames – man, we...
It was the dunk heard around Alaska; a two-handed thunderbolt hammered home by Seawolves' star Jason Kaiser of Anchorage. The 6-foot-5 guard out of Service High was a smooth jump shooter, not a rim rocker. But there he was alone on the break, throwing down a jam as...
In early January 2013, it was hardly surprising the Alaska Aces owned the best record in the ECHL, a 23-team, minor-league circuit two rungs below the NHL on North America’s hockey ladder. That’s in part because the Aces savored the services of four NHL forwards from...
Dig, if you will, the picture: Sullivan Arena, packed to the rafters, all 6,206 seats sold, another 200 standing-room tickets sold, for each of the UAA hockey team’s 17 home games, actual ticket scalpers outside that concrete building before games and cheers so loud...
Anchorage tennis player Emma Lewis made her name in doubles at Bowdoin College, but her claim to fame came in singles. In 2012, she rallied for a thrilling three-set victory in the decisive match to lift Bowdoin to a 5-4 win over Middlebury in the NCAA D3 national...