"If I didn't make it in baseball, I won't have made it workin'. 

I didn't like to work."

~Yogi Berra

MLB catcher and manager

Baseball Hall of Fame, 1972

"Thanks for the copy of the Ultimate Sports Guide.

A challenge for the ages   --Rudi Petschek

In the spring of 1983 a torrent of abruptly melting record snow pack in the Colorado Rockies overwhelmed Lake Powell's capacity to receive the runoff. The rising lake waters threatened to overflow the 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam. Using plywood panels, workers hurriedly elevated the 5 million-cubic-yard concrete structure by 10 additional feet to thwart the fast-rising Colorado River waters, which peaked with just inches to spare.

Glen Canyon Dam operators were releasing as much water as they dared through the dam's turbines, bypass tubes and the spillways that had already been damaged by the runoff, resulting in a far greater flow downstream through Grand Canyon than any of us longtime river guides had experienced during many years of transporting tourists in 17-foot dories through big whitewater.

Three of us professional boatmen saw this as an opportunity to fulfill our long-standing fantasy of rowing a hard-hulled wooden boat through Grand Canyon's 273 river miles in the shortest possible time, attempting to break a record set three decades earlier, before Glen Canyon Dam regulated the downstream flow.

To shorten a long story, we accomplished our goal. We rowed day and night, completing the 273-mile stretch (for which our commercial river trips take two and a half weeks) in 37 hours, 36 minutes and 29 seconds.

The longer story of how these twin dramas unfolded in parallel -- the dam's engineers struggling to save the mammoth structure and three river guides attempting a record run, each party oblivious of the challenges faced by the other -- is fascinatingly told by Kevin Fedarko in his award-winning book, The Emerald Mile (Simon & Schuster), a page-turner if there ever was one. Go get yourself a copy to read the entire riveting story. (Full disclosure: While a principal in the book, I do not receive a commission from book sales.)

Editor's note: Further full disclosure -- Rudi Petschek is the ULTRA talented brother-in-law of the Ultimate Sports Guide's publisher, Christopher Weills.