The "Sports Articles Your Mom Enjoyed Last Night" thread

[ThaJim2]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sport ... -espn.html

[peanut butter]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sport ... -espn.html

The entire series has been brilliant. Here's part two: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/sport ... nsive.html




PEACE

[ThaJim2]

Have not read it yet but seen some of the bombshells

http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the ... the-huddle

Or Shocking Gator on the Dust.

[peanut butter]

Deadspin compiled some of the best sportswriting of the year

http://deadspin.com/it-was-a-great-year ... 1489915294



PEACE

[DLG]

http://www.nj.com/jets/index.ssf/2014/0 ... s_car.html

[peanut butter]

Dr. V's Magical Putter
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysteri ... club-dr-v/

The cliffnotes, if you're too lazy to read
http://gawker.com/twitter-explodes-afte ... 1504164978

The Backlash
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cult ... trans.html
http://www.shakesville.com/2014/01/care ... table.html
http://grantland.com/features/what-grantland-got-wrong/

The Apology
http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v- ... he-editor/



PEACE

[ThaJim2]

^and that story after the story is 100 percent internet identity politic bloggers for you as well as what is wrong with much of the media. How the fuck do you tell that story and have the sex change bombshell and not report it? If the original author didn't write it someone else would have found that info after the story in about 2 hours. And why the fuck are they blaming him for the suicide? This person already tried to kill themselves once before. Holly shit this is every bullying story that has made the news in the last decade. Its always someone elses fault never the person that killed themselves.

[peanut butter]

I dunno about all of that. You might have a take that is a little too hot. But it is an interesting ethical dilemma. I'm not sure its as cut-and-dry as you are making it seem, but I do understand your perspective.


PEACE

[naturalborn103]

http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2014/1 ... ry-profile
My old favorite player in NFL is a piece of shit

[an-also]

What a scumbag.

[peanut butter]

Here's the best takedown of the Grantland piece that I've read yet:
http://gawker.com/the-journalist-and-th ... 1506799508



PEACE

[ThaJim2]

I dunno about all of that. You might have a take that is a little too hot. But it is an interesting ethical dilemma. I'm not sure its as cut-and-dry as you are making it seem, but I do understand your perspective.


PEACE

I understand the issue about force outings but in a story on how a person is a fraud and it did not take much effort to find the truth I don't know how you can not mention it. It is going to come out one way or the other.

My bigger issue is with the ID bloggers out there that in some cases straight up called him a murderer. This needs to stop. People that kill themselves do so because that is their choice. In this story she already tried once to kill herself so while this story might have played a part in her decision it is more likely it was she was going to be shown to be a fraud not that her birth gender was going to be exposed. Why do I say that? Because people that kill themselves tend to have tried to do so before. Because people that are exposed or are about to be exposed for wrong doing kill themselves fairly often.

[peanut butter]

My bigger issue is with the ID bloggers out there that in some cases straight up called him a murderer. This needs to stop. People that kill themselves do so because that is their choice. In this story she already tried once to kill herself so while this story might have played a part in her decision it is more likely it was she was going to be shown to be a fraud not that her birth gender was going to be exposed. Why do I say that? Because people that kill themselves tend to have tried to do so before. Because people that are exposed or are about to be exposed for wrong doing kill themselves fairly often.

I dont think I've seen any reasonable minded people saying that he is a killer or a murderer. There's a ton of interesting moral and ethical dilemmas involving this story, the way it was reported, written and received. Whether or not the writer should be considered a murderer is so far down the totem pole in terms of whats actually interesting or valuable here, its probably just best left for simpletons to blog about.


PEACE

[Reason]

Dr. V's Magical Putter
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysteri ... club-dr-v/

The cliffnotes, if you're too lazy to read
http://gawker.com/twitter-explodes-afte ... 1504164978

The Backlash
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cult ... trans.html
http://www.shakesville.com/2014/01/care ... table.html
http://grantland.com/features/what-grantland-got-wrong/

The Apology
http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v- ... he-editor/



PEACE

this whole saga was fucking riveting...missed this...damn thx

[peanut butter]

Dr. V's Magical Putter
http://grantland.com/features/a-mysteri ... club-dr-v/

The cliffnotes, if you're too lazy to read
http://gawker.com/twitter-explodes-afte ... 1504164978

The Backlash
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cult ... trans.html
http://www.shakesville.com/2014/01/care ... table.html
http://grantland.com/features/what-grantland-got-wrong/

The Apology
http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v- ... he-editor/



PEACE

this whole saga was fucking riveting...missed this...damn thx

I thought so too.

Here's the ESPN ombudsman chiming in on it:
http://espn.go.com/blog/ombudsman/post/ ... nexcusable



PEACE

[peanut butter]

Really great article by Zach Lowe, detailing his experience as a sports fan and balancing that with the way he's grown as a person:
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-l ... of-fandom/

It's cool to see the soul of Spock


PEACE

[Reason]

[DLG]

http://www.runnersworld.com/general-int ... 6-marathon

[ThaJim2]

http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2014/2 ... es-scholar

Smart or gay you are a distraction. Murder errr an accessory to murder and you are the fucking face of the NFL.

Also, can not say enough about Rolle. Meet Myron a couple of times when he was an undergrad and he was about the nicest dude there could be and heard so many stories about how unassuming and just a regular cat around campus. For all the shit FSU football gets it produces some awesome fucking people. Like Derrick Brooks of free shoe fame.

[naturalborn103]

Doesn't really have too much proof that reason he didn't make it was cause he was too smart. I would love to hear his take on the concussion issue though.

[peanut butter]

Fantastic story by Sam Miller about the Angels player development program

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/10470 ... n-magazine


PEACE

[peanut butter]

Hunter S. Thompson

— Grantland Rice: who was known — prior to his death in the late Fifties — as "The Dean of American Sportswriters."

They came together on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in heat.

Under a brown California sky, the fierceness of their struggle brought tears to the eyes of 90,000 God-fearing fans.

They were 22 men who were somehow more than men.

They were giants, idols, titans....

Behemoths.

They stood for everything Good and True and Right in the American Spirit.

Because they had guts.

And they yearned for the Ultimate Glory, the Great Prize, the Final Fruits of a long and vicious campaign.

Victory in the Super Bowl: $15,000 each.

They were hungry for it. They were thirsty. For 20 long weeks, from August through December, they had struggled to reach this Pinnacle .... and when dawn lit the beaches of Southern California on that fateful Sunday morning in January, they were ready.

To seize the Final Fruit.

They could almost taste it. The smell was stronger than a ton of rotten mangoes. Their nerves burned like open sores on a dog's neck. White knuckles. Wild eyes. Strange fluid welled up in their throats, with a taste far sharper than bile.

Behemoths.

Those who went early said the pre-game tension was almost unbearable. By noon, many fans were weeping openly, for no apparent reason. Others wrung their hands or gnawed on the necks of pop bottles, trying to stay calm. Many fist-fights were reported in the public urinals. Nervous ushers roamed up and down the aisles, confiscating alcoholic beverages and occasionally grappling with drunkards. Gangs of Seconal-crazed teenagers prowled through the parking lot outside the stadium, beating the mortal shit out of luckless stragglers....

What? No....Grantland Rice would never have written weird stuff like that: His prose was spare & lean; his descriptions came straight from the gut ... and on the rare and ill-advised occasions when he wanted to do a "Think Piece," he called on the analytical powers of his medulla. Like all great sportswriters, Rice understood that his world might go all to pieces if he ever dared to doubt that his eyes were wired straight to his lower brain — a sort of de facto lobotomy, which enables the grinning victim to operate entirely on the level of Sensory Perception....

Green grass, hot sun, sharp cleats in the turf, thundering cheers from the crowd, the menacing scowl on the face of a $30,000-a-year pulling guard as he leans around the corner on a Lombardi-style power sweep and cracks a sharp plastic shoulder into the linebacker's groin....

Ah yes, the simple life: Back to the roots, the basics — first a Mousetrap, then a Crackback & a Buttonhook off a fake triple-reverse Fly Pattern, and finally The Bomb....

Indeed. There is a dangerous kind of simple-minded Power/Precision worship at the root of the massive fascination with pro football in this country, and sportswriters are mainly responsible for it. With a few rare exceptions like Bob Lipsyte of The New York Times and Tom Quinn of the (now-defunct) Washington Daily News, sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover....

Which is a nice way to make a living, because it keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all. The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.

Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."

Right. And there was the genius of Grantland Rice. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that "The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen" never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the "Granite-grey sky" in his lead was a "cold dark dusk" in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories....

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence.... At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted "press releases" that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.

It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: "The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when 'Kazika, The Mad Jap,' a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have 'every available officer' on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap's legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a 'yellow devil.'"

"Kazika," as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don't give a fuck anyway.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/new ... d-19730215

Anyone have a Rolling Stone scrip that's willing to share the rest?


PEACE

[peanut butter]

Like any big kid with an appetite, Barkley will go on binges. Take last Saturday's, which came after Alabama had cut Auburn's lead to 69-61 with 3:39 left. In the next three minutes Barkley turned sundry rebounds, steals and loose balls into 11 straight points, including three dunks, one after taking a steal the length of the floor. He finished with 28 points and 10 rebounds in the Tigers' 83-70 win. "We expect him to do that," says sophomore forward Chuck Person, whose 20.2-point-per-game average leads the SEC. "For a stretch he'll just gobble everything up."

Barkley's full-court ramble evoked another one, earlier this season against LSU, in which he stole an inside pass, split two defenders with a crossover dribble and jammed just as a Bayou Bengal came by to foul him. He danced a jig before sinking the free throw. "Inside this body is the best point guard in the land," says Barkley. Says Smith, "I used to go out of my gourd when he did something like that. I've finally figured out he's just getting points for us."

Indeed, before this season Smith had all but given up trying to control and motivate Barkley. "Several times I got out the Blue Book [a college athletic directory] and said, 'Tell me where you want to go,' " Smith says. "I tried putting things on the bulletin board. I tried sit-down sessions, motivational tapes, even puke sessions [physical exercises designed to induce vomiting]. But he'd run harder in his punishment than in practice."

With Auburn—12-6 in the SEC, 18-9 overall—coming to the end of its most satisfying season ever, Smith and Barkley have kept a truce: The coach promises patience, and Barkley puts out as hard in practices as in games. "It's so hard to stay mad at the sucker," Smith says.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/ ... /index.htm

Cool article about Barkely in college. Nothing really groundbreaking, just an interesting insight to how, even in college, he struggled with his weight and still dominated as a player. Plus, the quotes he gives in the article are proof that he's always been the same character that he is now.


PEACE

[alpha]

had no idea him and Chuck Person were on the same team in college.

[peanut butter]

Yup. And listed at 6'6," though he was probably shorter, Chuck was the team's center.

Bo was at Auburn during the same period too


PEACE

[an-also]

Barkley is one of my fav people on this planet. Its crazy that the dude played at 295 pounds in college and still dominated. He got down to 245 on the sixers after the veterans whipped him into shape.

[alpha]

I had a Barkley vs Godzilla poster when I was a kid. Csb

[DLG]

http://deadspin.com/someone-ranked-the- ... 1539658606

kel should enjoy this (even though he's nothing like my mom)

[Gregg Popabitch]

Not a sports article but a I had a lot of fun reading this blog from Bill Simmons: http://grantland.com/features/the-actio ... ship-belt/

It's actually one of the rare Bill Simmons articles that I actually liked in the past few years. Or maybe I really wanted to like this.

[Gregg Popabitch]

Stephen Curry is reinventing jump shooting

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/10703 ... n-magazine