Search Results for: Deadspin

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.

A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next:

My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here —he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do anything else. Just show up. You don’t have to come to a single practice. You don’t have to warm up. Just show up at the meet.’

Well, I was unhappy with how the first warmup went. I didn’t think I was in good enough shape for the first warmup, but I won all my events, OK? And so before the second time I thought, I’ll just go to a few workouts, you know. And then slowly, but surely…

He was just so spot on. So then, sure enough, I’m now going to two workouts a day. I’m lifting weights and I totally get the hunger in a big, big way and my time was the third-fastest in the country. It wasn’t like the end-of-the-year time, which would be much faster, but I was really psyched that I could go that fast and do that well with just the amount of training that I had had.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist.” — Rob Trucks, Deadspin

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A sportswriter tries his hand at singing the national anthem at a baseball game:

The anthem is designed to humble you. The anthem is designed to ruin your shit if you get too haughty, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s ready to challenge you from the very beginning:

O say can you see …

That ‘see’ is tricky. That’s your first high note, and you have to sustain it for a second. You can tell whether or not an anthem is gonna suck usually by the time the singer has finished with just this line.

By the dawn’s early light / What so proudly we hailed …

Again, we have another trap. That high note on ‘proudly’ sneaks up on you, forcing you to jump up higher than many people are comfortable with.

“What’s It Like To Sing The Anthem At A Baseball Game? The Story Of One Man’s Perilous Fight.” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

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The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page:

Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a contributor to her new sports-comedy site. Within 15 minutes, she had another idea: ‘Here’s something I just thought of: Instead of becoming a contributor, would you like to join our team as an editor/creator for the memes section?’

With this proposal, he could make even more money. She spelled out specifics for him: She told him that her ‘initial goal’ for the site would be 2.5 million pageviews per month, which would bring him $38,400 a year. By the fall, they’d have 7.5 million pageviews per month and he’d be making $102,000 per year. Big money for a 19-year-old college student.

“Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet?” — John Koblin, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, New York Magazine, Deadspin, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker #fiction, plus a guest pick from author Aimee Phan.

What the writer learned from the premature birth of his third child:

When the baby cried, I knew it wasn’t gonna die. They had just pulled my son out of my wife and whisked him over to one of those fancy hotel pans that you put newborns in, and there was a brief moment when he said nothing, which you don’t want. You want the baby to cry. You want confirmation that the child can take air in its lungs and then blow it back out. You want the baby to cry the first time. After that, you want it to be quiet so you can get some goddamn sleep, but the first cry matters. The first cry means it’s gonna live. So it cried, and then I did. I cried and cried until it felt like my face was gonna split open. I yelled out, ‘He’s crying!’ to my wife, and after that everything was all right.

“Pain Is A Gift, And Other Notes From A Terrified Father During A Seven-Week-Premature Birth.” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

See also: “The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student.” Feb. 17, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.

A writer tries to figure out if he’s any smarter than he was at age 17:

Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over the question on my answer sheet. So every five seconds, I’d double-check my sheet to make sure I didn’t fill out my answers in the wrong slots. One time I did this, and so I had to erase the answers and move them all forward. Only I had a shitty eraser, which failed to erase my mark and instead smeared the mark all over the rest of my sheet. FUCK YOU, TRICK ERASER. I HATE YOU.

“What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

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Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:

Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.

Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.

“The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’.” — Erik Malinowski, Deadspin

See also: See also: The Making of ‘Nevermind’ (Excerpt from ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’) — Mark Yarm, MTV Hive, Sept. 19, 2011