Luke O’Brien

Deeply reported look at the power struggle inside Michael Bloomberg’s media business as he returns to lead it.

How two best friends rehabilitated the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise, and what’s coming next as the popularity of mixed martial arts expands globally:

“The UFC has border-hopped since 2007, first into Europe and Canada, then Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, and the Middle East. The next step is both simple and excessively difficult. Any international fan knows it: “We need a [local] hero,” says Puerto Rican journalist Angel Cordero. He runs a site called The MMA Truth that caters to a Latino audience, and he is convinced his boxing-obsessed homeland will embrace MMA–but only when Puerto Ricans can root for one of their own.

“Brazil is the UFC’s model country, a place with a tradition of martial arts and local heroes, none of them bigger than Anderson Silva, one of whose fights drew 32 million local viewers. The UFC has put on four live events in Brazil since 2011. It also went back to its American playbook–launching a Brazilian version of The Ultimate Fighter, which was a smash hit, generating the same level of social media buzz as Brazil’s 2010 presidential elections. MMA is now challenging to be the No. 2 sport in this soccer-crazy country.”

Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said Steinbrenner had sent him a prostitute. Even a hint of incredulity nettled him: “I know what’s been told to me in the past 22 years. That I’m the biggest scumbag in the world, that I’m worse than a pedophile, than a terrorist. I’ve made innumerable mistakes, but the only thing I don’t do is lie.”

Kobayashi is living in New York, but he will not be at Nathan’s tomorrow. The man and the event, having made each other internationally famous, are in a long-running contractual dispute, one which landed Kobayashi in jail after he showed up at last year’s contest. Questions abound. Is he trying to blaze a trail for independent eaters? Is he clinging to past glory? Or is he just crazy? According to Rich Shea, one of the Nathan’s promoters, Kobayashi has to decide “whether he’s the Che Guevara of gurgitation or the Kenny Powers of power eating.”

Over the past month, BYU has been held up as a symbol of all that is decent in college sports for its unsparing treatment of Brandon Davies, the African-American basketball player who violated the school’s honor code by reportedly having sex with his girlfriend. Davies was suspended shortly before the NCAA tournament, and a braying mainstream press lauded BYU for sticking to its principles. Sports Illustrated’s website even wondered if a values-driven, “non-hypocritical” BYU was “on the verge of becoming America’s team.” The reality isn’t so appealing.

Tobechi Onwuhara specialized in hitting home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), the reservoirs of cash that banks make available to homeowners. Once Onwuhara gained access to a HELOC, he could siphon out vast sums in seconds. His weapon was persuasion. It got him enough money to start building a colonnaded fortress in Nigeria; enough to gamble at the high-stakes tables in Vegas casinos all night. Even his accomplices appear not to have known how much he was really pulling down — not even his beautiful fiancée, Precious Matthews.

But the buzzy Boston author’s lusty take plays loose with the facts while missing the real story.