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A longtime manager on the dirty business of professional boxing:

I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn’t fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch “Blood” Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportunities for them, deals that came undone when they lost. It wasn’t as if the winners benefited in any tangible way either. At best their victories brought them smallish short-term bragging rights. Among boxing insiders they were objects of scorn for having won, as incompetent at their jobs as Green, Spinks, and I were at ours.

A comprehensive history of every black quarterback to play in the NFL, dating back to 1920:

More than a compilation of names, this was an opportunity to find and publish these men’s stories. Some are brief; others are long. We penned longer pieces on the most notable players, like Fritz Pollard, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, the immortal Akili Smith, and many more, but every player on this list is part of a broad narrative that traces the history of football and its relationship with the broader society.

As part of this, we tested old stereotypes and answered old questions. Do black quarterbacks run more or less than whites? Are they more accomplished passers? You’ll find answers here.

Former WWF wrestler Diamond Dallas Page is now a fitness guru who is helping other former wrestlers like Jake “The Snake” Roberts with their substance abuse addictions. Page’s home in Smyrna, Ga. has been dubbed by these wrestlers as the “Accountability Crib”:

“Page has a knack for bringing people under his influence. Linda is actually Brittany’s biological mother, but she allowed Page to legally adopt both of her daughters in the mid-’90s, and she and Page have since raised the girls as friends. Linda now works for Page, and eagerly adheres to the dieting (no gluten, no genetically modified foods) and exercise (DDP Yoga) regimens that he has laid out for her. Andrew first met Page at a WrestleCon in New Jersey, where he made it clear that he was looking for work. He has been living with and working for Page ever since, and he claims to have never felt this healthy or this good about himself before. Ted befriended Page in a gym 10 years ago and was featured in an early iteration of Page’s yoga DVD and book. The two have stayed in touch all these years, and Ted credits Page’s workout regimen for his sharp mind and his Jack LaLanne-esque physique. The house is full of these kinds of stories, in fact.

“‘He enjoys helping people, and it’s valid,’ Scott Hall tells me. ‘He gets high off helping people.'”

The writer visits the 2013 National School Scrabble Championship, a competition between children in the fourth through eighth grade:

“The two boys have a laugh at my complaints. Frankly, I’m in a no-win situation. If I lose, I’m a loser. If I win, I’m the heartless bastard who beat two middle schoolers. Sam’s mother agrees with my assessment.

“‘Oh, you have to lose,’ she says, laughing.

“‘I know, I know.’

“But then we draw tiles and I find that I have a bingo right at the start: FlOWERS. I put it down and suddenly I have an 82-0 lead. Then I draw the Q and the Z simultaneously and put down QUIZ to take a 124-24 lead. I’m crushing it. I’m killing it. I am killcrushslaying these kids. I have no interest in decorum anymore. The game has me. I want to win because I want to win.

A 1982 Inside Sports profile of Glenn Burke, one of the first professional athletes to come out. Burke died in 1995:

“Burke walks out to the sunshine of the patio, where there is enough quiet to reflect. ‘People say I should still be playing,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, so I faded away. My teammates’ wives might have been threatened by a gay man in the locker room. I could have been a superstar but I was too worried about protecting everybody else from knowing. If I thought I could be accepted, I’d be there now. It is the first thing in my life I ever backed down from. No, I’m not disappointed in myself, I’m disappointed in the system. Your sex should be private, and I always kept it that way. Deep inside, I know the Dodgers traded me because I was gay.'”

A college football star learns about the death of his grandmother and girlfriend on the same day and has inspirational stories written about him by major media outlets. But there’s a problem: His girlfriend never existed:

“There was no Lennay Kekua. Lennay Kekua did not meet Manti Te’o after the Stanford game in 2009. Lennay Kekua did not attend Stanford. Lennay Kekua never visited Manti Te’o in Hawaii. Lennay Kekua was not in a car accident. Lennay Kekua did not talk to Manti Te’o every night on the telephone. She was not diagnosed with cancer, did not spend time in the hospital, did not engage in a lengthy battle with leukemia. She never had a bone marrow transplant. She was not released from the hospital on Sept. 10, nor did Brian Te’o congratulate her for this over the telephone. She did not insist that Manti Te’o play in the Michigan State or Michigan games, and did not request he send white flowers to her funeral. Her favorite color was not white. Her brother, Koa, did not inform Manti Te’o that she was dead. Koa did not exist. Her funeral did not take place in Carson, Calif., and her casket was not closed at 9 a.m. exactly. She was not laid to rest.

“Lennay Kekua’s last words to Manti Te’o were not ‘I love you.'”

A Wayne Gretzky fan grows up to be his hero’s teammate on the New York Rangers:

“‘Gretz, I’m hungover. Maybe even a little drunk still. Can you keep the puck away from me today?’

“I could not believe I was saying this even as the words were coming out of my mouth. Was I really telling the greatest player in the history of the game—not to mention the finest passer ever—to keep the puck away from me?

“I was. And the Great One was great about it. ‘No problem, Prongs, I’ve been there myself.’

“Wait. Did he just call me Prongs? He knows my name? Somehow, that one line from Wayne put my mind at ease. Wayne knew my situation and he had my back. What a guy.”

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.”

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.”

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.”