SB Nation

Reconciling our love of sports with the risks associated with them:

When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.

So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I’d begun to outgrow my need for it, I’d also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college’s men’s team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.

How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money:

The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his “other phone,” to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way into town. We’re sitting in a popular restaurant near campus almost a week before National Signing Day, talking about how to arrange cash payments for amateur athletes.

“Nah, there’s no way we’re landing him, but you still have to do it,” he says. “It looks good. It’s good for down the road. Same reason my wife reads Yelp. These kids talk to each other. It’s a waste of money, but they’re doing the same thing to our guys right now in [rival school’s town]. Cost of business.”

The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption:

Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of understatement, “This is a unique story.” After returning to prison three years earlier, the former professional boxer had long since been recognized as one of the most feared and dangerous of the 1,150 inmates then living behind the walls of New Jersey’s most notorious maximum-security prison, a place journalist Ralph Wiley described “as if the world had dropped the sum of its sores into one of New Jersey’s gritty smokestacks, then chose not to watch as the results of the experiment filtered down into place.”

On the past, present and future of Manny Pacquiao, who was knocked out in December and now is returning to the ring. And despite earning more than $200 million, Pacquiao doesn’t have much of it left:

In the Times article, Michael Koncz, singled out Pacquiao’s Achilles’ heel: “The downfall of Pacquiao, if there is one, will be his kindness and generosity. At some point, I fear that’s going to catch up to him.” Beyond Pacquiao’s generosity, he reportedly squandered millions from gambling. That doesn’t even account for his fleet of cars and extensive property holdings, including houses, condos, apartments and such an intense desire to give his money away to the poor he had to hire people simply charged with the responsibility to apologize and prevent him from throwing money at all the open hands spread out before him.

Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. is a 24-year-old kid from Sacramento who quit his job as a janitor at a Greyhound bus station for a chance to drive across country and play basketball at Harlem’s legendary Rucker Park:

“A couple of days before, he took me from his place to Roosevelt Park on 10th and P Street, a quiet well-manicured playground just south of downtown. Right away, he asked again if I wanted to play one-on-one. I had on jeans and low-top sneakers and hadn’t planned on playing, but he needed to prove to me he had game, so I agreed. He showed off his turnaround jumper, quick hops and sharp lateral quickness. The hours of hard work had paid off and we split two games to 11. But when more players showed up for the noontime run, the crater-sized holes in his game became obvious.”

How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks:

“You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in the twilight of your career. Eventually, you do move back home and tell anyone that will listen that you did, in fact, play pro basketball. You try to find a 9-to-5 job while fighting off the inevitable depression that comes from losing the only thing you’ve ever truly loved, and, over time, you forget you ever had a dream in the first place. It’s a good life, at times an amazing life, filled with peaks and valleys higher and lower than you could ever imagine. And then, it’s over.

“For Copeland, however, there remained a gnawing inside his gut. No matter how well he did, it wasn’t quite enough. ‘I was feeling sad even though I was having a lot of success. In my head,’ he said. ‘I just still believed I could do better. I knew if I didn’t make it, I’d look back with a lot of regrets.'”