How Lenny Dykstra Got Nailed

How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison:

“Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him in prison—many details of which have not been previously reported—stemmed from his apparently insatiable appetite for flashy cars, some of which he obtained using falsified financial documents. ‘He had to have all of these trappings to prove to himself he was as good as he thought he was,’ L.A. County Deputy DA Alex Karkanen told SI after Monday’s sentencing.

“In the unreleased documentary, filmed after his bankruptcy filing, the former Met and Phillie explains the importance of a private plane to his contentedness. ‘I said, O.K., I know I’ll be happy when I buy my own Gulfstream,’ says Dykstra, reflecting on the plane he purchased in 2007. ‘But I got down to the end of the nose, I looked back and I said, O.K., happy, come on, come on. So it’s not about the Gulfstream. But it is about the Gulfstream. Meaning it just wasn’t as good a Gulfstream as I wanted.'”

Published: Mar 7, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,534 words)

The Way We Play the Game

High school hockey player Jack Jablonski was left paralyzed after a hit during a game—leading Minnesota to get tougher on rules, and leading families to rethink hockey’s risks:

“‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. Something in his voice is strange. He looks at me. Cade and Raye are both staring at me now. Peter touches my hand.

“‘Jack Jablonski broke his neck last night.’

“Jack Jablonski—known as Jabby to his friends and the kids like Cade who grew up skating with him on the lakes around our homes—is not the first boy to break his neck playing this game. But he is the first one whom we who have kids still in Minneapolis youth and high school hockey programs have watched grow up.”

Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,817 words)

The Legacy Of Wes Leonard

A Michigan high school basketball player hits the game-winning shot. Moments later he collapses from cardiac arrest and dies:

“After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010–11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss.

“It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.”

Published: Feb 14, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,491 words)

Did This Man Really Cut Michael Jordan?

The search for Clifton (Pop) Herring, Jordan’s high school coach, and the truth about the NBA legend’s early days:

“And so, over the next four years, as Michael Jordan became an Olympic gold medalist, a rookie NBA All-Star and the scorer of 37 points per game, Pop Herring went from suspended to unemployed to unemployable. As Jordan’s fame spread around the world, his old coach became a stranger in their hometown. Pop took to running, as if trying to shake out the sickness. His slender frame was seen on highways and bridges, north toward the tobacco fields and east to the ocean. Sometimes he’d come upon old friends and hug them, and other times they would call his name and he would keep running, looking straight ahead, as if they didn’t exist.”

Published: Jan 10, 2012
Length: 28 minutes (7,165 words)

The Forgotten Hero

Doyle approached him and said, “Do you know there’s a retired number in Williams football?”

“Williams doesn’t retire numbers,” Quinn replied.

“Apparently it does,” Doyle said.

On the Monday after that game Quinn called Boyer and asked, “Williams has a retired football number?”

“I don’t know about retired,” Boyer said, “but there’s this box down here.

Author: Tim Layden
Published: Nov 7, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,766 words)

The Man Who Isn’t There

It’s been two autumns now since JaMarcus Russell last played a down of organized football. This fall, when capable quarterbacks have been in high demand and short supply, he’s gotten no calls. The Raiders lost his successor, Jason Campbell, to a broken collarbone on Oct. 16, and last week they acquired 31-year-old Carson Palmer, who had chosen to retire rather than play for the Bengals. Oakland sent Cincinnati a first-round pick in 2012 and a conditional second-rounder in ’13, and will pay him a guaranteed $7.5 million over the next two years. Yet Russell still counts himself among Mobile’s legion of unemployed.

Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,254 words)

The Hero No One Knew

Even in the off-season Payton’s life was laid out for him. He and his wife, Connie, employed a live-in nanny, Luna Picart, who did most of the cooking and cleaning and helped rear their son, Jarrett, and daughter, Brittney. Payton had an executive assistant, Ginny Quirk, who answered all his calls, filed all his papers, scheduled all his appointments. His agent, Bud Holmes, handled most of the necessary filings and contacts regarding Payton’s quest to own an NFL team. His accountant, Jerry Richman, handled financial matters. Quirk and, later, Tucker, managed the day-to-day running of his charity. Now, thanks to that pampering, upon his retirement in the winter of 1988 as the NFL’s alltime leading rusher, Payton found himself burdened by a realization that had struck thousands of ex-athletes before him: I am bored out of my mind.

Published: Oct 3, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,734 words)

The Art Of Winning An (even More) Unfair Game

The secrets of Moneyball, eight years later. “The young men had heaps of fun, working crazy hours and, to blow off steam, knocking golf balls around the office, playing football among the cubicles and celebrating big wins with postgame refreshments at Boston watering holes. Then one day in 2002, a best-selling writer by the name of Michael Lewis walked into the Red Sox offices and knocked the smile right off Epstein’s face. Lewis was working on a book about baseball’s nascent information age, but Epstein wanted nothing to do with him. ‘I can’t believe Billy is letting him write this book,’ he told his colleagues. Billy Beane, Oakland’s general manager, had granted Lewis access to his front-office operations, which meant revealing how the A’s were mining information from statistical analysis, a tool used extensively at the time by only the Athletics, Indians, Blue Jays and Red Sox. ‘He’s handing out the blueprint,’ Epstein told Hoyer.”

Published: Sep 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,711 words)

My Favorite Year

There’s no reason you should care about this … but 1986 was the pivotal year of my life. It was the year my car spun out, the year I worked in a factory and in the photo department of a retail store (I called people while they were eating dinner to offer them a free 3×5 photograph), the year she said she just wanted to be friends. It was the year everything seemed hopeful and the year when reality came crashing down like the top shelf of an overstuffed closet. It was the year when a little man dunked, when young Bears rapped and an old bear charged, when the hand of God reached out (and the referee missed it), when a ball rolled through the legs, when a genius set up behind the net. It was a year of folk heroes and comic book bad guys, a year when a gladiator dressed in black terrified the world.

Published: Sep 1, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,815 words)

The 30-Foot Jump

Anyway, the record will probably be Mike Powell’s for many years to come because, like I say, we just don’t jump like we used to. Nobody in years has jumped close enough that the NFL chain gang would even bother to come out and measure. The longest jump of 2010 wasn’t even 28 feet. And the longest jump this year, by Australia’s Mitchell Watt, is just 28 feet 3/8 inches. Carl Lewis had 24 non-wind aided jumps in competition longer than that in his career. TWENTY-FOUR. No, nobody — at least nobody on the visible horizon — figures to jump as far as Mike Powell. But what if I tell you that the longest jump in the history of the world was NOT Mike Powell’s? What if tell you about a mystery jump by Carl Lewis when he was at the height of his powers?

Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,868 words)