Search Results for: ESPN

The Eagle Has Landed

Longreads Pick

The behind-the-scenes story of how NFL prospect Michael Sam came out:

The plan was set. The story would break right after the NFL Combine simultaneously on ESPN, The New York Times and Outsports. There might be a couple interviews after that, but otherwise Sam would focus on football.

The timing, however, would quickly change. Even as the plan was being formulated, it was like outrunning an avalanche. Every day it became more apparent that too many people knew what was coming. While Collins had kept his coming out a secret held among just a few trusted confidants, Sam’s sexual orientation would soon become the worst-kept secret in the sports media.

Source: outsports.com
Published: Feb 9, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,583 words)

The Death of the FCC Indecency Complaint

As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate—an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.

So for [former Chairman of the FCC Michael] Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy—the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.

“Is that all good? Probably not, but it’s not changeable either. We live in a new world, and that’s the way it is.

“They said the same thing when books became printed, right? They said it was the end of the world.

“But it wasn’t.”

Marin Cogan in ESPN Magazine (2014) on how the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII changed live television and American audiences.

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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match

Longreads Pick

Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2013

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match

The Match Maker

Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN | August 2013 | 34 minutes (8,461 words)

 

Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man who shrugged at the possibility that tennis champ and American hustler Bobby Riggs had thrown the famous September 1973 Battle of the Sexes match. The man’s name is Russell Boyd, and he claimed Bobby Riggs had talked openly and repeatedly with him, back in June 1973, about his intention to lose his upcoming match against Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was such a serious matter of him playing Billie Jean King,” Boyd, 56, told me, “and that he was actually expected to make an effort to win.” Read more…

A Former Basketball Star's New Life in Europe: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

College athletes who don’t go on to play professionally sometimes continue their career in Europe. And that’s usually the last we hear of them. But the University of Pittsburgh’s Jasper Wilson made good use of a trip to Strasbourg to profile former Pitt basketball star Ricardo Greer. Greer, now 36, does things like throw his kid a birthday party and dispute his salary with his boss. These are adult concerns, beyond dull to most college students. But Wilson saw these moments as part of his narrative, a “whatever happened to” story about a student-athlete who grew up to become a responsible adult who makes a living doing the thing college prepared him to do. Sports journalism is in desperate need of reporters who can identify fresh angles beyond the churn of conflicts manufactured by ESPN and talk radio. Wilson had to go all the way to France, but he found one.

Greer Made Career, Home Playing in France

Jasper Wilson | The Pitt News | November 6, 2013 | 12 minutes (2,928 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


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College Longreads Pick: 'Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal' by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Americans spend a lot of time with sports, so “healing power of sports” stories that elevate games beyond, well, games, have an undeniable appeal. But sports writing, when trying to transcend its subject matter, can run a little purple. Combine a sports-as-life story with a national tragedy, and you risk drowning your subjects in overwrought prose. With that in mind, there is much to admire in Isabelle Khurshudyan’s story on ESPN.com about a youth sports camp in Newtown, Conn. Kurshudyan, a student at the University of South Carolina who wrote this as a summer intern, demonstrates impressive restraint and respect for her subjects and their experience by letting them do the talking. Her straightforward, spare approach to writing gives the piece its own gravity.

Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal

Isabelle Khurshudyan | ESPN | 13 minutes (3,309 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

College Longreads Pick: ‘Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal’ by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Isabelle Khurshudyan, a student from the University of South Carolina who wrote this story as an intern for ESPN.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 21, 2013

Reading List: Love in the Time of Context

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

One reason I admire longform journalism is its ability to tell stories. Some of these stories gain national attention. Some are perfected in an MFA workshop. Some are written on the backs of receipts, after waking in the middle of the night, while in traffic.

Most longform stories are written with love: toward craft and toward subject. These four are no exception. They focus on falling in love with chance encounters and with self-acceptance. They are about a love of career and a love of potential. They are about the struggle-love of family. That is the loyalty of longform: to a love of context.

1. “Owning the Middle.” (Kate Fagan, espnW and ESPN The Magazine, May 2013)

Women’s basketball superstar Brittney Griner makes strides on the court and in LGBTQ athletic culture. Be sure to check the video interview and gorgeous portraits by Cass Bird.

2. “Growing Up With Sailor Moon.” (Soleil Ho, Interrupt Magazine, May 2013)

In the midst of her parents’ emotional divorce, a young Ho discovers and relies upon the subversive gender-empowering message of Sailor Moon.

3. “A Ruckus of Romance.” (Rachel Howard, Narrative.ly, February 2013)

They fall in love on the dance floor: Emily Hall Smith plays matchmaker to the artsy, queer women of New York City.

4. “Butch in the Airport.” (Kate, Autostraddle, May 2013)

The seemingly innocuous airport can be place of great anxiety for those whom identify as genderqueer. Here, Kate reflects on such practical and emotional difficulties.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Rosa Middleton

Longreads Guest Pick: Julie Kliegman on 'Owning The Middle'

Julie Kliegman is a senior studying journalism and Spanish at Northwestern University. Come July, she’s headed to St. Petersburg to work for PolitiFact. She loves to travel, and has lived abroad for short stints in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.

“This week I enjoyed reading ‘Owning the Middle,’ an ESPN story about WNBA star Brittney Griner. If their sleek online feature design (see: ‘Out in the Great Alone’) isn’t enough to woo you, Kate Fagan paints a compelling picture of life as a black, lesbian athlete. Griner developed a thick skin during childhood and her time at Baylor that now helps her deflect the bullies Fagan refers to as her ‘troll chorus.’ Reading this will make you want to be as badass as Griner—the proud owner of many tattoos and two snakes.”

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.