Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen. *** I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled […]
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Featured Longreader: Washington Post reporter Josh du Lac. See his story picks from the Post, Sports Illustrated, and more on his longreads page.
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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. […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Sports Illustrated, GQ, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, plus a guest pick from Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg.
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A trip to John Madden’s man cave, and whether sports video games can ever be described as “art”: Clearly, the way sports games are played, and the way Madden in particular is played, is ripe for some massive paradigm shift. Why doesn’t the quarterback position feel as visceral and pinpointy as firing a rifle in […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters, Popular Science, City Pages Minneapolis, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Jason Boog.
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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 […]
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A former Major League Baseball No. 1 draft pick battles alcoholism. He’s now in jail, charged with three felonies: In a sport where alcohol plays such a massive part in all social settings—on the same day Bush was arrested, Boston reliever Bobby Jenks, another player with alleged alcohol issues, was charged with a hit-and-run DUI […]
