Search Results for: basketball

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

The Courting of Marvin Clark

Longreads Pick

Inside the pursuit of a high school basketball star:

The day after Mr. Clark returned from Iowa State, Mr. Weber arranged floor seats for him and four of his teammates for the Wildcats’ game that night against Kansas, which was then ranked No. 1 in the country. When Kansas State pulled off an overtime upset, Mr. Clark was there to rush the floor with the fans.

Kansas State’s coaches brought him into the locker room to enjoy the celebration. One coach later texted, “That could be you on that floor next year!!”

Published: Jun 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,402 words)

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

Twenty Years After Infamous Bronco Chase, O.J. Simpson Is Still a Mystery

Longreads Pick

After riveting the nation with the Bronco chase and dividing it with the Trial of the Century, O.J. Simpson settled into a strange life as a celebrity pariah and ended up behind bars on unrelated crimes.

Inmate No. 1027820 works at the gym. He supervises other prisoners who clean and set up for basketball games, during which he operates the clock and scoreboard. He also manages a slo-pitch softball team that plays in the yard. He can’t bat because of a balky elbow and bad knees, but he likes to taunt the opposition, yelling, “Sit your ass down!” after missed swings. He loves playing dominoes, watches SportsCenter and crime dramas such as Person of Interest, and telephones his lawyer and old friends. He reads USA Today and the Game of Thrones books. He works out, though not as vigorously as he used to. He misses golf. He plays fantasy football; last season his team included Peyton Manning, Robert Griffin III and Alfred Morris. He also admires Marshawn Lynch. The way the Seahawks’ running back plays reminds the inmate of another life. The life he once had.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,262 words)

At the World Pun Championships, Victory Is Easier Said Than Punned

Longreads Pick

A profile of a 38-year-old ‘world pun champion’:

At one point Gruber helps lead a discussion of favorite puns. One competitor says, “What’s The Onion newspaper’s biggest competitor?” Ziek quips, “Is it Wiki-Leeks?” The punster seems embarrassed as he reveals his passable but inferior answer, the Garlic Press.

As the night wears on, the punsters form teams to play Schmovie, a board game in which players try to create the best punny movie titles. One round calls for a movie about a constipated basketball player.

A member of Ziek’s team comes up with Scottie Poopin’, but Ziek overrules him in favor of the more on-point LeBrown Jams. It’s a tough round, but his pick ultimately triumphs over another team’s Poop Dreams.

Source: LA Weekly
Published: Jun 5, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,885 words)

The Other Side of Deportation

Longreads Pick

An American struggles to prepare for life without her husband.

For the past five months, she had been documenting the gradual unraveling of their lives, in moments both mundane and monumental: the first visit to their home by immigration officers, the delivery of Zunaid’s deportation orders, his final trips to eat American ice cream and watch American basketball. Now only four days remained before he would be sent off to Bangladesh, a deportation that would upend not just one life but two. Zunaid would be forcibly separated from the United States after 20 years; his wife, an American citizen, would be forcibly separated from her husband.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 25, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,672 words)

Taking the Long View on Sports Reporting: Our College Pick

It’s been almost a month since the UConn Huskies won both NCAA basketball titles, but the pangs of withdrawal are evident on certain basketball-crazed campuses around the country. Without a good game, we turn instead to a good story. Cal Poly beat Texas Southern to secure a spot in the tournament and lost in the first round to Wichita State. It was Cal Poly’s first appearance in the NCAA Tournament, much thanks to forward Chris Eversley. In his profile of Eversley, writer J.J. Jenkins laces a narrative between the unlikely journey of the team and the personal triumph of one player. This is not a particularly unusual angle for a Cinderella sports story. But as a longtime sportswriter for Cal Poly’s Mustang News, Jenkins can write with the deep familiarity that comes with covering a team over time.

Eversley’s Ascent

J.J. Jenkins | Mustang News | April 2, 2014 | 18 minutes (4,389 words)

Why Owning an NBA Team is Like Having a House on the Best Beach in the World

Last year the Milwaukee Bucks were purchased by two hedge-fund billionaires for $550 million. In a piece for Grantland, Bill Simmons tried to nail down what exactly drives the super rich to acquire NBA teams, a purchase that—at least by the numbers—is often a pretty lousy investment.

Simmons concluded that for many owners, exclusivity and prestige outweigh straight number crunching: “You can’t rationally assess the ‘value’ of anything when ego is involved. What’s the value of sitting courtside as everyone watches YOUR team?” Apparently over a half a billion dollars, even for a losing, small-market team. After all, according to Simmons, “plenty of rich people can buy a plane or an island, but only 30 of them can say they own an NBA franchise.” It’s about supply and demand. As long as the supply in question remains incredibly limited, the super rich will remain drawn to what Simmons billed as “the world’s most exclusive club.” Here’s how he broke it down:

If you pretend the NBA is an exclusive beach on Turks and Caicos, it makes more sense. Let’s say it’s the single best beach in the world, and it can only hold 30 houses. Let’s say some of the houses are bigger and prettier than others, only all of them have the same gorgeous ocean view. And let’s say all 30 owners feel strongly that their investments will keep improving, barring a collapsed stock market or an unforeseen weather catastrophe, of course. Does it really matter if you bought one of the ugliest houses on that beach? Don’t you just want to crack the 30? You can always knock the house down and build a better one … right?

That’s the National Basketball Association in 2014. Who wants to be on the hottest beach? What will you pay? How bad do you want it? Get one of those 30 houses and you can invite your friends down for the weekend, show them around, make them drinks and eventually head out to your deck. And you can look out and watch the sun slowly setting, and you can hear the water splash, and you can hear your friends tell you, “I love the view, it’s spectacular.” Because right now, it is.

Read the story

Just Who Is Herman Curtis Malone?

Longreads Pick

Curtis Malone created a D.C. youth basketball empire. Turns out, he was a drug dealer, too:

The Malone these by-the-book high achievers know is, well, one of them. Over three decades, he guided hundreds — some say thousands — of teenage boys toward higher education, especially those whose skills on the basketball court set them apart from their peers. The athletically gifted youngsters often landed on the Amateur Athletic Union basketball team Malone founded with his friend Troy Weaver in 1993, D.C. Assault.Malone built a winning team, which attracted more talent, which meant more wins. Charismatic and driven, Malone grew D.C. Assault into one of the top AAU boys’ basketball programs in the United States with nine teams.

Published: Mar 27, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)

Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation's Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick

Mental health issues have lost much of their stigma on college campuses, as they have in the rest of the world. Today’s college students self-medicate just as much as they always did, but they also seek professional help in a much more public way than you might remember from your own school days. You’ll find evidence of this openness in this week’s College Longreads pick, from the University of North Carolina. Every one of Claire McNeill’s sources went on the record about their pain, fear, and suicide attempts. But what makes the story stand out, in addition to thorough reporting, is a thoughtful angle.

The University of North Carolina, the story posits, is a college campus known for its positivity and student satisfaction. “From its radiant azaleas to its basketball fever, from its 700 student organizations to its ranking as Best Public Value School in the nation, from the University’s favored buzzwords — inclusivity, diversity, collaboration — to its unofficial motto in ‘The Carolina Way,’ it seems from a distance that UNC’s 18,500 undergraduate students are living the life of a college brochure,” McNeill writes. How do you live with depression in a place that keeps telling you how happy you ought to be? The angle is what makes an otherwise well-trod story compelling. Journalists rely on this no-duh skill of finding fresh angles so much that they forget it’s something they had to learn, to refine, over time.

Depression in the Southern Part of Heaven

Claire McNeill | Synapse Magazine | February 10, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,807 words)