Search Results for: basketball

We Are All Teenage Werewolves

Longreads Pick

MTV’s “Teen Wolf” was conceived as a darker, sexier reimagining of the “Teen Wolf” story, and also a gorier one. Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, for example, Posey’s character, Scott McCall, discovers the naked, dismembered body of a young woman in the woods. So it’s clear right away that this will not be a sweet, silly sports comedy, like the old “Teen Wolf.” There will also be brooding! There will probably not be triumphant werewolf-basketball montages!

Published: May 20, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,503 words)

Accidental Hero: Beryl Shipley, 1926-2011

Longreads Pick

The onetime coach at Southwestern Louisiana was vilified for violating NCAA rules, but the author, who grew up in Cajun country, remembers Beryl Shipley for doing something courageous: helping to integrate college basketball in the Deep South

Published: Apr 28, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,237 words)

Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference

Longreads Pick

Exiled from the NBA, vilified by the press, and ridiculed for a serious of questionable YouTube videos (eating Vaseline? c’mon!), Stephon Marbury is seeking redemption—and vast riches—in basketball-mad China. Now, if he can just win over his Communist bosses, he’ll be the biggest thing since Yao Ming

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,683 words)

The Truth About Race, Religion, And The Honor Code At BYU

Longreads Pick

Over the past month, BYU has been held up as a symbol of all that is decent in college sports for its unsparing treatment of Brandon Davies, the African-American basketball player who violated the school’s honor code by reportedly having sex with his girlfriend. Davies was suspended shortly before the NCAA tournament, and a braying mainstream press lauded BYU for sticking to its principles. Sports Illustrated’s website even wondered if a values-driven, “non-hypocritical” BYU was “on the verge of becoming America’s team.” The reality isn’t so appealing.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Apr 15, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,658 words)

Princeton vs. UCLA: Reflections on a Historic Upset

Princeton vs. UCLA: Reflections on a Historic Upset

Princeton vs. UCLA: Reflections on a Historic Upset

Longreads Pick

I had a courtside seat for that game in Indianapolis, on the Princeton bench. I was a sophomore, small — too small, and slow — forward on that 1996 team. The only action I saw was the pregame layup lines. But countless times over the past 15 years, my former teammates and I have all had conversations, even with people we’ve just met, along these lines: “Oh yeah, you played basketball at Princeton? Were you in that team that beat UCLA?” “Yes.” “Man, I remember that game, I was at my frat house at Scranton going wild.” Or “I was at a sports bar in Baltimore,” or “I was in my den, screaming at the television.” People — and, believe me, not just Princeton or UCLA alums — know precisely where they were, what they were doing and what they were drinking (often alcohol) during that game.

Source: Time
Published: Mar 17, 2011
Length: 38 minutes (9,658 words)

Allen Iverson: Fallen Star

Allen Iverson: Fallen Star

Allen Iverson: Fallen Star

Longreads Pick

With his NBA career over, his marriage in trouble, and rumors swirling about drinking and money problems, the greatest Sixer of his era finds himself playing minor-league basketball in Turkey and spending his nights at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Istanbul. Isn’t it, weirdly, exactly how we always thought it would end for Allen Iverson?

Published: Jan 3, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,515 words)

Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. 

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In no particular order.

THE LEGEND OF BLACK SUPERMAN — Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin

I’m typing this in a Starbucks in the Robinson’s Place Mall in Manila. Everywhere I go in this city, I am reminded of Pacific Rims, Bartholomew’s chronicle of the place of basketball in the culture of the Philippines

The excerpt on Billy Ray Bates was my favorite sports read of the year. Any documentary filmmaker who wants a subject…

THE MURDERERS OF MEXICO — Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books

What else could you possibly ever want out of a journalist? Fearless, measured and whip-smart with an eye for narrative detail that should be the envy of every writer who has ever read her work.

Her reflections, observations and opinions on the war in Mexico should tower over every other work on the subject, the way Orwell towers over the Spanish Civil War. Hopefully, before it’s too late, someone in publishing will drive up to Guillermoprieto’s door with a suitcase filled with money, because if there is going to be another Homage to Catalonia, it will be Alma Guillermoprieto on the Narco Wars.  

INSANE CLOWN POSSE: AND GOD CREATED CONTROVERSYJon Ronson, The Guardian

The perfect companion for the world’s most baffling music video. I wish someone had done this for the Wu, circa 1994.

Ronson also broke open the seal for long-form articles written specifically to explain baffling youtube videos. Like somebody please write 3,000+ words on how they got that fucking bird to dance to that Willow Smith song. Choire Sicha, I’m looking you straight in the eyes and I am saying please. 

PELE AS A COMEDIAN — Brian Phillips, Run of Play

There are so many reasons why this essay should annoy me. It’s about a really kinda bad David Foster Wallace essay, it’s about soccer and it involves a lot of footnotes. And yet, it took me about a paragraph to discard all those hang-ups and just revel in the quality of writing, the intelligence of the mind at work.

RICHARD LAWSON’S AMERICAN IDOL COVERAGE — Richard Lawson, Gawker

The only reason I still watch the show. And, along with temperate weather and Mexican food, one of the three reasons why I love living on the West Coast. Because on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I can wake up and have Lawson’s mammoth recaps already posted on Gawker.

Sometimes, I find myself typing and deleting twitter messages to Richard Lawson. Mostly, they are about how my day is going. Sometimes, they are jokes about Crystal Bowersox. Once, it was a suggestion he get cloned so he could also write about the Biggest Loser

Mikhail Prokhorov, the Playboy and His Power Games

Longreads Pick

You might think that Mikhail Prokhorov would have had a not-so-soft case of buyer’s remorse this past spring. A month before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the 45-year-old Russian billionaire struck a deal to buy the New Jersey Nets from the real estate developer Bruce C. Ratner. When the league owners finally ratified the sale eight months later, the Nets record stood at 12 wins and 70 losses, and Prokhorov’s shiny new team was the laughingstock of the NBA

Author: Chip Brown
Published: Oct 28, 2010
Length: 33 minutes (8,343 words)