Search Results for: football

The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

Longreads Pick

Zac Easter, a former “smashmouth” high school football player, took his own life in the aftermath of suffering five diagnosed concussions during his football career.

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 10, 2017
Length: 34 minutes (8,624 words)

Roger Goodell’s Unstoppable Football Machine

Longreads Pick

A look at the football commissioner and the group of billionaire owners making all the decisions behind the N.F.L.

Published: Feb 3, 2016
Length: 25 minutes (6,349 words)

Life After Football: Our College Pick

Disappointment feels so much bigger when you’re young because you haven’t lived long enough to know that there’s always something else on the other side. In his story about a former football prospect who seeks a new identity on a baseball field, Jesse Dougherty elicits emotion from a normally taciturn type – the young male athlete – and conveys those feelings without tripping over purple prose.

Life After Football

Jesse Dougherty | The Daily Orange | April 5, 2015 | 1,647 words (7 minutes)

Football as a Barometer of Italian Society

“Football is a very simple barometer of a society,” says Paddy Agnew, an Irish Times correspondent and former RAI television commentator who has covered Italian soccer since the 1980s. “And if the red light is flashing in society, the red light is flashing in football. That’s what it is here, they’ve run out of petrol. This is a society — and it is not just football — that has stood still for 30 years.”

You can see many the troubles of Italian life through a lens of Italy’s favorite sport. A struggling economy exerts pressure on the country’s social fabric. High unemployment means plenty of young men living in their parents’ homes with little to do. To cope, many simply dive deeper into their calcio [Italian for football].

Peter Simek, writing in SB Nation about Italian football culture and the Rome-based football club A.S. Roma.

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The Last Days of Football

Longreads Pick

According to n+1, almost nothing is watched by everybody, but the thing that comes closest is the NFL. So why does the league have so many problems?

Source: n+1
Published: Jan 29, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,250 words)

In Pahokee, Football Serves as a Way Out

Longreads Pick

In a small, impoverished town in Florida, a high school football player works diligently to get a college scholarship and fulfill his dreams of playing for a Division I school.

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Dec 4, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,127 words)

Jerry Football

Longreads Pick

He’s one of the most infamous owners in professional sports, in need of one more Super Bowl. The complete story of Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys.

Source: ESPN
Published: Aug 29, 2014
Length: 42 minutes (10,638 words)

Football in Ferguson

Longreads Pick

Despite the turmoil tearing apart their small Missouri town, the boys of the McCluer High School football team still have their first game of the season Friday. Sports Illustrated‘s Robert Klemko follows the team and their coach, as they try to make sense of the madness around them as well as their “city’s conflicted past, its tumultuous present and its uncertain future, and what it all means for the people of Ferguson.”

Published: Aug 19, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,992 words)

College Football Star Michael Sam on How He Was Treated After Coming Out to His Teammates

Mr. Sam played down any repercussions, saying he had the full support of teammates, coaches and administrators. One teammate, he said, accompanied him to a gay pride event in St. Louis last summer, and others went with him to gay bars.

“Some people actually just couldn’t believe I was actually gay,” Mr. Sam said. “But I never had a problem with my teammates. Some of my coaches were worried, but there was never an issue.”

One lingering issue, Mr. Washington said, was trying to get players to change their casual language in the locker room. Loosely lobbed homophobic remarks suddenly had a specific sting.

Mr. Sam played down that, too. For him, coming out to his football team was a positive step, on a path that seems as if it will lead to the N.F.L.

In The New York Times, John Branch reports about college football star Michael Sam, who came out as gay to his teammates at Mizzou. Sam is on track to become the first publicly gay player in the NFL. See also: “Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand.”

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Photo: Komunews

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Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'

sasha
Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most riveted, however, by her 2011 profile in GQ of Fred McNeill, former star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings — which similarly begins in the car. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, with McNeill’s wife, Tia, fighting his dementia along with the Los Angeles traffic, and it’s a great example of Laskas’ gift for capturing language. As journalists continue to shed light on the concussion crisis in football, Laskas’ article stands out as one of the most personal, most devastating accounts of the long-term damage being done on the field.

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