Rustin Dodd is a sports reporter at The Kansas City Star. For the most part, he spends his time covering Kansas basketball and football, but he has also covered the Kansas City Royals for the last five years. He’s covered two Final Fours, two Major-League All-Star Games and The Masters. He resides in Lawrence, Kan., […]
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College Longreads Pick: 'Without Rules: The Untold Story of the Johnny Bright Incident' by Kyle Fredrickson, Oklahoma State University
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Journalism requires a relentless focus on the now and the next. But in order for journalists to give their audience any sort of context, they must always have a sense of the past. It’s not enough […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The American Male at Age Ten
Susan Orlean’s classic profile of a ten-year-old boy named Colin Duffy: “If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would ‘ wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand
[GLAAD’s 2013 “Outstanding Newspaper Article” Winner] How Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe became “football’s most aggressive straight ally to the gay rights movement”: “Kluwe says he doesn’t see the issue of gay marriage as political. His philosophy on the subject goes back to the Golden Rule, and he believes an amendment that would constitutionally criminalize […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?
[Not single-page] Anthony Wayne Smith, a former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, has been linked to the murders of four men: “Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Old Man and the Tee
A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming: “Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show
Loving alternative music, but feeling like an outsider: “One day in gym class, sitting on the bleachers adjacent to the football field, the popular kids in class came to sit next to me as we waited for everyone to suit up. Among hushed whispers, one of them turned around and asked me who my favorite […]
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Friday Night Tykes
In Texas, football is everything—even among 12-year-olds: “‘Celdon is the best eleven-year-old football player in America,’ Ronnie Braxton, his trainer, told me. ‘In America.’ Celdon isn’t the first youth football player to inspire that kind of claim. But when he hit the pile, his powerful legs churning furiously as he wormed his way through the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills
Undying hope from a city’s football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear: “For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Coach: A Local Legend and a Young Man’s Search to Find Himself
A young man’s memories of quitting the football team: “The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant’s picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of […]
