Search Results for: sports

College Longreads Pick: 'Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal' by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Americans spend a lot of time with sports, so “healing power of sports” stories that elevate games beyond, well, games, have an undeniable appeal. But sports writing, when trying to transcend its subject matter, can run a little purple. Combine a sports-as-life story with a national tragedy, and you risk drowning your subjects in overwrought prose. With that in mind, there is much to admire in Isabelle Khurshudyan’s story on ESPN.com about a youth sports camp in Newtown, Conn. Kurshudyan, a student at the University of South Carolina who wrote this as a summer intern, demonstrates impressive restraint and respect for her subjects and their experience by letting them do the talking. Her straightforward, spare approach to writing gives the piece its own gravity.

Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal

Isabelle Khurshudyan | ESPN | 13 minutes (3,309 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

College Longreads Pick: ‘Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal’ by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Isabelle Khurshudyan, a student from the University of South Carolina who wrote this story as an intern for ESPN.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 21, 2013

A Miami Clinic Supplies Drugs to Sports’ Biggest Names

Longreads Pick

An investigation reveals that Major League Baseball stars including the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez and the Giants’ Melky Cabrera allegedly received banned substances:

“Open the neat spreadsheet and scroll past the listing of local developers, prominent attorneys, and personal trainers. You’ll find a lengthy list of nicknames: Mostro, Al Capone, El Cacique, Samurai, Yukon, Mohamad, Felix Cat, and D.R.

“Then check out the main column, where their real names flash like an all-star roster of professional athletes with Miami ties: San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, Oakland A’s hurler Bartolo Colón, pro tennis player Wayne Odesnik, budding Cuban superstar boxer Yuriorkis Gamboa, and Texas Rangers slugger Nelson Cruz. There’s even the New York Yankees’ $275 million man himself, Alex Rodriguez, who has sworn he stopped juicing a decade ago.”

Source: Miami New Times
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,544 words)

Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare

Longreads Pick

Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions:

“Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not strong-arm the Xanadu County Board of Directors into funding the project by threatening to move to Los Angeles. His mistake. He wouldn’t last five minutes as an American sports owner. According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That’s enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today’s dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches — three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It’s also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars — wars rooted in the various publicly granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.”

Source: Sports on Earth
Published: Dec 14, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,530 words)

Kickoff: ‘Madden NFL’ and the Future of Video Game Sports

Longreads Pick

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 a first-person shooter? Could you make the experience of being an offensive lineman as interesting as anything on the ball? Why, for that matter, is running the ball such an isometric experience? When I put these and other questions to the Madden team in Florida, many of them smiled.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Jan 17, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,703 words)

Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Crip Life

Longreads Pick

Kalyn Heffernan is 24 years old, weighs 53 pounds, and measures three feet, six inches tall. She’s light enough to carry, compact enough to hide under a winter coat, and is sometimes mistaken for a child. But Kalyn, who has the brittle-bone disability osteogenesis imperfecta, is hardly innocent, precious, or inconspicuous: The Colorado native dabbles in graffiti, cusses gloriously, and has a septum piercing. She raps, scribbles rhymes, and has been known to cover the viral YouTube video “My Vagina Ain’t Handicapped.” If you ask—and even if you don’t—she’ll eagerly lift her shirt to show off the words “CRIP LIFE” inked on her stomach, an homage to Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE tattoo.

Kalyn is the founding member of Wheelchair Sports Camp, a fledgling jazz-hop trio cheekily named after a week-long youth-disability program she attended growing up and, by her own admission, “corrupted.”

Source: Village Voice
Published: Dec 7, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,839 words)

The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures of Sportswriting’s Last Badass

Longreads Pick

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.”

Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.

Author: Alex Belth
Source: Deadspin
Published: Dec 6, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,116 words)

The Shame of College Sports

Longreads Pick

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 13, 2011
Length: 57 minutes (14,417 words)

Game On! The Untold Secrets and Furious Egos Behind the Rise of SportsCenter

Longreads Pick

Have Keith Theodore Olbermann spend a few seasons working at your television network and see how you feel. Sort of like Kansas after a twister. If Olbermann hadn’t been so brilliant and talented, few would have put up with him. But Olbermann has a talent that can’t be taught. He can relate to people on the other side of the camera and, indeed, relate to the camera itself in a way that comes across as second nature. And yet he once told an interviewer that on some level, he’s always making fun of television: “Like, ‘Look how ridiculous this is, me sitting here and you sitting on the other end, watching me—what are you doing that for?’ I think that’s always been my attitude.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 16, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,029 words)

The Sports Infidelity Equation

The Sports Infidelity Equation