Search Results for: sports

How Athletes Get Great

Longreads Pick

How much of greatness is nature vs. nurture? Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule in a new book about the science of training, The Sports Gene. A lot depends on individual biology, and there are cultural factors, too:

“Usain Bolt is a great example. He was 6’4” when he was 15 years old and blazing fast. He wanted to play soccer or cricket. What are the chances anyone lets him run track in the U.S.? To me, it’s zero. There’s no way he’s not playing basketball or football. Nowhere but Trinidad, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica would a guy that’s 6’4”, with blinding speed, be allowed to run track instead of something else. People have asked me, ‘Should we do genetic screening for the best athletes or at least some sort of measurements?’ Yes, measuring kids and trying to fit them into the right sport for their body type absolutely works. That’s why you saw Australia and Great Britain up their medal haul with their talent search programs when they had their Olympics. However, when there’s a sport that’s most popular in an area, you don’t have to do that because you already have the natural sifting program. You don’t have to go hunt for the best football players in America because they’re already going to go play football and then we select them.”

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 9, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,302 words)

College Longreads Pick: 'Raising Trey' by Everett Cook, University of Michigan

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

Everett Cook, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, profiled former Wolverine and now NBA player Trey Burke last March. There are plenty of stories about athletic phenoms, but elite athletes are not the most innovative fodder. Cook used sophisticated storytelling techniques to reveal his subject. First, he told Burke’s story through his relationship with his father. And then he framed the profile around the father and his friends watching Trey play Penn State at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. (The setting is conflict enough.) Such a sophisticated structure is a high-level writing skill.

Raising Trey

Everett Cook | The Michigan Daily | March 18, 2013 | 13 minutes (3,158 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.

The Lady Jaguars

Longreads Pick

A look at a basketball program for teenage girls that offers guidance and refuge from their rocky family lives in a town plagued by unemployment, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy. The program is part of the Carroll Academy, a school run by the Carroll County Juvenile Court in West Tennessee. John Branch reports the story in two parts:

“Hannah arrived when she was 12, after she admitted stealing prescription pills from her mother and bringing them to school under orders from girls who had threatened to beat her up. It was Monica, wanting to teach Hannah a lesson, who called the school.

“It was only this spring that Hannah acknowledged that it was a lie — a lie conceived by her father, Hannah said, so that he could take the pills and avoid the wrath of his wife. Hannah wants to graduate from Carroll Academy. She likes the attention and a predictable schedule. She likes playing on the basketball team. She has flitting dreams of becoming a doctor or a veterinarian.

“Hannah’s parents do not like that she goes to Carroll Academy. Getting her to the van stop in the nearest town is inconvenient, and picking her up after basketball games (when school vans do not run) can cost an hour of time and $20 in gas money, if the car is running at all. But if Hannah does not attend, her parents could end up in jail. The juvenile court views truancy as a parent problem, not a child one.”

Don’t miss the 17-minute documentary that goes along with this story about 14-year-old Hannah’s experience at Carroll Academy.

Published: Jul 25, 2013
Length: 46 minutes (11,726 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Shannon Proudfoot on 'The King Of The Ferret Leggers'

Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News.

“It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The main character is unforgettable, perfectly drawn with a few brilliant details and vernacular dialogue. And the writing just crackles—clever, cheeky and nimble, but never getting in the way. Read this snippet and just try not to smirk: ‘Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer.’ It would have been easy to go for the cheap laugh at the expense of the odd in a story like this, but Donald Katz’s obvious affection for his subject pushes this into a sublime little realm for me.”

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Longreads Guest Pick: Rustin Dodd on 'The Courage Of Jill Costello'

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., home of the best local music scene in the Midwest.


Every year or so, I find myself going back and reading ‘The Courage of Jill Costello,’ a Sports Illustrated story by Chris Ballard from Nov. 29, 2010. It’s often said that the best sports stories are not about sports — and that’s true, of course. But this story is an example of simple, rich storytelling, elegant and beautiful. Jill Costello is a coxswain on the Cal rowing team, diagnosed with cancer before her senior season. (Ballard retraces her final year on campus, letting his deep reporting do the work.) And at its core, Costello’s story is about youth and heart and determination and time, and the question we all ask ourselves: What would we would do if we only had a little bit of life left?

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College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Light from Darkness,' by Mary Kenney, Indiana University

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

Recent Indiana University journalism student Mary Kenney used her study-abroad experience in India to test her abilities as a foreign correspondent. In “Light From Darkness,” Kenney profiles a sex worker named Akshaya. Akshaya was a rural girl who sought a new life in a big city. But like so many other impoverished women around the world, Akshaya’s life turned violent. Kenney relies on Akshaya’s own voice to provide the story’s tone and cadence, but without the soft-focus indulgence that can turn such narratives into overwrought Lifetime movies. Her willingness to spend time with a subject, and earn her trust, is evident in this piece.

Kenney is spending her first post-graduate summer on the sports desk at The New York Times, where she is a James Reston Reporting Fellow.

“Light from Darkness”

Mary Kenney | Inside Magazine | March 2013 | 2,932 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.

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi

Longreads Pick

Novelist Adam Johnson meets Kenji Fujimoto, a man who became the Dear Leader’s cook, confidant, and court jester:

“Many people envied me because I was a favorite of Kim Jong-il. At the parties, I poured sake for Shogun-sama, but Shogun-sama also poured sake for me, which was very rare. Every time Shogun-sama said to me, Do you like me? I answered, Of course, I like you so much. I was thinking about making a joke—I don’t like you, I despise you. I wanted to say that as a joke, but I had no courage. Shogun-sama said, If you like me, why don’t you kiss me on the cheek? I don’t remember how many times I kissed him. A hundred times? A hundred kisses. We would go to the sauna together, naked. Shogun-sama said, Oh, you have a good body, a masculine body. I said, I’m good at sports. It’s not too much to say I was a good playmate for Kim Jong-il. And every time he asked me to kiss his face, he always said to me, If you betray me, you will… Then he would go silent and make a gesture of a knife going into my stomach.”

Source: GQ
Published: Jun 3, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,252 words)

The Double Life of a Gay Dodger

Longreads Pick

A 1982 Inside Sports profile of Glenn Burke, one of the first professional athletes to come out. Burke died in 1995:

“Burke walks out to the sunshine of the patio, where there is enough quiet to reflect. ‘People say I should still be playing,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, so I faded away. My teammates’ wives might have been threatened by a gay man in the locker room. I could have been a superstar but I was too worried about protecting everybody else from knowing. If I thought I could be accepted, I’d be there now. It is the first thing in my life I ever backed down from. No, I’m not disappointed in myself, I’m disappointed in the system. Your sex should be private, and I always kept it that way. Deep inside, I know the Dodgers traded me because I was gay.'”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Oct 1, 1982
Length: 26 minutes (6,540 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Baxter Holmes on 'The Prophets of Oak Ridge'

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Baxter covers the Celtics for The Boston Globe, which he joined in 2013 after spending three and a half years as a sports reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. He’s a proud Oklahoman from a no-stoplight town where humans are outnumbered by cow and buffalo:

“A nun. A super-secure nuclear-weapons facility. A break-in. Click-bait, all of that. All ingredients succinct enough for an enticing tweet, which these days count. But Dan Zak, one of the best in this racket, has far more than a wild premise; he also wrote the hell out of his piece, ‘The Prophets of Oak Ridge,’ in the Washington Post. It’s my favorite longread of the week. Exquisite reporting, beautiful pacing (and writing), but no overwriting—a key. The online layout is ‘Snow Fall’ sexy, and the illustrations set it apart. The story itself bounces chronologically off their suspenseful B&E, keeping you in real time while divulging just enough history—but not enough to bore you. Some stories are as fulfilling as a top-dollar steak, medium rare, with nice fixings on the side. This is one of them. (But no spoilers.) Well done, Zak. You took a gripping narrative and turned it topical by showing how much the U.S. doles out per year on nuclear weapons. You also made me care about these servants of God, especially Sister Megan. I now give a damn about their trial. In all, this is newspapers at their finest. Long live print—and print will live on with stories like this.”

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Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Kruse

Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times who also contributes to ESPN’s Grantland, this year gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.  

1. Chris Jones on the animals in Ohio. What a way to start: The horses knew first. And want to know how to make people keep reading? End paragraphs and sections with sentences like this: He saw what was unmistakably a bear, giving chase. And: Then Kopchak saw the lion. And: Next she called 911. And: … and they knew that they didn’t have enough time or tranquilizers to stop what was coming.

2. Michael Mooney’s Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever. Because of the question. Will he or won’t he? I had to know. But also because Mooney made me care about Bill Fong. He could’ve taken me anywhere. I would’ve read forever. And because come on—who doesn’t love a well-told tale with a twist at the end?

3. Kelley Benham’s Never Let Go. Granted, Kelley’s cubicle’s not too far from my cubicle, so maybe I’m not too impartial, but I feel like this is a fact: This story is one of the best things that ran in a newspaper in America in the last 12 months. Three parts. One miracle. Life.

4. Caballo Blanco’s Last Run by Barry Bearak. Classic quest story. Looking for True. Also, in print, it was beautifully designed. Which matters.

5. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Cocaine Incorporated. Details. Details like the ghostwriter composing letters to the mistress. Like the dope-stuffed submersibles floating down the Amazon. The Sinaloa pot farm … on U.S. National Forest land … in the remote North Woods of Wisconsin … surrounded by Mexican farmers with AK-47’s. The catapult! The chili-pepper business! The air-conditioned tunnels with trolley lines! Surprises are such intoxicants. Oh, and this sentence: In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.