Search Results for: sports

Longreads Best of 2012: Esquire's Chris Jones

image

Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.

Favorite new writer discovery of 2012

I’m always scared of making lists like this, because a year is a long time, and I read a lot, and invariably I’ll forget writers and pieces that I liked very much. But this category is easy for me: Michael J. Mooney. He wrote back-to-back stories for D Magazine this summer that are so different but the same in that they both knocked me on my ass. First he wrote about a brutal rape in “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back.” (It is a difficult read, but the ending is more than worth it.) And then he wrote the most amazing bowling story ever in “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” Plus, he’s a straight-up good dude. Love this guy so much.

Best election story

I’m going to seem like a homer here, but I don’t care: Charlie Pierce did journalism on Esquire.com during this entire election cycle that bordered on heroic—and I don’t use that word lightly. In its ideas, in its language, in its sheer volume, his account of this election, taken as a whole, is humbling and inspiring at the same time. Start with the end, “The Greatness of Barack Obama is Our Great Project” and go back from there.

Best personal blog post/essay

I’m going to pick two stories here, both sports stories. Writers hate hearing athletes say, “You never played the game,” but it’s hard to deny that former athletes understand the games they played better than most of us do. Just the other day, The Classical posted a meditation by former basketball player Flinder Boyd about Ricky Rubio, “The Ricky Rubio Experience.” I’m not sure I can say why, exactly, but I was really moved by this story. Some of The Classical guys can be snide little shits, far too Internet cool, but Boyd wrote with real heart here. I love this story.

The second is by one of my most favorite friends, Kevin Van Valkenburg of ESPN. He wrote about the death of a semi-pro football player in a story called “Games of chance.” Kevin played college football at the University of Montana, and he writes beautifully about the pull of the game as well as the charge that comes from hitting and with being hit. Sometimes the first person interrupts; here it informs.

Best crime story

I see the great David Grann has already picked this one, but I’ll echo his pick, because it was that good: Pamela Colloff’s “The Innocent Man” for Texas Monthly is an epic, immersive, amazing story. And full credit to the gang down in Austin for committing so completely to longform journalism. That this story even exists makes me hopeful about so many things.

The story that made me feel the most awesome about just about everything

I’ve always been an optimist about writing, or at least I’ve always tried to be an optimist about writing, and 2012, for me, has been filled with reasons for optimism (like Pamela Colloff’s story above, which is really a multi-layered testament to the power of belief). Yes, this business remains in flux, and yes, many good writers continue to put more love into their writing than their writing returns to them. But I still feel like we live in a golden age, filled with possibility. One of the stories that most made me feel that way—both because of the story itself, and because of its subject—was “How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick” by Jason Fagone in Wired. The title describes the tale exactly, and it’s just as improbable and fun and crazy as it sounds. I feel like this story sums up the modern writing business as well as any: There’s still plenty of lightning out there, and there are still lots of bottles, and every now and then, someone still catches one with the other.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

The Beautiful Game

Longreads Pick

On Argentina’s violent—and often corrupt—soccer fan clubs:

“The first murder spawned by Argentinean soccer can be traced to 1924, when a Boca fan shot a Uruguayan rival during a tango-style showdown outside a luxury hotel in Montevideo. Sometime in the 1950s, the fan clubs organized for self-defense. La Doce took its fierce, fistfighting form in the 1970s. Then, around 1981, in the last violent days of Argentina’s military dictatorship, the fan killings accelerated. Journalist Amílcar Romero, who wrote a history of soccer—this country also produces philosophers and artists specializing in the sport—divided the violence into three ­periods. Only 12 fans had been killed during the roughly 30 years following that first hotel murder. In the next three decades there were 102. The next 30 years saw 144 dead.

“But Romero counted only game-day deaths. The antiviolence group Salvemos al Fútbol tallies 269 soccer-related deaths in its running count—with much of the killing moving off-site in recent years. In 2009, for example, the former Lepers leader Roberto ‘Pimpi’ Camino was shot four times while leaving a wine bar late at night. Today the violence often takes place within the fan clubs themselves, in fights to control the barras’ growing incomes and the benefits of their power. ‘They fight over money and women,’ one sportswriter told me. (He insisted on anonymity, saying, ‘No Argentine journalist could write this story,’ for fear of retaliation.)”

Source: Outside
Published: Oct 9, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,096 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Narratively, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, fiction from New England Review, and a guest pick from Matthew Herper.

“The Boy They Couldn’t Kill.” — Thomas Lake, Sports Illustrated

More by Lake

[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:

As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.

But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’

Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.

“20% of Anorexics Are Men.” — Nathaniel Penn, GQ

More from GQ

20% of Anorexics Are Men

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:

“As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.

“But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’

“Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,008 words)

How Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo went from a small Wisconsin high school football field to the NFL, and what teammates, coaches, and a local sportswriter remember about Romo’s performance at one particular game:

‘He knew what he was doing,’ Luther says. ‘He doesn’t look like your prototypical quarterback in high school. He knew where to put it. It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved in.’ 

After watching Romo in that game, Jackson says he believes that if Romo had played with any of the Racine city schools, they would have won the state championship. ‘It just doesn’t happen,’ he says. ‘You knock a guy out, he comes back in, and he just torches you some more. It was just a game that you don’t ever forget. I think if he goes to a city school, he goes to a high Division I university. We had all the exposure in the city. At given games, Wisconsin was there, Nebraska was there, Ohio State was there. All the scouts come into the city, because you find good talent with good competition.’

“Tony Romo: The Natural.” — Peter Simek, D Magazine

More from D Magazine

Tony Romo: The Natural

Longreads Pick

How Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo went from a small Wisconsin high school football field to the NFL, and what teammates, coaches, and a local sportswriter remember about Romo’s performance at one particular game:

“‘He knew what he was doing,’ Luther says. ‘He doesn’t look like your prototypical quarterback in high school. He knew where to put it. It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved in.’

“After watching Romo in that game, Jackson says he believes that if Romo had played with any of the Racine city schools, they would have won the state championship. ‘It just doesn’t happen,’ he says. ‘You knock a guy out, he comes back in, and he just torches you some more. It was just a game that you don’t ever forget. I think if he goes to a city school, he goes to a high Division I university. We had all the exposure in the city. At given games, Wisconsin was there, Nebraska was there, Ohio State was there. All the scouts come into the city, because you find good talent with good competition.'”

Source: D Magazine
Published: Aug 27, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,885 words)

What are your career options when you are seven feet tall? A tall writer meets a tall wrestler:

Paul Wight, bless him, seems to think of his massive size as a gift from God, not a devil’s bargain. There was a moment earlier this year when Wight was rumored to be fighting Shaq at this year’s Wrestlemania. If that had happened, it would’ve been the collision of the two most genially cartoonish giants in sports, the two guys who come off most like enormous eight-year-olds. I wanted to talk to Wight for this piece because, among the giants I’ve seen on TV, he seems the least tortured by his height. After all, he’s voluntarily spent the last 17 years in a grandly ridiculous, mortally dangerous line of work — strapping on his comic-book caveman singlet and pretending to fight hulking musclemen across the globe, risking crippling injury every time he lets one of them lift him.

There are plenty of reasons why I could never do what Wight does. Even though we’re nearly the same height, he weighs more than two of me. And the two afternoons I spent in a pro-wrestling training ring a decade ago taught me how much it hurts to wake up the morning after you’ve been learning to theatrically flop on canvas. But mostly, I’ve never been able to imagine performing my height. I’ve gotten used to people staring at me, but I’ve never learned to like it. I played basketball in high school, but I sucked at it, and hated sucking at it. I never bothered to learn how to play the game effectively beyond the obvious lumbering rebounds and shot-blocks. I fouled out of games on purpose if I was in a bad mood. I told myself that I wanted to do something with my brain and not my body, like that was even my choice to make, or like there was any real divide. So now I’m a writer, and I spend entire days living in my own house, only leaving to take my dog on walks or to take my kid to the park. Truthfully, I was too lazy and too self-conscious to ever do jack shit athletically. I’m a writer because it’s what I’ve always wanted to be, but god knows my height probably had something to do with that desire. Pro wrestling is pretty much the opposite of anything I could ever do. I am not like Paul Wight.

“Giant Size.” — Tom Breihan, The Classical

More from The Classical

Giant Size

Longreads Pick

What are your career options when you are seven feet tall? A tall writer meets a tall wrestler:

“Paul Wight, bless him, seems to think of his massive size as a gift from God, not a devil’s bargain. There was a moment earlier this year when Wight was rumored to be fighting Shaq at this year’s Wrestlemania. If that had happened, it would’ve been the collision of the two most genially cartoonish giants in sports, the two guys who come off most like enormous eight-year-olds. I wanted to talk to Wight for this piece because, among the giants I’ve seen on TV, he seems the least tortured by his height. After all, he’s voluntarily spent the last 17 years in a grandly ridiculous, mortally dangerous line of work — strapping on his comic-book caveman singlet and pretending to fight hulking musclemen across the globe, risking crippling injury every time he lets one of them lift him.

“There are plenty of reasons why I could never do what Wight does. Even though we’re nearly the same height, he weighs more than two of me. And the two afternoons I spent in a pro-wrestling training ring a decade ago taught me how much it hurts to wake up the morning after you’ve been learning to theatrically flop on canvas. But mostly, I’ve never been able to imagine performing my height. I’ve gotten used to people staring at me, but I’ve never learned to like it. I played basketball in high school, but I sucked at it, and hated sucking at it. I never bothered to learn how to play the game effectively beyond the obvious lumbering rebounds and shot-blocks. I fouled out of games on purpose if I was in a bad mood. I told myself that I wanted to do something with my brain and not my body, like that was even my choice to make, or like there was any real divide. So now I’m a writer, and I spend entire days living in my own house, only leaving to take my dog on walks or to take my kid to the park. Truthfully, I was too lazy and too self-conscious to ever do jack shit athletically. I’m a writer because it’s what I’ve always wanted to be, but god knows my height probably had something to do with that desire. Pro wrestling is pretty much the opposite of anything I could ever do. I am not like Paul Wight.”

Source: The Classical
Published: Aug 13, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,582 words)