“Now, thanks to that pampering, upon his retirement in the winter of 1988 as the NFL’s alltime leading rusher, Walter Payton found himself burdened by a realization that had struck thousands of ex-athletes before him: I am bored out of my mind. When strangers asked, he talked about how thrilled he was to be free of the burdens of football. ‘I’m not going to miss the pounding,’ he told ABC’s Peter Jennings. ‘And the getting up at six and working out until dusk.’ The words were pure fantasy. He would miss it desperately. ‘He went from an abnormal existence as an athlete to a normal one,’ says Brittney, now 26. ‘How does anyone do that?’”
“The Hero No One Knew” — Jeff Pearlman, Sports Illustrated
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“There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.”
“Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better?” — Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
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Longreads Pick
In 15 prison interviews with Yahoo! Sports and hundreds of telephone and email interactions, Shapiro laid out a multitude of reasons for blowing the whistle on his illicit booster activity. Chief is his feeling that after spending eight years forging what he thought were legitimate friendships with players, he was abandoned by many of the same Miami athletes he treated so well. He told Yahoo! Sports that following his incarceration, he asked multiple players for financial help – either with bail money, or assistance to individuals close to the booster. Shapiro admitted some of those inquiries included angry letters and phone calls to players whom he provided benefits. “Some of those players – a lot of those players – we used to say we were a family,” Shapiro said. “Well, who do you go to for help when you need it? You go to your family. Why the hell wouldn’t I go to them?”
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Published: Aug 17, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,148 words)
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Longreads Pick
Today it is as hard to keep up with Sir Roger Bannister’s mind as it once was to keep up with his feet. With the offer of tea and biscuits out of the way, Sir Roger, 82, sits down at the table in the living room of his Oxford flat, takes up his pencil and legal pad and begins his interview. “And what’s your Christian name?” he asks, in perhaps another of his historical firsts, given that he is soliciting this information from a David Epstein of Brooklyn. “There isn’t much about [track and field] in Sports Illustrated anymore, is there?” Nope. (Sir Roger was SI’s first Sportsman of the Year, in 1954, in honor of which he was given a replica of an ancient Greek amphora. He later covered track and field at the ’56 Melbourne Olympics for the magazine.)
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Published: Jul 4, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,896 words)
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Longreads Pick
No athlete has ever mastered that equation better than Yuriy Sedykh, who refers to his elegant throwing motion simply as “the dance.” But his physical gifts are far from the only reason his record is so untouchable. Sedykh entered his prime just as the Soviet sports machine was at its peak, creating an environment in which even hammer-throw success was considered essential to national pride. The machine provided him with advantages that today’s hammer throwers can only dream of: generous financial support and state-of-the-art coaching. It also blessed him with that one key factor that few aspiring record-breakers can live without. A nemesis.
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Published: Jun 21, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,074 words)
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Longreads Pick
Simmons is the most prominent sportswriter in America. He’s also a Boston fan. During his early years as a columnist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was sustained by the angst of backing losers, above all, the Red Sox. More recently, with Boston’s various sports franchises prospering, he has sought poetic inspiration in the teams he hates, and, with the exception of the Yankees, he hates no team more than the Lakers.
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Published: May 31, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,629 words)
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Longreads Pick
MTV’s “Teen Wolf” was conceived as a darker, sexier reimagining of the “Teen Wolf” story, and also a gorier one. Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, for example, Posey’s character, Scott McCall, discovers the naked, dismembered body of a young woman in the woods. So it’s clear right away that this will not be a sweet, silly sports comedy, like the old “Teen Wolf.” There will also be brooding! There will probably not be triumphant werewolf-basketball montages!
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Published: May 20, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,503 words)
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Longreads Pick
Originally published as “Lips Gets Smacked” in the January 1993 issue of Philadelphia Magazine and later anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing 1994. “It’s Lenny F-ing Dykstra. What a mouth on this guy — not just the utterances that pass through it, but the actual physical mouth. Never closed, even when its owner is ruminative or silent, it is the control center for heavy traffic. Things go in (filtered tips of cigarettes and clear liquids and fingers, one or two at a time) and things come out (a stream of profanity and filtered tips and gusts of smoke and fingers and a tongue). His tongue loves his lips. You can’t blame it. They are fine lips, bountiful, shapely, ideal for pursing or pouting.”
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Published: Jan 1, 1993
Length: 11 minutes (2,968 words)
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Longreads Pick
The first day I ever spent in Kansas City was the day I interviewed for the job as sports columnist at the musically named Kansas City Star. The paper’s sports editor at the time, a dreamer named Dinn Mann — the grandson of the famed Judge Roy Hofheinz, who built the Astrodome — picked me up at the airport and began to drive us toward downtown.
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Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,711 words)
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Longreads Pick
Everyone at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack of shock, that most of them were Jews. The business majors and the MBAers were Jews; one conference organizer, a Sloan student with a distinctively Irish name told me how glad he was I was writing this story, because clearly everyone there, himself included, was Jewish. The journalists covering the conference were Jews. And Mark Cuban—his family name was Chopininski—is Jewish, too. This matters.
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Published: Apr 27, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,920 words)
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