Search Results for: sports

Gareth Thomas … The Only Openly Gay Male Athlete

Longreads Pick

He’s 6’3″ and 225 pounds of muscle. He’s broken his nose five times, fractured both shoulders and lost eight teeth. He’s drunk his mates under the table and brawled by their side. He’s been named to the Welsh national rugby team more times than any other man. And, among active players in major professional team sports, he’s …”Wot, butt? You come to this tiny village in this tiny country and tell me that I’m the only gay man in a major team sport who’s out of the closet?” … “All the diversity in America, and no one there has done this?”

Author: Gary Smith
Published: May 3, 2010
Length: 21 minutes (5,468 words)

Either/Or

Longreads Pick

Sports, sex, and the case of Caster Semenya.

Author: Ariel Levy
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 30, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,663 words)

The Wrong Turn

Longreads Pick

Onetime Detroit Lions quarterback Jeff Komlo was a success in sports, business and love. So why did he die alone, on the run, thousands of miles from home?

Published: Jun 15, 2009
Length: 43 minutes (10,959 words)

Inside the NFL Draft with an Agent Not Named Jerry Maguire

Longreads Pick

Football dealmaker David Canter on what he knows before the mock drafts, how he pits teams against each other, and what kind of a stomach you need to make it in the sports-agent game

Source: Esquire
Published: Apr 23, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,423 words)

Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge

Longreads Pick

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995.

Author: Tad Friend
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 13, 2003
Length: 21 minutes (5,385 words)