Tag: football

Uruguay, a small nation with a deep-seated passion for soccer, is the inspiration for any underdog vying to win a World Cup.

His new novel is about mass incarceration, indoor football, and parallel universes. De La Pava says that when “you dig deep, you start seeing the way everything is connected.”

Football star Jackie Wallace’s life has taken him from the Super Bowl to the homeless camps of New Orleans, and he’s missing once again.

Kevin Sampsell examines his love of football — and a team that’s never won a Super Bowl.

The disturbing parallels between professional football and the business of pimping

ESPN Sportscenter host Jemele Hill has been suspended for two weeks for simply doing what she was hired to do: provide commentary on the news.

Gallaudet University has tensions between its deaf and hearing students, but the deaf football team brings the campus together.

Photojournalist Alexey Furman and writer Robert Langellier spent time with the Azov Dolphins, a football team in a town close the front lines of the violence in Ukraine. In a sad, intimate piece in Roads & Kingdoms, they explore the hope and hopelessness of young Ukrainians.

This excerpt from Chuck Klosterman’s book “But What If We’re Wrong?” is nominally about football, and violence, but is also a prescient analysis of U.S. politics.

At GQ, Reid Forgrave profiles Zac Easter, a former “smashmouth” high school football player who took his own life in the aftermath of suffering five diagnosed concussions during his football career.

At Slate, Gabriel Thompson describes what it’s like to be a food-service worker at Levi’s Stadium at Super Bowl 50 — and explores the low-wage, part-time workforce of Silicon Valley.

Disappointment feels so much bigger when you’re young because you haven’t lived long enough to know that there’s always something else on the other side.

“Football is a very simple barometer of a society,” says Paddy Agnew, an Irish Times correspondent and former RAI television commentator who has covered Italian soccer since the 1980s. “And if the red light is flashing in society, the red light is flashing in football. That’s what it is here, they’ve run out of petrol. […]

The industry term for or a blockbuster movie franchise is a “tentpole”—it’s the asset that holds the whole operation up. At the height of mass culture, in the second half of the 20th century, it was enough to be on television to command an audience in the tens of millions. But as channels multiplied, the difference between […]

Mark Leibovich, in the New York Times, gets a rare look inside the life of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who’s now 37 in a league where few play past the age of 40. The result is some obsessive habits about caring for his body and the food he eats: Every morning in the […]

Journey Bailey played football for years and, after one concussion too many, came to in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. In his searing essay, Bailey writes about a football culture that kept him from revealing his symptoms to coaches who downplayed the seriousness of concussions.

Journalists select profile subjects for any number of reasons.

Introductory news writing classes teach journalism students the pure fundamentals. Facts, not assertions. Don’t take sides. When you begin to understand the rules and know how to use them, that’s when you can break them. Journalists can use their reporting to advocate with the power of a publication behind them.

Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most […]

But it was Manning’s older brother Cooper who put his neck injury in the proper context and cured him of any self-pity. Cooper had been an athlete equal to anyone in the family, an all-state wide receiver with a scholarship to Ole Miss, when he began experiencing numbness and atrophy in his right bicep. The […]

I was a high school junior when I first met him. I got pulled out of class unexpectedly to see him waiting in the hallway—Pete Carroll, national championship-winning head coach. We stood and talked there by the lockers for a few minutes. I’ll never forget that—USC’s head coach coming to recruit me at Dominguez High […]

OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]

Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post. Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most […]

“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game […]

Drew Grossman is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared on MensHealth.com, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, and his hometown paper, The Tallahassee Democrat. My Longreads pick this week is Diane Roberts’s ‘Game of Tribes’ for The Oxford American. The piece is an excerpt from a longer project, a book on […]

“Coach: A Local Legend and a Young Man’s Search to Find Himself.” — William Browning, SB Nation See more by Browning

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 […]

This fall, Mo Isom is trying out for LSU’s football team as a kicker, and would like to prove that her athletic ability outshines the fact that she is a woman. She has already proven to be resilient after overcoming personal struggles and experiencing tragedy: In Isom’s family, her mom and her sister were ‘brains.’ […]

Neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee, a Green Bay Packers fan, on her autopsies of former NFL players and research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy: Over the last four years, McKee has become the most visible member of a cohort of research scientists and family members — wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the dead, dying, and demented […]

[Not single-page] A young football player kills himself after he sustained a concussion on the field: Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli. Scavongelli: “Do you know where you […]