Tag: Sports

Historically pushed toward softball, Baseball for All keeps young girls in the game.

“When I started asking myself questions about my own notions of masculinity. I just felt so limited, so suddenly afraid of becoming the kind of man I’d grown up in fear of.”

Accompanying a contestant to a pro-level Galaga tournament to discover how many digital space bugs you have to destroy to find renown, community, and a modicum of inner peace.

How the newly evolved bicycle helped liberate women and modernize America’s concept of fitness.

First, please retire the clichés.

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

Nicole Chung talks with Kristi Yamaguchi about the cultural significance of her figure skating victory at the 1992 Olympics.

The modern hip-hop classic reflects growing up in Compton “one thousand percent.”

Shannon Reed thought she knew what kind of fan she was, until she moved back home to Pittsburgh.

The host was brought on to help redefine the floundering ESPN brand. Now she’s under attack, and the channel is nowhere to be seen.

Nelson Mandela long realized that sports was a great unifier.

The young women of Girls Travel Baseball are mocked by opposing players, but they keep on playing.

After converting to Islam in the ’90s, the point guard began to pray during the national anthem. He was soon traded.

After years of Soviet control, the country looks to the cultural foundations of its nomadic past.

In tennis, smashing a racket can be an easy way to vent your frustrations, but it also comes with consequences.

Building a contender the old-fashioned way takes a patience few teams are willing to endure.

The story of a football team’s mascot, the man inside the costume, and the town that rallied around its local hero.

Why would anyone want to find out how many rock climbs they can do in a 24-hour period? For fun, of course.

It’s always polarizing when you’re trying to designate a single athlete as the “Greatest of All Time.”

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.

The art of egregious overreaction.

“His job gives him a platform. You will excuse him if he has a few things to say.”

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.

Over at Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a fascinating piece up about intellectual property rights and tattoos. He opens with the case of the NBA2K video game series, which is currently being sued by a tattoo artist agency over the games’ digitally recreated tattoos, which appear on the virtual bodies of players such as Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. But copyright issues […]

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.

Byers, who became the executive director of the N.C.A.A. in 1951 — a position he held for the next 37 years — transformed a toothless association into a powerful force that mirrored his own personality: secretive, despotic, stubborn and ruthless. He helped turn the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament into the financial windfall we now know […]

The best sportswriting in 2015.

A good bookmaker will set up odds so they appear enticing to both sides of a bet: if Arsenal plays Stoke in the Premier League, the bookies want an equal amount of action on both clubs, the better to spread risk. (This isn’t how they make money, however. They do that by designing the odds so […]

Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no […]

What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter […]