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 […]
As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment […]
Ryan Leaf’s Jailhouse Confessions, Written By His Cell Mate John Cagney Nash | Playboy | September 2013 | 19 minutes (4,710 words) Flinder Boyd (@FlinderBoyd) is a journalist for SB Nation, Sports on Earth, and the BBC among others. Athletes and sports writers usually come from two completely different professional worlds and as a […]
The Match Maker Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN | August 2013 | 34 minutes (8,461 words) Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California […]
Above: Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. *** Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist. “Flinder Boyd’s piece about an aspirational streetballer and his cross-country trip to New York’s legendary Rucker Park had me from the very first […]
“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 […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: College athletes who don’t go on to play professionally sometimes continue their career in Europe. And that’s usually the last we hear of them. But the University of Pittsburgh’s Jasper Wilson made good use of a […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Americans spend a lot of time with sports, so “healing power of sports” stories that elevate games beyond, well, games, have an undeniable appeal. But sports writing, when trying to transcend its subject matter, can run […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Everett Cook, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, profiled former Wolverine and now NBA player Trey Burke last March. There are plenty of stories about athletic phenoms, but elite athletes are not the most […]
Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News. “It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The […]
Rustin Dodd is a sports reporter at The Kansas City Star. For the most part, he spends his time covering Kansas basketball and football, but he has also covered the Kansas City Royals for the last five years. He’s covered two Final Fours, two Major-League All-Star Games and The Masters. He resides in Lawrence, Kan., […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher is helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Last February, a Washington Redskins executives said on a team talk show that 70 different high schools across the country share the NFL franchise’s controversial name. University of Maryland journalism graduate student Kelyn Soong did […]
Julie Kliegman is a senior studying journalism and Spanish at Northwestern University. Come July, she’s headed to St. Petersburg to work for PolitiFact. She loves to travel, and has lived abroad for short stints in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. “This week I enjoyed reading ‘Owning the Middle,’ an ESPN story about WNBA star Brittney Griner. […]
Jamie Mottram is the Director of Content Development for USA Today Sports Media Group and a proud supporter of Longreads. I work in sports media and read and think about sports A LOT. So the task of boiling the year in sportswriting down to some kind of best-of list is daunting indeed, and I won’t […]
A writer and his wife participate in a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition known as “Wife-Carrying,” a sport where male competitors carry a female teammate while racing through an obstacle course: And then my wife and I are 15 yards up the hill, and I am breathing hard, making it work. This isn’t so bad, I think. […]
An investigation of sports’ biggest conspiracy theories, starting with the 1985 NBA draft: I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redacted history. I believe that Game 6 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was a sham, that Spygate was a cover-up of a cover-up, that […]
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