Death of A Ballplayer
Billy Dillon was about to sign a contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead he was convicted–wrongly–of first-degree murder and spent the next 27 years in prison.
Showing 25 articles matching sports.
Billy Dillon was about to sign a contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead he was convicted–wrongly–of first-degree murder and spent the next 27 years in prison.
Brandon Sneed SB Nation Aug 2013 35min Permalink
A rape case in which most of the evidence lies in the archives of Twitter and Instagram divides a football-crazed town of 18,400.
Juliet Macur, Nate Schweber New York Times Dec 2012 Permalink
“The pitch meeting kicked off with one Nike official accidentally addressing Stephen as 'Steph-on.' ... It got worse from there. A PowerPoint slide featured Kevin Durant's name, presumably left on by accident, presumably residue from repurposed materials.”
Ethan Sherwood Strauss ESPN Mar 2016 20min Permalink
A profile of the Carolina Panthers quarterback.
Zach Baron GQ Aug 2016 20min Permalink
A former Saint and Super Bowl champion, Will Smith, was shot and killed by another player named Cardell Hayes. Their fatal collision highlights the fine line between triumph and tragedy in football and life in New Orleans.
Sean Flynn GQ Oct 2016 20min Permalink
How the 1983 assassination of his father, the president of American University of Beirut, shaped the Golden State Warriors basketball coach.
John Branch New York Times Dec 2016 Permalink
The house at 114 Lake Avenue in Bristol, CT that kept calling Aaron Hernandez, a NFL star by 20, back to “a volatile underworld of guns, drugs, and violence.”
Bob Hohler Boston Globe Aug 2013 10min Permalink
“Professional boxing is the only major American sport whose primary, and often murderous, energies are not coyly deflected by such artifacts as balls and pucks.”
Joyce Carol Oates New York Review of Books Feb 1992 15min Permalink
In January, the body of a 17-year-old athlete was found in his high school’s gym. The authorities ruled it an accident. His friends and family aren’t convinced.
Jordan Conn Grantland Sep 2013 30min Permalink
Eleven members of an Australian rugby club traveled to Bali. After a bomb went off at a nightclub, only five of them made it home.
Michael Paterniti GQ Oct 2004 35min Permalink
Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition.
Ben McGrath New Yorker Apr 2007 25min Permalink
John Scott is a hockey enforcer — he makes his living fighting, not scoring goals. Scott wasn’t supposed to make the NHL. He certainly wasn’t supposed to make the all-star game. But when the fans voted him in, the league tried to keep him on the bench.
John Scott The Players' Tribune Jan 2016 10min Permalink
Every time a bicyclist rides on an open road, we entrust their lives to a safety net of legal protection and basic human decency. That system has failed.
David Darlington Bicycling Magazine Jan 2009 35min Permalink
A profile of “the seven-time defending UFC light-heavyweight champion, practically unbeatable, and already maybe the greatest fighter of all time.”
Greg Howard Deadspin Dec 2014 50min Permalink
The team’s grand, analytics-driven experiment led by a business school grad who won the GM job after giving a “PowerPoint presentation that Sixers executives now recall as an ‘investment thesis.’”
Pablo S. Torre ESPN Feb 2015 20min Permalink
Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.
Chip Brown Businessweek Apr 2014 15min Permalink
The latest frontier of statistical research in baseball—and the newest front in the Yanks/Red Sox arms race—is defense. And it’s yielding some surprising insights about who is actually worth his salary.
Will Leitch New York Apr 2010 10min Permalink
Ten years ago, a pair of legendary TV executives decided it was time to change the formula for football broadcasting. One bet on Dennis Miller. The other bankrolled Vince McMahon and the XFL.
Julian Rubinstein New York Times Magazine Sep 2000 15min Permalink
A profile of the Los Angeles Clippers owner, an oft-sued real estate baron with a documented racist streak and a penchant for heckling his own players, on the occasion of him winning an NAACP lifetime achievement award.
Peter Keating ESPN Jun 2009 20min Permalink
In the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight, Marvin Harrison, the man who holds the NFL record for receptions in a season, may find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.
Jason Fagone GQ Feb 2010 25min Permalink
Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.
Kit Chellel Bloomberg Business May 2018 25min Permalink
The life and times of Myrtis Dightman, who broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived.
Christian Wallace Texas Monthly Jun 2018 30min Permalink
On the World Cup star’s relationship with her older brother, who has watched most of her games from a prison cell.
Gwendolyn Oxenham ESPN Jun 2019 20min Permalink
For more than 40 years, a former Olympian allegedly has been molesting boys and young men. Now, they’re speaking out.
Mike Kessler, Mark Fainaru-Wada ESPN Aug 2019 40min Permalink
Stare at the game long enough and the distance between everything—players, league, game, court, self, other—begins to collapse. Everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, the league and your life each generating infinite layers of meaning for the other.
Emma Healey Hazlitt Mar 2020 15min Permalink