An 11-month investigation ends with a booster, now in prison for a Ponzi scheme, going public with details of how he spent millions on college athletes from 2002 to 2010.

[Shapiro] said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play including bounties for injuring opposing players, travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.

Rafael Palmeiro was a surefire Hall of Famer before a positive steroids test derailed everything. He retired a few months later, quietly sent home early by the team that had been planning to celebrate him. Next came depression and a $53 million business deal gone bust.

An oral history of the 2002 Western Conference finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings.

Previously: Jonathan Abrams on the Longform Podcast.

Eddie Griffin made it to the NBA. Then his life began to unravel.

On the meeting of shaggy-haired American ping pong ace Glenn Cowan and Chinese master Zhuang Zedong (who died this week), and how their fleeting friendship thawed relations between the twon nations during the U.S. team’s historic 1971 tour of China.

In February, Jerusalem’s FC Beitar, the only soccer team in the Israeli Premier League to have never signed an Arab player, signed two Chechnyan Muslims, sparking national controversy and pitting the organization against their ultras fan club La Familia.

“At the gym, he’s not Garrett Holeve, the guy with Down syndrome. He’s G-Money, an up-and-coming fighter with big ambitions.”

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.

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.

“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.”

A profile of the Carolina Panthers quarterback.

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.

How the 1983 assassination of his father, the president of American University of Beirut, shaped the Golden State Warriors basketball coach.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A profile of “the seven-time defending UFC light-heavyweight champion, practically unbeatable, and already maybe the greatest fighter of all time.”

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.’”

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.

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.

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.