“Was she supposed to play by the rules and let her talent rot inside her extraordinary body? She’s saying that for girls like her, playing nice and fair would have gotten her nowhere. If it had worked out, we would say she was the manifestation of the American dream. Now instead we just say she’s very American.”

On bareback horse relay racing, a Native American tradition:

“It’s going to be America’s next extreme sport,” he predicts. “Compare it to Professional Bull Riders, PBR. Look how big that got—a million in prize money in every city they go to. That’s how Indian Relay is going to be in 10 years. I look for it to be at every track in the country by 2025.

He was the best alpinist of his generation, a quiet, unassuming Canadian known for bold ascents of some of the world’s most iconic peaks. Four months ago, at the age of 25, he traveled to Alaska to join climber Ryan Johnson for a first ascent outside Juneau. They never came back.

On Feb. 5, 2019, Maya Moore made an announcement on The Players' Tribune that would upend the WNBA: She would be sitting out the 2019 season to focus on "the people in my family, as well as on investing my time in some ministry dreams that have been stirring in my heart for many years." It was a stunning declaration. This was Maya Moore, in her prime.

“Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

Brian Chavez was supposed to be the one who made it out of Odessa. It didn’t turn out that way.

How one billionaire owner outflanked two others and brought the NFL back to Los Angeles, doubling the value of his franchise.

The son of a Red Sox legend, his trail of violent attacks runs back to his teen years. So does the line of judges who somehow saw fit, time and again, to give him one more chance. Now he’s on trial for murder.

“I was in the visiting clubhouse waiting to interview one of the Oakland A’s this year when one of the players called, ‘Here, pussy’—as though he were calling a cat. But of course, he hadn’t lost Fluffy; he’d found a woman in his locker room.”

“The regular average layman couldn’t see what I see. And the way they’re painting the trainer is all wrong. Look at him there, screaming, Do this! and Do that! I never had anyone telling me what to do. I did it. Shouting at the fighter like that makes him look like an animal, like a horse to be trained.”

On September 20, 1973, 50 million Americans watched Bobby Riggs lose to Billie Jean King in a tennis match dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” This spring, a man named Hal Shaw came forward with a secret he’d held for 40 years: Riggs, in debt to the mafia, had lost on purpose.

He pauses and glances around him. Just about everyone in the place is aware of him now. When he continues, the voice is still under control, but the eyes have become lasers. “I know that some of the press is out to get me. It’s ’cause I’m more intelligent than they are, I handle myself well, I’m wealthy and I’m black—and there ain’t nothin’ they can do about it.” He flashes his joyless smile

On May 12, 2014, Nicole Holder told Charlotte police that she had been assaulted by Greg Hardy. He was arrested, charged, and convicted. Then the case was dismissed on appeal. After a season out of the league, Hardy is playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Owner Jerry Jones has called him a “real leader.”

This is the story, and the photos, of what happened that night.

The case for coaches in professions other than music and sports. Like medicine, for example:

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down. It’s too soon to know for sure whether that’s not random, but it seems real. I know that I’m learning again. I can’t say that every surgeon needs a coach to do his or her best work, but I’ve discovered that I do.

The very complicated life of Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who once built a very good golf club.

Update: Grantland has published a pair of responses to the reaction to this story, "What Grantland Got Wrong" by Christina Kahrl and "The Dr. V Story: A Letter From the Editor" by Bill Simmons.

When I was 27, I quit my job to travel and ski-bum, and by that point I had managed to save a small sum that could float me for a year. I called it my fuck-you money, because if I was ever in a situation I didn’t like—stuck in a job or with a boyfriend I wanted to leave—I could say fuck you and go. Living in ski towns is how I learned the dirtbag lifestyle, and to my surprise I took to it naturally and with enthusiasm.

On the Red Sox’s historic implosion:

Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise.

How Frank and Jamie McCourt bought the Dodgers for “for less than the price of an oceanfront home in Southampton” and eventually became entangled in one of the most expensive divorces in California history, which laid bare their finances and confirmed what many already knew: they had bankrupted one of the most storied franchises in baseball.

In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team.

A former first-string tackle considers the green zone as a war zone:

Just as football has evolved in accordance with the evolving business ethic of American society, so has it evolved in accordance with the changing strategic assumptions about war. The development (or rebirth) of the T-formation in football coincided almost exactly with the development of a new era of mobility and speed in warfare best exemplified in the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German armies in Europe in 1939-40. The T-formation soon overwhelmed the “Maginot Line” mentality of traditional football, based as it was on rigid lines and massive concentrations of defensive and offensive power.

In high school, I started to become like a local legend. A hood celebrity, if you will. And you really gotta understand how poppin’ New York City basketball was at that time. I’m playing against Stephon Marbury, Skip 2 My Lou, Alimoe (rest in peace), all these guys who would become household names, they were just kids from around the way. Man, even Cam’ron was super nice!!!

I knew all these guys from when we was little kids playing church basketball, and now all of a sudden we got Jay-Z, Puff, Dame Dash — all these guys are showing up to our games. That’s how insane New York City basketball was at that time.