The Ghost of Speedy Cannon
How race and recollection still frame an Alabama football fatality 40 years later.
How race and recollection still frame an Alabama football fatality 40 years later.
Thomas Lake Sports Illustrated Oct 2013 Permalink
A decorated college track coach, forced to resign because of an affair she had with a athlete 10 years before, fights back.
Mimi Swartz Texas Monthly Sep 2013 50min Permalink
The rigors of youth football.
Jeanne Marie Laskas GQ Oct 2013 25min Permalink
Sex in the NBA in the wake of Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement.
E. Jean Carroll Esquire Apr 1992 25min Permalink
The lost dream of Korleone Young, a high school basketball star who skipped college and flamed out after only one NBA season.
Jonathan Abrams Grantland Sep 2013 40min Permalink
Charlie Rowan was a small-time cage fighter who couldn’t catch a break. He owed money to impatient people and needed to start over. Late one night, he came up with a plan.
Mary Pilon New York Times Sep 2013 20min Permalink
On boxer Canelo Alvarez.
Jay Caspian Kang Grantland Sep 2012 Permalink
On lucha libre’s exóticos, “wrestlers who dress in drag and kiss their rivals, never quite revealing whether the joke is on their opponents, themselves or conservative Mexican society at large.”
Eric Nusbaum ESPN Sep 2013 10min Permalink
A profile of the NFL quarterback gone bust.
John Cagney Nash Playboy Sep 2013 20min 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
In search of the former boxing champ, who refuses to believe he has HIV.
Elizabeth Merrill ESPN Aug 2013 20min Permalink
On the immense power of ESPN.
How ESPN dictates the college football schedule.
How ESPN turned Louisville into a powerhouse.
How ESPN, which earns more than four times what any other cable channel does in subscriber fees, fights in Washington to preserve its “beautiful business model.”
James Andrew Miller, Steve Eder, Richard Sandomir New York Times Aug 2013 50min Permalink
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.
Don Van Natta Jr. ESPN Aug 2013 35min Permalink
On not making the NBA.
Kiese Laymon ESPN 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
A father and his 9-year-old daughter watch Harvard play Yale in football.
George Plimpton Sports Illustrated Nov 1981 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
Basketball on a Crow reservation and a player named Jonathan Takes Enemy trying to escape.
Gary Smith Sports Illustrated Feb 1991 Permalink
A profile of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in American history.
Barry Bearak New York Times Aug 2013 10min Permalink
An interview on nature vs. nurture with the author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science Of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.
Jeremy Repanich, David Epstein Outside Aug 2013 20min Permalink
How the heir to a horse racing empire became an informant on the Zetas cartel as they pushed their money laundering operations into the lucrative quarter horse trade.
Melissa Del Bosque, Jazmine Ulloa Texas Observer Aug 2013 20min Permalink
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
How a Peace Corps volunteer turned a high school basketball squad into Afghanistan’s national team.
Chris Ballard Sports Illustrated Jul 2013 30min Permalink
How cable sports channels extort hundreds of dollars per year out of every cable subscriber for programming that less than 10% regularly watch.
Patrick Hruby Sports on Earth Jul 2013 20min Permalink
The last great brawling sports team in America—Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, and the Boss—remember their fallen leader.
Michael Paterniti Esquire Sep 1999 35min Permalink