One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. We start with two articles about the ongoing scandal in the NFL, and then move over to two profiles from Grantland.com, one about a champion Armenian fin-swimmer who became a hero when a trolley crashed into a lake and one about a teenager who may be one of the greatest athletes we’ve ever witnessed.
How Adrian Peterson Is Helping the NFL Avoid a Real Reckoning
By Bethlehem Shoals in GQ
In a lot of ways, Adrian Peterson has made Ray Rice less of a problem for the NFL. The narrative becomes one about violent athletes, not Roger Goodell’s backward attitudes and cold-blooded agenda.
The connection worth exploring isn’t the one between the behavior of Rice and Peterson, but the ways in which Goodell’s handling of the Rice situation—concealment, minimizing, double-speak, and dissimulation—mirrors the way the league continues to deal with the long-term effects of the sport on its athletes.
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Giving Up on Goodell: How the NFL lost the trust of its most loyal reporters.
By Stefan Fatsis in Slate
In his book The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, Dean Starkman describes two conflicting strains of American journalism: access reporting and accountability reporting. The former involves getting inside information from powerful institutions, the latter telling inside stories about them. “Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views,” Starkman writes. Like Wall Street and other big institutions, the NFL prefers and—in the case of reporters like Schefter, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, and Sports Illustrated’s Peter King—facilitates access reporting. It’s good business.
With the NFL’s possible perfidy the biggest story in all of American media right now, accountability journalists will rush in from outside the sports beat to dig for dirt. And inside the league’s formerly cozy media bubble, the men and women with access are going to start demanding answers, too. If he wants to keep his job, Goodell better hope that the answers he provides are the right ones, no matter which reporters he’s talking to.
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The Plunge
By Carl Schreck in Grantland
Just as Karapetyan reached the bridge, the sound of metal smashing against concrete tore through the cool evening air. He looked toward the commotion, through the blizzard of dust that had kicked up from the hillside below, and saw a trolleybus disappear below the surface of Lake Yerevan. Its two electric trolley poles poked up from the water like antennae. If Karapetyan gave any thought to his next move, he doesn’t remember it. He sprinted down the hill, ditched the weighted backpack, stripped to his skivvies, and dove into the lake.
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This Is Katie F---ing Ledecky: A Thesis About Kicking Ass
By Brian Phillips in Grantland
There’s a special kind of lightness you feel when you realize you’re seeing a truly great athlete for the first time. When you understand that what you’re watching is not someone who is merely very good, or very tough, or very skilled relative to her peers, but someone to whom the normal rules do not apply. When your imagination runs the math on an athlete and returns an error sign.