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.

This article profiles former NBA player Keyon Dooling and his life long struggle to come to terms with and recover from being abused as a child. It’s a fascinating and eventually uplifting piece that reminds us that no matter how big, strong, and fearless athletes look when they’re on stage, they are real people with their own struggles.

Keyon Dooling’s Secret

By Jordan Ritter Conn for Grantland

Now, when Dooling looks back on those years, he sees how he tried to cope with the trauma of his past. He sees himself in fourth grade, sneaking to his father’s liquor cabinet, pouring himself strong drinks and sipping them until the world was gone. He sees himself in middle school, smoking weed with friends, letting the drug ease the anxiety he’d felt since that afternoon. He sees himself at that same age, flirting with girls and then taking them home. The more girls he slept with, he thought, the more he proved that he was no longer that little boy.

Basketball helped. On the court, he could assert his dominance. With the ball in his hands, he never felt like a victim. He loved the power his talent gave him, the confidence that grew from knowing that almost every kid in his school and his neighborhood could only dream of doing what he could do on a hardwood floor. The first time he dunked — as a freshman, in a game — he felt invincible. As he grew older, the memory of that afternoon faded, but the coping strategies remained.

This past week, I reblogged a piece about how baseball fans need to decide — do they want a clean game or an exciting game. This triggered a back and forth with a baseball fan and friend of Dear Sports Fan who sent me this well-written piece as a rebuttal. I have to admit, after reading this defense of the pace of baseball, I question how much of my attitudes towards the sport are the product of hearing other people’s cliched criticism. 

What Pace of Game Problem?

By Russell Carleton for Fox Sports

Allowing for the fact that some of the rule changes would spawn some workarounds, you might save 20 minutes off the average game. All it would cost you is the clock-less-ness of baseball, the idea of free substitution, and a small piece of the integrity of the game. In other words, baseball would become a different game and for not much benefit.

What I find interesting is that baseball seems to have a pace of game problem because everyone says that it does… Maybe it’s just time that baseball recognized that there are people out there who enjoy a slower game and stopped trying to be all things to all people… Baseball should simply embrace the fact that it is a slower game and market itself accordingly. It’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no pace of game problem because there’s nothing morally superior about playing rushed games that take two and a half hours instead of three, no matter what United States culture tries to say.

This essay grapples with the difficulty of producing accurate statistics comparing NFL players to… well, to who, exactly? That’s part of the problem. With all of the scary statistics flying around about the health effects of playing professional football, it’s very hard to know what is real and what isn’t. I hope someone can take the work of this charmingly skeptical article and do the hard work to produce more reasonable and accurate scientific studies. There’s undeniably something scary happening to some percent of pro football players. Let’s figure it out.

NFL Players Die Young. Or Maybe They Live Long Lives.

By Daniel Engber for Slate

For every 770 men who play the sport on a professional level, we can expect one extra death from ALS. (Extra deaths from Alzheimer’s are even more unusual.)

Any extra death is cause for grave concern, but if you look at other, much more common deadly conditions, the change in risk goes the other way. The same dataset suggests that for every 770 football retirees, we should expect 13 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease and 14 fewer from cancer. So while it’s true that Alzheimer’s and ALS rates among NFL athletes could reasonably be described as “through the roof,” the number of players’ lives saved from heart disease and cancer exceeds the number of lives lost to those diseases by 2,150 percent.

But the methods used to find these stats raise a familiar and important question: Should football players really be compared to average men their age, of any race or body size or income level? How much does the choice of analysis affect its outcome?

So is it better to control for income or race, or should studies strive for both? And what about body size?

These may sound like simple questions, but they’re exceedingly difficult to answer. To some extent, the best approach depends on how you think about the NFL, and what point you’d like to make.

This charming story about the financial plight of the Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer teams reminds us that not all athletes have financial support on NFL levels. Sometimes it takes a desperate tweet and a kind opponent to get things started so that the Clinton foundation can finish things up!

Haiti pledges money to Trinidad and Tobago soccer

By Kurt Voigt and Anne M. Peterson for the Associated Press

Upon getting word that the Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer team might not even have enough money for lunch, Haiti’s team took a look at its fundraising for World Cup qualifying — an account totaling a little over $1,300 — and decided to turn it over to the competition.