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Mix and match – the best sports articles of the week

This week’s collection of endorsed articles about sports that are good to read whether you are a sports fan or just sports curious don’t have a real theme. If there is anything that connects them, it’s the idea that greatness, even or maybe especially in sports, comes in all shapes and sizes. From the dominance of an obsessive compulsive quarterback to the rise of an enthusiastic young defensemen to the notoriety of disappearing foam, sports greatness is as fun to describe as it is far ranging.

Preparing for Peyton

by Brandon Flowers for the MMQB

Peyton Manning is a familiar face because of his widespread commercial work (“chicken parm you taste so good” and “cut that meat, cut that meat” are my favorites). In his commercials, Manning comes across as down-to-earth and self effacing. But what is it like to actually be across the field from him, trying to stop him from doing the thing he’s best in the world at. On the field Manning is totally ruthless, effective, and to hear defensive back Brandon Flowers write about the experience, terrifying.

That week felt like we were preparing for battle. You have to be precise in everything you do. You can’t give him even an inch. You have to conduct a flawless game plan.

We thought we had a good one. After studying film, we had this one blitz our coaches drew up that we thought we could drop in. We’d essentially send our whole left side of the defense at him. He wouldn’t see it coming. Well, somehow he did. Nobody jumped or gave any indication we were blitzing. Then right before the play, Peyton checked and threw a quick pass to the left side. Big gain, first down. We weren’t even showing the blitz! I have no idea how he knew.

The Ice Breaker

by Ben McGrath for The New Yorker

P.K. Subban sticks out like a sore thumb on an NHL ice hockey rink. The obvious reason for this is that he is the child of Carribean immigrants and his inherited dark skin is still unusual on hockey teams. Subban has also been criticized and celebrated for sticking out for other reasons — his unabashed enthusiasm and his style of play. The difficulty in writing about him is separating his truly unique person from the stereotypical characteristics that he is imbued with in the eyes of others because of his skin. McGrath tackles this task with grace and insight.

Hockey, like the country of its birth, has long valued understatement—sometimes comic understatement—and shunned salesmanship… The conformist power of Canadian hockey culture is such that even New Englanders and Swedes, after a few years of inhaling North American Zamboni fumes, will come to adopt a Manitoban prairie lilt, and speak in run-on sentences of cautious optimism.

Subban’s family believes that others have mistaken their beloved P.K.’s boisterous personality for something more sinister. “He is confident,” Maria says. “My son is a different kettle of fish.” He is also an inveterate camera hog, dating to the earliest birthday parties and home videos. I can vouch for his chirping outside the rink, too, turning up the radio at stoplights and drawing wayward looks from other drivers as he shimmies in his seat.

The arrival of a force as disruptive as Subban, in an institution as self-regarding as le Club du Hockey, is as significant, in its way, as Gretzky’s arrival was in Hollywood a quarter-century ago.

That Weird White Spray they Use in Soccer: An Investigation

by Jorge Arangure for Vice Sports

Ever since the World Cup this past summer, I have wondered about the disappearing spray that referees used to mark distances on set pieces. Arangure gives me more information in this article than I had bargained for and it’s very interesting. As with many inventions, the disappearing spray seems to have been the product of convergent evolution, and like many inventions, now seems to be marketed aggressively and simultaneously by multiple get-rich-quick hucksters.

The true star of the 2014 World Cup was a little spray can that referees carried in their pockets and took out during stoppages. At this point, the ref would press down on a nozzle and spray out a foamy residue to draw a line on the grass that players were not supposed to cross.
Then, after only a few moments, the line would magically disappear.

Part of the spray’s popularity lay in that it lived in an almost philosophical universe. It existed and then suddenly it didn’t. It disappeared without leaving a trace of what had come before. And that was the allure. Its existence was never supposed to matter. The spray’s purpose was to mark a time and a place at a certain time and place and then it was supposed to go away forever. Who couldn’t use a magic metaphysical line to divide things every now and then in their everyday life?

Mario Lemieux from phenom to star to owner

The story of Mario Lemieux is one of the more incredible in sports history. In celebration of 30 years of Lemieux’s involvement with Pittsburgh as a player and owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has produced an excellent interactive history of his life. Written by J. Brady McCollough, this short-novel length article is well worth the time it takes to read whether you’re a fan of the Penguins, a hockey fan, or just someone who loves learning about honorable, determined, and talented people. The Post-Gazette has kindly given their readers three options for consuming this piece: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline.

From a young age, Lemieux was tagged as one of Canada’s best young hockey prospects. When he was drafted and signed by the pitiful Pittsburgh Penguins, he had no idea the twists and turns and challenges that were ahead for him and the city of Pittsburgh. During Lemieux’s incredible career, he endured chronic back and hip problems as well as a bought with cancer. Lemieux was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1993 at the age of 27, right in the middle of his prime as a hockey player. Coming face to face with his own mortality jarred Lemieux, as it would all of us, so he decided to focus his thoughts on the subject he knew the best. While his body was being treated for cancer, Lemieux’s mind lived in its own person ice hockey rink. Here’s the excerpt from McCollough’s piece:

Lemieux had spent so many nights over the years awake, thinking about what lay ahead and what he was going to do about it. With weeks of radiation therapy staring him down, that wasn’t easy to do. So, he just thought about hockey.

“I had a big lead on Pat Lafontaine,” Lemieux says of the points race. “I would stay up at night and watch ESPN and find out how many points he got, day after day. He got a lead, and that was my goal, to come back after the last treatment and step on the ice and start chasing him. That was important for me. That was a challenge.”

On the morning of March 2, 1993, Lemieux had his last radiation treatment. He had missed 23 games, and Lafontaine now led him by 12 points with 20 games to go. The Penguins were playing that night at Philadelphia against the hated Flyers, and Lemieux wasn’t going to miss it. He hopped a charter flight and arrived at the Spectrum, surprising everyone, even NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who didn’t have time to get to Philly from New York to witness it.

When Lemieux took the ice, the Philadelphia fans who had lustily booed him for years were now on their feet, cheering him. Having not skated for nearly two months, his body tired from blasts of radiation, Lemieux scored a goal and an assist in a 5-4 Penguins defeat. That felt remarkable, but he was just getting started.

Pittsburgh ran off an NHL-record 17 straight wins, as Lemieux set his sights on Lafontaine. Playing some of the most inspired hockey anyone had ever seen — never mind the circumstances — he scored 30 goals and 26 assists after his return to pass Lafontaine and win by 12 points.

It was one of the most unfathomable seasons an athlete has had in any sport, and for a guy who valued his privacy, all it did was pull his fans and admirers closer.

“He was a superhero of flesh and blood,” close friend Chuck Greenberg says. “He hurt, and he got sick, like real people do, and he did things that only superheroes can do.

After Lemieux retired, the Pittsburgh Penguins fell on hard times financially and their owner took the rare but not unprecedented step of declaring bankruptcy. Lemieux had structured his contracts as a player to include a lot of back-weighted money so that he could provide the most flexibility for the team to pay his teammates while he was there. The Penguins owed him over $30 million dollars, money that the current owner was not planning on paying as part of the bankruptcy settlement. This was the impetus for Lemieux to attempt something that was more than rare; something that was unprecedented — he decided to buy his old team. In what were eventually successful negotiations to do this, Lemieux ended up insisting that he take all of his back wages in equity in the team, as an exhibition of his intent to buy the team for the good of the city, not as a way to recoup his losses. And this is what he has done for the last fifteen years! Here is an excerpt from the Post-Gazette piece about the fateful night at Morton’s restaurant in Pittsburgh when Lemieux decided to try to buy the Penguins:

That night at Morton’s, it was time to discuss the options. Lemieux just listened, which was his way. Tom Reich started talking, which was his way. Reich said that the only way to guarantee Lemieux would get his money — and that the Penguins would remain in Pittsburgh with proper ownership — was for Lemieux to put together a group to buy the team out of bankruptcy. It was wild, insane even. But Lemieux considered it. They proposed the scenario to bankruptcy attorney Doug Campbell, who had the legal know-how.

“I said, ‘OK, do you have any money?’ No. ‘Do you have any investors lined up?’ No,” Campbell says. “OK, so you’re telling me a $30 million unsecured creditor who has no investors lined up is going to go head to head against two publicly-traded corporations, one of which has the master lease for the Civic Arena and the other the TV rights, and we don’t even have a telephone or an office, and we’re going to outmaneuver them legally and financially and get control of the franchise?”

Well, yes.

Go check out the full story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and J. Brady McCollough! You won’t be sorry. Again, the three options for consuming this piece are to: read selected excerpts, the full text of the piece or browse an interactive timeline. Enjoy!

The best sports stories of the week

No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. 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 the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:

Wilt the Stilt Becomes Wilt the Stamp

by David Davis for the New York Times

I just love that these stamps are extra long. Fitting for a man who was 7’1″ and loved to (ahem) rack up statistics.

Chamberlain, the only man to score 100 points in an N.B.A. game, will become the first player from the league to be honored with a postage stamp in his image. And fittingly enough, the two versions being issued by the Postal Service are nearly two inches long, or about a third longer than the usual stamp.

That time an NFL team used truth serum on an injured player

by Andrew Heisel for Vice Sports

This article wins the award for craziest sports story of the week. And the craziest part of it is that the contract the Buccaneers were trying to get out of paying by proving that their employee was malingering was not even a big contract. If they went as far as injecting him with sodium pentothal, how far would they have gone to avoid paying a player with a bigger salary?

In a drug-soaked environment where the ends almost always justified the means, is it really shocking that an NFL team doctor would shoot a player full of a substance that was used by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a top-secret mind control program? As McCall emphasized about Diaco, when a player enters a team’s training facility, he’s not dealing with his doctor but “their doctor.” There’s a difference.

When dyslexia blocked his path to college football, Maryland high school player took unusual route

by Dave Sheinin for the Washington Post

Wait, did I say the last story won the prize for craziest sports story? Hmm… let’s just say it’s a tie then. I’m actually surprised false identities don’t happen more often in order to get around the academic requirements to play top-level college football or basketball. I guess there are so many quasi sanctioned ways to cheat the system that going this far out of the box is rare.

He wasn’t a former power-lifter who turned one season of football at a prep school in Maine into a scholarship to Kansas State. He was actually a former all-state lineman from Maryland who, after failing to qualify academically for the NCAA, assumed the identity of his best friend — John Knott — and, using Knott’s transcripts and some forged documents, went off to chase his NFL dreams.

Yes, there was a real John Knott. But instead of the 6-foot-5, 280-pound black man who showed up in Manhattan, Kan., in January 1996 — touted by the National Recruiting Advisor as the “sleeper of the class,” because he was big and fast and nobody knew much about him — the real John Knott was actually a 5-9, 140-pound former high school teammate. And he’s white.

Thunder At Dawn, Or Prayer Of A Rugby Dad

by James Howdon for The Classical

Children often find ways to separate themselves from their parents’ avocations. For some children of sports fans, that means learning to play music or joining the debate club. For others, like the son whose father lovingly describes in this article, that means choosing a sport to play which his father knows nothing about.

There are outbursts of loudness, sudden messes, emotional extremity and inexplicable decision-making in our house, part of life with a bright and hasty teenaged boy. In rugby, it’s reversed: he’s the recipient, the object of constant chaos. Especially during the first few workouts, it must’ve felt like life in a tiny random universe: balls came his way without warning, bodies careened and bumped, and the flow of play suddenly reversed or stopped or accelerated in ways utterly surprising to him.

He is learning a sport about which his old man definitely doesn’t know better. He digs that part of the deal with a really big shovel, to be the one teaching.

Fantasy Football Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

by Courtney Rubin for the New York Times

As I wrote about earlier this week, the fantasy football playoffs start this weekend in most leagues. That means people all over the country, not just men, will be going crazy — screaming with joy, frustration, and staring fixedly at their phones, hoping for miracles!

Unflattering stereotypes abound about the female fantasy football player — does it only because of her boyfriend/husband, picks based on how cute the players are — but these days, young women are turning to fantasy football as a way to bond with friends, especially faraway ones with whom they communicate about their hobby on social media and GChat.

She [Adrienne Allen] is so competitive that she refuses to name her favorite research sources, lest she tip off the competition. But she will reveal that her diligence includes scanning the Internet for articles about players’ personal lives because drama can affect performance. “It’s a huge soap opera,” she said of the N.F.L.

In review: Ray Rice

With the end of the year approaching, Grantland, along with basically every other publication out there, has started to run some reflections on the past eleven months. That’s fortuitous timing for a reflection on the Ray Rice domestic violence story that has spanned almost all of 2014. The story is ongoing; Rice was just reinstated after winning an appeal of the NFL’s attempt to suspend him indefinitely. He won’t return to the playing field immediately or perhaps ever because his former team cut him while he was suspended, but there’s a good chance that some team will hire him again. Following the ruling on Rice’s suspension, the majority of the stories were about how poor NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, was made to look by having his suspension overturned. Brian Phillips, one of my favorite writers, argues a different case in this look back on the Ray Rice story. It’s not just Goodell who should be ashamed, it’s all of us who were only outraged once we saw the infamous video of Rice assaulting his then fiancee in an elevator.

The Dark Room

by Brian Phillips for Grantland

For the Rice tape to help you understand the extent of the domestic-violence problem in the United States, you have to imagine that TMZ kept posting videos — that it posted one two seconds later, in fact, and another one three seconds after that. It started throwing up 24 videos a minute, faster than you could play them, too fast for you to keep up. In three of these videos during the first day, you could watch a woman being murdered by her partner. Then three more on the second day. And so on. You kept playing them; TMZ kept churning out GIFs. You watched a million videos a month. Twelve million in the first year. And the videos kept coming.

Roger Goodell should lose his job. But if you’re angry enough to want Goodell fired, shouldn’t you be angry enough to think about the other victims of violence? To talk about them?

Football brilliance and its price, but is there hope?

Football, football, football. It’s mid-fall and my brain is still full of football. Soon, basketball, and hockey will creep in. Once in a while, a blip of tennis or soccer or volleyball pops up, but for the most part, it’s football, football, football. The sports media is equally obsessed and luckily for all of us, its producing a ton of great stories about football. Here are three from the past week that I want to share with you because of their great writing and impressive subjects.

Odell Beckham Jr.’s Catch Was A Culmination: A Former WR Explains

by Nate Jackson for Deadspin

Nate Jackson is a retired NFL player and the author of an insightful book about life in the NFL called Slow Getting Up. In this article for Deadspin, Jackson gives his thoughts on the incredible catch made by Odell Beckham last week that has widely been called the (or one of the) best catch in the history of the NFL. Jackson describes how difficult playing receiver is and also how little leeway the NFL’s obsessive coaches give players to practice the incredible.

But you can’t just play catch and call yourself a receiver. You have to get open. To get open on a route, you tell a lie with your body. This is harder than it seems. You may think you are leaning one way, but you’re not. To pretend to go one way when you really plan to go another way is counterintuitive. To do so at top speed requires a full-scale deception perpetrated against yourself. Every muscle, every bone, every ligament must be in on the lie, lest the defensive back see through you, and crush you.

But let’s think about something here, for one moment. ODB, a man with the football skills we just witnessed, is not allowed to trust his football instinct UNTIL the ball is in flight. He must stick to the PLAN until the ball is let go. …in the NFL, the freedom to improvise exists only for the quarterback. And even for him, it is rare. Our finest football players, men who would make Batman blush, must adhere to the small-minded tactics of a bygone era. And the arbiters of that era, uncoincidentally, are the men who also cannot conceive of such a catch being made in the first place.

Real Life or Fantasy?

by Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld

It’s probably worth noting that Odell Beckham, the player who made the amazing catch described in the first article, didn’t finish the game he made it in. He left the game hurt although he did play in the next game. That’s the life of an NFL player — play, get hurt, play, get hurt. Rinse, repeat, until it’s time to retire. This is the story of a player who, in his day, scored more touchdowns and took more hits than almost anyone else and what his life is like now.

Housewives wrote thank you notes to him. Office workers built desk shrines to him. People around America would spend more time in the fall thinking about Priest Holmes than they would about their families. They named their fantasy teams after him – “Holmes Wreckers” and “Judas Priests” and “The High Priest of Touchdowns” – and they moved their lineups around him and they spent their Sundays shrugging when opponents took a big lead because nothing mattered, nothing at all, until Priest Holmes stepped on the field and began his weekly fantasy football scoring spree.

The greatest fantasy football player of them all looks for cracks in the ground when he walks now. “Cracks,” he says. “Divots. Unlevel ground. A shift in the pavement. A crack in the hall.”

He looks for these things because the tiniest variation in elevation can throw his body now. If he hits one of those cracks just a little bit wrong, his ankle turns. His hip jolts. “I can blow out a knee,” he says. The body that once bounced off the ground after the most savage crash went dark now teeters with the slightest incline or dip.

Each week took a terrible toll on him. He would remember Friday nights when he still wasn’t sure if he could play. That’s because: The feeling happened every Friday night. “Something would happen between Friday night and Saturday night,” he says. “I guess it was the mental training of it, I’d just done it so many times that my body would come together. “But I would know that the minute that game ended on Sunday, I wasn’t going to be healthy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It would be back to Friday, and me saying: ‘Come on body, I need you one more time.’”

Concussions, by the New Book

by Bill Pennington for The New York Times

Times have changed in the NFL since Priest Holmes played. Sure, his career would have been ended by the knee and hip injuries that ended his career anyway, but perhaps, thanks to a new comprehensive policy on head injuries, the mood swings and scary loss of feeling that Holmes suffers from may have been lessened or prevented. There is some hope.

Once, the treatment of players with head injuries varied from team to team and could be haphazard. Beginning last season, all players suspected of having a head injury — should they lose consciousness from a collision or experience symptoms like a headache, dizziness or disorientation — were required to go through the concussion protocol system. It features a broad cast: a head-injury spotter in the press box, athletic trainers on the bench, doctors and neuro-trauma specialists on the sideline and experts in neuro-cognitive testing in the locker room.

Each doctor interviewed for this article said a consensus in the “Go or No Go” moment is usually reached easily and without disagreements. No one recalled discord. “Ninety percent of the time, it’s pretty obvious,” Kinderknecht said. “It’s not a whole lot different than talking to somebody who is intoxicated. You can tell.”

It is becoming more commonplace for players to self-report a head injury… Players are also policing one another, tipping off the trainers that a teammate acted oddly in the huddle. Gossett said he had seen game officials alerting medical personnel as well.

Happy Thanksgiving from the sports media

Good morning and happy Thanksgiving! While you’re trying to find the cranberries in the back of the fridge, (where did you put those things?), here are excerpts from the best of the many Thanksgiving and football themed articles from around the web.

Pigskin Pigsplosion NFL Week 13 Preview

by Ryan Glasspiegel for The Big Lead

A special Thanksgiving edition of The Big Lead’s weekly NFL football preview.

If you stop to think about it, it’s pretty rude of the NFL to make all three games on Thanksgiving be compelling ones. Though a motive would be hard to discern, it seems readily apparent that the league is involved in a sinister plan to cause relationship strife around this holiday.

26 (More) Rules of Thanksgiving Touch Football

by Jason Gay for the Wall Street Journal

Rules to live by if your Thanksgiving tradition includes playing touch football.

Remember: It’s not just a game. It’s an opportunity to relieve a year’s worth of pent-up aggression upon the loved ones who don’t return your text messages and never do the dishes.

9. If anybody starts a Thanksgiving family touch-football fantasy league, you can ban them from the family for seven years.

18. This year’s halftime show is explaining to Dad who Katy Perry is.

19. Relationship breakups can be hard on the Thanksgiving touch-football game. It was very sad that your brother Todd and his girlfriend Karen split up, because Todd is family. But mainly because Karen had six touchdowns last year.

Ndamukong Suh and Warren Buffett: The Bruiser and the Billionaire

by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal

Ndamukong Suh is one of the most compelling characters of the early game between the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears. He’s known as a rough and dirty player on the field but off-field he’s a burgeoning businessman.

“Everyone says, ‘Wait til your football career is over.’ Or the biggest saying is always ‘Life after football,’ ” Suh said. “But as an athlete, someone who is bright enough and understands how to compartmentalize, and has time management from already having two jobs at once—playing football and going to class and getting good grades-—you can have 70 to 90% of the focus on your ultimate job but at the same time slowly build to what you are going to be one day.”

Suh’s best memory was an arm-wrestling match between Buffett and Suh at an event. At his Michigan home, Suh has a letter, written by Buffett: “I, Ndamukong Suh, hereby release Warren Buffett from any claims for physical injury that I may suffer in the arm wrestling contest…”

Thanksgiving Football Is Tradition for Chris Borland

by Taylor Price for 49ers.com

Chris Borland is an unlikely new defensive star for the San Francisco 49ers who will be playing on Thanksgiving night versus the Seattle Seahawks. Here’s a story from the team’s site about his background and football upbringing.

Chris, the second-youngest of six boys, played football with his brothers; he also tried to keep pace with them in other ways. Joe, 13 years older than his NFL-playing brother, remembered Chris running around their home with two-pound weights in each hand. The story gets better. Chris used to do that in the winter time… as a 4-year-old.

The next game is on a familiar day for the Borland family: Thanksgiving. Although Chris hasn’t played in a “Turkey Bowl” game since his high school days, he has a pretty good memory of that battle. Just like any other group of family and friends who gather to play recreational football games hours before a Thanksgiving meal, the Borland’s were no different. Only, their game was a little more physical than most neighborhood contests.

In the last “Borland Turkey Bowl,” Chris caught the game-winning touchdown pass from Joe, earning the right to hoist a trophy topped with a plastic turkey head. Chris earned the hardware, too. He collided with a sapling tree and bloodied his forehead as he caught the winning pass. But as Joe tells it, Chris wasn’t even the toughest player in the yard that day. Sarah Borland, the only female sibling of the bunch, suffered a dislocated shoulder in the game. What did she do after the injury? Oh, she just popped her shoulder back into place and kept playing.

Chiefs safety Eric Berry has right attitude for what could be fight of his life

by Sam Mellinger for The Kansas City Star

Not a Thanksgiving story per se, but I thought it was good to include this as a reminder to give thanks for the health of us and our loved ones and for the people who support us when we’re faced with big challenges.

The Chiefs star will see a lymphoma specialist in his hometown of Atlanta this week, trying to find a definitive answer for a mass in the right side of his chest. His season with the Chiefs is over.

Everyone’s fight is their own, of course, but if this becomes Berry’s fight, he will engage it with an incredible amount of support… In high school, Berry volunteered at a dentist’s office. In college, he would sneak into the equipment room the night before games to help the team managers polish the helmets… With the Chiefs, he is constantly thanking the men and women who cook and serve the team meals. He’s the one hugging the flight attendant on the plane and donating backpacks full of school supplies to local kids.

Balancing diplomacy and passion in sports

There’s room for all types in sports. Or that’s what we’re told. “If you can play, you can play” is the slogan of a great organization working for inclusion in sports. White, black, gay, straight, male, female, young, old, everyone can play sports. But what about people who lose their temper easily? What about shy people? How accepting are sports of different personality types? Two articles came across my desk recently that make me think about the question of balancing diplomacy and passion in sports.

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 the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:

Boogie Cousins and The Upside of a Bad Attitude

by Bethlehem Shoals for GQ

Demarcus Cousins, mysteriously nicknamed Boogie, is one of the most talented young basketball players in the NBA. For pretty much his whole career, even in college, he’s been known as a player who let his emotions get in the way of his success. Bethlehem Shoals takes this idea and examines it for what it’s worth — which might not be that much. Why, Shoals asks, do we feel the need for our sports starts to fit into a single stereotype?

Cousins is exciting to watch because he plays with feeling; he’s unpredictable and at times, ecstatic. When he decides to take over a game or clinch a win, it’s as much a matter of will as it is ability. Like Russell Westbrook, he spurs his team to greater heights by wearing his emotions on his sleeve; there’s a range there that somehow seems more honest, or authentic, than more guarded, less expressive players.

Cousins is undoubtedly a post player but he’s always a few steps out from the basket, allowing him an extra move or two to try and throw off defenders. You could argue that this space is also where the emotion, the excitement builds. With Cousins, there’s a real tension and release. He gets the ball, gets worked up, and more often than not, pays it off with a big play.

Asking Cousins to change his personality wouldn’t have just been pointless—it could have been disastrous. A player like Davis can change his game in certain ways, according to a certain script, because it suits him as a person. Cousins has taken a different path, finding a way to channel his energy in a way that helps, rather than hurts, himself and all those around him. We’ve seen it before and yet somehow, players who get the “troubled” label are never allowed to just be themselves and evolve accordingly.

Meet Tom King, one of USSF’s most important people behind the scenes

by Grant Wahl for Sports Illustrated

While wearing your emotions on your sleeve might be a good idea on the basketball court, it’s certainly not in the game that Tom King plays. As Grant Wahl explores in this article, the arranging and scheduling of international soccer games is as complex and sometimes as confrontational as the sport itself.

One of the leading practitioners of U.S. foreign diplomacy is a guy who schedules soccer games… It’s just like diplomacy. Countries may say one thing privately and another thing publicly, and it’s hard to know what’s really going to happen until you sign a treaty (i.e., a contract).

“It’s about two organizations trying to come together on some common ground with regard to economic conditions, technical decisions and the best possible dates to play. These relationships have been built up over many, many years. And our philosophy is that if things go wrong in the negotiations or if any federation reneges on something they had perhaps previously agreed, or we had an agreement to play in principle but it didn’t come through, we always take the high road.”

Opening minds and eyes with sports

As we often explore on Dear Sports Fan, sports can be a reflection of social change or a harbinger of social change. Sports has its own culture, with progressive and traditional elements. Then there are the sports games themselves; the tactics of sports that evolve competitively. This week, three stories popped up that examine change within sports.

This fall has been a tense time for gender issues within sports. I think it’s also been a productive season for gender issues in sports. One challenge, examined in this article, is that only so much progress can be made while key echo chambers are so dominated by a single gender.

Why Are All My Twitter Followers Men?

by Wendy Thurm for Think Progress

I’m a sports fan and a baseball writer and I love the idea that American women care about sports nearly as much as American men do. But there are other numbers that tell us that while women might identify as fans of a particular sport or team, they don’t always engage with that team or that sport with the same level of energy we see from men.

For all the advances for women to play sports, there’s been very little change in the landscape for women covering sports… most sports shows still feature white male non-athlete reporters coupled with former players.

Which brings us back to social media. Despite the idea that new platforms have opened all sorts of discussions, including those about sports, to new audiences and participants, the divide between women and men looks remarkably similar to the one in traditional media… This is important because Twitter isn’t just part of the national sports discussion. It often drives the national sports discussion.

Here’s something I’ve long wondered. Why are positions so fixed in football? Why not put two quarterbacks on the field at once? Or, as Hawaii has done, a punter who can punt with either foot, throw, or run with the ball?

Meet Hawaii’s Scott Harding, the Most Interesting Man in College Football

by Michael Weinreb for Grantland

He was born in Australia, and he played Australian rules football for six years, five of them with his hometown Brisbane Lions. He grew up with the National Football League on his television set, a faraway curiosity that many Australians adore but most only partially comprehend. Watching the NFL and recognizing its broad outlines, Harding thought to himself, I have that kind of skill set.

Harding is a natural righty, but says he’s equally comfortable kicking with either foot, in part because the Australian game requires that sort of ambidexterity. Depending on the side of the field and the hashmark Hawaii finds itself on during a fourth down, Harding can either roll to his left and boot it left-footed, or move to his right and kick it right-footed. There is also the constant threat of a fake, because, in addition to executing pre-planned fakes off certain sets, Harding is adept enough as a runner that Demarest gives him a constant green light to take off. Because Harding is not averse to contact — the hits he takes almost feel muted, he says, after all of those years playing Australian football without pads — he winds up holding the ball until the last possible second so the kick coverage team can get downfield. He’s yet to have a punt blocked. His gross average is 41.8 yards and his net average is 41.1; opponents have managed a total of 30 punt return yards against him the entire season, a measly .41 yards per punt.

Every so often you hear about a sports team that poses naked to raise money. This is always fun because, who better to pose naked than fit, strong athletes? Plus there’s enjoyment in seeing some of the conventions of ultra-masculine (women’s teams have more nuanced stereotypes) groups of men getting naked with each other. One rowing team in England took things a step farther in awesomeness, when, after finding out that their calendars were mostly popular with gay men, decided to create a LGBT charity and donate a portion of their earnings from their calendar to it.

Team Calendar Makes A Splash To Fight Homophobia

by Ron Dicker for the Huffington Post

The U.K. squad has been producing a nude datebook fundraiser since 2009. When it discovered that much of its audience was gay, the team figured it should direct its charity toward the LGBT community, according to a video released to promote the new calendar. So the team has helped established a charity called Sport Allies, “a programme to reach out to young people challenged by bullying, homophobia or low self-esteem,” per the Warwick Rowers website.

Rethinking injuries in sports

Injuries are a sad reality of sports. As athletes, even amateur ones, we know they’re coming and we just hope they’re not too painful or debilitating. As fans, we are transfixed at the edge of our seats whenever someone on the teams we root for goes down in a clump, grabbing their ankle or knee. As fantasy sports owners, we’re a step removed from the injuries and they transform into simple tactical obstacles that need to be overcome.

This article subverts everything we think about athletic injuries by focusing on the organ donor whose tendon was put into NFL quarterback Carson Palmer’s knee in 2005 and the emotional impact of this on her family and Palmer himself. It’s a brilliant article not least because of its restatement of the age old grandfather’s ax paradox. Can a donor live on through her donee’s achievements? What happens when her tissue is replaced?

Carson Palmer’s lasting connection

by David Fleming for ESPN

De Rossi’s final gesture of organ and tissue donation would eventually save or improve the lives of more than 50 people. One of them just happened to be a Pro Bowl quarterback in need of a new knee. “A cadaver didn’t save Carson’s career, that was Julie, a person called Julie,” says Dorothy Hyde. “There was absolutely no one else on this planet like her.”

Twenty-two months after she was killed,  De Rossi’s Achilles tendon became part of Palmer’s knee. Within five months, Palmer was already jogging. He was back under center for the Bengals 2006 season opener without missing a single game. “It’s a little eerie, but it’s also pretty amazing,” Palmer said in an interview just two days before he re-tore his ACL. “Dorothy’s daughter lives on; a part of her is still moving and running and cutting. All the things my knee is doing, she’s doing too.”

His latest injury has severed his physical link to De Rossi… Yet the deeper connection between Palmer and De Rossi remains intact. Shortly after learning about Julie while recuperating from his 2006 surgery in California, Palmer asked his wife, Shaelyn, to drive him to the DMV. Eight years later, when he reported to a hospital for his latest surgery, he would have been asked to provide identification and any pertinent medical information. Palmer would have reflexively reached into his wallet, pulled out his driver’s license and handed it to a hospital administrator.

On the lower-left-hand corner of the ID, just next to Palmer’s smiling, tan face, is a tiny dark-pink circle with a single word written in small, thick black letters.

Donor.

Questionable to Start is a great blog I discovered this week on my voyages around the internet. Its creator started with a simple observation that mainstream media’s reporting on injuries in the NFL was not based on historic data. So, he decided to collect the data, build a database, and now he writes about NFL injuries from an informed perspective unavailable to most. This article is a response to some criticism for a debunking statement Questionable to Start made about quarterback Nick Foles’ broken collar-bone — a debunking statement that turned out to have been correct.

Are all injuries really different?

by Craig Zumsteg for his blog Questionable to Start

Yes, all injuries are absolutely different. While two players might both have collarbone fractures, those fractures are often in different locations. Different levels of stress and mechanics caused those two injuries, so the extent of the injury is usually different as well. Different players heal and respond to treatment in different ways.

I have examples of two recent quarterbacks who suffered fractures to their left, non-throwing, collarbone. One returned after missing seven weeks. The other was close to returning around eight weeks, then suffered a setback and ended up missing the ten games before the season was over. Yes, I admit this is a dangerously small sample size.

With those two examples in mind, something rings false about any estimate that includes four weeks as a possibility. Yes, I guess that’s physically and medically possible, but it is not something we’ve seen from a quarterback… In order for me to believe that a four-week return is possible for Foles, I would like to understand the specifics of his injury. Why is Foles injury half as crippling as the ones Aaron Rodgers or Tony Romo suffered? It is entirely possible that Foles has a smaller fracture. Or that his fracture is at a location more likely to heal quickly. Or some combo of the two. But, without those specific details, I think that a historical comparison approach is the best tool we have available.

What is we could prevent injuries before they happened? We would have fewer beautiful stories like our first story today and less need for intelligent statistical coverage of injuries like in our second. Still, I think we can all agree that fewer injuries is a good thing. This article is about a revolutionary attempt to prevent injuries in downhill skiing — one of the most dangerous sports out there.

Airbag System Approved for World Cup Ski Races

by the Associated Press in The New York Times

Perhaps if Lindsey Vonn had a big cushy air bag to fall on when she tore two ligaments in her right knee she wouldn’t have missed the Sochi Olympics… Looking back, it’s nearly impossible to calculate what effect — if any — an air bag would have had in those crashes. But with a radical air bag system being approved for use in World Cup and lower level races beginning in January, Alpine skiing could get a lot safer.

The system — which entails putting an air bag in the neck area of athletes’ back protectors — was developed by Italian manufacturer Dainese in coordination with the FIS. It inflates when skiers lose control and are about to crash.

Take this job and shove it. Sports style.

Sometimes it all gets to be too much and you have no choice but to do what the characters in the classic movie Office Space do and find an alternative.

Whether you’re a corporate lawyer, an NFL football player, or a feline mascot, the lesson from the guys at Initech holds true. Here are their stories.

I love bad teams and I recently quit my job to experiment with building a career in sports, but even I think what this Knicks fan is doing is a little wacky. Fired from his job as a corporate lawyer, Dennis Doyle decided to go to every Knicks game this season.

Living Out Knicks Dream, Complete With Nightmares

by Scott Cacciola for The New York Times

Few Knicks fans (if any) have chosen to express their existential crises by committing to attend 82 straight games. During a rebuilding season. And paying for it, in more ways than one.

“I could kind of understand if someone had wanted to follow LeBron around in Miami for a year,” Doyle said. “That sounds kind of nice, actually.”

The Knicks, on the other hand — well, Doyle has prepared himself for a long season.

Former NFL player Jason Brown left his own job as an NFL player to start a farm… even though he didn’t know how to farm! Not to worry, he’s a smart guy and youtube exists. No problem. Now he lives happily and gracefully as a farmer.

Why a star football player traded NFL career for a tractor

by Steve Hartman for CBS News

Jason Brown quit football to be a plain, old farmer — even though he’d never farmed a day a in his life.

Asked how he learned to even know what to do, Brown said:

“Get on the Internet. Watch Youtube videos.”

His plan for this farm, which he calls “First Fruits Farm,” is to donate the first fruits of every harvest to food pantries. Today it’s all five acres–100,000 pounds–of sweet potatoes.

Even if you can’t actually speak, you can still go on a work stoppage. That’s what Mike the Tiger has done this season down in Louisiana. He’s simply refused to get into the trailer which brings him to LSU home football games and his trainers, to their credit, refuse to force him. Nice work!

The Mascot Will Sit This One Out, Thanks

by Jonathan Martin for The New York Times

When the No. 14 Tigers took the field Saturday night for a nationally televised game against No. 4 Alabama with playoff implications, their beloved mascot once again did not join them. For all seven home games this season, Mike has refused to leave his well-appointed residence for the mobile cage that would take him into the stadium.

[LSU public address announcer, Dan] Borne, however, said he could not blame Mike for staying home. After all, more than a few college football fans enjoy sitting outside stadiums alongside their vehicles, watching games on television while enjoying beverages and food fare far superior to the offerings inside.

“My vision of Mike,” Borne said, “is that he’s inside there, he’s got four or five high-def screens, a remote control the size of Vermont for that big paw, and he’s just watching all the great football going on on Saturdays.”