Tag: reads

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.

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.”

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.”

As the world turns: evolution of sports culture

The sports, they are a-changin’.

Today we bring you four stories about how the sports world is changing to adjust to the wider cultural changes of 2014. From the long-pending acceptance of families with same-sex parents into mainstream sports culture to the inevitable dissolution of the NCAA’s hypocrisy to the generational shift away from football to less brain-injury inducing sports, to the simultaneous banning and normalization of the N-word, the world is shifting and sports is adjusting to fit in.

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:

This article tells the story of a family remarkable in its formation and makeup but exemplary in its core of love and support. The sports connection is the son in the family, Max Lenox, who is in his senior year at West Point where he plays point guard for their basketball team.

Max Lenox’s amazing journey to much-admired Army hoops captain

by S. L. Price for Sports Illustrated

It was strange, really, how the fear just leaked away. The first days and months Dave and Nathan kept an eye out for any effect of Corrine’s drug abuse on Max, but within a year his tensing had stopped. He grew up moving so hard and fast, and he picked up sports — gymnastics, swimming, soccer, tennis — so easily. Yes, Max was diagnosed with ADHD, but intelligence tests found him average to above, and besides, half of suburbia seemed to be popping Adderall.

He emerged as a rising talent in the D.C. area, an AAU star known for unselfishness and for twists that would soon grow into dreadlocks. Neither Dave nor Nathan had a sports background; one Christmas, Max gave Nathan Basketball for Dummies. And nothing, Dave and Nathan say, taught them how not to parent more than the rabid, backbiting AAU scene. Of course, few AAU parents had seen a family like theirs, either. Double takes, puzzled looks — Max’s teammates loved to see the nickel drop. Black kid, two white men: What the … ?

What follows here is my favorite part of the article. This is how sports can operate as a progressive force in society. Within a sport, if someone is honest about themselves, every cultural belief they have should be secondary to observations of performance and conduct within the field of play. Good for teachers and coaches like Fletcher Arritt who put their own beliefs secondary to their responsibility to the students or players.

A Woodson connection provided an option: Fork Union Military Academy, a Baptist boarding school in rural Virginia. Never mind that coach Fletcher Arritt had spent more than 40 years at FUMA reshaping more than 200 egocentric, unhappy or plain underbaked prospects into Division I freshmen. FUMA prohibited homosexual acts, mandated thrice-weekly chapel attendance and didn’t allow what Arritt calls the Five P’s — press, parents, posse, perfume (girls) and penguins (bad refs). Cellphones were banned. It seemed the worst match for someone like Max.

When Carter, Max’s AAU coach, called the then 70-year-old Arritt to give him a scouting report, he said, “Coach, I want to be honest with you: He has two dads.”

“What does that mean?” Arritt said.

“They’re gay,” Carter said, thinking, Here it comes.

“I don’t care,” Arritt replied. “Is he a good kid?”

The Washington Post has a long history of taking down seemingly invincible institutions… ask Richard Nixon. So when they and their respected sports editor Sally Jenkins set aim at the NCAA, I sit up and take notice.

It’s not that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s doing; it’s that the NCAA doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing

by Sally Jenkins for the Washington Post

The need to dissolve the NCAA and put its Indianapolis headquarters into foreclosure has been fully demonstrated in the past weeks. Repeatedly, the NCAA exceeds its authority in petty matters or intrudes in large matters where it has none, while completely failing in its one real responsibility: education.

Before any talk about how to “fix” the NCAA comes the question of what it is needed for at all. To establish rules? It has no means of enforcing them — short of extortion tactics. To negotiate TV contracts? All the big conferences can do that for themselves and are establishing their own networks. To stage championships? The biggest event of all, the $440 million College Football Playoff, isn’t even run by the NCAA, but instead by the five power conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision, who hoard the revenue.

The NCAA has proven incapable of reforming itself, or anything else.

Wright Thompson specializes in cultural description sports articles that make me want to read everything he writes AND take a road-trip with him. In this article, he gives his readers a glimpse into  the true Texas football culture of today. Not everything is Friday Night Lights anymore but if you go on this trip with him, you may meet some familiar faces. The selection I chose was from Thompson’s profile of country musician and former football player Charlie Robison.

9 Exits on America’s Football Highway

by Wright Thompson for ESPN

He lights another Marlboro Red, checking football highlights on the television. His knee aches when the bus rumbles along the highway, town after town, year after year. Vicodin helps him out of bed in the morning, 16 surgeries total on his knees. After so many concussions, he sometimes finds himself in the grocery store without a clue why he’s there. His 11-year-old son, Gus, is a star athlete who refuses to play football; he says watching his dad get out of bed cured him of that temptation. Charlie needed football, to sort out who he was and to become who he wanted to be, living in rough-and-tumble Bandera, a place still fighting for itself. His son, living in a moneyed enclave near San Antonio, doesn’t ask those questions. Football is something from his family’s past he wants to avoid.

Baseball is Gus’ sport, and Charlie coaches his team. Instead of pushing his son to remake his mistakes — which his hard-driving father, also a coach, pushed him to make in the first place — Charlie celebrates Gus’ decision, even brags about it, understanding on some level that it makes all the pain that football caused him somehow mean something. A cycle has been broken.

The NFL has been a popular cultural target this fall. They’ve been behind the curve on domestic abuse and child abuse. They have been seen as being arrogant and unyielding in the face of criticism while simultaneously pandering to public opinion without pause. On the subject of this next article, the N-word, it’s less clear where the NFL lands. Are they out in front, leading the charge or are they reactionaries, holding on to cultural history that’s no longer relevant. I suppose, it depends who you ask.

Redefining the Word

by Dave Sheinin and Krissah Thompson for the Washington Post

There are some who would say that debating the merits of the n-word is missing the bigger picture. The problem isn’t the n-word. The problem is racism. But it’s easier to fight a word than a complex, institutionalized system of oppression.

If life were as simple as the National Football League would like us to believe, the United States could simply police the word with yellow penalty flags, as if everyone were referees. A yellow flag on the hip-hop artist with the egregious lyrics. Another flag on the white kids at the mall, dropping the word on one another with no thought to its history. Another, if you wish, on the NFL for trying to ban in the first place a word used largely by African American players to other African American players.

You can't always get what you need 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 some of the articles this week that inspired me. We think of sports as a meritocracy where the best athletes rise to the top, where the best franchises flourish, and where the rewards are mostly commensurate to the risks. That’s not always the case. This week, I chose four stories about elements of the sports world that didn’t quite work out the way they were intended.

Marcus Lattimore was a star among stars in the world of college football. As a running back at South Carolina, he ran around and over the competition like few can. That all stopped after his second catastrophic knee injury. Despite his medical history, he was drafted into the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers who felt his talent was worth the risk that he might never recover. This past week, Lattimore decided to retire at the age of 23 because of chronic knee pain he could not rehabilitate his way through.

The Martyrdom of Marcus Lattimore

by Michael Baumann for Grantland

Lattimore directly contributed 3,444 yards from scrimmage and 41 touchdowns to the cause, at the cost of countless hours of work and the unimaginable physical agony that comes with being the title character in a game of Kill the Man With the Ball. His efforts led to the Gamecocks’ first SEC East title, first two 11-win seasons, and first two top-10 finishes in the AP poll. They also led to a boost in recruiting3 that helped make that success sustainable.

So what did Lattimore get for his contributions? A scholarship that paid for most of three years of college and prevented him from seeing a dime from the sale of merchandise that bore his number and the sale of tickets and television carriage fees bought by people who wanted to see him play. The promise that his time would come when he cashed in with the NFL. And the knee injuries that left him physically unable to cash in once that time finally came.

When a person like Lattimore suffers a career-ending injury while serving his school for no pay, making him whole shouldn’t be an act of kindness or compassion, as it is here. It should be the norm. It should be required.

Chivas USA was one of the more interesting experiments in the U.S. professional soccer league, Major League Soccer (MLS). Chivas is the nickname of a Mexican league soccer team — officially called Club Deportivo Guadalajara. The owner of the Mexican team bought the MLS team to use as an American outpost and minor league version of his main team. The experiment didn’t go well and the team has now been bought and sold and part of that sale is an agreement to shut the team down for a year or two and then reopen it with a new name, brand, and location in downtown L.A. 

The Once And Future End Of Chivas USA

by Connor Huchton for The Classical

Many bad decisions must be made for failure to arrive this spectacularly. These are some of the required ingredients, in short — a shared stadium and the second-fiddle perspective produced; an unclear identity; discrimination lawsuits and HBO investigative reports, league misstep after misstep; a few unremarkable teams. Eventually what’s left is desperate marketing ploys and cries of “Free tickets!” A good amount must go badly for a growing league to produce a team so haunted and solitary, and here, it did.

Some of the best Chivas games were two-goal losses, games when Wilmer Cabrera and his players hardly feared embarrassing final scores or the BigSoccer forum jokes that would follow. These were free-floating performances, runaway trains built from spare piston parts, heading for the cliff at high speed — because if you can’t beat them, then fuck it, still don’t join them – just play soccer of a more unhinged metaphorical sort. This identity wasn’t the troubled one Jorge Vergara and Don Garber had in mind, but somehow, it makes a lot more sense than any rebrand ever could.

One of the appealing things about sports is how clear its goals are. Winning is an objective thing. Statistics can be kept. This means it acts more like a true meritocracy than almost any other activity. Which is not to say that discrimination hasn’t and isn’t a part of sports. Black athletes in the United States were restricted from competing in the white professional leagues for decades and remnants of that discrimination continue today. What is usually the case with sports though, is that if a minority can get into a game, the game itself should be able to help prove their point about equality. One enormous exception to this rule has been transgender athletes, who continue to be barred from competition in many places. This article places a current legal battle in Minnesota in its historical context.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Myths: The battle for the rights of transgender athletes

by Parker Marie Molloy for Vice Sports

The reality is that even today, nearly four decades after Reneé Richards won the right to compete, trans people remain largely unwelcome in the athletic world—a world that is already well behind when it comes to LGBT inclusion. The NFL still hasn’t had an openly gay athlete on a regular season active roster. The NBA just recently had their first. Baseball and hockey remain a refuge for straight individuals.

Trans athletes strong enough to brave this harsh world are pioneers. Richards to Allums, Fox to Jönsson; unfortunately, they are sometimes also martyrs. As Leva and her ilk look to hamper competition, we should aspire to a world in which all athletes can perform free of hormone testing, “gender testing,” or the pseudo-scientific ramblings of the world’s Joe Rogans; a world in which all are welcome to compete.

Every profession has its unsung heroes. Carli Lloyd, a player on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is one of those heroes. This profile of her brushes the surface of why that might be but instead of getting caught up in that, it instead celebrates Lloyd for who she is, what she has done, and what she will do.

A Star (Still) in the Making

by Jeff Kassouf for NBC SportsWorld

Lloyd is a two-time Olympic hero, scoring the gold-medal winning goal for the U.S. women at both the 2008 and 2012 Games. She is the only player in history – male or female – to score in back-to-back Olympic finals. She wears the 10 shirt for the national team (customarily given to the top field player on the team). And yet, despite her heroics, she is hardly the face of U.S. Soccer.

Lloyd isn’t shy about telling you that she trains harder than anyone, and she’s frank about her quest to be the best player in the world. She forever carries a chip on her shoulder, fueled by a crowd of naysayers whom Lloyd doesn’t specify, yet acknowledges their existence. Lloyd said she doesn’t play for accolades, but she’s only human. She sees marketing and advertisements that don’t involve her. In 2013 she was left off the NWSL all-league first and second teams, and didn’t make the first team in 2014 after carrying her struggling Western New York Flash club through the season. But Lloyd was traded to the Houston Dash in October. Two weeks later she won the Golden Ball as the best player of the qualifying tournament.

Her attitude is classic if not cliché New Jersey: Work harder, always. And Lloyd is proud of that, calling herself a “Jersey girl for life.” She lives a few towns over from where she grew up.