tcraggs22 Page 33 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

What ESPN Will Be Talking About Today: The Win Is Fake, But The Injuries Are Real
A new feature in which we condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence....

School Of Fight: Learning To Brawl With The Hockey Goons Of Tomorrow (Deadspin Classic)
Last week, Glenn Stout, editor of Houghton Mifflin's Best American Sports Writing series, announced the lineup for the 2011 edition of the book. Among the stories was Jake Bogoch's dispatch from a notorious hockey fight camp for kids, where our writer took a teenager's punch to the kidneys and found...

What ESPN Will Be Talking About Today: Plaxico Catching A Football In A Pretend Game
A new feature in which we condense your morning SportsCenter to its essence....

ESPN Is Airing This TV Commercial For Grantland
Huh. It's like Jim Jarmusch meets The Sting meets a Klondike bar....

The Cool Kids Will Now Be Sitting At Bleacher Report's Lunch Table: A Slideshow
Introducing your new Bleacher Report "National Lead Writers" ......

The Winner Of Iowa-Iowa State Gets This Awful Trophy
This is the new Cy-Hawk Trophy, given annually to the winner of the Iowa State-Iowa football game. It depicts an Iowa farmer presenting to his family some of the subsidy-fattened corn crop that he will soon sell to an Archer Daniels Midland processing plant in Keokuk, whereupon the corn will be conv...

A Not-Entirely-Constructive Exchange With Yahoo's NCAA Scandal Hunter, Charles Robinson
A few months ago, I had an angry but illuminating exchange on Facebook with Charles Robinson, author of Tuesday's big Yahoo hoo-hah about the Miami Hurricanes. The topic then was Jim Tressel, but it might as well have been Miami or Reggie Bush or any of the many subjects of big Yahoo hoo-hahs over t...

My Correspondence With Yahoo's Charles Robinson
As mentioned here, this is my Facebook exchange with Yahoo reporter Charles Robinson. I've edited out only the comments from innocent bystanders....

NFL Suspends Terrelle Pryor For Breaking The NCAA's Rules
The NFL announced today it will essentially suspend Terrelle Pryor, a player who isn't in the NFL, for violating rules that aren't the NFL's. This is really incredible, and the most incredible part is that what should happen in a sane and just world—Pryor hires a very good attorney who buries the NF...

"Bunny-Fucking," "Cockbrisket," And Serial Commas: A Copy Editor's Guide To Nicholson Baker's Filthy New Book
Below is the copy editor's style sheet for Nicholson Baker's House of Holes, which The New York Times has called both a "porny Alice in Wonderland" and a "hideously glorious filthfest" (Sam Lipsyte said the latter; Sam Lipsyte would know) and which accomplishes what all great modern literature aspir...

Stories That Don't Suck: SportsFeat's Guide To Funny People (And Chris Farley)
Every Friday, SportsFeat picks a few great weekend reads for Deadspin. This week we're chipping in with our favorite long-form writing about comedians....

Dead Comedian Of The Week: Andy Kaufman, The Unlikely Bombthrower
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, from the best book ever written about stand-up comedy, Phil Berger's The Last Laugh, we look at the evolution of Andy Kaufman, meshuga provocateur....

Dead Comedian Of The Week: Mitch Hedberg, The Comic's Comic
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, the Masked Man looks at the legacy of Mitch Hedberg, the surrealist who developed a cult following before his death in 2005—and an even bigger one after his death....

Dead Comedian Of The Week: Vaughn Meader, Assassination Victim
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, Alexander Woo, a writer and co-executive producer for HBO's True Blood, eulogizes Vaughn Meader, the wildly popular JFK impersonator whose star plummeted after the assassination of his sub...

At Last, Video Evidence That Mike Laga Really Did Hit A Foul Ball Out Of The Old Busch Stadium
This is great. On Sept. 15, 1986, Mike Laga, one of those light-hitting Cardinals players whom St. Louis fans are always applauding for moving the runners over, supposedly knocked a foul ball clear out of the old Busch Stadium. Because we have all lost our capacity for wonder, this feat has lately ...

Deadspin Spends A Week With Norm Macdonald And His <em>Sports Show</em>: A Point-Counterpoint
Last November, two Deadspinners went to L.A. to work on the pilot for the now-canceled Sports Show with Norm Macdonald. They had very different experiences....

Total QB Rating: Everything Great About ESPN Multiplied By Everything Insufferable
It's been fascinating to watch ESPN roll out its new, proprietary Total Quarterback Rating over the past few days, and not just because we got to see Tirico, Gruden, and Jaws huffing and grunting and puzzling over the thing as if it were the first stone tool. ("This new measure of stats," Tirico cal...

NFL Tilts Stupidly At Stupid Windmill
The NFL has exciting new plans to implement a test of dubious efficacy for a substance of uncertain benefits. Whatever. We've been through this before, so I'll just note two things:...

ESPN Does Not Want You To See Dick Vitale Meeting The Pope
The following directive recently went out within the ESPN empire, via its newswire:...

Tony La Russa's Tortured, Petulant Justification For Plunking Ryan Braun, As Read By A 4-Year-Old Boy
You can watch Tony La Russa try and fail to justify himself — he cycles through logical fallacies as if they were middle relievers in a 5-4 ballgame against the Reds — or you can watch young Mack Scocca-Ho capture the essence of La Russa's monologue in the video above....