ac Page 939 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

How Dr. J Blackified Pro Ball, Found Himself, And Stayed Eternally Cool
Originally published in Esquire in February 1985 and anthologized in Teenage Hipster in the Modern World, a stellar collection of Mark Jacobson's non-fiction. Reprinted here with the author's permission....

Pacman Jones Tweets News Of His Latest Arrest—For Hitting A Woman
Has it really been a year-and-a-half since Pacman Jones was last sentenced by a judge for something or other? It's been so long that Pacman no longer wants to be called Pacman, never mind that Pacman is still the name that's on Pacman's Twitter handle. But look! Pacman's Twitter has news of an arres...

It Looks Like The Offseason Is Driving Russell Westbrook A Little Crazy
Pretty cool Vine, Russell Westbrook:...

The Moving Finger Writes: Red Smith On Reggie Jackson's Historic Homers
Red Smith is the most respected sports columnist we've ever had. In his prime, Jimmy Cannon, Smith's friendly rival, was certainly as well-known. Cannon, the Voice of New York, was an emotional, colloquial writer whose reputation, unfortunately, has faded. But Smith endures. What is it about his wri...

NBA Players Read Mean Tweets About Themselves
Jimmy Kimmel has been making celebrities read mean (often fake) tweets about themselves for some time, but now he's expanded to the world of the NBA. And that's a good thing, because now we get to watch Rajon Rondo face the fact that he looks like Franklin the Turtle....

Counterpoint: Baseball Games Are Exactly As Long As They Should Be
The most striking thing about the Baseball Games Are Too Long argument is the amount of time spent thinking about it. ...

Patrick Kane Finally Scores A Goal The Kings Can't Come Back From
The final goal of Patrick Kane's hat trick sent the Chicago Blackhawks to the Stanley Cup Finals and he needed an extra period and a half to do it thanks to Mike Richards....

Not Content Merely To Win, The Bruins Are Traumatizing Franchises
The Boston Bruins will welcome the winner of the Chicago-L.A. series to the Stanley Cup Final because of their utter dismantling of the Pittsburgh Penguins. In that series, the Bruins were able to stonewall a Pittsburgh team that won 75 percent of its regular season games and led the league in scori...

No One Notices The Spurs Because No One Notices San Antonio
Here's a working barstool-grade theory as to why, during its dynastic run to four (perhaps soon five) titles since 1999, America still embraces the San Antonio Spurs with a yawn and a why are you still here? squint. This phenomenon has flustered if not baffled sports cognoscenti for years. But they ...

How To Make A Peach Cobbler So Good You'll Cry
Maybe you don't think of yourself as someone who makes dessert. Maybe you think of dessert as a spoon and a tub of Ben & Jerry's, or a bowl of fruit, or maybe you just don't eat dessert at all because it makes more "sense" to just "eat dinner until you're not hungry anymore" and you "don't want dia...

Does A Baseball Player's Race Affect The Value Of His Card?
Is a baseball card worth more money if the player on it is white? Perhaps! On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang up and Listen podcast, Mike Pesca runs through the many studies have been done on the subject of racial bias and baseball card values, many of which posit that racism has long driven d...

Legendary Homer Jack Edwards Compares One Bruin's Shot-Block To D-Day
So Gregory Campbell blocked a shot, broke his leg, and finished a shift. It was courageous, in the way these things are, and—to state the obvious—unworthy of this hallowed analogy, which Edwards presented (naturally) on WEEI. There will forever be a great gulf between the sacrifices of soldiers and...

D-backs' Daniel Hudson, Recovering From Surgery, Is Injured Again
Daniel Hudson hasn't pitched since June 26 of last year, when he had to have Tommy John surgery soon after being pulled less than two innings into a brutal start against the Braves. He's now had a setback of the worst kind:...


My Dinner With Ali
Adapted from the original, which was published in 1989 in the Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine. Footnotes from the author (as told to Tommy Craggs) are included throughout the story, and a postscript from Glenn Stout, editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Sports Writing series, follows. The ...

Bad Ass
From the Bronx Banter archives, check out Pat Jordan's 1989 Playboy story on Rorion Gracie:...

How Big Brown's People Nearly Pulled Off Horse Racing's Biggest Scam
As 95-degree temperatures baked a crowd of nearly 100,000 at the 2008 Belmont Stakes—the hottest June 7 on record—the only person who seemed unfazed was Richard Dutrow Jr., the trainer of Big Brown, an undefeated colt just 12 furlongs from the first Triple Crown in three decades. With history agains...
