book-excerpts-that-dont-suck Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
How A Comedian Helped Birth The "F-You" Patriots
Back in September 2007, the Patriots were caught taping the Jets' defensive signals on the sideline. This was week one, after the Patriots beat the Jets, 38-14. The next 15 games—all of which the Patriots won—were blowouts a lot like that, but with a venomous edge. In his new book, War Room, which h...
"An Olympics Without Black Athletes": Martin Luther King Jr., John Carlos, And The Boycott That Wasn't
John Carlos is best known as the man who, along with Tommie Smith, raised a clenched fist—the Black Power salute—on the medal stand after the 200 meter race. Carlos took bronze, and Smith gold, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But that moment was a culmination of months of political discussion amon...
"I Ain't No Damned Monkey On A String": The Sadness Of Sweetness After Super Bowl XX
Today the 1985 Chicago Bears were finally honored at the White House—25 years after their 46-10 romp over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. (The original trip was canceled because of the Challenger explosion.) That Super Bowl was memorable for many reasons—the headbands of Jim McMahon, the ...
Deadspin Classic: A Prayer For Steve Bartman
Alex Gibney's film Catching Hell—about Cubdom's favorite scapegoat, Steve Bartman—aired tonight on ESPN. Last year, we adapted the following excerpt about Bartman from Will Leitch's book Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons and the New Golden Age of Baseball. Originally published May 4, 2010....
32 Paragraphs About 32 NFL Teams From The 2011 Football Outsiders Almanac
The following is excerpted from the team chapters of the always-excellent Football Outsiders almanac. Buy the PDF for $12 or order the book for $21.95....
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....
Making And Remaking History In Olympics-Addled Beijing
Adapted from Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, available at your favorite bookseller....
If Albert DeSalvo Wasn't The Boston Strangler, Who Was? Bill James Investigates
During the years 1962-64, 13 women in the Boston area were molested and then strangled by an assailant who came to be known as the Boston Strangler. In 1965, Albert DeSalvo, a convicted sex offender and patient at a local mental institute, began telling people he committed the murders. With the help...
Kelly Leak: The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived
The following is excerpted from Josh Wilker's book about The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, written for Soft Skull Press's Deep Focus series....
My Lunches With Costas: A Series Of Frank Encounters With The Journalist And Shill (UPDATE)
The following is adapted from Lipsyte's new memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, now available on Amazon....
ESPN Book Excerpt: Keith Olbermann, The Asshole Genius
GQ called dibs on the first exclusive excerpt of the gigantic Miller-Shales ESPN oral history, Those Guys Have All The Fun, but we've been given an excerpt of their excerpt just because nobody wants us running any more unapproved excerpts. We'll play along. So read this, then pop over to GQ for the...
The Sultan Of Twat: Babe Ruth's Swinging First Few Years With The Yankees
The following is excerpted from Weintraub's The House That Ruth Built, about Babe Ruth, the Yankees, and the 1923 baseball season....
Roberto Clemente's 3,000th Hit, In Glorious Graphic-Novel Form
The following is excerpted from Santiago's 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, a gorgeous graphic-novel biography of the martyred baseball great. Clemente got his 3,000th hit on Sept. 30, 1972, three months before he died in a plane crash. You can watch video of No. 3,000 here; Santiago's rendering b...
The Devil In Tampa: Remembering The Penny-Pinching, Snack-Policing, Nut-Cutting Days Of Vince Naimoli
In his new book, author Jonah Keri covers the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays under the stewardship of two Goldman Sachs alums and a private equity banker, who in 2008 managed to do to the rest of the American League what some of their former colleagues were doing to the U.S. economy. Before their arriva...
Deadspin Presents An Interpretive Rendering Of Cal Ripken Jr.'s Young Adult Book
We received an email from Cal Ripken Jr.'s publicity team at Random House, which will release his three-CD audiobook, HOTHEAD, next Tuesday. HOTHEAD (the caps are apparently intentional) is about a Babe Ruth League shortstop named Connor Sullivan and is "loosely based on challenges Ripken himself ...
How NASCAR Conquered America Through The Air
Greg Lindsay is the co-author of the forthcoming Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, which argues that air travel has a lot more to do with your daily life than you might think. In this outtake from the book, he describes how NASCAR teams took to the skies as the sport expanded nationally over th...
Why There Are More .300 Hitters Than .299 Hitters, And Why It Matters
Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, authors of the Freakonomically inclined Scorecasting, explore the peculiar power of round-number milestones and how they affect a ballplayer at the plate....
The Invention Of Air: The Myths Of Young Michael Jordan, Deconstructed
There was a time when Michael Jordan was a very different kind of superstar, writes Bethlehem Shoals in this excerpt from FreeDarko's wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History. That MJ was edgy and menacing, and he helped make embarrassing music that no one r...
A Yankee Stadium Memory: "Their Look Didn't Say, 'Shut Up.' It Said They Wanted To Kill Me."
The following is taken from Bronx Banter Presents: Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories, edited by Alex Belth and featuring recollections of the old ballpark—sorry, stadium—from the likes of Pete Hamill, Charles P. Pierce, and Joe Posnanski. Bob Costas has something in there, too, I guess. Here, the grea...
Jeff Garcia Pisses In Hand Towels, And The Art Of Breaking Thumbs In The Loose-Ball Pile
Today, mongrels, we're excerpting from Anthony Gargano's tremendous NFL Unplugged, which offers a ruthlessly entertaining portrait of the NFL. It has all the lawlessness, the poop, the broken fingers, the organized insanity that the league would prefer you not know about....