book Page 29 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Elmore Leonard Starter Kit
One of the coolest things about Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction is that he didn’t get to it until he was close to 50 years old and had been a professional writer for more than 20. His books pared away anything unnecessary with the ruthless good cheer of a steely veteran with little patience for wasti...
The Seahawks Know They Got Away With One
Now that we’ve had a night to sleep on the Seahawks’ controversial 13-10 win over the Lions, sealed by an uncalled “illegal bat,” let’s try to process what we saw—even as the NFL figures out what it can do to fix a very bad rule....
Seahawks Beat Lions After Referees Miss Easy Illegal Batting Call
Down 13-10 with just under two minutes left against the Seahawks Monday night, Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford dropped back from the Seattle 11 and found an open Calvin Johnson. As Johnson was tackled with the ball about to cross the plane of the end zone, Kam Chancellor popped it out of Megatr...
Walter Matthau Was Addicted To Losing
A Siegel Film, Don Siegel’s account of his life as a film director is an entertaining and instructive guide to making movies. I especially like the section about Siegel’s experience working with Walter Matthau on Charley Varrick. ...
Book Claims Louisville Provided Basketball Players And Recruits With Escorts
Pat Forde at Yahoo Sports has gotten his hands on a copy of a book written by self-described madame Katina Powell and journalist Dick Cady. The book, which has not yet been published, is called Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen, and is all about Powell’s alleged involvement in...
<i>Purity </i>Went To Communist East Germany And Found Itself
We’ll move further along in Purity in just a moment. First, I want to relay the story of what happened the first time I opened the book up after the last dispatch, in which I discussed how much truer and more knowledgeably written Jonathan Franzen’s one-paragraph description of Santa Cruz’s weather ...
The Story Behind Dashiell Hammett's Last And Most Popular Book
The following is excerpted from Nathan Ward’s The Lost Detective, a new book about the early life of Dashiell Hammett, one of the greatest crime writers in history....
I Found <i>Purity</i>'s First Honest Paragraph, On Page 66
When last we met, Jonathan Franzen had mucked up the early pages of his novel Purity with repeated appraisals of the sex appeal of his main character, Pip. I was creeped out, but leaving room for the possibility that Franzen might be up to something that would redeem—or at least make some sense of—a...
Jonathan Franzen Wants To Bone Pip, I Think?
So Jonathan Franzen is doing kind of a weird thing in the early going of Purity, his latest novel. He’s not the first author to do a version of this weird thing, but the particular way he’s doing it, at least so far, made me want to write about it now, before I’ve finished the entire book....
How Darryl Dawkins Changed The NBA
The following is adapted from the new Random House book Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity....
Six Memes That I Swear Curt Schilling Shared To His Facebook Page
Curt Schilling’s Facebook page shares a lot of memes. Curt loves memes. Excluding the greatness that was the “Muslims are basically Nazis” sentiment, we wanted to highlight six memes that really stood out for their hot truths. A note: All of these were shared in the past three weeks and we really do...
"I'm A Grown-Ass Man!": How Miami Trolled The Hell Out Of Nick Saban
The following is excerpted from the new book Saban: The Making of a Coach, by Monte Burke....
Married To Surfing: Talking to William Finnegan About His <i>Barbarian Days</i>
I picked up William Finnegan’s surf memoir Barbarian Days on a beach this summer, and felt—I was stoned, the sky was astounding, the waves were delirious—that I’d fallen into an almost violent communion. As with the excerpts previously published in The New Yorker, where Finnegan’s been a staff write...
Michigan Sports' Facebook Pages Hacked, Overloaded With Butts
Fans of the Michigan football and men’s basketball teams hoping to find some recruiting or offseason workout news on the teams’ Facebook pages have been instead been greeted with softcore porn. A hacker has apparently taken over the accounts, and is posting wild, sexually-suggestive links....
The Best And Worst Of Dr. Seuss
I read a lot of children’s books. Some are terrible, many are decent, and a few are truly wonderful. Most authors don’t have the staying power to slot multiple entries in all three categories while achieving worldwide fame and fortune; in fact, Dr. Seuss is the only one that comes to mind....
How The Dodgers Got Baseball's Last Buried Treasure
The following is excerpted from The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse. ...
Daniel Bryan's <i>Yes! </i>Is The Worked Shoot Of Wrestling Books
Late in Yes!, the new memoir from the great pro wrestler Daniel Bryan, there’s a moment where Bryan comes to an epiphany about what he’s doing in the WWE—the place where he’s been employed since 2009: “I came to the realization that what we were doing in WWE was no longer pro wrestling,” he writes. ...
<i>Go Set A Watchman </i>Isn't A Good Book, But It Is An Important One
If it weren’t for the circumstances surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the novel’s deep flaws might pass by unnoticed. It began life as a private manuscript that, after much editing, became 1960’s critically acclaimed and universally beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, and the two share the same...
NFL Changes The Dez Bryant Rule, Makes It Worse
Remember this shit? Remember how this was ruled not a catch, and the Cowboys went on to lose to the Packers in the playoffs? ...
This Is The Most Important Passage In Ta-Nehisi Coates's New Book
Last Tuesday, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates dropped his second book, Between the World and Me, to nigh-unanimous critical acclaim. It deserves it, because it’s an indescribably enlightening, enraging, important document about being black in America today. Coates is perhaps the best we have, and th...