book Page 49 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
A Plea To Joe Posnanski: Stop Writing Mealy-Mouthed Nonsense About Joe Paterno
Sports Illustrated's Joe Posnanski is in a tough spot. He's a gifted writer and by all appearances a decent guy. His decency is his defining characteristic; he grew up rooting for doomed Cleveland teams and covered the worthless Kansas City Royals, but he never gave in to the urge to be a hatchet ma...
Jim Rome Left Partly Because Of Stuff Said About Him In The ESPN Book
So Jim Rome is going from ESPN to CBS Sports Network even though the Worldwide Leader had offered him a multi-year extension for Rome Is Burning. According to a source, Rome wanted out at least in part because of comments made by an ESPN executive in Those Guys Have All The Fun, the oral history pu...
30 Paragraphs About 30 Teams From The Basketball Prospectus Guide To The Truncated NBA Season
The following is an abridged preview of an abridged NBA season, culled from the team chapters of the ever-incisive Pro Basketball Prospectus. Buy the book as a PDF for $9.98. ...
Gifts For People Who Read Books
When we have time, we at Deadspin like to read (and also sometimes write) books. These are the books we read and wrote this year that we think would make a great, last-minute gift for any literate people you might know, or even as a special treat for yourself....
The <em>Postmortal</em> Live Holiday Funbag
All right, we did this once before and it didn't end with Sarah Silverman crying, so let's close out the year with one more live funbag. I'll be here answering your questions from 1 till 4. You know where to send them. Put LIVE FUNBAG in the subject line. I'll get through as many as I can. And if yo...
Keith Olbermann Insists Suzy Kolber Was Just As Toxic At ESPN As He Was
Below is an excerpt from Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN, which is finally in paperback so those readers anxious for more Bristol back-biting don't have to carry around the cumbersome hardcover. The new version includes more bitchy anecdotes from Bill Simmons, further details a...
Why Philip Roth Declined To Blurb Scott Raab's <em>The Whore Of Akron</em>
Philip Roth, American literary titan. He's prolific, evocative, and controversial. LeBron James, American basketball titan. He's prolific, evocative, and controversial. Scott Raab, occasional Deadspin contributor. He hates LeBron James and loves Philip Roth....
When You Get Cocky In An MMA Gym, You Get Beat Down
Matthew Polly has never been a man for half-measures. When he wanted to learn kung fu, he left college for two years to live and train in the famous Shaolin Temple in China. Polly wrote an excellent book about the experience. His new book, Tapped Out, follows Polly on another two-year journey as the...
And Then Al Michaels Said To Howard Cosell: "You're Drunk. You're Ruining The Fucking Telecast."
Howard Cosell, who died in 1995, ruled sports broadcasting from the 1960s until the 1980s. He commentated on Monday Night Football from its inception, called boxing's biggest fights, and popped up on Olympics and baseball telecasts, too. In his new book, Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Tra...
My Peach-Cobbler Hallucination About LeBron James, PCP, Outlaw Bikers, Cocks, Abortion, And Suicide
When LeBron James stood up the Cavs live on ESPN last season, Esquire writer Scott Raab took his 50-plus years of sad-sack Cleveland sports fandom and became a one-man hate machine. For those of you annoyed by Raab's anti-King James Twitter rantings last year, you'll be happy to know his new book is...
Journalists Address PSU's JoePa Class This Morning, Say He's a Scapegoat
There is no more telling fact than PSU having a regular class about Joe Paterno. Comm 497G: Joe Paterno, Communications & the Media, better known as "JoePa Class," studies the media through the lens of the longtime football coach. Today was obviously not a normal day. Instead, Joe Posnanski and Pat...
There Is Finally An Inspirational Children's Book About Danny Woodhead
If every undersized, scrappy professional athlete could have an inspirational children’s book written about him or her, the world would be full of adolescents with overblown expectations about their futures. But since that’s already the case with America’s youth, scraptastic young men like Greg Paul...
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...
ESPN Has Found Its Answer To Problems Like Bruce Feldman And His Book
From the network that never lets its business interests interfere with its coverage: "Of note is that ESPN, as a matter of policy, will no longer grant permission to write as-told-to books with sports personalities." It's a conflict of interest, you see. Except when it isn't. [Front Row]...
This Is Why You Don't Ask A Professional Athlete To Be A School "Reading Champion"
I absolutely cannot think of a better inspiration for getting schoolchildren to read than by choosing a man who got very rich without ever having read a book in his life....
Book Readings That Don't Suck
If you're in New York, tonight is the latest installment of Gelf's Varsity Letters reading series, which this time features Stefan Fatsis, John Krewson, and Jeff Pearlman. It's at 7:30 at Le Poisson Rouge in NoHo. Doors open at 7....
"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...
In Case You Were Interested In A Book That Calls LeBron James A Whore
Esquire has the first excerpt from Scott Raab's The Whore of Akron, on sale Nov. 15. We'll have more later in the week. For now: "Lord. This is where LeBron James wants to play basketball, in front of sun-dried cretins who must be bribed to act as if they care about the game and the team. ... For as...
"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 ...
Mike Ditka Is Angry About The Walter Payton Book He Hasn't Read
I'd bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in yours that Mike Ditka hasn't read Jeff Pearlman's revelatory biography of Walter Payton, which was excerpted in this week's Sports Illustrated and which has the Chicago media scurrying to find any old Bear willing to glower at a book he ha...