books Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Did Bum Phillips Ruin Earl Campbell?
Like most Oilers—or “Earlers,” as they were known as their star galloped his way to Rookie of the Year and two MVP trophies his first couple of years in the league—Earl Campbell loved playing for the cowboy-hatted, easy-going Bum Phillips, who was always easy with a wisecrack. Bum once said of the t...
Jim Bouton Woke Up America
In 1969 and 1970, two books were published that demystified two of the most hidebound American institutions—presidential campaigns and major-league baseball. By and large, both were exercises controlled at their very top by Penis-Americans who were so white that they barely cast a shadow. They were ...
Q&A: John Urschel On NFL Analytics, Two-Point Conversion Cowards, And <i>That</i> Math Problem
John Urschel spent three seasons as an offensive lineman for the Ravens. He’s also a candidate for a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT—a pursuit he began in 2016, during his final season in the NFL. He’s also written a book, Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, that’s being released today by Peng...
The Ballpark Is The Great American Public Space
Is a ballpark a place to watch baseball, a theme park, a microcosm of its city, or something else entirely? It’s an open question that stretches back to the late 19th century, when enclosed ballparks, flanked by cheaply constructed wooden bleachers, began the gradual evolution of ballpark constructi...
Tom Brady’s Shady Guru Alex Guerrero Isn’t Ready To Give Up His Pseudoscience Or His Control
The following is excerpted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, by Amos Barshad, out today. Published by Abrams Books....
The Best Things We Read In 2018
Let’s get this out of the way up top: Yes, I agree, you wouldn’t think a cultural history of Oklahoma City would make for a compelling book. (I’ve had this conversation a lot this year.) But Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is the most engrossing piece of writing I’ve read all year. The book weaves together...
Merril Hoge Doesn't Want You To Use Your Brain
To clear up any confusion, let’s get this out of the way: Merril Hoge and Peter Cummings, who co-authored a book called Brainwashed: The Bad Science Behind CTE and The Plot to Destroy Football, are not CTE deniers. They do not dismiss the scientific notion that repetitive brain trauma is a high-ris...
Why An Ex-Jets Great Wants Nothing To Do With The Jets
Excerpted from Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl TEAM That Changed Football, now available from Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers....
Oh Good, Time For Patriots Fans To Get Mad At ESPN Again
Those were good times, weren’t they? When that big ESPN report on a schism between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, driven in part by Brady’s shady nutrition “guru” Alex Guerrero, dropped right before the playoffs and set off rounds of denials and non-denials and recriminations, and a whole lot of scre...
Roger Goodell Is Every Bit The Overcompensating Dipshit He Seems To Be
Excerpted from Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times, out today from Penguin Press....
This Children's Book Is Messed Up: <i>Caps For Sale</i>
Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business is a children’s classic that was published in 1940. Written and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, it’s an adaptation of a folk tale about monkeys stealing hats, because humanity’s entertainment situation was DIRE before strea...
This Children's Book Is Messed Up: <i>The Story Of Babar</i>
The Babar I remember from childhood was a jolly elephant who goes on adventures. Somehow that’s all I took with me into adulthood from early readings of The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff (and his wife Cécile, who first told their children the story at bedtime), a children’s classic that spurred...
How Pat Burrell Set The Home-Run Record... In A Sci-Fi Novel About Killer Prehistoric Sharks
Steve Alten grew up in Philadelphia. He went to schools—Penn State, Delaware, Temple—that Philly kids go to. And, though he lives in South Florida now, he’s still a huge Philadelphia sports fan....
Deadspin Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book We Were Eight Years In Power is eight previously published Atlantic essays each preceded by a new piece of writing that describes Coates’s intellectual, financial, and emotional state at the time of the piece, and musings on the Obama years. The eight new essays trace his...
The Best Things We Read In 2017
When we weren’t busy watching sports contests, we did some reading. Here are the best things we read this year....
<i>Ready Player One </i>Finds The Bleak Limits Of Nostalgia
It’s not hard to fracture the internet with a movie adaptation of a popular bad book. They’re made into movies all the time. They read like screenplays because they skip complex language that defies being replaced with pictures, and producers can’t resist a baked-in audience, which creates a baked-i...
There’s Another <i>Hike</i> Book Tour And You’re All Invited<em></em>
Last year the good folks at Penguin sent me out on a book tour to promote The Hike, and now they’re sending me back out on the road once more to whore out the paperback for cheapskates....
Jerry Jones Is A Great Guy Until He Fires You
Jerry is really personable. I mean, you’ve got to like Jerry Jones. If you’re around him, you’ve got to like him, unless you hate the Dallas Cowboys, which some people do. But as a person, he’s likeable. He’s fun to be around. His whole family is working with the team. They are a great family. I’m p...
Smart Baseball Can Still Be Fun Baseball<em></em>
Functionally and historically, the sabermetric revolution in baseball is over. Analytics is not some outsider’s method of attacking institutional baseball; it’s how institutional baseball does business. Every single major-league team receives immense amounts of data from MLB about their players’ bat...