eric Page 278 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Something Terrible Is About To Happen
There, in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. Behind the goal and a step to the left. The videotape is probably a copy of a copy of a copy, as grainy as a Navajo sand painting. A hockey game. The camera pans too fast, too slow, chasing knots of players back and forth across the ice. Medium wid...

Coming Soon: The Best American Sports Writing 2013
Coming October 8 is The Best American Sports Writing 2013. Edited by J.R. Moehringer. Check out the table of contents over at series editor Glenn Stout's site. Looks to be another sure shot to this great long-running series. ...

Eric Nesterenko And The Examined Life: A Hockey Intellectual Reflects
Excerpted from From Black Sox to Three-Peats: A Century of Chicago's Best Sports Writing (University of Chicago Press), edited by Ron Rapoport and featuring stories from the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News, and the Chicago Defender, among other papers. It's an excellen...

The USMNT Dances, Sings, And Chugs Beer After Victory Over Mexico
After clinching a World Cup berth with a 2-0 victory over Mexico, the USMNT came back out onto the field for some good old-fashioned celebrating, America style....

Just Put Your Lips Together And Blow
Our man Eric Nusbaum has a fun piece on the Lucha Libre star wrestler Maximo over at ESPN:...

The Time Eric Crouch Asked His Lineman To Spit In His Mouth
A reader alerted us to this story, which was written by former Nebraska quarterback and Heisman winner Eric Crouch for HuddlePass.com, a website featuring various first-person accounts from former college football stars about their playing days. Crouch's story is a pretty standard one about Week 1 j...

Ed And Steve Sabol: The NFL Dream Machine
Today gives the start of the NFL season. What better place to start than Rich Cohen's excellent portrait of Ed and Steve Sabol? The league as we know it is hard to imagine without them. Published last October in the Atlantic, here's "They Taught America How to Watch Football":...

The 16 Fall Movies You Should Be Excited About: A Guide
Labor Day is the signpost every year that the sugary summer junk is behind us and that the nutritious square meal of awards season has finally arrived. That's the theory, anyway: In actuality, summer movies like Before Midnight and Fruitvale Station will be as well-received as any Oscar bait, and th...

The Forgotten Genius of Ring Lardner
Over at the Daily Beast, Allen Barra weighs in on the forgotten genius of Ring Lardner:...

Note In A Fan's Notes
Found this copy of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes in a bookstore on the Upper West Side last week. Dig the inscription:...

The Sportswriter Who Wrote American Better Than Anyone Anywheres
Below is John Lardner's introduction to a 1959 edition of Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, a fictional series of letters from professional ballplayer Jack Keefe to his friend Al. Those stories are included in the Library of America's new collection. (There was also a comic strip based on the same char...

I Begged You To Get Some Therapy
It’s always nice to watch guys at the game of their game, as Pollack and Hoffman were in Tootsie. Sure, they might have wanted to strangle each other but the payoff was sweet for us. ...

Ring Lardner: An American Original
This week gives Ring Lardner who is being honored with a volume by the Library of America (edited by Ian Frazier). We'll run one of his stories from the collection tomorrow, and later today we've got a treat from his eldest son, John. Meanwhile, check out three of his most famous stories at the LOA'...

Up The Stairs With Cus D'Amato
From the Library of America's Story of the Week site, here's a gem—Pete Hamill's tribute to Cus D'Amato:...

Battle Of The Sexes
Next month, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of "The Battle of the Sexes," American Masters will premier their show on Billie Jean King. It's the first time in the program's history that a sports figure has been profiled. And this Sunday over at ESPN, Outside the Lines will feature a segment on Kin...

Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Age 66, Played All Nine Positions Last Night
The Spaceman's still going, man. Baseball's most famous old hippie again made a couple of appearances with the independent San Rafael (Calif.) Pacifics this week, nearly one year to the day after he tossed a complete game for them at the age of 65. Far out....

Bull Riding Is Love
From one of my favorite magazine writers, Jeanne Marie Laskas, here's her 1999 Esquire story, "America is Bull":...

Goalie Completely Whiffs On Clear-Out Kick, Gives Up Easy Goal
I'm not sure how extensive the complete list of things goalkeepers are not supposed to do is, but I imagine it contains something along the lines of "Don't ever dribble the ball back toward your own goal," and "Don't whiff like a goddamn fool when you try to kick the ball and there's an attacking o...

Tiger's $54 Million House Is A Slowly Sinking Metaphor For Something
You know, $54.5 million just doesn't go as far as it once did. Tiger Woods, who scraped together enough dough to get a mortgage at that price in Jupiter Island, Fla., two years ago, is already finding that out. We've all been there....
