ether Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
ATP roundup: Grass court season gets underway
No. 6 seed Jack Draper of England held off Austria's Sebastian Ofner 7-6 (4), 7-6 (5) in first-round action Monday at the Boss Open in Stuttgart, Germany.,Draper won 89 percent of the points on his first serve (41 of 46) and only made 11 unforced errors, offsetting a dozen aces and 33 winners by Ofn...
Sick, Sad World of Sports: Jumbo holiday edition
The holidays are a stressful time for everyone, including criminals, athletes moonlighting as criminals, and criminals moonlighting as athletes. ...
Reebok is looking to pump some life into its brand with Shaq and Allen Iverson
Air Jordans have dominated the sneaker industry since before my birth, but those were not the first shoes that fascinated me. I thought the Reebok Pump was the coolest shoe in the world. I saw it on TV, then at Foot Locker, and one day one of my cousins walked into my grandparents wearing a pair. Th...
LeBron is heading into uncharted territory
For anyone under the age of 30, it’s difficult to remember an NBA without LeBron James. ...
Magic Johnson and the Showtime Lakers not liking HBO’s <i>Winning Time</i> is what made it so good
On Oct. 1, 2006, Marlo Stanfield infamously told a security guard at a grocery store on Monroe Street in Baltimore, Maryland, “You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.” Who would have known that 17 years later, the words from one of the most important characters from HBO’s best show — The ...
<i>Winning Time</i> is the latest casualty of David Zaslav’s sports media bloodbath at WBD
On Monday, the guillotine hovering over HBO’s Winning Time finally dropped when the series joined a growing collection of shows canceled by the network. Declining ratings and criticism from its stars, who insisted that Adam McKay’s Lakers series based on Jeff Pearlman’s biographical account, turned ...
The Cubs are doing their best to piss away their wildcard spot
On the morning of September 7th, life was pretty good for the Chicago Cubs. They had just, essentially, ended the San Francisco Giants season by sweeping them in three games at Wrigley, leaving San Francisco 5.5 games behind the Cubs and 2.5 games out of any wildcard spot. The Cubs meanwhile were on...
Hey, Kyrie Irving, you’re a human being, we all know you
Welcome to Deadspin’s The Sports Nihilist, where all is for naught and we are but accidental jolts of electrified meat stuck to the surface of a rock in an indifferent universe. Fuck you....
Jay-Z is ready for his big piece of the NFL pie
What’s better than one billionaire, partnering up with a wealthier one?...
Oh, wow, a sport obsessed with stats finally realizes numbers are marketable
If you’re reading a post about baseball to start your Thursday morning procrastinating there’s a good chance that at some point in your life you’ve been at a bar with one of those punching bag machines. You know what I’m talking about, it looks like a huge speed bag and you put in a dollar or whatev...
A look back at what 'Winning Time' accomplished
In the final episode of Winning Time, Season 1 quickly does away with the spectacle and gets straight to the facts. The series’ biggest conceit is as a series based on real-life, it can’t deviate from the truth. But, for all the defending creators Max Borenstein and Adam McKay have done for the seri...
<em>Winning Time </em>Episode 9 “Acceptable Loss”
Jerry West is out for blood. The real Jerry West, that is, not the Jason Clarke avatar we have seen stalk and storm through the first season of Winning Time. The flesh and bone West, who is a part of the Lakers organization as much as Kobe Bryant or Magic Johnson, is really fucking pissed. Recently...
<em>Winning Time</em> Episode 8: “California Dreaming”
Since the poems, short stories, and writings of Henry Dumas, a specter has risen out of the outer fringes of American arts and letters — Afro-surrealism. A hallmark of this genre is a self-awareness by the reader, author, and fictional characters that the world they inhabit is off-kilter. The term h...
Jerry West and the Showtime Lakers are mad about their depiction in a Hollywood production of the most Hollywood era in sports
Jerry, Kareem, and Magic are pissed....
<em>Winning Time episode 7</em>: ‘Invisible Man’
When John C. Reilly and, ostensibly, Dr. Jerry Buss turns to address the camera, he speaks not in the future tense but the present. Reilly’s Buss is not granted foresight into what will become of his Lakers. He is far from an omniscient narrator and is in no way all-knowing, all-seeing. Instead, the...
Becoming Kareem
To capture the intellectual acuity of Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, an actor portraying the seven-footer would need to possess a towering level of gravitas. Winning Time creator Max Borenstein had said casting Kareem was the hardest of the Showtime Lakers. When Solomon Hughes walked through the...
Winning Time: ‘Piece of a Man’ explores Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s relationship with Islam
What makes Winning Time’s tapestry of stories enthralling is how it reflects the chaotic jazz of our lives. Every character is at odds against the world and themselves. Magic, Jerry Buss, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, each man is fighting a private war. For many of them, it’s a war of the spirit against the ...
Fictional Hooper Bracket: The Elite Eight
Welcome to the Elite Eight of the Fictional Hoopers Tournament. All the fat and sinew (Sandy Lyle and Steve Urkel) have been trimmed, and the characters left are all from powerhouse pictures. No one has been able to knock off either of White Men Can’t Jump’s main characters (celebrated last night at...
