mma Page 63 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
What Happens When Teammates Rape A Teammate?
This piece originally ran at The Sport Spectacle....
Joe Frazier Was Cooler Than Ali. Discuss.
Joe Frazier died two years ago today. Now is as good a time as any to pay tribute to the former champ through a single photograph that best captured the unbridgeable distance between the two premier fighters of the age — a picture made at the very moment when the rivalry between Ali and Smokin' Joe ...
Cain Velasquez And Junior Dos Santos Should Fight Each Other Forever
Cain Velasquez, the best heavyweight in the world, is nearly unique among top fighters in that he's terrifying: patient, methodical, and utterly dead-eyed. He fights like a man with no imagination, for whom nothing exists but the logic of his situation and autonomic response. It's unnerving to watch...
Say Goodbye To The Steelers' Somersaulting Celebrations
Last week, with the Steelers staring hard at 0-4 for the first time in 45 years, coach Mike Tomlin decreed that the pool and ping pong tables at the team's practice facility were off-limits to all players. Because that's the fix that was needed. But then the Steelers won! And they took joy from it! ...
The Meaning Of The First Sonny Liston-Muhammad Ali Fight
Over on The Stacks, we're republishing Murray Kempton's classic dispatch from the first Clay-Liston fight, in 1964; you can find the story below. Kempton was an elegant columnist and essayist with a great ear for the overtones and undertones of any public spectacle—mob trials, nominating conventio...
The Champ And The Chump: The Meaning Of Liston-Clay I
Originally published on March 7, 1964, in The New Republic. Reprinted here with the permission of the author's family....
From Louisville To The Nation Of Islam: My Ups And Downs With Ali
This story was originally published in a 1971 issue of Sport magazine. It is reprinted here with permission....
The Challenger And The Muslims
In this story, Dick Schaap writes about the newspaper article that first revealed the connection between Ali and the Black Muslim movement. Schaap's "scoop"—which ran on the front page of the Herald Tribune of January 23, 1964, three weeks after I became city editor of the paper—follows....
Ali In Exile: The Once And Future Champ Clowns In NYC, 1968
For several years in the late Sixties, while (largely) lesser fighters vied for the heavyweight title and while his great nemesis Joe Frazier was powering his way through the ranks, Muhammad Ali was effectively in exile. Barred from the prizefighting ring for refusing induction into the Army ("War i...
NFL Considers Fines For Two Jets For Jake Locker Injury
The Titans are feisty as all hell, only an overtime loss away from being undefeated. Jake Locker has started to look like an honest-to-goodness NFL quarterback, tossing six TDs to zero interceptions in his last three games. So, naturally Locker's going to be out a while, and Adam Schefter says the t...
Boxing Referee Dishes Out Street Justice On Unruly Fighter
This occurred at, no joke, an event called White Collar Fight Club. I don't know what the hell White Collar Fight Club is, but I do know that its referees don't take shit from anyone....
Brazilian MMA Fighter Dies Minutes Before Weigh-In
MMA fighter Leandro "Feijao" Souza died Thursday before weigh-ins for Friday's Shooto Brazil 43 card....
The Last Laugh: Mailer And Ali By George Plimpton
Norman Mailer went out running with Muhammad Ali one morning, a few days before the fight with George Foreman in Zaire. He asked me to go with him, but I thought of the long ride to Ali’s training camp at N’Sele in the darkness, and thumping along for five miles or so in the wake of the challenger, ...
G.O.A.T
It ain't cheap but Taschen Books' tribute to Muhammad Ali, Greatest of All Time, sure is fucking fabulous. ...
Chael Sonnen Now Making Domestic Violence Jokes About Rihanna [UPDATE]
As has been exhaustively documented here, much to the displeasure of his core fanbase of men's rights activists, truthers, and racists, Fox Sports 1 pundit/middling professional fighter Chael Sonnen is a shitbag, or at least someone willing to play one on television for money, which amounts to the s...
This Is The Funniest MMA Knockout Of 2013
Derrick Mehmen landed a shot on the side of Rolles Gracie's face that didn't seem particularly brutal in the second round during Saturday night's World Series of Fight 5. Oh, but it was....
Great Men Die Twice: Muhammad Ali In Decline
Originally published in the June 1989 issue of Esquire. Republished here with the permission of the late author's son, Mark Kram Jr., a wonderful storyteller in his own right. His postscript follows. For a contemporary, but very different, glimpse of Ali, check out Davis Miller's story about his day...
American Nightmare: <em>Blue Caprice</em>, Reviewed
1. The John Muhammed/Lee Malvo Beltway shootings in October 2002 continue to occupy a specific segment of the American nightmare. The twisted, horrible genius of the killings was their selective randomness: The Beltway snipers chose their targets specifically so that people would believe they could...
The Greatest Comic Book Of 'Em All: Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali
One of the juiciest pop culture sports books ever made is this 1978 gem with art by Neal Adams. ...