John Smoltz is, at this point in his second career as a color commentator, not really that good at the job. He understands the game well, but he’s also drowsy and grouchy in all the ways that old ballplayers tend to be: checked out and skeptical and reflexively salty about today’s players, grumpily grudgeful about…
Myth now dominates our misunderstanding of Muhammad Ali, who was once the most accessible celebrity in the world. The truth of the man is nearly irretrievable. With Ali having receded into an exile of his own choosing, the jokes and half-truths and outright lies he once told to entertain us have hardened into…
Not long after the release of Remember the Titans, the uplifting 2000 blockbuster about the integration of the T.C. Williams High School football team, former coach Herman Boone ceased to be the Titan his players all remembered. Instead, in public appearances, he began to play the role of Herman Boone playing Denzel…
It looked bad, LeBron getting Paul Pierced off the court, a Finals opener sliding wetly to an uneventful end, Gatorade trolling down from the ramparts of for-profit pseudo-science.
High on the list of myths thrown out as excuses to delay or prevent the advent of pay-for-play is that the price-fixing engaged in by the 351 schools in Division 1, and especially the now 128 schools in FBS who play football, is necessary to ensure competitive balance across the sport.
Excerpted from Taylor Branch's The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA, published by Byliner and newly relevant today as Northwestern football players seeking to unionize argue before the National Labor Relations Board that they are employees of the school. Byliner has unlocked The Cartel for the day…
Originally published at Sports on Earth.
Originally published on Sportsgeekonomics.
Just when we thought things on the Manti Te'o/Lennay Kekua front were over, they got weird again. Earlier this month, an unknown individual assumed control of Manti Te'o's deleted Twitter account, recreated its appearance, and started tweeting. The tweets weren't original, though; they were recycled from Te'o's own…
A quick primer to help you navigate this document. These are selected tweets from October 2011 to December 2012 for both Lennay Kekua, Manti Te'o's fake dead girlfriend, and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man behind Manti Te'o's fake dead girlfriend. We also included tweets from other users to Lennay.
Admitting that he deceived his parents and the press about the nature of his relationship with Lennay Kekua, but denying any involvement in the hoax, Manti Te'o spoke with ESPN's Jeremy Schaap Friday night for more than two hours in an off-camera interview. (Most of what little we know about the interview with Te'o…
This photo, provided to us by a friend of the Tuiasosopos, was taken on Nov. 23, 2012—the night before the Notre Dame-USC game. It shows Ronaiah Tuiasosopo's younger sister, known as Pookah, with Manti Te'o. (According to Manti's uncle Alema Te'o, Pookah supposedly posed as Lennay Kekua's cousin.)
ESPN's Shelley Smith is reporting that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the apparent creator of the Lennay Kekua hoax, confessed to duping Manti Te'o, according to an interview with a friend of Tuiasosopo. "He told me Manti was not involved at all, he was the victim," the woman told Smith, in an audio recording broadcast on ESPN.
Manti Te'o's uncle Alema Te'o went on The Zone Sports Network last night and spoke to radio hosts Scott Garrard and Riley Jensen about the Manti Te'o-Lennay Kekua story that we broke on Wednesday. Alema didn't have much to say about Manti, but he did offer some personal insight into the character of Ronaiah…
In our investigation of Manti Te'o and his nonexistent dead girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, published yesterday, we mentioned the media's role this fall in amplifying the hoax. Here are all the ways they got the story wrong:
The Notre Dame version of events is that Manti Te'o is still the hero everyone thought he was. He's just not so good at using the internet.
LONDON—The River Lea winds its way southeast from the industrial town of Luton to London's East End, where it drains into Thames a couple miles upstream of the ingenious tidal barrier that keeps the capital dry. A tame body of water by any account, the Lea disperses toward the end of its course into placid fingers…
I wrote a Dadspin post about stupid baby names last week, and whenever I write about baby names, I inevitably get scores of emails featuring the same dubious story. Here is one such example:
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