ric Page 509 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

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":...

Columnist Amazed College Football Players Aren't Scumbags
That is the major takeaway from this overcooked word-soup from Rick Reilly. Sure, he bizarrely shoehorns George Zimmerman into an article about "young, urban athletes" who were neither murdered nor murderous, but the real gist of this column is that Rick Reilly is fucking shocked that those four kid...

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...

Costa Rica Is Trolling The Shit Out Of The USMNT
On Friday, the U.S. national team takes the pitch in Costa Rica for a World Cup qualifying match. The Costa Ricans are making it as difficult as possible, denying them training grounds and even going so far as to refuse them game balls for practice....

Kill #killthewin: The Fight Over Stats In Baseball Has Gotten Stupid
Television is the worst. Look at what's happened to the MLB Network's house numbers guy, Brian Kenny, who's spent the season preaching to the choir by beating horses to death right in front of them. It's fucking awful....

This Is Possibly The World's Highest Trick Shot
No, we don't care how many attempts this took. The ground-level replays are great....

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

Insane High School Football Game Ends With Squib Kick TD Return
The video doesn't have the dramatic buildup of Plano East-John Tyler, but this Texas high school football game between A&M Consolidated and Copperas Cove had a ridiculous conclusion....

Welcome Back, College Football
Theory: people with three-word names are either assassins or college football fans....

Chargers Announcer Has Something To Say About "Richard Cunt"
Billy Ray Smith, the color commentator for Chargers preseason broadcasts on KFMB, made a reference last night to Richard Kent, a punter who was cut by San Diego on Sunday. Smith initially used the wrong vowel when pronouncing Kent's last name. His quick correction rolled right off his tongue....

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:...

Ricky Williams: America's Most Blunted
Chris Jones puts one—or many—in the air and gets lifted with Ricky Williams. "The Runaway" appeared in Esquire back in December of 2004:...

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. ...

King Tee and Richard Pryor Act A Fool
What do you get when you mix King Tee with Richard Pryor? Fun, dummy, fun is what you get. King Tee's "Act a Fool" already had Pryor cut-up on the record, we just added more because too much vintage Pryor is still not enough....

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'...

Young Gun: Dempsey Pounds Willard
Slide on over to Deadline Artists for this look into the past—Grantland Rice's 1919 column on the Jack Dempsey Jess Willard fight:...

Wing-Eating Contest Ends With A Pantsing And A Punch In The Face
To clarify: The winning dude-bro gets pantsed. The shirtless loser who does the pantsing gets punched in the face—and seems so surprised to get punched in the face. We've got no details on this other than what you see here, but if that Jacksonville sign in the background is any indication, this happ...

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:...

Nick Faldo Crushes Rickie Fowler And Jonas Blixt With Orange Puns
Earlier on the Golf channel, Nick Faldo and Co. were calling action at the Barclays, where both Rickie Fowler and Jonas Blixt are decked out in head-to-toe orange. The two are paired together today and actually planned to wear similar colors, though the orange is Fowler's trademark....