tldr Page 14 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Why Does Anyone Care What Athletes Have To Say About Politics?
So LeBron James has offered his “endorsement”—since the traditional newspaper endorsement has lost whatever influence it ever had, it doesn’t seem too ridiculous to use the word to describe political support given by a guy who throws leather balls against the ground for a living—of Hillary Clinton f...

Pakistan’s National Baseball Team Just Wants You To Know They Exist
This past weekend, Pakistan competed against teams representing Brazil, Great Britain, and Israel in World Baseball Classic qualifiers at MCU Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn. They were swept in the double-elimination tournament, losing to Brazil on Thursday afternoon and Great Britain Friday night, b...

A Night Of Tear Gas And Chaos In Charlotte
Charlotte, N.C. — The fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer in Charlotte on Tuesday sparked protests that started off peaceful and quickly turned violent. Those protests continued Wednesday night in the middle of a busy intersection in Uptown Charlotte, a night full of tear gas an...

A Few Ghosts Are Still Haunting George Michael's Sports Machine
Six years ago, the New York Times appended a correction to its obituary of George Michael, the sportscaster who pushed those big buttons on The Sports Machine, saying the original piece had “omitted three survivors.” The paper blamed the error on “information provided by a family member.”...
![How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry [UPDATED]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/qmyidkcgpbtupn5f3ijy.png)
How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry [UPDATED]
Update (January 16, 2019): In June 2017, RJ Bell and Pregame filed a defamation lawsuit over this article. The parties agreed to settle the case and, as part of that agreement, Deadspin is providing a link to Bell’s response to the allegations in the article: RJ Bell’s Response to This Article. Dead...

This Was Ali
Muhammad Ali’s recent death has opened the floodgates for eulogies, tributes, evaluations, historical perspective analyses, and writing of nearly every kind imaginable. This isn’t surprising; Ali was, by almost any reckoning, the most celebrated sports figure ever, and the one with by far the widest...

Kyrie Irving Did Outrageous Basketball Stuff At My Tiny High School
Kyrie Irving did gorgeous, stupefying things on a basketball court Monday night, but for me and my oldest friends, it was just an elevated version of a familiar sensation, a shot of nostalgia via the NBA Finals. Before the Cleveland Cavaliers guard played an injury-shortened season for Duke, and bef...

How I Accidentally Made The First Official Cuba-To-Florida Kayak Crossing
The shortest distance from Cuba to the United States is about 90 miles across the Florida Strait. By the standards of human-powered sea travel, it’s extremely doable, and it has been done for decades by refugees aboard the most makeshift of watercraft, driven by desperation. In the peak years, tens ...

James Dolan Wants You To Love His Band
The richest touring musician in the world is being called to the stage for a soundcheck....

The Profane Teachings Of Johnny Rodz, The Wrestler Who Jobbed His Way Into The Hall Of Fame
I’m standing in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York, a place Ali and Jake LaMotta trained in decades ago, and Johnny Rodz is giving me shit because I told him I like The Wrestler....

The Deranged True Story Of <i>Heavy Metal Parking Lot</i>, The <i>Citizen Kane</i> Of Wasted Teenage Metalness
Suburban dirtballs of the 1980s are a lost culture, worthy of academic study, that disappeared abruptly, leaving mysterious artifacts for future generations to work over. Think of them as, say, the ancient Mayans, only with mullets....

Where Does Future Go Now?
In explaining Outkast’s often radical shifts in sound, style, and subject matter between albums, André 3000 has described those transformations as the natural result of the two- to three-year breaks he and his partner, Big Boi, would take between projects, wherein both rappers would live their lives...

How Wile E. Coyote Explains The World
A joke has structure. It has a central rule. Setup, punchline. The setup produces a tensed, expectant state; the punchline resolves the tension with a surprise. If the elements of the joke are not arranged into a setup and a punchline, it is not a joke. It is just a statement....

How Rocky Graziano Became Boxing's Greatest Muse
In the late 1940s, a young Nebraskan actor named Marlon Brando had been starring for several months in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway when he was contracted to play a fighter in a TV pilot, Come Out Fighting! For the role, Brando decided to secretly study the famous New York tough guy with the...

Deadspin's Best Long Stories Of 2015
We wrote a lot of long stories this year that you probably didn’t have time to read. Now is your chance to get caught up....

How The Hero Of <i>Friday Night Lights </i>Won And Lost His Good Name
Of all the real-life characters in Friday Night Lights, Brian Chavez would surely have been voted Least Likely To Be Caught Brawling After Permian High Football Games Into Middle Age....

My Quest To Fight Muhammad Ali, The Man Who Saved Me
Excerpted from Davis Miller’s new book Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts (W.W. Norton). Be sure to read Miller’s other famous story about his relationship with Ali right here....

The First Three <i>Rocky</i> Movies Were Nothing But White Wish Fulfillment
This piece originally appeared in the August, 1982 issue of Film Comment. It is reprinted here with permission. ...

College Football Is My Terrible Boyfriend
Excerpted from Diane Roberts’s new book, Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America, now on sale....

The Hateful Life And Spiteful Death Of The Man Who Was Vigo The Carpathian
You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II. When the medieval sorcerer pictured within the painting begins to physically manifest, it is on the ...