tldr Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
How Patrick Reed Became Golf's Latest Villain
The following article is adapted from material that will appear in the author's upcoming book Slaying the Tiger, which is now available for order; it originally ran at Tobacco Road Blues....
How Archie Moore Fought Forever And Became Boxing's Folk Hero
This piece was originally published in the New Yorker on Nov. 11, 1961. It is reprinted here with permission....
The Ex-Con Who Turned His Life Around, And The NBA Star Who Killed Him
This piece was originally published in the August 2002 edition of GQ. A postscript from the author follows....
Deadspin's Best Long Stories Of 2014
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 Jon Jones Became The Baddest Motherfucker On Earth
The baddest motherfucker on Earth and I are in a posh restaurant in a poor city with two guys he picked up at some point or another to shoot guns and drink beer with whenever he isn't elbowing people in the face, and we're laughing, the four of us, hearty guffaws that crash around the table. I'm t...
"That Joke Has Everything": David Letterman, Before <i>Late Night</i>
In December 1981, a month before Late Night With David Letterman debuted on NBC, Peter W. Kaplan profiled the young comedian, and heir-apparent to Johnny Carson, for Esquire. The story is reprinted here with permission....
How The NFL's Forgotten Christmas Albums Almost Made One Man Rich
For the entirety of my childhood, my brother, mom, and I spent one day a year—usually a Saturday two or three weeks out from Christmas—being serenaded by the 1970 Oakland Raiders. Specifically, we would spend the day putting up our Christmas tree while Daryle Lamonica, Jim Otto, and others mooed C...
Did Vanderbilt Try To Kill An Ex-Hoops Player's Tell-All Book?
They were supposed to celebrate that night. It was mid-August, and Kyle Fuller, Eric Schulman, and Jerry Castro were all together in Nashville. The Tennessean had posted an article about their book project, a Kickstarter-funded look at Fuller's life as a Vanderbilt basketball player and student ...
The Future Of College Football Is ... The University Of The South?
Larry Majors saunters toward Hardee-McGee Field—the oldest on-campus football stadium in the South—from the brick house his family has owned for nearly 50 years, the one so close that a rusty tackling sled practically sits in the front yard. He passes a flagpole behind the east end zone that stands ...
How A Secret Brotherhood's Revolt Nearly Destroyed The National League
Today marks the 125th anniversary of the formation of the Players' League, the most radical experiment ever attempted by baseball's major leagues. It was a rebellion led by a slender, brilliant shortstop, who had begun pondering revolt nine months before, in the shadow of the pyramids....
Two Unrecognized Hall Of Fame Shortstops
This article is dedicated to the memory of the late Clem Comly, who did more than anyone to put together the Retrosheet.org public database of baseball statistics that made this article and all Internet baseball encyclopedias possible....
The Assassination Of Iker Casillas By The Coward José Mourinho
Real Madrid handily beat Barcelona this weekend, with adulation bestowed upon many of the individual victors for their performance. Isco proved his grit and talent in fighting for a spot on a team lousy with great attacking midfielders and excelling when given the chance. James Rodríguez showed why ...
The Top 200 Ways Bleacher Report Screwed Me Over
A month before I turned 21, I returned home from the Bay Area, where I was attending college, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family in Minnesota. On a Tuesday evening, I was sitting in the living room, about to head upstairs to go to bed, when my phone buzzed with a text from Dave Finocchio, fo...
I Was Tony Gwynn's Bat Boy
The baseball-card collection I had as a teen—145,000 cards in all when I last bothered to count, 800-count box after 800-count box, all of them occupying a dusty bookcase in my bedroom—was sold years ago. Some random stranger now owns that collection of 400 Tom Glavine rookie cards I bought on specu...
The Empty-Seat Game: Japanese Soccer's Non-Solution To A Racism Scandal
First it was a tall woman in bright clothing with a microphone. Then her cameraman. Then a short man in a coat and tie with a notepad. Then another man with a smaller camera that was already rolling....
Why I Fixed Fights
I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn't fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch "Blood" Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportuni...
How Nolan Nawrocki Made Himself Into The NFL's Most Infamous Scout
Nolan Nawrocki lives in the nicest house in a tidy neighborhood in Elmhurst, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago. When I visit him a couple of weeks before Easter, the windows are already awash in signage....
Two Days At Sloan: How Sports Analytics Got Lost In The Fog
"You're hiding all the good numbers from me." ...
The Coach Who Doesn't Care: How One Man Turns Skaters Into Champions
Gracie Gold was having a bad night. The 18-year-old figure skater was about a minute and a half into her free skate at the U.S. International Classic in September when she singled a double axel. It was a significant mistake—a loss of a couple of points—but for a disciplined skater, that kind of erro...