tldr Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Mike Daum Can Score. Now He Needs To Change.
There are few teams across the Division I landscape that are as consistent as South Dakota State when it comes to reaching the postseason. The Jackrabbits play in the Summit League and have won the sprawling mid-major conference’s auto-bid in five of the last seven seasons, and while none of those ...

This Is How To Pay College Athletes<em></em>
For all that the ongoing FBI investigation into college basketball’s underground economy has and could yet reveal, nothing is more obvious and undeniable than this: The on-stage performers in a multimillion-dollar entertainment industry do, in fact, have value beyond athletic scholarships and small ...

Boxing Is Going To Get Deontay Wilder-Anthony Joshua If It Has To Fix The Entire Heavyweight Division
On Saturday, March 3, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, Deontay Wilder, one of the worst heavyweight champions in boxing history, will successfully defend his WBC title by first-, second-, or third-round knockout of Cuba’s Luis Ortiz, the best and most dangerous heavyweight fighter today. Th...

Requiem For A Forgotten Globetrotter
Originally published in the November, 1977 issue of Sport, and featured in the Library of America’s new basketball anthology, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game. It is reprinted here with permission....

Joshua Simmons's Long Journey From NBA Draft Punchline To College Hoops Nomad Is Almost Over
You’ve likely never heard of Joshua Simmons. You certainly hadn’t heard of him when he entered his name in the NBA draft. Five years ago, at 20 years old, Simmons was on the NBA’s official early entry list, despite having played just a handful of games at a junior college 30 minutes east of Greenvil...

The Most Star-Studded Shootout In Olympic Hockey History, 20 Years Later
Even if you’ve never watched a hockey game from beginning to end, you’ve heard of the Miracle on Ice. In 1980, at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, the underdog Americans beat the heavily-favored Soviet team 4-3 during the men’s hockey semifinal. It happened despite the Americans being o...

U.S. Luge Is Chasing That Extra Thousandth Of A Second
“You always have that in the back of your head, wanting to beat the Germans. And I did it.” —Erin Hamlin, after winning the 2009 FIL World Championships and ending a 99-race winning streak by German women in top-level luge competitions....

Before He Surrendered, Roberto Duran Was Looking To Harm
Originally published in Inside Sports (June, 1980), this story appears here with permission....

The Only Thing That Works About The NFL Is Football
My friend tackled Shaun Alexander. Not recently, I should note. This was years ago, and years before the brief period during which Alexander was the best running back on earth. Alexander led the league in rushing in 2005 and was voted NFL MVP by the Associated Press, and then was out of the league ...

How An NFL Contract Negotiation Goes Down
NEW ORLEANS — Back and forth they went, both sides snapping off data points and counterpoints in a careful effort to leverage whatever they had. They were so into the task at hand that neither the thunderclaps from outside nor the 10-minute warning could interrupt their banter. They were teams of la...

Pittsburgh's Cutting-Edge Sports Site Is A Meat Grinder Of A Workplace
On the night of Sunday, Jan. 21, as the entirety of the sports world was consumed with football and the results of the NFL’s conference championships, Dejan Kovacevic made an announcement. It was almost understated, given the importance of the changes to his site, DK Pittsburgh Sports. Kovacevic wr...

White Girls Saying "Nigger" On Instagram Is The Black Mirrorest <i>Black Mirror</i> Shit
Imagine a world, one that very much resembles our own, set in some not-too-distant, semi-dystopian future. A sort of bizarro version of our modern Western society, where the increasing imposition upon society of otherwise benign technology and social media has warped the very fabric and structure of...

What Larry Nassar's Victims Wanted Us To Know
When a survivor of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse makes her impact statement to the court, she is first asked to state and spell her name for the record. And then Judge Rosemarie Aquilina asks her, “What would you like me to know?”...

Amen To Sonny Liston, The Better Sinner
Joe Flaherty’s obituary for Sonny Liston originally appeared in The Village Voice (January 14, 1971) and is also featured in At the Fights. It appears here with permission....

Gary Mays, The One-Armed Bandit of D.C. Sports Lore, Is Dead
Gary Mays, who should have been really famous, died Monday night. He was 82....

Rodney Mullen And Daewon Song Made A Video That Changed Skateboarding Forever
The opening title credits for “Rodney Mullen Vs. Daewon Song” fly onto the screen like text in a remedial PowerPoint presentation. The picture is grainy, as almost all VHS tapes were, and cuts bounce into each other instead of sliding with contemporary digital smoothness. The black background and wh...

Meet The Crazy New Yorkers Who Completed Five Triathlons In Five Days
Why? That’s the first question people always ask. Why would you want to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112, and then run a marathon? Why would you do it five days in a row? Why would you plan the whole thing yourself? In the five boroughs? In the middle of June?...

Deadspin's Best Long Stories Of 2017
Deadspin published a lot of long articles this year that might be toiling away in a bookmarks folder or neglected, tab-filled browser window. Now’s your chance to catch up, or at least use this as a one-stop guide when you do find the free time....

Inside The Punishing Dictatorship That Was James Cameron's <i>Titanic</i> Set
This feature was originally published in the December, 1997 issue of Premiere magazine and appears here with permission....

Major League Baseball's Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics
“On a historical basis, a decade from now, we’ll be looking back saying, ‘That was the highest route efficiency that’s ever been captured in baseball.’”...