tribute Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Remembering Steve Van Buren, Who Almost Slept Through The NFL Championship Game
On Dec. 19, 1948, the Philadelphia Eagles played the Chicago Cardinals for the NFL championship in a heavy blizzard. Running back Steve Van Buren almost didn't make it there that day. Let's let Ray Didinger of CSN Philly explain why:...
"That's What Friends Are For": A Tribute To Jack Twyman
If the Jack Twyman story were simply about basketball, it would be extraordinary enough: a six-time all-star in 11 NBA seasons. A Hall of Famer who was the first NBA player to average 30 points per game for an entire season, who retired in 1966 as the league's second all-time leading scorer. A broad...
"We Talkin' ’Bout Practice": Allen Iverson's Famous Rant Was 10 Years Ago Today
The video above—and any other existing clip that happens to be floating around on YouTube—can't do justice to Allen Iverson's press conference of May 7, 2002. The Practice Rant has come down through the years as a scattering of hilariously defiant, repetitious sound bites. But what made it a maste...
The D Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: Farewell, Dontrelle Willis, Crazy-Armed Everyman
The pitchers who wow us these days don't remind us of anything familiar. Most of MLB's sharpest aces—Justin Verlander, Jered Weaver, Roy Halladay, Clayton Kershaw, and C.C. Sabathia—were first-round picks, blessed with a freakish ability to throw much harder than their competitors, and groomed for m...
20 Years Ago, Tim Wakefield Had A Fast Rise And Fall In Pittsburgh
In May 1992, Pittsburgh's two daily newspapers at the time—the Press and the Post-Gazette—went on strike. The walkout left the city without a paper of record for eight months, an unremarkable footnote of Yinzer history that happened to coincide with a most remarkable moment for the city's sports tea...
Pat Burrell Is Retiring, But "The Machine" Just Might Live On
MLB Trade Rumors had it first, and noted rich guy Jon Heyman confirmed on Twitter: Pat Burrell is retiring. The thumping, lumbering outfielder posted a .253/.361/.472 line in 12 MLB seasons, most of them with the Phillies. He had ranked 25th among active players in home runs. He won two World Series...
This Guy Died This Year: Nate Dogg, The King Of G-Funk
Nathaniel "Nate Dogg" Hale always sounded smooth. His voice gave him a niche within G-funk's very stylized confines for the most quintessential G-funk crooner of them all—not that there were many, because who else did we really need?—and he held that title for as long as it even existed....
This Guy Died This Year: Peter Falk
Depending on your age, Peter Falk is that guy from Columbo, that guy from Princess Bride, or that guy from that show your dad used to watch (which was Columbo). But all three of these suppose Falk to be an actor. In reality, acting was the career he landed in after failing as an academic and rese...
This Guy Died This Year: Clarence Clemons, Big Sideman
When Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, died this year at 69 after a stroke, a lot of the remembrances, including Hickey's in this very webspace, cued up his solo in "Jungleland." "Jungleland" is a great song, one of Bruce's best, filled with lyrical drama and e...
This Guy Died This Year: George Shearing, Music's Original Hipster Taste
Jack Kerouac was into George Shearing before it was cool to be into George Shearing (or into Jack Kerouac, for that matter). Kerouac wrote a great deal about the near-orgasmic experience of listening to jazz, and one of his more notable passages on the subject appears in On the Road. It's drawn fr...
This Guy Died This Year: Shrek, The Unshearable Sheep
There is only meaning in life if there is revelation in death. Billions of generations have come and gone, and most are meaningless for the purposes of the living if we can't take some sort of lesson from their brief time on earth. It's why we scour the obituaries and mourn the famous and infamous a...
This Guy Died This Year: Bil Keane, Comics Paterfamilias
Bil Keane was known, among his fellow professional cartoonists, as a funny, funny man. His life's work, in The Family Circus, was to hide that fact from as many people as possible. Day after day, decade after decade, The Family Circus delivered the mildest gags imaginable—observational humor minus t...
Not Fadeaway: Farewell To Brandon Roy's Perfect Step-Back
Brandon Roy retired from professional basketball last week, at the age of 27 and after just five seasons in the NBA. He has, he told the Portland Trail Blazers, "degenerative knees."...
The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures Of Sportswriting's Last Badass
George Kimball hung upside down some 70 feet in the cold Manhattan air, still in need of a cigarette. Well, the doctors had said smoking would kill him, hadn't they? The previous autumn, they had found an inoperable cancerous tumor the size of a golf ball in his throat and given him six months to li...
What Losing Jose Reyes Really Means For Mets Fans
In eighth grade I wrote a poem about Jose Reyes, the Miami Marlins' new shortstop. The poem wasn't so good. I wrote it in Reyes's gregarious broken English, in which every third utterance is "you know" or "man." But I had to write something quickly for a class, and in April 2005, nothing captivated ...
Of Bad Mechanics And Torn Testicles; Or, Why I Love Adrian Beltre
The Classical launches in November, but the cruel folks behind it love baseball way too much to let the World Series pass without comment. Throughout the series, its writers will do a daily diary for Deadspin. Keep tabs on us @Classical....
S̶t̶e̶v̶e̶ ̶J̶o̶b̶s̶ Al Davis Is Dead (UPDATE)
Steve Jobs Al Davis is dead. The Apple chairman and former CEO who made personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital animation mass market products NFL owner who built the Oakland Raiders and became an NFL icon, passed away today. We're going to miss him. Deeply, and personally. ...
Dead Comedian Of The Week: Andy Kaufman, The Unlikely Bombthrower
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, from the best book ever written about stand-up comedy, Phil Berger's The Last Laugh, we look at the evolution of Andy Kaufman, meshuga provocateur....
Dead Comedian Of The Week: Mitch Hedberg, The Comic's Comic
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, the Masked Man looks at the legacy of Mitch Hedberg, the surrealist who developed a cult following before his death in 2005—and an even bigger one after his death....
Dead Comedian Of The Week: Vaughn Meader, Assassination Victim
For Comedy Week, we're running a handful of tributes in the vein of our Dead Wrestler of the Week series. Here, Alexander Woo, a writer and co-executive producer for HBO's True Blood, eulogizes Vaughn Meader, the wildly popular JFK impersonator whose star plummeted after the assassination of his sub...