1. My university account has long since expired, and the note is gone, but as I remember it, his message began with a compliment. He said he liked aspects of the story. But it needed work, he said. Then he proceeded to edit the thing, not quite line by line, but almost. He encouraged me to dig deeper, to explore relationships I’d mentioned but barely tapped into, to avoid clichés. So I wasn’t Gary Smith. But maybe the real thing could teach me how to be a better version of what I was.
We’re a week late to this one but it’s too good to let slide. Alan Siegel pays tribute to one of sport’s great writers, Gary Smith, who retired from magazine writing last week.
2. Costa, who grew up in Alhandra, does not come from a soccer-playing or even soccer-loving family. “It something that’s born with me; I have no reason or explanation for it,” she said. “There it was since I was young. Even with the dolls, I’d just break their heads off and make them into balls.”
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French second-tier club Clermont Foot made history this week when they hired Helena Costa, the first woman to manage in one of Europe’s major football leagues. She tells the New York Times’ Christopher Clarey about growing up in a house without football.
3. Last week, when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced that sprinter Tyson Gay would be banned for just one year for failing a series of drug tests, the Olympic sports world responded with a resounding: That’s it? You’re kidding! Thanks to his cooperation with investigators, America’s top sprinter was given half the standard two-year punishment. Since Gay stopped competing last summer after failing the tests, he will be eligible to compete again next month.
Yes, Tyson Gay got a very lenient doping ban — but David Epstein, author of the acclaimed Sports Gene, explains why.
4. In 2001, Australia set a world record for the largest ever victory in an international football match, netting 31 goals without a single breach of their own defence. The game’s top scorer, Archie Thompson, broke the record for most goals scored by a player in an international match by claiming 13 goals. While Thompson is now the tricky answer to particularly tough pub quiz question, the team Australia beat, American Samoa, is stamped on the memory of any football fan who heard the brutal score line.
Released this month, the documentary Next Goal Wins tells the story of the world’s worst football team – American Samoa. BBC’s Kev Geoghegan takes a closer look.
5. I got into jailhouse bodybuilding right away, joining a court and acquiring weightlifting gloves from a man in wheelchair. That was the only way to get them; the gloves are issued only to wheelchair-bound inmates, who then flip them for a nice profit. There were other paraphernalia. Straps for the slippery pig-iron bars, for instance. Guys would sew them out of canvas belts and sell them for a pack of cigarettes. The price was low because the cops took them away all the time.
6. The N.F.L. draft is also the moment on the calendar when the intersection of college sports and capitalism comes into clearest focus, and this year brings into view a couple of timely, overlapping crises: one of health care, the other of inequality. The first lies in our growing awareness that football played at any level of competition puts players’ bodies and brains at real long-term risk. (The problem isn’t unique to football; hockey, lacrosse, and even soccer produce head injuries at about the same rate, but football depends on collisions in ways that the other sports do not, at least not so entirely.) There is a growing sense that watching football is really watching bright young men turn themselves into broken old ones.
Playing for the world's worst football team and inside prison weightlifting: the week’s best sportswriting
1. My university account has long since expired, and the note is gone, but as I remember it, his message began with a compliment. He said he liked aspects of the story. But it needed work, he said. Then he proceeded to edit the thing, not quite line by line, but almost. He encouraged me to dig deeper, to explore relationships I’d mentioned but barely tapped into, to avoid clichés. So I wasn’t Gary Smith. But maybe the real thing could teach me how to be a better version of what I was.
We’re a week late to this one but it’s too good to let slide. Alan Siegel pays tribute to one of sport’s great writers, Gary Smith, who retired from magazine writing last week.
2. Costa, who grew up in Alhandra, does not come from a soccer-playing or even soccer-loving family. “It something that’s born with me; I have no reason or explanation for it,” she said. “There it was since I was young. Even with the dolls, I’d just break their heads off and make them into balls.”
French second-tier club Clermont Foot made history this week when they hired Helena Costa, the first woman to manage in one of Europe’s major football leagues. She tells the New York Times’ Christopher Clarey about growing up in a house without football.
3. Last week, when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced that sprinter Tyson Gay would be banned for just one year for failing a series of drug tests, the Olympic sports world responded with a resounding: That’s it? You’re kidding! Thanks to his cooperation with investigators, America’s top sprinter was given half the standard two-year punishment. Since Gay stopped competing last summer after failing the tests, he will be eligible to compete again next month.
Yes, Tyson Gay got a very lenient doping ban — but David Epstein, author of the acclaimed Sports Gene, explains why.
4. In 2001, Australia set a world record for the largest ever victory in an international football match, netting 31 goals without a single breach of their own defence. The game’s top scorer, Archie Thompson, broke the record for most goals scored by a player in an international match by claiming 13 goals. While Thompson is now the tricky answer to particularly tough pub quiz question, the team Australia beat, American Samoa, is stamped on the memory of any football fan who heard the brutal score line.
Released this month, the documentary Next Goal Wins tells the story of the world’s worst football team – American Samoa. BBC’s Kev Geoghegan takes a closer look.
5. I got into jailhouse bodybuilding right away, joining a court and acquiring weightlifting gloves from a man in wheelchair. That was the only way to get them; the gloves are issued only to wheelchair-bound inmates, who then flip them for a nice profit. There were other paraphernalia. Straps for the slippery pig-iron bars, for instance. Guys would sew them out of canvas belts and sell them for a pack of cigarettes. The price was low because the cops took them away all the time.
This does exactly what it says on the tin. Daniel Genis writes An Ex-Con’s Guide to Prison Weightlifting.
6. The N.F.L. draft is also the moment on the calendar when the intersection of college sports and capitalism comes into clearest focus, and this year brings into view a couple of timely, overlapping crises: one of health care, the other of inequality. The first lies in our growing awareness that football played at any level of competition puts players’ bodies and brains at real long-term risk. (The problem isn’t unique to football; hockey, lacrosse, and even soccer produce head injuries at about the same rate, but football depends on collisions in ways that the other sports do not, at least not so entirely.) There is a growing sense that watching football is really watching bright young men turn themselves into broken old ones.
As America indulges its annual obsession in the NFL draft, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik asks: Is it time to rethink college sports?
‘Living with Hillsborough is like living with any unresolved issue — it eats away’
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