On a team of high-definition personalities, Luol Deng is a man who works, a masterwork of Socialist Realism. Watch him and you see this acutely: real people doing things at tremendous physical cost, a theater of humble punishment. He's a star, and he's a laborer.
America's Greatest Fans, or whatever St. Louis Cardinals fans call themselves these days, have their own roost in New York City: Foley's, a bar in the non-neighborhood around the Empire State Building that's transformed into a bustling, red-clad scene during every Cardinals game. It's a unique scene—and a very different place once the Cardinals are out of the playoffs.
In an uncertain world, it’s nice to come upon hard evidence, even if the evidence doesn’t matter. Maybe this is what’s behind our attraction to meaningless baseball occurrences.
Only two teams remain in the baseball season. Or, more accurately, two teams, an infinite number of likely Brian Wilson-related antics, and a near-infinite number of truck commercials and McCarver-puns. Which is a lot, actually.
Mr. October got his name for his apparent ability to play spectacularly well when the games mattered the most. The narrative truth of this rests on his iconic three-homer game in the clincher of the 1977 World Series. His exploits, and the outsized personality that went with them, seemed to illustrate the notion that some guys are able to rise to a higher level during big moments.
Sometimes we watch sports in order to appreciate that we share the same basic species with those among us who can dunk, shoot an under-par round or dismount from the rings without breaking their ankles. And sometimes we watch fairly sure that whatever that poor sap is doing, we could probably do it too, if we ever cared to. Those saps are called kickers.
Donnie Moore was an all-star pitcher with a long major league career, but he’s best known for surrendering a late lead in what would have been a pennant-clinching game in the 1986 American League Championship Series and for being so haunted by the failure that he ended his life. This latter point is a garish reduction of the complex reality of Donnie Moore’s life and death, and of the complex causes of suicide.
The first installment in our NBA preview series on individual players focuses on perhaps the NBA's most individual player, Kobe Bryant, as he starts another season in his life's work: unapologetically working to harness his own world-historic self-obsession.
When it was launched late in 2011, ESPN's proprietary QBR passer rating was heralded as the rating that quantified the most complicated position in sports. Nothing could quite be or do that, but QBR has done a pretty solid job. So why has it more or less disappeared from ESPN and from the NFL discourse?
Chikara's King of Trios tournament is a microcosm of what the relatively unknown wrestling company does best: mixing nostalgia with innovative storytelling to create a mythos all its own. And if you've got $30, nine hours to kill and even the slightest interest in professional wrestling, you'd do well to check it out.
