life:
On the one-year anniversary of Joe Frazier’s death (he died Nov. 7, 2011), LIFE pays tribute to the former champ, taking a close look at the photograph that best captured the unbridgeable distance between Ali and Smokin’ Joe.
(via lolajambon)
The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again. It's the most extraordinary thing in the world.
Why am I the Arkadelphian? Ask me anything (provided what you're asking isn't lame).
Why am I the Arkadelphian? Ask me anything (provided what you're asking isn't lame).
November 7, 2012
July 11, 2012
chris brown's magisterial history of the air raid.
This essay might be a bit impenetrable for beginners to football, but for Xs-and-Os devotees, you really can’t beat Brown’s work here. The Air Raid is the dominant offensive philosophy of this era of college football, and it shows that it’s also one of Brown’s real passions. He’s been writing on the subject since I started reading him in 2008, and this really feels like the capstone of the process.
In short: essential reading for college football fans, especially those of you who want to learn more about the syntax, strategy, and history of the game as it stands today.
June 13, 2012
essential reading: gq's oral history of the dream team.
Sorry to spoil it for you, but here’s the best part:
There was one moment where Krzyzewski claps his hands and says, “Okay, plenty of time.” And Michael is at the other end of the court, and he shouts out: “Fuck that! We’re going to win this game. Fuck that.” You gotta figure Coach K never heard that at a Duke practice.
May 10, 2012
Cool article on the offensive predilections and results from various NBA teams.
April 29, 2012
no, i never got them, and they never got me.
(I’m bumping this post from last year’s NBA playoffs to commemorate the return of my favorite player, Chris Paul, to the grand stage. It’s also far and away the finest piece of sports writing I’ve done to this point.)
No word suffers from imprecision in the English language as tragedy does. The effect has been to reduce a tightly defined concept to the description of anything that is merely sad or pathetic, thereby robbing it of its significance. A tragedy is a narrative, burdened by an implicit recognition of the ineluctability of fate, that manages to yield meaning out of suffering. In so doing, the tragedy fulfills two pleasures for the viewer: the emotional resonance of Aristotelian catharsis, and the ecstatic moral reaffirmation of life’s value inherent in the demonstration of its limits.
In one of his essays, Tom Wolfe suggests that the reason America is so sports-mad is that sports provide the closest artificial recreation of war possible. It only follows that football, whose physical consequences (and, therefore, opportunities for glory) is greatest, should be the dominant sport in the age of television. Though neither the NFL, nor MLB, nor the NHL lack for outsized personalities, all three sports are ultimately too democratic to yield the dramatic interplay of character necessary for tragedy; only the NBA, the most self-consciously aristocratic of the four major North American sports, satisfies the requirements.
March 15, 2012
The art: Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (8), 2005.
The news: “Basketball players of the NCAA, unite!” by Patrick Hruby for TheAtlantic.com.
The source: Partial and promised gift to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.
Critic’s note: Hruby’s essay notes that the NCAA financial model relies on the fondness fans and alumni have for their schools. The athletes themselves mostly do not participate in that success: They are the unpaid labor that enables a multi-billion-dollar annual industry. Pfeiffer’s Four Horsemen reminds us that when the identifying jersey is stripped away the player is almost always anonymous. The athletes are conditionally adored by the fans even as they are exploited by the schools for which they play. Jerry Seinfeld was right: We root for the laundry with which we identify.
October 20, 2011
here's gay talese's remarkable 1966 profile of joe dimaggio.
I think that one of the most compelling things about sports is the moment at which someone who’s always had it simply doesn’t anymore. In a better, parallel universe to our own, for instance, Bob Sanders’ physicality never derailed his supernova career. But for us, and for very understandable reasons, Bob did lose it. Others, like Kurt Warner before his renaissance in Arizona, can only mystify us. No matter the player, however, time always wins.
If there really are no second acts in American lives, where can one go after the dissipation of his powers? For Joe DiMaggio, the loss was even more complete: the love of his life, his relevance, and the world he’d understood were stolen from him, one by one, by time. Talese’s profile, annotated in this Grantland update, doesn’t give us an answer. Perhaps for that very reason, it is as tasteful and real a depiction of a man’s private autumn as you will ever find.
(via Put This On).
May 9, 2011
no, i never got them, and they never got me.
(I’m bumping this post from last year’s NBA playoffs to commemorate the return of my favorite player, Chris Paul, to his stage of choice. It’s also far and away the finest piece of sports writing I’ve done to this point.)
No word suffers from imprecision in the English language as tragedy does. The effect has been to reduce a tightly defined concept to the description of anything that is merely sad or pathetic, thereby robbing it of its significance. A tragedy is a narrative, burdened by an implicit recognition of the ineluctability of fate, that manages to yield meaning out of suffering. In so doing, the tragedy fulfills two pleasures for the viewer: the emotional resonance of Aristotelian catharsis, and the ecstatic moral reaffirmation of life’s value inherent in the demonstration of its limits.
In one of his essays, Tom Wolfe suggests that the reason America is so sports-mad is that sports provide the closest artificial recreation of war possible. It only follows that football, whose physical consequences (and, therefore, opportunities for glory) is greatest, should be the dominant sport in the age of television. Though neither the NFL, nor MLB, nor the NHL lack for outsized personalities, all three sports are ultimately too democratic to yield the dramatic interplay of character necessary for tragedy; only the NBA, the most self-consciously aristocratic of the four major North American sports, satisfies the requirements.
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