December 2011
2 posts
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Call and Oates
719-26-OATES (62837)
The new Ghostbusters.
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November 2011
3 posts
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“The personality inequity between football and basketball is parceled out on...”
– Grantlandl’s Jay Caspian Kang on the NBA Lockout
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“Musicians often speak of the perfect music of their mind, the creative process...”
– Hua Hsu, via Grantland, on Drake’s latest album Take Care
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“The real hypocrites are the morons telling Cleveland to ‘get over it,’ as if ...”
– Scott Raab on hypocrites, schoolmarms and, naturally, LeBron James
October 2011
8 posts
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“The needle begins to whir again as Machine Gun Kelly takes his turn in the...”
– Jordan Zirm at Cleveland Scene
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September 2011
5 posts
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On the love of baseball and eating alone.
The Astros fired Rusty Pendergrass this morning. They told him he’d missed on too many players. He’s the scout who signed Hunter Pence, Ben Zobrist and would have signed Drew Stubbs if Drayton McLane hadn’t reneged on the offer. He’s maybe the hardest-working man I’ve known and loved the Astros more than 90 percent of the current employees at Minute Maid...
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A sad but excellent feature on journeyman baseball player Reggie Willits, now 30-years old and playing in the minor leagues with kids almost half his age.
For every familiar leading man like Torii Hunter, the Angels’ right fielder who is guaranteed $18 million a season for five years, there are dozens of bit players like [Reggie] Willits whose survival depends on a mastery of nuances such...
July 2011
3 posts
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Great stuff on Marshon Brooks and why he maintained such a low level of attention throughout 2010-11
It’s a whirlwind, a deluge of smoke and lights: spinning, twisting, squirming around defenders like a cat, he scores in every way imaginable, stuff of science fiction, his arms more like two ropes attached to his shoulders than a pair of human limbs, giving him a release where it looks as though...
June 2011
12 posts
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Jay Caspian Kang shuns the psychobabble regarding LeBron James
It is not hard to be a compelling asshole. Rasheed Wallace’s unabashed humanity, Ron Artest’s ongoing psychodrama, Jordan’s dickishness, and the vacillation of opinion on whether or not Kobe Bryant is a megalomaniac or if Kobe Bryant burns with some ineffable “competitiveness,” added a dimension to their...
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Jeff MacGregor went about his “everyday life” today and absolutely owned LeBron James. Or what we though was LeBron James…
Turns out Mr. James doesn’t exist. He is a construct of the hyena media. A hypothetical. A mystic figment. An incantation. He is an empty vessel into which Nike and the networks and sports writers high and low pour our nonsense and our curses and our...
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Today’s lesson: Grit and desire > stats and replay. And, everything > Miami Heat
The 2011 Finals, strangely, is the most metaphoric series in years, not because the Mavericks, or even Dirk, carry any inherent meaning, but because something must stand in opposition to Team Villain. The stats-and-replay revolution has freed sport of much of its weight and cleared the way for a more...
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So…about the next Pistons coach…
Isiah Thomas is an unlikable twerp with an almost unsurpassed record of abject failure in everything he has attempted since he hung up his playing shoes and his artificial public-relations grin. Allowing this unemployable gossoon anywhere near anything having to do with any basketball team anywhere is precisely the same thing as hiring Anthony Weiner...
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Jeff MacGregor, must you make my writing feel so inadequate?
Five years ago when the late David Foster Wallace wrote this, Federer was the best tennis player in the world by almost every measure. Two years ago when I wrote this, it was still possible to consider Nadal and Federer equals and opposites, brawn versus intellect, violence versus music. But as the shadows lengthened into night in...
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I hate to see Shaquille O’Neal retire, but it has been amazing for journalism.
[S]winging around the NBA every season, a rolling carnival show. When Shaquille O’Neal retires Friday at the age of 39, he will leave a void almost as oversized as he was, in every way.
After all, who can be like Shaq? Dwight Howard tries, but he is neither as good nor as funny nor as complicated, which were...
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Does anyone paint a scene sans brush better than Wright Thompson?
The islanders came to him one by one, let him know he’d always have a home here. The folks of Daufuskie are insular, but they had accepted Patrick as one of their own. One longtimer cried when she tried to tell him what he’s meant. Another came face-to-face with Patrick and could not speak. There were no words.
Two...
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[I’ve] never met an athlete so comfortable in his own skin, in being the person Whoever created him to be. Anyone who follows basketball is familiar with The Unhappiness of the Bigs. They are grumpy. They’d rather be anywhere else, as long as it was at a lower personal altitude than the one with which they’d been cursed. They’d all rather be two-guards. (See...
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He grabbed the side of the lectern as if it were a life preserver. He shouted and gestured like someone thrashing in deep water. […]
From Zen to zealous, from meditation to perspiration, the Lakers have gone from the son of a preacher to, well, a preacher himself.
Bill Plaschke on new Lakers coach Mike Brown
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One of the better Shaq tributes I’ve read in the last 20 or so hours:
Shaq won’t disappear. He can’t, and not because he’s so massive, but because of his personality. Like Charles Barkley, Shaq isn’t going to recede into nothingness. Some TV set is waiting for him, whether we’re talking reality or basketball. (Reality seems more his venue.) Bad enough for those...
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Spo’s not exactly living the life, but he’s three wins from the LOB
[Eric] Spoelstra is the Heat’s Dungeonmaster. He rarely sees the Miami sunlight and will sometimes go days without visiting the inside of his Miami Beach studio — a converted hotel room — because he overnights in The Dungeon. There, he breaks down game tape, evaluates players, figures out where the...
May 2011
11 posts
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The die has been cast.
This is America: Winning! is proof beyond reproof, rendering moot all evidence and argument to the contrary. If the bastard wins the NBA title, then he chose rightly, suffered unfairly for doing so, and surmounted his travails as a hero.
Scott Raab on The Decision, NBA Finals
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Since I’m a sucker for irony, given this weekend’s news of Jim Tressel…
I tell friends often that I’ve always pictured Williams as a perfect character for one of Shakespeare’s plays. His complexities are fascinating. He built his kingdom from virtually nothing, returning home in a time of turmoil to restore honor to a place that always felt picked on and slighted by...
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W/R/T LeBron, winning and “It.”
[P]eople’s minds are tricking them. Such ethereal reverence is often simply a function of a winning team; We rarely discuss or even remember spectacular performances in defeat. […]
ESPN’s Skip Bayless keeps proclaiming that LeBron is surprised that he’s making big shots and plays for the first time in his life. Maybe it’s that Skip, and others,...
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“Maybe Rose wasn’t the best choice for this season’s Most Valuable Player — even...”
– Co-sign.
Trey Kerby, The Basketball Jones. Way to bring it, boss. (via yourmandevine)
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Amazingly, this paragraph is not about Joakim Noah.
It’s easy to overestimate the meaning of dramatic speeches in sports, and in fact it is almost a rule. Same with bulletin-board material, or momentum, or any of the other various factors that get credit for the way a game turned out. This isn’t the movies, or everyone would be better-looking.
via Bruce Arthur
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Jeff Pearlman waxes nostalgic about the beat and Jorge Posada:
[To] cap off my all-time favorite routine, we (the press) asked the Yankees whether this would be a distraction. “This” is supposed to be, on the surface, Posada asking out of the lineup. But “this,” in actuality, is us asking and asking and asking whether it’ll be a distraction. In other words, it’s the ultimate self-fulfilling...
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“[LeBron] James had ended the conference semifinals bowing down on one knee to...”
– Adrian Wojnarowski
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“Sports are a lesson. Sports are the tally of our progress. Sports are the daily...”
– Jeff MacGregor
April 2011
12 posts
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“Some cities are tortured by their heroes. Ottawa when the Senators were owned by...”
– Bruce Arthur
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Amen, Jeff Pearlman. Amen.
One of the biggest problems with the lameness of sports crowds these days are corporations swooping down, purchasing enormous swaths of tickets, then using them to impress clients. The result is an audible yawn: Indifferent folks hogging up the best seats, sipping their luxury ale through a straw while complaining about the steak that just cost the company $40 (write...
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The best (worst?) part about this passage is that it can pertain to any one issue going on in sports right now:
So we’ll now hear long and loud from the hyena sporting press, from the moralizers and the hysterics, from the closet racists and the upfront bigots and the jackass elite, from the scolds and the corporate schoolmarms and the commercial apologists. They’ll grind their axes...
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“I have no doubt that a massive number of non-fiction books, including many...”
– Anonymous author via Chris Jones