Viral Video: The Most Famous 15-Year-Old Basketball Player in America

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But Woods’s weight as prep basketball’s premier Internet phenomenon -- and how dominant he looks in his highlights -- might give a false impression of his chances at future success. It's entirely possible Woods is at the height of his fame right now. I went to the Hammond School to see what that kind of uniquely modern sports celebrity felt like in person.
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End Zones: On Football, Sports Scandals, and Don DeLillo

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The machine of college football, of American athletics as a whole, would not exist without people like me: people who complain about the world of sports, but who still play. People like me, who forgive the sins, who forget the scandals, because of innocence, ignorance, or both.
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Wickets and Wonders: Cricket’s Rich Literary Vein

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Cricket fans hate lazy comparisons to baseball, but the literary analogy is an apt one here: if baseball is America, then cricket is—or rather, was—England.
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Burnin’ Down the (Big) House: The Unhappy Marriage between Michigan Football and Rich Rodriguez

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The “aw-shucks” Rodriguez blundered at his first press conference by answering “Gosh, I hope not!” to the question of whether he needed to be a “Michigan Man” in order to coach the Wolverines. In Ann Arbor, that’s tantamount to saying you’ve never heard of The Beatles. Months later, he would be reprimanded for using the word “ain’t” in an interview.
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The Problem with Sportswriting

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I will now posit a corollary to Godwin’s Law: as a sportswriter’s career progresses, the probability that he will needlessly invoke Nazis approaches 1.
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Scott Raab Isn’t Mellowing with Age: The Millions Interview

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If one of those [Cleveland] teams were to actually win a championship, I think it would be an unmitigated joy. I can't imagine any Cleveland fan going, "You know, I really liked it better when we could uniquely identify ourselves by our suffering." I can't. That thought is, if not really even perverse, it's just ridiculous.
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Baseball, Finally

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I loved baseball but baseball never loved me back. It’s true that I wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough. I did everything right except own the thing that makes a boy an athlete.
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The Joys and Compromises of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball

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Take whatever it is that’s important to you – knitting, perhaps, or mountain biking – and then imagine waiting for a feature film about it. Would you be excited or nervous? Or would you simply be dreading how Hollywood would manage to fuck up your passion?
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Staff Pick: Baseball Playbook

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“You might have to coach Little League in a few years,” my father told me, handing me a strange, plain book. My son was a week old. It would be at least two years before he would learn to throw a cut fastball (and probably another year or two before he had any real command of the pitch).
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The Hot Stove Report: A Parody

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Now that the 2010 season has ended, it’s time to look at the off-season transactions that will shape next year’s division rivalries and pennant races.  Here, then, are a few of baseball’s most notable available free agents.
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Knockout Reading

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Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese, all wrote extensively about pugilism, but none of these portrayals of real life boxers nurse a bookworm’s dream of being a toughened fighter like fiction.
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Gay Talese’s The Silent Season of a Hero is Sports Writing That’s Destined to Last

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Even more fascinating to Talese than failure is the murky downslope of greatness, the twilight of storied careers, the ways stars must struggle to get their bearings after the cheering stops.
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World Cup Reading: Books, Beers, Bars

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It's all a question of the right book for the right occasion. For some people, that occasion will be at a bar where you’ll hear the zizzing of vuvuzelas, the shouting of national anthems, the thumping of a jabulani. It’s hard to justify spending hours in front of the screen, drinking beer no less, unless, of course, you bring a book.
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The Millions Interview: Tom McAllister

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McAllister became known as "the ultimate Philly guy." No wonder, considering he grew up in a row house, attended La Salle University, teaches at Temple, and even worked in a cheesesteak shop. But a person cannot be so reduced, as he explores in his new memoir.
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Fighting Words: Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History

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To its critics, boxing is as persistent and as worrisome a social phenomenon as prostitution; and indeed, being a very direct way for poor young men to make use of their bodies, it is a kind of masculine cognate for the female sex trade. The more sympathetic view is that boxing is ugly but necessary.
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The Magisterial Goal

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Soccer broadcaster Ray Hudson values hyperbole over precision. His quips, spontaneous and unedited, conflating science and art, have gained him a reputation as one the most notorious announcers in all of sports.
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In Play – Runs: Baseball and the Internet

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The internet is a sports fan’s utopia, a place where, for once, we can just talk about the game, without all that other crap.
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