EVERY SUNDAY WE flick back through some of our favourite pieces from newspapers, websites, blogs, wherever. Get stuck into this lot.
1. “One of the two distance runners, the one born in Somalia and raised from age eight in west London, will race the Olympics at home. Mohammed (Mo) Farah will circle the track and hear a sound unlike anything he’s heard before, initially in the 10,000 meters on the first Saturday night in August and then seven days later in the 5,000. He will feel a nation’s passion, sprung not just from patriotic medal lust but from a cultural love of the long run, an affair gone fallow for decades and now revived by this 127-pound wisp of a man with a shaved head and a small tuft of black hair that clings to the point of his chin, like a little climber on the underside of a cliff. On that Saturday night he will give Great Britain its first real chance at a gold medal in track and field at the London Games, and its first ever in a flat track event longer than 1,500 meters. He will understand what Cathy Freeman felt in Sydney 12 years ago when she won the 400 meters in her home country, sprinting through a torrent of noise. “Of course, Cathy ran for 49 seconds,” says retired British triple jumper Jonathan Edwards, who won a gold medal on the same night as Freeman. “Mo will be running for 27 minutes. The other of the two distance runners, the one who was born in Oregon and lives there still, will race the Olympics far from home.”
Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden meets friends Mo Farah and Galen Rupp before they face off this summer.
2. “When it came to drama, intrigue and occasional comedy, there was little to beat the early Olympic marathons. The event was created for the first modern Games in 1896, and its habit for creating scandal and legend, which was to reach its apogee that warm summer’s day in London, had been immediately evident – the third-placed finisher in Athens, Spyridon Belokas, was disqualified for travelling part of the course by carriage. In Paris four years later the course markings were so poor that confused athletes could be seen running randomly through most of central Paris; American Arthur Newton finished fifth but insisted that nobody had overtaken him all day, while his compatriot Richard Grant said he had been deliberately run over by a cyclist as he was about to catch up with the leaders. In a blow to fans of nominative determinism an athlete called Champion came second, and one named Fast finished third.”
Dorando Pietri won the 1908 Olympic marathon. But there was more drama to follow, Simon Burnton reveals.
3. “Over the years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated some five hundred movies, give or take, as Best Picture. Fourteen of those movies have been about sports. That number is either too high or too low, depending on your view of nominationless films like “The Natural,” “Hoosiers,” and “Bull Durham.” By one count, from Sports Illustrated, only thirty-five sports movies have been nominated for any Academy Award, from screenplays to sound editing, and only three of the sporting Best Picture nominees—”Million Dollar Baby,” “Rocky,” “Chariots of Fire”—have actually won the top prize. That isn’t a great percentage, shooting or batting or otherwise.”
With Moneyball up for best picture last Sunday night, the New Yorker turned the lights down and got the popcorn out for a look back at sports movies at the Oscars.
4. “What happened that night went well beyond nearly $10 million in forfeited paychecks and 146 games lost in suspensions. The melee transformed the Pacers from a Finals contender into a fringe playoff team and, eventually, a hopeless lottery case. Artest commenced a bizarre journey that took him from being one of the country’s most loathed athletes to Metta World Peace. The careers of Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O’Neal were forever tainted by split-second decisions that no human could have possibly premeditated. The media debated security, fan behavior, and the tenuous relationship between players and spectators for weeks. It represented the NBA’s worst nightmare: confirmation of the broad-stroke stereotype that its athletes were spoiled thugs.”
Grantland’s Jonathon Abrams pieces together what is now known as the Malice in the Palace – you remember Ron Arterst and teammates wading into the crowd during an NBA game in 2004. Here’s an great oral history of the evening.
5. “It is a good job that José Mourinho travelled to London incognito. Imagine if he had actually wanted people to know that he was there. Pictures have appeared all over the media both in Spain and in England – some of them from fans who encountered the Real Madrid coach on his travels, some of them from press photographers. The snappers were not exactly hiding in the bushes and Mourinho was not exactly sneaking about in a false moustache, cap pulled down over his face. As the caption in the Spanish newspaper AS put it: “He didn’t hide.”
He’s behind you, shouts Sid Lowe in the Guardian as, the Special One engages in another pantomime.
6. “After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010–11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss. It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.
This heart pounded two million times in February, probably more, heaving under its own weight, propelling Wes’s 6’2″, 230-pound frame along the glimmering hardwood with such precision and force that finally a kid from Hartford gave up on the rules and tackled him in the lane.”
You may have heard, Sport Illustrated ask, about the Michigan high schooler who made a game-winning basket and then died. Here’s the rest of the story, Thomas Lake.
7. “This week, the Miami Marlins slugger formerly known as Mike Stantonannounced he would now use the first name Giancarlo. Stanton’s full given name is Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton. His mother calls him Cruz, his father calls him Mike and teammates call him Bigfoot. Stanton became Mike because his junior high school teachers could not properly pronounce Giancarlo (JEE-ahn-cahr-loh); once he gets a contract extension befitting a 22-year-old who hits 34 home runs, as he did last year, he can presumably surround himself with people who have better diction.”
There’s a long tradition of changing your name in sport, we learned thanks to the New York Times, this week.
8. “After parking in front of an Irish pub, he pulls an 8-by-6 index card from his jacket and scans several rows of hand-scrawled names. He grabs an envelope, a standard No. 10 white-wove envelope that he buys in boxes of 500 from Staples. He double-checks its contents — six hundred-dollar bills — and crosses a name off the card. He gives a listen to the Duke-Michigan State game on the radio. He doesn’t care that a Duke victory will make Coach K the winningest coach in men’s college basketball history. He’s concerned only with the score: Midway through the second half, the Blue Devils are up 20. He’s got a “couple of bucks” riding on the outcome — in Fielding-speak, somewhere from $1,000 to $5,000.”
ESPN The Magazine’s Tim Struby takes a fascinating look at the humble life of a corner bookie.
