I remember hovering over the barbell most. In the basement of the Gold’s Gym on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC, the Ultimate Warrior told me to imagine my arms as hooks and my back muscles as arms lifting those hooks.
The Game of the Century, pitting Elvin Hayes versus Kareem Abdul Jabbar in the then state-of-the-art Astrodome, more than doubled the attendance record for a basketball game and became the first nationally-televised, regular-season, hardwood collegiate contest. By defeating UCLA 71-69,
Is Geno Smith behind the petition to ban Michael Vick from the New York Jets training camp? A Change.org petition calls on SUNY-Cortland, home of the training camp of the New York Jets, to bar the team’s new quarterback from
The Sports Hangover recovers from last night’s national championship game, ponders the sanity of people who wagered on Wrestlemania, and compares Manny Pacquiao’s Saturday opponent Timothy Bradley’s strategy of not showering the week of the fight with Pacquiao rival Juan
Oddsmakers peg the Kentucky Wildcats as 2.5-point favorites over the Connecticut Huskies in tonight’s national championship game. But what do they know? The bookies, like the NCAA’s selection committee, have proven that they don’t know much. Or, perhaps more accurately,
Some athletes tell journalists of their belief in God. Larry Sanders of the Milwaukee Bucks proclaims his belief in ganja. “I believe in marijuana,” Sanders told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The NBA believes in suspending players who practice what they preach
John Wooden, readers learn in Seth Davis’s Wooden: A Coach’s Life, was a simple man overflowing with complex contrasts and contradictions. His teams embodied these divergences. One of the fascinating paradoxes that most displayed the intimidating dominance of Wooden’s UCLA
John Wooden, readers learn in Seth Davis’s Wooden: A Coach’s Life, was a simple man overflowing with complex contrasts and contradictions. His teams embodied these divergences. One of the fascinating paradoxes that most displayed the intimidating dominance of Wooden’s UCLA
Ichiro Suzuki started the season in an unfamiliar place: the dugout. Healthy and eager, the future Hall of Famer nevertheless watched from the bench, warmed up in the clubhouse, but didn’t enter the game on Opening Day. He repeated the
One man’s photo op is another man’s coin op. Barack Obama invited the World Series champions to the White House Tuesday to generate positive press coverage. The MVP of the World Series instead used the visit to generate positive cash
Kentucky coach John Calipari enters the Final Four with a majority-freshman roster. That once would have made Kentucky a lock to return to the Final Four in the coming years. Now it means that Calipari will have to recruit a
Labor unions seek to organize Northwestern, Duke, and Stanford athletes the way they once organized Flint, Gary, and Paterson workers. Who could possibly object? “Face it: The jig is up,” William C. Rhoden declares in the New York Times.
When political leaders honor sports stars are they really honoring themselves? President Obama enjoyed a photo-op today with the Boston Red Sox serving as human props. The White Sox fan in the White House congratulated the Red Sox on their
DeSean Jackson, one of the most potent deep-ball threats in the NFL, remains unemployed five days into his unexpected free agency. Does character trump talent in the post-Aaron Hernandez NFL? Merely asking such a question marks one as a rube
“I don’t think the locker room has changed all that much,” former NFL lineman Conrad Dobler tells Breitbart Sports. “I think the public perception of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable has changed. Everybody has to be politically
Hope springs eternal for fans of thirty Major League Baseball clubs. It remains alive for just four college basketball teams. The Sports Hangover ponders a man banned from Cooperstown delivering a Sunday sermon, wonders how numbers go as high as
The Mets opened the season at Citi Field today against the Washington Nationals. Snow opened the day in New York City. Is freezing anyway to play America’s pastime? Thankfully, the only white sticking on the Queens field was the tarp
Patrick Corbin threw a greater percentage of strikes than any other pitcher in Major League Baseball last season en route to a 14-8 record with a 3.41 earned-run average. But he won’t be on the mound today during the Arizona
Irving Domingo Lorenzo, Jr., aka Irv Gotti, named himself after a mafia boss and started a record company called Murder, Inc. In a weekend essay at Rolling Stone, the rap mogul plays character witness for DeSean Jackson. The man misses
Houston Texans running back Arian Foster likes the Space Shuttle and the Toyota Tundra. He doesn’t much care for Caillou, that infantilized, PBS whiner who inspires parents to daydream about slapping an animated child–and ponder just what would be so
The Philadelphia Eagles shocked the football world by cutting ties with star receiver DeSean Jackson. “After careful consideration this offseason,” the team tweeted this morning, “Eagles decide to part ways with DeSean Jackson. The team informed him of his release
Riots aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, you had to firebomb a police car or throw a newspaper box through a bank window to earn the “riot” designation. Now, merely gathering hundreds of people together after
Kobe Bryant has his own opinion. Some people don’t like it–the opinion and the fact that it’s his own. The injured Los Angeles Laker told the New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath that the Miami Heat collectively taking Trayvon Martin’s side in
Joel Embiid has declared his intent to make himself available for the upcoming NBA draft. The Kansas center forgoes his remaining three years of collegiate play. “He should be a real strong pick,” explains Breitbart Sports’ John Pudner. “I say
Conrad Dobler was Richie Incognito before Richie Incognito. Dubbed “Pro Football’s Dirtiest Player” on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1977, the St. Louis Cardinals guard intimidated massive defensive linemen and, if you can believe his enraged opponents, clawed, eye-gouged,
They start a $68 million outfield. Their highest paid pitcher earns more than the entire staffs of the Marlins and the Astros. They boast ten players boasting ten-figure salaries. For the first time since 1998, when the Baltimore Orioles outspent
Can Mike Pouncey pass a Rorschach test? What will John Jerry tell a psychiatrist about his childhood? What kind of psychotropic drugs could transform Richie Incognito into a mild-mannered human being? The NFL is about to find out. Asked at
Wade Davis never played a down in an official National Football League game. But more than a decade after his NFL playing career never made it off the ground, the former Weber State defensive back has launched a successful career
In response to louder calls to change the name of his football team, Dan Snyder has decided to launch a foundation subsidizing Native American causes. “For too long,” Redskins owner Dan Snyder writes, “the struggles of Native Americans have been
The Sports Hangover explores mid-majors majoring in basketball, a football coach who does not play well with others, a 43-year-old who likes to punch younger men to sleep, and the passing of Oderus Urungus, who came to America from Scumdogia
The impulse to transform what’s special into what’s normal doesn’t make special the norm. It makes special less special. Heavy metal bands with Cookie Monster vocalists discover that loud loses its effect when not juxtaposed with quiet. Brats who enjoy
The Dan Henderson-Mauricio “Shogun” Rua rematch airing on FoxSports1 Sunday night leaves fight fans asking: Why isn’t this war headlining a pay-per view? A better question wonders: why is this battle happening at all? It’s only natural that the UFC
The New York Jets thought so highly of Mark Sanchez that their general manager traded up to the fifth pick to draft him in 2009 and their coach tattooed his jersey onto his body. But, despite leading the Jets to
Can we enjoy sports for sports’ sake? The question, considered obliquely by ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte earlier this week, evokes a similar debate over the arts informally held more than seventy years ago. Albert Maltz, a Communist writer tired of
It’s spring. But Mother Nature forgot to give the message to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Boston. Grounds crews at multiple Major League Baseball parks work feverishly to prepare fields for opening day. But when the Detroit area has endured 91 inches
One of the prized editions of my two-trunk Sports Illustrated collection growing up was a number with Villanova’s Dwayne McClain, Chris Mullin of St. John’s, and Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing sharing the cover. Three teams from one conference competing in the
President Barack Obama revealed his prediction for an NCAA men’s basketball tournament winner on ESPN Wednesday morning. In an Oval Office segment taped yesterday with Andy Katz, the president picked Michigan State Spartans to win it all. The president’s Final
Barack Obama revealed his NCAA men’s basketball tournament picks to ESPN today. The president plays populist in his rhetoric. But in his NCAA bracket, the president favors the one percenters of college basketball. The presidential Final Four consists of #4
Is it possible to snub a team when the tournament invites sixty-eight of them? Why must MMA imitate boxing’s ten-point-must system when its success has conspicuously come from doing the opposite of what the struggling sweet science does? What in
The NCAA basketball tournament is wildly popular. ObamaCare isn’t. So to boost interest in the latter the White House will hitch its star to the former. Can we get a Supreme Court ruling on the separation of sport and state,