From skateboarder Jason Lee to football’s Fred Williamson, Hollywood’s history is packed with excellent athletes who turned respectable acting careers. Jim Brown, Alex Karras, Wilt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the nearly-forgotten Paul Robeson did it. O.J. belongs on the list. Best-of lists about those guys have been done already. Besides, none of them are on active…
Gerald Wilkins, Michael Cooper, Orlando Woolridge, Xavier McDaniels, Mitch Richmond, Dennis Rodman, Joe Dumars and Gary Payton. (feel free to add more in ‘comments’) Those are a few of the Michael Jordan-era NBA players that served as competition for “His Airness”. Superb professional basketball defenders, among their other talents. There is a movement afoot to claim that the…
Young athletes have been entertaining adults for centuries. Some of them even got paid for it. Every year that the Little League World Series rolls around, the question comes up: Are we exploiting these kids? Should we be putting this pressure on preteens? Can they handle the increasingly intrusive media, which the average blogger or…
The Miami Heat keep getting facialized by former Duke University players late in the 2013-14 season. Did LeBron James insult the Dookies or something? Maybe Coach K, who knows the pros pretty well after his time with them during the Olympics, gave his old players some tips…
No matter who won the national championship, it is great that coach John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats once again stood at the top of men’s college basketball with transient young talent. It is excellent that the delusional “college hoops is better than pro because it is pure” advocate was left foaming at the mouth, as experienced…
The lie of assuming that keeping basketball players in college for one, two, or more years will improve the game is rising again. Why do well-meaning people, most of them considered sports “experts”, believe that the NBA and college basketball would benefit from such a rule? The common reasons: young players would have more time…
It wasn’t so much that he expected greatness of himself, but that he seemed to think it was destined, SLAM magazine wrote in 2004. How he just knew it was coming. Mostly, though, it was how he went about it all, and how it never quite looked… authentic. Like he was always trying. Trying to…