Recapping the Division II Men's Basketball Tournament
Admit it: you had #2 Winston-Salem taking care of business against #7 Slippery Rock—but alas, the magic of the spring is upon us once again. The NCAA Division II Men's Basketball Tournament has come and gone, leaving a nation enraptured, reeling from the possibilities of what could have been—two early exits from East Stroudsburg and Tarleton State, but the inviolable promise of next year, when our brackets may be better prepared and so may be the Fort Lewis College Skyhawks. BY JAMIE BERK
Tuesday, April 16, 2013Did Deadspin Defame Manti Te'o?
As Deadspin was celebrating its victory in reporting the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax, the blog's contributors began to tell the story of how the mainstream media dropped the ball. BY JAMIE BERK
Soccer Bleu
Appropriately enough, I can’t recall the first time I stooped under the bar’s low entrance and walked inside. But at some point in the summer of 2008, while a student in Paris, I began going every day, and between long afternoons in the bar, I found I could not stay away. It was a compulsion that puzzled my friends, professors, and most of all the bar’s regulars, who still look at me like a stranger. But these were the days of the European Championship soccer tournament, and I’d become transfixed by the soccer talk in the bar. When my studies ended I returned home, but on the eve of the World Cup in June of 2010, I boarded a plane for Paris to settle back in at Le Village. BY JOHN SAMUEL HARPHAM
Whispers in the Shade of Roses
In the shadows were the days before. "This is what I want to do with my life, but we could have it all taken away from us, " said Dean Roethemeier, a young breeder for Darley America. There, too, was Joe Drape, the horse racing reporter for the New York Times — "I'm pausing just because I think there probably is," he speculated on whether there might be an illegally doped horse in the race. "I wouldn't put it past them." And then there was Bob Baffert, the Hall of Fame trainer, asked how badly he wanted to win. "That is the stupidest question you guys ask," he said. "How bad do you wanna get laid? Huh? How bad do you wanna get laid? Tell me." BY JAMIE BERK
Hockey's Moneypuck Problem
Hockey is inching toward a sabermetrics-type statistical revolution. And like the other major non-baseball North American sports, hockey nerds are naturally taking cues from their baseball brethren, who have just recently seen their good work appear on ESPN tickers and stadium scoreboards. Hockey’s would-be Bill Jameses have even adopted the sabermetricians’ us-versus-them tone—the kind of snark with substance that incubates on message boards after a few thousand unfunny Fire Joe Morgan imitations. BY SAM PAGE