Steve Rushin
History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.Collection: History
Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.Collection: Sports
The first words Rebecca Lobo ever spoke to me when we met in a Manhattan bar in 2001 were, 'Aren't you the guy who just mocked women's basketball in 'Sports Illustrated'?' I blushed, broke out in a flop sweat and said, 'Yes.'Collection: Sports
After the abrupt death of my mother, Jane, on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, my dad took up golf at 57. He and my mother had always played tennis - a couples' game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love. But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range.Collection: Dad
Yes, sports are very often very boring, which is good and necessary: If games were one long highlight, we wouldn't have any highlights at all.
That's what Letterman did. He mocked everything and everyone in show business, even though he was at the top of show business. He was in it but not really of it, and that's one thing I came to love about him. I mean, you can't sit there and interview Cher and pretend you're not in show business, but he managed to pull it off somehow.
I had started writing for 'Sports Illustrated,' which was really my dream job growing up. But the writing probably read like I was auditioning to write for 'Letterman' or '70s-era Carson.
A great presidential address - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Truman's Farewell Address, Kennedy's Inaugural Address - has the power to inspire.
My wife's name, Rebecca Lobo, is on sandwiches and street signs in New England. It adorns the arena rafters at the University of Connecticut, where she first became a basketball star. Her high school in Massachusetts is on Rebecca Lobo Way, a nice trump card to play at reunions.
When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.
Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.
In 2007, Prince performed at the halftime of the Super Bowl. The stage in Miami was wreathed in purple light, and it poured during his performance, so that he played 'Purple Rain' in a purple rain.
The real driver of my golf game is family. The family that plays together stays together, at least literally so.
Hurricane Irene's advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn't pan out.
I had almost nothing published until I had something published in 'Sports Illustrated.' I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.
I'd happily cover the British Open every year until St. Andrews slides into the sea or Scotland runs out of beer, whichever happens first.
My first interview at 'SI,' I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.
As a kid, I always had my nose buried in the side of a cereal box.
I remember seeing Letterman do stand-up on 'The Tonight Show.' Or, it's probably more accurate to say, I remember hearing him do stand-up, because the Carson show existed mainly as sound leaking under my bedroom door at night. I'd hear Johnny telling jokes and my dad laughing at them.
I'd watch the news with my dad, and he'd quietly mock the anchors. An anchorman might say, 'Police are searching for...' and my dad would say in the anchorman's voice, 'the man who gave me this haircut.' This was in the real Ron Burgundy '70s. And I would laugh and start doing it myself.
With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.
If Charlie Sheen is the 21st century figure most closely associated with 'Winning,' it is perhaps time to consider an alternative to victory.
A lot of people say they eat, drink, and sleep sports, but does anyone really do it, ingesting nothing but Dodger Dogs and Soda Shaqs and Greg Norman Zinfandels 24/7?
The man who consumes sports to the exclusion of all other things will never be well-rounded.
Quitting has always been the worst possible thing you can do in sports. It's downright un-American.
At its root, 'quit' means 'to set free' - think of an acquittal in a court of law - and to quit is often to be liberated.
There is something inherently foolish in soldiering on when there is no hope of payoff.
If you've never quit anything, you really ought to try. And if at first you don't succeed, try again.
Recording shows for later viewing is what TV types call 'time-shifting.' It's a beguiling idea.
Cinderella is older than she lets on. She's ancient. She's had work done. The Disney film was based on Charles Perreault's French story 'Cendrillon,' published in 1697.
Swish: A made basket. Swoosh: The Nike logo. Swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh: A thousand coaches in nylon tracksuits, walking through hotel lobbies at the Final Four.
Every era has its cartoon rich guys, but most of them are actual cartoons - Daddy Warbucks, Scrooge McDuck, C. Montgomery Burns.
Once upon a time in America, people aspired to party like a rock star. Now, rock stars aspire to party like a football owner.
We can project just about anything we want onto NFL owners - one of them is named Arthur Blank, for heaven's sake. He's a walking Mad Lib, just waiting for us to complete him.
When should a man stop wearing sports jerseys? When the buttons of his White Sox top finally pop, like rivets on a distressed ocean liner? When the pinstripes of his Yankees shirt have grown wider at the midsection than at the top, as the longitudinal lines on a globe?
It's one thing to wear jerseys at games, which fans have been doing in great numbers for 30 years, dressing as if they might be summoned from the stands on a moment's notice to pinch-run. But those same jerseys are now omnipresent on airplanes, in restaurants, in doctor's waiting rooms.
Grafted onto street clothes and removed from the field of play, jerseys don't even flatter men in their physical prime. Witness any baseball player wearing a uniform top over dress shirt and slacks at a press conference podium.
I'm a recovering jersey wearer who can't bear to get rid of the blaze-orange Knicks warmup top that makes me look like James Carville on a highway repair crew.
What's the best baseball name of all time? Is it Champ Summers? Clyde Kluttz? Razor Shines? Scipio Spinks? Sibby Sisti? Creepy Crespi? Before you answer, consider that Coco Crisp is not even the game's top Coco, an honor retired by Coco Laboy.
If you wonder why a man would shave before spending all day in his bass boat, you have never seen an angler's face projected in high-def on the JumboTron at a Classic weigh-in.
On its surface, the HBO documentary series 'Hard Knocks,' about the New York Jets' training camp, resembles another HBO series, 'The Sopranos.' Both star the stout patriarch of a New Jersey 'family' preoccupied with food, intimidation, and florid profanity.
'Hard Knocks' seems to have done for the self-serious NFL what the witch did for Rapunzel: persuaded it, somehow, to let its hair down.
As good as NFL Films is at making players human, it's even better at making players superhuman. No Hollywood studio has made movies that are more grand or gorgeous. Every meticulous shot of 'Hard Knocks' is a vision: every slow-motion spiral, every shaved head steaming like a Manhattan manhole cover.
LeBron will not likely win six rings.
All kingdoms look small through an airplane window - little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they're rather impressive.
Anyone who thinks sports are ruled by athletes need only think of American sports' most enduring tradition: Immediately after a championship, as the champagne sprays and the confetti falls, the trophy is passed not to the team captain but most often to the team owner, handed to him by his highest-ranking employee, the league commissioner.
Headline writers love the phrase 'Power Grab,' but you can't really grab it, can you? Power is a greased watermelon, a wisp of smoke, difficult to grasp, harder to hold, impossible to control while getting both feet down in bounds.
What's certain is that ranking powerful people is inherently self-defeating. For starters, true potentates know who they are without being told, and they have no need to announce it.
Football, played at its highest level, is catastrophic. Even relatively minor afflictions are grotesque and bookworthy.
The most enduring Top 10 ever written wasn't written at all, but chiseled onto stone tablets and conveyed down Mount Sinai by Moses, who introduced to the world not just a set of Biblical precepts but also a new format for starting arguments: the list of 10 things.