The SportsThink Weekly Review #20
October 23, 2020
Hello and welcome to the twentieth edition of the Weekly Review! 20 feels like a pretty big deal, thanks to everyone for joining me on the journey. A break from the blog this week to work on an academic publication, but hopefully making up for it with the 7 sports pieces below. On to the reads!
Inside the Lines: The Best Writing on Sports I Read This Week
Damage Assessment, by Patrick Hruby, via the Hreal Sports Newsletter. One of the biggest challenges in studying CTE (the degenerative brain condition most famously linked to football) is that researchers are limited to working with post-mortem brain samples. Here, Hruby details the quest to study CTE in the living, which would radically change the landscape.
Why a Perfect Spiral Football Pass Doesn’t Break the Laws of Physics, by Kenneth Chang, via the NYT. This is pretty cool.
There Is No Context For Anthony Davis, by David Thorpe, via TrueHoop. Excellent analysis on the playoff domination of this newsletter’s favorite NBA player.
An Ocean Separated Them. A Surfboard Connected Them. by Greg Bishop, via SI. I’ll defer to the tagline here: “An unlikely tale about an Ohio mechanic who lost his cherished board on one side of the Pacific and a teacher from the Philippines who found it on the other.” Great story.
Reminds me of this:How the Most Socially Progressive Pro League Got That Way, by Jonathan Abrams and Natalie Wiener, via the NYT. On the athlete-activists of the WNBA and the standards they set for their more famous male counterparts.
14 Big Ten Universities, Ranked by Annoyingness, by Spencer Hall, via Moon Crew. On the occasion of the return of B1G football, college football’s poet laureate sounds off. Some references may be a bit insular if you’re not a big CFB fan, but this is mostly hilarious, and accurate.
Love & Courage, by Eric Nusbaum, via his Sports Stories newsletter. I promise that I’m not an alt-account for Eric, I just always enjoy his stuff. Great history of model-turned-bullfighter Bette Ford, a story I knew very little about.
Tweets of the Week
Skateboarding is for the people.
Nah, I’m not crying.
Non-Sports Reads
Six Enormous Hot-Dog-Shaped Vehicles Travel America, Spreading Only Brand Awareness and Joy, by Bailey Berg, via the NYT. I’m a simple man: I come across a nice article on Weiner Mobiles, I share it.
The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion, by Julia Ioffe, via GQ. On mysterious Russian weapons that can silently inflict serious head trauma. Scary stuff; straight out of sci-fi, but it’s not.
As always, thank you for reading. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re having trouble accessing any articles, happy to send them directly your way. And, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone else who might like it.
See you next week,
Tolga