The American soccer community suffered a blow earlier this month when Grant Wahl, a veritable legend in the field, was abruptly fired after over 20 years at Sports Illustrated. As a member of that community, as well as a person with a healthy sense of solidarity with my fellow worker, I was enraged. Here was an established writer who was presented a boot to lick, refused to do so, and was kicked in the teeth for his temerity. For management to try and force a permanent pay cut on a writer, then smear him afterward, is absurd and unprofessional.
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Illustration by Chris Thompson
Preposterous. (Illustration by Chris Thompson.)
Stephen A. Smith has a particular way of doing things, and the way he says MJ is no different. He emphasizes the J, not the M, so it’s M-J instead of the usual MJ that we civilian idiots favor when talking about the best player and worst dresser who ever lived. That enunciative choice is one of those things that is easy not to notice in normal circumstances. Now that sports are cancelled and the first hour of First Take on ESPN is nothing but promotion for the network’s bloated Last Dance documentary, though, that non-standard M-J utterance stands out a bit more.
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Art by Chris Thompson
When I last had a full-time job, in October, Clay Travis was a talking head whose 10-year-old jokes were mostly confined to a Fox Sports 1 gambling show. In terms of TV, that’s as close as a person can get to being banished to the Phantom Zone. Any time I’d write about him at my gig–this happened a handful of times–many of the commenters would be baffled as to who this person was, and annoyed that I had brought him into their lives.
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Screencap via TMZ
How are you going to make the most of this weekend before “the large football match”? Spend time with friends and loved ones? Enjoy the wonder of nature? Whatever your answer is, it’s certainly more healthy and productive than Darren Rovell’s, who has found himself in a rather Rovellian folly.
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