Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

NCAA President Mark Emmert has a base salary of something like $2.3 million. In 2017, he made $3.9 million. In 2018, he dropped off to $2.7 million.Read more...

It was another primetime night for the NBA in Orlando, and generally their worst nightmare is when the refs hijack such an occasion. NBA refs can never decide if they want to be the show or not, and the indecision tends to just make it worse (credit the other sports arbiters for knowing exactly what they want,…Read more...

The darkest day of my youth was the day the Mets traded Tom Seaver.Read more...

They told us that sports were a reward for a functioning society.Read more...

It’s rare that Twitter lights up in positivity, aside from baseball writers getting wind of a new Springsteen album. It’s a hellscape for the damned, and we’ve known that forever. But there is no dark space filled with the most vile evil that light cannot penetrate. U2 has a good song and a half somewhere in their…Read more...

As Serena Williams approaches Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slams, some rightfully wish Court were already an afterthought.

In a podcast appearance, Kirk Cousins questioned the efficiency of masks and said he was “at peace” with getting COVID, even if he died from it.

As Jordyn Wieber walked off the mat after her floor routine at the 2012 Olympics, she was giddy, and a big smile danced across her face as she walked down the performance steps.Read more...

A shortened baseball season isn’t weird enough to keep some traditions from continuing. The Pirates suck, the Dodgers are Skynet, and Aroldis Chapman is a cowardly asshat. Tonight he thought it’d be fun to fire a 101 MPH fastball directly at Michael Brosseau’s head, which came a millimeter or two from greatly altering…Read more...

It’s not the Kentucky Derby Churchill Downs would have imagined. It’s on Labor Day weekend instead of the first Saturday in May. It will take place without fans in the stands. It’ll be the second race of the Triple Crown instead of the first, as the Belmont has already been run. And whereas, for some, it used to mark…Read more...

The powers that be in this country never cease to amaze me.Read more...

When Senator Ron Wyden played basketball at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he got paid — just not on the court.Read more...

The Bubble Domes continued at pace last night, and perhaps the story was OKC forcing a Game 7 against the Rockets in their first-round series. Or rather, the story within the story.Read more...

It kind of came out of nowhere. While rumors of Weston McKennie wanting to move on from Schalke in the Bundesliga were running pretty wild, the mentioned destinations were more mid-tier Premier League clubs. Southampton was the main one, which made all the sense in the world. Certainly McKennie would have seen how…Read more...

As I wrote in the Mourning After, it seems strange that any MLB team would view this season with anything other than suspicion or derision. It’s hard to have any feel for what your team is after just 30 games, if your team has even gotten to 30 games. The expanded playoffs mean that just about anyone could eat it in…Read more...

For Black men of a certain age, John Thompson was the pinnacle. And even if they didn’t play for him, he was their coach.

Ja’Marr Chase is a smart man.

It was a garden-variety fuck up.

Legendary Georgetown Men’s Basketball Coach, John Thompson Jr., has died. He was 78.Read more...

It’s kind of perfect that on the weekend when so many teams had doubleheaders due to canceled games on account of a killer pandemic, the league is trying to trudge through while pretending “just going to their happy place” is an actual medical prescription, and when the A’s became the latest team to join the list of…Read more...

Standing alone on the baseline of his sport’s biggest stage, returning serve against systemic racism on-and-off the court, 1996 Wimbledon finalist MaliVai Washington, knows the weight of being a high-profile athlete balancing professional responsibilities with the complex dilemma of being a role model, speaking his…Read more...

Halfway through the season sprint, another MLB team has recorded another positive COVID test, bringing the contamination total to five teams.Read more...

If MLS and NWSL have a lot of things to catch up on to be considered a “major league,” one thing we can cross off the list is the speed at which they eject a shithead racist owner from their ranks.

Novak Djokovic certainly can’t be accused of just going along with the crowd, even if his own road takes him to some truly stupefying and weird places. It appears Nole is once again following his own beat, as he, along with Canadian tennis player Vasek Pospisil, are forming their own men’s tennis players union.

Updated on Aug. 29, 2020 at 8:05 p.m. EST: Milwaukee Bucks guard George Hill decided to sit out the national anthem before the Bucks’ playoff game vs. the Magic on Saturday... literally.Read more...

Everyone’s hopes and dreams have validity, and who among us has not dreamed of buying a baseball team?Read more...

Cliff Robinson, an NBA player who by many accounts was a time machine into the future in a number of aspects of his life, including being a fierce proponent of marjiuana legalization, died Saturday at 53.Read more...

After an historic few days of player protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wisc., by a white officer, the NBA and National Basketball Players Association announced a three-step plan in response to the concerns of players in their fight against racial inequality.Read more...

Even after all that 2020 has taken from us, the loss of Chadwick Boseman seems unbearable.Read more...

When Black professional athletes say police brutality and being treated like a criminal is important to them, they truly mean it because it’s personal.Read more...

That’s some Broad Street Bullshit.Read more...

A stunning new poll shows that Americans have had a drastic change of heart when it comes to professional athletes protesting against racial inequality.Read more...

The community that makes up the world of golf is largely conservative, white men over 50 years old. One member of that demographic, PGA Champions Tour player Kirk Triplett, became the first professional golfer to place a Black Lives Matter sticker on his golf bag a few weeks ago. He did so in the hopes of prompting…Read more...

Roughly 100 NBA employees watched the Milwaukee Bucks earlier this week take a stand against the brutalization of Black bodies by the police. Now they are following in those footsteps carrying the baton of racial justice a little closer to the finish line themselves.Read more...

August has been a monumental month on the trail of Black resistance and, by many estimations, Black global progress.Read more...

In the past two weeks, there’s been a rash of white men blaming the slurs they let slip onto social media on typos and, by implication, autocorrect.

Real Salt Lake owner Dell Loy Hansen is facing new allegations of racist behavior, and is being compared to former racist Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.Read more...

The Mets and Marlins did not play on Thursday night, instead taking the field, removing their hats, having a collective moment of silence — 42 seconds to honor Jackie Robinson — and leaving a Black Lives Matter shirt on home plate as they headed back to their clubhouses in Queens.Read more...

Young people have historically been on the forefront of American change, protests, and progress. So it’s no surprise that college athletes, too, have decided to strike and use their platforms to speak about Jacob Blake and issues of racial injustice.

Here’s a nomination for Truth Teller in Media award: Max Kellerman.Read more...

A day after players in other major sports leagues decided to not play to demand an end to racial injustice, the NHL canceled its Thursday bubble playoff games. A day late and a dollar short, so giving the NHL any praise for this is sorta like rewarding a puppy for peeing on the kitchen linoleum instead of your living…Read more...

As the NBA continued its postponement Thursday after players protested police violence on Black lives, some NFL teams staged a smaller scale work strike of canceling practices.

Some folks are born silver spoon in handRead more...

After a critical mass of protests across the professional sports world in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the most pressing and powerful question that remains is represented in only two words.

If you weren’t sure how serious and life-changing the historic NBA walkout is, the players’ vote late Wednesday night after the postseason was halted should clue you in.Read more...

As the sports world ground to a halt yesterday amid a growing movement to protest racial injustice, the NHL did the most NHL thing ever and offered a tepid, half-ass response before the Bruins-Lightning game in Toronto on Wednesday night.Read more...

Oh, hey, just in case you were wondering…

When Game 7 of the 2016 World Series went to a rain delay in Cleveland, after the Chicago Cubs, trying to end their 108-year championship drought, had let the lead slip away on Rajai Davis’ tying homer, they needed to pick up the pieces and figure out how to mentally get back into things for extra innings.