Posts by Jay Caspian Kang
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![Brian Holloway illustration]()
What Happened at Brian Holloway’s House?
An NFL player’s empty home. A massive teenage party. A tailor-made story of social-media shaming and a former star wronged. Until you dig deeper, that is.
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![Derrick Rose]()
NBA Betting Lines: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Smart gamblers are all alike. Every miserable gambler is alike, too. Both are narcissists — the smart gambler believes in the power of his reason to stave off the generations of other smart gamblers who ultimately fall into degeneracy; the miserable gambler believes that God has the time to shit out bad cards just to […]
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![Jordan Crawford]()
NBA Betting Lines: The Jordan Crawford Special
When I started this column just two days ago, I had a vague yet visceral premonition that it would end like this. I knew that at some point between now and the NBA Finals, I would doubt our betting process, our logic, our gambling heart. I knew this would all end somewhere in Reno, maybe […]
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![John Wall]()
NBA Betting Lines: Into the Void
I recently sent an uncomfortably large PayPal check to an old friend to cover what I owed him from roughly 80 games of online Scrabble played at stakes between $40 and $240. I average about 340 points per game in Scrabble. My friend, who is mostly illiterate and challenges words like “lenient,” averages 360 because […]
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![Bradley Marquez]()
Bradley-Marquez: Redemption?
It felt like redemption, but why? On Saturday night, Timothy Bradley beat a 40-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez in a split-decision victory that frustrated and bored the overwhelmingly Mexican crowd at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. The last time we saw Bradley, he was staggering around Southern California with what can only be […]
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![Floyd Mayweather Jr.]()
Money's Inferno: Floyd Mayweather vs. Canelo Alvarez
Las Vegas, one of our many deflating cities, managed to puff itself up for the Canelo Alvarez vs. Floyd Mayweather bout. The sights usually associated with fight week stayed more or less within expectations — the heads of retired professional athletes bobbing high above the scrum of drunk people streaming through the lobby of the […]
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![Canelo Álvarez]()
The Great Red Hype
Canelo Alvarez and the search for the next Oscar De La Hoya.
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![Tommy Morrison]()
In Memoriam: Tommy Morrison, 1969-2013
Tommy Morrison died late Sunday night at the age of 44, ending one of the most tragic and bizarre lives in a sport defined by tragedy and the surreal. All professional sports rely on the exploitation of the body, but I wonder if there has been an American athlete in the past 25 years who […]
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![Smith]()
Six Short Essays on Surfing
A trip to Huntington Beach for the U.S. Open.
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![Omar Figueroa]()
Fight of the Year (So Far): Omar Figueroa vs. Nihito Arakawa
Boxing’s best recurring scene goes something like this: Two fighters who have beaten the living shit out of one another for 12 rounds meet in the center of the ring after the final bell and embrace one another in a show of mutual respect and sportsmanship. The more savage the beating, the closer one fighter […]
