Posts by Michael Weinreb

  • Bubba Smith

    Remembering Bubba Smith

    They hanged Bubba Smith in effigy at Notre Dame. This was before he tore apart cans of low-calorie beer with his bare hands, before he showed up on Vega$ and Taxi and Hart to Hart and Eight is Enough, before he played a Bunyan-esque police officer in a film series that evolved from a low-IQ […]

  • Greg Schiano

    The Grantland Top Five

    1. Greg Schiano, football coach, Rutgers University College football is the most compelling sport in America, yet nothing is more torturous than listening to college football coaches speak publicly about their teams. I know this because I spent Tuesday morning standing in a hotel ballroom in Newport, R.I., while eight Big East coaches filibustered for […]

  • Kevin Kolb & Michael Vick

    The Grantland Top Five

    1. Kevin Kolb, quarterback, Philadelphia Eagles In 1945, facing an unwinnable football game against Army at Yankee Stadium, Michigan coach Fritz Crisler resorted to a desperate ploy: Utilizing the free substitution rule implemented due to the shortage of male bodies on campuses during World War II, he shuttled in a separate offense and a separate […]

  • A Season on the Brink

    The Sports Book Hall of Fame

    Looking back at classic sports literature.

  • Drew Brees

    The Grantland Top Five: NFL Retirees, Weed-Smoking Talking Dogs, and the Rest of the Week in Sports and Culture

    1. The National Football League, New York, N.Y. Once, in Kansas City, I watched Conrad Dobler self-medicate. He had cycled through Percocet and OxyContin, and by the time I found him, a few years back, he was getting through the day on a regimen of Vicodin and nicotine gum. He walked with a cane; his […]

  • Sam Keller

    The Grantland Top Five: Video-Game Smack Talk, D.C.-Area Private Eyes, and the Rest of the Week in Sports and Culture

    1. EA Sports College Football ’12, Electronic Arts, Inc. I’m not going to deny it: Sometimes I dream about a video game. It isn’t an every-night occurrence, but it happens, and when it does, these dreams are in Technicolor, and they are in high definition. And while these dreams take place in a Roger Rabbit […]

  • The Grantland Top Five: Absurd ’80s Posters, Tiger-as-Hermit, and the Rest of the Week in Sports and Culture

    1. The Costacos brothers, poster artists, 1980s A few years ago, I interviewed Jim McMahon in the lobby of a Connecticut casino. He was perched on a cherry-red motorized scooter, simultaneously drinking beer, trailing a muddy river of tobacco juice into a Coca-Cola bottle, and canoodling with a woman whose relationship to him was entirely unclear. […]

  • Renee Richards

    Renée Richards Wants to be Left Alone

    The transgender icon and onetime most controversial woman in sports is hiding in plain sight in New York.

  • Dennis Rodman

    The Grantland Top Five: Dennis Rodman’s Saving Babies, Josh Hamilton and the Rest of the Week in Sports and Culture

    1. Double Team, dir.: Tsui Hark, Columbia Pictures, 1997 There is a moment toward the end of Double Team — showing sporadically this summer in the HBO time slot reserved for insomniacs, security guards, and parents of newborns — when a shirtless Mickey Rourke, jacked up and rubber-lipped, kidnaps the newborn son of Jean-Claude Van […]

  • Garrett Gilbert

    The Grantland Top Five: Octogenarian Managers, UNC, and the Rest of the Week in Sports and Culture

    1. Garrett Gilbert/Matt Saracen, quarterbacks, Austin/Dillon, Texas The most emotionally compelling moment in the recent history of college football came on January 7, 2010, in the first quarter of the national championship game, when an 18-year-old freshman quarterback at the University of Texas stepped in for an injured Colt McCoy. Facing these daunting circumstances, Garrett […]

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