Showcasing stories that are worth the read…

Hua Hsu of Grantland has a nice piece on Oliver Luck, who has had an interesting life in his own right. Yet the West Virginia athletic director is known for only one thing these days.

Hsu writes:

A member of the football staff shepherds four potential transfers into Luck’s office and he invites them to sit around a conference table, cheerfully reciting some tidbit about where they grew up or what position they play as they settle into their seats. One of them has brought an entourage of his mom and little brother. Without their helmets and pads to protect them, you remember that they’re just kids: fidgety, restless, vulnerable, averting eye contact, almost shy. “I’m the athletic director around here. The AD,” Luck says. He smiles, and, if you’ve watched football over the past couple of years, you see the family resemblance. “That really stands for ‘Andrew’s Dad.’ That’s how everybody knows me nowadays.” The players laugh. They look up from their hands.

Later Hsu writes on the elder Luck:

“We always tell our student-athletes: Don’t let sports use you — you use it. You be selfish. You use it to get a free education, you use it to meet people. Don’t let it chew you up.”

It might all sound a little jaded, but Luck is here precisely because he understood all this from the beginning. College sports were always a means to an end, one that didn’t necessarily have to involve football. He was a curious and committed student who chose West Virginia over Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. He took his studies seriously and was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1981. Though he was the Houston Oilers’ second-round draft pick in 1982 and the team’s starter for the 1983 season, he describes his time in the NFL with a sense of detachment. Luck didn’t aspire for a long career and instead set the more modest goal of playing long enough to qualify for an NFL pension. The 1982 players’ strike had pressed him to think about life after football, so in his free time and during the offseason he took night-school classes toward a law degree. In 1987 he retired from the Oilers — with a pension — and received a law degree from the University of Texas. “I was healthy,” he says. “I saw a lot of guys that played 10 or 12 years who were all beat up.”

Luck is quick to point out that there was nothing unique about his extracurricular pursuits — the NFL wasn’t the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today, and a lot of guys in his day didn’t expect to get rich playing football. Still, Luck was obviously a little different: “When I knew I was going to retire, as I was getting ready for the bar exam, I thought, You know, I want to do something fun.” And so he walked away from professional football and became a lawyer.

For all the 140-character blasts and edgy blog posts, there is a ton of good, thoughtful and expansive sports journalism occurring on the World Wide Web. Here are a couple of stories that are highly recommended:

********

Wright Thompson’s piece in ESPN Magazine on Dan Gable’s efforts to get wrestling back into the Olympics.

This description of Gable struggling to watch a Iowa wrestler in an NCAA championship match goes above and beyond:

St. John pushes his opponent into the mat. “Ride him like a dog!” Gable yells. The first two periods pass. Sometimes Gable just mouths words, intense, forgetting to speak. St. John is tied with 48 seconds left.
 The Penn State fans in the next suite are peeking over at the red-faced, bald man losing his shit. At rest, Gable looks like a retired math teacher, but under the influence of anger and adrenaline, he transforms. His eyes seem to shift from a soft hazel to a dull black, the color of an alien, subterranean element. Given the right stimuli, like a vital Iowa match, he seems a good sweat from his final wrestling weight of 149. The eruption arrives. Watching Gable melt down is like watching Picasso paint. He shakes and strains, a rocket on the pad. The flying spit and sudden fits of decorum, like “Jiminy Christmas!” — Tourette’s in reverse — are followed by growling, intense curses.

*******

Paul Solotaroff and Ron Borges examine the life of Aaron Hernandez in Rolling Stone. It created some controversy with some allegations about the Patriots.

Most people, even self-important stars blowing thousands on bottle-shape women, might have simmered down about now. But the 23-year-old Aaron Hernandez wasn’t like most people; for ages, he hadn’t even been like himself. The sweet, goofy kid from Bristol, Connecticut, with the klieg-light smile and ex-thug dad who’d turned his life around to raise two phenom sons – that Aaron Hernandez had barely been heard from in the seven hard years since his father was snatched away, killed in his prime by a medical error that left his boys soul-sick and lost. Once in a great while, the good Aaron would surface, phoning one of his college coaches to tell him he loved him and to talk to the man’s kids for hours, or stopping Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, to kiss him on the cheek and thank him damply. There was such hunger in that kid for a father’s hand, and such greatness itching to get out, that coach after coach had covered for him whenever the bad Aaron showed – the violent, furious kid who was dangerous to all, most particularly, it seems, to his friends.

I’m going to try to do this more often. For all the 140-character blasts and edgy blog posts, there is a ton of good, thoughtful and expansive sports journalism occurring on the World Wide Web.

SB Nation Long Form has been a leader in this area. Highly recommend you check out the site.

This piece on Ricky Bell comes from Jeff Pearlman. Earlier this week, Pearlman attracted some attention for a F-bomb filled post/tirade against Alex Rodriguez.

This story on Ricky Bell shows Pearlman’s true talents:

It was obvious. But, in a way, not so obvious. Ricky Bell still looked like Ricky Bell — the high hips, the miniature Afro, the letters B-E-L-L stitched atop the number 42 on his creamsicle-and-white jersey. He walked with a regal gait, signed one autograph after another, spoke of better Sundays to come. And yet, Bell was … iffy, and his teammates and coaches knew it. Back in 1979, when quarterback Doug Williams handed off to his halfback, Bell burst toward the line with the force of a cue stick slamming into the ball. All power. All energy. Now, he seemed sluggish. Bell still ran hard, but minus the speed and power. More often than not, he reached the first defensive player and fell backward. John McKay, the Buccaneers’ head coach, had coached Bell at USC, and often compared him to a young O.J. Simpson. He selected him over Pittsburgh’s Tony Dorsett with the first pick in the 1977 Draft, and knew what type of weapon he could be.

This wasn’t that Ricky Bell.

“Me and Ricky lived in the same apartment complex on Dale Mabry (Highway),” says Lewis, a former teammate USC. “That last year in Tampa, I spent a lot of time helping him into his apartment. I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it was soreness and wear and tear. He played a tough position, and got hit a lot. It never occurred to me that something might be wrong with him.”

Well worth the time.