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:

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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.

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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.