I'm trying to get our players to listen to me instead of you guys. All that stuff you write about how good we are? All that stuff they hear on ESPN? It's like poison. Like rat poison. | | | | The Blue Jackets allowed seven goals to the Oilers but not this one.
(Kirk Irwin/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I'm trying to get our players to listen to me instead of you guys. All that stuff you write about how good we are? All that stuff they hear on ESPN? It's like poison. Like rat poison.”
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| | rantnrave:// Today is the end of an era. MIKE FRANCESA will do his last show at WFAN. Five hours on the radio, all by himself, one final time beginning at 1 pm ET. He is a legend of sports talk radio. Hell, basically cemented the format. MIKE AND THE MAD DOG is the MODEL T of sports radio. The duo were great together. Two local AM radio hosts who built a national profile. The biggest voices in the biggest city. A NEW YORKER profile. Watch the 30 FOR 30 on them to understand how big they were in their heyday. Would there be a FIRST TAKE without them? When Francesa and CHRIS RUSSO split in 2008 he started doing five hours a day on the radio alone. Francesa's isn't universally beloved. He bullied callers. He was pompous. He had a TRUMPian style to him. He cared about ratings. He became a meme for his self-aggrandizing, for refusing to admit he fell asleep on air, for AL ALBUQUERQUE. TWITTER was good for him. Helped augment his audience by sharing clips of his show, even if they were poking fun at him. Did he get by on nostalgia or listener inertia at the end? Some say he hasn't been listenable in a long time. Would he be as popular now if he started? Does sports talk radio have the same tug on the conversation in each city? There are a lot of options available, even if you're trapped in your car. Francesa has managed to remain a star, able to bridge generations. He'll go out with an exit worthy of his ego... Stories about athletes learning a new language always resonate with me. Maybe it's because I'm an immigrant and know what it's like. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's ALEX PREWITT profiled RANGERS winger PAVEL BUCHNEVICH. He's 21 and thriving in his second season in the NHL. The RUSSIAN is also picking up ENGLISH quickly. It's not easy. In baseball, teams put LATINO players into English language classes and give JAPANESE players interpreters. NBA players come over from EUROPE and have to assimilate. The NHL is full of players like Buchnevich. Their stories of cultural immersion should be told more often... He's not talking about PATRICK SWAYZE right?.. AARON RODGERS is back. He's coming to save the PACKERS... It's about handle, not height. | | | - Mike Vorkunov, curator |
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| Current and former ESPN employees say an entrenched locker room culture puts women at a serious disadvantage in the male-dominated world of sports media. | | |
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| The headline the next day read, "The Night It Rained Tears." It was a cold, rainy night on Dec. 13, 1977, a night in Evansville, Indiana, history that everybody remembers. What they were doing. Where they were. The details are seared into their memories. At 7:20 p.m. | | |
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| The first basketball practice was just days away, and in Louisville the expectations were high. Although the University of Louisville Cardinals had lost several top players, they had an influx of new talent, especially Brian Bowen, a highly regarded prospect from Saginaw, Mich. In the preseason polls, the team was ranked in the top 20. | | |
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| On a crisp November morning in Moscow, Steven Seagal found himself within the walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, seated across from Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man in the Russian Federation. Dressed in a blood-red kimono and black trousers--a throwback to his days as a martial artist--Seagal observed the Russian president from behind his trademark amber-tinted glasses. | | |
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| A coach, a quarterback, a community and a run to the high school football state championship game. | | |
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| What Mike and the Mad Dog talk about when they talk about sports. | | |
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| Pavel Buchnevich is the unlikely player helping spark the Rangers. The Russian youngster is conquering the NHL almost as quickly as he's mastering English. | | |
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| On the first play of the second half of the NFC Championship Game in 2011, Packers defensive end Ryan Pickett plowed into Bears right tackle J'Marcus Webb, who fell on the right foot of Bears center Olin Kreutz. The impact caused a tear of Kreutz's Lisfranc. | | |
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| Koché’s excellent pre-fall show puts an exclamation point on the year’s most enduring trend. | | |
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| For the past couple years, ESPN has been stuck with a seemingly unsolvable problem: It is on the hook for expensive sports deals that keep getting more expensive. At the same time, its subscriber base, and the revenue that generates from subscription fees and ad sales, has been melting. | | |
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| How the Seattle football team became the social justice warriors of the NFL | | |
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| Jericho's upcoming match in Japan against wrestling sensation Kenny Omega is the latest arc in a storied career that has always seen him stay one step ahead of where the industry is going. | | |
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| In the early 1990s a few ambitious politicians rejected redistribution for a ‘new capitalism’ based on equal opportunities and the free market. Some people became filthy rich and others turned to grassroots politics. Sound familiar? | | |
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| After accidentally killing a man while under the influence, Donté Stallworth writes that we need to work harder to prevent people from driving impaired. | | |
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| This past March, Michigan State University trustee Joel Ferguson told Michigan's WXYZ-TV that "MSU is going to look great" after an internal investigation into how the school handled sexual assault allegations against Larry Nassar. | | |
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| A video game famed for its realism and attention to detail misses the mark in its attempt to represent gay footballers. | | |
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| Recently, I discovered that I am now a Mammoth. Perhaps a wooly one. The emotional wrench -- as my alma mater, Amherst College, switched this year from being the Lord Jeffs to the Mammoths -- wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be. | | |
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| LeBron James welcomes the Lakers to Cleveland on Thursday night. Is he taking the court against his future teammates, or will "LeBron to L.A." remain the stuff of Hollywood fiction? | | |
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| A contract clause meant to reward Cubs free agent Tyler Chatwood drew controversy at the winter meetings when the BBWAA objected because it potentially could compromise writers' integrity. | | |
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| Chess isn't an easy game, by human standards. But for an artificial intelligence powered by a formidable, almost alien mindset, the trivial diversion can be mastered in a few spare hours. | | |
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| | | | | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit |
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