1. An awkward silence filled the space between them until Trittschuh realized what was happening. Baggio, perhaps the greatest player of his time, was asking a 25-year-old defender from Granite City, Illinois, to trade pants.

“I had Baggio’s shorts forever, man,” Trittschuh said one recent morning as he prepared to coach his Colorado Springs Switchbacks of the United Soccer League. “It was the coolest thing.”

This oral history about the USA’s Italia ’90 campaign is a great read. There was teams other than Ireland there apparently.

2. 

John Riordan wraps his always-enjoyable weekly Irish Examiner column from New York:

3. ”When I sat down with Every at a shaded table outside the Colonial clubhouse in late May, it didn’t take long before he cemented his reputation as the most outspoken professional golfer in the universe. We had met just once before, and didn’t speak for more than five minutes. Clearly, my status as a stranger—and one armed with a tape recorder—didn’t faze him. Within minutes, he was boasting, complaining, joking, and opining about golf and himself—his two favorite subjects—with a startling amount of insight and intelligence. I liked him immediately.

If you can take this onslaught in stride, it quickly becomes clear that the recurring criticism of Every—his arrogance—is off base. He does carry himself with a certain amount of swagger, and has a smile that verges on smug, but there’s not much self-importance or superiority to him—far less anyway, than you get from your average golfer. The world is interesting to Every, and he makes himself vulnerable to outside elements. He wouldn’t like the word I’m about to use, and you wouldn’t know it by his bulldog build—five foot eleven and solid, with a head like a cinder block—but the truth is that he’s sensitive, albeit in the most combative way possible.

Every, then thirty, has been kicked around the Tour, mocked by fans and media, and targeted for his past, but unlike the vast majority of American golfers, he never tries to hide his emotions or retreat into a cocoon.”

Golf.com carried an extract from a new book ‘Slaying The Tiger: A Year Inside The Ropes on the New PGA Tour’ by Shane Ryan, that looks great.

4.  “On February 28, 2013, I was a junior at the University of Michigan. That particular night, like many others, one of my housemates and soon-to-be basketball spirit guide was watching his beloved New York Knicks. What I saw was someone – possibly a child, definitely not a Knick – making an unreal number of shots he had no business taking.

Let’s get one thing clear: I was not a sports kid. I grew up with zero athletic bones in my body and, by virtue of where, little to no sense of athletic fandom. Before Steph Curry went for 50 that night against the Knicks, I was not a basketball fan, and I certainly wasn’t a Warriors fan. Steph Curry’s performance that night helped change that of course, and now, either way they go, these NBA Finals are going to make me cry. Steph Curry is to blame for that, too.”

Shea Corrigan, a ‘lifelong sports agnostic on falling in love for the first time’, on the Classical.

5.

“Whichever way you slice this one – context, execution, arrogance, dramatic irony – it is the undeniable masterpiece of the backpassing genre. You know the story behind it – you could barely script it.

Steve McMahon, having sternly gestured to his Liverpool team-mates that only one minute separated them from the league title, decided to run down a few seconds of it. Alan Hansen takes a free-kick short to McMahon, who has no interest in the Arsenal half.”

An ode to the backpass by Adam Hurrey of Football Cliches.

Originally published at 07.30

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