“This rumor,” Callahan said on air, “this Aaron Hernandez rumor—which is so juicy. . . . It is big.”
“It’s something we can certainly play with as the days go on,” Minihane said. “I’m not sure how comfortable Michele is in talking about it.”
McPhee was, however, open to talking about it. “I mean, hey,” she said to her radio pals. “Let’s tease away.”
The three then jokingly riffed—in a cringe-inducing manner familiar to most listeners of American sports radio—on the suggestion that Hernandez was sexually attracted to men. Using football metaphors to insinuate his preference, the men referred to Hernandez as a “tight end on and off the field,” adding, “then he became a wide receiver.” This went on, with McPhee adding that Hernandez kicked “with both feet.”
Two days later, and just hours before his former team stood with Donald Trump at the White House in honor of its Super Bowl win, Hernandez hanged himself in the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, in Shirley, Massachusetts, after inking a Bible verse on his forehead and placing cardboard under his cell door to make it difficult for guards to intervene, as was detailed in the Boston Globe and in McPhee’s subsequent reporting forNewsweek.
1. The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea charts the reporting of Aaron Hernandez’s sexuality before and after his suicide
Curry really is nice. Ask anyone in the organization. Ask anyone who’s had multiple interactions with him. As Draymond Green often says of his teammate, “It’s not a front.” If “nice” is Steph’s brand, it’s a brand buoyed by authenticity.
In many ways, nice built this team. It’s allowed Steph to delegate powers to others who, fortunately, have used those powers well. It’s allowed him to focus on improving himself, while leaving others to do the kinds of jobs that augment his efforts. It’s allowed the Warriors to fire Mark Jackson, against Curry’s wishes. And it allowed the team to make its biggest, boldest move of all: force the very nice man who resurrected the franchise to marginalize himself — and like it.
2. On ESPN.com, Ethan Sherwood looks into the inside story of how Kevin Durant’s arrival in Golden State began the marginalization of Steph Curry
They needed Wall, even if he was a shell of himself. “I know I can jump higher than this, run faster, cut better,” he groused. He watched game film from high school and Kentucky to see how nimble he used to be. Then he showed the clips to Washington trainers, including Thomas Knox, during frequent house calls. “See,” Wall told Knox, “this is me.”
When he wasn’t studying his old video, he was monitoring Westbrook and Steph Curry, Kyrie Irving and Damian Lillard, mainstays in the long-running deliberation over the NBA’s best point guards. Wall wasn’t in the conversation. “I’d be about to play a big game against Russ or Steph, and I’m thinking, Damn, I hope my leg is good today,” Wall recalls. “There were so many days I woke up and I was like, ‘I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this.’
But I couldn’t make an excuse, because I was out there.” Only those closest to Wall could tell that he lacked lift on his jumper, that he strained for every chase-down block and fast-break dunk. He didn’t keep his condition a secret, but he didn’t broadcast it either.
3. SI’s Lee Jenkins writes about how Washington Wizards guard John Wall has found another gear this season
To Frade, his approach is a management philosophy, a personal dogma and a belief system rolled into one. It is a way of thinking more than a way of playing, one conceived and crafted in this office, at this university, but that can now claim devotees around the world.
Its most famous evangelist is José Mourinho, who deployed it to considerable success at Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid, and who now hopes it can revive Manchester United. But Mourinho is not alone. Most of the great Portuguese coaching diaspora carry some of Frade’s imprint: André Villas-Boas and Vítor Pereira most directly, from the time they spent at F.C. Porto, but also Monaco’s Leonardo Jardim and Hull City’s Marco Silva at one or more removes.
4. New York Times writer Rory Smith investigates Cybernetics, Cesarean Sections and Soccer’s Most Magnificent Mind
Sanches is two years younger than Alli. Increasingly he looks not just like a cautionary tale for any grand talent in football’s bay of sharks; but a convincing candidate for the title of most startlingly strange, meteoric, 24-month first-team career ever, even in a notably odd modern game.
His rise at Benfica was thrillingly swift. A first-team debut in October 2015 was followed within a year by a league and league cup double, a Euro 2016 winners medal with Portugal and a mega-money move to Bayern.
Sanches looked like something genuinely precious at the Euros, a tyro general with the skill to hold the ball, the boldness and strength to stride through the midfield and the brain to pick a pass. This was a player who just needed to be left to grow and learn and keep on pushing the limits of his own talent.
5. Barney Ronay looks at the cautionary tale of Renato Sanches for The Guardian
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