“To Porter’s clients — actors and musicians as well as athletes — he is almost indispensable. He will not say it, but he is the ultimate purveyor of the Premier League lifestyle. It is Porter whom you call to get your hands on the latest cellphone, or when the time comes to upgrade your car. It is Porter who can make sure your Christmas shopping is completed, or your vacation is booked. It is Porter who knows the people to hire if you want Santa to visit your children, and it is Porter, to at least one player, whose help you seek when you want to propose.”
– Rory Smith of the New York Times talks to Charles Porter, who has helped to provide the Premier League lifestyle to hundreds of players in English football over the past 20 years.
“For one season only, Crystal Palace experimented with writing two lines of information below each player’s name in the team lineup in the matchday programme. Something along the lines of: “Back in form with a goal at Norwich following a lean spell.” Inane? Possibly. Try writing them for every player 21 times a season. The aim by the end was to think of something to write about Phil Barber that didn’t contain the words, “Mr 110%…” It wasn’t until Mark Bright accosted me at the club’s Mitcham training ground to find out why I thought that he’d been out of form prior to his aforementioned goal at Norwich that I realised that the players actually read those lines. They may have been the only ones. As a 15-year-old, trying to explain to your hero that he hadn’t actually been out of form, just unlucky, was not the most pleasant of tasks.”
– Life at a football club through the eyes of two interns, by Tom Maslona and Tom Bloomfield for When Saturday Comes and the Guardian Sport Network.
“You could show a photo of Kaepernick’s protest to someone who has never seen a football game or heard the national anthem or has no concept of race relations in this country, and the viewer would immediately understand the dynamics at work. The person kneeling had chosen to set himself apart from the group and had done so peacefully. The pose and its meaning are easy to replicate. And now every week another football team, whether college players at the University of Nebraska, high schoolers in San Francisco, even Pee Wees in Beaumont, Tex., kneel or raise a fist during the national anthem. Over the course of two months, Kaepernick has gone from a forgotten and failing quarterback to mass-produced icon. Hundreds of Kaepernicks kneel everywhere.”
– By kneeling during the US national anthem, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has ignited a new era of activism by athletes, writes Jay Caspian Kang for the New York Times Magazine.
“The thing I remember the most about the movie being over is that Michael kept trying to tell everyone that the last play of the game — that stretch dunk thing he does — he kept trying to tell everyone that he’d really done that. He swore up and down that it wasn’t special effects. I said, ‘Michael, you really expect me to believe that you stretched your arm 40 feet long and dunked it from half court? You for real expect me to believe that?’ He said, ‘You’re a giant cartoon chicken and you speak English.’ I guess he had a point.”
– A satirical oral history of Space Jam by The Ringer’s Shea Serrano.
“The fact that Ankersen is a ‘co’ director of football, a role he shares with Phil Giles, is part of that difference at the club owned by Brentford fan Matthew Benham — who established Smartodds, a business based on using data to predict the outcome of sports events to customers including professional gamblers. It has led to suspicion — and even ridicule — not least with a turnover of managers before Dean Smith was hired as head coach last November, from Walsall, with Brentford employing a ‘head of football philosophy’, coaches specialising in set-pieces, throw-ins and even ‘kicking’ and when the club’s academy was closed.”
– English Championship club Brentford opened its doors to The Telegraph’s Jason Burt to offer an insight into how they want to ‘out-think the opposition’ and plot a path into the Premier League.
“Strangely enough, the team didn’t tell me immediately what was wrong with me. After a few weeks, they told me that I had been suffering from anemia. When I finally started getting treatment, I was like 6’8” and like 71 kilos (155 lbs). I was a skeleton. Before the next season started, I was up to about 85 kilos (190 lbs). I felt really strong and good, and my game took off. Now looking back at it, it’s interesting to think about all the stuff I went through and that I did. I’m still here, I’m alive. I’ve put in the work. And now I’m good. Five years ago, I could not run down the court at practice without wanting to go to sleep. Now, I’m on the New York Knicks.”
– Kristaps Porzingis writes his story for The Players’ Tribune.
