There was a time when Barcelona fans did not expect success. To wallow in pessimism was the accepted norm. Trophies? Titles? They were for others, usually the reserve of the grandiose club of the capital, Real Madrid.
The European Cup was as elusive as the unicorn: talked about, looked at with wonder, pictured with others but never seen in this Catalonian city by the Mediterranean sea.
A club like Barcelona, the nihilistic fans would say, would never reach the zenith of European club football. There was no bombast, no peacocking, just fatalism.
The ironhanded years of General Francisco Franco, whose dictatorial regime had crushed Catalonia’s earlier limited autonomy, had ruined the spirit.
True, Barcelona had been able to sign football greats such as Johan Cruyff and Diego Maradona, but two European Cup finals — in 1961 and 1986 — had ended in defeat and between 1961 and 1990, the club won just two league titles in Spain’s top flight, finishing runners up 13 times.
But all changed on May 20, 1992.
1. Aimee Lewis takes an interesting look at the match that changed football for CNN
Something else happened to O’Sullivan after his mental health problems were finally articulated and addressed. He got politicised. Having never voted before and professing an understandable apathy in the face of interchangeable career politicians, in 2015 he threw his support behind Ed Miliband. Almost overnight he seemed to become convinced that parliamentary politics have the potential to change lives. Since then, he has been a dogged defender of Labour and increasingly vocal about social inequality and poverty.
“I’ve not paid much attention to what is going on in the outside world,” he said in an interview in 2015. “But that has changed now, and it has changed my outlook on life like you wouldn’t believe. I now realise how lucky I’ve been… I get the chance to choose when I play and when I don’t play. Most people are stuck in jobs they don’t like and have no choice over the hours they work. Or are struggling to find work. That can’t be easy or good for the mind.”
2. Vice’s Megan Nolan explains how snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan found politics
No pitch has ended more aspiring careers than the curve. As former Kentucky congressman Ben Chandler once said on behalf of the great diaspora who know the feeling too well, “I was planning to be a baseball player until I ran into something called a curveball.”
No pitch causes major league hitters to freeze more often. No pitch has inspired more legends, myths, fear, grips, nicknames, and ooohs and aaahs. It is a wonder of physics, geometry and art, a beautiful, looping arc through space made possible by the interplay between gravity and the Magnus force—a result of the flow of air around the spinning sphere—that often leaves us, and the hitter, paralyzed in wonderment.
This season marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first curveball (and its first controversy). So it’s fitting that McCullers and the red-hot Houston Astros are at the forefront of a revolution in pitching. Spin is in. Thanks partly to technology and the ubiquity of high velocity, the curveball is enjoying a very happy 150th birthday.
3. Tom Verducci investigates for SI how baseball’s curveball is becoming an increasingly lethal weapon in the pitcher vs. hitter battle
There are just only so many times a person can go back to the well before it dries up. In Golden State’s 129–115 finishing blow in San Antonio to reach its third consecutive NBA Finals, Steph Curry dropped 36 points in fewer than 34 minutes, raising his postseason average to 28.6 points per game on 50–43–90 splits.
But numbers just don’t seem like enough anymore. The Warriors aren’t necessarily boring, they’ve just reoriented their standards of beauty to something less visceral. Their beauty this season has been expressed infractals, whereas last year, in searching for (and destroying) the NBA’s offensive boundaries, it possessed the kind of haphazard magic of a Jackson Pollock.
4. The Ringer’s Danny Chau remembers The night Steph Curry became a star
The drive from Las Vegas to Long Beach is, under ideal conditions, an excruciatingly dull 283-mile slog that offers non-breathtaking views of dirt, sand, rock, dust and roadkill. Located 157 miles to the west of the strip, Barstow serves as an oasis to wearied travelers. So Jaso made the decision to stop here; to give his players a rest and to fork over $8 a head in the name of salvaging something from an otherwise miserable endeavor.
After the two buses pulled into the allotted parking spaces along the northern side of the In-N-Out, players wearily rose from the green vinyl seats, when Robert Hollie, the Jackrabbits’ backup quarterback, gazed out a window and said, softly at first, “Yo, it’s Pac!”
5. Jeff Perlman on Tupac causing havoc at a football game for Bleacher Report
Brian Kerr’s letter got straight to the point.
Damien Duff remembers reading it and being impressed not just by the finer details but, more pressingly, the closing line. “The World Cup final is on July 15,” Kerr wrote, “so don’t book any holidays before then.”
6. For the Times, Garry Doyle charts the story of the most successful underage team in Irish football’s history
