1. “Right up until he started quoting Hitler and dropping N-bombs, my new friend was a great dude. I’ll call him The Hooligan. A more generous host would be hard to find. Soon after we met, he made sure we stopped at the one place in town that served Campari correctly. He speaks eight languages, and seemed nothing like the Hellas Verona fans I’d read about, the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, racist thugs. The Hooligan insisted the Veronese just have a dark sense of humor and refuse to wear the yoke of modern political correctness.”
Writing for ESPN The Magazine, Wright Thompson makes some new friends and takes a journey into the world of Italy’s racist football fans.
2. “‘It’s horrendous,’ he says. ‘There’s no worse feeling. You know that the past has gone but you realise after the final game there’s no chance of that reinvention, not for another eight weeks. That one you lose and you think, ‘I can’t bear it’. And I literally couldn’t bear it. I sat in that changing room and thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now’. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’ He almost shudders at the recollection. ‘Horrendous.’”
Jonny Wilkinson is a born winner so how is he coping with Toulon’s defeat in the Top 14 final? It’s eating away at him, he tells the Telegraph’s Oliver Brown.
3. “Montaous Walton, now 29 years old, says his story should be titled ‘The Dream Chaser’ and in a sense, that would be right, but only almost. There are other titles one could choose, names given Montaous by others, like ‘The Fraud,’ or ‘The Con Artist’—but those wouldn’t be quite right, either.”
SBNation’s Brandon Sneed tells the story of Montaous Walton, the Milwaukee man who wanted to be a baseball player so badly that he created a fake persona.
4. “I felt my shoe hit something. I retreated, looked down, squatted and brushed aside confetti. There it was: a Champions League player’s gold medal. I looked left. I looked right. Nobody could see me. I slipped the medal into my back pocket, got up and got the heck out of Wembley.”
While Sports Illustrated writer Nick Zaccardi was killing time in Wembley, he found a Champions League medal. Here’s the story of how he returned it to its rightful owner.
5. “For Mets minor leaguers, the last stop before the majors is a dilapidated ballpark 2,200 miles away from Citi Field. It is nestled along a row of abandoned lots and boarded up storefronts 5 miles north of the Las Vegas Strip, just past a motel sign that reads ‘Elvis Slept Here.’ Cashman Field is the home of the Las Vegas 51s, the Mets’ new Triple-A affiliate. And for a Northeast team whose rebuilding plan hinges on the development of its young pitchers, there is no worse place to be.”
How did the New York Mets end up with a minor league ball park out in Las Vegas? Brian Costas writes for the Wall Street Journal.
6. “The media loves the speculation of the transfer rumour mill. Without games to report on, it fills a vacuum whenever the transfer window is open. If the readers didn’t love the stories, the newspapers wouldn’t print them. But they do – more than any other topics. It’s a glimpse into a potentially brighter future with new players, an escape from reality and the demand is insatiable. Even a tenuous transfer story involving a big clubs can come out top for sport stories online.”
The Daily Post’s Andy Mitten on journalistic sources and transfer rumours in the age of social media.
