The New Republic

The Memphis Grizzlies entered this NBA season as a good basketball team living in the worst of all possible worlds. Coming off two consecutive playoff runs, they were bound to compile a record sufficiently strong to fail to qualify for a lottery-high draft pick, yet not improved or even different enough to be likely to emerge from the super-competitive Western Conference to play for the championship. READ MORE >>

Those of us who courageously and valiantly defend the NBA as being superior to college basketball generally face an uphill struggle. It’s true that the NCAA is a blatantly corrupt organization, and that the likes of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant (who both went from high school to the pros) are nowhere to be found in the college game. But professional basketball is burdened with giant egos, often anemic effort, and too much ball-hogging. Only the sheer quality of the top players can cover up these problems. READ MORE >>

The front pages have spoken: Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United FC has retired. David Moyes, presently in charge of Everton (the other Liverpool club) will take over this summer. Ferguson, lovingly referred to by Man U fans as SAF, as if he were a unit the British Special Forces, has won for the club thirteen English Premierships, two Champions League and world club champion titles, and a number of cups. READ MORE >>

On the biggest day of his life, West Virginia quarterback Geno Smith was eager to prove his critics wrong. READ MORE >>

This morning, NBA center Jason Collins became the first active athlete in a major American sport to come out. “I’m black. And I’m gay,” he wrote in the first line of an essay for Sports Illustrated. READ MORE >>

Upon hearing that Jason Collins, the journeyman National Basketball Association center, just became the first active male major-league athlete to announce publicly that he is gay, the mind involuntarily compares him to a previous sports trailblazer. When he donned a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 (as chronicled in 42, the feature film that has grossed more than $55 million in its first three weeks), Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play Major League Baseball or any other professional sport. READ MORE >>

Tonight, the NFL Draft begins—in case you hadn’t heard. The cover of the most recent ESPN The Magazine is dedicated to it, and Sports Illustrated likely would have fronted it, too, had the Boston Marathon bombings not taken precedence. READ MORE >>

In the same way that, as poet Philip Larkin put it, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963,” Robert Lipsyte invented cynicism about the world of sports. Which is to say: He didn’t literally, but he may as well have. READ MORE >>

A sad fact of life is that there are few great soccer novels. There are many reasons: In soccer, the true drama is enacted on the pitch; great players, whose success is reliant on repetition and discipline, are cads at best, colorless characters at worst; the managers comply with the stereotype of the fatherly figure. The only serious runner for a great soccer novel is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, narrated by someone who never gets into the fray—a committed fan. READ MORE >>

The 24-hour news cycle yielded one of its better sitcom interludes last week when Rand Paul went to Howard University, the historically black college, to tell its student body why it needed the Republican Party. The libertarian junior senator from Kentucky, at one point, asked for a show-of-hands from those who knew that most of the African Americans who founded the NAACP more than 100 years ago were Republican. READ MORE >>