Ray Lewis and Murder, They Wrote.

 

Ray Lewis entered the NFL in tears, mourning the death of his slain friend and roommate Marlin Barnes on draft day.

Ray Lewis left the NFL in a spasm of joy Sunday, a two-time Super Bowl champion at the conclusion of the final game of his 17-season career.

In between, Lewis went [...]

Football, Body and Mind.

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I had a mostly unremarkable, short career in football—yet that was still more than enough time for the game to leave its mark, all over my body. I had been dealing with arthritis, joint stiffness, and backaches for years when a weight-room mishap drove me to an emergency clinic in the summer of 2010, when I was 32. Several follow-up appointments ended with me in an MRI machine and an appointment with a neurosurgeon. [...]

“Girls Don’t Know How To Play Football.”

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After his six-year-old daughter declares matter-of-factly that little girls don’t play football, a father considers how our ideas about gender are formed. [...]

The End of Football.

Once the whistles were blown and men started thudding into one another again, Robert Griffin III summoned all of that magic and most everyone forgot about his head in favor of his arm and legs.

It’s easy to forget about the men – and their heads – beneath all that armor. They are [...]

PostBourgie: The Podcast | #20: Giving Up Football, And Losing A Language

The cloud of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — the concussion-related brain disease that can lead to mental illness and Alzheimer’s-like symptoms — has hung over the apparent suicide of Junior Seau, one of the N.F.L.’s great linebackers. The news was the final straw for Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, who wrote that he could no longer find [...]

What If …

… Michael Vick was white?

Well, if we have to provide an answer, I suppose he’d look like Brian Austin Green and play like a slightly less effective but more dynamic blend of Steve Young and Fran Tarkenton.

But that’s not really the question worth asking. What I really want to know is [...]

Hate Me Now.

“[At] the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m [...]

Do Athletes Need to Stand Up?

Jamilah King has a good post up at ColorLines that ponders what, if anything, is required of athletes when it comes to political leadership.

As professional athletes have risen in media exposure and income over at least the past four decades, so too has the call for them to take center [...]