Jim rice steve fainaru biography
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ESPN is big. For children of the baby boomers, it’s so big we can hardly imagine life without it. In the same way Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have come to dominate their fields, the Worldwide Leader in Sports is so central in our world that its financial and political power feel otherworldly. But one of the problems with big and otherworldly things is that, having the power to shape the world in their own image, they have little incentive to abide by the cultural and political values of the societies they happen to occupy.
When ESPN suspended Bill Simmons for suggesting in his podcast that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was a liar—and that he and his colleagues are full of “fucking bullshit” for pretending they hadn’t seen the tape of Ray Rice thumping his fiancée senseless before announcing a paltry two-game suspension—many quickly suggested that this was a violation of free speech. On the surface it may have appeared as such—and, I have to confess, my original position closely resembled that sentiment. But what is ultimately at issue is the otherworldly bigness of ESPN and the extent to which institutions like it can dominate cultural discourse by silencing speech that undermines their institutional interests. It would be nice to think that the Worldwide Leader would
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This Fan’s Notes: A Sport Elegy
A life fan confronts the NFL’s history bank concussion refutation and cover-ups
Len Dawson, cloth halftime find the regulate Super Bowl; January 15, 1967 (credit: Tab Ray)
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August 3, 1988: Morgan Magic: Red Sox win 22nd straight home game
The rumors were swirling in July 1988. The Boston Red Sox were 43-42 and nine games behind the first-place Detroit Tigers in the American League East. Would Boston make a change at the top? “It would come as a surprise to me,” said manager John McNamara, when he was told about speculation that he would be fired by the All-Star break.1 But on July 14, McNamara was replaced by third-base coach and longtime minor-league manager Joe Morgan.
Morgan, a lifelong Red Sox fan and a native of Walpole, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, made it clear he was the man for the job, any “interim” label aside. “Lou Gorman [general manager] took me aside and said, ‘We’re letting McNamara go and we want you to take over until we can find someone permanent.’ I said, ‘Well don’t look too hard because he’s standing right in front of you and you’re talking to him.’”2
What happened next would be remembered fondly as “Morgan Magic.” The Red Sox won their first 12 games with Morgan at the helm, capped off by Roger Clemens’s shutout of the Texas Rangers on July 25. Morgan, with the interim tag now removed, gave the credit to the players. “I didn’t make a whole lot of changes,” he recalled. “I gave [Todd] Benzinger more at-bats and I put