How the media abuse Hank Aaron:

The great slugger’s dignity is of interest only insofar as it can be picked up by the likes of George Will and swung in the general direction of Barry Bonds. … “As Barry Bonds continues his gimpy, joyless pursuit of such glory as he is eligible for,” Will wrote, “consider the odyssey of Mobile’s greatest native son.” Or as a Cincinnati Post headline pronounced: “Safe To Say Bonds No Aaron.” Of course, with Aaron, it has always been thus. It is the singular curse of his career: to be treated like a sandwich board for the prevailing attitudes of the day.

A profile of post-scandal Tiger Woods in light of his recent victory and a reflection on how little he has changed since Thanksgiving 2009.

I was in my friend Mark’s dorm room, sitting on his bed, watching the game. We were freshmen, a bit more impressionable and a bit more willing to get excited about the athletic pursuits of our alma mater. Kristi Toliver hit the three-pointer, Kristi Toliver hit the free throws, and Maryland was the national champion in women’s basketball.

We didn’t join the mini-riot on Route 1 because, well, we were precocious enough to have some common sense. But I remember the game well. I hadn’t been around (or a Maryland fan) for the 2002 men’s title, so Toliver and Laura Harper and Brenda Frese were the winning Terrapins to me. I covered the team a few times, even once in Cancún, and appreciated its success.

Tonight, the men. Tomorrow, the women. Kentucky, Kansas, Baylor and Notre Dame fans, I hope you remember where you were.

Does he ever sit back and realize just how silly it is that he has built a life and fame around all of this?

He laughs and shakes his head.

“Every day.”

So allow me the obligatory moment to point this out: Peter Crouch is really, really underrated. Throughout his career, he’s been consistently underestimated, not only by fans but also by his own managers. It’s as if, because he looks like Kevin Durant being possessed by the spirit of Princess Diana, no one quite believes that his contributions are real; there must be some other explanation for whatever he does.

What happens when players get traded.

An excerpt from “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team.”

A profile of Rick Pitino, from his days at Kentucky.

Did you see Tiger Woods on Sunday? There he was: red shirt-wearing, intimidating, win-closing Tiger Woods strutting the course at Bay Hill and flicking off all comers like they should have known better.

Sometimes, it’s not a case of the rich getting richer as much as the rich remembering they’re the rich. Last year, as Butler and Virginia Commonwealth crashed the Final Four and—oh, the audacity!—stole a whole semifinal for themselves, we shrugged. This is what’s become of the NCAA tournament in the one-and-done era, the thinking went. The Butlers and VCUs have more experience, and experience is the great equalizer. 

Tiger Woods didn’t win a tournament in 2011, though.

There’s nothing throwback about this Final Four. Don’t be misled—it was only back in 2008 when all four No. 1 seeds made it to the final weekend. This is the college basketball gods’ attempt at a balancing act. This is the twisted apology for that unsightly title game last year. We’ve got four public universities with deep basketball histories, three (sorry, Louisville) high-powered offenses, and below, we’ve got one story for each team, plus a fifth on the scene.

The national championship game won’t end 53-41 this time. And Tiger Woods will win again.

The Miami Heat’s hoodied-down team photo, and LeBron’s tweeting thereof, was both a symbolic gesture and more than that.

Barça are now so drilled on the field that in some ways they are more like an American gridiron football team than a soccer one.

What Chip Jones did that night was nothing and everything.

He went to the team hotel, slept in, woke up, got his old body moving again and headed back to the park, looking for any little baseball thing that he could do right.

Spending a few days with the most powerful man in women’s hoops:

But the truth is, Geno is an egomaniac, if an egomaniac can be defined as someone deluded enough, certain enough of his own grandeur, of his own infinite possibilities, that he sets as his goal in life the unattainable, Perfection. “It’s simple,” Shea Ralph, a former player and now a UConn assistant coach, told me. “The problem is that Geno has a vision in his head of the perfect game, and we’re supposed to play it. If we’re ahead by 30 at the half, he’ll tell us how pitiful we are.”

On Fabrice Muamba and how athletes fall:

There’s no gentle way to put this, so I’ll just say it: I think everyone who watched this unfold believed that they had just seen a player die. Muamba had had a heart attack, was the (correct, as it turned out) assumption. On Twitter, in forums, and I imagine in a thousand conversations, there was optimism, but it was mostly of the hoping-against-hope variety. Something to cling to when you know that no one’s supposed to die on a sports field.

Excerpt from the 1999 book, searching for the man behind the stereotypes.

Wallace’s unlikely popularity, and what it says about our changing conception of the athlete as role model.

Meet Greg Cauley, the most dedicated–or, depending on who you ask, the craziest–college sports fan in America.

A meditation on Philly’s most overpaid / underrated / surly / selfish / inscrutable / cowardly / polarizing athlete. Ever.

We foist a lot of expectations on the NCAA tournament. We want upsets. We want the best teams to go far. We want exciting finishes. We want perfect brackets. When those fail, we want total havoc. But we want order and certainty that the teams will be as memorable as the shining moments, that a single-elimination tournament is a reasonable way to crown a champion.

Tom Izzo’s Michigan State teams are 17-3 in the second game of NCAA tournament weekends. I love that statistic because it explains why Izzo is the ultimate NCAA tournament coach. It’s not that he’s perfect; he’s imperfect in a way that makes sense and provides ideal fodder for our entertainment. Izzo’s Spartans were the first victims in George Mason’s march to the 2006 Final Four. And they cut Vermont’s run short in the second round the year before. These things make sense to me: The first game of the weekend, upsets provide fun. The second game, an upset provides a week-long feeling of inevitability (even if a Virginia Commonwealth slips through into a third weekend occasionally).

Through two three rounds, this tournament has followed the basic pattern we’ve come to expect: Izzo’s pattern. There were just enough wild upsets to keep us entertained (even if they didn’t start until Friday evening), but the round of 16 has the substance demanded of it. There’s a Cinderella in Ohio, a reeling No. 1 seed in North Carolina and a pair of teams that got into an all-out brawl in non-conference play.

The emblem of the weekend: Robbie Hummel’s tears. We’ll miss him, as Gregg Doyel notes in one of our five selections of Sunday’s best writing from the NCAA tournament, but the loss makes sense. March Madness, 52 games in, makes sense.

Tyson, Artest, the Internet, and the case of the “crazy” athlete.