A Year After Jovan Belcher's Final Act, Friends Offer Clues to Tragic Downfall
Mother & Son Who Inspired 2Pac’s ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ Reunited After 34 Years
2Pac‘s classic song “Brenda’s Got a Baby” was inspired by a true story — and the story continues.
The rapper wrote the song addressing teen pregnancy in America’s ghettos while he was filming his star-turning role as Bishop in Juice after coming across a story in the news about a 12-year-old girl who threw her baby in a trash chute after being impregnated by her 21-year-old cousin. The track has since become one of the late entertainer’s most important records in his extensive catalog....
The rapper wrote the song addressing teen pregnancy in America’s ghettos while he was filming his star-turning role as Bishop in Juice after coming across a story in the news about a 12-year-old girl who threw her baby in a trash chute after being impregnated by her 21-year-old cousin. The track has since become one of the late entertainer’s most important records in his extensive catalog....
'Everything in Our Lives Was Traumatic': Tupac Shakur's Early Years in Baltimore
The story of Tupac Shakur has been told many times since his tragic death at just 25 following a drive-by shooting in 1996. Yet a life so big and complicated is always ripe for further exploration. Jeff Pearlman’s new biography, Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur, is a 400-page deep dive into Shakur’s brief and tumultuous existence, from his childhood in New York City, Baltimore, and the Bay Area to his early brushes with fame, the development of his gangsta rap persona, and h...
Shattered: Stories from the University of the Southwest golf program's tragic van accident
‘This Whole Thing Has F---ed Me Up’
The man walks into a Las Vegas Starbucks and his hands speak first. They are small and rough and soiled, with used-sandpaper skin and nails nubbed down by an uneasy life. You can read so much from a person’s hands, and Tony Rodriguez’s hands tell the story of a troubled journey.Or, put differently: There is no joy to the 47-year-old sitting here. Not as a medium black coffee is placed before him, not as he talks about shared geography and athletic glory days. Some folks walk the earth with a pep...
Inside the Lakers' Kobe-Shaq dynasty: fistfights, battle lines and Show(boat) time
Editor's note: The following story contains excerpts from Jeff Pearlman's new book, "Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty," published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book is on sale today, Sept. 22.Before Kobe Bryant was THE Kobe Bryant -- five-time NBA champion, 18-time All-Star -- he was a young boy growing up in Italy, the third of Joe and Pam Bryant's three children. His father, an eight-year NBA veteran nicknamed Jellybean, was playing out his car...
There would be blood: Witnessing the first sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing card in the U.S. in more than a century
CHEYENNE, WYO.—They said it shouldn’t be done.They said it had to be done.They said it was barbaric.They said it was safe.They said it was insipid.They said it was historic.The mayor of Cheyenne wanted nothing to do with it.Wyoming’s Combative Sports Commission wanted everything to do with it.People were horrified.People were giddy.In the leadup to Saturday night’s Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship here at the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center, many statements were uttered about the first sanction...
After starring in the NFL, Thomas Jones is rushing full speed toward his second act
In the lifespan of every male professional athlete, there comes a post-retirement moment when machismo is formally stripped, and the state of existence transitions from snarls and grunts and blood and sweat to an uncomfortable actuality of pedestrian life.When Ellis Valentine, the thunder-armed Montreal Expo outfielder, departed the game, he took a job parking cars at Avis. Shawn Green, once the great Los Angeles Dodgers slugger, is now a ballet dad. Ryan Grant, the former Green Bay Packers half...
Excerpt from new Favre biography, 'Gunslinger'
Following is an excerpt from the prologue of the new Brett Favre biography by Jeff Pearlman, "Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre." The book is set to be released Tuesday.
In many ways, a biography is a search for definition of character. You can’t possibly recreate every moment, or enter the brain of a subject matter, or know what a man or woman was precisely thinking at a particular moment (this is something that has forever bothered me about sports media: “Joey...
In many ways, a biography is a search for definition of character. You can’t possibly recreate every moment, or enter the brain of a subject matter, or know what a man or woman was precisely thinking at a particular moment (this is something that has forever bothered me about sports media: “Joey...
Book Excerpt: Showtime
Over the course of the two and a half years during which I researched Showtime, I came across a slew of funny, funky, cool, weird characters. No one, however, matched former Laker forward Kurt Rambis.
During the 1980s, Rambis was something of a novelty. First, he was a white starter at a time when there weren’t many. Second, he was a little-known nobody out of Santa Clara. Third, he appeared to be disheveled and overmatched. Of course, standing alongside the likes of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abd...
During the 1980s, Rambis was something of a novelty. First, he was a white starter at a time when there weren’t many. Second, he was a little-known nobody out of Santa Clara. Third, he appeared to be disheveled and overmatched. Of course, standing alongside the likes of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abd...
News of Gary Carter's inoperable brain cancer hits especially hard
Imagine a lineup of the 36 men who played for the 1986 New York Mets.Picture them standing there, all young and eager, decked out in their blue, white and orange uniforms. They are in their 20s and early 30s, the kings of New York, the kings of baseball.Now, if you will, arrange them in reverse order of predicted future health.These Mets are, in many regards, a troubled group. At the front of the line one must place Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, the two young stars who will battle years a...
For one writer, difficult assignment spawned a lifelong friendship
The worst day of my life was September 11, 2001.The second worst day of my life was September 12, 2001.The third worst day of my life was September 13, 2001.I was -- and still am -- a New Yorker. My wife and I lived less than a mile from the World Trade Center. Shortly after the first plane hit, I saw the burning hole in the side of the building. What the hell is that? What the ...I had no idea.The aftermath was hell. The odor of burning rubble. The thousands upon thousands of "IF YOU SEE THIS P...