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Tommy Craggs
Reporter, editor, TV writer, etc.
some stuff i’ve done
The LaRouchies and their fascist project are still alive and unwell (New Republic)
“LaRouchies still walk among us, embarrassing undead artifacts of another era’s grotesque folly, like Henry Kissinger or the Bay City Rollers.”What’s the matter with cultural politics? (Mother Jones)
“The critics’ premise has two parts, the one at odds with the other. The first is that these cultural issues are so powerful as to dislodge certain workers from their ‘natural’ affinities and antagonisms, as crudely reckoned by their class position. One glimpse of the specter of wokeness and they go running into the arms of the party of the bosses and plutocrats who hate them. The second is that these cultural issues are so flimsy and evanescent as to vanish at the mention of ‘meat-and-potatoes issues,’ as Claire McCaskill put it on MSNBC the day after the election. Which is it? Are cultural issues a set of powerful currents that buffet people around the political spectrum? Or are they a collection of irrelevancies and distractions with no real substance or meaning, lightly worn and easily dismissed?”Don’t listen to the blowhards. The 2016 election was about the issues (Slate)
“The one favor Trump did us was to be monstrous about the things in America that matter the most, to force a confrontation with all the stuff our politics typically is at pains to suppress. This campaign was about power, and it was about impunity.”A prospect’s bong video revealed the substance the NFL hates more than any other: bad PR (Slate)
“The outrage wasn’t so much about the pot as it was about Tunsil putting himself in the position of getting bad publicity. Rozelle was a PR man before he was a commissioner, and he instilled within the NFL a PR man’s fear not of the thing itself but of what someone else might think of the thing.”The doping allegations against Peyton Manning were a great argument against the sports world’s war on drugs (Slate)
“The distinction between enhancement and recovery has never made much sense, least of all in the context of football, where players spend their brief careers just trying to enhance themselves out of bed in the morning.”How Cam Newton stretched the sports world’s racial boundaries (Slate)
“You can be Black and prideful, but only to the extent that you’re willing to play the heel (Barry Bonds). You can be Black and demonstrative, but only to the extent that you’re willing to play the clown (Chad Ochocinco). Your flaws as an athlete are racial traits, and your physical ‘gifts’ are, too, and your success is a matter of how effectively you transcend your brute atavisms and embrace the prevailing ‘white’ idioms of play (Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick, even Michael Jordan).”How Steph Curry became a basketball folk hero (Slate)
“I watched him against West Virginia, in the midst of a massive and boisterous walk-up crowd on a night when Madison Square Garden for once earned the right to call itself a basketball mecca. Fans yelled ‘Shoot!’ every time he touched the ball, and more often than not he would do so, sometimes from roughly the Palisades, sometimes with the West Virginia defense draped around his shoulders like a shawl, and everyone cheered the minor miracle of his even squeezing off an attempt. Then came his shimmying little flick of a crossover, and his defender was on his heels, and the fans were on their toes. We all said ‘Shoot!’ and he did, and for a moment it was like a great big magic act everyone was in on.”How a high school kid became a basketball folk villain (Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine)
“It is a vast, roiling Dodge City of the hoops landscape, lying as it does outside the reach of high-school coaches and the regulatory arm of the N.C.A.A. an unsavory world, in the popular imagination, of street agents and shoe boxes full of cash and chest-thumping 16-year-olds with Adidas stripes branded like bar codes on their foreheads. And largely for that reason, summer ball has become a catch-all symbol of basketball indulgence, blamed for everything from the death of the bounce pass to the corruption of America’s youth to the occasional failures of the grown men who represent USA Basketball on the international stage. It is something like basketball’s bad conscience. And it was in this system that [Renardo] Sidney thrived.”The selling of a shit-talking Black bass fisherman (SF Weekly, anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing 2004, back when the series seemed to have a one-fishing-story-per-year quota)
“‘Call me Ish,’ he says.”Why does Joe Morgan hate Moneyball? And why is he yelling at me? (SF Weekly, reprinted in Deadspin)
“The earth beneath Joe Morgan’s feet is impossibly flat, every bump smoothed over, every blemish manicured into oblivion, all so that a white cork-filled ball might roll straight and true, the way it has for a hundred years.”All the overwrought emails the sports media sent to Auburn’s PR guy during Cam Newton’s wild 2010 season (Deadspin)
I obtained via public records request all the emails exchanged between the media and the Auburn football team’s PR apparatus during the school’s national championship season. The emails told a story about how media narratives are built, unbuilt, and built anew, and about the power of ESPN (back then, at least) to distort everything that entered its orbit. (Deadspin)A review of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss (Washington Post)
“It’s a companion piece to Branch’s blockbuster Atlantic Monthly article from 2011, which brought moral urgency to a cause that in most formal venues was being pressed in the dry proceduralese of antitrust litigation. If Branch’s story was a brick thrown through the NCAA’s window, ‘Indentured’ is all the theses nailed to its door. The book’s only failure is that it seems not to realize, in all its understandable triumphalism, that the story being told between its lines is ultimately a gloomier one about the resilience of the status quo.”The man who beat some sense into baseball (Deadspin)
“He was in the phone book. That’s the thing that always got me about Marvin Miller, the former head of the MLB players association and the man who pulled baseball out of its crude prehistory. You expect your heroes to be unlisted. You don’t expect to find one of them in the white pages, right there between a Marva and a Mary, willing to give 30 minutes to a callow stranger who wants to talk about Jim Bunning or David Stern or Sonia Sotomayor.”God, John Wooden was an insufferable prig (Slate)
So was Grantland Rice (Deadspin)
I wrote a lot about ESPN during my time at Deadspin. Here’s a story about Skip Bayless, Jamie Horowitz, and the deeply cynical “Embrace Debate” era of ESPN. Here’s one about what Howie Schwab meant to ESPN. Here’s one about the time I crashed ESPN’s “state of the union” address. (Deadspin)
The media diminished Hank Aaron by turning him into a cudgel against Barry Bonds (Slate, anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing 2008)
Back in 2010, I obtained financials for several MLB teams, some of the most closely guarded documents in sports. In part because of our story, the SEC launched an investigation into the financing of the Marlins’ new stadium. (Deadspin)
about me
I’m an editor and a writer of all kinds, most recently for HBO’s Game Theory With Bomani Jones. Before that I was an enterprise editor of Mother Jones and HuffPost, politics editor of Slate, executive editor of Gawker Media (RIP), and editor-in-chief of Deadspin (RIP). My writing has appeared in the Best American Sports Writing (RIP), the New York Times, Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine (RIP), New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Pitchfork, and a bunch of other places, some of which may still exist. Full CV here.