By Kevin Dowd

The University of Washington football record book lists some 2,000 men who’ve lettered in football over the past thirteen decades, spanning from Bob Abel (1919-20) to Bryan Zurek (1949-51). Broken down by position, these are the best names in school history:  Continue reading “The UW Huskies all-time all-name team”

“Running … is like getting up every morning and shooting yourself. You know that you are going to put yourself through something really painful, but you also know how much strength and speed are going to come with it. The passion of the runner is to force forgetfulness on that pain and embrace the benefits that will without fail make you a better person.” –Adam Batliner, former Colorado Buffalo

The metaphor is a little sloppy, but the sentiment is undeniable. Running sucks. People who don’t run know this, and people who do run know it on a much deeper level. So why do we do it?

Continue reading “The Passion Of The Buffaloes”

After Part I, Part II and Part III, here we are: the ten greatest athletes of the millennium so far. Now we enter the upper echelon. Each of the names below could stake a claim as the greatest athlete ever in his or her respective sport—with maybe one exception.

These are the men and women who’ve made my jaw drop the most during the past two decades:

Continue reading “The 40 Greatest Athletes of the Millennium, Part IV”

With half our list gone, we’re getting into the realm of the all-timers, athletes who can genuinely claim to be legends in their respective sports—including three lefties, two California natives and one middle-aged man known for yelling “Omaha!” The margins are getting smaller. If you flip-flopped No. 20 with No. 11, I might say you’re wrong, but I wouldn’t call you crazy.

If you missed the previous twenty names in the rankings, check out Part I and Part II. Here we go:

Continue reading “The 40 Greatest Athletes of the Millennium, Part III”

Welcome back to the second part of the list—or if you’re just joining in, go back and check out part one, featuring young guns like Mike Trout and Kevin Durant and more elderly specialists like Mariano Rivera and pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva. Yeah, a pole vaulter—we’re going deep here. Among today’s additions: A Serb, a seven-footer, and one-time sensation from Down Under.

Without further ado, here are ten more of the greatest athletes of the millennium:

Continue reading “The 40 Greatest Athletes of the Millennium, Part II”

Why do we watch sports? There are lots of answers, but here’s my favorite: To experience greatness. To get goosebumps. To see the human body, this thing we all share, do incredible things. To witness men and women who can change our definition of what’s possible.

And there are so many of them. This all started off as a much shorter list. A top ten turned into a top fifteen, which turned into a top thirty and, well, here we are. It’s been seventeen years and nine months since the beginning of the 2000s, a period that encompasses nearly my entire memory as a person, and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of that time watching and reading and thinking about sports. I’ve had the chance to develop some opinions.

This is going to be a bit of a journey, if you choose to stick around. I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.

Continue reading “The 40 Greatest Athletes of the Millennium, Part I”

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

–David Foster Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” 2006

The few seconds I’ll remember came when John Isner lobbed a shot over Roger Federer’s head into the ad corner. You could see what was coming before it happened: In the way Federer gave chase and positioned his body, how he ran past the ball, let it pass between his legs and come oh-so-close to striking the ground before flicking his wrist and blindly scooping the little yellow sphere off the floor — his back still to the net — to send a through-the-wickets rocket across toward Isner. A bit of casual genius.

Continue reading “Both Flesh And Not”

Sophomore year of high school, we all had to do a job shadow. I kind of wanted to be a sportswriter, but that didn’t sound like a very fun day off school. So since my dad a) worked at the University of Washington and b) had a friend in the basketball office and c) is not shy about such things, he asked said friend if his fifteen-year-old son could follow Lorenzo Romar around for a day. For some strange reason, Romar said yes.

And so it came to be that I spent one late-winter afternoon in 2008—I wanna say it was four or five hours—hanging around Hec Edmundson Pavilion with no particular purpose.

Continue reading “The End Of An Era”

Is it weird to say basketball is our most romantic sport? In the artistic sense, not like it’s all lovey-dovey. I think most votes would go to baseball and its obsessive pastoral nostalgia, and fair enough. But I’ll take basketball any day. I’ll take the pick-and-roll. The give-and-go. The 10-year-old heaving up shots toward a crooked rim at the end of her dusty driveway as the moon rises and day turns to dusk turns to night. I’ll take the opening credits of Hoosiers.

I’ll take Kelsey Plum. And if you want to throw him in, I’ll take Michael Porter Jr., too.

Continue reading “Kelsey Plum, Michael Porter Jr., And Basketball Transcendence”

The human brain has evolved perfectly for wrongness. When presented with a new situation or new data, we make assumptions based on similar things we’ve encountered in the past. Once we make those assumptions, we find it difficult to change our minds. We are herd-like creatures: If the people around us believe something, we’re more likely to believe it too. If someone or something does manage to convince us a belief is wrong, in retrospect, we usually won’t remember it that way. We’ll recall being more correct originally than was actually the case.

These are some of the tools we’ve picked up over the millennia to make sense of reality, to cope with a chaotic universe in which everything from asteroids to poisonous berries is trying to kill us. For the purposes of being smart enough to advance the species another generation, they’re great tools. There’s a reason we’re overwhelming the planet. But when it comes to solving some of humanity’s more complex problems, well, it’s safe to there are sharper ones buried elsewhere in the shed. Continue reading “The Unbearable Wrongness Of Beings”