Author: Don Yaeger

The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad—you probably know it better as the 2024 Summer Olympics—is about to kick off as the world’s best athletes converge on Paris.

So, you consider yourself a team player, do you? Well, would you be willing to leave money on the table so that your team could offer more to somebody else? How about if that money amounted to a generational-life-changing $113 million? You’d give it up, right, for the good of the team?

The dog days of summer are approaching and normally that would mean looking forward to some downtime in sports television viewership. But every four years, the arrival of the Olympic games gives us something to stay up late, get up early, and stay tuned for.

In 2020, the Tennessee Volunteers baseball team debuted the “pink daddy hat” that was awarded to players as they rounded the bases after hitting a home run. In 2022, the Volunteers added a gnarly looking cheetah print fur coat to the ensemble that homerun hitters get the odiferous pleasure of flinging over their shoulders in the dugout for as long as they can bare it.

Since Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown joined forces on the Boston Celtics in 2017, they have been the stars on teams that have impressed fans and foes alike. But they also have lost three Eastern Conference Finals and one NBA Finals. That made them one of the best Celtics teams never to have hoisted a banner in TD Garden.

The NBA has posted a rare interview with Jerry West from 1968. The video is black and white and, compared with today, low production. That’s what makes it powerful. In the video, the great Los Angeles Lakers guard and future Lakers executive is seen shooting around with some local kids at a playground across the street from his house. He stops playing to talk to his interviewer on a little strip of grass beside the...

One of the great Boston Celtics teams not to have won an NBA championship yet is looking as though it may finally raise the eighteenth banner in Boston’s TD Garden, in no small part to the addition of Kristaps Porzingis. At 7 feet 2 inches tall, Porzingis gives the Celtics a presence around the rim that the aging Al Horford could not provide. Porzingis may be the missing piece of the latest Celtics’ championship p...

Some years ago, when Dave Butler played with Steve Kerr on the US Men’s National Basketball Team, the two players were talking about Kerr’s college team, the University of Arizona, and Butler confided in Kerr that he had always considered Arizona to be a team that comprised not only great athletes and talented players but also good people.

Brian Cornell grew up playing football, baseball, basketball and track, and like any sports lover grew up as an avid reader of Sports Illustrated. It was on the cover of that esteemed journal that he first saw John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA men’s basketball who has inspired generations of coaches, athletes, and leaders. The Wooden mystique further influenced Cornell when he found himself walking the UCLA...