LeBron’s media machine in Hollywood, Grobbelaar on war in Zimbabwe and the week’s best sportswriting
1. He winces as he remembers how one of his fellow white soldiers mutilated the bodies of black freedom fighters. “This guy would cut an ear off every man he killed. He kept the ears in a jar. And he had quite a few jars. His family had been brutalised so he wanted revenge.”
The 60-year-old pauses before describing the moment he first killed a man. “My first time was at dusk. As the sun sinks you’re seeing shadows in the bush. You cannot recognise much until you see the whites of their eyes. It’s you or them. You shoot, you drop and there’s overwhelming gunfire. You hear voices on your side: ‘Hey, corporal, I’m hit.’ You whistle to shut them up otherwise we’re all getting killed. When the firefight is finished you see bodies everywhere. The first time everything in your stomach comes up through your mouth.”
How many people did he kill? “I couldn’t tell you.”.
Donald McCrae chats to Bruce Grobbelaar on his traumatic experiences in Zimbabwe’s war of independence, Heysel and Hillsborough, and the match-fixing trials which tainted his reputation
Source: Christopher Thomond/Guardian
2. Rugby has historically been a macho world. The men would go and watch the local rugby team, have a few pints in the clubhouse afterwards, enjoy a day out with the lads.
As the years have gone by, it’s become a really inclusive sport – on and off the field.
These days you see loads of women going to enjoy games too – be it the local club side, one of our regions, Wales at Principality Stadium, or whoever – and go for a drink afterwards too. It’s become a day out where youngsters can also enjoy the rugby occasion – and quite rightly so, in my humble opinion.
The change off the field has helped the change we have started to see on it in terms of the number of women and young girls playing the sport these days – and, of course, the emergence of Ireland’s Joy Neville as a top referee.
Nigel Owens says the macho world of rugby has become more inclusive and we’ll see more women referees
Source: Inpho/Billy Stickland
3. With 32 minutes gone at Old Trafford an unusual event took place. Alexis Sánchez did something. Not something to make the highlights reel. Or indeed to pay back any significant part of the £130,000 of actual human wealth Sánchez earned for being a Manchester United player on Tuesday .
With the score 0-0 and the game drifting – unless specifically stated otherwise, this game was always drifting – United won a free-kick 30 yards from goal. Sánchez spotted it, paused, then punted the ball hard and flat on to the head of the nearest defender.
Click Here: George Morrison Forever Stamps 2022OK, it wasn’t much. Had it been on target it would have counted as Sánchez’s fifth shot at goal so far this season. But he did at least earn £200 in the couple of minutes or so it took for this to happen, perhaps the most money anyone has earned for doing next to nothing in front of a vaguely curious audience since David Blaine stood in that glass box on the River Thames while people with drones flew Big Macs past his face.
Alexis Sánchez, writes Barney Ronay, embodies drift at a ghost ship of a sporting giant
Source: PA Wire/PA Images
4. In his first days in a Lakers jersey, LeBron James made an odd discovery. The Los Angeles sports media hadn’t spent the past decade hanging on his every word. How do you juggle basketball and entertainment? one reporter asked him. “How long have you been following me?” James replied. Another asked why James wears no. 6 at practice instead of his game number, 23. “I’m starting to figure out a lot of you guys are just now recognizing who I am, huh?” James said. What makes James feel pressure? “Nothing.” What about people who say … ? “I’m the last person to ask about what people say.”
Later, after dispensing an anecdote he’d told many times in Cleveland, James turned to his right and said, “Dave, you know that.”
In a sea of iPhone-toting strangers, Dave McMenamin was a familiar face. McMenamin covered James for the last four years in Cleveland. He was officially ESPN’s Cavs beat writer but practically speaking its chief correspondent to the most important athlete on the planet. “Dave is our frontline LeBron guy,” said his colleague Brian Windhorst. “That’s what his job is at the company.”
The Ringer’s Brian Curtis discusses LeBron James’s arrival in Hollywood and how his media machine followed
Source: The Ringer
5. On Aug. 28 at St. Bernard High School in Los Angeles, about two dozen scouts, players, and trainers watched as Gordon Hayward and Bradley Beal lined up to play one-on-one.
It was Hayward’s first time playing one-on-one against an NBA starter since undergoing an unexpected second surgery in late May to remove a plate and screws from around the left ankle Hayward shattered five minutes into his Celtics career. The discovery that he needed another surgery had devastated Hayward. It threw his rehabilitation timetable into disarray. By Aug. 28, he was supposed to have been months into five-on-five games against NBA competition. Now, he was easing into one-on-one.
“I wasn’t thinking ‘I’m gonna kill this guy,’” Hayward told ESPN.com Tuesday night, after another disappointing preseason game for the Celtics. “I was thinking it would show me what I needed to work on.”
Zach Lowe goes Inside Gordon Hayward’s misery-filled fight to play again for the Boston Celtics
Source: SIPA USA/PA Images
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