Does ESPN.com’s sports reporting no longer include game coverage?

ESPN.com above the fold, 10:43 p.m., July 28, 2009

(Select the image to enlarge it and read ESPN.com’s headlines.)

Is game coverage no longer an essential part of ESPN.com’s sports reporting?

Yes, there’s a baseball scoreboard above the masthead, but in terms of articles on ESPN.com? Only one headline is about the result of a sporting match (“Phelps beaten buy world-record time in 200 free”).

Examples of what sports stories did merit prominent coverage:

• a washed-up quarterback is not coming out of retirement
• trial status for a football player who accidentally shot himself at a nightclub
• predictions of union talks

Did I catch the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports’” website at an off moment or were ESPN.com’s editorial decisions the norm for sports reporting?

Covering the Pro Bowl, and the NFL’s worthless fan events, for Deadspin

For six weeks this winter I was in Hawaii (my wife was assigned there for work and freelancing usually allows me the flexibility to work from anywhere).

We were in Honolulu during the NFL’s Pro Bowl, so I pitched Will Leitch at Deadspin, the second most visited sports blog on the Internet, to see if he was interested in on-location coverage of one of sport’s most worthless events.

He liked the idea and asked me to write two pieces: one that ran before the Pro Bowl and covered the first few days of game-related hullabaloo and another that was posted the day after the game and reported on the weekends’ doings (which, yes, included something resembling a football game).

Here are the posts:

• “Fun” In The “Sun” At The NFL Pro Bowl
• We Watched The NFL Pro Bowl So You Didn’t Have To, But We’re Not Doing It Again

Make sure you read the comments too; as is customary on Deadspin, they’re hilarious. And from a writers’ standpoint, it’s an ego boost to have so much response to a blog post (even if most entries on Deadspin receive a lot of feedback).

Is it British English or just wrong?

Because I have a fetish for has-beens who cash out, a few months ago I was following David Beckham’s first MLS game on ESPN.com.

The phrase “took finally the field” gave me pause: Did ESPN.com make a rare grammatical mistake? Or was it just another lame attempt by an American sports writer to infuse humor into a piece on Beckham by trying to sound British?

About 30 minutes later, I had my answer.

It’s better to be wrong than a hack anyway.

Wake Forest alumnus Hunter Kemper is the world’s top triathlete

Congrats to fellow Wake Forest University alumnus Hunter Kemper. Last week Kemper, the world’s top-ranked triathlete, won the Life Time Fitness “Battle of the Sexes” Triathlon.

Kemper ran for the Demon Deacons when I had the men’s track and field beat for the Old Gold & Black, the school’s student newspaper.