THE MERCY RULE
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Hearing the Spurs
As I age, my ear is retuning itself; I can finally hear something other than “ugh” watching the San Antonio Spurs play, which is cool, except how it parallels suddenly finding a 'Rod Stewart Sings the Standards' record soulful and great. Full story
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Leave Derrick Rose Alone
Derrick Rose, who won an MVP award in 2011 then wrecked his ACL and has been out for a year, has spent the last week getting kicked around by tough-guy sportswriters outraged that he's not back on the floor in his Chicago Bulls' series against the Miami Heat. He refuses to engage… Full story
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The Last Kings of Sacramento
On Monday, the Maloofs will find out which of two potential buyers will pay them for the privilege of taking over the Kings, one of the NBA's worst franchises. So let's say goodbye, finally, to this family of avaricious, spray-tanned ghouls. Full story
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Why Sports Help
There is nothing out there on the internet, nothing useful to learn about the Boston bombings, only more of the guilty inertia that leads us to put this shit on in the background in the first place. There’s nothing here for us, at the moment. So I’m going to a baseball game tonig… Full story
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Building a Better NFL Draft
The NFL Draft takes three days and involves some of the dumber shout-machines on American television applying the same five adjectives to various muscular men over and over. It is very bad. But it can be better, if only because it can't be worse. Full story
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Horrible Bosses
Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice abused his players. He called them nasty names, hit them, threw balls at their heads, and was a generally awful human being. Now he's fired, and for good reason, but that he was more or less allowed to do these things to teenagers is part Full story
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The Little Gulfy That Could
If there's a reason to cheer for FGCU—beyond the fact that they're fun as hell to watch—it's for the way they refuse and defuse and otherwise dunk right in the face of all that familiar college hoops sanctimony, simply by being the goofy, grimy Florida-ass thing that they are… Full story
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Bill Walton, the Tallest Troll
During his time in the announcer's booth, Bill Walton has demonstrated both a deep understanding of basketball and a sharp, sometimes vicious, sense of sarcasm. The worse the basketball gets, the better Walton gets at projecting his disdain for it. Full story
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Meet the Satire Called the Mets
Mets fans are not notably smarter or dumber, more or less entitled, or even sadder than the fans of any other flailing team. But thanks to their owners, the Wilpon family, the team's narrative is less a standard Shitty Owner Ruins Team story and more like a strange, sprawling sat… Full story
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Neon Waters Run Deep
adidas's new college basketball uniforms are just a dumb thing to look at and crack some jokes about. But the only compensation the athletes wearing them get is the enjoyment of the enhanced comfort provided by the breakthrough wicking polymers. Full story
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That's So Jordan
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever, and that being more or less beyond dispute does not make it something basketball fans are less excited to talk about. But in the decade since his last NBA game, talking about His Airness has become a different and stranger th… Full story
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National Shouting Day
National Signing Day, the least telegenic televised "event" of all time, is a giddy beef auction presided over by the psychotic golf dads who coach high-level college football covered as if it were a moon landing. Full story
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Why Breitbart Sports Will Fail, I Hope
It’s only fitting that after a career spent treating politics like a long football game between Black Nazi Communists and the Founding Fathers, Andrew Breitbart has posthumously leant his name to a sports news website. Full story
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The Lakers' Unreality Show
There’s a certain ugly thrill in watching these Lakers fail, but it’s not a lot of fun—it’s tough to take much joy from watching all these great players playing so poorly and unhappily, even with the leavening knowledge that their ill-tempered awfulness is probably preventing Jac… Full story
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Hall of Lame
Like talk-radio types, Baseball Hall of Fame voters are blithely holding others to impossible standards in the most self-righteous way possible, and define “getting tough” as “accusing people you barely know of being cheaters instead of dealing with a complex issue.” The differen… Full story
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Taken
There’s no reason why anyone should talk about or listen to other people talking about sports for hours and hours every day. There is not necessarily that much to say about men running and catching balls under the best of circumstances, and necessarily not that much to say in mos… Full story
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The Pelicans’ Grief
Team names work best when they’re both goofy and ambitious. The very words Utah Jazz conjure someone pouring a quart of milk into a clarinet; the idea of a Sacramento King mostly just gives you the image of a winking Guy Fieri sitting on a pepperoni throne wearing a crown made of… Full story
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Someone's Super Bowl
This is how we wind up with something like Saturday's SEC Championship Game, which is an orgy of crass bloat and khaki-clad excess to some, something much more important than the Super Bowl to a great many others, and objectively a good deal stranger a thing than we're supposed t… Full story
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Miami Blues
In some ways, the Miami Marlins are Florida—overleveraged, overbuilt, and cruising blithely towards foreclosure while being ruled by a clownish, childish, tone-deaf, permanent cadre of special-needs elites. Less metaphorically, they’re a fucking bummer. Full story
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Champions and Winners
The two teams playing in the World Series are not, objectively and subjectively and quite predictably, the two best teams in baseball. They are the most momentum-fortified, or the luckiest, teams in baseball at the moment, and one of them—at the moment, it looks like the San Fran… Full story
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Alex Rodriguez, All-American
In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly a… Full story
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Adopting October
Who do you root for if you don't have a team in the postseason? While there are no wrong answers to this question (except for "the Yankees"), if you're not cheering for the Oakland Athletics, you're probably a jerk. Full story
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Picking at Scabs
The scab refs look, in short, like scabs—unqualified people hired to do a job they don't really know how to do at the behest of a management group which doesn't especially value that job, or at least less so than they value the chump change saved by not paying those who actually… Full story
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The Mercy Rule: Welcome to College Football
College football is, in many ways, less a sport than a bumpy mass of public discourse and stomach-aches and public spending and almost religion. The talent and competition is not as consistent as the NFL, but there are moments of awesome, or at least of very good. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Unlimited Juice
The last week or so has been a bad one for athletes who take drugs. These are not the rare and random wild-card athletes who get nailed for "drugs of abuse," these are athletes who, for reasons that usually come down to making more money playing sports, get in trouble for taking Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Olympics Are Weird
The Olympics are an expensive, relentlessly over-branded jarring event choreographed by idiots. They're also weird and awesome. Full story
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The Mercy Rule: The Worst Idea In Sports
The 2012 ESPYs: Awkward athletes, toothy celebrities, bad jokes, nu-metal, and nothing remotely cool. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - To Live and Ugh in LA
If Steve Nash could spend nearly a decade in the psychotic sun-baked methscape of Phoenix, he surely can do it with a clean conscience in a city that's actually pretty nice. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Welcome to the NBA Draft
The NBA Draft is here, and with it an opportunity to project upon a host of gangly young giants the irrational aspirations of a nation of basketball fans. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Taking the Heat
The Heat are now the best team in the NBA, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that, even by the usual standards for the NBA's sour and over-determined dynasty aspirants, these guys are kind of dickish. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Welcome to the NBA Finals
Who will be the champions of The Year the Season Started at Christmas Because the Buttsteak Owner of the Suns Wanted to Prove Some Dim Point About Unions or Whatever? Full story
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The Mercy Rule: The Oklahoma Problem
Oklahoma, as a state, is not doing awesome. But despite the controversy, their basketball team is pretty admirable. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Contemporary Magic
There's something remarkable about the fact that acerbic gnome and mock-turtleneck aficionado Stan Van Gundy is the most recognizably human player in the chain of events that cost him his job. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Exit Sandman
Mariano Rivera, one of the few players baseball fans can agree upon, ripped up his knee shagging flies during batting practice. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - People Actually Watch the Draft?
Three days of interviews with neckless general studies majors from Southeast Conference schools makes for pretty excruciating TV. It's only natural for you to wonder why anyone would watch that. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Ron Artest Is the Player Fox Loves to Hate
As an athlete and human being who everyone pays attention to, Artest is interesting. But as a political magnet for the daddish anger of a certain type of NBA fan, he's excruciating. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - A Confederacy of Assholes
Getting outraged about Bobby Petrino is easy, and kind of fun. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Welcome to Baseball
Still not sure if you’re a fan or a non-fan? Here are some questions you may have about baseball, and some answers that will help you figure out whether America's favorite pastime is for you. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - My Beautiful Dork Twisted Fantasy
I'm done apologizing for playing fantasy football. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Black Comedy of Tim Tebow
The most important thing to remember, as Tim Tebow's career makes its official transition into farce, is that it was already, and always, a joke. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Good Kind of Bad
March Madness is not the sort of thing that can be reasoned with, or through. You fall into it, like a David Lynch movie, or a conversation, or a bad habit. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Old College Try
The NCAA Tournament is often terrible basketball, but even bad basketball is better than anything else when it is played by emotional teenagers from the boonies, chasing a futile dream. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - All-Star Weakened
For All-Star Weekend, the NBA will wrap all the good stuff—the awesome basketball stuff—in lucrative, sponsored artificiality, so that no one would ever possibly care about it. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Linsanity Defense
It's a favorite trope among certain types of sportswriters to compare various NBA basketball players to one pickup game archetype or another. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Meet the Super Bowl’s Sociopaths
In the interest of helping you enjoy the football-related portion of Super Bowl Sunday more, here is what you need to know about the two teams involved. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - My NBA Hipsterism Problem, And Ours
Considering its fan base is comprised of eight-year-old kids, the NBA is not the semi-secret thing that the hipsters would seek out, stake out, overrate, and claim as their own. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Leave Tim Tebow Alone!
It is better to let Tebow be the thoroughly outmatched quarterback he is than to turn him into a humped-to-death abstraction. Not even someone with his baffling passing mechanics deserves that. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The NCAA Is a Donut Burger
To a cosmopolite elite like me, big-time college football looks like a transparently un-consumable Paula Deen donut burger. For others it is delicious enough to justify the diabetes-sweats it brings. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Donald Sterling, Human Cold Sore
Donald Sterling is a real estate billionaire of a notably porny bent who looks like a Milk Dud that has had Botox, and who was born without the capacity for shame. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Commercials are Fucking Terrifying
The average NFL commercial break is television's crowning insult to the notion of our shared humanity. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The No Basketball Association
If fuming about some bullshit abstraction is what gets you through your commute, then by all means fume. But please, please do not buy a NBA basketball team. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Monday Night Sack O’ Garbage
Monday Night Football's ass-backwards posturing is too much like America for comfort--it's basically the House of Representatives with better production value and more violence. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Anger in Management
Resplendent on a Danzigian throne of skulls, shaking his head at all he surveys, there is Tony La Russa--one of the greatest managers and most nasty humans in baseball history. Full story
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The Mercy Rule – Young, Dumb, and Full of Jesus
To a sizable percentage of football fans, the fun-but-flawed incurious quarterback Tim Tebow comes about as close to a Warrior Prophet as the game has ever seen. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - All Hail Quetzalcoatl
We goofed on late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis because he looked like the Crypt Keeper in a white sweat suit. And because the serpentine bastard seemed to truly love his sport. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Do the Collapse
We have only so many hours on Earth, and only so many reasons to spend some of those watching sports. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Our Heros Are Ball-Throwing Hamsteaks
The NFL is powered by a dozen different types of violence and monetized by beer commercials in which men choose macro-brewed fart soda over attractive women. But it’s also hugely sentimental. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Exploiting Amateurs
The average college sports fan knows that the NCAA is in the process of reconfiguring itself, moving from regional-ish athletic conferences towards sprawling mega-conferences in search of better television deals and more money. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Every Day Is 9/11 in the NFL
It's generally a good idea not to pay too much attention to things that pro sports commissioners say for the same reason you shouldn’t listen to whatever on-message platitudes come out of politicians’ mouths on the state-fair circuit. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - There's No Lockout in Streetball
The two edicts from the NBA's front office arrived in rapid succession in the mid-90s, each contradicting the other. The first was that the text on the back of Topps' NBA player cards should be somehow more street; presumably the word “urban,” deployed in its “you know, like blac… Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Just Another Yacht-Sex Scandal
Other than a puffy-faced Jose Canseco talking about himself in a Jacuzzi, or some sour-faced Russians doing cocaine in a garish nightclub bathroom, the current scandal consuming the University of Miami football program is basically the most Miami thing anyone could ever imagine. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The Inhuman Element
When Alex Rodriguez got into trouble earlier this month for purportedly playing in some illegal high-stakes poker games it was barely a story. I… Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Too Stupid to Say Out Loud
It’s tempting to blame all of baseball’s problems on San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, the chuckling, inescapable tryhard who seems to have mistaken the drain-circling Charlie Sheen for some sort of meth-toothed prophet. Very tempting, in fact, but not entirely fair. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Too Stupid to Say Out Loud
It's tempting to blame all of baseball's problems on San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, the chuckling, inescapable tryhard who seems to have mistaken the drain-circling Charlie Sheen for some sort of meth-toothed prophet. Very tempting, in fact, but not entirely fair. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Gambling Is Not a Sport
The question of what is or isn't a sport is always kind of awful, something best debated by terrible guys in terrible bars over the soggy din of the Steve Miller Band and the room-temp dregs of a pitcher of ass-seltzery macro-brew. Or, more simply, something best not debated, per… Full story
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The Mercy Rule - The NFL's Final Offer
Football has never been embraced by anyone outside of the USA, and it’s easy to see why. A good football game can be fun to watch, but football is also loud and backwards and discussed with a Barcalounger-tough-guy militarism that is unmistakably, unattractively American. Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Where They Keep the Money
It's possible that there are some doofuses out there who can look at a Chris Paul crossover or an Adrian Peterson cutback or an Albert Pujols anything and see nothing but a constellation of dollar signs in action. But most of the people who bitch about money in professional sport… Full story
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The Mercy Rule - Don't Save the All-Star Game
There are things that only sports fans care about. Hot wings and Adam Sandler movies come to mind, as do all-star games. This doesn’t mean you’re required to care about these things, of course. And just like I don’t enjoy looking at those Khmer Rouge-y drifts of tiny chicken bone… Full story
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We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict About Rob Ford
Chatting with an expert about Rob Ford's crack scandal.
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VICE News: B.C. Bud
Visiting grow ops and the RCMP to chat about weed and weed production.
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Pakistan's Election Went Off Without a Hitch... Sort Of
Just being able to transition governmental authority without military involvement is a victory.
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Speaking with Adam Kokesh, Before He Was Detained by the Feds
This would be the first in a series of controversies surrounding Adam and his politics.
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In Search of Tim Dog, the Rapper Turned Con Artist Who Probably Faked His Own Death
This February, the legendary rapper turned grifter Tim Dog died. So why is there a warrant out for his arrest?
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George's Fun Happy Place
George has a lot of problems to overcome, but he's capable of an incredible lightness.
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Psychic Melt: The Art of Alexandra Mackenzie
Noodle faces, girls with guns, wolves, galaxies, reptiles, crystals, and more.
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VICE News: Triple Hate
'Triple Hate' is a four-part documentar
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VICE on HBO Outtakes: Tobaccoland
Thomas Morton gets a full smoke-therapy treatment in Malang.
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Fringes: Deportee Purgatory
Tijuana’s El Bordo is home to thousands of heroin-addicted Mexican deportees.
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Is War Brewing in Niger?
If the latest terrorist attack is any indication, the answer might be yes.
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The Creators Project: Turning CCTV Footage into Art
An invasion of privacy and erosion of our civil liberties can serve as a source for art.
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Meet the Nieratkos: Jeff Grosso Has a Beautiful Mind
Is Jeff Grosso the last vestige of free speech in skateboarding?
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Carlos Rafael and His Fish Are the American Dream
I spoke to him about cod and federal tax evasion.
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Pen Pals: HardWhite and Harry Potter
Little white wizards get no play in county lockup.
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This Week in Racism: Sergio Garcia Can't Wait to Serve Tiger Woods Fried Chicken
Golf is racist.
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We Watched the Suburbs of Stockholm Burn
Are the riots in the suburbs of Stockholm a real threat or just some bored, teenage pyros?
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Ryan Florig Blends Skate Photography with Guns, Weed, and Fire
This Washington-based photographer thrives on the principles of street photography.
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Facebook and Censorship's Slippery Slope
You're not in America when you're on Facebook—you're on the internet.
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Director Alex Gibney on Hackers and Julian Assange
If Michael Moore is obsessed with outra
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MMA's Greatest Moment (and Ben Henderson's Worst) Makes Its Way into the Mainstream
As long as he lives, Ben Henderson will never be free of Anthony Pettis’ mind-scrambling kick.
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George's Fun Happy Place
George has a lot of problems to overcome, but he's capable of an incredible lightness.
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What Does Terrorism Mean in 2013?
It's a difficult word to define, according to Glenn Greenwald.
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Fringes: The Warrior State
Mexican civilians who are taking justice into their own hands.
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VICE News: Triple Hate
'Triple Hate' is a four-part documentar
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Pump It Up
Photos by Anna Ryon and styling by Lola Chatterton.
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Get Rich or High Trying
The smart money is increasingly looking to marijuana as the nation's biggest new business.
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Murderous Fanatics and EDL Idiots Brought Darkness to Woolwich Yesterday
We spent the day there trying to make sense of it all.
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A Few Impressions: 'Leviathan,' I Love You
It holds up a mirror to nature, but this mirror came from a funhouse.
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The Loneliness of the Village at the End of the World
Niaqornat's residents fight alcoholism and suicide as their village sinks into the Arctic.
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Hamilton's Pharmacopeia: Tanks for the Memories
What happens to the mind, body, and spirit while inside the tank.
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Deportee Purgatory
About 40 percent of Mexican immigrants deported from the US are sent back through Tijuana.
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VICE News: Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor
A new drug called sisa is tearing its way through Athens' poor.
Deportee Purgatory
Welcome to Tijuana’s El Bordo 
'Leviathan,' I Love You
James Franco at the Movies 
Juggalos Are OK, Cupid
Don’t Be a Tumblr Asshole 
Get Rich or High Trying
The Coming Age of Corporate Cannabis 
Triple Hate - Part 1
The KKK vs. the Crips vs. Memphis City Council 
Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments
They Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity 
