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Ben McGrath
- Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003. He has contributed more than two hundred stories to The Talk of the Town, and written features on a broad variety of subjects, from the Tea Party, to prosthetic limbs, to a Mafia trial. His first feature piece, in September, 2002, explored the new look of the Professional Bowlers Association, and he has continued to write frequently about sports.
McGrath has also written for the New York Times, Slate, and the New York Observer, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
Results 1 - 10 of 328
August 6, 2013
Blog: Comment
Alex Rodriguez’s Sense of History
It was foolish, in retrospect, to expect that the most vexed athletic career in a generation would end on such a perfect note. So here we are, several days later, and A-Rod, or A-Roid, or A-Fraud (take your pick) is back in pinstripes, just as he promised he would be.
Aug 12, 2013
The Sporting Scene
Throw Like a Girl
The quicker pace of softball derives in part from the players’ well-coached reluctance to dwell on disappointment. One of the pleasures of watching pro fast-pitch is that you can sit close enough to hear the dugout chatter, which is remarkably, sometimes defiantly, upbeat, and to discern the players’ nicknames for one another, which aren’t always as predictable as men’s (Gelato for Olivia Galati, for example).
Aug 12, 2013
Here to There Dept.
Amateur Spelunker
Phase I of the Second Avenue subway will run from Sixty-third Street to Ninety-sixth Street, with three new stations, at a cost of four and a half billion dollars. These days, it’s nice down there, in an apocalyptic sort of way.
Jun 24, 2013
New Jersey Postcard
Governors’ Club
Brendan Byrne, the governor of New Jersey from 1974 to 1982, reclined on a sofa at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Christine Todd Whitman stood nearby, gazing out the window. Soon James Florio, Whitman’s predecessor, arrived. “Tell me what I’m doing here,” he said. Whitman laughed, and then noticed Thomas Kean, Byrne’s successor and Florio’s predecessor, approaching.
Jun 10, 2013
Salvage
Queens Woodpile
A pair of government agents piloted an old black Crown Victoria to a clearing, near a couple of fishing piers, which had become a makeshift lumberyard for the wreckage of the Rockaway boardwalk.
May 9, 2013
Blog: The Sporting Scene
The Marlins’ Mess
Over at Deadspin, they’re having some fun at the Miami Marlins’ expense, and for good reason. The team has lost twenty-five of its first thirty-five games, and is now shuttering the upper deck of...
May 06, 2013
The Sporting Scene
Oddball
R. A. Dickey, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, sometimes seems like a sports hero dreamed up by a bookworm. He is a knuckleball pitcher, already the most ungainly of athletic specialists, relying on physics to make jocks look foolish. In 2011, inspired by Hemingway, he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and blogged about it for the New York Times. Every celebrity has a charitable cause, but, this past winter, Dickey actually travelled to the red-light district of Mumbai in support of his: curbing sex trafficking in India. He wrote about that for the Daily News.
Apr 22, 2013
The Sporting Scene
The White Wall
The Iditarod, Alaska’s Super Bowl, bills itself as “the last great race on earth,” implying an ancient heritage, but it’s six years younger than the actual Super Bowl, and its history can be traced through three generations of Seaveys, who will have been in Alaska fifty years this August. Dan Seavey, who helped found the race, grew up in Minnesota, in the nineteen-forties, listening on the radio to the crime-fighting tales of Sergeant Preston and his sled dog Yukon King. In 1963, he got a job as a history teacher at Seward High School, on the Kenai Peninsula. Within months, he was raising huskies.
Feb 04, 2013
The Sporting Scene
The Art of Speed
THE SPORTING SCENE about Adrian Newey, who designs Formula One race cars, and the possibilities for Formula One in the United States. The most accomplished man in the world’s most glamorous sport stands at a drafting table all day. His name is Adrian Newey, and he is often said to…
January 5, 2013
Blog: The Sporting Scene
The Transformation of Ray Lewis
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis’s looming retirement as a lovable football hero in good standing—a “cuddly warrior,” as I once called him—should give pause to all those inclined to prophesy imminent doom for the game he plays.
Results: 1 - 10 of 328
