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Daily Fantasy Football Fix
Outside the Lines (Sunday 9 a.m. ET, ESPN; 10 a.m. ESPNEWS)
Credit: ESPN/Producer Simon Baumgart
Tom Griffiths, co-founder of FanDuel, with Darren Rovell
Fantasy football players no longer need to wait an entire season to see how well they drafted. Now there’s daily fantasy — which is growing so fast that investors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the largest providers of the game, and top players are making big bucks. Darren Rovell reports critics say daily fantasy is nothing more than internet gambling, which is illegal in the U.S.
“It’s growing two to three times every year bigger than the last year. Every week, it seems there’s a new daily fantasy competitor popping up. We stopped counting around 45.” — Tom Griffiths, FanDuel co-founder, on the growing popularity of daily fantasy sports
“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean that it’s right and it doesn’t mean that it’s good social and economic policy. When you marry electronic gambling — which is known as the crack cocaine of hooking people into gambling — with sports, with the risk taking ambiance of young people, you are going to see a huge explosion in these types of endeavors.” – John Kindt, University of Illinois professor of business and legal policy, on the potential issues of daily fantasy sports
Bucket Brigade
SportsCenter (Sunday, 10 a.m., ESPN)
Meet the man behind the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge which is saturating social media pages. Pete Frates, the 29-year-old former captain of the Boston College baseball team, was diagnosed with ALS two years ago. He has dedicated himself to fighting and finding a cure for ALS while serving as Boston College Director of Baseball Operations.
“I think about the video clips of Lou Gehrig Day July 4th at Yankee Stadium. You watch him take some of the trophies and plaques that were given to him that day. You notice he doesn’t hold them up and smile and say thank you…he directs them right to the ground because he wasn’t able to hold them up. That was 1939. It’s now 2013… the disease is the exact same it was all those years ago…I think [that] is what’s wrong with this picture.” – Pete Frates
Running Out of Time
ESPN The Magazine (College Football Preview issue, on newsstands now)
ESPN.com
Melvin Gordon is a man on the wrong side of history — a gifted runner headed to a league that no longer values running. Now he’s out to prove the NFL wrong about his position… and himself. Chris Low reports.
“If they like me now, they’re going to love me later.” – Melvin Gordon
Reportajes Especiales’ 360 Series Debuts with Piece on Roy Miller
ESPN Deportes SportsCenter (Sunday, 11 p.m. ET)
Reportajes Especiales (companion piece on ESPNDeportes.com)
Reportajes Especiales’ 360 Series, which will feature top athletes within the Hispanic community, debuts with a piece on defender Roy Miller of Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls. Miller was also a key player for Costa Rica (which took the 2014 FIFA World Cup by surprise).
Girls Power Little League Contenders
espnW.com
Mo’Ne Davis has been the talk of the Little League, as the only girl among the American teams advancing to the Little League World Series this year. espnW’s Melissa Isaacson takes a look at Davis and Kayla Roncin, another trailblazing girl whose team reached the Regionals competition.
Questioning The Questioner
Louisville Courier-Journal writer Adam Himmelsbach featured ESPN correspondent Tom Rinaldi in his “Adam Asks” column after catching up with the Emmy Award-winning reporter at the PGA Championship in Louisville.
When asked if there was a story he was most proud of, Rinaldi replied:
“Let me preface by saying, without any equivocation, I have the greatest gig at ESPN, because of all the opportunities I get. I get time to report and tell a story. I work with an incredible stable of producers and crews. We invest the money to tell the story. Let’s face it, producing features costs money, especially features of length, and I get to do it.
“We did a 9/11 story about a young man named Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana (received the 2012 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Long Feature). He had been a Boston College athlete, was working in the South Tower, and had been a volunteer firefighter. He helped save a group of people by ushering them down a stairwell to safety, and then he climbed up and did it multiple times until he died.”
For the entire column: courier-journal.com/story/adam-him…