This Week in No Mas

4/15
Let's Play Two... and Two-Thirds
The anniversary of the longest night game in MLB history, a 24-inning 1-0 nailbiter between the two worst franchises in the National League in 1968 - the Mets and the Astros.

4/16
The Best Sports Movies You've Never Seen
Aaron Cohen continues our series on unheralded sports movies with his take on the HBO movie, The Soul of the Game, a 1996 film about the Negro Leagues right before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the bigs.

K.O.W. - The Manly Art of No Defense
With fighters lining up left and right to take on the presumably shot Arturo Gatti, for our No Mas Knockout of the Week we take you back to Thunder's heyday and his mind-blowing throwdown with Gabriel Ruelas in 1997.

4/17
The Best Sports Movies You've Never Seen
Mark Young, a.k.a. Baggiesboy, unearths an under-appreciated predecessor of Million Dollar Baby called Girlfight. "Of course, that Million Dollar Baby won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture, and topped $100 million at the box office. (And continues to leave me with two unanswered questions: How can Maggie Fitzgerald not be declared the champion on a DQ after being slugged after the bell? How can Frankie Dunn unplug Maggie’s life-support system and calmly walk out of the hospital unchallenged?)"

I-285
We take a look back at a true No Masian giant, Pascual Perez, on the 23rd anniversary of his first cocaine suspension from major league baseball. "For his look alone - the Jheri curls, the gold tooth, the conspicuous in-game bling - Pascual is a No Mas All-Star, and that's not even to get into his on-field proficiency with the finger-gun and his love of the beanball and his recurrent use of the Eephus ball and just his generally inappropriate and hilarious antics on the mound."

4/18
The King in the Ring
As part of our ongoing partnership with Tribeca, Large examines Elvis Presley's turn as a boxer in 1962's Kid Galahad, and analyzes the King's ring skills. "The guy had rhythm, no doubt. He also looks like he had a natural straight right hand. There's a good training scene with Bronson where he's punishing the pads with one right after another that seemed to have legitimate pop (he's wearing a sleeveless turtleneck at the time, which kind of diminishes the air of ferocity, but only slightly)."

Vive Le Tournoi
Quick, who was Roland Garros? A Swiss watchmaker? A bon vivant known for his wicked bon mots? A great French tennis player so great they named a tournament after him? None of the above.

Deep Tennis with Steve Tignor
Steve celebrates the Sampras/Lendl quarterfinal at the 1990 U.S. Open, one of the sport's true changing-of-the-guard moments. "...On that afternoon, the era of one champion ended and another's began. The two players were the best of the 80s and 90s, respectively, but their reigns didn’t overlap. Sampras’ rise was born from the demise of Lendl, right in front of our eyes in Louis Armstrong Stadium."

4/19
Where have you gone, Giorgio Chinaglia?
For the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, we dig into the No Mas archives for this classic piece from I-berg on the splendid Cosmos' doc, Once in a Lifetime. "During their epic ’77 title run, the Cosmos were media darlings, a box office smash (first team to sell out the Meadowlands), and legendary studio 54 swordsmen who knocked in booty hat-tricks like they were penalty kicks."

4/20
Brother O, Why Art Thou in Prep School?
Large writes about his favorite Shakespearean revisionist teen drama, O, in which Makhi Phifer plays Othello as a black basketball star at a predominantly white prep school. There's a rumor going around the No Mas offices that Large does not in fact like this movie at all, but needed an excuse to use that headline (ed. note. - this is not true, I did like O, it's good).