The 10 Most Influential Athletes Of The Century

There may have been some–a very few–who were better than these, but none had greater impact on how their games were played. Along with Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Pele, these were the people who shaped the century in sports –By Daniel Okrent BABE RUTH In sports’ first golden age, there was Babe Ruth–and then there was everyone else

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Why Sports in LA Are in Disarray

On April 20, Major League Baseball took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team whose overleveraged owner is going through a humiliating public divorce and steering the franchise towards bankruptcy. The Dodgers’ financial situation had been so dire that last week Frank McCourt, who is fighting for ownership of the team with his estranged wife, Jamie, needed a $30 million loan from Fox, the team’s television partner, to make payroll.

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Tough task: Designing a game about your ‘first time’

In an industry dominated by men, leave it to women to come up with the winning idea in a contest to create a concept for a video game about losing one’s virginity. On Wednesday, at the Game Developers Conference here, the two-woman team of Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson won the Game Design Challenge with just 36 hours of preparation, while their competitors had weeks to come up with concepts for a game about “your first time.” This was the sixth straight year of the design challenge, hosted annually by New York-based game developer Eric Zimmerman.

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Black actors still face Oscar challenges

On a winter evening in early 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black performer to win an Oscar, a best supporting actress honor for her performance as Mammy, the servant in "Gone With the Wind." She accepted her award at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Coconut Grove, a nightclub in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, where she was seated in the segregated section at the rear of the room. Though her win was played as a sign of progress for black actors in America — “Not only was she the first of her race to receive an Award, but she was also the first Negro ever to sit at an Academy banquet,” said Daily Variety, according to Mason Wiley and Damien Bona’s indispensable “Inside Oscar” — her role was poorly received by much of the black community.

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