What the hell happened to Darius Miles? | Hacker News Reader

What the hell happened to Darius Miles?

theplayerstribune.com

240 pointsribasushi61 comments

The Players' Tribune does some cool stuff. Like others mention, the amount of ghostwriting is unclear, but the pieces all feel faithful (and accurate) to the subject. They are never hagiographic, and while there's some amount of bravado in almost all of them (I mean, they're former sports stars), it is always tempered by honesty, and often regret. Maybe HN is less likely to assign much weight to what athletes say, but these are pretty unvarnished accounts from people who, by and large, became world-class at something tons of people try. They have interesting things to say.

Some other good pieces are NBA player Dion Waiters' freewheeling account of his life so far [1], former NBA player Steve Francis's bizarre path to and from stardom [2] (an interesting complement to teammate Yao Ming's entertaining account of his own rookie year [3]), and for a rather darker and more harrowing (but also quite moving) story, former NHL player Clint Malarchuk's account of his infamous on-ice injury and its (extensive) consequences [4].

[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/dion-waiter...

[2] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/steve-franc...

[3] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/yao-ming-my...

[4] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/clint-malar...

It might be pure hometown bias, but this article by Sue Bird immediately comes to mind when I think of the Player's Tribune: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/sue-bird-se...

I liked the piece by Pete Sampras which also got some traction here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9803867

as an avid NHL fan, so many of the NHL stories brought tears to my eyes. Also never though I'd see this on HN

I work at The Players’ Tribune, leading a small team of engineers, and I never thought I’d see one of our articles on the front page of HN.

Our mission is connecting fans and athletes, and our long-form articles do a great job of that. We’re also exploring how technology can create even deeper connections and more compelling experiences. Would love to hear thoughts on this from the HN crowd.

Is there a good way to contact you? Or maybe email me (addy in profile)? Would love to drop you a line on exactly what you are asking - deeper connections through tech with the folks that enjoy TPT.

Regardless, keep up the great work. I'm a big fan.

Would love to talk more, and have some projects in-progress that will need beta-users.

nwildermuth at playerstribune.com

Sent

Ask HN “Beta testers for players tribune?” Will likely fill your quota.

If you could incorporate a reading of this, by Darius (and Quentin for his parts), that'd be amazing. I'd love to not only see the athletes write long-form articles about themselves, but to hear them talk about it. I feel like there's just so much more emotion that comes through, even when they do write in a colloquial style like this one, which does showcase a lot of emotion.

Thanks! There’s been some conjecture about Alexa and narrating articles. I think it is definitely worth an experiment.

You’re right about the emotional connection being an essential element. We’ve ramped up our video production over the last year, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities of live-streaming video. Especially as an ongoing conversation following up on an initial article. I’m curious if opening up a dialogue between an athlete and readers would be more (or less) emotionally engaging, and what forms would work best.

I think the script for an audio version would probably be a different piece altogether. Although, as an avid podcast listener, I'd probably be very into it.

You work at a fascinating place. I'm a big basketball guy and PT articles routinely make it into r/nba. In a world of content farms, I really appreciate the good writing you all put out.

What sort of tech stack do y'all run? Any interesting / unique tech challenges you get to face?

I came onboard last year, and at that time we had a vanilla Wordpress stack that had been worked on by various contractors over the years. The layered codebase was hard to maintain and extend, so we did some surgery to replace the FE with Next.js, React, and GraphQL. On the BE we kept Wordpress, but put it behind a GraphQL API that stitches in both WP content and other data from other services.

I have no love for Wordpress, but we have a lot of legacy data and the admin GUI is what our company is used to. So we kept it. However, our use of a stitched GraphQL api enables us to move functionality out of WP into other services. Small example: articles often include the social media handles of the athlete. This data is stored, managed, and served from another system. The stitched GraphQL schema has been a real benefit to us. One API to rule them all.

Otherwise we’re on Google Cloud, use Fastly for caching Next.js SSR content, and manage deployments with Kubernetes (managed GKE, nothing fancy).

It might come across as over-engineered, but our system is simple, solid, performant, extensible, and insert-more-buzz-words.

If it sounds interesting, we are expanding the team and would love to hear from people!

do you have any blog posts or writing about the graphql stitching part, mostly curious about the architecture? I've just recently started looking at and using graphql and your usage of it seems pretty neat. It seems like it's allowed you to keep business requirements of the WP GUI but given a lot more freedom in terms of API extension

Honestly I find this way more interesting than watching an actual game. I'm not a sports fan whatsoever. But relating to this guy as a human being, hearing his story, I mean it seems like anybody can find something interesting about that.

I've always been more of a scholar than an athlete, and my only thing outside of that was music. I can name who played bass for what band during which years and albums so forth, but not who played small forward for the Clippers. I had to look all that shit up.

Actually that's an interesting note too - this article had an interesting side effect of spurring me to go over to Wikipedia to look up noob shit like where have I heard this name Darius Miles before? (Turns out it was from his stint in Portland.) And what's a small forward? And then off on tangents... what are the other four positions, and who are some famous players in those positions, and what's a "pick" and what's the "post" and what's a "triangle offense" and all kinds of stuff. I learned more about basketball today than in many preceding years.

If you start reading this, pause and think "is this my sort of thing"....I strongly encourage you to go back and keep reading.

Wonderful article, but easy to jump by if you're in Hacker News skim mode like I was.

Thanks, I started reading, thought "Oh I'm not really a basketball person". Saw your comment and decided to give it another go, and I'm glad I did. For others wondering why - It's an insightful story about being in over your head and depression by a guy who played pro ball, rather than a story about pro ball.

When the Players Tribune started, I thought it was gonna be garbage. It's soooo good. At least the handful of pieces I've read. I know there's a lot of ghostwriting. But I don't really care because the end product is compelling.

I agree. I really appreciate the fact that there's similar through-lines between the major sports. So many of these athletes are treated like superheros we forget that they've got their own struggles and triumphs like everybody else. It comes with a strong air of honesty too. There's been a number of articles that touch on my hometown teams (Buffalo Bills and Sabres) that make me respect the athletes even more for being so truthful.

This is such a great read. For those who don't know (I didn't) East St Louis is in Illinois, across the bridge (Eads?) is St Louis. Never been to Illinois. Most I know about it is it's not actually windy and Chicagos there.

I spent a lot of time in the projects in Virginia (Hampton/Norfolk), places like Lincoln Park. My friends were living it rough, I got to see it from the outside when I'd bike over to play Gameboy. They had to come to my house to play Sega, they didn't have tvs or if they did no games. I can't imagine Darius' life.

Wow. The way he described his childhood felt surreal. The only thing I had to worry about as a kid, was classes and high-school drama. I literally never once worried for my life or physical safety. It's insane that some kids in America, one of the richest countries in the world, have to grow up in an environment like that.

> “Look at these boys! Look at my beautiful boys!”

I mean we all know at this point that Donald Sterling is/was racist, but holy fuck the sliminess of the plantation owner vibe I get from this quote.

i didn't think much of darius miles back then, he could definitely dunk, but i didn't see him as an upcoming star, the guy flat out couldn't shoot the j and sometimes he made some really bad decisions on the court, so i didn't have much respect for him, didn't think he was the brainiest of the players.

but this article changes everything, i think he's quite articulate, if this was really written by him and reviewed by q, it's not a bad piece of work, never mind the ebonics, but it's not half bad at all.

i think a lot of fans don't realize the punishment professional athletes take on their bodies, surgeries that normal folks would probably forego and instead wait to heal at their own pace. obviously professional athletes get compensated for this, but it's still quite taxing, look at all the scars grant hill has from his multiple ankle and knee surgeries, walking just isn't the same anymore. but i'm sure most people would give up their right arm for the chance at a few years in the nba on those salaries.

I would assume that most of these stories are ghostwritten. After all, you dont make it to the NBA by spending your time reading and writing... Great story, though.

Listen to Jalen Rose to soften that prejudice. He’s better as a podcaster than he was on the hoops.

Playfully I disagree. Jalen was an amazing player and his junior year at Michigan is perhaps my favorite college season of any player. He had a coast to coast dunk in the great 8 (game they lost) that was...perfect.

WoW. I can only say this from the bottom of my heart. It takes courage, persistence and a hell lot of dedication to pull yourself up, especially when everyone else is trying to pull you down. God Bless you man. Fist Up!

I am an nba crazy person and vividly remember those guys and that era. It was a thing. That team with those two and Odem showed glimpses of being the future of basketball. It was easy to cheer for them because they seemed like good dudes just having fun. Great article.

My dad had partial Clipper season tickets (because Laker tickets are obscenely expensive and Clipper tickets were dirt cheap at the time) when these guys started playing. Before them, the team was a joke. The people who went to the games we’re just there to see whichever team the Clippers were playing against. There were like 12 actual Clipper fans and everybody would look at each other and go, “What kind of a weirdo wears a Clipper jersey?”.

But these guys changed everything. There was this incredible energy at the games. There were real fans. Little kids whose favorite player of all time was a Clipper. It was surreal. And so, so much fun.

I grew up in SoCal in the early 2000s and I distinctly remember how fun the Clips were to watch. They were heavily overshadowed by the Lakers and no one really expected them to win. But they were entertaining.

This is a story that mostly focuses on the come up rather than the come down. It must have been a hell of a run to become a multimillionaire teenager and work out of LA, no less. The anecdotes with Alonzo, MJ, and Shaq are hilarious. I could totally see Shaq doing something like that. I hope Miles can parlay that history and access into something cool for his future.

There's an interesting point both of them make about social media; I'm not sure I believe it. I imagine it's just as fun and wild to be a teenage NBA player was it was in the early 2000s.

Props to Miles for speaking out about his depression. Kevin Love and I think Lowry have been open about their struggles. We're all human, NBA players or not.

I read this the other day and thought it was an interesting story. I find some of the troll comments on here just as interesting. When I read it originally, the style of writing didn't even cross my mind. I could tell it was conversational. And seeing that Darius Miles is a little younger than me we use the same type of slang in conversation. At least around friends.

When I'm at work it's a different ball game. Like anybody else I try to sound more professional. But I find it amusing that some people are saying that the story doesn't read like English. It's a little hard to take them seriously.

I have no idea who this guy is or any interest in basketball but couldn’t stop reading. Awesome!

Wow spent that last 20 min reading the whole thing glued to wonder what did happen to Darius Miles. His mom was awesome and understandably a reason to be depressed, at the end of the day all you got is your family.

Seriously incredible...I know nothing about basketball but he has a way with words that made the whole story unfold in full color.

Heartbreaking in parts, glad to see something like this on HN.

This is great. I liked the early 2000s Clippers and many times have asked what happened to Darius Miles. First NBA game I went to was Clippers vs. Lakers with this group.

I have a Darius Miles Trailblazer jersey from when he was on our team. Just saying.

You play for the Trailblazer?

No, I live in Rip City.

Really awesome article. Felt real and touching.

Fantastic story.

Yes, and think about it, how concise it was. I got the same out of reading this 10-minute article as if he had a 250 page autobiography.

The article flowed, I liked reading it.

This is really well written.

Started reading, couldn't stop. A lot of the tone-deaf comments here seem to be missing the point that growing up where Miles did might as well be a different country. It's about culture – and looking down on someone just because they talk different is ignorant. And you do yourself a disservice by missing out on a piece of writing that is pretty fantastic. Is it relevant here? Of course. It's about making it in America; and all the ups, and downs, and inequalities involved.

> It's about culture – and looking down on someone just because they talk different is ignorant.

It's a shame, but linguistic discrimination is super common, and there doesn't seem to be much of a trend to change that. Likely because of education forcing the idea there's "One True English" (TM) and that if you didn't learn it you're dumb...Despite the fact nobody learns it natively, and you have to actually learn it, not acquire like your native dialect...So it all comes down to proper education, and did you learn when to use it, etc. Linguistic register is a nice term for everyone to Google.

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