Sports & Recreation

While Reddit is often maligned, fairly, as the internet’s bathroom wall, there are spaces on the sprawling link-sharing site that provide genuine community. One such subreddit is /r/Cowboys. /r/Cowboys is a happy place, full of goofy inside jokes like the deification of Cowboys kicker Dan Bailey and the shared experiences of a fan base that’s gone more than 20 years without an NFC Championship game experience. The subreddit’s members are often genuinely insightful about the latest tidbit of news out of Frisco, Arlington or Oxnard. Stop by whenever you need a quick look at the Cowboys universe.

July did not go well for former Cowboys wide receiver and return specialist Lucky Whitehead. Whitehead’s dog, Blitz, went missing, and the receiver received calls from someone asking for a ransom. A week later, a Fort Worth rapper named Boogotti Kasino returned the dog, claiming he’d bought it from someone else. Less than a week after that, Whitehead was off the Cowboys. The team cut him after finding out that he had a failure-to-appear warrant related to a shoplifting charge in Virginia. Which would’ve been fine, if a little tacky, except for the fact that the person who did the alleged shoplifting wasn’t Whitehead. Instead, after getting arrested, a still unidentified man gave police Whitehead’s identifying information, including his Social Security number. The Cowboys refused to give Whitehead another chance, but the unlucky speedster caught on with the New York Jets, one of the NFL’s worst teams.

The story of the 1988 Carter Cowboys is really three stories. It’s a riveting sports story about a Dallas ISD high school that put together the most talented team in the history of Texas high school football despite an academic scandal likely created by jealous parents at a rival school. It’s a crime saga, too, about a group of middle-class kids who started pulling armed robberies because they were bored after the season ended and then spent hard time in the Texas prison system. Finally, the story of the 1988 Carter Cowboys, as told in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary What Carter Lost is one of redemption for the team. For the five Cowboys who ended up in jail, it’s enough that they are all out and leading productive lives. For the rest of the team and the Carter community, it’s about being recognized as more than just the team that ended Odessa Permian’s Friday Night Lights season and later had to give up its state championship.

It’s time to give the devil his due. In August, Jones went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’s turned the Cowboys into the world’s most valuable sports club at an estimated value of $4.2 billion and finally, thank God, turned over most of the team’s day-to-day operations to his son Stephen. The Cowboys play in a beautiful stadium for which the city of Arlington helped to pay and are a money-making machine. If this core of Cowboys players (led by Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott and Dez Bryant) wins a championship, Jones may finally earn forgiveness for chasing Jimmy Johnson out of town after Super Bowl XXVIII.

There are Rangers fans out there who still, somehow, think Joey Gallo is not good at baseball. They’re wrong. Gallo may be hitting below .200. He may strike out in nearly 40 percent of his plate appearances. But thanks to his tremendous power, above-average base-running and decent defense, he is still an above-average Major League regular. Gallo is going to hit more than 30 home runs this year while getting on base more than 30 percent of the time and being a great teammate. As he is, he’s good enough to be a starter on a winning team. If his game matures and he begins to make more contact, he’s capable of being a perennial MLB All-Star.

Quarterback Dak Prescott is the face of the Cowboys, and the Cowboys couldn’t be in better hands. After being drafted in the fourth round of the 2016 NFL draft, Prescott led the Cowboys to 13 wins and a division title. He did so while earning the respect of his teammates and his adopted city, charming fans with his easy smile and earnestness that borders on dorkiness — seriously, the guy listens to Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” to get fired up before games. Prescott has the game to lead the Cowboys back to the promised land and the personality to etch himself on Dallas’ sports Mount Rushmore.

Pluckers Old Town is everything a great sports bar should be and nothing it shouldn’t. On college football Saturdays and NFL Sundays, the Upper Greenville wing joint has plenty of screens, enough to broadcast any game anyone might have shown up to see. The wings are very good, as are the bevy of fried appetizers and desserts — seriously, the fried mac and cheese and fried Oreos are delicious, despite the self-loathing they might induce later. The beer, available in pints and 34-ounce “Mother Plucker” mugs, is cold and cheap. There isn’t anything healthy on the menu, but that would just be a distraction anyway.

Readers’ Pick: The Rustic

The old-school batting cages at Ellen’s in Cedar Hill feature pitch speeds from 45 mph to 85 mph, in addition to both fast- and slow-pitched soft balls. They’re cheap as far as batting cages go at $1.50 for 20 pitches and have a comforting, no-frills, low-pressure vibe. You don’t feel like you’re wasting anybody’s time by hacking at slow-pitched meatballs for an hour or two. After taking out your frustrations, be sure to enjoy the complex’s miniature golf course, one of the best in DFW.

Readers’ Pick Topgolf

This is one of our more awkward picks. The fact is, the best sporting goods store is dependent on your sport and how committed you are to it. If you’re a serious camper or backpacker, you’re going to REI. A cyclist? See you at Richardson Bike Mart or one of the other fine cycling stores in DFW. Training for another marathon? Take those tootsies to Run On! And so it goes. Academy is a big-box generalist in a market filled with niches — not to mention Amazon. Still, for the casual sportsperson who’s looking for discounts and a wide selection of goods, those getting ready to try out a new sport or sign their kids up for little league, tailgaters and weekend barbecuers, or those just needing some casual workout togs, the big box has its charms. It has a little bit of everything, tons of locations throughout DFW and the sort of prices one gets by buying in volume, volume, volume.

Readers’ Pick Academy Sports + Outdoors

If you want luxury, air conditioning, a coffee shop, a concealed-carry class or to rent a machine gun to try out, take your fat wallet up to Frisco Gun Club, the country club of DFW gun ranges. We, however, prefer to do our shooting in the great outdoors, where we’re not hammered by the concussion of our neighbors’ cannons and, to be honest, we can get a little more privacy. Better still, we like value for our shooting. (If you think golf is an expensive hobby, you haven’t priced ammo lately.) For $15 Garland Public Shooting Range will let you shoot all day — you can even come and go during the day on a single pass — and it rents a variety of guns to try for another $15 all day. (You have to buy the range’s ammo for its rental guns, but that’s SOP at gun ranges, and the prices are reasonable.) Spotting scopes, safety glasses and ear protection can be rented for $2 each. It offers pistol, rifle and skeet stations and is open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day. Yes, that includes Christmas, which is actually a pretty busy day. Hey, if Santa leaves you a sweet Sig under the tree, you don’t want to have to wait around to try it out. We’re all just kids at heart.

Readers’ Pick DFW Gun Range and Training Center

The painful truth is that Dallas is terrible for disc golf and has earned its reputation for offering few places to play. BB Owen takes the prize for the city’s best, beating out the one in Oak Cliff with drainage tunnels crowded with homeless people. Still, the short course is fun to play, and there are no pesky hills to wear you down in the heat. The flat terrain and straight holes are good for beginners and seasoned players who want to calibrate the range of their throws without impediment.

Readers’ Pick Oak Cliff Founders Park

Add some country club vibes to a gym and you get Life Time. When you walk in, you’re greeted immediately by a welcoming smile at the front desk, and it’s followed up by a couple more on the way to the luxury locker rooms. The club has plenty of machines, so you’re never awkwardly waiting for something to open up. It also offers several classes: HIIT, TCX, yoga, dance, cycling and more. On top of all of that, it has indoor and outdoor pools, basketball courts, a sauna and a steam room. A solid balance of members — gym rats, olds and dad bods — frequents the gym, so you’ll never feel out of place. After your workout, stop by the Life Cafe for a delicious (but healthy) chipotle chicken quesadilla and a strawberry sunrise smoothie.

Readers’ Pick Life Time Fitness

Over the last few seasons, FC Dallas, which, despite its name, inexplicably plays in Frisco, has built itself into an Major League Soccer juggernaut. Thanks to homegrown players like budding U.S. Men’s National Team star Kellyn Acosta, during the last year, North Texas’ professional soccer club has racked up a U.S. Open Cup, MLS Supporters Shield and Champions League semifinal appearance in the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football. By building from within, starting with a league-best youth system, FC Dallas has achieved sustainable, repeatable success in a league that is built to enforce and ensure parity. While MLS leaves a lot to be desired as a league, FC Dallas is as good a soccer club as exists in the United States.

Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott scored a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, Dec. 18. After his two-yard run, Elliott ran through the back of the end zone and headed for the oversized Salvation Army kettle that the team displays during the holiday season. He hopped in, drawing a 15-yard penalty thanks to NFL’s humorless anticelebration policy. The Cowboys came out unscathed, however, eventually winning the game 26-20. The real winner, however, was the Salvation Army. In the two days following Elliott’s leap, the charity raised more than $800,000.

Early in its first-season run, The Doomsday Podcast got a bit of a shock when ESPN laid off co-host and longtime NFL reporter Ed Werder. What started out as an interesting but straightforward weekly look into the Cowboys added an intriguing layer of pathos as Werder’s career was in limbo. For the first time in years, he isn’t on ESPN, but he can’t work anywhere else because the network continues to pay his contracted salary. He’s only allowed to keep doing the podcast, he says, because he got the go-ahead before being laid off. Stir in the fantastic guests Werder and fellow host Matt Mosley have booked, including Dak Prescott, Jaylon Smith and Wade Phillips, and Doomsday has become an appointment download for fans of the Cowboys and pro football in general.

In the natural bottomlands and prairies along the Trinity River in Arlington are 8 miles of paved hike and bike trails. The more than 1,000-acre park, much of which is shaded, is open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and its wooded areas are natural habitats to hundreds of species of wildlife, including bobcats, armadillos, raccoons, wild boars, snakes and turtles, which can often be spotted along the trail routes. Although not 100 percent complete, River Legacy Trails are part of the vision to link Dallas and Fort Worth via trail, says Michael Debrecht, park operations manager. “We are in the planning stages to extend our eastern portion to [State Highway] 360, where [Fort Worth] and Grand Prairie can then join and extend within their jurisdictions,” he says.

Readers’ Pick Cedar Ridge Nature Preserve

Our apologies to the Dallas Off Road Bicycle Association (dorba.org) and the fine work it does maintaining a large number of off-road trails in the area, but we’re skinny-tire guys here. In fact, some of our staff members occasionally bike-commute to work, though to be honest, a good, solid mountain bike is needed to ride many of Dallas’ poorly maintained streets. For our money (new rims cost a bundle), give us the good ol’ White Rock Trail — not the part around the lake, necessarily, but the portion that runs from the north of the lake to Valley View Park north of LBJ Freeway. Its 9.3 miles aren’t packed with pedestrians and strollers like Katy Trail, and it takes riders through native forest, past shopping plazas and under freeways, giving cyclists the full panorama of city living. That includes the grittier side — we’ve seen homeless guys bathing in the creek and one shaven-headed, shirtless soul lugging a 6-foot-tall cross on a freeway bridge embankment. Best yet, if you really want to put some miles on, you can connect to the Santa Fe Trail to downtown, or with a little backstreet maneuvering past Valley View Park or from the connecting Cottonwood Trail (watch out for homeless people’s shopping carts), riders can reach Plano’s extensive trail system, making it possible to ride from downtown to Frisco without fear of catching an SUV in the back.

Readers’ Pick White Rock Lake

At the risk of raising howls of outrage from Dallas’ bike community, we’re just gonna say it: There’s a lot of snobbery and cliqueishness in the bike world. “Oh, you have derailleurs? My fixed-gear just seems more kind of the back-to-basics real thing.” “Ah, still riding aluminum, eh? Well, maybe when you get serious, you can make the jump to carbon frame.” “Carbon? I find it just doesn’t have the same feel as my custom-made titanium beauty, hand welded by an artisan in Boulder.” It’s driven by gear lust, and it’s why we once heard high-end bikes described as “a poor man’s Porsche.” No place in Dallas satiates gear lust better than Richardson Bike Mart, the perennial readers’ favorite for best Dallas bike shop. The main shop on Campbell Road isn’t the cheapest shop in town. It doesn’t offer the personalized service of some of the smaller local joints. It’s just so damn big. It has everything, from entry-level commuter bikes to recumbents to e-bikes on up to a $12,000 Trek Domane roadster with electric shifters. (Pedals sold separately. No kidding.) Neon spandex, ultralight and cool helmets, shoes that would make Manolo Blahnik envious — it’s all there. Don’t worry. You can get out of Richardson Bike Mart with a decent set of wheels and money in your pocket. But if you fall in love with the sport, you’ll be back for more. So much more.

Readers’ Pick: Richardson Bike Mart

The Dallas Morning News has exactly one sports columnist worth reading any time his byline crosses your Twitter feed. Bob Sturm, who also does great work for The Ticket, the Dallas Stars studio show and FC Dallas’ local broadcasts, breaks down the Cowboys offense and defense in two columns each week during the season, in addition to providing commentary on prospects in the runup to the NFL draft. His writing is insightful, nerdy and still easy to read, perfect for anyone who wants to dive deeper into the Cowboys’ performance every week. Even when he’s wrong, and he rarely is, Sturm is perceptive. After panning Dak Prescott before the 2016 draft, Sturm had the good humor to eat some crow and try to figure out what he and the rest of the media missed about the new Cowboys star.

Readers’ Pick Dale Hanson, WFAA

In an era when some Dallas bowling haunts have become more club than alley, with wait times and prices to match, USA Bowl in Northwest Dallas sticks out for its simplicity. More than four dozen lanes, a decent pro shop and fair-to-horrible bowling alley food make for a decent way to spend a Saturday afternoon or a Tuesday morning, depending on your schedule. If you aren’t worn out from all that rolling, USA Bowl boasts some stellar neighbors to visit after bowling as well — the Spearmint Rhino is right across the street.

Readers’ Pick Bowlounge

There are definitely worse ways to spend a fall afternoon than finishing the Rangers’ annual 5K. For the entry fee, runners get the usual stuff, including a T-shirt and post-race food and drinks, but they also get the chance to finish on Globe Life Park’s warning track and a ticket and parking pass to that night’s Rangers game. Proceeds from race benefit the Rangers Foundation, which contributes to youth baseball, education and crisis prevention throughout North Texas.

Readers’ Pick Katy Trail 5K

If there’s ever a workout almost everyone thinks he or she can do, it’s yoga. But of course, we all know that once you actually get inside a yoga studio, it’s apparent that it’s not for the weak-minded or weak-boned. Yoga is for the mentally strong who thrive in a quiet room surrounded by quietly likeminded people. At Uptown Yoga, everyone is welcome, with students ranging from young adults to those in their 60s. If you’re ready to cleanse your soul and mind and be renewed with one workout, head to Uptown Yoga.

Readers’ Pick SunstoneFIT

What is more spiritual than 90 minutes on a bike listening to your favorite pop or hip-hop music? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And SoulCycle Uptown is proof of that. Whether it’s a Beyoncé themed day or a Taylor Swift versus Katy Perry hype session to get your legs going on the stationary bike, there’s no better place in town for the rejuvenating and toxin-cleansing workout that is SoulCycle Uptown. It almost feels like an out-of-body experience when the lights are dimmed and you cycle your ass off. It’s like a less-sexy Ariana Grande music video, but somehow we are into it. And we keep going back for more.

Readers’ Pick SoulCycle