girinathan Page 49 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Joel Embiid Says He Learned To Shoot By Watching White People Online
Joel Embiid, who’ll make his NBA debut tonight, wants our attention, so badly. He seeks it in many ways: by guzzling Shirley Temples by the syrupy pitcher, by clowning on Andrew Wiggins, or by publicly asking out Rihanna. And we give it to him, maybe a little begrudgingly, because the content is goo...

Is Juan Martin Del Potro Back?
The large, hard-charging Argentine is winning things again. Juan Martin del Potro just captured his first ATP title in two years at the Stockholm Open, an event he’d only qualified for by way of wild card. Most of those two years he spent addressing chronic wrist injuries and free-falling through th...

Dustin Brown Can Make A Lob Look Sexy
As far as outright winners go, lobs might be the least exhilarating way to terminate a point of tennis. You plop the tennis ball high into the air, way out of your opponent’s reach, and then it falls way back down into the court, hooray. You can respect the lob on a technical level—an especially def...

Hindus And Trump Rallied Together In A Xenophobic Fever Dream
Grab a plate of good, oily pav bhaji and watch a well-loved Indian movie star perform for thousands of immigrants. He greets the crowd in Tamil, jokes about jet lag, shimmies, and shimmers in the hallucinogenic stage lighting; the crowd squeezes as close as security will allow. Then watch as presid...

Nick Kyrgios Picks NBA Celebrity Game Over Tennis Tournament, Which Is Actually Good As Hell
Nick Kyrgios has done dumb things lately and has taken plenty of heat for it—from disappointed fans, from hand-wringing commentators, and from the ATP itself via heavy fines and suspension. They’ll all be tempted to wag their fingers again after Kyrgios’s latest move: pulling out of February’s Rot...

What Did The Ball Ever Do To You, Sir?
While I have no way of knowing exactly what was on world No. 44 Nicolas Almagro’s mind, he poured a lot of it onto this unsuspecting tennis ball during yesterday’s match against No. 86 Yuichi Sugita at the Stockholm Open. ...

Nick Kyrgios Fined And Suspended For Tanking
Apparently unamused by Nick Kyrgios’s tanking antics in a second-round match at the Shanghai Masters, the ATP struck the No. 14 ranked player with a $25,000 fine for “Conduct Contrary to the Integrity of the Game” and an eight-week ban from the tour. ...

Alexander Zverev, The Large Tennis Kid, Can Move
At 6-foot-6, Alexander Zverev cuts a tall, almost skeletal figure on a tennis court. Curiously, the German 19-year-old’s path through the Shanghai Masters pitted him against the other extremely large tennis men, John Isner (6-foot-10) and Marin Cilic (6-foot-6)....

Nick Kyrgios Tanks Masterfully, Trash-Talks Fans
Mayflies can live up to one day; the notion that Nick Kyrgios was going to take a serious approach to tennis lived for just three. Sunday, he won his first ATP 500 event, the Rakuten Japan Open, and by Wednesday he was gloriously tanking his second-round match of the Shanghai Masters against Mischa ...

Roger Federer And Rafael Nadal Are Not In The Top Four For The First Time Since 2003<em></em><em></em>
Scroll through the ranking histories of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, skim over the mind-numbing string of No. 1's during Federer’s untouchable 2004-2008 run, and you might notice that you need to dig back to June 2003 to find a moment when neither Fed nor Rafa was among the top four players in th...

Nick Kyrgios Likes To Look Cool As He Makes His Opponents Look Silly<em></em>
Nick Kyrgios is the bold bad boy in a sport where it’s frowned upon for fans to make noises during play. Tremble as you realize that this youngster, well ... he truly might not give a damn....

Andy Murray Dryly Recounts The Time He Was Stalked Across Europe
Andy Murray just did a dull interview, revealing nothing of note, other than more of the usual banal athlete platitudes. After being asked “Do you have the ‘dry English humour?’” and confirming that he did have the dry English humour, he delivered a yawn-worthy anecdote about unsatisfactory room ser...

Novak Djokovic Visits The Bomb-Ravaged Tennis Club From His Childhood
Novak Djokovic livestreamed a visit Monday to some childhood tennis courts that were struck by the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in what was then Yugoslavia. Hiking through Kopaonik, Serbia, the No. 1 player pointed out three former clay courts, now overrun by vegetation, only a fence and net post rem...

Stan Wawrinka Says He Had An Anxiety Attack Before The U.S. Open Final
To watch Stan Wawrinka dispatch Novak Djokovic in the U.S. Open final last month was to see the physical toll the sport can take. Both men looked dazed and drenched in the heat of late-summer New York City, and Djokovic cramped severely and took an injury timeout for a blistered, bloodied toe. But t...

Rafael Nadal Halts Play While Mother Seeks Her Lost, Weeping Child
When will parents learn the consequences of minding their children? First, the death of the handsome silverback Harambe. Now, the brief interruption of an obscure exhibition doubles match pitting Rafael Nadal and teen Simon Solbas against old guys Carlos Moyá and John McEnroe, out in Nadal’s home is...

Send Us Your College Roommate Horror Stories
At the risk of doomsaying like some David Brooksian “kids these days” reactionary luddite, it must be said: College now seems crueler than ever before....

Frances Tiafoe Is A Good American And This Is A Great Point
If for some sad reason you’re a U.S. tennis stan and find yourself sick of big-serving lunk John Isner, you’d be wise to shift your loyalties to Frances Tiafoe, who serves as Isner’s perfect foil: Eighteen years old, closer to six feet tall than seven, spry, exceedingly mobile. My favorite part of T...

Lucas Pouille Is The Next Big Tennis Guy
Decked out in Agassi-era neons and backwards cap, Lucas Pouille looks like a guy who stumbled onto the court after an EDM festival, or after getting chased off a fictional Seth Rogen’s property. But the 22-year-old also just won his first ATP title—the Moselle Open, in his home country of France—and...

Study: America's Large Adult Sons Economically Crippled By Good Video Games
The bare fact will not surprise you: Many of our country’s young men fritter away potential work hours by enjoying fun leisure activities instead. Nor is it especially news that more men do this more often than they did even a decade ago—we’ve had a recession in the interim, after all. What is odd i...

We Don't Remember The Sweatpants Kid, But Let's Remember Some Pants
An apologia of “Sweatpants Kid” over at New York magazine left some of our staff wondering: who was the Sweatpants Kid? Did he exist, and is it accurate to generalize his existence across era and geography? Some of us remembered, or even were Sweatpants Kid in grade school, and a few saw him persist...