Locker Page 36 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Chess and vibrating anal beads?
It’s been a little over a week since 19-year-old chess prodigy Hans Niemann shocked the world at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, taking down the top-rated player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, 31. Here’s a short recap of the fallout:...

Who the hell let Ray Hudson in the house?
CBS has mostly been a gift to soccer fans. Unlike Turner when it bought the Champions League rights, forgot about it until the day before the tournament started, and then dusted off some closet and called whatever former USMNT members were within an hour’s flight of the studio, CBS has taken its cov...

You get eight months to come up with better than that
There is more that goes into being a head coach of an NFL team than I can possibly imagine. But then, no one’s paying me several million (feel free to though!) to learn all the things it takes and be good at them. Not only do you have to manage the side of the ball that you have been as a coordinato...

HBO isn’t the only home for a Song of Ice and Fire
You can only hope you’re witnessing history at the moment. You obviously can’t know until the perspective of time kicks in. You tell yourself that this moment or that moment feels different than other ones you think you saw. But does it? Are you just telling yourself that? You can tell yourself anyt...

There’s losing to Kentucky and Marshall, and then there’s losing to App State and Georgia Southern
The unassuming weeks are always the most dangerous for college football, but especially so early in the season when the rankings are more guesses than earned distinctions. Still though, when you schedule an FCS school and pay them to come play non-conference patsy during homecoming or whatever else,...

How do you cheat in live chess?
Magnus Carlsen achieved the rank of chess grandmaster — the highest rank achievable in chess — at the age of 13 years old. The 31-year-old Norwegian mastermind is a five-time World Chess Champion and widely regarded as the best chess player in the world. He rarely loses, and that made his loss in th...

Oh great, they’re letting humanoids play tennis now
The US Open could’ve fizzled out after Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal lost. Casual fans are conditioned to look for those four names when following a Grand Slam. While we weren’t watching for Williams’ pursuit of her 24th Slam, we were still watching for Serena. The men’s bracket was more of the s...

It’s also the start of NFL propaganda season
You always have to hope that the Sunday night game, or really any primetime NFL game, is a good one. Because when it’s bad, there’s just far too much dead time for Cris Collinsworth’s brain to drip out of his ear. I don’t mind Collinsworth as much as other people. He can be a little too “Everything ...

Sports world reacts to death of Queen Elizabeth II
The reaction from the sports world came down quickly after Thursday’s passing of Queen Elizabeth II at 96. Tweets and other posts from athletes of British descent and others from around the globe paid tribute to the Queen, who served as the United Kingdom’s monarch for 70 years....

Doug Gottlieb has to grovel like the chode he is
As sports media devolves into the same kind of morass that the rest of the media is, and society probably (happy to do my part!), you can kind of split the main outlets into two main categories. There are those who are simply around to belch out something most days of the week, no matter how noxious...

Relieved to miss the redemption arc we didn’t need
It certainly speaks to the world’s ability to completely turn over and surprise you that Nick Kyrgios was installed as the favorite to win the U.S. Open after he pretty much paddled Danil Medvedev and Francis Tiafoe overturned Rafael Nadal. This is Nick Kyrgios after all, who never needed more than ...

It’s come together for Frances Tiafoe
There’s a pretty common narrative for tennis players, which has been blunted on the men’s side for a while because well, there’s been three guys stopping anyone else from taking the final step. The arc is supposed to be that a player shows up in his late teens or early 20s, flashes some serious game...

Might be time for pro athletes to beef up that security — or flaunt less online
In a little less than three months, it will be the 15th anniversary of Sean Taylor’s death from a home invasion in South Florida. A physical specimen by any metric, the University of Miami and Washington NFL franchise star died from a gunshot wound at age 24. ...

It’s just a game
The first time I wrote “professionally” about Serena Williams, back when Bleacher Report was still an onslaught of slideshows, I called her overrated. I was just out of college, and my terrible, awful, horrendous take was she didn’t win as much as she could. This was more than a decade ago, and it w...

Where does Tony Khan think stars come from?
AEW maven Tony Khan had his pre-All Out media call yesterday. These can be fascinating encounters, where he’s there basically to promote a show, and most of the people asking him questions are throwing hanging curveballs so he can do so. However, every so often someone asks him something that doesn’...

No one wants to let go
It is obviously going to take a brave woman to stare down Serena Wiliams at Ashe Stadium, where 24,000 (minus the handful they have in their player’s box) will be backing the legend to keep her career alive for just a couple more days. It is perhaps the most unique advantage in tennis history, a wal...

Baseball is for lovers
The joke used to be that you were supposed to think of baseball to un-horny yourself. When you needed to prolong proceedings to a length of time that wouldn’t be embarrassing or possibly even to one acceptable to both (or more?) parties. Think of every third baseman in the National League in 1991 an...
