champions Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Adam Wainwright will be harder to replace in the clubhouse than on the mound
Adam Wainwright represents a lot for St. Louis Cardinals fans. He’s the final player standing from the club’s latest but not-so-recent recent World Series victory, a pitcher who was a mainstay of a consistently good to great staff for almost two decades, and a cornerstone in the clubhouse both on an...

The umpires strike back
There is no longer season than the MLB one, and it’s understandable that just about everyone is at the end of their rope and not ready to deal with any sort of guff from any sort of swine. ...

Is there any point in playing this Champions League?
Nope, not really! But my editors and management insist that these posts are longer than three words, so I guess I’ll have to explain. If Manchester City waltzed to last year’s trophy, only really sweating in the final for about an hour against a stubborn Inter, they very well may never get out of a ...

Week 2 NFL Takeaways: A bounce back week for Chiefs, Bills, and Giants
Another week of NFL football is in the books. For all of my qualms with the NFL, Week 2 arrived a bit too quickly for my satisfaction. Scott Hanson’s first announcement of “seven hours of commercial free football,” and his second one felt like they were only a few days apart as opposed to an entire ...

Dustin Johnson needs to stop whining and reap what he's sown
You reap what you sow. And Dustin Johnson has no one to blame but himself for not making the United States Ryder Cup team. Once he sold out to Saudi-backed LIV Golf last year for a reported $125 million, his margin for error to make golf’s premier team event became razor-thin. And it shouldn’t be a ...

Behold, the magic of the Blue Jays' face-plant!
It’s been a wonky season for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was supposed to be the one where they leaped from just a playoff team to AL East titan. Didn’t work out. Part of it is that Alek Manoah started throwing wiffle balls. Another part is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power went to the zoo for most of...

Name something dumber than Jay Norvell talking smack about Deion Sanders
This week, ESPN’s College GameDay is setting up shop in Boulder, Colo., for Prime University’s cakewalk contest against Colorado State. Colorado are 23-point favorites, but the Worldwide Leader needs a reason to hop onto the Deion bandwagon before it loses steam once the schedule toughens up. Even b...

The NBA can try all it wants, player rest is impossible to stop
Remember when the Dallas Mavericks concluded an embarrassing 2022-23 season by not dressing Kyrie Irving and Luka Dončić instead of attempting to qualify for the Play-in Tournament? The Mavericks were fined $750,000, and I think that the NBA reached a breaking point in its never-ending saga of star-...

The Astros are just going to win again, aren't they?
There’s been a lot to get excited about in the American League, and a lot of new....

Djokovic and Gauff were machines at the US Open
There are a lot of ways to win in tennis. Novak Djokovic has found all of them. Coco Gauff may yet one day, though she found the one for this US Open. While Djokovic has had to vary his game at various points to overcome various challenges, at the base of it all remains the same truth as the day he ...

Coco Gauff will write her own story
When Coco Gauff beat Venus Williams at Wimbledon in 2019, a flood of expectations followed considering she was 15, American, Black, and had just ousted tennis royalty. The talent and potential was obvious enough, yet there are too many variables and unknowns to account for that calling anything a fo...

Ben Shelton's moment has arrived
I went to the US Open last night. First time inside Arthur Ashe Stadium and on the grounds in Flushing. It was also my first professional tennis event since attending the semifinals of the 2003 Legg Mason Tennis Classic and watching Andre Agassi lose in a third-set tiebreaker. The US Open dangles be...

Can the Detroit Lions live up to all the hype around them this season?
The Detroit Lions enter the 2023 NFL season on a wild hype train of high hopes and expectations after finishing strong last year, winning five of their final six games. Jared Goff looked like Detroit’s quarterback of the future, and Dan Campbell proved that he’s much more than a barbaric man who wan...

Coco Gauff is proof that tennis is wack without Black women
They used to not want Althea Gibson’s “kind” around. Now we don’t know where tennis would be without them. That’s how you ace an opportunity....

Arsenal are the Premier League’s new chaos masters and Chelsea can’t buy goals
It used to be Jürgen Klopp’s first Liverpool teams, and possibly the current one, that were considered the most raucous chaos merchants in the Premier League. They were equally capable of the most destructive football, going in both directions, equally capable of howitzer-ing their opponents or thei...

If you’re not watching Coco Gauff, you’ve got Spectrum
After a week of US Open coverage, two things are apparent: You need to see Coco Gauff and Carlos Alcaraz in person to really appreciate them, and for some tennis fans, that might be the only option. A carriage dispute between Charter Communications and Disney led to the Mouse pulling all its channel...

College football is back, and Nebraska is still gonna suck
The obsession with college football led to the creation of “Week 0” and it’s an American oxymoron to which no one will object. The tribalism compared to the NFL’s fandom spreading to every corner of the country that comes with having a longer season – that will only get longer next season with the e...

Maybe Noah Lyles was right about the NBA after all
The NBA announced Wednesday morning that the Dallas Mavericks will take on Euro League champions Real Madrid in a preseason exhibition on Oct. 10 in Spain. It isn’t unusual for the NBA to send teams to other countries for games before the start of the regular season, but this announcement’s timing ...

Green Bay’s patience with Jordan Love should make Trey Lance envious
Green Bay took the Jordan Year literally. Early in 2023, general manager Brian Gutekunst read all the stars and tea leaves, glanced at Aaron Rodgers’ advancing age — not to mention his diminishing mobility and prima donna behavior — and named the Packers’ latest first-round QB pick, Jordan Love, as ...

After 30 years (!!), it is finally time for Venus Williams to call it a career
Unlike at this time last year, the central figure of the US Open isn’t a Williams sister. Serena’s matches were all appointment television, maybe because of the known stakes, being one of tennis’ all-time great’s last event. And Flushing lost its luster after Serena’s third-round exit, until the sta...