fl Page 18 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Why Won't The FCC Let Orphan Counties Watch Their Local NFL Teams?
Billy Paul got NFL Sunday Ticket this year. It was the only way to watch his Patriots every week. Paul lives in Massachusetts. See a problem?...

Do We Grow Out Of Going Home For The Holidays?
This year on Christmas morning, we four adult children will emerge from our various haphazard sleeping situations, my sister and I from the double bed we traditionally share, and my brothers from their makeshift beds in the unfinished basement, or perhaps one of them will have fallen asleep on the c...

How Steven Seagal Became A Useful Puppet For Post-Soviet Dictators
On a crisp November morning in Moscow, Steven Seagal found himself within the walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, seated across from Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man in the Russian Federation. Dressed in a blood-red kimono and black trousers—a throwback to his days as a martial artist—Seagal obs...

Olympic Curling Qualifier Gets Hamstrung By Politeness, Finishes With Insane Danish Shot
One of curling’s unusual features, other than everything else, has been its politeness and sportsmanship. The first page of the official rulebook discusses The Spirit of Curling for a reason, as it points out that players should be the first to admit if they broke a rule. (Imagine if NBA or NHL play...

The Complete Guide To Understanding Chess
You probably remember the rules of chess, but what’s actually happening there on the board? How many moves are Grandmasters really thinking ahead? Why do they never actually checkmate the opponent? Is my life just like a game of chess?...

Where Is The UFC's Next Generation Of Stars?
Max Holloway is everything the UFC and its fans could possibly want in a young champion. His high-octane, aggressive, and dangerous but technical style makes him appealing to both the base desire to see blood and the intellectual side of fandom simultaneously. He could conceivably reign over one of ...

What The 2024 Olympics Will And Won't Do For Paris
You already know what is worth celebrating about the Olympics. You may know this because the Olympics will not stop reminding you of them, but this does not mean they’re not real. The spirit of sportsmanship is not just a cliché for the telecast, and the games really do give women athletes, underval...

Nina Roth And John Shuster Win Olympic Curling Spots In A Nailbiting Trials
USA Curling held their Olympic trials over the past weekend and officially have their teams for Pyeongchang in 2018. The women’s team will be led by Nina Roth alongside Tabitha Peterson, Aileen Geving, and Becca Hamilton, in the first Olympics for everyone on that team. On the men’s side, well, stra...

Canada Accidentally Forced Olympic Hopefuls Into Midnight Curling
Ah, tiebreaker scenarios: everyone’s favorite chaotic twist to a championship run. Baseball loved them so much, it went ahead and built it into the schedule. Yet some of the wildest tiebreaking calculus of the year occurred, out of all places, in the peaceful province of Prince Edward Island this...

Looking For Peace With The Man On The Wire
Originally published as “Philippe Petit: Slow Dancing on the High Wire” in the October, 1986 issue of New York Woman, this feature appears here with permission from the author....

The Totally Unexpected True Story Of Yi Jianlian's Magical Mystery Chair
Mention Yi Jianlian, and the first thing that comes to mind is probably that video of him working out against a chair. The baseline drive, the juke, the spin move around the defenseless chair and the ferocious slam. Do you remember it?...

How UNH Turned A Quiet Benefactor Into A Football-Marketing Prop
The internet abounds in cheerful content, and last fall one of its most cheerful stories started like this: In a press release, the University of New Hampshire announced that an elderly librarian had died—and left the school a shocking donation of $4 million....

The World Series National Anthem That Infuriated America
The current crop of athletes protesting during the national anthem has roots at the 1968 Olympics, with the Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos after they finished first and third, respectively, in the 200 meters. John Dominis’s famous photograph of the two U.S. sprinters on the medal...

The Legendary Baseball Photo That Almost Didn't Come Out Because The Stadium Was Shaking Too Hard
The baseball soared into the early-morning blackness, heading toward the left-field foul pole. Tracking the flight of the ball he’d just hit, Carlton Fisk began to frantically flap his arms in an effort to will it fair. ...

Every NHL Team Is Bad: A Season Preview
The NHL season starts tonight. Some teams have no realistic chance at a Stanley Cup. Yet all the teams are bad, in their own special ways. ...

Trash, Like Feelings, Can Become A Sad Wet Fire When Buried
Today’s column is about mysterious trash fires....

How A Small-Time Training Group And An Army Program Changed American Distance Running
Warmed up and stripped down, 15 blade-thin runners milled on the track, game-faced, gathering themselves. A few words between them, Swahili and English—“20 seconds ... 10 …”—and the amorphous group coalesced into a single-file line, shuffling. Scott Simmons had not finished saying, “Go!” when the fi...

Want To Avoid Getting Screwed On Arena Deals? Look To Seattle.<em></em>
Nine years ago, Seattle’s sports scene was in about as dire circumstances as a city can get. The owner of the SuperSonics, Starbucks mogul Howard Schultz, had thrown a hissy fit over Washington’s refusal to gift him $220 million to renovate an arena that had just been renovated 11 years earlier, and...

Reconsider The Lobster
ROCKLAND, Maine—The New Hampshire/Maine split on I-95 in Portsmouth, N.H., is unpredictable. Sometimes you’re able to breeze through to your final destination—back to your shit hole of a dorm room in Durham, or off to the Kittery Trading Post to buy a crossbow and a bottle of deer piss—but other tim...

The Ratio Is The Triple Crown Of Bad Tweets
Every bad tweet lives a life. They begin as every tweet begins: in idiocy and shame, but also with hope. No tweet will ever be anything but the legible stain of a person yielding to the human impulse to transcribe the precise sound of every fart; even the good tweets that exist are basically the rec...