fl Page 23 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Improbable Story Of Baseball's Wildest Comeback
It definitely ain’t over ‘til it’s over. The 116-win 2001 Seattle Mariners were one of the greatest teams, in any sport, to not win a championship. Led by Lou Piniella, the team was built for success: they boasted great pitching, an impeccable knack for getting on base (their .360 OBP was the highes...
I Tried Chessboxing And I Will Never Do It Again
BERLIN – Let me say something obvious: fighting someone is exhausting. The switch—or whatever you want to call it—that flips when the lizard part of your brain tells the rest of you to hold off on metabolizing or thinking is inescapable. When you’re a novice fighter like me, the only thing you can t...
A Different Kind Of Party At The Women's World Cup
In May I was at a bar in Portland, Ore., with two of my brothers, watching the U.S. women’s national soccer team play the first of a series of pre-World Cup tune-ups. At first, we were the only people there—it was Mother’s Day, around brunchtime. A little after halftime, an older couple sat down at ...
Can Nairo Quintana End Europe's Stranglehold On The Tour De France?
This year’s Tour de France boasts the strongest group of contenders this decade. Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali split the last two Tours in dominant fashion. Alberto Contador, the greatest stage racer of his generation, hasn’t finished a Grand Tour lower than first in over a year. All three are hi...
"The Worst Team In The World" Is Living Its World Cup Dream
THIMPHU, Bhutan – Six to zero. 6-0. The final score of the June 16 China-Bhutan World Cup qualifier was six to freaking zero in favor of the Chinese. And do you know what the Bhutanese fans did after the game? They sang to the players. They cheered. They screamed with absolute joy when the keeper, H...
An Illicit Tour Of The New Vikings Stadium
The Vikings’ new billion-dollar stadium is little more than a year from opening, and feels much further away. Bulldozers work upon the patch of broken earth that will eventually become a football field. Its upper deck levels are nothing but giant, bare, staircase-like concrete slabs and along every ...
Ty Cobb Was No One's Antihero
For no obvious reason, 2015 has become the summer of Ty Cobb. Two new books about the famously belligerent outfielder are in print this year, one from SI editor Charles Leerhsen and another, more ambitiously-subtitled one—War on the Basepaths: The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb—by independent histo...
How The Most Iconic Photo In Women's Soccer Was Almost Never Taken
It was arguably the biggest moment in the history of American women’s sports, and the single most memorable and reproduced image of the celebration. Brandi Chastain had just converted the penalty kick that cemented the 1999 Women’s World Cup for the United States over China. She then experienced a f...
Why Are UFC Champions Hanging Out With An Accused Russian War Criminal?
Here is a delightful vignette: UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman doing his best impression of the lezginka, the national dance of the North Caucasus region of Russia, in the palace of Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic. You can see Kadyrov in the video—he’s the short, bearded gentlem...
Behind The Photo That Changed The Boston Marathon Forever
Everyone knows someone who’s run the marathon. Today’s big-city races—in places like Boston, New York, Berlin, and London—draw Olympic hopefuls competing for hundreds of thousands of dollars and hordes of weekend warriors raising money for their favorite charities or just hoping to check off “compl...
How Has The NCAA's New 30-Sec Shot Clock Worked This Postseason?
As a college hoops superfan, I'll watch the NIT, and even the CIT and CBI given the chance. I've even attended two CIT title games. But the reality is that there's little at stake in these events other than the chance for participating teams to play more basketball and for me to watch more basketb...
What Happens To Enforcers When Hockey Uses Them Up?
More winter Friday nights than not through my first few years of high school, I was in my usual seat at the local arena, three or four rows up behind the home team's bench. On the ice, the Ontario Hockey League's Ottawa 67's, a group of—boys, really, aged 16 to 20. A handful of them would go on to...
Is WrestleMania Going To Be Garbage, Or What?
Welcome to Deadspin's new irregular pro wrestling column, in which Tom Breihan and Ernest Wilkins will comb through the past month of superkicks, lariats, and 450 splashes in search of the greatest things that this most American of artforms has given us....
How Anthony Davis Gives The Pelicans Open Looks They Don't Deserve
Good ball movement generates open shots. This is Basketball 101, so fundamental to the game's primary education it may as well come down on stone tablets to every young player. It's proven: perhaps to the relief of youth coaches around the country, SportVU player-tracking shows that ball movement in...
How One Of America's Greatest Sportswriters Disappeared
It was almost endearing how an ink-smudged, deadline-addicted newspaper editor of yore would squint through the smoke from his cigarette and ask a bright young man why the hell he wanted to write sports. An editor like that was usually about as sensitive as a bolt cutter, but he couldn't resist th...
Even God Cheats: How Anderson Silva Shocked Us By Doing The Expected
The Nevada State Athletic Commission is a bumbling, soulless government agency, and so a strange agent for the delivery of the message that our gods have forsaken us. They never have been particularly diligent messengers in any event, but for whatever reason—bureaucracy, incompetence, something more...
Does Skiing Need Cheerleaders?
The 2015 World Ski Championships have had some historic firsts. The first World Champs to be held in the U.S. this century. The oldest women's winner (Tina Maze, 31, downhill). And then the oldest World Champs winner, period (Hannes Reichelt, 34 downhill). The first skier to win the same discipline ...
A Way-Too-Serious Scouting Report On The NBA All-Star Celebrity Game
The Celebrity Game is without question the crown jewel of NBA All-Star Weekend, an event that provides the too-rare opportunity to see the TV and movie and music stars (and in some case, "stars") the world worships be extremely terrible at something, and for however brief a second, be able to say ...
Anna Fenninger's Amazing Save Showed That Size Doesn't Always Matter
Late into a giant slalom run that looked like it would clinch her second gold in the 2015 World Ski Championships, Anna Fenninger suddenly snowplowed....
The Miseducation Of Deion Sanders
Deion Sanders knows better than most that there's power in a nickname. When he was still just a skinny cornerback at Florida State University, he dubbed himself "Prime Time" and birthed an alter ego that would earn him fame, riches, and a place in the pantheon of the 20th century's greatest athlet...