fl Page 26 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Fast-Food Fight: Subway's Pulled Pork Vs. Wendy's Pretzel Bacon Burger
There are three main founts of greasy innovation whence spring the majority of new fast-food items. The bulk originate in the wide and shallow Same Shit, Different Condiments pool; they are joined by more ambitious offerings from the genres of Cynical Stunt Food and Honest-to-Ronald Attempts to Intr...

This Year, Everyone At The Tour De France Is Crashing Out
The opening stage of this year's Tour de France was a blatant attempt to get Mark Cavendish his first yellow jersey. Organizers kicked off the race with a pancake-flat run into Harrogate, UK, where Cavendish's mother is from. It's probably the only time the peloton's most accomplished sprinter will ...

The Tour De France Is Agony For The Spectators, Too
Whenever I hear hardcore cycling fans explain the Tour de France to novices, they seem to emphasize one aspect of the race—the suffering—above the rest. Sure, they talk about the sprints and the hills and the strategy, and explain how the cobbles of northern France, when wet, make the road as slippe...

Donald Cerrone And John Lineker Are What's Right With Fighting
I love body shots. There is a horrible, wonderful noise generated when a professional athlete hits another professional athlete in the torso, a thudding slap of skeleton and meat. It sounds like a Foley artist's garish exaggeration of what you think a body shot should sound like. I love this sound...

Hacking Still Sucks: On <em>Watch Dogs</em> And Next-Gen-Console Malaise
The promise of Watch Dogs was simple, and explained much of the anticipation leading up to the wantonly hyped prestige video game's May release: Finally—finally! (finally?)—someone was going to make hacking cool. In this case, it was the developer Ubisoft, whose ambition to make coding as engrossi...

Yakuza Throwing Frisbees: The Graceful Savagery Of <em>Sonatine</em>
In 1994, the year after he released his lyrical yakuza movie Sonatine, the Japanese movie star and director Takeshi Kitano got into a bad motor-scooter accident. He came away with half of his face paralyzed. You almost couldn't tell....

The Trouble With Floyd Mayweather
Last week, Floyd Mayweather announced that he will fight a rematch with Marcos Maidana on Sept. 13. Their first fight, two months ago, was Mayweather’s closest challenge in years, with many in the boxing media believing that Maidana had earned the decision. And while that bout may have failed to mee...

Why I Love <em>So You Think You Can Dance</em>, Dopey (Or Dead) Dads And All
Less than 10 minutes into the first episode of the 11th season of Fox's So You Think You Can Dance, a contestant's dad was onstage dancing to "Blurred Lines." To begin, he set a water bottle on the floor before him, and then, as though initiating an ancient mating ritual, he approached and hovered a...

Big, Dumb, Unsexy: <em>Sex Tape</em>, Reviewed
Sex Tape is such a dumb movie that it's hard to know where to start. So let's try this: Its premise is total nonsense. Married-with-kids couple Jay (Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz) decide to spice up their inert love life by filming themselves with Jay's iPad doing every position mentioned...

LeBron's Team Requested Extra Police At His Home For Announcement
Remember all the way back to yesterday, when police cars were spotted outside LeBron James's home, leading to all sorts of frenzied speculation? As it turns, the presence of those officers actually wasn't a coincidence—his team requested extra off-duty officers for the Bath, Ohio spread specifically...

From <em>Slacker</em> to <em>Boyhood</em>: Ranking Richard Linklater's Movies
Today, Richard Linklater's acclaimed Boyhood (which we love) opens in select cities. (It'll be expanding next week and be practically everywhere by mid-August.) To celebrate, we decided to rank all 16 of the man's commercial features, and what we hope you'll notice is that over a 23-year career, he'...

Tomato-Beer Smackdown: Bud Clamato Vs. Modelo Especial
Last week, Drew Magary issued his Definitive List of Excuses for Day Drinking, a timeless document of unrivaled beauty and precision from which he intentionally omitted brunch, because he likes to leave the odd scrap for the rest of us. So let's address brunch booze....

How Did Metallica Ever Survive <em>Some Kind Of Monster</em>?
Like a lot of boys growing up in the early 1990s, I was fascinated by the hard-rock band Metallica. What drew me was no mystery. They were dark and powerful and commanded the respect of millions. I was nine and lived in fear of having to undress for swim PE. The gap between us was impossible. For ye...

Prince Fielder's Naked <em>ESPN</em> Cover Is Sexy As Hell
One of the most beloved tropes in sports lore is the Triumph of the Unexpected Body. When I think about those stories, I think about cheering on Muggsy Bogues from my friend's living room when I was eight or nine. I knew nothing about basketball, but seeing that small man dart around the court alo...

Great Ape: <em>Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes</em>, Reviewed
Three years ago, expectations for Rise of the Planet of the Apes were understandably low. The director (Rupert Wyatt) wasn't well-known, a lot of people despised the film's star (James Franco) for his Renaissance Man routine, and we all remembered how terrible Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes...

Cruise Control: The Loopy Terror Of <em>Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol</em>
Tom Cruise is not like us. This was always pretty evident, but as recently detailed in this great Amy Nicholson L.A. Weekly story, it became inescapable fact around 2005, when he jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch. That story is full of convincing evidence that the whole couch episode didn't happen t...

FIFA Is Its Own Metaphor: A Day Inside The Underground Bunker
Excerpted from The Soccer Diaries: An American's Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game....

High On Life: The Divine <em>Boyhood</em>, Reviewed.
1. Boyhood makes you want to protect—to save—everyone onscreen. They're not in any sort of peril, at least not plainly so; there are alcoholic dads and neighborhood bullies and some broken hearts, but no one's ever in any danger of being attacked by a bear or anything. But without ever seeming t...

All Shock, No Awe: 7-Eleven's Doritos Loaded, Reviewed
Are you repulsed by the idea of eating prepared food from a convenience-store chain most notable for a sludgy cold-sugar drink with the word "slurp" in the name? Are you fundamentally opposed to having your lunch heated in a machine also used to reinvigorate yesterweek's Go-Go Taquitos? Are you not ...

The Whitening Of Neymar: How Color Is Lived In Brazil
Originally published in Africa Is A Country....