fl Page 33 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Miami Marlins Owner's Insane Book About <em>Peanuts</em> Will Melt Your Brain
When we speak of spring and baseball, we speak of renewal. New shoots of grass, possibility, the warm rays in Florida. We rarely mention the game's antipodal force that dwells there too, a darkness that consumes joy—its unblinking saurian eyes unevolved for 37 million years, unregenerate in its pred...
No-Win Scenario: Errol Morris' Great, Infuriating <em>The Unknown Known</em>
On February 29, 2004, director Errol Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War. Subtitled Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, it consisted of a one-on-one interview with the former Secretary of Defense as he looked back at his management—and mismanagement— of the Vietnam War. ...
If MMA Doesn't Change, Someone Is Going To Die
No one needed to see Marlon Moraes continue beating on Josh Rettinghouse. Moraes had outclassed his opponent in every facet of the game for 15 minutes, piling on abuse and bludgeoning his lead leg. Rettinghouse could barely support his own weight, let alone continue to defend himself, and as he hobb...
How Roberto Luongo Saved Vancouver
In time, any serious hockey market will destroy its $64 million goaltender....
A Lip Reader Deciphers The Rest Of 2013's Manager-Umpire Fights
Lip-reader Evan Brunell is here to once again decipher a collection of manager-umpire fights. Previously, Brunell deciphered all of the arguments from the 2012 season and the first half of the 2013 season. Here now are the fights from the second half of the 2013 season....
Six Potential Cinderellas–And How They Can Win
We may not remember who won the NCAA tournament three years ago, but we can always recall the 14-seed that went to the Sweet 16. We love March Madness for the Cinderellas. Dedicated loyalty is fine for alumni, but the people who pay attention for three weeks each year could care less. The sleepers b...
Inside The Bum Phillips Opera. (Yes, There Is A Bum Phillips Opera.)
"Places, Old Lady!" the stage manager shouts. "Places, Hippie Pig!"...
Is A No. 11 Seed Actually Among The Best Teams In The Country?
One of the quirks of college basketball is that we get to see only a brief audition of each team before the NCAA tournament begins. By the time the NBA playoffs start, there are 82 games' worth of data on each team, and each of those consists of 48 minutes. At the college level, teams entering the t...
Irish Beers, Ranked
St. Patrick's Day is tough on a civic-minded, humanist boozebag. I love New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving Morning and Arbor Weekend and all the other "amateur hours" that too many self-proclaimed sophisticates haughtily dismiss, but Paddy's Day comes soaked with complications beyond the rivers of glit...
Why I Thought About Murdering My NBA Coach (And Why I Didn't Do It)
Spencer Haywood, aka Weedie, aka Driftwood, had one of the most significant and controversial careers in professional basketball history, with a landmark Supreme Court victory at one end and a druggy, nearly violent washout at the other. His legacy is still very much in dispute. Last year, Haywood w...
The Pleasures Of Watching The Most Versatile Big Man In The Country
He doesn't look like anyone's idea of a superstar, which is perhaps one reason Jerrelle Benimon is among the most underrated college basketball players in America. He's 6-foot-8, 245 pounds, built big and a little on the soft side, more along the lines of a tight end than a power forward. When he br...
Reading Deadspin? Allow A Former MLS Player To Convince You Otherwise
This morning, I sat at my breakfast table going over the news. Checking through my inbox, I saw an email from a friend: "This is going to make you furious." It contained the link to a Deadspin article: "Getting Ready for MLS? Allow Us to Convince You Otherwise."...
When A Famed Nike Coach Tried To Steal A Race, A Track Protest Was Born
The scene was unprecedented: seven runners walking off the track hand in hand, in quiet protest against their own governing body. The women had just run the 1,500-meter race at the U.S. indoor national championships on Feb. 23 in Albuquerque. The day before, the winner of the 3,000-meter race, Gabe ...
Title IX's <em>Other</em> Effects: Do Sports Make Women Less Religious?
How does playing a sport in high school affect a woman after she has graduated? We know from Betsey Stevenson's 2010 study in The Review of Economics and Statistics that female former high school athletes tend to go further in school and make more money. But what about the effects on a woman's socia...
The Amazing True Story Of Victor, The Wrestling Bear
In the 2008 Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro, which centers on a fictional ABA basketball team, there's a scene where Jackie Moon, played by Ferrell, wrestles with a grizzly bear at halftime of a game. It's an absurd, ridiculous, preposterous scene, and it was, believe it or not, based on a real promotio...
Dominica's Fake Ski Team Scammed The Olympics And The Press
After the opening ceremony, the Olympics were one long ungroomed trail for Gary di Silvestri and Angelica Morrone, the most-publicized husband-and-wife carpetbagging oldies act in cross-country-skiing history....
How 18-Year-Old Mikaela Shiffrin Kept Her Nerve And Won Slalom Gold
This morning, 18-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin became the youngest skier to win gold in the Olympic slalom. Ever. How? She took on a course with the kind of calm usually shown by athletes who have been on the race circuit for, well, as long as she's been alive....
How I Broke The Indoor Mile Record: An Interview With A "Freak"
Eamonn Coghlan is not too sensitive about the fact that today's twentysomethings were infants when he ran a mile in 3 minutes 49 seconds and 78 hundredths on a 10-lap track—which is to say, a world record—and he doesn't mind that they don't know who he is or what he's done. That's OK. He's pretty di...
Was The Figure Skating Fix In? It Probably Didn't Matter.
Russia's Adelina Sotnikova delivered a shocking upset Thursday, when she–not reigning world and Olympic champion Yuna Kim, not former world champion Carolina Kostner, not even 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya, who had been pegged for weeks as the co-favorite–won Olympic gold in women's figure skating. ...
Why Does NBC's Primetime Figure Skating Broadcast Suck?
For the past few weeks, I've been having a problem. My job, such as it is, has been to watch the Olympic figure skating competitions and to then write about it for this website. So nearly every day, clad in my pajamas and sporting my best last-panel-of-a-Cathy-comic hair, I've loaded up the NBC live...