fl Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Mastermind Behind The College Admissions Scandal Used To Be A Crazy Middle School Basketball Coach
The members of a middle school basketball team that represented a Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, were not expecting the 2001 season to be an auspicious one. The previous season had produced mediocre results, and there was no reason to expect much of an improvement going forward. That al...
Is There Anything Fishy About The Sharks?
The San Jose Sharks have forged a reputation over the decades of always being invited to the party and always having to leave by 10:30, either because that’s when their ride is leaving or they have to relieve the babysitter or they have to work in the morning and need their eight hours because they ...
Baseball Owners Want An International Draft Because They Want Absolute Control
For North America’s amateur baseball players, be they generational talents like Mike Trout or organizational filler like Mike Fish, the road to the majors begins in the same place: with Major League Baseball’s amateur draft. There is no such system in place for international players, at least not ye...
Can Sports Show The Way To Smarter Voting?
Electoral reform is coming to America. This year in MLB, a simple first-past-the-post voting system will no longer determine all-star starters. Fans will instead select three finalists in a Primary Round and then vote from among those finalists on a single Election Day....
If The Pelicans Don't Deserve Zion Williamson, Every Other Team Deserves Him Less
When the New Orleans Pelicans landed the right to seize the beginning of Zion Williamson’s basketball career, the reaction was swift, predictable and consistent: “What did those people do to deserve such a prize?”...
USA Gymnastics Can't Stop Fucking Up, So Why Should It Exist At All?
When Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics’ fourth CEO in under two years, came to the job in February, she had her work cut out for her. She’s been tasked with guiding the organization as it attempts to resolve dozens of lawsuits, survive a bankruptcy, and restore trust with a community of athletes USAG has ...
The Ballpark Is The Great American Public Space
Is a ballpark a place to watch baseball, a theme park, a microcosm of its city, or something else entirely? It’s an open question that stretches back to the late 19th century, when enclosed ballparks, flanked by cheaply constructed wooden bleachers, began the gradual evolution of ballpark constructi...
Do The Blazers Have A Chance Against The Warriors?
Now that we have entered the dog days of the Western Conference playoffs, it is incumbent upon us to find ways to caricature the Portland Trail Blazers to keep up our interest in what most folks fully expect to be a desultory series against the Golden State Warriors....
The Four Horsemen Of The Second Round
As the second round came to a close I looked upon the remnants of the NHL and beheld the Four Horsemen who delivered judgment upon the match-ups. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death each sent a team into the next life, which appears mostly to be either Worlds, or a golf course in British Columbia....
She's Got The Strength, But Who Has The Power?
JayCee Cooper was looking forward to her first sanctioned USA Powerlifting meet in her home state of Minnesota when she received word, just a month before the event, that she wouldn’t be allowed to compete....
Thomas Ulsrud's Norwegian Team Is Disbanding After 12 Years Of Curling, 10 Years Of Outrageous Pants
The curling team with the pants. That’s all you have to say. The imagery is instant: four grown Scandinavian men and their provocative trousers. It’s quite an accomplishment, especially for a niche Olympic sport....
We Demand More Overtimes
The best overtime game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs was the Denver-Portland game Friday night. All glory and honor to Blues-Stars Game 7 Tuesday night, which certainly did its best, combining multiple overtimes with the additional sparkle of not just sudden death but expulsion, but it remains the sil...
What It's Like To Get Crushed By <i>Jeopardy! </i>God James Holzhauer
James Holzhauer is one of the finest Jeopardy! contestants the world has ever seen. Through his 22 games as reigning champion, he has won $1.69 million, averaging $76,864 in winnings per episode. He appears to be a real threat to break Ken Jennings’s record of 74 straight wins, which was set in 2004...
Why Are Good Young Racehorses Ending Up As Meat 7,000 Miles Away?
Two years in the life and death of a racehorse:...
911 Call Data Confirms Wrigleyville Is A Terrible Place To Be During Cubs Games
The internet is full of anecdotal evidence that a professional sporting event is a great place to witness reckless, rowdy, and even violent behavior. But do they really present more dangers than can be found in any major American city on any given night? That’s what we aim to find out....
The NBA Got Out Of Basketball's Way
When Allie LaForce was dispatched to get a postgame interview from Tuesday’s Rockets-Warriors game, she or maybe her producer chose the sport’s third eye, Klay Thompson. Not bad, as these things go. Thompson is always a better choice than nearly anyone else for these say-little-and-then-go-inside se...
Calm Down About Spoilers
Spoiler culture—the capital-D Discourse surrounding how much of the plot you should know before heading into a piece of media—reached its apotheosis with the releases of Avengers: Endgame and the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night.” The furor around spoilers is such that it is entirely believab...
Three Mushers, One Impenetrable Blizzard, And The World's Hardest Dog Sled Race
Everything was going to be decided within the next five minutes. Three mushers and their dog teams were on top of Eagle Summit, a 3,685-foot tall gap that runs through the White Mountains in central Alaska. They were stuck in a blizzard, huddled together with their dogs as winds up to 40 miles an ho...
Pay-To-Play Is The Stadium Grift That Keeps On Giving
Sometime in the next few days, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb—aka the guy who took Mike Pence’s job when Pence ascended to the Old Executive Office Building—is expected to sign a bill extending the Indiana Pacers’ lease in Indianapolis through 2044. In exchange for agreeing to have his team play where it...
If This Is Rockets-Warriors, Let's Just Get It Over With As Soon As Possible
In case you ever decide to hate sports without the crutch of a rooting interest, financial, familial, or simply laundry-based, here’s your ticket. The pre–NBA Finals NBA Finals are already a drunken bar argument, and they’re only going to get worse. The Houston Rockets ... the Golden State Warriors ...