fl Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Baseball's Unwritten Rules Are The Vestiges Of A Drunk And Violent Sport
Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson is having a very good April, give or take a gratuitous insult to his buttocks. He’s hitting .383, which is second in the AL, and has stolen nine bases, which leads the league. He has popped four home runs, too, which is the issue, here. After one of those hom...
How To Leave Sportswriting And Never Regret A Second
In the autumn of 2012, I began working at a pricey midtown Manhattan steakhouse. At one of my first tables sat Geno Auriemma, the women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. Eleven years earlier, I had embedded with him and his players for six months for a book I’d write. I’d held a n...
The 8 Deadly Sins Of The First Round
All your brackets are dead. Every prediction model is forfeit. Does the regular season have any meaning whatsoever? (Does life?) Does chance play too great a role in this slippery sport? Does the best team ever win the Stanley Cup?...
Sports Were Good As Hell Last Night
When God (or whatever you decide is the name of the invisible being you keep nagging for favors for your favorite sports team) stops letting the nutters run the world and starts listening to the constituents, we will get Thunder-Blazers and Knights-Sharks on a loop that never ends, with a crawl acro...
Is This The End For Joe Thornton And The Sharks As We Know Them?
The San Jose Sharks have been reduced in their time to being the NHL’s glorified version of the Portland Trail Blazers—almost always in the playoffs, always ultimately being on the business end of a handshake line. It’s almost a zen koan at this point; when unrequited love turns to “Call us when you...
One Last Opening Day At A Dying Minor League Ballpark
WOODBRIDGE, Virginia — None of the elite members of the Washington, D.C. sporting press were on hand at Pfitzner Stadium to witness the home opener of the Class-A Advanced Potomac Nationals. It was probably for the best....
Someone Has To Clean Up After Broadway's Creative Destruction
If you are familiar with the still boyishly handsome but extremely serious actor Ethan Hawke, you know that when stage directions state that a character he’s portraying onstage wields a golf club and then is “seen smashing typewriter methodically,” Hawke will absolutely be smashing the shit out of a...
The Warriors Deserved That
Tiger Woods sat back and said, “Well, what I did was pretty damned impressive, but that? Did you see THAT?” “That,” of course, was the most spectacular pipe job in NBA postseason history....
After Jackie Robinson Bent Baseball's Color Barrier, Two Journeymen Broke It For Good
Today, Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the day that Robinson crossed baseball’s color line. Robinson is as revered an athlete as you will find in any sport and has become a symbol for how a single person can change a powerful institution for the better. While Robi...
What Do The Sacramento Kings Want To Be?
Let’s start with this: the Sacramento Kings will never not be the Sacramento Kings. There will never be a time when this is not both painfully accurate, and just painful:...
Real Cross Country Delivers Real Redemption
Jakob Larsen, director of Danish Athletics, revealed at the pre-race press conference that the guiding concept behind the design of the 2019 World Cross Country Championships course was a scene from the movie Crocodile Dundee. “That’s not a knife; this is a knife,” says our man of the outback in th...
The State Of The Warriors On The Edge Of Unrest
If, as has been predicted with almost frightening certitude by anyone who has watched a basketball game since Zelmo Beaty roamed the earth, the Golden State Warriors tromp through yet another field of challengers and re-re-almost-repeat as NBA champions, you outworlders will be pleased to know that ...
Who's Keeping The NHL Out Of Quebec City?
Go to a New York Islanders game at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, and you will be treated to a relatively quiet evening. One whole end of the arena sits empty because it overhangs one of the nets, making it impossible to see the action from that vantage point. The rest of the arena isn’t lac...
How To Lose Everything And Get Some Of It Back
It’s 1993 and an addict is tending bar, probably the worst possible job for an addict besides, maybe, professional basketball player in the 1970s....
Germany's Small But Devoted Group Of Knicks Fans Has Plenty Of Takes And Hates James Dolan<em></em>
BERLIN — As he watched the New York Knicks play on TV in the middle of March, Max Thümer explained why he had, weeks before, vowed to stop watching the team....
WWE Is Trying To Defuse Its Own History With A Storyline
Kofi Kingston isn’t the sort of wrestler that gets to compete for a WWE championship, which is why his quest for that title stands out as one of the most interesting angles on Sunday’s WrestleMania slate. A long-time midcarder who found his greatest success as one-third of The New Day, Kingston caug...
Hugo Lloris Reminded Us That There Are Infinite Ways To Craft A Goalkeeping Howler
History will show that Tottenham defender Toby Alderweireld’s 90th minute own goal was responsible for gifting Liverpool a 2-1 win during a tight race for their first league title since 1989-90. History can be a strange and misleading thing. In this case what Alderweireld is responsible for is stand...
Duke Is Out. What Will You Do With Your Hate Now?
At the exact moment Duke lost to Michigan State on Sunday, our sporting Borg collective went through the following thoughts, in this order and all within a second:...
Fixing MLB's Broken Economics Is About More Than Free Agency<em></em>
There have been a number of significant hints that MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association are headed for some very combative collective bargaining in 2021, but the two sides being willing to talk about economics ahead of schedule will stand out to anyone who has ever been through thi...
The Women Who Nod At Death And Say <i>Let's Go</i>
BULVERDE, Texas — Bronc riders’ bodies are wreckage sites, but they are also evidence of lucky streaks on the roulette wheel of survival. Daryl McElroy’s body is like that. He has broken too many bones to remember. He has fractured more lumbar vertebrae than not and come perilously close to rupturin...