hang Page 22 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Meet Godfrey Chitalu, The Zambian Lionel Messi
Barça's Lionel Messi scored a lot of goals this year. 86 of them, apparently.* That's a record for a soccer player. Or is it? Zambia's Godfrey Chitalu—whose heyday as a player came in the late 1960s and 70s, before he began coaching in the 80s—may have scored 116 goals in 1972. On this week's excerp...
Lots Of NHL Players Have Headed To A Russian City That Is Essentially A Toxic Waste Dump
Magnitogorsk, Russia. Our kind of town. They've got one hell of a hockey team, with Evgeni Malkin and Nikolai Kulemin, and all the rest. They just added the Avalanche's Ryan O'Reilly. What's in the latest headlines over there?...
Who Has The Funnier Challenge-Flag-Throwing Motion, Rex Ryan Or Chan Gailey?
The Deadspin NFL Coach Challenge Challenge is a tournament pitting the throwing motions of 20 NFL coaches against one another....
A Story About College Sports Conferences, Told Through One School's Many Entangling Alliances
You want to know what conference realignment looks like? We've told you about how it works at bigger schools, but how does it work at smaller schools, like, say, the University of Denver? Most of its teams are headed to the Summit League. Where are they coming from? Mike Pesca explains, in this week...
Eliminating Kickoffs Would Ruin Football, According To A Kicker And A Kick Return Specialist
Yesterday, we discussed the possibility that the NFL will do away with kickoffs and instead institute a punt-or-4th-and-long option. On its face, the idea seems logical, maybe even preferable, if not necessarily a top-priority reform. The NFL can frame it as an issue of player safety, but truthfully...
Oh No, Caffeinated Cracker Jack ("Cracker Jack'd") Is A Thing Now
Oh no, oh no, oh no. Not only do the folks at Frito-Lay want to ruin your childhood, they want to ruin baseball too. They recently unveiled Cracker Jack'd, or, caffeinated Cracker Jack. Yeah. On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen, Slate's Josh Levin sings (literally sings) of Cracke...
Should Golf Be Allowed To Grow Up? The USGA Says No.
Let us, for a moment, discuss the intricacies of golf. Putting is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the game. One inch to the left, you win; one more to the right, you lose. Good putting requires an incredibly smooth stroke. In recent years, some players have started to use long putters—which the...
We Love You, Verne Lundquist, But It's Time To Go
On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Josh Levin makes a simple, fair case for why cuddly Verne Lundquist, CBS's lead college football play-by-play announcer, ought to call it a career. Lundquist makes a lot of mistakes on air. Levin captures many of them here. Listen up:...
This Is The Best Sports Internet Rabbithole You Can Find
On this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, Stefan Fatsis found a place on the internet where you can waste so, so much time. Lucky's Amazing Sports Lists. Go now, or some other time, when you have a big project to do. Lucky himself has an unusual story, too-the man is obsessive....
Liverpool Apologizes To Fake Rumormonger For Threatening His Family
Sean Cummins was just a regular guy with too much time on his hands, and a pseudonymous Twitter account, and a knack for guessing at soccer transactions. Liverpool executives believed that "Duncan Jenkins" was a real journalist, with sources inside the club, who drove up the team's transfer costs by...
An Interview With Ove Johansson, The Man Who Kicked The Longest Field Goal Ever
We're in a glorious age for placekickers. St. Louis's Greg "The Leg" Zuerlein wows us every Sunday. David Akers hit a a 63-yarder in September, and Sebastian Janikowski never stops doing Sebastian Janikowski things. A Spokane high schooler was good from 67 earlier this month....
Geno Auriemma Wants To Lower The Rim In Women's Basketball
Auriemma is about the only man in the world who can say this and not have it come off as condescending, but the UConn coach has a radical proposal he plans to present to the rules committee next spring—he'd like to see more scoring, fewer missed layups, and the way to do that is to lower the hoop fo...
FIBA Really Wants Three-On-Three Basketball In The 2016 Olympics
Olympic basketball is fun. But doesn't it look a little too much like NBA basketball? Sure, the lanes are were trapezoidal, and the three-point line's a little bit closer, but those tweaks are minor when compared to the upheaval that FIBA's proposed three-on-three basketball brings. Watch the clip...
A Major Match-Fixing Scandal Is Rocking French Handball
Handball: it's not just a sport to watch on CNBC at 7:45 a.m. in early August every four years. Apparently there are leagues and teams, and those teams play important games, on which people bet money. Not very much, though, as Stefan Fatsis explains, on this week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and L...
An Astounding Story Of Fraud, Blackmail, And The Fake Twitter Rumormonger Who Took On Liverpool
You don't need a ton of context to appreciate how batshit amazing this story is. Out of nowhere, a Twitter account emerges, claiming to have inside information. He floats some transfer rumors, scores a few hits, and all of a sudden becomes one of the more trusted sources covering Liverpool FC. So tr...
Roger Federer Finds "Bizarre Death Threat" Mildly Distracting
Roger Federer is in China, playing in the Shanghai Masters tournament along with most of the upper-tier tennis circuit. Yesterday, he had a first round bye, so he didn't play any tennis, and he also wasn't killed. The last bit wouldn't qualify as news were it not for the death threat that came Feder...
An Exhaustive Audio History Of The "Yankees Suck" Chant
This week's excerpt from Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast is super-timely. It's got the Red Sox, the Yankees, and people who say the Yankees suck. Can't ever get enough of them. Massholes, like Sully. Gotta love Sully. And there's politics! There's some kind of political affair tonight, isn't ther...
Learn About Grippers, The Affordable Way To Demonstrate Your Unnatural Forearm Strength
The man above is Manfred Hoeberl, a former fixture in the World's Strongest Man competitions they periodically rerun on ESPN2. He was—is?—very, very strong. But he doesn't use your silly, wasteful, boring means to test his strength. Nope. He uses grippers. They're affordable. And certified! Josh Lev...
Vladimir Putin Dressed Like A Bird And Flew With Endangered Cranes
Manliest of world leaders, Vladimir Putin has never met a sporting photo op he didn't like. So it's precisely zero surprise to see the Russian president flying an ultralight aircraft, leading a flock of endangered birds on their first migration....