history Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
How Terry Funk Ended Up In A Match Even Weirder Than Mayweather/McGregor
Terry Funk, along with being a legendary professional wrestler, deserves recognition as a sort of godfather of the Boxer vs. Other fight, a matchup of differing combat disciplines of the type that will captivate the world for however long Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Conor McGregor lasts....
Why Didn’t The Eastern Roman Empire Fall?<em></em>
When the Roman Empire disintegrated over the course of the fifth century, only half of it actually fell, the western half. The eastern half of the Roman Empire would survive in one form or another for a thousand years....
The Sad Failure Of Donald Trump's Desperate Attempt At A Baseball League<em></em>
Jeffrey Gildenhorn, a beloved D.C. restaurateur, recreational politician, and full-time man about town for several decades, died earlier this summer after choking on his meal at the Palm, a local power lunch institution. He’d lived a full enough life that none of his many obituaries mentioned his su...
Chris Froome's Next Race Will Be Against History
There hasn’t been genuine last-week intrigue about who would win any Tour de France since 2011, when Cadel Evans took the yellow jersey from Andy Schleck on the penultimate day of the race. Schleck gouged Evans and the rest of the field for minutes on Stage 18's summit finish atop the Col du Galibie...
War Is The Health Of The State
Have you ever stopped to wonder why practically every government on earth follows the same basic form?...
Women In Wrestling Have Taken A Hard Road To Get To Where They Are Now
Recently, Netflix released the first season of GLOW, a dramedy based on the production of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, the comedic late ’80s women’s wrestling promotion that was, ever so briefly, a smash hit in syndication. Many reviews have focused on how a gifted, majority-female cast and creativ...
Could The Roman Empire Have Survived?
No empire, from Sargon’s Akkadian Empire to the Soviet Union, lasts forever. There’s always an expiration date....
10 Years Ago, WWE Killed Vince McMahon In Its Most Ridiculous Storyline Ever
When you watch WWE programming for a long time, certain patterns emerge, ranging from production quirks to how matches are laid out to certain tropes that consistently recur in the storytelling. One of these is the way WWE lets show its utter contempt for its audience. Hell, it showed up recently wh...
After Rome Fell, Europe's Barbarians Had To Figure Out How To Be Kings
Political structures and institutions—the bedrock of the systems that underpin our world and society—aren’t a given. They can and do evolve and strengthen, or, alternatively, crumble into nothingness. That’s one of many reasons the fall of the Roman Empire is a valuable example for us to bear in min...
Rome's Fall Left Britain A Violent, Cityless Hellscape
In the year 350 AD, to paraphrase the historian Robin Fleming, Britain was as Roman a place as anywhere in the Empire. It had a dense network of roads and ports, luxurious villas with mosaic floors and private bathhouses, a profusion of small, prosperous towns that served as markets for regional tra...
Rome's Collapse Turned Petty Kings, Strongmen, And Warlords Into The French
Decades before Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 AD and the Western Roman Empire officially went out of business, the provinces of northern Gaul (roughly the area between Paris and the lower Rhine in what’s now the Netherlands and northwest Germany) had long since slipped from the grasp of the a...
Billy Corgan Is Buying Pro Wrestling's Oldest And Deadest Brand To Use As He Pleases
Depending on the specific argument you’re making, you might say that the National Wrestling Alliance, pro wrestling’s oldest governing body, ceased being relevant as much as 35 years ago. So it was definitely surprising last week when Billy Corgan (yes, that one) bought its remnants from Bruce Tharp...
Gift Ngoepe, First-Ever African-Born MLB Player, Got A Hit In His First Career At-Bat
Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates were losing to the Cubs and they replaced Antonio Bastardo on the mound with Dovydas Neverauskas. The Lithuanian pitched two innings and became the first Lithuanian-born player to play in a major league game. Neverasukas was optioned back to Triple-A Indiana...
Yakov Smirnoff, America's Secret Weapon In The Cold War, Is Still Laughing
The National Security Advisor gets bounced for covert dealings with a Russian ambassador, then the Pentagon announces that Russian fighter jets recently buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea, and reports come out that the Kremlin has begun testing cruise missiles in utter disregard of a bilateral...
Why Phillies Fans Still Hate Danny Tartabull
Phillies pitcher Clay Buchholz had surgery earlier this week to fix a torn flexor tendon in his right arm. His 4-to-6 months of recovery will keep him out for the rest of the season....
After The Visigoths Sacked Rome, They Established A Full-Blown Kingdom
When last we met the Goths, they had just sacked the city of Rome in 410 CE, the act for which this barbarian people is both famous and infamous. They were, after all, the first group in 800 years to pillage the Eternal City, and that kind of action is going to leave a mark in the history books. The...
Vince Russo, One Of Pro Wrestling's Biggest Bullshit Artists, Is Back Where He Started<em></em>
Hard as it may be for long-time fans to believe, this month marks 25 years since Vince Russo first emerged as a presence in pro wrestling. All these years later, the former WWE, WCW, and TNA storyline writer and television personality is best known for his role behind the scenes in the Attitude Era ...
Russell Westbrook Has A Double-Double For The Season<em></em>
Tonight, Russell Westbrook scored 12 points, grabbed 13 rebounds, and handed out 13 assists in a rout of the listless Milwaukee Bucks. The 13 rebounds that Westbrook grabbed give him 822 for the season through 77 games. Westbrook is already well over the 820 points he’d need to average double-digit ...
The Roman Empire Was Brought Down By Structural Rot
One way of telling the story of the fall of the Roman Empire is to examine the lives and personalities at the very top of the political spectrum, the emperors, generals, court officials, and kings at the center of power who made the life-and-death decisions that reverberated throughout the Roman wor...
A History Of Globalization
“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”...