mbl Page 71 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

David Foster Wallace Was Tennis's Best Observer
The splashiest piece of sportswriting in my lifetime might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile of Roger Federer, printed in the New York Times’s short-lived Play magazine. A wrinkled copy of it lived under my old Xbox console for years, so that I knew exactly where to revisit it. At the time, the...

Marcus Willis Is The People's Champ Of Wimbledon
To get to the second round of the Wimbledon finals, Marcus Willis had to beat the 54th-ranked player in the world, the 99th, and also a pair of highly-touted Russian teenagers. If Willis wants to get to the third round, he’ll have to beat Roger Federer. This is fairly standard fare for most anyone w...
![How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry [UPDATED]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/qmyidkcgpbtupn5f3ijy.png)
How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry [UPDATED]
Update (January 16, 2019): In June 2017, RJ Bell and Pregame filed a defamation lawsuit over this article. The parties agreed to settle the case and, as part of that agreement, Deadspin is providing a link to Bell’s response to the allegations in the article: RJ Bell’s Response to This Article. Dead...

Only You Can Help Saddle This Minor League Baseball Team With A Dumb New Name
The Binghamton Mets, the AA affiliate of the New York Mets, have decided, as we briefly noted earlier today, that it’s time for the ballclub to forge boldly onward into the future and delineate their own identity outside of the influence of the mothership. This is noble and good, because minor leagu...

How To Survive A Vegas Bachelor Party
If you’ve ever been suckered into being a best man, it’s a conversation that’s bound to come up eventually. Your brother/best friend/weird cousin who doesn’t have any close friends outside his World of Warcraft guild has proposed to the love of his life, and, miracle of miracles, she said yes. You n...

I Was Catfished By ABC's <i>What Would You Do?</i>
I originally leveraged online dating to begin seeing average-sized women. Before moving back to New York a few years ago, I had only dated little women— i.e., women who were born with dwarfism. At bars or parties, my social anxiety, the kind that comes with being a little person myself, made it diff...

Fan Wins £20,600 On £5 Bet That Leicester Would Win The Premier League
While absolutely no one can reasonably claim they saw Leicester’s impossible yet now real Premier League title season coming, that didn’t prevent some exceedingly optimistic fans from putting down a few bucks in the off-off-off-off chance (their preseason title odds were 5,000-1) that Leicester woul...

The Time Hunter S. Thompson Passed Out In A Pool And Missed The Rumble In The Jungle
The classic 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire attracted, among other things, famous writers like Norman Mailer and George Plimpton and even ol’ Hunter Thompson. But while Mailer and Plimpton and the rest of the world marveled at Ali’s command performance, Thompson, well, he experienced the fight as on...

Loyola University Chicago Investigating Head Coach Sheryl Swoopes After Mass Transfers
Basketball legend Sheryl Swoopes has been coaching the Loyola University Chicago women’s basketball team since 2013. After the 2014-15 season, five players transferred to different programs. This year, 10 of the team’s 12 returning players have transferred or requested a release from their scholarsh...

The Time Robert Parish Won Thousands By Dunking On Manute Bol
The following story about the 1985-86 Boston Celtics is excerpted from Back from the Dead, released last month by Simon & Schuster, and available here....

DraftKings And FanDuel Suspend College Sports Contests
DraftKings and FanDuel have reached a voluntary agreement with the NCAA to cease all college sports daily fantasy contests, reports ESPN....

Damn, This Dude Flat Out Crushes This Ball
A lot to enjoy here: 1) the shot by Wimbledon’s Jake Reeves itself, coming off an expertly controlled bounding ball and a wallop of a kick that sends the it way up into the air before it dips and swerves into the goal; 2) Reeves’s cocky little strut that he starts right after the ball comes off his ...

DraftKings And FanDuel Agree To Cease Operating In New York
DraftKings and FanDuel have reached an agreement with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to immediately cease operating in the country’s fourth largest state. The sites will remain inoperative in New York until at least September, when the state’s Supreme Court Appellate Division will hear ...

Actually, Ruben Amaro Was Very Into Analytics, Says Ruben Amaro
Ruben Amaro, Jr. took over as Phillies GM right after they won the World Series in 2008, and for a few years maintained that success. But as the Phillies’ core aged, Amaro made a string of terrible moves, to the point where the Phillies were one of the worst teams in baseball the past three seasons,...

Fourth Yomiuri Giants Pitcher Admits To Betting On Baseball
Japan’s professional baseball league was hit by a betting scandal this past fall, when a Nippon Professional Baseball investigation revealed that three pitchers on the Yomiuri Giants had bet on games. Now a fourth pitcher, reliever Kyosuke Takagi, has admitted to betting on games, as well as lying t...

Players Resist Urge To Knock Out Referee After Getting Screwed Out Of A Goal
This is just unreal. Right after Accrington Stanley’s (yes, that’s actually the name of the team) striker Billy Kee had fired in what should’ve been the opening goal against AFC Wimbledon, the referee for some reason decided to blow the halftime whistle, nullifying the goal. The game ended 0-0....

Report: Former Cowboys RB Joseph Randle Gambled On Sports
Running back Joseph Randle, who the Cowboys cut in November, bet on sporting events during the season, according to The Dallas Morning News. Randle was arrested Monday on an outstanding speeding charge, and in the wake of his fourth arrest in a year-and-a-half, the Morning News has an exhaustive rep...

Texas Attorney General Declares Daily Fantasy Illegal Gambling, And The End Is Nigh
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion today that daily fantasy sports constitutes illegal gambling under Texas law. “It is prohibited gambling in Texas if you bet on the performance of a participant in a sporting event and the house takes a cut,” he said in a statement. “Paid daily ‘fa...

How To Win At A Casino
With all due respect to the good people of Thackerville, Okla., I am not currently aware of any defensible reason to rumble down their I-35 off-ramp other than to wander, aimlessly and awestruck, around the world’s largest casino. That is, unless you really like tornadoes or porno stores, the two th...

Illinois Attorney General Declares Daily Fantasy Is Illegal Gambling
Illinois became the eighth state to prohibit daily fantasy behemoths DraftKings and FanDuel from operating in their state, as attorney general Lisa Madigan declared that daily fantasy constitutes gambling under state law. Madigan based her interpretation on the following sections of the Illinois Cri...