obit Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Alex Rodriguez Was Big Enough To Take All The Blame
It’s obvious where this begins: Thirteen years ago, at baseball’s annual winter meetings, the entire story was Alex Rodriguez and when and where he would be going. The Texas Rangers, who’d averaged 90 losses in three seasons with Rodriguez at shortstop, had made clear that they wanted out from under...

What We've Lost With Muhammad Ali
Yesterday, we lost Muhammad Ali, the Greatest of All Time. Note the absence of a noun in that title. He was not the Greatest Boxer of All Time; he was not the Greatest Athlete of All Time; he was not the Greatest Showman of All Time. No, Greatest stood alone, floating, butterfly-like, unencumbered b...

Growing Up Watching The Greatest
Muhammad Ali was the most popular guy in both the world and the McKenna household throughout my formative years. So I’m sad today, sadder than I’ll be about any other athlete’s death ever again. ...

Get Fucked, John Kasich
What even was John Kasich’s sweaty, affronted, whatever-happened-to-the-responsible-grownups-in-this-party act if not an even more insulting and ahistorical version of “Make America Great Again”? When was the last time the Republican Party had responsible grownups? When it sold a needless, catastrop...

Farewell To Ted Cruz, Self-Made Sucker
Ted Cruz, the worst possible man, lost the Indiana Republican primary to Donald Trump yesterday. He’d staked it as his last stand in the nominating race, even brokering a cynical armistice with John Kasich to unify anybody-but-Trump voters in the state, and got clobbered anyway, by some 17 percentag...

Prince Is Dead, Long Live Prince
So it’s true: Prince Rogers Nelson, a musician so superhuman that he was convincingly able to go by a single name even though that name is also a word, was found dead this morning at his studio compound in Minnesota. He was 57 years old, which is young for anyone, but so crushingly young for someone...

Kobe Bryant Is Finally Going Away
In a few hours Kobe Bryant’s career will be over. It was very long....

Johan Cruyff, The Man Who Invented Modern Soccer, Dies At 68
It would be impossible to even approach summing up the totality of Johan Cruyff’s unparalleled influence and contributions to the game of soccer in one blog post. First as the best player on the planet suiting up for Ajax, Barcelona, and the Dutch national team in the 1960s and 1970s, and later as a...

How To React To A Bad Person's Death
People die every day; famous people die over the course of many days. Those left behind watch as the internet floods with earnest RIPs and dewy-eyed takes and angry ripostes toward anyone with the gall to joke or critique At a Time Like This. In some instances, some otherwise empathetic people cut s...

Marco Rubio Will Have To Find Another Bed To Shit
Marco Rubio may very well be the emptiest suit to have campaigned for national office in my lifetime. He makes Paul Ryan look like Benjamin Disraeli....

Ben Carson's Presidential Campaign Was A Big Success
Hear me, O Americans. If lots of people want to give you lots and lots of money to go stand on stages and just kinda sleepily free-associate whatever pops into your mind in response to prompts from strangers, and want to treat you like a rock star for doing it, and will support you in this behavior ...

Jeb Bush Is Not A Joke; He's A Sack Of Shit
Jeb Bush finally—fucking finally—dropped out of the Republican primary campaign over the weekend, by my reckoning at least a few months later than observable reality said he should. Nobody wanted him to be president. Possibly he himself did not really want to be president, so much as he wanted not t...

Lifelong Failure Carly Fiorina Does What She Does Best
If Carly Fiorina’s life were a television series, last Wednesday’s season finale would have occasioned a lot of groaning about lazy formulas. Really? Another season ending with Carly an utter abject failure, and the people who worked for her unemployed? For chrissakes, House was more unpredictable t...

Rand Paul Was Always Bullshit
Rand Paul dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign after he came up shy of five percent in the Iowa caucus. This must have been a tremendous disappointment to ... well, nobody....

Farewell To Viral Internet Man Rick Santorum
Once upon a time, Rick Santorum was an ambitious young legislator whose considerable oratorical skills and policy fluency existed in unsteady balance with social views that make St. Paul look like Aleister Crowley. Now he is a slang term for the frothy mix of lube and shit that sometimes is a byprod...

Mike Huckabee's Campaign Charade Is Over, So That His Other Charades Might Continue
Driving south on Interstate 95 through Maryland, eventually you come to the I-495 interchange near College Park. If you stay on I-95, then for the next little while, you also are on I-495, the Capital Beltway; the routes are concurrent, sharing the same physical road. Farther along, in Springfield, ...

Martin O'Malley, A Stock Photo Of A Handsome Man, Ends His Presidential Bid
Generic man Martin O’Malley ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last night. The Iowa caucus was rough on the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor: Once poll-workers sorted out the caucus-goers who thought they were standing in line to get their photo taken with “tha...

You Know Who Should Run For President? George Pataki
I mean, if the guy could get elected governor of New York as a Republican, he could be a heckuva candi—...

Fuck Off, Lindsey Graham
Lindsey Graham announced the end of his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination this morning. Don’t worry! He wants you to know that he still believes in his plan to wage needless war on a distant millenarian death cult whose lifeblood is the Western antagonism that certifies its ri...

Bobby Jindal, Obsequious Twerp, Simpers The Fuck Out
Bobby Jindal will no longer pursue the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He also will not pursue Alpha Centauri, or growing a second head out of his left shoulder, or the Elder Wand. Dogs will not shoot lasers from their eyes. The sun will not be a showerhead that sprays grapefruit juice. Man...