obit Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Wrestling Legend George "The Animal" Steele Dead At 79
Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area in the ‘70s, I’d hear a rumor from fellow pro wrestling fans whenever we discussed George “The Animal” Steele, who died last night at 79, which held that he was a college math professor....
Mike Ilitch Was No Saint<em></em>
If you only went by what you read in the Detroit papers this week, you’d think Mike Ilitch—the pizza baron and owner of the Detroit Red Wings and Tigers who died last week at the age of 87—was a god incarnate. And for the last three decades, if you’d asked anyone in Michigan, you’d have gotten the s...
Report: ESPN Is Canceling <i>The Sports Reporters</i>
The Sports Reporters, a Sunday morning talk show in which boomer columnists who stopped actually watching sports when Michael Jordan retired for the second time take turns benevolently donating their dignifying Pensive Faces to the vulgar ball-games, will be canceled, according to a report by Sports...
Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka Dies At Age 73, Weeks After Murder Case Dismissed
Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, the legendary wrestler more recently charged with the 1983 death of his girlfriend, has died. He was 73. The case against Snuka was dismissed earlier this month after a judge ruled him incompetent to stand trial. His death was announced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. ...
Ravens Assistant Coach Dies After Bout With Cancer
Baltimore Ravens assistant coach Clarence Brooks died Friday night after a bout with stomach and esophageal cancer. He was 65....
Phyllis Schlafly Finally Croaks
Phyllis Schlafly, who spent her adult life encouraging the American courts, legislature, and public to oppress women, among others, died tonight, not a moment too soon. She was 92....
A Few Ghosts Are Still Haunting George Michael's Sports Machine
Six years ago, the New York Times appended a correction to its obituary of George Michael, the sportscaster who pushed those big buttons on The Sports Machine, saying the original piece had “omitted three survivors.” The paper blamed the error on “information provided by a family member.”...
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...