open Page 26 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Simona Halep Has Weathered Everything
Simona Halep will play the Australian Open final. On its face, the fact of that doesn’t seem particularly remarkable or surprising. She is after all, the highest-ranked player in the world, the top seed at this tournament, and only a few months removed from her last major final. She has yet to lose ...

Serena Williams Calls On Tennys Sandgren To Apologize
With Chris Fowler busy hand-waving away Tennys Sandgren’s alarming political views and hateful beliefs, and the rest of tennis media cowed into silence by Sandgren scolding them for asking about his beliefs after he encouraged them to ask him about his beliefs, Serena Williams called for Sandgren to...

Tennys Sandgren Pissily Scolds Media For Asking Him About Things He Said
Hyeon Chung defeated Tennys Sandgren 6-4, 7-6 (5), 6-3 in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. Before that, under the new scrutiny that comes with being one of the last eight remaining players in one of the biggest tournaments in tennis, Sandgren deleted all his tweets, including one that expre...

Chris Fowler Would Really Like Everyone To Be Nicer To Pizzagate Truther Tennys Sandgren
When it became clear late in the third set that American Tennys Sandgren was probably going to lose his Australian Open quarterfinal match to South Korean 20-year-old Hyeon Chung, ESPN commentators Chris Fowler and Patrick McEnroe decided it was the time for a perfunctory discussion of how Sandgren ...

What's The Best Possible Animal Army In A Battle To The Death?
Here’s a rock-dumb hypothetical the staff has been arguing about for a few hours: If you were forced to choose two groups of fighters from the following draft class of eight kinds of animals and one guy with a gun, what’s the best possible defense you can construct for yourself against the remaining...

Is It Time For Tomas Berdych To No Longer Be Owned?
There is perhaps no active player who has been as owned by the Big Four as painfully as Tomas Berdych. Poor, big-hitting Tomas Berdych, one of the fixtures of the men’s game, constantly found loitering in the later rounds of the majors, but never winning them. The Czech quasi-star has surged as hi...

Tennys Sandgren Deleted All His Tweets, Like The One Where He Said Pizzagate Is Real
In an interview with ESPN earlier today, surprise Australian Open quarterfinalist Tennys Sandgren said he ran a program to clear out his tweets, like the one where he believed that Hillary Clinton participated in a Satanic ritual. At the time of the interview, the program had cleared several consecu...

Here Is Hyeon Chung, The Last Kid Standing
Through all of 2017 and then through the first week of the Australian Open, Rafa and Fed continued their merciless march through what was supposed to be the next crop of tennis contenders. A whole generation of hopes and dreams have been splattered across their windshields. The men’s game still awai...

What Does Pizzagate Truther Tennys Sandgren Find "Interesting" About The Alt-Right?
American tennis player Tennys Sandgren, Pizzagate truther and guy who said America can’t be racist because it elected a black president, thinks the alt-right has some “interesting” ideas. This came to light at the Australian Open during today’s post-match presser when a reporter asked Sandgren about...

Which Loss Is Worse: A Blowout Or A Heartbreaker?<em></em>
The most miserable way to watch your favorite team lose a big game is unquestionably through a miraculous comeback like Falcons fans endured last year. But what about the two other extreme options, a close game that comes down to the wire or a game that was never competitive to begin with? This year...

Some Guys Have All The Luck
And hand-eye coordination, and anticipation, and soft touch, foot speed, visual acuity, etc. ...

What's Up With The Broken Stats At The Australian Open?
As you might have gathered from the three tiebreaks and the names involved, today’s third round match between Nick Kyrgios and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was a white-hot serve-off. At 1-1 in the third set, Nick Kyrgios fired one particular serve that caught my eye. By this point I was admittedly a little de...

What Do You Listen To At Work?
I’ve been listening to a lot of KC and the Sunshine Band lately. Probably too much, by most definitions, but these extended cuts of ’70s songs on YouTube have been awesome for my productivity....

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Yells At Heckler During Match, Says He'll "Kick His Ass"
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga received a code violation at the beginning of the fourth set of his third-round match against Nick Kyrgios for telling a person in the crowd that he was going to “kick his ass,” while Kyrgios, who on the first day of the tournament told a heckler to “shut the fuck up,” remained mo...

Gael Monfils And Novak Djokovic Played Tennis In A New Circle Of Hell
One interesting new plot twist in tennis—I wish I’d been reminded of this before last night—is that every match between Gael Monfils and Novak Djokovic must be conducted in Hell. Like their last encounter in New York, the match must be as Lynchian and listless as possible, and the conditions must be...

Reporter Knows Nothing About Daria Gavrilova, Asks Her Questions Anyway<em></em>
Before her second-round match against Elise Mertens in the Australian Open, No. 23 Daria Gavrilova fielded questions from reporters and apparently some guy who stumbled into the press room. ...

Shapo Stalled Out Two Points From The Finish Line
The last time Denis Shapovalov met Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, he could have easily been confused for a half-fluke, a lucky amoeba. At 18 and barely breaking the surface of the ATP tour, he’d been competing mostly at the Challenger level. A flip switched suddenly. Fresh off beating Juan Martin del Potro and...

Hey, Look, It's Stan Wawrinka And Novak Djokovic
Tennis missed its lost injured boys. I missed seeing a dude look like he a sipped through a six-pack, dozed off on the couch, toppled out of it, peed golden-brown, shuffled off to his match and immediately began lashing 100 mph backhand winners. There are a lot of professional tennis players, but th...

No. 1 Simona Halep Practically Twisted Her Ankle Off And Still Won
On Day One of the Australian Open, top-seeded Simona Halep stretched for a ball in the second set of her match against 17-year-old Destanee Aiava and rolled her ankle over... and over, and then somehow over even more until her foot was roughly perpendicular with her lower leg. The video is above, bu...

Nick Kyrgios Told A Heckler To "Shut The Fuck Up" And Said He's Never Spoken To Colin Kaepernick
The tennis, as it has been lately for Nick Kyrgios, was encouraging this weekend—a 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 rout of Rogerio Dutra Silva in the first round of the Australian Open—but of course it’s never only about the tennis when it comes to Nick....