politics Page 11 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Members Of Congress Ask Adam Silver To Suspend NBA Activities In China
A day after NBA commissioner Adam Silver released a statement wondering whether everyone couldn’t just get along and enjoy some hoops, eight members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz, signed a letter to Silver condemning the the NBA’s response to the controversy over Dary...
Honestly, You're Being So Dramatic About Ellen DeGeneres Yukking It Up With A War Criminal At A Cowboys Game
Salah Hassan was a journalist working in Iraq for Al Jazeera in 2003 when the U.S. military arrested him, took him to the Abu Ghraib prison, and tortured him. This happened because did his job well—he was quick to the scene after a roadside bomb attack in Diyala. As Hassan spent 48 days in detention...
Stop Calling It "Gaslighting"
“Lie” is a great word. It’s a short, to-the-point noun with a universally agreed upon meaning that we all learn before we even enter kindergarten. Call someone a liar, and any English-speaker in the world will require no clarification—they’ll know that someone isn’t telling the truth....
There's Nothing More Predictable Than Mike Leach Suddenly Having Dumb Thoughts About Homeless People
College football coaches tend to be graded on a steep and extremely generous curve when it comes to their personalities. How well they do or don’t do their jobs is easy enough to assess, because it creates a binary win/loss record that reflects the sum of the players they recruit and the assistants ...
The Sport That Can't Stick To Sports
Dublin beat Kerry 1-18 to 0-15 on Saturday to take their fifth straight All-Ireland football championship, and become the first team to five-peat in the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association’s annual national inter-county tournament. And we’re talking a long history: Dublin and Kerry first face...
Donald Trump Namedrops “Big Strong Guy” Ryan Klesko During Mariano Rivera Ceremony
Donald Trump’s speech this afternoon was relatively lucid. He stayed on topic, and he even used a series of facts to prove his point, which was that Mariano Rivera was the greatest baseball pitcher of all time. It wasn’t quite diplomacy, but this 15-minute speech about baseball might have been the l...
The Legendary Public Rec Center In A Private School's Pocket
Every now and then comes a reminder that The System works precisely as everybody suspects it does and wishes it didn’t. The situation now roiling the youth sports scene in the Nation’s Capital is one of those. The D.C. government recently agreed to let the Maret School, one of the more elite private...
Alexi Lalas Should Think Less
Wouldn’t you know it! Alexi Lalas, the guy who said, “Damn right, I’m gonna stand,” and implied that players kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial inequality would be the same as a player wearing a MAGA hat during the national anthem, has more half-baked political takes....
Curt Schilling Once Again Threatens To Run For Office
Curt Schilling, former major-league pitcher and World Series hero who squandered away so much goodwill that the Red Sox no longer want anything to do with him, has for the umpteenth time floated the idea of running for office. What makes this time different is that Donald Trump gave him a signal boo...
Brian Flores Encourages Kenny Stills To Keep Stephen Ross Criticisms Private, Like A Real Company Man
In his apt criticism of team owner Stephen Ross’s support of Donald Trump, Dolphins wide receiver Kenny Stills has the truth, accuracy, and righteousness on his side—but not, it seems, his own head coach....
NFL Owners Have Always Been Terrible. It's Just That Now The President Is Worse.
When it comes to marrying brain-frozen, heavily armed plutocracy with mindless and quasi-religious ritual, the National Football League pretty much got there ahead of everybody. The number of NFL owners whose general political and social outlook has progressed past the conventional wisdom of the Art...
Congress Responds To The Larry Nassar Scandal With A Half-Measure And Handshakes All Around
It’s been about three years since Rachael Denhollander called the Indianapolis Star and said she was sexually abused by the longtime doctor for the women’s national gymnastics team, Larry Nassar. Since then more than 300 women have said that they were abused by Nassar; the disgraced doctor has been ...
Jimmy Pitaro Says The Research Shows Viewers Like ESPN Best When It's A Bland Paste
ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro’s purpose has been clear from the start—he is the massager of the balls, there to soothe the company’s corporate interests, the reactionary to predecessor John Skipper. But with employee Dan Le Batard’s honest and true radio rant two weeks ago about how a “stick to sports...
Minor League Baseball Team Claims Blue Lives Matter Flag Patch Is "Not Political"
The Aberdeen Ironbirds, a Class-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, defended the Blue Lives Matter flag patch on the back of their jerseys on Wednesday. The team claimed that they aren’t a political statement, but a way to honor two sheriff’s deputies killed in February of 2016. ...
Enes Kanter Claims Turkish Embassy Bullied A Mosque Into Canceling His Basketball Camp
In a statement released Wednesday night, Boston Celtics big man Enes Kanter claims that his very public criticism of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his regime has cost him one of his summer basketball camps. In the statement first shared by New York Daily News reporter Stefan Bondy, Kant...
Report: ESPN Reminds Employees Of Craven No-Politics Policy In Wake Of Dan Le Batard's Criticism Of The Network And Trump
It was only a matter of time before ESPN decided to do something in response to Dan Le Batard very correctly calling the network’s anti-politics stance “cowardly,” after he denounced the “send her back” chants that Trump’s racist supporters decided to hoot and holler on Thursday. Surprisingly, howev...
Artemi Panarin Becomes Highest-Profile Russian Athlete To Criticize Vladimir Putin
The New York Rangers’ marquee free-agent signing of the summer, Artemi Panarin, gave an interview that posted on Thursday where he did something unprecedented for a Russian athlete of his caliber: criticize President Vladimir Putin. ...
You’re Not Sticking To Sports When You Stick To Sports
We live in an age of mass cowardice, and so it’s unsurprising that the PGA—that famed bastion of sporting tolerance—would not only charge ahead with staging a major tournament at a Trump-owned golf course, but also that they would limply try to have it both ways by consigning the President’s flagran...
Megan Rapinoe Cannot Make This Any Clearer
Megan Rapinoe does not want to go to the White House. Megan Rapinoe does not want to go to the White House if the U.S. Women’s National Team wins the World Cup, because Donald Trump is the president. She does not want to visit Donald Trump because of his record and statements on racial issues, gende...
ESPN President: We're Going To Keep The Old Whites Happy
ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro, whose biggest accomplishment since taking over the network more than a year ago has been tenderly kissing the NFL’s ass, is once again harping on the importance of sticking to sports. This time, however, he’s not just saying the network shouldn’t cover “pure politics”; h...