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Usain Bolt Is A Soccer Player Now And He's Actually Not Terrible
Usain Bolt may have retired from track, but he hasn’t given up sports entirely. He is currently signed to a trial contract with the Central Coast Mariners, an Australia A-League team, trying to realize his dream of becoming a pro soccer player. He made his official debut in a preseason friendly last...

The College Football Season Began With A UCF Player Carried Off On A Stretcher<em></em>
Thursday night was, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the college football season, as an actual ranked team in UCF took on UConn in the silliest rivalry in sports. (There’s also a Northwestern-Purdue game, for the true perverts among us.)...
![Chair Umpire Begs Nick Kyrgios To Start Caring About Match; Kyrgios Rallies And Wins [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/tj7go1zgg2t0ro89w1mr.jpg)
Chair Umpire Begs Nick Kyrgios To Start Caring About Match; Kyrgios Rallies And Wins [Update]
By the second set, Nick Kyrgios had earned his first boos. He’d lost the first set of today’s U.S. Open match to Frenchman Pierre-Hugues Herbert on a double-fault second serve going 129 mph. Kyrgios’s serve—untouchable whenever he desires it to be—was broken to start off the second, and when he plan...

Tyler White's Unlikely Walk-Off Dinger Set An MLB Single-Season Record
The Astros won 5-4 today in the final game of a three-game series against the Athletics, after DH Tyler White hit a walk-off bomb. White’s homer not only extended Houston’s lead in the AL West to 2.5 games, but set a neat little MLB record, too....

The NBA's Crappy One-And-Done Rule Is One Big Step Closer To Death
The NBA is steadily laying the foundation for the end of the rule requiring basketball prospects to wait a year after graduating from high school before declaring for the NBA Draft. Adam Silver has been making noise about this for a while, and Condoleezza Rice’s otherwise useless commission recommen...

Clint Dempsey Is An Intractable Asshole Who Never Backed Down From Anyone
After playing professional soccer for 15 years, Clint Dempsey—celebrated striker and guy who broke John Terry’s face—is retiring at age 35 from both the Seattle Sounders and the United States national team. The Sounders posted a statement detailing Dempsey’s long and successful career; Deuce, chara...

U.S. Open Umpire Hits Alize Cornet With A Bizarre Code Violation Because She Briefly Took Off Her Shirt
If you haven’t heard, the U.S. Open in New York City is brutally hot this year. Players are keeling over from the heat right and left, and everyone is so freaking sweaty I feel really bad for the ball kids who get the sweat towels flung in their faces after every point. A “heat rule” was in full eff...

Delightful Clown Show Opens Up Flood Gates In A's-Astros
The Oakland Athletics jumped out to 4–0 lead early in Monday’s big tilt with the division leading Astros. The A’s have been hot as hell, and closed Houston’s lead in the AL West to a game and a half, and this had the look of another stirring Oakland victory to kick off an all-important series in Hou...

Every Ruling Is Still Going Against Larry Nassar
Larry Nassar is 0 for 2 so far in appeals of his state and federal prison sentences. First, he lost his appeal of his federal sentence for child porn. And today, his appeal of his sentence in Ingham County, Mich., was denied by Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, the same judge his court-appointed attorneys u...

How To Attend The U.S. Open And Survive
The U.S. Open starts today in Queens, N.Y. I’ve covered it for the last six years, usually every day for the entirety of the tournament. Here’s a guide to not having your U.S. Open experience be a sweaty hell....

Tennys Sandgren Now Enjoys A "Very Intense" Friendship With Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald telegraphed this one back in March:...

Here's The Special Issue Of The MSU Alumni Magazine On Sexual Abuse That Was Spiked By School President John Engler
Back in June, the Detroit Free Press reported that Michigan State president John Engler spiked a special issue of the alumni magazine that was supposed to focus exclusively on the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal, the victims, and the fallout. Such an issue seemed like a natural thing for the magazin...

Russian Gymnastics Legend Svetlana Khorkina Gets Pissy When Interviewer Wants To Talk Politics
Russian gymnastics legend Svetlana Khorkina, when she’s not busy talking about whether American gymnasts are doping and what she really thinks of WADA (hint: she likened them to a certain WWII Axis power), can be found lending her expertise to the Russian speedskating team—she’s now listed as a “spe...

The Big Ugly Battle Over The World's Largest Rubber Duck
SANDUSKY, Ohio — There is more than one enormous rubber duck. I did not know this when I decided to travel to Sandusky to see one, but I can’t unlearn it now. Though there was once a bigger duck in Saint-Nazaire, France, the monstrosity anchored in Sandusky comes with a registered trademark: it is t...

Simone Biles's Skills Are Even More Mind-Boggling In Very Slow Motion
Have you ever watched Simone Biles do gymnastics and thought, “I need to watch her again, this time in super-slo-mo so I can really appreciate what I just watched”? If so, you’re in luck, because we’ve slowed down Biles’ performance from this weekend’s national championships (where she routed the fi...

Isaiah Austin Is Still Medically Banned From The NBA, But He's Crushing It In China
During the process leading up to the 2014 NBA Draft, Baylor center Isaiah Austin’s career ended before it could even begin when he was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue. The NBA ruled that the chances of Austin’s enlarged aorta bursting were...

Larry Nassar Loses Appeal Of His Federal Sentence For Child Porn
In December, Larry Nassar—the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State physician who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls under the guise of medical treatment—was sentenced for the first of three times. In that case, Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to posses...

Tanking Master Bernard Tomic Is Back On His Bullshit
After what feels like an eternity of emotionally disintegrating in public, Bernard Tomic is somehow only 25 years old, with plenty of talent to spare, and was as recently as last season a top-30 player on tour. This season he’s been fighting to qualify for the majors, though the tortured former No. ...

Christian Covington's Ego Takes A Hit As The New <i>Madden</i> Has Him Looking Like A Gelatinous Thumb
Texans defensive end Christian Covington is not a particularly handsome man. He’s not an ugly man, either, just an average-looking one. Still, as unremarkable as Covington’s face may be, he does not resemble the creepy, poorly rendered avatar the folks at EA assigned him in Madden 19, as he has disc...

Wily Fox Steals Golf Ball Right Off The Green
Golfers are used to having to contend with environmental hazards, from violent winds, to prehistoric swamp monsters, to fires spewed forth from the bowels of the earth. During one recent round in Massachusetts, golf aficionado Daniel Adams was confronted with the added challenge of a thieving fox. A...