w Page 2859 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jonny Gomes: I Nearly Asphyxiated A Quarter Of My Team After We Clinched The 2008 AL East
The 2008 Tampa Bay Rays were one of the coolest and most delightful out-of-nowhere success stories in recent baseball history, a team filled with a bevy of teen stars and veteran hitting that coalesced to make an astonishing World Series appearance after having gone 66-96 the season prior. As an ora...

If Stanford's Defense Can Hold The Line, The Cardinal Are Going Places
Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, ...

Dutch Gymnast Goes Full-Blown Cat At The European Championships
When Dutch gymnast Celine van Gerner was introduced for the last time in Glasgow at the 2018 European Championships, she waved to the crowd sporting a full face of cat makeup. The reason: Van Gerner, 23, was set to compete to music from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats for her floor final....

Why Your Team Sucks 2018: New York Jets<em></em>
Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here....

Did You Ever Wish Tennis Were Faster And Louder?<em></em>
PHILADELPHIA — Two days before the World TeamTennis finals, the host and No. 1 seed Philadelphia Freedoms had a problem: Their mascot was missing....

Pro Football Hall Of Fame Considers Rule Change To Make Attendance Mandatory
Every sport gets the hall of fame it deserves. That’s why baseball has a bunch of old, weird prisses gatekeeping, and why hockey honored Jeremy Jacobs before Willie O’Ree, and why the Pro Football Hall of Fame loves insane, sanctimonious asshole Ray Lewis but might change its own rules because of Te...

The Browns Have Turned Yet Another First-Round Pick Into A Bag Of Shit
American sports are set up to all but guarantee that a franchise as putrid as the Cleveland Browns cannot remain putrid for eternity. All those losing seasons just add up to higher first-round draft picks, which should eventually add up to winning seasons. It take some real work to waste free ticket...

Terrell Owens Is Right To Feel Insulted
Terrell Owens has a point. In his Hall of Fame speech, given at the University of Chattanooga, during his own, unprecedented off-site ceremony, Owens described the process that delayed his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame like this:...

Ray Lewis's Hall Of Fame Speech Was Actual Frothing Madness
Ray Lewis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. He gave a speech. It was an exhausting performance, and not just because Lewis was stomping around the stage and holding poses with all the staccato swagger of the lead singer of an ‘80s hair metal band, mid-ballad. It was also a...

Carloz Gomez Has More Fun Than Anyone
Carlos Gomez is having a rotten season, overall. He’s batting just .220, and his OPS sits at the always alarming .666 mark. The batting average is the worst of his career; the OPS is his lowest mark since 2010. But he does lead the majors in one useful statistic: Gomez and Brandon Nimmo have each be...

Here Is A Legally Blind 96-Year-Old Great-Grandmother Who Would Kick Your Ass At Bowling
Kathryn Robinson will turn 97 years old next week. Also, according to this delightful Palm Beach Post report, she “lost all sight in one eye and most in the other,” making her legally blind. But that does not stop her from being a tremendous bowler:...

Robert Klemko of Sports Illustrated shares his experience of how the Ravens, the NFL, and Ray Lewis’s teammates made it nearly impossible for reporters to get answers from Lewis about his conviction on charges of obstruction of justice related to two murders in Atlanta in 2000: “‘First of all, you k...

And Now, James Franklin's Dark Purple Butt
Penn State head coach James Franklin spoke at Penn State Media Day about, among other things, the experience of taking all his players paintballing for a recent team outing. This may not have been a great idea for a person whose job it is to push these competitive young men to endure exhaustion and ...

Johnny Manziel's First CFL Start Did Not Go Well
Johnny Manziel started for the Montreal Alouettes Friday night, against his former team, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. This was always going to be a tough assignment—Manziel was traded to Montreal just 14 days ago, and had only practiced with his Alouettes teammates four times before taking the field as ...

Let’s Remember Some Guys: Early '90s WCW With Nick Aldis
Nick Aldis is now the NWA world’s champion. Not just that, he’s a fighting champion: He defended his title 20 times recently. Sure, wrestling is scripted, but that still means Aldis has wrestled near the top of the card at 20 shows this year. Aldis is part of a wrestling family in the spotlight: His...

Rick Ankiel, Who Could And Then Couldn't, Might<em></em>
We should begin with the important stuff. There is a league that plays at Louisville Slugger Stadium, in Louisville, over the course of a brief eight-team tournament held at the height of summer. It’s called the Bluegrass World Series, and seven of the teams in its field have rosters made up of coll...

Heartwarming: Asshole Boss Owned By Impromptu Strike
Friends, what we have here is the most compelling argument for worker solidarity you will see all day. Earlier this week, Indianapolis welder Antoine Dangerfield was working for a contractor building a UPS facility when he caught the moment when over 100 workers walked off the job after a few of the...

There Is A Controversy In Irish Powerlifting Over, Uh, The Government Of Germany From 1933–1945
Jay Farrant is the head coach of the Ireland Powerlifting Federation, as well as one of the owner of one of the country’s most prominent weightlifting gyms. He also has ideas about what the Nazi party didn’t stand for....

Vikings Safety Andrew Sendejo Has A Not-So-Subtle Message For The NFL
The NFL rulebook is absolutely riddled with confounding and indecipherable rules, but I can’t remember one eliciting such strong reactions from players as the league’s doomed new helmet rule. Players have essentially been told that they can no longer tackle the same way they’ve been tackling through...

It's Time To Get Excited About The USWNT
On the one hand, this was just a friendly that the Stars and Stripes were supposed to win. But on the other hand, it’s time to get frickin’ hyped about the USWNT! With a 4-1 win over Brazil on Thursday night, America took home the Tournament of Nations trophy. But more important than that hardware i...