Idaho’s capital is not, by any stretch, a geopolitical choke point. Yet on a crisp Saturday evening in late November, the Boise State Broncos and the Air Force Falcons will square off on a rectangle of blue plastic so garish it can be seen from the International Space Station—an orbital fact proudly cited by locals…
Duquesne vs. Akron: The Tiny Mid-Season Collision Reverberating from Pittsburgh to Pretoria By: Our Man in the Dugout, Still Nursing Jet Lag and Existential Dread It begins, as so many planetary tremors do, in a half-empty gym whose air smells faintly of popcorn and the slow death of dreams: Duquesne University versus the University of…
Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ three-time MVP catcher, has long been filed under “American baseball legend” and left to gather dust alongside other sepia-toned curios. Yet if you squint past the nostalgia, Campy’s story turns out to be a surprisingly useful lens on the planet’s chronic inability to play fair—on the diamond, in passport queues,…
Arkansas State versus Kennesaw State: A Microscopic Civil War, Televised for the World’s Schadenfreude by Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between the Ozark foothills and the outer ring-roads of Atlanta—those asphalt moats we once called suburbs before they metastasized—two modest American universities are preparing to bludgeon one another with shoulder pads this weekend. To most…
San José, California—If you want to see American exceptionalism reduced to its purest, most comically earnest form, forget the aircraft carriers or the moon landes; come to CEFCU Stadium on a Saturday when San José State University (SJSU) is playing football. To the outside world, the Spartans are a curiosity: a mid-tier program in a…
UIW vs Northern AZ: How a Thursday Night Football Game in Texas Quietly Explains the Collapse of Civilization San Antonio, Texas — While the rest of the planet argued over whose navy gets to sink whose fishing boats this week, the Incarnate Word Cardinals and the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks did something revolutionary: they played a…
Botafogo vs. Atlético Mineiro: When Brazil’s Footballing Family Feud Becomes a Global Soap Opera By the time the first whistle blows at Estádio Nilton Santos, the usual suspects—London, Madrid, Abu Dhabi—will be pretending to ignore the match. Their analysts, trained on Champions League spreadsheets and Gulf-state balance sheets, will sip flat lattes and mutter that…
Bill Parcells and the Global Gospel of Winning Ugly By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Somewhere over the North Atlantic, between the lukewarm coffee of JFK and the existential dread of Heathrow, it occurred to me that Bill Parcells has quietly become America’s most successful cultural export since the KFC Double Down. The Tuna—part…
In the grand global theater of human endeavor, where Ukrainian wheat fields burn, Argentine inflation pirouettes past three digits, and Tokyo salarymen still pretend karaoke is therapy, a 22-year-old wide-receiver-in-waiting named Jaxon Smith-Njigba has improbably become a kind of Rorschach test for our collective anxieties. The Ohio State alumnus, freshly drafted by the Seattle Seahawks,…
PARIS—In the grand amphitheatre of Roland-Garros, where the clay is the color of dried blood and the Parisian sky looks perpetually disappointed in you, Alexander Zverev appears to be auditioning for a role he never asked to play: the last sane man in tennis. At 6’6″, with the gait of someone who has read too…
Justice Haynes: The Running Back Who Could Outrun Geopolitics (For About Four Seconds) By the time Justice Haynes, Georgia’s latest five-star running back, hits his third stride Saturday, he will have covered more ground than the average U.N. peacekeeping convoy manages in an afternoon. That, dear reader, is the only reliable metric left in our…
Bill Belichick, the NFL’s hoodie-clad Machiavelli, has finally vacated the New England Patriots’ throne room after twenty-four seasons, six rings, and enough surveillance footage to make the NSA blush. To the average Boston barfly, this is sports-page melodrama. To the rest of the planet, it is a miniature of how empires collapse: first the satellites…
