The World Watches as Two Southern American Colleges Duke It Out—And Pretends to Care Geneva, Switzerland – While the United Nations Security Council was busy debating the finer points of who gets to veto whom this week, an arguably more urgent geopolitical flashpoint erupted in the American Deep South: Louisiana-Monroe versus Alabama. Yes, the Warhawks…
The North Carolina A&T Aggies versus the UCF Knights is, on paper, a football game so geographically modest that a European could sneeze and miss it. Yet this September collision in Orlando—part of UCF’s annual “Let’s Try to Look P5 While Still in the AAC” showcase—offers a perfect micro-dose of the global malaise we all…
Cal Football, or How a Struggling Pac-12 Side Became a Metaphor for Late-Stage Empire By “Special Correspondent in Mild Exile,” Berkeley-adjacent BERKELEY—While COP28 delegates argued over commas in Dubai and the European Central Bank quietly asked Italy for its next fiscal miracle, 50,000 souls filed into Memorial Stadium last Saturday to watch California Golden Bears…
West Point cadets, Kansas wheat farmers, and a global audience of insomniacs tuning in at 3 a.m. from Singapore to São Paulo—welcome to the latest episode of “America’s Collegiate Gladiator Hour,” where a football game between Army and Kansas State is sold as a clash of civilizations rather than what it really is: two groups…
UNC vs Charlotte: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World Already Burning By Our Correspondent in the All-Too-Cozy End Times Raleigh—If aliens ever bothered to tune in to earthling “sports,” they’d probably mistake last night’s North Carolina vs UNC-Charlotte tussle for a particularly well-choreographed food riot. Two bands of unpaid laborers—sorry, “student-athletes”—chasing an inflated sphere…
PARIS—Somewhere between the genteel pop of champagne corks on the Champs-Élysées and the less-genteel pop of another dislocated knee on the hard courts of Melbourne, Chris Evert keeps resurfacing like a polite ghost at the banquet of modern sport. The woman once known as the “Ice Maiden” still skates through global conversations—usually right when some…
The United States Open—once a quaint tennis tournament where polite applause and strawberries-and-cream nostalgia collided—has metamorphosed into a hard-court casino where the house always wins and the chips are denominated in human cartilage. This year, the purse swelled to a record-smashing $65 million, a figure that, if converted to Sri Lankan rupees, could probably bail…
Nevada Football: The Desert’s Last Honest Rebellion Against Global Sanity By Ramón del Plata, International Correspondent at Large Las Vegas—If you stand on the cracked tarmac of Allegiant Stadium long enough, the jet-wash from the next London-bound 787 will sandblast your notebook into origami. That’s fitting: Nevada football is essentially the same exercise—folding something stubbornly…
PARIS—Somewhere between the first croissant and the third existential crisis, Andy Roddick’s name still flits across café screens like a stubborn pop-up ad from 2003. It shouldn’t make sense: here we are, two decades deep into the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic infinity loop, and yet the Nebraskan with the howitzer serve is trending again—this time because a TikTok…
Tracy Austin: The Teenage Queen Who Made the Whole World Late for Dinner By our correspondent in the departure lounge of history, sipping lukewarm coffee and pretending the Wi-Fi works. In the spring of 1979, while diplomats from 35 nations were busy signing the SALT II arms-limitation treaty in Vienna—thereby promising not to blow up…
BILLIE JEAN KING, OR HOW ONE WOMAN MADE THE WORLD PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT EQUAL PAY FOR AN AFTERNOON By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats PARIS—In the city that once guillotined its aristocrats for sport, a bronze statue of Billie Jean King now stands on the hallowed clay of Roland-Garros, racket frozen mid-backhand as…
Sacramento State vs Nevada: A Microscopic Tilt Beneath the Shadow of a Dying Empire By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere East of Reason From the vantage point of a damp café in Sarajevo—where the espresso tastes like history and the Wi-Fi still drops every time a NATO convoy rumbles past—last night’s Sacramento State Hornets versus…
