The world’s most consequential geopolitical contest this week is not playing out in the South China Sea but in a dimly lit spare bedroom in suburban Milwaukee, where Trevor—an actuarial analyst who once misspelled “Ukraine” on a conference call—is deciding whether to start Jordan Addison or bench him for a London game that kicks off…
Yahoo Fantasy Football: The Last Empire America Still Runs Better Than the U.N. By Diego “Draft Day” Serrano, International Correspondent filing from a Wi-Fi dead zone near the Syrian-Turkish border If you want to witness a functioning global bureaucracy that still inspires mass participation without drone strikes or debt ceilings, skip Davos and open the…
Naomi Osaka, the soft-spoken grand-slam dispenser who once made an entire stadium hush like a library in a police raid, has become a global Rorschach test. From Melbourne to Manhattan, Lagos to Lausanne, people peer at the 26-year-old and see whatever the zeitgeist needs: a mental-health pioneer, a corporate cash-cow, a reluctant activist, or—depending on…
**The Global Hamstring: How Justin Jefferson’s Pulled Muscle Quietly Terrified Four Continents** *By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker International* MINNEAPOLIS—Somewhere between the 38-second mark of the second quarter and the next round of artisanal nachos, Justin Jefferson’s hamstring sent a ripple across the planet that registered roughly 3.7 on the Richter Scale…
Athletics vs Cardinals: When Cosmic Irony Dresses in Spandex and Feathers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you tuned in expecting a quaint American baseball rivalry, congratulations—you’ve just been punked by the universe. The phrase “Athletics vs Cardinals” is no longer the exclusive property of two teams that trade…
The Curious Case of Djed Spence, or Why the World Keeps Buying Wing-Backs Like NFTs By Our Man in the Transfer Twilight Zone The planet is presently on fire—literally from Athens to Anchorage—yet the global economy still finds room to obsess over a 23-year-old Englishman whose principal talent is running up and down a patch…
Karolína Muchová: The Czech Enigma Who Makes Tennis Cosmopolitan Again By Dave’s Locker International Desk | June 2024 Prague, a city that still smells faintly of Kafka, Pilsner, and the 1989 velvet that refused to get bloody, has coughed up another absurdist protagonist for the global stage: Karolína Muchová. She is currently the only Czech…
Lorenzo Musetti: The Last Italian Romantic in an Age of Algorithmic Tennis By our correspondent in Rome, still waiting for the espresso machine to be fixed since 2019 If tennis were still governed by Renaissance patronage, Lorenzo Musetti would already have a ceiling somewhere—probably the Sistine Chapel gift shop, between Michelangelo’s self-checkout kiosk and a…
Blue Jays vs Reds: A Global Tragedy Painted in Feathers and Box Scores By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism GENEVA — While the world’s finance ministers argue over digital-tax commas in Swiss conference suites, and while a forgotten war reruns its greatest hits on another continent, two North American bird-themed baseball clubs have…
Najee Harris and the Global Cargo Cult of American Football By Our Man in the Cheap Seats It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least from the VIP boxes in Dallas to the betting kiosks in Macau—that the United States exports only three things with reliable profit margins: weapons-grade anxiety, Marvel plot twists, and the National…
The Last Flight Out of Bucaramanga: How a Colombian Football Match Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with 2024 If you squint hard enough through the smog of modernity, the world occasionally lines up its metaphors like dominoes waiting for a toddler with a sugar rush. Case in point: last Tuesday’s Copa…
Pam Shriver: The Accidental Oracle of a World That Forgot How to Volley By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the International Date Line You know the world is in dire straits when a retired American doubles specialist becomes the most coherent voice in global sport. Yet here we are, watching Pam Shriver—she of the 1980s teased…
