David Goffin, the Belgian who once looked like he’d wandered off a Flemish Renaissance canvas and onto a tennis court, is still alive—both literally and professionally. This may come as a shock to the casual global sports fan, who long ago filed him under “perpetual quarter-finalist, possibly fictional.” Yet here he is, grinding through the…
There is, somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a football program whose greatest export is not touchdowns but existential dread. From the outside—say, from a café terrace in Sarajevo or a newsroom in Lagos—Virginia football looks less like sport and more like a slow-burn allegory for the American condition: lavish resources, chronic underachievement, and a…
The World According to Kamilla Rakhimova, or How to Be 22 and Already a Geopolitical Pawn By Our Correspondent in Everywhere and Nowhere PARIS—In the grand casino that is the WTA Tour, Kamilla Rakhimova has quietly become the house’s favorite underdog: a 22-year-old Kazakh with a baseline game as steady as a Swiss bank clerk…
Mark McGwire: America’s Giant, the World’s Punchline By Our Correspondent, nursing a €12 espresso in a Brussels café that still thinks baseball is rounders for grown-ups There’s a moment, somewhere between the third and fourth replay of a 1998 McGwire moonshot on the bar TV, when the Japanese tourists stop taking selfies and the Argentine…
From the Fog of Puget Sound to the Frontlines of Global Geopolitics: Reading the Seahawks Standings Like a State-Secret Briefing By Our Man in the Pacific Northwest, Still Wearing Gloves Because the Espresso Machine is Broken Again SEATTLE—Every Tuesday, long after the Monday-night fireworks have fizzled and the last influencer has posted a slow-motion video…
The Cardinals’ Defensive Coordinator: A Post-Imperial Job Posting in a World That Forgot How to Tackle By the time you finish reading this sentence, another Asian port city will have sunk two centimeters thanks to climate change, a European finance minister will have blamed migrants for bond yields, and somewhere in Glendale, Arizona, the Arizona…
The Empire Strikes Backhand: Coco Gauff as Twenty-First-Century Soft Power ————————————————————————– PARIS—On a humid Saturday evening, while the Seine lapped indifferently at its own reflection, a 19-year-old from Delray Beach, Florida, reminded the planet that the United States still knows how to weaponize a tennis ball. Coco Gauff’s 6-2, 6-3 demolition of Iga Świątek in…
Aaron Murray: The American Quarterback Who Became an Accidental Global Rorschach Test If you’ve never heard the name Aaron Murray, congratulations—you have successfully avoided the United States’ most efficient export after weaponized fast food and unsolicited military advice. Murray, for the uninitiated, is a former University of Georgia quarterback whose professional résumé reads like a…
Sergio Busquets: The Midfield Metronome Who Turns Geopolitics into Geometry By Alonso V. Delgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—While lesser mortals argue over border walls and trade tariffs, Sergio Busquets has spent the last fifteen years quietly redrawing the map of global football from the center circle. From Shanghai to São Paulo, diplomats and dictators…
JP Crawford and the Geopolitics of a Shortstop: How One Glove in Seattle Echoes from Caracas to Cairo By A. Hume-Jones, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice about JP Crawford—apart from the fact that his name sounds like an investment bank that just got bailed out—is the way he turns a routine…
**The Devon Witherspoon Doctrine: How a Cornerback from Florida Became an Unlikely Metaphor for Global Power Shifts** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and cryptocurrency barons purchase democracy like souvenir snow globes, it takes a peculiar sort of genius to find geopolitical significance in a 22-year-old…
Drew Petzing: The Quiet American Export Who Might Just Save Your Sunday (or Ruin It, Depending on Your Jersey) In the grand bazaar of globalized misery—where trade wars, crypto meltdowns, and cruise-ship viruses are passed around like stale canapés—one modest export from Minnesota is currently doing more to unite and divide humanity than most UN…
