BETHPAGE BLACK: WHERE THE WORLD’S EGO GOES TO DIE, 7,425 YARDS AT A TIME By Our Man in the Rough, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere on Long Island—geopolitically the demilitarised buffer zone between Manhattan’s hedge-fund fiefdoms and the Hamptons’ oligarch summer camp—lies a patch of fescue so sadistically groomed it could qualify for UNESCO World…
The Principality Stadium, Cardiff – a name that sounds like the sort of place where minor European royalty go to misplace their titles and their dignity in equal measure – has quietly become one of the planet’s most dependable temples of choreographed chaos. From the outside it resembles a giant metallic mollusc that washed up…
Rebecca Slaughter, the U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner whose surname feels like destiny’s idea of a punchline, is presently touring the globe with a suitcase full of antitrust briefs and the weary smile of someone who knows every airport lounge smells the same. From Brussels to Brasília, regulators are leaning in to hear how Washington plans…
Hannah Hampton: The Goalkeeper Who Makes Brexit Look Like Amateur Hour By the time you read this, Hannah Hampton has probably saved more shots than the Bank of England has saved face, and with considerably fewer press conferences. The 23-year-old Aston Villa and England custodian’s latest master-class—an 87th-minute penalty denial against Spain in the Nations…
Fred VanVleet, the 6-foot-nothing guard who once went undrafted and is now busy annihilating NBA salary caps, has become an unlikely Rorschach test for the post-pandemic planet. While North Americans debate whether he’s worth his new three-year, $130-million Houston contract, the rest of the globe watches with a mixture of envy and anthropological curiosity: only…
Jimmy Kimmel’s triumphant stroll back onto the Disney lot this week felt less like a mere late-night resurrection and more like the ceremonial lighting of a distress flare in the middle of the Pacific: technically reassuring to passing ships, yet also a blunt reminder that the ocean is vast, the sharks are circling, and someone…
Johan Cruyff: The Dutchman Who Taught the World How to Fake Left While Going Right—And Then Vanished Reporting from the cheap seats of global memory, it’s worth remembering that most revolutions never announce themselves with fireworks. They start with a lanky kid in Amsterdam nicknamed “Jopie” who could make a ball behave like a rumor—unreliable,…
Fabio Capello, the man whose surname sounds like an Italian espresso machine you can’t quite afford, has spent a lifetime proving that football, like politics, is mostly about yelling convincingly in several languages. From the touchlines of the San Siro to the frozen benches of Wembley and the tax-free luxury boxes of Sochi, Capello has…
Sarina Wiegman: The Dutch Architect Who Rebuilt English Football While the World Burned By Dave’s International Desk, somewhere over the North Sea If you’ve spent the last decade doom-scrolling through cascading crises—climate tipping points, crypto scams, populist re-runs—it’s oddly reassuring to know that somewhere, a 54-year-old Dutch woman in sensible sneakers is still putting cones…
MADRID—Somewhere between the 37th retweet and the 400th WhatsApp forward, Vicky López stopped being merely a teenage football prodigy and became a global Rorschach test. Depending on which hemisphere you woke up in, the 17-year-old Barcelona Femeni midfielder is either a) the long-delayed correction to centuries of male sporting primacy, b) Spain’s consolation prize for…
From the ashes of Project Runway’s early-aughts fever dream, Christian Siriano has managed to do something almost no one thought possible: turn a reality-TV victory lap into a functioning, globe-spanning luxury house without combusting in a blaze of tacky licensing deals or ending up as a cautionary sidebar in a Business of Fashion postmortem. While…
Sporting CP versus Moreirense FC, 3 February 2024, Estádio José Alvalade. On paper it is merely match-day 20 of Portugal’s Primeira Liga—somewhere between a title procession and a relegation pillow-fight. Yet in the grand bazaar of global football this little fixture is quietly selling far more than three points. It is flogging hope, laundering geopolitical…
