The World According to Pat Surtain: How a 6’2″ Cornerback Quietly Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Border Control By the time Pat Surtain II stonewalls another wide receiver at the line of scrimmage, a container ship the length of four football fields has slipped through the Suez Canal, the Shanghai Composite has ticked up 0.2%,…
The Curious Case of Harrison Butker, or How One Kicker Became the Planet’s Favourite Punchline By Diego “Weathered Passport” Salazar, International Affairs Desk Kansas City, Missouri—If you had told the average Parisian, Lagosian, or Singaporean that a man whose primary job is to boot an inflated pigskin between two yellow sticks could trigger a planetary…
Tetairoa McMillan and the Quiet Extinction of Distance By Dave’s Locker, Chief Cynic-at-Large Somewhere above the Pacific, half-way between the Marquesas and the Las Vegas Strip, a 6-foot-5 sophomore from Ewa Beach is busy re-writing the laws of physics. Tetairoa McMillan—known to the rest of the planet as “T-Mac,” because global attention spans now demand…
The Global Importance of a Man Named Cal Raleigh—Yes, Really By our correspondent in the cheap seats, watching civilizations rise and fall between innings In the grand taxonomy of world-historical figures, Cal Raleigh currently sits somewhere between “that guy who invented the paperclip” and “the second-best barista in Ljubljana.” Yet on a humid Tuesday in…
George Pickens and the Weaponization of Spectacle By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Circumnavigating the Globe One Highlight Reel at a Time If you squint at the right angle, George Pickens is less a wide receiver than a perfectly calibrated piece of soft-power ordnance—launched weekly by the Pittsburgh Steelers straight into the retinas of…
Troy Franklin, Wide Receiver, American: How One Twenty-Year-Old in Shoulder Pads Quietly Became a Data Point in Everyone Else’s Existential Crisis By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the 50 and the Apocalypse Picture, if you will, the planet at 3 a.m. Kyiv time, 7 p.m. in Oregon, and roughly half-past despair in…
Cardinals Score: How a Red-Bird Box Score Became a Global Rorschach Test By L. Vespertine | International Desk, Dave’s Locker MINSK—Somewhere between the third vodka toast and the fourth lament about the price of microchips, a Belarusian state-TV anchor paused to announce, “The Cardinals scored seven.” The entire bar froze. Was it the Vatican’s scarlet…
Cooper Beebe: The Overlooked Colossus Quietly Rebooting the American Empire’s Offensive Line—and the World’s Power Grid By A. Grigor, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global capitalism has many moving parts—semiconductors, shipping lanes, crypto scams—but few are as under-celebrated as the 6-foot-3, 335-pound human firewall known as Cooper Beebe. While the chattering classes in Davos sip lukewarm…
From the vantage point of a crumbling press box in Sarajevo—where the coffee is thick enough to refinish parquet and the Wi-Fi password is still “NATO99″—the name Bryce Young lands with the soft thud of another American folk-hero origin story. Halfway around the world, the 2021 Heisman Trophy winner has been reduced to a scrolling…
Denver, Colorado – Somewhere between the thin alpine air and the thicker wallets of corporate sponsors, the Broncos played another game last night. This alone is hardly news; the sun also rises, and the Broncos also lose. Yet from the vantage point of a planet simultaneously on fire and drowning in its own plastic, the…
Cardinals Game: A Feathered Spectacle in Which the Planet Gambles on Red Robes and Higher Stakes By Our Man in the Eternal City, nursing an espresso and existential dread Rome, Thursday – While half the world was doom-scrolling through inflation charts and the other half was busy re-branding war as “special military operations,” roughly 120…
The Longest Field Goal Ever Kicked: A Parable of 66 Yards and the Global Attention Span By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (tired, over-caffeinated, and still jet-lagged from Doha) On 26 September 2021, in the concrete cathedral formerly known as Mile High Stadium, a 26-year-old Baltimore place-kicker named Justin Tucker swung his leg like Zeus flipping…
