Kavontae Turpin: The 5’7″ American Glitch in the NFL’s Global Matrix By Dave’s International Affairs & Existential Futility Desk When Kavontae Turpin, a man roughly the size of an airport sushi roll, returned a punt 78 yards for a touchdown against the Giants last season, the play ricocheted across continents like a rogue satellite signal….
Elic Ayomanor: Stanford’s One-Man IMF Program and the Global Trade in Miracles When Elic Ayomanor, a 6-foot-2 Canadian wide receiver who sounds like the love child of a Silicon Valley IPO and a Scandinavian crime-novel protagonist, torched Colorado for 294 receiving yards last autumn, the earth did not actually stop spinning. It merely wobbled, the…
Ricky Pearsall and the Global Theatre of a Single Gunshot By Matteo “Grimly Amused” Rossi, International Desk, Dave’s Locker SAN FRANCISCO—Somewhere between the sourdough tourists and the algorithmic fog, a 23-year-old wide receiver named Ricky Pearsall took a bullet to the chest on a Saturday afternoon. The shot was allegedly fired by a 17-year-old who,…
Nick Folk, the aging American placekicker now plying his trade for the Tennessee Titans, has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane. While most of the planet fixates on missile trajectories in the Taiwan Strait and wheat futures in Odessa, Folk is quietly proving that global influence can still be exerted by a 39-year-old man whose…
Jim Nantz: The Last Gentleman Broadcasting to a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the azaleas of Augusta and the smoldering remains of what used to be the rules-based international order, Jim Nantz sits in a CBS compound that resembles a minor principality, calmly introducing the Masters as though Vladimir Putin…
Milan vs Bologna: A Derby of Desperation in the Age of Global Collateral Damage By Our Man in the Mezzogiorno, still coughing up neoliberal dust MILAN—At first glance, tonight’s Serie A fixture between Milan and Bologna is merely the 156th official meeting of two clubs whose combined trophy cabinets could house a modest oligarch’s ego….
Hunter Henry, the American footballer whose surname sounds like a Bond villain’s accountant, has just signed a three-year, $27 million contract to keep catching spiraling leather projectiles for the New England Patriots. From Nuremberg to Nairobi, the planet’s collective shrug was almost audible—yet beneath the surface, the deal is a tiny but telling synecdoche for…
Astros vs. Braves: A Cosmic Farce Played Out in Left Field By Diego Valdés, International Sports Desk Somewhere between the asteroid belt and the Beltway, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves have managed to turn a provincial baseball quarrel into a planetary Rorschach test—one that reveals less about curveballs than it does about humanity’s…
Eddy Piñeiro: The Cuban-Born Foot Who Reminds the World That Nations Still Argue Over 100 Yards of Grass By the time the American football season mercifully ends and the rest of the planet returns to grown-up sports, Eddy Piñeiro’s right boot will have ping-ponged between glory and infamy more often than a diplomat at a…
In the grand tradition of global crises that aren’t actually global crises, the planet briefly paused this week to fret over the throwing elbow of one Joshua Patrick Allen, quarterback of the Buffalo Bills and, apparently, the linchpin holding Western civilization together. From the moment a grainy sideline clip showed him grimacing like a man…
From Baton Rouge to Bangkok, the name Kayshon Boutte is now being whispered in the same breath as “regret” and “rookie contract clause.” Once the Louisiana State wunderkind who could turn a screen pass into Mardi Gras, Boutte finds himself today as a cautionary export—shipped north to New England like over-seasoned crawfish—whose global footprint now…
Stefon Diggs and the 21st-Century Gladiator Exchange Program By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over Greenland Somewhere between the sushi bar at Narita and the duty-free Marlboros in Dubai, Stefon Diggs—wide-receiver, occasional philosopher, and full-time mood ring—was traded from Buffalo to Houston like a collectible NFT nobody asked for. The transaction pinged across…
