Calvin Austin III, 5’9″ in cleats and 4.32 seconds from zero to existential dread, is the sort of human highlight reel who makes every passport-holding couch potato wonder why we bothered inventing the metric system. The Pittsburgh Steelers’ rookie wideout—fresh off Memphis tape that looks like it was sped up by an intern with a…
The AP Poll Is the World’s Most Tolerated Lie—And Everyone Keeps Pretending Otherwise By “Globetrotting” G. M. Lefèvre, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS, FRANCE—Every Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (7 p.m. GMT, 3 a.m. Tuesday in Pyongyang for the truly committed), a cabal of 62 American sportswriters and broadcasters releases a ranking that…
Flushing Meadows, Queens—where the Long Island Expressway coughs up its commuters and the aroma of fried dough collides with jet exhaust—has once again become the planet’s most ostentatious tennis court. For two weeks every late summer, the US Open transforms a former ash heap into a stage where geopolitics, corporate choreography, and fragile human tendons…
It began, as these things often do, with the polite fiction that nothing was at stake beyond the usual patriotic pantomime. Yet when Türkiye and Spain squared off in Berlin’s Olympiastadion for their Euro 2024 quarter-final, the planet’s more excitable commentators insisted the match was really a referendum on neo-Ottoman swagger versus post-imperial Iberian melancholy,…
The Ballad of Darius Slay, or How a Cornerback Became the Pentagon’s Favorite Metaphor By Our Paris Correspondent, nursing a third espresso and the suspicion that the world peaked in 1997. It begins, as so many modern fables do, on Twitter. Darius Slay—Philadelphia Eagles cornerback, human highlight reel, and possessor of a surname that sounds…
BREAKING: British Tennis Prodigy Retires to Pursue Full-Time Career in Being Photographed By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between SW19 and Abu Dhabi Laura Robson, the woman who once made Wimbledon Centre Court sound like a Beatles reunion, has officially hung up her racket at the age of 28—an age at which most players in Eastern Europe…
Istanbul – Somewhere between the kebab smoke and the sangria haze, Turkey and Spain have decided to flirt again. The rendezvous is billed as a “strategic partnership summit,” which in diplomatic French means “let’s see how much we can irritate everyone else while pretending we’re just talking trade.” The rest of the world, of course,…
Dolphins 34, Jets 13—an American gridiron footnote that, in saner times, would be of interest only to Floridian barflies and the three people in London who pretend to “get” the NFL. Yet the moment the final whistle shrilled across Hard Rock Stadium, the scoreboard’s neon digits were already ricocheting through fiber-optic cables, inflicting themselves on…
The Glorious, Illegal Afterlife of Football: A Totalsportek Travelogue By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a Moldovan data center and a server rack in Curaçao—jurisdiction shopping at its most romantic—the website Totalsportek continues to thrive like a cockroach after nuclear winter. It is, depending on which intellectual-property lawyer you ask, either the last true…
Skattebo Syndrome: How a Tiny Swedish Tax Shelter Became a Global Morality Play By “Lars-with-the-Burnout,” roving correspondent, Dave’s Locker Stockholm—If you squint hard enough at the map, Skattebo is barely a freckle on the Baltic’s pale cheek: 42 red houses, one ICA supermarket that doubles as post office, and a bus stop optimistically labeled “Central.”…
NFL SCORES, OR HOW THE WORLD LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE A 6–3 THRILLER Dave’s Locker – Global Desk If you’re reading this from a café in Lagos, a metro tunnel in Seoul, or a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, congratulations: you’ve already outlasted several American quarterbacks. Last weekend’s NFL scores—Chiefs 27, Ravens 24; Cowboys…
Kenneth Gainwell, the Memphis-born running back whose surname sounds like a self-help seminar for hedge-fund managers, is currently the most geopolitically intriguing 5-foot-9, 200-pound American in cleats. While the planet debates tariffs, tundra melt, and whether this year’s Eurovision will be decided by tactical drone strikes, Gainwell quietly embodies the late-capitalist paradox: a man whose…
