Troy Aikman: How a Helmeted Cowboy Became the World’s Most Unlikely Soft-Power Export By the time Troy Aikman finished carving up NFL secondaries in the mid-90s, the Berlin Wall had already been rubble for half a decade and CNN was beaming grainy footage of American excess into living rooms from Lagos to Novosibirsk. What those…
Mac Jones and the Export of American Quarterbacking: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts By Our Man in Exile, Somewhere Over Greenland Act I – The Transatlantic Pipeline When the New England Patriots drafted Mac Jones 15th overall in 2021, the moment did not, strictly speaking, make the front page of Le Monde or spark a…
American Football’s Reluctant Messiah: How Josh Allen Became the MVP the World Didn’t Know It Needed by Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest cryptocurrency implosion, the planet’s attention was hijacked this week by a 6-foot-5 Nebraskan with the haircut of a Scandinavian death-metal bassist and the arm of…
Chip Kelly and the Global Gospel of Hurry-Up Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the 15th arrondissement’s stubborn cigarette haze and the fluorescent glow of a Buffalo Wild Wings streaming Pac-12 After Dark, Chip Kelly keeps sprinting. Not literally—his knees filed an injunction years ago—but philosophically. While the rest of the…
Calais Campbell, the 6’8″ American football colossus whose very name sounds like a French port town hosting a discount mattress sale, has announced his retirement after 17 seasons of politely rearranging the spines of quarterbacks. While this might register as mere “sports news” in the parochial corners of U.S. cable television, the reverberations ripple outward…
The Curious Case of Russell Wilson: An American Quarterback as Global Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere above the North Atlantic, at 38,000 feet, a cargo Boeing 747 hums eastward carrying 7.4 metric tons of Wilson-branded “Dangerwich” sandwich boxes bound for discount supermarket freezers in Poland. The manifest has no entry for irony, but…
In a world where grain freighters reroute around the Red Sea to avoid drone hobbyists and the Arctic Council meets via Zoom because the polar ice has melted too much for a physical quorum, the Denver Broncos’ freshly released 2024 schedule lands on my desk like a glossy brochure from a saner planet. It promises…
The Curious Case of Malik Nabers: How a 20-Year-Old from Louisiana Became the Canary in the NFL’s Global Coal Mine By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Atlantic If you had told a Parisian sommelier, a Singaporean crypto-evangelist, and a Lagos ride-hailing driver to place bets on the next American export likely…
