When a 6-foot-5 Curaçaoan with a 95-mph heart-rate closes a baseball game in Los Angeles, half the planet yawns while the other half quietly recalibrates its own ambitions. Kenley Jansen’s nightly ninth-inning séance in Dodger Stadium is, on the surface, a local folk ritual: organ music, beach balls, overpriced lager. Zoom out, though, and the…
In the annals of American football, few names conjure the same polite, transatlantic shrug as Shaun Alexander. To the average Parisian café philosopher or Singaporean derivatives trader, the phrase sounds less like a gridiron legend and more like the alias on a mildly suspicious offshore wire transfer. Yet Alexander’s 2005 MVP season—when he carried the…
The Curious Diplomacy of Shedeur Sanders: How a Quarterback Became the World’s Most Unwilling Soft-Power Asset By Our Man in Geneva (Where Else?) GENEVA—In the marble corridors of the Palais des Nations, where diplomats habitually argue over comma placement in climate accords, the newest topic of cocktail-hour chatter is not grain corridors or submarine cables…
Across oceans and borders, in the smoky backrooms of Geneva think-tanks and the fluorescent glare of Seoul sports bars, the name Malcolm Brogdon has started to carry the faint whiff of geopolitical metaphor. Not because the 6’4″ guard can single-handedly reboot supply chains or lower global interest rates—heaven forbid we inflate another athlete into a…
The Left Arm That Shook the Globe By Diego “Digger” Santangelo, International Correspondent Somewhere above the Mediterranean, on a chartered El Al flight in October 1965, Sandy Koufax told the captain he would not be pitching Game 1 of the World Series. The reason? Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Up in…
The Last Full-Contact Diplomat: Why the World Still Cares About Jim Brown, Dead or Alive By our man in the cheap seats of global memory Cleveland, Ohio, is not, by any stretch of diplomacy, a world capital. Its river once caught fire—twice—an achievement even Beirut politely calls déclassé. Yet when news of Jim Brown’s death…
Cameron Heyward: The Last Man Standing in a League Bent on Self-Immolation By our man in the cheap seats, Brussels Bureau Let us begin with the obvious: Cameron Heyward is a very large human paid to run into other very large humans on behalf of a city whose river once caught fire. This is, on…
