In the grand casino of professional tennis—where fortunes swing faster than a Kyrgios meltdown—Belgium has quietly pushed another chip onto the green baize. His name is Zizou Bergs, a moniker that sounds less like a tennis prodigy and more like a Scandinavian death-metal band that tours in a repurposed Volvo. Yet behind the syllabic absurdity…
At 350 km/h, the only thing louder than a MotoGP bike is the collective ego of the paddock. From the glass towers of Doha to the rice terraces of Mandalika, the circus pitches its carbon-fiber tents, promising the planet a two-stroke antidote to its own slow-motion collision with reality. We tune in to watch twenty-four…
From the Ashes of Summer, America Sends October Missives to a Distracted Planet Byline: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic While COP negotiators in Baku trade carbon credits like Pokémon cards and the Indian Ocean swells with yet another “once-in-a-century” cyclone, the United States has decided the most pressing global calendar…
Astros vs. Angels: A Cosmic Rivalry for an Age of Collapsing Empires By Our Man in the Dugout of Despair Somewhere between the 405 and the existential void, two baseball teams are locked in a feud that feels increasingly like a metaphor for the entire international order. On one side, the Houston Astros—freshly rebranded from…
Kyle Harrison, Age 20, Has Already Won More Than Your Entire Country Bylines from Lagos to Lima are now muttering the same name in the same incredulous tone: Kyle Harrison. The American lacrosse prodigy just pocketed his second NCAA championship, a Premier Lacrosse League MVP, and—because apparently the universe enjoys overkill—a freshly inked Nike deal…
Scheffler at the Ryder Cup: America’s Reluctant Atlas, Europe’s Favorite Punching Bag By the time Scottie Scheffler stepped onto the first tee at Marco Simone last September, the world had already spent two years treating him like a walking algorithm: plug in fairways, receive birdies. Inflation? Solved. War? Calmed. Simply project Scottie’s Strokes-Gained chart onto…
The Swedish Meteor That Missed Every Radar Screen By our correspondent in the bunker beneath Geneva’s Palais des Nations GENEVA—In a week when the planet busied itself with the usual carousel of missile tests, crypto collapses, and whichever royal duchess is currently suing a tabloid, a 24-year-old from Esbjerg (yes, that’s in Denmark, but try…
Karolína Muchová Isn’t Just a Tennis Story—She’s the Bleakly Beautiful Metaphor We’ve All Been Waiting For By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Correspondent PRAGUE—When the Czech Republic’s Karolína Muchová dismantled world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the 2023 U.S. Open semifinal, she did more than reach her first Grand Slam final. She offered the planet a…
MADRID—Somewhere between the clay of Roland-Garros and the artificial sun of a Saudi exhibition court, Paula Badosa is busy reminding the planet that tennis still sells a very old product: the illusion that individual will can outrun geopolitics, biology, and the algorithmic attention economy. The 26-year-old Catalan, currently ranked inside the top-40 but spiritually hovering…
David Goffin, the Belgian who once looked like he’d wandered off a Flemish Renaissance canvas and onto a tennis court, is still alive—both literally and professionally. This may come as a shock to the casual global sports fan, who long ago filed him under “perpetual quarter-finalist, possibly fictional.” Yet here he is, grinding through the…
Seve Ballesteros: The Swashbuckling Spaniard Who Made Golf Global (and Occasionally Globalized the Rough) By the time Seve Ballesteros sauntered onto the first tee at Royal Birkdale in 1976—barely old enough to order sangria legally in his native Spain—golf was still the polite preserve of blazer-clad colonels and American network executives who used the word…
Roki Sasaki’s 19-strikeout perfect game—hurled last April for the Chiba Lotte Marines against the Orix Buffaloes—arrived just as the planet was debating whether World War III should be scheduled before or after the next climate summit. In that context, a 20-year-old Japanese kid painting the outside corner at 101 mph felt almost quaint, like watching…
