Kelvin Sheppard’s Global Cameo: How One Linebacker Accidentally Became an International Metaphor for Everything Going Wrong By the time Kelvin Sheppard’s name crossed the Atlantic this week—carried on the same jet stream that now delivers wildfire smoke and micro-plastics to whichever hemisphere is currently on sale—most of humanity had already forgotten what position he played….
Denny Hamlin Is the Last American Export That Still Runs on Leaded Nostalgia By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk PARIS—On any given Sunday, while half the planet doom-scrolls through tariff wars and the other half wonders whether Brussels will ration olive oil, somewhere in the Carolinas a man in a fireproof onesie mashes a throttle…
Global Footnotes: How Jake Moody’s Right Foot Briefly Became a Geopolitical Talking Point by Our Man in the Cheap Seats For most of the planet, Jake Moody remains the sort of name that slides off the tongue like lukewarm tap water—forgettable, slightly metallic, gone before the swallow. Yet on 12 February 2024, somewhere between the…
The Empire’s Tennis Ball: How US Open Champions Quietly Rule the World By a correspondent who once got food poisoning at Arthur Ashe and still blames capitalism NEW YORK—Every September the United States dutifully stages its fortnightly imperial coronation disguised as a sports tournament. The US Open crowns a new sovereign of string and neon,…
Green Bay’s Roster Shuffle: A Cheesehead Saga Reverberating from Lagos to Lhasa By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently hiding in a Reykjavik bar where the Wi-Fi is stronger than most governments) If you think the annual reshuffling of the Green Bay Packers roster is just a provincial footnote in the American sports coliseum, congratulations—you have successfully…
NFL Divisions: How Eight Petty Fiefdoms in Shoulder Pads Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the sun rises in London, the citizens of the United Kingdom have already placed their accumulator bets on whether the Miami Dolphins will remember what a defense is. By lunchtime in Lagos, WhatsApp groups light up with hot…
Mason Taylor and the Quiet Collapse of the Borderless Résumé By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent If you squint at LinkedIn long enough, every Mason Taylor on earth starts to look like the same politely smiling algorithmic ghost. The name itself could be the default setting on a factory-fresh passport: Mason—solid, vaguely colonial; Taylor—an occupation that…
From Manila to Madrid, the arena lights dim to a conspiratorial hush just before the three-point line becomes a geopolitical fault line. Enter Wardell Stephen Curry II, a 6’2″ Californian with the diplomatic passport of a rock star and the jump shot of an intercontinental ballistic missile. While lesser mortals debate tariffs and troop deployments,…
Eugenio Suárez and the Curious Elasticity of National Heroes Dave’s Locker – International Desk | 8 June 2024 If you squint at a map of the Americas, you might notice that Venezuela—birthplace of Eugenio Suárez, third-baseman turned planetary metaphor—has roughly the same shape as a broken baseball bat. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of…
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…
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…
The Yankees play a meaningless mid-week tilt against whichever AL Central also-ran is currently in town. Meanwhile, the world keeps burning—literally in some latitudes—but 46,000 ticket-holders still shuffle through the turnstiles because, well, what else is there to do while waiting for the apocalypse? From the upper deck of Yankee Stadium you can almost see…
