Reds vs Cardinals: A Blood-Soaked Ode to Baseball, Bolshevism, and Birdwatching Gone Global By the time the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals finish their three-game set at Busch Stadium, roughly 2.3 million viewers across 137 countries will have pressed pause on coups, heatwaves, and the slow-motion implosion of whatever remains of the global supply…
UEFA Champions League 2025: The Last Circus Tent Still Standing GENEVA—As the planet’s glaciers melt faster than a striker’s contract clause, the 2025 UEFA Champions League final has improbably become the final shared ritual left for a fractured world. From Lagos living rooms to Seoul sports bars, 450 million humans will momentarily ignore inflation, wildfires,…
Yankees vs Twins: A Ritual of Empire Under Fluorescent Lights By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Tokyo Bureau There is, somewhere in the upper deck of Target Field, a Japanese salaryman in a pin-striped Ichiro jersey who has flown 6,000 miles for the singular pleasure of watching strangers in pajamas swing lumber at a…
Emeka Egbuka and the Quiet Art of Global Relevance By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 38-yard line, the planet’s attention span fractures like cheap porcelain. One half obsesses over ballistic missile trajectories; the other half refreshes mock-draft simulators. Into this bipolar circus strides Emeka Egbuka—wide receiver, Ohio State sophomore,…
Houston, We Have Depth: How the Texans’ Roster Sheet Became a Mirror for a Fractured Planet By the time the Texans’ latest depth chart slithered onto the NFL’s official site at 04:17 GMT—an hour when only insomniacs, night-shift nurses, and European insolvency lawyers are still conscious—it had already been parsed by data-scraping bots in Bangalore,…
Atlanta vs. Washington: A Small Civil War on Grass, Observed from Afar From the vantage point of a rooftop bar in Lisbon—where the only curveball is the bartender’s wrist as he muddles mint for yet another overpriced mojito—the Atlanta Braves and Washington Nationals are engaged in what Americans call a “divisional rivalry.” To the rest…
The Cubs and the Pirates squared off again last night in Pittsburgh, a rivalry whose very name sounds like a rejected theme for a low-budget children’s cartoon. Yet from the vantage point of a café terrace in Sarajevo—where the waiter, having lived through actual siege warfare, finds American sports disputes quaintly adorable—the game carries more…
Monday Night Football Tonight: The World Pauses to Watch Grown Millionaires Chase an Oblong Ball While Rome (and Kyiv, and Gaza) Burns From the relative safety of Dave’s Locker, somewhere between the last lukewarm beer and the first existential crisis of the week, we bring you tonight’s dispatch on “MNF tonight.” The acronym, of course,…
From the Pyrenees to the Pacific: How the Word “Espanyol” Became a Global Rorschach Test BARCELONA—Last week, in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Seoul, a teenager practiced rolling the Spanish “r” in the word “espanyol,” blissfully unaware that 10,000 kilometers away a Catalan separatist was spitting it out like cheap vermouth. Meanwhile, on a Reddit thread…
Marcus Mariota, erstwhile savior of the Tennessee Titans and current itinerant quarterback, is the rare American football export who can make the rest of the planet shrug in unison. While the NFL busies itself inflating viewership numbers in London pubs and Munich beer halls, Mariota has become a walking metaphor for globalization’s limits: a Samoan-Hawaiian,…
Monday Night Football: The Glittering Coliseum Where the World Watches America Argue With Itself Dave’s Locker International | Dispatches from the End of the Couch Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of Ozempic, Monday Night Football became the last universally accepted American export that doesn’t arrive accompanied by sanctions or a drone…
Dan Marino: The Last American Gunslinger Who Couldn’t Outrun Globalization By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Dan Marino became a living fossil—an artifact of a time when a quarterback could still be mythologized without a passport, a…
