The Bills-Ravens Cold War: How a Mid-Atlantic Playoff Spat Became the World’s Most Watched Proxy Skirmish By Matteo “Weather Permitting” Dravos, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker BALTIMORE—In the end, it wasn’t nuclear brinkmanship or a trade embargo that brought Beijing’s midnight-shift baristas, Lagos Uber drivers, and Reykjavik insomniacs together in group chat. It was a football…
TJ Hockenson’s Knee and the Fragile Cartography of Global Hope By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the North Atlantic There’s something poetically on-brand about the fact that the most consequential geopolitical event of last Sunday happened in Minneapolis, involved a ligament, and was broadcast live to 184 countries that otherwise agree on…
Jim Kelly, the Buffalo Bills legend who once quarterbacked four consecutive Super Bowl defeats—surely the most heroic act of sustained disappointment in modern sport—died this week at 63. The world, hunched over its collective smartphone, paused for roughly the time it takes to scroll past a funeral tweet, then resumed doom-scrolling. Yet for those old…
The Ballad of Joey Bosa, or How One Very Large Man in Pads Explains the Modern World’s Collapse By: Our Man in the Press Box, Somewhere Over the Pacific We open on a Wednesday in the Year of Our Overlords 2024, when the news ticker crawls past like a dying tapeworm: “Joey Bosa, Los Angeles…
From the Beltway to the Beijing Belt-and-Road—Trent Williams as Global Rorschach Test —————————————————————– PARIS — Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the International Date Line, Trent Williams ceased being merely the NFL’s most overqualified bodyguard and became a geopolitical inkblot: what you see in the San Francisco left tackle says more about your hemisphere than…
The Curse of the Pass-Rusher: How Harold Landry Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Going Sideways by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—In most time zones the name Harold Landry still registers as “that guy who sacks quarterbacks for Tennessee,” a useful but hardly epochal résumé line. Yet on five continents his recent off-season melodrama—domestic violence…
The Curious Case of Tommy DeVito: How a Fourth-String Quarterback Became a Global Metaphor for the Year 2023 In a world where nuclear powers trade playground insults on social media and cryptocurrency exchanges evaporate faster than a Moscow winter, the international significance of Tommy DeVito might seem, at first glance, roughly equivalent to the geopolitical…
Dolphins 34, Jets 13—an American gridiron footnote that, in saner times, would be of interest only to Floridian barflies and the three people in London who pretend to “get” the NFL. Yet the moment the final whistle shrilled across Hard Rock Stadium, the scoreboard’s neon digits were already ricocheting through fiber-optic cables, inflicting themselves on…
Jameson Williams: How One Speedster’s Hamstring Became a Geopolitical Flashpoint By Dave’s Locker, World Affairs Desk PARIS—On Tuesday, while the European Central Bank was busy attempting to convince 450 million citizens that negative interest rates are somehow a personality trait, another drama with far graver implications was unfolding across the Atlantic: Detroit Lions wide receiver…
From a safe distance of 4,000 miles and several failed revolutions, the world watches America’s latest export of precision anxiety: Justin Tucker, the Baltimore Ravens’ resident field-goal necromancer. While lesser nations measure progress in GDP or UNESCO heritage sites, the United States has calibrated its self-worth to the arc of a leather ellipsoid booted by…
Budapest, 3:07 a.m. local time—while the rest of the city nurses pálinka hangovers and debates whether the Danube is rising fast enough to solve the parliament-building real-estate problem, a man named Za’Darius Smith is simultaneously being discussed in five different languages on three continents. Not bad for someone whose surname sounds like an investment bank…
The Saints Depth Chart as Global Rorschach Test By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (in exile, again) NEW ORLEANS—Somewhere between the beignet grease and the humidity you can still taste Hurricane Katrina’s ghost, the New Orleans Saints released their 2024 depth chart. On the surface it’s a tidy list of 53 men arranged like toy soldiers:…
