Caitlin Clark and the Global Soft-Power Dunk Heard ’Round the World By: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Emeritus If you’ve spent the past year orbiting anywhere outside the American sports-media bubble—say, sipping overpriced espresso in Rome or watching North Korean missile parades on mute in a Seoul hotel bar—you may have missed…
Jarvis Brownlee: How One Man’s Mid-Season Swap Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the tweet finally detonated, it was already 3 a.m. in Singapore, lunchtime in Lagos, and the exact moment in London when polite society pretends to be scandalised by things it privately adores. Jarvis Brownlee—cornerback, former Louisville Cardinal, now passport-carrying citizen…
Christian Yelich and the Global Currency of Elite Mediocrity Dave’s Locker – International Sports Desk MILWAUKEE, USA – While half the planet argues over the price of bread and the other half doom-scrolls through the latest geopolitical fire sale, Christian Yelich woke up this morning, stretched his $215-million hamstrings, and prepared to jog languidly toward…
The Chlorinated Oracle: How Michael Phelps Became the World’s Wettest Exports Policy By the time Michael Phelps hung up his goggles for good, the planet had quietly agreed on one metric of global power: the number of gold medals a nation could attach to a single human sternum. Eight in Beijing, four more in London,…
The Ravens vs Lions Showdown: A Global Metaphor for Our Collective Descent Dakar, Senegal – As the Baltimore Ravens prepare to face the Detroit Lions in a contest that will be beamed into 197 countries this Sunday, the world watches with the peculiar intensity usually reserved for nuclear negotiations or celebrity divorces. Here in West…
Green Bay, Wisconsin—population 104,777, median household income $52,214, and, until recently, the last place on earth you’d expect to host a geopolitical flashpoint. Yet there stands Jaire Zakar Alexander, cornerback, human eclipse, and—depending on which global capital is doing the tweeting—either a swaggering symbol of American exceptionalism or a walking indictment of it. While the…
BETHPAGE BLACK: WHERE THE WORLD’S EGO GOES TO DIE, 7,425 YARDS AT A TIME By Our Man in the Rough, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere on Long Island—geopolitically the demilitarised buffer zone between Manhattan’s hedge-fund fiefdoms and the Hamptons’ oligarch summer camp—lies a patch of fescue so sadistically groomed it could qualify for UNESCO World…
The Principality Stadium, Cardiff – a name that sounds like the sort of place where minor European royalty go to misplace their titles and their dignity in equal measure – has quietly become one of the planet’s most dependable temples of choreographed chaos. From the outside it resembles a giant metallic mollusc that washed up…
Kansas City, USA – In a world where a misplaced drone strike can shave 3% off global wheat futures before your coffee cools, the opening of a quarterback-themed steakhouse hardly seems like geopolitical news. Yet when Patrick Mahomes—American football’s golden-armed boy-king—unveiled “Mahomes & Co. 15” inside the glitzy Loews Hotel last month, foreign desks from…
Travis Kelce: The Tight End Who Tightened Global Pop Culture’s Moral Waistband by “The Diplomatic Cynic,” Dave’s Locker foreign desk In the grand tapestry of human folly, certain threads shine brighter than others, glittering like disco balls at the apocalypse. Enter Travis Kelce: Kansas City’s 6’5″ security blanket for quarterbacks and, as of 2023, an…
The Seattle Mariners and Houston Astros—two franchises separated by 1,900 miles, roughly the same distance now separating global wheat futures from reality—met again last night in a contest that, on paper, was merely an early-season American League West tilt. Yet to anyone who has watched the planet tilt further toward entropy while baseball insists on…
The Accidental Diplomat: How Case Keenum Became the NFL’s Only Functioning Global Institution By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In a world where multilateralism is collapsing faster than a European bank on a Friday afternoon, we have—against all odds—found a rare example of sustained international cooperation: Case Keenum’s passport stamp collection. Yes, the journeyman quarterback best…
