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…
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…
Fever vs Mystics: A Global Temperature Check on the World’s Oldest Rivalry By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Equator and Existential Despair If you spent last night doom-scrolling past floods in Bangladesh, forest fires in Canada, and whatever Elon Musk just renamed this week, you might have missed the latest installment of “Fever…
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…
Connor Heyward: The Accidental Geopolitical Metaphor Running Through a Tackle PARIS — Somewhere on a practice field in Pittsburgh, a 6-foot, 230-pound fullback—listed, charmingly, as “tight end” on official rosters—named Connor Heyward just pancaked a linebacker and, in so doing, unwittingly illustrated the entire 21st-century world order. Allow me to explain before your eyes glaze…
Trey Benson and the Curious Case of the Global Running Back Industrial Complex By Dave’s Locker International Desk In a world where grain shortages, crypto meltdowns, and billionaires cosplaying rocket men dominate the headlines, the meteoric ascent of one Trey Benson—Florida State sophomore running back, 6-1, 223 lbs, reportedly capable of outrunning guilt—somehow warrants a…
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…
Michael Vick: The Quarterback Who Went Global by Way of a Dogfight When Michael Vick’s name surfaces in polite conversation from Berlin to Bangkok, it is rarely preceded by “three-time Pro Bowler” and almost always followed by the Germanic hiss of “Hundekampf.” The American football star’s spectacular fall from grace in 2007—bankruptcy, 23 months in…
Tyler Johnson and the Curious Alchemy of Global Attention By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It’s 3 a.m. in Dubai, which means the trading screens have just gone quiet and the city’s army of sleep-deprived analysts are scrolling Instagram to see what exactly Tyler Johnson did this time. By 4 a.m. in London, the FT’s early-bird…
Madrid, 3 a.m. local time—though the hour is largely theoretical in a country where dinner starts when most Scandinavians are already in REM sleep. Spain, that sun-bleached amphitheater of ancient grudges and modern appetites, is once again the place where Europe tests whether optimism can be reverse-engineered from a hangover. While the rest of the…
Is Micah Parsons Playing Today? A Question That Echoes from Lagos to London, from Tokyo to Tehran By the time most of Europe’s cafés are pulling their first espressos, a small but telling slice of humanity is frantically thumbing refresh on their sports apps, wondering whether the Dallas Cowboys’ resident quarterback-eater will suit up. The…
