Spectator Life

FIFA looks set to face its first major scandal of the 2026 World Cup – if you don’t count the exorbitant cost of the tickets, that is. The Egyptian FA has made a formal request for the cancellation of an LGBTQ+ celebration planned to take place at their Group G game against Iran on June 26 in Seattle. The game roughly coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The Seattle Pride match committee are planning to combine celebrations of the anniversary with the game.  A Pride match or Pride night is a tradition in American sports going back to around the year 2000 and is now embraced by most professional leagues. These events usually involve a particular game being dedicated to certain communities.

Sports media can’t stop complaining about Louisiana State University’s new head football coach, Lane Kiffin. A cliché tells us what’s really going on here: they hate him cause they ain’t him.   Kiffin spent the last five years resurrecting Ole Miss’s once-mediocre football program. The Rebels are currently 11-1, ranked sixth in the AP poll and have almost certainly secured a playoff spot. But that didn’t stop Kiffin this morning from getting on a plane bound for the swampy fields of Baton Rouge, home of the most attractive coaching vacancy in a year filled with big openings.“After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU,” Kiffin said in a statement.

With bated breath, diehard sports fans in America and across the globe waited to see what LeBron James’s “The Second Decision,” meant for the NBA icon’s future. Retirement? A team change? Another son being gifted – ahem – earning an NBA draft pick? “Everyone’s on pins and needles across the country,” the host said in the anticipated video. “You ready to go, LeBron?” Then, a pause for unnecessary dramatic effect. “LeBron, fans want to know where you’re taking your talents this year. What’s your decision?” “In this fall, man this is tough,” James’s bad acting enunciates, “In this fall, I’m going to be taking my talents to Hennessy VSOP.” Hennessy is a cognac brand. He was announcing a new brand deal.

Until this week, NFL RedZone stood alone as an untainted representation of hyper fandom in the sports television arena, in the midst of what Cory Doctorow labeled the "enshittification" of everything. The channel, exclusive to NFL Sundays, promised every highlight, every score and what narrator and host Scott Hanson branded “seven hours of commercial-free football”. For the multitude of Americans who lacked the funds to pay for all the games on Sunday Ticket, or an at-home assemblage of televisions to create their own octo-box, RedZone was the perfect compliment to your main game – a running second screen of every big play, with the fantasy and gambling information to boot.

The most famous cheerleaders in the National Football League once belonged to the Dallas Cowboys. Both fans and haters of the Texas stars affectionately referred to the busty, well-coiffed, smiling gals as “America’s sweethearts.” Today, America’s most-talked-about sweetheart is . . . a man. This week, the Minnesota Vikings announced its new cheer squad on Instagram in a video that quickly went viral. In it, a young male cheerleader sashays in the middle of a dance group accompanying a caption that reads, “The next generation of cheer has arrived.” Shortly after, another male cheerleader said he also was joining the squad.  They sure stirred up the crowd. Twitter fingers went flying faster than a back handspring.

New York People are too into politics. I used to be called gay for liking politics in school. They should go back to that. No one used to care about politics. Now everyone’s into it and it’s made people insane. I think it’s partly to do with social media in general. I don’t really care about social media – I wouldn’t have it if I didn’t need it for my job. It baffles me that there are so many people just screaming at, say, the Secretary of Agriculture all day. For no money. It’s probably because they don’t have jobs – the economy can’t absorb labor like it used to. Similarly, podcasts need to die. It should be a humiliation to admit publicly that you listen to one. I only listen to one podcast: Arsenal Vision, about the football team.

In The Spectator’s lengthy sit-down interview with President Trump earlier this year, 45 teased the idea that the return of Washington’s NFL franchise to the Robert F. Kennedy stadium site could be a legacy level achievement in his second term. He also implied a willingness to step in to take over the situation if the DC council failed to approve a stadium deal.

Okay, I’ll admit it: Shane Gillis made the ESPYs entertaining. Gillis was the only person worth talking about. If not for his name trending on social media, I would have had no clue the award ceremony was still televised in 2025. For an event once heralded for its altruism, prestige and celebrity, it’s remarkable that a former Saturday Night Live comedian is all that’s left of the withering carcass. Full disclosure: I worked for ESPN from 2014 to 2017. When I was there, colleagues clamored for a call from network brass to host sections of the event’s red carpet. As a more “serious” SportsCenter journalist, I never received the call to charge the company for an overpriced dress and fly to the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.

From his lofty BBC and ESPN perches at Wimbledon, John McEnroe is agitating people… again.In particular, he has irked Sally Jenkins from the Washington Post who has accused him of “belching up words” in a diatribe column dedicated to removing him from TV.This, however, only goes to prove that McEnroe can still move the needle. As he should. It is the McEnroe way. Dare I say, it’s the American way – brash, loud, and a bit erroneously confident.Sure, McEnroe mispronounced names this tournament, notably calling Hungarian Marton Fucsovics, “Fuskovitz,” or “Fuksovitz,” in a third round loss to American Ben Shelton. He didn’t fare much better with 26th ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas in this year’s Australian Open.

In May of last year, at the Saturday corrida of the Feria de Pentecôte in Nîmes – “no hay billetes” – I had the traveler’s luck to find myself seated next to the son of one of the late, great French toreros of the 1970s. We were seated high in the Arènes de Nîmes, the city’s Roman amphitheater completed around 100 years after the Crucifixion – a structure far superior in function and beauty to Rome’s defunct and messily eviscerated Colosseum. In Nîmes, as in neighboring Arles, the French have triumphed over the Fall of Rome in restoring these structures to something of their original purpose: hosting feats of gladiatorial courage tamed by a strict protocol. But that inheritance has once more been threatened by legislation that contests its place in the Fifth Republic.

On Saturday at the California Interscholastic Federation State Track and Field Championships, the biological male athlete AB Hernandez won gold in both the girls’ high jump and triple jump. The medals came at the expense of female athletes, sparking outrage from parents, local leaders and former collegiate athletes. As Sophia Lorey put it: “Girls deserve fair and safe sports. It’s time for adults to stand up and do something.” This is just the latest injustice created by the extreme Democrat ideology that has forced itself on California, the state that will be hosting the 2028 Olympics. It’s a cruel irony that a state set to showcase the world’s commitment to fair competition on the global stage allows policies that rob its own female athletes of fairness and opportunity.

In threatening on Truth Social to withhold federal funding to California for allowing biological men to compete against women, Donald Trump was trying to restore fairness to amateur athletics. He was also setting the scene for a major showdown at the pinnacle of professional athletics: the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.The President on Tuesday cited a “transitioned male athlete” who had “won everything” as he warned Governor Gavin Newsom that funds would be cut if his executive order, aimed at protecting women’s sports, was not implemented.But in trying to make the state comply with his directive, he is also applying pressure to the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which this week signaled it would sidestep the order.

A pair of announcements by the National Football League in collaboration with Washington, DC has local citizens more excited than ever about football’s future in the capital city – but it’s also attracting opposition that stands to create a YIMBY versus NIMBY showdown on the left on the biggest national stage.  For YIMBY futurists on the left, whether you’re talking about Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda or Matt Yglesias’s dreams of a billion Americans, the possibility on offer by the NFL and the Washington Commanders seems ideal to achieve great things for the city.

The NCAA women’s big championship game takes place on Sunday. A lot of people will tune in – a ton more, in fact, than have historically given women’s basketball the time of day. This year, the Athletic reports, “Heading into the Final Four, all games have averaged 967,000 viewers, up 47 percent from 2023.” Television networks can thank “the Caitlin Clark effect” for these remarkable viewership numbers. And girl dads and moms across the country should be thanking Caitlin Clark for putting women’s sports on the map and inspiring more youth sports participation, the benefits of which extend beyond physical health to include increased emotional, mental and social wellbeing.

Editor’s note: The views stated in this article are the author’s opinion and arguably contentious. Derek Webb, a California resident mentioned in this piece, offers his alternative view here. Today tens of millions of Americans will happily place a billion bets they know they will lose. The tradition of March Madness office pools, one of the healthiest forms of camaraderie-based parlay gambling, will take place all across America, with people who have never seen a single game played by any college basketball team this season picking UC San Diego over Michigan, because they know a guy who knows ball and he has a feeling. Or, even more popular, the all-mascot bracket, which will struggle with this year’s Houston-SIU game – because they’re both the Cougars. Best to flip a coin?

The Democrats are hellbent on handing President Trump win after win when it comes to the issue of biological men competing against women in sports.  Their desire to die on this hill is baffling especially considering Trump’s November mandate. Generous souls that they are, now progressives are ensuring their arch nemesis can make the most of his winning message during his presidency.  During his joint address to Congress last night, Trump introduced Payton McNabb, a former volleyball player who, in 2022, suffered a traumatic brain injury after a man was allowed to compete against her in a match. She received a standing ovation from Republicans as Trump vowed to protect female athletes. He didn’t stop there.

Shohei Ohtani had a baseball season for the ages. The Dodgers’ sensational designated hitter hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases to become the founding member of baseball’s 50/50 club. Even before his Dodgers won the World Series and Ohtani won the National League’s MVP award, sportswriters were calling him the best player in baseball history. His heroics bring a key question into play: is Ohtani’s 2024 season one of the greatest performances in sports history? It’s up there for sure, but there are other contenders. Jesse Owens won four gold medals under Adolf Hitler’s nose at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic lawmaker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: "Fly me to New Orleans." Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of "America the Beautiful" and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of "faith, family and football"?

Minus a few big plays, the Super Bowl match-up between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs itself was a bit of a snoozer. But everyone knows the main event is not really the main event at the Super Bowl. Prior to kickoff, there’s the panning of the cameras to show the famous folk in attendance. Taylor Swift was mercilessly booed, and she didn’t seem to know how to react to the derision. In her defense — who would? Say what you will about Swift, but having your face appearing on a jumbotron elicit jeers loud enough to be heard from inside your swanky private box must be soul-shattering, no matter how many billions you have in the bank. President Donald Trump’s appearance had the opposite effect: the crowd goes wild!

File this under sentences that shouldn’t have to be written, but President Donald Trump just signed an executive order barring biological males from participating in women’s sports. The Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports order, reports ESPN, “gives federal agencies, including the Justice and Education departments, wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the Trump administration's view, which interprets ‘sex’ as the gender someone was assigned at birth.” The move seems like a no-brainer, and most Americans will likely roll their eyes, turn on the Super Bowl this weekend to watch the most testosteroned of muscley, macho men bash each other to the ground and not give the chromosomes a second thought.

The issue appeared without fanfare at the 2017 US Open giftshop: a bright-red background offset an Impressionist yet unmistakable painting of Yannick Noah hitting a forehand, dreadlocks flaring. And with that, publisher Caitlin Thompson and editor-in-chief Dave Shaftel — an unlikely journalism pair who had met bonding over the poor state of tennis media — announced the launch of Racquet magazine, a journal that would explore the lifestyle, culture, history and zeitgeist behind modern tennis. In his first editor’s letter, Shaftel more or less laid out his and Thompson’s grand plans. “We don’t think of the game as a country club sport lumped in with golf and healthy only in the suburbs,” Shaftel wrote.

Almost two decades after claiming she was raped at a party thrown by members of the Duke University lacrosse team, former stripper Crystal Mangum admitted Thursday that she lied. It is curious that she finally decided to state the obvious after years of standing by her rape accusation. Mangum, who is currently serving time in prison for the second-degree murder of her boyfriend in 2013, gave an interview that suggested her moment of truth might be tied to a conversion to Christianity. “They trusted me that I wouldn’t betray their trust, and I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Mangum said. “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.