Sports

Tuesday

Jack Holmes

Why America’s top TV networks are banking on English soccer

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.

premier league

Friday

Kevin Cook

Football is now going hog-wild for legal betting

A new football season has fans reaching for their wallets and e-wallets. Americans now bet more than $100 billion a year on the NFL through legal sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings. Illegal gambling adds billions more. According to the American Gaming Association, 73.5 million bettors will make an NFL wager this year. Fifty million of us have skin in the game thanks to fantasy football teams that pay off in cash and bragging rights. Until recently, the men who run pro sports pretended that fans loved the Lions, Bengals and Bears out of sheer team spirit and a love of tailgating.

betting

Wednesday

Ethan Strauss

Why the New York Times sports section failed

The New York Times sports section finally, officially shuttered, making way for my old employers, the Athletic, to operate under the NYT aegis. That all makes sense because the New York Times bought the Athletic specifically to fill its sports void. If you read the (surprisingly) vast amount of media eulogies to the New York Times sports section, though, you’d hardly get a sense that there was any void to fill. Instead, what happened is depicted as a lamentable tragedy, possibly born out of small-minded corporate callousness. It’s the result of the NYT looking to undermine its unionized “guild” writers. The New York Times sports section, like so many defunct media properties, was superb, flawless even. Except, that’s not entirely what’s going on.

vaccine

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

Roque is alive and well in Angelica, New York

Goose-pulling is dead and gone, and lawn darts are on life support, but roque is alive and well and avoiding the roster of extinct sports thanks to the good folks of Angelica, an attractive village of fewer than 1,000 souls in the southwestern corner of New York State. What’s that: you’ve never heard of roque? Affix a “c” to its left and a “t” to its right and you have its sporting parent. Roque is a nineteenth-century American variation on the erstwhile European pastime of the leisure class. A hybrid of croquet and billiards, it is played on an oval-octagonal court of sand and clay with fixed wickets and hardwood boundaries off which a player can ricochet shots. Its mallets, shorter than those used in croquet, are now either homemade or handed down from roquers past.

roque
basketball
Kevin Cook

Basketball is more popular, and soccer-like, than ever

Basketball is one of America’s best exports. Back in 1992, NBA rosters featured only twenty-three foreign-born players from eighteen nations. That was the year the US Olympic “Dream Team,” starring Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, posterized its way to the gold medal by an average margin of forty-three points. The Dream Team helped spur a worldwide hoops boom that shows no signs of stalling. When a new NBA season tips off on October 24, there will be at least 120 foreign-born players from forty nations on league rosters. Basketball, born in a dusty gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, is now one of the world’s two favorite sports, second only to soccer. The games are close cousins.

Friday

Kevin Cook

Is Shohei Ohtani the GOAT?

How good is Shohei Ohtani? “If he were a Yankee, he’d be Taylor Swift-famous,” a friend says. That might be a rare case of overselling the Los Angeles Angels’s pitcher and designated hitter, the lone supernova in a sputtering old pastime that needs all the hype it can get. It has been more than a century since baseball had such a double threat. Babe Ruth was once one of the game’s best pitchers, but not even Ruth, who focused on hitting after the Yankees bought him from Boston in 1919, ever dominated on the mound and at the plate like the twenty-nine-year-old Ohtani has done since he left Japan to join the Angels in 2018.

ohtani

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

How the NCAA twisted women’s sports

This has been a banner, or perhaps baneful, year for women’s intercollegiate sports, what with trash-talking basketballers, record TV ratings and biological men swimming in the distaff pool. But the focus on celebrity female athletes only emphasizes the degree to which the NCAA has twisted women’s sports into a depressing duplicate of the Y-chromosome side of the street. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The pioneers of women’s collegiate — not necessarily intercollegiate — athletics conceived and promoted a healthy and democratic ideal that was antithetical to what they saw as the elitist, corrupted and sloth-inducing male version.

sports

Tuesday

Kevin Cook

Did Ernest Hemingway have CTE?

It was July 2, 1961. Ernest Hemingway was three weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday. He had been living comfortably in a cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, with his fourth wife, Mary. He liked it there. He liked the hunting and fishing and the clean air. Still he had a plan. That morning he padded to the basement in his pajamas and bathrobe. He unlocked the gun closet. He selected a favorite shotgun, a double-barreled twelve-gauge. He put a shell in each barrel. He put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth. Why pull the trigger now, after so many years of defying death? Eight months earlier he had checked into the Mayo Clinic as “George Saviers,” the name of his elderly doctor in Ketchum.

hemingway

Sunday

Neal Pollack

The unstoppable march of the gambling giants

There’s an old adage in the gambling business: “You never hear anyone say ‘I used to be a bookie but then I went broke.’” So if you’re betting on the DraftKings sportsbook app going under soon, even though the company lost $242 million in the fourth fiscal quarter of last year, you’re as big a sucker as the people who think they’re going to get rich by hitting a ten-team parlay. The company brought in $855 million in revenue in the same time period, up 81 percent from the previous quarter, and increased its user base to 2.6 million, up 31 percent. It only lost money because it spent a fortune on advertising and promotions, which, given the other numbers, have clearly been successful.

gambling

Monday

Neal Pollack

Barn Hunt: a strange, but not obscure event for dogs

Lately, Lord Queso von Taco has been really into Barn Hunt. Lord Queso von Taco is a Boston Terrier who lives in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, with two other Boston Terriers and their owner, a graphic designer named Ashley Peterson. I know about Queso’s existence because I own his mother, Briar, a retired and celebrated show dog in her own right. So we follow Queso’s athletic exploits quite closely. He’s been a champion “dock diver” for a few years now, which brought him to a talent scout’s attention, which led to several TV commercials, including, most prominently, a recent Christmas advert for Takis. Nothing will keep LQ off the docks. But he loves Barn Hunt, too.

barn hunt

Saturday

Dave Seminara

Why track and field is such a great kids’ sport

Our 4x100 relay team had just finished a distant second and my star athlete was furious with me. “We should have won that race,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “Can we decide who runs next time?” At first, I was stung and irritated by this eighth grader's impertinence. But as I heard her out, I realized that she was correct. I’d picked someone for this relay team who didn’t belong in the event. In that moment, I realized that I was a bad track coach. But I also resolved to get better and earn the confidence of the fifty-odd kids across four teams — girls and boys, varsity and junior varsity — who were counting on me to, at the very least, not screw up.

Monday

Rosie Gray

Big Pickleball is coming for your tennis court

One morning this past summer I played tennis with two friends at the John J. Carty tennis courts in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. About halfway through our session, dozens of senior citizens flooded onto what looked like four child-sized tennis courts next to ours. Wielding rectangular paddles, the seniors formed doubles teams and thwacked plastic wiffleballs back and forth across the nets, producing a bracingly loud pop-pop-pop sound. They were playing pickleball, a sport with origins as a 1960s backyard pastime that has become a craze in the United States over the past few years. Given the small courts and slow ball, the players didn’t have to move very far in any direction to keep a good rally going. They looked like they were having a lot of fun.

Pickleball
F1 formula one
David Marcus

How Formula One took America by storm

Even for Texas the scale of the Austin Grand Prix is overwhelming. The Circuit of the Americas, as the track is known, is simply massive: it is state-fair sized, though the goings-on are of a far more sophisticated flavor. Walking into the Paddock Club, techno blaring and pretty people flitting about like accented Abercrombie and Fitch models with cocktails in tiny Patrón bottles, one friend looked at me and said, “This ain’t NASCAR.” And indeed it is not. Formula One racing, one of the world’s most popular sports, has begun to get a foothold in the United States, owing in part to the Netflix series Drive to Survive.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Degenerate sports gambling is good for the soul

Ever since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling that allowed sports gambling to explode across the nation, the United States has seen a steady increase in the ready availability of gambling opportunities and apps that are now some of the main advertisers and sponsors for sports coverage of all stripes — from ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS to the likes of Barstool and podcasts a plenty. Some traditionalists and conservatives are put off by this — gambling, they've long argued, is bad for communities and imposes a tax on working-class Americans. That's certainly true when it comes to the presence of casinos and the regressive taxation of lotteries. But sports gambling, unlike other forms of gambling, has significant social benefits that should not be ignored.

Sunday

Amber Duke

What it’s really like to play sports against men

The left is now arguing that the people most upset about biological men like Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard competing in women's sports are the ones who otherwise don't care about or watch women's sports. It's nonsense, just like the argument that men can't have an opinion on abortion, but allow me to present my credentials nonetheless. I was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school, and was most accomplished as a goalie for the field hockey team. I broke my school's record for saves in a season and was named Defensive Player of the Year in my region. Alas, I wasn't quite good enough to be recruited to a Division I team, so I opted to play on the club team at Georgetown.

men UPenn Swimmer Lia Thomas (Getty Images)

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The ultimate human futility of sports

If it were true that civilization progresses inexorably according to the laws of some teleological principle, public — in modern times, professional and commercialized — sports would not have survived Classical Greece and the Roman Empire, thus sparing the modern world such obscene extravagances as the Super Bowl in the United States, the World Cup in Europe and the international Olympic Games. Mass man at play in his leisure hours is not a pleasant and encouraging sight in any circumstances, but gathered with his fellows in massive sports stadia one views him at his absolute worst.

sports
cricket
Andreas Campomar

Cricket in Buenos Aires

For most Latin Americans, who are themselves no strangers to sporting eccentricity, cricket remains a baffling proposition. The game is dismissed as being far too English and is often confused with croquet. Ignorance, however, does not preclude peculiar theories on how the game is played. I remember a Uruguayan diplomat attempting to explain the rules to a colleague who had recently arrived in London. “It’s very simple, che. All you need to know about el críquet is that when the ball hits those three little sticks, it’s a goal.” In the nineteenth century, cricket was played across Latin America. Matches were sometimes held in fantastic surroundings: Emperor Maximilian I donned his white flannels in the grounds of Mexico City’s neoclassical Chapultepec Castle.

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Hoosiers of New York

Poor March. It has so few defenders. Yet annually, on the first day of the month, I stand in the snow or sleet or icy rain and recite William Cullen Bryant in hopeful placation: “Ah, passing few are they who speak/ Wild stormy month! in praise of thee.” Bryant went on to speak in measured praise of the third month not so much for its qualities, such as they are, as for the promise it contains of the eventual arrival of the fifth month. For me, though, unheralded March offers the spectatorial pleasure of basketball.

hoosiers

Thursday

Pedro L. Gonzalez

America the fat and impotent

The dark link connecting pornography to everything from depression to marital strain to erectile dysfunction to romantic disinterest is irrefutable. The neurological effects parallel substance abuse, quite literally rewiring men's brains while polluting their hearts and sapping them of their ability to love. The video medium of porn, its ubiquity, the instantaneous access — these things combine to wreak havoc on the neural wiring that underlies learning and memory processes. This is not the same as watching an action movie or reading a book; porn becomes more real to the mind than reality.

fat america

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

Gracious China allows athletes to speak out on social issues again

Even after China unleashed a viral pandemic on the planet, crashing the world economy and killing thousands, we all find ourselves in their debt. You see China has been magnanimous enough to let those who matter most in America finally begin to weigh back in on social and political issues: our beloved professional athletes.Remember when China stopped NBA players from speaking about what was happening in Hong Kong? That now seems a long time ago. This past week has seen a flurry of professional athletes finally stand up and speak out against a racist government and police brutality. At an Atlanta rally in the wake of the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, Atlanta Hawks head coach Lloyd Pierce spoke about the protest movements happening across the world. What about China?

lebron james china athletes