Kevin Cook

Thursday

Kevin Cook

The dying art of sports journalism

Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four journalists to Italy after all – down from more than a dozen. That’s four people to cover a two-week event with more than 116 medal competitions. Then at the start of this month, all 45 members of the sports team were told the section was being shut down. “We will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a statement afterwards.

Monday

Kevin Cook

Which GOAT really is the greatest?

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.

GOAT

Monday

Kevin Cook

Golf keeps getting weirder

From our UK edition

Golf has never been weirder or better. In 2022, the upstart LIV Golf, funded by Saudi Arabia’s $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, took on PGA Tour, poaching stars including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka. Mohammed bin Salman’s regime lured them by shovelling oil money into their pockets, with Mickelson signing for a reported $200 million. A graying, 42-year-old Sergio Garcia, with PGA Tour earnings of $54 million in his 23 years as a pro, got an instant $40 million to lose LIV tournaments to younger, better players. Sure enough, the suits in the PGA Tour’s executive suites soon brokered a secret deal with the Saudis Golf pundits like me predicted a quick death for LIV. Donald Trump disagreed.

Tuesday

Kevin Cook

Does boxing still matter?

Quick — can you name boxing’s heavy-weight champion? If you’re like most readers, you drew a blank. If you’re a sports fan you may at least have heard of Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk, who holds three of the world’s four heavyweight title belts. Usyk has a good story: an Olympic gold medalist in 2012, now unbeaten and untied in twenty-one pro bouts, he took time out from training to serve as a soldier in his country’s war with Russia. The fourth title belt, symbolizing the WBC’s heavyweight crown, belongs to England’s Tyson Fury (yes, he’s named after Mike Tyson). The 6’9”, 278-pound Fury is also undefeated, with a record of 24-0-1. His parents are Irish Travellers; Fury proudly calls himself the “Gypsy King.

boxing

Wednesday

Kevin Cook

Is flag football the future of the game?

“Where does it stop?” Andy Reid was griping about the NFL’s new kickoff rule. This year, for the first time, players can call for a fair catch on kickoffs short of the end zone, with the play considered a touchback and the ball coming out to the twenty-five-yard line. The rule is meant to reduce concussions on kickoff returns — the most hazardous play in the game, with players often colliding at top speed. “We’ll see how this goes,” said Reid, head coach of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. But he had his doubts. Reid sees kickoffs as a significant “piece” of hard-hitting NFL action. “You don’t want to take too many pieces away, or you’ll be playing flag football.” Travis Kelce went further.

football

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

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.

basketball

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

Wednesday

Kevin Cook

Is the PGA-LIV merger sports’ biggest betrayal?

What just happened to golf?  On Tuesday, PGA Tour commissioner Joseph William “Jay” Monahan IV announced that the PGA Tour will merge with LIV Golf, creating a new super tour along with Europe’s DP World Tour.  So much for the war between golf’s establishment and LIV, the upstart league backed by Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund. Starting next year, Monahan will be the super tour’s CEO, answering to its chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, a close ally of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  So much for moral posturing. Just last year, with LIV critics citing the Saudi regime’s ugly human-rights record, its links to 9/11 and Saudi thugs’ murdering and dismembering columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Monahan claimed the high ground.

LIV PGA

Saturday

Kevin Cook

The rise of the golf rebels

From our UK edition

Golf wasn’t supposed to be this much fun. Now in its second season, LIV Golf keeps upping the stakes in its revolt against the game’s establishment. The two sides kept things polite at April’s Masters, where LIV’s Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka made a run at the green jacket only to finish second behind PGA Tour pro Jon Rahm. Still, there is plenty of bad blood between golf’s warring camps. ‘There’s lot of animosity,’ said Tiger Woods, who has ghosted ex-friends who defected to the breakaway tour. There is also a whole lot of money. Woods, still the game’s top star at 47 despite injuries that have hobbled him, turned down an offer of more than $700 million to join LIV.

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

Wednesday

Kevin Cook

Thirty years from Waco: what the fatal siege wrought

On a windy morning thirty years ago, the FBI staged a surprise attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who followed the apocalyptic preaching of their self-styled prophet, David Koresh. They had been holed up in their ramshackle retreat for fifty-one days. Finally, at 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, tanks broke through the compound’s flimsy walls, firing tear gas at the people inside. The gas was meant to end the standoff by flushing the Davidians out, but Koresh had handed out Army-surplus gas masks. Some of the Davidians took shelter. Others shot at the tanks and federal agents outside. Hours later, fire leveled the compound. Several Davidians burned to death.

Waco