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Tag Archives: Sports

Summertime Serenade

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July 31, 2025
Sports
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One of my greatest weaknesses is an inability to remain calm; even when silent, my hands are shaking, or my feet are bouncing, or my eyes are darting. Because of the prolonged, unnecessary chaos happening in previously functional communities here and abroad, this is now my default state.

When the going gets tough, sometimes the going has to come to a complete stop. In a summer sponsored by atrocity, brought to you by the same people who convinced your bosses to lay you off or, better, yet, convinced you to get a STEM degree a decade ago before eliminating the sciences in favor of the bomb, it’s been a little difficult to focus on any one thing and even more so for the good.

Acknowledging all of that, though, means acknowledging the rest, the aforementioned good. The candle of joy, wherever and however possible, is now the daily pursuit of millions of us. Maybe we even shared in one of these instances.

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Everyday People

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June 22, 2025
Sports
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Sam Presti, a man from Massachusetts who split time at colleges before graduating from Emerson and landing with the more or less dynastic San Antonio Spurs of the mid-aughts under Gregg Popovich and R.C. Buford, is 47 years old. Since private equity clown[1] Clay Bennett hired Presti to generally manage the Seattle SuperSonics in 2007, the team has 1) moved cities, which has nothing to do with Presti and everything to do with Bennett, and 2) drafted four (4) NBA Most Valuable Players[2].

Three of them played together in a decisive NBA Finals game thirteen (13) years ago; the fourth plays alone on Sunday night. Drop your phone and stop talking about the Lakers, or Desmond Bane, or wherever you think Ace Bailey is going to land. Ex-Sonic Jeff Green – still active! – will likely be watching. Will you?

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His Name Is My Name, Too

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April 14, 2025
Sports
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Let’s talk names. Do you like your name? More to the point: Do you remember ever not liking your name?

Despite the compliments of people whom I assume are only trying to appease me to their own nefarious ends, it has taken me the majority of my life to like my own name. My brothers and I all have traditionally Irish names, but mine is the only one you wouldn’t readily misidentify for any other national origin. In my recollection, the one that matters in this case, nobody in South Carolina got it. No adults, anyway. More teachers than not through middle school assumed that my first name was a typo on the sheet and would ask if there was a “Cory” or, worse, the dreaded “Roy.”

Part of my distrust of and slow-burning resentment toward my own name was due to that initial imperceptibility to strangers. Naturally, though, the only people who got my name right from the start were those coming to put me in line: parents, teachers, youth group leaders, and otherwise the kind of Hidden Valley Ranch Davidians that the white Millennial recognizes instantly, like strangers who don’t want you biking too closely to their mailbox. A truth universally acknowledged: kids do not like hearing their own name from any of these people.

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Field-Reversed Configurations

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March 31, 2025
Sports
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In the middle of the third quarter of what would end up being a 39-point loss to the ascendent Houston Rockets, Kevin Durant, for all intents and purposes the only Phoenix Sun at this point as well as the guy who’d gotten Dillon Brooks ejected earlier in the game, collided with Jabari Smith and crumpled to the floor. He exited the game, a microcosm of how this Suns season has gone.

Reports suggest he’ll be out at least a week. With the Suns five games below .500, sitting eleventh in the Western Conference and with only seven games remaining, the slow burn of this disastrous year is reaching its flameout point. Trade rumors evoking Phoenix’s, ahem, Big Three of Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal have been circulating for months.

At this point, if not much sooner, we can take some stock of what this era of Phoenix Suns basketball has meant as the team confronts the questions that will decide what the next era might look like. Namely: what does the team do with its stars, and with Booker in particular?

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Freedom Ain’t [Phee]

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October 21, 2024
Sports
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They did it. They actually did it. After 28 seasons of existence, and in the final WNBA Finals of the best-of-five format before moving to best-of-seven next year, the New York Liberty finally won their first championship in the full five games featuring two overtimes it took to undo the Minnesota Lynx, featuring Defensive Player Of The Year and MVP runner-up Napheesa Collier (awesome playoff run, and thanks for the headline, but: we will not be hearing about her for the remainder of this post). Behind Finals MVP Jonquel Jones and Nyara Sabally, the latter of whom put up a much-needed thirteen points and six rebounds in seventeen minutes off the bench Sunday night, the Liberty won 67-62.

Despite Sabrina Ionescu’s (1-19; alt text: ONE FOR NINETEEN FROM THE FIELD) and Breanna Stewart’s (4-15; alt text, but slightly – only slightly – more cordial this time: FOUR FOR FIFTEEN FROM THE FIELD) worst efforts on offense of their respective playoffs, the Liberty’s defense carried them through. The New York Liberty are the WNBA champions.

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Blogs We Like(d), Ranked

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October 31, 2019
Pop Culture, Sports, Underexplained Lists
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Wikimedia Commons

So, yes: you are reading a sports-adjacent blog right now, at this very second. Good for you for spending your time here and not elsewhere! There are desperately few even decent places to be left on the internet, and soon, given we are collectively being pushed all the way into technocratic fascism against our will, there will only be three websites total, all of them having provided enough funding for their governors to shoot themselves into space and away from our dying planet. Killer!

In being here, though, there is a key thing to remember: namely, that without the blogs, blog-esque and blog-adjacent sites that came before us, we would not exist.

As a blog that barely registers as an SEO dog whistle on its best days, it behooves us to mention the very good and great ones in tribute, just so you know where we’re coming from, even if it isn’t necessarily where we’re going. Given that private equity hawks continue to drop good things to their deaths, it also stands to reason that, though assuredly limited in scope, this is a place to remember some blogs.

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The Hypothetical SuperContest 2016 – Week 1

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September 9, 2016
Gambling, NFL, Sports
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Football is back. Can you believe it? Last night, sitting in my favorite bar with two of my favorite people, I got to yell “WIDE LEFT” drunkenly at a muted television screen just before Graham Gano made contact with the football and turned my words into reality and an 0-1 start to the season for the Carolina Panthers.

I felt alive.

And now that football is back, so is the Hypothetical SuperContest. It’s our fourth year here! We’ve had our ups, our downs and probably a few to many references to Jon Gruden. For those that have been here from the jump (Hi Rory! Hi Dad!): thanks so much for supporting my degenerate dreams. For those new to this space, welcome to my gambling nightmare.

Well, it’s not necessarily a nightmare. Not every week at least.

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Redemption Song

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August 28, 2016
America, sexism, Sports, Tennis
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Nearly three-quarters of the way to its conclusion, #manypeople seem comfortable writing off 2016 as a failed experiment, the kind of revolution around the sun we’d sooner edit-undo than save as draft so that we know not to make the same mistakes twice. Not that it isn’t tempting, given the tornado of seemingly every sociopolitical attitude storming past social courtesies on its way to enraged prominence, the tortoises of Twitter emerging only to present a counterpoint to happiness and the deaths of nearly every celebrity you never expected to let you down, even against the undefeated specter of mortality.

Largely overshadowed when set against that intense bleakness is the fact that 2016 has been a banner year for redemption. In the last eight months, we have borne witness to: Nick Saban’s Alabama going Omar for the ring[1], Villanova stealing the highest-stakes game of H-O-R-S-E in college basketball history, an outstanding Broncos defense carrying Peyton Manning’s rotten skeleton to a walk-off like no other[2] only two years after an historic Super Bowl humiliation, LeBron James delivering the city of Cleveland a more thrilling high than anything you could read about in VICE[3], Michael Phelps death-staring down Chad Le Clos and, just a week ago, Neymar exacting some revenge against a team which had bestowed such a beating so comprehensive that one hand was not enough to denote it with accuracy.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the next reclamation in line, at the top of her game and coming off a disappointing Olympics, belongs to one Serena Williams.

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Cleveland Rocks

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June 20, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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OAKLAND, CA - JUNE 19: LeBron James #23 of the Cleveland Cavaliers holds the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy after defeating the Golden State Warriors 93-89 in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals at ORACLE Arena on June 19, 2016 in Oakland, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Photo: Ronald Martinez, Getty Images / 2016 Getty Images

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

At some point, somebody was going to hit a bucket. Tied 89-89 for what felt like several eternities, because playoff fourth quarters contain multitudes, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors kept hurling rocks at windows several stories above, waiting for the sound of shattered glass. When Kyrie Irving finally shattered that glass to put the Cavs up 92-89, a pin dropping in Oracle Arena would’ve registered many more decibels.

LeBron going down with an apparent injury with just over ten seconds left gave him one more opportunity to lift up a city against the odds, but he’d done that all series. The first missed free throw was vaguely Starks-esque in its presumed defeatism, but then, defeatism doesn’t get you anywhere when you’re trying to win, and it doesn’t seem likely that anybody has ever tried to win harder than LeBron was trying to win Game 7. He did, as we know, and now he is a champion as a Cleveland Cavalier, for the first time and for all time.

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