Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Roger Federer is a generous man. He’s spent the last two decades of his life pouring every bit of his heart, mind, and soul into giving us the best tennis experience possible. All he’s ever asked of us in return is that we come to the net more.

Football has hulking men in tights and shoulder pads, running headlong into walls of opposing meat to protect a beloved (quarterback). MMA features the sweaty and nearly nude, engaged in what is often best described as aggressive hugging. Soccer is the game of the beautiful ones, filled with passionate theatricality…Read more...

Yahoo Sports obtained a memo that was sent by four NFL players to league commissioner Roger Goodell, in which they request league support for various social justice causes and the creation of a league-recognized activism awareness month.

Raul Mondesi, who played 13 years in the big leagues, has been sentenced to eight years in prison in his native Dominican Republic for political corruption.Read more...

The New York Giants have had a bad start to the season. This is something that everyone, including YES Network radio host Don La Greca, can agree on. What La Greca will not countenance, however, are people who seek to mitigate the Giants’ badness by using fancy stats. For those people, La Greca has some harsh words…Read more...

We’ve seen several deals on these electric shoulder massagers, but this one is somewhat unique in that it’s battery powered, so you can use it outdoors, on a plane, or anywhere around your house where there isn’t a convenient power outlet nearby. We’ve posted a similar product from Naipo a few times before, but this…Read more...

Whether you need a new Wi-Fi router, more ethernet ports, a modem to call your own, or some smart switches to start automating your home, Amazon’s TP-Link Gold Box has you covered.

Rocky Gale is 29 years old. He has been in San Diego’s minor-league system since 2010, and he has spent almost all of that time in Triple-A. Other than a very brief showing as a September call-up in 2015—eleven games, only one of which he got to play more than three innings, with ten plate appearances and one hit—he…Read more...

Sabermetrics godfather and occasional Joe Paterno apologist Bill James has spent the past many years as something of a paradox. You can be confident that he’s smart at something, but a great deal of what he says and does flies in the face of that knowledge.Read more...

The Arkansas Razorbacks are remaking their football team’s alternate uniforms in the style of the Dallas Cowboys, in honor of alum and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones making the Pro Football Hall of Fame. They shared a clip today of Jones getting a little emotional while reflecting on his time playing football for the…Read more...

Since 1901.

Even the most serious soccer fans, if you press them, will admit it: When you go to games, you want to see goals. You want buckets of them—absurd, joyful numbers of them—because, honestly, there’s not much to celebrate otherwise.Read more...

Former NFL player Albert Haynesworth accused his ex-girlfriend, former basketball player Brittany Jackson, of repeatedly physically abusing him and calling him racial slurs in a string of tweets today. TMZ reported that Haynesworth tweeted in response to Jackson’s accusations that he wasn’t paying child support for…Read more...

To nobody’s surprise, the first response two NFL teams had to a devastating natural disaster was, “How can we use this tragedy to advance our brand?” For the Tennessee Titans and the Denver Broncos, after this week’s earthquake in Mexico City (donate here), that meant defacing the Mexican flag by slapping an ugly logo…Read more...

A video posted to Facebook yesterday shows a Pittsburgh police officer landing about a dozen punches to a man already on the ground Tuesday night outside of the Penguins arena. In the video, you can hear officers yelling, although it’s hard to tell who is yelling at each moment. You can hear, “Shut up, you fucker,”…Read more...

Early in the story campaign of Destiny 2, you are tasked with reclaiming a lost arcology, found floating in a methane ocean on the Saturnine moon of Titan, from a race of alien bug assholes called the Hive. After leaping around on some platforms, you plunge headfirst into an overgrown nest of Hive monsters, which only…Read more...

A few weeks ago, Impact Wrestling—formerly known as TNA—announced the launch of its own subscription video streaming service, the Global Wrestling Network. The announcement follows on WWE and numerous other wrestling promotions having launched their own over-the-top services in recent years. The hook appears to be…Read more...

I am not from Britain, nor have I ever visited, nor do I have any particular affinity for tea or meat pies or passive-aggressiveness. I do, however, watch a lot of soccer, and have recently learned how to correctly pronounce the word “twat,” so I feel comfortable watching this superbly narrated lowlight reel of Alex…Read more...

Welcome to the Deadspin 25, a college football poll that strives to be more democratic and less useless than every other preseason poll. Leading up to the college football season kickoff, we will give you previews of the 25 teams that you, the readers, voted to be most worthy of writing about. Now, No. 7 Navy.

The Yankees and Twins stopped their game briefly in the bottom of the fifth inning after a young girl was apparently hit by a foul ball Todd Frazier hit into the stands.Read more...

Back in 2003, when the U.S. hosted the world championships in gymnastics, three Cuban gymnasts used the competition as an opportunity to defect. Among them was Charles “Charlie” Tamayo, the first Cuban male gymnast to win a medal at the world championships. Now, more than a decade later, Tamayo, who was just hired as…Read more...

The narrative around Dwight Howard, as codified most recently in a kind of silly but enjoyable Lee Jenkins Redempt-O-Matic profile that appeared on Sports Illustrated’s website yesterday, casts the 31-year-old center as something like a failure, a wayward basketball soul in need of hoops atonement and redemption. That…Read more...

Most of the planets are good, very good. But some are better than others. Here are the planets of our solar system, ranked from best to worst.

This piece originally appeared in the January 1981 issue of Inside Sports. It is reprinted here with permission of Jeanine Flaherty.

Manchester United and the anti-racism group Kick It Out are cracking down on a supporters’ song about recently acquired striker Romelu Lukaku, which is one big racist stereotype:Read more...

Handsome Dutch genius Tom Dumoulin capped off a tremendous year with his first ever world championship, as he dusted Chris Froome and everyone in the time trial to take the rainbow jersey in Bergen this morning. He rules and I can’t wait to see him don his stripes at the Tour de France next year.

Pat Neshek, who currently plays for Colorado Rockies, has been a top-notch reliever over the past six years. He’s made two All-Star appearances, including one this season (while with the Phillies). He’s a good pitcher!Read more...

At this point, more than a decade into one of the greatest careers of all time, there is no use trying to encapsulate Lionel Messi’s performances in writing. It has been tried millions of times. We’ve tried it dozens of times. And every single rhapsody penned in Messi’s name has failed to approximate what it’s like to…Read more...

Hunter Pence put the Giants ahead of the Rockies in the fifth inning of last night’s game with a two-run home run to center. Unfortunately for him, the man on base was pitcher Johnny Cueto.Read more...

Getting puked on is disgusting. Getting puked on and then getting punched in the face by the person who puked on you is what you get when you go to an NFL game. The guy in the white shirt learned this the hard way at Monday’s Giants-Lions game.

NFL games are hell and I don’t know why anyone would want to attend, but it’s even worse when you’re not safe even after it’s over. From Sunday’s win over the Jets, here’s a brawl near the Coliseum BART station, which the video uploader says started as a dispute over whose Uber ride had just pulled up.Read more...

A few months ago I attended a Ring of Honor/New Japan Pro Wrestling show at the 2300 (née ECW) Arena in South Philly. When a Japanese ref entered the ring, someone in the stands yelled “Mr. Miyagi!” The crowd immediately booed, then began chanting “That was racist!” (That one of the wrestlers in the match began it by…Read more...

NASCAR Cup Series driver Chase Elliott’s No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team was penalized Tuesday for unapproved aerodynamic modifications to his car at Chicagoland Speedway. While that isn’t good for Elliott’s playoff hopes, what’s more interesting is that it was caught by fans on live TV.

Robert Grays, a sophomore cornerback who played for Midwestern State, died Tuesday from a neck injury suffered during a game on Saturday.

Chase Headley was, incredibly, relatively fine after being hit with a pitch in the dick. May we all be able to walk things off so quickly.Read more...

The Angels’ decision to let Bud Norris make his first start of the year on Friday, rather than come from the bullpen to work toward his 60th relief appearance of the season, might have helped block them from having to pay up for the $500,000 bonus Norris is contractually owed if he reaches that milestone. Don’t worry,…Read more...

The Giants’ year has been a miserable and seemingly interminable slog of suck, a mess of bad baseball and bad feelings and essentially an entire season spent in last place. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bruce Jenkins today, the team’s executive vice president of baseball ops Brian Sabean makes no…Read more...

What better way for the Ravens to prepare for their upcoming game in London than to tweet out a creepy-as-hell photoshop featuring the team’s logo superimposed on Queen Elizabeth II’s face, complete with a weird and somewhat robotic red eye?

By the time September rolled around, it became a question of when, not if, MLB’s 17-year-old collective single-season dinger record was going to fall. The record-breaking home run came in the eighth inning of tonight’s game between the Royals and Blue Jays, as Alex Gordon smashed the 5,694th dong to break the mark set…Read more...

Your bachelor party is supposed to be special. Your bachelor party is supposed to be yours. Do not let yourself be limited by the cultural mandate for an uninspiring night of strippers and overpriced tequila shots. You can dream bigger. You can dream of—say—dressing up as Magnum, P.I. with 44 of your closest friends…Read more...

Watching the Red Sox is quickly desensitizing me to most great plays (Andrew Benintendi already had a stellar outfield assist tonight), but it’s important to recognize players doing what no one else can do, even if they do it often. With that in mind, here’s yet another awesome catch from Boston centerfield wizard…Read more...

Virginia Union coach Mark James apologized to a journalist after one of his players slapped a phone out of the journalist’s hands during a post-game handshake that turned into a shoving match.Read more...

On the heels of US Soccer revoking the North American Soccer League’s Division 2 status for 2018, the NASL has fired a shot back, filing a lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation alleging that the USSF is violating antitrust laws through the division structure of its leagues.Read more...

The Los Angeles Chargers are back in town and nobody gives a shit. They can’t even sell out a soccer-specific stadium and home fans are getting drowned out by people cheering for Jay Cutler. Mayor Eric Garcetti, a jackass who helped bring the Olympics to town, even admitted that the city didn’t really need two NFL…Read more...

So, this video. It sure is something. Specifically, it is a group of Tottenham fans performing their Spurs-themed version of The Lion King’s “Circle of Life,” named “Tottenham For Life.” You should listen to it. It is, uhh, interesting.

Soccer leagues around the world held matches for their respective domestic cups today. German, Spanish, and English teams all played, and Mexico’s Copa MX was scheduled to begin its round of 16, but the devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit southeast of Mexico City has put the day’s matches on hold. Organizers…Read more...

Here’s a question: Should you go see Mother!, the new, polarizing, bearshit-insane film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem that everyone is talking about though apparently no one saw and the few who did see it had no idea what in God’s name was going on? Well,…Read more...

NFL line judge and former VP of Officiating Carl Johnson is reportedly under police investigation in Louisiana for an alleged pattern of domestic violence, according to TMZ.Read more...

Yesterday, Kevin Durant, a tall, expensive shoe who gets revenge on the haters by boasting about how you join them if you can’t beat them, got caught talking shit about his former Thunder coach and teammates on Twitter. It was mean of Durant to slag his old team by claiming he could have never won a championship with…Read more...

Theme cruises are popular. The website Theme Cruise Finder lists more than 500 upcoming cruises, in categories ranging from comedy (there’s a Chris Tucker cruise next week) to History & World Affairs (there are two New York Times cruises coming up) to sports (the Dallas Cowboys Fans Cruise sets sail in February).Read more...