Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Romanian kickboxer Eduard Gafencu is only 10 fights into his young professional career, but he already has a career-defining knockout. Gafencu defended his Colosseum Tournament 81-kg belt against poor Thomas Doeve today in Bucharest, Romania, and even though Doeve is thrice as experienced as Gafencu, that did nothing…Read more...

Tiger Woods needed to come up clutch at the end of his final group stage game at the World Golf Championship match play event in Austin to stave off early elimination. He trailed Patrick Cantley from the sixth through tenth holes this afternoon, and seemed headed for his second straight match play defeat of the week.…Read more...

One day after Jennifer Ravalo and Gloria Allred called on the California State Athletic Commission to suspend heavyweight Kubrat Pulev for grabbing Ravalo’s face and kissing her during a post-fight interview last weekend, CSAC confirmed today that they’d do just that.Read more...

FanSided—the scuzzy content mill attached to Sports Illustrated, which is itself owned by the Koch-brothers-backed Meredith Corporation—has long exploited the workers whose output allows FanSided to exist, selling young writers on the idea of writing solely for “exposure.” Most FanSided workers are unpaid…Read more...

The Colgate Raiders men’s basketball team made its third-ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament after winning the Patriot League’s automatic bid by winning the conference tournament over Bucknell. The Raiders were given the 15-seed in the NCAA’s South Region, where they fought gamely but ultimately lost by seven…Read more...

Frogs: the very name conjures visions of wonder and terror. But what’s up with them?Read more...

Earlier today we published a (very long) story that provided a detailed insider’s view of the Ricketts family’s 2009 purchase of the Chicago Cubs. Included in that story are a bunch of emails revealing that a significant amount of intra-family squabbling took place during the sale process. In the interest of serving…Read more...

The freezing rain that was forecast for later in the day of the Queens Baseball Convention never really materialized. It was still unpleasant out, but this was winter in New York City. It was at least near to the end of the worst part of winter—before pitchers and catchers were even obliged to get to Florida and get…Read more...

Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the few people in sports who manages to strike the seemingly impossible balance between being a highly competitive, elite professional athlete—who does extremely rude dunks—and being a genuinely good guy.Read more...

To kick off their Miami Open quarterfinal Thursday night, Roger Federer handed Kevin Anderson a bagel. It was one of just six sets the big-serving Anderson has ever lost 6-0 in a 12-year ATP career, and his first-ever bagel in an opening set. Here’s how Federer chose to cut it up:

Ah, baseball. The crack of the bat, the smell of hot dogs, the pitter patter of wittle paws as a cat scampers across the field.

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What can you do in five minutes and 43 seconds? Plenty of things, from clipping your nails to heating and eating a Hot Pocket, but if you were Oregon’s men’s basketball team on Thursday, the one you could not do was score a field goal. That’s because the vaunted Virginia defense finally demonstrated, simultaneously,…Read more...

Texas Tech sucked the life out of Michigan in the most brutal of ways on Thursday night, riding adequate offense and criminally exasperating defense to a 63-44 win and a trip to the Elite Eight. For all 40 minutes, the two-seeded Wolverines didn’t look like they even belonged on the same court as the Red Raiders,…Read more...

An agent mentioned The Belt to me once, and I thought he was joking. This is not me doing that thing where reporters try to downplay someone else’s scoop by letting you know they already knew a thing, even though they didn’t report it, which makes them completely useless. This is me trying to convey just how wild this…Read more...

On October 27, 2009, the Ricketts family officially purchased a 95 percent ownership stake in the Chicago Cubs from the Tribune Company, bringing an end to a long, arduous, and complex sale process. Now, thanks to a cache of emails and documents obtained by Deadspin, more details from that process can be revealed than…Read more...

You cannot say we weren’t warned. On Monday, in the Rangers’ final exhibition of the spring, Elvis Andrus debuted a new walk-up song. A familiar song, you might say. One that your child has probably played on Youtube so many times that you wished you could throw it (the computer; your child) through a wall. One that…Read more...

If you’ve ever wanted your grooming products to look like they come from a boutique laboratory with a penchant for minimalist design, today’s Rugged & Dapper Gold Box is worth paying attention to.Read more...

A Celtics fan who taunted DeMarcus Cousins with the n-word when the Warriors visited Boston in January has been banned by the Celtics for the remainder of this season and all of next season, according to a report from Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports:

After three straight years of getting dumped out of the NCAA Tournament in the Sweet Sixteen, Purdue is finally going to the Elite Eight. They seemed headed for a breezy win over Tennessee for the bulk of their game tonight, but a wild Tennessee comeback probably should have been enough to steal the game for the…Read more...

Purdue and Tennessee are playing overtime in a genuinely fantastic, insane college basketball game. Lots of threes, lots of clutch plays, lots—lots—of missed free throws. Purdue’s Carsen Edwards knocked down a pair of late freebies to tie it up for Purdue, which left Tennessee to inbound the ball under their own…Read more...

Opening Day, baby! Many good teams—the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Phillies, the Astros, the A’s—looked impressive; certain lousy teams—looking straight at you, Orioles—looked inept in a way that is possible to find charming in the very first game of the year. But wherever your team fell in all of this, surely we can…Read more...

Robert Kraft really doesn’t want you seeing the tape of him recorded by authorities inside the Orchids of Asia Day Spa where, according to Jupiter police, he twice received sexual acts in return for money. Last week, his legal team tried arguing there were pieces of the state’s public record law that prevented the…Read more...

The Dodgers kicked off the 2019 season in style, destroying the Diamondbacks at home for an easy 12-5 win. The final 11 of those runs came courtesy of eight dingers, the most any team has ever hit on opening day. That ties a Dodgers franchise record for homers in any game and comfortably surpasses the previous…Read more...

Last weekend, Bulgarian boxer Kubrat Pulev ended his interview with Vegas Sports Daily reporter Jennifer Ravalo by grabbing her face and kissing her. Pulev defended the kiss and claimed that he and Ravalo were friends who laughed about it later, though Ravalo strongly denied Pulev’s version of events in a press…Read more...

The uncommonly complex saga of the one-game suspension of Warriors second-year center Jordan Bell took another twist Thursday. To recap: Bell was suspended from Wednesday’s game in Memphis because he reportedly charged a purchase at the team hotel to the bill of assistant coach Mike Brown. Initial reports failed to…Read more...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who wanted to defund the Special Olympics and then “correct[ed] the record” by confirming that she indeed wanted to defund the Special Olympics, is having a tough week, but that seems deserved given that she wanted to defund the Special Olympics.Read more...

Opening Day is here again, and you know what that means: hot dogs, dingers, the smell of the freshly mowed grass, and also the experience of standing in a line for 45 minutes because overdramatic security measures and some pointless new technology means that fans are slowly being let into the ballpark one at a time.Read more...

The Patriots will not be turned into Schiano Men. Former Buccaneers and Ohio State coach Greg Schiano, who had just been tabbed as New England’s defensive coordinator in February, announced his resignation today. The team hadn’t yet officially announced his hire, but he’s already gone.Read more...

Joe Ingles performs nearly every NBA skill, up to and including heavily-accented shit-talk, at a high level. On a team as diffuse and decentralized as the Utah Jazz, the Aussie is a do-everything hub. The scoring rarely leaps out, but that isn’t the point.Read more...

Police in Hastings, Minnesota have identified two men they suspect of driving onto the Veterans Athletic Complex and doing a ludicrous amount of donuts, damaging over 200,000 square feet of soccer fields in the process, according to ABC 5 Eyewitness News. The two men, who have not been publicly named yet but whom…Read more...

Brandon Adams was going to be a star.

Yankees first baseman Luke Voit is big and beefy and slugs dingers—including one in the first inning on Opening Day—so one could probably assume that he consumes calories, at least on occasion, in order to give his body energy.Read more...

Even if you are someone who cares about the sport a great deal, there is more ebb than flow to the average baseball season. There are moments and milestones over the course of the year that are authentically exciting, but it’s the nature of the season that every one of them is followed by a long languorous…Read more...

There is just so much pro wrestling, spread over so many promotions and so many years. There is so much, in fact, that a great deal of it—not just forgettable Reagan-era bouts but legitimately legendary matches featuring iconic performers giving dazzling performances—is presumed lost. These matches might well be out…Read more...

Ah, to be 18 again. A skeleton with no aches, the ability to deplete whole pantries of food without adverse effect, the optimism of seeing all your best years before you, and a lifetime 5-0 record against top-20 players in professional tennis. Fine, maybe that last trait is unique to Félix Auger-Aliassime, the lank…Read more...

I’d bet there isn’t a person with decision-making power at Manchester United who saw this coming, other than maybe Ole Gunnar Solskjær himself. But here we are, with United rewarding Solskjær for his complete turnaround of what looked like a lost season by officially making him the club’s permanent manager today.Read more...

On the second Tuesday of February, at 3:00 in the afternoon, around 40 employees of MLB Advanced Media—one arm of MLB’s media empire, which also includes MLB.com, MLB Network and MLB Productions—nervously filed into a conference room at MLBAM’s office in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. They had been living in fear of…Read more...

It’s Opening Day, folks, and you know what that means: It’s time to speculate and make predictions about the upcoming major league baseball season. Which teams will win the divisions, wild cards, pennants, and World Series? Who’s gonna sock a ton of dingers? Which bizarre Internet Libertarian ailments will prevent …Read more...

Devin Booker has scored 109 total points in his last two games. Let that sink in. The 22-year-old guard became just the seventh player since the NBA-ABA merger to score 50-plus points in back-to-back games, joining a list that includes James Harden, Michael Jordan, and Allen Iverson. He shot over 60 percent from the…Read more...

An Eddie Bauer sale, Thermapens, Canon lens, monitor mounts, and a rear view camera kick off Thursday’s best deals.Read more...

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The putative news from Eli Manning’s appearance Wednesday on a panel discussion about brain injuries is that the Giants QB declared Odell Beckham Jr. to be the most talented player he’s ever played with. This is not “news,” as such, because: no duh. It also wasn’t the most interesting thing Manning said during the…Read more...

Duke is technically 31-5 so far on the year. But everyone knows that 60 percent of those losses don’t count. The top-seeded Blue Devils are a completely different and much worse team without Zion Williamson, and when he’s in the lineup, they’re 28-2, with zero losses since Jan. 14. That’s a really scary fact if…Read more...

Spring is finally here, and all of those projects you’ve been waiting to tackle are ready for your attention. Today only, Amazon’s lowering the price on a 20V cordless drill and tool kit to just $52, the lowest price we’ve seen for a year.Read more...

When it was announced Wednesday afternoon that Warriors center Jordan Bell would be suspended by the team for one game for “conduct detrimental to the team,” the safe bet was a missed meeting or chronic tardiness, nothing very spicy or interesting. There’s a whole range of relatively mundane workplace transgressions…Read more...

Tuesday night Jeff Green was on the very wrong end of a highlight when he stumbled brutally in isolation defense while guarding Lance Stephenson in a Wizards loss to the Lakers. Green may have been unfairly victimized by Stephenson accidentally stepping on his toes mid-sequence, but that will not make Green feel much…Read more...

The University of Texas has suspended the Texas Cowboys, the fellows who fire the cannon at football games, for six years following an investigation into the circumstances of the death of a new member during a group retreat back in September. The investigation found that the retreat included a lot of hazing, and…Read more...

If you had to point out a single factor that most contributes to the U.S.’s stunted development as a soccer nation, you could make a good case for pay-to-play as the culprit. Pay-to-play is the system that sections off the best youth coaching and competition and reserves it only for those who can afford to pay for it.…Read more...

Nikola Jokic looks and acts like he has a bad head cold, moves like he’s in pajamas with a nightcap on and a candlestick in his left hand, and still can pull off a Rondo ball-fake at quarter-speed to clear the way for an off-the-backboard alley-oop. That’s what he did in the Nuggets’ 95-92 win over the Pistons on…Read more...