2025-11-18 04:32:53
Conor Benn dominated familiar and familial foe Chris Eubank Jr. on Saturday in front of another sold-out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium crowd in London. Seconds after the bell for the 12th and final round of the bout, Benn was being carried around the ring on the shoulders of his previously more famous father, former middleweight and super middleweight champ Nigel Benn. The dad and his boy were both beaming, and the piggyback parade made for a wonderful and poignant scene.
But Conor Benn is his own man now. So thorough was the beating he handed to Eubank Jr.—punctuated by two knockdowns in the last round—that it avenged, not only his April loss by unanimous decision in the same packed London venue, but maybe also the 1990 loss and 1993 draw Nigel Benn got from his two matchups with Chris Eubank Sr. As the younger Benn was reminded seemingly every few minutes this year, nobody from his family had ever come out of the ring with a win against a Eubank. But Benn’s finally had enough with the daddy stuff.
2025-11-18 04:01:10
Like the ebb and flow of the tides or the migratory patterns of seabirds, there is an almost pleasant regularity to the recurrence of the Draymond Green Incident. Not that the Incidents are ever pleasant themselves, merely that the metronomic reliability of Green expressing some deep-seated frustration against some antagonist is a way to mark time passing. The NBA season is roughly one month old, which means this past weekend's Draymond Green Incident has arrived right on time.
The place: New Orleans, where the Warriors cruised against the recently de-Willie Greenified Pelicans, thanks to Moses Moody exploding for 21 first-quarter points. The time: Two minutes before the end of the second quarter, after Green fouled Herb Jones to send him to the line to make it a four-point game, capping a 10-0 run and erasing most of the previously mentioned Moody magic. The incident itself: A ruddy fan in a black Pelicans polo, later identified as Sam Green, kept yelling "Angel Reese" at Draymond Green (no relation), and the two 35-year-olds went, as ESPN somewhat unhelpfully put it, "nearly chest-to-chest." Green has gotten into it with fans before, most notably in 2022 when he was fined $25,000 for chirping with a fan in Dallas.
2025-11-18 03:22:35
It was a crucial situation in the NFL’s marquee game of the week. The Lions had been unable to do anything on offense, but their defense had played well enough to keep them within a score of the reigning Super Bowl champions. Then the Lions finally did it. They broke through with a big play. And then the refs called a bullshit penalty.
The worst call in the Eagles’ 16-9 win over the Lions wasn’t the pass interference call on Detroit CB Rock Ya-Sin that iced the game with two minutes left. And that was an awful call! Lions fans should spend all week whining about it on either Costa & Jansen with Heather or The Mike Valenti Show with Rico. It was such a bad call that my dad texted me that he agreed with Cris Collinsworth’s assessment that, if anything, it was offensive pass interference on AJ Brown.
2025-11-18 03:00:00
Before the pandemic, Zakiya Gibbons was everywhere, all the time. Whenever I saw her, she was on her way to another engagement she’d double stacked that day. She’s a people person. A textbook extrovert. But she lived alone during the pandemic, and like a lot of people, all that alone time made her a little neurotic. Suddenly, going on dates started to feel draining, and she experienced a social anxiety she didn’t recognize in herself. About a year ago, she quit dating apps altogether and decided to spend some time alone.
Now she’s ready to get back out there, but she’s found herself in a new predicament: She keeps finding herself on dates with men because they are what she calls a “low-hanging fruit.” As a bisexual woman, she’s way more comfortable slipping into the gender roles expected from a hetero pairing, but there’s a part of her that doesn’t quite recognize herself in these relationships, either. She wants to do more queer dating, but she feels rusty, and this newfound social anxiety makes it feel so much scarier.
2025-11-18 02:33:22
The comfort of rooting for a baseball team like the New York Yankees or Philadelphia Phillies is that even when they putter out of the playoffs in humiliating fashion, as they did this season, fans can still grasp a general idea of what next year will look like. The baseball postseason is always a crapshoot, but this is what distinguishes a Cinderella run from a window of contention. A core is built for the next few years, ownership has the motivation to bolster that core with trades or free-agent signings, and fans have the luxury of declaring "GG go next."
After the Seattle Mariners were eliminated in the ALCS by the Toronto Blue Jays, thanks in part to some dodgy bullpen management, they were in limbo. This was a good team that bought at the trade deadline and entered the playoffs with the goal of a World Series, and in theory should have become bona fide contenders. But the Mariners have a penny-pinching ownership that has historically precluded the prospect of a future. Magic and Etsy witches can only carry you so far. Trade acquisitions Eugenio Suárez, who in spite of his delightful bob and helix piercing was not so successful, and Josh Naylor, who because of his Wario-esque mien was successful and much beloved, were on expiring deals. Are we out of the 54-percent trenches yet?
2025-11-18 02:18:59
As UEFA qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup come to a close this week, the quality of the automatically qualified teams is high. So far, England and France, two perennial tournament favorites, have won their groups handily—the former allowed zero goals in eight matches, and the latter's only blemish on its record was a draw against Iceland in October—and Portugal and Croatia, two teams with plenty of recent international success, have also secured their spots without need for a playoff triumph. Elsewhere, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands should seal up qualification in their final group matches later this week. This is all to be expected; you could do worse than those seven sides when trying to figure out who the cream of the European crop is and has been for some time.
However, among all of those traditional titans of the continent, there is a polar bear encroaching on the elites' playground. Thanks to a 4-1 comeback thrashing of Italy on Sunday, Norway has now stomped its way into the 2026 World Cup, its first time getting back to the big show since 1998. Along the way, the Scandinavians racked up a perfect record of dominance: eight matches, eight wins, and a plus-32 goal difference (the highest in the qualifiers, and tied for the highest per-match goal difference ever in European qualifying). Norway can now book their flights to North America with the knowledge that they are one of the scariest teams in the competition.
