There’s really only one true contest in the fighters’ grab for a dump truck filled with cash: a two-month clash of mouthsFew in sports are taking the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight seriously. Why should they? As boxer Lennox Lewis told ESPN this week: “Mayweather is the best in his weight class, no one can touch him in boxing. He’s a pugilist of the highest order, so for another man from another sport to fight him?” But people will buy. They will buy big. They will buy a lot. They will spend $100 on pay-per-view if that’s what it takes. They will drop $4,000 or $5,000 a ticket and fill Las Vegas’s T-Mobile Arena and even grab a handful of officially-licensed T-shirts emblazoned...
The World Cup winner reached 50 goals for NYC FC on Saturday, and he appears dedicated to lifting up both the league and his team-matesPlayer quotes within club-sanctioned press releases are notoriously bland. That is especially true when it is a Major League Soccer club rolling out a decorated European veteran.When New York City FC announced their first-ever signing in 2014, the summer before its inaugural season, David Villa hit on all the familiar clichés. Related: A decade on, did David Beckham's move to MLS make a difference? Continue reading...
Using a new course in Erin Hills two years after Chambers Bay’s questionable debut hurts the US Open’s identity in a sport where playing in the greats’ footsteps draws us inChange may be afoot in golf’s calendar but the US Open’s position remains nonnegotiable. The United States Golf Association, in moving towards a series of championships around this time of year, has made it both publicly and privately clear that its biggest one of all will continue to conclude on Father’s Day.Elsewhere, confirmation may not be slow in arriving that the US PGA Championship will revert to May from 2019; a long-awaited scenario which would have knock-on impacts for both the European and PGA Tours. The US Open, therefore, would...
The Manchester United manager’s tactics mirror those of boxing’s former world champion: get your retaliation in firstMike Tyson has an interesting new book out called Iron Ambition. In it he talks about his violent childhood, explores his relationship with his late coach, the great Cus D’Amato, and kicks the whole thing off with a passage about wandering around his old Brooklyn neighbourhood, marvelling at the gentrification, tourists and, above all, the sight of people taking selfies all over the place.Like many other grouchy middle-aged men Mike hasn’t, you sense, fully engaged with the selfie craze. “Imagine trying to do that with the people I was hanging out with in Times Square,” he writes. “‘Hey man, let’s take a selfie!’ Motherfuckers...
Golden State played beautiful basketball from the start of the season through to their inevitable title. But will their brilliance hurt the league?The dusky antechinus is a small marsupial native to south-east Australia. The males in the species live until their first mating season, when they breed and then quickly die from all the exertion. All that build up to a moment of accomplishment, the pinnacle of their existence ... and then nothing more but the dark embrace of death. The Golden State Warriors may have made the NBA into the dusky antechinus of sports leagues.It’s a waste of time to debate that the 2017 Warriors are anything but one of the greatest NBA teams of all-time, if not the...