This week’s highlights also include interloping cows, heartening sportsmanship and a 159ft putt from Michael Phelps1) Aylesbury United’s Ollie Hogg re-popularised an old classic on Monday night: the skied penalty. Here, see for yourself. It’s a beauty, clearing the stand behind the goal and sailing off into the night. Keisuke Honda did much the same in an Asian Cup game against UAE in 2015, only he didn’t have the excuse of a dodgy pitch to fall back on. The usually ice-cool Eden Hazard has sent a penalty into orbit before, too. So has Sergio Ramos. What? No sympathy? And who could forget David Beckham’s glorious shank at Euro 2004? “He’s skied it, and Turkey have got a lot to say...
The American’s startling victory at the US Open has split opinion because his radical approach is a challenge to the way things have always been done in golfYou couldn’t miss Bryson DeChambeau at the Masters in 2016. He was 22 and just out of college. He should, in fact, have been midway through the senior year but he’d quit to take what he called a “six-month apprenticeship” on tour. So here he was, strutting around Augusta National in his flat cap and bright red shirt, clean cut, square-shouldered and riding high up the leaderboard. After 35 holes he was one shot off the lead, then he made a triple bogey on the 18th. DeChambeau finished tied for 21st, the best...
The tradition of greedy owners destroying what makes baseball good to line their pockets is as old as the sport itself. But using a pandemic to expand the playoffs for good would be a new lowOne of the first examples of baseball’s near-sighted willingness to deface itself in the name of maximum profits came in 1887 when, in an effort to boost attendance for the upcoming season, the joint major-league rules committee decided to allow the batter four strikes instead of three. Chaos ensued, predictably, and they changed the rule back for 1888.Indeed, the blight of greedy owners content to muck with the formula and squeeze every possible dime out of the enterprise at the expense of what makes baseball...
On 23 September 1970 nine women decided they had seen enough misogyny in tennis and broke away to play their own tournament, sowing the seeds for today’s WTAIf Kristy Pigeon’s father had had his way, she certainly would not have been a tennis player. She would have spent her youth as a cheerleader with ample angora sweatshirts and then in college her priority would have been the pursuit of her future husband, of her future breadwinner.“That’s just another indication of how men viewed women back 50 years ago,” Pigeon says in a phone interview. “I was teased when I would jog and be training for tennis. In high school ... people thought it was not very attractive for women to...
American was only player under par at Winged Foot and is already looking forward to taking his long hitting to AugustaThe Green Jackets cannot say they have not been warned. With seven weeks to go until the Masters begins under towering Georgia pines, Bryson DeChambeau has promised to mirror – or enhance – the approach that delivered US Open glory on Sunday.DeChambeau is not the sport’s most popular figure but, for now, he is easily its most significant. Should the Californian’s style of blast and gouge prevail at the Masters in November then we really would be in the midst of a revolution. “Length is going to be a big advantage there,” the new US Open champion said. “I know...