Some thought Major League Baseball games with pitch clocks might feel forced, rushed, even gimmicky. But the new rules have proven to be a rousing successThe time – emphasis on time – has come to declare that Major League Baseball has nailed its effort to speed up games. MLB people always talked about wanting to finish games in less than three hours, but they never could make it happen. Now they have.The average time of a game in the first two-plus months of the season is 2hr 40min – a span not seen since the early 1980s – much shorter than the bloated averages of 3hr 6min in 2022 and 3hr 11min in 2021. But stats are only part of...
Saudi Arabia’s takeover of golf is a blueprint for the future – would your favourite sport put up any more of a fight?Perhaps you were invited to the exclusive Venice wedding of a billionaire’s daughter where Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan are reported to have met for the first time. Perhaps you happened to be playing a round at Beaverbrook Golf Course at the same time as Rumayyan and the PGA board member Jimmy Dunne were thrashing out the early stages of a deal that would change golf for ever. Perhaps you happened to be eavesdropping at the next table as they ate dinner or at least close enough to hurl a well-aimed bread roll or slip something into the...
An insatiable Heat side that has overcome so much to reach the NBA finals as a No 8 seed finds it back against the wall once again following Denver’s Game 4 win on Friday nightFor a just minute or two early in the fourth quarter, it seemed possible, perhaps even probable. Nikola Jokić picked up a fifth personal foul and trudged to the bench. A double-digit deficit – the Miami Heat’s cue to spark into life throughout this unlikely playoff run – was quickly halved with a Jimmy Butler and-one.The Heat’s Kaseya Center rose with expectation. They had seen this before; the sheer will of a Heat team that has defied conventional logic for two months. In the end though,...
After becoming the first player in 72 years to win on her LPGA debut, the 20-year-old American could be what’s needed for a tour that’s deeper than ever but wanting for household namesNo sooner had Rose Zhang finished off one of the more extraordinary fortnights in golf history – capping her Stanford career with an unprecedented second NCAA title, ringing in her 20th birthday, entering the professional ranks and immediately becoming the first player to win on her LPGA debut in 72 years – than she was back on a plane to Palo Alto to nail down some unfinished business.Three more final exams. One last problem set for CS-106A, the introductory computer programming course that’s sworn her off coding for...
As the Nuggets tighten their grip on the NBA finals, the staggering performances conjured by their singular star are making a convincing claim for historical greatnessHybridity has always been in Nikola Jokić’s basketball DNA; after all, this is a player who was famously drafted by Denver in the middle of a Taco Bell commercial for the quesadilla-burrito mashup known as a quesarito. The pretty, historic town of Sombor, where Jokić grew up, is tucked into the northwestern pocket of Serbia, flush against the borders with Croatia and Hungary; the Hungarian, Habsburg, Ottoman and Austrian empires have all, at various points over the past half-millennium, laid claim to it. Jokić, perhaps fittingly given his origins, has emerged over this postseason as...