The best thing about Sofia Kenin, who won the Australian Open today, is that you cannot tell whether she’s madder after losing a point or winning it. Down-the-line winner after a long quad-pulverizing rally? Keels over the racket and howls like she’s mad at it. Holds serve with a first major title in sight? Pops the unused ball out of her pocket and whips it over her shoulder 10 feet in the air like she’s mad at it. Thumps an untouchable return with title just points away? Hop-skips and kicks the baseline hard like she’s mad at it. This is a potent, chaotic energy and tennis needs it badly. Please join me in warmly welcoming this new Sith apprentice into the sport’s deep roster of weirdos.
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Ceci n'est pas un brap.
You couldn’t be Mike Francesa. This is fine, to be clear, and you should be glad about it. It’s hard to imagine who besides Mike Francesa would really even want to be Mike Francesa, just given that his job is extemporizing about sports on the radio for six hours a day despite not really liking sports anymore and also how his brain is. But that’s just it: no one else could do it. To be Mike Francesa, to inhabit his specific grandiosity and towering impatience and thermonuclear self-confidence, one must always have been Mike Francesa. Francesa is very good in Uncut Gems in a small acting role, but he’s effective for the same reason that those unsettling baldish brothers who keep popping up to harass Adam Sandler are—he’s been refining his craft as a very specific type of strange person for many years. In his stupendously pissy high-handedness, Francesa is a masterpiece of his own making. It is in every way a life’s work.
That work is not the sort of thing that any person, let alone one as proud as Mike Francesa, would want to see undone by the brassy and undeniable brap of a fart captured on tape. This is where our story begins.
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Quarterback-turned-color commentator Tony Romo is the object of a bidding war, according to anonymous sources who definitely aren’t his agent. Romo’s contract with CBS will end soon, and he’s due for a raise, as he’s displayed an ability to string together complete sentences and shown an enthusiasm that isn’t phony or excessively loud.
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Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Lost in the detritus of the week is the very bizarre and very delightful hiring of Dusty Baker as the new manager for the New Evil Empire. Even the picture of him on the Astros’ own Twitter feed says volumes about the team’s existential crisis.
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Illustration by Chris Thompson
Of the four worst players in the NBA by box plus-minus, a perfectly solid catch-all metric used by Basketball Reference, three are rookies, none of whom are old enough to buy their own drinks, one of whom was a second-round pick. The fourth is Isaiah Thomas. Those youths have promise and potential, in varying measures; Thomas is a husk. He plays for the Washington Wizards, and despite his team’s catastrophic lack of genuine NBA talent, Isaiah manages to make them demonstrably worse every time he takes the floor, which is often. He is the worst player in the NBA.
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Screencap via TMZ
How are you going to make the most of this weekend before “the large football match”? Spend time with friends and loved ones? Enjoy the wonder of nature? Whatever your answer is, it’s certainly more healthy and productive than Darren Rovell’s, who has found himself in a rather Rovellian folly.
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Illustration by Billy Haisley
Erling Haaland announced himself to the world last spring when he bulldozed Honduras at the U-20 World Cup, scoring nine of Norway’s goals in a 12–0 blowout. Anyone who considered that record-breaking nine-goal afternoon a fluke had a harder time hand-waving away the striker’s 16 goals in 14 league matches for Austrian club Salzburg over the first half of this season, and especially the eight goals he scored against the likes of Liverpool, Napoli, and Genk in the Champions League. And today, after his third-consecutive multi-goal day for Borussia Dortmund–his new club as of January–it’s impossible to believe this 19-year-old is anything other than the realest of deals.
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Illustration by Chris Thompson/UTSB
My dog is extremely regular. I walk him in the morning and he shits. I walk him at night and he shits again. If he does NOT shit on either of those walks, I come back home and announce the news with grave concern. “He didn’t poop! What if the poop got backed up in his system and it explodes out of his little doggie skull?” This has yet to happen to my dog, much less any dog, but I remain wary nonetheless. Mostly I don’t want him having to shit on the coffee table in a pinch (pun intended).
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Illustration by my wife
My stockpot is huge. This is not a boast. In fact it may be more like an accusation.
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Zion Williamson is big fun. Imagine all the Zion things that would have been blogged. Wouldn’t those have been fun blogs?
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