1. He wasn’t gentle. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s the easy thing to say about him, the thing movie costars from his Princess Bride days would trot out in interviews because it made an efficient sound bite — oh, Andre? He looks so scary, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
People loved him, and when you love a very large man who deals in violence for a living you look for ways to minimize the importance of the violence. You say, “but that’s not really who he is.”
Andre was slow, and he moved carefully, and he had those vague, sad, deep-set eyes; it took a less than giant-size leap to convince yourself that his size and career path belied an essential delicacy, a fragility even, as though he were a kind of tragically mistranslated child.
The trouble with this interpretation is that Andre Roussimoff, a.k.a. Monster Roussimoff, a.k.a. Monster Eiffel Tower, a.k.a. Géant Ferré, a.k.a. Giant Machine, a.k.a. Andre the Giant, was neither particularly childlike nor particularly averse to fly-hurting.
Brian Phillips tries to understand Andre the Giant, wrestling’s massive, indefinable contradiction on Grantland.
2. There are two sides to every glory. For every winner there must be at least one loser and the contrast between the two has rarely been as neat as with Manchester United’s Class of 92 and Liverpool’s Spice Boys. They were so different as to make chalk and cheese seem like the perfect sandwich filling.
One is a brand, the other a cautionary tale. One maximised their talent; the other pissed their talent up the wall and wore white suits at Wembley. One chose success, the other excess. One claimed a load of leagues and cups, the other collected female trophies. If you count Premier League medals won by the two sets of players, the final score was Manchester United 50-0 Liverpool.
That is how the story is told and, while it does contain an essential truth about the fundamental differences between the sides, it is also a little simplistic. The undeniable greatness of the Class of 92 needs little further exploration, but the story of that Liverpool side is more complex than the received wisdom would suggest.
Rob Smyth relives Manchester United 2-2 Liverpool: the Class of 92, Spice Boys and Cantona’s return for The Guardian.
3. I remember the exact moment my Mets fandom crested: September 16, 1998, when Todd Hundley cranked a pinch-hit solo homer to put the Mets up 4-3 in the 11th inning in Houston.
Turk Wendell, that rosin-tossing freak show with the lethal slider, blanked the Astros in the bottom half to clinch the win. The Mets were 86-68, just a half-game behind Chicago in the wild-card race.
I sprinted upstairs, busted into my parents’ bedroom without knocking — what in the world was I thinking? — and announced, breathlessly, that the Mets had won on a Hundley homer.
I had been watching the game 45 minutes earlier with my dad when Mike Piazza, the long-lost superstar New York had acquired in the middle of that season, came up with two on and two out in the ninth and the Mets trailing 2-0. I was shaking on the couch. I felt the home run coming in my bones. I told my dad. He laughed at me.
Grantland’s Zach Lowe writes about falling out of love with the Mets.
4. The game in Detroit was tied in the bottom of the ninth, and Ned Yost needed a relief pitcher. As the manager of the Kansas City Royals, he had a formidable bullpen at his disposal. Kelvin Herrera, who throws 99 m.p.h., had already pitched the seventh inning, his usual assignment.
He struck out all three batters he faced. Wade Davis, the master of a near-unhittable cut fastball, had done his job by pitching a scoreless eighth. That left Greg Holland, who has saved 116 games for the Royals over the past three seasons. Holland’s responsibility, as Yost saw it, was to finish games — but only when protecting a lead.
Yost said repeatedly that he wouldn’t use Holland when his team is behind or tied. ‘‘Don’t look for me to do it,’’ he told the beat writers after one game last year. ‘‘I’m not going to do it.’’
Now Yost brought in Ryan Madson, a hard-throwing journeyman who had been with four clubs in four years. The first batter he faced, José Iglesias, led off the inning with a single. The second, Ian Kinsler, smacked a fastball over the left-field wall. Quick as that, the Royals were losers.
Bruce Schoenfeld examines how Ned Yost has made the Kansas City Royals unstoppable in their quest for a second World Series win for the New York Times.
5. Tie the ribbons on the trophy. Unsheathe the engraver’s scalpel. We have a winner. Yes, the award for the most hilariously deluded disciplinary action by a sporting administrative body 2015-16 goes to Uefa and its decision to charge Manchester City after the home support booed the Champions League pre‑match jingle on Wednesday night.
At first glance this already looks a pretty straightforward wrong turn. The outrage at Uefa’s move following the match against Sevilla at the Etihad has been genuine and entirely justified. Freedom to offer dissent is a basic tenet of western democracy. Freedom to sneer and snark and shout things like: “REFEREE YOU’RE A WASTE OF SKIN!” is a basic tenet of being in a football crowd. Case closed, you’d think. Another false step taken, another sign of Big Football’s basic disconnect, another waft of alienation.
Except there is a little more here. Dig a little deeper and all of this – Abu Dhabi millions, financial fair play fines, freedom of speech – starts to turn in on itself, to get a little tangled up in its own entrails. As George Costanza once said: “This thing is like an onion. The more layers you peel, the more it stinks.”
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay says that Manchester City’s plan to defend their fans’ right to freedom of speech is ironic given the repressive nature of the Abu Dhabi regime.
6. Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, eager (and perhaps not entirely sober) fans could, if they wanted, spend three hundred dollars on a bright red warm-up suit branded with the name of the most famous athlete in the history of Kazakhstan.
It was, to be fair, an impressive-looking suit, although what was more impressive was the way the suits disappeared from the merchandise stands as the night wore on, along with white T-shirts priced at sixty dollars and emblazoned with the athlete’s sponsors. These names seemed, in an arena typically ruled by familiar brands, refreshingly exotic: BI Group, Stada Pharmaceuticals, Tsesnabank.
The occasion was the biggest fight so far in the phenomenal career of Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, known as G.G.G. (or, as it’s pronounced, Triple G), an unbeaten and seemingly unbeatable boxer from Kazakhstan. He fights as a middleweight, a hundred and sixty pounds, demolishing opponents and then grinning about it, looking less like a sadist and more like a good-natured guy delighted to discover, anew, that he can entertain crowds simply by doing something that comes naturally to him.
Kelefa Sanneh asks if Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin is the next best boxer in the world in the New Yorker.
