data-mm-id=”_44pw8ikz8″>Shohei is an MVP wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. While America was sleeping, Ohtani announced that he was married. He did this on social media, completely out of nowhere, as if he was announcing he had just eaten a slice of pizza. It was the quintessential Ohtani gossip reveal. No one had asked and no details were given. It is just now known and that's all we get. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Shohei Ohtani | 大谷翔平 (@shoheiohtani)Honestly, it's quite impressive. No other famous person can do this. Or maybe no other famous person wants to do this. All anyone really knows about Ohtani is that he can hit and pitch. Or at least we used to know that. He suffered an arm injury that required surgery last season, but even he hasn't revealed exactly what that surgery was (Tommy John? Again? Maybe?). We know he's hitting again because we can see it with our own eyes. He'll probably pitch again in 2025, but who knows! Wait and see because he's not going to tell you. In an era where we know everything, he's let us know nothing.Just think back to the privacy required to meet with Ohtani while he was a free agent. Jeff Passan reported in November that Ohtani wanted to keep his free agency meetings completely under wraps. Via ESPN:If there is one thing to know about Shohei Ohtani's free agency, it's that you are unlikely to know much about it until he signs somewhere," Passan wrote. "If visits between Ohtani and a team are reported publicly, it will be held against the team, so the circles will be tiny and tight."A few days later, Ohtani collected his second MVP and did so with a dog in his lap. Ohtani then made the public wait a month before he revealed the name. Interest was so high and information so scant that even Pablo Torre and his team of very serious investigative journalists tried to find out the dog's name. "The rumor I have heard is that Shohei Ohtani’s dog's name — the reason they're not saying it — is because the dog's name is the name of one of the teams he is considering."— @PabloTorre 👀 pic.twitter.com/XtT57zuUKm— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) December 8, 2023Yet all Torre could find out was fake news. A week later, Ohtani revealed the dog's name at a press conference after he also revealed that he had signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The most revealing part of all this was that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts admitted that the Dodgers had a meeting with Ohtani and he still signed with them. It begs the question, what don't we know about those negotiations or what the other teams might have done to drive him into the arms of the highest payroll in sports. So maybe Ohtani only cares about money, which the Dodgers gave him a lot of. But he also deferred most of it because he doesn't need it, even though he was apparently planning a wedding at the time. Maybe it was a startegic play on the Dodgers part. Not because they didn't have the cash, but because considering what we now know about Ohtani's love of privacy, you have to wonder if he would have taken payment up front, purchased all the tickets to home Dodgers games and bought the rights to broadcast their games and then just not aired them. That way he could play out the rest of his career with no one but his wife in the stands. Of course, that would require him to tell her that he's a professional baseball player. For all we know about what she knows, he may have only revealed that he works in Los Angeles, California and travels a lot for work. Somebody's got to stay home and watch the dog.
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data-mm-id=”_hqnkck6dy”>The XFL has made it two weeks. While many positives exist, the same can't be said for about half of the teams. Here are The Big Lead's XFL Power Rankings through Week 2:8. Tampa Bay Vipers (0-2)Tampa Bay Vipers / Abbie Parr/Getty ImagesThere are only eight teams, which makes it possible for a 0-2 team to rebound. Simultaneously, everything that occurred after the Viper's 9-0 lead this week was bad news. Tampa Bay has only scored nine points this season. And, based on their play, that is an overachievement. They continue to rotate quarterbacks and none of them have even been decent.7. New York Guardians (1-1)Matt McGloin / Scott Taetsch/Getty ImagesNew York isn't winless but was atrocious this weekend. The Guardians did nothing well in Week 2 …
data-mm-id=”_yyv1njbm4″>Can you believe Mayweather-Pacquaio was five full years ago? Like most things in right now's not-so-distant past, that seems both too recent and ages ago. How much would you give to watch The Kentucky Derby today and then finish your night off with a prize fight? What if I told you Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski did both in person? For normal people, you could watch those events on television. Throw in some second-round NBA playoff action and some random regular season baseball games and you just got lightheaded and passed out, didn't you?Considering our current situation, look at what Brady and Gronk did back in 2015. There was a huge sporting event where over 170,000 people gathered and ate and drank and gambled and they both went. Then they got on an …
data-mm-id=”_si26bakr4″>The country is in turmoil and sports seem like the least important thing right now. However, there is some relevance to what's been happening around the United States recently and something that happened in sports a few years ago. The Houston Chronicle highlighted that reality with a powerful cover photo on their Sunday sports section. Sunday's @HoustonChron Sports cover pic.twitter.com/A4P4VTx70e— Tom Fox (@foxt78) May 31, 2020Imagining a world where we focused on what Kaepernick was advocating for and not what he did, the Houston Chronicle skillfully weaves sports into the current state of society. It isn't easy to do. Outside of players commenting on the protests or Jaylen Brown joining them, sports don't feel connected to the more impor…
data-mm-id=”_sytjadgd5″>Attention was taken off the NBA playoffs when a video of police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting unarmed black man Jacob Blake in the back seven times went viral. All the players participating in the league's restart have been strong and constant in their unified messages to end police brutality and institutionalized racism in America. Thus, when asked about the video today, their frustration and anguish that this keeps happening was clear. It's also become clear to these men that simply speaking out isn't causing the widespread change they're calling for. Norman Powell and Fred VanVleet of the Toronto Raptors told reporters that boycotting a game or games is something the players have been talking about. Norm Powell and Fred VanVleet …
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data-mm-id=”_dn0uocuqi”>The NBA and everyone involved knew the 2020-21 season was going to be complicated. Without the benefit of the bubble, each team is subject to the chance that a COVID diagnosis could sideline important players for weeks at a time. Less than a month through the season, that has proved more true than anticipated. The Philadelphia 76ers suffered a coronavirus outbreak a few days ago. It all came to a head today when the Sixers were at risk of not having enough players eligible to play against the Nuggets this afternoon. Under the new rules for this season, that would result in a forfeit. Philly got tests results back for three players this morning, and they now have nine. Philadelphia has nine eligible players today for 3 PM tip vs. Denver, including Ben Simmons, Ty…
data-mm-id=”_ucdt2nl0j”>The week before the Fourth of July, a group of men and women with very different career journeys all gathered at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, New Jersey. The resumes in attendance were impressive, to say the least. There were Olympic gold medalists and Super Bowl champions, baseball Hall of Famers and Wimbledon winners. This eclectic group of accomplished athletes was gathered for the ICON series tournament, described as, "a truly unique sporting event, bringing together the world's biggest sporting icons to compete in a series of competitive team matchplay format events." Set up like an amateur Ryder Cup of sorts, there were two teams comprised of 13 athletes each. The American team, led by Fred Couples, faced off against the Rest o…
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data-mm-id=”_9ly332zf1″>Donald Trump spoke to a crowd of supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida on Wednesday night. The speech was broadcast on Right Side Broadcasting Network which used the chyron "TRUMP STOPS IN 'THE SUNSHINE STATE,'" which is a funny way to describe Trump going somewhere less than five miles from his Mar-a-Lago home.As for the speech, the topics changed at the usual breakneck pace. This time Trump even worked in an impression of Rush Limbaugh while repeating Barack Obama's name. Trump claims Biden is letting terrorists into the country because “Barack Hussein Obama” and just repeats the name over and over again before saying the capital of the United States looks like “shit” pic.twitter.com/9xkxqcEOCs— Acyn (@Acyn) October 12, 2023…