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Fall on the track with your butt as your padding a couple times—everyone does, before painful repetition drills into you that kneepads are there for a reason—and you’ll have the fresh realization that your ass is just the very bottom of your back. Those threaded segments of spinal column: a butt fall jangles them like a ziti necklace. More often, it’s a two-knee fall, or a four-point fall. That is, wrists down too: they are named for the parts of you that touch the floor. But you imagine, darkly, that it also represents the number of points the scorekeeper will wipe away as you continue to be absolutely terrible, a hazard to yourself and others, as you reinvent, again and again, the whole act of falling. This is how roller derby starts, and it is the worst you have ever been at anything.

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The chair had buckled below her. A guy nearby, wearing a white tee that bore an American flag and the text “Back to back world war champs,” tapped his friend, pointed at the girl on her face in the grass, and said, “Sweet!”

Two days earlier I had been sitting in my office, clean and sober, dignity intact, when a buddy of mine emailed me to say we should go to the Preakness on Saturday. I told him it was pretty late notice to decide, on Thursday, to head to Baltimore on Friday night, and that I had basically promised someone I’d go to a graduation party in New Jersey on Saturday.

“That sounds pretty lame,” he wrote back. “I should remind you, there will be over 125k drunk people in the infield. That’s at least 50k booties in jean shorts. Beers are 2 bucks.”

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Despite the fact that Extreme Sports (or X-treme Sports, if you remember the original boom), are an undeniably global phenomenon, absolutely no one cared. This is surprising, because while the summer headliners -- skateboarding and BMX -- seem distinctly American, you could win an easy bar bet searching for them in any of the three new X Games locales. That is, after all, why they bothered expanded into foreign markets. Yet, somehow, after almost 20 years of the X Games, ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, can’t seem to bring its brand of extreme sports worldwide.

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Brendan Flynn: Everyone's all mad at Chris Broussard. Evidently unwilling to Embrace Debate.

David Roth: And Tim Brando! No one wants to hear his truth because he's white and old and successful, and that's not worth a damn thing these days. I've always thought the big issue with regard to how gay athletes was how it made random television guys feel. Are they proud? Are they angry? We need to know about this, it's the most important thing.

Brendan: Really interesting to hear Broussard's thoughts on adultery and children out of wedlock as it relates to gays. Really looking forward to his #TruthToPower moment on all the other sinners he's covered.

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“This really should be the end of it,” someone I wouldn’t exactly call a friend said to me about the Cleveland Cavaliers. “Or something has gone horribly wrong.” He’s talking about, or more accurately issuing ultimatums about, the rebuild through which both the Cavs and their fans have suffered over the past three years. You know the one: LeBron left, team ripped off the longest losing streak in NBA history, Kyrie Irving teleported in from a planet where people believe in themselves but have very vulnerable lower bodies, and that about catches us up. There is reason for hope, but the team is still, at this stage, highly capable of getting blown out by 18 points in Detroit. This means some fans consider Cavs GM Chris Grant to be on the hot seat. They are not the ones whose hands are on the temperature dial, but they are no less certain for that.

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The new Dolphins logo, or more precisely what might be the new Dolphins logo (if UniWatch's Paul Lukas is more or less convinced, I'm convinced) isn't necessarily good or bad. It's a dolphin, if kind of sleeked-out and tuffed-up as befits the fact that it's a NFL logo, and thus is supposed to be sleek and tuff.

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The two had been doing battle for nearly an hour. But more than that, they had been doing battle for three decades. Mike Randalls was a man’s man, a wrestler’s wrestler. The only thing fellow professional wrestlers feared more than one of The Wolf’s lethal submission grips was his death stare, honed in the dojos at which he had studied across the Far East. Troy Windham, for his part, was professional wrestling’s premier bad boy. He openly bragged about using the industry to gain a toehold in Hollywood and called himself professional wrestling’s only true icon.

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If there's sense to be made of what happened to Reeva Steenkamp in the home she shared with the double amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, it's a bleak sort of sense. What happened is beyond dispute: Steenkamp is dead, and Pistorius is the prime suspect. Without relying too much on anonymous police leaks, it appears that the cops think Pistorius murdered Steenkamp in cold blood, shooting her once in the bedroom before she fled into a bathroom, where he shot her several more times through the door, killing her. He may or may not have caved in her head with a cricket bat, though it's unclear how that account fits into the previous timeline. The specifics are vague, but the generalities—the one governing general fact, which is a young woman murdered—are specific enough. We know enough to know that this is awful.

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"Rough" is, honestly, maybe understating it. I cringe at the dramatic sliding and stomping around the stage, the emphatic rhythmic speech slyly turning into a melody, and then into a song that infects innocent bystanders who magically chime in, in perfect synchrony. The transition from daily life to song and dance is the musical's central conceit, but it also feels like a clumsy trick, an uncommonly dorky hustle. I was watching, after all. Everything was normal and then, out of the blue, there's the eruption of choreographed/chaotic collective delusion. This is maybe not the bravest of stances, but I won’t be part of it.

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It's happened before—for Dave and for his wife Lacey, perennial contenders at the North American Wife-Carrying Championships, a raucous gathering attended by both fitness fiends and softies like me who think, wrongly, that Wife-Carrying is an easy kind of carnival game. It's not.

The basics on the most difficult nuptial sport around: fifty couples run in the Championships, two in each heat, and the two best times overall make the finals. The husband dangles his wife upside-down over his head and tries to traverse a hilly, sloppy, divot-filled, 278-yard obstacle course as fast as he can while gradually coming to realize, once and for all, that his hamstrings are useless. He thinks, Oh God, I'm about to tumble in the most emasculating fashion possible. That was my experience, at least.

But Dave Castro did much better than that. He came up only three feet short, and he hasn't stopped thinking about it since.

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As a growing contingent of fans spent weeks loudly denouncing the work of the replacement refs on Twitter and had begun to literally call for the NFL to fix the problem before someone got hurt (whether it be on the field or at the hands of their bookies), the NFL had an actual PR problem on its hands. This, above all else, forced both sides to a negotiating table they never wanted to be at in the first place; finally reaching a decision late last night. But in order to understand just what had the owners and referees at odds with one another, it’s important to understand just what the owners and referees wanted from one another.

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While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here like wreckage, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history co-exists at once. The mystery of Cuba’s place in the world today has never been anything like a riddle. When Castro was put on trial and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at an insurrection, to all his followers delight, he dropped the name of a poet.

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I was 15 years old, in the middle of that aching, interminable era of pent-up urges, when you want to do a lot of things but simply can’t. I wanted to cry then and at plenty of other times, but inhibition always won out. I wanted to spend my days running free and knocking into shit, but instead I sat imprisoned in the classroom. Most cruelly, I wanted to fuck a girl, or at the very least, God willing, perhaps touch a breast. That wasn’t happening either.

All of which goes to say that I relished the frequent spats of roughhousing that would break out in school throughout the day. “Brawling,” we called it, in ironic hyperbole. It was wholesome, thudding contact, hardly “fighting.” Punches were rare, restricted to when somebody was having a really bad day.

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In Mandarin, it’s called gǎnlǎnqiú (literally, ‘olive ball’) but back in the West, it's better known as American football and what had just taken place on the grounds of the Shanghai High School was its team’s inaugural fixture.

A relatively error strewn game of flag football between the high school team and their teachers might not have been pleasing to the eye but it is symbolic of the growth of the sport within China. The school’s football programme is almost certainly the first of its kind in a Chinese-run school and only came about after students hassled a couple of American teachers into coaching them.

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