Author: Don Yaeger

After the final seconds ticked off the clock in the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center on Saturday night, a mob of Florida State basketball players giddily tossed one another t-shirts and hats. Together, they’d just defeated Boston College to claim the school’s first-ever Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season basketball title, so a little bit of celebrating was in order. The melee was quickly halted, however, as the...

One of the greatest athletes I know will spend tomorrow night doing something extraordinary: at 8:00 PM Eastern, aerialist Nik Wallenda will step out onto a 1,800-foot high wire strung across the active Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. Every step (or misstep) of the journey will be captured by ABC and broadcast live to the planet. It’s just the latest of Wallenda’s death-defying walks above the world.

Imagine being in a crowd at a professional hockey game drinking a soft drink, sharing a sandwich with your wife when your cell phone goes off. It is a working opportunity to live your dream. Minutes later, you are in bowels of the arena, strapping on pads and skates and headed onto the ice. Within an hour, you’d become the stuff of legends. An NHL team would have a t-shirt on sale in their team store with your name...

It has been a couple of weeks since the Astros cheating scandal took over the news cycle in baseball. Because everyone with a microphone within earshot had an opinion, I have to admit I struggled with just “piling on” to the “how could they?” narrative. Then I saw this headline: “Little League teams from California to Pennsylvania ban ‘Astros’ nickname after cheating scandal”

Painter Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” His point was that the marginally talented attempt to do something exactly like someone else. The innovators—the true geniuses—borrow an element from someone else in order to create something else entirely. If that’s true, then Oliver Luck and the people behind the XFL must be geniuses. Not only has the upstart football league successfully...

If you follow college basketball, you know the near-mythical rivalry that is Duke-North Carolina. Over the last 100 games between these two teams coming into their matchup over the weekend, each school had won 50 and they scored the exact same number of points. Those freaky statistics make clear this isn’t a gimme type of series—each team brings its best whenever the game is played. That being said, I wasn’t expecting...

The past 48 hours have brought a lot of Patrick Mahomes news. As the second-year quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs delivered that city’s first Super Bowl victory in 50 years a thrilling 31-20 win over the San Francisco 49ers, he’s been on quite a roll. Named MVP of the Super Bowl, which meant delivering the now iconic, “I’m going to Disney World” line. Actually going to Disney World and taking a young Chiefs...