With every new technology we invent, the Star Trek universe seems more and more realistic. Tons of futuristic technologies (tablets, Skype, Blueetooth) are now just mundane parts of our daily lives. On the other hand, we’re nowhere remotely close to interstellar travel, and the fact that we’ve never observed any…
It takes a different kind of animal to ride a motorcycle. Probably everyone has entertained the thought of riding one, but, for most people, the call of the open road gets drowned out by the allure of air-conditioning, longer life expectancy, and not ever needing skin grafts. Where this puts…
Phoenix FC is a long way away from being a great soccer team. The Wolves only claimed 9 points in the first eight matches of their inaugural season. The football club has a lot of talented young players but that young talent seems to translate into red cards just about…
The Phoenix Mercury should write a book on failing forward. The Merc managed to have each of their two worst seasons just in time to draft two of the most highly touted prospects in WNBA history. In 2003, this meant Phoenix got to draft guard Diana Taurasi (who proceeded to…
Tommy Grady is in a slump. A year ago, the Utah Blaze quarterback posted the greatest season of any passer in Arena League history. Grady shattered the records for passing touchdowns and yards and almost single-handedly dragged a mediocre Blaze team to a conference championship game against the Arizona Rattlers…
It’s odd that horse racing and dog racing are viewed so differently. When you boil the two activities down to their essentials, they’re both basically gambling over which animal will run the fastest over the course of a couple of minutes. There’s no denying horse racing is the more genteel…
It’s hard to be terrible in the Arena Football League. Salaries are essentially the same for every team and player, the league is small enough to allow for a decent sized talent base, and the rules of the game are slanted heavily in favor of underdogs. Still, the Orlando Predators…
Four weeks ago, the Phoenix Coyotes’ playoff hopes were all but dead. After a seven-game losing streak and an apparent trading-deadline fire sale, the Coyotes were, mathematically and subjectively, closer to the bottom of the Western Conference than they were to the playoffs. The Coyotes were able to right the…
Soccer has been touted as America’s next national pastime for as long as we can remember. Back in the 1970s, Pelé was going to make soccer king. In the ’80s, it was the growing popularity of youth soccer leagues, and in the ’90s it was, of course, the box-office success…
If you’re older than 25 and younger than 50, you remember the Super Off-Road arcade game. Even if you’ve never played it you’ve seen it if you were around in the early 1990s. The off-road truck racing game was an arcade staple. What you may not know is that the…
Whatever else is written about the Arizona Diamondbacks this season, they deserve this much: The team wasn’t afraid to take a risk. The D-Backs finished last season as a disappointing third in the NL West. The team brass responded by trading their franchise player—the hyper-talented but maddeningly inconsistent Justin Upton—to…
Before Ahmed Alsoudani took the contemporary art world by storm, he grew up in Iraq, lived in Syria as a refugee, and fled to the United States where he was granted asylum. His young life experiences were heavily surrounded by violence and consequences of violence — themes reflected in his…
Baseball is the most predictable team sport ever invented. A clever statistician can predict — with surprising accuracy — how many wins your team’s big off-season acquisition will bring to the table. Sadly, the better people get at modeling baseball, the more the sport becomes an exercise in determinism. The…
Baseball doesn’t lend itself to nationalism like other sports. England and Argentina will always have bad blood not because of the Falklands, but because of Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal in the ‘86 World Cup. There was a national crisis when USA Basketball took bronze at the 2004 Olympics…
We’ll say this much for the lockout that shortened this year’s hockey season: It certainly has made the rest of the season more interesting. In a normal year, it’s likely the Phoenix Coyotes would be sitting comfortably near the top of the standings. The team’s spot in the playoffs would…
With the exception of a Super Bowl here or there, it’s rare that Arizona gets a glimmer of national spotlight for sports. The glaring exception to this rule is the Cactus League. For one month each year, all eyes (or at least all of the eyes that belong to people…
February is an awful time of year to be a sports fan because there’s basically nothing of importance going on in any major sport (regular-season basketball and hockey games that are effectively meaningless don’t count). This is why Sports Illustrated devotes an entire February issue to the fast-paced sport of…
Human beings have a unique talent for believing they’re discovering patterns, though those patterns actually don’t exist. This explains why people dump small fortunes into slot machines, why it seems like the number 23 is following you everywhere, and why Phoenix Coyotes fans were expecting big things from the team…
It’s rarely considered newsworthy when a 40-something pro athlete flirts with retirement (especially if he doesn’t send lewd text messages to a reporter first). So we have to tip our hat to Phil Mickelson. The 42-year-old ASU grad generated plenty of controversy earlier this month when he suggested that he…
The Mexican Men’s National Soccer team has always suffered from being a big fish in a small pond. El Tri have dominated CONCACAF play for the last 50 years. Mexico has struggled, however, when not playing the minnows in North America. In its history, Mexico has won a round in…
Last year was a bittersweet one for Ryan Villopoto. On one hand, the 24-year-old supercross star captured his second consecutive AMA Supercross title and had the most dominating season in the history of the sport. On the other hand, Villopoto’s dream season ended with him shredding his ACL, the second…
Robert Putnam famously used bowling to demonstrate the decay of social interaction in the United States, observing that even though more people go bowling in the United States today than in the 1950s there are significantly fewer bowling leagues. There’s some dispute over whether Putnam was correct about Americans becoming…
