Sports

By Hannah Keyser, CNN Brooklyn (CNN) — Early in the Eastern Conference Finals, as the New York Knicks pulled off miraculous comebacks and marched to unprecedented blowouts, I noticed that the official watch parties outside Madison Square Garden had become meta funhouse mirrors of phone screens. Semi-professional streamers encouraged antics for cameras suspended on gimbals,

By Ben Church, CNN (CNN) — Note: This is story first appeared in The Beautiful Game by CNN Sports, our daily newsletter on all things World Cup. To subscribe, click here. The first games of the World Cup always seem to have a little shock in them. On Saturday, Switzerland, Brazil and Turkey found that

CNN By Ben Church, CNN (CNN) — Note: This is story first appeared in The Beautiful Game by CNN Sports, our daily newsletter on all things World Cup. To subscribe, click here. The first games of the World Cup always seem to have a little shock in them. On Saturday, Switzerland, Brazil and Turkey found

By Don Riddell, CNN (CNN) — Nobody can predict how the 48 teams will do at the FIFA World Cup this summer, but if you wanted to gamble on Japan being the tidiest team, you’d surely clean up at the bookies. Thanks to a societal expectation of all Japanese people, you’d never know they were

By Julia Vargas Jones, CNN Moorpark, California (CNN) — The crest is red, white and green – the colors of the Iranian flag. Nader Adeli, the 65-year-old captain of Arya Football Club, holds up the jersey and laughs: “We are Iranian! We are Aryan, alright?” All 11 Arya FC players on the field are Iranian

By Kyle Feldscher, CNN (CNN) — The New York Knicks are NBA champions for the first time since 1973, using another epic fourth-quarter comeback to defeat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and taking the series 4-1. The Knicks trailed by as much as 16 in the game and nine

By Ben Church, CNN (CNN) — Note: This is story first appeared in The Beautiful Game by CNN Sports, our daily newsletter on all things World Cup. To subscribe, click here. It now feels like we’re well underway in the World Cup with matches coming thick and fast. After the USA’s dominating win yesterday (more

By Hannah Keyser, CNN (CNN) — One time, before she met her now fiancé, Victoria Perry went on a first date with a man who said he wasn’t into the NBA. “I was not going on a second date,” she says now. And just think if she had – and they had hit it off

By Emile Nuh, CNN (CNN) — The quest for a sixth star begins again for Brazil. This storied, soccer-mad nation has lifted the World Cup five times – more than any other country – but its last triumph in 2002 is beginning to feel like a distant memory as over two decades of frustration have

By Alaa Elassar, CNN New York, New York (CNN) — On a warm May night in 1973, in a working-class New Jersey suburb just across the Hudson from Manhattan, 17-year-old Greg Hourdajian stood in front of a television set shouting himself hoarse alongside his mother. The New York Knicks had just put away the Los