Sports Poets Society

GIULIA ZONCA  La Stampa - Lunedì 31 agosto 2026 Pagina 37 La maglia numero 7 si abbassa e quasi sparisce in una scena affollata in cui tutti hanno un posto, ma non c'è più un ordine. Un marine a fare schermo, fotografi appostati e una schiera di gente che guarda avanti con la mano sul cuore: in mezzo non c'è Cristiano Ronaldo assediato dalla curiosità, ma Colin Kaepernick accerchiato dall'attesa. È il primo settembre 2016 e Kaepernick, giocatore di footbal americano dei San Francisco 49ers, si è appena inginocchiato durante l'inno americano. Il gesto ha segnato lo sport e il suo ruolo sociale, ha creato discussioni, costruito sostegno, scatenato performance, smosso coscienze, destato imbarazzo, caricato dibattiti e dieci anni dopo resta un atto di coraggio. Quando Kaepernick decide di appoggiare il ginocchio destro a terra, non sa che la partita poi giocata a San Diego sarebbe stata una delle ultime da titolare. Era un quarterback, il mestiere che negli Usa si sogna da...

Colin Kaepernick, 38 anni, era quaterback dei San Francisco 49ers nel 2016: si inginocchiò all'inno Usa per i diritti afroamericani e non ebbe più un contratto in NFL  Sam Rock Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images. Colin Kaepernick -  Dieci anni fa si inginocchiò per protesta durante l'inno e diede il via a Black Lives Matter. Da allora nessuna squadra lo ha voluto in Nfl EMANUELA AUDISIO La Repubblica - Mercoledì 22 aprile 2026 Pagina 41 È l'uomo che ha messo in ginocchio l'America. E anche lo sport. Il quarterback che ha lanciato la palla nel mondo, quello del passaggio vincente. Il ribelle con una causa. The Game Changer. Perché lui ha cambiato il gioco, non solo la partita. E nel 2016 ha fatto un gesto. Uno solo. Come Rosa Parks nel '55, come Muhammad Ali nel '67, come Tommie Smith nel '68 . Non si è alzato davanti all'inno americano. La sua spiegazione: «Non posso onorare una bandiera che rappresenta un Paese che opprime i neri con una b...

FOTO AP - Een fan draagt een vlag met rapper Bad Bunny  buiten het Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. De Puerto Ricaanse superster Bad Bunny gaf een gelaagde en feestelijke show tijdens de Super Bowl. Lady Gaga kwam langs als speciale gast, terwijl Donald Trump achteraf boos reageerde. 10 Feb 2026 - NRC Thijs Schrik  - AMSTERDAM „God bless America.” Met die woorden begon Bad Bunny het laatste deel van een spectaculair optreden tijdens de rust van de zestigste Super Bowl. Hij maakte meteen duidelijk dat hij niet alleen de VS bedoelde. Met een opsomming van landen en gebieden in Noord- en Zuid-Amerika benadrukte de megaster de thema’s van zijn halftime-show: eenheid, vreugde en de cultuur van zijn geliefde eiland Puerto Rico. Achter hem liep een grote groep mensen, van muzikanten tot dansers en acteurs, die zwaaiden met verschillende vlaggen. Op een groot scherm in het stadion verschenen in kapitalen heldere woorden: „Het enige dat sterker is dan haat, is liefde.” Daarna werd ‘DTMF’...

Pendant le show de la mi-temps, Bad Bunny est apparu, de blanc vêtu,  au milieu d'un champ de cannes à sucre, références directes au colonialisme sur son île. La plus grande star sur le terrain, c’était lui. Le chanteur portoricain a livré un show inoubliable à la mi-temps d’un Super Bowl qui, lui, ne restera pas dans les annales. Les Seahawks l’ont emporté 29-13 contre New England. “Un affront à la grandeur de l’Amérique '' DONALD TRUMP, PRÉSIDENT DES ÉTATS-UNIS 10 Feb 2026 - L'Équipe LOÏC PIALAT SANTA CLARA (USA) - Le vrai spectacle a commencé quand les joueurs sont retournés aux vestiaires. Pendant deux quart-temps, les défenses de Seattle et New England avaient étouffé le jeu. Il n’y a eu que Jason Myers, le botteur des Seahawks, pour donner du travail au tableau d’affichage (9-0). Et puis est venu le temps du « Benito Bowl ». Bad Bunny, de son vrai nom Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, a recréé Porto Rico sur le terrain du Levi’s Stadium. Mais il y a un match à jouer...

Il romanzo di Eugene Marten , considerato dal guru Gordon Lish tra i migliori autori USA GIULIO D’ANTONA La Stampa - Venerdì 9 gennaio 2026 Pagina 25 C'è un romanzo che non assomiglia a nessun altro al quale la letteratura americana degli ultimi vent'anni può avere abituato i lettori. Se esiste una regola nella nuova narrativa statunitense, questo libro la sovverte. Eppure, pur contravvenendo al canone che identifica la buona scrittura nella scrittura lineare, completamente al servizio della trama e avulsa al genere, La vita pura di Eugene Martens (in Italia per Playground e la traduzione di Antonio Bravati) è anche un esempio di realismo, uno di quelli che un tempo si sarebbero definiti "spaccati artistici" di vita americana – una canzone del Bruce Springsteen di Nebraska , per esempio, o un racconto di Trilobiti di Breece D'J Pancake – , che devia sul thriller e sfocia nel body horror. Sherwood Anderson incontra Patricia Highsmith e insieme vanno a far visit...

Illustration by João Fazenda https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/22/duck-cover-and-pass-the-atomic-bowl A former Crawdaddy editor produced a documentary on a peculiar postwar military football game in Nagasaki. THE NEW YORKER -  September 15, 2025 By Zach Helfand Published in the print edition of the  September 22, 2025 , issue, with the headline “Duck, Cover, and Pass.” FALLOUT DEPT. In 1972, Greg Mitchell was an editor at Crawdaddy , the proto-rock magazine, when someone called his desk. “It was some fast-talking manager, who said, ‘I’ve got this hot act. We’re getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison,’ ” Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. “I thought, Well, I don’t care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing,” Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler , the magazine’s editor-in-chief, rode along in the band’s van. The manager was Mike Appel . The act was Bruce Springsteen . Nobody el...

https://artsfuse.org/313555/documentary-film-review-the-atomic-bowl-the-catastrophic-game-is-still-on/ The at times chilling narrative of The Atomic Bowl raises probing and vexing questions about why we continue to face the threat of nuclear peril today. The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero – and Nuclear Peril Today.   Directed by Greg Mitchell.  Narrated by Peter Coyote.  Produced by Lyn Goldfarb.  Streaming at PBS.org and via PBS apps and public TV stations on July 12.  Broadcast on New Hampshire PBS  on August 4 and 7, 2025. A scene from the documentary The Atomic Bowl. July 8, 2025 -  Arts Fuse   By Robert Israel Nagasaki, destroyed by the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States on August 9, 1945 — three days after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima — is the subject of Greg Mitchell’s engrossing and insightful documentary film. Broken into succinct chapters that explore the city’s history before and after the bombing, The Atomic...

Original title: “In 1946, German POWs awaiting repatriation played football against each other in Stockton, California. Organized by American military officials, the game became known as the Barbed Wire Bowl.” Subreddit: /r/NFL Post date: June 9, 2018 This isn’t related to the NFL in particular, but I thought it was an interesting-enough story to share during this offseason. Football. It’s about as American as apple pie, bald eagles, and killing Nazis, right? Well, what about Nazis playing football? After World War II, American troops overseeing German prisoners of war proposed an interesting way for their prisoners to pass the time until they were sent home: a game of football. This was the Barbed Wire Bowl. With World War II coming to a close, American military officials pondered what to do with German prisoners of war staying in camps located in the United States. At the Stockton Ordnance Depot in California, Colonel Kenneth M. Barager had an interesting idea: before repatriating th...

https://gregmitchell.substack.com/p/the-atomic-bowl-football-on-a-killing Greg Mitchell Jan 01, 2024 Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “ Hiroshima in America ,” “ Atomic Cover-up ” (on sale now for $1.99 as an ebook) and the recent award-winning “ The Beginning or the End : How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021 for PBS (including “ Atomic Cover-up” ) . He has written about the atomic bombings for over forty years.  The famed biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945, three months after the atomic bombing (which killed at least 75,000 civilians ) with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the new weapon. Arriving by jeep after dark, he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as ...