Author: Shekari Philemon

Rinky Hijikata of Australia rallied from a set down to defeat Gael Monfils 2-6, 7-6, 6-3 Thursday in first-round action at the Cincinnati Open, earning his first ATP win on hard courts while giving the French veteran a fitting farewell in what was his final appearance at the tournament. Hijikata, 25, who played college tennis at North Carolina before turning professional, will face Italian Luciano Darderi in the second round after completing the comeback. The win on hard courts is a meaningful milestone for the Australian, who has shown more of his game on different surfaces over the past two…

Retirement gets planned for years. The date gets circled. The savings get counted. The mental image gets refined over decades until it becomes something vivid and specific, a life without meetings, without alarms, without the accumulated weight of professional obligation. Then the day arrives and the first week feels exactly like that. Then the second week comes. Something shifts in the second week that nobody really warned them about. The job is gone, and in the space it occupied, something else shows up. Not freedom, exactly. Not the vacation feeling, which turns out to have a surprisingly short shelf life.…

Elena Rybakina reached the National Bank Open final in Toronto early Thursday, defeating Coco Gauff in three sets to set up a title match against Iga Swiatek later the same night. The second seed defeated Gauff 5-7, 6-2, 6-2, completing the match just before 1 a.m. after the night session had been delayed by rain. The six-foot Kazakh added consistent power throughout the second and third sets after dropping the first, winning 12 of the final 14 games to close out the match convincingly. The victory gives Rybakina her 13th career title opportunity. She has been in strong form this…

Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels has told LSU it can no longer use his name, image and likeness, escalating a dispute over the school’s decision to allow a current player to wear the No. 5 jersey Daniels wore when he won the Heisman Trophy in 2023. An attorney for Daniels sent a cease-and-desist letter to LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry on Aug. 5, copies of obtained. The letter cited the school’s use of Daniels’s NIL beyond the terms of his college contract, which permitted LSU to continue using his likeness for 180 days following his final game. The attorney stated…

Crowley was out of the race a month ago, and on Tuesday night he became the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin by fewer than 4,000 votes. The Milwaukee County executive edged past state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had led the field for most of the primary, in a result almost nobody in the party saw coming. With nearly all ballots counted he held 39.8 percent to her 39.3 percent. A prediction market had put her chances at 95 percent hours before polls closed. The win hands the Democratic establishment a reprieve in a state that decides…

Deshaun Watson will start the Cleveland Browns’ preseason opener Saturday against the Chicago Bears, coach Todd Monken announced Wednesday, giving the embattled quarterback his first game action since tearing his right Achilles tendon in October 2024. Watson sat out the entire 2025 season after undergoing a second Achilles surgery in January of that year. His appearance Saturday in Chicago will mark a return after nearly two full years away from competitive football, and it comes in the context of an open quarterback competition with rookie Shedeur Sanders. Monken told both quarterbacks his plan after Wednesday’s practice. He will start the…

Russell Westbrook announced his retirement from professional basketball on Wednesday after 18 NBA seasons, choosing to step away on his own terms after declining opportunities with the Sacramento Kings and Washington Wizards, ending one of the most statistically dominant careers in league history. The 37-year-old announced the retirement on social media, accompanying his post with a video of his career narrated by actor Michael B. Jordan. He described the feeling of the ending with characteristic directness, conveying that the conclusion had already happened before anyone knew it, and that it was now over. He had been in discussions with the…

Doc Rivers spent time working on the speech he will deliver Saturday when he is formally inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and what he discovered during the writing process surprised him. The speech, it turned out, had very little to do with him. He said that when you go through the process of writing something like that, you realize it is not about you in a very good way. The people in your life got you there, he said, and the speech becomes a celebration of them rather than of yourself. He described…

The New York Knicks will face the Philadelphia 76ers and LeBron James again on Oct. 30, the opening day of NBA Cup play, the league announced Wednesday as it released the full schedule and the 15 nationally televised games that will air on ESPN, Prime Video and NBC/Peacock. The matchup between the defending NBA champions and the 76ers, who also met on opening night Oct. 20, gives the league a marquee fixture to launch the tournament portion of the season. The Lakers visiting the Golden State Warriors also headlines the Oct. 30 slate, the first of the Friday game windows.…

Women’s IBF lightweight champion Elif Nur Turhan has signed with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions, joining a growing roster of elite women’s fighters at the promotional company that now holds the prospect of staging some of the biggest unification bouts in the division. Nur Turhan, who carries a 14-0 record with eight knockouts, becomes the second fighter to join MVP from Matchroom Boxing under a recently announced strategic alliance between the two promotional organizations. Australian featherweight champion Skye Nicolson moved to MVP earlier under the same arrangement. The Turkish champion’s most significant victory came in December when she stopped the…