JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian soccer players and fans reacted with tears and outrage after the country was stripped of hosting rights for the Under-20 World Cup only eight weeks before the start of the tournament amid political turmoil over Israel’s participation, leaving Indonesian soccer at risk of further sanctions.

The youth soccer event was expected to be a rare turn on the global soccer stage for a country that hasn’t been to the World Cup since winning independence. But it was officially canceled Wednesday after two regional governors said they would not allow an Israeli team to play in their territories.
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FIFA said Indonesia was removed from staging the 24-team tournament scheduled to start on May 20 “due to the current circumstances,” without specifying details.

In an emotional meeting with Indonesian youth players and their coach in Jakarta on Thursday, Zainudin Amali, deputy chair of the national soccer association, apologized. Some players were seen shedding tears while others looked down sadly.

“It’s a heartbreaking decision that ruined our dreams, and now we are confused about our future as players if FIFA imposes sanctions,” said Hokky Caraka, a striker in Indonesia’s U-20 national team, “It’s the players who suffer the most,” he said.

Shin Tae-yong, a South Korean former professional footballer and manager who is coaching the Indonesia national football team, said Indonesia’s failure to host the U-20 World Cup is a big loss.

“I am hurt!” he said, “I can feel the sadness and mental breakdown of the players. They have prepared tirelessly alongside me in the last three and a half years.”

Popular social media were flooded with outraged comments from disappointed fans. Many blamed politics, a year ahead of a presidential election. Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation and does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

“Indonesia’s name in international sports is tarnished, this is a bitter event in our soccer history,” said Andieka Rabbani, a university student in the capital, Jakarta.

He added that Israeli delegations have been to Indonesia for sporting and diplomatic events before, including four Israelis who competed in the World Cycling Championship last month in Jakarta.

A number of members of the Israeli Parliament also attended the Interparliamentary Union conference in Bali last year were also warmly welcomed by Indonesia’s house speaker Puan Maharani, the grand-daughter of Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, and the Bali Governor Wayan Koster, who was the first to reject the Israeli youth soccer team.

An Israeli delegation also attended the COP-13 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali in 2007 without any rejection.

“Our stance on the U-20 World Cup is too politicized, because a presidential election is coming,” Rabbani said.

Arya Sinulingga, a national soccer association executive committee member, was concerned about further repercussions.

“This is a sign that we are not able to carry out what has been asked (by FIFA) … among other things that there should be no discrimination,” Sinulingga said in an interview with local television, “What we are most worried about right now is that we will be ostracized from international events, especially from world soccer activities.”

The Indonesian soccer federation could be further disciplined by FIFA. A suspension could remove Indonesia from Asian qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. The continental qualifiers start in October.

The decision followed a meeting in Doha, Qatar between Indonesian soccer federation president Erick Thohir and Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.

Thohir, the former president of Italian club Inter Milan and a former co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, said as a member of FIFA, Indonesia had little choice but to accept the decision.

“I have tried my best,” he said in a statement. “After delivering a letter from President Joko Widodo and discussing it at length with the President of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, we must accept FIFA’s decision to cancel this event that we were both looking forward to.”

He said although he’d conveyed all the concerns and hopes of Indonesia’s president, soccer lovers as well as the players from the Under-20 Indonesian national team, “FIFA considered that the current situation cannot be continued.”

Soccer and public authorities in Indonesia agreed to FIFA’s hosting rules, which require hosts to accept all qualifying teams, in 2019 before being selected to stage the 2021 edition of the Under-20 World Cup. The coronavirus pandemic forced the tournament to be postponed for two years.

Indonesia has long had an uneasy relationship with FIFA, which rejected a long-shot bid to host the 2022 World Cup early in the campaign in 2010 because mandatory paperwork was not filed. FIFA also removed Indonesia from the 2018 World Cup qualification program over government interference in the domestic league.

Thohir’s appointment this year to run Indonesian soccer was intended to bring more stability.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said Tuesday evening that his administration objected to Israel’s participation, but urged citizens to keep sports and politics apart. He told citizens that the country agreed to host before knowing Israel would qualify.

Israel qualified in June of last year for its first Under-20 World Cup by reaching the semifinals of the Under-19 European Championship. The team went on to lose to England in that final.

Israel has played in Europe since the 1970s, after leaving the Asian Football Confederation for political and security reasons.

—Dunbar reported from Zurich. Associated Press writer Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

Tomorrow is opening day in Major League Baseball, a fine time as any to get all gooey about our national pastime. Hope springs eternal, and all that jazz. Nostalgia rules the day. Every team, at this moment, has a shot at a World Series.

I count myself among the millions who love and appreciate the rhythms, the history, and the characters that define baseball. Heck, I’m so old that I remember when baseball was cool.

You know, sort of how basketball is now—with all the kids these days wearing Steph Curry and LeBron James jerseys, and sharing dunk highlights on the social medias. Or football, the country’s most popular sport. Or even soccer, with its global imprint and epic quadrennial events, the World Cup.
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Baseball’s been cool in the past. Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio carried himself like royalty. Willie Mays—“The Say Hey Kid”—proffered a style all his own. Mickey Mantle — “the Mick”—inspired mass devotion. Players had cool nicknames. Musicians penned songs about these guys.

When I was growing up, in the 1980s, Ozzie Smith was doing backflips on the field. Rickey Henderson was stealing hundreds of bases. In New York City, Darryl Strawberry of the Mets stood 6’6”, with a long, looping swing that sent rainbow-shaped homers to the sky. His teammate, Dwight Gooden—“Dr. K.”—was equally electric, whiffing batters at a record pace.

You dared not miss a moment. Baseball drove sports culture. Even a goofy Saturday-morning instructional TV show hosted by Johnny Bench—The Baseball Bunch—became must-see TV for trading-card-collecting Little Leaguers obsessed with playing second base. In the 1990s, Ken Griffey Jr. flashed his smile, turned his hat backward, and scaled walls to rob home runs. In the 2000s Derek Jeter was King of New York. You can’t deny that was cool.

Read More: Willie Mays Does Not Hold Back in New HBO Documentary on His Life

Any reasonable observer would agree, in recent years, baseball’s lost some cool. Great modern-day players like Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, and Shohei Ohtani excel on the field. But these stars don’t crave limelight. No baseball player has the cultural clout of a James or Curry or Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes or a Lionel Messi. Plus, the game itself has devolved into a predictable mix of strikeouts, home runs, and three-hour-plus affairs.

MLB is aware of these problems. To its credit, the league has taken tangible steps this year to shorten games and add more action. Further, a crop of charismatic young players like Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Ronald Acuña Jr., and particularly second-year standout Julio Rodriguez, who, like Griffey Jr. performs out of the Pacific Northwest, promise to bring more buzz back to baseball.

The New Rules

In 2023, baseball is introducing three new initiatives.

The first is a pitch clock, similar to the shot clock in basketball. With no runners on base, a pitcher must throw to the plate in 15 seconds; 20 second with runners on. Batters receive one timeout per plate appearance. Pitchers can disengage from the rubber—to throw to a base for a pickoff, or simply to step off—only twice during an at-bat. The pitcher can make a third pickoff attempt is made, but if it’s unsuccessful, the runner automatically advances a base.

According to MLB, these limits on pickoff attempts in the minor leagues led to a 26% increase in stolen-base attempts. The running game has faded in importance in baseball in recent years, and MLB is trying to revive that area of the game. In 2022, the pitch clock made games 25 minutes shorter in the minors.

During this year’s spring training, the pitch clock won over some skeptics. “I’m an old baseball guy,” says former pitcher Jeff Brantley, a broadcaster for the Cincinnati Reds who spent 14 seasons, from 1988-2001, in the big leagues. “I believe in how you’re supposed to play. Seeing some of this stuff, I thought, ‘This is just going to be Mickey Mouse.’ But I think the clock is awesome.”

Brantley appreciates the speed. “It’s almost like you’re sitting there, and every scene in the movie is an action scene,” he says. “Our world has really changed from coming to the ballpark and just killing some time for three or four hours. A few beers, a hot dog, just sitting out in the sun, or you’re enjoying a summer night. There ain’t too many folks sitting on the back porch, brother. They’re on their phone, or they’re on their computer, and they want their information and they want it right now. Making action front and center, as soon as you get into the ballpark, it’s going to resonate with the younger folks.”

Read More: 2022 Athlete of the Year: Aaron Judge

Another tweak promising to create more action is a ban on the infield shift. Thanks to data advances in baseball, teams knew the hitting tendencies of players all too well. So if a batter was more likely than not to, for example, hit the ball to the left side of the infield, teams could overload fielders in that space, taking away hits. Now, two infielders must be positioned on each side of second base, with their feet in the dirt. This fix should also allow for more athletic plays in the field. Shortstops and second basemen, for example, will have to dive for balls up the middle or in the short outfield, rather than position themselves there in the shift, which they’ve been doing with alarming frequency in recent years.

“Those are the plays that, at the end of the day, the kids are watching late at night,” says Brantley. “They ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaaah’ and they pick up their phone and they text their buddies, ‘Did you see this?’ If that play never happens, then you know what? The conversation about baseball never begins.”

MLB is also increasing the size of its bases, reducing the distance between first and second base, and second and third base, by 4.5 inches. This slight tweak could also have a big impact on base running. Many stolen-base attempts are very close calls. So runners might be more willing to risk it with a few-inch advantage.

“Even if he never runs, if you’re in the stands and you’d think he might be running, you’re on the edge of your seat,” says Brantley.

The Julio Show

While rules changes should help baseball evolve into a more modern, attractive product, personalities always rule sports. Julio Rodriguez, the second-year center fielder for the Seattle Mariners, turned in one of the best rookie seasons in the sport. He became the first player in major league history with 15 or more home runs, 50 or more RBIs, and 20 or more stolen bases in his first 90 career games. According to one advanced datapoint on power and production, Rodriguez, 22, joined Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Ted Williams as the best rookie position players ever. He helped the Mariners end the longest active playoff drought in the “big four” North American pro sports—21 years. The campaign compelled Seattle to sign “J-Rod” to a 12-year, $210 million contract extension—in his rookie season.

What’s more, J-Rod desires crossover appeal. He dresses sharp. He has stunning eyes that stare into your soul. He engages with fans and the culture via his YouTube channel and social media. He just did clever Bob Villa and The Bachelor parodies. He tried to swim on the bases after a stumble and embraced the ribbing. He’s turned centerfield into a “no fly zone.” He slammed 81 home runs at the All-Star home run derby.

He’s just what baseball needs in this moment: player with prodigious talent and an infectious personality, giving viewers reason to watch him, his team, and his sport. “There was a time where, if you were a young guy and you showed too much personality, organizations and some managers didn’t like that,” says former outfielder Gary Matthews Jr., who played in the majors from 1999-2010. “They didn’t like players to express themselves or express their emotions. That was kind of frowned upon. But someone like Rodriguez in Seattle, here’s a really, really young guy who seems to be a really not only a great player, but also a great person. At the end of the day, fans will connect better with a generation of players who are allowed to be authentically themselves.”

So happy opening day. The Cincinnati Reds are still in contention. The games will be quicker. Julio Rodriguez will be worth watching.

And baseball could be cool again.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Uncertainty over the timing and location of the Under-20 World Cup continues two days after Indonesian authorities postponed the official draw for the May 20-June 11 tournament because of protests over Israel’s qualification.

The draw, scheduled to held in Bali on Friday, was delayed indefinitely by Indonesia’s soccer federation amid backlash from conservative Islamic groups.

Doubt had already been cast on the draw ceremony when the governor of Bali, Wayan Koster, called for a ban on Israel playing there because of Indonesia’s diplomatic support for the Palestinian cause.

FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, has not commented on Indonesia’s status as host or a reported offer from Argentina to stage the event, with the trade-off of having an Argentine team in the tournament.
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Pressure on Indonesia’s soccer association, the PSSI, and its chairman Erick Thohir is mounting because if local authorities fail to resolve the hosting issues over Israel, the country risks being suspended by FIFA and potentially missing out on Asian qualifying for the 2026 World Cup.

Thohir is a former owner of major international teams, including Italian soccer giant Inter Milan and the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, and has been Indonesia’s minister of state-owned enterprises since 2019.

His sport and political diplomacy skills will be seriously tested. Thohir and FIFA president Gianni Infantino are also both members of the International Olympic Committee.

“Continue to be passionate about finding solutions to every challenge, for the sake of an increasingly global Indonesia,” Thohir wrote in a Twitter post aimed at resolving the impasse.

Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture, Muhadjir Effendy, said Thohir planned to fly to Zurich to hold further meetings with FIFA.

“We are still conducting talks,” Effendy, who is also serving as the acting minister of youth and sports, said after a cabinet meeting Monday. “We hope we can find the answer and at least FIFA will understand Indonesia’s position in this problem.”

Effendy also said that Indonesia submitted conditions to FIFA about the presence of Israel during the tournament, but there was no common ground. He did not reveal the conditions.

“This is not merely a rejection or protest, but this is related to our country’s Constitution,” he said in response to questions about the leaders of two provinces selected as tournament venues pushing back against hosting the Israeli team.

The preamble of Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution states: “Whereas Independence is the inalienable right of all nations; therefore, colonialism must be abolished in the world as it is not in conformity with humanity and justice.”

Thohir only took over as leader of the PSSI after a government investigation concluded that the national soccer association had been negligent and ignored safety and security regulations ahead of a deadly stadium crush last October and replaced its chair and executive committee.

The disaster in Kanjuruhan stadium in East Java’s Malang city was among the world’s worst sporting tragedies, with 135 people killed after police fired tear gas inside the venue, setting off a panicked run for the exits.

Read More: As the Kanjuruhan Tragedy Shows, Indonesia Has Not Resolved Its Long-Standing Problem of Soccer Violence

The Israeli team, which qualified for the Under-20 world tournament for the first time, had been expected to be based in Bali, home to one of the six stadiums scheduled to be used for the tournament, but the governor’s comments have thrown that into doubt.

Then Central Java Gov. Ganjar Pranowo, who is also the frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, joined calls for the Israeli team to be denied a place in the tournament.

Pranowo said as a member of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, widely known as PDIP, he would uphold the mandate of Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, whose daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri is chair of the party.

“We know Bung Karno’s commitment to Palestine, whether in the Asia-Africa Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement or the Conference of the New Emerging Forces,” he said last week, referring to Sukarno’s popular nickname, “So, we follow his mandate.”

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation with about 277 million people and does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel. However, Indonesian soccer and public authorities agreed to FIFA’s hosting requirements in 2019 before being selected to host the 2021 edition of the Under-20 World Cup, which was subsequently postponed for two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Israel qualified last June by reaching the semifinals of the Under-19 European Championship. The team went on to lose the final to England.

The Israeli football federation plays continental competition under the European soccer umbrella after leaving the Asian Football Confederation in 1974 because of boycotts from the some national teams.

Near the beginning of the second half of Princeton’s Sweet 16 game against the Creighton Bluejays on Friday night, Creighton big man Ryan Kalkbrenner, who stands 7’1”, threw down a monster dunk on 6’7” Princeton forward Zach Martini. Kalkbrenner’s mass sent Martini, who fouled the Creighton star on the play, careening backward; Martini took a few steps before falling to the floor. The basket, plus Kalkbrenner’s foul shot, put Creighton up seven, 52-45, with just over 18 minutes left.

But more than anything, the slam felt like a statement. Creighton was just too big, and too skilled, on this evening. The Bluejays would go to win the game, 86-75.

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An unlikely run for Princeton, the No. 15 seed in the South region, is now over. After shocking No. 2 Arizona and silencing No. 7 Missouri in the first two rounds, these Tigers became just the fourth 15th seed to ever reach the Sweet 16 in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The Tigers hadn’t gone this far in the tournament since 1967.

The Elite Eight is now all set. Florida Atlantic, the No. 9 seed in the East, plays No. 3 Kansas State in one regional final, in New York City tomorrow. Out West, in Las Vegas, No. 3 Gonzaga faces No. 4 UConn. Miami, a No. 5 seed in the Midwest region, shocked No. 1 Houston on Friday to reach the Elite Eight, where the Hurricanes will play Texas in Kansas City on Sunday. And in the South, No. 5 seed San Diego State faces Creighton on Sunday in Louisville.

Read More: Exclusive: Behind the Scenes With Princeton–the Cinderella of March Madness–Ahead of the Sweet 16

This will be the first time, since the NCAA began seeding teams in 1979, that the Elite will have no top-seeded teams.

Princeton students, fans, and alums traveled from all over the world to Louisville, to witness a potentially historic run to the Final Four. Before the team headed to the arena, Princeton coach Mitch Henderson addressed a raucous crowd of some 700 Princeton supporters gathered in a hotel ballroom. He shared words a poet friend texted to him about the Tigers. “If this team were a mode of conveyance, it would be a parachute, dropping behind enemy lines.”

The fans went nuts.

“I’ve been calm all week,” Henderson said in a quiet moment afterward, before he boarded the bus. “But my heart was racing after that.”

At times, it felt like a Princeton home game, especially when the Tigers got hot in the first half. The Tigers shot 51% in the first 20 minutes, and 50% from three-point range. The problem: Creighton could barely miss. The Bluejays shot a 62% from the field—and 50% from long-range—to take a 47-43 lead at halftime. Fans witnessed a high-level offensive display, from both teams.

While Creighton continued to pour in the offense at the start of the second, the rims tightened up for the Tigers. Princeton came out shooting 1-5 in the half—and missed three straight layups. With 12:33 to go, the Bluejays went up by 16, 68-52. Princeton marksman Blake Peters, who hit two threes in the first half, missed all four of his attempts in the second. He walked off the court with tears in his eyes.

Mostly, Princeton had no answer for Creighton’s size and skill. Kalkbrenner finished with 22 points, on 9-12 shooting. Slivery lefty Baylor Scheierman was lights out: he finished with 21 points, on 9-11 shooting overall, and 5-7 from three. He even banked a three-pointer in the second half. Trey Alexander added 19 points.

Creighton likely would have won by a larger margin, but Princeton made a defensive switch— to a 1-3-1 zone—with just under 10 minutes left in the game. The move slowed Creighton down a bit, but the Bluejays hit enough threes, and made enough smart passes down low to the bigs to create mismatches against Princeton’s smaller players, to keep the margin safe.

Two Princeton seniors, Ryan Langborg and Tosan Evbuomwan, provided the bulk of the scoring for the Tigers, finishing with 26 points and 24 points, respectively.

They’ll both be greatly missed in New Jersey.

After the final buzzer, the Princeton players and coaching staff walked across the court to the team’s orange-clad cheering section at the KFC Yum! Center. Everyone saluted one another. It wasn’t the ending anyone wanted. But what a Cinderella ride.

Mitch Henderson stretches out his legs on his living-room couch on Tuesday evening in Princeton, N.J., a Modelo in hand. He’s just put his three children, ages 10, 7, and 5, to bed. The coach of the Princeton Tigers, the No. 15 seed in the South region – and just the fourth 15th seed in history to make it to the Sweet 16 of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament – is relaxing, and reflecting, after another furious day of practicing and preparation. Not to mention all the national media appearances. As the only double-digit seed remaining in men’s March Madness, Princeton has heard from everyone from ESPN to CNN to prominent national sports radio shows.
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Henderson, his cropped curly hair slightly graying, shakes his head slowly. The Tigers were a team, a little over a month ago, that couldn’t beat Dartmouth, an annual Ivy League also-ran. A week after that loss, Princeton blew an 19-point second-half lead to Ivy rival Yale at home. But since that low point, the Tigers have been on an all-time roll, winning four straight Ivy League games to reach the NCAA tournament, shocking No. 2 Arizona in the first round on March 16, and thoroughly outclassing No. 6 Missouri, in the second round, to set up tonight’s Sweet 16 clash against No. 6 Creighton, in Louisville, for a potential trip to the Elite 8.

To Henderson, the story doesn’t feel real. “Nobody’s going to take this away, right?” he says, staring straight ahead. “We’re still in this, right?”

They sure are. A Final Four, improbably, is now in reach for Princeton, which hasn’t gotten that far in the NCAA tournament since basketball Hall of Famer Bill Bradley led the Tigers to the men’s national semifinal in 1965. Henderson, a former Princeton player whose leap into the air, arms raised, after the Tigers defeated defending champion UCLA back in 1996, became the subject of an iconic photo that defined Cinderella upsets for a generation, is now helping create new lore for the school.

All season long Henderson, who took over as head coach in 2011, has honored the legacy of his former coach and mentor, Hall of Famer Pete Carril, who died last summer. The Tigers wear bow-tie patches on their jerseys, as a nod to Carril, whose patient, precise offense system—which emphasizes three-pointers and layups—still influences basketball today. Henderson, however, largely scrapped Carril’s playbook, playing a faster offensive pace, recruiting more physical defenders and rebounders who can bang with some of the biggest teams in the country, and making the program all his own.

Full disclosure: I traveled to Princeton and then to Louisville this week as a journalist, but also as a former member of the team and a longtime friend of Henderson. We played together at Princeton in the 1990s—he was a star, I was a deep reserve, and we have remained close since. In fact, I was a member of the selection committee—convened by former Princeton athletic director Gary Walters—that hired Henderson as Princeton coach in 2011. So, I am not unbiased when it comes to this team.

It is thanks to this connection that I have had a front-row seat as a reporter embedded with the Tigers, to share the inside story of Princeton basketball’s quest to shake up sports, again, this weekend, and continue its dream run, all the way to Houston and the Final Four.

Tuesday, March 21, 4:15 p.m., Princeton, N.J.

On this clear afternoon, the walk to Jadwin Gymnasium, the multiuse, spaceship-looking facility off Lake Carnegie in which the Sweet 16-bound Princeton Tigers play their basketball games, feels like business as usual. Members of the women’s soccer team are stretching on a practice field. A handful of students bike past the Jadwin entrance. Three days before the Sweet 16, any visitor can walk pretty unbothered to the side of the court where practice is taking place.

It’s difficult to picture a similar stroll into the sacred confines of, say, Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University or the Dean Dome at North Carolina or Allen Fieldhouse at the University of Kansas. At those schools, basketball teams operate in their own well-resourced bubbles. None of those schools, however, are playing in the Sweet 16.

But Princeton is. And on the practice court, Henderson is putting his team through drills designed to limit Creighton’s scoring on fast breaks. “When we get to Louisville, that place belongs to us,” says Henderson. “That’s how you go about your business.”

Matt Allocco, the team’s vocal leader who universally known as “Mush”—as in Mush Mouth, someone who’s always talking—raises the intensity. “Just get in your f–cking matchup,” he shouts at a teammate.

One key cog in stopping 7’1” Creighton center Ryan Kalkbrenner, the team’s leading scorer who shoots an incredible 71% from the field, is Zach Martini, the 6’7”, 235-lb. junior reserve forward from Warren, N.J., known as “Ox.” Out in Sacramento, during the first round of the tournament, Martini sat in the stands watching Utah State and Missouri prior to Princeton’s game. “My leg was shaking uncontrollably,” says Martini. “I’m like, sh-t, dude, settle down.” Once he checked into the game against Arizona and started knocking bodies, however, he felt a sense of calm.

Kalkbrenner offers a whole new challenge. But it’s one for which he feels prepared. “I pride myself on being undersized,” says Martini. “It’s motivated me so much. No lobs, no angles, no seals. We’ve been saying that all year. That’s not going to change Friday.”

While Ox is doing his dirty work, Henderson is imploring freshman guard Xavian Lee, who Henderson believes will become a special player but who has played few minutes in the NCAA tournament games, to speak up on defense. “No one can hear you!” he shouts at him. “Use your outside voice!”

Henderson is on him all practice long about speaking up. “It gets annoying,” Lee says afterward. “But I know he’s right.”

Tuesday, March 21, 6:30 p.m., Princeton, N.J.

After the end of the practice session, Princeton’s best player, 6’8” senior Tosan Evbuomwan, sits against a stanchion. A national audience is now discovering Evbuomwan’s singular skill set: his footwork, dribbling, and passing abilities that have captured the attention of NBA scouts. Growing up in Great Britain, where college basketball is largely an afterthought, Evbuomwan never filled out an NCAA tournament bracket. He still hasn’t. And that may have helped Princeton’s cause. “After the Arizona game, I didn’t feel the urge to jump up and down and dance all night,” says Evbuomwan. “Because I didn’t grow up here with March Madness, maybe I don’t appreciate how big of a deal this is. But secondly, I generally felt like we weren’t done. I felt like we were supposed to be there and we did what we were supposed to do.”

His senior thesis is due in mid-April. Evbuomwan’s project is on how diversity in executive management in the NBA affects team performance. He has the diversity data but still has to run the regressions. That can come, however, after Princeton’s run is done.

Evbuomwan and his teammates are still getting used to all the adulation from strangers. “There’s this guy in my hallway, I see him every now and then in the bathroom, but we haven’t exchanged many words all year,” says Evbuomwan. “This morning, I saw him in the bathroom and he’s like, ‘Really great job, Tosan, I’m driving down to Louisville to support you.’ That’s a small snapshot of the stuff that’s gone on.”

Tuesday, March 21, 8 p.m., Princeton, N.J.

It’s Taco Tuesday at the Henderson house. Afterward, Henderson is treated to a concert: his son Theo, 10, plays him “Eye of the Tiger” on the trumpet and daughter Pippa, 7, plays “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the violin.

Henderson grew up in Vincennes, Ind., the son of an electrical contractor and stay-at-home mom. He excelled at pretty much everything. Henderson won the Johnny Woodcrafter award at a woodcraft camp when he was 13. He became a three-sport athlete at Culver Military Academy, was a good enough baseball player to be drafted by the New York Yankees, in the 29th round of the 1994 MLB draft, but attended Princeton to play basketball.

While Henderson was a junior at Princeton, his father died of a heart attack, at 52. The tragedy occurred during the basketball season, and Henderson had to miss a nationally televised game against North Carolina. “I became closed off,” Henderson says when we sit down to talk. “I was like, well, I’m going to put my head down, and I’m going to work like a werewolf. And that’s what I did for years.”

He spent a decade as an assistant coach at Northwestern before getting the Princeton job. He studied the strategies of physical Big Ten teams like Michigan State and Wisconsin, so when he arrived in New Jersey, he was determined to veer away from Carril’s playbook. Henderson has always been an intense leader, but his sense of calm has been apparent during this March Madness run. He credits meditation, which he started doing in December—twice a day, even in some far corner of Jadwin Gym if he has to—with contributing to the smile he cracked as Princeton pulled away from Missouri. “It’s changed my life,” he says.

“It hasn’t always been easy for him, because he’s the type of coach that, if it doesn’t go well, he puts it all on himself,” says close friend Jesse Marsch, the former coach of Leeds United in the English Premier League. “He really internalizes and puts full responsibility on his own shoulders, which I think is what a leader should be about. And so that part is great. But, you know, he’s had to also kind of learn and teach himself to accept failure sometime, and learn from it. It’s part of the way he’s been able to help this team achieve their potential.”

Henderson has sought out mentors inside and outside the basketball world, and developed a connection with Steve Kerr, the coach of the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors, after Henderson’s wife, Ashley, encouraged him to introduce himself to Kerr at the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament. “Mitch is salt of the earth,” Kerr tells TIME. “He’s a really humble guy, and I enjoy being around him.” After Princeton beat Kerr’s alma mater, Arizona, last week, he sent Henderson a text message: “Bastard!!!!!”

A few years ago, Henderson dug out the thesis that Kerr’s father, Malcolm, wrote as a Princeton senior back in 1953: “Turkey and the Eastern Question of World War II.” He presented Kerr with a bound copy of his father’s work after a Brooklyn Nets game. Malcolm Kerr was assassinated in 1984, while serving as the president of the American University of Beirut. Overwhelmed with gratitude, Kerr bowed his head, teared up, and hugged Henderson.

Wednesday, March 22, 9 a.m., Princeton, N.J.

Packed for the charter flight to Louisville later that afternoon, Henderson is driving his Chevy truck to Jadwin Gym, outlining the principles that he and Evbuomwan settled on together to drive this team. “Focus on the details/discipline/lightheartedness/joy.”

A pre-practice war-room session, however, isn’t so heavy on the joy. Henderson and his staff are watching film on Creighton’s sets. “We have to practice today like we play,” says Henderson, who wasn’t satisfied with the energy at yesterday’s session. “They’re too good. They’re too well-coached. They’re too oiled.”

For today’s practice sessions, he implores an assistant coach to correct a small error he had made scouting a Creighton play in yesterday’s practice. “Tell them, ‘I messed this up.’” And Henderson is still bothered by the lack of vocal communication on defense. “Early Talk – Loud Today,” he writes on a white board. He again points to Lee. “Get rid of the embarrassment,” Henderson says. “F-cking talk.” Henderson decides he’ll have a one-on-one sit-down with Lee before the team’s morning video session and practice, to remind him of his belief that Lee can be one of the top guards in the country, but to try to correct what the coaching staff perceives as a lack of focus.

Wednesday, March 22, 10:45 a.m., Princeton N.J.

With the team filed into cushioned seats at Jadwin for a film session reviewing Creighton’s offensive strategies, Henderson runs down the itinerary for the day. The team is receiving a public sendoff before leaving on the team bus around 1 p.m. “You’ll land in Louisville, Kentucky, and you’re going to the Hyatt Regency and it’s going to be amazing,” says Henderson.

But first, the team needs a better practice performance. “Do not worry about distractions,” says Henderson. “Lock in. It’s not that hard. But the details matter so much. The team that you’re playing is good, talented, and they have what you have. They have continuity and they’re together. It will take a very special version of you to win.”

He reminds them of the joy. “Now after practice, sign yourself up for the best time of your life,” says Henderson. He asked the players if they’ve signed up on Opendorse, the Name, Imagine and Likeness (NIL) platform that enables players to cash in on newfound fame. “Anyone got cash coming in?” Henderson asks. The players laugh sheepishly. Not really. Though that could certainly change if Princeton wins two more and is playing in Houston at next week’s Final Four.

Wednesday, March 22, 11:15 a.m., Princeton, N.J.

The Tigers take the practice floor. “I don’t think we can win the game today,” Henderson says as the team huddles at half court. “But we can lose it.” Meaning, a bad practice today, two days before the Sweet 16 matchup, could be disastrous.

Henderson is bringing his random bursts of energy to today’s session. “Make shots! Make shots!” he says. He appreciates that his players like making fun of him. Starting power forward Keeshawn Kellman spreads his hands out, and goes “don’t use ’em all, fellas”—something Henderson is fond of yelling when players dunk in practice, as if they won’t have any slams left for the game. “He’ll talk slowly, then start to talk fast,” says Kellman. “The start of his sentences and end of his sentences don’t correlate sometimes. He makes a good point. But how did he get there?”

Wednesday, March 22, 1 p.m., Princeton, N.J.,

Hundreds of students and fans gather near the team’s bus to see the players off. “Sweet 16! Sweet 16!” people chant, dressed in orange. Band members play the Princeton fight song on their kazoos. “It’s sinking in,” Henderson says as he saunters over to the crowd, holding his travel bag. One fan is holding a Henderson Fathead.

Princeton athletics has enjoyed plenty of success over the years. But this scene is one of the rare moments in which Tiger sports feel “big time.” The national attention that comes along with a Sweet 16 run will do that to a school. “I’m not going to lie,” says Andrew Guo, a sophomore molecular-biology major from upstate New York. “I never would have expected this in a million years.”

“Holy sh-t, this is a lot of people,” says Lee, who’s about to load his bag onto the bus. “More than we have at our games.”

Wednesday, Match 22, 1:30 p.m., I-95, en route to Philadelphia International Airport

On the bus ride to Philadelphia for the charter to Louisville, Evbuomwan, from his athlete alpha position at the back of the bus, leads a debate on the power of sports superstitions. “If I have a lucky hat, and I somehow lose it, what, I’m supposed to then play bad?” says Evbuomwan. Fellow senior Ryan Langborg has listened to the same three EDM songs prior to the Arizona and Missouri upsets, and Evbuomwan insists that Langborg do so again, acknowledging that he’s being somewhat hypocritical. “I’m not superstitious,” says Evbuomwan. “But I won’t discourage anyone else from following their own superstitions.”

A group of Princeton players, including Evbuomwan, Langborg, Allocco, and reserve center Jacob O’Connell, are part of a pregame crew that watches movies the night before games. (They took in The Benchwarmers before beating Arizona.) Martini has been disinvited, because the night before an Ivy League tournament semifinal game against Penn, he missed movie night because he was watching Twin Peaks. “I was getting right to the part where we find out who killed Laura Palmer,” says Martini. The next day, Martini had his most clutch game of the season, hitting four three-pointers and scoring a career-high 12 points in a Tiger win. Princeton hasn’t lost since.

Two freshmen, starting forward Caden Pierce and reserve guard Jack Scott, look like they’re playing some form of patty-cake. Turns out they are dueling in a game that Scott calls “James Bond,” a rock-paper-scissors-like affair involving three hand motions: loading a gun, shooting a gun, and shielding your chest from a shot. “It’s the kind of thing you see in middle school,” says O’Connell, the senior, with a hint of derision at the freshman.

The Princeton players are a tight bunch that relish teasing one another. Veterans like Evbuomwan, Langborg, Allocco, and others missed the 2020-21 because of the COVID-19 pandemic; the Ivy League was the only Division 1 conference in the country that did not play basketball games. While losing the season hurt, the players did spend that winter improving their skills in practices, and growing closer as a group. In a weird way, the off-year may have contributed to the Sweet 16 berth.

Wednesday, Match 22, 2:40 p.m., Philadelphia International Airport

Once the Princeton traveling party of players, coaches, administrators, cheerleaders, and band members arrive at the airport, everyone has to kill time while waiting for the Allegiant charter— which is running behind by about an hour—to arrive. Henderson leads a game of Simon Says with a group of kids in the parking lot. Pierce and Scott play more James Bond. Band members start juggling. “The nerd factor here is off the charts!” remarks one member of the group.

Not wrong. On the security line to board the plane, Scott mesmerizes his teammates by claiming he can name every NCAA men’s basketball champion since 1965 in under 50 seconds. He begins to rattle off names and years – “UCLA, 1965, Texas Western, 1966 …” until he gets to “2022, Kansas, 2023, Princeton Tigers!” which sets off cheers. He breaks his own record easily, finishing his savant-like task in a cool 44.45 seconds.

The plane is finally set to take off. Blake Peters, the Princeton sophomore who came off the bench to score five key three-pointers in the second half against Missouri—and went viral after screaming “Anything is possible!” in his postgame interview—takes out a textbook titled The New China. NJ.com labeled Peters “the most interesting man in the NCAA tournament,” given in his fluency of Mandarin, desire to become U.S. Secretary of State, and affinity for the Wall Street Journal. Since Henderson’s days working in Princeton’s Firestone Library, he’s remained good friends with his former supervisor, Jerry Williams, now a poet who teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. Williams is a big fan of the stout and sculpted Peters.

“His body is almost square,” Williams texted Henderson, summoning his poet’s voice. “Like a wall made of fireplugs.”

Across the aisle, band member Jian Arnold, a junior, pulls out an iPad. He’s about to knock out some astrophysics homework.

Wednesday, March 22, 8 p.m., Louisville, Ky.

For Henderson, this team-only dinner at Vincenzo’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Louisville, is a well-earned prize following all the media obligations, crash prep for Creighton, and other elements of a torrid whirlwind. The next two days will also feel harried, so here’s maybe one last chance at real relaxation. Over beef tournedos with wild mushroom/cognac sauce, plus chicken parmesan with grilled vegetables and roasted potatoes—and some red wine for the staff—Henderson holds court about his team. He’s particularly proud of Lee’s performance in practice today, and tells him so as Lee heads to the restroom and passes Henderson at the head of the table. “I’m so excited for you,” Henderson tells the freshman. “Good Lord. Thank you.”

Two women approach Henderson at the table, asking if they can take a picture: he encourages both of them to head down to the other end, to take snapshots of the players. “Hello, I’m with the federal government,” a white-haired man tells Henderson, startling the coach for a second. But not to worry: he is a bureaucrat, not a special agent, and is looking to take a photo for his colleague, a Princeton alum.

Allocco—Mush—sits at the other head of the table. He, Langborg, O’Connell, and Evbuomwan are discussing strategy for their upcoming spring soccer game against the Princeton women’s soccer players. Allocco’s teammates are quick to point out that he talked a lot of smack in last year’s game. “Hey,” Allocco says. “I am who I am.”

They are debating movie choices for Thursday night. Perhaps a Jordan Peele horror flick, Get Out or Us? Shawshank Redemption?

Allocco is thumbs-up on his first-ever tiramisu. “It’s pretty sick to go to such a fancy restaurant,” says Evbuomwan, “in sweatpants.”

Wednesday, March 22, 9:30 p.m., Louisville, Ky.

On the post-dinner bus ride back to the hotel, after a round of applause from the other patrons as the team left the restaurant, Henderson is hell-bent on finding a microphone on the vehicle, for impromptu karaoke. When he, the driver, and assistant coach Lawrence Rowley can’t solve the bus’ AV capabilities, he figures his players can make do without a mic. He walks to the back of the bus. “Tosan, get off your phone,” says Henderson. “Come on fellas, what are we doing? Maybe some Bill Withers?” Instead, they settle on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” “Darius, get off your phone,” he says to reserve forward Darius Gakwasi.

“I’m pulling up the lyrics,” Gakwasi protests, before belting out the first verse. The team joins in. Not half bad. Now it’s time for check-in and bed.

Thursday, March 23, 10 a.m., Louisville, Ky.

At breakfast the day before the big game, Peters tells the story of how, after the awful Yale loss in February, a boozy fan handed him a note saying something along the lines of “you’ll get them next time.” Peters tore up the note in front of the guy, a human reaction: who wants to hear cliches right after your team blows an 18-point lead? Scott takes the other side. “You easily could have just put the note in your pocket,” he tells Peters. After a little back-and-forth, the table moves on and starts quizzing each other on constitutional amendments.

After breakfast, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) FaceTimes the team. He tells the players they are dominating the discussion in Washington, D.C., and that no senator in the nation’s capital is prouder. “You are a band of brothers that are going to inspire the whole country,” Booker says. (New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy stopped by Jadwin Gym earlier in the week to wish the team luck.)

Henderson wants to devote most of the 90-minute early-afternoon practice session at the KFC Yum! Center to shooting. So they walked through Creighton’s plays with the scout team in an adjacent ballroom. “Hey, we got more space,” Henderson says. “We’re in the Sweet 16.”

A staffer makes a half-court line, and foul line, out of tape so Princeton can approximate defensive spacing in the ballroom. Allocco wears a Batman T-shirt. Kellman dons a shirt featuring OutKast – he’s not really a fan of the hip-hop duo, but just likes the getup. Henderson keeps harping on defensive noise. “We have the best fan base,” he says. “Everybody loves you guys. We have to be loud, loud, loud.”

In fact, he summoned some sarcastic applause for Evbuomwan. “Hey everyone, for the first time in four years, Tosan has talked during a walkthrough,” Henderson says. Evbuomwan smiles sheepishly.

The team huddles one more time in the ballroom before busing over to the KFC Yum! Center to face national media. “Have fun, be personable,” says Henderson. “Enjoy what you’re about to do.”

Thursday, March 23, 6:30 p.m., Louisville, Ky.

After the media session and practice at the arena, the players have a few hours to themselves to rest before the team dinner at the hotel. Over a chicken parmesan and lasagna in the ballroom, most players are competing in a trivia contest on an app called Sporcle. Langborg asks if a pigeon can be a bird flying on the countryside. It’s certainly possible, I volunteer. It appears I’ve done my duty as Sporcle referee.

I mention to Evbuomwan that his team is really dialing up the dork factor. He seems pleased with that assessment. “We embrace it,” he says. Still, he expects to win more than quizzes in Louisville. “We’ve been counted out twice,” Evbuomwan says over the Sporcle cheering. “I hope people aren’t quick to count us out a third time.”

The movie crew settles on Get Out for the pregame flick. Martini, showing his confidence, watches it.

“They know they can do it,” says Henderson. “I don’t know if there’s a happier group. They’re just sitting here talking about how much fun they’re having, how much fun it is to be around one another. You don’t have the feeling that I have, that we have, very often. It feels very good.”

New Jersey has put its stamp on March.

Fairleigh Dickinson University, a private commuter school near the George Washington Bridge in Teaneck, N.J., on Friday became just the second No. 16-seed in history to win a game in the men’s NCAA tournament. The Knights knocked off the No. 1-seed Purdue Boilermakers, 63-58 on Friday in Columbus, Ohio. Fairleigh Dickinson’s victory comes five years after No. 16 UMBC dominated the top overall seed in the tournament, Virginia, 74-54. Before Friday, No. 16 seeds were 1-150 all-time against top-seeded teams since the men’s field expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

The state of New Jersey is continuing its magical NCAA tournament run these past few years. A season ago St. Peter’s, another commuter school in the northern part of the state, made the Elite Eight—the first No. 15-seed to do so—before losing to North Carolina. (They also managed to knock No. 3-seed Purdue out of the tournament.) On Thursday, No. 15 Princeton shocked Arizona, 55-51, in a first-round upset.
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And now, FDU joins the Tigers as the toasts of the Garden State.

Say what you will about the NCAA, but it generally seeds its men’s basketball tournament well. The dominance of the No. 1-seeds over the past 38 years bears that out. So when a team like FDU rises to the occasion, it counts as a monumental moment in college basketball—and in all sports.

Fairleigh Dickinson—which has about 6,500 students on its main campus—has the shortest team in Division 1 basketball, with its players averaging 6’1” in height. Purdue’s All-American center, 7-foot-4 Zach Edey, had a fine game—scoring 24 points and grabbing 15-rebounds—but he turned the ball over late in the game, with under two minutes left, after three Knights collapsed on him in the post.

READ MORE: How Howard University Finally Made It Back to March Madness

FDU’s Sean Moore, a Columbus native, scored a layup to give FDU a five-point lead, 58-53. Moore also nailed a huge straight-away three pointer on the next possession. Purdue had an opportunity to tie the game a late-three pointer, but Fletcher Lloyd threw up an air-ball from the corner, after being contested by an FDU defender. Demetre Robbins, who is 5’8”, grabbed the game-sealing rebound.

The Knights refused to be intimidated by Purdue’s size and pedigree. A zone defense from the smaller FDU team seemed to confound Purdue’s players. The Boilermakers, despite being coached by the seasoned Matt Painter, were out of rhythm, as they seemed to spend a lot of time looking into Edey, who was double and triple-teamed. They had little to know flow. Purdue, despite often suiting up some of the top-ranked teams in the country over the past four decades, hasn’t made a Final Four since 1980.

A year ago, FDU coach Tobin Anderson was coaching at tiny St. Thomas Aquinas College, in Division II, a 2,000-student school in New York’s Rockland County. Moore was one his players there. Fairleigh Dickinson finished last season 4-22, fired coach Greg Hernenda, and took a chance on Anderson. Moore came with him. One final twist: FDU wasn’t even supposed to be in the tournament; the Knights lost to Merrimack College in the Northeast Conference Tournament on March 7. But Merrimack isn’t eligible to play in the NCAA tournament this year, so FDU got a shot.

Now, Moore and Anderson are both preparing for a second round March Madness game against the winner of Memphis and FAU.

Fairleigh Dickinson plays on. It’s the beauty of March.

“NBA and Cocaine: Nothing to Snort At,” declared the Los Angeles Times headline wryly. “There are no reliable figures on the use of cocaine by players,” writer Chris Cobbs admitted, “but estimates by people in the game range from 40 to 75%, with perhaps as many as 10% getting high with freebase.”

When that story ran in August 1980, the NBA appeared to be a league in crisis. And given that around 75% of the league’s players were African American, it appeared to be a Black crisis. Cobbs’s exposé came in the wake of the well-publicized drug-related arrests of Bernard King (New Jersey Nets) and Eddie Johnson (Atlanta Hawks). Not only had game attendance and television ratings dipped, but now professional basketball seemed to be on the verge of a cocaine epidemic. This was a public relations nightmare for a majority-Black league that white sports fans already perceived as being violent, criminal, and out of control.
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Yet, rather than revealing the truth of the NBA’s so-called Dark Ages, Cobbs’s sensationalistic story throws into relief the fault lines of a decade-long struggle in the NBA over the future of the sport—one that intersected with broader racial politics. As Black ball became a referendum on Black freedom, the professional game emerged as a kind of morality play about the shifting place of African Americans in U.S. society—a site where the contours of Black citizenship and belonging in the post–civil-rights era were rehashed and reshaped. The white-controlled business of professional basketball, much like the nation at large, had to reckon with rising Black demands for not just equality of opportunity, but also equality of results. The supposed decline of professional basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of racial integration in America: The rules of the game had changed, allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything.

However, in reality, this was hardly the case. As they challenged the status quo on and off the court, African American players from the 1970s laid the groundwork for the rise of the dazzling, star-laden NBA we know today.

With Afros waving in the breeze, players such as Earl “the Pearl” Monroe and Julius “Dr. J” Erving remade the professional game by infusing it with the aesthetics and ethics of Black streetball. Nurtured on the playground courts of African American neighborhoods, this aggressive, aerial, and fast-paced brand of basketball emphasized feats of individual athleticism, creative deception, and stylish improvisation, from trash talking and in-your-face shot blocking, to behind-the-back or no-look passes, to nimble jump shots and sometimes backboard-shattering slam dunks. Although we now celebrate these moves, in the ’70s, basketball traditionalists blamed “selfish” Black players for the decline of a once honorable and disciplined white game of teamwork and fundamentals.

Read More: The Milwaukee Bucks Led the Way as Athletes Took a Stand Over Jacob Blake. Players Decades Ago Helped Win Them the Power to Speak Up

Off the court, outspoken and unapologetically Black players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wali Jones took advantage of their increasing visibility in the media to express new forms of Black masculine identity and to weigh in on current affairs. Jabbar, in many respects, embodied the complexity of African American politics in the post‒civil rights era. His favorite book was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. He listened to the jazz music of Miles Davis, converted to Islam, and studied African languages. Meanwhile, Wali Jones, who was known for his tall, bushy Afro and Black liberation wrist bands, openly critiqued the hyper-policing of Black youth and the deepening cuts to social welfare programs in Black neighborhoods. While playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, Jones founded a service group called Concerned Athletes in Action (CAIA) that ran youth camps and drug-prevention clinics in urban Black communities. In their own unique ways, both Jabbar and Jones pushed back against the typical rules of racial etiquette that white Americans expected of Black athletes—more specifically, the expectation to be humble, be grateful, be cheerful, be accessible, and, above all, be apolitical.

Black players also leveraged the existence of the NBA’s competing league, the American Basketball Association (ABA, 1967‒1976), and turned to legal strategies and union organizing to push for better salaries and benefits, as well as more control over who they played for and under what conditions. Antitrust lawsuits involving Connie Hawkins, Spencer Haywood, and Oscar Robertson challenged the NBA’s monopolistic business practices, from blacklisting to the four-year rule to the reserve clause. This labor struggle was about far more than just money. In Robertson’s 1971 testimony before a Senate Subcommittee tasked with deciding the legality of an NBA-ABA merger, he conveyed the players’ principled opposition to the proposed consolidation. “I do not stand to benefit financially by having the leagues continue to compete for my services,” the veteran superstar said, “but I do stand to benefit as a man. I do stand to benefit by seeing that the 300 some-odd ball players in professional basketball have an opportunity to be treated as other people in American life; that they can truly negotiate for their services.” They were fighting for their dignity as workers, their desire to be recognized as men, not boys, and their right to have the same economic freedoms as other U.S. citizens. (In contrast, women ballplayers weren’t even on the radar at this point, especially because the passage of Title IX was still a year away and the WNBA was founded in 1996.) Although the merger eventually went through in 1976, the players had managed to elicit key concessions, including the elimination of the reserve clause. Free agency and the power of today’s players to determine the trajectory of their careers came out of this earlier moment of activism.

Read More: Dear Police Unions: Please Stop Asking Jocks To Apologize

What’s more, the growing prominence of African American men in professional basketball helped usher in some of the first Black coaches, general managers, and even league executives, from Wayne Embry to Simon Gourdine, who sought to change the NBA from within. When Gourdine became the NBA’s deputy commissioner in 1974, he was the highest-ranking Black executive in all of U.S. professional sports. However, when the league bypassed him for its top position when Commissioner Walter Kennedy retired, African American fans were outraged. New York state senator Carl McCall even called for a boycott of the league by Black players and ticket buyers: “The N.B.A. became a multimillion-dollar super-agency because Black athletes, who make up the majority of the association’s superstars used their talent to make money for the N.B.A. and themselves,” said McCall. “However, when it comes around to selecting the people responsible for directing the N.B.A. the picture changes and the administration, at the highest level, remains lily white.” Although no boycott materialized, Gourdine’s struggle helped to open the door for Black NBA executives and team owners in subsequent decades.

Unfortunately, these rapid developments bred racial resentments: white fans, league officials, and sportswriters blamed Black players’ supposed pathologies for the NBA’s declining fortunes, whether embodied by Kermit Washington’s infamous punch of Rudy Tomjanovich and the uptick in on-court violence or the overlapping “cocaine crisis” of the late 1970s and early ‘80s involving the likes of Bernard King, Terry Furlow, and Eddie Johnson.

Although this earlier generation of African American ballplayers won numerous battles, many of the issues they faced, both on and off the court, remain unresolved. In 2010, when LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat, he faced intense criticism for being greedy, disloyal, and ungrateful—a racialized narrative that continues to plague star players who choose to exercise their right to free agency. In the following year, during a heated labor dispute with the NBPA, the league pulled straight from the ‘70s playbook by blaming the players for their woes. With team owners crying financial hardship, the NBA locked the players out, hoping to force them to give back some of their share of the profits.

Meanwhile, on social media and in other public forums, many players voiced their support for the broader #BlackLivesMatter movement. In 2012, LeBron James and the Miami Heat took a pregame photo wearing hoodies in support of Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager gunned down by vigilante George Zimmerman in Florida. In 2014, after a New York City police officer choked African American Eric Garner to death, Black NBA players wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts on their warm-ups, demanding justice for Garner. More recently, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020, NBA players used the unprecedented opportunity of playing in the league’s “bubble” at Walt Disney World to organize in support of racial justice. They donned uniforms emblazoned with political messages and the Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic even engaged in a wildcat strike to protest the police shooting of Black Wisconsinite Jacob Blake.

In many respects, Black players’ hard-won battles for higher compensation and labor protections in the ‘70s opened up the space for this vibrant critique decades later. Their battles against the interlocking monopolies of the white basketball establishment deserve recognition as a significant part of the enduring Black freedom struggle. Though sometimes disparaged and often disregarded, this earlier generation helped pave the way for the growth of the NBA as a global profit machine and cultural force.

This article has been adapted from Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler. Copyright © 2023. Available from Bold Type Books an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The global professional soccer players’ union says it sent a letter signed by 150 women’s national team players to FIFA calling for equal World Cup prize money.

FIFPro confirmed that the letter, which also asks for equal treatment and conditions for women’s teams playing in soccer’s most prestigious tournament, was sent to the sport’s international governing body in October — a month before the start of the men’s World Cup in Qatar.

The Women’s World Cup is set for this summer in Australia and New Zealand.

Read More: Megan Rapinoe on Her Last World Cup and Equal Pay
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“We can confirm a letter signed by 150 players from national teams on every continent was sent to FIFA in October. These players are seeking equitable conditions before the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. FIFPRO is currently negotiating with FIFA on behalf of these players,” FIFPro said in a statement to The Associated Press. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the existence of the letter.

FIFPro did not share a copy of the letter and said it could not comment further, as negotiations are ongoing. The names of the players who signed the letter also were not made available.

FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The move comes as there are increasing calls for FIFA to make the prize money for the two tournaments more equitable.

Argentina earned $42 million for winning the men’s World Cup in Qatar, out of a prize pool of $440 million. In contrast, the U.S. women’s national team won $4 million out of a prize pool of $30 million for the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France. The prize pool for the women’s tournament this summer has not been set.

Under their historic collective bargaining agreements reached last year, the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams will equally share the prize money won at the World Cup after U.S. Soccer takes a percentage off the top.

Read More: How U.S. Soccer’s Historic Equal Pay Deal Came About

U.S. Soccer is currently the only federation that evenly distributes World Cup prize money. The Canadian women’s national team has called for a similar provision in ongoing negotiations for a new labor agreement with Canada Soccer.

The Women’s World Cup, which starts on July 20, has an expanded field of 32 teams, up from 24 in France. The 2019 tournament drew a global broadcast audience of more than 1 billion viewers.

Any casual follower of the U.S. men’s national soccer team could suss out that an investigation into the ugly feud brewing between World Cup coach Gregg Berhalter and parents of player Gio Reyna was going to reveal some inappropriate conduct. Some of the angling and backstabbing, after all, by former U.S. star Claudio Reyna, one of Berhalter’s former teammates and close friends since high school, and Danielle Reyna had already spilled into the public square in early January.

Back then, Berhalter and his wife Rosalind released a joint public statement in which Gregg admitted to kicking Rosalind, his then-girlfriend, during a dispute outside a North Carolina bar in 1992, when they were both freshman in college. Berhalter said that he’d grown and moved on from the “shameful moment” more than 30 years ago but that “an individual” contacted U.S. Soccer during the World Cup to leverage information about the incident to perhaps push him out as head coach of the national team.
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The next day, Danielle Reyna admitting to contacting U.S. Soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart, who has since resigned, about Berhalter, since she was frustrated that Berhalter had discussed, at a leadership conference in early December, how he nearly sent Gio Reyna home from the World Cup due to lack of effort.

“I thought it was especially unfair that Gio, who had apologized for acting immaturely about his playing time, was still being dragged through the mud when Gregg had asked for and received forgiveness for doing something so much worse at the same age,” Danielle Reyna said in a statement on January 4.

Claudio Reyna similarly admitted to sharing frustrations about his son’s World Cup experience—Gio, 20, appeared in just two of the team’s four games—with Stewart and former general manager Brian McBride. (McBride, Stewart, Berhalter, and Claudio Reyna were all teammates on the 2002 U.S. World Cup team that reached the quarterfinals, the U.S. men’s best finish in the modern era).

So when U.S. Soccer announced it had hired a law firm, Alston & Bird, to look into the Berhalter incident as well as “potential inappropriate behavior towards multiple members of our staff by individuals outside of our organization” (a.k.a. the Reynas), it stood to reason that the investigators would discover some parental meddling.

What they turned up, however, was worse than mere meddling. The findings, released on Monday, expose how some parents will unabashedly utilize friendships and connections to promote their own children at the expense of any and all others; how intertwining family, friendships, and sports can destroy lasting relationships; and how an inside story of helicopter parenting, at the pinnacle of the sporting world, is at times quite uncomfortable to read.

Complaint Department

The more sordid material starts on page 25 of the 36-page document Alston & Bird’s attorneys produced. Claudio Reyna, it turns out, had been sticking his neck into U.S. Soccer business for years. (Reynya worked for U.S. Soccer from 2010 to 2013 as the technical director for youth soccer, and he was the sporting director for Major League Soccer’s New York City FC and then Austin FC before he resigned from Austin on January 26).

In 2016, according to the document, Reyna urged a U.S. Soccer official to overturn a red card to allow Gio to play, instead of having to sit out, the next match—as if typical rules shouldn’t apply to his son.

In July of 2018, Reyna sent an email to an official complaining about the performance of a female referee in a 2018 match involving Gio again. “And in all honest [sic] can we get real and have male refs for a game like this,” Reyna wrote. “Its embarrassing guys. What are we trying to prove?”

In 2019, during the FIFA U-17 World Cup, Stewart told investigators that Reyna complained to him about Gio’s lack of playing time and what he saw as the team’s substandard travel arrangements. “Specifically,” the investigators wrote, “not flying business class.” According to the report, “Mr. Stewart commented that in his more than 20 years ‘in this business,’ he has never had these types of discussions with other players’ parents.”

Berhalter said that during that same World Cup, Reyna sent him texts ripping into the U-17 coach, calling him “the worst coach.” The report says that Berhalter provided texts sent by Reyna in 2019 and 2020, “complaining about Gio Reyna’s treatment, travel arrangements, and coaches,” to corroborate the claims.

“When things don’t go great for Gio,” Berhalter told the investigators, the Reynas “pivot and go into attack mode.”

The Turning Point

The Reynas didn’t hide their disapproval of U.S. Soccer during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. According to the report, after Gio was benched during Team USA’s World Cup opener against Wales, a 1-1 draw, Danielle Reyna refused to board the same bus as friends and family of the Berhalters.

After that first match, Reyna began to imply, vocally, that she possessed information that could hurt Berhalter. Gregg Berhalter said that the relationship between his wife Rosalind and Danielle Reyna, who had been teammates and roommates in college, instantly changed following that Wales game. “They had talked every day for decades,” he said. “And it ended immediately.”

Claudio Reyna, according to the report, sent the following text to McBride after the Wales game: “Our entire family is disgusted, angry, and done with you guys. Don’t expect nice comments from anyone in our family about US Soccer. I’m being transparent to you not like the political clown show of the federation.”

McBride and Stewart met with the Reynas on November 24, the day before the U.S. played England. “Mr. McBride commented that such a meeting would not typically occur with parents of players, but they agreed to it as a courtesy to Mr. Reyna given their long friendship and history as former teammates,” the attorneys wrote. “Mr. McBride informed us, that, during the meeting, Mr. Reyna stated, ‘you guys don’t even know what we know about Gregg,’ but offered no additional details.”

Lessons Learned

The investigators interviewed both Berhalters. “We were impressed with Mr. Berhalter’s candor and demeanor,” the investigators wrote, and they noted that Rosalind Berhalter also cooperated fully. The report states that the Berhalters offered consistent accounts about the 1992 incident, and investigators found no evidence that Gregg Berhalter ever repeated his violent outburst. He sought counseling, told his family and coaches about the incident, and he and Rosalind began dating again at the start of their sophomore year.

“There is no basis to conclude that employing Mr. Berhalter would create legal risks for an organization,” the investigators conclude, which is a key point: Berhalter remains under consideration to coach the U.S. men’s team at the 2026 World Cup in North America.

“We were less impressed with the Reynas’ cooperation,” the investigators wrote. Danielle Reyna, according to the report, at first denied that she spoke to Stewart on the phone on December 11. She then called the attorneys back to admit that she had told Stewart about the North Carolina incident involving the Berhalters. Claudio Reyna was not interviewed by investigators. While the documents make clear that Claudio Reyna did not violate any laws or U.S. Soccer policies, the report suggests that he may have run afoul of FIFA’s Code of Ethics by advocating for his own son while working as a club executive.

“Claudio and Danielle acknowledge that they have said and done things in the heat of the moment that they regret,” the Reynas’ agent, Dan Segal, said in a statement tweeted by Steven Goff of the Washington Post. “Gio acknowledges that, like countless players before, he showed too much disappointment when not selected to play at the World Cup. That is only part of the story here, but the only side of the story that investigators chose to tell. It is disheartening and grossly unfair to see the family turned into one-dimensional caricatures to progress a narrative that benefits others.”

Though the investigation has concluded, U.S. Soccer still finds itself in a difficult spot. Gio Reyna, who plays for Borussia Dortmund of Germany’s Bundesliga, remains a key component of U.S. Soccer’s future. If Berhalter is rehired, can the pair possibly coexist? Or if U.S. Soccer looks elsewhere for a coach, would a perception persist that the Reynas ultimately won this feud? The federation needs to sort this all out. In the meantime, sports parents the world over can take an immediate lesson from this whole sad affair.

In the heat of the moment, never text.

LONDON — Gary Lineker will return to airwaves after the BBC reversed the former soccer great’s suspension on Monday for a post on Twitter that had criticized the British government’s new asylum policy.

“Gary is a valued part of the BBC and I know how much the BBC means to Gary, and I look forward to him presenting our coverage this coming weekend,” BBC director general Tim Davie said.

Britain’s national broadcaster was forced to scrap much of its weekend sports programming after commentators, analysts and Premier League players refused to appear as a show of support of Lineker.

Lineker, one of English soccer’s most lauded players and the corporation’s highest-paid television presenter, was suspended Friday after he compared the Conservative government’s language about migrants to that used in Nazi Germany. The BBC said the tweet breached its impartiality rules, but critics accused it of suppressing free speech.

Davie said there would be an independent review of the BBC’s social media rules to address the “gray areas” in the guidelines.

Read More: ‘Maximum Suffering.’ A Man Stripped of His Citizenship Sheds Light on the Potential Impact of the U.K.’s Nationality Bill

Ever since Title IX opened the door to our participation, female athletes have been encouraged, or even required, to fight their body’s natural development and restrict their diet to keep up with the boys. But no matter how many news stories come out about the epidemic of disordered eating and subsequent injuries and trauma for women in high school and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sports, we have continually failed to address the root issue: sports, as we know it, have never been designed around the developmental norms of the female body.

As a woman with nearly three decades in elite sport, first as a five-time NCAA and two-time USA champion athlete, and later, a coach of professional female distance runners, my direct experience and research shows how insidious and widespread this problem is for female athletes across a variety of sports, while our institutions are doing little more than shrug.
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Why female athletes are experiencing harm in such large numbers isn’t a mystery. The sports institutions we fought to gain access to were designed by men for men and boys, and the system is built around physiology and performance norms for male bodies aged 14 to 22. But the male body develops in an entirely different way than the female body. A culture of leanness and expectations of linear progression may make sense for bodies that are responding to an influx of testosterone and androgens. Expecting the same of the female body during those same years is not only ignorant, it is also deeply harmful.

Typical healthy female puberty invests in the development of tissues such as breasts and other body composition shifts that are not immediately beneficial to performance, making the female body softer than the male body, even in elite athletics. In natural development, females can expect a temporary performance dip or plateau while the body adjusts to puberty and the menstrual cycle before making a second rise toward its prime. The cause of the plateau is normal and essential, but a lack of basic education about the female body causes it to be viewed as a deviation from the ideal or a devastating setback. Coaches and athletes associate male-like body fat levels with fitness, leading to a culture of body shaming and endorsement of food restriction. So much of the embodied experience of females during adolescence is viewed as a problem to be fixed or minimized. The result is that women and girls are placed at war with their own bodies.

Read More: After ‘Devastating’ Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade, Women Athletes Worry About Their Future

To combat this, we must assemble and mobilize the research that clearly demonstrates how female athletes are experiencing harm, and how that harm shows up long-term. Two to three times as many females as males develop stress fractures in NCAA sports. They experience anxiety at roughly twice the rate of their male peers. In response to the inhospitable environment for female development where 60% of females report pressure from coaching concerning body shape, an alarming 54% of female athletes report being dissatisfied with their weight, and of these, almost 90% believe they are overweight by an average of 13.6 pounds. 35% of female collegiate athletes are at risk of anorexia, (vs 10% of males) and 58% are at risk of bulimia (vs 35% of males). These diseases are extremely serious, carrying the second highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses behind opioid addiction. They break bones, impair mental function, damage major organs, and strain social relationships—and are notoriously difficult to recover from. Early intervention is key to having a chance at a full recovery, but the NCAA has no formal policy for eating disorders, despite creating the ideal environment for them to propagate.

As football coaches long did with concussions, coaches often look the other way—exploiting the temporary performance benefit that comes with weight loss, and failing to make the connection when everything comes crashing down. In the absence of formal policy or best practices, the individual programs and coaches that are trying to solve the problem are winging it. Those who prioritize athlete health can suffer losses to teams that exploit athlete bodies for points. This problem is far too serious to take a laissez-faire approach.

The result of an unrealistic body ideal and unchecked energy deficiency is an epidemic of RED-S, (relative energy deficiency in sport), a syndrome of impaired physiological function that is the focus of a surge in research right now. A remarkable 80% of female athletes screened for RED-S had at least one symptom, with period abnormalities being among the easiest to identify. Female athletes have experienced menstrual dysfunction at such high rates in sports for so many years that a lost period has come to be mistakenly viewed by many coaches, athletes, and even medical professionals as a “normal” response to training despite an abundance of research demonstrating that a healthy hormonal cycle is absolutely essential for immune function, recovery, sexual function, reproduction, mental health, and more.

Bone health is a particular area of concern for female athletes facing RED-S. During the ages female athletes need to be building their lifetime bone bank, too many are doing the opposite. One study of high school female runners average age seventeen showed that nearly half had a history of period loss and 42% had low bone mineral density. Those who go on to compete in college will be subject to two to three times the rate of stress fractures as their male peers, and if they have RED-S, fracture risk is four to five times more likely, all this despite participating in a sport widely known to increase bone density in the general population. The legacy continues years later: Former elite runners in their 60s were found to be more likely to have osteoporosis and bone fractures than their non-athlete peers. Now that we are finally able to study athletes into older ages, we can see that generations of women are carrying the invisible wounds of their sport experiences.

Monitoring, protecting, and talking about menstruation—a basic human function that affects half the population—is key to identifying and preventing harm, but our overwhelmingly male coaches often can’t even say the word “period” without euphemisms. At a minimum, we need mandatory education on female puberty and physiology for all coaches. As with concussions, addressing who is responsible is an essential next step in the path forward. Concussions were previously viewed as the athlete’s problem, an occasional bad luck consequence of playing the sport. But when research showed how concussions actually stemmed from institutional neglect, everything changed. The harm is now attributed to poor prevention and treatment policies in the sporting institutions, making the institutions themselves liable. Once it potentially costs more to ignore a problem than fix it, concrete changes follow.

If women and girls were placed in sporting environments built around the norms of female puberty and female improvement trajectories, if their bodies were respected and encouraged to develop in their own time, outcomes for women would be entirely different. We can utilize the research on female athletes to drive change, and we must.

But this story goes far beyond statistics. I’ve lived it. Countless women who have gone through our sports systems carry a story about themselves that isn’t true. They were told something was wrong with their changing bodies, when they were actually right on time for a timeline nobody around them was educated about. This false story changed their sport experiences and their conceptions of themselves.

The war against one’s body extends years beyond one’s final competition, creating a kind of psychological static that colors so much of life. We cannot quantify this kind of pain or loss as easily as broken bones, but if we decide we care, if we are strategic, we can prevent it.

Near the end of a 20-minute conversation on Thursday from her home in Vermont, Olympic middle-distance runner Elle Purrier St. Pierre apologized for feeling a bit tired. She didn’t need to do so, given she could go into labor at any moment.

The holder of the American record in the indoor mile and indoor two-mile, Purrier St. Pierre, 27, announced that she was pregnant last September. In the past, many female athletes, particularly in track and field, felt like they had to choose between starting a family and pursuing their sporting dreams. Purrier St. Pierre, however, hopes to join an emerging class of athletes who’ve embraced pregnancy and returned to compete at a high level.
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Purrier St. Pierre and her husband, Jamie, also work a dairy farm in Vermont, where they both grew up. She spoke with TIME about why she wanted to start a family while continuing her athletic career; why she only stopped running a few weeks ago; and the challenges of training while pregnant—especially when nosy strangers give you those looks.

(This conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity)

TIME: So today is really your due date?

Purrier St. Pierre: Yes.

Wow.

I’m still pregnant.

I’ve been covering sports here for more than 20 years, and can honestly say I’ve never interviewed any athlete, Olympic or otherwise, on her due date. So thank you for this opportunity to do something new. We’d love to share with readers some insight about what you’re going through.

The biggest challenge is just trying to relax and not be so anxious. It’s just the anticipation. The unknown is what drives me nuts. But at the same time, I’m so excited for this next chapter. You’re almost like a kid going to Disney World.

I haven’t been running the last couple of weeks. That’s definitely been a challenge. Running has been different. With my growing belly, I don’t really feel like myself. I’m a capable person, and this belly has definitely slowed me down. At the same time, I have such a greater appreciation for my body, going through this process and being able to bring life into the world. It’s kind of amazing that women’s bodies can do that.

So you only stopped running a few weeks ago. What is the hardest part of running while pregnant?

Progressively getting slower and feeling worse on your runs. I hadn’t been feeling like myself from the start. I didn’t know I was pregnant at USAs [the U.S.A Track and Field Outdoor Championships, in June of 2022]. I didn’t feel good. I felt fine enough to not know that I was pregnant. But I don’t think I ran as best that I could. So it really does take a toll on your body.

It’s just being mentally strong through it. Because I was still able to run all the way up to pretty much the end of my pregnancy. But it just looked different. And so embracing that difference was challenging. But doing that was able to get me through.

Starting a family presents much bigger challenges for female professional athletes than their male counterparts. Some choose to wait until their athletic careers are over before having children. There have been several recent high-profile examples of women returning from childbirth and still enjoying athletic success. Allyson Felix, Serena Williams, and Alex Morgan come to mind. Was it a struggle for you to make that decision to have a family now? What ultimately made you comfortable with making that choice?

It’s definitely a really personal decision. In a way, I feel like I didn’t make the decision. I just followed my heart. It was a piece of me that has been missing, that I’ve wanted in my life for so long.

But ultimately, it was a decision. I gained confidence from seeing other athletes do it. I don’t think that comes lightly. It used to be a lot harder, but now we have a lot more resources and a lot more support than we used to.

I really believe that this is going to make my career last longer. Because I wanted this so badly. And if I was to wait and do it later when I was older, it might have been harder to come back or my career might have been cut shorter. You never know how long you’re going to run. It’s not a secret that I’m not going to be running these times when I’m 50 years old.

I’m not going to say I didn’t try to plan it around the Olympics [in 2024, in Paris]. That’s still something that people take into consideration. But yeah, there are just a lot more women doing it now.

You’ve mentioned there’s more resources available to female athletes now. But that hasn’t always been the case, particularly in track and field. A few years back, Felix, for example, felt compelled to hide the early stages of her pregnancy from her shoe sponsor. Were you afraid to tell your coach or your sponsors about your pregnancy?

My coach was the first person that I told. I guess I was a little nervous to tell him because it was in between USAs and Worlds. But he was so supportive. The first time that I told him, he’s like, “that’s great, you and Jamie should be so excited.” I feel really fortunate having such a great sponsor that has supported me through this. The vice president of running [at New Balance] sent me a personal message when he found out that I was pregnant. It was nothing about running. It was like, “I just heard the great news, congratulations.” He was telling me to enjoy this time in my life. That’s a big step.

[Purrier St. Pierre will be featured in New Balance’s “Run Your Way” brand campaign—launching broadly in mid-March— that celebrates runners of all shapes and sizes.]

Read More: Motherhood Could Have Cost Olympian Allyson Felix. She Wouldn’t Let It

The World Championships are in Budapest this summer, in August. Ideally, how soon after giving birth do you want to be training again?

It’s really hard to tell. I have to make plans with my doctor, depending on how labor goes. I think I’ll slowly build back up. I don’t think I’m putting any limits on anything. I’m really just focusing on bringing this baby into the world right now. But after that, the biggest goal is going to be the Olympics. I’d like to have a smaller season this summer and see what I’m able to do. But I’m not putting high expectations on anything this summer.

What’s it been like working on the dairy farm while pregnant?

I’ve been working at the farm a bit more since I haven’t been training and traveling as much. That’s something that’s actually been able to help me a lot through this pregnancy. I really like to stay busy. So when I haven’t been lifting as much and running as much, I’ve had more time to do these other things. It’s helped me stay mentally healthy, working at the farm and being busy and making a difference there. It is kind of like a double life that I live. It’s been pretty nice to be home a little.

You may have heard: parents can be quite judgmental of other parents! So as an expecting parent who only stopped running a few weeks ago, were there relatives or friends or just strangers questioning your commitment to push yourself? Did you encounter judgment?

Definitely. People just make a lot of comments. Just being pregnant, it opens the door, for whatever reason, for people to make comments.

I’ve heard people talk about that. And I never really experienced it. Now I have and I know how it feels. It’s a really sensitive time in your life. You don’t want to feel judged. But you have to at the end of the day know that you’re making the best decision for yourself and your baby and just be confident in that. As a runner, I’ve learned how to listen to my body and know the cues and know what’s right. I’ve carried that through my pregnancy and I’ve made so many adaptations to this body right now.

What kind of adaptations?

Well, running less. I was able to run an hour a day pretty far into the fall. I just slowly have kind of phased out. Doing things differently in the gym. Not using certain muscles. I can’t use certain muscles in my stomach right now.

But I feel like people have always wanted to protect pregnant women. It comes from a good place. But everybody’s different. You can’t just have one size fits all. Just because you couldn’t run when you were pregnant doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t. It doesn’t mean that it’s not healthy. That goes for not just running, but for any other kind of physical activity or job—pregnant women should still be able to do it without being judged.

Any final takeaways you’d like to share?

Listen to your body and do what makes you happy. You can’t just cut everything out of your life. You have to do it in smaller steps. I don’t have all the answers. This is my first pregnancy, but here I am at 40 weeks. I made it through. I still have a long way to go and I would just say, lean on your support group.

This is what my grandma always says to me. She’s like, “people have big opinions about what pregnant people should and shouldn’t do. But if you’re a runner then and you’re pregnant, then you’re still a runner. If you ride horses and you’re pregnant, you can still ride horses.”

I wouldn’t say take up riding horses. Maybe that’s not the best example. [Laughs] You have to do what you do when you’re pregnant. Because mentally, that’s who you are. You can’t just completely change your identity.

Last thing: babies are smart, right? Their brains learn language and process the world around them, even though we often can’t tell that it’s happening. So assuming your son can hear you right now and understand you, is there anything you’d like to say to him right now?

I talk to him sometimes, I guess. I would just tell him to be strong—and we’ll see you soon.

So not “come out already?”

He’s getting an eviction notice here pretty soon.

In my unhumble opinion, Jackie Robinson is the greatest American in history/­herstory. I met him only once. It was in his later years, at a Long Island University basketball game, which was played at what used to be the Paramount Theatre, where Frank Sinatra sang to thousands of Bobby Soxers, at the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush, across the street from Junior’s cheesecake, in the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York.

During halftime, my Father pushed me toward Jackie, whose head was full of gray. At first I couldn’t believe this man was the great Jackie Robinson. I went up to him and said, “My name is Spike Lee and I know who you are.” His big hand swallowed mine. Jackie said, “Young fella, do you play baseball?” I answered, “Yes, sir.” Jackie said, “What position?” I quickly answered, “Second base.” “So did I!” Jackie shot back. After that, my Father taught me how Branch Rickey signed Jackie to the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color barrier.
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Read the original story from 1947: Rookie of the Year

“Dem Bums” were the favorite team for Black Folks, even the ones who didn’t know about baseball. They said their prayers every night on bended knee that Jackie would get a hit. They knew a lot—maybe everything—was riding on this. The advancement of The Negro Race. No African American had more pressure on him/her to succeed than Jackie. OK, you may throw President Barack Obama in there, but if Jackie had failed “the Great Experiment,” would Obama be the First Black President? Jackie’s failure would have set Black Folks back for many generations afterwards. Martin Luther King Jr. said himself, “without him I would never have been able to do what I did.” He was a Sit-Inner before Sit-Ins. A Freedom Rider before Freedom Rides.

The deal Jackie made with Branch Rickey was that no matter what, he couldn’t fight back. NO MATTER WHAT. Imagine the pressure. The entirety of African American progress is on your shoulders. The thing I feel kept the great Jackie Robinson safe and grounded is Rachel Robinson, who just turned 100 years young. She was his Rock. She knew the Hell he was going through, especially in 1947, the year of his major-­league debut and of his TIME cover, a cover that now hangs in my office—before Rickey signed other Black players like Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe. This strong Black Woman stood by his side and loved him. I have gotten to know Ms. Robinson over the years. She is the definition of GRACE. She reminds me of my Grandmother Zimmie Shelton; she lived to be 100 years young too. These Black Women, pillars of our communities, stood by their Men, who, under the tyranny of White Supremacy in this country, were denied their manhood. Our Grandparents and Parents, these Warriors, did what W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, with their different ideologies, championed: Uplift the Race.

When I was writing my original screenplay for Do the Right Thing, I knew I had to honor Jackie Roosevelt Robinson in this third Spike Lee Joint. Mookie proudly wore Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers home jersey, number 42. Major League Baseball retired Jackie’s number 42 in 1997; my question is: What took them so long?

Lee is a writer, director, and producer

Soccer fans in Istanbul flooded the pitch on Feb. 26 with plush toys for children who survived the two devastating earthquakes that hit earlier this month. 4 minutes and 17 seconds in, the match was paused for the donations in remembrance of the first earthquake, which struck at 4:17 a.m.

Videos of the “This Toy is For You” event—which took place during a match between teams Beşiktaş and Antalyaspor at the former’s Vodafone Park—showed fans showering the field with teddy bears, plush dogs, and at least one monkey attached to a letter that seemed to be hand-written by a child.
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Over 44,000 people have been confirmed dead following two earthquakes on Feb. 6, which reached 7.7 and 7.6 on the Richter scale in the southeastern city of Kahramanmaraş, according to the Turkish interior ministry’s disaster and emergency management authority. Over 5,000 people also died in Syria, according to Reuters.

During the match, there was also a reminder that many Turks are critical of the government’s response to the disaster, with some fans chanting “government resign,” CNN reported. Earthquake survivors told TIME that the government dispatched an inadequate number of emergency teams, which delayed rescues from the rubble. Meanwhile, the government worked to curb dissent in the aftermath of the disaster, blocking Twitter for 12 hours and arresting people who had criticized the government.

The Turkish Justice Ministry has announced the investigation of 134 people who were allegedly responsible for the collapse of buildings in the earthquakes, including contractors, although others have argued that there is shared responsibility across the government for fostering a corrupt system.

PHILADELPHIA — The NCAA asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to reject a legal effort to make colleges treat Division I athletes like employees and start paying them an hourly wage.

Lawyers for the student-athletes said that weekly, they often spend 30 hours or more on their sport and often need money for expenses, even if they are on full scholarship. And they believe the athletes deserve a share in the millions that are spent on coaches, college administrators and facilities — and the billions that networks pay to televise college sports.

They are not seeking pay equivalent to their market value, but only a modest across-the-board pay rate similar to those earned by work-study students, the lawyers said.
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“This does not open up a circumstance in which there’s a bidding war (for top talent),” lawyer Michael Willemin said.

The NCAA urged the court to uphold the tradition of college athletes being unpaid amateurs. Critics of the pay-for-play scheme also fear the cost could lead schools to cut sports that don’t generate as much or any revenue while sending more resources to their profitable football and basketball programs.

Read More: Why Telling the NCAA to Pay Players Is the Wrong Way to Help College Athletes

Lawyer Steven B. Katz, arguing for the NCAA, said a finding that athletes are employees “launches you on the edge of a slippery slope that rapidly takes you to someplace that you don’t want to go.”

As an example, he said that the cost to attend some of the private colleges involved in the case exceed $70,000 a year. The value of a full scholarship would far outweigh the $10,000 to $15,000 the athletes might earn if they were paid a modest hourly wage, he argued.

Katz also said the scholarships could become taxable if the students are deemed employees. And he questioned how teams would function if some students were “paid employees” on scholarship while walk-ons without a scholarship were not.

At least one person on the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Theodore McKee, seemed to think at least some student-athletes may be employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act — while acknowledging such a finding would create “so many practical problems.”

Would football players at powerhouse schools earn more than swimmers at small schools? What about Division II athletes?

“Maybe that’s where we end up — that the quarterback at the SEC school is an employee and the woman who’s running cross-country track at Alabama, they’re not an employee,” McKee said.

When Katz raised the potential risk of back taxes being owed, McKee cut him off, saying “the case is complicated enough without us going down that” rabbit hole.

A lower court judge had declined to dismiss the lawsuit before it went to trial, prompting the NCAA to appeal. The three-judge panel did not indicate when it would rule.

Willemin, arguing for the students, said the NCAA burdens athletes with rigid rules on gambling, earning outside income and free speech while their school teams further restrict their choices by controlling their class schedule, study halls and at times even their college major. The NCAA could loosen its grip on student-athletes and the case might go away, he suggested.

“The NCAA has turned the idea of student-athlete on its head, even in non-revenue generating sports,” he said. “These are regulations the NCAA can change. They’ve chosen not to change them.”

The case is just the latest one to test the NCAA’s traditional amateurism model — and comes as the organization already faces complicated issues stemming from the advent of “name, image and likeness deals that can top $1 million for the most popular college athletes.

The NCAA also hopes that Congress might weigh in, given a series of setbacks in the courts. They include the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that lifted the ban on compensation beyond full scholarships, and lets colleges give athletes education-related benefits such as computers and study abroad program fees.

In recent history, working as an offensive coordinator for a Super Bowl-winning team has almost guaranteed you a head-coaching job in the NFL.

Unless you’re Black.

Just look at the record. The Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LII, in 2018. About a week later, Eagles offensive coordinator Frank Reich was introduced as the new head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. He took that job after the Super Bowl-winning offensive coordinator in 2017, Josh McDaniels of the New England Patriots, decided at the last minute to turn down the Colts job and keep his assistant position in New England. The Patriots won Super Bowl LIII, in 2019, the following year. McDaniels is now the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.
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Then the Kansas City Chiefs began what could be a dynasty. KC won Super Bowl LIV, in 2020. But Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, a Black former NFL running back, did not receive any head-coaching opportunities. The following season, Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Chiefs. Bucs offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, a Black former NFL quarterback, was not hired as a head coach. Leftwich took himself out of consideration for the Jacksonville Jaguars job the following season, reportedly because he did not want to work with with the team’s incumbent general manager. Tampa Bay fired Leftwich as offensive coordinator in January.

Read More: America’s Most Popular Sport Belongs to One Person: Patrick Mahomes

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Rams won last year’s Super Bowl. Afterward, the Minnesota Vikings finalized the hiring of that team’s offensive coordinator, Kevin O’Connell, was their new head coach. And on Sunday, the Chiefs won their second Super Bowl in four seasons, as they eked out a 38-35 thriller over the Eagles in a game watched by 113 million people, the third-highest viewed TV program in history. After the game, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid went out of his way to praise Bieniemy. “Eric Bieniemy was tremendous down the stretch there, putting things together,” Reid told Fox’s Terry Bradshaw during the Lombardi Trophy presentation. He told another interviewer that Bieniemy was “phenomenal.” Kansas City’s clever play designs and adjustments helped the team overcome a 10-point deficit.

But once again, Bieniemy was passed over for a head-coaching job. He had interviewed for the Indianapolis Colts’ position, but on Tuesday, the team announced that it was hiring the offensive coordinator from the losing Super Bowl team, Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen.

“Eric Bieniemy has done everything he is supposed to do” to secure a head-coaching job, says Louis Moore, professor of history at Grand Valley State University who specializes in African-American and sports history. “He’s worked his way up, and he’s won. If he was white, he would have a job. There’s no question about that.”

According to one accounting, Bieniemy has interviewed 17 times, with 16 different teams, for head-coaching positions since the Chiefs reached the first of their five straight AFC championship games, back in 2019. At this point, one reason often cited for his lack of opportunities—that Reid, not Bieniemy, calls the plays in Kansas City—feels particularly hollow. Two former Chiefs offensive coordinators—Doug Pederson and Matt Nagy—under Reid were also not regular play-callers for most of their tenures. Nor had they won Super Bowls in Kansas City, like Bieniemy has. But both were hired as head coaches: Nagy by the Chicago Bears, and Pederson with the Eagles, where he won a Super Bowl.

Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh did not call offensive plays as the special-teams coach for the Eagles before being hired as Ravens head coach in 2008. Nor did Joe Judge, another special-teams coach whom the New York Giants hired as head coach in 2020. Harbaugh won a Super Bowl and has held the job for 15 years. Judge was fired after two seasons.

Less accomplished coaches, like Steichen, are getting jobs before Bieniemy. Younger white coordinators, it seems, are more likely to be labeled offensive gurus or wunderkinds. Few have granted Bieniemy that cachet.

“Bieniemy is going on probably the greatest five-year offensive stretch in history right with the most dynamic quarterback ever,” says Moore. “And the Chiefs are making a conscious effort to make him out to be the guy. What more do you need to be done? The NFL hasn’t come to terms that there could be a Black genius.”

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To Moore, the Bieniemy situation reveals the NFL’s institutional struggles with racism. A group of former Black NFL head coaches, for example, are suing the league for discrimination. Nearly 70% of NFL players are Black, but just three of the league’s 32 teams have Black head coaches (Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Todd Bowles in Tampa Bay, and DeMeco Ryans in Houston; Miami’s Mike McDaniel is biracial). Colin Kaepernick, a Black quarterback who led a protest movement against racial injustice back in 2016, has been out of the league since then. Former Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Jon Gruden was fired after racist, sexist, and homophobic emails he sent were made public. The NFL used “race-norming” in determining payouts for retired players under the league’s $1 billion concussion settlement: this testing method assumed Black players start with lower cognitive function, making it harder for them to show they suffer from a mental deficit linked to their playing days. After a lawsuit and an uproar, the NFL agreed to end race-based testing in 2021.

In his 34 years as owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones has never hired a Black head coach. Todd Boyd, a professor of race and popular culture at USC, points to a key comment that Jones made in a Washington Post article back in November. That story contained a picture of a teenaged Jones standing in a crowd of white boys blocking the path of Black students seeking to desegregate an Arkansas high school back in 1957. While that photo sparked understandable controversy, Boyd believes Jones’ revealing words on why more Black coaches aren’t hired got lost in the uproar.

Jones admitted that, in his experience, the actual job interview for head coaches doesn’t mean all that much. He hired people he knew, like former Cowboys coaches Jimmy Johnson, a former roomate with whom he played on an all-white championship team at the University of Arkansas, and Barry Switzer, another friend from Arkansas. Jones did almost hire a Black head coach, Dennis Green, in the early 2000s. But that was only after he worked with Green on the NFL’s competition committee—and got to know him. (Jones ultimately passed on Green to hire Bill Parcells, who had coached the Giants to two Super Bowl victories.)

“I didn’t hire Jimmy through an interview. Did I? I didn’t hire Barry Switzer through an interview, okay? And I didn’t want Denny through an interview at the time. But I knew ’em,” Jones told the Post.

“The question, as Jones sees it, is how to escort Black coaches into the circle of cronyism so they don’t have to be interviewed,” wrote Post journalists David Marannis and Sally Jenkins. “Jones insists the most avid candidates will find a way in.”

“To me, that explains everything,” says Boyd. “It is an old boys’ club. These old boys are going to hire whoever they want.”

Colts owner Jim Irsay, for example, hired former Colts great Jeff Saturday as interim coach this season. Saturday had never spent a second on a college or professional coaching staff. Indianapolis finished 1-7 under Saturday.

“These guys do not want to hire Black coaches,” says Boyd. “Maybe when they make the decision, that’s not at the front of their mind. Maybe they don’t say, ‘I’m not going to hire a Black coach.’ That’s the result. They can think of a million and one reasons why not to do it that have nothing overtly to do with race. But when you look at who are the coaches in the NFL, it speaks for itself.”

The Chiefs held their Super Bowl victory parade today. Bieniemy will reportedly interview with the Washington Commanders on Thursday. For their vacant offensive coordinator position.

Fox was hoping the matchup of two top teams in the Super Bowl and a close game would lead to a record night.

Even though Sunday’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles came down to a field goal with 8 seconds remaining, Fox fell just short of its goal.

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The Chiefs’ rally to defeat the Eagles 38-35 is on pace to become the third most-watched television show in history, with an estimated 113 million people watching, according to preliminary numbers released Monday.
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Fox said the audience estimate includes the broadcasts on Fox and Fox Deportes as well as streaming on Fox and the NFL’s digital sites. The figures are via Nielsen’s Fast National data and Adobe Analytics.

The 2015 game between New England and Seattle on NBC holds the record at 114,442,000 viewers (not including streaming), followed by Super Bowl 51 in 2017 on Fox between Atlanta and New England (113,668,000).

This was Fox’s 10th Super Bowl since it began airing NFL games in 1994 and the second most-watched program in Fox Sports history.

It would also be a slight increase over the 112.3 million average for last year’s Super Bowl. The Los Angeles Rams’ victory over the Cincinnati Bengals was broadcast by NBC and Telemundo and streamed on Peacock and NFL digital sites.

According to Adobe Analytics, this year’s digital feed averaged a Super Bowl-record 7 million streams, an 18% increase over last year (6 million) and more than double Fox’s last Super Bowl in 2020 (3.4 million).

It was the third straight year the streaming average has surpassed 5 million. The first Super Bowl to be streamed, in 2012, averaged 346,000.

Rihanna’s halftime show averaged 118.7 million viewers, making it the second-most watched in Super Bowl history. Katy Perry’s 2015 performance holds the top mark at 121 million.

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The Spanish-language audience average for the game was 951,000, a record for the most-watched Super Bowl game in Spanish-language cable television history. It was also the most watched non-soccer event in Spanish-language cable history.

The Spanish-language number is down from last year’s record of 1.9 million on Telemundo, which unlike Fox Deportes has broadcast affiliates in 90 markets.

The Super Bowl has been televised in Spanish in the United States since 2014.

Final Nielsen data will be available on Tuesday, including the English-language television-only figures. After Super Bowls averaged over 100 million viewers from 2010-18, four of the five games before this year had fallen short of that number because of cord-cutting. That included 95.2 million for the 2021 Super Bowl between Tampa Bay and Kansas City, which was the game’s lowest TV-only average since 2007.

If Sunday’s number can better the 99.18 million from last year, it would mark the first time since 2015 there had been two straight years of increases.

Unsurprisingly, Kansas City and Philadelphia were the two highest-ranked markets. Kansas City led the way with a 52.0 rating and 87 share followed by Philadelphia’s 46.3/77.

The rating is the percentage of television households tuned in. The share refers to a percentage of the TV-watching audience viewing a particular program at the time.

Cincinnati, which lost to the Chiefs in the AFC championship game, and Minneapolis also recorded 77 shares.

The flood of ads during what is easily television’s most-watched event of the year was heavy on celebrities — Ben Affleck, Ozzy Osbourne, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Martha Stewart and “Breaking Bad” cast members.

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Steve Williamson, senior vice president of the market research firm GWI. said surveys show that trust in brands is down this year and companies were looking for well-known names for a boost.

“There wasn’t a primary brand that took over the Super Bowl,” he said. “There were all sorts of brands from alcohol to gambling to Jesus.”

Fox also said 15.5 million people watched the season premiere of Gordon Ramsay’s competition show “Next Level Chef” following the game. The spot after the Super Bowl is usually the most-coveted time slot on television.

— AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed to this report.

When Patrick Mahomes hobbled off the field late in the first half of Super Bowl LVII on Sunday night in Glendale, Ariz., the worry felt real. He appeared to have twisted his right ankle, the same ankle that he injured in an earlier playoff game against the Jacksonville Jaguars and that hampered his mobility in the AFC Championship Game two weeks ago against the Cincinnati Bengals. Mahomes couldn’t hide the pain on his face. The Philadelphia Eagles went into halftime leading Kansas City, 24-14. For the second time in three years, Mahomes and the Chiefs were in danger of a Super Bowl letdown.
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Mahomes, however, had something more magical in mind.

Reminiscent of his Super Bowl performance in 2020, Mahomes rallied his team from a double-digit deficit in the second half, as the Chiefs scored on each of their offensive possessions in the last 30 minutes of the game to beat the Philadelphia Eagles in a thrilling 38-35 victory on Super Bowl Sunday. Mahomes won his second Super Bowl MVP award, completing 21 of 27 passes for 182 yards and three touchdown throws. He threw zero interceptions, and on a creaky ankle in the second half, Mahomes completed two key scrambles—one for 14 yards, the other for 26 yards—that further proved his generational talent.

At Super Bowls, the sideshows often steal attention from the games. Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake. A blackout. Buzzy ads and halftime shows. This year, the commercials largely received meh reviews. Rihanna certainly showed up, as she showed off her baby bump to the world to become the first pregnant woman to star at the Super Bowl halftime.

The game itself was headed for all-time-classic status, before a late holding penalty called on Eagles cornerback James Bradberry gave the Chiefs a crucial first down, essentially sealing the Chiefs’ victory and draining the game of last-second drama. Kansas City was then able to run the clock down to 11 seconds, setting up a chip-shot field goal from Harrison Butker to seal the win. The Eagles got one more play off in the waning seconds, put a desperation pass fell well short.

To many, the holding call felt egregious. LeBron James, for example, offered a reasonable reaction. “His hand on his back had no effect on his route!” James wrote on Twitter. “This game was too damn good for that call to dictate the outcome at the end. Damn!”

After the game, however, Bradbury came clean, making it more difficult to lament the refs.

In the end, Mahomes owns this Super Bowl. He’s the first Black quarterback to win two Super Bowls. (His quarterback opponent in this game, Jalen Hurts of the Eagles, had a fine first Super Bowl outing—throwing for 304 yards and a touchdown pass and no interceptions—and it’s easy to imagine him back on this stage). Mahomes is now one of just six players in NFL history to win a pair of Super Bowl MVPs, joining Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana, Tom Brady, and Eli Manning. He’s the third youngest player to win multiple NFL MVP awards, and he’s the first player in 23 years—since Kurt Warner in 1999—to be the NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP in the same season.

To be sure, the Chiefs turned in a stellar all-around effort. Kansas City’s line play, on both sides of the ball, deserves kudos. The Chiefs rushed for 158 yards, and a fourth-quarter special teams play—a 65-yard punt return by Kadarius Toney, who also caught a fourth-quarter touchdown pass—will be long remembered along the Kansas-Missouri state line. And it’s borderline scandalous that Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, whom Kansas City head coach Andy Reid praised repeatedly in the postgame celebration, hasn’t received a head coaching gig.

Still, this Super Bowl lesson is clear. Tom Brady is finally gone. Mahomes is a multiple-time champion—at 27. Football, now more than ever, is a quarterback-driven sport.

No need to overthink this. The NFL belongs to Patrick Mahomes.

PHOENIX — The Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs is rapidly approaching. Here are some things to know ahead of Sunday’s game:

How do I watch?

The game begins at 6:30 p.m. EST on Sunday and can be viewed on Fox, Fox Deportes and the NFL+ app. It can also be streamed on multiple services, including YouTube TV. The national radio broadcast is on Westwood One.

Who are the teams and players?

The Kansas City Chiefs are back in the Super Bowl for the third time in four years after winning another AFC Championship. The Chiefs won Super Bowl 54 against the 49ers after the 2019 season but lost to the Buccaneers after 2020.
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The Chiefs are led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who claimed his second MVP award on Thursday night. They’ve also got several other stars, led by tight end Travis Kelce and defensive lineman Chris Jones.

The Philadelphia Eagles won the NFC championship and are trying to win their second Super Bowl in six years. They’re led by quarterback and MVP finalist Jalen Hurts, receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith and linebacker Haason Reddick.

What’s the half-time show?

Nine-time Grammy Award winner Rihanna is the headline act of this year’s halftime show.

She’s had 14 No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits, including “We Found Love,” “Work,” “Umbrella” and “Disturbia.” She and rapper A$AP Rocky recently welcomed her first child.

“The setlist was the biggest challenge. That was the hardest, hardest part. Deciding how to maximize 13 minutes but also celebrate — that’s what this show is going to be. It’s going to be a celebration of my catalog in the best way that we could have put it together,” Rihanna said.

Where’s the game being played?

The Super Bowl will be played at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, which is home to the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals. Glendale is a suburb of Phoenix.

It’s the third Super Bowl the stadium has hosted.

The Phoenix area is no stranger to big events: In fact, two of them are happening right now. The Super Bowl is obviously attracting a lot of attention but the yearly WM Phoenix Open is also this week, drawing thousands of golf fans — and a steady stream of private planes — to the city to watch players like top-ranked Rory McElroy.

The NBA even made a brief cameo: The Phoenix Suns acquired superstar Kevin Durant in a trade with the Brooklyn Nets late Wednesday that rocked the sport and galvanized the city’s fan base.

Who is favored?

The Eagles are favored by 1 1/2 points to beat the Chiefs, according to FanDuel Sportsbook, and the line has stayed fairly constant over the past two weeks. The over-under is 50.5 points.

Picking the game’s winner is one of the basic ways to bet, but there are many, many prop bets gamblers can also choose.

Sportsbooks have taken advantage of the increasing popularity of prop bets, which could range from whether there will be a safety to whether the Chiefs or Eagles will score more points than NBA stars LeBron James or Steph Curry when their teams meet the day before the big game.

Professional sports bettors tend to make the more traditional wagers and look for value in the props if they believe they can find a betting number to exploit. For the most part, the props belong to the general public.

What were the top moments from NFL Honors?

The league had its yearly “NFL Honors” show on Thursday night, with Mahomes receiving his second MVP and Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott earning the NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year.

Another highlight: Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin made his second appearance of the week, paying tribute to those who had a hand in giving him a second chance at life.

Hamlin was on stage a little more than a month after he went into cardiac arrest and needed to be resuscitated on the field in Cincinnati.