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A Browns fan weighs how to think about Deshaun Watson

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A Browns fan weighs how to think about Deshaun Watson

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I first started rooting for the Cleveland Browns more than 50 years ago. It was about six years after the team had won the 1964 championship against the Baltimore Colts behind the running of Jim Brown, the passing of Frank Ryan and a stout defense.

I was 2 months old when Cleveland won that "chip," its last ever. In an attempt to get back to the top of the NFL some 58 years later, the Browns signed a player they think can restore the magic of Ryan and Brown. Deshaun Watson received the biggest contract in club history, for the most guaranteed money in league history, a deal that will pay him $230 million over five seasons.

Watson also has another distinction: Twenty-two massage therapists and other women have accused him of sexual assault, sexual harassment and additional inappropriate behavior while he was with his former team, the Houston Texans. Each woman has filed a lawsuit.

The allegations didn't stop numerous teams from entering the Watson sweepstakes, once a Texas district attorney announced that a grand jury decided not to pursue criminal charges. And the Browns, with their historic offer, prevailed.

Now, as a lifelong fan and season-ticket holder, I've had to figure out if this team is still worth supporting. Football has been a critical part of my life since I was a boy playing it on the playgrounds in my East Cleveland neighborhood in the late '60s. As a teen, I sold hot dogs with the famous "stadium mustard" that supposedly could only be found in Cleveland. As an adult, I became a season-ticket holder right after the team managed to lose all 16 of its games in 2017. I guess I was buying in low.

I've watched the Browns in recent years get more desperate as they've tried to build a championship roster. Many great players don't choose to come to Cleveland. And the Browns have been poor evaluators of college personnel over the years.

One way around that front-office incompetence is to try to find value in players who might not come to your team or stick with your team unless you overpay to get them or let them stay despite off-the-field trouble. There's a long list of these flawed players on the Browns in recent years. Watson is now one of them. Running back Kareem Hunt is another.

I love the Browns. They were often a distraction for me as I grew up on some of Cleveland's meanest streets. But with the Watson signing, after some of the others, I've asked myself is it worth it. The answer to that is that if I thought it would change anything, I would probably not support the team financially. Yet I don't believe trying to cancel this product that's so dear to me is the way to make a meaningful change.

Deshaun Watson walks off the field after warm-ups against the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field on Dec. 13, 2020, in Chicago.
Stacy Revere/Getty Images

Other Browns fans, though, say they've had enough.

"Officially done w/ @Browns," one fan wrote on Twitter. "This is morally repugnant & I want no part of it. Contacted my ticket rep to let him know to cancel everything."

Watson is accused of crimes that have put many other men behind bars. You can read the summary of the lawsuits against him here. It's bad stuff and includes allegations that he ordered massages and touched the female workers with his penis and forced some to give him oral sex. An attorney ended up filing 23 lawsuits on behalf of the plaintiffs (one suit was later dropped).

Watson has professed his innocence through his attorney and on social media, but he's not spoken to the media or said anything else in public about the allegations. The NFL is investigating the claims. That Texas grand jury heard evidence for six hours on March 11 and decided there wasn't enough evidence to indict the quarterback.

The decision to not charge Watson set off the derby to sign Watson and now the civil cases are front and center. Many fans and pundits have adopted the "where there's smoke, there's fire" belief. Given that 22 women are proceeding with lawsuits against him, few of the critics believe Watson is without some culpability.

I'm in that camp, for sure. There are just too many complainants and too many specific details from different accusers for me to look at these circumstances and say they're all part of a conspiracy targeting Watson. I believe that the Browns, who said they did a thorough investigation into the matter that didn't include talking to any of the women or their attorney, have to know this.

Watson is a highly compensated professional athlete. Many fans ask more of professional ballplayers. They want them to uphold a high standard for behavior. They're appalled at the notion of Watson propositioning massage therapists who are trying to make a living to support their families.

What he is alleged to have done is reprehensible, whether the district attorney can figure out a way to file charges or not. Others have written about this aspect of the Watson saga and have said it well.

My goal here is not to regurgitate what's already been said. But it's to provide the view of one longtime Browns fan, one who has been invested in the team since childhood and who drives or flies to most home games, even though I live nearly 500 miles away.

I think the easiest thing for someone like me to do would be to withdraw support from the team. Certainly if the women accusing Watson are brave enough to file a lawsuit, knowing full well their names might end up before the public, that's the least that I can do.

Yet I fail to see how that would help things. Teams have been signing ogres as long as they've believed the most important thing is winning. The Browns have drafted and signed players who have had criminal records or other such allegations of wrongdoing since 2016. Watching the team at work for as long as I have, I think they've become more desperate to win over the years. The fact that the other in-state NFL team reached the Super Bowl this year, something that the Browns have never done, only increased the pressure on the Cleveland front office.

Watson is, indeed, a rare talent, one that the Browns decision-makers have been looking for for a couple decades. Most superstar professional athletes have not willingly come to play for the Browns. Odell Beckham Jr. is one of the few who have agreed to a trade to Cleveland in the prime of his career. Cleveland is a relatively small sports market where the weather is often not good and the nightlife is quiet, relatively speaking. It's not Miami or New York.

The Browns signed Watson, even though he'd become a pariah, hoping the stench would blow over after the initial wave of criticism. But the Browns also took it a step further, and that's infuriating critics as well. They backloaded his megadeal so that he's only making about $1 million in salary in his first year, which is when a suspension might kick in. This way he'd only lose about $57,000 for each game if he's suspended, instead of millions per game.

Some people would say that's a smart business move on the part of Watson's agent, but I believe the team could have pushed back on that aspect of the deal to maintain some integrity. And, if Watson decided to go elsewhere because of that, then so be it. They would have stuck with Baker Mayfield at quarterback and, win or lose, kept some dignity.

What makes this deal difficult for the paying public is that many fans leaguewide know that Watson could have joined their team. The Browns aren't unique in wanting to sign him. Atlanta, New Orleans and Carolina are the other teams that were mentioned as in the running for Watson's services. Yet the NFL is a league where two of its most prominent teams, the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys, have recently dealt with sexual harassment scandals involving front-office personnel.

You can say the Browns are only operating within the rules everyone plays by. The NFL is America's most popular sport and it also has some of the most obnoxious behavior by some of its best players. Teams in the league have shown over and over that they're willing to risk keeping a bad egg on the roster or signing a star with allegations as long as that player's talents fill a critical need.

The Kansas City Chiefs drafted Tyreek Hill, knowing he had punched his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach, among other offenses, causing his college team to get rid of him. The Browns, in 2019, signed Hunt, even though those same Chiefs released him after a videotape showed him kicking a woman at a hotel. And then there's the Pittsburgh Steelers. For the last decade, they've played now-retired quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who settled a lawsuit with a woman in 2012 after she had accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2008. Another woman accused Roethlisberger of similar behavior in 2010 and sued as well. That case was tossed out.

As a man, I want to learn how to be a better ally to women. As I've thought about the Watson signing in the past few days, I've heard from female colleagues and others whom I admire and respect. It's dawned on me that a lot of men only care about these issues when they're right in front of us, like now. Not supporting the Browns isn't going to cause me to help the situation. But giving stronger support to sexual assault victims and the groups that support them could help.

As a Black man, I see how pernicious racism is and how it's adversely impacted my life and the lives of all my family members. That upsets me. I want racism to go away and often think about how someone could be racist and what causes them to be that way. I need to put that same effort into understanding misogyny.

If the Watson signing by my favorite football team has done anything, it's opened my eyes.

Whether I go to a football game or not isn't that relevant.

Whether I put my money where my mouth is to support women and to support victims of sexual assault, that's what's important. Every year, I donate money and volunteer my time to groups that work with Black boys. Now I'm going to redirect some of that money and time to groups that help girls and women, especially victims of sexual assault. And I'm going to talk to the boys I help about treating women with respect.

Dwayne Bray is a senior writer for Andscape. He writes about topics ranging from general sports to race relations to poverty. He previously ran ESPN television's award-winning investigative team and is a die-hard Cleveland sports fan.

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A Browns fan weighs how to think about Deshaun Watson

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I first started rooting for the Cleveland Browns more than 50 years ago. It was about six years after the team had won the 1964 championship against the Baltimore Colts behind the running of Jim Brown, the passing of Frank Ryan and a stout defense.

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How To Build The Best Gymnastics Team | FiveThirtyEight

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How To Build The Best Gymnastics Team | FiveThirtyEight

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UPDATE (June 27, 2021, 11:45 p.m.): After the Trials, the U.S. women's team was announced on Sunday as Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum, with individual spots going to MyKayla Skinner and Jade Carey.

Selecting the Olympic gymnastics team is a bit like a Swarovski crystal-strewn game of "choose your own adventure." Is your priority the highest possible team placement or team score? Then go for door one. Are you most concerned with bringing home the most medals? Then door two might be the one for you. Or is the integrity and transparency of the selection process itself paramount, regardless of strategy or potential Olympic outcomes? Then pick door three. Oftentimes the team with the highest potential score is also the team that will yield the most individual medals. And sometimes all your most promising gymnasts perform exactly as you hoped they would during qualification competitions so you don't have to explain why a gymnast who hit was excluded but one who didn't was named to the team. But sometimes things go sideways.

If you watch the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Team Trials starting on Thursday, you'll hear the commentators talk about the ways Tom Forster, the high-performance director for the women's program, could put together his four-person team and select for the additional non-team spot that the U.S. women have earned for themselves. This is Forster's first time choosing an Olympic team since he was hired in 2018, and he has one card to play that makes his job essentially foolproof: Simone Biles. There's no possible team he could send to Tokyo that isn't in line for the gold medal if it includes Biles, which of course it will, barring anything unforeseen. (Even thinking about the possibility of Biles not competing in Tokyo makes me want to knock on wood or throw salt over my shoulder.)

But one possible weakness in Forster's team selection strategy is his preference for taking all-arounders based on how they finish at the Trials. That's what he did in 2019 for the world championships, and that's what he might do here. While at first glance, this might seem like a good idea - and one that is seemingly transparent - it doesn't always yield the best results if you're concerned about getting the highest possible team score or maximizing medal-earning opportunities.

A fourth-place gymnast could be good across four events but not a standout performer on any one piece. Do you take her in case you need another all-around athlete? Or would you take a gymnast who placed a little lower in the all-around but is potentially a top three finisher on an apparatus or two that may be a weakness for other team members? A specialist might have a good chance at making apparatus finals on her best pieces, therefore boosting not only the team score but also the medal tally. But a balanced all-around gymnast could provide you with a safety net in case disaster strikes.

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How the team is chosen will depend on the priorities of Forster and the rest of the selection committee. And with Biles on the team, the selection committee can appear way more strategic than they actually are.

So who might join Biles in Tokyo? Two other gymnasts seem almost assured team berths if they compete at Trials the same way they did at nationals: Sunisa Lee and Jordan Chiles.

Lee, who at age 18 would be the first Hmong American to make an Olympic gymnastics team, placed second to Biles at the recent national championships and also in 2019. At the last world championships, she earned the bronze on the uneven bars and the silver on the floor exercise. Chiles, on the other hand, didn't compete at the last world championships or any worlds in this cycle. Though she was a much-heralded junior, her senior career hasn't gone as many had hoped - until this year. Since the start of this very abbreviated 2021 season, the 20-year-old has been a hitting machine. She won the Biles-less Winter Cup and then placed second behind her training partner at the U.S. Classic. At nationals, she placed third after going 8-for-8. Based on performance and scores, it's clear that Biles, Lee and Chiles are ahead of the rest of the field.

Presuming these three gymnasts make the Olympic team, their strengths and individual medal-earning potential should be taken into account when considering who should be named to the fourth team berth and the additional individual spot. It's assumed that Biles will qualify for the all-around, vault, beam and floor finals. Because of the two-per-country rule, this means that only one additional American can participate in those finals with her. Depending on the kind of day each has in team qualifications, either Lee or Chiles might join Biles in the all-around final.

But the skills of one other specific athlete also matter in how the team is constructed, and this is where things could get dicey.

Jade Carey, 21, has already earned an Olympic berth via the Apparatus World Cup qualifying route. She won't compete as a member of the four-person U.S. team, but her event final berths will still count toward the country's allowable maximum. And even though she qualified to the Olympics as a vault specialist, she is still permitted to compete on all four events in qualifications.

Carey's best events are floor and vault. She is a two-time world silver medalist on vault and won a silver on floor in 2017. So when Forster looks to fill in the fourth team slot and the individual spot, it might not be wise to take another floor/vault specialist. Between Biles and Carey - and even Chiles, who's particularly good at floor - the possible American event final berths for those apparatuses will already be maxed out.

Balance beam and uneven bars are a slightly different story. With beam, at least one finals berth will be claimed by Biles, who is the defending world champion there. That leaves one other beam berth for another U.S. gymnast and potentially two bars berths.

Lee is probably good for one of those bars berths. She's doing one of the most difficult bar routines in the world, so a hit in qualifications should mean an appearance for her in the event final. For the other potential finalist, the U.S. might look to a specialist, a move Forster recently signaled he might make for the extra non-team spot. And top of the list is 20-year-old Riley McCusker, who competed solely on bars at nationals due to a recent foot injury. She made the most of that one event, placing second behind Lee and ahead of Biles, who placed third on the only event that she didn't win.

Though she could claim the extra spot, McCusker wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for the fourth spot on the team. Unless McCusker is fully recovered from the ankle injury she sustained at U.S. Classics in May, it would be very risky to include her on a four-person team that already includes Lee, who is managing a sore Achilles tendon. With McCusker on the team, Lee might have to do leg events in the "3 up, 3 count" Olympic team final format or vice versa. And if McCusker isn't totally prepared to do floor and vault and injury should strike one of the other three gymnasts, then this faulty team construction could prove disastrous.

You want that fourth spot to go to an all-arounder - perhaps not the woman ranked fourth specifically but at least a gymnast who could jump in with reasonably strong routines on events outside of her specialties in case a team member gets injured late in the game. Essentially, you want this person to be a built-in alternate because the U.S. can't replace a gymnast after the competition has started.

There's a whole mess of people who might contend for that fourth spot. If you look at the all-around results from nationals, you might be inclined to go right down to Emma Malabuyo. Once a promising junior, she spent much of this quad injured and didn't make a world championship team, but she's been on an upward trajectory since the U.S. Classic, where she placed a surprise seventh before she placed an even more surprising fourth at nationals. Though Malabuyo does have a huge start value on beam, her inclusion wouldn't lead to the highest possible team score. There is room for her to improve from nationals, but the gymnast who was less than half a point behind her has even more room to improve: Leanne Wong. Wong, who had a two-fall performance at nationals, has higher scoring potential than Malabuyo; she has a gorgeous floor routine, strong bars and beam - when she hits - and a usable vault.

After Wong, there's Grace McCallum, who was on both the 2018 and 2019 squads and had a respectable showing at nationals, tying for seventh with Skye Blakely. McCallum recently had hand surgery and, while now healthy, is scrambling to make up for lost time. She was especially strong at nationals on the balance beam, an event that could be put to use in an Olympic team final. The inclusion of MyKayla Skinner, 2016 Olympic alternate and 2019 worlds alternate, could result in the highest-scoring team in the final on the strength of her vaulting. (I know I said it might not be wise to bring on another vault specialist, but it's hard to deny that Skinner on the four-person team would yield a very high team score.) Kayla DiCello is another contender for the fourth spot. She had a tough outing at national championships, but if she improves her performance at Trials, she could help round out the team with strong floor and vault and usable routines elsewhere.

As Spencer Barnes of The Balance Beam Situation demonstrated using the average of scores from nationals, all the choices for the fourth spot lead to team final totals within six-tenths of a point of each other. No one seems to have a decisive advantage. Making this decision more challenging is how few competitions there have been in the past year and a half because of COVID-19. To choose the team, the selection committee will have to extrapolate from just a few events where most of the gymnasts performed inconsistently. This arrangement might end up favoring Forster's preference for going solely off the results of Trials.

Before last week, the wrinkle in all this was Carey. Despite locking up her own berth, she had been holding out hope for a team spot for one simple reason: Being a member of the four-person team is the only way for her to become an Olympic champion. While Carey has a very good shot at medaling in Tokyo on vault and, to a lesser extent, on floor, she has no chance at winning the gold on either since her best events are also Biles's best events. You simply don't beat Simone Biles on her best pieces.

But had Carey qualified into the four-person team, she would have had to give up her individual spot earned in the Apparatus World Cup. Because her spot is nominative - meaning it belongs to her, not her federation - Team USA would have forfeited its sixth berth, denying another athlete a chance at Tokyo. After much speculation, Carey announced last week on Instagram that she planned to accept her nominative spot when it's officially awarded after the final World Apparatus Cup competition.

If Carey had not pursued this path, she could have had an excellent shot at being selected for the four-person team as a complement to Biles, Lee and Chiles. She can contribute big scores on floor and vault, and she's improved substantially on the other two events, so should an injury strike a team member, she could function as a built-in alternate. As it stands, Carey in the nominative spot is a de facto alternate for the four-person team. If a team member suffers an injury right before the start of qualifications, Carey could be substituted. By then it would be too late to bring in one of the actual alternates due to COVID-19 restrictions.

So there you have it - and by "it" I mean a headache trying to make sense of all the possible considerations and team permutations. Which specific door Forster will choose is still up in the air. But in the end, it comes down to one simple principle: All U.S. teams get the gold in the age of Simone Biles.

CLARIFICATION (June 23, 2021, 10:40 a.m.): At press time, Riley McCusker had been slated to compete in all four events at Trials, but she now will compete in bars and beam only.

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How To Build The Best Gymnastics Team Around Simone Biles

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UPDATE (June 27, 2021, 11:45 p.m.): After the Trials, the U.S. women's team was announced on Sunday as Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum, with individual spots going to MyKayla Skinner and Jade Carey. Selecting the Olympic gymnastics team is a bit like a Swarovski crystal-strewn game of "choose your own adventure."

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Two managers gone in two days - What losing Alex Cora, AJ Hinch means for baseball

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Two managers gone in two days - What losing Alex Cora, AJ Hinch means for baseball

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Jan 14, 2020

David SchoenfieldESPN Senior Writer

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Senior writer of SweetSpot baseball blog

Former deputy editor of Page 2

Been with ESPN.com since 1995

The Boston Red Sox decided not to wait. A day after manager Alex Cora's name was mentioned 11 times in the commissioner's report on the Houston Astros' sign-stealing scandal from when Cora was the team's bench coach in 2017 -- a report that implicated Cora as the mastermind behind the entire scheme -- the two sides decided to part ways. A less nice way of putting it is that Cora was fired before probably facing the same season-long suspension that commissioner Rob Manfred handed down to AJ Hinch and Jeff Luhnow on Monday.

The Red Sox issued a statement on Tuesday from principal owner John Henry, chairman Tom Werner and CEO Sam Kennedy indicating that after reviewing Manfred's report, "... We collectively decided that it would not be possible for Alex to effectively lead the club going forward and we mutually agreed to part ways. This is a sad day for us. Alex is a special person and a beloved member of the Red Sox. We are grateful for his impact on our franchise. We will miss his passion, his energy and his significant contributions to the communities of New England and Puerto Rico."

It is a sad day. It has been a sad two days for the sport -- but a necessary two days, lest further sign-stealing scandals erupt into a full-blown, steroids-like melodrama that engulfs the entire sport for years. With the commissioner's office still investigating the 2018 Red Sox for impermissible electronic sign stealing -- with Cora as the manager and, like the 2017 Astros, on their way to a World Series title -- the Red Sox ownership had no choice but to let Cora go and begin the search for a new manager.

Indeed, Monday's report detailed that "Cora was involved in developing both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs. Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players' conduct."

I think back to covering the Red Sox throughout their 2018 playoff run. To a man, the players praised Cora's energy and communication skills, how he deserved a lot of credit for the team's success. It didn't come across as typical robot playerspeak. They genuinely liked and respected their manager. Cora, who had been a broadcaster with ESPN before his one-year stint as bench coach in Houston, was open and engaging with the media, and he took great pride in his Puerto Rican heritage. He appeared to have a bright and long future in the game.

The same could be said of Hinch. He had just managed the Astros to three straight 100-win seasons, with that 2017 title and another World Series appearance in 2019. Still just 45 years old, Hinch had established an early path as a potential Hall of Fame manager. Now, in two days, baseball has lost two of its biggest faces of managing. That's a blow to the sport.

Still, as well-liked and well-respected as Cora and Hinch have been, their reputations are now permanently stained -- especially Cora's, since he took part in schemes with both organizations, while the commissioner's report at least suggested that Hinch wasn't happy with the sign-stealing scheme (but didn't do anything to stop it). Fair or not, they will forever be branded as C-H-E-A-T-E-R-S.

It looks like both are persona non grata in the game for the 2020 season, and you have to wonder what kind of timetable exists before another opportunity arises for either -- if not managing, perhaps in broadcasting or in a front office. As we saw with players implicated in the steroids mess of the 1990s and early 2000s, forgiveness exists -- think of Mark McGwire eventually returning as a hitting coach for three different teams.

It is worth noting, however, that in the statement released by the Red Sox that Cora didn't apologize for any of his actions, either with the Astros or with the Red Sox:

Statement from the Boston #RedSox and Alex Cora: pic.twitter.com/qXsUhSobSy
- Red Sox (@RedSox) January 15, 2020

Indeed, sign stealing and looking for an edge was ingrained in him from very early in his career (while a player, Cora had a reputation as one of the best sign stealers in the game). Check out this quote during the 2018 World Series, when he was asked about the current focus on stealing signs:

"You just have to be prepared as a team. That's the only thing you can do. Stealing signs and tipping has been going on forever. I learned in, I don't know, in Miami in college, we used to do it. I don't know if that's good for the program, but, yeah, we used to do it.

"And then I played -- in winter ball, it really doesn't matter how talented you are, you better know the game and pay attention to the game because you're not playing Double-A or A-ball.

"In 1996, I played in Vero Beach, Florida, and then I played winter ball and I'm playing with big leaguers, and that's when you learn to start paying attention to details.

"In 2000, I played for Sandy Alomar Sr., and Sandy, he was a guy, he'll always tell you, the game will tell you something, you just have to pay attention to it. The scoreboard is not for the fans; the scoreboard is for the players. Outs, innings, strikes, all that stuff, if you pay attention to that, something is going to tell you what to do on the field."

In October 2016, Cora had even tweeted this back when he was still working for ESPN:

Stealing signs, relaying signs, getting signs...not that easy.
- Alex (@ac13alex) October 17, 2016

It is interesting to look back at all this. Asked a simple question about sign stealing in today's game, Cora gave a long answer about his own history. The rest of that quote included a detailed explanation of a play involving Roberto Alomar from a winter league game that Cora had remembered from almost two decades earlier. Cora took great pride in his baseball IQ -- understandably so, as he was a player who lasted a long time in the big leagues in part because of his ability to do the little things. It might be safe to say, even, that Cora was obsessed with stealing signs.

This points to the bigger picture across the sport: In the competitive drive to get an advantage over your opponent, do those involved -- and we can speculate that the cheating went well beyond the 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox -- not realize they had crossed the line?

I'm not so sure that's the case. In Monday's report, the commissioner detailed the incident when Chicago White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar appeared to notice the bangs on the trash can: "Several players told my investigators that there was a sense of 'panic in the Astros' dugout. ... Before the game ended, a group of Astros players removed the monitor from the wall in the tunnel and hid it in an office. For the Postseason, a portable monitor was set up on a table to replace the monitor that had been affixed to the wall near the dugout."

* Key questions on MLB's discipline for Astros
* Passan: Why many think Astros got off easy
* Olney: The five biggest victims
* Luhnow, Hinch fired for sign stealing
* Daily Podcast: Astros' Consequences

They knew. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew they were cheating. Not much different from the PED users some two decades ago shooting up in secret. They knew.

Some will feel that Cora and Hinch are the scapegoats for actions committed by the players, who escaped any punishment. That's an argument, I suppose. But history tells us players are incapable of policing themselves, as in the steroids era when few players spoke out against what was happening (former Texas Rangers pitcher Rick Helling was a notable exception). Indeed, if Oakland Athletics pitcher Mike Fiers, a member of the 2017 Astros, hadn't broken the player code of silence, we might not be where we are today.

Monday's report and the upcoming report on the 2018 Red Sox are only the beginnings of baseball trying to figure out how to cope with the technological era. Maybe it's time to ban all in-game uses of video, no checking your previous at-bats, no watching the in-game feed. MLB stepped up its monitoring of technology in 2019, but as any science fiction writer will tell you: Beware what the future holds. The ramifications for Cora and Hinch are harsh, but Manfred had to send a message: Knock it off. Now.

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Two managers gone in two days: What losing Cora, Hinch means for baseball

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Jan 14, 2020 David SchoenfieldESPN Senior Writer Close Senior writer of SweetSpot baseball blog Former deputy editor of Page 2 Been with ESPN.com since 1995 The Boston Red Sox decided not to wait.

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Golf's not-so-secret fascination with CBD oil

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Golf's not-so-secret fascination with CBD oil

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Jul 8, 2019

Tom VanHaarenESPN Staff Writer

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ESPN staff writer

Joined ESPN in 2011

Graduated from Central Michigan

When Scott McCarron returned to his locker after a round in the 2018 Boca Raton Invitational, a bottle of CBD oil pills had been placed in the cubby by Functional Remedies EndoSport. It's not unusual for professional golfers to have various products given to them to sample, but this one in particular was intriguing to the No. 1-ranked player on the PGA Champions Tour.

McCarron didn't know a great deal about CBD oil, but he knew enough from research and talking to other athletes who had taken cannabidiol (CBD), a supplement derived from the hemp plant, to realize that it might be able to help with some of his ailments.

"I went and tried it about two weeks later when I went home. I measure my sleep with a device called WHOOP," McCarron said. "That's a sleep and strain device. Major League Baseball, NFL and Olympic athletes use the device. For the first time in about two years that I'd been wearing the device, I was taking the CBD oil, started on Monday and had sleep in the green, which is fantastic sleep, for seven days straight the first time I took this CBD oil at night to help me sleep."

McCarron has now been using the products for nearly two years and is among a growing list of PGA Champions Tour players using CBD oil for various reasons, including sleep, recovery, anxiety and inflammation. Through word of mouth of the perceived benefits, the products have spread on the Champions Tour.

Despite its open popularity among the senior players, it has taken longer to surface as an acceptable practice to discuss publicly with the PGA Tour players. That is rapidly changing, though, as the perception of and education about the product are growing as well.

What used to be a taboo topic, and a product quite a few players on the Tour were using but were reluctant to talk about, has become a growing industry -- now diving into sponsorships and ambassador programs with high-profile players from both tours, including McCarron, Bubba Watson, David Toms, Vaughn Taylor, DJ Trahan, Kenny Perry, Tom Kite and Scott Piercy, among others.

Part of the reason CBD oil has been more popular early on in the Champions Tour is because the players are older, with rapidly changing bodies, and are looking for ways to continue competing at a high level with their grueling schedules.

A big reason the senior players are more open to discussing CBD use than their younger counterparts on the PGA Tour, however, is because they are not drug-tested in the same way as the under-50 crowd on the PGA Tour.

CBD is derived from the hemp plant, which is a strain of cannabis, but it is grown and used to make the products because it typically contains less THC, the psychoactive ingredient that causes a high, than the marijuana plant.

THC is a substance banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and because the CBD products are not regulated by the FDA, there is a level of uncertainty about what is actually in the product. It raises questions about whether the THC levels are low enough to keep the Tour players from failing a drug test and if the listed ingredients are actually what make up the CBD oil.

"I think everybody [on the Tour] was taking a wait-and-see approach," McCarron said. "They want to make sure it is legal and there is nothing in it. One of the things with the Tour, to their credit, they put out a statement saying it's not illegal to take this substance, but you better make sure you know what's in it.

"There's so many CBD companies out there right now, that you might not know what's in it. So if you're on the PGA Tour, you better do your homework and make sure there's nothing in it that can give you a positive test."

That's why Steve Patterson, the director of sales at Functional Remedies EndoSport, was apprehensive at first about whether the Tour players would accept it when the company decided to go beyond the Champions Tour in the fall of 2018.

The company now has 50 players on the Tour who are using their products, which include a salve to rub on the skin, oil to take orally and pills.

"The players are comfortable with a low THC count. That was the main thing I had a hesitancy about, what is their response to putting something in their bodies that's new?..." Patterson said. "But it's also a natural product, so then word of mouth, it really took off. That's where the popularity and acceptance has come in."

The PGA Tour's stance on CBD, according to Andy Levinson, the senior vice president of tournament administration, is that it falls under the same category as permitted supplements. The Tour warns its players that any supplement is to be taken at their own risk and that there are potential pitfalls to taking products that could contain ingredients not listed on the package.

"There's very, very little FDA regulation over the supplement industry as a whole, so if a player wants to take any supplements, whether it's CBD, or a multivitamin, or a protein powder, they need to understand that there is risk associated with that regardless of the manufacturer, because there is very little FDA regulation over the industry," Levinson said. "There is no guarantee that what is on the label is actually contained in the product."

Because the CBD products are considered supplements and not a drug, the manufacturers are not allowed to make any medicinal claims of benefits, either. The players have noted that they have seen improvements in sleep, recovery, anxiety and focus, and that's where the word-of-mouth testimonials have benefited the companies.

Those testimonials started to spread quietly, as more and more players were using the products but were still mainly unwilling to talk about it publicly -- until some bigger names came out and openly endorsed a few products.

The biggest was Bubba Watson, who announced a partnership with cbdMD in April and displays the company's logo on both sides of his visor in tournament play.

Similar to Functional Remedies, cbdMD manufactures its own products, which allows it to monitor the THC levels, and it gave Watson a level of comfort to openly use the products.

"Just because of, I'm getting older," Watson told TheStreet. "The inflammation in my body, waking up with better sleep. That was the two things I focused on. With a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old at the house, and playing golf all day, I needed some energy fast.

"For me, it was all about sleep and trying to get the body right."

There are still misconceptions about the products that have made some Tour players hesitate to publicly announce they use CBD oil in any form. For example, the product is derived from hemp, not marijuana. Also, hemp is produced for high CBD content and marijuana for high THC content.

That's the challenge some companies are still facing. But as more and more players are seeing an impact with the natural remedy, more golfers are willing to use it. And as education about the products continues to spread, and as the companies are doing more to ensure they meet the standards for each sport's governing body, that hesitancy is likely to fall as well.

"We're also working on getting what is called NSF for sports certification. Once we get it, we'll be in baseball in particular, because those guys are so paranoid about putting anything in their body," Patterson said. "But once you get the certification, it's basically a vetting process. When you have the logo, players know that your products are safe, they're not contaminated, and they feel comfortable taking them."

Levinson is quick to note that no cannabis product has NSF certification for sports, but he says that if a company were able to obtain it, that is considered the gold standard by the PGA Tour in terms of consistency and knowing what is in the product.

It would be a vote of confidence for the brand to achieve the certification, and the PGA Tour only considers supplements that are NSF-certified for sports for any marketing partnerships or business-related relationships, let alone recommending them for players.

"The risk here [currently] is that you really don't know what's in a product," Levinson said. "Taking a supplement that you really don't know what's in it may or may not be better for you. There's no substantive science behind the claimed benefits of these products, whether it's inflammation or anti-anxiety, or what have you.

"Without FDA regulation, a lot of these companies are able to make these pretty broad claims about the health benefits without any science behind it whatsoever."

McCarron was comfortable using the product before many others were and didn't need the certification or studies after doing his own research. He acknowledges the lack of long-term studies on effects and impact CBD oil can have, but he has also seen the effects of other medicines and remedies his fellow professional golfers have used to help heal their bodies and minds.

Players using Ambien to sleep and ibuprofen to control their pain are now turning to CBD products as a more natural way to feel relief.

"You would take Advil like candy sometimes, not knowing the effects or what it could do to your kidney and liver," McCarron said. "I hardly take any anti-inflammatories anymore because I don't feel like I need to. That's a huge positive for athletes, because taking a little bit of Advil or Aleve, that's fine, but if you're dependent on it to function every day, that's a problem."

It's a problem many athletes face, including golfers at every level.

McCarron even believes CBD could help the average golfer who deals with the anxiety that comes from playing the sport recreationally. Alcohol is the drug of choice for the everyday golfer, and McCarron thinks there is a borderline abuse issue stemming from golfers thinking they need to drink while playing to cut the anxiety.

Naturally, the products are being aimed at the average golfer as well. Functional Remedies is now selling its products in 125 golf shops, with 12 sales representatives selling to golf courses around the country.

Stress and anxiousness are amplified at the professional level, which is why some of the athletes are taking CBD.

"Between the mental focus and overall clarity necessary to play a solid round, golf is a challenging sport," said cbdMD director of public relations Dillon Kivo. "That's where CBD can come into play. Again, although research is still in the early stages, there seems to be support behind the idea that CBD can be utilized to help aid mental functions, as well as work to reduce overall stress. The idea is that CBD helps calm some of those intense bodily responses that may result in further health complications, all while working to naturally relax the mind and body."

Those claims are still unfounded scientifically, but the proof may just be in how many golfers continue to get on board with using the products and openly touting how their bodies feel.

The Champions Tour might have been the guinea pig, but as the products are becoming more widely accepted, and as players gain more knowledge about what they're putting into their bodies and the potential impact it could have on their performance and recovery, we are heading to a point where more and more Tour players will be comfortable publicly saying they are utilizing a form of CBD.

"What the perception was, when someone said CBD initially, [was] is it THC, is this marijuana, is it legal?" McCarron said. "I think there was a misconception of what it really was, a hemp oil. I think there was a lot of buzz about it, but people weren't really sure. I wasn't really sure what to think of it. But when you find out what's really in it, what isn't in it, that it's natural and that the levels of THC are so minute, I think it's going to continue to take off."

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Golf's not-so-secret fascination with CBD oil

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Jul 8, 2019 Tom VanHaarenESPN Staff Writer Close ESPN staff writer Joined ESPN in 2011 Graduated from Central Michigan When Scott McCarron returned to his locker after a round in the 2018 Boca Raton Invitational, a bottle of CBD oil pills had been placed in the cubby by Functional Remedies EndoSport.

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Let Zion Williamson choose where he wants to play next

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Let Zion Williamson choose where he wants to play next

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Jun 18, 2019

Kevin ArnovitzESPN Staff Writer

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NBA writer for ESPN.com since 2008

Former contributor and editor at NPR

In one of his more candid moments this past season, NBA commissioner Adam Silver confessed that he was concerned about the mental health of NBA players.

"A lot of players are unhappy," Silver told Bill Simmons at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, attributing much of the anxiety to social media.

There are any number of environmental or chemical factors present in "unhappiness" -- social media is certainly one, mental health conditions that go undiagnosed and untreated are likely another. One less obvious feature present in the lives of young NBA players is that the vast majority of them are playing in cities, for bosses, with co-workers and on behalf of brands they had zero influence in choosing.

In the NBA, a first-round pick who shows promise is effectively under the control of the team that drafted him for the first seven seasons of his career. This means that in the most formative years of their professional development, the most talented young men in basketball are given no agency to decide what most of us take for granted: where we will live, work and put down roots in our adult lives.

As Anthony Davis was preparing to become the No. 1 pick in the 2012 NBA draft, I wrote a piece proposing the NBA ditch the draft. Though the idea was presented as a fix for tanking, I also wanted to emphasize the principle of fair labor. I suggested that among the effects stemming from the abolition of the draft "would be a likely uptick in retention. A young player who chooses his destination based on his personal criteria is far more likely to stick around long term."

Seven years later, Davis has proved to be an apt illustration of the downstream effects of the draft system. If you were looking for a valve for the unhappiness Silver was talking about last winter, Davis was it. Wherever you come down on the conduct of Davis and his camp during the chaotic standoff that paralyzed two franchises and rippled out to several others before Davis was dealt on Saturday to the Lakers, it's fair to ask what role the current draft system played in the affair. Davis never chose New Orleans, and though he signed a flush multiyear extension with the Pelicans in 2015, he was yoked to restricted free agency when he did.

Freedom of choice for players should be a sacrosanct principle, particularly in a league that claims to value meritocracy. Looking at the roster of NBA owners, it's hard to believe that these billionaire proprietors, many of them self-made, don't subscribe to that virtue. Can you imagine if Memphis Grizzlies owner Robert Pera -- who, upon graduating from UC San Diego with a master's in engineering, chose to take his skills to Apple -- was instead asked by some governing authority in big tech, "Where don't you want to go?" then promptly assigned there?

We are currently seeing that elite young basketball players, even before they arrive in the NBA, appreciate the value of choice more than ever. Witness RJ Hampton opting to play professionally in New Zealand rather than go uncompensated for his labor in college. The NBA has recognized as much by essentially opening up the G League as an alternate route for prospects who, like Hampton, want to steer clear of NCAA basketball.

Proponents of the draft generally maintain that it's the only way to ensure fairness in a 30-team league in which some of those teams are far more appealing homes than others. When a prodigy like Zion Williamson declares himself eligible to play in the NBA, the fairness of allowing him a say in where he'd like to play must defer to the fairness of giving the league's failing teams an infusion of talent.

Williamson, though, might entertain ideas about what kind of coach he'd like to play for, or the kind of city he'd like to live in, or the types of teammates he'd like to share the court with. Given that Williamson is a player with uncommon force whose output will need to be managed carefully, he might not want to entrust his body to just any medical and performance staff.

In a league where the product is the talent, why do employers get to interview the potential employees, but not the other way around? As Williamson embarks on building a global brand for himself over a career whose prime will come and go in about a dozen years, he might even have certain standards about what kind of person or businessman an NBA owner should be. Why is disqualification a one-way street, whereby no team has to employ a player whose character it finds questionable, but no incoming rookie has the right to dismiss an owner he and his family might think is sketchy?

NBA teams vary greatly in identity. Some are highly structured organizations, governed by order and discipline that have been in place for a while. (See: Miami, Oklahoma City.) Others feel like start-ups, with aspirational principles in place, and everything new and in flux -- and boy is it exciting! (See: LA Clippers, Brooklyn.) Teams are a lot like players in that way, and their personnel decisions are often expressions of those identities. But acting on preferences isn't a privilege that's afforded the draftee.

If NBA teams had to sell themselves to the rookie class, the overall quality of NBA management and the competitiveness of the product might improve considerably. It's likely that NBA owners understand this, because many of them have made hundreds of millions of dollars by mastering the incentive structures present in markets. Even though the league this year adjusted that structure for obtaining the highest draft picks -- tweaks that penalized the spectacularly awful teams in favor of the pretty awful ones -- failure is still the path to the best draft talent in the NBA.

Most fans and those inside the league widely acknowledge that the NBA product over the final seven weeks of the regular season is a watered-down version of the real thing. Remove the incentive to lose and the NBA could elevate the quality of play during the final third of the regular season. But more than that, the league could make winning games an advantage -- not an impediment -- toward luring a top young prospect to a team.

Imagine a system in which incoming rookies enjoyed the power to choose -- say unrestricted free agency. Critics contend that such a setup would concentrate the best young rookies on established and/or sexier franchises. But in a restrictive salary-cap system, a capped-out team doesn't have the resources to offer Williamson what he'd command in free agency. The Warriors would be every bit as hamstrung in pursuit of Williamson, Ja Morant or any other top-five pick as they are in chasing Kawhi Leonard and Kyrie Irving.

Would the Lakers be assured a top-three talent every year by virtue of being the Lakers? Who knows, but under the current system, the most recognizable brand in North American professional sports drafted the No. 2 pick three years running from 2015 through 2017, and are slated to pick fourth this season. If rookies were free agents, the Lakers would not only have to win prospects with the power of persuasion, they'd also have to pay them something close to market value.

Get ready for Zion, Morant and more.

* Pick-by-pick analysis
* Five comps for Zion
* First-round winners/losers
* Trade tracker and grades

With NBA teams holding nearly equal spending power and operating under the same rules in the current cap structure, those who employ stars earning big salaries will have only so many resources with which to outbid teams that don't for the services of the most talented rookies. Only one of the eight conference semifinals teams (Philadelphia) would have any meaningful cap space to outbid the have-nots, and if rookie free agency occurred after veteran free agency, the Sixers could do so only by moving on from one of their veteran free-agent stars.

It's not that bad teams would have nothing to worry about -- but that's a feature, not a bug. Teams that have been circling the drain for years could no longer afford to perpetuate the cycle of misery with the comfort of knowing there's help on the way via the draft. Instead, poorly performing franchises would be pushed to do whatever was necessary to warrant the attention of the better prospects. They'll have to win basketball games, or build the best performance programs and training facilities, or hire executives and coaches whom players want as bosses. At the very least, franchises would have to approach desirable rookies and be able to say confidently, "This is a place where you can be the face of a franchise, win and build a personal brand."

Typically, arranged marriages don't produce the happiest unions, which could help explain why there are so many troubled working relationships in the NBA. A more equitable system would mean fewer storylines about player discontent and stars wanting to be elsewhere when their contracts expire -- and that's better for business.

The most capable teams, of course, will find their Kawhi Leonard, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Kyle Lowry or Pascal Siakam -- not one of them, incidentally, chosen in the top 10. They'll identify him early as the value play in the incoming class, all while a dozen rivals invest their resources and attention on landing one of the top three picks in a "three-player draft."

Scenarios like these would force front offices to act strategically, as there are a number of very good players who will gladly sign with a smart organization that values them as a foundational piece of the future and demonstrates as much -- not a safety school for a team that swings and misses on its first two pitches.

For those who believe that unrestricted free agency would be too punitive toward the NBA's doormat teams or less alluring markets, the league could develop a "matching system," like the National Resident Matching Program (or NRMP or "The Match"), which labor economists continue to regard as a remarkably effective model for assigning incoming talent to employers who need it.

How does it work? Every year, graduates of medical school -- the nation's future doctors -- rank the places where they'd like to be resident physicians in order of preference, while the medical institutions rank the graduates they most want to hire. An algorithm then processes the choices and issues the matches. The most talented young doctors are frequently paired with the most prestigious institutions, because there's often mutual interest.

The Pelicans have agreed to send six-time All-Star Anthony Davis to Los Angeles, where he'll team up with LeBron James, sources tell ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski. Full story

* Lowe: Questions after the huge AD trade
* Shelburne: Risks and rewards behind trade
* 5-on-5: How trade changes title chase
* Grades: Who wins this blockbuster deal?
* Updated mock draft: Culver at No. 4
* Social media: 'NBA is a 365 operation'
* Free-agent buzz | Trade tracker

But as Alvin Roth, who directed the redesign of the NRMP in 1995, writes in "Who Gets What -- And Why," The Match is a system in which "no applicant and residency program not matched with each other preferred each other to their assigned matches."

In an "NBA Match" system, if North Carolina's Nassir Little landed with Charlotte, there's a mathematical guarantee that no team he preferred ranked him higher than the Hornets did. Likewise, if Detroit ended up with Romeo Langford, it's certain that no rookie the Pistons liked more than Langford ranked Detroit higher than Langford did.

In an NBA Match system, mutual affection between player and team is recognized and honored. Overall, the best players and most desirable teams would clearly benefit in a match system -- and in this sense the NBA would begin to resemble the rest of professional life.

Concerns over whether Morant, the projected No. 2 pick, would just choose a winner ignore practical realities in the NBA that inform behavior. Would Morant really be willing to play behind Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson with Golden State or Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum with Portland? Would he willingly choose to play with Houston's James Harden and Chris Paul? How about Ben Simmons in Philadelphia, Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City or the majority of the league's teams that are committed long term at Morant's position?

How would Morant rank his preferred teams if he had the opportunity afforded to every med school grad in the country -- or if he was endowed with total freedom, like the smartest engineers coming out of college right now?

Would he seek out a situation like Trae Young's, in which the keys to a franchise are handed over to him on Day 1? Would he choose to play with LeBron James, assuming James has any interest in the final years of his career teaching a remedial education in NBA life to a 19-year-old? Would he look for a team that could offer a different flavor of veteran mentorship? Would the native of Sumter County, South Carolina, who played at a lower-profile college program prefer a smaller market?

Whatever criteria Morant applied to draw up his list, the common denominator would be, "What would make me happy?" And a league that has spent the better part of a year wringing its hands over the unhappiness of many of its best players could consider furnishing the next generation of stars the most basic amenity of professional and personal happiness: a say in where you work and live.

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Let Zion Williamson choose where he wants to play next

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Jun 18, 2019 Kevin ArnovitzESPN Staff Writer Close NBA writer for ESPN.com since 2008 Former contributor and editor at NPR In one of his more candid moments this past season, NBA commissioner Adam Silver confessed that he was concerned about the mental health of NBA players.

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Caster Semenya: what her story says about gender and race in sports - Vox

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Caster Semenya: what her story says about gender and race in sports - Vox

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"I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast."

So said the reigning Olympic champion in the women's 800-meter last year, in a statement challenging rules that could threaten her athletic career.

The rules, issued by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF),require some female runners whose bodies produce high levels of testosterone to take medication to lower those levels. Many saw the rules as a direct effort to target Semenya, who is believed to have a condition that produces high testosterone. The runner appealed the new regulations, but on Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against her.

Semenya's story is about the ongoing efforts by sports governing bodies to develop gender divisions that are fair to all athletes. But it's also about what happens when an athlete - especially a black athlete - doesn't conform to other people's ideas about womanhood.

"Certain bodies are never allowed to be female, are never allowed to be women, are never allowed to just be," Pidgeon Pagonis, an intersex activist and co-founder of the Intersex Justice Project, told Vox. "What I think this comes down to is, Caster's faster than white girls and she made them cry."

Semenya, who is South African, identifies as a woman and has never publicly discussed her medical history. But ever since she arrived on the global scene a decade ago, she's been subject to constant scrutiny, as the media, the public, and her fellow athletes speculated about her anatomy, misgendered her, and argued that she shouldn't be allowed to race against other women. Her career is a reminder that when people challenge perceived ideas about masculinity and femininity, their bodies can become fodder for public discussion - often against their will.

Semenya has been scrutinized since 2009

Caster Semenya, as she is usually known in the press, first gained worldwide attention in 2009 when she competed in the 800 meters at the world championships in Berlin. She was 18 years old.

Even before her first race in Berlin, though, others in the track and field world began questioning her gender. A source told the Daily Mail at the time that her "astoundingly quick performance" at a prior event in Mauritius had "prompted suspicions over her gender."

"Experts were concerned over the way she runs and urged the South African athletics body to test her," the source said.

The issue seemed to be that Semenya appeared masculine to some observers, and that she was fast.

Semenya went on to win gold in Berlin, but she was also subjected to a battery of tests by the IAAF designed to determine whether she should be allowed to race as a woman. The testing was leaked to the press, and Semenya's body was analyzed relentlessly by armchair gender experts around the world, as Ruth Padawer reported at the New York Times.

"Could This Women's World Champ Really Be a Man?" Time magazine asked.

"These kind of people should not run with us," said one of Semenya's competitors, Italian runner Elisa Cusma. "For me, she is not a woman. She is a man."

The IAAF did not release the results of the tests, but media outlets began reporting on alleged leaks, fueling even more speculation about Semenya's private medical information. Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper claimed that Semenya was a "hermaphrodite," a term that the Intersex Society of North America deems stigmatizing and misleading. A BBC correspondent said in 2009 that Semenya had "testosterone levels that are three times higher than those normally expected in a female" and that "it's likely that she has some hermaphroditic or intersex condition."

"There has a lot of hype and sensationalization in the media, making this assertion that Caster's a man who's trying to compete with women," Sean Saifa Wall, a co-founder of the Intersex Justice Project, told Vox. "It's a lot of fearmongering."

Semenya was eventually allowed to run again, and went on to win gold in the 800 meters in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. But last year, the IAAF ruled that runners with testosterone above a certain level would have to take medication to lower it in order to compete against other women in the 400-, 800-, and 1,500-meter events.

Semenya has not stated that she has high testosterone. But she and others saw the regulation as directed at her. "I know that the IAAF's regulations have always targeted me specifically," she said in a statement to the Washington Post. Semenya has not responded to Vox's request for comment.

The runner appealed the ruling, but on Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport denied the appeal.

It's not clear if Semenya plans to take testosterone-lowering medication in order to compete in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, according to the Post. Her lawyers have said they will consider appealing the court's latest ruling.

For her part, Semenya says she is undaunted. "For a decade the IAAF has tried to slow me down, but this has actually made me stronger," she said in her statement to the Post on Wednesday. "The decision of the CAS will not hold me back. I will once again rise above and continue to inspire young women and athletes in South Africa and around the world."

Her story demonstrates the discrimination people face when they seem to defy gender norms

Semenya has never publicly identified as intersex, a term that, according to the Intersex Society of North America, refers to a person born with "a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male."

No matter what her personal medical history is, her story illustrates the way people, especially people of color, can be scrutinized when they seem to fall outside gender norms.

Being intersex is not the same as being trans, but society at large tends to conflate the two, Pagonis said. "And a lot of people hate trans people."

Meanwhile, "I see a lot of intersex phobia that is heightened because she's a black woman," Pagonis added. "Had Caster been a gender-conforming, straight-identified white girl who just was faster than the other people, they would have never invaded her body" by demanding testing, they said.

Over the years, many have compared Semenya's story to that of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who was brought to Europe and displayed in freak shows in the 19th century as the "Hottentot Venus."

"Her body was put on display" for Europeans "to look at it and to gawk at it," Pagonis said, and Semenya's treatment "reeks of that legacy."

Gender divisions in sports are complicated. But the idea of testosterone testing has sparked a lot of criticism.

In denying Semenya's appeal, the Court of Arbitration for Sport acknowledged that the IAAF testosterone regulations were discriminatory toward athletes with naturally high testosterone. However, the court ruled that "such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF's aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics," according to the Post.

The question of how - if at all - to make gender divisions in sports has been much discussed in recent years as more openly trans athletes compete and as intersex conditions become better understood.

When trans cyclist Rachel McKinnon broke a world record for women in her age group, for instance, she received criticism from some fellow athletes and a torrent of online harassment. The IAAF's decision to use testosterone as a standard replaced the organization's previous policy, under which the organization retained the right to evaluate athletes if someone challenged their gender, according to the New Republic. This policy was criticized for discriminating against athletes based on appearance.

But experts have also criticized the testosterone standard, arguing that research on the effects of the hormone in female athletes is flawed. The available evidence does not convincingly show that high testosterone actually gives women an advantage in the 400-, 800-, and 1,500-meter races, bioethicist Silvia Camporesi and her co-authors Simon Franklin and Jonathan Ospina Betancurt wrote in a blog post at the British Journal of Sports Medicine last year.

Moreover, "the question of whether testosterone confers an advantage does not settle the question of whether an advantage would be unfair," as Camporesi wrote in a statement to media in reaction the court's verdict Wednesday.

Many physical characteristics give people an advantage in sports, advocates note, but no one demands that they change those characteristics.

Swimmer Michael Phelps has exceptionally long arms, which gives him an advantage in his sport, Pagonis said. "But nobody's suggesting that his arms should be shortened."

Hormones and intersex conditions are treated differently because they relate to sex and gender, "which are such taboo topics in society," Pagonis said.

Semenya and her legal team now have 30 days to appeal the court's ruling. No matter what happens, Semenya has already shown that "she's an amazingly resilient person," Pagonis said, noting that the athlete often posts subtle digs at her critics on social media.

On Thursday, the athlete tweeted a meme reading, "They laugh at me because I am different. I laugh at them because they're all the same."

Listen to this

The track and field world is trying to figure out what it means to be female. South African Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya's future is caught in the balance.

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"I am a woman and I am fast": what Caster Semenya's story says about gender and race in sports

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"I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast." So said the reigning Olympic champion in the women's 800-meter last year, in a statement challenging rules that could threaten her athletic career. The rules, issued by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF),require some female runners whose bodies produce high levels of testosterone to take medication to lower those levels.

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At Colorado, a Breach in Football’s Wall - The New York Times

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At Colorado, a Breach in Football’s Wall - The New York Times

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Sports of The Times

Two University of Colorado regents have spoken out about the morality of colleges supporting big-time football. "I can't do this anymore," said one who cast a vote against football. Credit... Justin Edmonds/Getty Images

BOULDER, Colo. - The University of Colorado hired a new football coach in December, and as coaches are wont to do, he talked tough.

"Our team, we will be physical," Coach Mel Tucker said at his introductory news conference. "My dad always told me the name of the game is hit, hit, H-I-T. There is always a place on the field for someone who will hit."

He was preaching that old-style pigskin religion. Unfortunately, Tucker, who came from the University of Georgia, runs a football program that has produced at least a half-dozen players - including several who played in the N.F.L. - who have killed themselves. Other former players are alive but afflicted by severe post-concussion problems.

Two university regents, dissenters from the Church of Hit, Hit and Hit, read Tucker's remarks and shook their heads. A few days later, these heretics voted against his five-year, $14.75 million contract. They could not block the contract, but another cannon had been fired in the football concussion wars.

Linda Shoemaker, one of the regents, described her pilgrimage from casual fandom to casting a vote against football.

"I really thought at first that we could play football safely with better rules and better equipment; I drank the Kool-Aid," she told me. "I can't go there anymore. I don't believe it can be played safely anymore. I want these young men to leave C.U. with minds that have been strengthened, not damaged."
[Read Michael Powell's account of a Colorado player struggling with head trauma.]
The N.F.L. long ago settled on a tobacco-industry stance toward the damage done by concussions and subconcussive hits; its officials have covered up and obfuscated and, only reluctantly, conceded liability for the many hundreds of former players left with minds that fade in and out like old television sets. It is a $14 billion industry, and acting in its pecuniary interests is deplorable but perhaps not surprising.

The nation's universities face a more ticklish problem known as morality. These institutions were founded with the purpose of developing and educating young minds. It is difficult to square that mission with the fate of those like running backRashaan Salaam, who ran so beautifully for the University of Colorado and then as a pro, and like Drew Wahlroos, a fearless, rampaging Colorado linebacker. Both men suffered emotional and cognitive problems that friends and family and even university officials related to thousands of hits taken over the course of their careers. Each killed himself.

There are, too, those like Ryan Miller. I wrote about him Wednesday, an intelligent and introspective giant of a young man and a former stalwart offensive lineman for the University of Colorado who at age 29 suffers migraines and the shakes and once in a while gets into his car and has to think many minutes before recalling where he intended to go.

I came to Boulder because of these outspoken regents and because of Bob Carmichael, a long-ago player at Colorado, who has taken upon himself the role of moral goad and pushed others to speak out. "I try to tell players that risking your future when you are in your early 20s is a stupid concept that many players, myself included, regret," Carmichael said.

"My dad always told me the name of the game is hit," said Mel Tucker, Colorado's head football coach. Credit... Joe Amon/The Denver Post, via Associated Press

Thanks to these three, the University of Colorado has come closer than most institutions to wrestling with an urgent question: Is running a college football program unconscionable?

"We should move in the direction of offering lifelong insurance and medical care for football players who become badly damaged," said John Kroll, the other regent who voted against the coach's contract. "But to do that is an implicit acknowledgment this game is incredibly dangerous to play."

I spoke with the chancellor, the athletic director, two doctors and the chief trainer, who talked a lot about safety and sounded earnest. They have built a beautiful sports medicine center into the side of their football stadium, a placement that occupies a land between admirable and sadly metaphoric. Their staff teaches nutrition and healthy habits, and they have spotters in the stands who look to see if a coach has missed a player grown too wobbly on the field. Their football team, like many others, has limited the practices in which players are made to tackle and hit.

They have embraced the current college vogue for studies of the effects of rattling hits on brain health. The N.C.A.A. and the Defense Department are working on a study, as is the Big Ten-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration. Now the University of Colorado, as part of the Pac-12 Conference, has a Student-Athlete Health and Well-Being Concussion Coordinating Unit.

This is grand. Yet I wondered if they could save themselves time and money and read the work of the Boston University chronic traumatic encephalopathy center, which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football players and 21 percent of those who played high school football.

It's perhaps worth noting that college football players who experience head trauma are not eligible for workers' compensation or disability benefits. They are not, after all, employees.

Universities, Colorado included, have scientists and doctors beavering away at efforts to create safer helmets. I asked Miller, the former offensive lineman, about this, and he said that better helmets mostly make players feel like cruise missiles.

Dr. Sherrie Ballantine works at the sports medicine center, and she is certainly not a football abolitionist, but she too sounded dubious of an armament fix.

"The more you pad a player, the more aggressive and stupid they play," she said. "We're better off padding the goal posts."

Miguel Rueda, the associate athletic director for health and performance, noted that the staff trains freshman football players to speak up if injured. "We go over the risk of injury because there is a tie to mental health from any injury," Rueda said. "They are encouraged to understand their part in the injury process."

Have you ever, I asked, suggested that incoming freshmen read synopses of the Boston University reports before they signed their health waivers and embarked on a football career?

A half-dozen former Colorado players - including several who played in the N.F.L. - have died by suicide. Credit... Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Rueda saw no reason for that.

"There is no proven direct link between concussion and C.T.E.," he said. "There are a number of people who are out there actively pursuing the investigative process."

That answer sidesteps the key point. There is much unknown about brain trauma and C.T.E., including the role of individual body chemistry and the precise nature of the most dangerous hits. Those brains studied, by definition, came from men who worried about brain degeneration. Still it appears irrefutable that a link exists, and that nutrition and better ways of tackling and blocking will most likely not change that.

No freshman player, Rueda said, ever declined to sign a health waiver.

I sought the counsel of Brian Cabral on the question of better training. He was a magnificent linebacker at the University of Colorado and played nine years in the N.F.L., earning a Super Bowl ring with the Chicago Bears. Then he returned to Colorado and became a linebacker coach.

He recruited the running back Salaam and coached the linebacker Wahlroos, both of whom are dead. He also coached Ted Johnson, a brilliant linebacker who has spoken with aching honesty of his struggles with depression and memory loss after more concussions than he can count.

Cabral loves the band of brothers aspect of football, and yet he cannot dodge the shadows. He knows too much, and several times during our conversation he paused, choked up.

"I hate to say this, but I taught players what I was taught," he said.

And what was that technique?

"Put your helmet right in the guy's jaw and drive up through his throat to his head," he said. "I regret it, I really do."

I noted that officials said better technique might offer a sort of salvation. He nodded yes, and then quickly shook his head. "They try to take the head out of tackling, but come on," he said. "We bang heads and guys get concussions."

In a few weeks, spring football practices would begin; in late April, the team will play a televised game, kicked off by a "Healthy Kids" session for middle schoolers.

Shoemaker is a former journalist and now a grandmother, and several times she has walked down to the football field and just listened. "It's frightening to hear the hits," she said. "We have physicians there, but they all work for the university and they are very much in favor of football."

She added: "Hard hits lead to head trauma, and that makes lives more brutal. I can't do this anymore. I don't think the game can be played safely."

If I cast my dice, I'd roll in the direction of Shoemaker's bottom line.

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At Colorado, a Breach in Football's Wall (Published 2019)

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Sports of The Times BOULDER, Colo. - The University of Colorado hired a new football coach in December, and as coaches are wont to do, he talked tough. "Our team, we will be physical," Coach Mel Tucker said at his introductory news conference. "My dad always told me the name of the game is hit, hit, H-I-T.

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More controversy for Garcia, Kuchar, but fault lies with Sergio | Golf Channel

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More controversy for Garcia, Kuchar, but fault lies with Sergio | Golf Channel

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AUSTIN, Texas - Even in the best of times, Sergio Garcia can be petulant, and Saturday at the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play was not his best moment. Although, it could be argued it wasn't the worst in what has been an eventful career.

What had otherwise been a productive week turned in a moment for Garcia when his 7-footer for par at the seventh hole slipped past the left edge of the cup in his quarterfinal match against Matt Kuchar. Without looking up - and this part is important - he reached over and attempted to backhand his next shot from 4 inches into the hole. His ball caught the lip and spun out.

That's when everything went wrong.

Kuchar had been standing on the back of the green some 30 feet away and never told Garcia the putt was conceded. He didn't nod, he didn't wink, he didn't give a thumbs up - which are all universally accepted ways to give an opponent a putt.

"As I looked up again, I saw he had missed the next one," explained Kuchar. "I said, 'Sergio, I didn't say anything [regarding a concession], I'm not sure how this works out.' I didn't want that to be an issue."

The two huddled with the rules official with the group, Robby Ware, and Garcia admitted the mistake. This should have been simple. Golf's silly rules strike again and Kuchar heads to the eighth tee, 2 up, after winning No. 7 with a bogey.

"He knew he made a mistake. I didn't want that to be how a hole was won or lost," Kuchar said.

At this point Garcia suggested a wildly unorthodox solution, "You can concede a hole," he told Kuchar on the eighth tee.

"I thought about it and said I don't like that idea, either," Kuchar said.

There was plenty of discussion between the two as they played No. 8 and again on the 10th hole. "I would say I would try to make sure we were just on the same page," Kuchar said.

"It's quite simple. I screwed it up, it's as simple as that," Garcia said. "The only issue that it was, was that [Kuchar] was like, I didn't say it was good, but I don't want to take the hole. So, I was like OK, it's fine, what do you want to do? Because there are many options that you can do if you don't want to take the hole, even though I've already lost that hole. But obviously he didn't like any of the options that were there."

Kuchar won the match, 2 up, to advance to Sunday's semifinal frame, but it was another awkward chapter for two players who have spent the better part of this year trying to win back hearts and minds.

For Kuchar it was multiple mea culpas after the world learned he'd paid his local caddie just $5,000 following his victory last fall at the Mayakoba Golf Classic instead of something closer in line to the traditional 10 percent of the $1.29 million winner's check. After initially digging in against mounting criticism, Kuchar eventually relented and paid the caddie an additional $45,000. He also met with the caddie last month at the WGC-Mexico Championship to clear the air.

Garcia found himself on the wrong side of public opinion when he was disqualified from the European Tour's Saudi International in February for going all Paul Bunyon with his putter on a few greens.

He later asked for forgiveness: "I apologize for, and I have informed my fellow players it will never happen again."

WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play: Full bracket | Scoring | Group standings
WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play: Articles, photos and videos
This isn't the first time the WGC-Match Play has brought out a player's worst self, either. At the 2015 Match Play, Keegan Bradley and Miguel Angel Jimenez nearly came to blows over, well, a meaningless match. At least Kuchar and Garcia had something on the line.

It's inconceivable that Kuchar purposely slow played Garcia on a putt that was obviously good, but he must say the words, "that's good" or something to that effect. And the idea that the American somehow needed to make everything right by conceding the next hole is just as ridiculous.

That's not the way sports work. The Saints didn't get a mulligan from the Rams during the NFC Championship Game. UCF didn't get a "do over" for the no-call late against Duke in the NCAA Tournament. In golf it's called the rub of the green.

Whether he thought it was fair or not, Garcia made a mistake, which he owned. What he didn't acknowledge is that he was equally at fault for pushing Kuchar into an awkward and patently unrealistic corner when he suggested he concede the next hole.

Garcia fielded a single question from the media following his match and when asked to clarify how the conversation with Kuchar unfolded, he declined to comment, offering instead a rebuke on the media, "You guys never want to talk to me, only on days like this," he said.

Yes, it's the media's fault. It's Kuchar's fault for not violating the code of competition. It's the greens fault in Saudi Arabia for pushing him to the brink.

The 39-year-old has spent more time in "time out" this year than in contention and yet somehow blame, complete and unencumbered, eludes him.

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More controversy for Garcia, Kuchar, but fault lies with Sergio

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AUSTIN, Texas - Even in the best of times, Sergio Garcia can be petulant, and Saturday at the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play was not his best moment. Although, it could be argued it wasn't the worst in what has been an eventful career.

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ESPN.com - Matt Kuchar defends paying caddie $5K: 'Can't make everybody happy'

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ESPN.com - Matt Kuchar defends paying caddie $5K: 'Can't make everybody happy'

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Matt Kuchar defends paying caddie $5K: 'Can't make everybody happy'

Matt Kuchar said Wednesday that he doesn't regret paying caddie David Giral Ortiz $5,000 from the $1.296 million he received for winning the Mayakoba Classic in November.

The amount has been criticized by some as being too small; caddie deals on the PGA Tour vary greatly, but there is often an extra amount thrown in for top-10 finishes and typically a 10 percent bonus for a win.

Kuchar confirmed to GolfChannel.com that he and Ortiz, his fill-in caddie that week in Mexico, originally agreed to a $3,000 fee for the week with a bonus amount that could up that total to $4,000. After the win, Kuchar confirmed he paid Ortiz $5,000 and also offered him an additional $15,000, which the caddie turned down.

"It's done. Listen, I feel like I was fair and good," Kuchar told GolfChannel.com. "You can't make everybody happy. You're not going to buy people's ability to be OK with you, and this seems to be a social media issue more than anything. I think it shouldn't be, knowing that there was a complete, agreed-upon deal that not only did I meet but exceeded.

"So, I certainly don't lose sleep over this. This is something that I'm quite happy with, and I was really happy for him to have a great week and make a good sum of money. Making $5,000 is a great week."

Social media reports about the money dispute began surfacing last month when Kuchar was in contention -- and eventually won -- the Sony Open in Hawaii. They resurfaced this week when Golf.com published an interview with Ortiz in which he detailed his side of the story.

"Matt is a good person and a great player,'' Ortiz, a regular caddie at the Mayakoba Resort near Cancun who said he can make up to $200 per day, told Golf.com. "He treated me very well. I am only disappointed by how it all finished.''

Kuchar, who is playing in this week's Genesis Open, said he is disappointed the story escalated the way it did.

"It's kind of too bad that it's turned into a story," Kuchar said. "I really didn't think it was a story because we had an arrangement when I started. I've done enough tournaments and had enough weekly caddies, and I'm very clear about what the payment will be. And we had an arrangement Tuesday that David was OK with, and I thought Sunday he was very much OK with it.

"I kind of feel like unfortunately some other people have got it in his head that he's deserving something different than what we agreed upon. And it's just too bad that it's turned into a story, because it doesn't need to be. We had a great week."
ESPN's Bob Harig contributed to this report.

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ESPN.com - Matt Kuchar defends paying caddie $5K: 'Can't make everybody happy'

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Matt Kuchar defends paying caddie $5K: 'Can't make everybody happy' Matt Kuchar said Wednesday that he doesn't regret paying caddie David Giral Ortiz $5,000 from the $1.296 million he received for winning the Mayakoba Classic in November.

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Tiger's victory brings on mixed emotions -- and that's OK

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Tiger's victory brings on mixed emotions -- and that's OK

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Apr 15, 2019

Close
Sarah Spain (follow her on Twitter @SarahSpain) is the co-host of Spain & Fitz on ESPN Radio, host of the That's What She Said podcast, a SportsCenter reporter and an espnW columnist since 2010. She was a heptathlete at Cornell and is a lifelong Chicago sports fan.

I can usually tell when I've got an opinion that's going to stir things up. For instance? I don't like doughnuts, pineapple does belong on pizza and I've never seen an episode of "Game of Thrones."

I'll give you a moment to collect yourself.

If I'm not in the mood to stir up the crowd -- in person or online -- I tend to keep these takes to myself. So as I settled in to watch the Masters on Sunday, I decided to enjoy Tiger Woods' dramatic final round without getting into my personal feelings regarding his so-called "redemption story." In the past, simply mentioning that I feel conflicted rooting for him has earned me doughnut-take-level contempt.

I made it all morning keeping my qualms to myself, until right around Tiger's tee shot on the 16th hole. He'd just taken over the lead, and supporters were out in full force on my Twitter timeline. What struck me was not the happiness they felt in watching him pull off a miraculous return to the top -- that was to be expected -- but rather their demand that everyone else feel the same way.

"If you're not pulling for this guy today, you are heartless," one user tweeted at me.

This all felt very familiar. Every fan thinks his or her team's win is the greatest achievement on earth, but Tiger fans have been uniquely unforgiving when it comes to dissenting opinions about their guy. For years, I've been shouted down for even mentioning that a return to the top of the leaderboard might not be as wholly redemptive as some would suggest. The injuries, surgeries and doubts about his future are a massive part of Tiger's comeback tale, but there are some people, myself included, who won't easily forget the rest of his downward spiral.

Ever since his tabloid-fronting heel turn from beloved superstar and family man to troubled philanderer in 2009, I've struggled to separate my feelings about Tiger the man from my feelings about Tiger the golfer. Plenty of professional athletes cheat on their wives, but rarely do we have the intimate details of the ways in which that marital trust is broken. In the case of Tiger, we heard reports about an array of women, including sex workers, a VIP host in Las Vegas, an adult film star and a server who used to wait on him and his wife at Perkins diner. We learned of unprotected sex, prescription drug abuse, a rehab stay for sex addiction and, as recently as 2017, an arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence of Vicodin, Dilaudid, Xanax, Ambien and THC.

People deserve second chances, and the ability to recover from rock bottom and find success again is admirable, but a return to the winner's circle can't erase the pain and suffering of the people hurt along the way. I find myself feeling deeply empathetic toward his ex-wife Elin Nordegren, imagining what those months and years must have been like. Knowing how some of my own friends have been affected by infidelity in their parents' marriages, I wonder what Tiger's children may face in their own future romantic relationships. Some don't care about these things when they choose which athletes to root for, and I try not to begrudge them that, but I won't accept the directive that we all must feel that way.

It's mostly unique to athletes and other celebrities, this desire to whitewash the worst of things. If a friend's husband cheated on her with countless women, threatened her health by engaging in unprotected sex, ended their marriage and put their kids through hell, would you be quick to forgive, or only if he was great at golf? It's fascinating how Tiger fans get downright angry when they're reminded that his comeback story isn't just about spinal surgeries and swing changes. Especially since the fact that he was, in many ways, the architect of his own precipitous fall makes his rise all the more compelling. His story is far more complex and rich than merely overcoming injury.

I was rooting for Tiger to win on Sunday. I wasn't looking to ruin the moment, and I wasn't suggesting that anyone -- on television or otherwise -- needed to address a years-old scandal, I was merely pushing back on the idea that Tiger should be universally loved and supported. People argued it wasn't the time to offer up a dissenting opinion, but when else do you point out that demanding support for a flawed hero is problematic?

The final round of the Masters was as compelling as any, and the tale of Tiger's first win at a major in more than a decade was unbelievable enough without sugarcoating his rise from rock bottom and rejecting those who wanted to discuss it in its full context. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about Tiger's story is that the very same flaws that make him relatable to some are the reason others struggle to support him.

We love to dig into the layers of sports to get to the stories and stakes beyond the box score or scorecard, to empathize with the battles that go beyond the physical and understand the athlete as human being. We like to dissect others' interests and get to the deeply personal roots of fandom. Acknowledging how conflicted I am about Tiger seems to incite great anger, when instead it could inspire great conversation. We could talk about how and why people "fan," who and what drives our passion, our emotions and our connection to sport. Instead, asking to address the full story disrupts the fairy tale that some want Tiger's comeback to be.

After Tiger won, one Twitter user wrote, "If you're not crying, you're not human."

I wasn't crying. I was certainly moved by the relief on Tiger's face when he sank the putt on 18 and raised his arms in triumph to a delirious crowd. I liked seeing the smile on his face as he hugged caddie Joe LaCava and realized the years of doubt, pain and hard work had paid off. The athlete in me appreciated the ride and all the challenges -- mental and physical -- that he had to suffer through in order to feel the joy of victory once again.

But as I watched him hug his children, both of whom are finally old enough to appreciate the moment, I felt more sadness than joy. The visual was certainly profound -- this man, whom we used to see fall into his father's arms after victories, was now, more than a decade after his last major win, celebrating with an embrace of his own children. But the very personal moment made me think of Tiger's humanity, of the full scope of his comeback story, and the people he hurt along the way.

You can root for that perfect scene on the final hole and still see it within the context of his larger story. My humanity doesn't hinge on whether Tiger's win brought me to tears. In fact, perhaps it's more fully evidenced by the fact that it didn't.

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Tiger's victory brings on mixed emotions -- and that's OK

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Apr 15, 2019 Close Sarah Spain (follow her on Twitter @SarahSpain) is the co-host of Spain & Fitz on ESPN Radio, host of the That's What She Said podcast, a SportsCenter reporter and an espnW columnist since 2010. She was a heptathlete at Cornell and is a lifelong Chicago sports fan.

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In Which Friedrich Nietzsche is a Fan of the Cleveland Browns - Existential Comics

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In Which Friedrich Nietzsche is a Fan of the Cleveland Browns - Existential Comics

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In Which Friedrich Nietzsche is a Fan of the Cleveland Browns

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A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

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Matt Kuchar denies rumor that he paid local caddie just $3K during win

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Matt Kuchar denies rumor that he paid local caddie just $3K during win

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Social media was abuzz Saturday evening on the subject of Matt Kuchar, but the man himself has noted there is nothing to see here.

Tom Gillis, a former PGA Tour player and current PGA Tour Champions contestant, caused a stir on social media with this Friday night tweet:

The storm really caught on Saturday evening, though, as it became clear the player Gillis referred to was ... Matt Kuchar (regarding his victorious Mayakoba Golf Classic showing in November 2018).

If Kuchar wins this weekend let's hope he pays his man more than 3k like the last win. 45 mil in earnings. Could've changed the mans life. 👎

- Tom Gillis (@tcgillis) January 12, 2019

Obviously, that is a juicy accusation. Not paying a caddie properly is a major black mark in the golf world.

Shelling out just $3,000 to a caddie on Mayakoba's $1.296 million winner's check would certainly qualify for that infraction considering a looper in professional golf usually gets 10 percent for a win (thus supposedly meriting a roughly $130,000 payout in this case).

There is additional context that makes this even more fascinating: Kuchar is considered one of the Tour's nice guys and his looper that week wasn't his regular man. John Wood, his normal caddie, had a prior engagement and thus Kuchar turned to a local looper for the tournament.

That duty went to a man known as "El Tucan," and it seemed the pair had the ride of its life on the way to Kuchar's eighth PGA Tour win.

The allegation that noted nice guy Kuchar paid a local caddie just $3,000 in a win would seem to sully the feel-good tale of their magical one-week partnership.

But after taking a two-shot 54-hole lead Saturday at the Sony Open in Hawaii, Kuchar clarified the allegations are not true.

"That's not a story," Kuchar said, per Golf Channel. "(What I paid him), it wasn't 10 percent. It wasn't $3,000. It's not a story."

As in, don't believe everything you read on social media.

Kuchar did note in his comment that he didn't pay "El Tucan" 10 percent of the winnings, but that is justifiable. A local caddie generally doesn't have the ability to do as much for a player as his longtime professional looper. A local caddie also doesn't have to deal with the large travel costs that a full-time pro looper must on a week-to-week basis.

Thus, the 10 percent benchmark more applies to professional caddies rather than all loopers. A local caddie may then expect a smaller percentage.

Whatever Kuchar paid the man, he disputes it was $3,000 and clearly feels the amount he did dole out was appropriate.

Kuchar is one day away from another win. This one would net him a $1.152 million check. Wood is on the bag this week, and the assumed 10 percent for the regular would mean he's in line for roughly $115,000 if his man pulls this out.

There may be social media commentary out there. But with Kuchar's denial and no true proof at the moment of the $3,000 allegation, Wood is probably secure in knowing he will be properly paid.

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Matt Kuchar denies allegation he paid local caddie just $3,000 for win

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Social media was abuzz Saturday evening on the subject of Matt Kuchar, but the man himself has noted there is nothing to see here. Tom Gillis, a former PGA Tour player and current PGA Tour Champions contestant, caused a stir on social media with this Friday night tweet: The storm really caught on Saturday evening, though, as it became clear the player Gillis referred to was ...

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Very Bad Wizards Episode 146: Sore Losers (Does Sports Make Us Unhappy?)

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Very Bad Wizards Episode 146: Sore Losers (Does Sports Make Us Unhappy?)

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Is being a sports fan irrational? Does it lead to more suffering than happiness? David and Tamler discuss a recent study that suggests the answer is "yes." But does the study really capture the benefits of being fans? More generally, does science have the tools to truly measure the costs and benefits of rooting for your favorite teams? Plus, we talk about The Nation apologizing for publishing a poem written in Black English Vernacular, and introduce a dramatic new segment: "Guilty Confessions."

Support Very Bad Wizards

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Sore Losers (Does Sports Make Us Unhappy?)

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Is being a sports fan irrational? Does it lead to more suffering than happiness? David and Tamler discuss a recent study that suggests the answers to these question is "yes." But does the study really capture what it means to be a sports fan, and how it can contribute to our well-being?

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Rich people and their addiction to golf: a philosophical investigation.

In the middle of Los Angeles - a city with some of the most expensive real estate in the world - there are a half a dozen exclusive golf courses, massive expanses dedicated to the pleasure of a privileged few. How do private country clubs afford the property tax on 300 acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate? RH brings in tax assessors, economists, and philosophers to probe the question of the weird obsession among the wealthy with the game of golf.

Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers.

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Revisionist History | A Good Walk Spoiled

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Rich people and their addiction to golf: a philosophical investigation. In the middle of Los Angeles - a city with some of the most expensive real estate in the world - there are a half a dozen exclusive golf courses, massive expanses dedicated to the pleasure of a privileged few.

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JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Jad. Before we start, in case kids are listening, just know that this episode contains -- well, Molly curses a little bit in this one. I do too.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

MOLLY WEBSTER: I'm Molly Webster. This is Gonads episode four. This week we're releasing two episodes that are related. Starting with ...

[SKYPE RINGTONE]

MOLLY: Dutee Chand is a world-class runner from India.

MOLLY: I called her with More Perfect producer Sarah Qari. I was having Sarah translate. Dutee speaks Hindi. We caught up with her in Hyderabad where she's currently training, and I called her because a few years ago, right as her career was taking off, she got caught up in this maelstrom that almost ended it. And throughout the series, we've been asking all these questions about biological sex inside the body, and this moment in her life takes all of those questions and thrusts them out into the world in a very public way.

MOLLY: Just to start at the beginning.

MOLLY: Dutee's sister was a track star in school.

MOLLY: Years went on. She kept training with her sister, and she just got faster and faster and faster until 2012 she had this big break.

MOLLY: This is a journalist who has spoken to and written about Dutee, Ruth Padawer.

MOLLY: And Ruth says what happens in 2012 is Dutee qualifies for the National Youth championships in Bangalore.

MOLLY: Like, grown-up professional runners, while she's still a teenager.

MOLLY: She goes back to the youth national championships ...

MOLLY: That same year, still 2013, Dutee starts racing internationally.

MOLLY: She ran her best 100-meter time yet. An 11.62. Only about a second slower than the world record.

MOLLY: So Dutee is basically the hottest young female runner in India. And then 2014, was preparing for the Commonwealth Games, which are sort of like a warm-up to the Olympics for certain countries. And as she's preparing for the games, she gets sent to the team doctors for a doping test. And she said, like, this was kind of a normal part of her life.

MOLLY: So she goes to see the team doctor and he's like, No blood. We're gonna do an ultrasound."

MOLLY: Which is not normal. And so she asked them why, and they just said, "Oh, we're, like, looking at your bone density." And so she's like, "Okay, whatever." Eventually, she does do a normal blood test. Goes back, keeps training for the games. Couple of weeks later picks up the newspaper and sees her picture on the front page of the newspaper.

MOLLY: She has no idea what's going on, but she said at that point her phone starts blowing up.

MOLLY: Saying, "Is it true? Is it true? You failed the gender test?"

JAD: You failed the gender test?

JAD: Is that what was happening in the MRIs and the ultrasounds?

JAD: And what exactly is a gender test? Like, what is that exactly?

MOLLY: I -- yeah, Dutee saying it was the first time I had ever heard that phrase, but it's actually this thing that's been happening in sports for a long time. And I'm gonna take you on a journey back to the beginning of it. So I didn't know this, but the -- but the sort of first modern-day Olympics was 1896, which seems very recent.

MOLLY: And there were no female athletes.

MOLLY: And apparently, like, one of the people who was charged with sort of like restarting the Olympics said something like this is, like, no place for women. But sure enough, by 1900 ...

MOLLY: You had 22 female athletes. Which ...

MOLLY: ... was not uncontroversial. But by the 19 -- by 1960 ...

MOLLY: Which were the Olympics in Rome. There were 600 female athletes.

MOLLY: And so two things conflate at the same time, which is a lot of women now participating in the Olympics. And the Cold War. You know, the Soviet Union, the U.S. A lot of posturing.

MOLLY: And there was this, like, fear, not very merited it turns out, that maybe the Soviets were taking men and putting them into female athletics to win more medals. Or that the U.S. was doing that also.

MOLLY: And so what started were these things that everyone calls ...

MOLLY: So this is happening all throughout the '60s. People start to complain -- rightly ...

MOLLY: And then tested for Xs and Ys.

MOLLY: Because that supposedly equals female.

MOLLY: Here you have a test that's theoretically less invasive.

MOLLY: And way more precise.

MOLLY: Except when it doesn't. Like we talked about in our last episode, there is a gene on the Y chromosome that if you have it and if it turns on, you will likely become a male. But there are a lot of XY women in the world. These are women who had a Y chromosome which is associated with male, but that little gene? It didn't turn on. Conversely, you can have XX males, meaning that little piece of the Y chromosome got onto an X.

MOLLY: There are all of these different chromosomal, like, aberrations. You could be XXXX.

JAD: You have two extra Xs?

MOLLY: You could have three extra Xs.

MOLLY: You could be XXY. You could be XYY.

JAD: And these are perfectly healthy people?

MOLLY: It runs the gamut. You could have fertility issues or developmental issues or no issues at all.

MOLLY: And eventually all of the sport's governing bodies came around to that conclusion. And by 2000, everybody was like, "No more chromosome testing." In fact ...

MOLLY: You have this moment where it looks like gender testing is gonna go away. Cold War is over, those fears are gone. Maybe we didn't need it anymore. But then this other idea walked into the room that actually had been there all along. This idea of fairness. Because the fact of the matter is, if you compare male athletes to female athletes in pretty much every track and field event except for a few, there's a big difference in performance. Like, take the 800 meters. The women's record is 1 minute 53.28. Whereas the men ...

MOLLY: Almost 13 seconds faster. In fact, I talked to -- I talked on background to one female athlete. World champion. One of the fastest women in the world, and she said her fastest mile is regularly beaten by, like, a good high school boy. And so if you're a female athlete, or even, like, a spectator who's watching this sport, you want to make sure that females and males aren't racing each other. And so what you saw when this sort of like organized gender testing went away, is that whenever someone got really, really fast, whenever a female got really fast, there was finger-pointing. And this all came to a head in 2009.

MOLLY: On August 19th of that year, a South African runner, just 18, Caster Semenya just crushes the field.

MOLLY: On the final lap, she wins by so much.

MOLLY: And almost immediately after the race ...

MOLLY: There was just a thought that there was a problem.

MOLLY: This is Madeleine Pape.

MOLLY: She ran against Caster Semenya in that heat. She's since become a big defender of Caster, but she says at the time, because Semenya's times were increasing so quickly, because she was kicking the field's ass like so totally ...

MOLLY: Over the next 24 hours she says, the rumors got louder and louder.

JAD: What ended up happening to Caster Semenya?

MOLLY: Well, the IAAF banned her. There all these closed-door meetings and she didn't race for, like, a year.

MOLLY: But what emerged from all the mishegoss is that in the end the IAAF recommitted to gender testing.

MOLLY: And the way they decided now to be clear was no longer about chromosomes. No more medieval nude parades. Instead, they were going to look at hormones. Specifically, testosterone.

MOLLY: The idea was, we know that testosterone causes muscles that are, like, faster, stronger, leaner. And that men have 10 to 30 times more testosterone than women, which is a byproduct of having testes. And so the concern was in these women that have that Y gene, either that they might have internal testes that haven't descended, or like a gonadal streak. Like, some reproductive tissue that would be emitting testosterone, giving them some sort of male-like advantage.

MOLLY: And this is the first time they try and put a number on it. They say that your testosterone levels, if they're greater than 10 nanomoles per liter you cannot run.

JAD: Nanomoles per liter.

MOLLY: I know. What does that even mean?

MOLLY: So this rule gets put into place, and this is the rule that Dutee bumps into and ultimately pushes back against. That part of the story after the break.

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MOLLY: We're back. I'm Molly Webster. This is Gonads episode four with Indian runner Dutee Chand. So when Dutee shows up in 2014, when they take her in for a secret gender test because she's doing so well, it is to test for high testosterone.

MOLLY: And so Dutee gets banned.

MOLLY: Dutee's first thought was basically, "This is bullshit."

MOLLY: So she gets her own doctor and she does the tests again.

MOLLY: Ultimately, Dutee decides, "I'm gonna fight this." And Ruth says she sends a letter appealing her ban to the Athletics Federation of India.

MOLLY: And eventually Dutee ends up at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

JAD: Is that a higher body than the IAAF?

MOLLY: It's like the -- it's like the Supreme Court of sport.

MOLLY: Everyone calls it CAS. So on the one side you have Dutee, and on the other side you have the IAAF.

MOLLY: Sort of the way it breaks down is Dutee's essentially making two main arguments. The first is that the hyperandrogenism rule is discriminatory. It's discriminatory towards women. To which the IAAF essentially says, "Yeah, it kind of is. But we're doing it for a reason, and that reason outweighs the risk." Right? There's definitely an argument that if you eradicated gender you would be screwing over hundreds of thousands of women. Their sort of -- their big thing is like, "Listen, as a society, even in this court case, we all seem to agree we want to separate men and women. We need to figure out some way to do this." Dutee's response to that, her second argument is, "Sure. Okay, fine. We need to separate the sexes. But the way you've chosen to do it is not solid." You have this number, 10 nanomoles per liter, which is supposedly the high end of testosterone for women. But if you actually look at the data, there's crazy variability. Like, you'll see women with levels that were, like, less than 1 and levels that were above 30, which is typically considered -- 30 is, like, considered high for men.

MOLLY: So there was these studies that came out where one study was like, we've looked at all these different testosterone levels and, you know, there's an average for men and there's an average for women and they're on different ends of a spectrum. But what we saw is there's totally overlap. It's not like one end, the other end, never the two shall meet. That like there's -- that some women go high and some men go low. And you've got, you know, men with low testosterone who are world class champions, and you've got women with high testosterone that never win. It's just -- it's not always clear the role that testosterone has in performance.

JAD: Oh really? I thought it was -- I thought that was well-established that if -- that testosterone will make you faster. Like, isn't that what steroids do?

MOLLY: But some scientists argue that a sudden burst of testosterone is much different than sort of a natural level of testosterone that your body's calibrated to. The long and the short, the science is surprisingly contested. Furthermore, Dutee argued, if you really want to talk about fairness, you need to look beyond sex.

MOLLY: And other people had disadvantages. Like Dutee said, I came from a village in Southeast India where I raced for years with no shoes, and only had vegetables and rice. You know, like, if you want things to be fair then, like, we should all have the exact same upbringing, the exact same coaching system, the exact same shoes.

MOLLY: Court rules that Dutee can continue to race. And they say to the IAAF like, you don't have enough scientific evidence to have this hyperandrogenism rule. Go work on that. Let us know what you find. And through this whole controversy, at least a year goes by. Dutee never stops running.

MOLLY: And the summer after the ruling, at a big international meet in Kazakhstan, Dutee ran 11.3 in the 100-meter, setting an Indian national record. And she makes the Olympics.

MOLLY: Meanwhile, the IAAF, just like the court asked, they go back to the drawing board and they commission their own study. And last summer it was published. What they did was analyze blood samples from a couple thousand athletes at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships. And what they were looking for was to see if the women with high testosterone outperformed the women with low testosterone. And what they found is that if you are a female runner who runs the 400-meter, the 800-meter, the 400 hurdles or the mile, you are conferred an advantage with high testosterone levels.

JAD: In only those events?

MOLLY: In only those events. Oh, and there's also a throwing event, and one other. Having high testosterone levels conferred an advantage of, like, 1.8 percent to 4.5 percent faster, or, like, two percent to four percent roughly. And just to say, like, if you're a runner, one percent could be like two-tenths of a second, one tenth of a second.

MOLLY: Which is often how races are decided.

JAD: Right. And these -- so these distances are the higher distances? Am I right?

MOLLY: These distances are the middle distances.

JAD: So the sprint -- not the sprints and not the long distance.

MOLLY: What their study finds is that the sprints do not -- you do not get an advantage from testosterone. The long-distance, no advantage from testosterone. These middle-distant races, seemingly an advantage from testosterone, and a throwing event -- was it hammer throw?

JAD: What a fucking mess! So you're saying to me that, like, we started with, like, the nude parade. and now where we end up with, like the line that we've chosen to draw is, in these middle-distance races, that's where we're gonna, like, make a big deal about trying to separate out the sexes in these.

MOLLY: It just -- it feels like everyone's just arguing over change at this point. Even since that study was published, the data's been called into question and there's a call for retraction, and they published that there was a bunch of data errors. The authors still stand behind the study and in fact, the IAAF is now using it as the basis for a new testosterone rule they introduced this past April. We reached out to the IAAF a few times and didn't hear back. But, I mean right now we're arguing about testosterone, but I think that the bigger issue here is that we're, like, coming into a moment as society where we're more and more open to gender fluidity.

MOLLY: But if we've all agreed on the whole that it's unfair to group women with men in sports, then we do have to answer a real question, which is, "How do I keep the dichotomy, the binary in athletics while the rest of the world is changing?"

MOLLY: And what you see with Dutee or any of these female athletes, is they're sort of caught at the place where these two worlds meet. Which is a hard place to find yourself. Dutee told me when this whole thing blew up she was only 18 years old.

MOLLY: Three weeks ago, Dutee Chand made headlines by breaking her own national record in the 100-meter. She beat it by one hundredth of a second.

MOLLY: This episode was reported by me, Molly Webster, with co-reporting and translation by Sarah Qari. It was produced by Pat Walters with production help from Jad Abumrad and Rachael Cusick. The Gonads Theme was written, performed and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington. Special thanks to Geertje Mak, Maayan Sudai, Andrea Dunaif, Bhrikuti Rai and Payoshni Mitra. Plus, thanks to Joe Osmundson and Madeleine Pape, who is currently working on research about the regulation of female, transgender, and intersex athletes in sport. I'm Molly Webster. See you next week.
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ADVERTISEMENT] JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Jad. Before we start, in case kids are listening, just know that this episode contains -- well, Molly curses a little bit in this one. I do too. [RADIOLAB INTRO] MOLLY WEBSTER: I'm Molly Webster. This is Gonads episode four.

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A "Socratic" Dialogue (1965) by Hans-Georg Gadamer | Blog of the APA

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A "Socratic" Dialogue (1965) by Hans-Georg Gadamer | Blog of the APA

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Modeled on Plato's dialogues, Hans-Georg Gadamer's dialogue about tennis shares some strengths and weaknesses of the incorporated genre. Gadamer's imitation adopts Plato's concern with hierarchy: who or what is the best? The dialogue, published in 1965, has no identified voices other than male, making it in that aspect no different from its elitist Platonic paradigm. It's likely parts of Gadamer's dialogue will cause some readers to cringe, such as when Socrates suggests that male tennis coaches might be distracted by "pretty young girls" [junge Mädchen]. In an earlier post , I outlined some reasons for the text's importance beyond its appeal to an audience of tennis enthusiasts and suggested the concluding tone of egalitarianism warrants attention. Outside the context of this dialogue, Gadamer compared intellectual argument to the back-and-forth of a tennis match. The sport clearly influenced his own philosophical outlook and contributions.

I want to thank Elizabeth Wener at Mohr Siebeck for obtaining permission from Gadamer's daughter to publish this English translation. The copyrighted version of the original appears in Gadamer's Hermeneutische Entwürfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000).Thanks also to Alexander Crist who assisted with a couple of helpful suggestions on smoothing rocky portions in the translation.

From Hans-Georg Gadamer's Hermeneutische Entwürfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000): 227-233, translated by Bruce Krajewski.

Socrates: Where are you going in such a hurry?

Fred: To play tennis!

Socrates: Where are going to play?

Fred: At the best club in the city, naturally.

Socrates: So, you know, then, which one is the best?

Fred: Of course.

Socrates: That's interesting. With so many things, I find myself asking in vain: What makes something good? I'm fortunate to have found someone who knows, if only for tennis. May I ask you?

Fred: Please do.

Socrates: Tell me, why is your club the best?

Fred: Because it's the best one for networking.

Socrates: What kind of networking? For playing tennis?

Fred: Not at all. I just mean networking in the usual way.

Socrates: Tell me - don't you go to the tennis club to play tennis?

Fred: Oh, yes, that too.

Socrates: Then tell me now why yours is the best tennis club.

Fred: Because the best players are there.

Socrates: That's a convincing answer. And yet: Tell me, my friend, if they are all better players than you, have you ever witnessed better players wanting to play with much worse ones?

Fred: Certainly not.

Socrates: Wouldn't it be better to go to a club where the players are worse than you?

Fred: It might look that way, but then I wouldn't learn anything.

Socrates: That's true. Then isn't it probably best to go to a club where players have similar skill levels?

Fred: Apparently.

Socrates: But what does it mean to be a similarly good player? Those who believe they are at a similar skill level, or those who really are, even if they believe themselves to be better players?

Fred: Those who believe and really are, because any others wouldn't play with me again.

Socrates: Oh, my. What did you say? In your experience, you equate similarly good players with those who are really better players?

Fred: Yes. That's true.

Socrates: That kind of person will not like playing with you. So, who do you want to play with, when those who are equally good think they are too good?

Fred: With the worse players, who think they are as good as I am.

Socrates: But then you won't learn anything. Besides, if they realize they are worse, they won't push you to play with them, because they want you to think of them as equally good.

Fred: Indeed.

Socrates: It turns out on this line of thinking, my Friend, that your club is the best for some reason other than its players.

Fred: But there are rankings and elimination matches that compensate for that.

Socrates: Have you noticed that elimination matches cut down on disputes? And have you noticed that in the eyes of losers it is always bad luck or the fault of the referee that they lost?

Socrates: And didn't you notice that the winners aren't looking for a rematch?

Fred: Yes, but there's a coach in the club.

Socrates: Ah, so your view is that the best club is the one where the coach has the most say?

Socrates: And if the coach doesn't say the right thing?

Fred: Of course, I mean the club that has the best coach.

Socrates: What is your understanding of "the best coach"?

Fred: Well, the one who gives the best training sessions.

Socrates: But what good is that to you, if he doesn't have anything to say? Do you think he will find players to prove you are making progress?

Fred: Of course. That's what the coach must do. He will set up the correct ranking.

Socrates: Oh, my Friend, the more you explain this to me, the less clear it becomes. Please don't get upset, but what is "the correct ranking"?

Fred: What do you mean?

Socrates: I mean this: is the correct ranking one in which the best player is first on the list and the worst player last?

Fred: I think so.

Socrates: But how do you know who the best or the worst is if you don't have playoff games?

Fred: Oh, that's what the coach says.

Socrates: And how does he know that?

Fred: Oh, he knows.

Socrates: Haven't you heard that some wise coaches don't set up a ranking list, but a list that's strategic?

Socrates: If the worse player ranks ahead of the better one, don't you think the coach is motivated to avoid fights between players?

Fred: Apparently.

Socrates: A "clever" ranking thus results in making it laborious to come up with serious rankings, and sportsmanship suffers.

Fred: It appears that way.

Socrates: Wouldn't it be better to have a club where you didn't play serious games at all, but only training matches?

Fred: It appears so.

Socrates: But do you really think that would help? Wouldn't the training matches end up being ranked, at least in the dressing room?

Fred: You're right.

Socrates: Maybe the best club would be one where you don't play at all?

Fred: That can't be it. Why would the coach be there then?

Socrates: But who really is the best coach? You said it earlier: the one who has the best training sessions or the one whose sessions really are the best?

Fred: The one whose sessions one considers are the best, and who really is the best.

Socrates: But who is this "one"? A sports committee? The club's president? Who?

Fred: I'm not quite sure.

Socrates: I would think the ones the coach plays with. They know what his training sessions are like.

Fred: You should think so.

Socrates: But does a coach play with everyone the same way? Is he a robot?

Fred: If it seems good to make an effort, he gives better training sessions.

Socrates: What do you mean by better training sessions?

Fred: Well, that he's into it. And that he, for example, doesn't flirt with nearby girls during the session.

Socrates: Do you think he does that less when he plays tennis with a pretty young girl?

Fred: You've got that right.

Socrates: So the best coach is the one who gives the best lessons to young girls?

Fred: It appears so.

Socrates: But, think again. Do you really hire a coach because of young girls?

Socrates: Who actually hires the coach? Don't you think it's the people with the biggest influence at the club?

Fred: Certainly - the ones with the dough, and with seniority.

Socrates: Undoubtedly. So would the best coach be the one most eager to play with those who have seniority at the club?

Fred: I'm not sure.

Socrates: You see, this isn't so easy. Maybe it's the same with a coach as it is with other people. Maybe it's not so crucial how he is, but how his wife is?

Fred: Oh, yes, that happens. I've heard of situations in which a coach didn't do so well, because his wife didn't like the people at the club so much.

Socrates: You see, that's the way it always is. Even if it's the groundskeeper. There seems to be an insoluble conflict. What to do if the groundskeeper is good, but his wife is not so endearing, or the wife is nice, but the groundskeeper is sub-par?

Fred: Yeah, that looks to be how things go.

Socrates: But let me ask again, who is a good groundskeeper?

Fred: Oh, simple. The one who maintains the place well.

Socrates: But wouldn't the place be maintained best, if it were not used at all?

Fred: Indeed.

Socrates: So the best groundskeeper is the one who keeps most places locked?

Fred: But is he allowed to do that?

Socrates: Well, either the surfaces are too wet or they're too dry [clay courts]. Or they're reserved for the next tournament. Is the best club where the most places are kept locked?

Fred: I don't think so.

Socrates: Well, tell me what the best club is. I am completely confused. It's not where the best networking happens, not where the best players are, not where the best coach is, nor the best groundskeeper. Which is it?

Fred: Maybe the one with the best president.

Socrates: Maybe, but tell me who is the best club president? The one everyone is afraid of and who rules over everyone so that nobody complains? Or the one you don't even notice?

Fred: I think the one you don't even notice.

Socrates: Tell me: why is he there anyway?

Fred: Maybe you'll notice him when he isn't there.

Socrates: You've said something extremely clever. But I have a small reservation. If someone notices that he's not there, he's indispensable. Wouldn't he know that himself?

Fred: Certainly.

Socrates: And if he knows he's indispensable - have you ever known such a person not to exercise power?

Fred: So it appears.

Socrates: The best club president is the one you notice, but not too much?

Fred: That's it.

Socrates: Maybe the head of the sports committee is more important than the club president?

Fred: Yes, and the head of the entertainment committee.

Socrates: Why that person?

Fred: Because it's a pleasure to be in a club.

Socrates: That's certainly correct. But, tell me, what's the right kind of pleasure in a club? In most people's eyes won't the best club be the one with the prettiest girls, and where the best dancing and drinks are before and after the tournament? And don't you think the best way to prepare for a tournament is to celebrate the night before?

Fred: Actually no.But sometimes it's fine. Because, if you lose, there won't be a celebration, and on top of that, you'll have an excuse.

Socrates: So the best club is the place where the most things are going on before and after playing?

Fred: Yes. Now you're speaking from the heart.

Socrates: But didn't we agree that you go to a tennis club to play tennis?

Fred: Yes, we said that.

Socrates: Someone once told me about a club. I forget where it was. Everything was different. The man told the club: "When I first came here, I saw a person who played very well, but he wasn't first in the ranking. I asked who that was. Then I was told it was the club pro. I asked who he was playing with. Oh, with someone from the second team. Is that really true? I thought about it. As I kept looking around the club, I thought I was in an upside-down world. When I came in, a half a dozen games were set up to test my ability. The coach would check up on things and would suggest new tennis partners for me. I saw for myself how he led the team in training and how he conducted individual lessons. He watched carefully, gave lessons on strategy, corrected strokes, combined pairs, and he even did that with the second women's team..."

Fred: (interrupts) That's incredible! I thought the coach avoided the second team - and even the women's team - as much as possible.

Socrates: Listen, that's not all. The man went on to say: "I used to think that junior players had to use old balls, and the senior players got the new balls. Here, on the other hand, the juniors were given a few balls used by the senior players. And for the team training, the club provided the balls. There were always serious playoffs, even among the juniors. If someone played a game, he didn't bring a hoard of his friends as spectators. He also didn't try, if it was critical, to irritate his opponent. He also didn't say that the other paid the wrong amount, or that an out ball was good, and then argue about it. He also didn't go to the other player's side to retrieve balls or try to distract the opponent by encouraging spectators to shout or laugh. And if in spite of all that he did not do, he won, what do you think? - then he asked when they should start playing again, and when the opponent was ready, he started again. And then something truly special took place. The 60-year-olds had their own tournament. And they were eager to finish their tournament first. No one dodged. No one got cocky; everyone was always ready to play.

Fred: (interrupts) Is that so? Are old men different from other people?

Socrates: I didn't think so. I mean, that must have been a group of saints.

And he continued: "There were married couples, not a cross word spoken between them and not just because the woman took all the good shots. And one could see a mother and daughter in women's doubles, and if they lost, they remained calm, as if they were friends. And the most astonishing was: everyone played a lot of tournaments, and there were always seats available for businessmen on the weekends, and for young students. When you went to the club terrace, there seemed to be no distinct groups at all. Everyone spoke kindly to everyone else, and not just to their faces. And no one used titles in talking to others. Even professors were talked to in honorable tones. There were players who were more like chess masters, who played three-set battles, showing no fatigue: you wouldn't believe how fast they played, putting their opponent on the defensive so powerfully and deliberately. Even the oldest gentlemen, when they hit the ball well on the court/chessboard, played tennis zealously. Even 75-year-olds! Or am I mistaken? Was it the club that was already 75 years old?

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A "Socratic" Dialogue (1965) by Hans-Georg Gadamer

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Modeled on Plato's dialogues, Hans-Georg Gadamer's dialogue about tennis shares some strengths and weaknesses of the incorporated genre. Gadamer's imitation adopts Plato's concern with hierarchy: who or what is the best? The dialogue, published in 1965, has no identified voices other than male, making it in that aspect no different from its elitist Platonic paradigm....

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Income Inequality Explains the Decline of Youth Sports - The Atlantic

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Income Inequality Explains the Decline of Youth Sports - The Atlantic

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The state of youth sports in America is either booming or suffering, depending on which box score you're checking.

You could follow the money. Kids' sports is a nearly $17 billion industry, which makes it larger than the business of professional baseball and approximately the same size as the National Football League. Or you could follow the kids. The share of children ages 6 to 12 who play a team sport on a regular basis declined from 41.5 percent in 2011 to 37 percent in 2017, according to a recent report from the Aspen Institute. Going back to 2008, participation is lower across categories, including baseball, basketball, flag football, and soccer, in some cases by a lot: Baseball is down about 20 percent.

The decline of youth sports participation is the sort of phenomenon that seems exquisitely tailored to exacerbate fears about the state of American childhood. One might suspect that the falloff is the result of children gravitating to video games, television, and other electronic distractions that don't require an open field or a court. Perhaps athletics is just another legacy institution that can't compete for attention anymore, like church, community centers, and bowling leagues.

But dig into the numbers, and a more complex, two-track story emerges. Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it's trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

This isn't a story about American childhood; it's about American inequality.
Read: What's lost when only rich kids play sports
"Kids' sports has seen an explosion of travel-team culture, where rich parents are writing a $3,000 check to get their kids on super teams from two counties, or two states, away," said Tom Farrey, the executive director of Aspen's Sports & Society program. Expensive travel leagues siphon off talented young athletes from well-off families, leaving behind desiccated local leagues with fewer players, fewer involved parents, and fewer resources. "When these kids move to the travel team, you pull bodies out of the local town's recreation league, and it sends a message [to those] who didn't get onto that track that they don't really have a future in the sport." The result is a classist system: the travel-team talents and the local leftovers.

Unsurprisingly, the leftovers often lose interest. As Chris Moore, the executive officer of the U.S. Youth Soccer Association, The New York Times, "If you can't make a travel team, some kids may say, 'What's the point?' and quit playing altogether."

In short, the American system of youth sports-serving the talented, and often rich, individual at the expense of the collective-has taken a metal bat to the values of participation and universal development. Youth sports has become a pay-to-play machine.

Declining athletic participation is a prime example of how the choices even benevolent rich households make can hurt poorer families-especially their children.

As a general rule, rich parents in the United States don't just spend more money on their kids; they spend a larger share of their income on their kids. (One could say that enrichment spending on children is a luxury good.) If you divide American households into five quintiles by income, the richest group earns about five times as much as the poorest, but spends about seven times as much on kids- about $9,300 to $1,300 per child. Income inequality, vast at the household level, is even vaster at the child-investment level.

It's commendable for all parents-rich or poor-to love, and desperately want to help, their children. But not all expressions of love are harmless. In his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders, the economist Richard Reeves wrote that economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining in the past few decades in part because of "opportunity hoarding." For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. In so doing, they-in effect- snatch precious opportunities away from the less fortunate.
Read: The case against high-school sports
Parenting doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, but it often is. As Matthew Stewart wrote in an this year on the new aristocracy, those in the nation's upper-middle class have "taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls"-physical walls and social barriers-that make it harder for any child not born into privilege to reach the same level of success.

In youth sports, many affluent parents have taken their children out of local gyms, put them onto planes, and shut the air-lock door behind them. "Many of the parents are not doing it with the intention to harm anyone, since they're just trying to help their child," Farrey said. "But they don't think about the kids they're leaving behind. They're not thinking about what makes sense for the whole community."

Well-off parents dedicate so much time and money to kids' sports partly because of the college system, which dangles tantalizing rewards for the most gifted teenage athletes. In the 1990s, Division 1 and Division 2 colleges distributed about $250 million a year in full and partial scholarships to student athletes. Today that figure has grown to more than $3 billion. This scholarship jackpot gives some children from lower-income families a chance to attend schools they might not otherwise afford. But it also sends a clear message to richer parents looking to enhance their kids' eventual application: Sports matter. As soon as some children enter second or third grade, their parents scramble to place them on youth travel teams, which will set them up for middle-school travel teams, which will set them up for high-school athletic excellence, which will make them more competitive for admissions and scholarships at select colleges.

The predictable rejoinder to the inequality of kids' sports is basically: The system works just fine. Many famous athletes come from poor backgrounds, and some of them owe their careers to specialized super teams. Besides, one might argue, even though super teams for gifted and sufficiently wealthy young people might leave disadvantaged kids behind, this is simply the price that society must pay for excellence. It's a version of a familiar conservative economic argument about the general economy: The U.S. has the world's smartest people, because we celebrate success and punish indolence; so we should cut taxes on the rich and unwind collectivist welfare programs, which only dampen the nation's competitive mojo.

But just as Europe offers alternative models for balancing equality and efficiency in the overall economy, it also offers alternative models for youth sports.

Read: Hypercompetitive youth soccer is tough on kids.

For example, Norway's youth-sports policies are deliberately egalitarian. The national lottery, which is run by a government-owned company called Norsk Tipping, spends most of its profit on national sports and funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to youth athletic clubs every year. Parents don't need to shell out thousands to make sure their kids get to play. And play is an operative word: Norwegian leagues value participation over competition so much that clubs with athletes below the age of 13 cannot even publish game scores. Remarkably, teams that release their scores online can face expulsion from the Norwegian confederation of sports.

It might seem like any country's athletic prowess would atrophy under such socialist and anticompetitive policies. Instead, Norway is an athletic juggernaut. In the last Winter Olympics, the country won 39 medals-the most of any country in the history of the Games and nearly twice as many as the United States. It did so with a smaller population than Minnesota's.

The U.S. sees itself as a land of winners bred by a culture of fierce competition that rewards success. But in youth sports, that competition doesn't happen-excuse the metaphor-on a level playing field.

One way to address the class-related participation problem in youth sports is to tone down the competition that leads wealthy parents to pay for elite traveling leagues and unintentionally degrade the local leagues. In other words: Follow the Norwegian model.

Look at U.S. youth ice hockey, where participation has grown to an all-time record, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Among several possible factors-the NHL expanded recently into southern and western states, and the youth hockey organization banned body checking among players under 12- USA Hockey also recently eliminated national championships at the peewee (under-12) level to discourage parents from building super teams. "We felt it would be hypocritical for our sports to offer up an event that encourages people in the field to start to put together super teams at an early age," said Ken Martel, the technical director of development at USA Hockey. At first, mothers and fathers complained, but "once it was eliminated, just crickets. People like it."

Hockey parents thought they needed to win. But they were happy enough for their kids to just play.

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American Meritocracy Is Killing Youth Sports

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The state of youth sports in America is either booming or suffering, depending on which box score you're checking. You could follow the money. Kids' sports is a nearly $17 billion industry, which makes it larger than the business of professional baseball and approximately the same size as the National Football League.

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NBA -- How the Philadelphia 76ers formed a culture built to win

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NBA -- How the Philadelphia 76ers formed a culture built to win

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Apr 19, 2018

Kevin ArnovitzESPN Staff Writer

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NBA writer for ESPN.com since 2008

Former contributor and editor at NPR

ONE MORNING LAST season, the Philadelphia 76ers gathered for a team breakfast, a monthly get-together in the dining area of the Sixers' training facility in Camden, New Jersey. The airy space, appointed in soothing grays with sleek black-ribbed pendant lights hanging from the ceiling, is one part premium airport club, one part communal dining room where players can grab a freshly blended smoothie or help themselves to the healthy, chef-driven spread. And it was there that they listened to forward Robert Covington share his love for reptiles.

Present was not only the entire roster, but most of the basketball operations staff, from assistant coaches to the analytics crew. While they scarfed down their breakfast, they intently watched and listened to the PowerPoint presentation by Covington -- a full-time student of the game of basketball, and part-time enthusiast of herpetology.

Covington, who recently acquired two pogonas (also known as bearded dragons), briefed the group on the evolutionary origins of snakes, and showed a clip from season two of BBC's "Planet Earth" in which a gang of snakes surround and attack an iguana.

"He thinks snakes are beautiful," guard T.J. McConnell says. "Which is ridiculous."

As the gruesome video played, Covington pointed out that the snakes, though each ostensibly acting individually, were actually working as a group to encircle the prey. As he concluded the presentation, Covington reached to collect his backpack.

"It kind of threw everyone for a loop," Covington says. "Nobody knew it was in there. I reached for my bag at the end of the presentation and said, 'Everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Max.'"

"The whole room just scattered," Covington says. "Joel was the first one."

Max is Covington's bumblebee python, nearly 4 feet in length. And as Covington pulled him out of his backpack, Embiid's 7-foot frame darted across the dining room, hiding behind the serving counter area, a healthy distance from the nonvenomous snake. Covington offered to let teammates hold and touch the snake, but received no takers apart from a few junior members of the front office.

"[Embiid said,] 'Don't bring that thing near me, or I'll kill it!'" Covington says. "He repeated it over and over again, 'I don't like snakes. I don't like snakes. I don't like snakes.'"

More than a year later, an idle comment from Covington, such as "I have something to show you," with a bag in close proximity, will elicit anxiety from Embiid and others. Impressed by the visceral response to Max, the coaching staff even named the 76ers' transition defense drill "The Max," in which an odd-numbered break triggers the Sixers' defenders to scramble back and account for the attack. (The Sixers' transition defense ranks fourth in the NBA in opponents' points per possessions on the break.)

Pulling a python out of a knapsack is unlikely to win an NBA team a basketball game. Yet Max, and the larger tradition of player show-and-tells, is a fitting example of how the 76ers have developed a ritual to create moments of conversation, collective introspection and unscripted humor in service of team-building.

This phenomenon didn't begin during the 16-game winning streak the Sixers ripped off to conclude their joyous 52-win regular season. It started during a period when naysayers complained that the franchise was intentionally injecting itself with an epidemic of losing that would infect it for years to come. But while the critics clucked their tongues, the Sixers were building a foundation for a winning culture, one talk at a time.

SIXERS COACH BRETT Brown calls the breakfasts, generally on an off day. Sometimes the invited guest speaker will be a wrongfully convicted criminal defendant, or perhaps a celebrity such as film director and Philadelphia native son M. Night Shyamalan. But about once a month, a member of the Sixers' roster will be called upon to prepare a presentation. The player will work with the team's director of player development and coaching administration, Connor Johnson, and the video coordinator to craft the talk. Together, they'll come up with a PowerPoint component and maybe a couple of video clips.

The Sixers have embraced a basic human truth -- people want to tell their stories -- and turned it into a team-building exercise.

A few weeks ago, big man Amir Johnson educated the team on tattoos. He traced the practice back to its ancient origins, including Maori warriors of New Zealand and the 5,300-year-old mummified remains with tattoos discovered by German archaeologists. Johnson then touched on how tattoos emerged in the United States, first popular with sailors, then adopted by the countercultural movement of the 1960s and '70s.

"Tattoos have been a part of my life for a while," Johnson says. "I did research, and explained how they became a part of the culture and what inspired me to get mine."

Then there was the fun part -- a quasi-tribute to the NBA's tattoo pioneer, Allen Iverson, and slides of amusing tattoos from around the league, including Mario Chalmers' "Super Mario" image and the Larry O'Brien Trophy found on Jason Terry's biceps.

One of Johnson's overriding messages: Tattoos are a way for in-groups to express identity. It's a permanent mark of tribal affiliation, one that persists over time, irrespective of national success or failure.

Take an exclusive look inside the film room with Donovan Mitchell and Jazz coach Quin Snyder as the duo breaks down the Rookie of the Year contender's rapid rise.

Here's what we know: Joel Embiid, at 30 minutes per game, is an MVP candidate. Here's what we also know: Embiid is nearly healthy again and rotations get shorter in the playoffs. So, Joel Embiid ... with no restrictions? Look out, NBA.

The Sixers aren't running out to the tattoo parlor for some matching ink like the Morris brothers -- another slide in Johnson's presentation -- but they're forging a creed. While they were losing 253 games over a four-year span, skeptics bemoaned that an unintended consequence of the organization's rebuilding strategy would be the entrenchment of a losing culture. Yet today's Sixers insist that what the outside world saw as an abject, overmatched unit was a team that -- well aware of its limitations on the court -- focused its attention on cultivating the mindset of a winner off it.

"All of that was a time of learning, a time of progression, a time of really seeing the type of person you can become when you endure hard time," says Covington, who started 165 games for the Sixers during the lean years. "That journey made us who we are. The 18-win season, the 10-win season. All that, it built us up for this moment."

That moment -- the Sixers' first foray into the playoffs since 2012 -- is spotlighting a team that ranked second in defensive efficiency (third overall) and fifth in offensive efficiency since the All-Star break. But apart from their on-court performance, the Sixers have demonstrated a poise and cohesion uncommon for a team featuring three starters under the age of 25. Talk to anyone at the training facility on a given day -- vets, the youth brigade, senior management, support staff -- and you'll hear a similar refrain.

"We have an extremely close group," Brown says.

Winning has a way of breeding mutual affection, and the Sixers have done plenty of it in 2018. Since entering New Year's weekend with a record of 15-19, the Sixers have won 37 of 48. Such a run requires talent, but there's something ineffable about the Sixers' success, a vibe of collective confidence. For the Sixers, it's a vindication of an ethic that was being implemented even if nobody outside of the organization could see it.

T.J. MCCONNELL LOVES coffee. Loves it in the morning, loves it before practice, after practice, loves "the coffee nap" before games. Loves it on a boat. Loves it with a goat.

So the significance of civilization's most enduring beverage was a no-brainer as a breakfast topic for the guard who, like Covington, endured the losing seasons as an undrafted long shot -- but established himself as a mainstay.

Like Johnson, McConnell started with history -- coffee was first cultivated by Ethiopian shepherds in the ninth century and banned in the 16th because it was thought to inspire radical thinking. And did you know it would take at least 80 cups of coffee for the caffeine to kill a person, but that it can help you burn fat by increasing your metabolic rate between 3 and 11 percent?

"The talks are far-reaching," Brown says. "Each of the topics, each of the presentations, each offers some level of entertainment, some funny, some sad, some humorous. It's another layer to developing and growing culture, and people. And it's been a wonderful experience, and I think I achieved the goal that I wanted when we implemented the program."

McConnell is the NBA's ultimate caffeinated player, best demonstrated when he's picking up opposing point guards at 75 feet. The Sixers, at their very core, are an energy team, ranking fourth in pace and committing to early offense as an imperative.

The energy is derived from the component parts. Much of that is a reflection of rookie point guard Ben Simmons, already one of the league's most devastating open-floor players and the force that provides the energy that propels the on-court product at both ends. JJ Redick, whose former coach Doc Rivers referred to him in Los Angeles as "his own offense," buzzes in constant motion around a dizzying array of screens. Embiid is a lighthouse that towers above the game, but a total departure from the big men of old who stood stationary on the low block. He dominates from every spot on the floor, and has lent the team his dynamic personality off it. Covington defends 1-through-5, while Dario Saric has blossomed this season -- another multipurpose player who rarely stops moving.

The sum is a team that derives energy from the circuits that connect it in the locker room, then expends it with reckless abandon on the court.

THE BALKAN CONFLICT was embedded into Dario Saric's consciousness from birth. He was born in 1994, during the height of the war, and grew up in basketball, where Serbs, Croats and Bosnians co-mingled in a basketball-obsessed region where cultural and national identity run deep.

After some background on geography and recent history, Saric showed a video of the 1990 Dinamo-Red Star riot in Belgrade, where fans of the Serbian and Croatian national soccer teams clashed a year prior to the armed conflict that killed approximately 140,000 and displaced 4 million people. To illustrate the human element of the conflict in more relatable terms, Saric then chronicled the bitterness that emerged on the Yugoslavian national team during the ensuing decade.

"Dario's [talk] was the most impactful," Covington says. "He spoke about everything that went on. You could tell it was a tad bit sensitive for him."

The Sixers' starting lineup is composed of an Australian, a white American from the rural south, an African-American who grew up in the near suburbs of Chicago, a Croat and a native of Cameroon. The reserve unit includes two players from Turkey, and one each from Italy and France. On the surface, an international roster could lend itself to a Tower of Babel effect, whereby players from such divergent backgrounds have trouble finding a common language.

Brown, who spent the 1998-99 season in San Antonio, then 11 more after a stint in Sydney, was fully immersed in the Spurs' value system, which embraces individual differences to craft an organizational commonality. It was a place where Gregg Popovich insisted that players share stories of their upbringings overseas, and where visiting speakers educated the team on the world outside basketball. For the Spurs, "breaking bread" as a team was less about the food -- though only a little less -- and more about celebrating a world where guys from the Caribbean, South America, Eastern Europe, Australia and the Middle East could build lasting bonds.

As it was in San Antonio, diversity has been a virtue in Philadelphia.

"Through sort of just organic discovery, we started to learn that the conversation topics, and the level of variety, is expedited tenfold when you have foreign views from a small group of 14 or 15 teammates," Brown says. "And whether it gets to religion, whether it gets to politics, whether it gets to geographic conversation, it's just healthy when you have a perspective that you certainly couldn't generate if you had 15 American players in a row."

Saric's talk on the Balkans was weighty, whereas Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot's presentation on France, after which the team sampled escargot, was whimsical. In late March, Simmons -- normally a reserved voice -- wowed teammates by highlighting the deadly wildlife of Australia, featuring the saltwater crocodile.

"[Embiid said,] 'Don't bring that thing near me, or I'll kill it!' He repeated it over and over again, 'I don't like snakes. I don't like snakes. I don't like snakes.'"Robert Covington, on Joel Embiid meeting Max, Covington's pet python

The Sixers' roster is as varied in national origin as that of any team in the league, and their offense is similarly diverse. The pick-and-roll is the backbone of the vast majority of attacks in the NBA, but the Sixers run fewer of them, opting instead for a wide-ranging menu.

"It really, at times, isn't an NBA feel," says Brown, who coached internationally for 17 years. "It's got a high level of motion, and movement. I hope that we use Joel the way we should. We stumbled on something. In the light of day it sure seems smart making Ben Simmons a point guard. I think that we've changed his career when we've just given him the ball, and ultimately maybe the career of the Philadelphia 76ers. And so offensively, I love our style, the pass is king."

The Sixers are decidedly international in their offensive sensibility. In a certain sense, diversity -- on the floor, in the locker room, and in the interests shared at the team breakfasts -- is the identity in Philadelphia.

COFFEE, TATTOOS, A 4-FOOT SNAKE. Then there was this: "Are we living in a simulation?"

"It put people's heads all over the place," Covington says.

JJ Redick's first slide posed the following to his teammates: "Are we living in base reality? Questions and moralities surrounding the Simulation Theory and the Quantum Mechanical Laws that explain our very existence."

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003 addressed this question and several others in a paper whose central themes and implications have mesmerized a generation of folks ranging from public intellectuals to science fiction fans to those who just like to have a good time with existential riddles. Is it possible that our descendents -- who are now superhuman, thanks to computing capacities that we can barely imagine -- are running a detailed simulation of their ancestors?

"I am fascinated by this whole theory," Redick says. "[The talk generated] lots of great questions -- some of them existential, some of them logistical. We discussed whether God could coexist with this theory, which I believe he can. To be clear, I don't believe we are living in a simulation, but I do believe that it's a possibility."

Redick continued the presentation with a clip of the iconic scene from "The Matrix," in which Morpheus presents Neo with the blue pill and the red pill, with some quotes from physicist Max Tegmark and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Redick concluded with some questions for the room, asking teammates and Sixers staff whether, if the theory were true, they'd want to know.

IS IT POSSIBLE the 76ers are living in a simulation? That years from now, after The Singularity, some being is playing its posthuman version of NBA 2K -- and Redick and his teammates are just along for the ride? That the versatile talents of Embiid and Simmons are the product of said being, through computer learning, getting better and better at this whole basketball thing?

If only a single NBA team is living in a simulation, it might very well be the Sixers, who are evolving at a warp speed that seems more like a product of technology than the maturation of a ballclub.

And so it was that Saric, who wasn't thrilled with the notion that what we are experiencing as human beings isn't entirely real, continued the debate long after practice. With Redick's presentation still detonating in his brain, Saric showered, then made his way out into the players' parking lot with 76ers wing Justin Anderson. A few minutes turned into nearly an hour as they stood there, a 23-year-old from a small city in Croatia and a 24-year-old from suburban Washington, D.C., exploring the nature of our universe.

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Pythons and PowerPoints: How the Sixers cracked the culture code

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Two years ago, the Philadelphia 76ers won 10 games. Now they're a 52-win 3-seed, with two possible future MVPs, each under the age of 24. This is the inside story of the talk therapy that helped make it all happen.

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An Open Letter About Female Coaches | by Pau Gasol

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An Open Letter About Female Coaches | by Pau Gasol

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I grew up just outside of Barcelona, a child of two highly successful professionals. My father was a nurse and my mother was a doctor. Naturally, I took to studying science - and after high school I even did one year of med school, before eventually devoting my time fully to basketball. I sometimes think about what would have happened if I had stuck with medicine and followed in my parents' footsteps.

I remember how people would often mistake my father as the doctor and my mom as the nurse - it happened more often than it should have, in my mind. To me, that my mother was a successful doctor ... this was just the norm. And don't get me wrong: I admired my dad's hard work and job as well. But I grew up knowing that my mom got into a more rigorous school and program, and thus she had the more prominent job. That wasn't weird, or a judgment in any direction. It was just the truth. And we never really thought twice about it.

Growing up, my brothers and I always admired this standard set by our parents.

And now that I'm an adult, and looking forward to being a parent in the near future myself, I realize even more how lucky I am to have been raised to that standard. It's a standard by which the only question worth asking - it isn't about if you're the right "kind" of person for your job. Rather, it's about how well equipped you are for the job.

In 37 years, I can honestly say, I've never once thought of my mom as a "female" doctor.

To me, she has always just been ...

And a great one, too.

The reason I wanted to start by telling you about my parents, is that their story makes me think about today's NBA. Specifically about how, in the 72-year history of the league, there has never been a female head coach. Even more specifically, it makes me think of Becky Hammon: a coach who has been the topic of much conversation lately, and who I've had the opportunity to play for in San Antonio.

But if you think I'm writing this to argue why Becky is qualified to be an NBA head coach ... well, you're mistaken. That part is obvious: One, she was an accomplished player - with an elite point guard's mind for the game. And two, she has been a successful assistant for arguably the greatest coach in the game. What more do you need? But like I said - I'm not here to make that argument. Arguing on Coach Hammon's behalf would feel patronizing. To me, it would be strange if NBA teams were interested in her as a head coach.

What I would like to do, though, is knock down a few of the silly arguments and talking points against Coach Hammon's candidacy - and the larger idea of a female NBA head coach - that I've seen floating around.

The argument that I see most often is thankfully the one that's easiest to disprove: It's this idea that, at the absolute highest level of basketball, a woman isn't capable of coaching men. "Yeah, female coaches are fine coaching women's college basketball, or the WNBA," the argument goes. "But the NBA? The NBA is different."

First, I've just gotta tell you: If you're making that argument to anyone who's actually played any high-level basketball, you're going to seem really ignorant. But I also have a simple response to it - which is that I've been in the NBA for 17 years. I've won two championships ... I've played with some of the best players of this generation ... and I've played under two of the sharpest minds in the history of sports, in Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. And I'm telling you: Becky Hammon I'm not saying she can coach pretty well. I'm not saying she can coach enough to get by . I'm not saying she can coach at the level of the NBA's male coaches. I'm saying: Becky Hammon can coach NBA basketball. Period.

I'll tell you a quick story to illustrate my point. This year, in a practice a few months back, I was drilling the pick-and-roll with Dejounte Murray. It was a standard drill, just the two of us alone at one basket: I would set the screen and either pop out for the jumper or roll to the lane. If I popped, Dejounte would hit me with a chest pass. If I rolled, a bounce pass. Like I said, a very standard drill - we'll do this a million times.

But what I remember about this particular drill is that, at some point during it, Coach Hammon stopped us mid-motion. Coaches Hammon, Borrego and Messina walk over, and Becky says to Dejounte, "D.J., O.K. - your bounce pass? It's too low. You've got to hit Pau exactly where he needs it. Run that again." We then talk some more as a group about how I need the ball a little more precise, with a little more zip, so I could have a better chance to finish the action at the rim. And then we repeat the drill a few times, alternating from the left and right sides of court. Of course, Dejounte being Dejounte, he figures it out fast - and pretty soon we're flying through. But something about that moment has just always stuck with me. Just, like ... the level of knowledge of the game that Becky showed, you know what I mean?

She noticed a small detail out of the corner of her eye - and then instantly located both the problem and the solution. And not only that, but we were also able to communicate with each other in such a way that we got the result that we needed. It's a good reminder, I'd say, of the importance of communication between team members - especially at the NBA level. I don't think I caught another stray pass the rest of the season.

Another argument that I've seen tossed around - maybe even sillier than the previous one - is that Becky rose to her current position because having her on staff was "good p.r." for the Spurs.
What?
No. We're talking about the NBA here - a business where there's a lot of money on the line, and little patience for mediocrity. Also we're talking about the San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful NBA franchises of this century: a system that has produced David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginóbili, Tony Parker - and that's just the Hall of Famers. This is a team that won 50+ games for 18-straight seasons, and five championships in the last 20 years.

Would you really expect Coach Pop to develop his staff any differently than he develops his players? Of course not.

Pop's only standard for doing anything is whether it'll help us in just one way ... and it isn't getting good p.r.

It's getting W's. And getting those W's The Spurs Way.

O.K. - and then one more thing. It's almost too stupid to include here ... but at the same time, in another way, I also think it's pretty important. And it gets at something about this league, in the bigger picture, that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

It's this idea that, if there were a female head coach in the NBA, there would be some sort of ... "awkwardness in the locker room."

Maybe you're laughing to yourself as you read that. And I get it. It's ridiculous. But I think it's worth taking seriously, too, for a moment - just in terms of how embarrassing it is for us as a league that this is something people are actually talking about.

First, as for the idea itself: I mean, of course it's a myth. Give me a break. There's really nothing to say about it even. The players dress in a certain area, and the coaches dress in a certain area. O.K.? And yes, I'm sure, within that coaches area, Becky has a private space. But the point is - it's not like you're seeing male head coaches sharing a space with players while they're changing. It doesn't happen. So all I can tell you is that from a decade and a half of personal experience ... this line of thinking - like I said, it's all just very ridiculous. In terms of the locker room, and in terms of behind the scenes, there really is no practical difference in this league between having a male or a female head coach.

But I also think it goes to something deeper than that, when people will make this argument - in a way that really bothers me. It goes to this idea that ... as we're making all of these amazing strides in society, in terms of increasing our social awareness, and making efforts toward ideas like diversity and equality, and just sort of creating this more inclusive world ... somehow sports should be an exception. It's this idea, for some people, that sports should almost be this haven, where it's O.K. to be closed-minded - like a bubble for all of our worst ignorance. And that as athletes, if we have any problems with the way things are, we should (as the saying goes) "stick to sports."

So when I see arguments - or even jokes - that we shouldn't have female head coaches in the NBA because of "locker room" situations or whatever ... I guess it just reminds me that, for as much progress as we've made as a league over these last few years ... we still have a ways to go. Because let's be real: There are pushes now for increased gender diversity in the workplace of pretty much every industry in the world. It's what's expected. More importantly - it's what's right. And yet the NBA should get a pass because some fans are willing to take it easy on us ... because we're "sports"?

I really hope not.

I hope the NBA will never feel satisfied with being forward-thinking "for a sports league." Let's strive to be forward-thinking for an industry of kind.

Last week, I don't know if you saw, but the Suns hired the first European-born head coach in NBA history, Igor Kokoškov.

By all measures, this was a very cool piece of news for the league. But on a personal level ... man, I have to tell you: this was a special moment for me. It's been 17 years now since I was drafted - and yet I can still remember the comments from some of the people at the time. It was, Oh, no ... you can't take a Euro at No. 3. That's craziness. Maybe later in the first round, yes. This kid has talent after all. But top five??? Top five ... there you're looking for a franchise player. Someone with a killer instinct, and leadership capabilities. And these Euro guys - they're soft, man. No, you can't take this kid at No. 3.

And of course they did take me at No. 3. Now, you see European players going high in the draft all the time. It's just very ordinary. This year, with Luka Dončić, who knows - maybe it's another No. 1 out of Europe.

And it's really been the same with coaches. At first, no teams in the league are staffing up with foreign assistants. But then some innovative teams start to do it ... and they have success. And then you see the other teams start to follow. And now, Igor has the Suns' job as their head guy.

And I don't mean to compare Igor to Becky, because I don't think it's exactly the same. But I just think it's this beautiful thing, you know, to see the NBA begin to reflect the larger world. Because it's such a big world, isn't it? And I think any time you can expand your horizons, toward something new and meaningful ... it can only make you a better person.

Which is also why I'm so encouraged to see this league taking the lead on so many important issues. I see it when we're coming together over something as urgent as Black Lives Matter ... I see it when guys like DeMar and Kevin are being vocal and open about emotional wellbeing ... I see it when Adam Silver, our commissioner, is marching in an LGBTQ pride parade ... I see it when MVPs like Steph and LeBron keep showing the world that nobody is too famous to use their platform to stand up for what they believe in ... and of course I see it when a franchise like the Bucks is willing to give an interview for their head-coaching vacancy to a candidate who - male or female - absolutely deserves it.

I see it everywhere now in this league, and it fills me with pride.

Because to me, this league - it's a family. And one of the things that comes with being a family ... it's that you're the ones who can be the most critical of each other. You're the ones who can most tell it to each other like it is. Because at the end of the day, you know it's all love.

So what I would say to my NBA family right now, I think, is, Hey - let's all keep up the great work. Let's be proud.

But let's also not be satisfied.

Let's recognize that one protest does not mean we have solved the problem of racial inequality in this country. One parade doesn't mean we're doing everything we can for the LGBTQ movement. And one coaching interview doesn't mean we have solved the issue of gender diversity in our workplace.

A more complacent league, it might take a look at these accomplishments - and be comfortable saying, O.K., we did it, we're finished. But the NBA is not a complacent league.

It's a great league.

And to me, a great league would take a look at this, and say, We've come a long way, and we've shown a lot of growth ... but there's still a lot more growing left for us to do. A great league would say, Yes, this is progress - but it isn't the finish line.

Wait and see. We're just getting started.

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An Open Letter About Female Coaches | By Pau Gasol

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I grew up just outside of Barcelona, a child of two highly successful professionals. My father was a nurse and my mother was a doctor. Naturally, I took to studying science - and after high school I even did one year of med school, before eventually devoting my time fully to basketball.

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What if MLB teams could bid for more home games?

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What if MLB teams could bid for more home games?

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Welcome to the third and final installment of the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not merely by limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes. Our goal isn't (necessarily) for these ideas to land on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred's desk. Instead, they're intended to stir conversation about the state of the sport -- and what would happen if ...
In late August, the A's flew 400 miles south to play three midweek games against the Angels. The set drew some of the smallest home crowds in Anaheim last season, but still, it was a pretty good haul: More than 100,000 paying customers saw the Angels sweep the A's.

A week later, the Angels flew to Oakland. That midweek set drew crowds of 14,571, 11,110 and 10,544 -- four fewer fans combined than the Angels had drawn the previous Tuesday night. There are plenty of reasons for the difference: The hosting A's were out of postseason contention, while the hosting Angels were in a race for the wild card; the Angels draw from more than double the metropolitan area the A's do; the Angels had a more famous roster, including the best player in baseball; the Angels were more likely to win; the Angels have a more comfortable ballpark; and the Angels hadn't alienated their fans by trading many of their stars away. Lots of good reasons why three late-season games would be worth more to a huge group of Angels fans than to a smaller group of A's fans.

Call us crazy, but we have three not so modest proposals for revolutionizing baseball.

Part I: What if every team made the playoffs?

Part II: What if players were paid on commission?

We might not think of live baseball games as a scarce resource -- there seem, to be infinity of them -- but of course, they are. They're costly to produce, and there are limits on the weather, the labor, the public's attention, and so on. Major League Baseball gets to put on 2,430 games per year. If they played one of them in Kalispell, Montana, they'd sell some tickets and some happy fans would get to see it, but at the cost of selling many more tickets to many more happy fans in some larger city. So they play them in Anaheim instead.

Three baseball games between the Oakland A's and the Los Angeles Angels are worth millions of dollars. At $30 per head -- the average ticket price* at Angel Stadium -- the world has demonstrated a willingness to spend at least $3.1 million on these three games, of which about half will end up going back to the labor force.

But these three games were "worth" only about $870,000 to the world when they were held in Oakland, in September, in the middle of the week. It's not playing games in Kalispell, to be sure, but those are three games from MLB's 2,430 limited stock, shipped to a market where not that many people wanted them.

Professional sports might be the only privately owned industry in the world that ships exactly as much product to every market, regardless of how much actual demand there is for the product, and regardless of how much of the product goes unused. Baseball is, in my opinion, pretty close to a public utility, and in a decent world every person who wants baseball games should be within reasonable distance of some of them. But even public utilities are smart enough to know every metro area doesn't get exactly the same amount of anything; the Northeast needs more natural gas than Miami, and Los Angeles needs more trash pickup than Barstow. Baseball is weird like that, and I think we can fix it.

Our idea to fix it

Teams can bid for home-field advantage.

How it would work

The simplest concept is probably the best: Each team gets 81 scheduled home games a year, as they do now. But they are permitted to sell hosting privileges, for whatever price they can squeeze out of their opponents, up to -- let's say -- two weeks before the game is scheduled to be played. The Rays -- who draw 15,000 fans per game, generating roughly $350,000 in ticket sales -- might find an eager buyer in the Blue Jays, who draw 40,000 fans per game and generate a little more than $1 million in ticket sales.

Any number of variables would affect the price. The Yankees, for instance, are a very powerful draw on the road, so they would likely have to pay more to buy out another team. But they also draw huge crowds at home, at higher average ticket prices, so they'd probably be willing to pay more for home field. They'd also probably put a higher value on the competitive advantage of having home field, because they're competing for a playoff spot. If a scheduled series in Tampa Bay comes immediately after one in Toronto or Boston or at home, the Yankees might pay extra to avoid the travel; if it's in early April, when the weather is junk in the Northeast, maybe they pay a lot less. If the Yankees are out of the pennant race in August but the Rays are in the thick of it, maybe the price goes way, way up -- maybe the Rays start buying games from the Yankees. And so on. And so forth. Intrigue aplenty.

Needless to say, teams would no longer play "balanced" schedules of 81 home games and 81 road. This seems unfair, at first glance. The Yankees and Dodgers spend four times as much a year on player salaries as the Rays and A's. We passed "unfair" a long, long time ago. This might help fix it.

Two reasons it works

1. It's, well, a lot more money for the sport of baseball. A game at Wrigley Field is something like four times more valuable, economically, than a game at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, and Fenway produces six times more ticket revenue per game than Tropicana Field in St. Pete. Let's just say that the teams in the bottom third of ticket revenue sell 20 percent of their home dates, and that the teams in the top third buy 20 percent more home games. Nothing else changes, just 160 out of 2,430 games switching to fuller ballparks. If those games draw what the average game in each park draws, that's about 2.5 million more tickets sold per year, and about $165 million more ticket revenue -- just ticket revenue; concessions and parking and so on all excluded -- in the industry.

Further, we could speculate the total gain is bigger, because the "selling" teams wouldn't actually lose many fans at all. Do Padres fans go to a May 13 game against the Cardinals because it's on May 13 against the Cardinals, or do they go because they like to go to a few games each season and that was one of the many options? If that option were gone, wouldn't they just go May 14 against the Rockies, or May 8 against the Nationals, or July 27 against the Diamondbacks? These teams might not lose much total revenue at all, while the buying teams would, truly, gain by increasing capacity.

I'm not trying to wrap this into a "baseball is dying" premise; baseball is healthy, and whether owners get a little healthier or not isn't an existential concern for the sport or for me. But more revenue means more money for players, which seems good, because they're being asked to do the work anyway and because athletes have vanishingly short windows to make their fortunes. And more fans who want to go to baseball games would be getting the chance to. A lot of those new tickets would, presumably, be sold to fans who want to go to more Cubs games but Cubs games sell out, or more Cardinals games but the good seats all sell out, or more Red Sox games but (because of scarcity) the tickets are just too expensive. When lines are too long, when popular products are sold out, when pricing is driven up by lack of supply, it's bad for customers. Like you!

2. It would give small-market teams a resource they could use to be more competitive.

Home teams in the majors win about 53.7 percent of their games. Turning a road game into a home game, then, is worth about 7 percent of a win. Teams pay a lot on the free-agent market for an expected additional win -- around $10 million these days. So, in addition to wanting home games for the revenue, richer teams would want home games for the competitive advantage.

Which is good for small-market teams, because one thing small-market teams have a lot of is home games. Just by having 81 games scheduled at home, they control the WAR equivalent of a Manny Machado. We're just freeing them up to use it however they want.

Is it shallow to treat home games as an asset to be swapped for something more valuable to the team? Is it unfair to let rich teams buy competitive advantages like this? Is it disloyal to a team's city to pare back its home schedule?

I ... am still pondering that. But we generally agree it's not shallow to treat Manny Machado as an asset to be swapped for something more valuable to the team, or to let rich teams buy competitive advantages like Manny Machado, and that (within reason) it's not disloyal to a team's city to trade away its Manny Machado. Or, if it is, it's all a fair and acceptable part of the competitive struggle.

What seems moderately unfair is to tell a small-market team, struggling against a ludicrously unbalanced financial landscape, that it isn't allowed to get the most possible value out of its few significant assets. The Reds are 7-24 this season; they were barely trying when the season began, and they'll tear down as the year goes on. They'll host the Giants on Aug. 17, 18 and 19. It'll be hot and sticky, and they'll draw 12,000 per game, make a million bucks or so. Whether they win or lose those games will be almost entirely irrelevant to their long-term strategy, their objectives for 2018, and their fans. The system is already crass and uncompetitive.

It's not unreasonable to think the Giants, if they're in a pennant race, would pay $10 million to host that three-game set and draw 120,000 fans. Could you really tell the Reds $10 million wouldn't help them get competitive sooner than hosting those three games?

Two reasons it might not work

1. Aug. 19 is Kids Fathead Wall Decal Day in Cincinnati. What are they going to do with all those wall decals?

Winning isn't everything -- and that applies to nearly every MLB team this year. We define a successful season for each club based on, well, reality.

There are 750 active major leaguers on any given day, and roughly 730 of them are relief pitchers (give or take). It's impossible to keep track of them all -- but here are a few worth rooting for and why.

Duck! Pitches are flying all over, strikeouts are surging and lineups are bottoming out ... it's early, but MLB's latest evolution is taking shape.

Truly, though, making a 2,430-game schedule is already a logistical nightmare, and this would turn everything into a logistical hellscape I'm mostly going to handwave away. But the one thing I won't handwave away, and that guarantees this probably never gets through collective bargaining, is that the travel demands -- unexpected travel, longer-than-usual travel -- would be brutal for players. We might be two or three big advances in air travel away from this idea being humane.

2. Now, we do have some precedents for this concept. In college sports, for example, nonconference games are generally scheduled by the schools themselves -- they decide who they play, where they play and how revenue is split. It leads to some crass outcomes, as I understand it, but it basically works (as I understand it). And in baseball, with lousy attendance in Montreal, the 2003 and 2004 Expos played a quarter of their games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There were differences -- the other 29 teams owned the Expos at the time, and the Expos weren't selling home-field advantage so much as sacrificing it -- but the scheme at the very least rhymed with this one: A team whose fans weren't buying tickets found fans who would, sacrificing home-field edge to do so.

But that said: Until you see something in action, it can be hard to gauge the Yuck factor. This plan could definitely end up making us all say Yuck. I'd like to think a rebuilding team might sell a few home games, use the money to sign good players and feed their minor leaguers better lunches. But there's the very real chance instead that some, say, South Florida-based ownership group would sell all their games and spend all the money on shoes. It feels almost paternalistic to say this, but in the tanking era, it might be a bad idea to give teams more ideas about what they can sell off.

However, if we believe teams are rational actors and just want to run good businesses and make good baseball teams, this would give them another tool to use. Or to not use at all. They'd get to decide.

I have only one economic principle: If one person values something much more than another person does, there should be a way to get that thing in the hands that value it most. Any system that can't manage this is a broken system, a failed process, a waste of the store of human happiness.

I think the Rays value the Yankees' loose change more than the Yankees do. I think the Yankees want to host baseball games more than the Rays do. This idea might be a disaster in implementation, but there's a business and a league running at about 80 percent efficiency right now, costing players money, costing fans access, and costing small-market teams a valuable resource. Letting teams negotiate might be the solution.
*All average ticket figures come from this site, which is largely consistent with estimates published over the years elsewhere.

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What if MLB teams could bid for more home games?

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Welcome to the third and final installment of the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not merely by limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes.

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What if MLB players were paid on commission?

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What if MLB players were paid on commission?

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Welcome back to the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not merely by limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes. Our goal isn't (necessarily) for these ideas to land on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred's desk. Instead, they're intended to stir conversation about the state of the sport -- and what would happen if ...
Here's a non-rhetorical question for you: What's the purpose of paying baseball players?

The answer seems obvious -- so they'll play baseball -- but Major League Baseball is a weird institution, burdening itself not just with the mandates of a business but also with the balancing act of an entertaining competition. Following baseball daily, you might conclude that the purpose of paying baseball players is to add a layer of strategy, variety and entertainment to team-building. If this is the purpose, then the system is working. Payroll management drives most modern baseball strategy: It's behind multiyear rebuilds, trading for international bonus slots, extensions for pre-arbitration players, keeping star prospects in the minors to limit their service time, virtually every trade involving established major leaguers, and every discussion of "best" and "worst" contracts. If that's the purpose, then it justifies baseball's increasingly complicated, non-free-market salary rules: the tiered luxury tax penalties, the bonus restrictions for international free agents, revenue sharing and, of course, the stair-stepped earning rights of pre-free-agency players.

Call us crazy, but we have three not so modest proposals for revolutionizing baseball.

Part I: What if every team made the playoffs?

Part III: What if teams bid for home-field advantage?

But the obvious answer should be the right answer. The point of ballplayer compensation is to compensate ballplayers. I don't want to rush past this: The point of ballplayer compensation is to compensate ballplayers, and a good system would fairly and efficiently pay the most valuable ballplayers the most money. The current system does not do this. Instead, it artificially restricts player salaries until those players are veterans, at which point some lucky few reach free agency or get close enough to free agency to sign lucrative extensions while still pretty good. These lucky few get a huge, disproportionate share of player salaries. Then they get older, most of them get worse, and by the end of their contracts, a lot of them are resented as burdens to their own teams by their own fans (who have been trained to view salaries primarily as strategic hindrances).

Meanwhile, an unlucky bunch of players -- those who fade early, develop late or sign early extensions rather than tread the unnecessarily risky path to free agency -- get a disproportionately small share. Josh Donaldson has been one of the five best position players in baseball over the past six seasons, but he bloomed late, and those six seasons all came before his free agency. Now on the cusp of free agency, he has a weird shoulder injury, he's 32 years old, and one way or another, teams will be wary of this player in his decline phase. There's a decent chance that Donaldson retires having made about a fifth of what he has been "worth" on the field and significantly less than, say, Pablo Sandoval or Ian Desmond.

What we're saying is, baseball has an extremely complicated and inefficient way of distributing money to players, and it seems to create unfairness and sadness all over the sport.

"The man who has it all, millions and millions, and at least 40 more coming, is crying," a newspaper column about Vernon Wells once began. Wells was a very good ballplayer for a long time. His only sin was getting paid out of order. We should fix this.

Our plan to fix this

Pay players after the fact based directly on performance. Everybody is working on commission. Baseball players are all professional golfers now.

How it works

Here's the simplest version: Half of the league's revenue is put in a central fund, contributed to proportionately by teams based on market size. This money is for player salaries. For math purposes, call it $10 billion in revenue and $5 billion for player salaries. There are 1,000 wins above replacement available in a major league baseball season. (This is how "replacement level" is set, at both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs.) Divide the $5 billion salary pool by 1,000, and that's what a win is worth -- in this hypothetical, $5 million. (Or use something other than WAR, or a revised model of WAR that incorporates clutch performance or whatever gets through collective bargaining. Of course, nothing like this would ever get through collective bargaining, but let's push on.)

Every player on a 40-man roster gets a base salary at the major league minimum. Beyond that, a player's salary is entirely determined by his performance, paid out of the central fund so that cheapo, small-market teams don't risk getting hammered by overperformance. This is true of minor league veterans claimed off waivers and thrown into a bullpen in July, and it's true of Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. If a team wants to bid more than the going rate for a win, it may, but based on a player's performance, the team must pay the overages out of its own budget, not the league's central player-salary fund. Player compensation will never dip below the floor guaranteed by the central fund.

(A more complicated version: All of the above, except draft picks, would still be under club control until after the sixth season. An even more complicated version could also pay these players reduced salaries per win until they hit free agency, but the entire system of suppressing young players' salaries is insane and should be scrapped. I could offer other, even more complicated, versions -- this is a whole new economic model and would probably end up running 800 or so pages -- but I'll spare you.)

Three reasons it works

1. Fans would like players more. A lot of us have always had a fraught relationship with player salaries. Call it envy. Or don't. The point is, it's a lot of money for players who, when they're making that money, disappoint us a lot of the time. We'll never solve -- nor should we -- the "a lot of money" issue, but by directly linking pay to performance instead of to GM predictions of performance, we cut way into the disappointment issue.

"The uphill is always harder than the downhill is easy," my dad once bemoaned on a backpacking trip with his 8-year-old son, which is how I always think about the Vernon Wells problem. Consider, instead of Wells, Ian Kinsler, who signed an extension with the Rangers two years into his career and another one four years after that. He has been traded twice since, but wherever he landed, he has been one of the best bargains in baseball. His salary has never been higher than $16 million in a season; according to FanGraphs' player-value model, he has never been worth less than $19 million in a season. In 2011, his performance would have justified a $50 million salary. He has earned just under $100 million to date in a long career, and he has been "worth" $300 million with his play. Even in the years after he could have qualified for free agency -- after the salary-suppressed six seasons big leaguers play under -- he has been "worth" more than double the $77 million he has earned. Do fans give him, the anti-Vernon Wells, a standing ovation every time he steps to the plate? They don't. We mostly only care about the ugly uphill.

That's what this system does: It creates a lot of players who are underpaid, whom we take for granted, and some players who are overpaid, whom we grow to hate with every bitter nerve in our body, and we call that an economic wash. But it's not a wash emotionally! It has introduced a lot more bitterness and seething and anger into the world, and it has given 90 percent of players a reason to feel sad; either they're hated or they're underpaid. Simply put, the current system benefits some individual players but not the collective body.

2. Teams would, I hypothesize, be willing to pay more in the aggregate if they didn't have to take on all that risk. For one thing, teams are right now, this moment, paying for insurance policies on the players they've committed to. That's money that isn't going to players, but that teams have demonstrated they're willing to spend on players. So we know they're willing to spend more than players get.

Beyond that: You've maybe heard of the concept of " loss aversion," in which folks "prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. Loss aversion implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 windfall." This implies that GMs -- or, perhaps more accurately, their owners -- would be less willing to sign players as the level of risk goes up. In baseball, the risk is very high. You can't predict baseball.

So change the system. Pay players for what they did, and by definition, teams get what they paid for. Everybody's happy. Nothing's a gamble anymore.

3. Major League Baseball has become a sport not just about which players can play baseball best but about which GMs can GM the best. This is what's at the heart of modern tanking: The game on the field doesn't matter as much as the front office's plan. That plan turns players into "assets" and reframes their contributions as "surplus value"; every player represents either "cost certainty" or "sunk cost."

Maybe that has happened because the audience really loves business school jargon or because fans love the meta-game. I, of all people, can appreciate the relatability of the general manager, and I (a nerd) really do love the meta-game and the MBA aspects of it. But I'm skeptical this is what the much, much, much larger audience of baseball fans likes about the sport. I think most fans like watching good baseball players smash into each other in a baseball competition, and they hate clever accounting.

Removing baseball players from their price tags -- while still paying them what they're worth -- would put the focus back on the field. Good GMs wouldn't be the ones who could shift resources around most efficiently but the ones who could identify good players and recruit them, who could build an organization in which players thrive and are happy and who could help players become better players. Players, meanwhile, would no longer pick teams primarily based on which GM overvalues them the most; instead, they'd look at which team offers them the best opportunity. Something like last winter's Shohei Ohtani pursuit, except without the outrageously capped salary, or like college sports without the exploitation.

Three reasons it might not work

1. It's harder for players to buy houses if they don't know how much they're going to be making this year, next year or the years after.

Winning isn't everything -- and that applies to nearly every MLB team this year. We define a successful season for each club based on, well, reality.

There are 750 active major leaguers on any given day, and roughly 730 of them are relief pitchers (give or take). It's impossible to keep track of them all -- but here are a few worth rooting for and why.

Duck! Pitches are flying all over, strikeouts are surging and lineups are bottoming out ... it's early, but MLB's latest evolution is taking shape.

More broadly: It's one thing to suggest a radical change that mostly affects baseball schedule makers. It's a lot more sensitive to suggest a radical change that would affect hundreds of baseball players' earnings and that would inevitably cost some individual players (especially the ones who get hurt) a lot of money. This whole idea is intended to be good for players, to reward the best players and to increase overall spending on players. But I suppose all that wouldn't matter to the individual losers in this scheme.

2. We don't really have a foolproof method of valuing players, and we'd be constantly arguing about whether any model of WAR (or any other stand-in stat) was good. Of course, as it is, players are being paid based on these same vague notions of value, but before they perform rather than after. But under the current system, GMs are weighing players' contributions and negotiating with those players about how much those contributions are worth -- and they can include any criteria that might have value. They get to use judgment. If we paid them after, that contribution would be decided by a heartless statistic, a common, fundamental complaint of performance-related pay in other fields: "The performance of a complex job as a whole is reduced to a simple, often single measure of performance." This sounds like a nightmare, to be honest.

3. Even today, when performance incentives are limited to a handful of measures (e.g., games finished, innings pitched, All-Star games made) and are a small fraction of player compensation, they often lead to drama. It's not uncommon for a player to feel that his team is shortchanging him on appearances to keep an option from vesting, for example. They would do this for every single plate appearance that a player doesn't get. This sounds like a nightmare, too.

The current system, for its flaws, does have a significant benefit: Once the contract is signed, the player and the club are on the same side. The player's success benefits the team, and money is, on a day-to-day basis, simply not something that has to be negotiated any longer. By having teams contribute to and players get paid from a central fund, we've tried to set up a system in which that relationship remains. But if the Yankees bid $10 million per WAR for a free agent, they'd have some incentive to limit that player's chances to produce WAR, perversely.
Bonus obstacle
4. The whole idea is insanely complicated! Sam, what are you even talking about?

OK, sure. I get that.

I like watching baseball players. They do things that are beautiful, that remind me of those things I used to imagine myself doing but could never actually do. I admire their endurance, their commitment, the way they have fun together as a team. I am entertained by the suspense of their performances. For this, I am happy to pay them money.

My money is then laundered through about six layers of negotiation until it ends up in some player's pocket. I'm happy the player has it. But the laundering has fundamentally changed how we view the players. We are constantly asking not whether the player is good but whether he is worth it. The player becomes equipment -- a depreciating tractor, sputtering. We yell at it when it doesn't start. We talk about its resale value.

I don't know if there's a real way around this. Some teams are always going to have more money to spend, every team is always going to have some limit to how much it can spend, money is always going to be a scarce resource, and players will eat into that resource.

But there's a lot of money in the game, the players deserve to get their share, and there's a principle here that's worth chasing: Compensation isn't for our entertainment but for compensating.

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What if MLB players were paid on commission?

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Welcome back to the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not merely by limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes. Our goal isn't (necessarily) for these ideas to land on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred's desk.

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What if every MLB team made the playoffs?

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What if every MLB team made the playoffs?

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Welcome to the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not by merely limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes. We'll present three radical ideas this week, starting with today's. Our goal isn't (necessarily) for these ideas to land on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred's desk. Instead, they're intended to stir conversation about the state of the sport -- and what would happen if ...
For the first few decades of the 20th century, there was a big debate about how long hope springs eternal in the baseball breast.

"Hope springs eternal in the baseball breast until about this time in August," a Tennessee sports page read in 1907 (note: emphasis is ours in this and the following quotes). "Hope springs eternal in the baseball breast, only to die out around June or July," according to a 1952 Newport Daily News story. Two years later, the same publication quoted "someone" who said hope springs eternal (in the baseball breast) "only to wither and die out before late June." Oakland Tribune, 1930: "Hope springs eternal in the baseball breast until around the middle of May or the first of June."

Call us crazy, but we have three not-so-modest proposals for revolutionizing baseball.

Part II: What if players got paid on commission?

Part III: What if teams bid for home-field advantage?

In 2018, though, we can see playoff odds. Every day, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs and FiveThirtyEight run thousands of simulations of the season, count up how often each team makes the playoffs in those simulations and tell us just how hopeful we should be -- or, more distressingly, how hopeless. It's hard for hope to spring eternal when we know as much as we do these days. It's hard for a lot of teams to even pretend.

This season, on Opening Day, the White Sox had an 0.1 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs' odds -- roughly one in 1,000. The Marlins were also at 0.1, the Tigers at 0.7, the Royals at 0.9 and the Reds at 2.0. All five teams fell further in the season's first two weeks. So, too, did the Padres (from 2.6 percent to 0.5 on April 12), the Rays (4.9 percent to 0.3), the Orioles (4.9 to 0.1), the Rangers (7.7 to 1.6) and the A's (9.2 to 5.1). That's a third of the league with a combined 1-in-12 chance of claiming a single playoff spot, including a mere wild card. That's three weeks into the season. This is a problem if your product is baseball games sold by the barrel.

Our plan to fix this

Every team makes the playoffs. You can't have low playoff odds if you're guaranteed to make the playoffs.

How it works

On Sept. 1, the playoffs begin. The worst team in each league plays the second-worst team in a winner-take-all game. One travel day later, the victor in that game plays the 13th seed -- in the 13th seed's park -- in the same format, and the winner of that stage plays the 12th seed, and so on, with stages getting progressively longer until the league champions face off in the seven-game World Series. All playoff games, until the league championship and World Series, take place in the higher seed's home park.

Three reasons it works

1. If they're going to sell us baseball games that matter, those games should actually matter. Last season, there were 441 games in which the home team had zero percent playoff odds. More than 40 percent of all games were hosted by a team with single-digit odds, and 1 in 6 games featured two teams that were in single digits, competing for nothing. (These games drew, on average, about 5,000 fewer fans than the average game.)

Winning isn't everything -- and that applies to nearly every MLB team this year. We define a successful season for each club based on, well, reality.

There are 750 active major leaguers on any given day, and roughly 730 of them are relief pitchers (give or take). It's impossible to keep track of them all -- but here are a few worth rooting for and why.

Duck! Pitches are flying all over, strikeouts are surging and lineups are bottoming out ... it's early, but MLB's latest evolution is taking shape.

Beyond that, there's this: Even the games between competitive teams usually don't matter, technically speaking. Last season, the Rockies won the second NL wild-card spot by one game over the Brewers, but otherwise, no team's playoff outlook was affected in any way by a single game. Every other team either won its spot by at least two games or missed the playoffs by at least two games. (The Indians would have had home-field advantage over the Astros by one game had they played each other in the playoffs; they didn't.) In retrospect, not one walk-off victory, blown save or anything else actually made any difference to any of 28 teams.

Now, those wide margins aren't preordained, and fans don't know until the end whether the 14-inning loss in June will end up costing their team a playoff spot in October, but on a basic level, we all know that in a 2,430-game season, the stakes of a single game usually end up being low.

If every team makes the playoffs, then every team is in it all the time -- no team enters April, or even September, out of it. Almost every team, from the Marlins to the Astros, has an incentive to win every day because jumping a single spot in the seedings roughly doubles a team's chances of winning the World Series, just as falling a spot halves those chances. There were 17 teams last year within a single game of another team in their league. More than half of all games would have had a direct impact on the final playoff seeds. Six more teams were within two games, and only three teams -- the Twins, Dodgers and Nationals -- weren't within three games of another team.

2. Ever since baseball expanded from two postseason teams to four (in 1969), there has been a clash between two sports-tournament ideals: One is that a tournament should be wild, just absolutely bonkers, and introducing chaos is what makes for memorable outcomes. The other is that a tournament should sort out who the best team is, reward that team with a championship and avoid undercutting a long and grueling regular season with a nihilistic coin flip. Every expansion of baseball's postseason (to eight teams in 1995, to 10 in 2012) has added to the bonkers possibilities (wild-card teams have been as likely to go all the way as the team with the best record in baseball) at the expense of the best-team ideal. Baseball's home-field advantage is small, and in a short series, the being-the-better-team advantage is, too. No playoff format has figured out how to give a 97-win team a fitting edge over an 83-win team in a week of baseball.

This would. Despite it being possible for the worst team in a league to win 15 straight rounds of playoffs and take the World Series, it is extremely unlikely. Even a 10 seed would be around a 1-in-50,000 shot to win it all, by my estimates. In fact, this format would benefit the bad teams a little (by giving them a sliver of a chance and something to play for) but benefit the very best teams the most (by giving them a shorter path to the championship). More than half the titles would be won by teams that led their leagues in regular-season wins.

3. Ah, but the bonkers that would happen along the way! Last year, the Oakland A's went into September with a 58-75 record; they'd have been the 14th seed in the American League. Then, for no obvious reason and for no real gain, they got hot. They won five straight and 14 out of 17 and ended the season on a 17-7 run. Historians will forget this stretch of good baseball, as will the 9,329 fans who showed up in Oakland to see the A's play the Mariners on Sept. 25. But had it been timed just right, that stretch could have carried the 14th-seeded A's all the way to a five-game matchup against the No. 5 seed. Rookie Matt Olson, who slugged .741 with nine homers in that stretch, would be a playoff legend. Starting pitcher Daniel Mengden's 1.54 ERA in September would have defined his career.

Allowing every team to reach the postseason creates the possibility for a truly exceptional run and for the sort of upsets that grab an entire nation's attention. Baseball's current postseason doesn't really have underdogs. It has the best team and the slightly worse teams, but nobody is making an inspiring movie about the 83-win Cardinals going all the way in 2006. In this format, there would be underdogs. A truly bad team really would occasionally bump into a truly good one in a high-stakes matchup. This is good for the broadcast business: Humans who have no natural rooting interest will tune in to root for an underdog. It's good, too, for anybody who just likes some variety.

The logistical challenge I think we can solve

This would cause incredible scheduling turmoil. Good teams don't want to take a month and a half off before the playoffs finally get around to including them. They'd say it would make them rusty, and they might even be right. We need to figure out a way to keep them playing.

We just keep the regular season going -- through the end of September, as we do now. All the teams that aren't engaged in a playoff series stick to the regular schedule, and the seedings continue to change as regular-season games are won and lost. For example: On Sept. 1, the 15th-seed Marlins and 14th-seed Padres play each other. The Marlins' and Padres' regularly scheduled opponents would play each other in a two-game series, and those games count as regular-season games. Everybody else plays their regular schedule. The 13th seed at this point obviously can't fall lower than 13 but could still climb to 12, just as the No. 1 could still fall to No. 2, and so on. This ends up with the No. 1 seed having to sit idle for 12 days; maybe they can go camping. The point is this: Almost all the games matter, all the way to the end.

(I'm going to assume all ballparks remain available on short notice, just as they seem to be in October now, and the burden of booking travel is, as in the current October format, manageable, if inconvenient. I'm cutting the regular-season schedule back to 154 games and using those extra eight off days in September, so the regular-season schedule can match up with the travel days in the playoffs. I'm ... hoping it never rains. I still have the seventh game of the World Series ending on Nov. 1.)

Mostly because players deserve to play for something and because the sport really works only if we believe they're playing for something. As it is, a full third of the league exists more or less outside the realm of hope and faith. Joey Votto's value to most of us is as a stat-creation machine for our fantasy teams. Joey Votto's value to the standings is to play spoiler and ruin another team's weekend. For one of the five best players in the world and one of the great careers of this generation, that seems like an incomplete existence. At least once every season, Joey Votto should be allowed to play in a packed stadium with the World Series (at least technically) on the line. Baseball gave us one Felix Hernandez, and we blew it. It gave Daniel Mengden the month of his life, and we told him it basically didn't count.

Maybe this all worked a few decades ago, when hope still sprang eternal in the baseball breast. Nowadays, we know better. If they want us to hope, we need a more hope-inducing system.

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What if every MLB team made the playoffs?

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Welcome to the Radical Ideas Series, in which we "fix" baseball not by merely limiting mound visits or even instituting pitch clocks but by revolutionizing the game's competitive structure with way-out-there -- yet at least vaguely plausible -- changes. We'll present three radical ideas this week, starting with today's.