Cape Verde Blue Sharks
Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
via: Where is Cape Verde? Meet the tiny African island nation upsetting World Cup giants (Guardian)

[ed. Love this photo - pure joy.]

My Horrible, No Good Weekend at the UFC White House Fight

[ed. I didn't waste ten brain cells thinking about this 'celebration' - before or after. I guess it happened.]

If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. [ed. Yow.]

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters.

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being. [...]

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment. [...]

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action. [...]

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party!

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Oiled-Up, Half-Naked Men Entertain President On 80th Birthday (Wonkette):]

***

Something around $30 million dollars was spent to turn the South Lawn of the White House into a giant cage fighting ring called “The Claw.” Behind it, on The Ellipse, was a small UFC festival. There was a large stage; scantily clad ring-girls; dumpy MAGA dudes in America-themed sleeveless T-shirts; bars shilling $12 Budweiser, $20 whiskey or tequila cocktails, $4 12 oz. cups of water; $25 burgers and kielbasas called “Giant Western Sausages”; portable chemical toilets; and two “free water” stations. There were two or three large stores offering a seemingly endless supply of UFC and Freedom 250 merchandise, like trading cards, T-shirts, hats, fingerless gloves and novelty championship belts. [...]

It should be noted that general admission tickets to the Fan Experience on the Ellipse were free, and seemingly given out at random to anyone who signed up on the UFC site. There were also some special VIP packages for deep-pocketed investors that ranged up to $1.5 million. [...]

But why not? It’s a goddamn UFC fight on the South Lawn! It’s like a grisly highway crash that backs up traffic for miles. Eventually, you creep close enough to submit to your lesser human instincts and gawk like a shaved ape when you finally pass the smoldering wreckage.

You Can Make Free Money on Polymarket. If You Know Math.

Betting is fundamentally about risk: You might win or you might lose. But what if you could always win?

Enter prediction markets, sites that let users bet on pretty much anything. Most of those users lose. But a savvy few have made a fortune using basic math.

Prediction sites like Polymarket and Kalshi offer many of the same markets. And usually, they post the same odds.

But sometimes the odds diverge — like in these markets about the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

In March, Kalshi had Gavin Newsom’s odds of winning at 29 percent, but Polymarket had them at 24 percent. These disparities are good news, if you’re gambling.

Taking both sides of the same bet is usually a wash. But not when there’s a price disparity.

In the example with Mr. Newsom, imagine you bought “Yes” on Polymarket, for 24 cents, and also “No” on Kalshi, for 71 cents.

If Mr. Newsom wins, then Polymarket owes you a dollar.

If he loses, then Kalshi owes you a dollar.

One of these bets must be a winner — so you’re guaranteed to make a dollar. But because of the disparity, you’ll only have spent 95 cents on the bets.

If this sounds like printing money, that’s because it basically is. It’s called “arbitrage,” long a favorite strategy of quantitative traders trying to juice profits from the stock market with minimal risk. You buy something at a cheap price, and simultaneously sell it at a more expensive price. It’s a win-win.

Some bettors are now using the same strategy to rake in thousands of dollars from online prediction sites. Moving quickly, they can take advantage of price gaps between exchanges like Polymarket and Kalshi, or even between the prediction sites and sports-betting sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. The wider the spread, the bigger the potential profit.

Ryan Noel, 25, has built a career arbitrage-betting (or “arbing,” as he calls it) during sports games. He regularly makes more than 1,000 arbitrage bets per week on prediction sites like Polymarket, Kalshi, Novig and ProphetX, in addition to online sportsbooks, he said.

“Software shows me the price of every sort of market at the same time,” said Mr. Noel, who started arbing in late 2023, while working as an actuary, before quitting his job last year. So far, the strategy has netted him more than $1 million, he said. “I don’t care about sports at all. I think watching sports is the most boring thing you can do with your time. I’m a mathematician.”

Math skills are essential — but so are the right tools, said Aidan Gawlowski, a Chicago-based college student who started arbing last year before coding his own software to hunt down prediction-market price discrepancies. Mr. Noel buys software from OddsJam, Pick the Odds and Bookie Beats that tracks price changes across thousands of markets, flagging the possible arbitrage.

“I figured out that there was this opportunity,” said Mr. Gawlowski, 21, who said he started betting when he was 14. “You’re mathematically guaranteed to make money.”

Some moneymaking opportunities last longer than others. The arbitrage with Mr. Newsom? It existed, unexploited, for weeks. During that period, you could’ve bought “Yes” on Polymarket and “No” on Kalshi, for a roughly 3 percent profit. (The probability spread of around five percentage points, minus Kalshi’s transaction fee.)

But there are a couple of reasons that opportunity was an anomaly. For one, the market doesn’t resolve for two years. That’s a long time to tie up money you could invest elsewhere, said Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School at Penn. There’s also additional risk that some bets carry more than others: What if the election gets weird, and the sites don’t agree on what defines a Newsom nomination? Then, you might lose both sides of your bet.

That was enough to deter Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, who spend most of their time arbing on sports. There are loads of sites that let users bet on sports, meaning more chances for price discrepancies. And during games, odds must constantly update to keep up with live developments. That process takes time, which can translate into arbitrage opportunities.

“You can make a significant amount of money on a big N.B.A. day,” Mr. Gawlowski said. During sports games, Mr. Noel’s price-tracking programs catch an arbitrage opportunity every minute or so, he said.

These discrepancies often emerge when casual users, betting based on vibes, move a market just a hair out of alignment. Then arb bettors pounce, and their actions end up evening the odds across the sites again.

Taking advantage of these short-lived opportunities is hard enough for you and me. But the window is closing even for bettors like Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, as big financial institutions get in on the action with automated bots that can trade faster than any human. [...]

“Back in 2022, these arbitrage opportunities would last 30 seconds,” said Alex Llewellyn, 36, a professional sports bettor. “These days I execute bets in two to five seconds. And instead of 8 percent arbs, you generally see 4 to 5 percent.” [...]

Prediction sites, awash in Wall Street money and bots, are heading toward the same fate as other major financial markets. One-tenth of the top one percent of accounts on Polymarket rake in more than two-thirds of the profits, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

“You’re not betting against Joe Schmo anymore,” said Alex Monahan, the founder of OddsJam. “You’re betting against a quant firm with infinitely better technology than you.”

by Evan Gorelick and Katherine Chui, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Forget the opioid crisis - so yesterday. These days everybody's got a gambling addiction. Here's a different form of arbitrage: Net Gain (NYT):]

***

For the first game of the N.B.A. finals, my friends and I went to a bar offering a deal that seemed too good to be true: If the Knicks won, the bar would cover every customer’s tab, up to $100.

As tipoff approached, young people variously clad in starched button-downs and Brunson jerseys galloped from nearby Midtown offices for a chance at free booze. The line snaked around the block, and the bouncer made a show of blocking the front entrance. People screeched at one another. My buddy, already inside, shooed me in through a side door. (I heard someone whine, “Why does he get to go in?”)

Three hours later, when the Knicks overcame a 14-point deficit to take down the Spurs, strangers in the crowd were hugging and high-fiving. Outside, a passing garbage truck honked its horn in celebration. The entire city seemed to be shouting with joy. And at the Jeffrey, which bills itself as a neighborhood spot for “craft beer, cocktails and bites,” 726 beers, 385 cocktails and 175 smash burgers were on the house.

Over the hedge

When someone hands you a freebie, by all means: Take it. But you and I both know there ain’t no such thing as a truly free lunch. So while downing drinks, I kept asking myself whose money I was taking.

Turns out, it belonged to Kalshi users who’d bet on San Antonio — in other words, deadbeats and turncoats who had it coming. (Kidding! Kind of.) Before the game, the bar’s owner, a 50-year-old corporate lawyer, had used the prediction market to bet $5,000 on the Knicks. Since the Spurs were the favorites, that position netted him around $8,000 when New York prevailed — enough to cover nearly everything the crowd had consumed. If the Knicks had lost, the bar would’ve been out the $5,000, but it could have covered its losses with all those drinks and smashburgers. (Plus the free publicity — you’re welcome.)

Why Pro Golf is Full of Bad Marriages

Early in my career, a person I respected told me to find a woman who didn’t know who I was. On the surface, it made sense. Marry someone who isn’t chasing the lifestyle, isn’t measuring you by your World Ranking, loves you for reasons that have nothing to do with your sponsors.

The reasoning is airtight. What such a relationship does to your game is another matter.

I’m not talking about bad marriages. For most guys out here, the right partner is the only reason any of this is sustainable. She’s running the house, the kids, the calendar, the bills while you’re three time zones away missing a cut by one. She’s the voice on the phone Sunday night calming you down after a closing 74. The right person at home is the most underrated edge in professional golf, and it’s not close. Plenty of guys would have washed out years ago without the unglamorous, unphotographed work of a spouse holding their life together. That’s what makes the harder cases so confusing. Sometimes the genuinely supportive spouse or girlfriend, the person doing everything correctly by any normal standard, can wire backward into bad golf.

A lot of the best players out here have been with the same person since before they were famous. The high school sweetheart, the college girlfriend—she’s been there through the grind. She was there in the mini-tour years when you were sharing a rental car with your caddie and eating at McDonald’s. She watched you miss cuts and come home deflated and go right back out the following week. She knows what a Monday qualifier looks like. She understands why you’re on the range at 7 in the evening when the tournament ended at 4. She’s not asking why you’re binging course footage instead of Netflix. She’s been shown a thousand demonstrations of what this life actually requires, and somewhere along the way made peace with it. That’s no small thing. That’s years of negotiation that never have to be spoken aloud because the terms were established before anyone had anything to negotiate over. That dynamic works.

The woman who meets you when you’re already out here, who falls for the version of you that’s successful and sponsored and on television, she’s meeting a finished product. She didn’t sign up for the obsession because she never saw the ugly underbelly that often powers it. She saw the result, which can look from the outside like a man who plays golf for a living and has a lot of free time. Explaining the difference is harder than it sounds, and some guys never quite manage it.

Sometimes relationship dynamics shift. Some guys hit their mid-30s, their kids are getting older, and they want a change. They don’t want to wake up and find the children are off to college, that they missed ballgames and birthdays, that their kids barely recognize them. That’s a man getting his priorities straight. It’s often the same deal with a second marriage. Players who’ve been through a divorce are usually not making the same personal mistakes twice. The issues that ended the first marriage—usually just travel and time, not anything scandalous—are front of mind. That player has done the reflection. He’s had the hard conversations, probably with a therapist, definitely with himself at midnight in a hotel room on the back nine of a bad season. He knows where things went wrong, so he adjusts. He softens. He eases the schedule, comes home earlier, takes fewer optional practice rounds, skips a pre-tournament trip he would have previously considered non-negotiable. He texts back faster. He’s present in the ways he wasn’t before. By most human measures, he is better. But the game has no interest in what’s reasonable or mature. It only knows what you give it.

That’s the uncomfortable truth at the center of all this. Professional golf doesn’t reward balance. The guys at the top of the world rankings are not balanced people. They are obsessive, single-minded, occasionally impossible to be around and completely fine with all of that. When a player starts genuinely dividing his attention—not just his time, but his mental energy, his hunger—his golf notices before he does. His best is still very good. It just doesn’t happen as often, and out here, the real trick is getting the most out of yourself when your best isn’t available, so that’s exactly where you see the drop off.

The genuine disasters—the controlling spouses who create scenes, who make demands of agents and sponsors, who insert themselves into decisions that have nothing to do with them—are rarer than tour gossip might suggest. Most of the horror stories are exaggerated, or they’re about friction on the business side rather than anything that touches the actual golf. Even then, it’s not always a straight line to worse tournament results. I know one player whose wife was, by consensus among everyone who dealt with her, a complete nightmare. Managers, sponsors, tournament officials—everyone had a story. Yet, this guy played some of the best golf of his life when she was at her worst. (After the kids, she settled down.) The explanation I heard from a mutual friend made more sense than it should have: If she was going to cause that much trouble, he’d better make the whole thing worth it. Sometimes chaos focuses a man. It’s not a model I’d recommend, but I’ve seen stranger things produce birdies.

by The Undercover Pro w/Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:
Image: Madison Ketcham

[ed. Probably applicable to many other sports, as well. And there are so many 'distractions' out there.]

Bye, Bye SI

On Friday, several of Sports Illustrated’s best and brightest writers, or what remains of them, announced they’d been laid off.

Jeff Pearlman, who made his bones as a journalist for SI when it was one of the world’s most prominent sports magazines, had his heart broken all over again.

Among those who said on social media that they’d been laid off were Stephanie Apstein, Tyler Lauletta, Kyle Koster, and Mike McDaniel. Meanwhile, Front Office Sports reported that several longtime writers — including Greg Bishop and Michael Rosenberg — were laid off as part of the latest round of cuts at SI.

This is, of course, just the latest in a long series of cuts and reorganizations for the once-proud sports media brand that now trades on its reputation to create merchandise, resorts, and mostly mediocre editorial content, sometimes aided by AI.

“As a guy who wrote for Sports Illustrated for a long time and a guy who loves Sports Illustrated, like loves, loves, loves… this stuff carves me up,” Pearlman said in a TikTok video. “And it’s one thing that they get rid of writers, they lay people off. What I hate the most is that these corporate douchebags who have taken over the magazine view it just as a name now.

“That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn. It’s something to put on whatever you can shove that thing on. That’s what it is now. Sports Illustrated has become nothing more than a way to attract people… It’s just so disturbing.”

Pearlman then ran down the who’s-who list of prominent sports writers who once graced the magazine’s pages. [...]

Pearlman, who left SI in 2002, says he could see the writing on the wall even back then.

“I started knowing SI was in trouble, I would say, for me, a couple of things,” Pearlman said. “Number one, when they f*cked up adjusting to the internet. Big time screw-up. Number two, when they laid off all of their photographers, considering it’s literally Sports Illustrated. Number three, when they just decided to destroy their library. Like, literally take the SI library, which was awesome, and just give it away.

“And now here we sit. The last of their name writers gone. Now, basically an empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports. It sucks. It’s a dark day in sports.”

by Sean Keeley, Awful Announcing|  Read more:

Image: Sports Illustrated Resorts, Jeff Pearlman

[ed. Rolling Stone business model.]

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies.

The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to.

This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants.

The truck stops everywhere

Sysco does not just feed independent restaurants. They feed hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, public schools, and the food service companies that supply the cafeterias of the United States Capitol. Fiscal year 2025 closed at $81.4 billion in net sales. The customer count sits at roughly 730,000 across 10 countries, with 337 distribution centers and around 1,719 employed drivers.

The thing people should understand is what those numbers do at the supplier layer. When Sysco moves a spec on a chicken breast, the spec moves on the plate of a restaurant-goer, a public school kid and a federal prisoner in the same week. When Sysco strikes a single supplier deal for frozen seafood, the cafeteria at the United States Congress and the chow line at the Bureau of Prisons end up with the same case from the same boat. [...]

The clam chowder in a New England diner and the clam chowder in a Florida diner come out of the same Sysco can. The biscuits at a Tennessee breakfast joint and the biscuits at a Wisconsin one come from the same frozen case. Regional cuisine, the kind that used to be the reason people drove to a particular restaurant in a particular town, requires regional ingredients and regional suppliers and a chef with the leverage to source both. As Frerick put it, “every independent diner becomes an off-brand Denny's."

Among line cooks, the saying is simpler. “When a Sysco truck pulls up to the loading dock, the kitchen has stopped trying.”

Dr. Bobby

Bobby Wagner, former Seahawks star, earns honorary doctorate from Utah State.

Former Seahawk Bobby Wagner … oops. Former Seahawk Dr. Bobby Wagner had to crack a few jokes when he took the stage at Utah State University’s graduation last week.

Wagner, who played for the Seahawks from 2012 to 2021 and again in 2023, returned to his alma mater on April 29 as the commencement speaker. During the ceremony, Wagner received an honorary doctoral degree from Utah State.

“If you didn’t know, my name is now Dr. Bobby Wagner,” Wagner said. “And to any family members here, you need to update my name in your phone. It’s ‘Dr.’ now. I will no longer respond to ‘Bobby.’ It’s Dr. only.”

The honorary doctorate adds to a long list of accolades that Wagner has collected throughout his career. In addition to his Super Bowl win with the Seahawks, he is a 10-time Pro Bowler and six-time All-Pro. Wagner also was named the 2025 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year.

Wagner’s jokes were on display when he accepted that award, too.

“I really didn’t think I was going to win this award,” Wagner said on stage after learning he won the Walter Payton award. “I almost didn’t even come to be honest. I’m glad I did.”

While accepting that honor back in February, Wagner delivered a speech that balanced humor with thoughtful reflection and gratitude for his mother who died of stroke complications when Wagner was a student athlete at Utah State.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 6,000 graduates in late April, Wagner joked about how lucky the graduating class was to have a Target in town, a luxury that wasn’t around during his time, before telling the story of how he ended up at Utah state.

He recalled a winter visit he made to the university with his mother. On the trip, he was offered a scholarship and despite having no other scholarship offers, Wagner told his mother he wanted to take his chances.

“She told me I either accept the scholarship, or I wasn’t coming back home,” Wagner said standing at the podium. “Back then there was no Ubers. There was no NIL. I wasn’t getting paid. So, I accepted the scholarship.”

“One of the things that taught me was the place you least expect to be is the place you’re exactly supposed to be,” Wagner said.

Wagner went on to be a four-year starter at Utah State, leading the program to their first bowl game in 14 years. He tied the school record with 446 career tackles and earned various other individual honors.

After graduating, Wagner was selected by the Seahawks in the second round of the 2012 draft.

The linebacker’s speech continued on, talking about the importance of building connections and going after personal goals. In addition to his NFL career, Wagner has various off-field pursuits including the Phenia Mae Fund and FAST54 that promote stroke education in honor of his mother. Wagner also recently earned his MBA from the Howard University School of Business.

Wagner’s 15-minute speech was threaded with jokes, including some well received trash talk.

“It’s fun to be able to talk trash to every other school, like I tell them, ‘I don’t know, Stanford’s cool, but it’s not Utah State,’ you know what I mean?” Wagner said.

by Sofia Schwarzwalder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. Dr. Bobby. Blessed with class and talent. Seattle's been lucky. We've had Ichiro, too.]

LIV R.I.P.

LIV Golf will soon be gone. Its collateral damage will linger.

LIV Golf is on life support. The circuit that promised to disrupt the sport by liberating players and democratizing power is losing support from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Its architect, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, has stepped down. A recent event was postponed, the league citing heat and a soccer scheduling conflict. LIV insists the project continues, scaled down from its Golf But Louder origins, with a restructured board of directors hoping to find new investment to keep it running come 2027. The rest of the evidence is harder to soften. No funding, no captain, no fanbase to absorb the financial and reputational weight the league is now dragging, its marquee star Bryson DeChambeau openly entertaining a return to the tour he sued.

Should LIV's attempt at survival fail, it leaves behind a landscape permanently altered—Fissures that will take years to close, loyalties that calcified under pressure, and a generation of fans that watched the sport they love hold itself hostage. It is tempting to declare winners. This is understandable and mostly wrong. Let's be precise about what happened, because there is a specific kind of silence that follows a standoff that neither side truly won, with the participants left wondering what, exactly, they were fighting for.

LIV Golf was not, at its core, a golf league. It was a geopolitical instrument. Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $5 million to $8 billion on the venture because soft-power exercises work. PIF understood, correctly, that associating the kingdom's brand with the game was worth more than any conventional PR campaign could deliver. The players who signed were not naive about this. Some convinced themselves the cause was separable from the source. Others simply didn't care. Both positions were defensible in their own way, and both were, ultimately, wrong.

The LIV product was mediocre, although that was besides the point. What made LIV genuinely, existentially dangerous was its bottomlessness, and the greed that bottomlessness unleashed. There is no conventional competitive response to an opponent who has decided that losses are acceptable. The PGA Tour spent a century building a system of merit. LIV walked in and wrote checks that made that system feel like a prank. When Dustin Johnson signed, when Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm signed, each name felt like another stone pulled from a wall that had seemed permanent.

The tour suspended the defectors, asked its remaining membership to fight for the league, then reversed course and announced a framework deal before the deal existed. It was the behavior of an institution that had never gamed out the scenario it was now living through. Jay Monahan was right to fight. He was wrong to pretend, for as long as he did, that the fight was about the integrity of the sport rather than the preservation of the tour. The PGA Tour outlasted its opponent in part because a foreign government decided to redirect its attention elsewhere. That is not the same as winning. The tour had strategy and endurance. It also had luck, and the difference between strategy and luck is the kind of thing institutions are tempted to revise in their own favor afterward.

The professional golf landscape after LIV looks like a neighborhood after a flood—structurally intact in most places, yet waterlines on the walls everywhere you look. The players who stayed, who watched colleagues leave, who made the calculation that their careers and their principles required them to remain, who played through the uncertainty of a tour that was simultaneously suing a competitor and negotiating with it, were never celebrated for staying. Loyalty tends not to be. You are left with the satisfaction of having made a decision you can live with, and you get to watch the tour eventually extend an olive branch to the men who burned it. [...]

The most lasting damage may be the hardest to quantify, which is the goodwill of the audience. Golf as a participation sport was growing before LIV, lifted by a pandemic-era surge that had introduced millions of new players to the game and returned millions of lapsed ones to it. Rounds played hit a 40-year high. Equipment sales broke records. Junior participation climbed. The sport had momentum it had not felt in a generation, and the timing was rare, a confluence of cultural availability and demographic interest that the industry had spent decades trying to manufacture. It then spent the next five years asking that audience to care about a labor dispute between multi-millionaires and a sovereign wealth fund.

The casual fan, always the most important and most fragile constituency in any sport, is not an idealist. That fan understands athletics are not synonymous with saints. However, that fan requires the sport to be primarily about sport. LIV made that impossible. Every tournament existed inside a larger conversation about money and loyalty and the kingdom's human-rights record, a conversation most fans had neither the appetite nor the obligation to follow. The hardcore audience stayed. The hardcore audience always stays. But the viewer who had started watching after 2020, who was learning the rhythms of the season, who had not yet decided whether this was a sport that belonged in the rotation alongside the NFL and the NBA—that viewer was handed an exit ramp, week after week, for five years. Some took it. The industry will be measuring the cost of that for a long time.

The damage was particularly harmful because it was cumulative, a slow tax on attention paid in storylines nobody asked for. Golf exhausted its fans quietly. That is, in certain ways, harder to recover from. The current effort to frame Yasir's departure, PIF's pullout, and the postponement of the New Orleans event as "strategic decisions" is part of the same pattern. What this moment does offer is clarity. For five years, golf operated under an atmospheric pressure of uncertainty. Would the deal happen, would more players leave, would the framework collapse, would the Saudis walk away? That pressure is lifting. The air is cleaner. You can see farther. [...]

There is a version of this story that ends on the triumphalist note. Golf survived! The sport is resilient! That version is incomplete. What LIV revealed, underneath the politics and the money and the posturing, was a question the sport had long avoided asking itself directly: What is professional golf actually for? Is it a meritocracy or only in name? Is it a global sport, or a primarily American entity with global marketing? Are its players independent contractors or franchise assets? Does the history of the game belong to the tour that administers it, or to the game itself? These are not new questions. LIV pulled them into the light and refused to let anyone look away.

The soul of golf has never belonged to a tour or a sovereign wealth fund or a television contract. It belongs to the men and women who play the game, watch it, argue about it. Who make any of this matter in the first place. They were sidelined, asked to spectate a fight they did not start. The game has outlasted wars and scandals and its own periodic conviction that it was dying. Not gracefully, not cleanly, but through a stubborn refusal to be finished. For five years the sport lived that refusal out loud, without much dignity. Survival means little without an accounting of what it cost.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Icon Sportwire

[ed. See also: LIV Golf members have reached out to PGA Tour about return, but terms and pathways will be more restrictive (GD).]

Sports Go Sports

The Trump administration tries to set broad NCAA policy by fiat, as in Executive Order, demanding a five-year eligibility cap, one free transfer, national agent registry, medical care protections for athletes, women’s/Olympic sport protections and a ban on NIL collectives it calls ‘fraudulent schemes.’

This is not how our government works, but Trump would to just declare things, so he’s trying to threaten NIH or other funding to force the universities to do what he wants, even when what he wants has been ruled illegal by courts and doesn’t actually have a working legal definition or plan to deal with the existing court rulings. He just thinks he can say ‘implement these things or else I will cut your funding, even though the courts probably think that is illegal, I don’t care,’ and sit back.

Kyle Saunders: And here’s the thing Heitner caught that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Section 4(b) of the order conditions the NCAA’s rulemaking mandate on actions taken “to the extent permitted by law and applicable court orders.”

The order contains its own limiting principle. It knows it can’t override the courts. It says so, in its own text, and then directs the NCAA to do things that courts have already ruled are antitrust violations.

The good news is that there seems to be momentum behind passing something, and everyone smiled about the order. The bad news is that all of that is meaningless.

How did we end up with a legal system where there is no punishment for repeatedly issuing orders that you yourself know are illegal, other than ending enforcement of those illegal orders after someone sues, thus allowing this to be used as leverage?

Shrug.

by Zvi Moshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. Don't know much about the issue in question, but this short description of Trump administration strong-arm tactics is near perfect. It's a strategy. Here's another Republican doing exactly the same thing (using the legal system to run out the clock): DeSantis plots end run of Florida law to create more GOP House seats (Axios).]

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

From Laundromats to Airplanes

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. [...]

Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

[ed. See also: Exclusive: Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets (CNN).]

Masters 2026: Unforgettable Moments Walking a Harrowing Back Nine with Rory McIlroy

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Rory McIlroy raised his arms in the air. And so did I. The defending champion Masters defended reclaimed his green jacket and did it in dramatic fashion on the back nine Sunday. Attending the tournament for the first time in 10 years, I knew I had to get out and watch it and I’m glad I did.

Having walked every hole of the back nine with McIlroy as he posted his one-under 71 for a one-shot victory over Scottie Scheffler, here are five observations about the back-to-back champ

How Rory’s walk has changed

When a 21-year-old McIlroy built a four-shot lead after 54 holes at the 2011 Masters, he bounced around Augusta National. Long, curly, dark hair coming out from under his Jumeriah-sponsored cap, his walk was quick, youthful and energetic. Fast forward 15 years and the man and that walk have evolved.

Weekend rounds at Augusta are slow. As I arrived at the ninth green Sunday, in front of the Augusta National clubhouse, it was 4:35 p.m. Just a few feet to my left, on the 18th green, McIlroy would go on to win the tournament at 6:55 p.m. It took the final group nearly 2 1/2 hours to play the back nine, on perhaps the hottest day in Augusta, Ga.,, this year.

I was struck by just how slow Rory’s walk was. Down to the green on 10, back to the tee on 13, across the bridge on 15, he wasn’t bouncing. He was pacing himself. Literally. He spoke throughout the 2025 Masters about how he and Bob Rotella, a famous golf psychologist, had worked on a mindset of “staying in a bubble”, focusing on himself and controlling what he could control.

A year later, it was more of the same.

On the 13th hole, McIlroy slowed to a stop. Standing in the fairway for about three or four minutes. Not as his ball in the fairway, back near the tee. Just him and Harry Diamond, his caddie, waiting. I was confused. I could see two balls near where I was standing but begin wondering if Cameron Young had hit a provisional ball. I asked a couple of fans if they had seen what happened. They were as confused as I was.

“I don't know what had happened,” McIlroy said after the round, “but Cam was pulled in behind the hedges by a couple of referees to talk about something that may or may not have happened on the course.”

It’s unclear what went on with Young in that moment, but it is clear how Rory handled it.

“I thought, instead of me getting up there and waiting at my ball forever, I'd just hang back until Cam came back out. I don't really like that second shot anyway, so I don't need to be up there looking at it for too long. So I just tried to hang back … you know, just so I could get to the ball and go through my normal routine and not be waiting up there for what I would feel like is forever.”

He paced himself. All day, but especially on the back nine. And was clear to all down at Amen Corner. [...]

The shot that may define 2026 Rory

As I arrived at Amen Corner, I positioned myself to the right of the 12th tee. With a good view of the 11th green, I watched as McIlroy made a crucial par putt from six feet to remain one shot ahead. He walked onto the 12th tee with with his caddie to a standing applause. Many patrons removed their hats, holding them in the air and cheering as the leader arrived on their stage. Young then followed, to a similar, albeit less exuberant, ovation.

The wind wasn’t strong but it was as strong as it had been all day. The flag on the 11th hole was barely moving but the 12th flag, 155 yards away, was dancing back and forth. Diamond, stood next to Rory, signalled an 11 o’clock wind direction. They had a brief conversation and pulled 9-iron. Then the wind gusted. Rory backed off and Harry stepped forward. Not towards his boss but further down the tee, attempting to get a better feel for what the wind was doing and throwing grass in the air at the end of the tee box. The information was relied to McIlroy and he settled into his routine. Not rushed, but brisk.

We watched as he hit a sawed-off fade with his 9-iron, the same shot he had practiced late on Saturday night on the range. Often you’ll hear a player talk to their ball when it’s in the air, especially on par 3s, but Rory said nothing. Dozens of patrons shouted, nearly everyone of them in admiration as the ball flew towards the bunker, fading ever so slightly towards the right pin position. It landed, both with a thud and a huge cheer from the crowd, and released out to seven feet.

It will be the shot that many will say won him the green jacket. What is undeniable is that it won the closest-to-the-pin contest there on Sunday. No one, none of the other 53 players who teed it up in the final round, hit it closer.

There is no prize for that. But he’ll settle for another green jacket.

The sneeze that could have changed it all

After McIlroy rolled in his putt for birdie on 12, I moved about 100 yards towards the 13th hole, taking a spot just past the trees that line the right side of the fairway. McIlroy’s ball, amazingly having missed that tee shot well right in the opening three rounds, landed just a few feet away, barely on the fairway. He was two shots clear of the field and now in the “go zone” on the par five.

Every hole is lined with fans that place their seats early in the morning with the plan to return to those seats when the leaders come through. I stood probably three rows back from those chairs, always looking for relatively short fans to stand behind. I’m 6-foot-3 and height is an advantage in these situations.

McIlroy arrived at his ball, surveyed the shot with his caddy, and pulled an 8-iron out of his bag. A good swing here and the Northern Irishman would have one arm in the green jacket. Waggle. Look. Waggle. Look. Achoo. The teenage kid in front of me sneezed. McIlroy heard and backed off his shot, resetting with his caddy and going back through his routine.

Luckily, for all involved, McIlroy avoided the same watery fate that bestowed him here 12 months ago. His ball landed on the green and released just over the back.

“I’m so f****** glad he didn’t go in the water” said the kid. His dad appeared to agree.

by Jamie Kennedy, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: J.D. Cuban

[ed. A real nail-biter. In the end he had every golfer's dream - a two-inch putt to win the Masters. Yay, Rory! The years have added a lot of grit to his game. See also: In the post-Tiger Woods era, Rory McIlroy is the lion golf needs (The Athletic). Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have what golf doesn't need: Sergio Garcia damages Masters tee box with his driver.]

Masters: 4/12/2026

[ed. Masters Sunday!]

Masters 2026: Sometimes golf needs to be told to go to hell

Golf is supposed to be a gentleman's game, a polite handshake between competitor and course. In reality it’s a hostage negotiation. We try to maintain our composure, but this sport operates like a bad contract with fine print you didn't read — every clause designed to remind you that the house always wins. Other sports at least pretend to be fair. You can outwork a defender, wear down a pitcher, grind an opponent into submission. Golf offers no such recourse. What it delivers, you take.

The toll of that arrangement is real. Every bad break deposits something into an account you can't access, pressure building in increments so small you barely notice until you realize the damage on the statement. Expecting players to absorb that indefinitely without some kind of release is fantasy. These are obsessive competitors who have organized their entire lives around a game that sets an impossible bar and then moves it. Perfection is the expectation and failure the guarantee.

Which is why the release, when it comes, makes a strange kind of sense. A perfectly deployed expletive, the kind that arrives with equal parts exhaustion and clarity, can work like a pressure valve, the emotional equivalent of opening a window in a stuffy room. And there is something cathartic about watching a club meet its end after a particularly unforgivable betrayal, a brief and satisfying severance of a relationship that clearly wasn't working. These aren't ugly moments. They're honest ones. Reminders that no matter how much money is on the line or how many people are watching, nobody has actually figured out how to make peace with this game.

What's maybe more compelling than the outbursts themselves is how reliably we seek them out. There's a recognition factor at work. The sudden collapse of the professional facade revealing something deeply familiar underneath, like running into a coworker at the grocery store and realizing they also have no idea what they're doing. These are the best players in the world, and when the wheels come off, they look exactly like the rest of us: bewildered, aggrieved, and entirely convinced the game is cheating. 

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Images: J.D. Cuban/Adam Glanzman

[ed. Factoid of the day (because, of course... it's the Masters):]

***

Every April, Augusta, Ga., transforms and becomes one of the most sought-after destinations in the world.

Masters week is an economic bonanza for residents. And for the homeowners who open their doors? Well, often it's the best investment they've ever made. A home less than three miles from Augusta National rents for $30,000, and the premium end? They command six figures.

The best part … every dollar these homeowners earn is likely tax-free thanks to a provision in the federal tax code called the "Augusta Rule." Allowing homeowners to rent out their property for up to 14 days a year without paying a cent in income tax on the earnings.

Hot Ticket

Jeffrey Epstein’s web of influence stretched from European palaces to Ivy League universities and Wall Street banks, but there was apparently at least one little corner of the establishment that seems to have been beyond his reach: Augusta National. In July 2019, Epstein sent an iMessage to Steve Bannon asking for his help with a particularly difficult problem. “Need to work magic to get brad Karp admitted to augusta golf club,” Epstein wrote. “The head of Paul Weiss Brad Karp?” Bannon replied. “Yes.”

Karp, the former chair of the legal firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, stepped down from his position in February because of his ties with Epstein.

Bannon and Epstein talked it over for an hour. Bannon suggested that Karp’s “best shot” was to “take a strong interest in amateur golf”, Epstein complained that some of the existing Augusta members who might help, like Bill Gates, “have no sway”, and asked “Who s their senator” as if they might. Bannon explained that he thinks the club is run by “7 Atlanta and Augusta families”, who he calls “crackers” from the “Old south” who are prejudiced against “lawyers and investment bankers”. The heart bleeds.

It’s a pungently obnoxious conversation, racist and misogynistic, and at the end of it, Bannon and Epstein are absolutely no closer to figuring out how to go about getting in.

Which is one of the great lessons of Augusta National. Money only goes so far. It is, even now, just about the only sports event in the US where you don’t need to worry that Donald Trump is going to decide to put in an appearance.

If Brad Karp and his ilk are busy worrying about how to get a club membership, most of the rest of us would settle for just making it inside the gates during Masters week. But admittance, like everything else around here, is done according to its own peculiar set of rules. Most of the tickets go to lifetime patrons from the local community, who own badges passed down through the generations along with grandad’s pocket watch. That route in was shut back in the 1970s. The other is the annual lottery, and your odds of winning it make Tiger’s chances of a sixth Green Jacket look good this year.

Officially that’s it. Unofficially, anyone who’s willing to spend enough was usually able to pick one up from one of the touts who camp out on the easements down by the interstate, just beyond the reach of the 2,700ft boundary that makes scalping near the property a criminal offence under Georgia law. Reselling tickets is against the terms and conditions, but the loophole was that anyone who bought one could always insist they had received it as a gift. In recent years, though, resale has become an industrial business, and second-hand tickets have been appearing on the internet where they sell for as much as 50 times their face value.

Until, that was, Augusta’s members decided they had had enough of other companies making the profit the club have chosen to forgo by keeping the actual admission prices so low. The Sunday of last year’s Masters was described as a “bloodbath” by an executive working for one of the hospitality companies in the area, as hundreds of paying customers found they were detained, and even refused entry, at the club gates because they had come on someone else’s ticket. According to industry reports, as many as 200 ticket holders were turned away on the day.

Some said they were taken into a room and asked to hand over their identity documents before being grilled about how they got their tickets, and where they were staying during the tournament. One person said it was like being pulled over by the police. Some were let in anyway, others say they were turned away. As is the way at Augusta, it’s almost impossible to get a straight answer from anyone at the club about exactly what’s going on and, in the absence of any information, there are an awful lot of rumours about the club’s crackdown on the market.

They say the four-day tickets have radio-frequency identification chips in them, and that the club were able to trace all the ones that were being returned back to a single geographical location each evening before being used again by someone else the next day. They say the information contained in the barcodes includes the buyer’s address. They say the club are employing undercover agents to idly ask patrons where they picked up their tickets while they are walking around the grounds.

The other theory is the club are buying up a lot of the resale tickets themselves just so they can find out the names of the people who put them up for sale. The letter they send out is a masterpiece of Masters manners, thanking the recipient for their support and patronage over the years before informing them that they are now permanently banned from the grounds.

by Andy Bull, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mike Blake/Reuters

[ed. Master's weekend. Glad there's still one institution left with some balls.]

WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.

One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.

When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.

This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.

“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.

Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”

“The WNBA community is rightfully celebrating a historic moment of growth, investment and progress for the players, fans and the future of the game,” he said.

Goldin played no sports growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But she has deep knowledge of women’s pay: As an economist, she spent years rifling through boxes of surveys and personnel records and tracking down data to document women’s changing role in the workplace.

 
That research has included the role that discrimination plays in pay gaps between men and women. Goldin won her Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor-market outcomes.

Goldin earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago economics department in 1972, when few women were in the field. She became the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department.

In early 2024, when Jackson approached Goldin, the average NBA player made about $12 million, according to Basketball Reference, a statistics website. The average WNBA player made $118,000—less than one cent on the dollar, as Goldin is quick to point out.

Around that time, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and other young stars would enter the WNBA draft and spur a surge in popularity in the league that continues today.

 
Goldin’s first task was examining players’ average compensation—salaries plus benefits like housing.

She also looked at career length. She and a research assistant scraped roster data going back to the league’s 1997 launch and built what demographers call a “life table.” It’s the same tool that insurance actuaries use to calculate life expectancy, adapted to estimate how long a typical player might expect to play in the WNBA.

The answer: two or three years. In negotiating player benefits, it was important to know that if they kicked in after three years or later, many players wouldn’t receive them.

The foundational piece of revenue for the WNBA is an 11-year media-rights package finalized in summer 2024. The contract with broadcasters will pay the WNBA $2.2 billion over the life of the deal. The NBA’s deal with the same partners is worth about $75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation.

by Rachel Bachman and Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Images: Carlin Stiehl/Steph Chambers/Getty

Something's Wrong With Tiger Woods

Something's wrong with Tiger Woods. We don't know the struggle’s precise shape, but it's there. It has been there. The evidence is not subtle, and it is not new. That is the sad and disconcerting thing, and until it is reckoned with honestly, everything else is secondary.

What happened with Friday’s two-vehicle crash in Jupiter Island, Fla., and Woods’ subsequent arrest, involved drugs or medication; the Martin County Sheriff said so plainly, because the breathalyzer said 0.00 and the man crawling out of the overturned SUV appeared lethargic, impaired, somewhere other than fully present. That part we know. What we also know, and have known for a while, is the context that surrounds it: all the surgeries, a body that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the pharmaceutical architecture required just to get through a day is complex, possibly dangerous, and for someone with Woods' injury history genuinely hard to escape. Chronic pain and how people manage it are not moral failures. They are medical realities that have unmade careful, disciplined, strong-willed people for as long as the drugs have existed. Tiger Woods is, whatever else you want to say about him, among the most disciplined human beings to ever stand over a golf ball. That discipline did not protect him. It may have obscured how much protection he needed.

We are looking at a pattern. The 2017 arrest was not an isolated incident. It was a signal. The diversion program, the rehab, the public statement about an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications, these were events that fit a sequence the press was not particularly interested in identifying as one. There was a comeback to cover. There was Augusta to wonder about. And then 2019 came, and the green jacket, and it became nearly impossible to hold both things at once, the miracle of that Sunday and the unanswered question from two years earlier. So we didn't.

Consider 2021. Woods drove off a California road at high speed and shattered his leg, nearly lost it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff called it an accident. No blood was drawn. No substance test was administered. The official account was no evidence of impairment, and that was mostly accepted, because Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with, in place of information, was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say: we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters.

The golf world, this publication included, has organized its Tiger coverage around one persistent question for years: Can he play? It is a reasonable question if you are covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question—Is this man OK?—is visibly, and has for some time been, no.

***

We hope we are wrong. Maybe there is an explanation for the refused urine test that has nothing to do with what it appears to suggest. Everyone is entitled to their privacy, and no one should be mocked for their trials. But privacy is a harder argument to make when the struggle keeps arriving in public. On roadsides, in mugshots, in sheriff's press conferences. At some point, looking away is not discretion. It's something closer to abandonment.

The other questions will come. The legal exposure, the Masters, the PGA Tour committee he chairs, what any of this means for a legacy that was secured long ago and cannot be taken back. Those are real, and they will get their due. The sport will process this the way it processes everything: with coverage and debate and hot takes and updates and eventually, probably, a return to the question of whether he might somehow play. That is what we do. That is what we have always done with Tiger Woods, turning him back into a story about golf.

But there is a 50-year-old man who has been in some form of pain, physical or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him. Who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies are meant to do.

The golf can wait. It has waited before. The difference now is that what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him.

Joel Beall and Joe Raedle, Yahoo Sports |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Will Crash Shake Golf From Its Dependency on Woods? (BBC)]