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[Assistant] And then you have the question of the talent pool. Basketball inherently rewards unusually tall players. This chart shows the height and weight of different positions in different leagues. These are the NBA players, and here's the height of the average American man.


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[Assistant] Soccer and hockey don't require such an outlier body type, so you'd expect less variance in player's skill. And that leaves more to luck.


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[Assistant] To understand what that means, you have to see how Mobusen calculated all of this.


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[Assistant] For our purposes the equation looks like this. The variance of the observed real life results equals the variance of skill plus the variance of luck. Skill plus luck equals everything that happened.


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[Assistant] Over a season, some teams win about half their games. Some do a lot better than that, some a lot worse.


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[Assistant] So if the variance is a measure of how spread out those win-loss records are for the league, you can see that you have more variance in basketball than hockey.


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[Assistant] The variance of luck varies from sport to sport depending on how many games there are in a season. More games mean lower variance of luck.


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[Assistant] Just like the more times you flip a coin, the closer your data gets to 50-50.


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[Assistant] Basically what this asks is how different does the real world look from a world in which the winners are just chosen at random? He averaged the results of five seasons for each sport, and that's how he placed them on the continuum.


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[Assistant] Which raises the question of what we want our sports to do. Do we want to measure skill as precisely as possible? Or do we just want to feel alive?


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[Assistant] There are pickleball courts around the city, but we could just come in here and play, like, not really play anything in advance and just find a spot. Being able to just, like, grab that little bag here and come out and text my friends and have people show up and meet new people is, uh, very appealing, I think.


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[Assistant] The goal of this new system is to make every element accountable for.


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[Assistant] You're seeing a lot more skaters now try all these quads and the program becomes messy because maybe they're not so consistent on it, but they're hoping that because it's a good base value.


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[Assistant] That they can up their technical score and then their artistic score starts to lag behind.


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[Assistant] Bestowing upon Cassius X an original name.


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[Assistant] It wasn't always like it is today. Today we're used to people pushing past us on the sidewalk dressed in neon and kitted out with iPods and Fitbits. It's normal that everybody looks like cyborg highlighters. And in America, the metric system is basically kept alive by 5k races alone.


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[Assistant] But back in the 60s, running was so unusual that it had to be explained to people.


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[Assistant] The newest road to fitness. A typical recreational runner, Andre Mandeville, ran 11 minute miles. He also smoked three to four packs of cigarettes a day.


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[Assistant] That same year, in New York, runners like Dick Cordier got ticketed for illegal use of the highway by a pedestrian. And in Connecticut, Ray Crothers was chased by five squad cars cruising the streets because he was...


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[Assistant] Running. Small town athletes suffer too, women especially. One woman wrote there was no thing odder than a woman jogging in a small town. She decided to swim instead. Athletes always ran.


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[Assistant] For recreation, it was rare. Boxers, track stars, and soldiers, sure. But normal people rarely ran before the late 60s. It wasn't just odd outdoors, either. The most infamous use of a treadmill wasn't in a gym, but in a prison.


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[Assistant] The prisoner in that case? The writer Oscar Wilde, who was serving a two year sentence for sodomy. His hard labor included the treadmill. Long story short, you did not jump on the treadmill while watching House Hunters after work.


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[Assistant] Treadmills had been used as a power source for thousands of years, but in the 1820s, the Brixton Prison made them famous as a tool in jails. If there was nothing for the treadmill to grind, they had to power a fan to grind the wind. Yes, even prison treadmills had a difficulty setting.


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[Assistant] And while treadmills were used by medical professionals and athletes in the 1900s, the prison treadmill was a symbol of what running meant. At worst, torture. At best,


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[Assistant] But by 1969, treadmills were being developed for home use, and that reflected the sea change that ultimately made jogging mainstream.


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[Assistant] The New York Times reported the reason inventor William Staub believed his mainstream treadmill could work. A 1968 book, Aerobics, convinced him of the health of an aerobic workout.


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[Assistant] And it was one of many books that pointed to jogging as a way to get fit. Much of the credit for jogging specifically goes to legendary University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman, who discovered cross-country jogging on a trip to New Zealand in 1962 after meeting with pioneering runner and coach Arthur Lidiart. Bowerman's 1966 pamphlet was a hit, and it was followed by a massively popular book. Others followed.


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[Assistant] Runners like Steve Prefontaine became celebrities, and writer-runners like Jim Fix continued the 70s running boom with hit books. Around the same time, a young company called Nike, co-founded by Bowerman,


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[Assistant] had financial incentives to push the new sport forward. Nike and other companies also meant those early jogging shoes and outfits got a lot better. And it's continued that way to the present. Race participation alone has quadrupled since 1990, and there's almost no shame about incredibly colorful tights and talking about your quads to strangers. It's become a sign of political vigor.


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[Assistant] But even in the 60s, people like Secretary of the Interior Sturt Udall were confident that jogging's here to stay. It turns out they had good reason. As another runner put it in 1968, At first, you think everyone is staring at you. And they are. After a while, you enjoy jogging so much that you don't give a damn.


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[Assistant] I'm a runner myself, really slow, but technically a runner. That might be why I find some of these anecdotes amusing. One of my favorites is from 1968 when Senator Strom Thurmond was running around Greenville, South Carolina and he was followed by a squad car because he was suspiciously jogging.


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[Assistant] Until now, this marker was the only reference fans in the stadium and at home watching on TV had for the first down.


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[Assistant] In 1908, Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin spoke the phrase that would become the Olympic Creed. The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight.


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[Assistant] The essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.


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[Assistant] They look like they're rushing to the bathroom. Tell me, do we know why they


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[Assistant] Yeah, they don't just study it, they track it. This little Tron-like thing that is on the screen with the race walker, this is an actual top race walker who they've studied how she walks.


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[Assistant] So if one foot is kinda in the air like this, then another has to be on the ground, or at least to the human eye?


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[Assistant] So it's kinda like traveling in basketball. Sometimes these guys will take an extra step and if the ref doesn't catch it or call it, it just means they're a good player. It means they know what they're doing.


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[Assistant] It does look really smooth if you just look at their upper body. It's just a straight line. There is no bouncing.


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[Assistant] So basically these walkers figured out how to fit the rules and make walking more efficient, but more efficient ends up looking kind of weird.


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[Assistant] Getting disqualified from an elite racewalking race would be a brutal blow, so they try to keep it fair. Most rules require that three different judges each give you a red card before you can be disqualified from a race.


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[Assistant] Welcome to the Real Sports Podcast. I'm your host, Max Gershberg. You just heard a clip from Bryant Gumbel's news story on the uphill battle black coaches continue to fight trying to land head coaching jobs in the NFL.


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[Assistant] Today, the NFL, a league made up of 70% Black players, has only three Black head coaches. We first covered this issue on Real Sports almost 20 years ago.


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[Assistant] At the time, an all-star legal team led by Johnny Cochran was threatening to sue the league if they didn't implement better hiring practices. And in all the years since there's been a lot of talk around this issue, many promises of reform.


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[Assistant] But very little actual progress. And as you'll hear in Bryant's report shortly, frustration among Black coaches continues to mount.


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[Assistant] Later on today's episode, I'll be joined by Rod Graves. He's the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization that advocates on behalf of minority coaches. Graves is on the front lines of this fight. He's at the table with


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[Assistant] Roger Goodell and team owners, and he has unique insight into this glaring lack of diversity in the NFL's coaching ranks. He'll join us to discuss the story and share some thoughts on what he thinks the future may hold.


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[Assistant] But first, here's Brian Gumbel's latest Real Sports Report.


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[Assistant] Joining me now is Rod Graves. Rod spent 37 years working in the NFL and now he's the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which means in many ways Rod is the


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[Assistant] The tip of the spear in this fight for more equitable NFL hiring practices. Nobody knows this issue better. Rod, thanks so much for joining us.


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[Assistant] So Rod, Mike Tomlin called the lack of black NFL coaches a global collective failure. How would you describe the current state of affairs?


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[Assistant] So when Roger Goodell says he's more committed than ever to fixing this problem and creating more opportunity for black coaches.


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[Assistant] Teams, their only mandate is under the Rooney rule. They have to interview a minority coach, but we, as we heard about in Brian's story, you now have this unintended consequence of the quote unquote Rooney rule interview, right? Teams just check in the box.


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[Assistant] So Stephanie Johnson, the professor Bryant interviewed from Colorado says the money talks and owners aren't going to change how they hire until they think it impacts their bottom line. I know you've suggested the same notion previously. So how does that happen? How do those financial pressures actually get applied?


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[Assistant] So, just to be clear, when you talk about legal efforts, governmental efforts, there's nothing in the works right now that you can tell us about, but you're saying theoretically, you might need to push those buttons to force change.


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[Assistant] Where does the players association come down on this? Where do players come down in their conversations with you? Do they want to be more involved in this discussion moving forward?


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[Assistant] That's certainly a dynamic we've seen in the NBA, right? Player empowerment is alive and well in that league and often it seems like players have a lot of influence on who coaches, which coaches are hired, which are fired. Do you see more star players using their influence in that way?


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[Assistant] Eric B. Enemy, you know, his two predecessors as the offensive coordinators with the Kansas City Chiefs were quickly hired as head coaches, Doug Peterson and Matt Nagy. He's interviewed, I think now Rod with what? Close to a third of the league and hasn't gotten his chance. Is his as glaring a case as you can remember?


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[Assistant] As the enemy once again got passed over this off season, one guy who did land a head coach job, Dane Campbell got the gig in Detroit. Uh, we heard the clip in Brian's piece of his, uh, shall we say unusual introductory press conference. Let's play it again.


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[Assistant] When you're at home watching that, Rod, what's going through your mind?


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[Assistant] And right now in your eyes, it's not a meritocracy.


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[Assistant] Well, the league and its owners have certainly spent a lot of time and energy of late promoting its commitment to racial justice, promising to do more in that arena.


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[Assistant] Harder for you to take that at face value, given these issues that still persist in terms of coaching.


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[Assistant] What would be the grade point average at the class?


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[Assistant] Well, in this area, they'd be failing. Okay. Last question for you, Rod. The Rooney rule is coming up on 20 years old, but as Brian's piece pointed out, we have three black coaches in the NFL today, the same number that were in place the year the Rooney rule was instituted. Will we be any further along 20 years from now?


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[Assistant] Rod, we will certainly continue to watch it play out and see how the league and its owners navigate these issues. Uh, thank you so much for coming on to talk about it. We appreciate it.


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[Assistant] And of course, that is just one of the stories from this month's episode of Real Sports. Here's what else you'll see on the latest show. David Scott examines the role youth sports have had in spreading the coronavirus. Even as schools have remained closed and group gatherings of all sorts have shut down.


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[Assistant] The $17 billion youth sports industry has carried on with its games and its travel, much to the dismay of public health officials who believe our kids' sporting events have exacerbated the pandemic.


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[Assistant] For his cold water immersion and breathing techniques that have allowed him to climb the world's biggest mountains in nothing but shorts, run a marathon in the desert without water, and now some researchers actually believe Wim Hof's methods can have remarkable health benefits too.


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[Assistant] He's a fascinating guy and that's a crazy story you won't want to miss.


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[Assistant] Reminder, you can catch those stories and all recent episodes of Real Sports with Brian Gumbel on HBO Max. And that'll do it for today's Real Sports Podcast. I'm your host, Max Gershberg. Thanks for listening and please join us again next time.


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[Assistant] Well, basically, I mean, within the rules, I don't think all of a sudden we can start telling people that own football teams how to run their company. I don't think that'll fly.


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[Assistant] Let's have the body inventory list of injuries.


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[Assistant] How viable is marijuana as a pain killing alternative?


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[Assistant] I was talking to one of your peers and when I mentioned to him the notion of, of pot for


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[Assistant] Painkilling purposes. He rolls his eyes and he goes, you know what? You smoke pot because you wanna get high. I don't wanna hear about it as a painkiller. Viability to that?


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[Assistant] Chris Kluwe was a punter in the NFL from 2005 through earlier this season. How much does marijuana use cross cultural lines, social lines, age, you name it in the NFL?


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[Assistant] And they take the energy and they use it. And it gives them that lift, it gives them that boost. And it works.


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[Assistant] This is a four-time NFL Pro Bowl star who has gone off the rails before.


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[Assistant] He is Richie Incognito, one of the toughest linemen in the NFL, but also one of the most troubled.


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[Assistant] Police soon conclude that incognito, at this time in a temporary exile from pro football,


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[Assistant] is exhibiting bizarre behavior and place him on psychiatric watch.


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[Assistant] A weekday about four hours, then weekend, uh, sometimes eight hours.


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[Assistant] We went from, here's a healthy kid Tuesday morning to.


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[Assistant] You're talking about a liver transplant, Wednesday afternoon. And we're still trying to grapple with, well wait a minute, what happened? I didn't even know what a heat stroke was.


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[Assistant] Jordan was extremely sick. Extremely sick. Superman couldn't have came out of that.


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[Assistant] When Andy Roddick arrived in New York last August for his 13th US Open, he didn't think it would be his last.


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[Assistant] It was a shocking end to a long and very successful career. There's plenty of athletes who don't know when to get off the dance floor. I mean, you could have hung out.


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[Assistant] For a couple more years and made millions of dollars. You just left that on the table.


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[Assistant] I'm Bryant Gumbel. If we assume that there are limits to what a civilized society should be willing to stage, watch or accept in the name of sports and competition, what are they?


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[Assistant] Over the years, I've been prompted to ask that question by a variety of questionable events, each of which leave me wondering if we're not mining new depths. The latest item is a mixed martial arts fight scheduled for next month in Florida.


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[Assistant] It pitched 28-year-old David Steffen against 23-year-old Garrett Holland.


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[Assistant] Their talents aren't exceptional or noteworthy, but their disabilities are.


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[Assistant] You see, Stefan has cerebral palsy, and Holov has Down syndrome.


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[Assistant] And while they're each to be applauded for their accomplishments, the same can't be said for those who are willing and eager to see them engage in a no-holes-barred fight in a cage for the supposed enjoyment of others.


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[Assistant] Mitch Hollow, Garrett's father, says he's proud of his son, and I'm sure he is.


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[Assistant] He wants to support a son who's determined to excel and I get that too.


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[Assistant] But what I don't get is unnecessarily exposing a disabled person to an assortment of long-term risks that they may not even understand.


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[Assistant] I also don't get the mindset of those who will turn out to watch this spectacle or what the appeal is for them.


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[Assistant] Lastly, I don't get how the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation can claim to not be involved in the sanctioning of the bout.


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[Assistant] When it was okayed by an independent body that it supposedly licenses. But then again, it is Florida. I don't get a lot of rulings coming out of Florida these days. I'm Bryant Gump.


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[Assistant] Do you think you were traded because you're not Mexican or Mexican-American? Yeah, I would say.


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[Assistant] Do you think your teammates were traded because they're not Mexican or Mexican-American?


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[Assistant] They saw systematic expulsion of players who were not Mexican or of Mexican descent. Is that true?


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[Assistant] Well, it was an act of love. I wanted to spend more time with her. But Bernie, the fact that you don't know something is never a barrier to doing it.


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[Assistant] It's the heart of the NASCAR season, and America's best drivers are in Bristol, Tennessee.


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[Assistant] competing on a short track known as the fastest half mile in the world.


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[Assistant] But if you think the biggest star at this speedway is in one of these cars going round and round at nearly 200 miles per hour, think again. Oh look at Harvick, he has a big moment there.


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[Assistant] Which is why that world was stunned last year, when in the prime of his career, Earnhardt made a sudden and unexplained announcement.


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[Assistant] One Earnhardt had been keeping from everyone in his life for years. When he says he's finally ready to fully reveal.


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[Assistant] As a child, he had one goal, to follow in the footsteps of his legendary father. Dale Earnhardt Sr.


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[Assistant] Perhaps the most celebrated driver in the history of American racing.


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[Assistant] Even to you as a little boy, he was a mythic character.


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[Assistant] In public, the popular Dale Sr. was charismatic and likable. But behind closed doors, Dale Jr. says, he was distant and aloof, even with his own children.


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[Assistant] And when Dale Sr. was around, Kelly says, he was a strict disciplinarian. When Dale Jr. acted out at the age of 12, his father shipped him off to military school.


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[Assistant] His father's rejection stung, Earnhard says, especially because he felt the punishment didn't fit his so-called crimes.


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[Assistant] But the Moordale senior pushed his son away. The Moordale junior wanted to pull his father close. And as a teenager, he decided to try to follow his father into racing. Why did your brother decide to be a race car driver?


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[Assistant] Earnhardt raced his way up the ranks and eventually made it to the big leagues, signing with Dale Sr.'s NASCAR team.


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[Assistant] Then, in Dale Jr.'s second season in 2001,


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[Assistant] At the Daytona 500, NASCAR's marquee event, Dale Jr. was poised for an even bigger triumph.


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[Assistant] But Dale Sr. wasn't alright. He'd sustained a severe head injury and was rushed to the hospital. There was nothing the doctors could do.


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[Assistant] Dale Jr. was at the hospital waiting with his uncle and cousin when he got the news.


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[Assistant] But before long, the sport that took the life of Dale Sr. began to take its first bites out of Dale Jr.


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[Assistant] In 2002, he endured a crash that looked eerily similar to his father's, and like his father, sustained a head injury.


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[Assistant] By ignoring his concussion and staying on the track, Earnhardt was able to keep his momentum going.


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[Assistant] Dale Jr. was seen as a kinder, gentler version of his father. Younger and hipper too. Able to market himself and his sport beyond the sport's traditional southern base. I like my music the same way I like my race cars. Fast and loud as hell. He appeared on MTV and made cameos in Hollywood movies.


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[Assistant] His popularity helped NASCAR's ratings soar and made Earnhardt a staggeringly wealthy man with a fortune estimated at $400 million. Rich, famous and single, he indulged.


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[Assistant] He bought this 300 acre property in North Carolina. Then, of all things, had builders recreate an old Western frontier town from the saloon to the chapel.


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[Assistant] But when Earnhardt decided to have a proper home built on his property, his bachelor ways came to an end. Because one of the interior designers hired to decorate it was a woman named Amy Ryman.


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[Assistant] It's almost too silly and too good to be true. But it kinda turned out that way. It did.


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[Assistant] When you came to understand how big Junior Nation was, was it a bit overwhelming to you?


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[Assistant] Loyal fans, a wife to be, success on and off the track.


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[Assistant] Outwardly, Earnhardt seemed to have it all. But secretly, concussions were haunting him.


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[Assistant] In 2012, he sustained his worst one yet.


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[Assistant] Still, Earnhardt kept racing, and eventually a pattern took hold. Crash, get concussion symptoms, suffer in secret, then race the next weekend anyway.


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[Assistant] At his worst, Earnhardt could barely drive to the grocery store, let alone around a racetrack.


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[Assistant] Finally, Earnhardt told someone what he'd been dealing with secretly for years.


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[Assistant] Earnhardt knows that the years of damage could have long term effects.


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[Assistant] During his ordeal, even as he spoke nothing of the problem, he wrote meticulous diary notes to himself.


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[Assistant] Every morning has been a real challenge with worry about my future.


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[Assistant] How I'm changed now, how much of myself I will never recover.


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[Assistant] How much do you worry about him because of all the concussions he's had?


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[Assistant] Surely you have read up on CTE, you know how dangerous the future could be for your husband.


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[Assistant] For now, Earnhardt is focused on learning how to make his new life work, learning how to be a broadcaster, not to mention a father, and learning to accept the part of his life that's gone.


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[Assistant] Are you still sometimes calling a race in the booth, wishing you were in one of those cars?


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[Assistant] It just felt like this is the Mecha of Chess in a way. So I wanted to, to be part of it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I can't really talk about the financial aspect of it, but I was offered support to be back in the US.


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[Assistant] Yeah, millions of chess games haven't played. The number of possible moves is just astronomical. It's more than any of us can possibly imagine.


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[Assistant] Before the game I decided what I want to play against everything that he could potentially do. Uhm, and so it's millions of moves that I have to commit to memory.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but I hope that we can go back to that. I mean, I think in November I have a chance of helping bring chess back to that level of popularity and, and maybe making front page news again.


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[Assistant] There's of course a lot of people out there that wanna see the crash at the NASCAR race. Well, there's a lot of viewers that are watching me to see if I'm gonna fall and I would be in the same boat. If I was the one behind the screen, I'd be watching to see if the guy's gonna make it across or not. That's natural, that's human and I respect that.


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[Assistant] Todd Vance is a wounded warrior. He's been injured by what he has seen, by what he has done.


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[Assistant] By what he can't forget from the battlefields of war.


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[Assistant] What was it about competing that replaced the drinking, the drugs, the violence?


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[Assistant] People who might have post-traumatic stress disorder from violence would then turn to violence to be cured.


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[Assistant] Are you trying to recreate the feeling you get in combat?


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[Assistant] Uh, not meaning to laugh at you, but uh, I don't consider MMA violence.


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[Assistant] I did that on the schoolyard when I was a kid, you know. Once that cage door closes, absolutely they're on a different side of me that comes out. But I'm able to shut that off at the same time the second I walk out.


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[Assistant] I just want you to know what the screensaver says. I'll read it again. Why don't you read it for me?


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[Assistant] Immediately, the country's top programs flocked to State College to poach Bill O'Brien's best talent.


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[Assistant] Quarterback Matt McGloin couldn't believe what had become of his school. He'd grown up around here, knowing what it meant to play for Penn State. But now he was shamed, mocked by fellow students and fans because of the Sandusky scandal.


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[Assistant] Even worse though, after the sanctions, he had no idea if there would even be a team for him to play for.


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[Assistant] How did a 5 foot 3 inch woman with no prior experience wind up here? Meet the mastermind behind this Christmas pageant.


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[Assistant] Ted Bullard was a NASCAR executive when he first hatched his plan to find someone with beauty and brawn who would take the racing world by storm.


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[Assistant] Well, my godfather is a doctor, and he told me that with men it does temporarily lower your testosterone, but for women it raises it. And so it's actually good for you before a competition. Uhm, so I was like, good to know.


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[Assistant] Plus you're so stressed out and there's a lot of anxiety, you know, leading up to a fight. So, you know, it helps. I find it helps. So, if I do have a boyfriend, I would probably be more inclined to do it more, but...


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[Assistant] I guess I'll have to deal without it. I had to... I've dealt with disadvantages before. So, uh, I guess...


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[Assistant] So I don't know, I'll just have to train extra hard to be able to deal with being without.


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[Assistant] My job is to run at the top, you know, it's to give it all I got, push the sled for six seconds and I jump in the sled and then I'm in the back texting people.


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[Assistant] I'm in the back, my head is like, you know, going all around, and it's more like, just really loud, super loud, you feel like a car crash, you know? But mainly, I'm trying to just make my job sound better, really, I just pull the brakes at the end, like, brake, man, pull the brakes.


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[Assistant] During the games and after the games. Controlling for other variables. What is the change in fiscal revenues? What is the change in employment? What is the change in GDP? And so on. We don't see these gains materializing.


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[Assistant] The day-to-day leagues where they have every couple of days or if it's baseball every single day they have a new game, that's standard economic issues.


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[Assistant] But if it's something where a lot of people are coming from out of town.


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[Assistant] And there's one big event, or there's one series of events, like the Olympics is 17 days, or the World Cup has traditionally been around 28 days. You're doing something special that doesn't normally happen and involves tens of thousands, if not millions of people, then we call that a mega event.


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[Assistant] Somewhere between four and six billion dollars of revenue will get generated.


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[Assistant] By hosting the summer games in these days. On the expense side, it's much, much, much higher. That's not a good financial balance.


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[Assistant] The University of Oxford in England, uh, has done a number of studies on costs and cost overruns. What they have found is that since 1976, the average cost overrun or the median cost overrun for the summer games is 252%. So that means 3.52 times the initial bid.


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[Assistant] If the Olympic games are going to start on July 20th of a particular year, you can't call up and say, oh gee, we need another two weeks. The Olympic stadium won't be ready on July 20th. No, that, that can't happen. And so once you have that kind of a very firm, hard deadline in place,


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[Assistant] Now the construction companies know that this has to be top priority and they have to start shifting workers from other construction projects and shifting materials over there and that gives them an excuse to bid up the prices still more. So you have all of these factors working together and all of a sudden you're two or three or four or five times higher than the initial bid.


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[Assistant] What happened in 84 was good for Los Angeles it turned out for some.


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[Assistant] saying, please, please do this. And so the Los Angeles committee dictated terms and one of the terms was we're not going to be responsible for cost overruns.


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[Assistant] I'm optimistic about the 28 games for the same reasons. I think that they have really excellent management of the organizing committee and they're Los Angeles. We've got a lot more stadiums now than they had back in 1984 and they've got more infrastructure including public transportation that they didn't have. So I think it'll turn out, it'll turn out well.


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[Assistant] They're creating all sorts of problems in terms of how the labor force is, uh, is treated in terms of environmental destruction and so on. So corporations are sort of pulling back.


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[Assistant] Uh, or they're saying, well, if you expect us to stay around, you gotta clean this stuff up.


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[Assistant] I think FIFA has an easier job only because there are more places that have the necessary venues and infrastructure. Uh, and, and because of the very profound and lasting and pervasive popularity of soccer, they have more leeway, I think, uh, than the IOC. So hopefully, uh, we'll see some good changes there.


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[Assistant] What I would favor in the long run, what I think is most rational, particularly in these days of climate change and the need to conserve resources and not waste resources, is we ought to have one city that hosts the games permanently.


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[Assistant] I think there are much more sensible ways to proceed. Whether the world decides to be sensible or not I think is still an undecided question.


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[Assistant] Describe for me what it's like to be going at those speeds in such tight confines. Is there anything like it?


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[Assistant] My mom was really, she wanted me to be healthy. She would make these great, awesome, healthy meals.


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[Assistant] And I would trade them away for Twinkies. You know, like I would go to school and steal somebody else's lunch.


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[Assistant] People have said, like, oh, it's such a shame how her parents, like, let her get so fat and how, you know, how disgusting their parents should've done something. They did all they could do.


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[Assistant] Definitely transport sector is one of the big areas where the world needs massively to improve.


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[Assistant] You're running hard from first base, you're running hard from first to third. You're running hard to your position. Everything is done. It permeates the entire game.


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[Assistant] The fact is, for all Madden's new age panache, he's really old school, a regular Joe, the grandson of an Italian immigrant turned coal miner by the name of Madden.


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[Assistant] He's a black-long, your dad is a plumber his entire life.


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[Assistant] Did you have expectations that you were going to live and die in Hazelton?


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[Assistant] Your hometown has changed. Yeah. And it's changed in ways that, uh, it's become a flashpoint for the immigration.


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[Assistant] In response, Madden started something called the Hazelton Integration Project. That's right, HIP.


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[Assistant] As I've dug into this business, I mean, it's mind-blowing, I think, for anyone who's looking at it to say, it's two million bucks. Like, I mean, and look what it's become.


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[Assistant] Starting today, our company is now Meta. Now we have a new North Star to help bring the Metaverse to life.


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[Assistant] Since, uh, 1994, it's hard to believe it's been that long. I'm really excited about where we are. Yeah. And also what's in store as we move forward into the future.


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[Assistant] Then, uh, this guy named Jordan, uh, you know, emerged in the late 80s, early 90s, uh, the dream team, you know, now you're growing and sort of showcasing these talented players all over the globe. Uh, so all this was happening prior, tremendous amount of momentum during that


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[Assistant] Uh, important time. There was also a bit of a void. That was Jordan's first retirement. Who was gonna next carry that mantle?


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[Assistant] And to think in the last 25 plus years, like we've taken it to a whole nother level. Now this was before.


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[Assistant] Social media, this was before really even the internet. And so it was, it was a magical time. And I think a lot of times we kind of refer to that era, uh, as sort of the golden era. The mid-80s to the mid-90s was, was an important part, important time frame, I believe, for the growth and the success of our league.


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[Assistant] Yes, so, you know, my dad played for the Cowboys, and uhm, Roger Staubach was obviously his teammate, uh, was in my parents' wedding, so our families were very close.


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[Assistant] Uh, in anticipation of my arrival, uh, my parents had, uh, picked out girls' names, and I think they assumed why and how, I don't know, but they assumed I would, I would be a girl.


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[Assistant] Obviously I wasn't. And anyone who knows my father, uh, it takes him forever to make a decision. And so for two or three days, I'm in Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, Texas, and uhm, my name is Baby Boy Hill.


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[Assistant] And so Roger Staubach comes to visit, you know, the baby and mom and family and is determined to give the baby, me, a name. And, uh, and so we took my paternal grandmother and her maiden name is Grant.


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[Assistant] And so, uh, and my dad's middle name is Grant. So sort of keeping it in the family, honoring, uh, you know, my, my, my parents' fam, my dad's family.


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[Assistant] Hall of Fame iconic quarterback. He came in, took charge of the huddle, or in this case, uh, the hospital room, and gave me my name. And as a football fan growing up in the late 70s, early 80s in Washington D.C.,


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[Assistant] That was my claim to fame as a cowboy fan, to be able to brag in elementary school that Roger Starback named me.


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[Assistant] To teach me and lessons learned and so, you know, little did I know that would help me later on as I entered the business of sport in a number of different ways, but uhm, you know,


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[Assistant] They were achievers. They were successful. I was cognizant and aware of that. And a lot of my peers


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[Assistant] Uhm, from different ethnicities, like didn't have parents who were my mom and dad. And so I was always aware of that. Uh, at times it was intimidating and I struggled with


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[Assistant] Confidence, I think. Sometimes those were such big shoes to fill and felt overwhelming during my young years. Uhm, but in basketball, like, that doesn't help you.


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[Assistant] You know, and sometimes people, that could be a hindrance, you know, and the perception of a, you know, of a dad who...


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[Assistant] And so, you know, I, I, I kind of, you know, use that to my advantage, uh, and, and, you know, perception, steroids, whatever was there, you could feel it sometimes. But, you know, the one thing in sports, I say it's the ultimate meritocracy, first of all.


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[Assistant] There's nothing I can do in terms of money, resources, whatever, that can make them be successful. They have to go out and earn it.


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[Assistant] And I was so driven when I was their age, when I was young, to earn whatever came my way on the playing field, or in this case on the basketball court.


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[Assistant] And so my parents success, that was great, had great advantages, great exposure, great education, lessons learned, still learning to this day. But that doesn't help you when you're on the court and you're at the playground or you're trying to establish yourself. And so I was determined to like carve out my own lane and to do my own thing.


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[Assistant] In part, maybe why I didn't play football, which was my first love. Now also, my dad wouldn't let me play until I got to high school, but basketball, like, was a chance for me to achieve.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, it's hard to think that, you know, players, you know, majority stayed in school all four years and, uh, a totally different time. And it wasn't even...


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[Assistant] Like it wasn't even an option. Like I didn't, it wasn't something that I, I mean there were some examples of players, Magic Johnson after two years and certain guys that Michael Jordan was there for three years at North Carolina. But for the most part you stayed in school and I like, I had fun. Like I would have stayed another year. Like I had so much fun as a student athlete.


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[Assistant] The four years that I was there, we did some amazing things. Uhm, but there's a connection.


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[Assistant] That I have with that school and I had with my alma mater and other players of that era I think had with their school.


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[Assistant] The alumni, the school, the administration, the faculty, everybody got to know you. They got to follow your journey.


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[Assistant] And that emotional connection that we have with, you have with Georgetown. You know, you get a chance to be and watch that. When guys now are only there for one year, you don't really get a chance to know them and connect with them and feel like,


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[Assistant] When players like Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, uh, skipped college and went right from high school into the NBA. When the league changed that rule to now a one and done. You had to go to college for one year.


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[Assistant] I don't think we had the resources to support young teenagers making that transition.


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[Assistant] And so, as you fast forward to present day, and I know with the Hawks, like we have unlimited resources. We have people who help with player development on the court, off the court, uhm, and that transition,


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[Assistant] From one year of college, two years of college, to now the responsibilities and the pressures and, and all of the potential pitfalls that are out there. Uh, we're able to support these players a lot, and I think that's universal across the board in the NBA. So, uh, the times have changed. We're younger.


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[Assistant] We draft more maybe on potential and what they potentially could become.


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[Assistant] You know, intercollegiate athletics is rapidly evolving. And it's a little, it's exciting, but it's also a little scary.


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[Assistant] And because of the rules, the school couldn't give me a jersey. And I had to pay $120 for my own jersey.


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[Assistant] And like to me, that still doesn't sit right with me. And not that they're making money off of me, but just the fact that I had to pay for my own jersey. Like that, I didn't quite understand that.


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[Assistant] But now you have extremes amount of money that certain players, certain athletes are getting. And go ahead, get as much as you can.


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[Assistant] It just changes things a little bit. And now the innocence, now the relationship with the school, you know, you can almost be looked upon in some ways as an employee. And, and so,


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[Assistant] You're not there at the ultimate. You haven't reached the destination yet of getting to the professional ranks. I hope that that doesn't hinder.


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[Assistant] You know, one of the things when I went from being a college player to a pro player was now it's a business. Now not everybody necessarily wants to see you succeed on your own team.


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[Assistant] And now you throw this money around in college and you sometimes can worry, will that be the case in the intercollegiate environment?


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[Assistant] Athletes have taken as it relates to activism. You think of Bill Russell, Kareem, Muhammad Ali. Uhm, our country at that time was obviously going through a lot and was in the midst of changing and transitioning. They were speaking to what they were experiencing even as superstar athletes.


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[Assistant] A lot of people like to say, my era in the 90s, we, we, we failed, but a lot was happening in sports and the, first of all, the money that was being made was extreme. Uhm, also the access to information was not like it is now. This young generation, I think the digital age that we're in,


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[Assistant] Uh, social media, the sharing and exchanging of what's happening, not just in your own backyard, but what's happening all over the world. I knew it was a game changer. 2010, I think this was the right year, 2010, maybe, I don't know the exact date or exact year, but I had Twitter. And,


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[Assistant] We had, I guess, captured and ultimately, I think, killed Osama Bin Laden. And I found out about it on Twitter.


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[Assistant] This is when years ago you would have Dan Rather or you know breaking news on major network and here we are on Twitter finding out this information and so to me that was


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[Assistant] That was a sort of a change in a lot of ways and so this generation who all they know is the internet.


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[Assistant] How to deal with social media. So they have, they have the access. If I played in Detroit in the 90s and something happened not far away in Cincinnati, Ohio.


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[Assistant] I could dig for it and really look and research, but, you know, unless it was on the news or it was reported,


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[Assistant] You know, you really didn't know. You were kinda unaware. And uhm, and so now...


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[Assistant] Uhm, for embracing, uh, athletes sticking out, uh, and talking, uh, about issues, talking, being critical about the world we live in, being critical about our league, you know, being critical about everything, but, uhm, you know, you have to be willing to adapt and adjust.


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[Assistant] Uh, successful leaders, I think, to have longevity, are willing to do that. And I think our league, uh, accepts that, and our players live that and demonstrate that, and it's something we're proud of.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and I do think in the process of writing the book, I came to the realization


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[Assistant] That, you know, because you have to live in your past and you have to, you know.


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[Assistant] Attack certain things that have happened throughout your life or at least, uh, be willing to unpack them.


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[Assistant] And on this awesome trajectory early on, and then that being derailed. Yea, I came back and I had fun and I, you know, appreciative and grateful for that. But, not seeing it all the way through.


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[Assistant] has given me this obsessive thirst and hungry to achieve. And I think the lesson and thing that I've learned here is that I can't say yes to everything. And I think at times I've tried to do everything and I've run myself ragged.


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[Assistant] My career and some of the things that unfortunately happened during my career. I don't know if that makes sense.


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[Assistant] And ownership with the team and USA Basketball, uh, working with others, managing success, handling failure, sacrifice, like all these intrinsic values, like these values that are necessary for success, I, I wholeheartedly believe


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[Assistant] They transfer and carry over into other aspects of life. That's why Coach K gets like a million dollars to give a speech at a, well not a million dollars, but gets a lot of money to speak at a corporate event because people are fascinated by team building and leadership and we live it. Sports, there's immediate results.


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[Assistant] For the whole world to see and judge and to critique. A lot of times in business it's like sawing wood and over time you might get those results. But building team, collaborating with others, having a collective responsibility. That's all sports. Team sports. And really, that's business as well. It's people. And talent.


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[Assistant] Off the field, very humble, respectful young man. On the field, aggressive, deadly, beast-type mode. The energy in the stands, everybody is cheering him on. It's like, it's just really our son.


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[Assistant] Russia received a four-year ban for doping from the World Anti-Doping Agency.


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[Assistant] Remember when gambling on sports was illegal in America?


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[Assistant] Today, the idea of sports gambling once being illegal almost seems quaint.


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[Assistant] Once allowed only in Nevada, betting on sports is now legal in more than 31 states, with more on the docket. But to say the floodgates have opened is putting it mildly.


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[Assistant] Legal sports betting in the US went from less than $5 billion in bets placed in 2018 to $57 billion in 2021.


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[Assistant] And the top sports gambling companies work more like Facebook and Google than a Las Vegas casino, using big data to encourage more bets from users while simultaneously keeping down big winners.


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[Assistant] So while sports is a multi-billion dollar industry, it's possible the costs may outweigh the gains.


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[Assistant] Today, FanDuel and DraftKings are the undisputed giants of sports betting. Just turn on your TV during any sporting event.


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[Assistant] But they didn't start out that way. They started as daily fantasy companies, or DFCs.


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[Assistant] The question at the time, was it considered gambling?


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[Assistant] Eventually, DraftKings and FanDuel ended up paying $6 million each in separate settlements with the New York Attorney General over false advertising claims.


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[Assistant] After the ruling, the major American professional sports leagues, who all at one point denounced sports gambling, started doing a rapid 180.


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[Assistant] While California overwhelmingly voted against legalized sports betting, it's still pending in a number of very big markets.


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[Assistant] But for the markets where it is legal, the race for customer acquisition was on.


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[Assistant] Draftkangs and Fandl have dominated the market, boasting between 60 to 70% of the entire sports betting market, and they've spent massive amounts to get there.


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[Assistant] Sky-high advertising budgets have kept both companies in the red for years.


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[Assistant] FanDuel, however, is the first to actually post a profit.


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[Assistant] The other side of the coin when it comes to growing the sports betting business are partnerships with the sports leagues themselves.


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[Assistant] For the leagues, this is a massive win. It makes fans more engaged than ever. Just think about it. If the Orlando Magic are playing the Charlotte Hornets on a Monday night, most people won't care.


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[Assistant] Along with the deluge of media marketing for sports betting comes seductive sign up offers for free money.


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[Assistant] So once these sites acquire these customers, they have to keep them there and they have definitely found their hook.


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[Assistant] In-game betting allows the user to bet throughout the game.


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[Assistant] Chasing losses is maybe the most dangerous phrase in sports betting.


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[Assistant] Which can make betting on sports less about heightening the game and more about getting a fix.


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[Assistant] And while only 2% of gamblers become addicted to gambling, for the ones who do, it has the potential to ruin lives.


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[Assistant] This is Joel Soper, a gambling addict and the author of Never Enough Zeros, a book about his life as an addict.


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[Assistant] With the help of a gambling treatment program, Joel was eventually able to kick his gambling addiction and is now devoted to helping others.


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[Assistant] While the risk for addiction is small, both DraftKings, FanDuel, and others say they are dedicated to what's called responsible gaming.


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[Assistant] For now, the main requirement in many US states is that companies provide helpline numbers and avoid marketing to people on what's called self-exclusion lists.


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[Assistant] While that data is used for simple things like confirming customer's age and location, it has other applications as well.


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[Assistant] State regulators allow the companies to profile customers based on betting histories and limit the size of some wagers expected to win.


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[Assistant] Much like traditional casinos kicking out sharps from the blackjack tape.


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[Assistant] Ultimately, by leaving it up to the states and with no federal legislation on the horizon, these organizations, for the most part, are left to police themselves.


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[Assistant] While individuals ultimately bear the responsibility for their own actions, many hope that the biggest companies in this area will make safety an ever bigger part of their mandate, if only to assure this boom doesn't end anytime soon.


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[Assistant] Best Shooter's in my house, he just don't know it yet. There's no way in the world he's not gonna be a better shooter than Steph Curry. You ain't never seen nothing like this from a third grader in hell.


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[Assistant] Every single day, they make 500 shots a piece. They get up at 6 in the morning, work out for about 2 hours, eat breakfast, do their schoolwork, eat lunch, work out another 2 hours, small break, and work out another 2 hours.


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[Assistant] But now, when you pick up the regular sized ball, the weight of it, it feels like nothing. It's like a resistant thing and it's a strength thing so they get, they get strong every time you use a heavy ball. Another resistance type of thing, it's a strap go around your waist with a bungee cord that controls the basketball.


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[Assistant] You don't need a basketball goal, you don't need a partner at all. You can pass it, the ball will come back. You can shoot it, the ball will come back. You ain't gotta spin it. Let's go 10 reps. Make sure you write your pivot now. Make sure you write your pivot. Good. Good. Perfect.


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[Assistant] Anything you do in life, you're consistent with it, you got no choice but to succeed in it. What makes them stand out is their mental toughness. You'll never catch my kids ever crying in a basketball game. But anything competitive, I mean,


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[Assistant] Somebody gonna win, somebody gonna lose, so they have the mental toughness to know it's just a game, although I wanna be the best and I do believe I'ma win. If I don't, it's okay.


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[Assistant] One day you're fine, and 24 hours later they're telling a kid, 9 year old kid, you need a new


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[Assistant] The disease that causes the heart to enlarge and ultimately to break down.


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[Assistant] He was put on a donor list and eventually given a heart transplant.


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[Assistant] In a very short period of time, Compton's medication transformed his appearance so dramatically that he looked completely different, almost fleekish.


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[Assistant] When you see pictures of yourself back then, what in the world goes through your mind?


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[Assistant] In fact, he became the best junior player in the country. Then an All-American at the University of Georgia. All with someone else's heart. But one huge problem was looming.


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[Assistant] The average transplanted heart lasts about 12 years. Compton's transplant was already approaching 16 years.


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[Assistant] But you knew that a transplanted heart only has a


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[Assistant] But on October 3rd, 2007, Compton's second heart did finally give out.


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[Assistant] It happened on the golf course, where he felt the beginning of what turned out to be a massive heart attack.


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[Assistant] I always think the best CEOs are grinders. Yes, you have to have a vision. Yes, you got to set a culture, but the best ones are, it's not about them. It's the grinding.


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[Assistant] We're not risk averse and we never want to be risk averse whether it's on the football field or off. And that allows you to have this culture that can achieve some successes continuously.


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[Assistant] We're stewards of something incredibly popular. Let's run it well, but at the same time, let's really make a big difference in the communities and across the country and maximize our love for each other.


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[Assistant] So not easy, and I think what we were able to do early on is establish that culture. That culture is very intense, hardworking.


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[Assistant] So, you know, for me, it's not wanting to, it's much more wanting to embrace the fans directly, not through gatekeepers. So I always saw sports talk radio as,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Interesting, valuable to, uhm, you know, for fans, but it's a very different business. We're in the business of trying to win big.


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[Assistant] Have a great organization. Represent the community in a great way. We're not into wanting to monetize drama.


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[Assistant] I've never wanted to make popular decisions. I kinda grew up in Boston with a baseball team at the time that always kinda made popular decisions and they always kind of ended up not doing very well.


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[Assistant] And I always thought, you know, if I ever had the chance to run or own a team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't continue to make that investment in that player mistake, but move on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sort of a self-critical nature about, that's part of the culture. Uhm, I think that's been one of our keys to success is we, we pay very little attention to the outside noise and recognize some of it is true, some of it's not true and the best thing you can do is do what you think is right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're out there, we're out there to have a great practice. You know, we're singularly focused on the next play, the next practice, the next game. And yet our lives, we're human beings and this is a chance to kind of put it all in perspective and it doesn't take away from being hyper competitive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It makes you want to make a difference, whether it's on the football field or off. I think it ups your odds on winning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I hesitate for a long time integrating my


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wanting to try to make an impact in the world of autism because of my brother, uhm, and the family business so to speak. Uhm, it became something where I wasn't needing to like push it aside but saying, you know what?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We could be a sports team that absolutely identifies with a underfunded condition that affects millions around the world and kind of,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's amazing to see our players and everybody want to be part of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To be good, really good community examples and let's not just be, we're the NFL, we're so successful, we dominate television, our valuations are gigantic. Let's absolutely be the best citizens we can be and let's judge ourselves, not just on the field, but off the field.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I cherish having, you know, players like Malcolm. I encourage players to be really community involved. I always really enjoyed his ability to think through what he wanted to accomplish and then set a series of short-term mechanisms to do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, there, there's definitely an intersection between sports, entertainment, and popular culture. It's up to us, the leaders in those industries, to be able to celebrate the beauty that we have and attack the problems that we have, because there's real problems of poverty, inequality,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Social injustice, these are real. Yet at the same time, let's celebrate, uhm, the wonderful people that we have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what I'm doing now, but it was all focused on making the enjoyment of watching, like the fan of movies, enjoy their experience. So big, beautiful screens, clean bathrooms, easy parking. This was his way in to try to get people to appreciate storytelling.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It got presented to us as this is a project would you like to help from the very beginning with Questlove and we've got access to the archives of all this music and we just thought it was a perfect project for us and often we will take


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stories that happened, history that happened that has a very, very real present day, uhm, relevance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was one where I love showing it to our players. Uhm, they were in most cases like shocked at.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Having a documentary film company is to explore the humanity and elevate


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Obviously, very difficult summer, but not atypical.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, there's a lot of, uhm, taking down of black citizens, uh, all across the country every, every day, every week, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, a terribly polarized time in America and a lot of anger coming out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so it's not in any way, well, okay, this person is, uh, is black or whatever. That, that's never been the case. We always want to get the best player. On the other hand, whatever, uhm, I'm involved in, I think there's a feeling of sort of undervalued. Certainly,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Felt that with Donovan McNabb, nobody had ever drafted a black quarterback that high in the history of the NFL at the time, number two. We were lucky to get him. I mean, we were so lucky that the team who had the first pick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Undervalued him. His mobility and his ability to be dynamic on the field were probably undervalued by that team. And it goes on and on. With Michael Vick, it was more, this man deserves a second chance. The things he got involved in were awful. You know, I describe him as heinous, uh, with dogs. And I'm a dog lover, but we...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Felt in America at that time and, and still to today, often black people don't get second chances.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this was a man who was very talented, that's why he was getting a second chance, but also because we believed his...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Desire to make good on some of the, you know, things that he caused a lot of pain, uh, were real. And, and Michael proved us to be right for giving him the second chance. So there's a, there's a history to, to Randall, to Donovan. We had Rodney Pete. I could add Jalen Hurts to that. Um, just, just all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Excellent people comes down to it. Excellent people who probably were undervalued and so whether it's black musicians in the 60s or quarterbacks in the, you know, 90s and 2000s, uhm, there's a similarity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like you're just running a business. It's not the same.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To the best of your ability and not what outside world influences. Those are short term influences. Don't pay attention to that stuff. Don't try to be popular. That's, that'll create unpopularity basically in the long run.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm sure you could. No way. No and you won't be successful. You gotta be really passionate and feel that weekly


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ultra competitive nature. And it's also what makes it great. I love that competitive juices. You're not manufacturing widgets. You are trying to maximize human beings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I train a lot of kids and so I think with her it's a little bit more personal because it is my daughter. That's what makes the training worthwhile is the fact that she wants to be great. She wants to be elite and she doesn't miss shots. I don't have to chase after rebounds a lot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when she misses a shot, I'd remind her, okay, you're normal, but let's be abnormal now. Let's not be from here. Let's be from a different environment, a different universe. We're not even from here. And what that means is you can go off on 25 straight threes and that's not normal for people at 15 years old.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Watching her at eight years old, she developed playing with boys. She was the best player on the team. And so I think at that age, I knew it was something special. It was something that she'd do forever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that Kalina would be known as one of the greatest basketball players, regardless of gender.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I go to gym at 8.30 in the morning and then I end at 11.30. Then I go to school and do my schoolwork and then I go back to gym and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I like to paint and cook. My favorite thing to cook is fried Oreos.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In Fundamentally in the US, uh, you have a league system whereby there are a defined number of teams in the league.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Particularly in the UK, you have a league system of four professional divisions and then a number more amateur divisions. And theoretically, if you or I set up an amateur team tomorrow, we could, inside a decade, be playing in the Premier League. It's obviously in practice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More difficult, but by being promoted up the tiers, we could be, uhm, a Premier League team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, when you look at the names of teams, actually, you can see some of that. You think about a team like Arsenal, it was actually the team associated with


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Woolwich Arsenal, a military base south of the river in London. With Aston Villa, that's my team. It was a cricket team that met up and said we want to stay fit during the winter. They met outside Aston Villa, A Villa in the Birmingham suburb of Aston, named their team after it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, and a lot of that is to do with the success in cultivating an international audience. The way that the Premier League in particular has really forged the lead was in a sense by following what happened in the U.S.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the early 90s, they started doing collective bargaining for their broadcasting rights. Used to be the case that if you were Manchester United or Arsenal or whichever club it might be, you would individually negotiate with the broadcaster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They said, actually we're better off as a unit if we all negotiate together. And that's when the Premier League was formed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You tied that up with the arrival of Rupert Murdoch trying to bring a satellite TV station to the UK.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He recognized there was a huge amount of passion for football. If he could lock up the rights for that, he would secure an audience for his pay TV station.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, since the Premier League was formed, we've seen a huge ballooning in the value of broadcast rights. It's jumped 60-fold since, uh, 1992. So previously, the value of the rights was about £600,000 per game. In the most recent round, it was at about £9 million per game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They've seen opportunities for a bargain. Uhm, you can buy a middling football club for several hundred million. You can buy a football club in the second tier for considerably less than that. You compare that to the NFL where, you know, franchises change hands for perhaps two billion dollars. Huge difference then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The most famous US owners were the Glazers, who owned the Tampa Bay Bucks. They came in and bought Manchester United. And they approached it with the kind of attitude of a private equity company. You can pile a huge amount of debt onto it, extract some of that as cash to lie in your own pockets.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And because they are fundamentally media assets, you know, it's quite resilient. As long as they invest enough in the playing squad, keep them in the Champions League, you're going to be able to generate enough free cashflow to service your debt obligations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Promotion to the Premier League could be worth anywhere from 130 to 200 million pounds


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The value of that team is very closely tied to its on-field performance and that is just not the case in the US. You're de-risked to a great degree as a franchise owner in the States because you know


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you have a poor year, you'll get, you know, top pick of the draft. That gives you, uhm, you know, better chances of improving in subsequent years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have one poor year in the Premier League and you're down a division and losing a huge amount of revenue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ultimately, they, I think, are looking for a story to be able to tell, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. It looks like they're seeking a vehicle for a narrative, and ideally that narrative is get the team promoted, up the divisions, and that would make for


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you're looking at a Netflix show which you're selling for several hundred thousand pounds an hour and you have an eight hour mini series, all of a sudden you double that team's revenue in one fell swoop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a sort of active management. It is very much bringing special sauce and applying it to the asset.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think you went to ask almost any football fan, do you like relegation and promotion?


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[Assistant] Out of the top league for a number of years and in the doldrums.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a move to try to get the top lubs in a league which is always the same members year in, year out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is a way of ensuring that those clubs retain their value. They have predictable revenue that will be recurring for the years to come. And because it's at a European level where they'll be playing against all the other top clubs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, they will attract a bigger international fan base. Now, that might be the detriment to the detriment of the normal fan, everyday fan in their home city.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On a simple reason, they may not be able to travel to Munich or Madrid or Milan every other week. It's quite expensive and so it's something that investors like but fans on the whole really don't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His stated ambition is to turn UFC into the biggest sport in the world, and he's as big of a character as you can find.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Quick Takes Chief Correspondent Jason Kelly recently sat down with Dana in Las Vegas to understand his plan for global domination. I'm meeting Jason at Barfly in New York to hear more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Jason, I have watched a UFC fight before, I would not call myself a UFC fan. But, it's massive, and I didn't realize that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're still facing a lot of controversy though. I mean, anybody who looks online will see that they have an anti-trust suit against them. I mean, how do they navigate that? What's their plan?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a wrap. Thanks so much for watching this episode of No Days Off with Brandon McCoy and don't forget to click the link below to grab the perfect gift to light up someone's holiday.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As we went through 2020 and the world shut down, we went from concerned about solvency and when we're going to open and if people are going to be playing golf to the largest golf boom that I've ever been a part of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tiger, who was amazing, but his star burned very bright and then, uh, it didn't have as strong a lasting power. But that's normal for a unique athlete, right? They, they go through those, those phases as opposed to what we're seeing right now, which is some structural change along with what is candidly a COVID dividend.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Top golf is the avenue for most of the world to experience golf and get into golf. And it never existed back in the early 2000s.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well on course golf is what you think traditional golf. So there's 24 million people in the U.S. that play golf on a golf course per year. But most of those play one round.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so, and then off course golf means that you experience golf not on a green grass golf course. So that is you're going to a top golf or a driving range.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Topgolf is changing the world of golf, and it's creating access to, you know, players of all types. By merging the two, we have a competitive advantage in overall reach to golfers of all abilities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you think about growth of the sport, but then growth of our business.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was probably 13. That was in a Super Bowl we had.


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[Assistant] You can see him thinking, processing a lot of times, just trying to build out those scenarios in his head about, you know, what could go wrong and how he can adjust to them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He taught himself how to play the piano. Listening to it, it sounded like he was instructed by somebody.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, he knows how to speak to certain players to get the most out of them.


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[Assistant] Without being that rah rah guy. But uhm, as far as anything is, he leads by example.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you look at tech and sports right now, it's completely innovating the way training's going, completely changing the way recovery's going. I think sky's the limit as far as where it can go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I first started talking with everyone from Hyperice, I had actually been a fan of the product myself for a long time. I think the biggest thing you get when you're dealing with recovery and the biggest thing that athletes want is convenience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Obviously, having suffered a few injuries these last two years, it has been very tough and having products like Hype Rice have been huge for me. Not just being able to recover and come back quickly, but also in training in general and just staying at the top of my game at all times.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The amount of recovery that you can do is limitless. You don't have to be in the training room 24-7 to be able to recover. You can kind of take ownership of that at your house as well. Not just sit there in soreness and say, well hopefully I feel good tomorrow. No, I can do something about it now because I have something in the palm of my hand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hope that one day I can move the national team, break records, score goals, and help my team to win.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My name is Maria Cardas. I'm 12 years old and act by soccer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I first discovered soccer when I was eight years old. I was looking through some of my dad's old jerseys. I thought it would be fun to try it. Then after that I just started playing and now I love soccer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think my dad inspires me a lot because I look up to the way that when he was younger, he trained really hard every day and wanted to be the best and achieve most of the goals that he wanted. So I hope that someday I can do that too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's fun to be in a family of soccer players because of course I have my dad to look up to and then I have younger siblings that look up to me too. At the end of the day we're usually just pushing each other to get better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember at the beginning of the season, I'd never played striker before, so I wasn't used to it. So that's why our first game we won 13-0.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm happy that my team's doing so well in the ECNO. We've been playing some really good teams, so it's been challenging us. It's been fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've scored 20 of the 50 goals we have so far this season. We only have three against because we have a really good defense. There were some games where like I could have scored more goals, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was really hard because the teams, they do really well on defense. Some of the games are a little bit easier because they give me a little bit more space.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When he was six, he started throwing the football with his brother. We were like, man, okay, Zayn's starting to get a little Zany.


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[Assistant] And with everything that he's been through so far, I just know that he's going to be able to overcome anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Good. So we'll do a little dribbling. Okay. Left to right. Gigi's a high level player. She's very skillful and creative. Uhm, very good with the ball. She is a very self-driven young lady. Towns only gets you so far and then it's hard work and determination and the dedication. Gigi's got all those tools.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's nothing about her that makes it any different between her and another teammate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Her freshman year, she was doing things that felt more natural to her. She wanted to do her own thing and not see the whole of the way she should have. So I had a little excited, Bella, you are not doing what your coach did you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the next play, she literally took the ball, hit the hole between the tackles right in the B gap and scored a 20 yard touchdown. It's phenomenal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Her confidence as far as like knowing that she has a place here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of just being a football player, that's 1000% the biggest growth I've seen from her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My first initial reaction was that she was a tough kid. She came in, she took hits, she took handoffs, she did everything she was asked of too. Uhm, so I didn't see any difference really.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No matter what she does in life, she works hard at it, she can do whatever she wants. She's worked her butt off for four straight years to have tremendous success and there's no doubt her future is going to be successful as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's been surreal, it's been crazy. We really thought that all the publicity and stuff would die down like within a week or two after it happened and it's like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In terms of basketball, number one skill set, he's an attacking guard. I've never met anyone alive that can keep him out of the paint, right? There's nothing you're gonna do. Whether it takes him one move, two moves, three moves, four moves, five moves, he's gonna get to the paint. That's a no-no. It's just about what happens after he gets to the paint.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My name is John Hawthorne of Hard Work 24-7. Uh, I am a NBA slash WNBA worldwide professional basketball trainer and I know Adam from here with our program at the Riverside Hawks who I've been training for the last five or six years or so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, Adam got to where he is as a worker. He's just a diligent, profound worker. He truly wants to be better at his craft.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he does what it takes on a daily basis to improve this process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Today we focus mainly on his attack. Adam is an attacking guard, a strong driver of the basketball. So we want to keep the main thing the main thing and for him to be able to stay shifty, keep defenders off balance, and be able to finish at a high level around the rim against sides and against guards his side.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To me I train life and to me life is synonymous with basketball. So basketball is just a tool, just a vehicle that I am able to implement and partake and give.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, as a steward to others who are walking in that same path that I've walked in. So I believe wholeheartedly that I'm able to share those tools with someone else at an earlier age so that way they can have more information than I did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I help Adam understand and get the thoughts and streamline the thoughts out of his head into what he actually has to do to achieve it. He sees something and he knows that he's going to get there. He sees a finish line, but the how-to is cloudy. So I'm there to show the how-to to end up where he's going to end up, where he knows he will end up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Since I started the pre-drive process, it's been pretty intense.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was around basketball from a pretty early age when my sister plays basketball. She plays in the WNBA. She's been in the league for eight years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I love most about playing center is just the ability to be that anchor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now every single game we play, we got our opponent's best game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Final Four was a crazy experience. We played in the Superdome electric environment, you know, you got 70,000 people there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My ghost, LeBron James. The hype he had coming from high school. You know, he's lived up to all those expectations and more. And also just stuff off the floor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, creating a school, inspiring his community, and things like that make him a go. My favorite Duke players were Grant Hill, Christian Leighton, JJ Reddick, Zion, and Jason Tatum.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lil' baby. Three hours. I never liked you. Sincerely, Kentrell. My turn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll probably go with JJ Reddick. You know, he can just score it. He let it be known that he was that good and people didn't like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the rest is history. We just started playing. We really enjoyed it playing here in Missouri as well. We found tournaments and kept going.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Marshall likes to work me hard, he makes sure that I'm not walking out of there like ready to go jump on a trampoline or something.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm playing probably about 35 tournaments a year. Doing school on top of it makes it a little more challenging to, to find some practice time, but I typically practice pickleball 15 to 20 hours a week. When there's a tournament on the weekend, I'll, I'll be able to finish school work the first three days of the week, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I'm traveling later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tickle ball is commonly described as a cross between tennis and ping pong. So you play with a wiffle ball and a paddle.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's very similar to tennis in that there's a net. You have to hit the ball over. You have to keep it inside the lines, inside the court. So, so you play games to 11 and it's not rally score. You have to score on your serve, but it's a really fun sport. I think it's the number one growing sport in the country right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of the pickleball players that I really looked up to and kind of modeled my game off of were Kyle Yates and Dave Weinbach and later on Vin Johns.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those three, I watched them the most just because they were winning the most, honestly. They had the most success at the time so I figured I might as well learn from the best. So Major League Pickleball has kind of been a newer thing in our sport where it's a team event that brings players together and they've brought in a lot of celebrities to the sport. To name a few, LeBron James, Tom Brady, Drew Brees.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know Drew Brees and Tony Romo have gotten out there. If I had to choose between playing against Tom Brady, Drew Brees, or LeBron James, I would probably choose to play against Tom Brady.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A few match points, got back into the game, made it 14-14. Eventually the game ended at me winning 18-16 and that was actually


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No Days Off to me means you're putting in a lot of work to maintaining your level in pickleball and even getting better and competing against some of your opponents who are not taking days off themselves, so it means waking up every day and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And going to get a workout in even if you're tired and getting all my schoolwork done, you know, doing all the, all the little things, right, to make sure that I have the ability to compete at the highest level I want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My goal is to be one of the greatest gymnasts of all time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hi, my name's Ariana and I'm seven years old and I'm a gymnast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started gymnastics at the age of one and a half. My favorite part about gymnastics is that you can have fun. It's a tough sport, but just keep trying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because I won Florida State Champion in 2021. I was against the best 12 girls in my age.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I really enjoy winning because, like, your teammates cheer you on. It just needs a lot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He knows that he can do things at a high level. He expects himself to do that and he works really hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He knows that he can do things at a high level. He expects himself to do that and he works really hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Cam's been training with us for about a year and he is a pitcher primarily and what we talked about is just having that other side of his game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's a leadoff hitter for his team now. He is a really consistent line drive hitter. He's such a great athlete. It's just getting him to simplify things and make him a little bit more consistent with the bat and he really helps his team now from both sides.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It gives us trends and allows us to track, uh, speed and distance over time, uh, and it gives the players immediate feedback after every swing where the ball would go, land, all that stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he's a superior athlete. I mean, he is a really high level football player, track and baseball player. So my hope for him is that he just continues to work really hard at his games, continue to improve day to day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got into baseball when I was about five or six years old. Playing t-ball and my dad getting me in the sport and been playing it ever since. Baseball kind of runs in the family. My older brother and my little brother, they both play baseball.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started pitching when I was about 10 years old. What I love most about pitching is just controlling the game and just being that guy on the mound and just the pace of the game just goes by what you do.


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[Assistant] I've always kind of thrown hard. I've thrown at 92 to 93 and I've topped out at 95.


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[Assistant] The way I stay motivated is by bringing the game back to when I was a little kid and it being a kid's game. Having fun and just playing every game like it's my last.


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[Assistant] I work with Josh DeMoney. He really helps me figure out hitting from a mental standpoint. He's trying to help me take pitches just one pitch at a time.


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[Assistant] I've played basketball since I was a little kid. We got a basketball court outside and we're always competing against each other, just me and my brothers. We're going to play a game of pig, so you go first.


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[Assistant] So this was my first year this past year playing up on the varsity team. I was a young guy at prep. They all took me under their wing and they trusted me to be on the team with them and it was just amazing. It was a heck of a season we had.


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[Assistant] I'm really proud of that one. My most memorable trophy is my 13G Select Fest Home Run Derby Champion Trophy and it's my favorite. I didn't really expect to go and win the Home Run Derby and it was one of the best experiences I've ever had.


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[Assistant] Over here I got my two gloves. This is my perfect game, select best glove that we got to customize. And then when I play infield and pitch, I use this glove right here.


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[Assistant] I got a lot of neat wood bats. I like to swing Marucci and the Donut bat. It's probably one of my favorites. It's a really cool type of bat. When I use a metal bat, I use the Easton, the B5. This is one of my favorite bats to swing.