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23 Articles

Spur of the Moment

THE THRONG of media in the Spurs’ pregame interview room was large enough for even Gregg Popovich to take notice. “Is this the playoffs?” the Spurs coach asked. No. It is just another day of Wemban-mania. In mid-January, San Antonio made its lone trip through Boston, which meant a fresh crop of reporters to pepper Popovich about his star rookie, Victor Wembanyama, and a sold-out crowd to get a first look at him. Fans arrived early. Camera phones rolled. The game itself was anticlimactic: The Spurs trailed by five after one quarter, 25 at the half and fell behind by as many as 30 in the third quarter before settling for a 19-point defeat. When a reporter suggested the game was fairly even save for a lopsided second quarter, Popovich grinned. “What are you,…

Spur of the Moment

The Dodgers’ winter haul—the team added Shohei Ohtani (who will only bat in 2024) as well as starters Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow—makes them the firm favorites heading into this season. Their latest futures odds on SI Sportsbook are +350. (The next shortest belong to Atlanta, at +650.) But does that bode well for Los Angeles (or bettors looking for a sure thing)? Not really. Ten of the last 12 World Series winners had preseason odds of +1000 or higher, with last year’s champs, the Rangers, opening at +5000. One of the takeaways from Texas’s title run is that when it comes to the playoffs, anything goes (page 14). The Rangers were still only +1000 on Sept. 1 and had actually dropped to +1800 heading into the wildcard round. So who could…

READ MIND GAME by Julie Kliegman WRITING A book—at least one people will want to buy and read—about athletes and mental health isn’t easy. It’s a serious subject, to say the least. In the words of Julie Kliegman, the author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, “My biggest fear when I was writing this, was that it would come off like a textbook. It’s not like people say, ‘Oh, let me go get the mental health book for Christmas for my friend.’” But Kliegman has succeeded in writing a book that is engaging but at the same time important. The stories of athletes such as Simone Biles (above), Chloe Kim, McKayla Maroney, Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, among others, are especially relevant at a time…

NASCAR: FULL SPEED

AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX THERE’S A moment in the second episode of NASCAR: Full Speed in which driver Bubba Wallace says, as he’s settling in for an interview, “Is this the Drive to Survive moment when they sit down and get all situated? Is that what we’re going for?” It’s a cheeky statement that addresses the elephant in the room: Would Wallace (above) even be in said setting without the success of Netflix’s other auto racing documentary series? It’s a good question, especially given the fact that Full Speed is one of three Netflix series released already this year that’s aiming to capitalize on the Survive model. Behind-the-scenes shows on men’s tennis and international rugby—both produced by the same team that puts out the Formula One docuseries—also hit the airwaves in January. The answer…

NASCAR: FULL SPEED

THE INSTAGRAM feed of Richard Blais is an interesting mix. Occasionally he’ll post a picture of himself many years—and many pounds (like, 60)—ago, before the chef and TV personality committed to living and eating better. Blais had wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball in high school. “I always felt like I was Deion Sanders,” he says. “A really horrible version of Deion Sanders.” But when he started working as a chef, he started doing what many in the industry do: taste a lot of food, then settle in after work with a burger and some wine. At the same time, the now-veryit 52-year-old posts an astonishing number of videos of himself basting fish or other meat in an ungodly amount of butter. It’s proof that you can take care of yourself…

CAULIFLOWER NUGGETS

FROM PLANT FORWARD FOR THE NUGGETS • 1 large head cauliflower, broken into golf-ball-sized florets• 2 tablespoons olive oil• 1½ teaspoons salt• ½ teaspoon freshly ground blackpepper FOR THE BUFFALO SAUCE • ½ cup Frank’s RedHot Original sauce• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted• ¼ cup crumbled blue cheese for garnish (optional) DIRECTIONS 1. Preheat the oven to 400°. Have on hand a nonstick sheet pan or line a pan with parchment paper. 2. Toss the cauliflower in the olive oil and season with the salt and pepper. Spread the cauliflower on the pan and roast until just tender, 30 to 40 minutes. 3. Make the Buffalo sauce: In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the hot sauce and melted butter. 4. Remove the cauliflower from the oven once tender and add it to the bowl with the Buffalo sauce.…

CAULIFLOWER NUGGETS

ANOTHER NFL postseason, another strong showing by home teams: 5–1 in the wild-card round, followed by 3–1 in the divisional playoff and 1–1 in the conference championship games, for a record of 9–3, the same mark as last year. That’s an 18–6 advantage (.750) for home teams over the past two years, well past the previous .670 mark since 1990. Meanwhile, the impact of home field advantage in baseball is clearly trending in the opposite direction. Forget what you learned growing up about how important it is for baseball teams to play at home in the postseason. Here is the evidence that the home field advantage in baseball is at a fivedecade low. • Home teams in the regular season last year had a .521 winning percentage, the worst in any full…

BEFORE HE changed his mind and decided to play at Princeton, Bill Bradley committed to Duke. What ultimately lured him to New Jersey instead, he told SportS IlluStrated’s Frank Deford in 1962, was the school’s emphasis on character and academics. “The one thing I don’t want to be is typed,” he said. “I don’t want to end up as just old Satin Shorts Bradley.” At the time Bradley was a sophomore who was making a strong case for being the best player in the country. Against Army (pictured), he scored 23 points in a Tigers win, below his season average of 27.3. A Hall of Fame NBA career came next (but not before a Rhodes scholarship), and then Bradley truly showed he could excel in long pants, serving three terms…

FACES IN THE CROWD

OLIVIA CHAMBERS Sport: Para Swimming Hometown: Little Rock Chambers, who is legally blind and competes in the S13 classification for athletes with visual impairments, won the SM-13 200-meter individual medley and set the S13 1,500-meter freestyle world record (17:53.84) at the 2023 U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships in December. A junior at Northern Iowa, she won two silver and four bronze medals at the ’23 Para Swimming World Championships last summer. AJANI DWYER Sport: Track and Field Hometown: Sewell, N.J. Dwyer, a senior sprinter at Washington Township High, broke the New Jersey record in the 55-meter dash (6.18) at the Millrose Games Trials in January, eclipsing the previous state mark set in 2011 by former NFL wideout Damiere Byrd by 0.08 seconds. Dwyer, a Penn State commit who is competing indoors for the first time in his…

FACES IN THE CROWD

WITH HIS father, mother and older brother working in his corner, Jordan Fuentes entered the U.S. Olympic boxing team trials in December, in Lafayette, La., as a wild card and left as a champion. Fuentes, 18 and the youngest boxer in the 57-kilogram division, toppled the Nos. 1–3 seeds en route to winning the event and being named an alternate for the 2024 Games. (Jahmal Harvey formerly qualified for Paris in the same weight class by winning gold at the ’23 Pan American Games.) A Cinderella story? Not quite. Fuentes beat the ’22 Youth World Championships bronze medalist in the finals of USA Boxing’s Last Chance Qualifier to earn a trials bid. He knew he could break through, and the trials win landed him a Team USA Selection Camp slot in Colorado…

LAST GOAT STANDING

In any outdoor market running through an urban downtown, there is inevitably a T-shirt vendor. And at the entrance to Kalemegdan Park, at the base of a pedestrian promenade in Belgrade, the T-shirt guy offers two main choices. One is a shirt adorned with an image of Novak Djokovic, face contorted in intensity, as he is, no doubt, about to win one tennis title or another. The other option features Nikola … no, not Jokić, but Tesla, the Serbian American inventor and engineer, best known for pioneering alternating current in the late 1800s. Such is the status conferred on Djokovic in his homeland. Djokovic’s level of esteem is not much different in the tennis sector. Except that here, he stands alone. He isn’t just a generational figure; he’s a transformational one,…

LAST GOAT STANDING

CHERYL MILLER did something last summer that she had never done before: She bought USC women’s basketball season tickets. Miller, of course, is the best player in the history of the program, if not the history of the game. She led the Trojans to glory in the 1980s and served as head coach in the ’90s. Yet she couldn’t remember when she’d last caught a USC game before this season. It had been at least 10 years, she figured, maybe 15. She hadn’t bothered even for the crosstown rivalry games with UCLA. The program no longer engaged much with its alumnae, Miller says. But they hadn’t missed too much. The Trojans had one of the most storied histories in the game; USC was among the first schools to give Division I…

SPRING SURPRISES

ZVONIMIR IVIŠIĆ KENTUCKY | C › The 7'2" Croatian made his debut in January after spending the first 16 games sidelined while awaiting NCAA clearance. He had 13 points, three treys and some dazzling passes against Georgia. He’s a unicorn, with a skill set at his size matched by few NBA players, let alone college ones. JOHNNY FURPHY KANSAS | SF › A late addition to the Kansas roster last summer, the Australian native has the size (he’s 6' 9") and athleticism on the wing to help maintain Kansas’s switchability defensively. But Furphy’s biggest asset is his ability to space the floor from beyond the arc. LANCE JONES PURDUE | SG › Jones wasn’t even considered a top-100 transfer in the portal this offseason. The Boilermakers’ Big Dance bugaboos have been outside shooting and perimeter defense—especially against smaller…

SPRING SURPRISES

THE STRIDES OF MARCH

IN SO many ways, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament makes absolutely no sense. A 68-team one-and-done tournament on neutral courts is an imprecise way to identify the nation’s best team. Wealthy athletic departments are merging into superconferences, forming a dominant upper class—yet the tournament reserves more than a third of its bids for lesser leagues. College athletes constantly transfer, often for money, via wink-wink NIL deals; winning for their school should be an antiquated concept. No sense at all. But somehow, when the ball is tipped, there you are: In 1983 or ’91 or 2008. Zach Edey is Patrick Ewing, and Fairleigh Dickinson is Villanova. Armando Bacot is Tyler Hansbrough, and Kyle Filipowski is Danny Ferry. March Madness is like a casino floor: Somewhere, somebody is sure to experience the biggest…

THE STRIDES OF MARCH

1 CHRIS JONES Chiefs DL Projection: Four years, $112 million Jones, 29, is going to get a massive payday, whether it’s in Kansas City or somewhere else. After holding out of training camp and ultimately receiving a one-year deal with a $19.5 million base salary, he earned firstteam All-Pro honors for the second straight year with 10½ sacks. Jones is slated for unrestricted free agency, something he’s never enjoyed before. Expect many teams to make inquiries about the future Hall of Famer. 2 KIRK COUSINS Vikings QB Projection: One year, $40 million Cousins played some of the best football of his career (completing 69.5% of his passes while averaging more than 290 yards per game) before sustaining a season-ending Achilles injury in Week 8. He probably would have landed another lucrative long-term contract extension had…

ARE WE ASKING TOO MUCH OF MIKE MCCARTHY?

THE 2023–24 coaching carousel was among the most entertaining in recent years. Each team acted in a completely different way to solve its own individual desperations. There was no real trend. This was dart-throwing at its finest. The Chargers pried Jim Harbaugh away from Michigan. In past years Harbaugh, one of the more reclusive and fickle personalities in the business, was notorious for trying to handle most of the minutiae required to land an NFL job on his own, or with a small army of rotating associates. This year he signed with an agent, Don Yee, who has repped Tom Brady and Sean Payton. Los Angeles’s desire to hit what fans could consider a home run—Harbaugh is rare in that he has a proven track record of success in both the…

ARE WE ASKING TOO MUCH OF MIKE MCCARTHY?

TAMING THE WAVE

HER EARS were bleeding. It was February 2023, at Sunset Beach on Hawai'i’s North Shore midway through the World Surf League Championship Tour’s second event of the season, when Caroline Marks woke up feeling like something was stabbing her face from the inside. Her pillow was soaked in blood. On her way to the hospital, she couldn’t stop crying. “So much pain,” she says now, during an early-January drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway from her home in San Clemente, Calif., to Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point. Her ear canals had closed and ruptured, she explains. Issues related to her deviated septum and an influx of seawater had created infections in her sinuses, adenoids and ears. That night, the doctor ordered immediate surgery. “Well,” she replied, “I have to surf.” She…

TAMING THE WAVE

THE RACE FOR Second

REMEMBER NASCAR? It used to be all the rage, with stock cars supplanting open-wheelers as the preferred racing vehicle in the U.S. in the 1990s. Big TV contracts followed, and then, well, kind of nothing. The reasons its bubble burst are legion and debatable, but one recurring theme, rightly or wrongly, is that the racing got predictable. The new next big thing is, of course, Formula One, which has ridden a wave of popularity and goodwill from its Netflix reality series. (Again, an overly simplified explanation for the sport’s standing, but space is tight.) The great irony in the transfer of power is that last year NASCAR had one of its most unpredictable seasons ever. A total of 17 drivers visited Victory Lane, including a fella named Shane van Gisbergen, who…

THE RACE FOR Second

BUMPS IN THE ROAD?

11 SERGIO PÉREZ › As brilliant as Verstappen is as a driver, the fact remains he’s blessed with a tremendous car. So is his Red Bull teammate, Pérez, and that alone makes him dangerous. Pérez won twice in the first four races of the 2023 season, then struggled as Verstappen dominated. While Pérez wound up second in the drivers’ standings, he crashed out in qualifying in Monaco in May and had two DNFs in the final seven races, leading to speculation that the 34-year-old’s seat may not be safe. Pérez has developed a reputation, for better or worse, as Verstappen’s sidekick/escort. (Max dubbed him the Minister of Defense for his work running interference on rival drivers.) With his job on the line, Pérez will likely be looking out for No. 1…

BUMPS IN THE ROAD?

BAHRAIN March 2 › Verstappen has it all: guts, instinct, savvy, intelligence. None of that does a driver any good if his car won’t start. Not only does Red Bull provide a machine that is as fast as all get out, but it provides one that’s dependable as well. Max has gone 41 races without a retirement (leaving a race without finishing 90% of the laps). If there’s an exception that proves the rule, though, it’s the Bahrain Grand Prix. Should gremlins torment Red Bull, this is the likely place. In 2022, Verstappen and teammate Pérez suffered fuel pressure issues. Four years earlier Verstappen went after a second-lap collision with Hamilton, but even then he lasted longer than his then teammate Daniel Ricciardo, who completed one lap when he lost power. Those…

GOODBYE, GUENTHER After Drive to Survive premiered on Netflix in 2018, one of the series’ first breakout stars was an unlikely character: Guenther Steiner (above). The Haas team principal endeared himself to fans with his candidness and penchant for cursing like a sailor, all in an accent combining his Italian and German roots. After driver Kevin Magnussen slammed a door following a Steiner tonguelashing, the now 58-year-old provided one of the show’s most memorable lines: “He does not f---smash my door.” Haas finished last in the constructors’ race last year, and in January it emerged that Steiner was being let go by North Carolina–based team owner Gene Haas. So what does the future hold for Guenther? He performed admirably in the Fox booth last spring for the NASCAR Circuit of the…

The house is quiet now Sitting at the end of a dusty central Texas road, the air inside the stately brick ranch hangs still, no longer disturbed by the family of five careening through the halls en route to school or a dental office or golf courses. Echoes of those past lives are displayed on seemingly every wall, adorned by photos of a family smiling on ski trips, celebrating graduations or posing on the links. Slight of frame, eyes kind, the father in those photos stands proudly alongside his three young boys, his hands on their shoulders. Turn the corner into the living room, though, and he appears suddenly aged in a series of shots from his eldest son’s wedding: He hunches forward. His hair has whitened. His eyes have dimmed,…

IT’S HARD to remember a time when the UConn men’s program, the defending national champ and the country’s No. 1 team heading into the final month of this regular season, wasn’t a college hoops blueblood. But at this time 25 years ago the Huskies were just another upstart, a status that upgraded when they took down Duke in the 1999 NCAA final. It was the first of five national titles over the next quarter century, the most by any school in that span—tied for the fourth most, period. If the Huskies may feel inevitable this March, they have program predecessors like Richard Hamilton to thank.…

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