The Baffler no. 79

Player Haters

June 2025

Masthead

The Baffler

234 5th Ave
New York, NY 10001

Editor in Chief

Matthew Shen Goodman

Strategic Director and Managing Editor

Bidi Choudhury

Art Directors and Designers

No Ideas

Senior Editors

Jess Bergman

Dave Denison

Web Editor

Zachariah Webb

Editor at Large

Chris Lehmann

Literary Editor

J.W. McCormack

Staff Writer

Jess McAllen

Assistant Editor

Arielle Isack

Editorial Fellow

Grayson Scott

Photo Editor

Chris Maggio

Contributing Editors

Susan Faludi

Evgeny Morozov

Ann Neumann

Liz Pelly

Rick Perlstein

George Scialabba

Jacob Silverman

Astra Taylor

Catherine Tumber

Kate Wagner

Eugenia Williamson

Publisher

Noah McCormack

Executive Director

James White

Marketing and Social Media Manager

Kelly Dickinson

Web Developer

Michael Gardiner

Administrative Coordinator

Leila Markosian

Past Publishers

The MIT Press, 2012–2014

Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011

Greg Lane, 1993–2007

Founding Editors

Thomas Frank

Keith White

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alma Beauvais, Lina Chang, Warren Hildebrand, and Federico Perelmuter for their help crafting Baffler no. 79.

Own Goals

Matthew Shen Goodman

© Fromm Studio

“America first does not mean America alone,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on April 23, seeking to reassure the market three weeks after the president declared Liberation Day and tariffed the world. Spooked by turbulence in the bond market—or eager to discard the pretense that this wasn’t primarily about a Sino-American decoupling—the White House had already announced a ninety-day pause exempting all countries besides the Middle Kingdom from the new import levies. Despite Bessent’s remarks, the administration’s attack on all the factories under heaven has been met with international opprobrium and plunging domestic confidence in our chief dealmaker; the United States’ position in the twenty-first-century global order has arguably been more threatened by its upheaval of the supply chain than, for example, the approximately 4.5 million left dead in the war on terror, to say nothing of what this country now abets in Gaza.

“Player Haters” surveys the state of competition in Fortress America, where the only flourishing industries are sports betting and YouTube. The latter’s vloggers have embraced the country’s masculinist turn: fewer suicide forest pranks and tiny-mic’d street interviews, more beating the shit out of each other. Sean Nam demonstrates how influencers took over the dying sport of boxing, selling sloppy bouts to an uneducated audience while decrepit and corrupt regulatory bodies played blind and profited big. Elsewhere in violence, mixed-martial-arts moguls TKO Group Holdings, Inc. have diversified, now proffering Professional Bull Riders, a multimillion-dollar novelty league that sells highlight reels of bovine-on-man accidents and the Western frontier as not a place but a vibe, per Grayson Scott, easily accessible everywhere given this nation’s omnipresent fears of invasion. Country-fried LARPing continues in Lena Redford’s exhibit of cowboy mounted shooting, while Tristan deBrauwere’s photos of CarJitsu—i.e., jiujitsu in a car—depict another breed of vehicle-based brutality. No one has choked out a Formula 1 driver at 230 miles per hour, but perhaps one of the citizens of Las Vegas might chance it, aggrieved, as David Hill shows, by the city’s many capitulations to the racing league.

Other athletes watch as once quintessentially American pastimes experience a downturn. Dennis M. Hogan contemplates whether college sports are too dependent on exploitation to survive paying players. Dave Denison wonders how long the change-resistant sport of bowling can endure the vulture capitalists buying up alleys around the country. Petra Browne details the challenges faced by female bodybuilders long after their 1980s heyday, competitors reliant now on muscle-worshipping groupies to bankroll their costs—inclusive of the steroids necessary to compete at the highest levels. Andrew Schenker considers the complicated questions faced by halls of fame, like whether a separate wing should exist for the dopers and cheaters.

On its current course, the United States could use some juice of its own. Domestic production will have to be bolstered and industrial inputs found. Meg Bernhard reports from Arizona’s copper mines, necessary for the cutting-edge technologies we’re supposedly about to furnish ourselves, alongside the billions of dollars of pharmaceuticals we’ll no longer import from abroad. But will putting a “Made in the USA” sticker on every bottle of Advil compel the middlemen of medicine, described by Jess McAllen, to take pity on our wallets? It’s doubtful. The tariffs, as currently conceived, are already a regressive tax, and America First seems to only ever mean immiserating the poor until they’re penniless and alone.

Humping Iron

The secret network of sleaze underwriting female bodybuilding

Petra Browne

© James Hosking

Halfway through Ronnie Cramer’s 2001 documentary Highway Amazon, bottle blond Christine Fetzer speaks into a cordless phone. The camera is tight on her face, though by now we’ve seen over thirty minutes of her dense, sinuous body, including shots of her doing a dumbbell routine on the shoulder of a road beside bluffs of red sandstone. Even as she tours the country, she has to keep up her physique. After all, men at each of her stops—Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York; the list goes on—will pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the chance to wrestle a female bodybuilder. “It’s kind of an underground thing here, what I do,” she says into the phone. “People don’t believe you actually wrestle men on beds in hotel rooms.” In the next shot, a horizon is formed by the teal coverlet of a motel bed. Fetzer, wearing a black vinyl lingerie set, is on her feet, locked in a struggle with a weedy, olive-skinned young man who could have just walked out of a university chem lab. Her well-muscled arms are thicker than his, but he pulls her arm over his shoulder, spins his back into her, and gently rolls her onto the coverlet. The camera bounces. Moments later, they are both on the bed and she mounts his body, taking his head in a scissor hold between her thighs. For an instant before the shot cuts, her firm, rounded glutes jut out below his chin. This is the moment he has paid for: the erotic surrender. According to Fetzer, about 50 percent of these sessions will end with the client masturbating to climax as she stands out of reach, flexing.

Like most bodybuilders, Fetzer entered the sport believing she could make a living through contest winnings and sponsorships. But also like so many, she has found herself reliant on the thousands of men who lurk on forums and exchange photos of their favorite female bodybuilders, as well as hot takes, smut fiction, and reviews of “sessionettes” like Fetzer. This hobby, as it is commonly called, provides economic support for as much as half of all female bodybuilders. Without these men, there would be fewer women with the means to pay for gym memberships; spray tans; custom posing suits; choreographers; supplements; steroids, insulin, and human growth hormone (HGH); and, of course, treatments to counter the androgenic side effects. They are, by turns, reviled and welcomed. They are a lifeline. They are, in the parlance of the trade, schmoes.

Weird Flex

That women as nonconformist as Fetzer and her peers should depend on male intervention is less surprising when we understand their sport’s historical origins in the 1950s, when bikini or women’s “fitness” contests began to appear as side acts at male bodybuilding contests. Back then, these women more closely resembled pinups than today’s muscle-bound competitors. With few exceptions, female bodybuilders didn’t exist yet. This was the era when collegiate women played basketball on the half-court because running the full length was thought too strenuous. These pageants—for that is what they were—bore little resemblance to today’s bodybuilding competitions. While the entrants might cheekily flex a bicep onstage, it was understood that they were there to present trophies to the men, hang on their arms like ornaments, and otherwise service the male gaze. Muscles were not required or even wanted. What were required were bikinis, heels, makeup, and costume jewelry. The women’s function, like that of ring girls at a boxing match, was to affirm the tenuous heterosexuality of the all-male audience as they looked long upon slippery, shaven male bodies. Their feminine presence reflected a core anxiety of male bodybuilding: Is it gay to look at dudes? After all, by the 1930s, photographers were taking out advertisements in the back pages of physique magazines, offering “undraped”—read, nude—photographs of beefy men, and by the 1950s, homoerotic publications like Physique Pictorial were available on newsstands. It became so pervasive that in 1956, the mainstream fitness magazine Iron Man called for the eradication of “the homosexual element” that permeated physical culture, suggesting a ban on magazine advertisements for nude photographs. Similar worries would motivate bodybuilding kingpin Joe Weider when, in 1980, he decided that each cover of his flagship magazine Muscle & Fitness would feature both a man and a woman; a defense, he explained, against “the public’s lingering suspicion that bodybuilders were gay.”

But another thing drove Weider toward equality on the page: the dream of doubling his empire. Women were a market, after all. By 1983, the combined annual circulation of Muscle & Fitness, FLEX, and Shape—all published by Weider—had grown to one million. Furthermore, Muscle & Fitness, which began in 1940 as Your Physique, a mimeographed zine with very few ads, had become a full-color marketing vehicle for numerous Weider products: mass gainers and protein powders, exercise equipment, instructional videos, et al. In fact, before 1979, it exclusively advertised Weider products. All of this would have been enough for Weider to play kingmaker in a growing sport. The fact that his brother Ben ran the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation (later renamed the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness, and mystifyingly shortened to the IFBB in both instances), widely acknowledged to be the “only game in town,” seems almost gratuitous. That the American arm of the IFBB was, at least until 2017, a nonprofit is immaterial. The league was simply the black earth from which their crop grew and magazines the combine used to harvest it.

By the late 1980s, Joe and Ben Weider were worth an estimated $250 million. In 1993, anthropologist Alan Klein compared them to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, if he were to own 80 percent of football teams, plus Sports Illustrated and Sporting News. The completely integrated power structure of the IFBB and its amateur feeder organization, the National Physique Committee (NPC), headed by the brothers’ crony Jim Manion, is part of what made bodybuilding unlike any other sport. It meant the Weiders had the ability to make sure those athletes who brought them the greatest profit would win. When explaining the loss of Afro-Cuban phenom Sergio Oliva at the 1970 Mr. Olympia competition, Joe was blunt: “I put Oliva on the cover of my magazine, I sell x number of copies. I put Arnold [Schwarzenegger] on the cover, and I sell [three times] that.” This monopoly also gave the Weiders the power to freeze out athletes who displeased them, effectively ending their careers. In 1990, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon started his own bodybuilding league, the World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF), offering eyewatering contracts to lure top bodybuilders away from the IFBB. In retaliation, the Weiders eliminated from their magazines those who jumped ship, even persuading sponsors to cut ties as well. Unhappily for those athletes, the WBF lasted only two short years.

With such a juggernaut behind them, is it any wonder that the Weiders would take credit for launching women’s bodybuilding? When referring to his 1980 decision to put women on the cover of Muscle & Fitness, Joe Weider said, “I knew that if bodybuilding was to take off, we’d have to get women into it.” But they had already begun getting “into it” without his help. Three years earlier, in 1977, Henry McGhee Jr., the weight training director at a YMCA in Canton, Ohio, independently organized the Ohio Regional Women’s Physique Championship, the first true women’s bodybuilding competition—in the sense that things like facial beauty and breasts did not translate into medals. McGhee wanted competitors to be judged “like the men”: in terms of muscular development, symmetry, and presentation.

In 1980, the Ms. Olympia event was created by promoter George Snyder as a companion to the already famous Mr. Olympia. It was the first contest in which women posed like men, went barefoot like men, and wore no jewelry. In 1985, Ms. Olympia, now under Weider ownership, was held at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden before an unprecedented crowd of over five thousand spectators. Five years later, 1990’s Ms. Olympia brought thirty entrants, the largest number ever seen. Yet by 2005, IFBB announcer and talking head Bob Cicherillo was complaining in FLEX Magazine, “Year after year, women’s bodybuilding has consistently lost money. One year, the Ms. Olympia sold 38 tickets . . . 38! So, the fans have spoken: from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t survive; nor can it survive.” What went wrong?

Muscular Creep

The conundrum of the bodybuilder is that one’s career is often so poorly paid that it generally requires another career—or, more likely, a series of gigs—to support it. In fact, the Weiders initially created Mr. Olympia with the aim of stanching attrition to more menial jobs. In its first year, 1965, the prize for first place was $1,000, or about $10,000 today, a sum that pales in comparison to current winnings. In 2023, for example, the top five male competitors received a combined $700,000, with $400,000 of that going to first place. The combined winnings of the top five female competitors in 2023 was just $95,000, with $50,000 going to first place. It’s not just that Ms. Olympia Andrea Shaw took home one-eighth of what her male counterpart did; the runners-up hardly took home anything. For either gender, only a tiny number of aspirants are ever able to make a living at what they love.

It makes sense, then, that the first thing Colette Nelson, two-time winner of the NPC USA Heavyweight Championships, told me over the phone was, “You gotta have a plan to get out. I think if you go into this sport thinking there’s some kind of rags to riches—it’s a hobby.” In the 1990s, Nelson and her boyfriend made their money onsite at competitions, offering hair, makeup, and tanning services to other hopefuls. They managed to make between $6,000 and $10,000 per show, but success like theirs is the exception to the rule. Even on a national scale, there is only ever room for a handful of businesses like Color by Colette. Furthermore, the work occupied a layer in what Nelson sees as almost a pyramid scheme built on the backs of hapless competitors, one which she believes preyed on “people’s desire to be loved, desire for some type of recognition.”

Unlike most sports, bodybuilding is not fostered by grade school and collegiate programs. Nor does it offer the familial support of figure skating or gymnastics; childhood does not mold the future athlete except, perhaps, psychologically. While the majority of bodybuilders start out as athletes of another stripe, the critical stage in their ontogenesis takes place in adulthood, and their careers peak much later than other athletes'. It’s a game of accrual rather than real-time performance. The average age of a Mr. Olympia winner is thirty-six; of a Ms. Olympia, thirty-two. Only shooting sports are comparable, because their accomplishment rests on acquired skill rather than the raw capabilities that fade with youth. (Equestrian events don’t count; the real athletes—equine—peak at fifteen or sixteen, like gymnasts, though this number has increased in recent years.) What this means is that any hopeful bodybuilder must commit to a long apprenticeship within the economic frame of the real world. One of my sources, fetish worker and former bodybuilder BrandiMae Akers, put it this way, “You’re spending five to six hours a day training, doing cardio. I mean it’s really hard to have a life or a job or do anything else outside of that.”

In his 1993 anthropological study of male bodybuilders, Little Big Men, Alan Klein described four common ways his largely blue-collar subjects made a living: bill collecting, bouncing, bodyguarding, and beefcake. The first three of the four Bs require a physically threatening mien and are not typically available to women. Beefcake, however, knows no gender. Though it began, like bodybuilding, as a male genre with the homoerotic magazines of the 1950s, beefcake more or less realized gender parity in the VHS tapes of the 1990s and the online video clips and webcam sites of the 2000s, due in part to the economic pressures unique to female athletes, pressures that have grown along with the physiques themselves. Female bodybuilders did not start out as mass monsters. When the first Ms. Olympia, Rachel McLish, stepped onstage in 1980, she stood five feet, six-and-a-half inches tall, and weighed in at 130 pounds. Iris Kyle, who from 2001 to 2014 won first or second place—mostly first—was only half an inch taller but peaked in 2009 at a stupefying 165 pounds. In fact, if you lined up all the Ms. Olympia winners from 1980 to the present day, the overall pattern would be that of a matryoshka doll. This phenomenon, which I will call muscular creep, is the result of both athletes pushing the limits and judges mostly rewarding them for doing so, whatever the higher-ups might have to say.

In any event, as the standard for muscularity became increasingly difficult to achieve, competitors took more and more performance-enhancing drugs (PED) to keep up, something that both Nelson and Akers confessed was a factor in their own retirements from the sport. They simply didn’t want to take the quantities of drugs necessary to win, with good reason. Colette Nelson, who is now a nurse practitioner specializing in hormone replacement therapy, told me that a typical female bodybuilder will take between two hundred and four hundred milligrams of subcutaneous testosterone per week, two to four times the amount typically prescribed to trans men. On top of that, bodybuilders will stack another anabolic steroid such as Primobolan, Equipoise, or Deca-Dianabol. Insulin, which drives glucose into cells, including muscle cells, is also sometimes used. This is not what causes added financial pressure, however. The pink tax lies in managing the side effects of taking cross-sex hormones: laser depilation for body and facial hair, microneedling and platelet-rich plasma for hair loss, fat grafting for sunken cheeks, Botox for hypertrophied masseters. Perhaps even more troubling than the effects of anabolics are those of HGH. Taken to help cell growth and regeneration, HGH can cause acromegaly, the post-pubertal growth of cranial bones, leading to overdevelopment of the brow ridges, the jaw, and the nose—think of Andre the Giant, whose bones grew until his death—effectively masculinizing a woman’s face. This is what Nelson meant when she called PED use “a handshake with the devil.” But what compels someone to meet the devil at the crossroads?

The two major ingredients that seem to go into the making of just about every bodybuilder are a background in youth athletics and a core wound. As Nelson put it, “For every bodybuilder I’ve ever met, it comes from pain.” In her own case, it was a childhood diagnosis of type 1 diabetes that made her feel “broken.” Akers, too, has a story. In a 2010 interview on Real Sports, she told Bryant Gumbel:

My mother abandoned me when I was maybe about four or five. She was a prostitute and on and off drugs for the past twenty years. . . . I had no control, as a young kid, of my environment around me. With this, I’m able to control how my physique looks. I’m able to control my training in the gym. I’m able to control my body. For many, being able to make a living as a bodybuilder is an intoxicating dream.

This dream, this mirage, recurs again and again in bodybuilding media. Akers believes the illusion arises from the unique and bygone conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s. During that period, women could get paid sponsorships from gyms and supplement companies. They set up booths at industry expos, either representing a supplement brand or selling their own posters and 8 × 10s. They could bring in as much as $10,000 at larger events like Olympia Weekend. But after the dot-com boom, supplement sales moved online. Bodybuilding.com bought out hundreds of supplement companies, effectively eliminating most sponsorship opportunities. The posters and 8 × 10s were replaced by the jpeg. That Akers would have experienced this collapse as a bait-and-switch makes sense given the timing of her career, from 2000 to 2016, but even in the year 2000, there were much easier ways to make a living than bodybuilding. Nelson likens the sport to an addiction, and she believes the drug is “that moment of feeling true love, whether it was fakery or whatever” that happens onstage. But that doesn’t seem quite right either. Though I agree with her that it is compulsive, I would argue the thing that motivates bodybuilders is closer in nature to anorexia nervosa. After all, as Nelson herself admitted in our conversation, many female bodybuilders already have eating disorders, and many mistakenly believe that bodybuilding is a healthier alternative.

They are wrong. The period leading up to a show is called “prep,” and during this time the bodybuilder must maintain a caloric deficit while losing whatever is left of their body fat. The all-consuming level of control the process requires, combined with the physiological effects of starvation, often induce a submerged, numb state. For many, it is relieving. In a world of almost limitless variables, the bodybuilder only focuses on a few: macronutrients, repetitions, drugs. Everything else falls away. When I was prepping for my own first competition in 2015, in the much smaller Bikini category, my mother called to tell me that my grandfather had died. She wanted me to fly down to Texas for the funeral. I panicked. Although I knew that going was the right thing to do, the thought of being unable to control my eating struck terror in my heart. I was two weeks out from the show and had been reduced to eating tilapia, avocado, asparagus, and kale; to grinding out forty-five-minute cardio sessions on the elliptical; to going from grocer to grocer and buying out their distilled water because it was all I was allowed to drink. I was living in an alternate reality, and the death of my grandfather was an unwelcome impingement. I told my mother I couldn’t go. She offered to pay. I still refused. Only later did I learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger, while prepping for a show, had missed his own father’s funeral.

Still, I never took drugs. At that time, it wasn’t really required to compete in Bikini, although, ten years on, that’s changed. It’s easy for me to believe that had I used them and experienced androgenic side effects, I would’ve had the awareness and the willpower to stop. But such effects are insidious, often arriving so slowly that it is easy to rationalize them away. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous makes much of the “peculiar mental twist” that renders the alcoholic “without defense against the first drink.” Bodybuilders may fall prey to a similar mental twist, experiencing body dysmorphia that makes them size-blind and unaware of how they look to others. Nelson told me about an experience she had backstage with a woman whose face had been destroyed by PED use. As they stood side by side before the full-length mirror, the woman told her, “Look at how gorgeous we are.” Nelson was aghast. But even if, like Nelson and Akers, a woman is able to retire without permanent physical side effects, it doesn’t mean she emerges unscathed.

Akers told me she began producing fetish content after enrolling in college as a single mom. She’d tried doing some photoshoots for magazines but quickly realized there wasn’t any money in it. With the pressure of providing for her young son weighing on her, she started creating videos for the site Clips4sale. Five years later, she, like Christine Fetzer and so many others of her cohort, was doing fetish work in the flesh. “Sessions,” as they are called in the community, typically take place between a sessionette and a customer in rented hotel rooms and include private wrestling, lift-and-carry, posing, and muscle worship—which generally involves the customer applying oil to the sessionette’s muscles and feeling them up. Fetishistic wrestling is divided into two categories: fantasy and competitive. In the latter, the customer is allowed to really test their strength, but not all women offer it out of concern for their prime commodity, i.e., their bodies. There’s less risk of injury in fantasy wrestling, and it is less exhausting—an important consideration when one may have as many as six clients a day. Other delicacies include arm wrestling, tickle wrestling, and belly punching. Depending on the practitioner, and on the chemistry with the patron, these sessions may end in sexual favors or what is known in the hobby as “full service.”

Estimates on how many bodybuilders do fetish-for-pay vary wildly, but Nelson and Akers estimate that about half of female pros participate. In any event, private audiences with bodybuilders are more common than with, say, stage actors or jazz musicians, who might also make meager or inconsistent livings. Of course, bodybuilders possess a niche physique; to do fetish work, one has to be a fetish candidate, and specialized markets dovetail with financial need. But is it possible that bodybuilders are especially vulnerable? Both Nelson and Akers spoke of how self-absorbed their compatriots were, and Alan Klein wrote much in his monograph about the prevalence of narcissism among male bodybuilders. He interviewed one who admitted, when asked about hustling, “You have no idea how hard it is to stop. . . . It just makes you feel appreciated.” Of course, not everyone shares this sentiment. Colette Nelson, who admitted to testing the waters, found her patrons “so weird. You’re gonna pay me $700 to have me squat you and then you come all over my back. It’s just gross, man.”

Schmoe Money, Schmoe Problems

But who are the men who patronize female bodybuilders? Preconceptions abound. “If you picture that, like, pedophile-pervert-looking, sort of sick and fat, sitting behind the computer all [panting] like that, sweating and, you know, big, fat guy.” This is how Lee Priest, a retired Australian bodybuilder sitting in a power rack with his face half-consumed by a tribal tattoo, describes the archetype. The schmoe’s modus operandi, according to Priest, is to weasel his way backstage with a camera and a dubious press pass. A day or two later, “you’d see a girl in the gym or down in the park in her swimmers or a little tiny dress and high heels just walking back and forth, back and forth, and he’s fucking filming her. You know, how gullible. Poor girl.” While it spares their purity, Priest’s presumption that the women are being tricked condescends to their basic intelligence. After all, whether the photos will be published or further their career, they are getting paid for them.

Priest’s enmity toward schmoes makes sense, however. After all, he and his ilk have invested decades of their lives building a facade of muscle and strength. Some date petite women, as though to highlight their own bulk. Schmoes are the inverse, with some cultivating weakness in order to increase the erotic pull of strength. A good portion of fetish content features men of small stature being humiliated. One particularly potent example shows Kristina Nicole Mendoza, five foot five and 160 pounds of muscle, comparing her own massive legs to that of a diminutive male companion. To quantify his ignominy, she uses a measuring tape. Throughout the process, he is smiling. His system is likely flooding with adrenaline, heightening his arousal, and volunteering to be ridiculed gives him a sense of control. And then there’s the masochistic comfort of exposure, of hearing someone say what you’ve always suspected to be true. I once spoke to a woman with a humiliation kink who said that she appreciated outsourcing work (that is, self-criticism) that she always had to do herself. It was the emotional equivalent of hiring a maid.

Still, many schmoes work out, and, though the majority do, not all seem to want to be dominated. Some enjoy athletic bodies and vanilla sex. In an episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, the BBC journalist visits the bizarre sanctuary of female muscle advocate Charles Peeples. After a tour of the house, which has a fully equipped gym in the living room, they head over to a wooded area of the sixty-five-acre grounds to watch a video shoot. Every scene involves a female bodybuilder in a matching camo sports bra and booty shorts ambushing a man. Theroux volunteers to appear as an extra and have a woman crush him against a tree in a kind of fatal hug, which Peeples refers to as a “Kleenex moment.” Although Peeples is clearly into the idea of being overpowered by a woman, he carries a fair amount of muscle himself. At the end of the segment, he pinches the sleeve of Theroux’s polo shirt. “Work on these arms a little bit,” he says. “You still got some surplus space there.” A number of schmoes may be going undetected, passing as average bodybuilding fans. Whether the fetish market is bigger for women than men is untested, and opinions from the field are mixed. Colette Nelson believes muscle worship is just as prevalent in the gay community, while in Highway Amazon, Christine Fetzer estimated that there were “like four” males in the industry. Either way, the federations seem much more concerned about policing women than men.

In the decades since women first stepped onstage alongside male bodybuilders, the homophobia seems to have calmed—there have been hardly any women on the cover of Muscle & Fitness since the nineties—and been replaced by a kind of trans hysteria. In a 2019 interview, Cicherillo said, “The minute you put male hormones into the equation, it changes everything.” Fourteen years earlier, he’d predicted the category’s downfall. In the column “Chick on Chicks” in the September 2005 issue of Flex Magazine, he had this to say:

“It’s a niche market,” say its advocates. No, men’s bodybuilding has its niche market; women’s bodybuilding has no market; what little market it has is made up of schmoes and fetishists. Women’s bodybuilding is an oxymoron. Nothing in the term or the concept matches up. Beautiful, sexy and muscular do not make a harmonious package. Notice the hopeless desperate trend: when women’s bodybuilding became bestial and alienated all interest, women’s fitness had to be created to fill the gap. When that became too muscular and abandoned its audience, it had to be replaced with figure. What’s next, bikini contests?

Of course, Bikini was exactly what was next, one of the latest in a long line of categories added after efforts by the IFBB and the NPC to reign in muscularity failed. The first of these categories, Fitness, which involves a gymnastic or dance performance, was added in 1995, possibly in response to a debacle at the 1992 Ms. International. The favorite to win that year, Paula Bircumshaw, placed eighth, while the much smaller and conventionally pretty Anja Schreiner won, a choice that reflected an official move toward smaller physiques. Bircumshaw gave the judges—and Joe Weider—a piece of her mind onstage before receiving a standing ovation from the crowd of about four thousand. Afterwards, she was handed a two-year suspension. The year 2001 saw the debut of the Figure category, requiring a smaller physique, and in 2010, at last, Bikini. Finally, in 2012, a seeming death knell was sounded for the open division with the creation of Women’s Physique: essentially a rebrand of Women’s Bodybuilding, but with a muscularity ceiling and a ban on certain “masculine” poses. Two years later, the IFBB announced that they would no longer be holding the Ms. Olympia contest. The class was moribund. It simply wasn’t profitable.

Aerospace heir Jake Wood and his then-wife, bodybuilder Kristal Wood, disagreed. In response to the cancellation of Ms. Olympia, they created Wings of Strength, a subscription website that catered to schmoes. “The basic idea,” he said in a 2019 interview with Muscular Development, “was the same as any website like it. You go there, you pay your $17.99 a month membership, and you view all the photographs we have there, just thousands of female bodybuilders, and the first year we generated—our [gross] on that was just a little bit over one million dollars.” Unlike other subscription sites, a portion of Wings of Strength’s proceeds were diverted into a bodybuilding competition: the Rising Phoenix World Championships. It offered record-breaking prizes—first place took $50,000 cash and a muscle car—and it was sanctioned by the IFBB. But by 2019, pay sites like Wings of Strength were failing due to the rise of free pornography, Instagram, and OnlyFans. Wood planned to rework his model into a traffic-driven website and launch a media push, but the promised makeover never materialized: if you go to wingsofstrength.net today, the website barely loads. The Rising Phoenix World Championship endures, however, its main source of funding an open question. The organization did not respond to a request for comment, but there are speculations that the contest is being paid for out of Jake Wood’s pocket or subsidized by the Olympia Weekend, which Wood purchased in 2020 along with the rights to Muscle & Fitness and FLEX magazines. Whatever the case may be, female bodybuilding’s initial resurrection had the fetishists to thank.

Nobody would dare call Jake Wood a schmoe. The term is derogatory, and Wood, at six foot six and about 270 pounds (my estimate), doesn’t fit the stereotype. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that a solitary superfan is propping up an ailing sport, hoping the world will change. Charles Peeples, on Weird Weekends, shared his sentiment. “One of these days the rest of the world will wake up to this. The problem is that most of the world hasn’t seen it the way it should be seen.” But Peeples and Wood may be too late. After years of shifting judging standards, corruption, and scandals like Bircumshaw’s, few women care to compete anymore. In Maria R. Lowe’s 1998 sociological monograph Women of Steel, one of her informers pointed to attrition in the ranks: “Yeah [the rules have changed], and they’re kind of stuck going, ‘Oh, you mean I just spent the last some odd years and some odd thousand dollars and all of this—I’ve lowered my voice, I’ve grown hair on my chin, and all this stuff—for nothing.’” That was in the late nineties. Things have gotten much worse since. FLEX has been folded into Muscle & Fitness, which is in print only because of Wood’s charity. In the mid-2010s, by evading his NPC board members, Jim Manion managed to shutter the nonprofit, transfer the rights to the logo to himself, and reincarnate the amateur physique organization as a for-profit business, ushering in the extractive capitalism of corporate America. When I asked BrandiMae Akers which brand of exploitation she preferred, she replied sagely, “Whether onstage or in the fetish [world], you’re still a commodity.” Luckily or unluckily, for women disappointed with the federations, the schmoes will be waiting with open arms.

Take a Picture It’ll Last Longer

Natalie Shapero

The old world is dying and the new world

is actually also concurrently dying; it’s not

a good time. I heard they were able

to laser off your tattoo

of a ten-point spread; was there any discussion

of keeping it and lasering you off

instead? I’m just checking. I’m just feeling

fine. It’s a short straight line

from reading a book about a rich girl

growing up in New York City—

the high-rise and the hot stone and the shingled

ocean outpost—to taking 3:1 odds

on whether I can die and then come back. No

other way to make that much that fast.

Cow Tools

The state of professional bull riding

Grayson Scott

© Tyler Comrie

“You’re looking for a bull to get off his feet. The higher their front feet are off the ground the better, and you want him to kick his back legs straight back. They call that break over, when they rear in the front and kick in the back.”

Mike Miller was explaining what he expects from his bulls. Miller is a stock contractor, a person who raises, trains, and provides the bulls used in Professional Bull Riders events. PBR produces several tours running year-round, with events from Boston to Brisbane to Brasília. Millions of people go to see them live. We were in the cab of a Ram truck towing three bales and a skid steer on a gooseneck trailer down a dirt road in Linden, Pennsylvania. Linden is a town of a couple thousand, midway between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where Miller grows hay and raises bulls. I had driven from New York at 5 a.m. to watch Miller and his son Troop feed cattle. One of Miller’s bales of dry hay weighs around one thousand pounds; a bale of wet hay weighs about five hundred pounds more. Hiss animals eat thirty-four bales a week.

I’d met Miller at a PBR event in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a few days before, where he ran twenty bulls. Miller owns about sixty-five of the roughly seven hundred bulls that buck at PBR events. His figure is approximate because Miller is always buying and selling them: Miller had sold one the night we met for $13,000. Troop had sold two three-year-olds of unsatisfactory ability the day before to be slaughtered for beef at $1.86 a pound. (Bucking bulls don’t finish growing until they’re five, at which point they weigh at least fourteen hundred pounds.) Some of Miller’s bulls, which PBR calls “bovine athletes,” are six feet tall at the shoulder and weigh more than sixteen hundred pounds; the other athletes—riders—are ordinarily under five-foot eight and one hundred and sixty pounds.

“You want a bull that breaks over, leaps in the air, kicks really hard, and turns back. It’s got to do all of that, and it’s got to do all of it at the same time.” This static image is the PBR logo and what people imagine when they think of bull riding. The breaking over, the leaping, the kicking: a rider needs to suffer it for eight seconds. Eight seconds means a rider gets a score, based half on the bull’s performance and half on the rider’s. It’s common for riders not to stay on long enough to get a score at all; so far this year, the average ride in PBR’s top-level tour is 5.79 seconds. A typical PBR event includes thirty to forty riders trying to ride one bull each. In the PBR’s lower-division tour, called the Velocity Tour, the best rider wins a few thousand dollars. Awards for a single event in Unleash The Beast, the upper-division tour, can be ten times as much. One out of every fifteen rides results in an injury that requires medical attention.

All of the rides begin the same way: a cowboy is assigned his bull in a random draw. (No woman has ever competed in PBR; the company’s media contact tells me presently there are no female prospects on PBR’s radar.) The bull walks through a gate into the bucking chute. A door shuts behind him; the chute is snug and confining but not immobilizing. Before a rider gets on, someone has to flank the bull: this is the term for fixing the cinch that the rider grabs around the bull’s midsection. This man drops the rope, the middle of which is weighted with metal bells, down the bull’s offside, then grabs the tail of the flank with a flexible hook. The tail end of the rope has been coated in rosin, a dark, resinous substance that smells faintly of pine. Cowboys have different ways of mounting the bull: JB Mauney, who has won the most money and most titles in PBR, puts his feet on the animal, then his knees, then wiggles his hips around as he sits. The toes of one’s boots are pointed parallel alongside the bull, so a foot won’t be crushed perpendicularly into the chute’s wall.

The flank man pulls the tail of the rope up so the rider can run his gloved fist along it repeatedly to heat the rosin. The warm sap is sticky and adhesive. The rider puts his riding hand through the handle, palm up, and wraps the rosin-coated tail end of the rope through before closing his hand around it. His forearm lines up with the bull’s spine; usually, his little finger is directly in the center of its back. He moves off his back pockets onto his inseams until he is nearly sitting on his fist. When the rider is ready, he signals to open the chute. His signal is often silent because a loud voice can startle the bull as he begins to exit the chute.

The rider stays on by remaining straight-backed, his upper body snapping with the bull as it bucks. It is in his interest, in terms of his score, to draw a more difficult bull: these are called “rank” bulls. He is disqualified if he touches the bull with his off hand or loses his grip on the rope. A bull rider’s most common injury is dislocation of the shoulder on his riding side.

The Buck Starts Here

PBR was founded thirty-three years ago by twenty bull riders, each of whom invested $1,000. Before, bull riding was one of many events in a rodeo, alongside various kinds of roping and roughstock riding. The PBR founders realized they were drawing most of the crowds but not an equivalent share in prize money. Their experiment in worker control paid off. Ty Murray, perhaps the most entrepreneurial of the PBR founders, broke a record by earning more than $200,000 on the national rodeo circuit two years before PBR got started, when he was twenty-eight. Thirty years later, in 2024, a rider named John Crimber made five times as much before he’d turned twenty. Crimber is one of fifty-two PBR riders who have earned more than a million. About a thousand riders have PBR cards entitling them to compete for cash: last year’s payouts totaled $16.5 million. Over its lifetime, PBR has paid out nearly $250 million.

The first PBR event I saw this year was in a nearly nine thousand-seat stadium, in a city with a population about ten times as large. PBR makes dozens of stops like these during a season that runs year-round. In addition to upper- and lower-division tours, and a concurrent season of team-based events, the five months of what would be the offseason are laden with “Challenger Series” events where new riders can earn their way into the regular-season tours. Part of the reason for the freneticism is the fact that PBR takes about a third of its revenue from ticket sales. Many, many more people are buying tickets than one might think: four hundred thousand people went to live PBR events in the first six weeks of this year. Twenty-five of them were sold out, including all three nights at Madison Square Garden, both nights in Chicago, and both in Pittsburgh, these last being PBR’s first events in that market. PBR has a deal with CBS that books twenty-five hours of broadcasts a year. The arrangement brings in a million viewers annually and will run until 2030.

The first breakout sport in a generation could be a frontier pastime repackaged for the enjoyment of coastal elites by a succession of billion-dollar companies. This means that an enormous number of spectators, and at least a plurality of the most talented of rodeo’s possible participants, are increasingly concentrated in a segment of the sport that has very little to do with the American West.

The hyperliteralism of rodeo’s Americanness makes pointing it out almost useless. Cattle began being raised on the plains in the 1840s, but it took the development of railroad networks in the two decades following for the industry to become economically hegemonic. This was a time of territorial expansion after the Civil War wherein national consolidation in the Southwest—following the Gadsden Purchase and Mexico’s forced concession of Texas—could provide a unifying imperial commercial project that displaced the previously contentious one of enslavement. Natives posed a threat to the new ambulatory commodities, which could be easily stampeded or captured as scarce cowboys drove them to commercial centers. Other occupants of the land also needed to be destroyed, and at this time killing buffalo became one of the most popular activities in the world. The son of a tsar, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, came to America to kill buffalo; future president Theodore Roosevelt left New York to do the same. Buffalo Bill Cody, the popularizer of modern rodeo if not its inventor, claimed to have killed over four thousand buffalo. The eradication of the herds allowed for their replacement with twelve million cattle in the 1880s, mostly Texas longhorns, whose eponymous characteristic made it impossible for them to escape rudimentary frontier fences by crawling underneath them. Banks in New York, London, and Scotland began investing in ranches and cattle as rail and refrigeration technology made it possible to sell beef in the new American metropoles.

The cowboy became a myth at the same time as this commodity boom remade, and then unmade, the West. Teddy Roosevelt came to hunt the buffalo and ended up buying a ranch in North Dakota. While at Harvard, he met Owen Wister, who would invent the Western genre with his 1902 novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. (Wister was also a coastal elite; Henry James claimed his mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was one of the most fascinating women he ever met.) We owe Wister the cowboy. Brave, fair, gallant, but above all else competent. “Now back East you can be middling and get along,” Wister writes in The Virginian. “But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you’ve got to do it well.” The cowboy is his ability: to drive cattle, rope, ride, and shoot.

PBR developed from a tradition that began with informal competitions in the antebellum West among livestock workers using skills they needed in their jobs. Rodeo, as the sport exists today, includes seven events. The “roughstock events” are bull riding and bareback and saddle bronc riding. The “timed events” are various kinds of roping and steer wrestling. That last is also known as “bulldogging,” after its original incarnation: a man named Bill Pickett jumped from his horse onto a steer, bit its upper lip, and wrestled it to the ground. (Pickett would die after a bronc kicked him in the head.) Now cowboys aren’t expected to bite the steer and are asked to tie its legs, but the event is otherwise as it was in the beginning. All of those are men’s events; women compete in breakaway roping and barrel racing. Novelty events like goat dressing (what it sounds like) and kids’ events, like mutton busting and mini bull riding, also feature. Rodeo has professionalized, too, but within a different structure: the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association (PRCA) and its women’s counterpart, the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, sanction individual competitions but don’t engineer them wholesale. Each competition can retain its own emphases, oddities, and character—Cheyenne’s rodeo is very different from Nacogdoches’s. But the indispensable event was and still is bronc riding. It is less organically compelling than bull riding: horse bucking patterns are less dimensional, more linear. It is also safer. Larry Mahan, arguably the first rodeo celebrity, observed in a 1972 interview with Playboy that “if a horse bucks you off, it will jump over you. But bulls will step on you, and if they get a chance to hook you with their horns, they enjoy themselves that much more.”

If bronc riding has a greater-than-gestural affinity to the actual occupation of a working cowboy—making an unrideable horse into a useful ranch tool—bull riding is abstract, metonymic, confabulated. The finest artifact of American rodeo culture as it was before is a 1974 documentary called The Great American Cowboy. During the movie, a man in a straw Resistol and a white snap-front shirt describes his work. “We are selling a violent sport. It’s a sport that puts a one-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound cowboy against a fifteen-hundred-pound bull, and if that’s not violence in action then I don’t know what is. It’s kind of what America stands for: strength itself.” Bull riding is an increasingly factitious reenactment of the decade-and-a-half of domination and defeat that ended in the closing of the frontier. The figure of the cowboy has, indisputably, a renewed purchase on our fantasy lives, somehow the only part of the “vibe shift” that still seems real: everyone I met mentioned Beyoncé, Zyn, Realtree, Yellowstone, daisy dukes. (But not Cliven Bundy, water rights, or treaty enforcement.) PBR wants the thing that defines our ideas of the cowboy to be an eight-second task that, if they’re correct, will soon be optimally performed by someone who grew up on half-pipes, not ranches; when I talked to the newly appointed head of “rider development” for PBR, he said they’re interested in recruiting BMX riders, surfers, and skateboarders.

A 2006 congressional resolution establishing the National Day of the Cowboy alleged: “The cowboy loves, lives off of, and depends on the land and its creatures.” Europa, the mythological namesake of Europe, was abducted and impregnated by Zeus in the form of a bull. Rodeo is America’s substitute myth. The frontier, something that was once defined by its inconstancy—its capacity to be pushed outward—can now be instantiated as completely in Norfolk as in Fort Worth. PBR can bring the frontier anywhere.

All Hat and No Cattle

They can even bring it fifty miles from Philly. On a Friday night in Reading, Pennsylvania, everyone was going to the Santander Arena: the modestly dressed teens, immodestly dressed teens, the Kryptek camo guys, the older and fatter Grunt Style guys, the young Mennonite woman in a sweater that said “vibes.” This was the lower-division tour, but every PBR event opens the same way and has since their first event. Men pour kerosene on the dirt to spell out PBR. This is, predictably, ignited, and the riders walk out and line up along the edge of the arena. They kneel for the announcer’s prayer in their fringed custom chaps. (There is a difference of opinion on how to pronounce this word, from the Spanish chaparajos: chaps or shaps.) The lower-division events include about thirty-five riders and an equivalent number of bulls. Riders with the best combined scores from the first round advance into a short round where they compete for the event win. It lasts about two hours, with an intermission.

I ran into a woman named Carol about two blocks from the stadium gates earlier that night. Carol had organized a protest against the event and had an armful of signs: only bullies ride bulls, , blood sport (with red splatter), he bucks because he is in pain!, real men are kind to animals. In all fairness to Carol, the animal rights line on bull riding is two contentions loosely affiliated with one argument. The first contention is that the bulls buck because they are being shocked with cattle prods. This isn’t an inexplicable belief: cattle prods, usually called “hot shots,” are used at PBR to move cattle from trailers through gates and enclosures before they get to the chutes. The main American rodeo organization, the PRCA, also allows hot shots, but they and PBR both ban them from bucking chutes. The bulls aren’t bucking because they’re being shocked, but they are being shocked. (I do believe that the prods hurt. The first time I used a hot shot, I was moving cows toward a head gate for pregnancy testing. The hoof of one I zapped shot out and cracked a four-by-four fence post beside my head.) The activists’ second contention is that the bulls buck because a cinch tied around their midsections fucks with their genitals in a way that is painful. This is not true, something that can be confirmed by looking at the strap, which straightforwardly has nothing to do with their balls.

Ultimately, the advocates argue that animals should not be coerced into performing for our entertainment. That strikes me as something you either buy or don’t. Someone who works for PBR told me about a municipal inspector coming to view the conditions of the bulls at an event in Pennsylvania. The official compared their bucking to a dog’s impulse to fetch: an expression of play that looks like work. Whether one finds this report persuasive or not, it’s a remarkable index of bull riding’s indifference to violence that an acceptable answer is, essentially, “we suspect the bulls enjoy hurting people.”

My problem with seeing bull riding live is more about overcoming the painful tediousness of watching people I dislike enjoy themselves. One of the boxes in the stadium in Reading is, literally, a suburban bungalow perched under the roof of the Santander Arena, between sections 113 and 114. It has a porch, an unlikely number of dormer windows, a semi-detached two-car garage, vinyl siding, and it’s completely packed. Close to me in the stands was an extremely drunk woman who kept threatening to take her top off, which I had first taken as a misunderstanding about how to get on the Jumbotron; later, I observed that she continued lifting the hem of her shirt even when inside the concourse and away from the cameras.

Working against her chances were the kids everywhere: lots of teenagers, as you’d expect for any event at all in a place like Reading on a Friday night, but also tons of actual children. I am unaware of any other live event with such a high likelihood of grievous injury at which there are so many children present. This implies a consequential indifference to the violence of bull riding, which is probably the feature of the sport they encounter first: in clips of injuries on social media. I wondered if no one actually cares how violent this is, except with a kind of attenuated hedonism. The last decade’s cultural preoccupation with CTE in contact sports wasn’t solved, we just stopped talking about it.

The national anthem was accompanied by absurd troop-fucking obscenities like “Gentlemen, please remove cover.” One of the announcers began a prayer. “Thank you, God, for never taking a day off and never taking a vacation.” Guitars swelled. “God, you know, I usually just call you Dad. Daddy. Tonight, tell these people what a daddy’s love is all about.” Cheering, applause. Soon, a clown cued up the “Cha Cha Slide” and “Careless Whisper” as we watched a person in pain, afraid, with his face in the dirt. The clown, who’s really a kind of emcee, was a white guy in white face paint: tiny but with a big distended gut and an affected generic Southern accent. (His counterparts who actually protect the riders are no longer called rodeo clowns but “rodeo protection athletes” or bullfighters.) At one point, the clown gave a gift certificate to Boot Barn to a young woman about whom he remarked: “She’s hotter than a VCR in a crack house!” She did not look old enough to have firsthand experience of a VCR.

The complement to violence in PBR’s portfolio is sex, or at least a taurine facsimile. PBR licenses its intellectual property to a company that runs sixteen PBR-themed bars around the country. Combined, they gross more than $3 million a year for PBR. They’re a successfully blunt effort to cash in on the wave of cowboy-adjoining lifestyle spending PBR helped invent: each location contains a mechanical bull, which customers can ride, and varying amounts of complementary “entertainment,” like line dancing and “special military salutes.”

In practice, what PBR has done is put their name on a chain of breastaurants. (PBR’s disinhibition around sex is surprising given its perverse neuroticism about blood and death.) I visited the Philadelphia iteration, which is inside a multi-bar compound with big screens to facilitate sports betting. This whole complex is alone in the middle of enormous parking lots for three huge stadiums. There were about ten customers. Some were accepting syringes full of green liquid from an employee dressed in black pleather chaps over underwear and a low-cut PBR logo shirt that said best 8 seconds of your life on the back. A guy squirted his syringe into his buddy’s mouth.

The employees in the wipe-clean chaps are called “buckle bunnies” after the women who are said to follow PBR events in hopes of fucking the bull riders, who traditionally receive buckles as trophies. Three goths, two of whom reported enjoying the much larger and clubbier PBR Bar in Norfolk, had come down to celebrate their friend’s twenty-fourth birthday. One goth felt our mechanical bull operator “hated women” because he kept perfunctorily dumping them off the bull. Riding the mechanical bull didn’t look exactly sexy, in the sense of being erotic, even when that was clearly the intention of its rider. It looks only very approximately coital. The goths were right: the PBR Cowboy Bar is lame.

The Toughest Sport on Dirt

PBR hasn’t figured out what to do with the violence. It’s been there from the start, of course. A PBR founder, Jerome Davis, was paralyzed from his chest down during a ride. JB Mauney’s career ended when a bull broke his neck; he walked out of the arena unassisted (and later bought the bull, Arctic Assassin, and let him retire on his ranch). I asked Dr. Tandy Freeman, an orthopedic surgeon and the medical director of the PBR in his thirty-first year with the organization, what he thought about the sport’s dependence on suffering. “People don’t go to see the wrecks, but they darn sure want to be there when there is one.” Freeman has seen more than one hundred thousand rides and can still wonder at the violence and its place in the events. “There are times,” he said, “when they show a replay that I go, ‘Why? Why do you want to do that?’”

Freeman has treated thousands of riders during his career. PBR has seen four fatalities since its inception and two men paralyzed. Freeman has witnessed only one death, the rider Glen Keeley’s, caused by 1999 Bull of the Year Promise Land. It sometimes seems remarkable that rodeo is as safe as it is. However, on average, only about twenty Americans die from encounters with cattle each year, and only ten of those deaths are caused by bulls. Fifteen percent of total injuries, by Dr. Freeman’s account, are concussions. The riskiest time for a bull rider is the dismount. The front end of the bull is, in general, more dangerous than the back. The doctor remarked that the introduction of helmets, mandatory for riders born after October 15, 1994, has reduced maxillofacial injuries significantly. The helmets are modified hockey headgear. In 1990, PBR founder Tuff Hedeman—who got his nickname when someone slammed his hand in a car door when he was five years old—broke nearly every major bone in his face when a bull named Bodacious thrust its head into his.

If someone knows Tuff for one thing, it’s his “ride for Lane”: world champion Lane Frost had died in early 1989 after he was injured dismounting from an eighty-five-point ride on a bull called Takin’ Care of Business. Tuff knew that if he rode his tenth-round draw for eight seconds, he would become the world champion. He continued riding for an additional eight seconds after the whistle, beating the animal with his hat, in a display he later said was in honor of his late friend. Cody Lambert, another PBR founder and a pallbearer at Lane’s funeral alongside Tuff, invented the protective rodeo vest that became mandatory after Lane’s death. The vests are meant to protect the riders from what happened to Lane, who died when a bull’s horn tore an artery in his side. Today’s vests are made of leather, with layers of plastic and foam, and are almost certainly inadequate.

If you look at the PBR’s official YouTube channel—since last year, PBR events have been available for free on the platform—the ten most-watched videos aren’t championship events or famous rides but wreck compilations. The most-viewed video of a ride, the legendary JB Mauney’s ninety-four-pointer on the equally famous Bruiser, has one-seventh as many views as the most popular wreck anthology. PBR’s head of rider development, a guy named Joe Ernst who’s in charge of recruiting and training riders for PBR, told me that “even after a ninety-five-point ride with a perfect dismount, nine times out of ten, the rider is limping back.” Everyone at every level understands that the violence is not incidental to bull riding. But it seems at best orthogonal to it: every time I saw a rider get hurt in the arena live, I watched the crowd turn away from the rider. They looked at the mounted cowboy in the arena trying to rope the bull, or the bullfighter’s attempts to redirect the animal, or the clown heckling the only people in the stadium who weren’t white for arriving late.

In the Velocity Tour, there is sometimes not much to pay attention to apart from the wrecks. I saw two successful rides all night in Reading: one at eighty-four points, perhaps slightly better than respectable for the lower division, and one at fifty-six, which is truly bad wherever you are. (Scoring is helpfully schoolish.) It can be difficult to separate the middling ride from the bad-but-still-qualifying ride; the best estimate I can give is that the four judges score based on the rider’s representation of control and confidence. The Velocity Tour is about persuading people who are unlikely to follow the sport to pay moderately high prices for the lower division’s uneven and frequently mediocre performances. PBR has built itself from the beginning on a celebrity model; people follow particular riders and, surprisingly often, particular bulls. Unleash The Beast, the upper division, has the top forty riders: the genuinely famous ones, returning champions, and promising rookies. It does the metropolitan and important Western and Southern stops. Running a smaller circuit, the Velocity Tour feeds the “premium” tour through an obscure mechanism. (I asked a PBR employee how this worked and got a puzzled response: “You’re asking me questions no one has ever asked me before.”) There is an observable difference in the quality of the spectacle: in the lower division, around 20 percent of riders stay on long enough to receive scores; in the top tour, 40 percent do.

0.25mL of Semen

“I could have been fucking shot,” said Colleen. Colleen was working the media desk at Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She was frustrated by her inability to get a response on her radio, with which she was attempting to raise my media contact. In Reading, I had bought my own seats: average ones, a little far away from the action. Tonight, I had front-row press tickets to the Velocity Tour, courtesy of PBR.

My media contact was a guy named Andrew. I liked Andrew because he was personable and took my idiot questions seriously. I had, early in my research, sent the media people at PBR some general questions that included one about figures on injuries (the riders are independent contractors, so PBR doesn’t collect them); just minutes into a phone interview, one representative explained directly that if I was writing a piece that emphasized rider welfare—in their example, exposure to concussions—PBR would become uncooperative. I was struck by their defensiveness. A big deal had just gone through the day I was in Bridgeport: Endeavor, formerly WME-IMG, sold PBR as part of a $3.25 billion deal to TKO, the organization that owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment and therefore has a virtual monopoly on commercial violence in America and, consequently, everywhere else.

PBR’s money comes, roughly equally, from tickets, media deals, and sponsorships. Some of these sponsors are inevitable. There are Tecovas and Ariat, brands of cowboy boots established by graduates of Harvard and Stanford, respectively; agricultural equipment manufacturer Kubota; and Anheuser-Busch. There is also the U.S. Army leaderboard and the U.S. Border Patrol bucking chute. “This is one of their most successful recruiting events,” Andrew said, when I asked about the Border Patrol branding. “PBR is a family thing,” he continued. “That means recruiters can talk to kids and their parents at the same time.” The USBP sponsorship was worth $2 million in 2020; I imagine it’s higher now. (Nearly half of PBR riders are on visas.) Per Andrew, “The protection theme is good branding: the ‘borders’ of the arena.” The night I was there, the USBP were advertising a $30,000 signing bonus, which was about $500 under the area’s per capita annual income.

The price of a bucking bull ranges from $50,000 to $300,000. An owner can also make money from selling shares in bulls—one stock contractor I met said he’d recently sold half a share in one of his for $75,000—or their semen, which garners $300 to $500 a straw. (For comparison, the same 0.25mL from a Jersey or Holstein goes for as low as $10.) PBR doesn’t own any bulls, instead paying the stock contractors who raise and train them to bring them to their events. Each contractor is paid the same amount per ride. There are only two ways for a contractor to earn more than his colleagues. The first is to simply run more bulls. The second is to run “ranker,” or more punishing, bulls. If there is a round with no qualified rides, the money for that round that would have been disbursed to riders is instead divided evenly among all the bulls that bucked.

Behind the bucking chutes, Andrew introduced me to Mike Miller, the stock contractor whose ranch I would visit in a few days. Miller had brought the most bulls that night, with twenty in a semi. He had also brought among the rankest: Miller had what was then the seventy-seventh-best bull in the PBR. He was on track to earn tonight. (Miller had also made some money recently renting one of his bulls, Micro Man—who has what Miller, without elaboration, called “Little Man Syndrome”—to PBR for use in some kind of advertising campaign on Wall Street, and he was pursuing a complex and ambitious deal involving a share in a highly ranked bull named Cockeye with some brothers who own a Ducati franchise in Manhattan.)

Bull names approach meaning laterally. Some are named in part after their sponsors, sires, or characteristics. Miller has Cash Goblin, Inaffit, Sig Sauer Side Piece, and Pneu-Dart’s Gold Standard. (Pneu-Dart manufactures tranquilizer guns; Miller also had the company’s name embroidered down the sleeves of his shirt.) There are bulls in PBR called UTZ BesTex Smokestack, Wino, Army Slasher, Nighttime Crime, SweetPro’s Long John, Fringe Minority, Day Thuggin, Strange Cargo, Mexican Elvis, Carhartts and Lace, Cracky Chan, and Umm. At Madison Square Garden, a bull named Daniel Penny went out on opening night; this was after Penny had been found not guilty for killing Jordan Neely, but before he was hired by Andreessen Horowitz. The bull’s name was changed to Bruised Ego by the next day. Crescent City Bulls, who owns Bruised Ego, got the National Federation of Professional Bullriders 2024 Stock Contractor of the Year Award. Half of CC Bulls is Gene Owen, who also owns Man Hater, the number one bull in the PBR standings and last year’s World Champion Bull.

I mention this because the tone is noticeably less bipartisan in Bridgeport than it was in Reading. The announcers gave a weirder speech in the interstice between the national anthem and the obligate prayer: “We know these are troubled times in America. I want to thank our police, Border Patrol, and soldiers who keep this country safe.” They continued: “I want you all to think about the history of where you are. All you have to do is drive two or three hours and you can be where the heroes who founded this country were.” It was the closest PBR got to acknowledging the myth they’re trading on. The frontier—the modern one, the one the Border Patrol is responsible for—is more concept than place; legally speaking, it’s an envelope extending one hundred miles inside the border. One could drive two or three hours north or south from Bridgeport and still be on the border. The announcer went on: “Think about how much America means to the rest of the world.”

On the fourth ride, a bull left the roughly ten-by-ten region in front of the gates where they do most of their work and flung himself in front of my seat. A thick, clear, hot rope of mucus splattered across my forearm. This is the only thing about sitting in the front row that registered as more intense than being further away; otherwise, it was easy to tell that both bull and rider are smaller and moving more predictably than you thought. The quality of the rides was much the same as in Reading. I found my attention waning even though I was right on the dirt. Of the handful of riders who register, most scored in the eighties.

It occurred to me that I could be a few feet away from someone dying, but this felt much less likely than it did in Reading. Proximity was somehow nullifying. In the upper division, the Unleash The Beast Tour, the bullfighters are called the U.S. Border Patrol bullfighters. In the Velocity Tour, they’re the Boot Barn bullfighters. They wear black cowboy hats, shirts like motocross jerseys and long, loose basketball shorts. Dr. Freeman had mentioned that bullfighters in the PRCA are 1 percent of the athletes but account for 10 percent of injuries. In Bridgeport, a rider, upper body snapping in rhythm with the bull, was thrown. As he failed to stand, a bullfighter leaned over and placed his hand on the bull’s head. The bull was still spinning, throwing its legs into the air, back bending toward ninety degrees. It looked more dangerous without a person on it. A commentator broke in, announcing the Silencer Shop Salute to Service, a sponsored encomium to cops and veterans beginning, “We think this is the greatest country in the world.” The bull was guided out. His rider was hurt, bent over and grimacing, but he walked over and dapped a bullfighter as he left the arena.

The clown started an Eddie Vedder impression. The new rider in the chute looked like he was already in pain. Someone was forcing a piece of metal, shaped like a U and perhaps eighteen inches wide and several feet long, down the side of the chute. “He’s using it to stop the bull from pressing against his leg,” said Andrew. The rider struggled to get seated on his bull and get it flanked. A timer started counting down from thirty; if it finished before the rider started his ride, he would receive a score of zero. At seven seconds he left the chute and was immediately thrown. Two men carried him away, one lifting him by the belt of his chaps. “Funky Cold Medina” started to play. As I left, I realized I still didn’t understand how PBR thinks someone can become a fan of bull riding without having been born into it in the same way people are fans of basketball or hockey: not because it’s comparatively cruel, or violent, or trashy, but because its original aesthetic armature—rodeo, ranch life—is so much more compelling than the corny, short-form packaging they’ve inflicted on it. Yet three million people went to see PBR last year, up 20 percent from ten years before and 1,000 percent from attendance in 1995.

Cardiacs Among the Cows

A few days later, I was in Linden, Pennsylvania, with the Millers. Both father and son are short and compact, the ideal size for rodeo athletes, and were wearing trashed Carhartt work clothes: a bib for Miller, a vest for Troop. Troop is a few years younger than me but has been raising, buying, and training bulls for more than half his life; he has never had another job. The ride in Miller’s truck ended outside the barn where he keeps his better rodeo stock, and I stood near a series of gates and chutes running inside. I watched Miller use the skid steer to drop a bale of hay into a feeding ring, spinning chaff into the light. There were blue, languorous hills in the background. The breeze was at my back, so it barely smelled like cow shit.

I asked Troop about Black Thunder, a bull he had mentioned earlier that had gone to the PBR Finals when Troop was twelve. “I bottle-raised him. He was an orphan, and it turned out he was really good.” I asked if anyone ever managed to stay on him for eight seconds. “Someone rode him at the Finals. I think the score was eighty-three points, and that’s the only time he was ever rode. Then I brought him home and put him out with the cows. He bred the cows, and then he had a heart attack out there with the cows.”

I scuffed my boot around in the Millers’ dirt. At PBR events, a man named Randy Spraggins is responsible for the dirt. He has special rodeo dirt secreted in twenty locations throughout the country, its composition arrived at through chemical assay at a lab in Michigan and forty years of experience. Each event requires 750 tons of dirt, also transported by Randy, and arranged by skid steer and scarifier into two layers: a firmly compacted one about five inches deep and an aerated one of about three inches. The dirt matters for the bulls’ footing, but Spraggins’s skill also helps keep a cowboy from injuring himself by dismounting onto a hard, unyielding surface.

Mike had been injured, badly, four times in a recent six-week interval, including being run over by a bull while still on crutches from the previous collision. Troop, last summer, had his face stitched up after a steer-wrestling injury: “It wasn’t that bad. I had all my teeth coming out through my bottom lip, and they ripped my top lip loose through my gums.” The night I met him, Mike’s wife called to say she’d been kicked in the head while delivering a calf. Their daughter Saige had recently been thrown across a barn while holding a cow’s tail as Troop artificially inseminated it.

“For us, we don’t even think about it. It’s normal, everyday stuff,” Mike says. “Where I come from, if you work for a ranch, say it’s the Forty-Four Bar Ranch, then they’ll call that their brand: Forty-Four Bar. So you can go to the coffee shop in the morning, and the guys will ask you, ‘What are you doing today?’ Checking fences, riding your horse. And you’ll say, ‘Just riding for the brand.’”

This is what it takes to make those spectacular eight seconds possible: everyone in your family getting kicked in the head, over and over, for their entire lives. But also hauling 750 tons of exactly the right kind of dirt, or using a hot shot, or splinting hundreds of fractures. PBR’s success depends on its ability to create facsimiles of the frontier anywhere in America. It isn’t enough to have the rides. They need a large, heavy, anagogic spectacle—it’s America, where the good guys always win. There is no way to tell a frontier story without violence, but the violence can’t overwhelm the myth. For it to work, it’s got to look like everyone is just riding for the brand.

Helium Quality Targets

with text by Grayson Scott

Lena Redford

One of the most successful ranchers of the twentieth century was Jack Simplot, a man who made his fortune supplying frozen french fries to McDonald’s. His company now controls nearly half a million acres of land and is one of the largest producers of beef in the West, turning out four hundred thousand-plus head for slaughter every year; his family’s private holdings alone make them one of the five largest ranchers in the country. In 2022, fourteen years after Jack died, a judge found the Simplots were unlawfully cheating federal grazing permits using a subsidiary called Dickshooter Cattle Company.

The Simplots have many challengers for the cowboy’s legacy, although it can be tough to figure out exactly how it became so attractive. “To most people, until lately, the cowboy was a ‘bold bad man.’” So wrote Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, when she visited America in 1886. Wallace Stegner thought the cowboy’s “fabled independence” was “chiefly the privilege of quitting his job in order to go looking for another just as bad.” Americans collectively renovated this figure—of whom there were perhaps forty thousand originals at their nineteenth-century peak—into the avatar of our national consciousness.

In 1994, Jim Rodgers tried for this inheritance by founding the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association (CMSA), formalizing a cowboy-themed activity he invented that combined firearms and dress-up. Mounted shooters, who are both men and women, dress in period or contemporary “traditional Western” clothes and gallop their horses through an arena course of ten balloons (“helium quality targets”) on poles, popping them with single-action revolvers. The pistols are loaded with five blank cartridges each; the heat and pressure of the thirty-grain black powder charge will pop balloons at ten to fifteen feet, no projectile necessary. The horses wear earplugs, pieces of foam the size of shot glasses.

The first five targets are arranged in a specified pattern called the “random course.” Rounding a barrel, the rider returns to a full gallop and dispatches the next five balloons, arranged in a straight line called the “rundown.” The fastest time wins, with penalties for infractions like missing a target (five seconds added), dropping your gun (five seconds), or losing your hat before starting the course (ten seconds). The best shooters can finish a course in ten seconds.

Shooting from horseback has verifiably nothing to do with a cowboy’s work: it is more in line with monster truck derbies than cattle roping. It is unlikely many of its participants are working ranchers. But with twenty thousand claimed participants, cowboy mounted shooting is gaining on more familiar LARP-based sports: the serious end of the foam-sword-and-turkey-leg crowd, the Society for Creative Anachronism, has over thirty thousand members on the rolls. (In an interview with a YouTuber, one male contestant remarks of the CMSA, “There is no other sport in which women talk about guns and men talk about their clothes.”) Perhaps the most interesting part of the sport is the kids’ competition: they navigate the course on horseback but hold toy cap pistols instead of real ones, making a pantomime of their parents’ already figurative gesture. Who really wants to be a cowboy?

BadRx

Are medicine’s middlemen pharmacy parasites?

Jess McAllen

© Irene Suosalo

Cole Schmidtknecht was among the hundreds of workers employed by Kriete Truck Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The twenty-two-year-old, along with 54 percent of Americans, had health insurance through his job: Kriete Truck Center contracted with UnitedHealthcare and its pharmacy benefit manager, OptumRx. Like other PBMs, OptumRx works with insurers and large employers to manage their prescription drug benefits. This arrangement had worked well for Schmidtknecht up until January of last year. For no more than $66 a month, he was able to purchase a preventative inhaler, Advair Diskus, to manage his lifelong asthma. That changed when OptumRx switched up the drugs on its formulary, or the list of drugs covered by a given insurance plan, without informing its customers, according to a recent lawsuit. On a winter day in early 2024, Schmidtknecht went to his local Walgreens pharmacy, located near a tax preparation business and a Taco Bell, where he was told that the medication was no longer covered. Instead, he would have to pay $539.19 out of pocket. He opted to go without so he could pay his rent on time. Five days later, after relying on an old emergency inhaler, he died from an asthma attack.

Schmidtknecht is far from alone in choosing to forgo a prohibitively expensive prescription. In recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 30 percent of Americans reported that they had not taken their medications as prescribed in the previous year due to cost. Other studies have estimated that more than 1.1 million Medicare patients will die over the next decade for the same reason.

This year, on the anniversary of Schmidtknecht’s passing, his parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit and a negligence lawsuit against both Walgreens and OptumRx. When the case became public, many social media users said it was a shame the couple’s son hadn’t heard about medication coupons, which could have lowered the cost of his inhaler. This kind of commentary reflects a major shift in the pharmacy space over the past fifteen years: the rise of coupon aggregators and their widespread adoption, even among those with health insurance. While medication coupons have been around for decades, they used to exist mostly in the form of physical drug discount cards given to the uninsured as a discreet concession or act of charity. Now, bargain-hunting consumers with and without insurance look to coupon aggregators and other related startups as a health care savings hack.

The most well-known among these companies is GoodRx, which was launched in 2011 by Trevor Bezdek and former Facebook employees Doug Hirsch and Scott Marlette. (Marlette’s previous claim to fame was inventing the concept of photo tagging.) Hirsch, formerly the chief mission officer at GoodRx, often says that he was inspired to create the company after being charged $450 for a medication. “I took my prescription to different pharmacies in my area,” he told Business Insider in 2018, “and realized that the prices of prescription drugs varied widely from pharmacy to pharmacy.” Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, GoodRx works by collating two types of medication coupons: expensive brand name drug discounts, offered by manufacturers to compete with cheaper generics, and generic medication discounts, which are made possible by GoodRx’s intimate relationship with the PBMs employed by various insurance companies. Counterintuitively, generic medications often cost more when purchased with insurance. (“Hundreds of generic medications are available for $4, and some are even free, without insurance,” reads a section on the GoodRx website.) It’s a big business: generic medications, or unpatented drugs with similar ingredients to brand-name drugs, account for 90 percent of prescriptions in the United States.

I first heard about GoodRx from a CVS pharmacist in 2019, when I burst into tears at the prospect of a $300 copay for ear infection medication. At the time, I was on a marketplace health care plan that seemed allergic to covering anything. GoodRx reduced my copay to under $20. The website felt like a secret rather than a legitimate service. Its existence was particularly novel at the time of its creation because pharmacists were previously banned from telling patients about cheaper payment options unless they explicitly asked. (In 2018, President Donald Trump overturned this so-called “gag order” at the federal level, although at some pharmacies, like the one Schmidtknecht went to, the culture sticks.) With a GoodRx coupon loaded up on their phone, patients can now sidestep onerous prior authorization requests and just pay for a prescription out of pocket. This is great news for insurance companies who still reap the benefit of patients’ yearly premiums without having to enact the coverage they have been paid to provide.

At the end of 2020, GoodRx had 478 employees, according to SEC filings. Five years later, the company has more than 1,110 employees. And this February, they announced a 6 percent increase in yearly revenue, to the tune of nearly $800 million. The company now offers a gold membership plan, where users can pay a monthly fee for higher discounts on generic medications, as well as a home delivery option.

Today, GoodRx’s competitors include BlinkRx, founded in 2014; SingleCare, also founded in 2014; and, more recently, Cost Plus Drugs. The last, created in 2022, is the brainchild of radiologist Alex Oshmyansky and billionaire Shark Tank maven Mark Cuban. It works slightly differently than the coupon aggregators by purchasing generic medications in bulk at low prices and selling them at cost, plus a flat 15 percent markup and pharmacy labor and shipping fees. Last year, Cuban told the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that he was on a mission to make health care more affordable. “I don’t want to be ninety-five and look back and say, ‘I was president, but I didn’t get to know my kids at all,’” he explained. “I’d rather say, ‘I fucked up health care, and everybody’s healthier and everybody's got a better world to live in.’” It turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in fucking up health care. That’s where the mission of some of these companies starts to look a little less big-hearted.

In its time as the leader in the medication coupon world, GoodRx has formed some eyebrow-raising partnerships. They received a hefty investment from Silver Lake in 2018, which earned the private equity firm a 35 percent stake in the company. Private equity’s recent foray into health care has mainly been about squeezing out as much profit as possible at the expense of patient health, which seems at odds with GoodRx’s mission of helping Americans access affordable medication. More recently, the company has faced legal scrutiny over the nature of its collaboration with PBMs, crucial players in the health insurance industry that are largely responsible for the inflated price of prescription drugs in the first place. While GoodRx helps individual patients save money, it benefits from an unsustainable status quo—and contributes to a bleak future for independent pharmacies.

The House Always Wins

PBMs act as intermediaries in the health insurance industry. They oversee which prescriptions an insurer covers, negotiate with drug companies, and reimburse pharmacies for dispensing drugs—all without having to share negotiation details with the insured. In theory, they are supposed to help keep costs down: drug makers compete to get onto a PBM’s formulary by offering substantial discounts. But the opacity of these dealings means that patients often don’t see any savings. “They have these proprietary contracts, so people don’t know what other people are buying and paying for. As long as that total black box exists, [PBMs] are going to find ways to make money,” says Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. “The PBM will bill the client more than they reimburse the pharmacy.” This is called “the spread”: “It’s the difference between what the PBM is paying the pharmacy to dispense that drug and what they are billing the ultimate payer, the client.” Joyce compares the process to the book (and movie) The Big Short. “You talk to employers, you talk to manufacturers, everybody knows the PBMs are ripping them off. They just don’t know how.”

Today, there are three main players in the PBM network who control some 80 percent of prescriptions in the United States: CVS Caremark, owned by major pharmacy chain CVS, which also owns Aetna health insurance; Express Scripts, owned by Cigna Insurance; and OptumRx, owned by insurance monolith UnitedHealthcare. Over the past five years, these three PBMs made an estimated $1.4 billion in spread pricing from fifty-one generic drugs alone. Overall, their profits increased by more than 400 percent between 2012 and 2022, from $6.3 billion to $27.6 billion.

The industry has become an oligopoly through mergers and acquisitions: an insurance company, PBM, and pharmacy may now fall under the same umbrella. This arrangement means that medication reimbursements are easily manipulated. And, according to patient advocacy groups, there is a clear correlation between increasing PBM consolidation and rising patient costs. PBMs can also steer patients toward the pharmacies they own, whether brick-and-mortar or mail order. Last July, the Federal Trade Commission released a blockbuster interim report that found PBMs often reimburse their own affiliated pharmacies at higher rates than they do independent ones. Damningly titled Pharmacy Benefit Managers: The Powerful Middlemen Inflating Drug Costs and Squeezing Main Street Pharmacies, it paints a picture of a business that lacks transparency and is causing the death of small pharmacies. The effects are devastating: “In some rural and medically underserved areas, local community pharmacies are the main healthcare option for Americans, who depend on them to get a flu shot, an EpiPen, or other lifesaving medicines.”

PBMs have also been accused of deadly negligence. In May 2022, a thirty-nine-year-old California man named Craig Vanausdal was arrested at an airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands when local officials discovered an outstanding 2004 arrest warrant from Pennsylvania, related to an old marijuana charge. He was remanded to custody in the St. Thomas jail, where he died twelve days later. In a lawsuit brought by Vanausdal’s estate, the death was characterized as the result of multiple failures of care; it names several defendants, including the PBM Express Scripts and Accredo, a specialty pharmacy Express Scripts owns. Specialty pharmacies have become another source of income for PBMs in recent years. “More than half of drug spend now is on what is called ‘specialty’ or high-cost drugs—cancer drugs, biologics. What the big PBMs have done is developed their own specialty pharmacies, and then say, ‘You have to fill these expensive drugs in our pharmacies,’” explains Joyce.

The lawsuit outlines a frustrating series of events. Vanausdal, who had a condition called hemophilia A that kept his blood from clotting properly, relied on a medication that the jail’s staff allegedly threw out because it had expired. After he complained of a swollen ankle, jail doctors called their local pharmacy to get a refill of the drug, but they were informed it was only available via Accredo, who said they wouldn’t send the medication because they had already mailed a twelve-dose prescription to Vanausdal’s California home. As his symptoms worsened, a jail employee asked Vanausdal’s girlfriend if she could ship the medication, but the fee was too high: $500, according to the lawsuit. Finally, one desperate jail doctor told Accredo to just invoice them for the cost, and the company relented and mailed the medication to St. Thomas. A day later, Vanausdal complained of an increased heart rate and was bleeding at various sites of his body. Two days after that, he was dead. Accredo’s failure to ship the lifesaving medication in a timely manner, the lawsuit alleges, likely contributed to his death. (Express Scripts did not respond to a request for comment.) Vanausdal’s case may be extreme, but it illustrates the risks of PBM-mandated mail-order medication, which has led in recent years to delays, temperature-control hazards, and increased costs.

In the current system, patients are left with patchwork solutions to challenge the power of PBMs, such as filing lawsuits or banding together to form advocacy groups. One such group is the Infusion Access Foundation, a collective of patients who are dedicated to protecting access to medication infusions and injections for people with chronic illness. Executive director Alicia Barron told me that the foundation had seen firsthand how PBMs impede patients from receiving lifesaving treatments by creating “hoops that [they] have to jump through in order to access medications.”

Pennsylvania resident Rebecca Savastio is currently battling OptumRx over the medication she needs for metabolic syndrome and a genetic leptin receptor deficiency. For nearly three years, Savastio had been taking Ozempic, which her insurance Blue Cross Blue Shield approved with the caveat that it couldn’t be used for weight loss alone. Then her doctor suggested switching to Mounjaro. OptumRx, which is contracted by Savastio’s insurance, denied the claim, saying the drug would be used for off-label purposes. They also stopped covering the Ozempic she had already been taking long-term. Eli Lilly, the drug manufacturer that makes Mounjaro, offers a coupon for a similar drug called Zepbound; customers can buy it directly from the Eli Lilly website for a discounted $500 a month. Still, that’s a far cry from the $50 a month Savastio had been paying for Ozempic. This is all on top of the $11,000 a year she pays in health insurance premiums.

“I’m going to take money out of retirement,” she says, “and I’m going to take [OptumRx] to court.” She’s not the only one sizing up her legal options. In March, a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit brought by four ex-employees of Wells Fargo that accused their former employer of allowing Express Scripts, the PBM Wells Fargo contracted, to overcharge for drugs. The dismissal came as a relief for large employers who are now facing a new wave of litigation from workers seeking justice for costly PBM fees.

A former OptumRx employee who worked in the appeals department, fielding calls from people who’d been denied coverage for medications they were prescribed, said he felt the company intentionally subjected patients and providers to a byzantine process. The employee, who asked to remain anonymous, ended up on disability leave for depression when the task of repeatedly rejecting lifesaving medications became too much. As a senior pharmacy appeals technician, he handled prior-authorization requests. He would log the information that doctors sent over, and the PBM’s computer system would generate specific questions for the doctors about a given prescription. Doctors were faced with impossible timeframes to answer these questions, he says. For instance, if questions were faxed to a provider on a Friday and the office responded the following Monday, the medication request would be automatically rejected, or “auto-denied.”

Employees were also expected to limit phone calls to just seven minutes per customer, however irate. Patients would appeal algorithmically denied chemotherapy claims, he says, only to be faced with a human representative trying to hang up as soon as possible. “I never understood how a system that can auto-deny medications knows better than the patient’s doctor,” says the former employee.

It’s natural, then, that an OptumRx customer faced with impossible medication denials or outrageous costs would turn to GoodRx if they can. But GoodRx now works with OptumRx, helping, in turn, to rake in new customers for the PBM. Coupons are presented as a stopgap measure to make drugs more affordable, but they’re still helping to line the pockets of bad actors in the health insurance industry whose main function is to deny coverage and drive costs up. (OptumRx did not respond to questions about his account, nor Schmidtknecht’s death.)

© Irene Suosalo

Lucrative Failure or Sophistry?

It used to be that patients had to decide between GoodRx coupons or their insurance, but never the twain shall meet. Then, in 2024, GoodRx created a formal partnership called the “integrated savings program,” or ISP, with several PBMs, giving them access to the company’s drug pricing database. This switched up the old GoodRx model: now, when eligible customers covered by the program present their insurance card to a pharmacist, the ISP software automatically compares their copay for a generic drug to the GoodRx price and selects the lowest one, applying the cost to the customer’s deductible even if they use a coupon. On the other side of the transaction, the partnership allows participating PBMs to reimburse pharmacies at the lowest possible rate offered by their competitors. GoodRx makes money both ways: pharmacies, as usual, pay GoodRx a small transaction fee, and PBMs pay GoodRx for helping them access new customers. In its 2024 financial report, “prescriptions transactions revenue,” which includes kickbacks from PBMs as well as those pharmacy fees, accounted for 73 percent of GoodRx’s total income. “PBMs don’t view them as a threat,” explains Joyce, “because they are filling a part of the market that PBMs don’t have access to.”

Late last year, independent pharmacies who’d long begrudged GoodRx for dipping into their registers had had enough. A group of small pharmacists and the organizations that represent them filed several lawsuits in quick succession, culminating in a class action antitrust lawsuit against GoodRx and the PBMs in its ISP. The legal complaints make for captivating reading, accusing the coupon aggregator of being in cahoots with Big Insurance and operating a “cartel” to implement price-fixing, all part of an “illegal conspiracy” to kill small pharmacies. (GoodRx did not respond to a request for comment.)

One of the pharmacists leading the charge was Deborah Keaveny, owner of Keaveny Drug in Winsted, Minnesota, and president of Pharmacists United for Truth and Transparency. According to Keaveny’s October complaint, “GoodRx and the PBM Defendants agreed to artificially suppress prescription drug reimbursement rates paid to independent pharmacies, and to increase fees charged to pharmacies, on all GoodRx transactions. This conspiracy has caused harm to independent pharmacies throughout the United States.”

Small pharmacies say they play a crucial role in their communities that differentiates them from the profit-driven big chains. (They can certainly look different; a pharmacy I visited in Weeksville, New York, prints out memes and tapes them on the customer-facing plexiglass: Bernie Sanders, bundled up in a scarf, says, “I am once again asking for your birthday”; Homer Simpson, a phone pressed to his ear, says, “I need to speak to your pharmacist . . . what time do you close?”) They are able to cultivate personal relationships with their customers and play a more active role in their overall health. Teresa Dickinson of Melrose Pharmacy in Phoenix, Arizona, recalled a regular who came in one day with yellow-tinged skin. “I asked her if she had noticed it, or if someone had mentioned something, and she said ‘no,’” Dickinson explained. “It ended up being something to do with her liver.” Keaveny said that smaller pharmacies act as a de facto health hub. “People are going to come to us first and say, ‘Do I need stitches, or can I just put a band-aid on it? Do I need cough syrup, or do you think I have pneumonia?’” Jersey Shore pharmacist Kalyan Dandu added that if a customer calls with a prescription ten minutes before closing, he or another staff member might drop it off on the way home. “That’s not something a big chain pharmacy would do.”

Fighting the Pharm-Headed Hydra

As fed up as they are with the current system, most of the pharmacists I spoke to aren’t looking for radical change. Many told me, unprompted, that they believe in the free market. They asked: Who else but a PBM would administer prescription drug payouts? But short of genuinely transforming the American health care industry, there are many possible ways to rein in both prescription drug prices and the most flagrant bad practices of PBMs. Joyce thinks that PBMs should be paid a flat administrative fee, something like $4 a prescription, and that Congress should expand the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to stipulate that PBMs act in the best interests of their clients. (Thanks to one of Trump’s recent executive orders, Lowering Drug Prices by Once Again Putting Americans First, the latter wish might come to fruition.) Barron agrees, adding that true reform would include banning spread pricing, increasing transparency around PBM data, and strengthening “any willing pharmacy” rules, where PBMs are required to contract with any eligible pharmacy, rather than preferring the ones that they own, to prevent the arbitrary exclusion of certain pharmacies.

On the state level, a law that will severely cut back the influence of PBMs has just passed in Arkansas. House Bill 1150, which will go into effect in January 2026, seeks to cut down on anticompetitive consolidation, dictating that a company can have a license to operate either as a PBM or a business, but it can’t do both. It is the first bill to prevent PBMs from owning pharmacies. Various other states have also passed anti-steering laws that aim to prohibit PBMs from forcing customers to only fill their prescriptions at the pharmacies that they own. “But,” says Keaveny, “it’s a complaint-driven system. So the pharmacist has to take the time to make the complaint, fight it at the state level, the state has to do the investigation, and it’s really cumbersome.”

Many more ambitious federal PBM reforms have been introduced only to go nowhere. In 2023, Senator Bernie Sanders put forth a bill which, among other things, would ban spread pricing. It never passed. But advocates are continuing to apply pressure.

Months after Cole Schmidtknecht’s death, the manufacturer of his inhaler announced it would cap its out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month after a group of senators launched an investigation into inhaler prices. His parents went on to launch a website, Patient Protector, dedicated to PBM and insurance reform. Last December, Schmidknecht’s story was shared at a congressional hearing in support of a bipartisan bill called the Pharmacists Fight Back Act, which aimed to stop price gouging by PBMs. Congressman Jake Auchincloss spoke about how Schmidtknecht was an independent young man, someone “who stood up for the little guy” and enjoyed playing video games. He added that Schmidtknecht loved elephants and had hoped to one day get a tattoo of the animal on his arm.

The Pharmacists Fight Back Act was part of a slate of PBM reforms included in the massive federal spending bill put before Congress in December 2024. There was a mood of bipartisan hope after years of negotiation. But then, as portends many other disasters, Elon Musk posted on X. “This bill should not pass,” he said. A few minutes later, he posted a photo of the bill’s 1,547 pages, which included new requirements for PBMs. The caption read, “Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?” Musk, alongside president-elect Donald Trump, who also opposed the spending bill, got his wish: Congress ended up passing a smaller package with no provisions related to PBMs. Two weeks later, he reposted a video of frequent Joe Rogan guest Brigham Buhler criticizing PBMs as a “pay-to-play system.” “What is a ‘pharmacy benefit manager’?” Musk asked, with no obvious trace of irony.

If the episode was another blow to PBM reform, it was a boon for GoodRx, whose business model depends not just on the PBMs they partner with but the continued unaffordability of prescription medication more broadly. In the small print of a deck presented to investors this February, a disclaimer section on forward-looking statements notes the possible “impact of PBM regulation and reform on our business.” GoodRx’s new CEO, Wendy Barnes, is counting on the Musks of the world to continue their obstruction. In a recent article about her new position, she sounded an ominous note: “What we know is there will always be a growing list of drugs that are not funded, which means there will always be a place for GoodRx.”

Brawl for All

How clout chasers ruined boxing

Sean Nam

© Frank Augugliaro

Sham prizefighting goes by many names these days—crossover boxing, celebrity boxing, influencer boxing—but it’s been around a long time. In the 1940s, a retired Jack Dempsey, folk hero of the Roaring Twenties, struck a path on the comeback trail by taking on a string of wrestlers. In 1975, George Foreman traveled to Toronto to flatten five tomato cans, one after the other, in a single night, in a bid to restore his confidence after Muhammad Ali had shattered it in Zaire. A year later, Ali went fifteen execrable rounds with the wrestler Antonio Inoki in their bewildering mixed-rules mash-up in Tokyo. The twenty-first century saw the breakout of celebrity boxing, featuring D-listers who were, according to one promoter’s pitch, on the prowl for their sixteenth minute of fame. Featuring the likes of Tonya Harding and Joey Buttafuoco, the Fox television series Celebrity Boxing was a ratings hit in 2002, some of the episodes going neck and neck with The West Wing and Fear Factor.

What has changed recently, however, is our attitude toward what can be described with the umbrella term “gimmick boxing.” When twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxing-agitator Jake Paul and fifty-eight-year-old boxing alpha Mike Tyson linked up last November to swap punches in their live Netflix spectacle, it was as close anything has come in our anemic, discombobulated democracy to being a come-together cultural moment; hate it or love it, people were watching. With more than seventy thousand spectators present in the stands of the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, the fight saturated the media ecosystem and lured Wall Street and Madison Avenue, with companies like energy drink brand Celsius and credit score tracker Experian latching onto the event as sponsors—unusual developments in contemporary boxing, given its shrinking public profile and haphazard business model.

The floodgates opened in 2017. Regarded as the biggest stars of boxing and mixed martial arts, respectively, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor broke pay-per-view records in an extravaganza that year, reportedly generating more than $600 million. (Only Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao in 2015 has performed better.) Contested under boxing rules—boxers are usually inept when kicks and grappling are involved—the fight was also held as a pro bout, meaning open betting lines and more money for “Money” Mayweather, who got to call the shots because he is inarguably the most financially successful prizefighter in history. (Mayweather, in fact, attempted to plunk down $400,000 on himself in a prop bet—KO in less than nine and a half rounds—the night before the fight but was denied.) His one fight with Robert Guerrero in 2013 netted him a minimum $32 million (not including pay-per-view upside, gate revenue, and foreign television rights), whereas McGregor, effectively an employee of the wage-gouging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), needed nine fights across a seven-year period to earn nearly $20 million, according to court records.

The year 2017 was also a pivotal moment in the internet culture fueling gimmick boxing’s current permutation. British YouTubers Joe Weller and Theo Baker—roughly seven million subscribers between them currently—bandied punches with headgear inside an empty gym and posted it online. Like the porno set bouncer Kimbo Slice, who parlayed backyard brawls posted on the web to a pro-MMA career, Weller and Baker created an inadvertent sensation whose virality went up another notch when the YouTuber KSI called out Weller, the winner. Six months later, the two sold out an eight-thousand-seat London arena and drew a peak of 1.6 million viewers; two days later, the playback garnered twenty million views. Soon thereafter, Logan Paul, Jake’s older brother and an influencer in his own right, got in on the action by duking it out with KSI—first in 2018, then again in 2019. Suddenly Twitch streamers, TikTokers, and OnlyFans influencers with handles like FaZe Sensei, Halal Ham, and Astrid Wett were leaving their gaming chairs to duck through the ropes. KSI went so far as to establish his own boxing promotional company, Misfits Boxing, whose sole focus is to recruit from the influencer side. Mayweather, always on the lookout for ploys with low risk and high reward, immediately saw the appeal of pairing up with a heel like Logan Paul; the pair would get together in 2021 for an exhibition match that ended up generating more pay-per-views than the majority of high-level fights in recent years. To purists who accuse him of tarnishing the sport and undoing his legacy by fighting the likes of Paul and, most recently, borgata nepo baby John Gotti III, “Money” Mayweather has a simple retort: no one’s forcing you to watch. Gimmick boxing has never been more lucrative, online, and, alas, legitimate.

The rise of gimmick fights in this era has often been framed as an either-or proposition: Is it competition or entertainment? Does it bring a fresh audience to a sport that struggles to stay relevant? Or does it crowd out actually good fights from the marketplace? The answers are polarized: “The Honor of Boxing Is at Stake,” went one column in the New York Times, ahead of Mayweather-McGregor. Later, the Dallas Morning News would claim that “Tyson-Paul isn’t a gimmick fight. It’s just what boxing needs.” Others hold that the two can coexist peacefully, if separated. “We can do the two things side by side without polluting each other,” then-president of Showtime Sports Stephen Espinoza told the New York Times in 2021. “The danger is when you start mixing and matching events, and trying to present one as the other.” But it’s likely too late for such binary thinking. To the extent that the gimmick fight has permeated (polluted?) boxing at large—and it has—we’re already in a place where it can be difficult at times to tell the difference between the two.

Two Trucks Crashing

That boxing is “always, it seems, on the very threshold of oblivion, has not prevented it from having become a multimillion-dollar business,” Joyce Carol Oates once wrote. The sport is, despite its minority status, unique among professional athletics in being capable of generating in a single night tremendous economic activity, even bordering the GDP of some small nations. (Not for nothing, the first sport to reach a million-dollar gate was boxing, with Dempsey against Georges Carpentier in 1921.) Accurately gauging the health of the sport requires going beyond boxing’s 1 percent and traversing its lower depths, where the poverty is appallingly obvious. Once integral to the sport, the regional live fight scene barely exists today. Take New York, long considered a prizefighting epicenter for much of the twentieth century: there were only sixteen fight cards staged in all of New York state in 2023, with just thirty-eight in 2006. In 1927, by contrast, there were more than nine hundred boxing shows staged in the state. “It’s not a 90 percent drop, it’s a 98 percent drop,” noted Don Majeski, a fight agent and matchmaker for over fifty years. “That’s an extinct species.” In the way that college freshmen today are reportedly having trouble reading an entire book, viewers of boxing lack the knowledge they would have received otherwise in a more vibrant ecosystem. “They don’t know what a good fight is anymore,” Majeski said. “I think [it’s because of] the loss of parochialism, where you would have regular shows in New York, regular shows in Los Angeles, regular shows in Philadelphia, where you have local fighters fighting.”

The regional fight scene’s decline corresponds to that of the sport’s usual delivery systems. After years of regular national programming on radio and then network television, boxing aligned itself with cable in the 1980s. By the 1990s, premium cable titans HBO and Showtime distributed the biggest fights by pay-per-view. With the sport more profitable than ever for the promoters and fighters, it was hard to see that the often-exorbitant paywall marginalized boxing as a relevant media offering. (Without the largesse provided by a television contract, promoters were also hard-pressed to run club shows in which they must bear all the financial risk, including rent, fighters’ purses, hotels, travel fees, and medical insurance.) Over the decades, boxing became known by that patronizing appellation: niche. HBO and Showtime both parted ways with the sport in the past six years. Today, ESPN remains the only cable network currently televising boxing in America. The company is reportedly uninterested in renewing its programming contract with its chief supplier later this summer, which means boxing could soon be bumped off the medium that has carried it for more than three decades.

Boxing now primarily resides, like so much else, on the streaming apps. Far from liberating the sport from the constraints of premium cable, the apps have only hastened boxing’s enduring marginalization. With the possibility that subscribers who were otherwise more interested in Sex and the City or Game of Thrones might tune into a card, cable had offered a chance for a special talent to transcend the strictures of the hardcore fan base. (See Gennadiy Golovkin, the feared puncher from Kazakhstan, who spent his prime toiling on German club shows until he found fame with the broader public on HBO.) The majority of fights these days land on DAZN, the UK-based service, whose limitations as a strictly sports-centric platform that appeals mainly to a European base—snooker, soccer, and cricket are a few of their key offerings—are obvious, especially from an American standpoint. In the à la carte style of streaming, in which one opens and closes the app according to the duration of a desired event, the likelihood of someone with no affection for boxing stumbling onto a match is nil.

Gimmicks have thrived in the disarray. DAZN, desperate for brand awareness, streamed the rematch between Paul and KSI in 2019, the same year it was busy plugging itself as the nerve center for the sport’s most consequential fights; Showtime, the last member of boxing media’s old guard, backed four of Jake Paul’s early fights before bowing out of the sport. But gimmick boxing took its most lurid and perhaps characteristic turn in 2020, when Covid-19 forced high-profile boxing to a complete standstill and a video-sharing app called Triller (a TikTok manqué) decided to branch out into promotion. Led by a disgraced Hollywood boy wonder named Ryan Kavanaugh whose boutique film studio went spectacularly bust in 2015, Triller targeted an ambitious match for its initial foray into the sport: a fight between Tyson and Roy Jones Jr., one of the biggest stars in boxing throughout the 1990s, on pay-per-view. What Kavanaugh had in mind was less a fight card than a Super Bowl-style hootenanny for the homebound populace, stacked with musical performances by the likes of Lil Wayne and DaBaby, along with light shows and fireworks. The undercard would feature former 168-pound titlist Badou Jack and rising lightweight Jamaine Ortiz, as well as Jake Paul in his second pro fight against ex-NBA player Nate Robinson.

Nothing came of Tyson and Jones’s fistic overtures nearly two decades ago, but now here they were in their fifties, ready to whale away at each other’s paunches. Still, it wasn’t entirely clear how this fight was going to be contested—exactly what Espinoza warned would be a danger to the sport. Set for Los Angeles’s Staples Center, the fight was classified on paper as an exhibition in accordance with the California State Athletic Commission, or CSAC. (Unlike any other professional sport, boxing has no central governing body, so individual states oversee the regulations, medical protocols, methods of adjudication, and the decision to sanction a fight as a legitimate contest or exhibition.) That meant eight three-minute rounds, instead of the traditional ten or twelve for a main event; twelve-ounce boxing gloves, as opposed to the widely accepted ten ounces for heavyweights; and no judges at hand, since this was not a competition. In an exhibition, a win was beside the point, to say nothing of the sport’s ne plus ultra, the knockout.

This is not to say that knockouts can’t happen under these bowdlerized terms. In 2006, a retired Tyson embarked on a “world tour” in an attempt to shore up his mounting debt. First up, a four-round exhibition in Youngstown, Ohio, on pay-per-view with his former sparring partner Corey Sanders. In front of a six-thousand-seat venue only two-thirds full, the match played out like a sparring session. A flabby Sanders wore a shirt and headgear; Tyson also kept his top on but ditched the protection. In a sport in which the brain is the frequent target of harm, even exhibitions can be subject to the harshness of a pro fight: Tyson dropped Sanders in the opening round. But Tyson knew to keep his more violent impulses at bay, as he demonstrated later in the fight when he held Sanders up from falling after connecting with a right hand. (The fans would start booing the lack of action midway through the fight; the promoter could not shake off the negative feedback, and in the end, Tyson’s expedition never moved on to its next leg.) The referee is key, offering reminders that this is all a gag whenever it gets heated; depending on the commission and the understanding between the fighters, the length of the referee’s leash varies. Mayweather managed to score three quick knockdowns during his exhibition with twenty-year-old Japanese kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in 2018 before the fight was promptly waved off in the first round.

Andy Foster, the gregarious head of the CSAC, was intent on keeping the Tyson-Jones matchup classified as an exhibition. “We can’t mislead the public as [if] this is some kind of real fight,” Foster told Boxingscene.com. “They can exhibit their boxing skills, but I don’t want them using their best efforts to hurt each other. . . . This isn’t a record-book type of fight. This is not world-championship boxing right now. It’s not what this is. People shouldn’t be getting knocked out.” The referee’s job, Foster went on, “is going to be to put the ice back on without having to kill the whole thing.”

While Foster’s comments sounded sensible enough, Kavanaugh was none too pleased to have his marketing angles undercut, finding it ludicrous to be told he couldn’t sell knockouts when Tyson and Jones were, in their heyday, two of the best at producing them. In true showbiz fashion, the native Angeleno groaned to the trades. In a Variety interview titled “Ryan Kavanaugh Insists Mike Tyson-Roy Jones Jr. Fight Will Be ‘Like Two Trucks Crashing,’” Kavanaugh excoriated Foster, accusing him of trying to seek attention. He also threatened to move his business to other states, where he figured he would run into less resistance.

Kavanaugh wound up doing exactly that not even a year later. Following the outright triumph of Tyson-Jones, which reportedly sold well more than a million pay-per-views (bringing in more than $80 million in revenue), he arranged for a pro boxing match between forty-eight-year-old boxing great Oscar De La Hoya and forty-four-year-old former UFC champion Vitor Belfort to take place in De La Hoya’s hometown of Los Angeles. But after contracting Covid-19, De La Hoya pulled out of the fight with a week to go, leaving Kavanaugh scrambling to find a replacement. Fifty-eight-year-old heavyweight legend Evander Holyfield agreed to fill in, in theory ending a ten-year retirement. The choice did not come out of the blue: a few days prior to his getting the nod, Holyfield filed an arbitration suit against Triller for $5 million in unpaid wages. Holyfield was already signed to the app on the understanding that he and Tyson would fight for the third time; when Tyson did not show any interest, Holyfield pivoted to another opponent, only for Triller to stall.

Kavanaugh, by the looks of it, had thrown Holyfield a bone to negate the threat of a lawsuit. There was one problem: the CSAC refused to license Holyfield, for either a professional fight or exhibition, on account of his advanced age and the short turnaround time. In a huff, Kavanaugh relocated the entire card to Florida, a state notorious for its lenient commission. A few days out from the fight, reports circulated that the Florida commission had approved Holyfield-Belfort as a professional fight. Fans and pundits were aghast. Holyfield looked severely diminished while hitting the mitts during a public workout and slurred and garbled his speech. Kavanaugh added to the confusion by telling the media that he would leave it to Holyfield to decide whether he wanted the fight to be counted against his record. In contrast to California, the promoter could wait until right before the opening bell in Florida to make that decision.

In the end, the fight proceeded with the understanding by the public that it was a legitimate affair. What followed was one of the more debased moments in the sport in recent memory. With “special guest” Donald Trump in the commentary booth, Belfort stopped a woebegone Holyfield with a fusillade of unanswered punches not even two minutes into the opening round. Incredibly, the farce did not end there. A few days later, the Florida commission confirmed reports that Holyfield-Belfort actually took place as an exhibition and not a pro fight as Triller’s advertising and press release had indicated. If the public had been hit with a bait-and-switch, the people, it seems, had the last laugh. For all Kavanaugh’s hoopla and hoodwinking, the card was likely a financial flop. Whereas Tyson-Jones was reported to have notched anywhere from 1.2 to 1.6 million in pay-per-view buys—a figure that, if at all accurate, would rank it above the vast majority of boxing pay-per-views in the past decade and a half—Holyfield-Belfort reportedly struggled to reach even 150,000 buys. Trump’s fee alone was $2.5 million, according to his personal financial disclosures.

No need to dwell on the bad when there is always the next hustle to play up. Immediately after the fight, Belfort called out Jake Paul, with Kavanaugh pledging to hand the winner $30 million. Paul could only roll his eyes. “Let’s be honest,” Paul told the media. “We know they don’t have that money to put up.” Indeed, a month later Triller defaulted on staging a lightweight title bout between Teofimo Lopez and George Kambosos Jr. that the company had bid over $6 million earlier in the year. Beating out two powerhouse promoters, Triller’s eye-popping move to legitimize itself in the eyes of hardcore fans ended with the company forfeiting the $1.2 million deposit.

In its bald-faced maneuvers to skirt regulation, Triller was simply following the well-trodden path of malfeasant promoters before it, perhaps differing only in degree of clumsiness. But no one in recent years has exerted so much effort to blur the exhibition–pro fight divide. Mayweather, to his credit, has always been blunt about viewing his exhibitions as a “fun” means to pad his wallet and keep himself in the headlines. Misfits, the influencer boxing promotional company headed by KSI, makes no pretense about its aims.

Triller did demonstrate, however, a couple of things that any well-connected and committed huckster could adapt for himself: One, that in boxing, a little persistence toward bending the rules can eventually yield favorable results; and two, a truly successful gimmick needs two big names, not just one. As Paul put it after Belfort called him out, “Vitor is not that big of a name. . . . I’m trying to get bigger with each of these fights. I’m trying to get more of a challenge”—someone more like a fifty-eight-year-old Mike Tyson.

The Tyson Haul

As with the commission in Florida, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation is thought to be one of the more permissive and lax regulatory bodies in boxing, routinely under fire for blatant cronyism and procedural mishaps. In 2018, it sanctioned a pro bout featuring a sixty-two-year-old whose last recorded fight was in 1986 and who would be knocked out by his much younger opponent in the first round. No wonder then that it was Texas—not California, not Las Vegas, not New York City—that wound up getting the nod to host Tyson’s reentry into the ring against Paul, some thirty-one years younger. The press release announcing their fight intentionally left out any indication as to whether it would be contested as an exhibition. In Texas, the finer details could be worked out later. About a month after the initial announcement, in early April, Tyson went on Fox News and informed viewers, in no uncertain terms, that the fight was indeed an exhibition. But Tyson immediately followed up by saying—and here the lines started blurring again—that their tête-à-tête would not adhere to any of the conventional “laws” of exhibitions. “This is a fight,” he promised. A few days later, with the same outlet, Paul revealed his team had submitted a request to the commission to change it to a pro fight. “Full face shots,” he said. “It’s an all-out war.” Before the end of the month, it was approved.

For nine months, the public was informed that this manufactured feud, sanctioned as a professional bout, would result in something awesome. When Tyson slapped Paul at the weigh-in, the violence finally seemed tangible. Best to forget then that only two years ago—and four years since he looked sprightly against Jones—Tyson was spotted at the Miami International Airport in a wheelchair, holding a walking cane. (It was his sciatica flaring up again, he later said.) Forget, too, the prison sentence for a rape conviction involving an eighteen-year-old, and the domestic violence allegations. May as well forget The Bite. The Baddest Man? That was all old hat. Now the public knew him for that cameo in the 2009 hit Hollywood comedy The Hangover. He was a weed farmer with a podcast, keeping up with the millennials, as avuncular as grizzled pop culture idols get these days.

Training montages of Iron Mike tearing up the pads with feverish combinations, doled out to the masses in shrewdly edited fifteen-second clips, helped soften the collective distrust. Here were six generations of demographic richness to work with, the analysts contended straight-faced. Unfortunately, it was that easy. Paul’s target audience, after all, was literal children. “Many people [in the sport of boxing] tout that we’re an eighteen- through thirty-four-year-old male demo, but [we’re] really not,” Nakisa Bidarian, Paul’s mouthpiece, told Sports Business Journal. “The product is aging, the stars are aging, the audience is aging. [Paul] really represents Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Not a lot of people focus on Gen Alpha, but that’s the next wave of consumer that matters.”

If those clips worked wonders on the tykes, they had a similarly stimulating effect on those who could recall watching Tyson in his prime. The boxer of yore was still there in those familiar gestures: the peekaboo stance, the exaggerated slips and dips, those chopping hooks. That’s when the transmogrification began. Suddenly, it seemed as if a moral forbade Tyson, former ruffian of Pitkin Avenue, losing to an online brat from the Ohio suburbs. True, Paul had already overachieved. Most of his life was spent hatching prank videos to post on YouTube, until he discovered he had heavy hands five years ago and started applying them to emeritus members of the UFC. Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley, and Nate Diaz may have been abysmal boxers, but they were world-class mixed martial artists at one time. Paul was beating them handily, starching a few of them and pretending like he was more than a scalp collector of retired MMA fighters. But this was Tyson now, and there was no denying his cosmic allure. “I’m getting ready to watch this Tyson vs Jake Paul fight like I’m watching someone cast a spell that I hope actually works. And I don’t really believe in magic,” Joe Rogan wrote on X. “But I want to believe.” Wouldn’t you, in the hour of judgement, want to be on the side that believes?

An unscripted glimpse at Tyson’s bare backside in the dressing room seemed a kind of atavistic rite that only fueled the belief of his supporters, somehow. Once the action started, however, there was no mistaking the crowd’s scorn for what was ultimately a desultory do-si-do. If Tyson had any chance of upsetting the upstart, the thinking went, he had to do his work early, before his body betrayed him. Charging after Paul with a few aggressive sallies in the opening round, Tyson appeared determined to do just that. The problem, of course, was that he had nothing left afterward. For the rest of the way, Tyson traipsed painfully slowly around the ring like an overripe Boris Karloff. Paul appeared to ease off his advances after sending Tyson into a scary, spastic shock in the third round, seeking to oblige the oldster by practically ushering him to the final bell. In the waning seconds of the eighth and final round, the boos reached a lusty crescendo when Paul broke out of his fighting stance to perform an “all hail” bow to the fistic icon turned frazzled has-been. Really, what else could anyone expect Paul to do but show his utmost gratitude? Paul’s guaranteed take for convincing Tyson to join in on his latest hijinks was a reported $40 million (Tyson’s haul was said to be $20 million), bestowed by Netflix, which streamed the live event to its quarter-billion-plus subscriber base without charging extra fees.

Afterward, the streamer’s own apparatchiks struggled to spin the evening positively. One elected to lightly condescend to the viewers. “Hopefully people aren’t too disappointed, but he’s fifty-eight years old. What did you expect?” said retired boxer Andre Ward, a former super middleweight champion who was the show’s lead booth analyst. Of course, Ward did not seem to have any qualms continually playing up Tyson’s chances to the media in the pre-fight hype. That Ward—a two-division champion, the last American male to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing, and a Hall of Famer—was lending his credibility to a snoozer that he’d tacitly admit had been nothing more than a poorly veiled ruse spoke to the sport’s shortcomings. Regarded as one of boxing’s most skilled if underwhelming fighters from the late aughts up until 2017, when he retired undefeated, Ward had never glimpsed a fraction of the revenue that Paul and Tyson had produced on that single night. After a career anchored in an imperious persona, Ward in his retirement apparently felt that there was no dollar too ignoble to accept as a talking head.

But the joke was on boxing. While overpromising and underdelivering, Tyson-Paul was certainly the most viewed boxing match of 2024, likely surpassing, at least in visibility, the two blockbuster heavyweight title contests between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk, which took place in Saudi Arabia. Their first pay-per-view fight reportedly generated 1.5 million purchases globally; Netflix’s metrics are proprietary and not audited by a third party, but the streamer’s claim of sixty million Tyson-Paul viewers, even accounting for exaggeration, vastly outstripped the viewership figures for Fury-Usyk. At the box office, the fight drew a reported $18 million in ticket revenue, doubling what Canelo Álvarez, regarded as the biggest boxing star in North America, did at the same venue in 2021. “You’d have to go back to the eighties to get a live audience that big that wasn’t a Super Bowl,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Despite its staggering letdown in the ring, the fight was a bona fide attention-grabbing success.

Tyson-Paul was also a gambling bonanza for sportsbooks, with some declaring it the most wagered on sports event in their company’s history. Bettors who had nurtured their habits during the pandemic were not going to miss out on this action, no matter their ambivalence (or ignorance) about the sport itself. Since betting on sports was legalized in the United States in 2018, the commercialization of the once-outlaw hobby has been relentless: commentary during televised games is peppered with aperçus of gambling odds, and commercial breaks are filled with spots from betting apps touting parlays with deviously long odds and offering free credit to anyone who opens an account. David Purdum, who covers gambling for ESPN, told me he believes that if you include the number of people who bet using offshore accounts, 95 percent of the sports betting in the United States likely takes place online. From the Gold Rush to Google, from scratch-offs to slots, Americans are pumped up on “lottery libido,” to lift a phrase from Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, always angling for that long-odds jackpot. “People in the U.S. love to bet on novelty events, from the color of Gatorade dumped on the winning Super Bowl coach to the over/under on the National Anthem,” Purdum said. “They also love a narrative. Tyson-Paul had a little bit of both.”

While the maelstrom of bets on both fighters was further evidence that Americans will gamble on anything as long as lines are offered on it, the furor also suggested to the world that this was a real fight. BetMGM reported that Tyson-Paul had four times as much money wagered than any MMA or boxing match in the previous seven years. It helped, too, that gobsmacked talking heads expressing shock at the volume of bets coming in gave implicit cover to the sham. At the same time, the murky circumstances surrounding the fight’s classification—was it on the level?—actually warded off some markets, with bets not accepted in seven states, including New York.

The decision to sanction Tyson-Paul as a pro bout paid off in spades. The largest bets were placed on Paul, the favorite, with one bettor in Michigan putting down $1 million. While betting site Polymarket reported that one of its users placed a $3.6 million wager on Tyson (the same user won $11 million betting on a second Trump presidency), the underdog was favored by a bevy of small plays by the squares. That so many bets came in for Tyson caught some sportsbooks off guard, with one risk manager at a Vegas institution telling ESPN that it was “pretty surprising to see how many people are still willing to take a shot on Mike Tyson at this age.” But who were they kidding? These weren’t boxing connoisseurs, likely not even fans, but the believers of those fifteen-second clips, the ones who figured sports talk radio vet Dan Le Batard might be onto something when he said that despite the boxer’s advanced age, “I would not want a human being of any kind to fight Mike Tyson. I would like Mike Tyson’s chances, quickly, against anybody.” When I spoke to CSAC’s Andy Foster recently about why he was so adamant about standing his ground on keeping Triller’s Tyson-Jones as an exhibition, he pointed to one thing: sports betting. “I don’t want to mislead the public, that’s first and foremost,” Foster said. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission and other gaming control boards had called him and asked whether the bout was a real fight. “I said, ‘No, it’s an exhibition,’ and they were cool with it. In sport we have to have some degree of integrity,” Foster continued. “I want people to go into something with their eyes wide open if they’re going to take bets and gaming places are going to open lines.”

Sluggers at Stupidweight

The ingrained structural problems of boxing are not lost on those with the most influence, though attempts to enact meaningful change usually either backfire or are flat-out ineffectual. On March 11, concerned with the surge of gimmick fights in recent years and how their ambiguous designations were confusing the betting public, the Association of Boxing Commissions, a nonprofit coalition of various state commissions committed to fighter safety and standardizing boxing’s balkanized regulations, sent out a stern communiqué advising its partners that professional fights need to adhere to a specific set of ironclad rules. Per the ABC, a professional boxing match has nonnegotiable criteria, and any bout charged as a professional venture needs to adhere to them, lest the fight be a “sham.” And a sham fight, the ABC stated, “is fraught with evils, such as the risk of mismatches, gambling manipulation and dangers to participants. The term ‘professional boxer’ is one which is held in high esteem for those few athletes who compete in the sweet science and follow all the rules set forth.”

The timing of the release was clearly occasioned by Tyson-Paul. But it makes one question why the organization did not speak out before then. After all, it was a well-known fact that Tyson-Paul would have two-minute rounds (the ABC calls for three) and that fourteen-ounce gloves would be used (instead of the ten ounces typical for fights contested at 147 pounds and above). The response was also a complete about-face. The head of the ABC, Michael Mazzulli, was on the record with USA Today in a November 11 article saying Tyson-Paul was “absolutely” a “real fight” because there would be judges.

When I pointed this out to Mazzulli, he said he had trouble recalling that interview. After a few back-and-forths, he said, “Everyone can go back on their opinions.” But since all the “evils” he mentioned in the release were public knowledge well in advance of the fight date, why hadn’t the ABC piped up earlier? Had there been internal backlash? Or pressure from other commissioners, perhaps? Mazzulli denied that that was the case, saying he and the board of directors had a change of heart after seeing how Tyson-Paul played out. “After the fight, I was like, ‘Jeez, we really need to distinguish the difference,’” Mazzulli said. “I think it’s safer for everybody. It rectifies a wrong for me.”

What happened after Tyson-Paul, of course, would make it difficult for any organization ostensibly committed to safeguarding the sport to stay silent. A rash of conspiracy theories proliferated online, all more or less espousing the view that Tyson-Paul was rigged. Despite Paul’s post-fight insistence that he had let Tyson off easy—“I didn’t want to hurt someone that didn’t need to be hurt”—the predominant view, incredibly, was that Tyson had taken it easy on Paul. Armchair sleuths combed every frame of the fight for clues to buttress their close readings. The speculation was not endemic to anons. Michael Irvin, the Pro Football Hall of Famer and current analyst for networks like Fox, claimed he had heard that Tyson was contractually barred from throwing the uppercut. “You taking away Mike Tyson’s best gift, which was that uppercut? Man, that’s a big lie to me.” In response to the burgeoning scuttlebutt, MVP, Paul’s own promotional company, issued a press release reminding naysayers that “rigging a professional boxing match is a federal crime in the United States of America.” Why, it read, would they want to enmesh their benevolent streaming partner in the crosshairs of the DOJ?

There is reason to be skeptical regarding the latest decree from the ABC, a largely toothless organization due to boxing’s inherent fragmentation. Unlike the NBA, NFL, MLB, or even pro pickleball, there is no overarching organizational structure (as in a league) in pro boxing, just a bazaar of rival promoters looking after their own fief, often in the form of an exclusive contract with a media platform. Joining this unruly fray are the sanctioning bodies, the parasitic alphabet soup outfits responsible for ostensibly articulating a pecking order in the weight classes and who “earn” their keep by charging a percentage of a fighter’s purse in a title bout. Only in boxing does a champion pay a tax for his title. Only in boxing are you routinely confronted with illogical inanities, such as having four champions per weight division.

In the end, all the ABC can do is offer recommendations and hope that its opprobrium has a discouraging influence on scofflaws. It cannot adjudicate matters for other states nor can it levy out punishment or fines. Would a state be willing to lose out on the economic jolt from an event like Tyson-Paul over a quibble about glove size? Time and time again, even the most stringent commissions have shown that, despite having “health and safety” in their mission statement, they will bend to suit the economic interests. The streaming platforms also see the power of gimmicks: Netflix reportedly wants to expand live sports programming. Tyson-Paul helped bring in nineteen million new subscribers (and unprecedented ad revenue) for the platform in the fourth quarter of last year—no small matter for a company that lost subscribers in 2022 for the first time in a decade and is now showing signs of market saturation. Sarandos, the Netflix executive, has made it clear in interviews that he is primarily interested in purchasing rights to singular events. “I don’t want a season of football,” he told Variety. “I want the Super Bowl.” With its decentralized, de-corporatized business, boxing can more nimbly offer the kind of glitzy, funhouse-style one-offs that the suits are calling for than sports with leagues and unions.

Meanwhile, Paul, the seasoned clout chaser, has not wasted time pursuing his next spectacle. This past February, Paul was on the verge of delivering Netflix a fight between himself and Canelo Álvarez, one of boxing’s elite talents, who Paul first called out to widespread chortles in 2021. The proposed Netflix deal fell through at the eleventh hour—Paul insists they had signed contracts—but that there were even negotiations to begin with was a sign of how far Paul has come along in boxing, now with one foot in the gimmick lane, the other in the pros. This March, Paul set into motion yet another scheme by dissing and calling out former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, who was knocked out brutally last September. This time no one was scoffing. Joshua’s silver-tongued promoter Eddie Hearn welcomed the idea, even though he was on record calling Paul’s fight with Tyson “disrespectful to the sport of boxing.” What’s more, the pitches are now flooding in unprompted: from clout-obsessed lightweight contender Ryan Garcia to UFC star Alex Pereira to fifty-six-year-old former light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver, everyone in the combat sports stratosphere wants a Paul windfall. Even Usyk, the heavyweight champion many believe to be the greatest boxer alive today, joined the breadline by floating a fight with Paul on his Instagram in late March. The money, as everyone knows by now, is real with Paul.

Gimmick boxing is here to stay, then, so long as the culture of which it is unquestionably a part cares to keep it around—a culture in which we take our dopamine hits from ludicrous premises and daisy-chained parlays. Forget about the actual fights. We barely have the attention span for that. Baudrillard, it seems, continues to be one of our prophets. Tyson-Paul may as well have never happened. No one will ever willingly sit through those eight rounds again. But the memes will carry on in our collective simulation: the slap at the weigh-in, Paul’s bow, Tyson’s ass cheeks, all in fifteen-second digestible clips that are all that’s required to get people through the door—or into the ring.

Lost in the gimmick’s Paul-centric shuffle are the less conspicuous but more desperate callouts from those who have no business fighting, such as the cautionary case of Paul Bamba. Enamored with what Jake Paul had managed for himself, Bamba, a fitness instructor from Puerto Rico by way of New York, plunged into boxing in 2021 with the express goal of someday challenging the gimmick lodestar. Grammy winner Ne-Yo, one of Bamba’s gym clients, signed on as his manager (hard to discount Triller’s influence here). In four years, Bamba, despite being a novice with no amateur background, notched an impressive-looking 19-3 professional record, with eighteen knockouts. He died last December, six days after a suspicious win against a journeyman. Bamba was thirty-five. In a Guardian exposé published in March, investigative journalist Thomas Hauser revealed that the majority of the fights on Bamba’s record took place in jurisdictions with minimal regulatory oversight (Alabama, New Hampshire, Colombia) and were likely fixed. The results of Bamba’s autopsy have not been made public, but, according to Hauser, many friends and associates believe Bamba, who publicly admitted to having suffered a concussion in 2023, died of a brain bleed.

As a vehicle for self-esteem, boxing has few peers. Paul himself has spoken about how boxing had “reinvigorated something inside.” Bamba, who came from poverty, was reportedly also very driven. After his last fight, he laced into Paul: “You can come get it . . . you can keep doing the gimmick fights. At the end of the day, I’ve put in the work. . . . You’ve made a lot of money but you haven’t earned anything in boxing.” Yet ambition, especially in boxing, can be a double-edged sword. In some circles, complaints that gimmicks are ruining boxing are disregarded as sanctimonious posturing. But one of the unintended consequences of gimmick boxing is that, by trivializing a bloodsport, it obscures many of the darker sides of the pursuit. In the end, you’re still getting hit in the head. Because there is no barrier to entry in boxing—there is no merit-based draft, for example, as in the big sports leagues—copycats like Bamba, transfixed by Paul’s achievements but who lack his natural athleticism, will likely multiply in the years to come. The sport will turn their zeal against them. When the British sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney reflected on the ring death of the young Welsh contender Johnny Owen in 1980, he observed that Owen, despite his frail stature, never looked more comfortable than when he was in the ring. “It is his tragedy,” McIlvanney concluded, “that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.” The tragedy of Bamba was that he was not even articulate.

Cake

I can hardly remember that other self

Laura van den Berg

© Chi Park

The cake has become a problem. In the back of the car the three women try to solve it like an equation. Rita sits in the middle, squished between Hilda and Seraphina, the golden cake board flat against her thighs. Rita, nearly six feet tall, has made a commitment to use her height to her advantage. No more shrinking away. But in the car she must slump to avoid thumping her head.

The cake is a giant vanilla sheet cake. It was served at a retirement party for a manager at the company where Rita works, wheeled out on a rolling table with Now You’re Dead to Us! written across the top in sapphire icing. She is an assistant, just like Hilda and Seraphina, though they have been at the company much longer. At this point in the night Dead to is all that remains of the lettering. In the car, Rita counts up the Dead to people in her life: her mother, her older sister, and her ex-boyfriend, who worked overnight at a hospital and came home smelling of cigarettes and bleach. Plus, the younger version of herself who tolerated too much. Who allowed bad things to happen.

The car hits a pothole. The cake quivers on the golden board. A loose hunk slides off the scalloped edges, and now Hilda has cake in her shoes. The three of them gasp. At a red light, the driver twists around, demands to know just what they’re doing back there.

“We’ll fix it,” they say, like good assistants. “We’re so sorry.” Even though they have no idea what to do. The cake didn’t seem like it would be such a problem when they were leaving the party, which was held in a stately townhouse, in a neighborhood so pristine the sidewalks glistened. The party was Rita’s first company function; she arrived in her nicest clothes, a black scoop-neck dress with low black heels, a black bucket purse, and her lucky yellow windbreaker. On their way out they were stopped by the manager and owner of the townhouse—older, elegant—in a blue silk dress. She appeared in the narrow vestibule insisting that they take the cake home.

“You can share it with your roommates,” the woman said. “Or just eat it yourselves. The three of you are skin and bones!”

No one stepped forward. Rita could sense the desperation crackling underneath the mask of the woman’s generosity. It was too much cake. Too much! It was Rita who reached out with her long arms. She was finding her impulse to accommodate hard to shed. Leaving the party together bound all three to the cake. Hilda held open the townhouse’s heavy front door so Rita could slide out sideways. Seraphina ordered a car on her phone. Rita was relieved. Her phone is ancient, and she forgot to charge it before the party, and by now it’s nothing more than a hard dark lump in the bottom of her bucket purse.

“You’re the first stop,” Seraphina says to Hilda. “And you have a roommate. You should take the cake.”

“My roommate can’t eat gluten,” Hilda replies. “She says the smell makes her ill.”

At her stop, Hilda slides out of the car. She moves with a slight limp because one of her satin shoes is stuffed with cake. The streetlights are ablaze. It looks like she’s passing through a short tunnel of light to reach her building.

The cake lurches on the board every time the driver sails over a bump or makes a sharp turn, and now Seraphina is claiming her fridge is too small.

“City fridges, you know? Also, sometimes I sleepwalk and do things I can’t control or remember. I could eat that entire cake in the middle of the night.”

They live in adjacent neighborhoods, both farther afield than Hilda’s. That’s one thing Rita has noticed about cities. Learning where someone lives can shift your entire sense of them.

“How long have you been with the company again?” Rita does not really understand what the company does. All day she enters data points into a computer. Whenever she asks the other assistants about the particulars they just smile and tilt their heads. She wants to tell her coworkers that she does not know anything. She is from a tiny town. She has only lived in this city for a month. Could someone please explain?

“Too long.” Seraphina yawns. She pats her open mouth. Her short, square fingernails are painted crimson. Rita’s mother believes yawning lets the devil in.

“I should be a manager now,” Seraphina adds. “It’s actually ridiculous.”

Rita wants to ask why there are only assistants and managers. No other class of employee. She wants to ask about the endless data streams. Is that how all the assistants spend their time? She might have asked these questions before taking the job. But she was so desperate to get away from her mother, her older sister, and her ex-boyfriend who worked overnight at the hospital.

“What does it take, exactly?” Rita asks. “To become a manager?”

“Total commitment,” Seraphina says. “Like, your commitment has to be utter.”

When Seraphina gets out at her stop, she takes off her navy heels, tucks one under each armpit, and trots up to her building.

© Chi Park

If I abandon this cake something bad will happen. Rita has exorcised her mother’s superstitions, but that hasn’t kept her from developing her own. That’s why she wears her yellow windbreaker whenever she goes out. It’s why she hums the same song in the shower every morning. It’s by Norma Tanega, one of her mother’s favorites; at some point “A Street That Rhymes at Six A.M.” got lodged somewhere deep within Rita. Fly a red balloon on someone else’s time. They will try to pull you down and change your mind. Rita’s fridge is large for a studio apartment and nearly empty. Maybe she’ll cut up slices of the cake and hand them out to neighbors. Maybe this cake will help her get to know people. At her stop, Rita inches across the back seat with the cake board cradled in her arms. Her yellow windbreaker flaps around her hips as she emerges into the night. Her black bucket purse hangs from the crook of her elbow. Her phone is dead and useless in the bottom. She uses her body weight to close the passenger door.

“Oh,” she calls out from the sidewalk, but it’s too late. The driver is speeding away. She’s on the wrong block. The faces of the buildings, the numbers—everything is wrong. She’s not even on her street. She does not recognize these street names. Is she in the right neighborhood?

She hurries down the block. She trips on uneven sidewalk—a treacherous lip of concrete—and mashes the cake to her chest. She peels the cake back. She has clots of icing on her collarbone. Icing in her hair. She tries to imagine telling Seraphina and Hilda about this ordeal tomorrow. She tells herself that by then, it will feel like a joke. “You will never believe it, the saga of that cake . . .”

Rita keeps walking. She hopes for a bodega where she could get a roll of paper towels. Explain where she lives and ask for directions. Instead, she finds a bus stop with a bench and sits down. She grabs at the cake, shoves fistfuls into her mouth. She can’t carry this cake around all night. But she can’t abandon it. What else is there to do? The cake is solid and sweet. The icing leaves a buttery film on her lips.

The last time she ate well past fullness was after her ex-boyfriend locked her in his bathroom. He reported to his overnight at the hospital. She sat in his cramped, windowless bathroom for sixteen hours. By the time he came home and let her out, she was mad with hunger. She ate an entire loaf of bread in seconds. When Rita told her older sister she howled with laughter.

Rita eats until her mouth dries out. Until her stomach swells and tightens. Somehow, she’s only managed to eat the to and the last d in Dead. How is there still so much cake? She stands up. She keeps walking. Block after block is strangely dim and quiet. She spots a lit window in a garden-level apartment. The blinds are half raised. Rita nudges open a low metal gate with her knee and goes down a few stone stairs. She can hardly see where she’s stepping. She crouches down. She makes a shelf for the cake with the undersides of her forearms and peers through the window.

A woman around her age and also quite tall walks into a tiny living room. She has an aura of familiarity about her. She’s holding a small white plate with a slice of cake. She sinks into an orange saucer chair and stares intently at something in front of her. Maybe she’s watching TV. A few bites and the cake is gone. Rita envies the modest size of the slice.

The woman walks the white plate into the kitchen. She returns wearing sneakers and gripping a set of keys. Rita hustles into the narrow gap between the woman’s building and the one next door. From the shadows she watches the woman leave, up the stairs and into the night. Off on a quick errand, perhaps, or a late-night visit to a friend, at ease in this city.

Rita slides between the buildings, down a thin alley that takes her around to the back, where the garden-level apartment opens onto a small patio. The door is locked, but the window is cracked open. She sets the cake board down on the metal top of a garbage can, pushes open the window, and climbs inside. She can see why the woman left the window ajar. The dishwasher is running, and the tiny kitchen is a sauna. She reaches outside for the cake and slides it through. The woman’s fridge is large and nearly empty. The golden sheet fits easily inside.

Rita closes the fridge door. She feels like her tall body is humming with light. She wanders around the apartment. She’s just in here looking for a phone charger. All she wants is to go home. She finds a charger and plugs in her phone. Ten minutes, she tells herself. Then you’re gone.

She starts looking at photos of the woman. This feels like a violation, but she can’t help herself. Two photos in silver frames on top of a bookcase. A few tacked to a corkboard. There is something familiar about her face. In each one, the woman is alone and in the throes of adventure: dangling from a cliff face in a climbing harness, in a raft, a black paddle hoisted over her head, in an immense and misty forest with a yellow windbreaker tied around her waist.

The moment Rita drops into the orange saucer chair she returns to the retirement party. To an uneasy thing that happened in the coat room. She was elbow-deep in a large closet, in search of her own yellow windbreaker, when a man with a silver goatee appeared behind her and draped a fur stole over her shoulders.

“Oh,” she said, shrugging the fur away. “That isn’t mine.”

“It could be,” the man said. “Wouldn’t you like to be made of fur?”

For a second, she was a statute, tall and silent and still, but then she remembered her vow to be different in this city. She slipped her windbreaker off a hanger and rushed past the man, cheeks burning, head down. What would the woman who lives in this apartment have done? Screamed? Cursed? Hit him with a hanger?

She doesn’t fight the yawn that pries apart her jaws. She gives her open mouth a little pat, like Seraphina did in the car. She’s got icing all over her fingers, a sweet grit under her nails. She stands up. She washes her hands in the bathroom sink. She splashes cool water onto her face. She strips off her clothes and gets in the shower. She shampoos her hair. She dries herself with a thick, soft towel. In the bedroom, she drops the towel and her sugar-crusted clothes into a cloth hamper. She finds a T-shirt and sweatpants in a drawer. She puts them on. City apartments are so small. It never takes too long to find anything.

She turns out the lights. She peels back the sheets and slides into the woman’s bed. When this woman comes home and opens her fridge, she will find a terrible surprise. Rita presses her skull deep into the pillow.

Hilda and Seraphina like to talk about how this city has changed them. “I was a different person before I came here,” they say. “I can hardly remember that other self.”

Hilda and Seraphina talk about these discarded versions of themselves like they are gone forever. Like they have been eaten alive by the current form. Rita waits to hear the lock turn. For the bedroom door to creak open. She has brought something into bed with her. It lies cold and flat under her left hand. She found it in a kitchen drawer. The blade is spade-shaped and serrated at the edges. A cake knife. Rita is starting to think Hilda and Seraphine don’t know as much as they claim to. They seem to have no idea that those old, lost versions could still be out there, floating around this city or waiting in bed with a knife.

In which the morning after, a boy’s body had been dismembered

Adedayo Agarau

To God who made me, the clouds move toward us on that field.

It has just rained & the street is flooded again.

A boy whose face I do not remember has been dancing in

the rain & has now caught a cold.

We gather around him as good friends do & because he sneezes, we sneeze.

As our shadows fall into the corridors of our fathers’ house,

we ask ourselves what we want to become in the future.

One says police. Another says pilot. I say I want to be a thief. We laugh.

I want to run all my life because I have seen the magic wind does to a garment in motion.

We gather our feet and count. & because “even number” rhymes with “evil number,”

you are a thief, the game master calls. Because “odd” rhymes with “Lord,”

you are catching the thieves. We sort into our numbers.

At the count of three, we go into hiding, he commands. We begin the search of our lives,

running from corridor to corridor, searching. Little boys of this world tending

to desire the way god tended the garden. Because I want to be found, I sneeze.

The boy carrying the wood shaped like a gun has so much compassion

& he can’t shoot at me. He smiles and keeps running. Later, it becomes fully dark

& the moon stands by watching our performance of escape. Our mothers,

who have finished cooking dinner, bring their benches & sit outside, watching

the galore of night dancers. The wind arrives briefly, and we trace the dark with our hands.

  When we

finally tire & our breathing arrives together, we gather in a circle, our feet touching.

& as we begin to count, a boy says, the last to get home is a fool.

Enter the Wagon

with text by Adrian Nathan West

Tristan deBrauwere

There are phenomena so singular, so strange to behold, that I struggle to believe that they are fruit of the same tumults of history and inconceivable coincidences that brought the universe into being: the song “Vacation” by the Go-Go’s, the Instagram account of murdered rapper Julio Foolio, and now, I guess, CarJitsu. The what of CarJitsu is simple: it is jiujitsu inside a car. The why is best answered with the question, why not? The how is threefold: it begins with Vik Mikheev, a Russian-born PhD student and martial artist living in Kansas who began filming friends doing jiujitsu in cars in 2020; it passes through JT Tilley, a former joke writer for Yakov Smirnoff turned novelty sports entrepreneur; and it ends in the kitsch capital of Branson, Missouri, where the studios of the Pro League Network serve as an incubator for “licensing and producing bettable niche sports.” Other offerings include Ultimate Tire Wrestling, Gorilla Games (imagine two men holding a plank position, each trying to knock the other over), and SlapFIGHT Championship. Pro League’s strategy is clicks and views, endorsements and crossovers, with a hope of viability in a far-off future to be achieved through brute-force assault on social media users’ attention: look at how garish this all is, how absurd. How can you not share a clip with your followers? Wouldn’t the adrenaline spike of gambling be sweet relief from the gray malaise of the doomscroll? For now, betting on CarJitsu is only approved in New Jersey, but soon it will no doubt be available on the online sportsbooks where almost one quarter of Americans have accounts. As for what the athletes feel when they stuff their opponent into the floorboard or bend his arm backward over the door panel, none of my friends was willing to risk a cracked windshield to let me find out. But non-car jiujitsu, speaking from experience, gives you a fleeting sense of pure consequence: existence compressed, intensified, and reduced to a small set of problems—how to submit another person and not be submitted, how to control and not be controlled. The stars of CarJitsu—like the “Mexicutioner” and the “Seatbelt Assassin”—are not, and will never be, athletes in the sense that Saquon Barkley is an athlete. They are the carnies of our time, setting up shop on YouTube rather than in muddy fields in whistlestop towns. CarJitsu is meant to go viral, which means it is destined to peak and die off. Its medium is the chronic nonchalance born of overexposure: Who can say anymore how many gifs they’ve looked at, how many unlikely animal friendship videos, how many individual gigabytes of inanity make up the sea of virtual shit that washes over us daily? It is a single-use sport, a fresh relic like the artificial ruins fashionable in eighteenth-century Europe, a reminder of the destruction wrought by time. Look upon my backseat bloodshed, ye mighty, and despair.

Changing Lanes

America’s most popular declining sport

Dave Denison

© Em Aull

I told myself it was a matter of gaining “tournament experience.” The bowling coach in my head was barking encouragement. Get out there and compete. You miss every shot you don’t take. You think you’re a good bowler? How well can you bowl when there’s money on the line? But by now, after a couple decades of trying, I have low expectations. I’m an underachiever under pressure. I’ve bowled poorly in every tournament I’ve ever entered. This one would be the same.

It was the first day of March, and I was driving two hours north to Vermont from my home in Massachusetts to take part in the fifty-second annual Green Mountain Open. By the time I got to the Rutland Bowlerama, the sleet had turned to spitting snow. Getting out of my car, I took a moment to admire the vintage sign that beckons to drivers along this commercial strip: four jumbo colored letters that spell bowl, with the O in the shape of a black bowling ball. I wheeled my ball caddy into the Bowlerama. It carries my best strike ball, a fifteen-pound Hammer Black Widow, and two fourteen-pound balls I use for spares.

Inside, the noon squads were in full swing. The roll and the clatter. To me, the place looked like the perfect bowling center: traditional but modern, with thirty-two well-lit lanes. Buzzing with activity. My usual pre-bowling mood—why am I doing this?—instantly changed to this is exactly where I want to be. I sized up the bowlers. Men and women of all styles, mostly middle-aged or older. There were five-person teams down toward one end and doubles teams filling up most of the rest of the lanes. I was set to bowl in the singles competition at 2:30 p.m. I noticed a banner above the pins in the middle lanes commemorating a rare event: a local bowler named Jon Wilbur rolled a 900 series here on January 14, 2019. That’s the pinnacle of bowling: three consecutive 300 games, which means thirty-six strikes in a row. There are only forty bowlers in America who have achieved that feat in the last three decades, according to the United States Bowling Congress (USBC), which maintains records and sets the rules for league bowling and tournaments.

I headed down to the office marked “Tournament Director” and introduced myself to presiding honcho Tom Smyrski. Yes, he had received the entry form I’d faxed to him in February; all that was left now was paying the $36 fee and getting my lane assignment. Reentries were allowed, meaning if I didn’t like the result of my three games, I could pay another $36 and bowl again in the 4:30 p.m. slot. For that matter, I could come back later in the season; the tournament ran on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays all the way through May 4. The prize fund, assuming this year’s number of entries would be similar to last year’s, was estimated to be around $60,000. That gets divided up between a lot of winners and strong finishers. Let’s just say if I’d happened to get an extremely hot hand and notched the highest score in the singles category—and nobody from then until May topped it—I could have walked away with about $2,000.

I did not register such a score, of course. In fact, I bowled below my regular league average in the first two games and only managed a ho-hum 197 in the third. Alternating between two lanes, as one does in competitive play, I bowled with three gentlemen from Connecticut. They introduced themselves. I remarked to the one named Lou Weber that he had a good name for a bowler; Dick Weber was one of the greatest bowlers in the sport’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. His son Pete Weber is perhaps the most famous pro bowler in America today, known to even non-bowlers because of the viral video of the time he won a tournament with a clutch strike in his final shot. Pumping his fist and gesticulating wildly, Weber turned toward a young fan he thought was rooting against him and shouted the now-immortal koan, “Who do you think you are? I am!” Lou Weber laughed and said he wished he was from that Weber family.

As I struggled to find a good shot, I glanced up at the monitor a couple lanes to my right and noticed that a woman named Darlene, looking like she had just walked off the set of Laverne and Shirley, was hitting all her spares and closed out with six straight strikes. This is what is called for in tournament play: you have to be touched by an angel. You’ve got to be in the zone. You have to bowl above your usual capabilities—in all three games. One of the men on our lane, Charlie Laskowski, reeled off six strikes and recorded a 247 in his second game. But he dropped to 156 in the third. Lou Weber threw three solid games above 220 and finished three pins short of a 700 series. At the end of the tournament’s first weekend, he was in first place in the singles category. I thought, Enjoy it while it lasts! The top bowlers tend to hang back and swoop in later when they’ve gauged what they’re up against. Last year’s winner broke 800.

When our round was over, I learned that Laskowski was the organizer of thirty-one bowlers who drove up from Connecticut. Many of them made a weekend out of it, skiing and bowling. He’s got an arthritic knee and hip, he told me, which limits his time on the slopes. He was limping while bowling, and by the third game, the stiffness seemed to catch up with him. Stocky and sixtyish, you wouldn’t take Laskowski for an athlete. But he knows what to do with a bowling ball, how to release it, where to put it on the lane. Even in professional bowling, the styles of delivery vary wildly; some bowlers are graceful and fluid, others are herky-jerky. The canny bowlers know how their ball will react to the oil on the lane, and they know what combination of velocity and spin will get it to hit the pins just right. But the lane conditions are always changing. What worked last week may not work next week. Even as a tournament is in progress, the oil gets streaky or dries up in spots. What worked for a game or two might not keep working. Experienced bowlers know how to adjust.

To be a bowler is to be at war with change. You feel it in the moment as you are bowling. But you also feel it whenever industry leaders talk about the need to “evolve.” You worry about looming transitions, as the bowling business struggles to adapt to the times. In my brief conversation with Laskowski, it became clear that this tournament, at this mostly unchanged place, is an annual ritual, a refuge. He told me something that impressed me as much as his ability to hit 247 while hobbled: this was his forty-fourth year bowling in the Green Mountain Open.

Pin City

Bowling is an old sport—ancient, really—but it’s not easy to maintain traditions like Laskowski’s long-running Vermont pilgrimage. There’s a lot of churn in the bowling world; alleys go out of business all the time. I bowled in leagues for several years at a venerable old heap just outside of Boston. Opened in 1942 and originally called the Turnpike Bowladrome (for its location on the Concord Turnpike in Cambridge), it had one level devoted to candlepin bowling, a once-popular New England variant, and an upper floor for regular tenpin. I met people in the leagues with whom I would otherwise never have rubbed shoulders: a genial postal worker with noticeably less genial political views; a retired military man who also ran the nearby Air Force base’s bowling alley; and a Thai immigrant who told me he developed his technique by watching YouTube videos—he delivered the ball with a precise, balletic style. I even got to know the mechanic who fixed the automatic pinsetters and ran the machine that oiled the lanes. But developers had been eyeing the land for years, and finally, in its seventy-fifth year, the place then called Lanes & Games fell to the wrecking ball, replaced by a “luxury” apartment complex.

Most longtime bowlers can tell a similar story. Their home lanes were sitting on land too valuable to justify its use as a bowling alley. Or their family-owned center had no one to maintain the business. Or there just weren’t as many regulars as there used to be. It’s been said that the industry overbuilt when the development of automatic pinsetters in the 1940s led to a bowling boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Bowling leagues were especially popular in the industrial Midwest, where factory workers could bowl and drink beer after a shift. Budweiser sponsored a team in 1954 that launched bowlers Dick Weber and Don Carter to fame. Four years later, the Professional Bowlers Association was founded in Akron, Ohio, giving superstars like Weber, Carter, and the dominant left-hander Earl Anthony the chance to go on tour and make a good living.

But the number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades. The number was down to about 3,800 in 2023, according to the USBC. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously cited the decline of league bowling in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as one of many indicators that civic engagement was collapsing across America, noting that league bowling declined by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993. The updated figure is even more dramatic: from a high of about 9.8 million league bowlers at the end of the 1970s, the number of USBC members in leagues for the 2022–23 season was 1.09 million. That’s a decline of 89 percent.

Despite his book’s title, Putnam’s discussion of bowling takes up about four pages in a five-hundred-page tome. It occurs in a chapter about “informal social connections.” After documenting dwindling participation in political and civic groups, as well as falling membership in unions and attendance at religious services, he notes that fewer people are playing cards, having dinner with friends, and going on picnics. In fact, he points out, bowling was one of the only sports that hadn’t seen major declines in overall participation in recent decades. But he saw the drop-off in league bowling specifically as worrisome. “By requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances,” he writes, it represents “a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by an occasional pickup game.”

It’s true that bowling with a diverse group of acquaintances—as I do in my current league—can widen one’s horizons. But the distinction Putnam makes between league bowlers and those he sees as “bowling alone” is one he conjured from statistics rather than from immersion in actual bowling culture. There’s not always a clear line: for several years, I met for regular Sunday morning bowling with a couple of close friends, and a wider circle of their friends. We named our informal league and kept stats. That variety of “recreational league,” which doesn’t register with the USBC, exists in bowling centers around the country. Often based on strong bonds rather than weak ones, it would also be an important form of social capital, though harder to quantify. Even the aspersions cast on the solitary bowler make no sense to a regular bowler if taken literally. The people we see bowling solo are inevitably there for practice because they are in a league.

Putnam’s contention, though, was that something vast had shifted in the culture. He noticed that while participation in most sports had dropped in recent decades, people were spending more time and money watching athletic events. Television and other electronic media were keeping people in their homes, he argued. His conclusion is even harder to refute today, when so many people are living virtual lives. And he’s not wrong that bowling leagues don’t fit into people’s lives the way they did at the middle of the last century.

Yet the decline in league bowling wasn’t just because people turned into couch potatoes. The disappearance of factory jobs, which gave working life regular and reliable rhythms, was bad for a lot of urban bowling alleys. Historian Andrew Hurley has noted that before World War II many industrial firms sponsored bowling teams for their workers, with some of the largest plants supporting as many as two hundred teams. “In heavily industrialized cities where many factories operated around the clock,” Hurley wrote, “it was not uncommon to find alleys hosting leagues on three separate shifts during weekdays.” The gradual deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s took away these core customers and created a vicious cycle. The consolidation of the bowling business made it harder for bowlers to stay in a league: when a neighborhood bowling center closes, league bowlers are left high and dry. Many of the people I bowled with at our now-demolished center haven’t quit occasional bowling, but the loss of the local lanes ended their league participation.

More so than with most other sports, bowlers exist in a relentlessly commercial arena. If you want to practice tennis or basketball, you can go out to a public court. Stay all day if you want; no charge. If you want to get better at throwing a baseball or football, all you need is an open space and someone to practice with. But outside of competitive collegiate bowling and the active practice of the sport on military bases, bowlers depend on proprietors, who need to sustain a capital-intensive business. When factory-sponsored leagues declined, the bowling industry embarked on a ceaseless campaign to find new customers, often alienating the older ones in the process. Do proprietors want to run a center for serious bowlers? Or do they want a recreation center with rock-climbing walls and minigolf, blacklight bowling, and “family fun”?

I asked Tom Smyrski at the Rutland Bowlerama, who is now in his twenty-eighth year running the Green Mountain tournament, whether participation has fallen off. He looked at a bunch of sheets posted on his office wall. Entries peaked most recently in 2016, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, the tournament had to shut down early—and was cancelled for 2021. Now the numbers are slowly recovering; when we met, Smyrski expected about 1,200 people to bowl in the GMO this year. But youth participation at the Bowlerama is not what it used to be. “We used to fill this place up with kids,” Smyrski told me. Not so much anymore. “I think bowling is going downhill,” he said.

Bowling has been going downhill for a long time. Still, the outlook isn’t uniformly grim. On the very day I was bowling in Rutland, the USBC’s annual nationwide Open Championship for league bowlers kicked off in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (It runs through July.) The USBC claims that the Open Championship is “the world’s largest annual participatory sporting event, attracting 45,000 to 75,000 participants.”

More than fifty million Americans bowl at least once during the year, according to the most recent survey of American sports participation by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). Bowling outranks golf, tennis, basketball, yoga—just about all fitness activities, other than hiking, running, and walking. It’s even ahead of pickleball, the fastest-growing sport, now at nearly twenty million players. It’s true that the majority of occasional bowlers are just out to chuck a ball down a lane. But with more than a million league bowlers around the nation—and over eight million people considered by SFIA to be “core participants,” defined as bowling at least thirteen times a year—the trade in high-end bowling balls, shoes, and other equipment is strong. And as long as alleys find ways to draw new customers, there will always be those who start trying to figure out how to get good. (One way is to buy a better bowling ball.) Some will get sucked in, start competing regularly, and end up hooked on the most popular declining sport in America.

Grab Your Balls

The first thing Tom Smyrski told me in Rutland was that the Bowlerama was “a family-owned operation.” The center was opened in 1956 by Guido and Clementine Forte. Their sons Guido and Clement kept it going, and it is run today by three of their sons, the third generation of Fortes. That’s the business model that is now in jeopardy. What’s taking over, naturally, is big corporate chain ownership. Take Bowlero Corp., which has been buying up independent bowling alleys, often those that haven’t seen any new investment since the 1980s, and renovating them with the signature Bowlero look: vaguely retro but full of neon lights and thumping music for a more clubbish atmosphere. The company has bought out family businesses and small to mid-sized chains such as Lucky Strike, AMF, and Brunswick Zone. With more than three hundred locations, and plans to grow to about seven hundred, Bowlero is now the largest bowling chain in the world. By the end of 2024, the company had rebranded as Lucky Strike Entertainment, signaling their plans to expand beyond bowling into the operation of family entertainment centers and water parks.

In a widely discussed investigation last year for The Lever, journalist Amos Barshad found that Bowlero’s boom was enabled by private equity groups like Apollo Global Management and Atairos. “As the company has expanded,” he wrote, “it has amassed massive debts, all while successfully enriching its founder and CEO.” Barshad included comments made by that CEO, Tom Shannon, that have not endeared him to the community of hardcore bowlers: “‘I don’t think anyone takes bowling seriously,’ he once said. ‘Why would you?’” Shannon had entered the business in the late 1990s with the purchase of the Bowlmor center in Manhattan’s Union Square. As he expanded under the Bowlmor and later the Bowlero and Lucky Strike brands, he pursued a vision to make bowling a more “upscale” part of the urban nightlife scene. He made his famous comment about the unserious and “ironic” side of bowling in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg Enterprise. He later clarified that the statement “was made in the context of ‘our’ bowlers, and Bowlmor customers don’t take the game seriously.”

By 2013, Bowlmor had absorbed AMF, and Shannon’s new company ran 264 U.S. bowling centers and eight in Mexico. His strategy all along has been to downplay league bowling. In an interview with Bowlers Journal International in 2014, he reasoned, “More people go out on a Saturday than on a Tuesday.” You didn’t have to read between the lines to see that he considered weeknight league bowling a relic of the past. Bowlero’s purchase of the Professional Bowlers Association in 2019 caused even greater alarm. Shannon likes to go on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money to talk up his company’s share prices; he once again alienated bowlers when he suggested his interest in the PBA was mainly “as an infomercial” for the Bowlero brand. Earlier this spring, bowling fans worried that Bowlero would bring an end to the moderate success the PBA has found in broadcasting its events on Fox in recent years: the contract with Fox was set to expire in June, and according to PBA commissioner Tom Clark, negotiations for renewal were ongoing.

Meanwhile, purists lament a new trend dovetailing with the consolidation of the bowling industry. Several equipment companies are pushing a labor-saving innovation for proprietors called stringpins. Their sales pitch is that the automatic pinsetters of yesteryear, heavy equipment with thousands of parts, are too cumbersome and expensive; they require constant maintenance, which means having skilled mechanics on staff. The solution is a new simplified pinsetter, in which the ten pins have black nylon cords attached. The pins fall and are pulled up by the cords and reset. One of the selling points is that you can lay off the mechanics; another is that stringpin setters use much less electricity.

I recall reading about stringpins back in 2012. A Kansas City firm called White Hutchinson, which advises companies in “location-based leisure & entertainment,” produced a report called It’s time to reinvent the game of bowling. Their idea was to move away from the heavy bowling balls some customers found “intimidating” and to revive duckpin bowling, which uses short, squat pins and a smaller ball. The problem was that no company was manufacturing pinsetters for the declining game of duckpins. White Hutchinson noted that stringpin setters have been around since 1963 and are in use around the world. So, combine the game of duckpins with stringpin setters, and you have the future of bowling! It sounded ludicrous. I had never been to a duckpins alley; though there are a few in New England, they’re mostly concentrated in Maryland. And I assumed no real bowling alleys would want to fiddle around with cords. I was wrong. The Los Angeles Times reported two years ago that alleys nationwide, including six of Bowlero’s two dozen centers in Southern California, were ditching traditional pinsetters. Both of the Boston-area centers I resorted to after the 2017 demise of Lanes & Games have recently converted.

It’s likely that the industry’s “innovations” won’t make any difference to the families who take the kids to the lanes for a birthday party or to the Saturday night crowd. But they cause many active bowlers to worry about the end of the sport as they know it. I used to bowl with a transplanted Midwesterner who refused to recognize candlepin bowling or duckpins as real bowling. A while ago, he drove to one of our occasional back-up centers called Boston Bowl, known for staying open late and offering both candlepin and tenpin. After a few frames at the tenpin end, he realized to his horror that he was rolling the ball at pins on strings. He left quickly, never to return. Nor has he patronized Town Line Ten Pin, in nearby Malden. Town Line became Town Line Luxury Lanes a few years ago, adding leather seats and going for a more upscale vibe. Now it’s also a stringpin center.

In the interest of journalistic inquiry, I decided I would make a February road trip to take in some of the latest developments. I dropped in on a Bowlero in the old mill town of Lowell and then drove to Town Line. It was a Sunday afternoon, the worst time to go. The Bowlero was noisy and crowded, with the lights dim and the music loud. When I started to bowl, the tired old 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling” assaulted my ears. I was bowling next to an elderly man—yes, bowling alone—who competes in two senior leagues during the week. He assured me that during the weekdays, the lights are up, and the music is off. To its credit, the center hasn’t given up on leagues. The attendant told me that local league bowlers who come to practice get a discount, plus eight free games a week. For the rest of us, it’s pricey. I paid $42.45 for five games. That’s the Bowlero model: raise prices and cut costs.

It’s the same formula at Town Line in Malden. I bowled three games ($28), trying to discern what felt different when the pins are on cords. There were a few times a corner pin fell over when I’m pretty sure it hadn’t been grazed by another pin. But for the most part, the companies have worked diligently to make the change unnoticeable to the recreational bowler, designing the system so that the cords are almost invisible. After the ball hits, a dark partition drops down to hide the puppetry.

Still, I wouldn’t return, even if I lived in Malden. Someone had mentioned that the owner of Town Line has had many business interests, including a trailer park and a nightclub. When I got home, I looked him up. A banner on his Facebook page depicts the president with his fist raised (fight, fight, fight) and a billboard that says pray for trump. He also turned up in the Boston Herald in a story from 2018: his sixty-eight-year-old father, described as “the wealthy patriarch of a North Shore business dynasty,” had tried to run him down with an SUV in the Town Line parking lot. The son was reported to have suffered chest and arm injuries. Turns out the elder had accused his scion of stealing $2 million, and the son was suing his father for breach of contract and “fraudulent misrepresentation.” Family fun at the luxury lanes!

© Em Aull

Bowling League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Hijinks like the parking lot assault at Town Line are a reminder of bowling’s ambiguous place in American life. In the early decades of the last century, bowling alleys were seedy places, often in underground establishments devoted to tobacco and gambling. Boris Karloff is shot in a bowling alley in the 1932 movie Scarface, not the last time bowling would figure in film noir. But then, in the post-World War II era, bowling centers opened up in suburban areas and marketed themselves as family friendly. It’s these contradictory registers that 1998’s The Big Lebowski revels in. As literature and film professor Bradley D. Clissold of Memorial University in Newfoundland wrote several years ago, Lebowski’s Hollywood Star Lanes is “decidedly no PG-13 bowling alley. Patrons liberally curse, smoke, and drink alcohol”—not to mention that “one of the regular league bowlers is a known convicted pedophile.” (The vintage Hollywood Star Lanes, where Lebowski was filmed, opened in 1960 but hasn’t survived: it was demolished in 2002.)

Perfidy, however, was not what I was looking for on my February excursions. What I had in mind was someone who ran a bowling alley as if they liked traditional bowling. Where were the bowling proprietors forging their own way, looking for a promising path for traditional bowling outside the Bowlero juggernaut? Who see a future that doesn’t envision duckpins on strings or otherwise turning bowling into a carnival game? For that, I traveled to Bayside Bowl in Portland, Maine, having heard the center was drawing league bowlers from far and wide. Something of a phenomenon in the bowling world, Bayside opened in 2010 with twelve lanes in an old warehouse in a neglected part of the city. It expanded to twenty lanes in 2016. Along the way, it attracted the interest of the PBA, which brought televised events to the center, where an avid fan base created a new kind of “electric” atmosphere that at first unsettled pro bowlers used to a more sedate environment.

Bayside is unlike any other alley I know. The aesthetic is industrial but modern. It is airy, with natural light and better food and music than in the old-style centers. Nor does it create the overstimulating, neon-lit pandemonium of the modern chains. I wanted to know how this place became so popular while bucking the industry trends that are ruining the experience for so many of us. I set up an appointment with the owner, Charlie Mitchell. Mitchell, a Maine native, had previously lived in New Orleans, where he bowled at the legendary Rock’n’Bowl, known for its live music. Later, he worked as a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., before moving back to Maine in 2007. Wanting to recreate the camaraderie he found down South and then in a softball league he joined while in Washington, Mitchell and some friends formed a bowling league at a local Portland center. It grew fast and attracted a beer-drinking, fun-loving crowd—and a waiting list for those who wanted to join. But he sensed the old-timers looking askance at the new blood.

One member of the league was Justin Alfond, whose family had owned the Dexter Shoe Company, specializing in, among other things, bowling shoes. Mitchell and Alfond had both served in the Maine legislature, where Alfond eventually became the Senate president. The two of them decided to open their own place, where they were free to create a newer, less staid style. That meant better music and better beer, but also bowling leagues that could become central to the business. The original twelve-lane center opened to a strong clientele; the active league that had formed across town took up at Bayside. It remained a heavy drinking crowd, Mitchell admits, recounting that the first time they brought PBA bowlers in—a non-televised event—things got so wild that some pros ended up bowling barefoot or shirtless.

In 2020, Mitchell became the sole owner. “Everything here is designed around treating bowling like a sport,” he said. Somehow, he has managed to appeal to recreational bowlers, casual league bowlers, and serious bowlers at the top of their game. It wasn’t by accident, Mitchell said. He traveled the country looking at successful bowling centers. He revisited New Orleans, went to Garage Billiards and Bowl in Seattle—now also absorbed by Big Bowlero—and Brooklyn Bowl in New York. His instinct was that a youngish affluent crowd in Portland would respond to something that featured live music, good food and drink, and that could even host weddings. But their success was also built on the networks from Mitchell’s days with an active league. They drew on what Putnam would identify as social capital.

Mitchell’s latest initiative was to replicate the Bayside model in a second location. A rival bowling alley made a go of it in South Portland but was hit hard by the pandemic. The pinsetting machines were not well maintained, resulting in a lot of breakdowns. The ownership didn’t seem to care about bowling, Mitchell said. So he bought the place and refurbished it in the style of Bayside. It’s now an appealing ten-lane center called Broadway Bowl that looks out over the Fore River. Yet, he conceded, “we’ve had a little bit more of a challenge than we thought, developing a bowling culture over there.” South Portland, he said, is more working class than the central city, and there was no built-in league base to bolster Broadway Bowl. As I rolled a few games, then ordered a sandwich and tater tots for lunch, I saw another obvious factor: though slightly cheaper than Bayside, it’s not an inexpensive outing.

After we spoke at Bayside, Mitchell took me behind the pindecks where we got the rearview of the early 1960s vintage Brunswick pinsetters. He employs one of the best mechanics in the area, he said, and is too much of a traditionalist to consider a stringpin conversion, but he understands the pressures pulling that way, especially the energy savings. Eventually, he predicted, most big commercial centers will make the transition. The Bayside style may survive in a few cities where iconoclastic proprietors can tap into an affluent base and create new enthusiasm for league bowling. Meanwhile, in bowling strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin, the small-time centers that have kept bowling affordable by avoiding the glitz will keep getting visits from the stringpin salesmen and perhaps eventually field an offer from the Bowlero division of Lucky Strike Entertainment.

Ducky Strikes

And now, a final twist. On the way home from Portland, I was heading right toward one of only two surviving duckpin centers in Massachusetts. It’s located in North Chelmsford just across the Merrimack River from the Bowlero in Lowell. The pin gods were leading me to believe I had come to that moment in life when it was time to give duckpin bowling a try. I’d bowled candlepins before and was blasé about it. But duckpins turned out to be surprisingly fun.

Having set out to explore the future of bowling, I ended up spending a glorious hour with its past. North Chelmsford Lanes is a tiny subterranean grotto with six lanes. It’s run by Ron Hennessey and his wife, Robin. Hennessey, who is sixty-five, bought it a few years ago from John DePalma, a top-level duckpin bowler who had operated it since 1974. He told me there used to be eight duckpin centers just in the Lowell area alone. This one has been in business since 1943. The current pinsetters are the same ones that were installed in 1959; Hennessy is the sole mechanic. “I call this place a bowling alley frozen in time,” he said, and you can see why.

Hennessey put a ball in my hand. It was the size of a bocce ball, slightly larger than the one used in candlepin bowling. He showed me how to use the score sheet, going down the column vertically instead of across the page. As in candlepin, you get three shots per frame. But you press a button to sweep away the “deadwood” between shots. The pins are shapely like regular pins but short and squat. They tend to fly up and scatter like ducks hearing a shotgun, hence the name.

I rolled a game and registered seventy-six. It seemed almost impossible to get strikes, and difficult to get spares. Nobody’s ever rolled a perfect game in duckpins or in candlepins. Hennessey walked me down the old wooden lane, which has no sheen of oil. The pinsetters were straight out of the industrial age, all visible levers and gears. It was thrilling to see them up close, to imagine these same machines working as designed, week after week, now in their sixty-sixth year.

Hennessey coached me through a second game, keeping score. I started hitting a few spares and managed to break one hundred. There were four women on lanes one and two, practicing. They’re in a weeknight league. They called my attention to a letterboard on the wall that listed a couple of them in the “Women’s 300 Club.” It took a moment to register, but I realized that meant three straight games above a hundred. Hennessey pointed out a few scoresheets posted on the entryway wall, showing bowlers who’ve broken two hundred. The lines showed spares all the way down, with a few strikes mixed in.

I could imagine trying to get good at this. If I someday end up with arthritic knees or hips, this game would be less taxing on my joints. Too bad I’ve discovered duckpins just as it’s dying out. Could I have been a contender? The spell broke on the way home. I started pondering once again my difficulty in tenpin tournaments. It’s not impossible to solve; I just need more practice. If I could round up a few teammates by this time next year, I’d like to bowl again in the Green Mountain Open, this time in the team events, the doubles, and the singles. After that, we could make the trip to Reno for the 2026 USBC Open. I want the tournament experience while I’m still able to hoist a fifteen-pound ball. And while bowling is still bowling.

Heavy Betting

Las Vegas gambles on the big leagues

David Hill

© Irene Suosalo

In the pre-dawn hours one Monday morning following the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, a fight broke out at Minxx Gentleman’s Club & Lounge on Wynn Road in Las Vegas. A patron had been throwing cash all over the club from a garbage bag full of bills. A brawl ensued, and the man with the bag of money was tossed from the club by two men, a bouncer and club manager Tommy Urbanski. Outside of the club, shots rang out. Hit four times, Urbanski survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.

A fight in a Vegas strip club isn’t usually front-page news, but the man with the bag was the NFL player Adam “Pacman” Jones—and the alleged shooter, accused of doing the bidding of Jones, was eventually sentenced to up to ten years in prison. The shooting at Minxx was the culmination of a weekend of chaos across the city; the Las Vegas Sun reported that “403 people were arrested from Thursday to Monday night, more than half in relation to prostitution.”

It was meant to be something of an experiment: the first time the All-Star Game had ever been held in a city that didn’t have an NBA franchise. To many, the weekend was seen as an audition for Las Vegas, where the mayor, Oscar Goodman, had made no secret of how eager he was to woo a professional sports franchise to the growing city. Goodman worked hard to develop personal relationships with many of the commissioners of the major sports leagues. His dogged pursuit of the NBA’s David Stern led to Stern telling Goodman that Vegas would only have an NBA team “over my dead body.” (“That can be arranged,” Goodman jokingly replied.) But Goodman didn’t give up, and the All-Star Game was his first breakthrough.

Las Vegas had long coveted pro sports, but no league wanted to be associated with Sin City, or at least with one sin in particular: gambling on sports. Prior to the 2007 All-Star Game, all attempts to bring a team to Vegas had come up short. That event signaled a thawing of the icy attitudes held by the sports-industrial complex toward the city. But by the time the sun came up on Monday morning, Mayor Goodman was receiving calls from casino owners and league officials. If the weekend had been an audition, Las Vegas wasn’t going to book the part.

It was a setback for Goodman, a former mob lawyer who famously played himself in the movie Casino. By 1999, the year he was elected, the city had undergone a stunning makeover. Las Vegas had long had a reputation as a seedy place, visited largely by gambling junketeers and men looking to cheat on their wives. The 1990s saw a dramatic shift in the focus of the casino business from gambling toward conventions and family tourism. Palaces of swank and excess were replaced by pirate ships, roller coasters, and medieval castles. Instead of blackjack and free booze, fine dining and world class entertainment became the draw. By the time Goodman was elected mayor, Las Vegas had eclipsed Chicago as the top convention destination in America, less than half of casino revenue came from gambling, and the city was experiencing a construction boom of mega resorts that employed tens of thousands, with at least five thousand people moving to Las Vegas every month.

Goodman was elected on a platform that highlighted three major policy goals: develop a cultural centerpiece for the city, upgrade the community’s medical facilities, and land a major-league sports franchise. He pulled off the first two, adding a number of museums and performing arts centers during his tenure, as well as playing a role in establishing the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. But big-league sports? That proved more challenging.

For many decades, Las Vegas had no hope of attracting a major league. The only sport that wanted anything to do with the city was boxing, which had always been closely associated with gambling and never seemed to mind. In fact, Las Vegas was considered the boxing capital of the world, host to numerous marquee fights over the years, stretching all the way back to when Archie Moore and Nino Valdes fought for the heavyweight title at old Cashman Field in 1955. Outside of boxing, leagues and team owners were in lockstep opposition to sports gambling and feared that Nevada’s strong gambling culture could lead to influences on game outcomes. And even if they didn’t, the public might assume as much, which would hurt the credibility and integrity of the sport.

From as far back as the 1950s, public support for gambling (outside of the Northeast, anyway) had been low. The anti-tax attitude that swept the country in the 1970s, however, paved the way for the spread of gambling as one state after another turned to lotteries or casinos to fill budget gaps created by tax cuts. As more Americans had access to gambling closer to home, the stigma started to wither away. But while gambling grew into a major industry across much of America, sports betting was only legal in one state: Nevada. While millions of Americans were playing the lottery or pumping nickels into slot machines at home entirely legally, betting on sports remained the province of underground bookies and illicit gamblers. And betting on sports was the one type of gambling that actually saw public support decrease during the last half of the twentieth century.

Gambling scandals involving high-profile athletes like Pete Rose and Michael Jordan likely contributed to a general feeling that gambling and sports shouldn’t mix. The stigma persisted, with Las Vegas bearing the brunt, even though betting on sports was legal and regulated in Nevada. As far as the leagues were concerned, association with Las Vegas was association with sports betting, which was no better than associating with criminals. This attitude was so extreme the NFL rejected the city’s bid in 2003 to run one of their famous “What Happens Here, Stays Here” promotional ads during the Super Bowl and forbade NBC from airing any ads for the drama Las Vegas during any NFL broadcasts.

Meanwhile, the boom in Las Vegas had produced a city like none other in the United States. The rapidly growing hospitality workforce had been highly unionized since the 1940s. As a result of a strong local labor movement, the jobs each new casino development created came with high pay and good benefits, including employer-paid health insurance and pensions. These jobs brought more job seekers to the city than there were good union jobs to give out, leading to high levels of inequality. Nevada’s lack of income tax also made Vegas an attractive destination, but this, too, created problems. With so many people moving to the city in such a short period of time, public services were pushed to their limits, and schools were underfunded and overcrowded.

Vegas’s limited tax base also made it difficult to attract a sports team. Throughout the 1990s, owners of professional sports teams were increasingly asking state and local governments to provide tax breaks or even public money for the construction of stadiums and arenas. The old canard usually offered as a justification was that a pro team would invigorate the local economy with tourists spending money in local businesses. This has largely been debunked over the years, as we now know that professional sports franchises produce almost no benefit relative to the public money they take and are sometimes even a net negative for local economies and governments.

For Las Vegans, however, the arguments for public financing were unpersuasive even at face value. The city hardly needed sports to bring in tourists or to convince people to spend more money in their town. For the millions of new Las Vegans, and for their new mayor, having a sports team was less an economic proposition for the new millennium than a civic one. In 2007, Las Vegas had 1.7 million residents, more than twice as many as in 1990. But despite being as big or even larger than many metropolitan areas that already had pro teams, Las Vegans couldn’t shake the feeling they were invisible to the forty million people who visited the city every year. To Goodman, who grew up in sports-obsessed Philadelphia, having a professional team would show the world that Las Vegas was an actual city that didn’t necessarily belong to the tourists, one that continued to exist even after they flew back home.

Casino No Aware

Even had the 2007 All-Star Weekend run smoothly, the city would have had to contend with its lack of a facility capable of hosting a major-league sports franchise. At the time, the hotel and casino company Harrah’s was in the process of securing funding for a twenty-thousand-seat arena they hoped would serve as a sports facility. Like a lot of wealthy sports team owners, Harrah’s felt the city or state should foot some of the bill. Unlike a lot of wealthy sports team owners, the company failed to secure any public funding. While leaders of the casino industry were major power brokers in Nevada, they were less powerful when the casinos didn’t all align. The other casino companies opposed any public support for a sports arena. “It makes no sense to us to take the tax dollars we’re creating and build another competitor down the street,” Alan Feldman, a spokesperson for MGM Mirage, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. It would hardly matter, as the 2008 financial crisis hit Las Vegas particularly hard, putting major construction projects in the city on ice.

By 2012 the economy in Las Vegas seemed to be on the rebound, and the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns a number of sports teams and stadiums around the world, including the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles, had decided Las Vegas deserved a shot at hosting professional sports. They partnered with MGM to build a multipurpose facility on the Strip that would meet both NHL and NBA standards. Most importantly, they financed it with $375 million of entirely private funds, something increasingly uncommon in modern professional sports. Of the fifty-seven stadiums built between 2000 and 2020 in the United States, forty-three were at least partially funded with municipal bonds. The construction of the arena prompted businessman Bill Foley to organize a consortium of investors to make a bid for an NHL expansion team. The league was skeptical there would be support for ice hockey in the desert, so the ownership group set out to get commitments for season tickets. They sold ten thousand in fewer than six months. The NHL unanimously approved the bid, and the Vegas Golden Knights were set to be the NHL’s newest franchise in October of 2017.

On October 1, just nine days before the Golden Knights’ season opener, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at a music festival from his room in the Mandalay Bay, killing fifty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. When the team played their first home game, the mood was somber, but the community chose to rally around the team, hoisting banners in the arena that read #vegasstrong and holding a ceremony to honor the victims before the game. Incredibly, the expansion team made it to the Stanley Cup finals in their inaugural season, with “Vegas Strong” as their rallying cry all season long, and the city of Las Vegas went crazy for hockey in the process. Just as Oscar Goodman had predicted years before, the team served as a bond for the community and gave the once-invisible citizens of Las Vegas a platform upon which to be seen.

The success of the Golden Knights proved that Las Vegas was a viable sports city. Mark Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders NFL team, had long wanted to move his team to Las Vegas. The last time he suggested it to one of the league’s executives in 2014, he was laughed at. Now he saw a new opening. He partnered with Sheldon Adelson, billionaire owner of the Venetian hotel and prominent backer of Donald Trump, to help him find public financing. While the Harrah’s arena deal didn’t take off ten years before, Adelson seemed to have more political juice in Nevada, securing a record $750 million in public funds for a new football stadium in Las Vegas. The deal—then the largest public contribution to a stadium in American history—did not pass without controversy. While excited about the prospect of an NFL team, Las Vegans were generally against the idea of publicly financing it. State legislators came up with a compromise that allowed residents to have their cake and eat it too: fund the stadium with a tax on hotel rooms. The tourists would pay for the stadium, not the citizens of Las Vegas.

The bill passed the House on a 28-13 vote without allowing any time for debate. By promising thousands of union construction jobs, the deal’s supporters successfully courted unions to help them lobby for the arena. The real power broker was Adelson, however. State senators voted to absolve themselves from reporting any conflicts of interest around the bill, probably because so many of them had taken campaign money from Adelson. Even still, opposition was bipartisan, with one Republican legislator from Sparks, Ira Hansen, calling the deal a “disgrace.” “The big power players got their way and the real losers are the Nevada taxpayers,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. While there was general agreement that a tax on hotel rooms would be less of a burden on locals, the question remained: If we can raise nearly a billion dollars from raising taxes on tourists, why don’t we use it for things like education and housing? “If you think it’s worth it socially, culturally to have a football team, then it’s fine to vote for it,” Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist who studies sports stadium deals, told the Gazette-Journal. “Just don’t do it if you think it’s an economic benefit. It’s an economic cost.”

After a considerable amount of backroom wheeling and dealing, the NFL eventually approved moving the team from Oakland to Las Vegas on a 31-1 vote among team owners in 2017. The Raiders wouldn’t get to play a game in Las Vegas until 2020, however, continuing in the meantime to play in the Bay Area in front of their spurned fanbase. Less than a year after the Raiders’ first season in their new home, the NFL made a stunning announcement: the 2024 Super Bowl would be played in the Raiders’ stadium in Las Vegas. It seemed like only yesterday the NFL had rejected the city’s request to air a tourism ad during the Super Bowl broadcast. Now the game would be held right in the heart of the city that nearly all of professional sports once held to be too unholy to associate with.

Most observers agreed one factor trumped all others in the about-face by professional sports leagues on Las Vegas: the 2018 repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) that led to the widespread legalization of sports gambling. As soon as the Supreme Court overturned PASPA, dozens of states moved quickly to legalize and regulate betting on sports. Rafts of money from gambling interests began to flow into the sports industry, from media to ballparks to the teams themselves. Within a couple of years, not only were people in many of the NFL’s biggest markets betting on football legally, they were sometimes doing so right in the stadium. A study by the American Gaming Association predicted that the four major sports leagues combined stood to reap as much as $4.2 billion in additional revenue from things like advertisements, sponsorships, and data fees from sports betting companies. One by one, the major sports leagues ended their longstanding opposition to any association with gambling, signing deals with sportsbooks and gaming corporations and dropping any pretense of concern about the integrity of sports. The final stigma had given way, and Las Vegas could now stand shoulder to shoulder with the other major American cities, a pariah no more. As Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal remarked, “It’s as if the entire history of Las Vegas was leading up to hosting the Super Bowl.”

Strip Mining

Not long after news of the city landing the Super Bowl broke, Las Vegas lured another big-time sport. Liberty Media, an American company that had purchased the global motorsports league Formula 1 a few years before, announced plans to hold an annual race on the streets of Las Vegas. The league promised to bring its global fanbase and incredibly luxe line of sponsors to the city by racing the fastest cars in the world up and down the Las Vegas Strip.

The Super Bowl would be, by all accounts, a major success. Unlike the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, the city was well prepared for the influx of 330,000 visitors, leaving them and the NFL impressed at how well-suited Las Vegas was for hosting an event that had vexed, in its size and scale, some larger cities. Tickets sold for an average of $7,790, an all-time high. The economic impact to the city has been estimated at $1 billion, with additional tens of millions in tax revenue.

Formula 1, however, began to test the limits of Las Vegas’s appetite for professional sports. After originally promising locals they wouldn’t need any public financing for the race, the government ended up footing a $40 million bill to repave the roads. Added to this cost was the constant construction around the Strip for several months before and after the race, creating traffic and confusion for nearly half of the year, costing local businesses between $20 and $30 million. While locals could rally around the Golden Knights and the Raiders, as well as WNBA’s Aces (which had been the San Antonio Silver Stars until relocating in 2018), Formula 1 was different. Ticket prices were so outrageous only wealthy international tourists seemed to be able to afford them. Locals who were promised discounts found their tickets were only for practice sessions, not the actual race. By the time the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix arrived, “Fuck Formula 1” bumper stickers were a common sight around town. Voters were demanding the city council figure out a way to get out of the ten-year contract with Formula 1.

In October of 2024 the Tropicana Resort was imploded, a common and almost ritualistic occurrence along the Las Vegas skyline, where massive edifices are razed to the ground and rebuilt over and over to reflect the ever-changing American culture and zeitgeist. What is planned to go up in its place isn’t another garishly themed casino resort but a baseball park. The Oakland Athletics, who ranked dead last in attendance in the MLB the prior two seasons, announced they were planning to relocate to Vegas. No longer was Las Vegas considered a bold or risky choice for expansion. “I’m very excited about the opportunity in Vegas. The fans there are terrific,” said Athletics’ owner John Fisher, citing the success of the Raiders and the Golden Knights, as well as the Athletics own triple-A team, the Aviators. In contrast to the controversial machinations behind the Raiders move, the MLB’s vote to move the Athletics to Las Vegas was unanimous. The deal was sealed by the Nevada legislature, which passed a bill in 2023 allocating $380 million in public money for the construction of the new ballpark. The day after approving it, Republican governor Joe Lombardo vetoed a bill that would have provided Nevada school children with universal free breakfast and lunch, something Vicki Kreidel, an elementary school teacher and president of her local teacher’s union, called a “knife in the gut.” She and a number of other teachers filed a lawsuit against the state to block the funds for the new ballpark, arguing the funding violated the state’s constitution by diverting money away from education.

Their lawsuit was thrown out by a state judge, but the fact remains that Nevada—with its lack of income tax—has some serious deficiencies when it comes to public education. Clark County, where Las Vegas resides, has the fifth largest public school district in the country, with about three hundred thousand students and over thirteen hundred teacher vacancies. The state spends about $4,000 per student less than the recommended levels. The teachers’ lawsuit stated that “during the last Legislative Session, with important education issues outstanding . . . Nevada politicians singularly focused on financing a ‘world-class’ stadium for a California billionaire.” That California billionaire is John Fisher, heir to the family that founded the clothing retailer The Gap. He took full ownership of the Athletics in 2016, and under his watch the franchise (and the stadium) went to pieces. The Los Angeles Times reported that, during his tenure as team owner, the ballpark flooded with sewage, experienced power outages during games, and had feral animals roaming the corridors. Meanwhile, Fisher doubled season ticket prices.

In a poll released in April of 2024, 52 percent of Nevada voters were opposed to the public financing of the new stadium, with only 32 percent in favor. After losing their lawsuit, the teachers union collected signatures for a ballot measure to block the public financing deal. That effort was also shut down in court when a judge ruled the petitions didn’t include the full context of the referendum and as a result were “confusing” to those who signed. The union is currently working to collect signatures to try again in 2026.

All of this means that Fisher’s plan to bring the Athletics to Las Vegas is currently up in the air. Before he can access any of the public money now allocated for the stadium, he has to show the state that he has at least $100 million of his own money invested in the project. He has yet to do so, leading some to wonder whether Fisher is hesitating given the ongoing public fight. Were he to move forward with the deal and the union’s referendum were to pass in 2026, he may be left to foot the entire bill out of his inheritance rather than the public till. With other cities who might be more amenable to subsidizing the team, everyone patiently waits to see if Fisher will call or fold.

Both Oscar Goodman and his wife Caroyln, who succeeded Oscar as mayor, have at times been critical of the Athletics deal—hard to believe, perhaps, given Oscar’s crusade to bring sports to Sin City at the turn of the millennium. “I may have been the pigeon, but I told them right off the bat I’m not going to let Las Vegas be used as a place that’s going to be played off against another city that’s trying to keep a team or build a stadium,” Oscar told local news channel KTNV. These days, the interests that once united to keep sports out of Las Vegas have conspired to turn Las Vegas into Sports City, USA. With nearly half of all the ticket sales for Raiders games—and more than half of the tickets for Formula 1—going to tourists, it seems all of America (and much of the rest of the world) believes they have a claim on Las Vegas sports. The city’s workers, schoolchildren, and everyday folks who once rallied around the Golden Knights with cries of “Vegas Strong” have once again been moved to the background. But if a group of pissed-off teachers get their referendum on the ballot next year, it’s going to be hard for anyone—tourists and billionaires alike—to ignore them much longer. Oscar Goodman always said that pro sports would give his city something to rally around and unite behind. He was right.

Loose Exegesis

Alina Stefanescu

a gender-modiﬁed golden shovel of Revelations 17:6

And how the pros sparkled! I thought I’d play this game best

when playing my betters. Up close to the net, pivotless,

I felt myself most alive when being slaughtered. Everyone

saw the shame, how swiftly it came to its descendant. Dark heirs

then cookies in a star tin. I licked the sweetness from each surface.

I thought I could handle it. Maybe a teeny tinge even

wondered. But you read me like a feather set on fire is the entirety

with us: a flame between two pages sharing a bench. Your words or Scriabin’s.

Great Coincidence, please take what you’ve won. Conceive my

admiration. Your head in my words—eros, cinders.

Going Critical

The quest for copper in Arizona

Meg Bernhard

© Anthony Gerace

The tour guide for ASARCO’s open-pit copper mine in Sahuarita, Arizona, was a stooping man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a monotone voice. His name was Dave. He addressed us from the front of a bus, where our group sat wearing branded hard hats and orange safety vests. “Mines,” the tour website had warned, “are inherently risky places.” By visiting an active copper mine, we assumed the risk of injury or death, but thankfully we could mitigate that risk by wearing closed-toed shoes.

It was an October day somewhere above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, unseasonably hot. The bus trundled through a landscape of creosote, cholla, and the occasional saguaro—habitat, Dave told us in rapid succession, for javelinas, deer, bobcats, snakes, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, Gila monsters, roadrunners, foxes, quails, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. If we looked to the right, he said, we could see grayish-green graded mounds. These were tailings, or waste left over from the copper extraction process, and they were green in color because they contained a polymer that Dave described as a sort of superglue for dust suppression in case the winds picked up. Further up the road, he said, we could see the tailings pond, a massive toxic body of water and chemicals also left over from extraction, six feet deep in places and large enough to be seen from Google Earth. The mine, he said, used about three hundred gallons of water per ton of copper ore milled, a mixture of groundwater and Colorado River water pumped hundreds of miles to Sahuarita from Lake Havasu.

We parked at what Dave called “the overlook,” which featured a pair of fixed binoculars and an iron barrier to protect us from falling 1,200 feet into the open pit below, a two-and-a-half-mile long crater that miners began carving into the earth sixty-six years ago. Within the crater were ledges and roads. Standing at the rim felt like peering into the ruins of an ancient civilization. Dave promised we would witness an explosion. We readied our phones—which, he later pointed out in a well-rehearsed bit, contained copper.

Copper, Dave also told us, is an antibacterial agent. It kills algae. Copper stimulates the immune system and repairs injured tissues. It occurs naturally in dark green leafy vegetables, asparagus, grains, nuts, seeds, shellfish, dried fruits, and cocoa. We use copper in electrical wiring, batteries, pipes. We use it in intrauterine devices to kill sperm, in fungicides to kill molds. Fifty pounds of copper go into the average gas car, while the average electric car requires more than three times that. “A person born in 2008 will use 1,500 pounds of copper over their lifetime just to enjoy daily living,” Dave said. The whole of modern human civilization, the copper industry likes to say, exists thanks to this metal.

Humans have been extracting copper from the Earth’s crust for millennia. At some point between seven and ten thousand years ago, our ancestors discovered copper embedded in rock, figured out how to harvest it, determined the metal was soft and malleable and began hammering the material into pendants, bowls, and eventually tools like fishhooks, knives, and axes. Somehow, they learned that extreme, concentrated heat could extract copper from its ore—an early version of smelting—and we left the Stone Age for the Bronze Age.

Over time, our thirst for copper has yielded increasingly fantastical and ambitious methods for obtaining it, like the process, now standard, that Dave showed us at ASARCO’s mine in Arizona. The explosion that we did eventually witness left a plume of smoke and dust in its wake, along with a pile of rock that trucks would cart away for further crushing. The resulting slurry of coarse gravel would be ground further into a sand, which would then be mixed in a tank with pine oil, calcium oxide (also known as lime), and chemical reagents to separate the copper from the “gangue,” or non-copper rock. That separation is a complicated process called “froth flotation,” which basically makes copper waterproof so it can latch onto bubbles for further processing—smelting and refining—while the rock waste piles up as tailings.

These are dirty techniques. Copper mining requires enormous amounts of water and threatens to contaminate the air and groundwater with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and uranium. It destabilizes land. It destroys the habitats of endangered species. In 1998, ASARCO settled with the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up hazardous waste and water pollution at copper mines in Montana and Arizona; the Arizona mine, a different one two hours north of Sahuarita, had contaminated ground and surface water with carcinogenic arsenic, mercury, and lead. More recently, in 2023, the Sahuarita mine emitted 2.2 million pounds of toxic byproduct, the EPA found. (ASARCO did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yet today, copper is getting a major green rebrand. A highly conductive metal important in electricity generation, copper is necessary for building wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicle batteries, and large-scale grid storage—all crucial to transitioning the world’s transportation and energy economies from fossil fuels. Industry heads argue that these environmental benefits outweigh the devastation caused by its extraction. “We seek to provide products and services that accelerate the transition to inclusive, low-carbon economies, maximizing the generation of benefits for our stakeholders and society in general,” the company notes in the sustainability section of its website.

This rebrand is about more than rehabilitating the image of a controversial industry. It also has land-use consequences: renewable energy production serves as one of the copper industry’s main justifications for opening new mines. But not everyone is confident that the environmental trade-offs are worth it, and critics question whether copper extraction can really be called green at all. Exacerbating copper’s ambiguous role in the energy transition is the fact that federal agencies can’t agree on whether or not to formally designate it as a “critical mineral.” It’s a linguistic debate that has real-world ramifications, including tax incentives and expedited permitting processes, as well as possible environmental ruin for the rural communities around mines. The picture has been complicated even further by the second presidential term of Donald Trump, whose interest in copper mining runs counter—or at least entirely parallel—to the mineral’s supposed environmental bona fides.

It’s Electric

In 1831, the English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday made a discovery that gave rise to life as we know it today. In his most famous experiment, Faraday insulated two coils of copper wire in twine and calico, wrapped them around different sides of an iron ring, and passed an electrical current through one of the coils to see what effect it would have on the other. When the current reached the second coil, he confirmed his theory of electromagnetic induction, which held that you could induce electricity with a magnetic field and an electric conductor. His discovery made possible the transmission of electricity over long distances. Wireless telegraphs, railroad communications, telephones, and transformers to distribute electricity followed—all thanks to copper. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the world got copper phone lines, copper car radiators, and HVAC systems. Copper started replacing lead in plumbing pipes because it was corrosion resistant. Demand soared.

You could argue all these uses make copper critical. But what does critical even mean? To different American government agencies, it can mean essential to national security and defense. To economic output. To energy production. To renewable energy production. To the manufacture of certain products, like cell phones and laptops. Critical can also mean vulnerable. As in, vulnerable to supply chain disruption. Vulnerable to an increase in demand without adequate supply. “Mineral criticality,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) states on its website, “is not static, but changes over time as supply and demand dynamics evolve, import reliance changes, and new technologies are developed.”

In 2017, President Trump directed federal agencies to create a list of minerals deemed critical specifically to American economic and national security, with the intent of reducing the country’s dependence on minerals from other countries, especially China. Currently, the United States imports 45 percent of its copper. Chile is the world’s top copper producer, with 5.3 million metric tons of copper mined in 2024; China is fourth, while the United States comes in sixth. China also mines and refines a large share of the minerals, like gallium, used in American defense industry technology, including semiconductors for missiles, radar systems, and communications equipment. Many lawmakers and policy experts agree that this puts the United States in a vulnerable position, where China could meddle in American weapons.

The list that resulted from Trump’s executive order was published by the USGS in December 2018. Its purpose was not just informational. A mining company proposing to extract a mineral that the USGS deems critical may have an easier time getting its permits approved. That’s no small thing; according to the analytics firm S&P Global, it takes an average of twenty-nine years to get from discovery—when companies are searching for ore deposits underground—to production. Often, it takes much longer.

In its first list, the USGS decided that thirty-five minerals were critical. (Today, there are fifty.) The original USGS list included, among others: beryllium, “used as an alloying agent in aerospace and defense industries”; hafnium, “used for nuclear control rods, alloys, and high-temperature ceramics”; lithium, “used primarily for batteries”; and titanium, “overwhelmingly used as a white pigment or metal alloys.” Copper was not included, nor is it on the list today.

In 2023, under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy, spurred by the Energy Act of 2020, created its own critical materials list, with a focus on minerals important not only to national security but also renewable energy technologies. Unlike the USGS list, copper was included because of its use in solar panels, EV batteries, and grid storage. Companies mining minerals on this list were, under the Inflation Reduction Act, eligible for certain loans, federal grants, and tax credits. In January of this year, Biden’s secretary of energy, Jennifer M. Granholm, said that 94 percent of IRA funds directed to the DOE, and 70 percent of grants and loans from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—over $170 billion—had been obligated, meaning that the agency and companies, nonprofits, and other funding recipients had signed legally binding contracts. Some of that money went to mines in Arizona. Freeport-McMoRan, a company based in Phoenix, received $80 million to use geothermal energy to help extract residual copper from already-mined material.

The discrepancy between the two lists has created uncertainty about copper’s future. “Everyone’s like, well, what the hell does this mean? Now we have two different federal bodies saying something’s important and not important,” Jack Conness, an analyst at the nonprofit Energy Innovation, told me. So: Which is it?

Photo of ASARCO’s open-pit copper mine in Sahuarita, Arizona. Courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

King Copper

On a cool February morning, I drove to Scottsdale to speak with Misael Cabrera, director of the University of Arizona’s School of Mining and Mineral Resources. Arizona provides around 70 percent of the country’s domestic copper supply, thanks to its particular geology. Copper formed from magma in Arizona’s ancient volcanoes, and some fifty to eighty million years ago, earthquakes caused that magma to rise to the Earth’s upper crust, cool, and harden. Arizona’s arid climate meant that erosion didn’t wash away the copper, and when the minerals did decompose, they sank further into the Earth and concentrated, creating the deposits for which the state is famous today. “As a human species,” Cabrera told me from a couch in a bright white conference room, “we have evolved to really thrive. And to thrive, there are two essential things we need: energy and water. Copper is essential to both.”

Before getting into mining policy, Cabrera, who has well-coiffed hair and kind, concerned eyes, worked at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, where he managed the cleanup of six state superfund sites. He described his move from the world of environmental regulation to the world of mining as one of optimism. He is enthusiastic about copper’s green potential, is adamant that mining can be done sustainably, and believes that people are fundamentally good. For the time being, Cabrera is not especially concerned about the possibility of Trump deprioritizing copper mining, given how much emphasis the president has placed on domestic energy production and security. “It is very difficult to have a thriving economy without abundant economic supply of minerals,” Cabrera said. “While I won’t speculate, I would assume that he and members of his administration understand that.” Still, there’s no guarantee that, even if the United States mines more copper, any of it will actually go to the green energy infrastructure that requires it, given Trump’s clear disdain for such technologies.

Today, Cabrera told me, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental agency based in Paris, has deemed copper a mineral important to the green energy transition. The same conductive properties that made copper ideal for early telephones—its ability to generate, transmit, and store energy—also make it essential for EV batteries. In May 2024, the International Energy Forum, an intergovernmental nonprofit, published a report arguing that the world needs six new large-scale copper mines each year to meet net zero goals by 2050. Unlike the DOE and the USGS, however, the IEF does not have the power to direct policy or funding in the United States or elsewhere.

To Cabrera, copper ought to receive the same kind of federal funding and speedier permitting that minerals on the USGS list receive. In June 2024, he testified to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources in support of a bill that would expand the USGS’s definition of critical beyond the realm of economic value, essentially combining the USGS and DOE lists. The Critical Mineral Consistency Act passed the House and was referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, but it failed to become a law. Arizona Representative Juan Ciscomani reintroduced the House bill in January, while Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, introduced a similar bill in February along with bipartisan cosponsors.

We need to mine more copper—billions and billions of tons of it—according to Frances McAllister, chairman of the Arizona Mining Association and vice president of land and water for Freeport-McMoRan: “for the decarbonization of the electrical industry, of the auto industry, and everything else.” The problem, he said, is, “we don’t have the resources to do that. We don’t have the ore bodies to do that. We don’t have the exploration.”

Then there’s the matter of copper’s regular old use for electricity generation. “I’m in my fifties. I’m kind of an old guy, and in my lifetime, which is not that long, the population of the planet has doubled,” Cabrera told me. “It’s gone from four billion to eight billion people just in my lifetime. Forecasters suggest that that’s not going to level off until 2060 or 2070, and by then, we’ll have somewhere between ten and twelve billion people on the planet.” As the world’s population increases, people will simply need to consume more electricity, which means the world needs more copper. Or so the industry claims. “I don’t know that we can produce enough of it,” Steve Trussell, executive director of the Arizona Mining Association, told me.

Cabrera believes that, with materials like copper, humans can innovate their way out of climate change. “While I do think there are certain risks that could wipe out the planet—thermonuclear war, for example, is a real risk—when I look at the rest of human history, we’ve shown that we’re not like the bacteria in a petri dish that consumes all of the gel and then dies,” he said. “Human history suggests that we are creative and innovative, and increasingly we are also conscious of our planet.” Just as we’ve shown our capacity to destroy, he said, we’ve shown our capacity to create.

I thought about the city of Phoenix, not far from where Cabrera and I were speaking. Its population is 1.65 million, with a metro population three times that. Arizona as a whole is one of the fastest growing states in the country, with a net gain of more than 62,000 residents in 2023. But at the same time, it is becoming less livable for many. Last year, Phoenix saw 143 days at or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than six hundred people died of heat-related illness across Maricopa County. Mining boosters often point to these kinds of figures as the precise reason we need more minerals like copper—to lessen our reliance on fossil fuels and remediate the effects of climate change enough to combat excessive heat. But can we really mine our way out of that death toll? Even if it were possible to reverse the trend of global warming by producing more solar panels and electric cars, it isn’t just red tape standing in the way of new mines. People who live near proposed mining projects are worried about the impact to their local environment.

This Little Land of Mines

Today, copper extraction is still governed by the 1872 General Mining Law, which opened up public lands across the country to mineral exploration. It decreed that any U.S. citizen could stake a claim to a plot of land they thought contained minerals from which they could profit. Then, they could file a request with the government for a small amount of money. The law was intended to develop the West, and indeed, it helped bring prospectors to Arizona, which became a state in 1912.

Nineteenth-century lawmakers had envisioned small claims miners digging little holes across the West. But thirty-odd years after the law passed, in 1907, the Boston Consolidated Copper & Gold Mining Company, together with the Utah Copper Company, opened the world’s first open-pit mine in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, some twenty miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Bingham Canyon contained low-grade copper, and after a few years mining with smaller, more labor-intensive methods entirely underground, the companies merged and decided to scale up their production to extract more ore for less money. Under the guidance of Daniel C. Jackling, the engineer who pioneered the open-pit method, the company attached steam shovels to railroad cars and began cutting a massive hole into the earth, one that would eventually become almost a mile deep and over two miles wide, one of the biggest open-pit mines in the world. It paved the way for large-scale mineral extraction across the western United States.

Legislation has yet to catch up with industry. In a 2022 congressional hearing, Steve Feldgus, the deputy assistant secretary of lands and minerals management at the Department of the Interior, emphasized that the 1872 mining law belonged to an America that no longer existed. “Congress did not . . . account for the legacy of environmental degradation that mining would have on its surrounding communities,” he said, “nor did it provide for royalties or a comprehensive system to evaluate, permit, develop, and reclaim mines to ensure sustainable mining and healthy public lands for future generations. In short, it was very much legislation of its time.”

Mining executives insist that these concerns are offset by the extent to which mining technology has improved in the century and a half since 1872. Companies have more precise drilling techniques, they say, and use water more efficiently. But several Arizona mines, proposed and existing, suggest otherwise.

After visiting Scottsdale in early February, I drove south to the town of Superior, population 2,470, to learn about a proposed copper mine that’s generated decades of controversy. Today, most working people who live there commute an hour north to Phoenix for their jobs, but a few decades ago, Superior was a thriving company town. Residents worked at the Magma copper mine just beyond the town’s limits. “Traditionally, you went to high school, and if you were fortunate enough to go to college, you’d go to college,” Henry Muñoz, who was born and raised in Superior, told me. “But there were so many mines around here that you’d just go work in a mine. You could graduate in May, and by August or September, you’d be driving a brand-new car. That’s how much money [you were] paid.”

Muñoz worked nine years underground in the Magma mine. It was dangerous work. Miners there employed a method called inclined cut and fill—a labor-intensive technique used primarily in ore with high concentrations of copper—to blast rock, extract ore, and then fill the spent tunnels with mining waste to stabilize the ground above. Though the work was grueling, Muñoz liked it enough, and it allowed him to buy a house and start a family.

But after global copper prices crashed in 1982, due in part to an economic recession that caused demand to fall even as supply increased, the mine shut down. Magma laid off 1,200 workers, and the town’s economy contracted. Muñoz moved to the company’s mine in San Manuel, fifty-five miles away. In 1999, however, that mine closed too, leaving 3,300 people out of work. Muñoz was devastated. He believed in the work and wished he could continue, but he decided to retire from mining. He found a job working in a nearby prison and joined a group called the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition. Initially, the group was worried about the high cancer rates among miners and people who lived near San Manuel’s smelter. But eventually their work evolved in an unexpected way: protesting a copper mine coming back to Superior.

In the 1990s, Broken Hill Proprietary, or BPH, a mining company based in Australia, bought the old Superior and San Manuel mines. In Superior, BHP identified a possibly massive low-grade copper deposit. This deposit could become the biggest copper mine in North America, the company says, and would help the United States “meet clean energy goals, bolster supply chain resiliency, and boost national security.” (In 2004, the international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, based in London, became the majority owner of the project.) But BPH wanted to mine it with a method called block caving, a controversial technique that has spurred lawsuits and permitting delays, all of which have prevented the mine from actually opening.

Block caving happens when all of the surface ore has been extracted. It involves undercutting ore so that it collapses under its own weight and breaks into smaller rocks, which are funneled into preconstructed chutes. The problem with block caving is that it makes the ground around it sink. The proposed BHP/Rio Tinto mine, called Resolution Copper, would be located between five and seven thousand feet below the surface. Muñoz and others worry that kind of deep block caving could leave behind a crater one thousand feet deep and nearly two miles wide.

Muñoz gesticulates enthusiastically when he speaks and often uses other kinds of visuals to convey his point. We met in his garage, where he likes to show journalists the Bureau of Land Management’s final environmental impact statement for the mine, an hourglass that mimics how the mine would make the land sink, and a model of the proposed mine itself. Inside the resulting crater sits a model Eiffel Tower, at scale with the landscape. The crafter dwarfs it.

Midway through our conversation, we were joined by Sylvia Delgado Barrett, vice chair of the Retired Miners Coalition and one of the first women to work underground at the Magma mine in the 1970s. We drove up the mountains to see the area where the crater would form. On the way up, Delgado Barrett and Muñoz told me about how the copper mine would also stress, reshape, and possibly contaminate the aquifer. The BLM’s environmental impact statement indicated that some areas around the mine would experience a groundwater shortage. It’s estimated that Resolution Copper would use forty-thousand acre-feet of water a year—the same amount that the entire city of Tempe needs for its nearly two hundred thousand residents. Delgado Barrett and Muñoz also worry about the stability of a potentially toxic tailings pile. They pointed to a 2015 disaster, in which a BHP-owned tailings pile collapsed in Brazil, killing nineteen people, displacing hundreds more, and causing extreme water shortages. “Tell me how you can justify green energy when you are destroying a town and polluting it?” Delgado Barrett asked.

The retired miners aren’t the only ones pushing back against Resolution Copper. Our drive took us to a campground dotted with oaks and mesquite and long grass. This was Oak Flat, the area that would become a crater. It’s a sacred place for the San Carlos Apache, who gather there for coming-of-age ceremonies and believe that spirits dwell in the land. In the decades since BHP discovered copper ore nearby, a nonprofit group called Apache Stronghold has become a key force in the fight against the mine. In September of last year, they appealed a Ninth Circuit decision that declined to protect Oak Flat, arguing that the proposed copper mine would infringe on their religious freedom, and they have brought the matter to the Supreme Court, which has not yet decided whether it will hear the case.

We walked around the site. It was cool and smelled like dust under the sun. When it rains, Muñoz said, water rushes down the campground and creates a small lake. As a kid, he and his friends would throw bologna into it, which crawdads would come up to eat. It’s been a while, he said, since he’d seen the campground fill up with water like that.

Tyson Nansel, a spokesperson for Resolution Copper, wrote in a statement that the “project is vital to securing America’s energy future, infrastructure needs, and national defense with a domestic supply of copper and other critical minerals.” The company, he said, is in “dialogue with local Native American Tribes and communities,” and the mine “will be a leader in water efficiency—using fewer gallons of water per pound of copper produced than any other mine operating in Arizona.” He added that Resolution Copper will seek to preserve native species and cultural sites, and “will be required to closely manage, monitor, and report subsidence impacts.”

Mila Besich, Superior’s mayor and a fourth-generation resident, is in favor of the project because she believes it will bring back local jobs. According to her, the exploration and permitting processes already have. “When Resolution came online, this town was boarded up,” she told a group of visiting journalists last fall. “It has created new jobs. It’s brought our young people into the mining industry, teaching them these important high-tech mining skills.” She was also optimistic that her town could play an important role in America’s green energy transition. “That ore body is not going to go away. How do you work with it versus trying to oppose it?”

On my drives between Phoenix and Superior, I saw two Resolution Copper billboards touting the company’s allegedly mindful approach. In one, a woman in a hardhat smiled next to the words making tomorrow’s copper using less water. Another, set against a lush river background, read, mining with less water = more for nature and communities.

Pedal to the Metal

The end of my Arizona trip took me farther south, to Tucson. An evening rain—one of the first in months—had cleared the sky, and the air out my window smelled crisp and faintly of creosote. I was in town to speak with Roger Featherstone, director of the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition. He greeted me in his front yard, lush with agave. Featherstone’s organization is not against mining; instead, they urge companies to mine better. For example, if a project has already started, it should be mined until the ore is all gone instead of destroying more land to create a new mine, thereby reducing environmental impact. The San Manuel mine where Muñoz used to work has an estimated thirty years of copper ore remaining, but the company left because it deemed mining no longer profitable there.

Featherstone has seen the copper narrative shift many times over his forty-year career advocating for change in the industry. Sometimes companies argue they’re important for national defense. Sometimes they’re green. Sometimes they proclaim economic security. “The Mantra company has changed its spots a dozen times in the past twenty years,” Featherstone told me, referring to one copper firm in particular.

Today, the narrative appears to be in flux once again. While USGS still does not consider copper a critical mineral, it is set to update its list sometime this year. Meanwhile, Trump has floated the idea of imposing tariffs on imported copper for national security purposes. (As of this writing, he has yet to do so.) In February, he also signed an executive order “launching an investigation into how copper imports threaten America’s national security and economic stability,” positioning domestic copper production as not only a defense priority but as an important part of his America First trade agenda. A further order, signed in March, instructed the heads of departments and agencies involved in the permitting of mineral production to “take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.” It names copper specifically, along with uranium, potash, and gold.

Featherstone got his start in environmental activism in the 1970s as a college student fighting a proposed nuclear power plant near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He’s seen a false sense of urgency—the idea that we need to produce more of a given form of energy, or we’ll die—play out over and over again. The owners of the proposed Wisconsin plant, the Tyrone Energy Park, would say, “Unless we build this plant, we’re going to freeze to death in darkness.” Fifty years later, we’re still here, and the Tyrone Energy Park isn’t.

Later, reflecting on our conversation, I thought about how the problem isn’t that we’ll need more energy—it’s that we’ve grown accustomed to having as much energy as we want, whenever we want it. Clearly, we need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the rush to mine more critical minerals like copper to fuel our present and future energy needs, we’re also harming our environment. Is this local destruction a worthwhile tradeoff for increased renewable energy capacity? Or are we not being imaginative enough about other possibilities for our planet’s future, like reducing consumption altogether?

Because mining companies are concerned, above all else, with profit, they’re not inclined or equipped to address these questions. Neither is President Trump, who declared a “national energy emergency” as one of his firsts acts back in office. His administration intends to produce even more energy, including and especially from fossil fuels. In this political climate, the possibility of states taxing energy and gas use—or even creating incentives for people to hang on to their cars, phones, and laptops for as long as possible before upgrading to new ones—feels more remote than ever.

School of Rocks

After speaking with Featherstone, I drove with a couple of friends to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Started in 1955 for the benefit of local rockhounds and lapidarists, the show has exploded into a massive commercial event, where nearly three hundred vendors from around the world sell crystals, rocks, fossils, and petrified wood to crowds of residents and tourists alike.

We pulled up to a large white tent just off Interstate 10, paid ten dollars for parking, and made our way through the stalls. Colors announced themselves—green, pink, silver, gold. There was purple amethyst from Uruguay, sparkling pyrite from Brazil, zinc from Madagascar, turquoise from Bisbee, opals from Madagascar, diamonds from Oregon. I bought a pentagon-shaped lapis lazuli from vendors who’d brought the stone from Afghanistan.

I lingered at one stall that displayed acid blue and shimmery brown chunks of raw copper. The man behind the company called himself the “copper guy” and said he searches for “museum-quality” specimens across Michigan. This was copper simply as a mineral, procured with only a shovel. It wasn’t a wire or an EV battery. It didn’t have any future in energy production. It was just a rock. I thought of a man in a baseball hat I’d seen earlier that day, staring down into a box of smoky quartz. “It’s amazing,” he said to no one in particular, “what the earth does.”

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

The Fame Game

Picking players for posterity

Andrew Schenker

© Irene Suosalo

This past winter, the forty-nine members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee faced a difficult task: they were asked to reconsider the case of Jim Tyrer. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Tyrer ranked high among the league’s dominant linemen. From his position as left tackle for the Kansas City Chiefs, he protected Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson’s blind side for 180 games straight, a team record at the time. Along the way, he earned virtually every honor that was available to an offensive lineman, and, in 1980, he seemed poised to cruise to the ultimate acknowledgment: election to the Hall of Fame. But then, in the early morning of September 15 of that year, before the Selection Committee could cast ballots, Tyrer shot his wife with a .38 caliber pistol before ending his own life. After that, his case fizzled as the arbiters of football fame were all too happy to pretend that both Tyrer’s stellar career and violent death had never happened.

The murder-suicide was shocking, but in retrospect, there had been signs of trouble. After thirteen seasons using his massive head as a blocking tool—a common technique for lineman in his day—he began suffering from depression and exhibiting evidence of paranoia. According to writer Mark Fainaru-Wadu, Tyrer met twice with a doctor, complaining of headaches and abdominal pain. When Tyrer committed the murder-suicide just two days after the second visit, the football world hadn’t seen anything like it, but today it seems all but certain that Tyrer was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease that, in one study, has been shown to afflict more than 90 percent of former NFL players. CTE would play a decisive role in such future tragedies as star linebacker Junior Seau’s suicide in 2012 and Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide that same year. It was the growing awareness of CTE’s effects that led the nine-member Hall of Fame Senior Selection Committee to recommend Tyrer for reconsideration, sending his nomination to the full Selection Committee—a group made up mostly of sportswriters and broadcasters, with each NFL city represented. Pushing for his candidacy, Senior Committee member Ron Borges, a former Boston Globe sportswriter, sent a letter to every voter, arguing that Tyrer was unfairly denied his place in the Hall “because the game he played destroyed his brain and led to a family tragedy. We can never repair that tragedy but we can at least give the man and his family the honor his play on the field earned him long ago.”

In those words, “play on the field,” lies the nub of the issue. Is it only performance that matters? The Baseball Hall of Fame famously saddles its selectors with a character clause that charges them with weighing a candidate’s “integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character” as essential criteria in their calculations. But such considerations have been deemed out of bounds for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In fact, not only are voters not allowed to consider any off-field factors, they’re not even allowed to discuss them. Nonetheless, it’s clear that extra-athletic transgressions can spell doom for a candidate if, like Tyrer’s actions or Packers safety Darren Sharper’s serial rapes, they’re extreme enough. In rejecting Tyrer when there was a strong case his on-field achievements merited induction, the original Hall selectors in 1980 showed that extracurricular concerns were decisive. When they dropped the question of Tyrer’s candidacy, they heightened questions about the very purpose of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and, by extension, halls of fame more generally—questions that the new committee would now pick up again some forty-five years later. Both museum and honor roll, halls of fame serve the related roles of narrating history and singling out the most important individuals who have shaped it. The choices made by the stewards of this history as to whom and what to include—and more significantly who and what not to include—reveal a tangled legacy of biases, cronyism, finger-wagging morality, stats-based techno-optimism, and the desire to shape a certain narrative about the sport in question. The result is a maddening hodgepodge of worthies, decidedly non-worthies, and glaring omissions that call more attention to the player than their election would have. The more you look at the way the football and baseball halls operate, the more you begin to see a familiar difficulty that affects American culture: history is full of disputed claims and judgments. There is no way to fully sanitize our sports stories for the protection of the fans.

Who’s Who

Who is to decide who is truly great? Or how “greatness” is defined? Before the Pro Football Hall of Fame and before the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (and well before the halls of fame for basketball, hockey, boxing, golf, and countless other sports), there was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Hearkening back to European models like the Parthenon, the Temple of British Worthies, and the Ruhmeshalle, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans was the first such institution in the country. The Hall, which opened on May 31, 1901, at New York University’s Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College), was the brainchild of school chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken, who viewed it as a tool to promote American virtues such as patriotism, good citizenship, and heroism.

It was an age of heroic thinking. Thomas Carlyle’s theory that “Great Men” shape history was part of the American perspective, widely promoted by schoolbooks that celebrated the nation’s founders and by the tales of Horatio Alger. Without a royal family and an aristocracy, anyone could, at least in theory, become a hero, and an individual’s achievement rather than their birth status was worthy of celebration. As Sheila Gerami writes in her 2024 study of the Hall, “The United States pioneered the implicitly democratic assumption that greatness could be acquired. In the newly founded nation built on egalitarianism and opportunity, rather than the Old World ideals of wealth and aristocracy, new heroes were needed to personify a new type of man.” This belief led, in the decades after the Civil War, to a strong interest in commemoration, with countless monuments erected to honor the nation’s military and political leaders, a development that found its logical endpoint in MacCracken’s Hall.

Designed by starchitect Stanford White in the then-popular beaux arts style, the Hall was an outdoor sculpture gallery in which statues were to line the colonnades of a loggia. The busts of the inductees didn’t appear until 1907, but the leadup to the opening attracted widespread attention. MacCracken encouraged the public to nominate inductees (a practice still followed by the football, but not the baseball, hall of fame), adding to the supposedly democratic ethos of the project. The list was then whittled down by the NYU senate and sent to electors to conduct the final vote. The first class included twenty-nine notables—among them George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John James Audubon—ranging from statesmen to authors, preachers, inventors, and military heroes. The Hall opened with a lavish ceremony and received ample and mostly positive coverage in the press, but there were a few dissenters. Contrary to the Hall’s claims of representing the full flowering of democracy, a writer for the New York Independent found the Hall to be “foreign to our democratic ideas, which let fame and glory take care of themselves,” while a correspondent from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, School Gazette argued that “the truly great need no monuments to extol their greatness.”

As the twentieth century unfolded, the country’s attitude toward heroes would evolve, both in terms of who qualified for heroic status and whether the concept of heroism itself still had any validity. Over the years, the Hall would attempt to keep up with changing times, scrapping its native-born requirement in 1914 and admitting its first black inductee, Booker T. Washington, in 1945. But by the 1970s, the institution had lost most of its luster and nearly all of its public interest. The last inductees were elected in 1976 to minimal fanfare as, post-Vietnam, the country was more focused on Nixonian scoundrels. Although the Hall still exists today, it has been largely forgotten. Its last gasp of fame was a minor footnote in the recent movement to eradicate Confederate monuments. In 2017, following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the removal of busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the gallery. The City University of New York planned to hold new elections to fill these spots, but funds for the endeavor could not be found.

Double Play

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is pretty much just an honor roll: while a small museum was originally intended to accompany the sculpture gallery, nothing much came of the idea. By contrast, the majority of the open-to-the-public square footage of the country’s major sports halls of fame is devoted to museum exhibits, with only a small portion set aside for the plaque galleries. This dual role—museum and honor roll—offers two ways of looking at history, with the halls’ museums, in theory, serving as a corrective to the galleries. The museums allow curators to shape their own narrative and tentatively highlight unsavory corners of the given sport’s history—steroid use, gambling, racism—that the voters and the governing bodies who make the rules by which those voters are bound would rather overlook.

In reality, though, the story most hall museums tell is light on troublesome asides and heavy on self-congratulation. On a recent trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, I encountered a breezy and welcoming atmosphere that was fully in keeping with this orientation. When I pulled into Cooperstown, New York, on a gusty February morning, it was clear that we were squarely in the museum’s offseason. The majority of the sports memorabilia shops that line Main Street were closed, and parking fees were waived in the mostly empty Doubleday Field lot. During my time at the museum, the guards easily outnumbered the guests, and their conversation betrayed an enthusiasm for the sport you would expect from people who work in a baseball shrine. (Two employees hashed out the Hall case of former Reds outfielder Vada Pinson.) The museum exhibits themselves were full of fascinating artifacts and juicy little tidbits of information. Spread across two floors, they consisted of two concepts: a series of displays that offered a chronological run-through of the sport’s history and a handful of special exhibits, many of which highlighted overlooked areas of the sport, such as women’s baseball leagues, the Latin American game, and pre–Negro-League black baseball.

All of this was entertaining and a pleasing tribute to the sport’s varied history, but there were a few disquieting items mixed in with the uniforms and bats. Among the lot: the presentation binder agent Scott Boras created for his client Alex Rodriguez in 2000. A free agent for the first time, the star shortstop went on to garner a then-record $252 million contract from the Texas Rangers, a widely criticized deal that launched the era of the modern super-contract. The binder itself is little more than a functional blue cardboard thing, an unglamorous piece of Staples-level product thrown in amid the more dazzling artifacts—a rare reminder from the Hall of the game’s real-world economics. In addition, A-Rod’s very presence in the museum stands out because it is a reminder of his absence in the Hall’s other section. Despite an all-time great career with the Seattle Mariners, the Texas Rangers, and the New York Yankees, his year-long suspension in 2014 for using illegal performance-enhancing drugs made him anathema to voters, even those willing to cut other PED users some slack, and his continued omission is one of several in baseball that makes it clear that neither fame nor excellence as an athlete are determining factors in who gets into the Hall.

Also discomfiting, but for a different reason, were a pair of letters displayed in the Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream exhibit. These two bits of contrasting correspondence were sent to Aaron as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record in 1974. During his chase, Aaron received reams of racist hate mail, and the Hall displays one such piece, shocking in its profanity. But the letter is easily dismissed: it is hand-written and barely literate. By contrast, an encouraging piece of fan mail that hangs next to it is typed and articulate. Surely, Aaron received plenty of typed pieces of hate mail, but the Hall, in neatly separating the letters into the low-class and the respectable, invites the viewer to sit comfortably on the right side of history. Only unschooled ignoramuses are racists, the Hall display implies, and, in conjunction with its feel-mostly-good displays on black and Latin baseball, suggests that the racial problems in baseball—and this country—are largely things of the past.

Rigged Selections

No one would care about these displays, however, if they weren’t tied to the Hall’s commemorative function. When National Baseball Hall of Fame mastermind Alexander Cleland came up with the idea of the institution to promote tourism in the Depression-ravaged village of Cooperstown in the mid-1930s, it was largely this function he had in mind. It turns out that the baseball powers that be had been thinking along similar lines. When Cleland approached commissioner Ford Frick with the idea, Frick was particularly receptive, having recently made a trip to the Bronx to contemplate the busts of the country’s most celebrated citizen-heroes. As Frick wrote in his memoirs, “By happy chance I had visited the National Hall of Fame at New York University a few days before Cleland’s visit. I was much impressed, and had a notion that a Baseball Hall of Fame would be great for the game.” At that time, organized baseball had been around for over sixty years, and there was an increasing push to memorialize the no-longer-young sport. In the early 1920s, Major League Baseball approved the building of a $100,000 baseball monument in Washington, D.C., which would list the names of the sport’s greatest players. The idea fizzled, but the sentiment lingered, and so virtually all the interested parties were on board when the establishment of a hall of fame was proposed. The Cooperstown location was particularly appealing, given that it was the very place where Abner Doubleday, a Civil War major general, supposedly invented baseball. That he actually did no such thing—the whole idea had been more or less dreamed up by baseball promoter Albert Spalding to fabricate an exclusively American origin for the game—made the very founding of the Hall an exercise in mythology.

The idea of establishing a place to honor the immortals appealed to history-minded baseball administrators and tourist-minded local boosters alike, but this was the last time anyone agreed on anything having to do with that institution. From the start, there was no clear plan on how to elect players. When it came to selecting the inaugural class, two different groups of voters, the baseball writers and a special Old Timer’s Committee, were each charged with singling out five candidates for election. While the writers came up with a class of worthies—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson—the Committee, whose purview was nineteenth-century ballplayers, couldn’t agree on a single name, and the inaugural class of 1939 turned out to be only half of its intended size. This two-pronged arrangement would define the Hall’s approach to elections well into the twenty-first century. While members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) vote in the regular elections, selecting from a pool of qualified contemporary candidates, various special committees have been constituted to fill in the gaps and consider older ballplayers and non-ballplaying contributors over the years. It’s never been an ideal system, with the Hall often taking an ad hoc approach to committee creation, tinkering with the rules to achieve a desired result, and occasionally infuriating the BBWAA writers in the process. As historian and statistician Bill James puts it, “the Hall of Fame has never really thought through the issue of how to identify the most worthy Hall of Famers. . . . From [its] primitive beginning, all that the Hall of Fame has done . . . is back away from problems.”

This James quote comes from his 1994 book The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame Really Works. By turns infuriating and enlightening, it is part history, part polemic on the Hall’s failures, and part in-depth analysis of individual candidates. Some of his suggestions are real head-scratchers, such as his proposal to overhaul the voting system by adopting a convoluted methodology in which elections would be carried out by equally weighted groups of players, fans, the media, and a committee of scholars, but his history lessons are an eye-opening portrait of official cronyism and mutual backscratching. Most of this bad behavior comes from the various small committees that the Hall has convened through the years, most notably the Veterans Committees (now known as Era Committees) that meet every year to recognize overlooked candidates. James is particularly critical of the committees from the late 1960s and 1970s, which featured Hall of Famers Frankie Frisch and Bill Terry. With these two men dominating the process, they simply voted in all their old teammates, many of whom are now considered among the worst selections in Hall history—forgotten men like Chick Hafey and Jesse Haines. Referring to an octet of especially bad selections, James writes that “selecting eight marginally qualified or frankly unqualified Hall of Famers from the same narrow well of talent, clearly defined by its proximity to members of the committee, is favoritism of the ripest, rottenest and most obvious nature.” More recently, the election of the marginally qualified or frankly unqualified designated hitter Harold Baines by a committee that featured several members with strong ties to Baines—such as manager Tony LaRussa, general manager Pat Gillick, and team owner Jerry Reinsdorf—revealed the same kind of cronyism that had long marked this type of specialized voting.

Surveillance Stats

Over the past twenty years, the approach taken by Hall of Fame voters in baseball, and to a lesser degree in football and basketball, has changed dramatically. Among Bill James’s other contributions to the Hall debate—and to the larger debate around player evaluation—is the development of new statistical models to assess the relative merits of players across eras. Writing in 1994 on the longstanding debate about the role of stats in Hall of Fame assessment, James argues that the “emphasis on statistics has been more or less appropriate, but that interpretation of statistics by the Hall of Fame’s various electors and committees has sometimes been shoddy.” As a pioneering statistician, James created countless new stats, which he outlined in his vastly influential Baseball Abstracts, published every year from 1977 to 1988, asking viewers to look beyond the received wisdom that had largely defined player evaluation for the past one hundred years. This approach continues in The Politics of Glory, in which he introduces several new evaluative tools, such as similarity scores and Fibonacci win points. Although these metrics are of varying utility, James’s contribution to the Hall debate challenges voters to look beyond the traditional benchmarks that define Hall qualification (three thousand hits, three hundred wins) and to understand that different offensive climates throughout the game’s history means that simply comparing raw statistics isn’t enough. Batting .300 in 1930 when the league average was .292 is very different than doing so in 1968, when the average had fallen to .237.

When James was writing, the role of statistics in Hall voting was still hotly debated, but today, it’s pretty much all a stats game, and the most notable development in this regard is the development of the catch-all metric wins above replacement (WAR). Designed to measure a player’s total achievement against the environment in which he plays, WAR takes into account offense, defense, baserunning, and defensive position, assigning each player a single number that represents the total wins they would add to a team’s record as compared to a replacement-level scrub. This stat has been further refined for Hall purposes by Jay Jaffe, a baseball writer who has made hall of fame evaluation his specialty. Jaffe’s metric JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score), which averages a player’s career WAR with the total from his seven best seasons, has become, for many voters, the standard by which a player’s Hall case should be judged. Although a number of old-school voters continue to resist these new metrics, and although Jaffe himself points out that JAWS is not meant to be definitive, his is probably the single most influential metric in contemporary Hall voting, while similarly comprehensive metrics have made their way into other sports, like football and basketball, as well.

Is this a positive development? I don’t think anyone wants to return to the benighted days of totting up batting averages and pitcher wins and calling it a day, and while no one in their right mind would ignore JAWS in their calculations, catch-all metrics can’t help but boil the conversation down to whether a player hits a specific number or not—in the past, it may have been four hundred home runs, but now it’s sixty WAR. Furthermore, the development of new statistics raises a whole new set of troubling philosophical questions. Much of the new data that we have access to is derived from advanced surveillance technology, in particular Statcast, an automated tool that has been installed at every ballpark since 2015 and which captures everything that happens in every corner of the field. Statcast has been particularly useful in developing models for defensive evaluation, but it’s based on an idea that writers like Jaffe embrace all too easily: that knowledge is an inherent good, and technology will help us know everything. It’s the techno-optimist’s dream of perfect objective evaluation in which a player’s performance can be reduced to a single incontrovertible number, but it’s unclear whether these goals enhance either our enjoyment of the game or our existential status as independent beings. Of course, the idea that greatness can be measured by statistics is a retreat from more difficult questions about character and integrity: How is that measured? Should it even be measured at all?

Gallery of the Unsavory

In the end, the voters on the most recent Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee were not impressed by Jim Tyrer’s case. We know neither how individual members voted nor how many votes Tyrer received—the process is notable for its lack of transparency—but we do know that his vote total came in below 80 percent, and that it is all but certain that the murder-suicide weighed heavily in the voters’ minds. Tyrer’s example was one of the first real test cases concerning Hall voters’ commitment to a strict interpretation of the Hall’s guidelines and was a real chance to open a new discussion not only about these rules but about what function the Pro Football Hall of Fame should serve in the 2020s and beyond. As such, it was a significant disappointment that the public discussion of his case was limited and that we don’t have access to individual voters’ thoughts.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Tyrer’s case portends a change in how football Hall voters consider lesser offenders in the future, but for their baseball counterparts, bound by the character clause, such concerns have become an increasing part of the voting calculus over the past couple of decades. This newfound focus on a player’s extra-athletic profile rivals the rise of new analytic tools as the most significant recent development in Hall voting methodology, and these moral reckonings have played out in ways both large and small in recent election cycles. When it comes to domestic abuse, for example, only a handful of baseball writers have publicly ruled out alleged abusers like current candidate Andruw Jones. As in the football Hall, only exceptional cases seem to derail a player’s chances when it comes to off-field transgressions. Slick fielding shortstop Omar Vizquel’s vote total peaked at 52.6 percent in 2020, but revelations emerged soon after about his alleged sexual harassment of an autistic batboy, as well as his alleged assault of his wife, and sunk his case—by the most recent round of voting, that number had fallen to 17.8 percent. I wouldn’t check the box for Vizquel either, but given the severity of his actions and his already borderline case, it’s been easy enough for voters to leave him off their ballots and feel like they’ve done their moral duty.

When it comes to on-field transgressions, though, it’s a different story—and one area of great difference between the baseball and football halls. As Jay Jaffe notes in his book The Cooperstown Casebook, in the last century, the character clause had been invoked, when it was thought of at all, as a reason to include players of exceptional personal merit who might not otherwise warrant election. In fact, with the exceptions of banned-from-baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, no one had ever been denied entry to the Hall for any reason other than on-field achievement, not even alleged Ku Klux Klan members like Tris Speaker or notorious cheaters like Gaylord Perry. This changed when the first wave of players from the so-called steroid era hit the ballot, and to date, only players with soft ties to illegal PED use like David Ortiz have been elected, while all-time greats such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have come and gone without election. (Bonds has also been accused of domestic abuse and Clemens of sexual misconduct with a fifteen-year-old, but their failure to gain entry likely has more to do with their use of drugs.) By contrast, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is far more forgiving. One of this year’s inductees, tight end Antonio Gates, was suspended for four games in 2015 for violating the league’s PED rules. This may have cost him election on his first attempt, but he cruised to induction in his second year of eligibility, a fate that is not forthcoming for baseball suspendees Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, both currently languishing on the ballot.

All of this takes us back to the question of exactly what purpose a hall of fame is supposed to serve. Personally, I can’t see any reason why the best players of the steroid era shouldn’t be enshrined, especially given the hypocritical election of former commissioner Bud Selig, who tacitly encouraged juicing due to the popularity of the home run–driven game. Rule-bending of various sorts has been winked at or even encouraged throughout the sport’s history, and the use of illegal PEDs in the late 1990s and early 2000s doesn’t strike me as terribly different from some of the stratagems employed by earlier Hall of Famers. For later offenders like A-Rod and Manny, both caught after MLB started cracking down, the case is different, but I don’t know what’s to be gained by leaving off two of the century’s best and most prominent players. Is the goal of a Hall of Fame to establish moral purity, or is it to include the most significant (however you define it) players of each era? For that matter, isn’t it time to at least reconsider Pete Rose’s case, given how he was railroaded into accepting a lifetime ban back in 1989 (even if saying so puts you in bad company these days)?

On the other hand, it could be that the idea of a binary system has simply run its course. A straight in-or-out vote does not capture the complicated legacy of Rose, a man who was one of baseball’s most famous and accomplished athletes, but who bet on his own team and then was accused of statutory rape in 2017. One proposal often put forth is to open a separate wing for the cheaters, the dopers, and the wife beaters, a sort of Gallery of the Unsavory. But ghettoizing the Hall’s bad boys does little more than punt the question, dismissing the inductees as not being “real” Hall of Famers. The issue can only really be properly addressed if the two sides of the Hall (honor roll and museum) work together. Along with a relitigation of the cases of the dismissed candidates, an honest discussion needs to take place, and it’s the Hall itself that must lead it. Why not present fans with a historically accurate account of these players and all their complications? The Hall could curate an exhibit highlighting Rose’s baseball prowess as well as his misdeeds. They could create an exhibit dedicated to the complicated stories of Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Halls of fame love to make interactive features; why not get fans involved in a visceral way and make them confront what many voters would rather ignore? Fans would find they couldn’t so easily dodge the questions that vex anyone who thinks about greatness. Are we talking about which athletes were the best performers? Or about which athletes deserve to be remembered with honor and respect?

In the end, it’s easy enough to say that the idea of sports halls in general is a relic, about as relevant as honoring George Washington and Andrew Carnegie in the country’s first such institution. But these halls continue to hold such an enormous sway over the imagination of fans, players, and professional commentators. If we attach any kind of importance to the sports they commemorate, it’s worth at least grappling with who gets in, who should be in, and who should never have come close. Americans are in retreat from honest discussions of history. It’s no longer acceptable to look at the ugly side of things. Surely, any sports hall of fame that dredged up stories of racism, gambling, cheating—and off-the-field immorality—and asked visitors to look at the unsanitized version of sports would be subject to considerable friction. On the other hand, American sports fans tend to be knowledgeable and opinionated. Maybe they could handle the controversy.

A hall vote is a small stab at shaping history, and for those lucky enough to get the chance to cast a ballot, it’s an honor that is taken seriously, even as voters are asked to weigh far more factors than their twentieth-century predecessors. Is a cheater less worthy of consideration than someone whose indiscretions were all committed off the field? Is a player who hits traditional milestones more deserving of election than a candidate whose case rests on a much subtler statistical evaluation? The voters can only muddle through, developing new statistical models and new models of moral calculus to help sort out the confusion. They won’t succeed, of course, but in that failure, in that complete inability to hit on any kind of consensus, lies all the thrill of the game.

Dolphins

Stephanie Burt

Princes, unready

to rule France or anywhere else.

No, they are glossy, all-too-human

marine mammals, unable to communicate

with their captors, till the intrepid

children set them free

at the climax of the film.

Some wish they were whales,

able to find their tribe—thanks

to their ultra-low frequencies—over nearly arbitrary

distances, like early AM radio DJs.

No, they are literally DJs, enshrined

in obsolescent studio slang,

who couldn’t master microphones,

soundboards, and other equipment,

however sweet or speedy their on-air patter.

They need frequent rescue. They flail around with their fins.

An old name for edible tuna. Diners don’t want

to eat any species that might someday talk back.

But really, they’re our well-off town’s

traveling swim team,

as the rained-on bumper sticker ahead

of me on Concord Avenue declares: a fundraising machine,

sky-blue and off-white, populated by kids

like ours, some eager

to splash and race, the rest pressed into it

by eager parents, who know they will learn to dive,

and push off fast, and master relay rules,

so that they might come ashore, five or eight years later,

in the right place. Someday they’ll live like kings.

A New GameDay Dawns

Were college athletics ever for amateurs?

Dennis M. Hogan

© Samuel Chen

College Sports: A History by Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin. Hopkins Press, 496 pages. 2024.

If you’re like me—i.e., just another beleaguered, non-tenure-track professor—when you watch the meathead legions and soused sorors come out for a College GameDay broadcast, you think: I wonder how much those talented young people are contributing to the economy. The answer in America, of course, is quite a lot. Thanks to fans like these and the millions of others who tune in around the country, college athletics generated about $13.6 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. Of that total, $4.2 billion came from TV rights packages, which see money flow from networks to the conferences that negotiate media deals and then to the schools themselves. For the most successful athletics programs, the big business of college sports can be extremely lucrative. The top three programs by revenue in 2022, Ohio State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Alabama, generated $251 million, $239 million, and $214 million in revenue per year, respectively. Ohio State’s athletics profits are so substantial that the program funnels money back into the university’s general budget, where it is (of course) used for education.

But Ohio State is exceptional. Notoriously, most college athletics departments operate at a loss. Even in the power conferences—the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big Ten, the Big 12, and, until 2023, the Pac-12—the majority of schools spend more money on athletics than they take in. In 2019, for example, sixty-five schools played Division I sports in one of these conferences. Only twenty-five reported positive revenue, and among the forty schools losing money, the average deficit was nearly $16 million. Lots of people are making money off of college sports, clearly: gambling companies that put sportsbooks in the pockets of every smartphone user; football and basketball coaches, who are the highest paid public employees in a majority of states; even some of the student-athletes themselves, given recent shocking legal developments. It just so happens that the schools operating the sports programs mostly are not.

Like most other aspects of American life these days, college sports are now divided between a very small group that thrives and the vast majority struggling to stay afloat. Opinions differ on how long this state of affairs can continue, but there’s an emerging consensus that whatever college sports once was is now over, at least at the highest levels. There’s too much money in the system, and elite college sports competition now looks almost exactly like a professional league. Like professional teams, big-time athletics programs live and die by TV money, and the quest to maximize broadcast revenue and secure the most lucrative contracts has injected a new ruthlessness into college athletic competition off the field, upending the conference system in the process.

Historically, conferences evolved to group together schools with similar athletic philosophies and levels of competition in the same region: the Big Ten covered the Midwest, the Pac-12 the Pacific Coast, and so on. Among these major conferences, however, not all the members possessed equally powerful brands: lots of people tune into ACC football to watch Clemson or Florida State; far fewer make time every Saturday for Wake Forest or Duke. In their quest to assemble the most profitable groups of schools for broadcasters, the conferences began to herd the powerhouses into the same leagues and hang the others out to dry. This is exactly what happened when the University of Southern California and UCLA—both strong sports schools in a large media market—announced they were joining the Big Ten in 2022 (UCLA’s athletics department has run a total deficit of nearly $220 million over the last six years). The two LA schools saw the writing on the wall. The Big Ten already pulled in more TV revenue than the other conferences; with the Pac-12’s media rights up for renegotiation in 2024, they had to act fast or get locked into a lower-tier contract.

The historic West Coast conference collapsed within a year. The loss of the two LA schools hurt the ten remaining members’ bargaining power; Colorado was next to leave, in July 2023. In early August, the conference announced a media deal with Apple that offered $20 million per year to each member school (Big Ten schools received between $80 and $100 million per year in 2023; SEC schools received, on average, $51 million). The next day, Oregon and Washington left for the Big Ten, while the University of Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah joined the Big 12. In September, Cal and Stanford headed for the ACC. Only two Pac-12 schools, Oregon State and Washington State, now remain. Conference realignments are far from unprecedented in the century-plus-long history of college sports. What is new, however, is the total collapse of a conference once considered one of the most powerful in the sport, which boasts a legacy of household-name alumni (like Tiger Woods, Aaron Rodgers, Marshawn Lynch, and Katie Ledecky) and the largest number of national championships across all sports of any college conference.

College sports stand on the precipice of a new era. Some plans are in the works to scrap the longstanding football system and move toward a “super league” model, in which brand-name schools compete against each other in a nationwide league while all the other schools, starved of TV money, presumably reduce the size, competitiveness, or number of their sports programs. (These proposals are in the early stages for now, but it’s an idea whose time is coming.) For those schools just below the top rungs but fighting to reach them, athletics departments will be newly incentivized to run up enormous deficits in the hopes of advancing into the next echelon of success, prestige, and earnings.

Yet for schools that make the cut, even the richest TV payouts may not be enough to keep their athletic departments’ coffers full: lawmakers, regulators, and the public now increasingly believe that college athletes ought to be getting paid. Former University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh said as much at a victory press conference after his team won the college football national championship in January 2024: “They’re maximizing every single revenue source there is, but they’re not sharing it with the talent. There’s no business that that would ever fly.” This turning of the tide means, in practice, that colleges and universities will have to start cutting athletes in on their TV money. Fair is fair, of course, but splitting up the revenue would also mean that athletics departments have less money available to subsidize nonrevenue generating teams or will require even bigger subsidies from their universities’ general budget. (And it would be a new, and expensive, cost burden on smaller programs that make less money and so have less to distribute. Programs that do survive will have trouble recruiting because they will pay much less.)

College sports is funny like that—the more money they make, the more they seem to cost.

Mens sana in corpore sano

If college sports as we know them disappear, I won’t be there to mourn. Where I grew up, there wasn’t really a college sports culture; we had real sports teams to root for. One of my areas of research and teaching is higher education itself, and I think—admittedly more from experience than data—that many, if not most, faculty members believe that athletics programs are all too much: too big, too rich, too powerful, and too distracting from what I still believe, perhaps naively, that schools are for, i.e., teaching, learning, and research. All these core functions have, not coincidentally, recently come under threat from a combination of demographic, economic, and political challenges.

Fellow professors and even some administrators are quick to complain about the ballooning size of athletics budgets, of the growing popularity of college sports over college study, as well as the growing incentives toward branding and commercialization that keep university administrations more focused on athletics than academics. Even I can name a handful of famous coaches off the top of my head—how many people can say the same about leading teachers and researchers? Every Saturday in autumn, millions of people tune in to watch the top few dozen college football teams compete; for most of March, sports coverage is dominated by the NCAA basketball tournament, a media frenzy that by itself generates nearly a billion dollars in revenue for the NCAA and the participating schools. The amateur ideal states that athletes compete in sports as part of the general personal, physical, and intellectual development they undergo during their college years: mens sana in corpore sano. True enough at Division III schools, maybe, but in Division I and I-A, the purpose of college athletic competition is to offer a blockbuster spectacle to the sports-watching public, to develop athletes into the professional leagues, to sustain the huge amounts of economic activity that now depend on college sports, and to build and maintain brand recognition and alumni relations.

Which is to say, if colleges are going to have big-time sports, the athletes who take part should be getting paid. Admitting that college athletes are really employees would definitively end the fiction that athletes recruited to play big-time sports are, in fact, on campus primarily as students. For every school like Michigan or Stanford that maintains high academic and research standards alongside a commitment to serious athletic competition, there are plenty, like the University of North Carolina, that have lowered academic standards for athletes (in UNC’s case, creating dozens of fake classes to help athletes maintain their playing eligibility), and many more where undergraduate educational standards are a mere afterthought.

Of course, a view of the college sports landscape that restricts itself only to the small handful of commercialized, big-time programs risks missing the larger context in which college sports are played by most athletes at most institutions. Even among the more than 350 football-playing schools competing in the NCAA’s Division I, the highest tier of competition, only a few dozen are national brands that regularly send players to the NFL. The further down the food chain you go, the more the players do look like bona fide student-athletes attending college to get an education and playing sports on the side. Part of the challenge of getting your mind around the college sports landscape is that there is no one college sports landscape: the situation at a big-time football school playing in one of the power conferences looks very different from that at a regional state school playing in DII or a DIII liberal arts college where a third or more of the student body may play a varsity sport (without dreams of ever playing professionally).

Fair though they are, many of the critiques leveled at today’s college athletics programs are also inexorably presentist. It’s common to act as though commercialization and athlete exploitation is a phenomenon of recent vintage or to rhapsodize about a golden age in which college sports represented a pure extension of the whole-person developmental ideal to which some U.S. colleges and universities have aspired. But there was never any golden age where sports occupied their proper, subservient place on campus, unpolluted by big money; the entire history of college sports has been one of a push and pull between athletics and academics, amateurism and professionalism, corruption and purity. For nearly as long as higher education has existed in this country, college sports has existed alongside it, as have the issues we kvetch about today. Illegal recruiting practices, persistent scandals, the influx of TV money, conference realignment, tensions between athletics and academics, regional and national jockeying for position and status among programs, failed attempts to achieve gender parity, even the explosion of sanctioned, omnipresent sports gambling—all have roots stretching back decades.

College Sports: A History, a new book by historians Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin, argues that anyone who wants to get a handle on what U.S. higher education is—and what makes it so unique and so maddening—ought to understand college sports. Typically, histories of the American university tell the story of the sector’s rise in predictable stages: from the origins of the religiously affiliated colonial colleges, through the clubbiness of the nineteenth-century college as finishing school for a moneyed elite, to the institution of the land-grant university in the wake of the Civil War. The story continues with the explosion of private philanthropy during the Gilded Age, the importation of the German research university model through the early twentieth century, and the worldwide dominance of the American multiversity in the postwar period. Finally, this story goes, U.S. universities turned to the market with the advent of neoliberalism as the close ties between the state and higher education began to fray; this new, corporate university saw the importation of business school-style management techniques, the growing financialization of university assets, the slow death of faculty job security, and the stratospheric rise of both student tuition and student indebtedness.

What’s missing from this scholarly consensus, Moyen and Thelin demonstrate, is how college sports have been a central organizing principle not only of many individual institutions but of the entire system. The university and its athletics evolved in tandem: just as the contemporary U.S. college athletics system owes its existence to the network of colleges and universities that support it, so, too, does the American university system owe its current form, at least in large part, to its role as a patron of institutionalized athletic competition.

The structure of American higher education—with its divisions of colleges and research universities; its hierarchies of wealth and prestige; its regional distinctions; its public and private split; and, importantly, its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, resources, and state and economic power—helped to create an athletics ecosystem that is unique in the world. Most countries have a higher education system, but nowhere else are college sports so prominent, so commercialized, and so widely watched by nonaffiliated spectators.

U.S. higher education is unique in other ways too. In no other country is the higher education system so large, so wealthy, and so multitudinous in its guises. Put simply: only in the United States is college imagined as a separate sphere, a bucolic retreat far from the real world in which young people go to experience an utterly separate existence for four years of their lives. It’s part of the reason graduates remain so attached to their schools, and it’s part of the reason why school pride is such a driver of charitable giving. None of this is imaginable without sports teams—even at schools that don’t engage in big-time athletics. For a huge number of students, the college experience is inseparable from the campus sports experience, whether they participated as athletes or just as fans. It’s a crucial fact, one that can make a scholar of higher education wonder whether they’ve been giving the athletics department short shrift in their understanding of what’s holding the whole enterprise together.

Our Athletics Departments, Ourselves

As long as there has been campus life, there have been campus sports. Early collegiate competitions drew huge crowds: a Harvard-Oxford boat race in 1869, for example, summoned an estimated half-million spectators to the banks of the Thames. Even in the early twentieth century, college football games were regularly packing in tens of thousands of fans, most of whom did not attend the university. And for as long as there have been college sports, there has been tension between the roles of student and athlete and debate about whether it is fair, reasonable, or sane to expect college students to fully embody both. This is the central contradiction around which all other controversies turn.

Perhaps no one understood this fact better than Charles Eliot, who served as president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Harvard was the leading college football school, alongside Princeton and Yale; Eliot, however, opposed football, which he attacked in his 1905 annual report to the university’s Board of Overseers, saying, “If a college or university is primarily a place for training young men for honorable, generous, and efficient service to the community at large there ought not to be more than one opinion on the question of whether a game played under the actual conditions of football, and with the barbarous ethics of warfare, can be of a useful element in the training of young men for such high service.” Eliot objected to the violence of the game, which regularly caused on-field deaths of players at both the secondary school and college levels. He also objected to the win-at-all-costs mentality that drove the emergence of the professional coach, who recruited top players and joined with alumni and boosters in ensuring these players received special privileges, financial consideration, and even endorsement deals. Such practices were anathema to the ethos of honor and amateurism that Eliot sought to preserve.

Yet, as Moyen and Thelin point out, football was not unique in growing more professionalized and more specialized. The growing professionalism of football was a symptom of the increasing professionalization of the university itself. As colleges transformed into large universities, offering specialized courses of study, training graduate students, and conducting scholarly research, students, faculty, and administrators all tended toward greater specialization too. As the history, sociology, chemistry, and physics departments evolved, so did the athletics department.

While the growing professionalism of the academy seemed natural enough to professors and administrators, the professionalization of the athletics department posed a problem. After all, weren’t sports becoming too big, too popular, and too much of a distraction from the real work of the university? (Professors then apparently thought much the same way as professors now.) This concern led to one of the great ironies of college sports history: one solution that administrators and faculty arrived at to regulate the growth and popularity of college sports was to found a national oversight organization to establish uniform rules and standards. This early association eventually became the NCAA, the organization that is more synonymous than any other with the commercialization of college sports—and with many of its abuses.

Many of the big conferences were established for the same reasons the NCAA was. The SEC originally began as an attempt to assert academic control over the athletic departments of what was then called the Southern Conference. In the 1920s, controversial practices that had taken hold in the service of fielding better teams included the recruiting and subsidizing of athletes, the lowering of academic expectations for players, and the deputizing of alumni to act on behalf of athletic departments. The same SEC originally founded to limit commercialization is now one of its greatest beneficiaries: the conference is synonymous with the college football way of life and boasts one of the most lucrative TV contracts in the nation.

Not all experiments in faculty control failed, however. The Ivy League also came together around resistance to commercial exploitation of athletics and commitments to academic standards and a reasonable, but not excessive, level of competition. Here again, college presidents played a key role. As the country entered World War II, college football suffered as many college-aged men were drafted into the military or found other ways to contribute to the war effort. The presidents of the oldest and most prestigious schools—the same schools that had inaugurated and dominated the first decades of college football—seized the opportunity to retreat from big-time sports and return to academic emphasis and athletic amateurism. As Moyen and Thelin put it, “There is some irony in the fact that the institutions that created big-time football in America were the first to collectively walk away from it.”

The retreat of the most prestigious universities from big-time college sports coincided with the postwar boom, the most sustained period of major educational investment in the country’s history. Large public colleges and universities expanded into a dizzying array of disciplines, schools, technological apparatuses, and research specialties. Athletics, too, became more hyperspecialized, developing even further as a special division of the university, complete with its own staff, budget, and professional identity. As colleges and universities expanded and more students began to attend college, the class, ethnic, and geographical diversity of athletic programs and college athletes expanded too. Athletes of color began to get their first opportunities to compete on a massive scale.

TV grew more important as well, and with it the role of the NCAA, which had evolved into a bona fide governing body covering almost all the college athletic programs in the nation. A massive expansion of women’s sports came about with the passage of Title IX in 1972. In guaranteeing gender equity in educational offerings, that law also guaranteed equal access to athletic opportunities, forcing schools, at least in theory, to strive for parity between men’s and women’s sports. With women’s competitions growing in size and importance, the NCAA subsumed the women’s games too. This same era, the 1970s and 1980s, saw the rise of the market-driven neoliberal university, as the collapse of the New Deal order ushered in the era of debt-financed degrees, financialized endowments, and the drawback of state subsidies that had bankrolled higher education’s postwar expansion. Market imperatives soon grew more dominant in sports too. Commercial incentives were already on the rise when a 1984 Supreme Court decision ruled that the NCAA, which had controlled college football broadcast rights on behalf of all member institutions, was in violation of antitrust laws and had to allow schools to negotiate their own TV deals. The justices thus created an entirely new business environment in which powerhouse schools could compete against one another for revenue. The demonopolization of college TV contracts delivered windfalls for some schools, but it also led to the chaos of conference realignments and a TV and streaming revenue arms race that continues to this day.

Name, Image, Likeness

Since 1984, more money, more publicity, and more commercialization has been the rule. Just like Ma Bell, the broadcast networks, or the airlines, the NCAA was another monopoly deregulated in the eighties, widening the chasm between big-time schools and everyone else. This change also strengthened the case for cutting athletes in on the profits. Colleges and universities have long sold the image and name of athletes to the highest bidder without the athletes themselves seeing a penny, but now the revenues became much bigger than they had been before.

Reform is slow, but it has been coming. In 2019, California passed a law that would eventually allow college athletes to negotiate their own Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals directly with sponsors. The practice soon spread and was institutionalized by the NCAA nationwide in 2021. In most cases, the NIL of a college athlete isn’t worth much—a few hundred dollars, perhaps a few thousand, now, at least, payable directly to them. For a small number of athletes however, the deals have been lucrative: such athletes typically have large social media followings, are already famous, or have become famous by excelling in their sport. Examples include LSU gymnast Olivia (Livvy) Dunne, LeBron James’s son Bronny (during his one year of college ball), and, until they went pro themselves, women’s basketball stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

Beyond the legitimate deals offered by individual agencies, advertisers, and sponsors, wealthy alumni donors and booster groups skirt the loosened restrictions to court the most promising prospects and offer them major NIL deals in exchange, functionally, for nothing more than playing at a particular university (this is a reprise of the same practices that college presidents sought to stamp out in the early twentieth century). The explosion of new NIL rules—which are largely maintained on a state-by-state basis rather than being nationally centralized—has created any number of loopholes that boosters now gleefully exploit. Such boosters work hard to attract top talent; see for instance John Ruiz, CEO of the insurance claims company LifeWallet, who has committed millions of dollars of his company’s money to endorsement deals designed to transform the University of Miami Hurricanes into a championship-level basketball outfit. (His company now faces an uncertain future, which could put the success of Hurricanes basketball at risk too.) Ruiz is just a symptom, these rules being regularly stretched by coaches, players, athletic directors, and others across the system.

In recent years, two more major changes to the status quo have seemed to be in the offing, one now looking more plausible than the other. The first would reflect a change in college athletes’ status as it relates to labor law: under Biden, the labor-friendly NLRB general counsel issued guidance that college athletes should be considered employees under federal labor law and thus allowed to unionize. In March 2024, Dartmouth men’s basketball had voted to unionize, the first college team to do so, but they rescinded their recognition petition after Donald Trump’s election, which has likely put the brakes on college athlete unionization for now; Trump’s NLRB reversed the Biden-era guidance in February 2025.

More dramatically, it seems overwhelmingly likely that many college athletes will now get paid directly by their institutions. In 2020, two players, Grant House of Arizona State and Sedona Prince of Texas Christian University, filed suit against the NCAA for lost NIL funds and for the right to receive a portion of the money from TV broadcast deals. (Prince recently played her final college basketball game under a cloud: initially celebrated as a voice for athlete compensation and equality for women’s sports, she has been accused of abuse or assault by a total of five women over the past few years.) The logic of the suit is simple: college athletes are the product sold to broadcasters when conferences negotiate broadcast deals, and without these athletes, schools would receive no broadcast money. Furthermore, athletes experience something like an employment relationship to their school: they choose to play sports, certainly, but their scholarship, their roster spot, and their enrollment often depend on their abiding by the rules of the program. This includes regular attendance at practice, maintaining behavioral standards, and meeting performance goals.

In an admission that the NCAA had lost the argument, the parties in the suit reached a landmark $2.8 billion settlement that would not only see current college athletes receive a payout but would extend compensation to all NCAA Division I athletes going back to 2016, a class that includes nearly four hundred thousand people. While the average size of the award may be quite small, the settlement has massive implications for the future: it would establish a $21 million limit for revenue sharing, meaning that each DI school could distribute up to that amount yearly among its varsity athletes. This limit is far above what most schools bring in in TV revenue but still well below what the top earners do.

The settlement—which, as this article went to press, is pending approval by the judge overseeing the case, Claudia Wilken—could create some problems of its own: critics say it would all but guarantee that Title IX is weakened since the majority of TV revenue comes from men’s football and basketball. If schools distribute revenue proportionally to the value of each sport to their TV deals, athletes in those sports would receive the highest proportion of revenue, with little left over for even mainstay sports like baseball, to say nothing of fencing, sailing, or golf. If the men in these nonrevenue sports receive small payouts, the women on many college teams could receive only a token amount, or nothing at all. The revenue sharing provisions would also limit roster spots, which could gut opportunities for athletes of all genders, including those who play less commercially viable sports—even historically important ones like rowing or track and field. In late April, Wilken delayed issuing a final ruling on the settlement and ordered both sides to modify the terms to address the roster issue.

Still, it will almost certainly be accepted: the NCAA’s Division I board of directors already conditionally approved more than 150 rule changes that will go into effect when the settlement receives final federal court approval. This shift will quickly overturn all past practice. Student-athletes have often found various ways to profit from their athletic talents, sometimes while at school and often afterward, but never before would any school have countenanced direct payments in exchange for athletic performance. It is a stunning capitulation that could announce the demise of big-time amateurism—always, as College Sports reminds us, an ideal more than an actual practice. As early as the late nineteenth century, professional players would clandestinely participate in college sports as schools attempted to gain an edge. Boosters would offer inducements; later on, bribes, perks, gambling, match-fixing, and point shaving were common. Even ordinary benefits like scholarships and preferential admissions policies have been cast as forms of compensation, particularly in arguments about player unionization.

The settlement also reflects the NCAA’s weakened position. Long the ultimate authority on every aspect of collegiate sporting competition in the country, the NCAA has been battered over the last few years. Covid was particularly challenging: it took years to return to anything like normal operations, and student life—not to mention student learning—was profoundly disrupted. Even as attendance has recovered and the chaos of the early pandemic years has faded, the NCAA has navigated escalating antitrust action, a growing unionization movement, the rise of anti-trans hysteria, an explosion of legal gambling that offers new revenues alongside new complications, and a round of conference consolidation that has created the specter of a winner-take-all world in which some of the biggest brands survive and other, once-storied programs twist in the wind. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the NCAA, which is, after all, the only major sports league in the country in which the teams collect revenue while the players play for free. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder what new horrors might unfold in a possible super league future, in which the sports tail will fully wag the educational dog at many of these universities.

We Both Go Down Together

Of course, only a minority of the more than half-million students competing in NCAA athletics every year play in big-time programs. College sports thus faces a bifurcated future, in which most students continue to play in the tradition of true amateurism, for the love of the game, while others engage in something much more like professional sports, with free agency, transfers, endorsement deals, wages, and fewer and fewer of the educational trappings that had once served as justification for their unpaid athletic appearances.

But here is another challenge: popular faith in higher education has declined precipitously among Americans even as college sports have grown larger and more spectacular. Sports, at first blush, is easily positioned as everything higher ed is not: accessible, popular, meritocratic, omnipresent, beloved. There’s a great deal of mythmaking here, ignoring much that’s rotten in the American sports establishment from the youth levels all the way through the major leagues. But it is hard to imagine millions of Americans supporting the dismantling of sports infrastructure in the same way they cheer attacks on higher education. And these attacks are not merely conjectural but all too real: Trump has so far targeted colleges and universities for special opprobrium in his second administration, subjecting campus protest, professorial speech, and federally funded research to special scrutiny while attempting the revocation of billions of dollars of research funding that supports university activities at public and private institutions and even threatening the tax-exempt status of schools that refuse to comply. Now, when we most need it, there is no real popular constituency for defending higher education; while some of Trump’s moves have caused great controversy, his assault on universities and colleges has, at best, been met with a shrug by many outside the academy.

Too many Americans see colleges and universities as cartels extorting outrageous tuitions from students in exchange for credentials that, despite delivering minimal educational value, have now become necessary for professional employment and a shot at some financial stability. They are not entirely wrong in this: for every student who attends a four-year resort to make friends and become the person they are meant to be, there are many more students hustling and going into debt to gain a foothold into the middle class or to get any job at all. Politicians happily caricature college students and professors as out of touch, willfully downplaying the connection between university research and the suite of economic activities such research supports. Yet college sports remain beloved. They are, as Moyen and Thelin observe, the most popular and lucrative product American universities have ever produced. If faculty—including those, like me, who think and write about the university—do not typically think of sports as major parts of the larger university world, I wonder whether college sports fans bother to think of their teams as part of that world, either. If they did, we might both heed Moyen and Thelin’s reminders that, in all likelihood, neither of us could survive without the other.

Recently, the faculty senate at Rutgers University seemed to acknowledge that, approving a resolution that called on the administrations of the Big Ten schools (now numbering eighteen members scattered across the entire country) to band together to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education through the Big Ten Academic Alliance, an academic consortium of conference members founded in 1958. Though its membership includes all the Big Ten schools, unlike the sports conference, the BTAA is controlled by presidents and administrators to leverage institutional cooperation and economies of scale in purchasing and other activities. With nine other Big Ten schools passing similar resolutions as of this writing, these universities might have a meaningful relationship that extends beyond athletics. Whether that means they’ll save higher education is another question—and I’m not holding my breath. But if they do, it would be a way of acknowledging that we are all of us, for better or worse, yoked together: the students, the faculty, the administrators, the coaches, the players, the boosters, the fans.

Because let’s not kid ourselves: people watch college sports because it’s college sports, not because they want a pro football or pro basketball minor league. (There already is a pro basketball minor league, and nobody watches.) So fans, coaches, and athletes should care about the threats to higher education. And academics like me should care about not only about the well-being of student-athletes, but the future of college athletics. Neither of us have survived yet without the other, and if one of us goes down, we likely both go down together.

Bafflomathy

(no. 79)

© Devon McFarland

Adedayo Agarau (“In which the morning after, a boy’s body has been dismembered”) is the author of The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press), Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund), and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press). He is the editor in chief of Agbowó Magazine.

Laura van den Berg (“Cake”) is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel State of Paradise. Laura teaches fiction at Harvard University and lives in the Hudson Valley. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Meg Bernhard (“Going Critical”) is a journalist based in the Southwest with work in the The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She’s at work on a book about the world’s deserts for Random House.

Stephanie Burt (“Dolphins”) is the Donald and Katherine Loker professor of English at Harvard. Her books include We Are Mermaids (Graywolf) and the anthology Super Gay Poems (Belknap Press).

Tristan deBrauwere (“Enter the Wagon”) is a photographer born and raised in New York.

Dave Denison (“Changing Lanes”) is a senior editor at The Baffler.

Fromm Studio (covers) is a 3D animation studio based in the UK.

David Hill (“Heavy Betting”) is a writer and author in New York. He is currently writing a book about gambling for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Petra Browne (“Humping Iron”) has previously written for The Believer and is currently at work on a novel. She lives in Queens, New York.

Dennis M. Hogan (“A New GameDay Dawns”) is a writer and scholar based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University.

Jess McAllen (“BadRx”) is a staff writer and fact checker at The Baffler.

Sean Nam (“Brawl for All”) is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, Fixed Fights, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing. He is vice president of the Boxing Writers Association of America.

Lena Redford (“Helium Quality Targets”) is a writer and artist working near Hollywood, California.

Andrew Schenker (“The Fame Game”) is an essayist and critic who lives in Catskill, New York.

Grayson Scott (“Cow Tools”; “Helium Quality Targets”) is a writer and an editorial fellow at The Baffler.

Natalie Shapero (“Take a Picture It’ll Last Longer”) lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, Stay Dead, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in September.

Alina Stefanescu (“Loose Exegesis”) was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Recent books include Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series), Dor (Wandering Aengus Press), Every Mask I Tried On (Brighthorse Books), and the collection My Heresies (Sarabande).

Adrian Nathan West (“Enter the Wagon”) is a literary translator, essayist, and author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and My Father’s Diet.

Art Contributors

Frank Augugliaro

Em Aull

Samuel Chen

Tyler Comrie

Anthony Gerace

James Hosking

Devon McFarland

Chi Park

Irene Suosalo

The front and back covers of this issue of The Baffler are by Fromm Studio.

Submissions

The Baffler welcomes submissions. We encourage authors to read our most recent issues and online coverage before submitting to familiarize themselves with the magazine. Nonfiction should be submitted in pitch form (no complete manuscripts, please), consisting of two paragraphs that describe your project. Poetry and fiction are welcome; our preferred length for prose is between 2,200 and 5,000 words. All contributions to The Baffler are paid. Submit at https://thebaffler.com/about/submissions.

The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789 E-ISSN 2164-9266) is independently published five times a year. Subscription orders and address changes should be sent to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Telephone: 212-390-1569 or email: subscriptions@thebaffler.com. An electronic, full-text version of The Baffler is available online at http://thebaffler.com.

Subscription rates are: Individuals: Print and Electronic ~ $50, Canadians ~ $60, Outside the U.S. and Canada ~ $80. Electronic only ~ $30. Institutions: Print and Electronic ~ $88.

Single Issues: Print ~ $14, Outside the U.S. ~ $24. Claims for missing issues will be honored free of charge if made within three months after the publication date of the issue. Claims may be submitted to subscriptions@thebaffler.com.

Postmaster, send address changes to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

Permissions: To request permission to photocopy, republish, or otherwise reproduce content from The Baffler, please visit our Rights & Permissions page at https://thebaffler.com/about/permissions, or contact the permissions manager directly at The Baffler Foundation, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Email: permissions@thebaffler.com.

Phone: 212-390-1569.

thebaffler.com.