AND THE VIDEO GAME:

Formula 1’s American revolution – how the series finally cracked the USA (Mark Mann-Bryans, 4/28/25, Motor Sport)

“Look at the whole Drive to Survive effect, which I think has had a global impact but is especially important in the United States – and when you look at the demographics, the sport has gotten younger, it’s gotten more popular,” he said.

“I have meetings all the time with guys like me, and I ask if they like Formula 1? And an American guy will say: ‘No, I don’t really follow it, but my college-age daughter loves the sport, so we watch it together’.”

Domenicali touched on Cadillac’s impending arrival and the F1 movie, released in June, with Slack highlighting Drive to Survive, which has been renewed for season eight. John Rowady, founder and CEO of US-based sports marketing agency rEvolution, believes the three things are intrinsically linked to F1 finding a home in the United States.

“It is an excellent signal that F1 has become a part of the American sports fabric, and it is here to stay,” he told Motorsport.com.

“It is the only truly global ‘super league’ offering fandom from anywhere without having to displace it from stick and ball sports. American sports fans gravitate towards authenticity – now that the sport has re-entered the American market and zeitgeist in an authentic and meaningful way, fans are connecting, exploring and engaging.” […]

“I find the real story for F1’s growth trajectory is in the demographic capture. Compared to the big four leagues, F1 boasts a younger fanbase and is particularly successful in attracting 16-24-year-olds, many of them females. In the U.S., the average F1 fan is between 32 and 35 years old, notably younger than the NFL (average age 50), NBA (42), MLB (57), and NHL (49). F1 doesn’t need to chase the 40–50-year-old demographic — it’s already cultivating Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the future leaders and consumers in America. The future lies with them.

DEEP IN THE HEARTLAND:

Bobby Fischer: While conducting a search that turned into an obsession, the author discovers a great deal about the chess genius who drifted into seclusion after winning the world title (William Nack, 7/29/1985, Sports Illustrated)

During those two months in Iceland, Fischer attained a folkloric celebrity that attracted millions of Americans to a game they had long associated with the relative obscurity of park benches and coffeehouses. Looking out from the cover of national magazines that wild summer, he was depicted as a gallant cold warrior, a solitary American genius taking on and crushing the Soviet chess juggernaut, with its Moscow computers and its small army of grandmasters arrayed against him.

The 29-year-old Fischer emerged a hero, of course, but he promptly rejected scores of offers, worth millions of dollars, to capitalize on his fame. In fact, though promising to be a fighting champion, he turned back every offer to play chess again. To this day, since Spassky resigned in the 21st and final game on Sept. 1, 1972, Fischer has not played a single game of chess in public. He forfeited his world title in 1975, turning down a multimillion-dollar offer to play challenger Anatoly Karpov in the Philippines when the world chess federation refused to meet all his conditions for the match.

So Bobby Fischer was gone. Ever since he won the championship, Fischer had been drifting quietly into seclusion, finding refuge in Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, a fundamentalist cult that observes Saturday as the Sabbath and believes in the Second Coming. After several years of serving as what is called a coworker—Fischer hadn’t been baptized—he left the church, too, and since then has retreated even further into his own private world. It is one in which journalists are not permitted. Indeed, his closest friends are sworn not to speak about him to the press, under the threat of Bobby banishing them forever from his life.

After Fischer relinquished the title, Karpov was named champion. Karpov still holds the title, but his crown has not been without a singularly painful thorn, for Fischer is still alive, out there somewhere in Southern California. No longer merely a former world chess champion, he has grown to almost mythic size, leaving behind him a trail of rumors and a chess world that is still reaching out for him in the void.

Much the same kind of effect was created in the 1850s when Paul Morphy, a New Orleans chess prodigy then recognized as the world champion, returned in triumph from Europe and soon simply stopped playing. Morphy was regarded as one of the game’s true innovators. Fischer revered him. They are the only two Americans ever acclaimed as world chess champions, and there remains that striking parallel in their careers. “Fischer’s like Morphy,” says international master Igor Ivanov, a Soviet defector. “What’s the story with you Americans’? You win the title, go home and don’t play any more.”

Later in his life, after abandoning chess altogether, Morphy suffered from delusions of persecution and withdrew into his own private world. Occasionally he strolled the streets of New Orleans, muttering, in French, “He will plant the banner of Castille upon the walls of Madrid, amidst the cries of the conquered city, and the little king will go away looking very sheepish.” He died of apoplexy, at age 47.

DOWN:

The Balloon That Fell from the Sky (Nick Davidson, March 2025, Atavist Magazine)

Each balloon in the race bore a yellow banner on its gondola identifying it as a Gordon Bennett participant. Race organizers had secured permission for the pilots to pass through any country the winds might carry them over, barring Russia. Just seven weeks prior, the country had scrambled fighter jets when a Virgin Atlantic passenger flight crossed Russia on a new route to Hong Kong. The jets threatened the plane with gunfire and forced it to land—even though the airline had cleared it with authorities. The organizers considered the country too unstable for competitors to enter its airspace, making the Russian border the hard eastern wall of the race. Any balloon that approached would be required to land or face disqualification.

Belarus and Ukraine, however, were young nations rendered independent by the Soviet Union’s collapse not quite four years prior. Both had agreed to open their skies to the race for the first time. The Cold War’s embers had darkened, and Wallace, for one, found the idea of more room to fly enticing. He felt good about their prospects as they entered a third night with plenty of ballast to spare. Behind them, Fraenckel and Stuart-Jervis were faring just as well.

Brielmann had better eyes than Wallace, and he performed most of the navigation aboard the Spirit of Springfield once the sun set. Night flying was serene if disorienting; Brielmann enjoyed it. He took occasional 20-minute naps, the sky illuminated by a full moon, and the night passed without incident.

At 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, September 12, as the Spirit of Springfield and the D-Caribbean flew south of Bialystok, a Polish weather probe ascended 60 miles to the west and, for a time, followed the balloons’ course. Both teams crossed into Belarus nearly an hour later.

At 9:34 a.m. local time, a Belarusian border guard in Brest looked up and noticed an object drifting through the skies 40 miles to the northeast, heading toward the town of Pruzhany. The guard wasn’t sure what the balloon was but thought it might pose a threat. He picked up the receiver and dialed the antiaircraft command post.

STUFF PLUS:

The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch: He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball. (George Plimpton, 4/01/1985, Sports Illustrated)

The Met inner circle believes that Finch’s problem may be that he cannot decide between baseball and a career as a horn player. In early March the club contacted Bob Johnson, who plays the horn and is the artistic director of the distinguished New York Philomusica ensemble, and asked him to come to St. Petersburg. Johnson was asked to make a clandestine assessment of Finch’s ability as a horn player and, even more important, to make contact with him. The idea was that, while praising him for the quality of his horn playing, Johnson should try to persuade him that the lot of a French-horn player (even a very fine one) was not an especially gainful one. Perhaps that would tip the scales in favor of baseball.

Johnson came down to St. Petersburg and hung around Florida Avenue for a week. He reported later to SI: “I was being paid for it, so it wasn’t bad. I spent a lot of time looking up, so I’d get a nice suntan. Every once in a while I saw Finch coming in and out of the rooming house, dressed to play baseball and carrying a funny-looking black glove. Then one night I heard the French horn. He was playing it in his room. I have heard many great horn players in my career—Bruno Jaenicke, who played for Toscanini; Dennis Brain, the great British virtuoso; Anton Horner of the Philadelphia Orchestra—and I would say Finch was on a par with them. He was playing Benjamin Britten’s Serenade, for tenor horn and strings—a haunting, tender piece that provides great space for the player—when suddenly he produced a big, evocative bwong sound that seemed to shiver the leaves of the trees. Then he shifted to the rondo theme from the trio for violin, piano and horn by Brahms—just sensational. It may have had something to do with the Florida evening and a mild wind coming in over Big Bayou and tree frogs, but it was remarkable. I told this to the Mets, and they immediately sent me home—presuming, I guess, that I was going to hire the guy. That’s not so farfetched. He can play for the Philomusica anytime.”

Meanwhile, the Mets are trying other ways to get Finch into a more positive frame of mind about baseball. Inquiries among American lamaseries (there are more than 100 Buddhist societies in the U.S.) have been quietly initiated in the hope of finding monks or priests who are serious baseball fans and who might persuade Finch that the two religions (Buddhism and baseball) are compatible. One plan is to get him into a movie theater to see The Natural, the mystical film about baseball, starring Robert Redford. Another film suggested is the baseball classic It Happens Every Spring, starring Ray Milland as a chemist who, by chance, discovers a compound that avoids wood; when applied to a baseball in the film, it makes Milland as effective a pitcher as Finch is in real life.

Conversations with Finch himself have apparently been exercises in futility. All conventional inducements—huge contracts, advertising tie-ins, the banquet circuit, ticker-tape parades, having his picture on a Topps bubble-gum card, chatting on Kiner’s Korner (the Mets’ postgame TV show) and so forth—mean little to him. As do the perks (“You are very kind to offer me a Suzuki motorcycle, but I cannot drive”). He has very politely declined whatever overtures the Mets have offered. The struggle is an absolutely internal one. He will resolve it. Last week he announced that he would let the management know what he was going to do on or around April 1.

WE DON’T EVEN DESERVE OUR IMMIGRANTS:

The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II: In honor of his mother and others imprisoned at the internment camp, baseball player Dan Kwong has restored a diamond in the California desert (Rachel Ng, 3/27/25, Smithsonian)

“Play ball,” the umpire hollered. The modest crowd roared. Little Tokyo Giants lead-off batter Dan Kwong stepped up to the plate. A gust of dry desert wind whipped up the loose sand across the infield. Kwong looked out to the clear-blue skies and craggy Sierra Nevada in the distance, taking in the moment.

“People were cheering,” Kwong reflected. “It was rather surreal that after all these months of work I was actually playing in a real game.”

Baseball game, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. / photograph by Ansel Adams Library of Congress
It was a scene plucked out of Ansel Adams’ iconic 1943 photo of a baseball game at California’s Manzanar Relocation Center. Only this time, the date was October 26, 2024, and Kwong and his teammates from the Little Tokyo Giants faced off against the Lodi JACL Templars in the inaugural game at Manzanar National Historic Site—the first since the incarceration camp closed in November 1945. Both well-established Japanese American amateur teams, the Giants beat the Templars handily in an eight-inning game, which was followed by an all-star game where players donned 1940s-style uniforms and played with vintage gloves and bats. The momentous doubleheader marked the soft launch of the newly restored field at Manzanar, a camp where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

NOT THE MOST SHAKESPEAREAN (profanity alert):

“Who Do You Think You Are? I Am!” The Oral History of the Greatest Outburst in Sports History (Alan Siegel, 3/13/25, The Ringer)

After growing up in the shadow of his distinguished father, Dick, the first face of the sport, he became the hard-partying, trash-talking, trophy-collecting bad boy of bowling. His personality made him, well, polarizing. “Half of the staid bowling community hated Pete because he seemed to buck tradition,” says Tom Clark, commissioner of the Professional Bowlers Association. “His father was the perfect ambassador. It would be like if Arnold Palmer had this wild son who became Happy Gilmore.”

That comparison isn’t quite apt. “Only because in that specific analogy, Happy had no idea about the game,” says current PBA superstar and former Weber rival Jason Belmonte. “I think Pete is, for all intents and purposes, just one of the most gifted players to ever throw a ball down the lane.”

Weber turned pro as a teenager in the late 1970s. As a young man, he talked openly about his cocaine use and drinking. He got suspended twice from the tour for “conducting unbecoming of a professional.” Yet somehow his theatrics—the WWE-inspired crotch chops, the spiking of sunglasses, the verbal outbursts—never fully derailed his career. In fact, like John McEnroe, he tended to feed off confrontation. Over 40-plus years, he piled up 37 total PBA tournament titles, 10 majors, and $4.1 million in prize money.

His most famous victory, the moment you might know him for even if you know nothing about bowling, was Weber at his most pure: deeply melodramatic, extraordinarily clutch, and bizarrely charming. On February 26, 2012, in North Brunswick, New Jersey, he won his record fifth U.S. Open championship by a single pin. When he clinched it on his final roll, this leapt out of his mouth: “Yes, goddamn it, yes! That is right, I did it! Number five! Are you kidding me?! That’s right! Who do you think you are? I am! Damn it right!”

At first, the nonsensical celebration was treated like a punch line. “I made all the halls of shame,” Weber says. Then, something strange happened. The lowlight turned into a highlight. “All of a sudden, it was a catchphrase,” Weber says. Strangers shouted it at him. High-profile athletes began repeating it triumphantly. Thirteen years later, it’s one of the most famous explosions in sports history.

PLEDGE DUTY:

What’s brewing with Red Sox? A chaotic coffee run from two top prospects (Jen McCaffrey, Mar. 13, 2025, The Athletic)

“He’s like, ‘We have to get coffee for every single person in the org,’” Mayer recalled. “And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He shows me a list. There were 40 coffee orders already.”

Marcelo Mayer’s coffee run led to a big day at the plate. (Mike Watters / Imagn Images)
Like preparing for the next day’s opposing pitcher, they had to develop a game plan. They picked a Starbucks on Alico Road about 6 miles from JetBlue Park, and the night before, they drove there and asked for the manager.

“I’m like, ‘You better bring your A squad tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. because we’re ordering 76 coffees,’” Mayer said. “They weren’t just all black coffees, everyone had a separate order.”

Mayer and Anthony begrudgingly woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get to Starbucks right when it opened.

The four-person staff was well-prepared for the Thursday morning madness. But making the process more chaotic, Anthony had to read off each individual order and pay one at a time. That way each cup would have a player’s name on it and they could keep track of who had which coffee.

After about 20 orders, Anthony’s credit card was declined, with the company suspecting fraud due to the flood of successive coffee purchases. Mayer started paying.

Over roughly an hour, Mayer and Anthony watched as the Starbucks crew brewed, shook, pumped, steamed and stirred the coffees, organizing them into cardboard trays.

“They did a very good job of pumping them out,” Anthony said. “It was crazy.”

“You’d think they did that (large of an order) every morning,” Mayer said. “They were really good.”

A few unlucky customers came through the Starbucks drive-thru during the Red Sox coffee crush, but thankfully for the staff, no one else arrived in the store during the early morning madness.

When it was all said and done, the bill came to more than $600, which Mayer and Campbell split, making sure to leave the baristas a hefty cash tip for all their efforts.

In the chaos of their morning, Mayer didn’t think to use his Starbucks app to pay for the order, which would have earned him stars toward future purchases.

“I would have had free coffee for a month,” Mayer lamented.

MONEYBALL BEFORE IT WAS COOL:

Earl Weaver, Baseball Lout and Legend: REVIEW: ‘The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented & Reinvented Baseball’ by John W. Miller (Matt Lewis, March 9, 2025, Free Beacon)

Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4″ Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players “in the aggregate.” Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.

ONCE WERE NEWSPAPERS:

The Last Sportswriters of New York (Dave Kaplan|Mar. 9th, 2025, New York: Intelligencer)

Along with 75-year-old Steve Serby and 74-year-old Larry Brooks, Mushnick is part of a holy trinity of snowy-haired sportswriters who anchor a section that trumpets itself as the “Best Sports in New York” — a claim that has gone virtually unchallenged since the New York Times shuttered its sports section and the Daily News, the Post’s fiercest competitor for decades, has been reduced to a skeleton operation. The paper covers the city’s sports scene like it’s still 1985 while navigating a vastly changed sports-media landscape. Locker rooms are now filled with what former Times columnist George Vecsey calls “the thumb people” — less-seasoned reporters constantly scrolling and tweeting updates. “It’s kind of interesting walking in there and seeing kids 50 years younger than me,” admits Brooks, who has been writing about the Rangers since the mid-1970s. Serby, who’s been covering the Jets and the Giants for over four decades, says, “Some of today’s athletes have no concept of what it means to be a reporter or columnist.”

In an industry ravaged by layoffs and early retirements, Brooks, Mushnick, and Serby are an endangered species — tab men from the old school.

BE DECENT:

A simple act of kindness from his favorite athlete changed his life forever (Jeremy Rutherford, Feb 27, 2025, The Athletic)

Jim Marquardt was 16 and seeking some privacy. He had an important letter to write and his short attention span couldn’t compete with the TV in the living room, so he retreated upstairs to his sister’s bedroom.

He shut the door and started scribbling. It was a Saturday night, and while his brain was telling his right hand what to write on the white legal pad, his ears were listening to the St. Louis Blues hockey game. He loved the team and specifically its goaltender, Mike Liut. He tuned into KMOX radio to hear Hall of Fame broadcaster Dan Kelly belt out, “What a spectacular save by Liut!”

On this particular night, the volume was low because Marquardt had to be dialed in. In a page or two, the high school sophomore wanted to capture what to say to his sports hero.

He poured his heart into his words, and as a poor student hoping for the letter to be perfect, he later took it to his English teacher for help. The teacher wondered why a student with flunking grades was suddenly motivated but made the corrections nonetheless. It was handwritten, so every mistake meant a rewrite. The final product was five pages and took a month to finish.

“I remember everything I wrote in that letter,” says Marquardt, now 59.