The Business of $port Weekender for September 9, 2016
Happy NFL everyone! With our Super Bowl rematch opener out of the way (Poor Graham Gano! Poor Cam Newton’s brain!), we have a big opening weekend to look forward to. I’m assuming Sunday will be filled with more tasteful tributes than this, but if this year has taught me anything, it’s not to underestimate the capacity of modern society to shock and awe.
As is to be expected when the NFL train rolls back into town, pretty heavy slate of stories about the gridiron in this edition of the Weekender. But don’t worry, my globally-minded friends, I worked in some of the other football too, with the Manchester Derby looming tomorrow.
You’ve heard plenty already, and you’re going to hear more this weekend, but there are a few worthy reads and important updates on the anthem protest that started with Kaepernick but is now spreading:
First off, if you haven’t read Howard Bryant’s ESPN Magazine piece, you need to fix that. My favorite passage:
The response to Kaepernick was an up-close view of the machine and the powerful components that combine to make it work. He exposed the mainstream impulse to discuss social issues only within boundaries that empower it.
I won’t do his words justice, so I’ll just urge you to go read it for yourself:
And then there’s Drew Magary, who makes a different but related point about the supposed sanctity of Francis Scott Key’s immortal words set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s The Anacreontic Song:
Ninety seconds isn’t nearly enough time to prove a citizen truly cares about their country, nor is it enough time for citizens to properly appreciate a returning veteran who needs more support than a round of courtesy applause. These teams are commodifying their patriotism while also trying to sanctify it.
ICYMI: The Broncos’ linebacker Brandon Marshall joined Kaepernick (and Megan Rapinoe, who did the same before her match on Tuesday, before her next opponent shifted the anthem’s timing so she couldn’t do it again) in taking a knee during last night’s anthem:
Looking ahead: yesterday, word started to spread that the Seahawks might–collectively, as a team–take a knee during the anthem at Sunday’s game. Now it seems as though they’ve got something else in mind, which receiver Doug Baldwin is referring to as a ‘demonstration of unity’:
Speaking of the Seahawks, I liked this longread from Richard Sherman in the Player’s Tribune, about how Pete Carroll’s team plays ball. I know Sherman can be polarizing, but he’s a smart dude (and the perfect contributor for Jeter’s Player’s Tribune):
I think I would buy a book that was nothing but hour-by-hour breakdowns of how famous trades throughout history went down. This MMQB recap of the Sam Bradford-Vikings hail mary is no ‘Oral History of Michael Jordan’s Legendary Flu Game’ but as far as oral histories go, it’s pretty good:
I am totally on board with the idea of the NFL in Vegas, especially if it’s the Raiders. And as I read about Shelly Adelson’s stadium plan–and think about the other awful things he spends his money on–it is clear this diversion of funds is a win-win for just about everyone except Bay Area Raider fans:
You know who is much better at doing preseason football uniform roundups than I am? Uni Watch founder Paul Lukas, that’s who:
Ex-ASU Sun Devil and Arizona Cardinal/Denver Bronco Jake Plummer is leading the charge to bring medical marijuana to a group who could use a little bit of pain relief: NFL veterans. Ride the snake, Jake. We’re with you:
Nothing but love for the efforts to digitize Cooperstown. I look forward to a future where we can use a Baseball Hall of Fame API to build all kinds of new ways to obsess over the game:
I am a die-hard devotee in the Cult of Swoosh/Js, but I’ll admit that I love the Bobbito x Puma collaboration on the Clyde. Also, bonus points for me because there’s no way you predicted there’d be a link to Vogue in your Weekender:
My favorite part of Peter Bodo’s ESPN piece on the U.S. Open’s celebrity relationships is this awkward bit:
As with all visas, some applicants are turned down. “Some of the names that come up at our meeting have us scrambling for our phones to look up who they are,” Fiur said. “Not everyone makes the cut.”
What celebrities have tried and been denied? Leave your guesses in the comments down below:
As mentioned above, this weekend won’t just give us the start of a new NFL season, it’ll also give us the Manchester Derby, the Manchester United/Manchester City match that will also be the first showdown since the clubs made their respective new manager hires (Jose Mourinho for ManU and Pep Guardiola for ManCity). It promises to be the most watched–and probably most expensive, in terms of salaries and transfer fees paid–match in Premier League history:
Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reported today that Amazon is seeking streaming rights to everything from the French Open to pro rugby. Between Twitter’s streaming deals, Facebook, Google and Verizon’s reported interest in the NFL rights, and now this, the sports video streaming space promises to heat up in coming years and change the way we watch sport (and the way leagues, teams and players profit):
Is it possible that within the span of basically one year we might get rid of Ecclestone and Sepp Blatter?:
Still not sure how quickly I am going to upgrade to an iPhone 7, however fundamentally superb it may be, but I did see one bit of hardware at Apple’s keynote this week that I will definitely be picking up: the Apple Watch Nike+ (shouldn’t it be the Nike+ Apple Watch?). Congratulations to my friends at Nike on outsexying Apple:
I remember when I was a kid and saw the first Flo-Rider wave machine in a surf video. It was at Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels. Not sure why central Texas is such a hotbed for artificial surf innovation, but I dig what cold-filtered scion Doug Coors is doing with the NLand Surf Park here in Austin and can’t wait to check it out in person:
This video from the crew at SB Nation on the psychology of sports fandom is definitely worth a view as we head into football season and a majority of us lose ourselves and/or loved ones to football every weekend:
Troy Ruediger and the team at Starters are doing some really interesting stuff and moving impressively fast to build an empire around coverage of the sports technology space. Excited to see them expand their ambitions here on Medium and beyond:
And then this last one is admittedly a bit of–pardon the pun–inside baseball, but I’m too excited about it not to share: the second season of the Dodgers Accelerator with R/GA has launched, and the R/GA services team (of which I am a part) are off to the races with five outstanding new companies. I’ll be sharing updates from the program over the next three months, but in the meantime, make sure you get to know these five future all-stars:
But it wasn’t just the Dodgers taking me out to R/GA LA of late. After having to keep a secret I wanted so badly to reveal, I can finally share the first of our work with the NFL, which got some love from Adweek yesterday:
That’s it for this week. Have yourself a great opening NFL weekend, friends. #KeepPounding
