THE WARMUP

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

Hope your Fourth was a good one. If you're reading this the morning after — coffee in hand, ears still ringing a little from the fireworks — you've got George Steinbrenner and Al Davis waiting for you below: two men born a day apart who ran their franchises like the country's birthday was a personality trait. One got banned by his own commissioner. The other gave his commissioner headaches by suing his own league and won. Neither would recognize what ownership looks like now.

Also this week: a free kick that might be the best in U.S. World Cup history, David Beckham cashing in on a World Cup he's not even playing in and 66 hot dogs.

Get in.

THE LEAD

George Steinbrenner paid a small-time gambler $40,000 to dig up dirt on his own best hitter. That's the kind of decision that gets you banned from your own team. In 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent suspended him from running the Yankees' day-to-day business for going after Dave Winfield through a man named Howard Spira.

He was reinstated in 1993 and went right back to running the Yankees the same way he always had, just minus the shady tactics, and the Yankees won five more World Series before he died in 2010.

Steinbrenner was born July 4, 1930. Raiders owner Al Davis was born a year earlier on the same day.

Both grew up watching self-made fathers claw a real business out of an unglamorous trade — shipping for one, ladies' garments for the other — and neither man forgot what that kind of will looked like up close.

It showed up in how they ran things.

Davis once drafted a track sprinter, Cliff Branch, in a league where speed alone rarely won jobs. It worked, but the instinct behind it also produced its share of Raiders picks who burned through stopwatches, yet couldn't play a lick.

Steinbrenner fired and rehired Billy Martin five times between 1975 and 1988. From 1973 to 1990, the Yankees changed managers 19 times.

Those same instincts also produced 1976, the year of America's bicentennial. Davis's roster of renegades and rejects won the Raiders' first Super Bowl that season. The Yankees reached the World Series for the first time in 12 years, then won it back-to-back the next two seasons.

Whatever else you want to say about how these two ran things, it worked when it mattered most.

Davis moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, then back to Oakland in 1995 (his son Mark moved them to Las Vegas in 2020). Every relocation came with a fight attached. And that bulldog combativeness oozed from both of them.

Davis sued the NFL over the Los Angeles move and won, and that lawsuit is why he could relocate a franchise unilaterally in the first place. His Brooklyn boxer mentality would give him leverage over a league. That abrasiveness is what got General Von Steingrabber, as New York Daily News legend Bill Gallo drew him because he grabbed so much space and so many headlines in the tabloid, into trouble as much as it brought him seven World Series rings and a recurring portrayal by Larry David on “Seinfeld.”

Neither man would recognize the way a team gets bought now: a spreadsheet decision by a hedge fund looking for a stable place to park money. Steinbrenner and Davis ran their teams the way their fathers ran their businesses: personally, stubbornly, and with the conviction that losing was a referendum on who you were.

Or as Davis put it so eloquently and bluntly as an American fighter would on the country's 250th birthday: Just win, baby.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Joey Chestnut ate 66 hot dogs and buns to win his 18th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest today. How many hot dogs shy of his own record was that?

See answer below 👇

THE READS

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

The Buffalo Bills’ new stadium (Highmark Stadium) quietly writes O.J. Simpson out of the building, even though he was the first running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season and was central to the Wall of Fame at the old stadium. It’s a strange kind of erasure, too, since his bust hasn’t gone anywhere — Canton isn’t taking it down at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, just Buffalo. Worth reading for the tension Carron J. Phillips digs into: an organization managing brand risk around a man whose name is still polarizing well beyond football, while the actual accomplishments quietly disappear along with him.

The WNBA’s slowest news period overlaps almost exactly with the point in the calendar when football commentators have nothing else to talk about, and that mismatch is doing real work in how the Caitlin Clark-Alyssa Thomas foul got covered. Maitreyi Anantharaman is not soft on the play itself — the league did retroactively upgrade it to a flagrant and suspend Thomas — but she pushes back on the idea that Clark’s season is a highlight reel of victimhood, pointing out she’s actually having one of her best statistical years.

Lindsay Dial’s take on the Carlos Mendoza firing at Citi Field gets at something more useful than the usual “fire the manager” reflex: she’s careful to note how little modern managers actually control on the lineup and analytics side, then builds the case for what she thinks does land on him anyway: a clubhouse that liked Mendoza but stopped listening to him. I don’t think it’s as clean as she frames it, and I’d still put more of this on New York’s front office and analytics setup than she does, but she’s right that he wasn’t just a helpless bystander in his own firing, either.

Arsenije Milenković opens with an unfinished screenplay about the old Aaron Ramsey death-curse myth, of all things, before landing on the real subject: Mexico hadn’t won a World Cup knockout game since 1986, until the round of 32 against Ecuador broke it. His closing point is the one worth noting before today’s Round of 16 match against England: lifting a curse doesn’t end a story; it just means nobody knows what the next chapter looks like. I mean the Knicks just ended a 53-year drought that was deemed a curse in some corners of Knickerbocker fandom.

Adam Steinmetz was watching his kid’s Little League All-Star game outside Boston when the Jaylen Brown-for-Paul-George trade broke, and the reactions he catches in real time say more than another hot take could. Then he does the actual work: digging past the incongruent facts to a stat that might explain the deal, buried in a Bobby Marks report: the Celtics have been better with Brown off the floor than on it for the better part of a decade.

Beckham hasn't played in over a decade, yet he's bending it all across Adidas, Lay's, Stella Artois, McDonald's, Lenovo, Home Depot and Bank of America campaigns this tournament — deals analysts peg at around $25 million combined. David Skilling's real point isn't that Beckham is famous; it's that he's become something rarer: a sponsor's risk-free bet, a guy who can move from a fashion campaign to a business conference without the transition feeling forced. Worth reading for the larger shift it points to — retirement used to end an athlete's commercial peak, and Beckham may be the clearest proof that doesn't have to be true anymore.

THE LISTEN

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Tennis & Bagels’ Andre Rolemberg watched Serena Williams play her first singles match in almost four years at Wimbledon and came away convinced she could still do it, even after she ran out of gas late against Maya Joint. Worth noting going in: the knee she tweaked in that very match ended up costing her the doubles reunion with her sister, Venus, she’d been building toward. The second half is an interesting listen: Rolemberg pushes back hard on Djokovic’s suggestion that tennis needs shorter matches. He makes the case that the stat everyone cites doesn’t mean what people think it means.

THE WATCHES

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Thomas Tuchel’s England has looked fine against nobody teams and shaky against anybody with a pulse, and James Lawrence Allcott (460K subscribers, a gig hosting the Premier League’s own tactics show) breaks down exactly why. His read: Mexico exposes the same gaps everyone’s been squinting at since the last international window, and Tuchel’s system needs a real fix before this turns into a bigger problem than one bad group game.

Malik Tillman’s awe-struck kick rivals Eric Wynalda’s legendary strike from 1994 for the best in U.S. World Cup history. Tillman looped it over the wall in the 82nd minute, with the USMNT playing a man down after Folarin Balogun’s red card, to seal a 2-0 win and send the USMNT to their first knockout-round win since 2002. Take a minute for this short from MEDspiration even if you’ve already watched the real-time replay a dozen times.

THE PRESSROOM

Last week we mentioned David Hyde had landed on Substack after getting laid off from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where he’d been a columnist since 1990. This week, the NSMA confirmed what more than three decades of that column had already established: he tied Tampa Bay Times columnist Rick Stroud for Florida Sportswriter of the Year, his fifth time taking the honor. Getting laid off doesn’t erase three decades of being the best in your state at this. If anything, it’s proof the layoff was never about the work.

THE ROSTER

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who either submitted their work for consideration or were considered independently this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

Let’s Talk Football | The Full Scope | Jack Greven | Michael King | Jason Clewes | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | The Secret Tour Caddy | Jessica Schiffer | Michael Ham | Rodrigo Martínez | Neil Paine | Wayne Coffey | Jack Carnefix | Eric Lusk | Tevin Morris | The Hockey Writers

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

THE ANSWER

10. Chestnut's record of 76 hot dogs, set in 2021, still stands.

THE SCORECARD