THE WARMUP

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, Alexi Lalas gets dunked on by everyone who already knew, Serena and Venus head back to Wimbledon doubles with Martina Navratilova’s record still standing, a 36-year newspaper career ends in a cost-cutting memo and a Substack, and the World Cup’s American media landscape looks nothing like it did in 2014.

Grab a cuppa and settle in.

THE LEAD

Fifteen months ago, on his State of the Union podcast, Alexi Lalas mentioned the vintage hockey jersey he had on. Cranbrook, he said, is the private school he attended growing up outside Detroit.

Then he got to the part he really wanted to say. Cranbrook, he told co-host David Mosse, is the school Eminem name-drops in his rap battle with Papa Doc, played by Anthony Mackie. Papa Doc was pretending to slum it with everyone in urban Detroit, when he was actually a private school kid from the suburbs the whole time. Lalas and Mosse started quoting the verse back and forth. “This guy’s a gangster. His real name is Clarence.”

“It’s the same Cranbrook that if you watched 9 Mile,” Lalas said.

Anyone under 50 knows the movie is called “8 Mile.” More people know 8 Mile Road itself, the line that’s separated the poorer side of Detroit from the affluent white suburbs for generations — Lalas’s side. He’s referenced the movie correctly on his own social media before. The slip didn’t feel like ignorance. It was the specific, unbothered arrogance of someone from the suburbs looking down at the other side of the tracks without much interest in getting the name of it right.

That arrogance is exactly what made Lalas the leading American soccer pundit for two decades, and why Fox Sports loves that he’s seen as a villain. He’s said himself that the 30-second hot take delivered with total conviction is the skill that got him there. The arrogance shows up in his politics too, in his unapologetic defense of pay-for-play youth soccer, etc. Whether you like him or not, you can’t stop watching. And it’s that air that makes it so easy to dunk on him now, watching him get out-talked, or dare I say, out-classed by Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimović, and Rebecca Lowe on Fox’s lead World Cup desk this summer.

Lalas peaked during ESPN’s coverage of the 2014 World Cup. Fox bought the U.S. World Cup TV rights after that and paid him trunkloads of money to be its lead studio analyst, betting that the same loud, fast certainty that had worked at ESPN would carry over.

He’s more the Tony Romo of soccer television now. Romo shot to fame in his broadcast career by calling out plays before the snap, off the strength of his film room work, until it became clear he no longer put in those hours. Now, even though Romo is still a TV star like Lalas is, Troy Aikman has lapped him entirely, the same way Henry and Ibrahimović have lapped Lalas. Jimmy Conrad, Charlie Davies, and Tony Meola — Lalas’s actual peer group — have spent the years since 2014 earning coaching licenses while their media work gets sharper. Lalas seems content to still be 2014 Lalas.

The American soccer fan is a lot smarter than that now. Years of close-up Premier League coverage, with analysts like former USMNT goalkeeper Tim Howard (and Kyle Martino before him) breaking the game down weekly, raised the baseline for what good analysis sounds like. Dozens of former U.S. players are making real waves in American soccer media as a result. Rog Bennett, an English expat who broke through at that same Brazil World Cup, has spent the years since building a soccer media empire of his own with Men in Blazers. Lalas figured out early that he was good at the studio quips. The build-up has been lacking ever since.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Serena Williams, 44, and her sister Venus, 45, are playing women’s doubles together at this year’s Wimbledon. Who is the oldest player to ever win a title at Wimbledon?

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.

Lane’s argument starts from a real tension: the current administration has tried to claim this USMNT roster as a “unity” symbol while pursuing immigration policies that would have kept several of its own players out of the country.

He runs through the roster player by player — Balogun, Weah, Wright, Roldan, Zendejas, Pepi, McKenzie — and the immigrant or refugee story behind nearly every one of them, noting that close to half the roster is made up of immigrants or the sons of immigrants.

His point isn’t subtle, but it lands: a team built almost entirely with people who came from somewhere else, or whose parents did, is being used as a backdrop for messaging that treats those same origins as a threat. Lane draws a distinction worth sitting with: unity isn’t the same thing as uniformity, and a team this specifically American in its diversity makes a better case for the country than any slogan could.

May’s exit from Michigan, two months after cutting down the nets for the program’s first title in thirty-seven years, is the kind of move that invites overreaction, and this piece by Craig Meyer resists it. May is only the second men’s college basketball coach to leave for an NBA head-coaching job since 2019, when John Beilein also left Michigan (for Cleveland), and the piece frames his departure less as proof college basketball is broken and more as one coach’s individual read on a sport in the middle of an awkward transition.

The line worth lingering on is the one about how recently this all changed: “long before NIL and the transfer portal were part of the sport’s vocabulary, players had far fewer ways to get paid before turning pro, and that shift is reshaping who stays in college and why, and now apparently who coaches there too.” Worth the full read for how even-keeled it stays about a moment a lot of other coverage treated as a five-alarm fire.

Last week, we shared a story about how much money is being made off the World Cup’s hydration breaks. Weinreb takes a sanctity-of-sport angle.

Weinreb’s setup is a slow burn worth sticking with. He opens on a 2006 Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader that ran over eight and a half hours combined across two games, with twenty pitchers and 782 total pitches between them — the kind of bloat American sports fans have simply made peace with, commercials and all.

Soccer, in his telling, was always the exception: forty-five minutes, stoppage time, halftime, forty-five more, no network breaking in to sell you pizza. For me, unless in a knockout moment, soccer is over in two hours. Bam.

Then this World Cup arrived on American soil for the first time in three decades, FIFA and Fox found religion on “hydration breaks,” and the one sport that didn’t make you wait for the action started making you wait for the action. The piece is paywalled partway through, but the setup alone is sharp enough, and the central bit — FIFA’s hydration break as a commercial break wearing a referee’s jersey — is the kind of line that’s going to stick with you well past this World Cup.

Lombardo went into this admitting his own initial assumption was wrong. He figured no team would touch a quarterback who’d bet on his own games at Indiana, and the early read from six sources, including front office executives and offensive coaches across the league, told him otherwise: Sorsby is getting drafted.

The reasoning is almost uncomfortably simple. He threw for 2,800 yards and 27 touchdowns against just five interceptions last season at Cincinnati, while adding 580 rushing yards and nine more touchdowns on the ground, and that kind of dual-threat production makes front offices willing to look past a lot. One veteran NFC evaluator put it plainly to Lombardo: there’s no doubt someone drafts him, the only question is where his background drops him relative to a strong incoming quarterback class.

The piece is sharpest when it points out the obvious tension nobody in the league office wants to say out loud — a team weighing whether to draft a player for gambling on football is doing so with a sportsbook logo on the wall down the hall.

Schiffer and Rothenberg collaborated on this by noticing something small and ran it all the way down. Serena’s comeback announcement video showed her holding a racquet with no Wilson logo visible, a detail easy to miss except that Wilson had been her racquet sponsor since she was roughly 6 years old.

Nike rolled out a full campaign almost immediately. Wilson, a brand normally active on social media, said nothing. The reporting behind that silence turns out to be more mundane than scandalous: sources on both sides say the two parties simply haven’t finalized a new contract since her old one lapsed during her years away from the tour, with one Wilson source noting her comeback caught the brand off guard too.

A second source teases a Williams-branded racquet and bag line timed to the US Open. A sharp reminder that even the most permanent-seeming sponsorships are still just contracts.

Wahdan’s roll call of the women in the F1 paddock makes a sharper point than the listicle format suggests. Her real argument is that the paddock has quietly assembled one of the most accomplished groups of partners in sport — an Olympic-level cyclist, an art historian, a professional golfer, a finance exec — and most of it went unnoticed until Kim Kardashian showed up.

Kelly Piquet studied international relations in New York, worked as a stylist assistant at Vogue Latinoamerica, and built her own following well beyond her famous last name, and that’s before getting to Carmen Montero Mundt, who reportedly draws as many as forty photographers per race weekend. A fun follow-up to the F1 fashion piece from issue one — same corner of the sport, different angle in.

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.

Forty minutes of solid Wimbledon table-setting from Tennis Tribe’s Hanlon Walsh, who covers a lot of ground without rushing any of it. He runs through the American men heading into the tournament — Ben Shelton and Taylor Fritz up top, with real questions about whether Tommy Paul and Frances Tiafoe can keep producing on grass — before turning to whether Aryna Sabalenka is set up for a bounce-back and why he’s bullish on a deep run from Jessica Pegula.

Serena and Venus both get a segment, tied naturally into the broader doubles conversation, where Walsh makes a real case for why doubles deserves more attention than the average fan gives it, with Katerina Siniakova’s climb up the all-time rankings as the anchor example. Good listen if you want the full Wimbledon picture in one sitting instead of piecing it together across five different previews.

THE WATCH

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.

Louis takes a real position here, and it’s not the easy one. His read on Wyndham Clark’s win is two arguments running side by side: Clark deserved it, and Clark also makes it hard to root for him, and neither of those cancels the other out. He pushes back hard on the idea that Clark’s lead came from an easier early draw, pointing out that plenty of players got the same favorable conditions and didn’t come close. The stats back him up — Clark graded out among the tournament’s best in both ball-striking and putting all week, which Louis frames as the real story underneath all the noise about lucky bounces.

Where he gets more interesting is on Clark himself: he argues the heckling and boos weren’t manufactured the way Matt Fitzpatrick’s “USA vs. England” treatment was earlier this season, and that Clark had a real chance to win people over the way Fitzpatrick did by engaging with the crowd, and didn’t take it. He’s also not shy about going after NBC’s broadcast choices, particularly the featured-group coverage that buried Miles Russell and Jackson Koivun in favor of less compelling pairings. Worth a watch for anyone who wants the case against the “Clark got lucky” narrative made well, alongside a fair amount of criticism of Clark’s likability that doesn’t feel like pile-on.

THE PRESSROOM

Dave Hyde, sports columnist at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for thirty-six years, was laid off this month in what the paper called a cost-cutting move. He’s only been laid off once before — as a teenage ice-rink skate guard, also for cost-cutting reasons. Hyde launched a Substack, The Hyde Side, on June 22. A venerable columnist forced into independence is exactly the kind of follow this newsletter exists for — worth tracking where he takes it.

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 | Jack Greven | Michael King | Heart of a Fan | Finn Foster | Michael Ham | Megan Rapinoe | Eric Katz | The Secret Tour Caddy | Rohan Ajit | Carron J. Phillips | Tevin Morris | Chris Russell | C.M. Thomas | The Hockey Writers | Jake Scudder

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

Martina Navratilova, who won the 2003 mixed doubles title with Leander Paes at 46 years, 261 days old — still the oldest Wimbledon champion in the tournament’s history, in any discipline. Timely footnote: Netflix just released Chris & Martina: The Final Set, a documentary on Navratilova’s decades-long rivalry and eventual friendship with Chris Evert, including their parallel battles with cancer.

THE SCORECARD