THE WARMUP

Happy Sunday. The Back Page is open.

This week, the Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, the World Cup is dressed and ready before a ball is kicked, Lisa Leslie tells the story nobody told at the time, and Sports Illustrated loses more good journalists.

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THE LEAD

The number that keeps coming back to me is 53.

In March 2014, I wrote about Madison Square Garden hosting the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 53 years. The drought traced directly to the 1951 point-shaving scandal that swallowed seven players from CCNY’s Grand Slam championship team — sons of immigrants, descendants of slaves, the best basketball the city had ever produced — and humbled New York’s hold on the game it invented.

That reporting earned me a first prize from the Associated Press Sports Editors. I was proud of it. Still am.

Now the number is back.

The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years. Atlanta took a 2-1 series lead in Round 1. The Knicks have won 11 straight since. Sweep Philly. Sweep Cleveland. Win 11 straight after going down 2-1. The East wasn’t strong enough is a hard case to make from those box scores.

I was a Knicks fan long before I was a journalist. Bernard King in the mid-80s. The entire Patrick Ewing era. Jordan breaking my heart more than once. The 1994 Finals loss in seven to Houston still sits wrong. But 1999 had something else. Allan Houston’s off-balance jumper against Miami in the first round, eliminating the top seed. Larry Johnson’s four-point play against Indiana in the Eastern Conference Finals. That team was a No. 8 seed playing like it had nothing to lose. They lost to San Antonio in five, but nobody who watched felt robbed. It was enough just to be there.

Twenty-seven years later, this team is back.

The Garden is 53 years removed from the last Knicks championship. Fifty-three years since the city rebuilt its basketball identity after the scandal gutted it — sending its best players out of New York and into programs across the country. Frank McGuire took a team of mostly city kids to North Carolina and beat Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain for the 1957 NCAA title. The Knicks of 1970 and 1973 gave it back. Then nothing.

This city has been waiting a long time. The gear is flying off the racks. You can feel it everywhere.

I hope they finish it.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Iga Swiatek is still alive at this year’s French Open. If she wins the title, how many Roland Garros crowns would she have — and where would that put her on the all-time Open Era list?

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 tournament hasn’t started, and Nike has already lapped the field — not with kits, but with collaborators.

Palace with England. Jacquemus with France. Slawn with Nigeria. NOCTA with Canada. G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE with South Korea. Virgil Abloh Archive with the USA. Tayler Willson maps how Nike paired each partner to a country’s specific cultural frequency rather than just slapping heat on a crest.

The World Cup is being fought on Instagram before a ball is kicked, and Nike knows it.

Bradford William Davis has been doing the kind of work on MLB’s domestic violence investigations that the league would rather nobody do.

Here, he uses FOIA requests to obtain emails between MLB’s Department of Investigations and local police departments — including correspondence from the 2015-16 José Reyes case — to show exactly how thorough the league can be when it wants to build a case.

The contrast with how the league handled Mike Clevinger’s accusers is the whole story. Essential independent sports reporting.

Adidas has supplied every World Cup ball since 1970. Fifty-six years, 14 tournaments, one contract nobody else has ever seriously competed for.

Woz traces the first half of that run, from the Telstar’s black-and-white panels built for television sets in Mexico to the Tricolore Zidane headed twice past the Brazilian keeper in the 1998 final, and finds a history of the sport hiding inside the equipment.

The Hand of God happened with the Azteca under Maradona’s feet. Baggio’s missed penalty in the Rose Bowl sent the Questra into the upper tier. Ronaldo was there in 1998, too, even if France 98 is not his tournament to own.

Part 2, covering the era when the match ball stopped being equipment and became a product line — and when Messi’s story begins — is coming. Start here.

The World Cup roster reveal used to be a list of names. Now it’s a brand manifesto.

Carla Bilche ranks the best announcement videos so far: Scotland with Ewan McGregor’s voice over local pubs and landscapes, the Czech Republic with kids in Nedvěd haircuts dreaming in their bedrooms, England opening on John Lennon and closing with four players striking the Help! album cover pose to announce Harry Kane. England wins.

The formula she identifies for what separates the ones that land from the ones that don’t is worth the read on its own. Part 2 is coming.

Molly Morrison covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. She was outside Madison Square Garden when the Knicks clinched, microphone in hand, watching the city come apart.

This isn’t a game recap, it’s a dispatch from the street, from the people who have been waiting 27 years for this. She writes about the ones who closed their eyes and thought of someone gone. The ones who weren’t alive the last time. Worth reading alongside whatever highlights you already watched.

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.

Three-time MVP, four-time Olympic gold medalist, first player to dunk in WNBA history — and she felt compelled to publicly apologize to fans for missing a season to give birth. Skylar Diggins and Cassidy Hubbarth’s new podcast is built around the specific experience of being a mother in professional sports, and this second episode is a strong early statement.

Leslie talks about what it took to bring her daughter on the road when no infrastructure existed for it, the financial and logistical realities that nobody was talking about then, and what real support for player-moms could actually look like. Worth your hour.

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.

Texas Tech transfer Mia Williams came back to Gainesville last weekend to face her former Florida team in the NCAA Softball Super Regional. Florida pitcher Keagan Rothrock had hit 20 batters all season. She hit Williams four times in three games (Williams was hit 5 times overall).

A Florida fan was ejected after striking Mia’s younger sister with a handheld fan, an altercation that also briefly pulled Jason Williams — White Chocolate, former Florida Gator, NBA champion — out of the stands before he returned. Williams answered the chaos the only way that matters: a two-run homer in Game 1, and a 16-7 Texas Tech rout in the series clincher.

Florida refused to shake hands after. Sarah Chovnick breaks it all down. If you aren’t following The Daily W Sports, fix that.

THE PRESSROOM

Ted Gioia, one of Substack’s biggest voices at 291,000-plus subscribers, pins Sports Illustrated’s collapse on the moment it published AI-generated content under fake bylines.

He’s not wrong that it was a self-inflicted wound. But the AI scandal was a cherry on top of a decades-long decline: the same slow retreat from ambition that has hollowed out legacy sports media across the board.

SI was already a shell before the fake bylines. The magazine that once published Faulkner on hockey and convinced a president-elect to write a freelance piece had been dying in slow motion long before anyone heard of a large language model. Friday’s layoffs took more good journalists with it. Read Gioia’s piece. Just know the story is longer than he tells 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.

Views From The 6th Borough | Jesse Gerritsen | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | Baseball Scoops | Sando’s FC Barcelona | West Ham Fan | Michael King | Tanish Arora | People Brands and Things | EMS | Madailein Olin | The Gist | Olivia Nielsen | Offball | The Full Scope | Josh Liddick | Rodrigo Martínez | Omar Zahran

Here are some tennis follows for the French Open (Roland Garros):

Ben Rothenberg | Christopher Clarey | Tennis Sweet Spot | Jessica Schiffer | Wayne Coffey | Tennis World Live | Inside American Tennis | Tennis Inside Numbers | Tennis Unfiltered

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

Five titles, which would move Swiatek into sole possession of third place on the all-time Open Era list, behind Steffi Graf (six) and Chris Evert (seven).

THE SCORECARD