The Black Lives Matter movement has not just made its presence felt through protests of police brutality and systemic racism within the American law enforcement and justice system, but also the world of business, as vast issues regarding a lack of diversity within some of the country’s biggest and most powerful companies have been viewed under a microscope.

Many companies were quick to issue statements supporting protests and condemning racism, often in vague terms and without mentioning the police and what the protests were really trying to express. Nike was among those that issued statements and created ads with some of its most prominent Black athletes, also pledging financial contributions — including the $100 million pledge with Michael Jordan through Jordan Brand — to support programs fighting racial injustice. On Thursday, Nike’s CEO John Donahoe announced some internal steps Nike will take to continue their promise to support Black culture.

Donahoe sent an internal memo noting Juneteenth will become a paid company holiday, and that they will start a diversity education program for employees as well as making sure leadership is held accountable for ensuring there is proper representation within the company, per Newsweek.

“For more than 40 years, our brand has celebrated incredible Black athletes and inspired millions of people all over the world by amplifying their excellence,” he said. “When we say that Black Lives Matter, it applies to the world outside of Nike and, importantly, it applies to our Black teammates within Nike. Simply put, we need to hold ourselves to a high standard given the heritage of our company and our brand.”

Juneteenth — which celebrates June 19, 1865, the day slavery became fully abolished in the U.S. — becoming a more widely celebrated day is important here in the United States, and Nike joins the likes of Twitter and Square in making similar announcements recently. What will be most important is that they follow through on the promise to increase representation of the Black and Latinx community within the company, particularly at the executive level, and that’s certainly something worth watching in coming years to see if they indeed take strides in that area.

Major League Soccer’s return got confirmed earlier this week, when the league announced the aptly-named “MLS is Back Tournament” for July 8. All 26 of the league’s squads will head to Orlando for an event at Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex, with clubs participating in group play before moving onto a knockout tournament.

Of course, in order to put on a tournament that features group play, you need teams separated into groups. That occurred on Thursday afternoon, when the clubs were broken up into six groups based on their conferences — all but one have four teams, with Group A including six Eastern Conference clubs. Here’s how it all breaks down, via ESPN:

GROUP A
1. Orlando City SC
2. Inter Miami CF
3. New York City FC
4. Philadelphia Union
5. Chicago Fire
6. Nashville SC

GROUP B
1. Seattle Sounders
2. FC Dallas
3. Vancouver Whitecaps
4. San Jose Earthquakes

GROUP C
1. Toronto FC
2. New England Revolution
3. Montreal Impact
4. D.C. United

GROUP D
1. Real Salt Lake
2. Sporting Kansas City
3. Colorado Rapids
4. Minnesota United

GROUP E
1. Atlanta United
2. FC Cincinnati
3. New York Red Bulls
4. Columbus Crew SC

GROUP F
1. LAFC
2. LA Galaxy
3. Houston Dynamo
4. Portland Timbers

The MLS season came to an abrupt halt in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic after only two weeks worth of games. As such, these matches will contribute to regular season records, with the tournament’s winner automatically earning a spot in the CONCACAF Champions League. Group play will begin on July 8, the knockout rounds will kick off on July 25, and the tournament’s final will occur on August 11.

If you’ve been watching Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown during quarantine and though the dramatic differences between the two brands was WWE’s biggest creative failing — one is red and the other is blue, it’s like night and day — don’t worry, your concerns have been heard. You weirdo.

Per an announcement made on WWE.com on Thursday afternoon, the creative teams for both Raw and Smackdown will be consolidated into one unit under Bruce Prichard. Like Smackdown? Have two Smackdowns! If you’re wondering where Paul Heyman’s supposed to end up under this new deal, the news blurb mentions that he’ll be concentrating on his role, “as an in-ring performer.”

In an effort to streamline our creative writing process for television, we have consolidated both teams from Raw and SmackDown into one group, led by Bruce Prichard. Paul Heyman will concentrate on his role as an in-ring performer.

Maybe Heyman and Brock Lesnar are going to make a run at the Raw Tag Team Championship.

It was around this very time last year when WWE announced they were getting their shit together, so to speak, and promoting both Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff to Executive Director roles. By October Bischoff was out and Bruce Prichard was in, and now Prichard’s managed to take both of those positions.

Smackdown is dead. Long live Smackdown.

The Star Wars franchise — especially the original trilogy — has by now been picked to death, its every secret made public, its every plot point and character and gizmo discussed to death. Or has it? Turns out there are some Star Wars tidbits we’ve never known before. For instance, do you know what Ewoks look like without fur? Have you ever thought to wonder that? Well, prepare yourself, because here’s what that nightmare looks like:

This comes from Jake Lunt Davies, a concept designer and storyboard artist whose credits include Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 10 Cloverfield Lane, the forthcoming Venom sequel, and four different Star Wars titles, including The Rise of Skywalker. He’s deep in the franchise, though the image he produced — of what looks like a full-body plaster caster of Shrek, but with scarier teeth — is actually from the extras on the TROS Blu-ray.

Ewoks, of course, are among the most contentious elements of the Star Wars-verse, especially when it was revealed the original concept for Return of the Jedi was much, much darker. At least everyone can agree they’re cute, though. Except now that we know what’s going on underneath, maybe not so much anymore.

(Via EW)

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In 1998, I had just graduated from the University of Missouri and didn’t have a job yet. Frankly, it was a kind of aimless year in my life where I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. That summer, I spent a lot of time at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, which pretty much anyone who was living in St. Louis did because there’s really not that much else going on there, ever. Oh course, this turned out to be the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa embarked on a then magical, now controversial home run chase that had never been seen before or, really, since.

On Labor Day, 1998, I was seated in left field when McGwire came up to bat, sitting on 60 home runs. He belts one high and deep, over my head. I’m sitting in an aisle seat and I instinctively start running up the steps. The ball ricochets off the Stadium Club glass and careens back down, right where my seat was. I’m not 100 percent sure I would have caught it. I had a glove. It would have probably been 50-50. But that day has haunted me for 22 years. Now, in A.J. Schnack’s new documentary, Long Gone Summer (which airs Sunday on ESPN), I got to relive the whole anguishing experience, as there’s footage of the whole thing.

What’s funny is, that week in Sports Illustrated, there’s a shot of the crowd and it caught me right when I realized I had made a terrible mistake. That’s me in the hat and bad shirt.

But what I liked most about Schnack’s film is that it really recaptures what that summer was like. Yes, there was a price to pay later. It wasn’t quite as “real” as we all hoped, and the film gets into the fallout from the steroid era. But, mostly, it concentrates on just how fun that summer really was. I’ve had conflicted feelings about the whole thing, but this film really helped me realize that summer was a great experience and, regardless of what came of it, it was still magic.

I spent a lot of time at Busch Stadium that summer. So, as I’m watching this, I see archive footage of myself from 1998…

Oh, that’s amazing. Which footage? Do you know?

Oh, yeah, I know. I almost caught 61.

Oh, wow!

I’m in that shot of the crowd diving for the ball. It’s kind of haunted me my whole life, and then I got to see it again right there in your film.

Memorialized now.

What’s interesting about your film is that, yes, you dive into the PED scandal, but the focus is on the home run chase itself. It reminded me just how fun that summer was.

Yeah, I really just want to put everybody back in that moment and feel the way people felt. I grew up outside St. Louis, also went to Mizzou. I was a Cardinal fan. That summer really reconnected me with my childhood experience of enjoying sports and enjoying baseball, driving around with my dad, listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon on the radio. And when that summer happened, I’d moved to L.A. I was starting to work in film, and it just reconnected me with all of those feelings and the emotions and the excitement that I felt about baseball. So I felt like, yes, we now know that that summer took place in baseball’s steroid era. But, first, especially for people younger than us, I want to just say this is what that felt like, to be in the middle of that summer.

I remember back then if someone called the local St. Louis sports radio station and even mentioned steroids, they were cut off and the subject was dropped.

The fact that Major League Baseball and the Player’s Association put out a joint statement that speculated about McGwire’s use of something was inappropriate? I think people forget that not only was the era, now we know, steroids, but the whole culture of this kind of gym culture took over baseball. The fact that you have Biggio and Brady Anderson and those clips in the film where they’re talking so openly about their use of creatine. And then, when it starts to become real with the whole BALCO investigation, it’s almost as if maybe people felt let down because they had willingly subscribed to the disbelief, but a lot of it was there if you wanted to see it.

Yeah, Brady Anderson. He was the first one where I remember even I was thinking, “That’s weird.” Out of the blue he went from 16 home runs to 50. And it’s just like, “Oh yeah, I guess he’s just having a really good season.”

I think my first time of thinking anything was going on was, in the midst of it, or right after, then I saw some highlights from the ’80s Cardinals, the Whitey Herzog Cardinals. Looking at those teams and being like they’re all like the size of toothpicks. They’re just so tiny.

I saw highlights of Jack Clark recently and he’s this skinny guy. At the time I remember him being huge.

Yeah, he was our slugger. Yeah, they were all so skinny. They could all fit in a Volkswagen together.

What was your approach to interviewing both McGwire and Sosa? Because McGwire has been pretty open about things and Sosa hasn’t really as much.

For both of them, I sat down with them without cameras. McGwire a few times, just to make sure they knew what I wanted to do and to get them comfortable with me and asking questions and talking about the season. So, by the time we sat down with Mark, I don’t think he’s done a long-form interview in 20 years…

He did the one where he kind of admitted what he did. Right? I think that’s only one.

Right. Yeah. That hour with Costas. When he started telling me stuff that I’d never heard before, I was really excited. I was like, oh, he’s serious about having this conversation with me, which was very exciting.

What’s an example of that, something you were really surprised he said?

I mean, I think him talking about being in therapy is something that he’s never talked about publicly before, certainly to the extent that he does in the film, so that was pretty early on in our first conversation. And then I was like, oh, so that’s what this is going to be. Great. We can really talk about everything.

How did that compare to Sosa?

Getting to Mark, once you’re with Mark, you’re only communicating with Mark. With Sammy, you’re going through a few people. And so, some of the opportunities I had to talk with Mark in advance, I didn’t have with Sammy aside from our sit-downs before. I think with him, I wanted to know if he was going to still be the guy from ’98 who was like, “Everything is great and I’m just happy to be here. This is wonderful.” So, I was happy with him, because he seemed to be more purposeful in wanting to claim his legacy as somebody who didn’t just have one or two good years. He wanted to make sure that he spoke to the fact that he was the first Cub to be a 30-30 player. And he did that more than one. He was a top home run hitter in the National League for many years, even before ’98. And that he was a big reason why people came to Wrigley for a good half-decade. I was happy and excited to see him kind of take ownership of those things and not just be like someone who’s just talking about how happy he is in his situation.

McGwire is in the Cardinals Hall of Fame. He was the hitting coach of the 2011 World Series-winning Cardinals team. I think we, as fans, were disappointed at first, but I think we still pretty much love that guy. But then Sosa hasn’t been back to Wrigley. What do you make of that dichotomy between these two players and their relationship with their team today?

I mean, I wish we even had more time to sort of dig into all of that. And Mark has had an almost decade-long run as a coach and everybody has nothing but positive things to say about him as a coach and his relationship to players. And players like Albert Pujols and David Freese and others have certainly talked to the influence they feel that McGwire has had over them. The positive influence, so that’s great. And, yeah, you’re right, he’s been welcome back to the Cardinals. Not just as a coach, but as a member of the team’s Hall of Tame, a member of their family. And it doesn’t mean that some people still don’t have some conflicted feelings about that summer, but they have welcomed Mark back. The Giants have welcomed Bonds back. And the Reds have put a statue of Pete Rose right outside their stadium. I don’t know why the Cubs have decided to make this harder than it needs to be.

That’s a great way to put it.

I do understand that Sammy, there were some complicated years at the end of his career with them. And hard feelings. I get it, but I don’t know of another situation in baseball where a superstar legacy player for a team has not been welcomed back, particularly now that we’re getting into more than 15 years since he left. And I really think it’s on them. A lot of people said like, well, Sammy has to say the magic words, whatever magic words they want them to say. I kind of feel like it’s on the organization to figure out how to get one of their legendary players back as part of their family.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Friday is a big day for Bill Burr. The comedian and actor has two things hitting Netflix: the Pete Davidson vehicle The King of Staten Island, in which he has a plum role, and his new comedy special, F is For Family. And last week his wife had a baby! Everything’s coming up Bill Burr, including a pretty decent anecdote, supplied to Variety, about what it’s like to fake-beat up the young SNL star.

Directed by Judd Apatow (who co-wrote it with Davidson and Dave Sirus), The King of Staten Island stars the star as a Davidson-like twentysomething, albeit one minus an SNL gig. Burr plays a firefighter who starts dating Davidson’s character’s mom (played by Marisa Tomei), and at one point they get into it in, of all places, a kiddie pool.

Fight scene, even ones with Pete Davidson for Judd Apatow, aren’t easy to stage. But just because Davidson is a scrawny guy doesn’t mean you should underestimate him. Here’s what Burr told Variety:

Because it was a fight scene, you really have to work out who’s gonna do what so you don’t get hit. Pete was pretty amped up, and also young, so there were a couple of times we clashed heads. I can’t even tell you how light he was. I have a bad shoulder and I was worried, but he felt like he weighed, like, 130 pounds. He’s like 6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3. But he has heavy hands. They’ll knock you out.

You can see the results of their tussle on Friday, when the film drops on Netflix. Meanwhile, Burr was also asked about whether or not it’s too soon to be making Covid-19 jokes, even if we’re still very much in the middle of a seismic pandemic. “No, nothing is too soon,” he replied. He added:

It’s all how you go about it, it’s all how you carve the turkey. You’re not going to make fun of the fact that somebody’s grandparents died, but you can make fun of the person who thinks they’re too good to wear a mask. Or the person with no medical degree that’s talking to you as though they do have one. Or somehow the CDC hasn’t figured out this virus, but this guy here, somehow he knows about it. I was in New York right after 9/11, and we were doing 9/11 jokes right out of the gate. You weren’t making fun of the people that died, but you made fun of the fear, the paranoia — and being in New York and actually having to be nice to people.

You can read our own interview with Burr right here.

(Via Variety)

Vic Mensa chopped it up with Talib Kweli last night in a live episode of People’s Party where the host, Mensa, and co-host Jasmin Leigh delved deeply into what has become a pretty hot topic nationwide: defunding the police. Following the veto-proof decision by the city of Minneapolis to disband their police force, the idea of diverting budget from law enforcement into other community-based initiatives is quickly catching fire.

As a Chicago native, Mensa knows the issue of police overreach well and took some time to expand on the idea of “defund the police” while on People’s Party.

“Police, by and large, have one function in our society and it’s primarily brutality,” begins Mensa, 39 minutes into the interview. “When we talk about ‘defunding the police,’ what we’re saying is ‘fund alternatives solutions to the issues that we face.’ In Chicago, the police are 40% of our city’s budget, so you can only imagine what percent of our city’s budget education is, you can only imagine what percent of our city’s budget housing is, you can only imagine the resources that are not being put into employment opportunities for the youth who are being weaponized as this symbol of black criminality… why don’t we put 10% of that into our education, put 10% of that into affordable housing, into the community point-blank? Statistically, more policing doesn’t equal less crime, but what is the opposite of crime? It’s education and employment.”

The police conversation actually starts around the 35-minute mark of the video, when Kweli asks Mensa about the lasting impact of his song “16 shots” — which detailed the police killing of Laquan McDonald.

“It can get fatiguing when you see a new name every day when you’ve got a new rallying cry every week because another person has been killed by the police,” Mensa says. “I mean, man, Emmett Till is Laquan McDonald and Emmett Till is Breonna Taylor — those brothers and sisters that rode down on the capitalist white supremacist imperialist society, with its foot on their neck, in the name of that man, they were able to change the world so that we do have a different existence than them, and it still ain’t perfect, and it still ain’t right and we still can’t condone it. But the fact that they rode for that man, made our lives differently, and gave us an opportunity to take things further.”

Check out the full chat above where Kweli and Mensa go deep on the verses of Black Star’s “Thieves in the Night,” looting in America, and Vic’s come up with fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper.

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Sony’s PlayStation 5 event took place on Thursday and featured a number of big announcements, from a first look at the new console to a number of new game announcements.

From the new Spiderman: Miles Morales to Hitman III and Resident Evil 8, there were a number of games that had people fired up, but Sony chose to open their presentation with the announcement that an old game would be “enhanced and expanded” for the PS5. While fans were hoping for a Grand Theft Auto 6 announcement, they were instead offered a look at what GTA V will look like on the next generation console, with promises of expansion of the GTA world and more online opportunities.

Sony also announced those that play GTA Online on their PlayStation 4 will get $1 million GTA dollars put in their bank account each month leading up to the release of GTA Online on the PS5.

“And starting today, all PlayStation Plus members on PlayStation 4 will get Grand Theft Auto $1,000,000 deposited within 72 hours into their in-game Maze Bank account each month they play Grand Theft Auto O Online until the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online on PlayStation 5.”

Given all the new games they showed off on Thursday, it was a bit of a curious choice to lead with a revamped GTA V, but Sony clearly wanted to promote their partnership with Rockstar and felt it was worthy of top-billing.