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It’s been a year of NBA players embracing creating and owning their own media. The Orlando Bubble saw a proliferation of podcasts and YouTube channels and the pandemic had bored players looking to live videos on their social platforms, hosting anything from talent contests to wine tastings. And as the summer of 2020 erupted in necessary protest and set a spotlight on social justice, player media echoed and supported the same sentiment being shouted in the streets.

Beyond28, a podcast created by the Warriors, sponsored by JPMorgan Chase and Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), and produced by Audio Up Media, is a new and necessary example of a team following in the footsteps of its players.

The Warriors launched their Beyond28 initiative in February 2020 to celebrate Black History Month, but largely to look beyond it. The premise of the platform is to stress that the recognition and celebration of Black culture should not be limited to one month per yer, and features player-led vignettes, interviews, and panel discussions, as well as spotlights on Black artists, culture drivers, and creators.

“We launched the Beyond28 platform last year, before the world set on fire,” Amanda Chin, Warriors VP of Brand Marketing, recalls over the phone with the levity needed to look back on the last 12 months. “When we came back to the table to talk about the importance of what we’re doing and how to approach it moving forward, to create the maximum amount of impact, the idea of a podcast really stuck because it gave us this vehicle to continue the dialogue recognizing the joy and the adversity the Black community faces, day in and day out.”

With the growing prevalence of audio as a preferred medium to tell intimate and inspiring stories, the podcast was in some ways the next logical step for the Warriors, Chin says.

Bay Area natives will recognize the voice anchoring the podcast, ESPN’s The Undefeated writer Marc J. Spears, who worked with Beyond28 last June, hosting a Father’s Day panel about growing up Black in America. Chin says when they started thinking about a host for the podcast, Spears’ name naturally came up.

Starting on Wednesday, April 21, the podcast will premiere across all audio streaming platforms, and a new episode will be released every month over a 12-month period. Episodes will have a wide range of topics, but each one-hour show aims to celebrate Black culture and community through the lens of a specific theme, featuring an array of artists, activists, community members and of course, Warriors players.

“The players have been very embracing of the initiative,” Chin says, “A lot of Beyond28 was really inspired by the players. Back when Andre Iguodala was on our team he was quoted saying that he doesn’t celebrate Black History Month, he celebrates Black History year round. In a lot of ways, that was the impetus for this actually coming to life.”

Already, the Beyond28 podcast has inspired other teams, including the 76ers, to reach out to the Warriors for best practices in lunching similar initiatives of their own. As a franchise-driven program, the podcast is already unique, and with fans hungry for new and meaningful ways to connect with their teams and favorite players, more NBA teams testing out podcasts as a platform to deliver seems the next natural trend.

“It’s great to see it catching traction across the league, and hopefully across sports and in other businesses as well,” Chin agrees.

As for longterm goals for the podcast, the focus is on spending “the next year delivering interesting content on the topic and hopefully reaching out to as many people as possible”.

“If all goes well we’ll continue the podcast,” Chin says, “but really, the goal is to keep our foot on the gas regarding celebrating and honoring the Black experience year round, as a whole.”

Listen to the audio trailer for the Beyond28 podcast here.

Now that Olivia Rodrigo has become a breakout star thanks to her hit single “Drivers License,” cars and driving will likely be a bigger deal in her life than it is in that of most other people. So, Rodrigo’s latest life update might not be news for most other celebrities, but given the context, it’s notable: She got a parking ticket.

Rodrigo took to her Instagram Story yesterday to share a photo of a parking violation she received from the city of Los Angeles. She had jokes, writing, “damn this driving sh*t isnt all fun and games.”

This isn’t Rodrigo’s first vehicle-related difficulty, as it took her quite some time to get her drivers license. In an interview from a month ago, she revealed that it took her four tries to get her driver’s license. Her first two driving tests were thwarted by scheduling conflicts and she said of her third go, “I go to honk my horn and the horn doesn’t work on my mom’s car and she had no idea that the horn didn’t work on her car, because she never uses her horn because she’s like the calmest person in the world. And so [the test administrator] was like, ‘Oh, your car is legally unsafe, I can’t take you out to take the test, go home.’ I didn’t even get to drive out of the DMV, I was so upset. I literally like cried in the DMV parking lot. But the fourth time, I got it, I got my driver’s license.”

Married… with Children was Fox’s first hit show. It also inspired the network’s first (but hardly the last) controversy.

After being “appalled” while watching the season three episode “Her Cups Runneth Over,” anti-obscenity activist Terry Rakolta convinced several companies to “cancel commercials on the Fox Broadcasting Company’s top-rated series and to review their television advertising policies,” according to the New York Times. She was offended by the comedy’s “blatant exploitation of women and sex and anti-family attitudes,” including an old man wearing garters and stockings and Al Bundy ogling a naked woman.

Rakolta may have won the battle — the president of Coca-Cola USA wrote to Rakolta saying that he was “corporately, professionally, and personally embarrassed” that a Coke ad aired during the raunchy sitcom — but Married… with Children won the war.

During an episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Katey Sagal, who played Peggy, credited Rakolta’s boycott for the show’s popularity. “We sent her flowers every year,” the Futurama and Sons of Anarchy actress recalled. “She tried to get us off the air and all it did was get us on the front of the New York Times. And it doubled our audience.”

In season two, Married… with Children was the 116th biggest show on TV with 4.7 million viewers per episode; by season five, it was up to #50 with over 13 million viewers. That’s partially due to still-nascent Fox’s rise into the Big Four, but it’s also because a controversy can do wonders for a fledgling show. It did here — Married… with Children aired for 11 seasons. It still holds the record for Fox’s longest-running live-action sitcom.

As for Terry, she’s married to John Rakolta Jr., who served as the United States Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration. Shocking.

You can listen to the WTF episode below.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

Smashing guitars has become a major part of Phoebe Bridgers’ career story in recent months thanks to her famous Saturday Night Live performance and the reactions that ensued. At least for now, she appears to be done destroying guitars, but not stringed instruments overall, as she has channeled her destructive abilities into pulverizing a ukulele.

She does so in a new trailer for the upcoming Showtime series Ziwe, a variety series from comedian and writer Ziwe Fumudoh, who, among other endeavors, is a writer for Desus & Mero. In what looks like an interview clip, Fumudoh, ukulele in hand, suggests to somebody off-camera, “We could break these ukuleles.” The shot then changes to Bridgers, who holds her own ukulele and declares, “Yeah, I’d love that.” The two then get to destroying the instruments by smashing them on the ground.

During a recent interview segment on CNN, Bridgers said of her fateful guitar-smashing moment on SNL, “I’ve always wanted to do it, and when I mentioned it to the show, they built me this whole monitor that would look like it was exploding even if I wasn’t hitting it that hard. So yeah, [it was] just a bucket list thing.”

Watch the Ziwe trailer above.

John Oliver grew emotional while voting for the first time as a U.S. citizen, and he dragged Trump hard over his silly refusal to concede. It’s no secret that he was all-in for a Joe Biden win, and the Last Week Tonight host previously gave himself 30 seconds to party hard before talking about the work to be done to clean up Trump’s mess. That doesn’t mean that he’s going to let President Biden get away with anything, however, and this week, he let loose on #46 for dropping the ball on the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and specifically, Biden’s seemingly forgotten vow to roll back the cap-based damage done by Trump.

That hasn’t happened yet, although Biden’s website is still promising to “undo the damage” done by Trump in this department. As Oliver notes, Trump “slashed the admissions low down to a historic annual low of 15,000,” and some of that wizardry was down to Stephen Miller, who was the architect of many of Trump’s anti-Muslim policies. Biden vowed (in February) to raise the annual cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 refugees (who have been displaced by war and who are fleeing persecution), but has he actually followed through on helping refugees resettle?

Nope. Biden hasn’t signed the necessary presidential determination, and there appears to be no reason why the president hasn’t done a very simple thing, as Oliver points out:

“He just needs to sign a piece of paper. And for a guy who clearly wanted to be the person who ‘restored the soul of America’ (a phrase he’s uttered many times), it is past time for him to look deep into his own, pick up a f*cking pen and do the right thing.”

And Oliver didn’t limit his disgust to the president himself. He’s got a little gem for White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who has had zero answers for Biden’s non-action on refugees:

“Props to Jen Psaki there, only a few months into the job and she’s already waiving away concerns about stranded refugees with the ease of a Spirit Airlines gate agent letting you know your flight’s delayed.”

On the subject of flights, Oliver pointed out how March saw cancellations of flights for at least 700 refugees who were supposed to be en route to the United States. The host added that the current batch of refugees who are already working on their resettlement process “are are still beholden to Trump’s low admission ceiling and bullsh*t racist rules.” He detailed how one pregnant refugee had her flight indefinitely delayed, which meant that she ended up giving birth before leaving for the U.S., and now, she must redo her own process, and her baby will also (ridiculously) have a process of its own to complete. It’s a great look, and Oliver really let Biden have it.

Perfect games, in either baseball or softball, are incredibly rare, but on Sunday North Texas pitcher Hope Trautwein did something in her perfect game that no one in NCAA history has ever done. The Mean Green took on Arkansas Pine-Bluff on Sunday afternoon and Trautwein was absolutely dealing from the rubber. Trautwein became the third player in NCAA D-1 history to throw 21 strikeouts in a 7-inning game, but the first to do so in a perfect game, seeing 21 batters and sending them all back to the dugout without putting the ball in play.

Per the Associated Press, the other two 7-inning, 21 strikeout games are Alexis Osorio in 2018 and Michele Granger in 1991 — and Trautwein had a 21 strikeout effort earlier this season in a 6-2 win.

NCAA records list two other pitchers with 21 strikeouts in a seven-inning game, but neither of those were perfect games. Alabama’s Alexis Osorio had a 21-K game against Fordham in 2018, and California’s Michele Granger did that against Creighton in 1991.

It is, put simply, the most dominant pitching performance in softball history, and while there’s not much video of Trautwein’s effort, ESPN did find footage of her final strikeout, as she blew a fastball by the hitter.

Trautwein’s performance on Sunday will go down as a legendary afternoon on the diamond, earning a significant place in the NCAA history books and surly being something she’ll never forget.

The San Antonio Spurs have hit a rough patch recently, dropping eight of their last 10 coming into Sunday, pushing them down to ninth in the Western Conference at 24-26, two games back of the Grizzlies in eighth.

The Spurs made the trek across Texas to face the in-state rival Mavs in Dallas on Sunday needing a win to end a five-game skid and keep themselves from slipping closer to the 10-seeded Warriors, and were able to do so thanks to some heroics from DeMar DeRozan. The star guard had 33 points, eight assists, and five rebounds to lead the Spurs on Sunday, outdueling Luka Doncic (29 points, seven assists, three rebounds) down the stretch.

It was a back-and-forth affair late, with Doncic tying the game with 20 seconds to play after driving for a floater off a Mavs offensive rebound.

DeRozan had the answer on the other end, with a filthy stepback from the midrange that found the bottom of the net and gave San Antonio a 119-117 lead with a half second to play.

It is vintage DeRozan, who has been terrific all season for the Spurs and is a big reason why they’re still in the hunt for the play-in out West. Doncic was pushed out near midcourt on the Mavs desperation attempt, and had his heave fall well short of the basket as the Spurs snuck out of Dallas with a much-needed victory.

Matt Gaetz has had a rough couple weeks. It started when The New York Times revealed that the Florida representative and die hard Trump loyalist was under investigation by the Department of Justice over sex trafficking allegations involving a minor. His attempts to clear his name have not gone well. And though he tried to act like everything was normal, even delivering a fiery speech at a Trumpy summit on Friday, sources tell CNN that his attempt to reach out to Trump for a meeting ended in a hard pass.

Aides have reportedly been warning the former president to steer very clear of the Gaetz scandal. And though he did issue a comically lame, two-sentence press release half-assedly defending the embattled lawmaker, the sources claim his team still rejected the meet-up. Moreover, during his typically inflammatory appearance at an RNC meeting on Saturday, he didn’t mention Gaetz once.

The Gaetz team (or what’s left of it) denied that Trump turned him down, which seems to play into his apparent strategy, which seems to be to wait it out, hoping the fury will die down eventually. But it’s clear this is far from over, with twists and other revelations emerging at a fairly steady clip, from claims that he’s known to share naked pictures of women he alleges he slept with to fellow lawmakers to Venmo receipts linking him to a known sex ring. But no doubt Gaetz hopes that an unemployed, disgraced former president who’s banned across much of social media will snap his fingers and make it all better.

(Via CNN)

There are some extremely rare feats in the world of sports. A perfect game in baseball, a hole in one in golf, a 70-point game in basketball, and so on and so forth, but one that is far more rare than any of those is a bowler picking up a 7-10 split. The dreaded leave of professional and amateur bowlers alike, it is the least converted spare chance of any by far and, while you likely aren’t dialed into bowling every week, it’s something that no pro has converted in 30 years during a televised event.

That is until Sunday, when Anthony Neuer stepped up at the U.S. Open staring down a 7-10 split in the 7th frame, trailing by a bunch in his match, and delivered something arguably more memorable than if he’d won the match, as he picked it up by sending the 10 pin flying across the lane to take out the 7 and etch his place in bowling history.

As for how rare that is, as mentioned on the broadcast prior, it’s only been picked up three times in a televised event and never since 1991, which is a wild stat.

That means this is truly one of the rarest feats in professional sports that we all got to witness and kudos to the young Anthony Neuer for delivering a perfect ball and getting a little luck (the 10 pin kicks off the side wall, off his ball as it’s in the back of the lane, and gets back to the 7 pin to take it out).

Hideki Matsuyama entered Sunday as the leader by four at the Masters after a brilliant 65 in the third round moved him to 11-under, and while he didn’t produce his best golf in the final round at Augusta National, he had given himself enough cushion to take home his first green jacket and win the first major by a men’s player from Japan.

Matsuyama got off to a rocky start, pushing his opening tee shot into the right woods and making bogey, but bounced back with a comfortable birdie on the second and then went on a run of pars before a pair of birdies to close his front nine on 8 and 9 to give him a five shot lead headed to the back nine.

His lead got as high as six after a bogey from young Will Zalatoris (aka Happy Gilmore’s caddie) on the 12th, but the rest of the way it was a grind for Japan’s best golfer. Xander Schauffele, who struggled early alongside Matsuyama in the final pairing, caught fire, birdieing four straight holes, starting with No. 12, to close the gap on Hideki. However, Matsuyama kept Xander at arms length thanks to the shot that very well will be looked back on as the one that won him the tournament, as he showed why he was the best at scrambling all week with a sensational chip on the 13th to set up a much needed birdie after a bogey on 12.

The tournament got really interesting on 15, when Matsuyama crushed a 4-iron over the green, bounding into the pond on 16, while Schauffele was in the bunker in two just to the right of the green. Xander got up and down with a brilliant bunker shot, while Hideki was able to salvage bogey after a safe chip just shy of the green and then a two putt from there.

With the lead down to just two and momentum clearly on Schauffele’s side, Xander pulled an 8-iron and took aim at the pin, but had the shot come up just short, bouncing off the bank and into the water. He would go on to make a triple bogey 6, ending his bid at a green jacket, while Hideki made yet another bogey to allow Will Zalatoris to get within two and in the clubhouse. Matsuyama stabilized on 17, hitting two perfect shots to leave a comfortable two putt for par, giving him a healthy cushion going to the final hole.

On 18, Matsuyama needed just a bogey to win, entering the hole two clear of Zalatoris, and found the right greenside bunker after a perfect tee shot. He’d chop out safely to 8 feet and while his par putt went begging, it was an easy tap in for a final round 73 to win the Masters by one stroke.

It was a longtime coming for Matsuyama, a player who has been sensational at Augusta since he debuted in 2011 as the Asia-Pacific Amateur champion and earned low-am honors. He’s had two top 10s before this and five top 20s in the last six Masters before breaking through for his first major championship at the place his career stateside took off. He joins a sensational list of players, including Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, to earn low-am and go on to win a green jacket in their careers, and, already a megastar in Japan, will become an absolute icon after this win.