The Lanakila Outrigger Club Junior Boys will represent Team USA at the International Outrigger Canoe World Distance Championships this week, August 13-21, in Niteroi, Brazil. Last weekend the Lanakila Juniors (above) teamed with paddlers from Oceanside and Long Beach in the Men’s Open Division at the Dana Point Whitey Harrison Classic. The team finished 12th, out of 36 entries. Photo courtesy of Lanakila Outrigger Club
by Paul Teetor
More.
That’s the basic catch-all answer to the many questions surrounding this week’s blockbuster news that ESPN is acquiring the NFL Network, as well as other NFL media properties, including the increasingly popular RedZone Network.
More of everything.
More pro football games.
More platforms for fans to watch pro football games.
More screens – small, medium and large – on which to view the action and make the bets that the league is begging you to make.
And most important of all: more money.
More money for ESPN and more money for the NFL.
And where is all this new money going to come from?
You guessed it.
From you, the fan who – if and when the mega deal gets approval by the Feds, as it surely will under the bigger-is-always-better Trump administration – will be able to watch NFL games on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And eventually on every day – and night – of the week.
Assuming, that is, you are able and willing to pay the various fees for individual games, for bundled games, for the dwindling number of over-the-air games, for streaming games and for the different networks that are going to offer different games at different times.
The media-landscape-shattering announcement about America’s most popular sport – and its most profitable sport – was straight-forward enough.
ESPN, which calls itself the world-wide leader in sports – what was once hype is becoming increasingly true – made the announcement last Wednesday morning that it is acquiring the NFL Network and other NFL media properties. In return, the NFL gets a 10% equity stake in the all-sports network.
ESPN will also acquire the NFL’s fantasy product and merge it into its existing platform, making ESPN Fantasy Football the official game of the NFL.
And in a separate deal, the NFL also agreed to license to ESPN other NFL content and intellectual property that will appear on the NFL Network and its other assets.
In other words, the two multi-billion-dollar giants of the sport – one on-the-field and one off-the-field – are now partners, bound together in a mutual mission: squeezing as much money as possible out of pro football fans who treat the NFL like a state religion.
That partnership should make it very interesting when ESPN is negotiating with the NFL for broadcast rights. How are they – on both sides – going to surmount the inherent conflict of interest?
And as far as ESPN continuing its hard-hitting investigations of issues like player concussions leading to brain damage and performance enhancing drugs being used and abused? Forget about it.
Networks generally don’t investigate themselves – and ESPN is not about to start bucking that trend.
ESPN sports talk shows like First Take with Stephen A. Smith and the Pat McAfee show will now fill up every dead moment of the sports calendar with such pressing topics as will the Dallas Cowboys holdout, superstar linebacker Micah Parsons, get his money or get traded? And which quarterback is the most likely to win next year’s Super Bowl: Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, Buffalo’s Josh Allen or Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson.
But the most intriguing part of the multi-faceted deal is the move by the RedZone Channel from the NFL Network to ESPN. For those who haven’t had the RedZone experience yet, it’s like watching football with your hyper friend who suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, and insists on hogging the remote.
RedZone will typically start the day showing up to eight games at once – each with its own little box on the big screen – and then jumping around to focus on one or two games when it looks like one of the teams is about to score. And when a team does score, it will show the play over and over again until something else exciting happens in some other game.
It will then switch to that game and/or games. Rinse and repeat.
At first – and last season was the first RedZone year for All Ball – the warp-speed, visual-overload experience is disorienting and confusing.
But by the end of the season, you’re so used to the RedZone experience that sitting and watching a single game at a time – or even two games simultaneously – seems slow-mo and boring unless you’re a die-hard fan of the teams playing or lucky enough to get a game (or two) that is exciting from start to finish.
Maybe, now that ESPN and the NFL are partners, they can arrange to make every game a RedZone worthy game.
After all, that’s what business partners are for: manipulating the market.
A Hard Day’s Night
In journalism, the informal rule is that if something strange but insignificant happens once, it’s a singular event that can be safely ignored. If it happens twice, it could or could not be a coincidence but certainly bears keeping an eye on.
And if it happens three times, well, that’s a trend that’s worth writing a news story – or at least a trend story — about.
Up until this week, All Ball had avoided writing about the strangest sports story of the summer: someone was throwing lime green plastic penises – in street slang, dildos or sex toys – on the court right in the middle of WNBA games.
Then this week it happened for the third time – at an LA Sparks game, a home game at the Crypt.
Now it could no longer be ignored.
The dildo grazed Indianapolis Fever star Sophie Cunningham before Sparks star Kelsey Plum – the high scoring guard brought in this season to prop up the sagging Sparks – stepped up and disgustedly kicked it to the sideline.
“Stop throwing dildos on the court,” Cunningham posted on X after the game. “You’re going to hurt one of us.”
Still, she couldn’t make the questions it raised go away.
It’s no secret that lesbians dominate the WNBA fan base, although more and more men go to the games, especially since Caitlin Clark brought her bombs-away style to the WNBA last season. And lesbians comprise somewhere around half the players – only a rough approximation for obvious privacy reasons. When this year’s clear favorite for rookie of the year, Paige Bueckers, confirmed the rumors last month that her former Connecticut teammate, Azzi Fudd, is also her girlfriend, it hardly caused a ripple in sporting circles.
No big surprise there.
But, for context, imagine if Luka Doncic announced that LeBron James was his boyfriend. The internet would explode and all sports would come to a screeching halt for at least 24 hours while fans processed the shocking news.
So you have to wonder: is the dildo-thrower making some sort of bizarre anti-gay statement? Is he or she a homophobe acting out their prejudices? Or are they just a prankster with a sick sense of humor?
There has been one arrest in the string of unprecedented incidents.
A 23-year-old fan, identified as Delbert Carver, was arrested for throwing a dildo on the court at the July 29 Dream-Valkyries game in Atlanta. He pleaded innocent to charges of disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure and criminal trespass. No word yet on his motive or intent.
While we wait for a definitive answer to those burning questions, Sophie Cunningham had the last laugh. She described how her mother used to call her before every game to wish her good luck.
“Now she tells me to watch out for flying dildos,” she said.
The. Strangest. Story. Of. The. Summer.
And totally newsworthy.
contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
