Brian Windhorst, LIV And PGA Merge, Dan Rapaport Breaks It Down For Us, Hot Seat/Cool Throne + Listener Submitted FAQ's

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We have Brian Windhorst on the show talking NBA Finals, talking NBA, Wemben Yama, LeBron, his tweet about him being strong, great interview with Brian Windhorst, and then we have our colleague Dan Rapport on the show to try to walk us through the entire live pga uh crazy news that happened we're going to start the show talking about that as well we have hot seat cool throne we talk a little stanley cup final game two we also have faqs some great faqs from the people ever had one of those days when it's just too cold to keep working nah neither has ariot ariot work jackets and boots are packed with all the cold stopping waterproof protection you need to get the job done under any conditions so you can take any job out there and always deliver check out ariot in your local workwear retailer or visit ariot.com work to get 10 off your first order when you sign up for email and whether whatever in ariot work gear okay let's go now in the streets there is violence and then a lot of work to be done No place to hang out or wash in And then I can't blame all on the sun Oh no, we're gonna rock down to Electric Avenue And then we'll take it higher Oh, we're gonna gonna rock. Don't do it.
It's Part of My Take, presented by Barstool Sports. Welcome to Part of My Take.
Today is Wednesday, June 7th. And PFT, stop me if you've heard this before, but Cash rules everything around us.
There you go. Little Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang Clan.
It's not everything around me, but everything around us there you go little wu-tang wu-tang clan it's not

everything around me but everything around us in terms of the live and pga the huge news the huge

merger money talks and the golf world was rocked today we're going to get into it more with dan

rapapur maybe the details but we're going to do our takes right now um pft jay monahan moynahan

I don't he doesn't even deserve to be called by his full real name jay monahan the biggest scumbag in the world the biggest scumbag in the world he is such a dickhead and everybody that's on the PGA Tour right now probably hates his guts.

I don't know how he survives this.

He definitely put in some sort of stipulation in the contract.

I read the press release. He's planning on sticking around as the head of the PGA Tour.
They're debating what framework is going to be put in place once the Live and the PGA eventually merge. But the bottom line is Jay Monahan kept players on the PGA Tour from taking money to go play on the Live Golf Tour by telling them that they would have 9-11 blood on their hands.
Invoke 9-11. If they were to accept $100 million to go play golf on the Live Tour.
So he said that to his players with a straight face. He brought in 9-11 families to act as a human shield for what he was doing behind the scenes, which was negotiating with the Live Tour to try to make the PGA Tour more money in the long run, while again, telling the golfers on the PGA Tour, don't do business with these people.
They are evil. You are bad if you do business with them.
So yes, he's the biggest piece of shit in the world the live tour by the way they come out of this smelling like roses like they're the michael scott paper company yeah comparably to the pga tour they started their own tour everybody laughed at them their ratings were bad but at some point along the way the pga tour needed the live tour just as much as the live guys needed the PGA Tour. So they came to the table, brought them back in, and now everybody that ended up going over to play Live Golf looks like they made the right decision financially at least.
Well, and so we start with Jay Monaghan because obviously I did a bad job starting there. If you are living under a rock, the Live and PGA've called it a merger from what it what like everything i've read and everything i understand it's essentially the live just being the money guys now of the pga tour the pga tour is keeping like what the pga tour is so it's not going to become you know the pga tour is not going to now be a uh 54 holes and everyone wearing shorts theGA Tour is still what we think it is, but the Live is now invested in it,

and the Live now has power in it to a point that we didn't think was going to be possible a few years ago.

And the Live Tour created this golf league as kind of a farce.

It was never going to exist long term.

And they did it so that they would put the pressure on the PGA Tour who was going to run out of money

and they got them to the table

and Jay Monahan who invoked

9-11, invoked 9-11 families

did an about face

with like two other people

sat in a boardroom for the last seven weeks

and did a deal with the guys that he

was saying were the baddest dudes on the block

and afterwards

after the dust settled today

he said, this is his

Thank you. and did a deal with the guys that he was saying were the baddest dudes on the block.
And afterwards, after the dust settled today, he said, this is his quote, I recognize everything I've said in the past is in my past positions. I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite anytime I said anything I said with the information, anything, sorry, anytime I said anything I said, I said it with the information I had in the moment.
So essentially either Jay Monahan's doing a material change or he watched loose change and has decided that history is completely different. And that's why he's okay with everything he was not okay with two years ago.
And I want to clarify because PFD and I have been pretty clear that like those guys who took the money like take the money take the money it's jay monahan who's the hypocrite here because he like went out and basically was like 9-11 bad things bad guys we have to protect the pga we're going to ban everyone and not two years later has completely turned around and done a deal with them. The information he had at the time though,

big cat was different than the information he has now.

Now he believes that there was thermite that was planted in the towers.

George W.

Bush is no longer welcome on the PGA tour.

If he comes out tomorrow and says that,

then,

then I might give him like 10% credit for it.

But yeah,

he's a piece of shit.

If he just said, I talked to Pete Carroll.

We had a long talk with Pete Carroll, and I've seen the light.

He is a real, real piece of shit, for sure.

And there's really no excuse for it.

And he did take money out of his own guy's pockets,

who had the opportunity to go make hundreds of millions of dollars.

And it's fucked up.

It's absolutely fucked up.

But there's something, I think you said earlier, that it's going to be the same PGA. It's not going to be changed or whatever.
We don't know that because it is changing. It's changing.
It's no longer going to be a nonprofit entity. No, I know.
I'm saying the golf. It's going to be a brand new for-profit league, though.
It's not going to be teams. It's not going to be this weird golf hybrid.
Maybe I'll be way wrong, but I would be shocked. There will be events that are teams.
I think that it's not going to be this like weird golf hybrid like i maybe i'll be way wrong but i would be shocked there will be events that are teams i think that it's gonna they're gonna be in the middle so it is it's definitely going to be a new league like it's going to be called the pga tour and they're still moving forward but it's a brand new for-profit entity is what's being created right yeah there's there's definitely going to be changes i don't think it's going to be drastic like they're all playing on teams now. That was my point.
I think you're still going to watch the same tournaments that you've watched in the past, and the majors are going to stay the same. And yeah, there might be some additional events, but it's not like the Liv is just making the PGA just now play in shorts and play on teams.
No, it's not going to be the Liv Tour, but there's definitely going to be some elements of the live tour that are brought into the fold. And we don't know what those are going to be yet.
Also, Greg Norman comes out of this looking like, like a, like dude, who's on the up and up compared to Jay Monahan. Oh, totally disagree.
Why's that? Because he's completely out. He took bullets for the last two years and got completely railroad.
Like everyone was hated him. He was the face of the live tour.
He's out. He wasn't in the press conferences.
He wasn't in any of the, any of the releases. You don't think he got equity or anything like that? He might've, but he's, he, he's, he has no power anymore.
So Kevin Van Valkenburg covers golf, uh, had a quote or her posted a snippet. Norman did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but a source told sports illustrated that his duties of late have been more as a figurehead and that he is not expected to be part of the venture going forward.
Norman's name was not mentioned in the announcement. I would imagine he's probably a little pissed that he was used in the manner he was used and now doesn't get anything going forward well that was gonna be my other question is who had equity in it so norman might have had equity in live to act as their figurehead for so long some of the players the captains of the teams on the live tour they had equity in their teams i don't know how that is going to translate over to the merger are the four aces going to exist are We're going to get more aces? I don't know.
Like six or seven aces? Yeah, but I think Greg Norman's a loser just because he's – it seemed like the Saudis used him pretty effectively, and now they're like, okay, buddy, we don't need you anymore. Thanks so much for your service.
See ya. Well, from a financial standpoint, he probably did okay is what I'm saying.
But he wanted to be in it for more than that.

I mean, he was the head of live. He was the figurehead.
He was walking around doing all the press conferences. I feel like Greg Norman probably wanted to be part of the future and is now out.
So the bottom line is we don't know what the PGA Tour is going to look like, how much it's going to change. but it's a it's a very very weird day I would imagine to be a PGA Tour golfer

who found out this information on twitter that after being told for two years to just hate everybody that's going to live being threatened to have uh you know to not be admitted into major tournaments if you go overseas or if you play for the saudis and then now it's like okay water under the water under the bridge, let's move forward now that me, Jay Monahan, has figured out a way forward through this. Now, and I tried to make this point on Twitter, I probably did a terrible job.
It's got to suck to be a PGA Tour player today because they were blindsided. They were told one thing, something completely different happened.
I would imagine Jay Monahan, when he had his 4 p.m. meeting with all the players, he probably ate a lot of shit.
I saw one report that it was 90-10 negative to positive, which makes sense. But he also was probably like, everyone's going to make more money now.
And again, it's not the same money that they could have made if they had gone. But in like 10 years, they'll probably look back and be like, yeah,

we did make a lot more money.

They already are making more money because of the PGA, like having to compete with live.

They're probably all going to make a shitload more money.

Now it still isn't good because it still isn't, it still probably doesn't sit well with them

because they were lied to and basically told it's a player's league.

And we know at the end of the day, the money rules and the rich guys talk and that's how decisions get made but like far in the future they probably will make a lot of money from this day happening yeah that might be the case but there's definitely a lot of guys that just oh yeah kill jay monhead for sure because they probably didn't go to play and live golf because they wanted to have some sort of a PGA Tour legacy. They wanted to play in all the events that they grew up watching.
They wanted to golf here in America. They liked the format.
And they were probably told, like, you don't go over there because then we will excommunicate you from everything having to do with American golf. Don't take, you know, $50 million, $100 million.
They probably took him at his word.

And then a year later, they're like, well, tell you what, we couldn't,

I know you missed out on that a hundred mil,

but good news is we're going to increase the prize pool by 30% next year.

So you're going to make more money.

That probably doesn't sit well with most of the players on the tour.

See, when you say format, like I still don't,

I think the live knew that like team format doesn't work. formats don't work in golf it just doesn't and so like they this was also part of them being like we're not a real golf league we never really will be the like the the way golf works is you have a bunch of guys competing against each other for the best and so now the the the live tour gets the benefit of getting to put money into the PGA tour and having a say in the PGA tour and also having it be a real golf league and stop the charade of whatever it was they were trying to do.
But so the main thing that the Saudis want to do with the public investment fund investment in the PGA tour is creating a for-profit league. If the PGA wasn't making enough money to begin with then they're definitely going to change something right I don't know I actually don't know I I wouldn't be shocked like this is at the end of the day the Saudis wanted to have a seat at the table and now they have a seat at the table I don't know if they I don't know if it goes further than that like they have they have power now.
They have major investment in a major sport in America, like mission accomplished for them. I honestly don't know.
I mean, I guess we'll find out. I just feel like the live was always – do you agree? Team golf doesn't work.
So team golf could work if it was a limited thing. I don't think it can work as a season-long thing my son chris will disagree with that but i'm telling you like i think that in limited like one or two events per year yeah i think i think that is that right exactly but if you brought that that same like team competitiveness to like one or two special events that are played during the regular calendar year i don't know let's ask the youths, Billy and Jake.
Does team golf work? I think team golf, like you were saying, is good and limited. Like the Ryder Cup outside of the majors is probably the most circled event on the calendar.
Right, because it's unique. Right.
So I don't think year long is born. Year long is born.
The live on CW barely got a rating rating right like no one cared like we we like the individual golfers we love brooks but like we were not setting our schedules aside to watch him in the live tournaments right i'm just thinking that there might be there might be a handful of new ones that are sure i don't think it's gonna it's not gonna be a complete format change it's not gonna be 50 whole golf or 54 whole golf they might do things with more more events that don't have a cut that might be part of the process or or paying players for appearance fees which is was was discussed when the pga was when this first happened and the pga was like why aren't guys getting paid just to show up if they're big draws which makes sense to me and. And it like does all come down to money.
The PGA was running out of money. They'd already kind of pushed themselves to the limit where I think, what was it last year or maybe it was two years ago, the memorial that was just played this past weekend was like a million and a half or a million, million point two.
Jake, you can look it up prize for the top winner. And, and now like last weekend weekend I think Hovland won like 3.6 so they were already making those adjustments I feel like it's just going to be even more money and I yeah I I would be shocked if the PGA like completely changes what they do there could be additional things but I think that the I think the Saudis just did what they wanted to do and they they now are there they're at the there's a seat at the table right yeah i i i agree i do think that there's going to be small changes i don't think it's going to be wholesale uh you know it's not going to be different format for golf altogether no i think yeah it's going to be money changes a lot of money there will be money changes whatever is making money they'll end up doing that if anyone's got the money to build an indoor golf cart of course it's saudi arabia like they could probably just play a tournament out in the desert somewhere but uh yeah it's it's a very very strange day for golf and the saudis have been trying to get involved in american sports for a very long time um i know the nfl doesn't allow any sovereign investment fund to make a purchase in terms of ownership in the team.

So the NFL is trying to keep that type of money out. But who knows where we're going to be in 25 years.
So this is a weird thing. As NFL teams keep getting more and more expensive, like the commanders just sold for a record $6 billion.
And their team has been run into the ground for the last 30 years. Imagine when a marquee franchise,

one that already has the infrastructure in place to be worth a lot of money,

if the Dallas Cowboys were to come for sale after Jerry Jones dies,

God forbid, at that point,

you're going to be talking above $10 billion.

And as the teams get more and more expensive,

there's fewer and fewer people who can afford to pay for these teams.

At some point, most billionaires in America that want a team

I'm not sure. As the teams get more and more expensive, there's fewer and fewer people who can afford to pay for these teams.
Like at some point, most billionaires in America that want a team will have had the opportunity to purchase that team. At some point, the foreign investment funds are going to become part of this shrinking pool of available billions that can buy American sports teams.
Yeah. So we might be like on that slide down there.
We'll see where it goes in the next 15 years. And we're going to talk more with Dan Rappaport, but it does, at the end of the day, fans, which we are, I'm a patron.
We benefit from getting to watch all the guys now again. And I don't know, like they said, they might enforce fines for live players to come back to the pga it feels like it feels like to me that they would and again i have no expertise no knowledge but it feels like they also will probably have to pay some of the existing pga tour guys to make them happy for like the fact that they walked they didn't take this you know money and now they have all money in the world.
They literally have more money than anyone. And the shitty thing for players that are on the PGA Tour that didn't leave to go over and play golf is you're pissed off right now.
You're very mad, and rightfully so, at your own league. They could give you some money to make you happy, but if they don't, now you really don't have an alternative.
Like what else are you going to do?

It's, I guess the only thing that could happen is like if the top players tried to unionize

and we're like, we're not playing, which seems like it would be hard to pull off.

Right?

Like, it seems like it'd be pretty hard to get a bunch of guys.

Cause whenever it comes to that type of situation,

then you have guys who are in the middle class of golf who are like, wait, we want to keep playing and we want to get a bunch of guys because whenever it comes to that type of situation then you have guys who are in the middle class of golf who are like wait we want to keep playing we want to get paid money like it's easier for a guy who's made you know hundreds of millions of dollars or 50 million dollars in his career to be like hey let's take a stand versus a guy who's made you know five million or ten million like wills al tour has made ten million dollars he's not going to be like, Oh, I don't want to play golf. I'm going to stand up for this.
And like those guys, it sucks for, because Wills Al Tours was offered a lot of money and he stayed on the PGA tour. Then he got injured.
Like, so I, I wonder if maybe the PGA tours has to, has to do something to take care of those guys, whether it be appearance fees, whether it be like guaranteed money. I have no idea, but it feels like something like that.
They're going to have to do a lot of smoothing over. And more than anything, Jay Monaghan, like I don't, he's now the CEO, but I don't know how, like they must be so fucking pissed and probably want him out, which rightfully so, because at the end of the day, it will all get settled.
It will probably like five years from now, we'll be like, Oh yeah, look, now now they're all making more money but Jay Monahan still stands as the biggest hypocrite who essentially told the players one thing and then behind their back did another and yes it is a just tough lesson to learn that the guess what like as much as player empowerment has come a long way like eventually like the big money always talks and and is is able to make the decisions and players are kind of left standing there being like, Oh, Colin Morikawa, finding out on Twitter this morning that the PGA tour is merging with live. He probably had an offer for like 150, $200 million.
Yeah. Maybe more to go join the live tour.
We should turn down. So, um, there's one name out there that we haven't really heard from in this situation who could be the other alternative to the PGA Tour.
That's Tiger. The Tiger Tour is something that had been talked about for years and years and years where he got so big.
He was literally bigger than golf. So if he wanted to, he could just say, OK, I'm playing these 20 tournaments a year.
And then I'm going to be the CEO of my own tour, basically. And because he was such a draw, it probably could have worked at some point.
Tiger Woods could come out and make a statement. I'm curious as to why he hasn't.
I, if it's, oh man, that'd be so much work. If you're Tiger Woods, you want to do all that work.
You'd have to do so much work like yeah like a lot of walking you're the best call forever you have more like more money you ever dreamed of and be like well we got to start from scratch i gotta do just a shitload of work he's human too or or what tiger should do is he should just start his own michael scott paper company start the tour start the tour play for like six rounds get a contract with i don't know true tv to put your game your matches on at 1 a.m and then hopefully you get a couple billion out of it if tiger and charlie just played the like nbc would give him a contract just watch the two of them play it should be tiger charlie and then somebody like uh like charles barkley it's like a really shitty golfer because I feel like sometimes people like watching bad people play golf more than they like watching good people play golf because it makes them feel better about their swing. Yeah, I'm also so curious, and I feel like I haven't because they don't have to disclose this stuff, how the payments all worked.
And it seems like it might be just like golfer to golfer was different for the live tour like if it was a contract if it was lump sum because then it obviously changes it if like say a dustin johnson he didn't get 150 million dollars he got 25 million dollars and he's going to get 25 million dollars next year and now it's all going to get reconfigured maybe that's part of like appeasing the current pga tour guys being like look he didn he didn't get this much. He got this much and now we'll spread it around and make it so that it, you know, everyone can kind of swallow this pill.
Yeah. And if you're, if you're Dustin Johnson and Muhammad bin Salman doesn't pay you that second lump sum of $25 million, what are you going to do about it? Right.
What are you going to sue him? What are you going to do? You're going to go knock on his door and be like hey man you kind of owe me 25 million dollars that's luck that's the craziest part about this because the saudis have so much money and they can really like make the rules themselves so they could be like oh yeah we're not paying any more of the live contracts but and we're gonna give some money to the pga guys everyone get in the boat everyone make more money let's fucking go yeah i'll tell you what the emir of qatar would never behave like this he would have created a stand-up league he should start his own league yeah he should um other losers i mean rory have we heard from rory i think he was was he at the meeting i believe so he was at the meeting um he claims that he had no uh beforehand knowledge of any of this situation I don't think that Rory's involved. I just, I don't get that vibe from him.
He does seem like a guy that was just, you know, the most supportive of the PGA tour because he cared about the corny stuff like legacy and all that. He was their, their poster boy, their golden child.
If he was involved in this good luck to him because step aside, Patrick Reed, Rory's going to be the most hated guy in golf. Yeah.
I mean, I, I probably, I'll take his word for it. I just know that he also had changed his tune the last couple of months about live, which seems a little bit like, huh, that's weird.
You know, like he wasn't, he wasn't going at them. Maybe it was as simple as he was tired of talking about it.
He wanted to focus on his golf that completely, that, that makes sense too. So it's just, it, the whole thing sucks for guys like that.
Good for golf fans. And yeah, I mean, Brooke, well, we suspended Brooks for one day.
It's funny how some people forget that it was one single day that we were suspended him for uh being like well oh now now you got to backtrack with brooks like no i think we're good with brooks we suspended him for one day as a joke from brooks of the year or blake of the year and and we're also on the record saying that if if mbs wanted to pay us a hundred million dollars to do a podcast just for him it'd be pretty hard not to room it'd be very hard to say no to that. This is why the sports washing works because now they're in the PGA.
So the next one gets easier. It all gets easier after you get the big one.
So yeah, I guess offer us $100 million. Or just one of us.
Or just one of us. Specifically one of us organically to integrate

some great propaganda

yeah Billy is very

how would you do that Billy

if the Saudi government asked you to like

organically say nice things about the kingdom

of Saudi Arabia

I like to drive

nuclear power is dangerous

they also just hand

Billy a computer that's just

full of like fake websites

and he can only go on those

Thank you. Nuclear power is dangerous.
They also just hand Billy a computer that's just full of fake websites, and he can only go on those. And then he comes out in a week, and he's like, I've been reading some really interesting stuff online, guys.
Let me tell you some of these things. Yeah, the line sounds like a glorious invention.
Who could turn down living within five square miles of everything that you need for the rest of your life in a line in the middle of the desert yeah um last thing we should talk about phil real quick i mean phil the whole story of phil mickelson is like the most fascinating story

ever basically his gambling debts are so huge that he then has to start like it's it's it's the it's

the domino meme like phil mickelson loses a five game parlay and then like hits the first domino

and we're- that he then has to start. Like, it's the domino meme.
Like, Phil Mickelson loses a five-game parlay and then, like, hits the first domino and golf changes forever at the end. That's essentially what happened.
Yeah, it's pretty much going to be Phil Mickelson, or it's like the Jets lose week three of 2011. Domino, domino, domino.
And now MBS as a major part of a massive sports league in America. Yeah.
Yeah. Brett Favre sends dick pic.
Yeah, exactly. There it is.
So crazy day. I was actually thinking not to brag I was at the gym.
And I was like, what we going to start the show with today? Um, and then this happened and it was like, holy fuck out of nowhere. It's rare in this day and age too, that we would, we have a story that like blindsides everyone.
All the reporters were blindsided. Everyone.
No one saw this coming. So it is kind of a wake upup call, though, to any player in a league like the PGA Tour.
Any professional athlete, if somebody is offering you an insane amount of money to play a sport, you should probably take that money. Because guess what? When it comes down to it, the league that you have any sort of loyalty to will not have any loyalty to you whatsoever if they can make a tenth of a percent more in net profit 10 years from now yes and it's you know we do it all the time with sports we're like oh this guy should take a hometown discount it's like well like jaylen brown right now like the the celtics debating whether they should pay him the like whether the celtics should pay the Supermax.
I would imagine Jalen Brown's like, no, you need to pay me the Supermax. Like, that's the deal.
Get your money. Get your money.
Here's a blanket statement that I've learned from this. Anytime somebody can pay you 10 times your total income to play a sport for fewer days a year to work less to not have to wear pants at your sport absolutely 100 take that money yeah and uh so jake just put in the chat cantley in 2021 was won the memorial 1.7 mil hovland this year 3.6 mil so you already had seen it like you already seen it was doubling they were doubling the purses uh that was probably why the pga had to go to the table too because they were pushing the money so to such an extent that they probably couldn't afford it and they're like we're kind of fucked if if live who is never going to run out of money just keeps doing whatever they're doing yeah the mu The Mohammed Salman paper company.
That's what it was. It's fucking crazy.
Um, okay. Let's kick it back to ourselves.
We have a great wind horse interview. Awesome time.
Fucking. I love that guy so much.
Uh, Dan Rapport talking more live PGA, hot seat, cool throne. And we have FAQs, listener FAQs, which are great.
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Hank.? My Hot C is college baseball. College Baseball World Series is going on.
Obviously, great, great time. But they had two things.
An Indiana player, Tyler Cerny, they hit a home run, and I think he brought out a chain or something that they put around players in the dugout, and he got suspended a game for that, which is pretty crazy. It was nuts.
If you watch the video, like you could barely tell what the suspension was technically bringing a prop onto the field. And it was one of those, like, fuck the NCAA.
Everyone agrees is the dumbest rule ever. Yeah.
I don't know why that rule is in place at all. And he didn't even bring it out there.
His teammates brought it out for him and put it around his neck as he was going down the third baseline right before he touched on plate you should be allowed there there are some rules that should remain unwritten in baseball like if that if it's that big a deal just let him wear one in the ribs the next time he gets up to the plate don't make him sit on an entire another game and then it's also um if the majority of guys playing in a game are not going to be pros and get paid to play, they should get to have maximum amount of fun. That should just be the rule.
Because for a lot of those guys, that is the biggest moment that they will ever have as athletes. Let them enjoy it.
Right. And to that point in another game, it was Penn versus Southern Miss.
It was 3-2, bases loaded, two outs. So, like, the best, probably one of the funnest situations, baseball crowd's going crazy, and the ump called a clock violation and called him out.
That's fun. Which is just like...
That's always... Everyone always wants to see the game end that way.
That should be another unwritten rule. If that's the count, that's the situation.
Like, the clock does not matter. Turn the clock off.
I agree with that, Hank. that should be another unwritten rule words if it's if that's the count that's the situation like the clock does not matter turn the clock off i agree with that hank there should be unwritten rules for umpires too there you know what they should do that should just be a written rule it should be it should be like um like the old uh teenage mutant ninja turtles game like you get more life if you like they like the ump just pulls out a slice of pizza if you eat it you get you get like another 20 seconds.
That would be fun. Mike Greenberg's dumb rules.
Like something to gain more life. I don't know what you could do, but like it would just be a fun wrinkle where it's like you get to do it one or two times a game where you just get more life on the at-bat.
Maybe an extra strike if you eat a whole pizza. This is Savannah Banana stuff.
This is just a way to get players to get fatter we want we want every baseball player to look like vogel back by the end of the season could you imagine though bases loaded two outs and you're like it's the most intense moment and first you have to just scarf down a slice of pizza and then get back in the box or if you smoke a heater at the plate yeah yeah that would be sick like you should get you should get four strikes if you're smoking a cigarette if there's a cigarette in your mouth while you're batting lit cigarette yes yeah if it drops automatic out yep and then and then pitchers trying to hit the cigarette out of the mouth yeah if you're not gonna and yeah and you're blindfolded and the pitcher's got a gun yeah these are great rules okay your cool throne uh my cool throne is throne is bonkaholics, bonkologists. Yeah.
Thank you, Hank. PFT, yeah, you're welcome.
I'm sure you're going to be there covering the sport, maybe participating. But a Swedish strip club owner is trying to start a sex league.
Oh. Okay.
It's a six-week sex championship. The guy's name, I mean, the owner's name, this is a classic guy that would start a sex championship.
Dragan Brodick. Wait, his last name is Brodick? Brodick.
Dragan Brodick. Dragan Brodick.
Six different disciplines practiced. Body massages, foreplay, oral oral sex and endurance uh six hour sessions each day each discipline lasting between 45 and 60 minutes okay so a real it's a real marathon i think they're they're judging endurance the wrong way it should be it should be time for speed yeah who can nut the fastest yeah zero to 60 that we.
We don't do who can drive the longest in a race. You know what I mean? You're not like, oh, yeah, who can drive slow for 24 hours? Let's get moving.
Yeah, they need the Olympics where you can do different track and field. Yeah.
A decathlon. Yeah.
Sting's got to be the number one pick, right? don't know i mean i feel like sting is like a well-known like uh kama sutra like 24 hour sex haver oh and it's nations will compete they're doing it they are doing it the uh that way i would go sting lenny kravitz lenny kravitz so who do you yeah that's what? Yeah, Lenny. The problem with Sting is that he's not actually all that he's cracked up to be.
So he gave one interview where he was starting to get into tantric sex back in the 80s, I think. And then his wife, for the rest of their life, has to deal with everybody that meets them, thinking that she just has sex for five hours at a time.
And apparently that's not true. I just found this out last week.
week so sting might be overrated as far as sex havers go what about michael douglas tap him in for some oral yeah without a doubt yeah i mean the guy literally risked his life for oral yep nancy reagan should be on the metal yeah yeah the nancy reagan dick sucking award yeah okay i would go to cover this event not because i'd be horny about it but because i'm intrigued about the entire all the fanfare around it all that stuff i'm sure it's going to be a once in a lifetime event because they probably won't do it a second time oh it's in two days so i guess we'll find out oh where is it uh sweden it's in chicago you can go really all right pft your hot seat cool thrown uh my hot seat is our brains big cat speaking of events that are taking place in chicago um it's going to be me you dave's team and then kirk manahan's team in the finals of the dozen which are going to be broadcast live on Thursday evening, live from Chicago. So Big Cat and the Yak, that team is flying out to Chicago.
Brandon and Fran are flying out here. Eddie and Clem.
I guess Eddie's already here. Clem's flying out with Dave.
And then whoever Kirk Manahan decides is good enough to be on his team tomorrow is going to fly out to Chicago. Rico and Quakes, Rico, the brotherhood, never break them up.
They're going to be, yeah, we're going to all be competing in live trivia tomorrow. So it's, it's the annual crown last year.
A lot of people said that me and Brandon and Fran choked. I, I don't know what tournament they were watching.
It was just me that choked last year, not Brandon and Fran, but it's, it we've got redemption on our minds, so it's going to be fun. And if you're in Chicago, I hope you come by and see us.
I'm very excited. It's going to be – the live crowd is always awesome.
And, yeah. It's live broadcast, too.
It's live broadcast. It's going to be – I do think it's the four best teams.
I'll say that. Like, I think you could make the argument for Frank and Frankettes.
But guess what? They're not going. So it's going to be the dozen trivia has some very, very diehard fans, and I know it's going to be packed, and it's going to be a lot of fun.
I just want to say, Big Cat, congratulations on winning the regular season President's Cup trophy of the dozen. That's very important.
I know a lot of people are saying that's such a huge, huge, massive award, so congrats on being the regular season champion. And congrats on your teammate, Brandon Walker, being the narcissist.
He is spoiling the match that people watched on Tuesday night so that he spoiled the match before his match. So no one has to watch our match.
They can only watch his match. Okay.
I saw that. And I realized that the spoiler people are on Twitter.
They're just as bad as the people that do the spoilers. Because what'll do is they'll reply to whatever tweet and be like, thanks, Brandon already spoiling it.
We already know that his team moves on. And then they're spoiling it to everybody else.
Yeah, no, Jeff D. Lowe said that.
He's like, they're just as worse because he closed his replies to tweets to limit that happening. But yeah, I guess the nature of spoilers, you get a hot tip and then you just want to tell everyone so uh yeah it's it did kind of whatever just enjoy the match enjoy the matches and guess what you can't spoil a live live tournament so on thursday night you'll get to watch it live and whatever happens there are no spoilers there still will be though uh people in the comment section be like already know who won 13 to 6 yak like that that always happens there there are also people that uh that zoom in real close to try to find cheating and there was one guy i'm pretty sure he was joking though who saw quigs and said that quigs was tapping in morse code yeah to give the answer to kirk minahan respect to that guy that's next level investigative skills yeah yeah you caught qu.
All right. Your cool throne.
My cool throne is aliens. Yeah.
Because there was a report that came out yesterday around midday that, um, aliens exist, that the earth, that, uh, the U S government has found, uh, and, and recovered partial alien crafts and that they are not of human origin. And then immediately nobody cared about it because Taylor Swift broke up with her boyfriend.
So Taylor Swift absolutely cucked the fuck out of aliens yesterday. In fact, I went up to our friend Kelly Keigs, who is maybe the biggest Taylor Swift fan in the entire world.
She's not part of the union. Yeah.
Well, she's, yeah, she's a scab fan union. She's a scab.
I went up to her. At the end of the day, I was like, so did you hear about the aliens? And she was like, what aliens? No.
So in every big horror movie and in every sci-fi movie, we've been told for years and years that when aliens do come to Earth, there's going to be riots. There's going to be people burning things in the street.
They're going to try to overthrow the government. It'll be utter utter chaos the markets will go to hell and then um that all turned out not to be true because taylor swift broke up with her boyfriend at the exact same time as the alien news announcement came the aliens gotta like i think it's people have just accepted the fact they've seen it all the reports have come out the former people that work in the government you know admitting it that they've you know known, you know, known about it since the seventies, the aliens have to destroy something.
Yeah. And then they got to show some, show some muscle.
Yeah. Like, yeah.
Like they gotta, they gotta take something out or like a massive, you know, you're literally just saying, you're literally just saying aliens come at us, bro. No, I'm just saying like, I, it is crazy.
The more the news that comes out, it's like, damn, like aliens exist. Like it's it's just it's just known now well I also I agree with PFT where it's like you everyone thought that when they it got known aliens existed people are going to freak out but the reason it hasn't is because they haven't done shit I also just assume whoever talks about the aliens like there's a former government guy the government basically was like this guy doesn't know everything let him fucking talk everyone will say he's Like, I want to know the stuff that we still don't know, because that's the real shit.
Maybe they have, but we just don't know about it. The whistleblower also commented that not only did they have intact crafts, but also intact bodies of the pilots of those crafts.
Oh. Yeah.
I mean, like, the stuff that we didn't know is what this guy just told us yesterday. But there's more.
He kind of did know something that we didn know. There's more because they would have killed him if he knew the real stuff.
Yeah, I think what Hank's saying is, when we're on the road, then we'll take you seriously. Yeah, then the series starts.
The series hasn't started yet with the aliens. Yeah.
Also, another theory that I was thinking over earlier today is that this guy might just be making it all up. And he's authorized by the government to make it up because that way China and Russia are like wait what the fuck we don't have any alien craft they they know all this technology in the United States that we don't know yet and then their military starts to panic and they get scared of us because we think we got that alien shit that's what I'm saying like this guy talking so freely I like they're like, let him talk freely.
You know? The United States government has killed people like, you know, opposing and leaking information for a lot less. So I just feel like maybe they let this guy run out there being like, oh yeah, he's crazy.
He'll say some shit. Everyone will think he's crazy.
Taylor Swift will break up with her boyfriend and no one will remember so one thing other whistleblowers yeah taylor might be working for the united states government and they just told her like hey taylor please dump your boyfriend right now because we need to cover up the alien thing yeah uh the other thing is with this guy going through the proper channels so everyone's saying that the reason why he was allowed to talk about this is because he followed mandatory whistleblower policies, which give me a break.

I mean, if you really wanted to keep this guy quiet, you wouldn't have a sniper positioned outside this guy's house. And then the guy in the van gives you a call.
He's like, stand down, stand down. It turns out he actually filed the paperwork correctly.
So we can't kill him. Right, right.
I just also don't think that if there was

alien spaceships

I could get from a different planet

to Earth that we have, why couldn't we just flip it and go back there? We don't know the controls. You ever try to drive a fucking manual car, Hank? We could figure it out, though.
I don't think they've had it for a long time. Billy doesn't think they're from other planets.
He thinks they're from Ohio. They're more likely from Earth.

Yeah.

Think about it.

Well, it's like Bloom Boy.

They're from underneath the Antarctic shelf.

Oh, okay.

Think about it.

We haven't explored that much of the ocean.

We haven't explored that much of the center of the Earth.

Just something to think about.

It's pretty hot, I think.

It's part of why we haven't gone down there.

Through the Earth into the sky.

I tried to dig to China when I was like seven.

You know what's fucked up is that we haven't tried to dig to China recently.

Yeah.

You know what the deepest hole that's ever been dug is only like, I don't know, what is it, a mile deep, a couple miles deep?

And we haven't even tried since the 1960s to dig to the center of the earth. We need to get back on that shit.
Yeah, we do. That guy who was digging the holes.
He was haunted. I think Billy just described the plot to Kong Skull Island.
Yeah. Oh, okay, so that's where he got from.
All right, my hot seat is also us PFT, but for a different different reason so we have a great life advice

or life episode coming with

Priscilla and Titus on Monday we're going to

talk about game 3 or game

4 of the NBA Finals as well but

we have 2 hours that we taped with them

we talked everything we also

did a Mount Rushmore of things that make us

feel old and after

we finished taping that night I watched

the Blackberry movie and PFT

I feel like we are officially at the

point where they're now making movies of things that we fully lived through and can completely remember and that fucking sucks because there were parts of the movie where they were like flashing to 2007 and i was just sitting there like yeah i remember when i got my first blackberry and i was so pumped and now like the like kids are gonna watch movies and be like what was it like then it's like fuck i was i was fucking like 25 yeah what the hell shit so what else is crazy along those same lines the uh woodstock 99 movie yeah right now people are looking back on woodstock 99 basically the same way that we looked back on the original Woodstock when we were growing up, which that blew my mind. Yeah, so that sucked.
It also, big miss by them to not throw in anything about Brick Breaker because that was the greatest game ever. I spent so much time in my office pretending to work, just trying to beat levels in Brick Breaker.
I've got a boomer take about the BlackBerry. I miss the keyboard.
Yeah. There should be keyboards on iPhones.
I like pressing the buttons and feeling the buttons get pressed down. It's a good sensation.
The iPhone is a superior phone in its totality, but in terms of business, the BlackBerry was king. That was business.
You did business business you did business on your blackberry closing deals if you see a guy walk into uh walk into an office with a blackberry and a bluetooth piece in one ear you know that guy's a billionaire yeah our boss dave portnoy invented the iberry where he just uh velcroed a blackberry on on the back of an iPhone, and he just flipped back and

forth for business and pleasure.

Got it.

Yeah.

All right.

My cool throne is our Vegas Knights and AWL Alec Martinez, who scored a goal.

That was a shit pumping.

They kicked the fuck out of the Panthers.

Panthers still tried to rough them up.

You had the big hit from Kachuk on Eichel uh but it looks like the Knights I mean you can't be more dominant than they have been through two games I know that we're going back down to Florida and and uh Jake and and Brooks are going to be saying go peas but it the Knights look good the Knights looked really fucking good yeah they were dominant the Panthers did exactly what I too, if I were the Panthers at the end of that game. If you're just getting the shit kicked out of you in game two, you want to make it as physical as you possibly can.
You want to get into fights. You just want to let all your aggression out.
You want to get it out there on the ice in game two so that you can turn the page, go on to game three. Don't try to win that game once you fall down 5-2, 6-2.

You just turn it into a shit-kicking.

You try to lay the dirtiest hits possible.

You just try to get physical.

You try to get all that out of your system.

And then you regroup, and you go back to Florida,

and you're like, okay, maybe this can switch around.

But that hit that Kachuk had on Eichel, that was awesome.

And it was a clean hit, right?

Yeah, Eichel just fell. Eichel was going across the ice, and he was leaning forward.
He was off balance, and he kind of leaned into the hit a little bit, which made it look, and it was a bad hit. It was very violent.
But the most impressive part of that hit was Kachuk was chewing on his mouthpiece. So his mouthpiece was sticking out of his mouth, and when he laid that hit on him, it knocked off Eichel's helmet helmet but Kachuk kept his mouthpiece just dangling out of his mouth the entire time it was awesome yeah I mean it was my point that I made on Monday that the Panthers are going to try to rough up this series the Knights are just like they're too disciplined to like they've been there they got fucking big dudes like they're just not going to play that game also shout out Conor Bedard, future greatest player of all time for the Blackhawks,

saying when he went on the desk for tnt he was like it's great to be with a bunch of hockey legends and biz so knows that he can throw a joke around that's good personality he's seen the stats about how how uh henrik lundqvist has more career points than biz nasty does which i looked it up turns out they were right about how many people didn't realize we were no we were joking in that like being like no you don't understand you know Lundqvist has assists like no we do understand we were just making a joke because biz like we felt bad for biz couldn't be making fun of we're also making fun of we were making fun of because we knew that it was true But yeah, he also said, Bedard said that if he's lucky enough to be drafted by the Blackhawks, he's excited to play for him. So maybe there's a chance Blackhawks pass on him.
Trade the pick. All right, Billy.
My hot seat is Eastern Canadian Forests, if you haven't noticed lately. The air quality in the upper Midwest and the Northeast has been pretty shoddy but we've had amazing sunsets and sunrises.
That's because there's some wildfires in the eastern Canadian forests. Second hot seat everybody in Charlotte who loves lacrosse Dugues last weekend was at the Bar Down Beer Lounge in Albany.
This week I want to to see if Charlotte can out-compete the Albany crowd and come to the Bar Down Beer Lounge. Are you going? I'm going.
I'm cleared for this week. I like this.
You're just going. I'm cleared for this week, and we got to get going.
Bill's just on the PLL tour now. I like this.
Yeah. I mean, some people train to play lacrosse.
I train for the beer garden. This is what's happening.
Not well, because you got beat. I beat Paul Rabel in a beer chug.
Paul Rabel's a martini guy. I know, I know, but it still counts.
And my cool throne is UFO believers. I like how Billy was like, I'm cleared to participate this weekend.
I was not cleared last week. He's reached all clearance.
I was not cleared last week. This week I am cleared.
Who clears you? The league. The league cleared you? The league cleared me.
They're going to have to revoke that after this week. No, no, no.
I was cleared. Okay, right.
But they can revoke it for next week. I wasn't cleared last weekend.
Right. Why weren't you cleared last weekend? I had a funeral.
In my cool throne is the Matrix. So Apple is now getting into virtual reality, which means it's actually going to catch on.
So that sucks. Goodbye, reality.
It's true. When other companies do it, when Facebook did, they were trying to make it more accessible.
So they were lowering the price of it to, what was it, 400 bucks for the meta thing. Facebook changed their entire company name to meta to get behind this thing.
Now Apple's going to come out. They're going to make it.
It's going to be like four grand and everyone's just going to buy the Apple one. Yeah, I just want it.
Because it's like, oh, it's Apple. Yeah.
You know what? I think I'm going to get one. Yeah.
Got to. That price? Got to try it out.
If it was $200, I'd be like, no thanks. I got to have it.
It's a good business lesson that sometimes you don't want to pay a lower price for something. Yeah.
Sometimes you just- I'm going to get it, and I'm never going to use it. I'm going to use it once it once and be like all right and then probably end up giving it to like one of brandon walker's kids or you get one for the office yeah yeah i did that with the oculus i bought the oculus i'd never even opened the box i just gave it away so yeah i'm gonna buy one uh all right jake uh my hot seat are fans who are trying to get on camera so there was a fan there was a Miami local sports reporter named Samantha Rivera on site in Vegas after the game and there was this fan trying to get on camera and she just stiff arms the crap out of him oh yeah that was awesome he had no shot of getting in the frame so that was a great move yeah that was and that happened also there was another guy who had to do that with knights fans as well i think after game one too rowdy yeah don't get in the shot no can't get in the shot i'm like you have to do my cool throne is our friend charlie woods yeah yeah good job future charlie woods just won a major over the weekend the major championship at village golf course he beat the field by eight strokes at one under par.
He just dominated. That's Charlie.
Yeah. Jake, I'm concerned that you're surprised by this.
Yeah. No, I'm not surprised.
I expected that. We knew that this was going to happen.
Yeah. Yeah.
The top five was rounded out by Noah Manley, Luke Friend, Cameron Cantine, and Logan Fox. Don't care.
Logan Fox. Charlie Woods.
Charlie Woods is all I care about. No one finished a blow par, Jake.

Yeah.

They're bums and losers.

Charlie Woods is one under and Noah Manley was seven over.

He should get second place, too.

Charlie Woods should get all the fucking, there's no prize money, but if there were, he should get it all.

Yeah, so he won the boys 14-15 division.

And he's what, 12 years old?

14 or 15, probably.

Oh, okay. I floated this out there to our good friend Max Homa,

who's very excited about –

Hank almost had a hole-in-one today,

which I can't believe we haven't talked about.

That was from – I saw you.

That was from at least a month ago.

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

Oh, okay.

It was a six-shot, though.

It was a six-shot.

I would like to see Charlie Woods teamed up on Max Homa's team on the PGA. if they're going to do team format let's get let's get our squad together yeah um okay let's get to our interview with brian windhorse and then we have our good friend dan rapaport on the other side talking about live pga and what happened today all protein bars generally taste the same but not one bars one made protein bars are actually delicious with Reese's and Hershey's.
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Find all one bars at a retailer near you or on amazon.com. And now here's Brian Windhorrian windhorse okay we now welcome on a very very very special guest been looking forward to this one three very three verys that's the voice it is brian windhorse from espn he is the best nba guy i'm gonna say it right now at esp The best.
He is a two-time New York Times bestseller, four books. And we have Wendy.
Wendy, thank you for joining us. Where are you right now? You're in Miami, right? I am in a green room that I stole from ABC in the Kasaya Center.
I don't know what Kasaya is. We we have our official abc interview in progress nice that i put up so they cannot bother me it's just an off day here uh interviews went on i think the nuggets are finishing practicing this is like a dressing room that like jimmy buffett's backup singer would have this is not the main dressing room this is just like a side dressing room that has like a couch that has tears in it.
I love it. It's perfect.
So I know people would have a bigger dressing room than this. We're going to we want to ask you a little bit about your career, but let's start with the NBA finals.
You you saw the teams today. What is the vibe both with the Nuggets and the Heat?

And I also want to just throw out there,

Wendy was the only person I heard after game one to be like,

hey, the Heat were a little bit more alive in that game

than people give him credit for.

This is going to be a series.

So kudos to you for that.

So, you know, Michael Malone, the Nuggets coach,

he's not afraid to, like, jump his team.

He's been doing it for years. Like, probably about three times a a year he rips the hell out of his team to the media.
Who knows how many times he does it to their face. They hadn't lost in a month.
They lost May 7th. Then they won the last two games of the Suns series, and they swept the Lakers, and they had 10 days off, and they won game one.
They hadn't experienced a loss in like a long time. And so when they lost in that game, even though I don't think that like they're, it wasn't like they were terrible, just Miami made a bunch of shots.
I mean, they obviously could have been better. Like Malone jumped them, man.
Like he ripped them in the locker room, then he came out and ripped him to the media. And so they flew here to Miami on Monday, and then they went to Jeff Green's house for dinner.
Jeff Green has played for like 14 teams, but I don't think the Heat are one of them, but yet he's got a house here. Okay.
And I asked Jamal Murray where the house was, and he said it was in Narnia. was so far i feel like he was going to narnia so my guess is my guess is it's somewhere in broward county but i don't know so i can i imagine like the bus just pulled up because you know they're not they're not taking ubers i'm sure the bus just pulled up to jeff green's house and so they had a bonding dinner uh on monday night and then uh today tuesday Tuesday they had a film session and Malone said he showed them 17 clips where they screwed up and then that's a lot by the way like normally a film session with an NBA team you're not showing them 17 you know there's a there's a you know attention span challenge there so they like had this monstrous film session here in miami today and and they practice so they're they're um saying that they're gonna do better i have to figure i don't know because i like during the games i'm watching i'm not you know in the gambling space is vegas getting slaughtered on live lines in the fourth quarter by the heat they have to be getting slaughtered they underdogs in every game pretty much.
They've been, I can't count the amount of times where they've been eight or nine point underdogs in one outright. It's just, it's a wild thing to have a team in the NBA finals, 1-1, and still everyone's like, well, it's the Heat and the Nuggets are better.
Yeah, you know what's wild? I was talking with some people from the Heat. When they were going into game two, they had lost four of their last five games.
Yeah. Excuse me.
How are you in the NBA finals? You lost four out of five. But, I mean, this Heat team is wild.
I got to imagine. So they've only been favored in one game in the playoffs, and they lost it.
It was one of the Celtics games. I think it was game four.
And I think they've won nine games as an underdog. And some of these fourth quarters when they've been down double digits, I don't know, but I've got to believe the live numbers have been wild that they've come back from.
So the Nuggets are trying to convince themselves to wake up and treat them like a real opponent. I think that's kind of what's happened in the last 48 hours.
Yeah, the Heat are very, very tough to kill. So it sounds like what you're saying is, and I'm going to spin this into my own way because I am rooting for the Nuggets.
It sounds like this was a good loss. It's a good thing that the Nuggets lost because it woke them up.
They needed something like this. Like you mentioned, they hadn't lost in 27 days to kind of get their shit kicked in in in the fourth quarter might have been a wake-up exactly the way michael malone phrased it uh you won't see it on television because it had to be bleeped but that's i don't know how'd you know it's exactly what he said oh it's amazing yeah we sure we share a similar mindset but so you're you're expecting the uh the nuggets to come out and have more is it was it a lack of effort that you think happened to them in game two or was it just yeah there were some issues on switching on screens that might be able to be explained away by a lack of effort but i feel like it was a lot of other things that went into it besides just not wanting more yeah so there was a couple of times where they screwed up like you said like there was a couple times where like michael porter Michael Porter, like they would set a screen.
I'm not X, I'm not an X and O guy. Cause I'll, I'll, I'll look foolish pretty quick, but there was a couple of times where Michael Porter, there was a screen and Michael Porter was supposed to switch to the other guy and he just double teamed.
And so the other guy just went over and was wide open and you know, Malone went ape over it. But the thing about it was in game one, the heat were five of 16 on the quote wide open threes which is over six feet of space that the tracking software and like the five out of 16 was like people were like wow that's really bad but i was like man 16's a lot like the nuggets won the game by like 12 or something and they only had eight wide open shots eight or nine and the heat and he had like almost double as men of open shots and got beat and so like the nuggets noticed this the coaches were like uh not necessarily a good idea and like they tried to like tell their players but like you said pft when you haven't lost in a month and you won game one with, I mean, having a B game, C plus B minus game, you know, it's sometimes hard to get going.
And I think they got caught in that. And by the way, they lost by three.
Right. And if Murray hits the last shot, like the heat made like almost everything and they lost by three.
So I still think the nugget, I mean, I huge respect the Heat. But I still think the Nuggets are in pretty good position here if they don't screw around, which they could because they've not done this before.
So talking about the Heat, we all talk about Heat culture. You know it because you've talked to Spoh many times, Pat Riley many times.
What is it about their organization that has them in these spots and always competitive with guys that you wouldn't be like, oh, that team looks like one of the best teams in the NBA? They are super duper crazy competitive with everything that they do. They'll be like a one-on-one or a one-on-zero, just a player doing a workout with a coach in August.

And the coach will try to make the player like pass out.

The Heat are relentless.

Like they weigh their players like every few days or like every,

I don't know what it is.

Like don't quote me on this exactly,

but like they're obsessive about weighing their players. Like normally teams will weigh them unless a player has like a weight clause.
They'll weigh them like at the beginning of the season, at the end of the season, the heat, like weigh their guys like all the time. And it gets to the point where the players just weigh themselves.
Yeah. Cause they, cause the heaters.
So like there was a player when I lived here for a couple of years covering heat. And there was a player that they were trying to get to lose weight.
He was a young guy. They were trying to get to lose weight.
And somebody saw the guy. There was a Taco Bell, like at least there used to be, like maybe three blocks down the road.
Somebody saw the player. Do you remember Taco Bell? You used to have like the, the sign, uh, it would say how much money you, you, you, your cost.
Like before they did that on the drive through, there was like that little thing that told you how much money your order was. Yeah.
You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. You lost.
So this is 10, 12 years ago when I was here, somebody saw this player in the drive through lineru line, somebody who like worked for the Heat, saw the player in the drive-thru line and they saw the number was like $28, which in like 2010, like $28 at Taco Bell was like enough to feed a wedding reception, you know? Yeah. And so like the Heat found out about it.
And Riley like called the guy in and like weighed him. And he was like, oh was just buying for all my boys you know i was taking home a feast and like that's how the heat roll like and like um shane battier once told me he's like if you have a big lunch they know about it and um lebron when lebron was here he used to weigh himself before and after every game or at least a lot of games and there was there was one game where lebron claimed to have gained like eight pounds in the game which i found completely unbelievable there had to have been some sort of flaw there but lebron told the story i checked with the trainer his trainer he goes yeah it happened um when jimmy butler came to miami on his recruiting visit like we want to sign you they brought him into the locker room you know had his locker all decked out and everything and riley riley pat riley stepped on the scale and he was like exact he's like i got i'm still at my exact weight when i was a laker let's see what you are jimmy like It was like a trick.
It was this recruiting visit. So look, those are just the Heat weight tails.
They just, they're just maniacal, but I don't say that in a bad way. They're maniacal about everything.
They compete at everything. So that summer league, they compete.
Like the Heat do two summer leagues. They've been doing two summer leagues for like years.
They're just maniacal about competing, and that carries over to just whatever they do. It sounds corny, but ABC, always be competing.
That's like Riley's methodology. And so that's Heat culture.
Yeah. And heat culture is also like if you're not getting it done, they'll slice your throat and say, get out of here.
Yeah. You told the story, Mario Chalmers can't even go to Taco Bell.
It wasn't Mario Chalmers. It was a guy who never really made it.
I was trying to get it out of you. No, it's Mark Steasley.
We just started naming players. But that's a great answer.
I mean, that is – I know that, like, it seems corny, but if it's a cultural thing and everyone from the top down is doing that in your face all the time, everyone starts competing like that. That's why Eric Spolstra says we're not for everybody.
Right. Yeah.
I mean, I would not last in the Miami Heat. Oh, if I had to weigh every day? You think I would last? You're the way of people every day.
You think I'm lasting? I don't think so. You're telling me they're competing.
I'm hearing that they're body shaming. Yeah.
Well, I just feel like they have expectations of what you're going to be. Listen, it would take one big cat Saturday morning donut.

Yes, I'm out.

It's not for everybody.

Not for me.

It is very Miami of them, I guess, to be doing this.

So can we get your official prediction for game three?

I don't make predictions.

But even if I did, I mean, man, I wish anybody luck

who's going to predict what's going to happen with the Miami Heat because Because this team, I've been calling them the bizarro team. I shouldn't make Seinfeld references, probably to your audience especially, because they don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
But they do things weird. They just do things backwards.
So I'm telling you that I'm looking at this, and I think the Nuggets didn't play that bad in game two and could have won and are probably in pretty good shape. But right when you think you got it figured out, the heat will put you right on your backside.
Yeah. So my guess is that we'll be 2-2 by the weekend.
But that's just a guess. I don't have, like, a great feel for it.
Yeah. so talking about your career you've had a fascinating career because for the longest time you were

deemed the LeBron whisperer you obviously are from Akron you're also a kid from Akron I think is the story right that your mom taught LeBron or was a teacher at LeBron's uh high school so yeah I'm curious like your career obviously has evolved was it annoying it sometimes to be, I'm more than just LeBron guy? Like I know that I cover him. I know I covered him in Cleveland, then Miami, then back to Cleveland.
But like I can talk about the whole league. I have more than just one player here.
I mean, obviously I made it a priority not to be that guy forever because I haven't covered him on a daily basis for a decade. Right.
But I mean, he was absolutely incredibly tremendous coming across him when he was 14 years old was the greatest break of my professional life. So like it was amazing to to do that.
And I don't regret one second of it. And if I have to get made fun of for it, then so be it.
I think the one thing I would say is when I came down here to Miami, when he came down here and I joined ESPN, I got kind of slaughtered for it. And the thing is, if I was getting special access, then it's like, okay, you made a choice.
You're like, you know, you decided you were going to go be on team LeBron. Um, and you know, that's your, you've sold out.
And so, but at least you get the cream, right? At least you get the interviews and everything. Like when I came down here to Miami, like he was furious at ESPN because of the way the decision played out.
And he basically, I mean, he was totally a pro, but he basically didn't give ES for a year um i'm for some period of time i don't want to say it was like the whole season but for some period of time he wouldn't even do walk-off interviews with espn or maybe he did walk-off interviews but he wouldn't do pre-game sit-down interviews whatever it was he like restricted espn access and you know we announced this big thing the heat index where we had multiple writers like covering him and like, he thought it was the worst idea ever. And so even though I knew him real well and had known him for many years at that point, like he had no interest, he was not interested in doing anything for me.
So I was like getting skewered for being this sellout. Meanwhile, I left a newspaper, I left the newspaper business, which, you know, I love the job that I had, which is the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
But like, I had been trying to get out of newspapers for five years, you know, I mean, like, I was not in position to turn down a massive raise and getting out of newspapers. It was, I mean, if I had turned it down, I would have needed, you know, medical attention.
So, and then, so I got this reputation, you know, in, by the way, after a year, everything was sort of fine. He sort of came back around, but then like, I haven't been his guy.
Like I've written and said many critical things. He's, trust me, he's been pissed off at me many, many times.
And like, if like, like I didn't get the decision, uh, or not the decision. I didn't get the return to Cleveland interview.
Like, Lee Jenkins got it. Like, good for Lee Jenkins.
But, like, if I had sold out and been, like, a sycophant, then at least I would have gotten that interview, you know. So, you know, so while that is annoying, I have no regrets.
And everything that LeBron helped magnify and uplift me, I mean, like the classic rising tide raises all ships. I mean, there's a whole bunch of people around LeBron who players, coaches, media, other people that he's worked with that have all benefited from him, and I am definitely in that tide.
But I've never been on his payroll. I've never been invited for Chris for Thanksgiving dinner, and I never will be.
But I'm always very, very, very blessed to have come into his life when I did. If you were a LeBron sycophant, you definitely would not come on this show.
That's true. That should put everything to bed right away.
There we go. Thank goodness.
What was the moment that you realized, though, because you're from the same area. You went to the same high school, right? You went to St.
Vincent, St. Mary's.
Yeah. When did you realize that LeBron James was going to be LeBron James? Well, first off, let me be clear.
I had no idea what the hell I was looking at because I was, you know,

I'm seven years old.

I think I'm seven years old.

Yeah, you're seven years old.

Six or seven years old.

We're the same age as LeBron.

We're that close to going to the NBA, just like him.

So, like, I really didn't know what I was doing either.

I was, like, 21.

I think when I first saw him, I was 21.

He was 14, yeah. So, it's not like I was like, well, I've seen a bunch of recruits in my day and this guy's the best one.
I just, you know, thought like this guy's really good. And, um, uh, so when he was a rising junior, so he just finished his sophomore year.
Um, he's going to go junior year. He goes to this camp in, um New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson university before they were the 16 seed champs.
And by the way, their gym was a 16 seated gym. Like it was only like half hardwood and it was like half like sport court.
And they had this, she used to have this huge camp there, the Adidas ABCD camp. And really the camp is designed for rising seniors, guys who are 18, you know,

going to be seniors. So LeBron was kind of there a year early.
But that summer was the summer that

Kwame Brown got drafted first. And like, if you remember, like four of the top eight guys were

high school guys, Eddie Curry, Tyson Chandler, Kwame Brown, Sagana Jop. And so it was like,

oh man, like, I guess the NBA draft is just going to all be high school guys now. So I go to this

Thank you. Curry, Tyson Chandler, Kwame Brown, Sagana Jop.
And so it was like, oh man, like I guess the NBA draft is just going to all be high school guys now. So I go to this camp.
My boss didn't want to pay for it. I was working at the Akron Beacon Journal, you know, medium-sized paper.
We had a really good sports section, but my boss couldn't comprehend the need to cover an AAU event. It wasn't AAU, but you know in New Jersey that required a plane flight and hotel.
He thought I was insane. So I paid for it in my own pocket because I knew that it was worthwhile being there.
So I went, and on one side of the gym were all the best college coaches in the country. It was like Krzyzewski, Boeheim, Calipari, Patino had just gotten hired at Louisville like a couple of months prior.
And then on the other side, there was all these NBA scouts because now the NBA scouts got all got to come watch the 17 year olds. So it was like, you know, Danny Ainge, you know, Pat Riley.
I don't know if Riley was there, but it was like all those guys. Okay.
And LeBron completely dominated the event from start to finish. wasn't like oh no I like that kid from Phoenix or you know those two kids from LA are probably better he dominated it from start to finish as a pimple-faced 16 year old and people there were like not when I say people I about like, you know, the coaches weren't allowed to say his name.

So they would talk in code. I remember Patina was like, there's a young man here who would be the number one pick on the draft.
If he was right now, there were people who were like, they're all the basketball scouts in like, you know, all the top basketball people in the country were there. And they were all like, yeah, this 16 year old kid would be the number one pick on the draft if the draft was today.
and so that's when I was like oh he's not just gonna be like

a this 16 year old kid would be the number one pick on the draft if the draft was today. And so that's when I was like, oh, he's not just going to be like a North Carolina recruit.
He's actually like going to possibly be the number one pick on the draft. So that's when I kind of got it.
And, you know, from there, kind of my outlook changed. Yeah.
So going off of LeBron you had uh from great to great because we are a Wembenyama podcast uh you were in Paris you got some flack for it which I didn't even understand because it was so clear like people like oh Wendy went to Paris for 90 seconds like it was pretty clear you were also starting a relationship with a guy who hopefully will be the face of the NBA for the next two decades. Is the hype, should we believe all the hype? What are you hearing and knowing the guy now and meeting him? We bought a lot of stock.
Should we hold the stock? Well, first off, I went to Paris twice, bros. I went to Paris in January for a whole week.
Wow. Forget about this 90 seconds.
I was there. I'd never been to France before.
I have now been there twice. You speak French? You don't have to speak French.
You can get by. You have to, you know, parlez-vous ingles.
That's all you got to say. I got a photographer I know or, you know, a videographer I know over there whose name is Jean-Claude.
Perfect. You know, his name was Jean-Claude, I was like, you've got to be kidding, right?

I got my favorite truffle bar there.

I mean, come on.

People were like, oh, you went there for 90 seconds.

I was like, no, I made two trips.

You think I made one BS trip?

I made two BS trips, ladies and gentlemen.

So I spent five or six days there.

His coach is great. His coach is, you know know they want kind of media attention quite frankly and because by the way but he came over to vegas like he might have made 50 to 75 million dollars by coming to vegas wow um you know because he's got indoor he's basically telling endorsing people to just wait wait out wait outside um so i got to see him play got to see him practice got to spend time with him uh rode in a car with him he we were in this range rover that his agent owned and it was like i just felt bad for him like him sitting in this car and i was like victor two words cadillac escalade you know chevy tahoe like you're when you get to the u.s you get taken care of.
Um, I just felt bad. Like he was so packed in there.
So I got to spend quite a bit of time with him and more time than cause you're saying no to like all media requests. They're like, but they recognize that ESPN is, you know, a key to, to introducing himself to the, um, to the, to the market.
Jonathan Gavoni, who's our draft analyst, who's been scouting Europe for 20 years, opened a bunch of doors. So I spent a week with them.
So when I went back over there, like I had already, we had this party. First off, there was, we spent another day with him doing an interview with a high profile person that will run close to the draft.

So I was there for like three days. Um, and then like when I went to this party that he had for his, like his whole people in his life, like I like knew like 20 people to party because I had interviewed all of his youth coaches.
I'd interviewed his, some of his teammates. I had interviewed, you know, members of his family, you know?

So like that, just that moment like we're we're it's 2 30 in the morning i mean mbappe is there yep you know mbappe is is that the like who are the most famous people in france who are the most famous there's some guy named um uh there was some actor who i don't know who he is he was in i don't know this guy is like the tom cruise of france i didn't know who he was his last name is is spelled s y psi c i i i i don't know pop culture he's this like when he left early he didn't he checked out like midnight. Mbappe's hanging out there.
Am I saying it wrong? Yeah, you are. It's great.
You're a basketball guy. Don't even put on pretenses that you're anything else.
There's no pretenses. One thing I don't do is pretenses.
So several of the most famous people in France are hanging out there. There's only like 65 people at the party, by the way.
It wasn't likeogue party it was you know and like i know like 15 of them so like that's a great opportunity to get to know them they played a game that night so it's 2 30 in the morning and like guys this we got this was so tightly scheduled it was like okay 2 24 a.m final envelope is opened. 2.26 a.m.
Victor does interview.

2.28? 2 24 a.m final envelope is opened 2 26 a.m victor uh does interview 2 28 a.m turn on wendy's mic right i don't i don't even know how that went jean claude that was jean claude's job uh 220 230 228 toss back to malika 230 game one westernals. It was like that tightly packed.
And I was like, I don't know if this is going to come off. But it did.
And I had the broadcast in my ear through like our feed. And I was about two seconds ahead of the feed they were watching.
They were watching the American feed. They were getting ESPN.
They were watching Woj say he's one of the greatest prospects. That'll be the memory that I have.
Woj is up there on the broadcast, and Woj does not overextend. When Woj says something, he's got it locked down.
And Woj is on the broadcast saying this is maybe one of the greatest prospects in the history of team sports. He's saying this.
I'm looking at his coach, who's the French national team coach, who understands what is being said. Not everybody in the room spoke English.
He's looking at me like, oh, my God, can you believe this? I'm like, no, I cannot believe this. Victor's looking at it.
He's playing it cool. And so I'm hearing two seconds ahead.
And I asked his agent, I said, do you want me to signal you? And he's like, no, I want to see it in the real time. So I was able to have just a little bit of a heads up to know what to look for.
And so then he did. He celebrated with his family for like one minute, came over and did the interview.
Granted, it wasn't the greatest interview in the history of interviews, but we got his reaction to being a spur 90 seconds in real time after he found out. So that was a once in lifetime thing that's not what you asked me you asked me was he going to be for real guys he is super duper as you know if you've seen him he's very very light he's got a very high center of gravity it's very easy to get him off balance so he is going to get embarrassed at times you know there will be highlights where people will laugh at him and say, this guy can't play.
And then he is going to bust your ass. So, like, there was this video that went viral.
He played in this event with the French national team, like, in February, and he was playing against, like, this 37-year-old, you know, like, seven-foot guy from the Czech Republic, and he's backing him down. He knocks him out of the way, and he dunks, and he glares at him.
And I saw it go viral, and people are like, oh my gosh, this guy can't play in the NBA. How is he going to be the number one pick? He had 22 and 17 in that game.
Jesus, yeah. So this is what's going to happen.
Yeah, he's going to get embarrassed. And then you're going to take a shot from their three-point range and think that he's in the paint and he's getting in the rebound.
And then you're going to launch it, and all of a sudden you're going to eat the shot because you're not going to comprehend how long this guy's arms are. And his hands are like a foot long.
He can almost grab the rim. I'll bet if he got on his tiptoes, he could grab the rim from the ground.
I don't think people understand how long his arms are and that he can defend the basket and the three-point line at the same time. And I tell that to people, and they go, you are out of your mind.
Why would you even bother saying that? Because I'm telling you, I saw it. He'd be protecting the front of the rim.
Dry would dribble in there. Okay, I can't score here.
And he'd kick it out to the corner and the guy would catch it in the corner. Okay, we shrunk the defense.
We're going to shoot our three. And the guy would launch the three and he would get out there in time to block it.
he's not going to do that if the guy in the corner is 6-10 he might not get that but that's the kind of plays he makes that is why everybody gets excited okay um follow up question about about draft night or about the draft lottery night when did you find out that he was going to be a san an Spur. Was it right before the envelope was shown,

or was it on your first trip to Paris when you went over there at ESPN and the NBA?

Adam Silver called you up.

He goes, get ready to learn French, buddy.

So first off, the night that all – you know, we wouldn't – we at ESPN wouldn't have wanted him to go to San Antonio.

And I'm saying this is a guy from Cleveland who lives in Omaha, you know.

The night all lottery conspiracies went to die was the zion lottery yeah because zion and jaw were in the same lottery and the final four were nicks lakers grizzlies um pelicans are you kidding me and the Lakers and the, and the Knicks miss out on that? Zion and Ja go to the Pelicans and Grizzlies? All conspiracy theories died that night. So, I mean, people can come up with them and it's fun to talk about it or whatever, but I will say this, PFT, multiple NBA general managers who knew I was over there because I called around to some GMs before some some teams that were in the lottery because I wanted to like have questions prepared so I called some of the teams are in the lottery like if you win and they were like well I don't know why you're calling me you should just talk to the Spurs because they're gonna win it like several of them said that beforehand having having conspiracies.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you got to see him and get his reaction right afterwards in the interview. And also you were around him and his family and his friends right after the cameras cut away.
What was his reaction genuinely, you know, not the boilerplate interview to finding out he was going to be a Spur. How did he react to that information after the fact? Was he just really excited about it? Because it does feel like it's the perfect fit for him.
Yeah, they were relieved. I mean, I do think he would have been okay with just about any place, but there were some places that, you know, I think may not have been the best fit right out of the gate.
That one, they, you know, they, they, they know what they do with guys like that.

And plus, the Spurs are like the most popular team in France.

Well, the Lakers are probably still the most popular team in France,

but because of Tony Parker, the Spurs are way up there. So there was a comfort level I think they knew they'd be taken care of.

And when I went to Paris the first time in January, after the new year the Spurs were there they had three executives at the games at the practices um when some of the interviews we did with like various people in his life like his youth coaches and everything like that the Spurs had already been there and talked to them or the Spurs they were like leaving a meeting with us and going to a meeting with the Spurs. So they were doing their full workup on him in the month leading up to it.
So they are going to be ready for him. Ultimately, he's got to stay healthy.
I mean, the track record on guys that big is not good. But he's played every game this year and looked great and took his teams in the finals right now was there any talk and this is a scenario that will never happen now that we know that he's going to the spurs but do you think he could have done a power play like an eli manning if one of the teams that he didn't want to go to had gotten number one he absolutely could have because he's european like it's one thing if like you realize or you, let's say you're Scoot Henderson, and you were the number one choice.
You could be like, well, I don't want to play for Team X. I'm going to go to Europe, or I'm going to go to Australia.
Well, you're kind of bluffing, right? Because if they call your bluff, then you actually have to go to Europe. Like Danny Ferry back in the 80s, like he had to go and play in Rome, right? Well, Wembenyama is French.
Like he would just be like, okay, I'll just stay here and play for Real Madrid and I'll make 10 million euros tax-free. Like he could have plausibly threatened to do that.
said that when i talked to him in january

he made it clear to me that he wasn't gonna do it that he didn't care where he played that he was gonna make it work but you never would have known for sure until you would have been until you would have played out yeah um i got a question a podcast question so you host the hoop collective great podcast with uh tim m McMahon and Tim Bontemps. So you guys sometimes have gone viral for a little tension in the podcasting.
The famous straw poll last year with Embiid. How real is that? I love it.
You guys snip at each other every now and then. It does feel like you guys are still friends.
But I like it because it's just like it's it's not it doesn't feel contrived debate it's real debate where you guys disagree about something and you have it out like unlike your relationship which is totally fake yes we script this whole thing yeah that's right i saw you guys are in separate buses separate now you're in separate rooms there's a real there's a conspiracy here i mean when is that yeah we're mike and mike We don't talk off there yeah yeah yes when is the when is the in-depth profile going to come out on there um no we we talk every day and we get in arguments every day not every day we get in arguments regularly and um you know uh tim bond tempest likes to call mcmahon a bozo he does it three to five times a a week, and he'll do it right on the podcast.

That's all real.

I mean, I don't want to argue every pod.

I don't think that's an effective way of going about it,

but we do it.

And here's the thing.

We're all out in the field.

Right.

Bontemps goes like 65 or 70 games a year.

McMahon is in Texas, and he was one of the first people I called,

and I was like, hope you better check that because he lives in Dallas. i was like you better check that flight schedule to uh san antonio big boy your uh your backside is going to be down there on when banyama watch you better learn french and um so yeah no that's all it's all real i mean we don't trust me we get into disagreements um you know there have been times where bond temps won't talk to me for six to eight hours at a time but it's always always we always end up okay i love it too because you guys are in the field like you said and that's something like you know we we talk out of our ass we we we have takes for sports fans but we don't know day to day when i listen to you guys it's it's a perspective of okay they're talking to the players're at the practices.
That's stuff that's invaluable that you really can't replicate

unless you're actually there.

So what's happened is, you know, we've been doing that pod for years now,

and it kind of in the last, you know, three or two or three years

has gotten widely listened to by the league.

And so, like, not some players, but more the executives, the coaches, the referees, like they're definitely hearing what you're saying. Like that's always an exit.
Like you guys live in that world. Yeah.
You guys are very high profile. You know, when you say something on PTI or you say something on on first take, you're the guys are going to see it, especially if it's somewhat controversial.
Maybe that they're not watching, but it's going to make it to them. And so you'll hear about it.
But that's now becoming the case with our podcast. It's become one of those things that people in the league listen to, the agents.
People reference it to me like in locker rooms and stuff. So we've had to be a little,

I mean, we always realize that we've got to held to a certain standard when you put

DSPN behind your name,

you're talking about the league,

but it has become something we've got to be aware of.

When you say something about somebody,

especially when you're covering a series,

like we're covering the finals right now.

And like,

I'm not sure the players are hearing that during the finals,

but like,

you got to say something,

you might see the guy you said something about,

you know,

six hours later. So you got to be aware of that.
And when Wendy speaks, people listen, there was an all time moment from last year. You went on first take.
I think, you know what I'm about to ask you about. You go on first take and you ask the question that nobody in the world cares about or is thinking about what is going on in Utah.
What are they doing and all of a sudden we all start to care about what's happening with utah jazz like something's happening with utah jazz wendy knows something he's not telling us why would wendy do that what that we we became you in that moment trying to figure you out did you know that you were about to just lead a trail of breadcrumbs out there and you were like i'm about to go on national television and put on the performance of a lifetime i definitely was leaving the breadcrumbs but i didn't know it was going to go viral um look here's what happened so that was a friday it was a friday of july 4th weekend and like 94 of espn was on vacation uh you know the nfl is in its dead period so people are already on it's you know i think july 4th last year was on a saturday or sunday everybody was gone so not only was like this there were skeleton crews everywhere but like i basically had the a block of first take like steven a like the a block of most shows is like eight to nine minutes. Like Get Up has a little bit more flexibility.
The A block of first take can go 25 minutes. Stephen A has that real estate that he earned, and so they will give you 25 minutes.
And they will talk about the Utah Jazz. Like sometimes ESPN, we make decisions, not sometimes, a lot of times we make decisions based on what the fans want to see.
I mean, it is data-driven. Like, I'm sure you guys live in a data-driven world.
You understand. Like, we talk about the Lakers and the Cowboys because the data says talk about the Lakers and the Cowboys.
Well, on first take, there's a little bit more flexibility. So I had 20 minutes where I happened to be the authority on the set at the time.
If we were talking about the NFL, I wouldn't have been the authority. If we're talking about boxing, or we're talking about college football, I wouldn't have been the authority.
But I kind of had first take, and I had it because it was Friday of, you know, Stephen A was gone, Chris Russo was gone. Molly Kieran was gone.
Not that the people on me were nobodies, but I kind of had the stage and I had all this time. I would never get three to five minutes to talk about the Utah Jazz on the highest rated show on the ESPN slate.
I don't know if PTI or first take one of the highest rated. I sort of fell into that moment and that's why it went viral it went viral because I had that stage and it just so happened I I knew that something funky was going on with the jazz I had done a podcast at midnight the night before with Bontemps and McMahon where I talked because I had heard that Gobert was about to get traded but I wasn't 100 sure it was going to happen so if you go on TV and you say I'm hearing Rudy Gobert is going to get traded and then he wasn't 100% sure it was going to happen.
So if you go on TV and you say,

I'm hearing Rudy Gobert is going to get traded, and then he doesn't get traded, which is very possible in any deal, then you're the asshole who said there was going to be a trade, and there's not a trade, and then you don't know what you're talking about. You're actually a moron.
But if you say something is going on in Utah that makes me wonder whether they're going to break this team up and here's my seven reasons and I have five minutes afforded to me I can do something that you rarely see which is to cherry pick a perfect situation in a high profile moment so a whole bunch of things had to align and then thank you Utah Jazz they did the trade like two hours later yeah in the fingers they could have done the. They could have done the trade the following Monday.
They could have waited through the holiday, but they did the trade two hours later. So the thing was starting to go viral, and then they did the trade, and so I looked good.
And then it was a holiday weekend where there was no new content. Everybody's on their phone for the holiday weekend.
I will go 30 more years in my career. I could have 25 times where I predict something that is better than that, but it'll never go like that because of the circumstances that lined up the way it did.
And now when people Google your name, the first picture that pops up is you. It's the fingers.
Can you do the fingers real quick? Yeah. Can we see the fingers? I'm in France.
I'm in France. People are stopping me on the street.
They're doing the fingers to you? Yeah. The fingers are the best.
All right. Well, Wendy, this has been awesome.
I have a couple last questions real quick. One of my favorite tweets ever, it wasn't from you, but it was your quote from March 15, 2017.
ESPN Cleveland tweeted out, Windhorse, as far as LeBron recovering and not being injured, he has more equipment in his home than most colleges, and he is so strong. What was going on there? What was the last part? And he is so strong.
He is so strong. Well, he is.
Yeah. I have no idea what that was was being taken from but he does have a lot of stuff in his house it's my favorite i don't know why but just ending it and he is so strong like reminding everyone like lebron james yeah i have strong you know the thing about lebron is that he a lot of people have hot tubs obviously but he had i don't know's got in LA, but in Cleveland, he always had like a cold tub at the ready.
Like it was like your lifetime fitness, your 24 hour fitness. Like his stuff was like ready to go at the drop of a hat, whether it was 3am or 3pm.
Like it was, he had like a professional great equipment at all times. And he is so strong.
He's very strong. So strong.
How strong is he? Not just strong. So strong.
So strong. All right.
And then my last question, it's a Roback question. R-H-O-B-A-C-K.com.
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This has been fantastic, Wendy. You are now a recurring guest, so you have to come on anytime we ask.
That's legally binding. Anytime.
Yes. My last question is, and this is a weird one, but whenever we have a guest on, I like to look through some of the tweets that I've had.
I think I might have a fetish with your hair. There's a lot of tweets I've tweeted out of talking about how good your hair looks what what products are we working with like i i'm literally like looking back five years and i'm just like windy with the double decker because you had like the two waves going in 2018 and windy's hairs and fuego and all this right now you're getting me i haven't i've been on the road basically for eight weeks so like i haven haven't had a haircut in forever.
I've got like part Conan O'Brien.

I got like the Mel Kiper is working here.

Like this is kind of getting Melly over here.

I use this, this, this, this, uh, like, you know, pomade product,

which was recommended to me by Kyle Corver.

Oh, cause I was like, cause I noticed that Kyle, he, noticed that Kyle, his hair would never move like throughout an entire game. And I think it's like Aveda is the product.
Please send me a case. And, you know, I just – there's a lot of physical attributes about me that are not attractive, but I do have good hair.
and when I came to ESPN and they started doing TV, there was like certain things they wanted me to do that I wasn't like, they were giving me these breathing exercises and they were telling me to lay on the ground and stretch your back out and all these things. And I've been like, I'm never going to look like Kevin to Gandhi, but they were like, grow your hair.
Cause I used to get the number two guys. Oh yeah oh yeah i remember that because i would get my i get my haircut all over the country i mean you know on the road six months a year i'd be like if i was in dallas if i was in vegas if i was in portland i'd like number two and i had the buzz cut no maintenance awesome and they were like grow your hair.
You're like, grow so i was like basically i was ordered not ordered heavily suggested by the espn uh talent coaches to grow my hair so it's great hair have it it's great hair yeah it is it looks very nice beautiful hair thank you it's got i don't have much going for me no no stop that your hair's great i mean this the nicest way. It's going to sound like it's not nice, but it is nice.
I promise. There's a little bit Conan O'Brien, like a little bit snooky.
You got a puff. You got a little poof up front.
It's got a little wave. It's really getting there now, man.
I mean, if this goes seven games, it's going to get really wild. And, you know, I'll take it.
Yeah. I'll take it.
Yeah. The last thing I have for thing i have for you it's not really questions just more of a compliment you didn't you didn't fall asleep during this interview so you don't have narcolepsy confirmed okay thank you for saying that i realized that it when i looked back and saw what you're talking about which was the appearance that i fell asleep on the air i had an agent at the time he called he called me immediately.
He was like, Oh my God, are you okay? Are you okay? Um, it did look very bad. Like I fell asleep.
Um, I did not fall asleep. I swear to God.
I mean, it's been like six years now. I would admit to you.
Um, you know, and like, it looked especially bad cause you know, you know, fat guy fell asleep, you know, blah, blah, blah. Um that I was with Carrie Champion, and Carrie Champion was doing the interview, and they told me that I was off, that I was only getting that one question or whatever, and I was looking down at my phone.
And I got heavy eyelids on a good day. I used to get pulled over.
You know, I got pulled over several times because I used to work late at night in newspapers when I was a teenager, and they were, like, violatingew. And I'd be like driving like three in the morning and the, and the guy was convinced I was high because I have a heavy eyelid.
So anyway, this is too much information, but I was just looking down at my phone. It did look like I fell asleep, but I would have had to have fallen asleep in like five seconds.
It would have had to have been like narcolepsy, but I have to admit that if I was on a jury and I saw the video, I would convict. Yeah, no, you felt.
You could you could just. Yeah.
I mean, what do you want me to say, big cat? I mean, I plead. I plead not guilty.
Yeah. You know, I throw myself at the mercy of the court.
At no point was he asleep. At no point.
I think they call that an Alford plea, right? When you're not admitting guilt, but you acknowledge that there's enough evidence to convict you. Yeah.
That sounds impressive. I will take your word for it.
So I, you know, but I would, let's put it this way. I would plea bargain.
Yes. I would be in enough trouble.
I'd probably have to plea. Yes.
All right. Well, Wendy.
I believe you. Thank you so much.
We really appreciate it. You are coming back on.
You're a recurring guest now. Good luck with the rest of the- Thanks for having me on.
Yeah. And you'll probably cut this out but no bs your guys work ethic is absolutely jaw-dropping and we stay up late and record as late as four in the morning um we've recorded as late as four in the morning after some of these games and it's hard but we do it because i know that you guys do stuff like that.
And I know how your audience appreciates that. So I don't want to make this like a love fest, but I would just say real talk, media person to media person, content creator, content creator, much respect and inspirational.
Why would we ever cut that? And you're so strong. Why would we ever cut that? We would never cut that.
That was awesome. Thank you.
We're going to actually take that piece and put it at the beginning of the interview as well. Nice little sandwich.
Then you can just end it right there. Alright, yeah.
Wendy, thank you so much and appreciate all your time. Hey, it's Rhea from Chicks in the Office.
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Shop their newest arrivals in-store and now for something completely different okay we now welcome on our colleague Dan Rappaport here to talk to us about the crazy crazy day that we've had in the golf world live PGA coming together uh I don't know even where to start I guess let's start here um on your shock level where was it when this news came out because it came out from a cnbc tweet that was the first i saw i think the world saw what was your shock level and like instant knee-jerk reaction to what was going on a 10 out of 10 i mean the players had no idea i i spoke to a bunch of players including major champions who they didn't know how to react to the news because they were still processing it like the rest of us. Like, the rumor mill for this has been churning and churning for years and years.
And I've heard so many batshit rumors. This guy's going to go.
That guy's going to go. The Saudis are going to do this.
I never heard a peep about this. I was at the memorial last week in Columbus talking with players, talking with PGT Tour executives about next year, about live.
It never came up. So really, really shocked that it happened as quickly as it did.
I mean, it was only a year ago that Jay Monaghan was on TV and telling us that these are bad people. These are nefarious actors.
They're trying to buy the sport. And you shouldn't do this.
You should stay loyal. Do not betray the PGA Tour.
Now you've got him on CNBC sitting next to Yasser Al-Rumayy and like their best pals. It's genuinely wild how fast it happened.
And I cannot believe that they kept it quiet. So how big of a revolt could the PGA have on their hands with their own players? Because if I was a player on the PGA Tour, I would be extremely upset at the commissioner.
I'd be upset at the entire tour because they just, like you said, they spent the better part of two years vilifying anybody that took the money, insinuating that there's blood on people's hands for getting paid $100 million to go play golf in shorts. And now it turns out they've been negotiating with them the entire time behind the scenes to do business with them, give them a on their board basically merge the two tours together and they actually like the tour took money out of its own players hands by doing this so what what recourse do the players have in terms of like i know there's gonna be like a closed door meeting uh there's gonna be meeting with with monahan they're probably gonna want to beat the shit them.
Like what, what do the players have? What power do they have right now? And how do you think that they're going to react? What the, what the entire tour did? I think they have less, maybe less power than they thought they did because throughout this whole last two years, the PGA tour has, has made a point to say that the PGA tour is its players. There's there, there, they're one in the samerun organization.
It's different from the other sports leagues. It definitely doesn't feel that way right now.
I mean, I guess they could strike, but I don't see that happening. You know, there are guys, people will be different levels of piss, right? You'll have the guys who are kind of rank and file, who are just upset because it's hypocritical, and Jay Monahan said one thing and did the other.
Then you're going to have the guys like you mentioned, like Ricky Fowler, who was offered $75 million. Will Zalatoris, $130 million.
I heard a rumor that was, I think, pretty credible that they offered Hideki Matsuyama $300 million and he said no. And one of the reasons they said no was because Jay Monaghan said to them, stick stick with us we'll take care of you stay loyal you won't have to apologize for being a member of this tour so you know there's going to be players who are going to look Jay Monaghan in the face and say you need to resign because you lied to us you told us this was never going to happen and now it just happened I mean there was one one guy Dylan Wu who fell in Northwestern Wildcat I had to get that in there who uh he basically went on twitter and said can someone explain to me how this guy gets basically a promotion because in in the release he's the commissioner of this new entity after just saying one thing for two years and then just completely doing the opposite like how does that work so monaghan's got a lot of splainin to do as they say okay so iGA Tour players are pissed right now.
Obviously, they have every right to be. Is there a small part, though, because it's a take on workshopping that probably doesn't make any sense.
I was just firing off tweets when all the chaos was going. Is there a small part of them, though, that they know that now they're going to get more money? Like, this means more money, I would assume, for PGA Tour players because at the end of the day, the PGA Tour was running out of money.
They couldn't compete with the money. Now Liv is investing.
Guys who can twist in their mind, I held my moral ground when I had to, but now I also get the benefit of having more money going on in the future. Yeah, I had this conversation with Harris English, who played on the Ryder Cup team, and he was talking about money, money, money.
And I basically said, like, at the end of the day, it's more money in your pocket. And jealousy is a nasty trait.
And look, maybe you didn't get the $50 million initially, but money will flow to you. Yeah, I think that's what Monaghan's going to try to say today to his players.
Right. There's a lot of noise going on right now.
But if we look back on this in five years, golf, we've had this kind of white whale in our sport for a while, of this global tour. Because golf is not just an American sport.
It's obviously huge in the UK, huge in Scotland, Ireland, England, Australia, Japan. But the PGA Tour is like so, so centric.
So there's been this kind of pipe dream of we could have like a Formula One circuit where we've got events in LA and New York and Rome and Paris and Australia and Tokyo. We are closer to that.
You know, the DP World Tour is also involved with this, which is the former European Tour. So golf is probably going more global.
There's definitely going to be more money involved eventually. I think people by nature, when there's a change this big and they weren't, they didn't find out about it.
I think in your life, if someone tells you something huge and you didn't know, you're like, why the fuck didn't you tell me? So I think there's that. But but i do think when the dust settles this whole thing has definitely been good for professional golfers they're richer than ever yeah and so tell me this because it's basically like putting it into two camps there's the guys that passed up big big bucks how many of those guys existed like that you know the ricky fowler's wills alder because they have a different level of pissed but if you're just a guy who wasn't even considering live this is more money for you going forward like the pga tour will have more money going forward yeah how many players were look like different guys flirted with the saudis to different levels there were some who got as far as an offer but basically every player had an agent at least take a meeting i mean right it would be professional malpractice not to you've got this new entity that's coming in and is going to pay people hundreds of million dollars.
If you don't at least have your agent sit down with them, then you're an idiot. But there's differing levels of this.
Guys like Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, they never really got to that level, but they did know, and all these guys know, that in the back of their mind, if they did kind of put themselves out there, if they did flirt a little bit, they could have gotten that money. So any player that these people name will recognize, like Xander Shoffley, Patrick Cantlay, Victor Hovland, Will Zalatouris, Matt Fitzpatrick, all of these guys know they could have gotten $50, $100 million.
And if they knew that this was going to happen, how many more of them would have done it? Probably a lot. That's the thing.
There are a lot of people out there that might be happy because they're going to get more money on the tour once the Saudi money comes into it um but they also would have gotten much much more money if they had taken the live deal gone over there for a year come back and then now there's a merger and now they're making more money on the PGA tour too so there's an enormous amount of money that a lot of golfers have lost and also I, I got to imagine there's probably a handful of golfers on the PGA Tour who are morally objecting to doing business with the Saudi government right now, even if they hadn't gone out and flirted with the Live Tour in the past. If there are guys that didn't even think about jumping ship, that might not be so happy that now your boss, who has spent two years telling you how evil this tour is, is now forcing you to also work for them.
There are probably a couple guys out there that don't care as much about the money that are thinking about that. Yeah, I mean, there are good people in the world.
There are definitely people who objected to this from a moral standpoint, and they'll continue to do so. And I think there's like a general sadness in the sport right now from a lot of people, which is like at the end of the day, and it sounds simplistic and it sounds kind of depressing, but like the money won out.
There's really no other way to put it. You know, there were all these moral objections and that's what the PGA Tour was trying to do initially.
They took a really hard line stance on this. They said, if you go over there, you're banned.
And then they also, you know, there was a concerted effort to tie these people to 9-11, to Khashoggi's murder, to the women's rights in Saudi Arabia. They wanted to make it really hard for people to do business with Live Golf because they thought, OK, if we can keep Live Golf as a money losing entity, right, then eventually the Saudis will just get bored or they'll move on or this won't continue forever and it will just kind of fizzle out that's that's obviously was never going to happen these guys have endless pits of money they just paid an aging French striker Karim Benzema 215 million I mean this is it's monopoly money to them so the PGA Tour I guess was wrong in that assessment they were wrong in thinking that they could outlast live when really live was the ones who were going to prepare to just keep pumping money

in and money in and money in and basically bleed the pga tour dry and the pga tour responded by

whipping together all this money and that was initially phil nicholson's things like where

did all this money come from all of a sudden there's this competitor and you have all this

money now to pay your players the answer is they had to ask their sponsors for a lot more and they

went into the reserves they like basically borrowed against future earnings in order to fund these tournaments this year that's why guys are making so much more like everyone is going to break the record for pga tour earnings this year john rom and scotty sheffler are already way past what anyone's made it's not even june you know it's june 6th and and that was not sustainable and i think that's what the pga tour realized when they came to the harsh realization that we cannot outlast these guys and and we're really extending ourselves thin trying to whip together enough money to appease our stars when you realize that you can't continue to do that like what what do you do at that point so so that's a great point because it's it's clear that like the timing was running out for the PGA. I've also seen thrown out there that obviously the ongoing litigation, they were going to start looking into the PGA being a nonprofit organization.
How much did that play into this happening right now? It's, it's definitely possible. I don't know the answer, but you know, no, and no entity wants their books opened up, especially when you're a nonprofit organization that has a bunch of VPs who live in very nice homes and a commissioner who makes good money and flies on a private jet.
It's just not really something that you want coming out. And other Porto Leagues were nonprofit organizations.
It's kind of like an antiquated thing. The NFL was until not that long ago.
And then eventually they're like, all right, we're a real business. We really got to shift this.
But the PGA Tour has kept it. There was in the 90s, they were challenged and the PGA Tour commissioner basically lobbied Congress to basically call the dogs off to let us keep this.
So I don't know. Is it possible that the DOJ went in and sniffed around, found some things they didn't like, said to the PGA Tour, look, this is not going to go your way.
I don't think that this is going to go your way and and that that's what brought them to the table it's definitely possible i i don't know i just don't know there's so many questions my my thought was that there had to be some sort of inciting incident that made the pga come to the table and reverse course all of a sudden something was happening behind the scenes i don't know if it was something along the lines of like more big names were going to go like if they were were going to get Scotty Scheffler to jump, they can't afford to lose all their best players to go over to live. And so that would be something that would bring the PGA Tour to the table.
Or it could be like you mentioned, the lawsuit. Even though it looked like a lot of live players were jumping off that lawsuit, they were still running the risk of discovery and they don't want to go to court.
But outside of that, outside ramifications have you heard anything behind the scenes about more big name players that were prepared to go over to the live tour that made the pga tour finally say okay enough is enough we need to do business with these guys it wasn't going to happen this year because unlike last year when when live was kind of throwing together everything and they were signing new guys every week it was it was electric in my business there were rumors for the first time you know golf doesn't really have rumors like that it was like the NBA trade deadline um but this year this year Liv had their 48 players set they have to do it the 12 forward band teams it's a huge part of their so I don't think it was players about to jump one thing that comes to mind in this is is Brooks won the won the PGA championship I know that's your guy's boy you know it's not so much that he won because we knew these guys were good. It was kind of the reaction afterwards.
There was a lot of heat taken out of it. There was a lot of heat taken out of the battle.
It wasn't so, oh, these guys are terrible. Even Rory McIlroy in the last couple weeks had sort of softened his rhetoric.
I don't hold this against guys who went and did it. So I just think when Liv initially came on the scene, it was such a crazy thing.
The Saudis are going to come over and try. But like, and maybe this is sport washing in play.
After a year or two, it was kind of like, okay, they're still around. They still have all this money.
They're still going to offer this money to these players. So I don't know if it was one inciting incident or more of like a slow burn.
You make a good point, which is that brooks kepka might have he might have created peace in the middle east he might have solved that entire entire conflict by winning the pga championship thank you brooks yeah he tweeted you know uh welfare check on chamblee and and that's actually a point that i've like tried to make is is in my world we're so inside golf that we can we can convince ourselves of so many different things and you talk to people at the pga tour and they say this and that, and it's actually good. It's actually kind of nice to just zoom out and be like, all right, what's the general reaction from people? The general reaction is that this is a win for the Saudis.
What's a reaction from the players? You've got the live players. Taylor Gooch is on there tweeting a picture of his feet at a beach being like, what happened today? Phil is dancing.
This is like the best day of Phil's life. Brooks Koepka is taking shots at brandon chamblee meanwhile you've got colin morikawa sending tweets like oh i love finding about this on twitter justin thomas you're tweeting of a screenshot or a screen video of how many texts he got the pj tour players are not happy and the live golfers are very happy so sometimes it's it's important not to read deeper than that yeah so um would you say it's fair to say that Live Golf,

this was kind of their plan all along. They wanted to be part of the PGA.
They were never really going to be sustainable as their own golf league. They were on the CW.
No one was watching the whole team method and everything. So if this was their plan all along and you say it's a win for them, what is it going to look like going forward like did they so the pga is still the pga but now the saudis have invested in the pga i explain it to me essentially like i mean i would i would love to explain it to you i don't have a full grasp because i'm not sure they have a full grasp but yes i do think it's going to continue to be the pga tour i think you're going to continue to see the tournaments that you've seen before you know riviera playersiera, Players' Championship, TPC Sawgrass, the Memorial, obviously the Majors, but that's sort of outside this discussion.
You know, it might look like there's actually, I don't know if you guys know this, there's actually a Saudi funded series on the LPGA Tour right now called the Aramco Series, and they pay them way more money than the LPGA events, and all the women play, and no one said anything about it. That's, again, a discussion for another time.

But yeah, it could be like there's a certain live circuit or maybe there's a live team competition that's going on in the background. The release did say that there will be a team aspect to this.
So I think they're still figuring all of that out. I think it will look more similar to the PGA Tour than it does to 54 holes, shotgun start.
I don't think that that entity and their business plan which was to sell these teams for hundreds of millions sell the cliques and then like that was in my opinion that was never going to work right that was just almost a front for them to just keep pumping money and keep pumping money and saying to players we're still going to offer you this we're still going to offer you this when their season ends in october there is going to be a whole new round of them coming to players and saying hey 200 million let's make it 250 so yeah it was their plan it seemed to be their plan all along this is a victory for them and just just look at the way that they're responding to this news it's a yeah yeah because it did feel like the live like we could pretend that they were trying to make a sustainable alternative to the PGA Tour but in reality they were just trying to get the PGA Tour to the negotiating table. And that's been the goal for all of their investments, really, in sports.
Think about golf is such a well-moneyed sport. You look at the sponsors of the big tournaments.
It's like Rolex. It's like Mercedes.
It's MasterCard. It's these insurance companies, like these huge American companies.
And what better way to get a seat at the table to start doing business with these people than to be on the policy board of the PGA Tour. So now you've got Yasser Al-Ramayan, who runs the PIF, which is the Saudi sovereign fund.
It's controlled by the government. He's got a seat at the table.
This is what they've wanted all along. And if you think that this is not going to embolden them to do this in other sports, like what's stopping them? They haven't, they have all this money and they also know they're smart.
They're definitely smart. They know that oil is a finite resource.
It's not going to be there forever. They have to do other things with this money.
And they've obviously decided that sport, maybe for business, maybe for PR, maybe it's an indirect way to make more money by being able to invest with these people because, oh, Yasser, he's on the PGA Tour policy board. Like this has very wide ranging implications.
Yeah, it has been crazy because I've been saying that if their goal was to launder their own reputation, the creation of the Live Golf League up to this point has actually kind of done the opposite of that. If anything, it had gotten more people talking about any human rights violations and all the problems with the Saudi public investment fund.
But now that they are fully integrated with PGA, I think that it's definitely going to spread soft power and mission accomplished to them. I actually, in a weird way, I think the PGA were, they're the ones that look like the biggest assholes and all this because of everything that you said, like linking the public investment fund to nine 11, all that stuff to be doing that while also going behind your own players' backs and negotiating, I think that's so dirty what the PGA Tour did to their own players.
My big question, though, is with a seat at the table, are the PGA players going to be allowed to golf in shorts now moving forward? It's a great question. It's a great question.
They would certainly like to. I mean, it's definitely possible.
I mean, mean you're gonna see a new commercial entity right there's gonna be there's gonna be new rules we don't know what the future is gonna look like yeah will they be wearing shorts will they be teeing off on the 13th hole I you know anything is fair game the Saudis are in the mix now so yeah I want to go back to something you said with Rory um I have a theory that Rory knew I know that most almost all the PGA players didn't know, but if you could track what Rory, the way he was acting, how staunchly opposed he was, and then the last couple of months he's backed off of that. Do you think Rory knew? And do you think Rory maybe got something to be like, hey, Rory, stop talking about how bad this is because we're making a deal with you or without you.
You can come along right now and get a little money or you can just deal with it and find out like everyone else. One part of me says yes.
If there's one player who would know, it would be Rory McIlroy. He's been the front man.
He's been the spokesman. But I talked to a source pretty close to the PGA Tour who was like, if the players knew about this, it would have leaked immediately.
The players don't really keep secrets. And Rory McIlroy talks a lot.
So in that sense, I feel like maybe he didn't know. But yeah, it is conspicuous timing because he did soften his rhetoric.
He did come off it a lot. If he knew and no one else knew, then that's going to make them mad too.
That's going to make the players mad too. They're going to be like, oh, you're taking care of some guys, but not the other guys.
I think you guys i think you're right pft i think this is a you know if you want to look at the pr spin it's it's it's a really tough thing for the pga tour to explain this this complete 180 you know i saw dave tweet a clip of jay monahan with his piercing blue eyes looking at the camera and being like i have family friends who died in 9-11 and my heart goes out to them and now he's calling them like a groundbreaking entity that he's going to do business with. The word hypocrisy comes to mind for sure.
And there's going to be a lot of people who want him out. Yeah.
No, he looks like a huge dick. Huge dick.
Yeah. He comes off way worse than MBS and all this, which is hard to do.
He's amazing. But he's pulled it off.
It's just a reminder to the players, like, take the money. Always take the money.
And sometimes you have to learn a lesson like this the hard way. But if somebody's offering you $100 million to do anything, my stance is I will do anything for $100 million.
You can name it. That's my price.
We all have a price to pretend otherwise, I think, is lunacy. Everyone's's got a price, know what that is.
And yeah, they, they fucked the players over. So when are we going to, when are we going to find out more about what the framework is? Is there a scheduled announcement about when these new rules, what the format's going to look like a super league for golf, or is it just going to be dangling out there for the rest of the year? I think they're going to figure it out as they go.
I mean, I have a really hard time taking the PGA tour for its word for anything right now. Just the way the last year has gone.
There's this meeting at four. I'm going to definitely talk to a few guys afterwards.
But I think if they knew more, they would give more because they know that this looks like a thing that was cobbled together, kind of behind closed doors the last minute. I don't think we have any idea what it's going to look like going forward and i think next year probably won't be the final product i mean this is just the beginning of this we we haven't this hasn't happened in in sports really like the nfl or the nba or the nhl just like basically letting in a huge sum of money from a foreign investor with a nation with a crazy bad reputation and now they're going to have a seat at the table deciding the future of the sport i got no idea i mean i'm sure there's there's calls going on the gust of national like so what what's going on here do we got to deal with these guys now it's it's just starting you know we thought this we thought it was kind of coming to to a not an end but it was slowing down the live news cycle they were just kind of doing their thing on the CW.
And then boom, this drops the net. On the other side of it, is there anybody that's on the live tour right now who is upset about the fact that they're going to have to go back and merge with the PGA? Is there anyone who was like, you know, getting cut every week that decided, okay, I'll take the money and go over to live? Oh shit, now I got to go back over and play in actual tournaments and risk not making as much money.
Is there anyone out there that's like actually looking at it from that point of view? Yeah, it's possible. Guys, I had a pretty sweet deal.
I shot 80-76 and I made 200 grand. It was pretty great.
Yeah, I don't know if that's going to happen anymore. No, I think that a lot of these guys took a lot of heat.
Like you said, people said really horrible things about them. And whether you believe that or not, that was the narrative surrounding a lot of these guys.
You had Phil Mickelson, an all-time great, who like turned into a ghost for a year because of this thing. And he's like the most gregarious character flashing the thumbs up.
He didn't even defend his title at the PGA Championship last year because this was such a horrible thing. He couldn't show his face.
Now they feel like they've – it's like a screw you. You guys were all hypocrites.
We were right the entire entire time so is there a chance that the new pga tour live do they pay because like it feels like all the pga tour players are gonna be pissed do they just like essentially how this whole deal happened because that's really what they can say is like money talks is there a chance they pay all the pga tour players like hey shut up here's some money Here's some guaranteed money. I know that they offered out that live players might have to pay fines to get back in the PGA Tour.
What do you think is going to happen with that? Yeah, I think a lot of that money that the PIF is pumping into golf will be funneled directly to the players. And that's what we talked about earlier.
At the end of the day, you give them enough money and they'll probably be okay with it. There's definitely going to be some awkward conversations.
There's going to be some really upset guys who are like, I can't believe that you, you know, Jay Monahan like went to visit a lot of these people in person. Like there were phone calls and dinners where he was not threatening and not begging, but like really, really saying, appealing to them on like an emotional level.
Like let's stay united. That was the, that was the messaging and all the player meetings throughout this whole thing was let's stay united front.
This is our tour. We're doing this for us.
Um, so yeah, I guess they'll probably redistribute a lot of that money to the players, but it'll definitely make them feel better if they have a couple extra million in their pocket. And the players are, the players are the winners in this.
They're making a lot more money than they were before right right that was my initial point that like it sucks really bad right now and there's some guys like i i miss out on 100 million dollars but at the in like five years i would assume a lot of these guys are gonna look back and like well it that was the moment that we started making a shitload more money it gets to a kind of a you know i know we got to keep things light on this show but it gets to like a very serious question of like is any money just like fine just take any money because it opens up that question in other sports if you know some guy who controls some country's money you know says oh i want to give the nba players a billion dollars you know and distribute it evenly whatever it is five million dollars and you know we'll go play play a game in whatever country. The PGA Tour set a hell of a precedent.
Yeah. Well, Vince McMahon did.
Vince McMahon, as always, is ahead of the curve when it comes to all this stuff. Is this the future of sports? Just every league will now be run out of Saudi Arabia? It's a question that you want to laugh at but it's actually like a fair question they're they paid for ronaldo they paid for it's a little different in soccer because there's so many players but like a sport like tennis is a good i think example if the saudis came and offered tennis because tennis is really great for the like the top 20 players but there's not nearly as many players making a good living in tennis as there is in golf the saudis came to tennis and said here's a bunch of this money let's make it the PIF tour they wouldn't say yes in a heartbeat yeah that's it's crazy I mean it's like it's we're sitting here we're talking about like our sports about to be bought by the Saudi Arabian government or other governments and it's not a ridiculous question it's not like a laughing I mean it's sort of a laughing matter just the ridiculousness of it but it's not like so outlandish well once the uh saudis get involved in like name image and likeness in college football that's when that's when we're going to have some real real conversations yeah this guy went to uh you know the university of alabama presented by the piff yeah yeah university of Riyadh becomes number one preseason ranked team.
Yeah. The dateline on the release today was New York, Riyadh, Ponte Vedra Beach.
It's just like you put it in there. There it is.
Like that's just. Yeah, Saban ending his career coaching in Saudi Arabia.
That would be quite the scene. His twilight years.
All right, well, Dan, one last question. No Bull is known for their best-in-class, award-winning footwear with options across training and lifestyle.
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Visit www.nobullproject.com slash barstool for 30% off your entire order that's www.nobullproject.com backslash barstool for 30% off uh so Phil Mickelson's kind of the biggest winner here right right? Yes. Maybe you could give us your top three winners and losers because Phil feels like the guy who was telling everyone, and similar to Rory changing his tune, Phil coming back on Twitter and starting to jump at people and jump down people's throats, that should have been an inkling of, oh, something is phil's getting he's getting chesty out there i i asked phil this question at the pga championship in rochester i said like why why are you continuing to do this he's like what do you mean i'm like why do you keep talking shit on twitter like surely you could just coast on all of your money and being an all-time great and everybody loves you he's like he gives me this look and he goes i know some things that other people don't and everyone everyone gets quiet and we're like, what do you mean? He's like, oh, it'll come out soon.
It'll come out soon. So I would say number one winner is Phil Mickelson.
Number one winner would be Mohammed bin Salman. Number two winner would be Phil Mickelson.
Number three winner I think would be the golf fan because this is dramatic. Golf Twitter has been electric.
And again, I think this will result in a better product. Morality aside, it's a big asterisk.
It's a big asterisk. but from a pure product i think this will result in a better product morality aside it's a big asterisk it's a big asterisk but from a pure product standpoint it will probably be a better product than it was before um the biggest losers in this uh jay monahan number one um it probably rory mccleroy number two not because rory's a bad guy just because he was the most vocal tiger also hates live and i think this is probably a moment for Tiger where he's like, shit.
He doesn't have the leverage that he used to have because he just doesn't play. He's got another ankle surgery.
It's like, what is his role in this going forward? Probably, he only plays the majors anyway, so he doesn't have a huge role in this. So I'll say Jay Monaghan, I'll say Rory McIlroy, and Brand Chamblee.
Yeah. Because he really, he really, and I do admire kind of how strong he's dug his feet in on the take.
I just saw him on Golf Channel say it's one of the saddest days in the history of professional golf. So, yeah, those are your winners and losers.
I find it hard to believe that Phil Mickelson would have had inside information about some business deal that was about to go down and then capitalized on it. That doesn't sound like the Phil that I know, Dan.
Look, it's another chapter in a career unlike any other. There was a book by Alan Ship that came out.
We need another chapter. We need more.
He just studied for the U.S. Open, that's going to be insane.
The press conferences, everything around it is going to be wild. Yeah.
There's energy. There's a tension in golf again.
There's, there's, you know, we're going to have those awkward pressers. The Netflix show, the Netflix show might be, might be the, the third biggest winner also, because they got, they got a blessing with live the first season.
And again, it looked like things were coming down. And then this happens again.
They've got a whole new round of drama. Yeah, Alan Shipnick might be one of the losers because he tweeted just last night saying that he finished his book, Live and Let Die.
So he had just finished. He was literally showing a tweet of him submitting it, and now I think you probably have to go back and work on it a little bit.
He's a winner. Alan's got four kids to put through college he's an absolute the book will sell even more but but just knowing like he had 24 hours to be like done with my book it took a year and a half and i mean one of the big one of the biggest losers is me i'm getting married this weekend true um and my my fiancee soon-to-be wife is is is not pleased with the timing of this news so you know not it's not about me again this is not about me but it's uh it's a tricky one i might you know i might be the first person to get divorced before they get married in human history you should you should invoice the saudis yeah yeah they're clearly hanging out yeah hey can you just you know we got some money we got this wedding um can you just split the bill maybe like sure no problem celebration yeah they love the press yeah they love the press they love the press all right well dan thank you so much good luck with wedding week um appreciate you filling us in on all this and uh yeah talk to you soon thanks guys see ya dan rapcourt was brought to you by the barstool sportsbook app the barstool sportsbook i on my phone right here.
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Who's asking them? Max? Hank? Memes? Memes. Memes should do it.
Yeah, memes should do it. He's in studio.
Mem in studio memes come on memes here we go you can do this memes i know you can read i struggle with it no you're good you're good you're a great reader remember to cut to yourself too okay he's a lot lot going on in memes brain right now let's see if he can get this hey father of 3 Hey, father of three cat pro nuggets talk commenter and others in honor of skip and Shannon breaking up. If either of you were to call it quits, but PMT had to go on, who is your dream replacement for your cohost? Not Billy.
That's a very good question. Probably skip.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think.

I don't really know.

I don't.

This is one of those things like they're basically asking us to think of like, hey, if you could cheat with one person, who would you cheat with?

Yeah. Who's on your whole past list?

I mean, big cat.

Yeah.

But like more thing about it more than like a chaotic way.

Yeah.

Emmanuel Acho. Done.
Okay. Just to bait him.
Yeah, but like more thing about it more than like a chaotic way. Yeah.
Uh, Emmanuel Acho.

Done.

Okay.

Just debate him.

Yeah.

Heavily.

Just bury him.

I would just be so sarcastic to him.

Just do a whole show where he never, he thinks that we're like getting along the entire time.

For me, I think probably Ravel.

And I would just be, I would just beat him up every podcast.

All right.

Time to record another part of my take, Darren.

Kick him in the nuts.

That'd be fun.

Or Rick Riley.

I'll be back. probably Ravel and I would just beat him up every podcast alright time to record another part of my take Darren kick him in the nuts that'd be fun or Rick Riley everybody would hate that podcast that would just be me and Rick trying to one up each other nothing would ever get accomplished what about Billy and Jake if you guys had to host with anyone else who would you host with anyone in the world Jake would just just be like uh al michaels mike torico yeah any of them are we talking sports or can we talk about sports okay this is a sports show jj watt okay and kyle long just so that they could fight the whole time oh nice bill he just wants to create like a grizzly bear fight video.
With humans. He should have done Taylor Luan and TJ Watt.
That would have been a good one too. Yeah, real beef.
Okay, next question. Will the new studio look like a production studio or will it still look like a strip mall tax guy's office? Cal from Minnesota.
So I don't know what a production studio looks like all i'll say is it will be if you were if you go back i think the pm tv where we did memories uh there was a scene where we first met jake in this studio it was clean there was nothing in here the new studio will be the same where the first month or so will be clean with nothing in there. And then we will live in there.
And then it will become exactly like this. The biggest difference with the new studio really is that we have a control booth.
Yeah. So Max and memes will be behind the glass.
Yeah. But PFT, we're going to, we're just, and Jake.
Yeah. So PFT, we're just going to, I mean, we're going to do the same thing.
Well, the biggest difference is we don't have any plans on having a squat rack in the studio. Yeah.
Yeah. So that, that will live outside the studio.
There will still be a squat rack there because we can't sacrifice these gains that we've made. Yeah.
And we're in great shape. If you look back compared to like six years ago, we started this podcast.
We're so much fitter and stronger and younger looking. It's crazy.
It will be nice to not be like, like hey let's put this gigantic thing in the middle of the studio that takes up space all the time yeah so instead of the squat rack we're getting an f18 cockpit simulator well and also a lottery ball machine that is going to be enormous i sent you guys final yeah i know i need to read it yeah uh okay next one can we do a sorry can we do a recap of why all the segments are named to read it. Yeah.
Okay, next one. Can we do a...
Sorry.

Can we do a recap of why all the segments are named accordingly?

I.e. the Michael Wilbon, I played golf with Obama last week.

Who's back of the week?

Sorry, whatever happened to Todd and Gordo?

Mmm.

Mmm.

PFT?

I didn't really hear that memes.

Can you speak up? He basically is asking how we named the segments.

And I'll start with the Todd and Gordo. He said, what todd and gordo todd and gordo is still alive i i think we just realized that you know we did it we did it well and then i think we did it in miami it didn't come people didn't love it as much i think we'll bring it back at some point for a video we can't do it all the time i think we have to save it for a special occasion if there's something big that happens in canada if if a canada team gets to a stanley cup final i'm sure todd and or gordo yes we'll make a reappearance at that point yes but yeah you can't we can't live life as canadians who's that would make us too soft who's todd and who's gordo um i'm gordo you're okay all right i did not remember that but yeah most of the other segment names if you haven't done segments traditionally we kind of evolved off of that but like those just you know came from our brains dumb actually i remember where they came from i remember when when big cat and i were starting to plan out this podcast it was probably like a month before we even taped a demo of it because we did one demo show.
And before we even got to that point, we were just on like a Google chat with each other back and forth. What do you think good segments for the show would be? I distinctly remember texting back and forth like PR 101, Spin Zone, Mike Wilbon's name drop of the week, these things back and forth.
And the ideas for the segments are really, I think, what got us excited about doing the show in the first place because we realized, oh, this is a person that thinks about sports

the same way that I think about sports.

This show is going to be funny.

Yeah.

And we still kind of do the segments.

We just don't say it before.

Like we still do Spin Zones and PR 101s and Mike Greenberg's dumb rules.

But yeah, we just don't say it, announce it before. Yep.
Next one. We all know how PFT got his name, but how did Big Cat become Big Cat? Well, my last name, it's not hard to figure that one out.
And I am a little bit larger, so people used to call me that. uh yeah it's quite a leap when you think about it neither one of our names really should take a rocket scientist to figure out damn wondering how that happened yeah that was a bad one uh what i tried i tried to i always wanted to be Cadillac.
That would have been sick. That one didn't stick.
I tried to force that on my friends. That didn't stick.
Like K-A-T. No, just like call me Cadillac.
Like imagine if I was the big Cadillac. Like had nothing to do with the name Cats.
Yeah. What? Just Cadillac.
Cadillac. Yeah, it sounds similar, kind of similar, but like, yeah.
I'm sure people called you cat too what's up cat and then yeah people call me cat yeah yeah so you want to be cadillac yeah cadillac yeah it's funny because i sometimes i hang out with people from like different parts of my life that know me by different names and a couple months ago i was with somebody that was one of my best friends in high school one my best friends in college, one of my best friends in Austin, Texas, and then somebody from Barstool. And all four of those were calling me four different names at the same time.
And it blew my mind to try to respond to all of them. And it also confused everybody that was at the table trying to figure out why other people were calling me different names.
I go by many names. Yeah, and I don't really – I call you PFT all the time.
Hank sometimes calls me Daniel when he gets mad at me. I call you Dan in meetings, which is – I always get a kick out of it.
I'm like, yeah, we'll talk – we'll see what Dan – Dan at PFT, though, I always just call PFT. That's not true because, Hank, sometimes when you are mad at me, you'll call me a nickname that one of my other friends has taught you that they call me.
So it's almost like you're making fun of me for having other friends. No, I like Leg.
Your friends call you Leg and it cracks me up. Yeah.
Okay. Is that it? That's it.
Great job, Memes. Round of applause for Memes.
Nice job, Memes. The camera work was not great.
No, that's okay. That's okay.
All right. Hey, Memes, have you ever gotten this? Nope.
Should we do the lottery ball? I'm ready. Is everyone ready? Billy, can you move the mic away from me for a sec? Let Jake do it.
You know what? Jake, guess first. You know what? What? I'm going to get mad one more time in the studio before i leave okay and it's gonna be fun numbers but it's not over 69 oh that was pft pft no that was pft that was very clearly you were in the middle of a talk you were talking and i said numbers said 69 it's crazy because me and big cat were making eye contact over a video feed with lag, and I still beat you.
I just had to get him in a sentence. Yeah.
Just get him talking. All right, so PFTS 69.
Billy, what's your number? 21. Okay.
Hank? What? 17. Okay.
Memes? 7. Never gotten it? 20.

Jake, 18.

I'll go 26.

The only number that has never come up.

I'm rooting for you, PFT.

Let's go.

57.

57. Nobody's guess.
57.

Nobody's guess.

57.

Jellyfish come out of their mouths.

They come out of their mouths? Okay. Squirters.
Love you guys. We're talking away

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To say I'll say it anyway

Today isn't my thing Talking away, I don't know what to say, I'll say it anyway. Today's my turn to find you.
I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone I'll be gone You are the things I've come to remember I'll be the way You're all the things I've got to remember Take me home Take me home Take me home Take me home Take me home Take me home Drinking on me

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