Ptmarquis

Major League Baseball will continue reviewing the Astros handling of the incident that led to the firing of a front-office executive, commissioner Rob Manfred said Friday.

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Perfectly serviceable rotation guard and tough-luck injury casualty Jeremy Lin was deeply bummed to find this summer that NBA teams had for the most part lost interest in him as a free agent. Now, a month later, Lin has made the decision to move on from the NBA and continue his basketball career elsewhere.

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Less than 24 hours after MLB commissioner Rob Manfred finally acknowledged that this year’s batch of baseballs might in some way, shape or form be contributing to the league’s historic home run pace—it’s not that the balls are juiced, the “pill” inside the ball is providing less drag—a home run distance record was set…

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Anthony Pettis connected with a right-handed Superman punch to the chin of Stephen Thompson to score a second-round KO in the UFC Nashville main event Saturday night.

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The city voted in favor of a tax on San Francisco's largest companies to pay for homelessness services, which was hotly debated by tech CEOs.

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As a fan of anything that you pay a lot of attention to, you accept a certain amount of, let’s call it, imperfection. That’s too polite, of course, for pro wrestling, given the amount of sexism, homophobia, and racial caricature baked into wrestling’s past. But you hope and at times agitate for things to improve. The arc of progress generally moves upward, after all.

It’s gotten better at WWE, the biggest pro wrestling company in the world. This odd, athletic soap opera I’ve enjoyed since I was a child has mostly caught up with the times.

Women who wrestle in WWE no longer compete in pudding matches, for example. They now wrestle in Hell in a Cell matches, Royal Rumbles and in no-gimmick contests that are sometimes great enough to steal the show. Hell, Ronda Rousey wrestles for WWE now.

Stereotypes, long used to bait fans’ basest instincts, are less abundant. The blackness of some wrestling characters and the homosexuality of others is no longer presented for crowds to fear or hate. These things are presented as, wouldn’t you know it, something fans might want to cheer.

There’s a lot of good in wrestling these days. There’s a lot of improvement and a lot of wonderful wrestlers and matches and shows that make WWE something I’ve enjoyed paying money to cheer for. Each summer I happily take boys my wife used to tutor to big WWE shows in Brooklyn. Each summer I also pay silly amounts of money to see the big Summerslam events and to sit as close to the floor as I can for episodes of Smackdown. I don’t buy any of the t-shirts or replica belts, but I started paying $10 a month for the WWE streaming network the moment it launched in early 2014. I had no regrets. I watched the WWE’s minor-league division NXT on it regularly, enjoyed their UK and women’s tournaments and was just getting into the cruiserweight show 205 Live.

This morning, I canceled my WWE network subscription.

WWE is planning to run a show called Crown Jewel in Saudi Arabia next month, and I’m not comfortable paying money to them if they follow through, given the latest allegations made against the Saudi government that is financing the show.

I have nothing against the basic concept of WWE running shows in Saudi Arabia. If they want to promote there and spend their own money doing shows that are true to their product, that’s cool. But that’s not what has been happening this year. In April, just two weeks after WWE’s ostensible biggest event of the year, Wrestlemania, WWE ran a show in Saudi Arabia called The Greatest Royal Rumble. It was not representative of what WWE is today, what with a notable section of its roster forced to stay home. While Wrestlemania featured several women’s matches, including the show-stealing Charlotte Flair vs. Asuka and the wrestling debut of Rousey, the Greatest Royal Rumble had none.

Instead, with women prohibited from performing, the April show had time to air men’s matches and some propaganda about how great Saudi Arabia is under the leadership of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. That’s the same supposedly reformist leader whose government is accused of cracking down on activists and dissidents, as detailed in a recent report in The Intercept. That’s the same leader whose agents are now accused of murdering Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist who was critical of the government.

WWE’s 2018 Saudi Arabia shows are part of a lucrative 10-year deal that the company has signed with the Middle Eastern kingdom. The Saudis have paid big money—possibly as much as $50 million per show, according to an outlet that looked over WWE’s public finances. Whatever the dollar figure, the crown prince is paying for shows beyond the scale of what WWE usually does. That’s why you get matches and appearances slated for these shows that haven’t happened in the States. When’s Brock Lesnar wrestling again? Not in any U.S. shows since August. He’s back for Saudi Arabia. When is the legendary Shawn Michaels coming out of a retirement he’s stuck to since 2010? Not in any recent years to wrestle WWE’s best wrestlers, like A.J. Styles or his own protege Daniel Bryan; he’s instead slated to come back at Crown Jewel in a glorified old-timer’s match featuring faded stars Triple H, The Undertaker and Kane. No women’s matches are announced for the card. That’s a shame, because then it’d show there was some good coming out of this besides corporate profits to compensate for state-run propaganda.

It’s arguably irrational to draw moral lines with how you spend your dollars in a capitalist society. The phone I use, the food I eat, and the games I love playing—and make a living covering—all are produced in ways that might discomfit me if I knew more about the process. But there are limits. Maybe it should have been something else? Maybe there are enough terrible things my own country does to make any stance against a Saudi-WWE deal too hypocritical. But as I see reports of a Saudi hit squad luring a journalist into a trap at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, killing him and chopping his body to pieces, my zeal for watching WWE programming filled with hype for the Crown Jewel event disappears.

There’s some room for skepticism, given that the claims have been made only by Turkish officials, have been denied by the Saudis and have yet to be confirmed by the U.S. There is supposedly audio and video evidence, but the Washington Post reports that it’s unclear if it has been vetted by the U.S. The possible killing is just the last straw, though. The Saudi-WWE deal has reeked for a while. It was always garish and repulsive. If the Turkish charges are true, it’s beyond what I personally can tolerate.

In the last few days, media and business organizations have suspended or cut ties with the Saudi government. U.S. Senators from both parties are now urging WWE to rethink their deal and perhaps “pause” plans for the show, according to a report today in the Independent Journal Review. Notably, the WWE CEO’s wife, Linda McMahon, is a member of President Trump’s cabinet.

WWE has simply said they are “monitoring” the situation. That’s not enough for me. If the facts of what’s been rumored are proven true, they’ll need to get with the times. If they don’t, count me out. I’d love to renew my WWE subscription someday. For now, it’s canceled.

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Preorder PlayStation Classic | $100 | Walmart | Also available at GameStop

Seemingly out of nowhere, the PlayStation Classic now a thing that exists, and it’s coming out on December 3. It’s a pretty sure bet to sell out, so if you want one on release day, you can preorder it now for $100 from Walmart and GameStop. It comes with two controllers and 20 preinstalled games (though the full list hasn’t yet been announced), so what are you still doing here?

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"We are now officially in a tech bubble larger than March of 2000," argues Keith Wright, instructor of accounting and information services at the Villanova School of Business. An anonymous reader quotes his commentary on CNBC: In case you missed it, the peak in the tech unicorn bubble already has been reached. And it's going to be all downhill from here. Massive losses are coming in venture capital-funded start-ups that are, in some cases, as much as 50 percent overvalued... 76% of the companies that went public last year were unprofitable on a per-share basis in the year leading up to their initial offerings, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business, and recently featured in the New York Times. This is the largest number since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000, when 81 percent of newly public companies were unprofitable... Several financial models project that up to 80 percent of unicorn companies are set to fail within two years. Uber, the highest-valued private technology company, has rapidly growing revenue but remains highly unprofitable. With revenue of $6.5 billion in 2016, it still registered a net loss of $2.8 billion. The truth is, when a unicorn is overvalued, it doesn't take long for the market to discover this fact.

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Straight from those who do, or have in the past.

When I look at Philadelphia 76ers guard Ben Simmons, I see a very tall and extremely talented young basketball player with a resting dick face and no jump shot. When Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens looks at him, he sees a curious foraging bear. For this reason, he is a basketball coaching genius.

That’s my main takeaway from this very good and smart piece by The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor, which does a fine job of showing the elegant tactical means whereby Stevens and the Celtics have neutralized Simmons and fellow Sixers star Joel Embiid and taken control of the second-round playoff series between the two teams. In Embiid’s case, the Celtics have maneuvered the giant center away from the basket at both ends of the floor, to areas where he’s less effective and where his shaky conditioning can be depleted. When the Celtics have the ball, that means using screens to get him on players who must be chased out to the three-point line; when the Sixers have the ball, that means sagging off him at the three-point line and making him wrestle to get within 18 feet of the rim.

In Simmons’s case, the goal is similar, at least when the Sixers have the ball: Keep him away from the rim. This is especially important, and has proven most difficult for opponents, in transition situations: Simmons often is too fast for forwards to cut off when he has a full head of steam, and too powerful for guards to resist once he gets his shoulders into them. But the potential rewards of keeping him away from the hoop are worth the effort: He’s a downright pathological non-shooter, and the Sixers’ offense often completely breaks down once all 10 players arrive to clog up the half-court and his defender can help off him with impunity. It’s no exaggeration to say that when Simmons can’t rumble to the rim in transition, he’s generally less effective than his backup, T.J. McConnell, who at least is an extremely pesky defender.

In any event, as O’Connor illustrates, Stevens and the Celtics have figured out an effective technique for addressing this challenge. You can see it demonstrated by Aron Baynes, in the number 46 jersey, here in this GIF from O’Connor’s article:

He stands his ground and puts his arms out wide, to make himself big. That’s how you ward off Ben Simmons in transition. It’s also how you ward off a bear in the dang woods!

I think the Celtics should go all the way with this. If the arms-out stand-your-ground technique works, imagine how much more effective it would be if Baynes were wearing a coat or had a blanket draped over his shoulders, to make himself appear truly huge! Imagine if he were banging a pair of metal pots together!

That part might be against the rules, I guess. But he could clap his hands really hard and scream, “HEY! HEY!!!!!” very loudly and, like, advance a step or two toward Simmons. If you can protect a jar of peanut butter this way, you can protect a hoop, too.

[The Ringer]

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After 29 years at Sports Illustrated, Peter King is leaving to join NBC.

SI announced King’s departure a few minutes ago, and NBC soon followed with an announcement of its own. King will continue to write his Monday morning column at NBC.

King had been with SI since 1989, where he was a senior writer and the founder of The MMQB, an NFL-focused vertical launched specifically for him five years ago.

Earlier this year, King indicated he wanted to scale back. His contract with SI had concluded at the end of March, and he continued to work at-will as he mulled what to do next. The larger question is what now becomes of The MMQB without King as its leader. In addition to writing and reporting for The MMQB and hiring a staff, King also rounded up brand partners.

Sports Illustrated is up for sale by its parent company, Meredith Corp., though a buyer was expected to take over by the end of June.

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Arizona coach Sean Miller received two separate standing ovations before his team's game against Stanford on Thursday and said afterward that the experience was "very emotional and something I'll never, ever forget."

25 years ago this week, the top story in pro wrestling was, in many ways, also the biggest pro wrestling story in the history of the business’s insider press.

“Cowboy” Bill Watts, a veteran pro wrestler turned matchmaker and promoter, had been running Turner Broadcasting’s World Championship Wrestling since late Spring 1992. Watts had previously been hailed as a near-untouchable wrestling genius, but the response to his WCW run had been mixed at best among fans, media, and wrestlers alike. The wrestlers hated new the rules he instituted, like being unable to leave an arena before the end of a show and the elimination of performance bonuses. The fans and reporters hated the decrease in production values, which was a product of the cost-cutting Watts had been told to do, as well as new in-ring rules banning moves off the top rope. The overall feel of the shows was bland, stripped down, and bleak.

Some of these struggles were a consequence of Watts having been away from wrestling for five years before he was hired. The rust showed, but Watts seemed to begin figuring things out at the end of 1992 and beginning of 1993. He signed new wrestlers like Chris Benoit, 2 Cold Scorpio, and Rob Van Dam who were the antithesis of the big football player types Watts had a history of pushing, and he also inked a deal for hardcore favorite Smoky Mountain Wrestling to become a developmental territory. It seemed like everything was starting to click, but then Watts left the company on February 10, 1993 in something of “You’re fired/I quit” scenario. His abrupt departure kicked up a firestorm in the wrestling media.

The story goes back to 1991, when Watts did a long interview with Wade Keller for his Pro Wrestling Torch newsletter’s Summer Annual. Watts’ thoughts on the wrestling business have long been cited by both Keller and Wrestling Observer Newsletter Editor Dave Meltzer as getting him the WCW job. At the end of the interview, though, the theme shifted to Watts’ social and political views. A rant began with “If you want a business and you put money in, why shouldn’t you be able to discriminate? It’s your business,” and it did not improve from there, as Watts made numerous offensive comments about homosexuals and the black community:

• “That’s why I went into business, so that I could discriminate.”
  
• “I can’t tell a fag to get the fuck out. I should have the right to not associate with a fag if I don’t want to. I mean, why should I have to hire a fuckin’ fag, if I don’t like fags? Fags discriminate against us, don’t they? Sure they do.” (The audio of the interview is available to Torch website subscribers, and Keller, now openly gay but then a 20-year-old college student, nervously says “I don’t know” after Watts barks out the “Don’t they?” line.)
  
• “Who’s killed more blacks than anyone? The fuckin’ blacks. But they want to blame that bullshit Roots that came on the air. That Roots was so bullshit. All you have to do if you want slaves is to hand beads to the chiefs and they gave you slaves. What is the best thing that has ever happened to the black race? That they were brought to this country. No matter how they got here. You know why? Because they intermarried and got educated. They’re the ones running the black race.”
  
• “Lester Maddox was right. If I don’t want to sell fried chicken to blacks I shouldn’t have to. It’s my restaurant. Hell, at least I respect him for his stand.”
  

Mark Madden, a Torch columnist who worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by day, was taken aback when he saw Watts hobnobbing with Hank Aaron, then a TBS executive, on one of WCW’s live TV specials. So he called Aaron, who had just spoken out against Cincinatti Reds owner Marge Schott’s racism two weeks earlier. “Our first conversation yielded that, indeed, he didn’t know who Watts was, let alone what he was like,” Madden wrote in the February 15, 1993 issue of the Torch. “And he sure didn’t know about Watts’s [sic] ill-fated ‘Torch Talk’ interview. You know, the one we all thought got Watts his job but, as is now apparent, no top executives at TBS came within seven miles of reading in the first place.”

Then he faxed Aaron the interview. “Aaron was horrified. He declined comment, but said that if Bill Watts did work for TBS—he really didn’t know who Bill even was—that he guaranteed something would be done about it. And he said he’d talk to me the next day. That was Tuesday. Wednesday Bill Watts was gone.” According to Madden’s account of their conversation that day, Aaron believed that Watts had resigned after being confronted, possibly by current Atlanta Braves chairman Terry McGuirk. “This is too big a company and it stands for too much to have something like this stand in the way,” said Aaron, who added that as far as he knew, nobody at TBS had ever seen Watts’ comments before Madden called him.

“It was horrible,” Aaron added. “They were horrible statements. It was just despicable, really. It was just terrible regardless of whether you work for a company, or work for yourself…if this is the way you think. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.” He also told Madden that Watts’ comments were “one and the same” as what Schott had been saying. Then, when asked about the image of him shaking hands with Watts, Aaron laughed.“I don’t mind shaking hands with him once again,” he told Madden. “It might bother him to shake hands with me, I don’t know.” Bill Shaw, a more WCW-adjacent TBS executive, refused comment to the Torch.

Watts stayed mum until writing a letter to Aaron on April 11, which was published alongside an interview with the disgraced ex-wrestler in the Wrestling Flyer newsletter, published by longtime Philadelphia sports anchor John Clark, two weeks later. Among other things, Watts cited his Native American heritage and his hiring of black wrestlers at a greater clip than his peers—“My track record in the wrestling business has been the most pro-black of any promoter/owner in the history of this business!” he protested. But Watts also talked about about Madden and the Torch interview. “Madden’s editorials in this newsletter are in my opinion often very personal, beyond the bounds of journalistic integrity, and probably on occasions the libel and slander status,” wrote Watts.

“I was unaware of his call to you or his accusations, and I had already resigned for my own reasons from World Championship Wrestling prior to Bill Shaw’s revelation of this accusation,” Watts continued, “so it had nothing to do with my departure from TBS. (I’m sure had I not already resigned, I was a ‘corporate liability.’)” Watts alleged that his comments taken out of context—the audio shows that they were not—and also claimed that the interview “was in the possession of TBS executives prior to my hiring in WCW; and I had already responded to that very allegation prior to being hired.”

As for what he actually said, Watts renewed his objection to anti-discrimination laws governing businesses, albeit in less inflammatory terms, arguing that the free market should determine if a discriminatory businessman succeeds or fails. There’s a strange parenthetical where Watts adds, seemingly out of nowhere, that “To me[,] the Japanese are truly the biggest racists invading the U.S. We as a nation condone that!” Then Watts addressed his comments about Roots:

As to my statement about “Roots”: In that era, slavery was very common. To me “Roots”’ presentation was skewed to make the U.S. feel guilty as a country. I do not believe we are “guilty” as it was accepted world wide. Our country was divided over the issue. Our country addressed the issue as no other country and fought an internal civil war! We should be acclaimed for that!

I feel the series should also have shown that not all slaves were trapped or taken by force. In many instances their own chiefs sold them into slavery for trinkets or trade goods. Slavery in Africa continued long after the U.S. discontinued it.

“Roots” did help to bring together and present black history to solidify black pride—an important process.

The letter does not address his comments about intermarriage or homosexuals, though, past saying that “I also enjoy jokes about blond[e]s, women, homosexuals, and many other forms of humor—but that doesn’t reflect in my business or personal history.” Watts also made sure to mention that he specifically requested that he ride with Aaron to the event at which they appeared together because he wanted meet him. “Thanks for reading this—at least you have my side of the story,” begins the final paragraph of the letter. “Isn’t corporate America insidious and hypocritical?! The corporate term ‘friend’ is a little ambiguous isn’t it? Is ever a person’s true integrity and ability smeared and discredited by just such accusations and innuendo?”

Fans who wrote to the newsletters about Watts were split on what happened, with many feeling that Madden made himself part of the story. The Shenanumake Post, a parody newsletter written by Atlanta area fans and indie wrestling announcers Jon “Craig Johnson” Horton, Steve Prazak, and Scott Hudson (later of WCW), took similar shots at Madden, as well. Watts, in his interview with Clark, echoed similar sentiments. “Oh, well, it’s something that if you were trying to sit and figure out what some scumbag would do, then you could figure out that that’s something a scumbag would do,” he said when asked how he felt about Madden’s role in the story. “He thinks he’s a power broker. I think, to tell you the truth, that Hank Aaron got way out on a limb on that whole situation and that that was a manipulation by TBS and for baseball.” Clark then asked if Watts believed that Madden did what he did out of spite, presumably over the perceived decline of WCW. “What does he not do out of vindictiveness?” Watts replied. “I think he’s a little bit intoxicated about himself I think he thinks he’s a lot more important than he is.”

“To me Mark Madden, in my personal opinion, if he was in the men’s bathroom he’d be singing ‘Stranger in Paradise.’ I mean, he’s not what I call a real man. He’s one of these people that hide behind this power of the press to slander and to viciously attack people. I have no personal respect for him at all. I don’t even know the guy. I’ve read enough of his articles to see that he just writes whatever he thinks will get the reaction he wants, without any, any consideration of how truthful it is.” Watts also continued to insist that the Torch interview was seen by TBS brass, and was even mentioned in his job interview by Bill Shaw.

From the perspective of 2018, though, Madden’s actions do not read in the way that Watts and many fans took it at all. He had a legitimate impetus for reaching out to Aaron thanks to his comments about Schott, especially since he was under the impression that the interview had been read by TBS brass. And that’s not even considering that WCW had already been sued at least once, by Robert “Ranger Ross” Ross, for racial discrimination. However, Watts’s answer to Clark’s questions about Madden did contain one eerily prescient comment about TBS executives.

“If you think TBS is not racist, you’re naïve, in my opinion,” he said. “Do you think racial comments aren’t made by TBS executives behind closed doors? The difference is that Marge Schott got brought to the front.” Kind of makes you wonder about the two dozen former employees who sued a little over a year ago, doesn’t it?

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David Bixenspan is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, NY who co-hosts the Between The Sheets podcast every Monday atBetweenTheSheetsPod.com and everywhere else that podcasts are available. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidbix and view his portfolio at Clippings.me/davidbix.

Fifth-graders in China's Shunqing district were recently asked to answer this question: "If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats on board, how old is the ship's captain?" The Washington Post: The apparently unsolvable question sparked a debate over the merits of the Chinese education system and the value it places on the memorization of information over the importance of developing critical thinking skills. "Some surveys show that primary school students in our country lack a sense of critical awareness in regard to mathematics," a statement by the Shunqing Education Department posted Jan. 26 reportedly said. One student offered a pragmatic law-abiding answer: "The captain is at least 18 because he has to be an adult to drive the ship." Meanwhile on Twitter, some have gone with 42, a reference to the science fiction novel "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams, in which 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything." BBC: "If a school had 26 teachers, 10 of which weren't thinking, how old is the principal?" another asked. Some however, defended the school -- which has not been named -- saying the question promoted critical thinking. "The whole point of it is to make the students think. It's done that," one person commented. "This question forces children to explain their thinking and gives them space to be creative. We should have more questions like this," another said.

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