From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny performing in this weekend’s Super Bowl, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in.
A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that affect not only sports, but American culture and politics. And that often means investigating the intersection of money and sports. “In sports, unlike in business, you can even argue, there is something resembling a meritocracy that is enforced and cared about by fans, let alone the officials that are meant to tend the store of what it is to have integrity in professional sports,” he says.
Torre’s reporting has shined a light on many stories that have gone unnoticed or underreported, like his investigation into LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer potentially violating the NBA salary cap. He also recently collaborated with Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly on a story about former college swimmer Riley Gaines’ rise to MAGA prominence through anti-trans activism. Gaines, Torre says, turned her grievance against one trans athlete into a career and political platform, “such that she is in real intimate connection with not just the White House, but the superstructure of political organizations that crop up to turn her cause as this supposed victim into a way to truly victimize trans people in America.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports.
Dig Deeper
Listen: How Sports Became a Battleground Over Trans Rights (Reveal)
Read: How Right-Wing Superstar Riley Gaines Built an Anti-Trans Empire (Mother Jones and Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Watch: What Is Riley Gaines Hiding? We Investigated (Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
| Pablo Torre: | The reason to have Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl is not anything I think resembling a cultural enlightened progressivism. It’s merely you want an audience that can become customers. But because Bad Bunny speaks Spanish, this is now wokeism. And almost like, it’s capitalism. |
| Al Letson: | On this week’s More To The Story, veteran sports journalist Pablo Torre. |
| As the Super Bowl approaches, we talk about the NFL’s recurring problems surrounding race and how a flood of money is transforming sports in America. Stay with us. | |
| This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson. Just a few decades ago, investigative sports journalism was thriving. There were high profile TV shows, national magazines, and intrepid reporters around the country who went deep and connected the dots on some of the most important issues in sports. But today, many of those outlets are gone or shells of what they once were. That’s meant that sports in the U.S., one of the most dominant elements of American culture, has often been left without probing journalism that shines a light on athletes, owners, leagues, and the tens of billions of dollars they generate every year. | |
| One of the reporters who stepped into that void is Pablo Torre. Previously a writer at Sports Illustrated and an ESPN contributor, Pablo is now the host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out. It’s an investigative show that has broken big stories in sports that had gone unnoticed or under-reported. Pablo says understanding sports in America, especially today, is easy. You just got to follow the money. | |
| Pablo, welcome to the show. | |
| Pablo Torre: | Al, thanks for having me. A very kind introduction. |
| Al Letson: | I’m curious if you can just rewind the clock a little bit and tell me your superhero origin story. How did Pablo Torre get sucked into the world of sports? |
| Pablo Torre: | You’re suggesting that my rippling athletic physique is not self-evidently my origin story, Al? |
| Al Letson: | You know, we’re podcasts and they can’t see you, so I just wanted you to kind of lay it out for people so that they understood. |
| Pablo Torre: | It’s a 14-pack. |
| Al Letson: | There you go. |
| Pablo Torre: | That’s obvious through my sweater. I grew up loving sports because I am the first person in my family to have been born in America. And so for me, I have an articulated sort of idea of this. It wasn’t apparent back then, but if you ask me the question in those terms, I answer in the sense of sports was my passport to knowing what this country is like and could still be like, which is to say I got to talk to people who had nothing in common with me and sort of microwave friendships and social intimacy. I grew up watching the ’92 Dream Team and Michael Jordan. They were superheroes to me. |
| And so in that way, I got to realizing, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I love playing pickup basketball and stuff, but developing a sense of the lore of sports was this social connectivity that nothing else provided. And then when you combine that with a general desire to figure out, okay, how do I express myself? And that’s going to be through writing. And how do I want to spend my time? It turns out it involves writing down statistics pathetically in a notebook for myself as if those numbers need to be preserved talmudically by me for the benefit of posterity. It radicalized me into being someone who just loves sports a lot. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I remember when I was much younger, one of my first major jobs was I was salesman/service provider for a knife sharpening business. Random as hell. But we used to sharpen carbide saw blades. In Northeast Florida, I would go out there, meet these guys, and they didn’t really like me because I’m a young Black kid from the big city, coming to their place. I found that the only way that I could communicate with them was getting to know sports. I wasn’t really that into sports at that point in my life, like in my early 20s, but I began to study sports. So when I go there, I could have something to talk about with them and ultimately service their blades, sell them new blades, and all of that stuff. And it worked. I got really good at sports because I needed to make a paycheck. |
| I think what you just said, it triggered that memory to me is that the bridge to talking to somebody who was so different than I was was sports. | |
| Pablo Torre: | Well, they’re heirlooms. They’re like family heirlooms. And so if you can speak that language and immediately skip several steps and start complaining about the same things. You can immediately just start making fun of the kicker who missed that field goal or that quarterback who chokes. I mean, man, I find myself at wedding receptions in Fayetteville, Arkansas or out west at Berkeley talking to people. You’re sort of going through the matrix politically and sociologically through our country to the extreme ends. And for better and for worse, one of the things that remains even vaguely monocultural is sports, is football, especially lately. |
| And so I just find that I’m doing the same things I did when I was a kid, showing up, trying to figure out, can I really relate to or become friends with these kids who don’t look like me at all? And I’m doing it still, except now I have on account of, again, the very self-evident musculature. I have the authority of someone who comes from the world of sports, which is a real trip for me, man. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I wish our viewers could see you because you’re a strapped specimen. |
| Pablo Torre: | It’s Flexing. It’s flexing. Constantly. |
| Al Letson: | I’m going to keep it nice because I don’t know what I’m going to do. The interesting thing about sports is that it definitely is a bridge to other people, but also sports are inherently political. And it feels today where we are, it’s even more political or at least the magnifying glasses on it in a way that like … I mean, everything in America now has been politicized. So it feels like there’s a magnifying glass on it in a way that, you know, I’m sure before me it was political as well. I mean, I’ve seen the pictures of, I think it was the ’68 Olympics. |
| Pablo Torre: | Mexico City. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Mexico City. |
| Pablo Torre: | And John Carlos. Yeah. |
| Al Letson: | Right. Exactly. So obviously it was political then, but also in this modern era, when I think about politics, it feels like Colin Kaepernick is definitely a bookmark, a place where you can see the specific polarization of America around a sports issue. |
| Pablo Torre: | It’s a reference point for so many people, which makes it politically useful. There’s a reason why Donald Trump, for instance, despite … And this is my scouting report on him. Dude doesn’t really know sports, but he knows enough to hang. And so what does that mean? It means that he can show up at a place and do a little bit of small talk in a way that, by the way, JD Vance cannot. |
| He’s at a donut counter. Dude, that’s when you talk about the Jets right now. That’s when you talk about the Alabama football team. That’s where you do that stuff and he really can’t do it. Donald Trump can get away with pretending like he is of sports because he can wear the costume well enough. The reason I say and go to that point specifically is because sports are being used politically all of the time. I think about this with the ’68 Olympics actually, the power of them is that people don’t watch sports for politics. And therefore when politics comes up organically or otherwise, they’re forced to confront politics. | |
| And so the sort of reaction to Colin Kaepernick, to two Olympians from America, two Black men raising their fists in the air for seven seconds such that we’re still talking about it decades and decades and decades later, it’s specifically because they provoked an audience that wasn’t asking to see this stuff to have to think about it. That’s the power of sports being the big tent we’re all climbing inside of for other reasons, is that the politics are going to be there because the people there end up expressing themselves authentically or simply because they can’t take it anymore. That’s an incredible platform that isn’t granted to them, but sports allows them to have it until, of course, the president says, “Get these sons of a bitches out of the stadium.” | |
| Al Letson: | Speaking of sports and politics, feels like it’s a nice bridge to walk across to talk about your reporting on Riley Gaines. Riley Gaines has become a force on the side of the right and when it comes to trans issues, but she didn’t always start there and your reporting along with Mother Jones kind of revealed that. Can you talk a little bit about that? |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. The reporting that we did with Madison Pauly, who’s the excellent reporter at Mother Jones, it was a story not even about the issue, which is should there be trans athletes included in women’s sports, which is a topic I’ve exhaustively, or at the very least, I’ve done a lot of work to discuss on my show, Pablo Torre Finds Out. This one is about the cottage industry of why sports are politically useful, as we were just saying. |
| It turns out, and the elections we’ve experienced have proven this, that the trans female athlete is what’s called an 80/20 issue for a lot of Republicans. They seem to win 80% of the time by fearmongering. Riley Gaines, who very famously now tied her fifth place with Lia Thomas at an NCAA swimming championship and objected to the fact that she, Riley Gaines, got the smaller of the fifth and sixth place trophies because it was a tie, and so they didn’t really know which one to give to which athlete. And so she got the smaller one and turned that into not just a grievance, but a career and a political platform such that she is in real intimate connection with not just the White House, but the superstructure of political organizations that crop up to turn her cause as this supposed victim into a way to truly victimize trans people in America. | |
| What do I mean by that? You follow the rhetoric, Al, and the rhetoric starts, and this is what we reported in the episode. The rhetoric starts with her being even understanding of how Lia Thomas herself, the trans athlete, is merely existing in a structure that she, Riley Gaines, objects to, which is the NCAA in how they deal with trans athletes and their inclusion. But over time, as she is goaded in interviews, which we play on tape for the listener, you see that whether it’s The Daily Wire or Clay Travis at OutKick or Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Again, the mortal combat sort of ladder towards the heights of conservatism in the modern era, she’s goaded in and incentivized to increase the temperature of the rhetoric such that Lia Thomas is allegedly an abuser. | |
| Lia Thomas is forcing the innocent girls in these locker rooms like Riley Gaines to basically view male genitalia as if they, the female athletes like Riley Gaines, are being sexually abused against their will. The rhetoric, as insane as that sounds, it’s all on tape. There are comparisons to Larry Nassar, who is the Michigan State doctor who’s responsible for the largest sexual abuse scandal in American sports history. Those are the equivalences that are being made online. Parallel to that, money is flowing in. | |
| Riley Gaines gets paid and we go through the charity and the nonprofit, the 990s, those forms that sort of show how she’s getting paid more and more every year to do the work of a political party that is using trans people as stepping stones to win elections, and it’s horrific. | |
| Al Letson: | Not long after your episode about Riley Gaines, she responded to you. She made a whole podcast that basically tore into your reporting. She pointed fingers at you. What’s your response after listening to that or did you listen to it? |
| Pablo Torre: | I listened to a good amount of it. I won’t say that I’m a subscriber to Riley Gaines’ show, although apparently she’s very successful at media in general. |
| What I would point out is that the story, the real teeth of the story, which I haven’t mentioned yet, is that as Riley Gaines was talking about how sexual abuse was being visited upon these “biological females” by trans athletes, there was in fact an actual sexual abuse scandal happening on her own college swimming team at the University of Kentucky. The person perpetrating that allegedly was her head coach and “best friend”, Lars Jorgensen, whom she has said one tweet about in the entirety of her rise to power in American politics. | |
| And so I’m not saying that I have a guide or mandatory instruction manual for how you should deal with a story like that if one of your closest friends, somebody you write about in your book and you praise, have praised frequently, ends up being someone who is that horrific allegedly. But the story we reported was fundamentally told through the perspective of Riley Gaines’ own teammates on her college swimming team, who fundamentally couldn’t take her rhetoric anymore, given her silence about an actual story of sexual victimization that she didn’t address. | |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Pablo examines how the rise of sports betting is threatening the integrity of sports itself. |
| Pablo Torre: | You can now bet on obscure athletes to underperform in any given game. What that has done is created incentives for those obscure athletes to do the easiest thing, which is to not be good at sports. |
| Al Letson: | Before we continue our conversation with Pablo, I want to remind you that there is a really easy way that you can keep up with all the important work we’re doing here at Reveal. You can sign up for our free newsletter, just go to revealnews.org/newsletter to receive your weekly email, reminding you about all of our good reporting. We have to stay connected now more than ever. |
| All right. Thank you. And we’ll be back in a minute with more from Pablo Torre. | |
| This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson and we’re back with investigative sports journalist Pablo Torre. | |
| From my viewpoint from 20,000 feet away, it seems to me that at least at one time that the NBA seemed to be way more progressive than the NFL. I’m specifically thinking about during the time of Black Lives Matter, I think that the NBA reflects what’s going on in the country more than the NFL does. During Black Lives Matter, NBA kind of really embraced it. You don’t see that stuff anymore because you really don’t see Black Lives Matter anywhere anymore, but it seems like the NFL had a really hard time wrapping their heads around it and really pushing against it. The way I’m looking at it, does that feel accurate to you? | |
| Pablo Torre: | That’s how it felt. There was a time, like 10, 15 years ago, even preceding the summer of 2020, when the NFL was seen because of concussions, because of its own slate of scandals, domestic violence, and otherwise. The ways in which Roger Goodell, the commissioners, seemed like a top-down relative autocrat compared to Adam Silver, who was very, again, on a relative basis, pro labor, pro player empowerment. It seemed like the NBA and the NFL, the graphs were going to switch over and the NBA would be the stock you’d want to own. |
| What’s happened since then, I think, is that the NBA has truly followed the money in a way that abdicated anything resembling a relative progressive platform. It’s not to say that the NFL now is itself leaning left. It’s merely to say that I think both sports decided that there is so much money available to us that if we cater to the mainstream or our understanding of it and we don’t alienate the people who don’t want this stuff, these politics in our sports, we’ll be better off for it. | |
| I mean, it’s kind of stunning, honestly. So to go from the summer of 2020 in which protest is the default assumption of what is an appropriate response to the administration of Donald Trump, now going, now going to general silence as the administration that we’re watching in the news do things that are so even further beyond the pale. It’s a reflection of, I think, capital winning of, by the way, labor realizing that if, unfortunately, if there’s this much money available for them on the table, why are we going to risk shaking the table? | |
| Al Letson: | It’s complete capitulation with the idea that if you don’t make noise and you just go along to get along, A, you’ll keep being able to get along, but B, you’ll be rewarded by that financially. |
| Pablo Torre: | Yes. Look, in sports right now, I think there is this dynamic with politics where if you follow the money, you realize everyone’s going to the same places. And so we’re living in this time, you know, you referenced my career at ESPN. I got to see from the inside what the cable television economy, the media rights deals, billions upon billions of dollars sort of gave rise to, which was the largess of professional sports. And now, because that same economy has been disrupted by the internet, they’re looking, sports broadly, is looking to the same places that this administration is looking for money. |
| They’re looking to the Middle East, they’re looking at crypto, they’re looking at private equity, they’re looking at Silicon Valley. And the through line through those entities that I just mentioned is not, “Wow, we really love free speech.” Now, they will claim it. They will pretend we’re the costume of we are free thinkers, but the proof is in how everyone is just chasing where capital is now available. That’s been an incredibly, I would say, jarring and sobering reminder of what happens when the goal is to preserve being a cash machine for lots of very famous public people. | |
| Al Letson: | There is a whole uproar over Bad Bunny being named the halftime performer at the Super Bowl. Why does the NFL seem to have these recurring problems surrounding race? |
| Pablo Torre: | That story is very funny to me because I think the NFL’s prime directive in this case- |
| Al Letson: | Was outreach, right? |
| Pablo Torre: | And it’s money, right? So outreach meaning more money. I think it reflects your question earlier of who gets to be the outsider. Because Bad Bunny, for those not familiar, is like the biggest international recording artist on the planet. And so the reason to have Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl is not anything, I think, resembling a cultural enlightened progressivism or anything resembling that. It’s merely you want an audience, you want to reach out to an audience that can become customers, but because Bad Bunny speaks Spanish, this is now wokeism. And almost like, it’s capitalism. That’s what it is. And people are grafting culture war onto a financial story to me. And right now, it’s very convenient to accuse, again, even the NFL of not sticking to sports because they got a Puerto Rican dude performing at the Super Bowl. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Question for you. I don’t follow college sports much at all, but what I do know is that money has now come into the picture in a way that it had never been in the past. I mean, it feels like in the past, players were being exploited and now players are actually getting paid. I mean, I think that that fixed one part of it. Do you think that that money is ruining college sports? |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. It’s a really good question and there’s no simple answer. To me, it’s important to know that college football is in fact the second most popular sport in America. It’s that popular. The reason it’s popular is because A, people love football, period. People would watch a football sitting on a table. But the second thing about football in the college context is that in college football, there’s this presumption that we’re watching students and the lie has always been that these are not employees simultaneously. |
| And so you got to lead with the fact that college football is a multi-billion dollar industry that only recently started permitting payments to the labor that are responsible for the billions of dollars that all of these conferences and these executives and these coaches are making. And so first reaction is, I’m glad that money is finally entering college football such that it could go to the labor. But at the same time, it’s happening in such a half measure unregulated way without contracts. Still wearing the costume of these are marketing payments as opposed to employment deals, that it is welcoming a level of chaos and just disorder, which is threatening, I think, the long-term viability of a product because the institution of college football wants to remain college, but it doesn’t know how to reconcile that with paying athletes. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. My father is from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. When I was a young man, I would come down and visit. It was right around the time when Atlantic City went from, at least from my point of view, went from little small casinos into Trump coming down there and making all these big casinos. I watched how gambling affected a lot of people, both in my family and around my family. And so for me, gambling has always been something that I stay far away from. But I’ve noticed recently that whenever I am on TikTok, Instagram or whatever, I am constantly seeing gambling ads for sports betting, which I never saw before because it seems to me that it came out of the shadows. How did it come out of the shadows and are we seeing that affecting the actual play of the sports? |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. I mean, there’s so much here. This is the story of legalized gambling occurring on a state-by-state basis. It’s not federally legal, it’s not for the entire country, but state by state, you’ve seen the opening of the market. And the legal gambling sports gambling operators have innovated something that the bookie around the corner didn’t used to, or even Atlantic City sportsbooks or Vegas sportsbooks didn’t used to, which is they now have, and I call it basically a cheesecake factory long menu of bets you can make on any given game. They include micro bets, what are called prop bets, which is to say hyper-specific things that you can now bet on. Basically financial instruments that are so obscure and complicated that they have in totality created one of the largest revenue drivers for legal sportsbooks because these are things that are deeply tempting and deeply addicting along the lines of people trying to play the lottery. |
| Because if you hit one and then another and then you put them together in what are called parlays, like multi-step bets that have these multiplier effects, you have, yes, possible windfalls that are happening, I would say, at a time in which our literacy around probability is not better than it used to be. And so people have really fooled themselves into thinking that this is, and it’s again, a lot like stuff that’s happening in the country, that this is their ticket to the economic windfall that our actual society is not otherwise apparently giving to them. This is the path to get rich quick. | |
| What has it done to sports itself? It’s absolutely mutated incentives. Briefly, these prop bets are things that are so small, but so universal that you can now bet on obscure athletes to underperform in any given game. What that has done is created incentives for those obscure athletes to do the easiest thing, which is to not be good at sports. | |
| Al Letson: | So I could do that. |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. Even I, the greatest athlete you’ve ever met. |
| Al Letson: | I know. I know. I was about to say, Pablo, come on. |
| Pablo Torre: | Even I could run an inside information betting scheme in which I underperform and let people who bet on my underperform. It’s profit. And so the level of scandal that is now emerging from the shadows, and there have been FBI investigations that we’ve covered on our show and lots of problems for the leagues in terms of like, okay, we’re again, drinking from that fountain of legalized gambling money while also watching our product have a giant conflict of interest that we don’t know how to solve. |
| Yeah, it’s leading to a really dangerous direction absent regulation. That’s not even getting to the medical concerns, which I think are worth considering even as I am not someone who thinks it should be outlawed, but I am someone who thinks that we need to disclose as accurately and as transparently as we can, what are the actual harms here as the experiment is being conducted on Americans as we speak? | |
| Al Letson: | On a personal note, as somebody who is deep in this stuff. I mean, you kind of know where all the bodies are buried, how does that affect you as a fan of sports? Do you still tune in just as a fan or is it all work now? |
| Pablo Torre: | Personally, I tend to put on sports and almost absorb it through osmosis as background noise a lot while I’m investigating someone in sports. It’s funny, I used to be engaged with games because I was just there to be present, watching the game. And now, because I think the lane I’m in is so large and otherwise unoccupied, there is an unlimited number of subjects that I’m curious about that require me to do research and to make calls and to think about the bigger stories that connect to larger issues. And so I don’t watch sports in the same way. |
| I will say that I love going to live events because there is nothing replacing that feeling to me of being present alongside, by the way, people who politically disagree with me, but we’re all there under a common cause to enjoy this experience. I think that is so rare on all of the levels that we’ve already referred to, that I try to be off my phone, obviously, if I’m going to actually go to a sporting event and be there as a fan. | |
| But even there, I mean, my answer, now that I’m real, I’m on my own therapy couch now, Al. My own answer could not help but be sociologically bigger picture. And so my curse and I think the blessing of what I do now professionally is that I still get to love sports and I’ve never engaged with sports more, but it’s just not in the way that I grew up learning to love sports as a kid. I find myself thinking, what does it mean to be a serious person? What does it mean to be an adult in the room who’s like, “Is anyone else going to point this shit out?” And it turns out that the gift and the curse is that I think it’s my job to at this point. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. You’re doing hard-hitting investigative journalism, but some critics say that sometimes you’re pushing stories too far, like you’re inserting yourself as a character and sensationalizing the stories. How do you respond to that criticism? |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. I mean, I exist on the internet and I exist in a desert of sports journalism. I grew up reading and then working at places like Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine. I watched a program like Real Sports, the foremost investigative news magazine on television at HBO. Those places don’t exist or are zombie versions of themselves now. Sports reporting, especially investigative sports reporting under the previous way of doing it couldn’t support itself. And so the question I face every day is, how do I make the reporting I’m doing, some of which you’ve kindly referred to already in our conversation, how do I make sure that that doesn’t get dismissed? How can I puncture an echo chamber? How can I make sure that the media person, me, the host of a show also does the job that’s required of us, which is also being a billboard for the work we do. |
| Anybody who runs a Twitter account against their will knows this feeling. I think for me, what that has extended into logically is yes, leaning into the idea that if I’m going to investigate a story, it’s also on me to be the defender of my reporting and also at times an adversarial character in trying to hold the subjects of my reporting to account. Because often I’m not just talking about Riley Gaines, I’m talking about some of the richest people on earth who come to sports for all of the reasons we’ve said, including, by the way, to launder their own images and to hide things from a public in ways that I think are more flagrant and indefensible than they’ve ever been before, given the levels of inequality in our country. | |
| And so for me, if I can do that, it also means that I need to be the one tooting my own horn. It also means that I need to convince young people who are on the internet that the sports reporting I like to do isn’t just vegetables. I’m also melting some cheese on it for them. Which means that I’m here to laugh and make jokes and exist on the internet and yes, be a character. That is not the way that this craft, this job was taught, but I think it’s an evolution that’s been an adaptation. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I think we need new definitions. I think that the world has changed and the way that you and I do our jobs has to change in order to grab ears and to grab people’s minds and hearts and all of that stuff. It can’t be the same way it was done 20 years ago because the world is vastly different. |
| Pablo Torre: | Yeah. I mean, look, there’s a world in which I would be a lot happier and a lot less stressed and my family would be less worried about me psychologically and otherwise. If I was just able to put something out into the world under a byline and it would sort of make its way down the river of discourse and I didn’t have to be the guy flashing a neon sign on this weird, again, I’m torturing various metaphors, on this weird motorboat. I’m loudly revving up to make sure that you know I’m coming. But that’s what it’s like to compete in a media ecosystem that’s attention driven. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Yeah. Pablo, before I let you go, are there any stories in sports that we should be keeping our eye on? |
| Pablo Torre: | Man, I’ve realized as I’ve tried to answer your questions that I think we need to see sports as the story of money. And so in my reporting on my show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, I’ve been doing this investigation to the Los Angeles Clippers and Steve Ballmer, one of the 11 now richest people in the world and the ways in which he’s been circumventing the rules around fair play in his sport by hiding secret payments that we’ve reported in these alleged schemes that have been basically ways to break rules, to spend money that allow him to get the thing that he can’t just buy, which is a championship. |
| The story of money, what do I mean? I simply mean that the people who own sports have never been richer. They’re coming from Silicon Valley, especially lately. What these people want is, again, if I may be simplistic for a second, is the ability to finally be the jock, the cool kid at school, the famous person sitting courtside who gets to be praised because they’re owning the coolest thing and the most exclusive club that they can join. But what they’re realizing is that they can’t just buy the championship, the trophy. | |
| In sports, unlike in business, you can even argue, there is something resembling a meritocracy that is enforced and cared about by fans, let alone the officials that are meant to tend the store of what it is to have integrity in professional sports. And so we’re watching this conflict between lots and lots and lots of money and what they’re using that money to do, which is get the stuff that they can’t buy. And so how do they do it? They break more rules. So I just think we should follow the money. | |
| Al Letson: | Pablo Torre, thank you so much for coming on. |
| Pablo Torre: | Al, thank you for not being intimidated by, of course, my physical presence. |
| Al Letson: | I was intimidated the whole time. What are you talking about? |
| That was investigative sports journalist and host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, Pablo Torre. You can subscribe to his show and listen to hundreds of Pablo’s interviews, investigations, and intriguing sports stories on your favorite podcast app. You got to do what I’m telling you. The podcast is excellent. | |
| Plus, if you like this show, then be sure to check out our January 24th episode of Reveal. It’s all about the debate over transgender athletes, which includes a story reported in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out. You can find it in the Reveal feed. | |
| Lastly, a reminder, we are listener-supported. That means listeners like you, you can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift, and thank you. | |
| Today’s show was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Brett Myers edited the show. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando, my man, Arruda and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. | |
| I’m out, letting you know. Let’s do this again next week. This is More To The Story. |