Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

We’ve got some legends of the game and a ton of reporting to get through. And we have to roast Drake again. So let’s get moving.

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the sheer amount of sports available.

Not even a month ago, sports was desperately calling out for a main character. Now, there’s one for all tastes.

Football is fully back, so you have a ton of choices. You can laugh at the misery of either New York football team. You can front-run with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce out in Kansas City.

Need something out of the college football realm? You can follow Texas as they show that this might actually be their year. Or laugh at Deion Sanders for barely beating an FCS team and losing to Nebraska ahead of a season that will likely head nowhere.

Soccer legend Alex Morgan offers you the story of the hero heading out on her own terms—not only that, her retirement was broadcast on approximately five different channels, a historic first for a women’s sporting event. She even got the poetic honor of ending her career with an assist and substitution out of the game in the 13^th minute, lining up perfectly with her jersey number.

Tennis has wrapped two fantastic arcs in the U.S. Open. Aryna Sabalenka finally got over the hump and won the women’s singles title. And on the men’s side Jannik Sinner won it while a doping scandal hung over him.

There’s so much going on that it’s easy to forget MLB has two fantastic playoff races unfolding and Shohei Ohtani on the brink of becoming the first player in the history of the game with 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season.

And don’t look now but NHL drops the puck in less than a month and the NBA comes back a few weeks after that.

There’s an embarrassment of riches. Take some of it in while you can.

My Reporting

Let’s start with work! We have a series of football stories we’ve been asked to do as the seasons pick back up and this week, it was a look at the business motivations around sports stadiums.

This is something I know a lot about since I produced a deep-dive explainer on it a couple of years ago. Here is that if you want to take a trip into the time machine and see what I could do thanks to the magic of pre-taped TV and friend of the newsletter Christian Bryant.

Fast forward to Friday, and we had former NFL player-turned-sports business consultant Marques Ogden on for a live interview with our host Lauren Magarino to talk about it. Here’s that chat!

The aforementioned Alex Morgan retirement gave me a window to help a show I don’t even work on. In addition to being a legend on the field, Morgan fought off the field to help her fellow players. She was one of the leading forces behind the successful fight for equal pay for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

But she also is a player representative for her team, San Diego Wave FC, for the NWSL Players Association, the union that represents the league’s players.

They made some major labor progress, agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement with the league years before the current agreement was set to expire. And the agreement features some massive wins for players, including some things no other leagues have.

Teams have to get the consent of any player before trading them. Some leagues have this as a perk earned via experience or skill, but I can’t think of any other where that’s true universally. While the USL W League, another top-tier women’s soccer league, formed this year without any player draft at all, the NWSL players were able to make their league the first to agree to give up on a player draft.

Other than contracts, players are completely free agents. While other leagues have long held up draft day as a celebration of player skill, there’s the unfortunate reality for players that they cannot choose their employer. Don’t want to play for the Chicago Bears? Atlanta Hawks? Cleveland Guardians? Too bad! If you were the best player available in your respective draft, you effectively had to go in order to become a professional.

Going forward, NWSL players won’t have that concern.

A big part of that was union leadership. Meghann Burke, a pro women’s soccer goalie who then went to law school, has been the union’s executive director for both of its collective bargaining processes. I spoke with her for a previous story on sports unionization and reached back out to her after the CBA was signed last month.

We got her on our afternoon show on Friday. I didn’t work on it but I did help make sure the chat between her and our anchor Chris Stewart could happen.

Here’s that clip:

It’s a good transition to my reporting on Saturday! The schedule’s really been favoring soccer lately and I got our local Washington Spirit vs. the Portland Thorns, last year’s second-place finishers who have had an up-and-down 2024.

Pregame, there was a ceremony honoring the six members of the US team that won the gold medal at this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris who were part of the two teams.

I was able to snap a few shots as the players received their gifts and applause.

I’ve been able to get a huddle video or two, but Portland’s huddle pregame was maybe the most candid one I’ve got. Full huddle, plus former national team player and team captain Meghan Klingenberg hyping up her teammates and hitting home some of the main things the team needed to do (with some profanities too, as a heads up if you play the clip below.)

I spent the first half getting pictures and video on the field. A few balls came my way. One hit the board I was posted up against with a loud thud. The wall shook and the feeling was comparable to going over a big pothole in your car.

Another ball even rolled to me and bounced right off my foot. I figured the best approach was to just be perfectly still and act like I was just part of the scenery.

There were plenty of chances to take in the action close up.

I was closer to the benches than usual so could hear coaches and players shout. Portland coach Rob Gale had to adjust after Washington had many chances in the first 20-30 minutes that nearly went in.

At one point, I heard him tell midfielder Sam Coffey an instruction and he added that “chances will come.”

They did, although nobody was able to fully capitalize on any chances before halftime.

All the scoring came in the second 45 minutes when I was upstairs in the press box. Portland’s Hina Sugita opened up the scoring by taking advantage of being hidden by a teammate in front of her to pop a ball into the net.

A few minutes later, national team star Trinity Rodman evened things up for Washington with an impressive effort, dribbling past a few defenders before finishing in style. She even swung by the sidelines to celebrate with newly announced Spirit co-owner and NBA legend Magic Johnson.

In the dying minutes, the game looked like a likely draw, but Rodman was able to dribble down the right side toward the corner and hit a cross that found midfielder Leicy Santos, who hit a lunging header to bounce the ball past Portland goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold and win it for Washington.

Postgame, I was able to join the scrums in the mixed zone, which as a reminder, is a space that is between the exit from the field and the locker rooms, where reporters can talk with players who either have been made available by their team or, in some cases, who reporters just flag down. Sometimes it’s just as simple as asking “can I ask you a couple questions?”

Washington forward Ashley Hatch took some questions. She was a big part of the team’s offense last year but has often been coming off the bench this year under a new coaching staff and system.

It struck me to see her in the starting lineup and I noticed she contributed quickly. She had several shots in just the first few minutes of the game and later assisted on the team’s first goal.

I asked her about that specifically.

“I wanted to be able to do my best for the team and just go out there and take advantage of the opportunity, because you never know when you’re going to get it again,” Hatch said.

Portland’s Sam Coffey took questions from a slightly smaller huddle of reporters. Thanks to that, I was able to sneak in a few more questions, picking up at about the 1:40 mark of the video below.

“It’s things on the field, but also intangibles,” Coffey said, explaining that it was the “little decisions” that cost them the game. “Body language, communication, when we’re able to pin someone on the sideline, not letting them out, our throw-in shape, set-piece structure. Marking the box, obviously, was what led to the goal. There’s a series of things that lead to us scoring and it’s never on one person or one play.”

And eagle-eyed readers may know her name from Edition 8A, since I gave a shoutout to her sister Alex’s piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer on watching Sam win the gold medal at the Olympics.

After I finished, fellow reporter Jonathan Tannenwald, also of the Inquirer, asked Sam for her side of the story, and she gave an answer that reminds you just how surreal it is to win an Olympic gold medal and have your family there for it.

In the postgame press conferences, Washington’s Trinity Rodman and Andi Sullivan took questions after their win.

I asked some perfectly fine questions—including one about Rodman’s postgame outfit, which featured artwork depicting her father, NBA star Dennis Rodman. Trinity has said she doesn’t have an especially close relationship with her father and has very strong support from her mother, who frequently attends games. It was the first time I had seen her acknowledge her father on her own terms.

She did add that she likes to think she got her style sense from her father. Considering her hair has been a few colors this season, I see no reason to disagree.

But the highlight, came from a question asked by Peyton Skeels from the site ShePlays. She asked Rodman and Sullivan, both of whom have been national team teammates of Alex Morgan, about Morgan’s impact.

Both of them had particularly poignant reflections on the outgoing legend. Rodman even referred to her as a “mom” and joked that “the training wheels are off.”

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

An Epilogue to Saturday’s Game: I ended up leaving the stadium at the same time as Peyton and Jonathan, the two reporters who I mentioned earlier. We ended up hanging around for a while after the game talking about the history of the game.

Peyton has an interest in trying to chronicle and archive that history, since as big as women’s soccer has gotten, its history isn’t written down or recorded as much as men’s sports. Beyond raw stats, a lot of the lore that you might be able to read about for the likes of the NBA and MLB is buried deep in old message boards, blogs, and in the minds of those who saw it and followed it.

Jonathan, meanwhile, is the latter. Having covered soccer for more than 20 years, he might know more about U.S. soccer, and especially U.S. women’s soccer, than just about anybody.

He talked a lot about soccer culture, mentioning how a city like Washington, DC is unique in that it has the sort of team soccer history that few other cities have. In some form or another, legends like Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach played for DC-based pro teams.

He also asks very sharp questions in interviews and mentioned that people ask him about it. He said he basically has no idea how he comes up with them and that they come basically on the fly and directly in reaction to what he’s seeing. 

But he did offer a kernel that I feel like might guide me and might be a pretty broadly applicable mindset for asking questions.

In talking about Alex Morgan, he said he’s seen a lot of great players. But that the thing he always tries to figure out is what separates the few truly elite, all-time players from the simply great.

It’s a super-interesting approach. It made me start thinking about a lot of things—how competitiveness manifests, how athletes rely on faith disproportionately, the way they have to balance passion for the game with the physical and mental pressures of chasing and then maintaining stardom. 

As much as this newsletter is called “I’m Curious,” that was as good a reminder as I could get that curiosity isn’t static. I tend to just let myself be curious about whatever I find interesting. But going forward, I know I’ll be thinking a lot more about how I’m curious about things.

Not Like Him: I was very happy to see Kendrick Lamar will be the halftime show headliner at Super Bowl LIX. The Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has long ago proved he is the rightful heir to the long tradition of rappers from his native Compton.

The Super Bowl is set to be the crown jewel of a stretch that very few people will be able to achieve in any discipline. Within a week this spring, he dropped three increasingly astounding diss tracks to handle a beef and rap battle with Drake.

In the process, Kendrick turned Drake into a national embarrassment, spawning a ton of memes, turning some of the people Drake most wants to love him against him, and getting arenas, marching bands, and just about anybody with a radio to jam to a song calling Drake a “certified pedophile.”

Drake’s 2023 song “First Person Shooter” has a line. “Big as the what? Big as the what? Big as the what? / Big as the Super Bowl.”

But it won’t be Drake who is as big as the Super Bowl. This February, it’ll be Kendrick Lamar.

Fantasy Football: Tuesday is the day fantasy football players love or dread, as the results from the previous week are made official and rosters unlock, allowing players to plan out who they will add or drop for the week to come.

This year, I’m in just one league, an 8-team PPR league with some local friends. We drafted last week, creating a rush of a week from draft day to gamedays. I am in a good mood after loving how my team came out of the draft and winning with the highest score of any team in the league.

I just hope this isn’t the peak but the start of a great season.

(Yeah, yeah, the old saying is “nobody cares about your fantasy team” but I care about mine at least.)

Also, I just love that I was able to pull out a Chappell Roan-themed name for my team. Allow me to introduce you to the Week 1 iteration of “Red Zone Supernova.”

Something Good I Ate

A quick one this week, but after Saturday’s game, I needed some food after only having a small breakfast.

An effort to avoid the crowds of fans coming for the Bruce Springsteen concert next door at Nationals Park led me to the fringes of Navy Yard and Side Door Pizza, a takeout spot attached to the restaurant Scarlet Oak that specializes in Detroit-style pizza.

I had a heavily cheesy Detroit-style pepperoni pie but the most notable thing was a $6 appetizer: the jumbo mozzarella stick.

Yes, it’s exactly as advertised: a 12-inch bar of hot, fried, ooey-gooey mozzarella cheese breaded and topped with pepper and parmesan cheese, served with marinara sauce. 

It had plenty of flavor and I loved the novelty of it. And with how hungry I was, it hit different.