Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

What was once a test to see if I can write a single newsletter has become an exercise in discipline for me.

Thank you for following along so far, because I know there’s a lot more exciting stuff to come. 

So please, don’t forget to spread the word to your friends, friends of friends, etc. Happy to have them join us!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s how sports make people feel more American!

I was at my college roommate’s bachelor party this weekend. All of us who were part of it had some sort of recent immigrant heritage in our family. One of the groomsmen mentioned that he would like to buy a Jeep Wrangler and take the doors off. Why? Because, he said, it would make him feel more American.

As the first American-born member of my family, I felt that. I know that feeling. The scenes from this past weekend, which included a lot of watching US teams win gold medals at the Olympics, brought it to the front of mind for me. 

Throughout the games, it’s been Americans of all stripes and backgrounds doing their home proud.

Swimmer Torri Huske, who we mentioned in an earlier edition and ended up tying for the most total medals of any US competitor, is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant mom.

Gymnast Simone Biles was born here to American parents but her adoptive mom, who raised her alongside Simone’s grandfather, came to the US from Belize. Her teammate Sunisa Lee, who won a gold in the team gymnastics event, was born to a Hmong refugee mother who fled from Laos as a child.

On the gold medal-winning US men’s basketball team, big man Bam Adebayo has had a complicated relationship with his background, as he carried the family name of his estranged Nigerian father.

And his teammate Joel Embiid had several countries vying for his Olympic play—his native Cameroon, France—who gave him citizenship in the hopes he would play for them, and the US, where he plays professionally. Embiid, a naturalized US citizen, played for Team USA.

Seeing these athletes with ties to all over the world draped in red, white and blue, reminded me just how central my love of sports has been to always feeling American.

Despite having a very typically Israeli name, and one that often poses a challenge to native-born Americans, I have virtually never felt like an outsider. 

Before I could even talk, I had sports. I glommed onto it, learned everything about it that I could. And countless times when I have felt like any sort of outsider, I’ve relied on sports to bridge the gap. It makes a tough conversation easier when I know some facts about their favorite team. Tense moments thaw when we see we’re wearing the same jersey.

Fittingly enough, the first moment I really saw this link came with my old roommate, the same guy whose bachelor party we were celebrating. In 2016, we traveled across America. My car broke down along the way, so we were stuck for a day in scenic Randolph, Nebraska, population 881. We took pictures and acted like tourists to the delight and confusion of locals. People waved hello and we would be confused why. Eventually we grabbed dinner and ice cream at the town’s snack bar pickup window.

We walked over to the park and athletic fields and grabbed seats on the baseball diamond’s bleachers. It was there, looking out over the ballfield, past the right field fence at the football field and the corn beyond it, that it hit me. Two guys, sons of immigrants, are stuck right in the middle of America and what makes this feel as American as it can be? The smell of the grass, the crunch of the dirt. It all ties back to sports.

My Reporting

I don’t really have a ton for you this week.

Some major political news and an off-day on Friday took me off the usual Friday Fun n’ Games story assignment and kept me to regular day-of news stories.

In doing a deep dive on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, I did see that he did very well at making a signature Minnesota food item.

When he was in Congress, Walz won the Minnesota congressional delegation’s annual Hotdish-off three times in a four-year span.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

See you at Pitbull Stadium: Mr. Worldwide has a space all his own. Florida International University announced last week that it is selling the naming rights to its football stadium to Pitbull.

Under the deal, the venue will be called Pitbull Stadium for at least the next five years with an option to extend the deal five more years.

Pitbull will have rights to perks including a suite at the stadium and the right to use the venue for up to 10 days per year.

In return, Pitbull will be the athletic program’s “official entrepreneur” and will be expected to make appearances, social media posts and possibly an “FIU Anthem” for the team.

I have never seen anything truly like this. The closest we got was a couple of years where Jimmy Kimmel bought the rights to a college football bowl game.

But the pairing of an individual celebrity and a college football program with naming rights thrown in is bizarre.

Then again, it’s created a lot of buzz for an often-overlooked football program. And it brings more eyeballs to both Pitbull and his beloved home of South Florida. 

As strange as it is, early on, it’s looking like a win-win.

AP Top 25: Before we move on, college football is really coming up. The first AP Top 25 rankings are already out, less than two weeks before the first games kick off.

Honestly, college football is so unpredictable that the earliest rankings feel like guesswork. Every team has questions about who will take a step forward, how transfers will factor in and if freshmen recruits will play right away. 

That being said, there are things to keep an eye on.

Georgia tops the rankings and while expectations are high for quarterback Carson Beck and the Bulldogs’ offensive line, they’re going to face a big early test in a matchup against Clemson in Atlanta on August 31. And it won’t get easier from there, as the ‘Dawgs have two road games against teams currently in the top six, including a late-September matchup at Alabama and a November showdown at Ole Miss.

Beyond that, some of the teams in new conferences might be most interesting. The formerly Midwest-based Big Ten conference now stretches from sea to shining sea. Sure, the trip from Piscataway to Eugene stinks, but who needs geographic proximity when you have TV money?

Oregon is ranked at number 3 ahead of its first season in the revamped Big Ten. Outside of a home matchup in its second game against Boise State, who received votes but missed the top-25 cut, they have an easy slate until mid-October, when they host number 2 Ohio State. Oregon has struggled to win big games in the past few years but beating the Buckeyes in one of the first major games in their new conference may send a message.

Texas slots in at number 4, and although it’s now in the SEC, its first big conference test may be the Red River Rivalry against its fellow SEC newcomer and longtime rival Oklahoma. If the Longhorns prevail, they’ll have a chance to beat Georgia at home and possibly even take the number 1 slot if they make it through that game undefeated.

Quinn Ewers will start the season at the helm at QB but if he falters, it may not be long before head coach Steve Sarkisian turns to freshman Arch Manning (of those Mannings) to start the third generation of Manning QBs helming SEC teams.

Double Basketball Golds: The US men’s and women’s basketball teams had fans seeing double this weekend.

Two heavily favored teams playing France and struggling a bit but holding on for gold.

On Saturday, the men faced some early struggles containing big man Victor Wembanyama and the French, only to pull away in the second half.

The French didn’t go away quietly but a clutch three-pointer from Stephen Curry sealed the deal.

Over on the women’s side, the French put up an even tougher and more valiant fight. It came down to the final possession and guard Gabby Williams even made the buzzer-beater that would have forced the game to overtime. The issue for her was that her foot was on the line and what needed to be a three-pointer only counted for two.

The US team scrounged up just enough for a win. A’ja Wilson had a double-double with 21 points and 13 rebounds, plus 4 blocks. Kahleah Copper had 12 points, including the two free throws that sealed the win for Team USA. And Kelsey Plum added 12 points of her own, including the only two three-pointers the US made all game.

Brittney Griner scored 4 points in just 5 minutes but might have had the biggest victory of all. Just over 20 months after she was released from Russian custody, Griner took the top step of the podium with her teammates with a gold medal for Team USA.

Raygun and the Good of Being Bad: I cannot go the full length of this newsletter without sending love to Australian breaker Dr. Rachael Gunn, aka “Raygun.” With breaking (breakdancing) as an Olympic sport in 2024, Raygun represented Australia after winning last year’s Oceania Breaking Championships.

She’s a 36-year-old academic who studies, among other things, the culture around breaking, and started doing it in her mid-twenties. She went out there and did some of the worst dance moves I have ever seen. She jumped around like a kangaroo, twitched around on the floor like she was trying to scratch a nasty itch on her side and looked more like a parody of the sport than an Olympic-level competitor.

She did not make it out of the first stage and was awarded zero points by the judges.

@crossandb0ne

#raygun #australia #australiaolympics #funnyolympics #breakdancingolympics #australiabreakdance #parisolympics2024 #chrislilley #mrG #olympicbreak

And you know what? Her performance was a good thing.

The clips of her went viral, with basically everyone online dogpiling her. TikTok turned her into a trend where users would try to replicate her performance with bad dancing of their own.

But Raygun was doing this as someone about a decade older than most other competitors. Her comments afterward have shown that she was not chasing gold with her unusual performance.

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative,” she told Australian broadcaster SBS News. “I was always the underdog and wanted to make my mark in a different way.”

Breaking is an art, and as such, will always be something hard to judge and put into an Olympic mold, where usually objective skill is what’s being measured. How can you measure something that’s arguably immeasurable?

On a broader note, being bad at something is also fine. You might be really, really good at something and freeze up on a big stage. You might be great at it but not as great as the very best.

For example, I remember last year Celebrity Jeopardy had WWE wrestler Becky Lynch on as a contestant. Lynch, an immigrant from Ireland, was clearly somewhat bright and kept a good spirit despite being possibly the worst contestant in nearly sixty years of the show airing.

She saw 60 clues, just like every other Jeopardy contestant in the show’s long history. And unlike anybody else to have ever stepped up to the show’s podium, she did not get a single one of those correct. It took her until the third round, which is unique to the celebrity edition, to ring in with a correct response.

As the game unfolded, you could see all of Jeopardy’s weak spots. The game itself was breaking.

Lynch visibly knew answers but couldn’t ring in fast enough. Some clues seemed tied to things that would seem obvious, but I would realize that it’s only something you would know if you were raised in the US.

As her opponents Macaulay Culkin and Rachel Dratch cleaned up in categories on things like nursery rhymes, cheerleading and U.S. cities, I didn’t get the impression of a wrestler being dumb at all. I saw how “Jeopardy!,” not unlike American sports, is tailor-made for an American brain and how someone from literally anywhere else would be left flailing in many categories.

In both Lynch’s case and the case of Raygun in Olympic breaking, we see that it’s not the competitors who break when they put in an exceptionally bad performances, it’s the institutions themselves.

Something Good I Ate

If you’ve read this newsletter for long enough, you’ll know I’m a sucker for cheesesteaks. We’ve given love to SoKo Butcher in Takoma Park, MD for its wonderful DC-area cheesesteaks.

In Philadelphia, I’ve long been partial to John’s Roast Pork and think they have the best cheesesteak in the city itself.

But a trip through Philadelphia on a Sunday, when John’s was closed, led to me acting on a tip from friends about a cheesesteak with an Indian twist.

Little Sicily Pizza 2 is in a South Philly strip mall, about a 10-minute walk from John’s. Inside, some guys of Indian heritage man a counter at what looks like and is a pretty normal Italian counter-serve pizza and sub joint, other than a laminated piece of paper on a divider laying out a small Indian-inspired extension of the menu.

On it lies an Indian chicken cheesesteak. I saw that it was the sandwich the place was most known for, so I ordered it at a medium spice level.

You get a sandwich filled with ground chicken seasoned in a way that seems a bit like tikka masala, as well as some onion, cilantro and a non-noticeable amount of mayo.

Every bite is loaded with enough flavor to bowl you over. It’s the kind of meal that’s spicy not as much in a “blow smoke out of your ears” way as a “full of a ton of spice-based flavor” way. It hits you right away and then compounds with every bite, steadily keeping your mouth buzzing from the seasoning.

I’m not sure if I can compare it to a traditional cheesesteak but it is one of the best cheesesteak-like food items I’ve ever had.