As Alex Rivero biked around town raising money for the Newton North High School football team last fall, the 17-year-old started getting pretty good at guessing which houses were worth the door knock. He’d look for lights on and listen for kids’ voices.

When he found a house that looked promising, he would stop.

At one place, Dr. Lee Goldstein opened the door. Goldstein cares a great deal about high school football. It’s what he was thinking about when the doorbell rang.

“I was writing about these postmortem pathology specimens — brains — from teenagers who had played football,” says Goldstein.

Clearly visible in the boys’ brains were tell-tale brown areas, the early signs of the same disease found in the brains of more than 100 former pro football players: CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

“This is the beginning of a dementing process that will destroy a brain,” says Goldstein, who leads the molecular research team at Boston University’s CTE Center. “To see this, a neurodegenerative disease, in a teenage brain, that’s tough. That’s really tough.”

Thinking back on that chance encounter, Rivero says, “It could have been any random dad who just came down the stairs and said, ‘Oh football, I used to play football.’ “

“No, it was the one dude who probably knows the most about CTE probably out of 99.9 percent of the world.”

The research Goldstein was working on would, a few months later, be published in the journal Brain and generate widespread media coverage. It involved evidence not only from teenage football players’ brains but also animal models that offered ground-breaking information: CTE can develop even without a concussion.

“We sat down on the porch,” Rivero recalls, “and he starts telling me it’s not just concussions that are the problem.”

“It’s about getting hit in the head,” says Goldstein. “And the more hits he gets, the greater the risk for this disease, even if he never has a concussion. Ever.”

“I didn’t realize how little you needed, how little damage you needed to suffer from CTE,” says Rivero.

Goldstein hoped the conversation would do more than inform Rivero. He wanted to convince him to stop playing football.

“That was my hope,” says Goldstein. “He seems like such a lovely kid and I’m thinking ‘Why? Why do this?’ “

Rivero says he plays football for many of the same reasons that, during the offseason, he engages in his other favorite sport: boxing. It’s the only sport with a higher risk of CTE than football.

“There’s something about it, when you’re boxing, when you’re playing football,” explained Rivero. “It just brings something out of you that you really only know if you play those sports.”

That chance meeting made Rivero think long and hard about the risks those sports carry. And when his English teacher assigned a research project, Rivero decided to write his own paper on CTE. His research included a visit to Goldstein’s lab at Boston University.

“He told me it was the most important thing he was doing that day and he said, ‘I know I might not stop you, but I feel like education’s the most important thing here.’ “

Rivero is still a regular at the boxing gym but says he rarely goes into the ring. He doesn’t want to get hit in the head. So, what about football?

“It’s kind of hard to think about but I’m still going to play,” says Rivero. “This is something I love. I dedicate myself to [this]. This makes me healthier physically, mentally. I’m doing what I love, making friends, there’s a lot of great experiences that I’m having from this.”

It’s hard to compare that tangible experience with the abstract idea of, decades from now, possibly being addled by brain disease. Although, Rivero says he gets it — playing football puts him at risk for developing CTE.

“It’s a thought, it’s definitely a thought. I know it’s entirely possible,” says Rivero, “but right now I’m just trying to enjoy life.”

“He loves the game and I get that. I really do,” says Goldstein, “And then I ask the question, not about his wishes, but about the greater society. Why are we not protecting our kids?”

Dr. Goldstein says the research on CTE is a lot like the early days of lung cancer research. The link to cigarette smoking was not immediately understood — or accepted. And it’s taken generations to change behaviors and policies around smoking. He thinks it might be the same thing with football.

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Strap in, purists. This game is about to get a good deal faster.

At least, that’s what Minor League Baseball officials are hoping. The league announced Wednesday that it plans to institute some pretty big rule changes for the 2018 season — including beginning extra innings with a runner automatically on second base and, in certain situations, shaving five seconds off the pitch timer the league had already instituted in triple- and double-A ball.

Now, when there are no runners on base, pitchers at those levels will get just 15 seconds to begin their pitching motion. When runners are on, pitchers will still enjoy the full 20-second clock first instituted in the minors in 2015.

If the pitcher fails to meet his deadline, a ball will be awarded to the batter’s count, while a strike will be counted against the batter if he’s not ready for the pitch. For a 15-day grace period at the start of the 2018 season, though, violators will just receive warnings as they get used to the new system.

As for the big rule change in extra innings: Beginning in the 10th, when the leadoff hitter takes his place in the batter’s box, the teammate directly ahead of him in the batting order will set up across from him on second base — already halfway to home plate before a pitch has even been thrown.

“We believe these changes to extra innings will enhance the fans’ enjoyment of the game and will become something that the fans will look forward to on nights where the game is tied late in the contest,” Minor League Baseball President Pat O’Conner said in a statement.

He added that officials also have the players’ interests in mind, saying that lengthy extra innings and longer games can pose health risks, both in the near- and long-term. He noted that their partners in Major League Baseball also have a vested interest in keeping their farm team prospects injury-free.

Visits to the pitcher’s mound from coaches and other players will also be capped.

“We feel that limiting mound visits and decreasing the amount of time between pitches with no runners on base will further improve the pace of play,” said O’Conner, “and make it a more enjoyable experience for our fans.”

Major League Baseball, for its part, will only be instituting a cap on mound visits, deferring a decision on pitch clocks this year “in order to provide players with an opportunity to speed up the game without the use of those timers,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said last month.

The rule changes were greeted Wednesday by many long-time fans with, let’s say, a fair bit of skepticism. Die-hard baseball fans rarely respond kindly to the notion of fiddling with their pastime, and a cursory Twitter search — “really horrendous idea,” the “dumbest idea since the glowing puck,” “GROSS!” — reveals a little immediate resistance.

That reference to pucks is telling, though: If the MLB decides to follow the lead of the minor leagues, it won’t be the only major sports league in the U.S. to brave the third rail in recent years with rule changes to speed up play or prevent injuries.

The NHL, for instance, got rid of the two-line pass rule in 2005, opening up the game to rink-spreading plays, and has toyed more than once recently with its own overtime regulations to coax more excitement out of the extra period. And the NFL has been chipping away at high-impact kickoff plays, also with an eye toward reducing player injuries.

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Billionaire CEO Warren Buffett has an NCAA men’s basketball bracket challenge that just may blow other office pools out of the water.

Buffett told CNBC last month that any Berkshire Hathaway employee who accurately predicts all Sweet 16 teams will receive $1 million per year for the rest of his or her life.

The Oracle of Omaha went on to say that “if either Creighton or Nebraska ends up winning the tournament, we’re going to double the prize.”

Buffett, a Nebraska native, is also offering a $100,000 prize to the employee whose bracket stays intact the longest.

Last year, a steel worker from West Virginia correctly predicted 31 of the first 32 games and picked up his six-figure reward.

Berkshire Hathaway owns more than 90 companies, including Geico and Dairy Queen.

Here is a dose of reality that will calm your but-I-don’t-work-for-Berkshire- Hathaway-itis:

USA Today reports the odds of accurately predicting the Sweet 16 are less than one in a million.

Previously, Buffett offered $1 billion for anyone who predicted a perfect bracket.

That feat has never been achieved in the 21-years that ESPN has been doing a bracket challenge.

The odds of predicting a perfect bracket, according to USA Today, are anywhere from one in nine quintillion to about one in two billion.

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The slots in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament bracket have been filled and Connecticut is the first overall seed.

At 32-0, they are the only team to enter the NCAA tournament unbeaten.

The Huskies are aiming for their 12th national championship. Last season, UConn was the overwhelming favorite but lost to Mississippi State in the Final Four.

This year’s other No. 1 seeds are Notre Dame, Louisville and Mississippi State.

Here’s a printable bracket for the women’s tournament.

There were five teams trying to get into the bracket’s top spots and in the end Baylor lost out.

The Associated Press reports the Bears, who lost just one game all season (31-1), instead get a No. 2 seed in Lexington, a region that includes top-seeded Louisville, Tennessee and Stanford.

“‘We felt there was a razor-thin margin between Baylor and Notre Dame,’ said NCAA women’s basketball committee chair Rhonda Bennett. ‘Notre Dame did have the top strength of schedule in the country and they did have the best strength of schedule in the country and they had nine more top-50 wins than Baylor and those were the reason that the committee put Notre Dame on that one line and Baylor on that two line.’

Baylor coach Kim Mulkey said she doesn’t see it as that big a deal.

‘We’ve won a national championship as a two seed, we’ve won it as a one seed,’ she said. ‘And really what does it matter? Because the one has to play the two. Mississippi State was a two last year and they played for the national championship. We were a two seed in 2005 and we played and won the national championship.'”

The first round of the women’s tournament begins on Saturday. UConn faces St. Francis University of Loretto, Pa.

The men’s NCAA basketball bracket was announced on Sunday.

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With much fanfare, brackets for the men’s NCAA basketball tournament were released on what has come to be known as Selection Sunday. Virginia, Villanova, Kansas and Xavier are the No. 1 seeds.

The tournament begins Tuesday with opening-round games in Dayton, Ohio, and then gets into full swing Thursday and Friday at eight sites across the country. Final Four action is set for March 31 and April 2 in San Antonio, Texas.

Hard core March Madness participants already know when their office pool brackets are due — most likely by Thursday’s games. That will give newbies and dilettantes plenty of time to study up.

Sports Illustrated reports:

“Murray State was the first team to secure its bid to the Big Dance by winning the Ohio Valley Tournament, and Michigan was the first team from a major conference to lock up a spot by defeating Purdue in the Big Ten Tournament Championship.

The last team to steal a bid into the tournament was Davidson. The Wildcats knocked off Rhode Island in the A-10 Tournament Championship Sunday to secure a spot in the Big Dance, and make the bubble a bit more difficult to navigate. The Selection Committee said Notre Dame was the team that was bumped out because of Davidson.

The ACC has the most teams in the tournament with nine (Virginia, Duke, North Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina State, Virginia Tech Florida State, Miami and Syracuse).

“The biggest snubs of this year’s tournament include Oklahoma State, USC, Saint Mary’s, Louisville and Notre Dame. Syracuse claimed the final spot in the bracket for at-large teams.”

This year’s tournament is being played under a cloud. Shortly after the new championship team is crowned, a commission investigating alleged bribes and payoffs is expected to release its recommendations.

That commission’s investigation, led by former Secretary of Stage Condoleezza Rice, started after the FBI charged assistant coaches, agents, employees of apparel companies and others in a federal bribery and fraud probe.

The Associated Press reports:

“No fewer than a dozen teams in the tournament have been named either in the FBI investigation or in media reports that allege coaches and others have directed payments and improper benefits to recruits and players – thus, breaking rules that go to the core of the amateur-sports code that defines both the NCAA and the ‘student-athletes’ who make this billion-dollar business run.

They range from teams that made it into the tournament off the so-called bubble — Alabama — to one of the best teams in the country. Arizona, a No. 4 seed in the South, has been roiled by a report that wiretaps caught coach Sean Miller discussing a $100,000 payment to freshman Deandre Ayton. Miller has strongly denied the accusation, though the story line figures to follow the Wildcats through what could be a long run in the tournament.”

In media interviews, chairman of the NCAA selection committee Bruce Rasmussen said the investigations did not play a role in the bracket-filling process.

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The stands shake as fans break into song. Hundreds jump up and down, setting a much faster tempo than the play on the field.

This soccer stadium is in the heart of political opposition territory in Ethiopia. On a recent Sunday, thousands of supporters are sitting shoulder to shoulder. And surrounding the pitch, dozens of paramilitary police look out at the crowd, some with their guns in hand, others at the ready with tear gas canisters.

“I came here to see the play,” says one spectator, Solomon, an older man who asked only to use his first name because talking to a journalist in Ethiopia can land you in trouble. “Most of the people came to see the play. But some people are here to see the disruption.”

For the past three years, this region of Ethiopia has been engulfed by protests. What began as demonstrations against the expansion of the capital Addis Ababa have widened to include protests about ethnic equality, corruption and democracy. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds have been killed. In February, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced his resignation and the government placed the country under a state of emergency. The unrelenting protests have presented the most serious threat to the country’s ruling coalition since it came to power in 1991.

The popular uprising has affected seemingly all aspects of life — including soccer, the country’s favorite sport. Soccer stadiums have become battlefieldsand teams have become a proxy for the political divisions in the country. The 16 premier-league teams represent provinces largely drawn along ethnic lines.

In this match the home team, Adama City, is from an opposition stronghold and Welwalo Adigrat University comes from an area dominated by Tigrayans, an ethnic minority group that controls much of the government.

Solomon shakes his head at the prospect of a confrontation here, especially if Adama loses. Across the country, soccer games have been disrupted by fans fighting each other and clashing with police. The country’s soccer federation has had to relocate matches from restive areas because of the potential for violence.

“It’s the low-minded people who bring protests to stadiums,” Solomon says. “It’s the young guys who don’t know that soccer is about peace.”

And just as he says that, Adama scores a goal and the crowd erupts into a joyous roar.

For a moment, at least, the country’s politics seem really far away.

‘Ethiopians love football beyond our life’

Ethiopia has a long and tortured history with soccer, which like many nations it calls football. The country was one of the founding members of the Confederation of African Football and, in 1962, the national team became the continental champion. Since then, Ethiopians have barely made it past the first round and have never qualified for the World Cup.

Still, Ethiopians love the game. Fans travel hundreds of miles to see their teams. Sometimes you’ll see caravans of cars stopped on the side of a highway — the fans jumping by the side of the of the road or on top of the cars waving their team flags.

“We Ethiopians love football beyond our life,” says Mokaninet Berhe, the host of Sport Zone Ethiopia,a TV program featuring sports documentaries. “They support their clubs beyond their life. They are mad. They are ultras.”

In Ethiopia, the beautiful game has routinely been an arena where politics are played out. It began in the 1930s, when Italy was trying to colonize the country. At the time, Ethiopians were not allowed to play alongside Europeans. So in 1935, the St. George Sports Club emerged as the first all-Ethiopian pro soccer team.

In the early 1940s, Ethiopia defeated Italy to end the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Almost immediately afterward, the two countries faced off on the soccer field. The Ethiopians won and St. George became a symbol of the country’s struggle for freedom.

“St. George football club is the only one [that allowed] Ethiopians to express their feelings,” Berhe says.

And that relationship continued through Ethiopia’s modern history. In the ’80s, during the red-terror days of the Derg regime, soccer again provided an outlet in a country where freedom of speech was, and still remains, deeply curtailed.

As the historian Solomon Addis Getahun describes it, during that period certain teams were linked with the military and police and others, like St. George, were associated with the people. So, it was not uncommon for games to end with clashes between security forces and soccer supporters.

Ethiopia is seeing some of the same things happening today: Spectators are shouting anti-government chants and there have been violent clashes between fans and with police.

“So now in Ethiopia, the supporters are now bigger than the game,” says Berhe.

It’s obviously political but it’s also about sports, he adds. On the streets, Ethiopians are demanding a better life. They want better education and jobs. They want their voice to be heard. On the pitch, they want coaching; they want commitment.

And right now, all they’re getting on the field is frustration — a moribund national team and a premier league with dispiriting games ending in a tie, or without a single goal scored.

Holes in the field

Back at the stadium, Adama takes a 2-0 lead. One of its players weaves through the Welwalo defense and finds an opening outside the box — no defenders and a distracted goalie.

He shoots but misses — high and wide. The crowd groans.

Tadyos, a guy in his early 20s, who also wants to be identified only by his first name because he fears retribution, sits down near Solomon. He has one hand on his forehead, not believing what he just saw.

A well-trained team shouldn’t miss a shot like that. But, Tadyos says, it’s not the training. “It’s the field,” he says, in Amharic. “It’s uneven with holes everywhere. If the government took care of it instead of using the money to enrich itself, fans would see better football.”

That play set Tadyos off. Suddenly his voice grows louder and he stops looking at the paramilitary police in front of him.

“The corruption in Ethiopia has not only ruined the country’s football,” he says, “but also torn the country apart by sowing division along ethnic lines.”

After almost three years of nonstop protests, Ethiopia has become deeply divided. A central aspect of the conflict is that huge ethnic groups in the country feel marginalized and left out of prosperity by the ruling coalition.

It’d be nice for the game to be pure again, says Tadyos, but he’s certain that won’t happen until all Ethiopians feel heard.

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Nearly every sport has been hit with news of doping — of athletes using illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Perhaps the most famous example is cyclist Lance Armstrong, who denied doping allegations for years and then admitted using performance-enhancing drugs in 2013. That’s where the documentary Icarus begins.

Director Bryan Fogel decided to explore the subject by taking his own regimen of performance-enhancing drugs to prepare for an amateur cycling race. He injected himself in the butt; he framed shots of blood running down his leg. It was, by his own admission, “almost an absurdist comedy.”

“I mean, it was a little ludicrous,” he says in an interview. “But for what I was doing — which was, you know, going on this very, very detailed mission of charting what I was taking and then getting blood tests done every single week and collecting my urine and, you know, there was a very, very large extent to which I was going — but, you know, I was out to make a film. And I was documenting that process. So to that extent, I mean, there was a method and a purpose to the madness.”

But halfway through his film, what began as an experiment on himself turns into something much bigger. One of the film’s main subjects blows the whistle on a massive Russian doping program with links to the highest levels of Russian government. And the film pivots to the tale of Grigory Rodchenkov, the mastermind behind that program, and the man who happened to be guiding Fogel through his own program, and the man now fearing for his life.

And now Icarus has won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. Here are highlights from our 2017 interview with Bryan Fogel.

Interview Highlights

On Fogel’s first impressions of Grigory Rodchenkov

Well, Grigory at the time oversaw the testing of all Russian athletes across all sports, and all international competitions in Russia — of all athletes coming to Russia to compete — on top of the Sochi games. And this guy is just this incredibly likable, enigmatic, larger-than-life personality.

Well, I mean, it was beyond strange [that he was simultaneously helping Fogel to dope himself]. And it was jaw-dropping. And it was also why, at that time before, you know, it pivoted, I felt like I still had a really interesting film. The fact that I’ve got this Russian scientist, who was supposed to be catching athletes for doping, breaking every single rule in the book to not only help me dope but to tell me what to do, and then even go so far as to come to Los Angeles to collect all of my urine samples which I had been taking, to bring them back to Moscow to test them in his WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency]-accredited lab — I mean, everything about what he was doing was against the rules.

On what happened after a November 2015 WADA report identified Rodchenkov as the supervisor of a Russian state-sponsored doping program

So, suddenly, this is a crisis. And he’s forced to resign from the lab by Vitaly Mutko, who is the sports minister. And Vitaly Mutko answers to one person and one person only, and that’s Vladimir Putin.

It was a combination of oh-my-God, scared, shocked. Russia’s suspended from world track and field. And then [Vladimir] Putin is on television — on Russia-1 — holding an official press conference not only denying all the allegations of this report, but that if any of this proves to be true, that it will be the individuals that are held accountable and that punishment will be absolute. And at that point, Grigory has two FSB, KGB agents living in his apartment, “guarding him.” And five days after the report, I’m on Skype with Grigory, and Grigory is telling me that he has got word from other of his friends within the KGB, the FSB that they have planned his suicide and that he needs to escape.

This happened so fast. I mean, this is — six days after this report, Russia for whatever reason didn’t have him on the do-not-fly list. And he’s somehow able to get out of the country. I bought the plane ticket — I put it on my credit card. He comes with just a backpack in his hand and three hard drives. And we put them up in a safe house in Los Angeles.

And over the next month, I discover that not only is Grigory involved — Grigory is the mastermind of a spectacular, unbelievable scandal that calls into question every medal ever won in the Olympic Games. And not only that, he oversaw the Sochi Olympics, where Russia won 33 medals, and they did it through this elaborate Ocean’s Eleven-style scheme, where they had literally created holes in the laboratory to slip out the dirty urine samples of all the Russian athletes and swap out their urine with clean urine. And this guy was the only man on planet Earth who had this evidence. And he was able to prove it.

On one reason why Rodchenkov eventually told his story to authorities and to The New York Times

What happened at Sochi he was incredibly upset about, because he had went from being a scientist, meaning his whole life is — yes, it’s doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, but he was using science to beat the system. There was a differentiation that he made in his mind. But at Sochi, this wasn’t about science. This was just fraud. This was literally like breaking into a bank vault and substituting real money for counterfeit money. It was spiraling out of control. And after Sochi, he was promised it would stop. Instead, he’s doing it for the swimming world championships. He’s doing it for the collegiate athletic world championships. And there’s essentially no end in this. And as you also see in the film, as you see that he’s disposable like so many others that betray the government or whatever.

On where Rodchenkov is now

He is in protective custody. And the reason why is the Department of Justice and FBI has been sitting on this case for the last 14 months. And we’re very, very optimistic that our government is going to continue to protect him because regardless of the wrongs that he did, it was tremendous courage and honesty to come forward with this staggering amount of evidence and let the world know what had happened. And without him, we would still be in the dark about this.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Ammad Omar produced and edited the audio of this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for Web.

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In 1954, at the age of 25, Roger Bannister made headlines around the world as the first person to run a mile under 4 minutes.

Bannister’s 3:59:4 mile unlocked the door to what was possible in track — both physically and psychologically.

It had long been thought that a sub 4-minute mile was far from achievable and perhaps deadly for those who tried.

British Prime Minister Theresa May led the tributes to the former athlete, who later became one of Europe’s leading neurologists and was made a knight.

“Sir Roger Bannister was a great British sporting icon whose achievements were an inspiration to us all. He will be greatly missed,” she said on Twitter.

At the same time Bannister was training on the track, he was going to school to become a doctor. At the end of 1954, he retired from sports to pursue his medical career.

Long after his record had been broken, Bannister said he considered his contributions to neurology more satisfying.

Former Associated Press writer Marcus Eliason, shared his memories of interviewing Bannister to mark the 30th anniversary of his historic track achievement.

“In 1984, while stationed in London for The Associated Press, I phoned Roger Bannister to request an interview for the 30th anniversary of his becoming the first man to run a mile in under 4 minutes. His initial response was: “Is there still any interest in this?”

“One has only to look at the worldwide reaction to his death at 88 to grasp what an understatement that was. And the interview remains one of the most enjoyable I ever had.”

Bannister also accomplished another first in 1954: He was picked by Sports Illustrated to be the magazine’s first Sportsman of the Year.

As long as it took to break the 4-minute barrier, Bannister’s record lasted only 46 days. Australian John Landy beat it by running a 3:57:9 mile.

Landy and American miler Wes Santee had been threatening to be the first to break the 4-minute mark.

“As it became clear that somebody was going to do it, I felt that I would prefer it to be me,” Bannister said in an AP interview.

The current record for the mile is 3:43:13. It has been held since 1999 by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj. He is the 13th record holder.

Bannister died Saturday in Oxford, where he lived in a modest home just minutes from the track where he made history.

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