NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to Bob Ryan what he will do Sunday mornings now that The Sports Reporters roundtable on ESPN is off the schedule.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

There are several Sunday morning TV roundtables that feature journalists parsing the week’s events and arguing about them – “Meet The Press,” “Face The Nation.” I tend to watch them joylessly as a form of homework, but there has been one Sunday morning roundtable that I’ve watched faithfully and happily, until last weekend when it aired for the last time.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE SPORTS REPORTERS”)

SIEGEL: ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” mixed a kid’s passion for sports with appropriate adult-sized doses of insight, realism and cynicism about the industries that thrive at the expense of gifted athletes. There was a host and a cast of familiar sportswriters, three of them each Sunday. Last week, Mitch Albom, Bill Rhoden and Bob Ryan joined host Mike Lupica for the last go-round.

And as I was wondering what I’m going to be doing without “The Sports Reporters” on Sunday mornings, the question occurred to me – what are they going to be doing? So we’ve called up “Sports Reporters” regular Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe, who joins us from Sarasota, Fla. Hi. Sorry to hear about it.

BOB RYAN: Oh, thank you very much. Well, in the short run, I think we plan on feeling sorry for ourselves.

SIEGEL: (Laughter).

RYAN: That’s – we’ll spend a good portion of Sunday mornings reminiscing and being nostalgic about all the good times we had, and, man, we did have many of them over the course of, in my case, 28 years.

SIEGEL: Twenty-eight. This week you weren’t scheduled to be on the show had there been one, but next Sunday morning?

RYAN: Oh, that is – I’m certain that that is when the withdrawal symptoms will become real.

SIEGEL: This Sunday, they I think would have been talking about perhaps an amazing win by the San Antonio Spurs on the road without their best player playing. Do you miss the chance to hold forth on these things?

RYAN: Positively. We would undoubtedly be marveling at the stunning development in Houston when the Spurs beat them by 39 points on their home court in an epic game 6.

SIEGEL: How different is the beat and the discussion that can be held by, you know, four sportswriters today than it was 30 years ago?

RYAN: So many of the people out there, the public, has access to information that was once our exclusive province, and so it’s easier to misspeak and be called on it than it was 30 years ago.

SIEGEL: (Laughter). And has the range of subjects – has the number of times that you found yourself talking about doping and domestic violence, is it radically different today than it was 30 years ago?

RYAN: Yes. The social issues are a part of the deal, especially in the fall when the National Football League goes about its business, and there is such a disproportionate number of miscreants, people who are unfortunately in the papers for the wrong reasons. I’m not saying that’s the only league where that happens, but I think anyone knows that you don’t get too far away without discussing who’s being suspended in that league.

SIEGEL: The show is unique on ESPN. Do you think it would be harder today to pitch a show where four people talk intelligently and, you know, not always shouting about sports? Is that considered just not an apt idea anymore?

RYAN: What is not considered an apt idea is agreement. What is considered an apt idea is conflict. We weren’t in it to seek conflict. If we had differing opinions, wonderful. It was organic. That was fine. But I have to tell you, and I’m a part of another program on the network, that sometimes we do manufacture issues for the sake of entertainment. And I don’t think for one second we ever thought that way on “The Sports Reporters.”

SIEGEL: By the way, why was “The Sports Reporters” canceled? Was it expensive to bring everybody up to Connecticut every week to do or just low ratings? Or what did they tell you?

RYAN: The only reason we were given – and I am not making this up, and I’m not being hyperbolic, I’m being – quoting verbatim – “we’re going in another direction,” unquote, unquote. So you can take a look at the drift of the nature of some of the programs on the network now, it will tell you what direction that is in. But I don’t see it that I have much of a right to complain about the opportunity that ESPN gave me and as well as the rest of us to have this forum for the last 28 years.

SIEGEL: Well, Bob Ryan, thanks for lots of wonderful Sunday morning half-hours that you and your colleagues and friends provided for me. Good luck, and I’ll be missing you.

RYAN: It’s nice to hear from you. Thank you, Robert.

SIEGEL: Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe was a regular on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” which aired for the last time last Sunday.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “PUT ON YOUR SUNDAY CLOTHES”)

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) Put your Sunday clothes. There’s lots of world out there.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Last week at Boston’s Fenway Park, fans openly used racial slurs, and in one case they were directed at Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones. NPR explores if the incidents are isolated or part of a larger problem.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Last week, Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones said he was the target of racial slurs during a game at Fenway Park in Boston. A day later at Fenway, there was another fan using another racial insult this time directed at a Kenyan woman who sang the national anthem. NPR’s Tom Goldman reports that people are wondering if these incidents are isolated or part of a growing problem.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: While the furor around Adam Jones has receded, the discussion hasn’t even 3,000 miles west of Fenway Park.

(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)

GOLDMAN: On an otherwise carefree afternoon, baseball fans at Angel Stadium of Anaheim stopped to talk about hate speech. None of those we polled this past weekend said they’d ever witnessed it at a ballgame, but all of them said they wouldn’t stay quiet if they did. Amanda Israel is a first-year dental student at USC.

AMANDA ISRAEL: I would honestly – I wouldn’t even go to the usher. I would go straight to the person. I mean, yeah, some people may be afraid to kind of approach it, but I think if you approach it yourself, you’ll know that it will get taken care of, whereas somebody might just brush it off because they don’t want to engage in conflict.

HARRY EDWARDS: I think it’s a positive thing for us to be talking about it.

GOLDMAN: That’s longtime sociologist and civil rights activist Dr. Harry Edwards. He says a national conversation about hate speech at the ballpark is especially positive because historically, black athletes dealt with racist taunts by themselves, athletes from Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Shaquille O’Neal and so many others who weren’t famous. But Dr. Edwards says with Fenway Park, we need to know what it is we’re talking about, an isolated incident or…

EDWARDS: Are we talking about these individuals as simply the latest manifestation of the much wider problem in American society?

GOLDMAN: Perhaps. Dr. Richard Lapchick directs the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. He tracks racist incidents in sports. In 2016, he says there were 31 nationwide, mostly affecting pro athletes.

RICHARD LAPCHICK: It was triple the year before.

GOLDMAN: That jump from 11 to 31 came at a time when there was a reported 20 percent increase in hate crimes nationwide. But few, if any, of those crimes had the counterpoint seen last week at Fenway Park when fans showed their support for Adam Jones. Again, here’s Dr. Harry Edwards.

EDWARDS: You can go from a racist incident that goes viral one day and the very next day have a standing ovation for that same athlete by 35,000 people. That carries a message with it.

GOLDMAN: Dr. Edwards says over the last 50 years, he’s witnessed the power of sports as a lever for social change. It’s a stretch to expect baseball to provide a roadmap for dealing with this country’s intractable issue of race relations. Still, MLB wants to send a message within its world. For at least the last decade, all 30 teams have been required to give fans the opportunity to report hate speech by alerting an usher or by sending a text to club officials. Late last week, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said MLB is surveying each team’s policies, what they do to handle Adam Jones-like incidents.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ROB MANFRED: As a prelude to giving consideration to some more industry-wide guidelines in this area.

GOLDMAN: At a minimum, baseball hopes to deliver what fans want from a day at the park – a day away from the world outside. Tom Goldman, NPR News.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Did you pay a little extra for a sports star’s name on your latest pair of sneakers? Well, a budding NBA player’s dad is relentlessly promoting the chance to pay even more for potential star power.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Did you pay a little bit extra for that last pair of sneakers – maybe even a lot more so that some sports star’s name could grace your ankles? Well, sports commentator Pablo Torre says you can now pay an even bigger premium for the mere potential of star power cache.

PABLO TORRE: If you haven’t heard of a man named LaVar Ball, consider yourself an endangered species. LaVar’s son, Lonzo Ball, is a relatively quiet kid, a point guard out of UCLA and a surefire top pick in June’s NBA draft.

But Lonzo has very little to do with why his dad is dominating the sports news cycle or why LaVar was called the worst thing to happen to basketball in the last hundred years by an executive at Nike, which passed on signing his son to a shoe contract, as did Adidas and Under Armour. All of that is happening because LaVar says stuff like this, from an ESPN segment.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LAVAR BALL: We going to get a billion dollars. Trust and believe that. I’ve told my boys this. Somebody got to be better than Michael Jordan. Why not you?

TORRE: He also says stuff like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BALL: I have the utmost confidence in what my boy’s doing. I’m going to tell you right now, he better than Steph Curry to me. Here, put Steph Curry on UCLA’s team right now. And put my boy on Golden State, and watch what happens.

TORRE: …And also stuff like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BALL: I don’t care if I’m viewed off the rails ’cause guess what? I am off the rails. So it don’t matter what y’all say.

TORRE: In that aforementioned quest for a billion dollars, notably, the Ball family had been seeking a business partner for Big Baller Brand, the family’s apparel company, instead of the typical endorsements for Lonzo. But with none of those giant corporations interested, Big Baller Brand was left to set its own retail price, which is why Lonzo’s custom-designed sneaker can now be had for a mere $495, which is more than twice as expensive as any Nikes endorsed by LeBron James. When this was announced last week, NBA coaches like Golden State’s Mike Brown had roughly the reaction you’d expect in response to a reporter’s question.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Would you buy your kids a pair of shoes for $500…

MIKE BROWN: (Laughter).

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: From an unproven NBA player?

BROWN: No.

TORRE: But while LaVar may be a delusional huckster, we should also be clear about something. He isn’t the downfall of basketball culture. In fact, the guy is just playing by the rules of the game. Yes, demanding a business partnership sounds ludicrous, until you realize that LeBron, who preaches seeking equity over endorsements, is pioneering that very model himself. And yes, $495 sounds like an arbitrarily exorbitant price point for a basketball sneaker, until you realize that $200, objectively, is too.

And yes, unabashed self-promotion sounds like a self-defeating tactic, until you realize that the most precious resource in the Internet age is attention, which LaVar generates nearly as easily as the president of the United States. So no, you don’t have to buy his son’s sneakers. But in sports, as in politics, you should never underestimate the upside of going off the rails.

INSKEEP: Commentator Pablo Torre is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The Yankees beat the Cubs last night in an 18-inning game that lasted six hours and five minutes, and broke the record for the most combined strikeouts in any game.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The New York Yankees played the Chicago Cubs last night at Wrigley Field – and played and played and played.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

They played into the morning, in fact. They tied in the bottom of the ninth and played to the 18th inning. For those of you who are math or baseball-challenged, that is nine more innings than usual.

MCEVERS: Six hours and five minutes of baseball, the longest major league game this season.

SIEGEL: There were many challenges.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DAN SHULMAN: You need some new baseballs. Four hundred and seventy-two pitches, 41 strikeouts, just shy of tying the major league record. We need a new supply of baseballs.

AARON BOONE: Rub ’em (ph) up. Rub ’em up.

SIEGEL: That’s ESPN’s Aaron Boone and Dan Shulman, used with permission of Major League Baseball.

MCEVERS: Another challenge for this marathon of a game was keeping the fans awake. One stretch at the seventh inning wasn’t enough, so they stretched again in the 14th.

SIEGEL: A few innings later, their fortitude paid off.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SHULMAN: New major league record, 44th strikeout in a game.

MCEVERS: And yet that record did not stand. When the Yankees finally won in the 18th inning, the number of strikeouts was up to 48.

SIEGEL: They were thrown by 15 different pitchers for a total of 583 pitches in this very long baseball game.

MCEVERS: Not just long for players and fans. ESPN’s Buster Olney set his own record.

BUSTER OLNEY: As a sideline reporter, you know, I have to remain in place basically from the first pitch to the end of the game. So I stopped drinking liquids at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon because I can’t go to the bathroom during the course of the game. So the game started at 7:08. And we get to 1 o’clock, we get to the 18th inning, and I have a crisis developing.

MCEVERS: Happy to say crisis averted.

SIEGEL: A final note. This is not the longest major league baseball game ever. That honor belongs to the White Sox and the Brewers. In 1984, they played for eight hours and six minutes, 25 innings, before Chicago won.

(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE BENSON’S “BENSON’S RIDER”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Lakshmi Singh talks to Tommy Caldwell, the first to free climb a 3,000 foot “Dawn Wall” granite cliff, about his book The Push: A Climber’s Journey of Endurance, Risk and Going Beyond Limits.

LAKSHMI SINGH, HOST:

For professional musicians, the instrument on which they play is more than just a tool of the trade. It can also be a muse, a partner and a voice. A new book titled “Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung” shares one artist’s story of finding her inspiration only to have it stolen away. We’ll let the author take it from here.

MIN KYM: My name’s Min Kym, and I play the violin.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: I started playing at the age of 6 and a half. I won my first competition when I was 11. And, yeah, I’ll start it from there.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: It took me until adulthood to be able to say the word child prodigy. Like, when I was a child and people used to sort of, you know, talk about me in that way, I was so mortified. I mean, it was just, you know, you just don’t want to be. I just wanted to have fun.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: From a very young age, I was aware that the most important thing as a violinist and as a musician is to find your voice through the right instrument.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SINGH: And for a professional soloist, that means a top shelf violin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And for Kym, that meant a Stradivarius. She had saved all of her competition winnings for this purpose. Now she just needed to find the right one.

KYM: The dealer who I was talking to came to my parents’ house. I was 21. And he had a double case with him and two violins. And everybody was sort of pointing towards one of the violins which had a incredibly sonorous and powerful sound, everything that as a soloist you would be looking for. So I picked it up and I drew my bow across it, and, yeah, of course, it sounded magnificent.

But it was like I was wearing an incredibly beautiful gown that didn’t suit me. And so I put it down, and I picked up the other one. And it was smaller. It had been repaired. It got through the walls, and I could see that. However, when I played that first note – just, oh, my goodness – the vibrations of it. I knew this was my voice.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: It had an incredible soprano. It was very bell-like. It had this what I like to call space around the notes.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: You could almost hear (laughter) – this is really going to make me sound like a fruitcake actually, but you could hear an orbit around the note.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: The real true partnership I felt was with this Strad. And I had my violin for 10 years, and I was still getting to know it. Even after 10 years, it was still showing me new things. It was teaching me new ways of playing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: But that was short lived. Unfortunately, it’s real life. It isn’t a fairytale.

SINGH: What happened next made headlines.

KYM: I remember it like it was just, you know, moments ago. It was a cold November evening. I’d had an asthma attack earlier. So I wasn’t feeling very well, and I had a argument with my boyfriend at the time who was going to look after my violin. And there were only two other people in my life that I’ve ever entrusted my violin. So I was very reluctant not to have it in my possession, but I did agree to let him look after the violin. And one minute it was there, and the next minute it was gone.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SINGH: While Kym and her boyfriend sat in a train station cafe, three thieves snagged her Stradivarius out from under the table.

KYM: I’ve relived that moment – I sort of think if this hadn’t happened, then that wouldn’t have happened. You know, if we hadn’t made this decision, if I hadn’t made that decision, you know, and I went through it, I went through it with such a fine-toothed comb with the detectives. And he just reminded me that he’s a professional. I’m a professional. And they were professional thieves. It’s one of those things that I still find so horribly painful to talk about.

I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt as though I was just sort of a shell of a person. You know, when it’s a human relationship, it’s something that everybody can relate to and understand. But I think as a violinist, as a musician, as an artist when, you know, the relationship you have with your particular art, it’s something that lives inside you. And it’s – it has a life of its own. And that’s very difficult to explain or describe. And so, you know, after three years, it was recovered. I was on the train, and I – and the phone rang. And it was Detective Rose (ph), and he said, Min, I have good news for you. So I thought, well, he’s never said that before.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KYM: For three years, my spirits were just on the floor. And in that nanosecond, they just completely lifted again, and I felt human again. I felt like me.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SINGH: Kym wishes her story would have ended with her being reunited with her violin, but unfortunately it didn’t. By the time the Stradivarius was found, Kym had already spent the money she received from the insurance claim on a new violin, so she could continue with her career.

KYM: Too much time had passed, so for financial reasons, I wasn’t able to buy my violin back. One of the most important things that I learned throughout this whole process is that we have such little control over anything, but one thing that we do have control is how you deal with the next steps forward. Writing actually finding this new voice, it helped unblock my musical life. And, you know, for the first time in seven years or so, I felt hopeful again.

SINGH: That was violinist and author Min Kym. Her book “Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung” is out now.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The Sports World is Forever Changed. Introducing Lonzo’s 1st Signature Shoe: The ZO2 Prime. pic.twitter.com/5JN1OLxlZS

— Big Baller Brand (@bigballerbrand) May 4, 2017

Independence is Beautiful. We are proud to present the ZO2 Wet.
.
.
.
Signed By Lonzo | LED Box Included pic.twitter.com/OnaUCLlLZQ

— Big Baller Brand (@bigballerbrand) May 4, 2017

Mike Brown says he won’t be buying LaVar Ball’s $500 signature LO2’s…or his $200 pair of flip flops pic.twitter.com/HZwhGchwBA

— KNBR (@KNBR) May 5, 2017

Hey @Lavarbigballer real big baller brands don’t over charge kids for shoes. pic.twitter.com/N2U0VPXXyt

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) May 4, 2017

Lonzo Ball’s shoes r $495/if he plays in the @NBA like he did vs BBN De’Aaron Fox they’ll go for $4.95 @darrenrovellhttps://t.co/hz6em0rqu1

— Dick Vitale (@DickieV) May 5, 2017

Lonzo Ball’s shoes in 6 months: pic.twitter.com/3WPDabYfuN

— Just Me. (@NoThoughtsHere) May 5, 2017

Lonzo Ball reveals his new shoe for $500 pic.twitter.com/0TH5o6j8YL

— Tom Brazy ?? (@Chuck__Says) May 4, 2017

& Lastly, The ZO2 Slide. pic.twitter.com/gyzHscfA3w

— Big Baller Brand (@bigballerbrand) May 4, 2017

Anu is seven and goes to school in Birmingham. Look what happened when she showed her friends her new sports blade. It’s just gorgeous!???? pic.twitter.com/Aa1UlnhlQy

— BBC Midlands Today (@bbcmtd) May 3, 2017

Adam Jones was given a standing ovation before his first at bat on Tuesday at Fenway. ??? pic.twitter.com/LsGr71JzYz

— TotalProSports (@TotalProSports) May 3, 2017

Fact: I’m Black too ??Literally stand up for @SimplyAJ10 tonight and say no to racism. We as @RedSox and @MLB fans are better than this.

— Mookie Betts (@mookiebetts) May 2, 2017