How the Reds’ Will Benson was shaped by the brother he never met

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September 26, 2023

CINCINNATI — There’s evidence of a future major-leaguer throughout Will Benson’s childhood room, a sports-adoring, adrenaline-thirsting teenager’s sanctuary that has remained untouched during his baseball journey.

There’s the bat bearing the signature of Hank Aaron, one of baseball’s luminary sluggers, especially to an Atlanta kid with dreams of powering baseballs into the outfield seats. The bat displaying his own name, presented to him the night he became a 2016 first-round draft pick. His geometric painting of the MLB logo. The two team pictures from the Duke baseball program, which Will nearly joined, with the maxims: “Trust your process” and “Preparation has no offseason.”

The most telling hint, though, that Will was destined for a big-league batter’s box is the busted violin that, for 20 years, has collected dust on the top shelf.

Will’s father, Ted, wanted Will to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Theodore Charles.

TC’s primary passions were violin and T-ball. But Will’s mother, Ramona, barged into Will’s room — TC’s old room — and caught her son swatting baseballs with the stringed instrument. The damaged tailpiece signaled the end of Will’s orchestral career.

Now, at 25, he pummels fastballs with a burgundy Chandler maple bat.

Will’s big-league ambition, his insistence on aiding Atlanta kids and his drive to reward his parents – and reimburse them for violin repairs – all trace back to an afternoon 28 months before he was born.

TC’s spirit has propelled Will throughout his baseball journey, one that has taken him from the brink of early retirement to the front line of a pennant race with the Reds. TC reminds Will why the Bensons hold onto family bonds with an unrelenting grip, especially as Will blissfully stares at the cutout of his baby boy’s face that dangles from the mirror in his Jeep.

Theodore Charles’ presence permeates every part of Will’s life – even though they never met.

One spring morning in 2018, Will stood near a back field at the Indians’ complex in Arizona and cried, reflecting on a note he received from his mom a few weeks earlier.

There aren’t 29 days in February but between today and 3/1 is the 22nd anniversary of your brother’s death. Today you made the darkest date of the year brighter. Love you to the moon and beyond. — Mom

That spring, a 19-year-old Will, sporting No. 66, pinch-hit in Cleveland’s final Cactus League tuneup. He smacked a two-run homer that clanged off the metal overhang over the right-field concourse.

His mom’s message, he said, reminded him why he so desperately wanted to thrive on the diamond.

That home run reminded him that he could.

Will convinced himself he would reach the majors a year after he was drafted, a teenager with a gap-tooth smile who carried around a lucky foxtail keychain, wreaking havoc on a league full of grizzled pitchers with a decade’s worth of big-league scars.

“Baseball,” says Will’s lifelong friend and former Cleveland teammate, Xzavion Curry, “is not just a smooth ride.”

That applies to a prospect with athleticism oozing from his 6-foot-5 frame, with enough muscle to plan to walk on to Coach K’s Duke basketball team, with enough speed to swipe bases and cover miles of outfield terrain and with enough power to produce a four-homer game in A-ball. And, as Ramona is quick to remind him, with enough flexibility to complete an arabesque — he begrudgingly learned that from his mom and sister, both dancers — which helped when stretching to snag a fly ball or when contorting to corral a missed jumper.

At the end of each minor-league season, his mom would meet him in whatever small town he spent the summer. They packed up his belongings, shut off his utilities and trekked back to Atlanta.

But in 2019, Will preferred a solo trip home from Lynchburg, Va. His parents waited for him at the front door, ready to praise him for trudging through another marathon.

Instead, Will told them he was done with baseball. The kid who every waking moment of his childhood needed a ball to rebound or swing at or kick, the kid who took batting practice with a violin — he was ready for something else.

“This defeated person was standing in front of us,” Ramona says.

He still loved the sport. But after repeating A-ball and suffering through a rotten second half, he just didn’t think he was capable.

They countered with encouraging statistics and home-run highlights. They asked him to stick with it for one more year. The following summer, when the pandemic wiped out the minor-league season, Will limped through two months in the Constellation Energy League, a four-team outfit tossed together in Sugar Land, Texas.

He took longer than he preferred to adjust to each new level. He was passed over in the Rule 5 Draft. He grappled with the purpose of it all.

But last summer, as he fetched Taco Bell for his then-girlfriend, he received a call informing him the Guardians were promoting him to the majors.

“It’s a beacon of hope for people with similar stories,” Will says, “people with similar backgrounds.”

In his first full major-league season, Benson hit .268/ .359/ .498 for a 127 OPS+ and stole 15 bases. (Dylan Buell / Getty Images)

On Feb. 29, 1996, Ramona received a call at work to rush to the children’s hospital.

Amid the chaos of afternoon dismissal, with children spilling out of Fickett Elementary School, her 5-year-old had been run over by his school bus. By the time Ramona arrived, TC had died.

Five days later, they held his funeral service at Wheat Street Baptist Church. A gathering necessitated by an inconceivably devastating, paralyzing tragedy carried an uplifting tenor.

“Life is a gift that is not promised,” Ramona says. “We never know how long we’re going to have, so you have to appreciate every moment as it occurs. When something happens that I can’t change, I have to immediately find a way to get through it and accept it. I was so immensely grateful for the fact that if TC had to die that day, he died knowing that he was loved every single day. Who has that? I had not had a chance to disappoint him, because he was only 5 1/2. I had not had a chance to destroy his image of how wonderful the world is, because parents do that. We talked about the things that we were grateful for and we celebrated the good things in his life.

“Everybody grieves differently and that’s how we got through it is that we accepted that from everybody. Do what you have to do to get through this.”

Ramona described the loss of their son as a tornado merging with a hurricane, their world overrun by howling winds and static rainfall. They abandoned their bid to purchase a new home. They delayed their plans to have a third child, “a tiebreaker” who would tilt the advantage in the Benson household, since Ramona and Heather found themselves on the opposite side of Ted and TC in every debate.

“It really derailed so much,” Ramona says.

Ramona preserved a memory box for each of her three children. Each box contains the onesie they wore home from the hospital, their favorite childhood book and other keepsakes. When Will’s sister, Heather, had a baby girl, Ramona bequeathed Heather’s box to her daughter. Will’s box included “Charlotte’s Web,” which he used to call “The Spider and the Bugs,” and a copy of “Pocahontas.” When Will welcomed his son, Ramona passed along Will’s memory box.

“The thing that’s so hurtful for me is that there will never be anybody to give TC’s box to,” Ramona says.

She has finally reached a point in which the precise number of years, months, days, hours and minutes since her son passed no longer flash constantly in her head. She isn’t sure if her mind is slipping with age, or if it’s because she has two children and two grandchildren to keep her occupied.

On March 1, 2023, a non-Leap Year, with no exact anniversary of TC’s passing, Will and his fiancée, Lindsey, welcomed their first child.

“Family was there when there was nothing but you in a diaper,” Will says. “That’s what I’m seeing being a father. Somebody had to do that for me. They made the sacrifice for me to be where I am today.”

Since the day he was drafted in 2016, Will has discussed partnering with his friend Curry and other Atlanta-rooted big-leaguers to create a baseball Mecca in Fulton County, with an array of diamonds surrounding one, main field, a haven welcoming anyone with a passion for the sport.“Why else are we doing this?” Will says. “Obviously, yes, to provide for our families. But also, to give another kid an opportunity just like I had, to make it more accessible, using the leverage and platform that I have.

“You’re going to see me and know that what I have is real and it’s attainable. I can set that example.”

Will and Curry had been inseparable since they played as Little Leaguers for the Sandtown Red Sox. They even began their climb through professional baseball together. Last February, as they finished the same weightlifting routine at the Guardians’ complex in Goodyear, Will noticed he had a missed call from team president Chris Antonetti. He knew what that meant.

Here he was, three weeks from becoming a father, his personal life headed for a metamorphosis. And now his work life was about to be flipped upside down, too.

Four months earlier, he was completing a gender reveal at Progressive Field, exploding a baseball to spread blue dust across the infield dirt. He was a wide-eyed rookie contributing a small role in pushing the Guardians to an AL Central title.

As the new season approached, Will was fixated on proving himself, carving out a regular role and rewarding the Guardians for their seven-figure investment and their patience.

So as he retrieved his phone to connect with his boss, he told Curry — the two were called up to Cleveland within two weeks of each other in 2022 — he was going to refuse to be traded.

“Look, I know what this call is for,” Will said to his friend, “and you better be coming with me or I ain’t going.”

Will had no actual say on the matter, of course. Antonetti told him he was being dealt to Cincinnati. For spring training, Will was only relocating a half-mile away on S. Wood Boulevard. He could wave to his old teammates each morning as he drove to the Reds’ facility.

“I don’t care what anybody says, there’s still a boy in there who doesn’t like rejection,” says Ramona, who had crocheted onesies with the Cleveland logo in anticipation of her grandson’s arrival.

“That whole time period was very testing,” Will admits.

Will Benson celebrated Father’s Day with his dad, Ted (left), and his son, Theo. (Courtesy of the Benson family)

Before Will’s first major-league home run whizzed past the right-field fence at Great American Ball Park, Ted was high-fiving his wife.

Ramona was fixated on the TV, which lagged a minute behind Ted’s MLB Gameday app. He’s too impatient to wait for the results to unfold on the broadcast, so as his wife sat on the couch, anxiety swallowing her whole, he couldn’t contain himself.

After Will connected with Evan Phillips’ fastball, he turned to the Reds’ dugout, shouted and slammed his bat to the ground. He initiated his trot around the bases, knowing his teammates would be waiting at home plate to toast to his walk-off blast.

The previous half-inning, between pitches, Will started mapping out the sequence in the outfield. He knew he was due up second. He knew the Dodgers would turn to their top righty reliever. And then, boom, a signature moment to punctuate another victory for a team announcing its arrival in the NL Central.

Every game, Ramona fields texts from high school friends and from her Westminster Wildcat mom group. The group thread for Will’s Oldest Fan Club, a collection of his aunts and uncles, never relents. She hears from parents of local Georgia players who consult the Bensons for advice on the scouting and drafting process and on how to navigate the professional ranks. When the Reds faced the Cardinals earlier this month, Ramona exchanged messages with Jordan Walker’s father, Derek.

Anytime Will hits one into the seats, Ramona’s brother sends the proper number of flexed bicep emoji to reflect his home run total.

Will’s emergence started last summer, when a conversation with longtime big-leaguer John McDonald spurred him to study video of Barry Bonds and Mike Trout. Will marveled at how they resisted chasing pitches, and how that made the pitcher sweat. He trimmed his strikeout rate at Triple A and, this year, he has compiled elite chase and walk rates. When he does connect, he inflicts damage. His .857 OPS ranks second on the Reds and fourth in the league among rookies with at least 300 plate appearances.

“Doing what I always knew I could is obviously awesome,” he says. “But the work is not done. I won’t look up until I’m done playing.”

That’s because he knows how quickly a career can evaporate. He was booted to the minors in April and every cell in his body told him to sulk and stress about the unlit road back to the big leagues. He referred to it as the most difficult juncture in his career, a real “moment of tribulation.”

And then he thought about his newborn. What sort of message would that relay? Could he share the saga of his career without feeling ashamed?

“I couldn’t tell my son that I gave up,” he says. “I can’t tell my son to keep going when my life work doesn’t replicate that. I wanted to give him an example and this is the most pure example you can give.”

Said his manager, David Bell: “It was incredible. It was very real. I felt like right then, he was going to get back and he was going to be better when he got back.”

As the Reds attempt to seize a Wild Card berth, Will’s parents will be watching – Ted in real-time and Ramona on a minute delay.

They traveled to Cincinnati for the weekend series against the Pirates. They caught a Reds series in person in Atlanta in April. The family also gathered for Father’s Day in Houston, where three generations of Benson boys finally united.

There was Ted, the reserved, 6-foot-9 former Purdue center and the subject of Ramona’s book, How to Babysit a Grandpa.

There was Will, the big-leaguer working to solve, simultaneously, life in the majors and life as a father.

And there was his baby boy, Theo.

(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Rob Tringali / Getty Images)

In Mountain View, Ark., Preserving the Ozark Way of Life

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Reporters News Wire

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September 25, 2023

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A merciful evening breeze kicked up, swatting away the Arkansas heat and giving wing to the melodies coming from two of the gazebos in the grassy park. In the larger one, a dozen people were playing the last strains of “Barbry Allen” on fiddles, mandolins, guitars, a stand-up bass, dulcimers, banjos and even a dulci-banjo.

A pretty tune I did not recognize drew me over to the smaller group. But I never got to ask what it was because, just as I approached, they stopped. Then their fiddler lowered his instrument and, in a clear, bold bass, started singing “I’ve Been Everywhere” — all of it, even the often neglected opening verse that name-checks Winnemucca. With the others playing along, he gave a performance Johnny Cash would have admired, no stumbles or stutters and not a single -burg, -ville or -ton forgotten.

I did wonder, though, why he hadn’t thrown in “Mountain View” — the town we were in that evening — not only because it would have fit so nicely with “Baraboo, Waterloo, Kalamazoo,” but also because I suspected that he, like me and a lot of other people in that park, had gone to some effort to get there.

Crafts and characters

All the roads to Mountain View, the seat of Stone County, in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas, are two-lane and twist through towns with names like Pumpkin Bend, Grubbs, Fifty-Six and Oil Trough. The last of these, a settlement beside the White River, traces its appellation back to the early 19th century, when hunters and trappers there used hollowed logs to render bear fat into lamp and cooking oil.

Those roads are all paved now, though that wasn’t the case until the 1970s. Mountain View wasn’t electrified until the 1930s, and didn’t get much radio until after World War II. Even decades later, it still lacked certain basic amenities — an absence that eventually played a part in the creation of the attraction that today brings many people to Mountain View for the first time: Ozark Folk Center State Park.

It’s not exactly on the way to anywhere. “You have to really want to come here,” Keith Symanowitz, the park’s promotions director, said. Even so, some 90,000 people do every year.

The center, which turned 50 this year, is singular among Arkansas’s 52 state parks in that its draw is not landscape and nature. “Our resource here is the people,” Mr. Symanowitz explained. “Our mission here is to perpetuate, present and promote the Ozark way of life.”

They do so by giving the people of the region, which is rural and largely white, a place to do the things they’ve always done — and where folks “from off,” as they say there, can watch them do it and even try it themselves: making quilts, brooms, knives and home remedies; carving wood, forging iron, tanning and shaping leather; weaving and dyeing fabric. One woman makes dolls from dried corn shucks — exactly, she told me, as her mother did, and her grandmother before that. “Play with your garbage!” she called out as I left her shop.

No one is in costume or character; while some craftspeople come from off, many, like that doll maker, are locals who are just doing at the park what they would be doing at home.

“There was great isolation, really, for ever so long” in the area, explained Kay Thomas. Everyone learned to make “stuff that you had to have for everyday existence.” Ms. Thomas, who is retired now, came from off (in her case, Little Rock) just out of high school and started working at the folk center when it opened.

It’s not uncommon to meet people who have been at the park that long or almost. A woman who worked at its gift shop until last spring grew up in a log cabin built by her father — no electricity or running water. That cabin, which the family abandoned in 1963, was later moved to the park and is now an exhibit there.

‘We’re not Branson’

For people who hear “Ozarks” and think of the bright lights, capacious venues and folksy kitsch of Branson, Mo., 110 or so miles northwest, this is very different. By design. “There has always been a consciousness around the folk center: We’re not Branson,” Charley Sandage, who helped get the center going, explained.

The Ozarks straddle the Arkansas-Missouri border, but the Missouri part has more industry, is more densely populated and draws more visitors. Historically, Mr. Sandage said, “Missourians thought they were better than Arkansas people.”

Like underdogs everywhere, people in the Arkansas Ozarks made that status a point of pride. They also had the confidence to go their own way. If just the Ozark region had voted before the Civil War, Mr. Sandage said, secession “never would have happened.”

Back in the early 1960s, Mr. Sandage explained, Stone County “was statistically among the poorest counties in the United States.” The town desperately needed a water and sewer system, but couldn’t afford one. People started to wonder if Mountain View might be able to attract federal grants using, as Mr. Sandage put it, its “deep pool” of Ozark culture, which abided long after other such pools had dried up almost everywhere else.

The folk center was open within a decade. Today, in addition to local craftspeople and musicians, it features extensive gardens growing many heritage plants that Ozark people have made use of for generations, like jewel weed, whose juice can soothe chigger bites, and elderberry, which when distilled into a tincture is said to break fevers. And the park has a thousand-seat theater, which hosts shows, traveling acts, weekly square dances and “Ozark Highlands Radio,” a variety program that airs on more than 100 stations nationwide.

Time to make music

Mountain View got its water and sewer systems, but aside from that, and the fact that you can get at least some cellphone service in town, it seems not much else has changed there since the ’60s. Once after supper, walking down Main Street, I met a young woman who greeted me with, “And how are you this fine evening?” A block down, I looked through the plate-glass window of the town community center and saw a crowd gathering; a woman inside, spotting me, came to the door and invited me in. “This is our monthly meet-up,” she explained. “We’ll be talking about greenhouses.”

Though Mountain View’s economy depends to a large extent on tourism, the place is — and this may be hard for someone from off to accept at first — utterly authentic. People there are just living their lives as they always have, not because they think you will find it enchanting, but because that is what they do and they like doing it. They are quite happy to have you there, but no one will fawn over you or do anything other than what they would be doing anyway.

And what a great many of them are doing is making music together.

Three nights a week, a modest space called the Mountain View Meeting Place becomes Club Possum, which hosts local musicians and bands and livestreams them on YouTube and Facebook. The shows last two hours, and admission is free. The audience is a mix of local and from off, and while there’s no bar — Stone County is dry, a fact many residents credit with preserving the town’s character — you can buy a bag of popcorn for $1.

Walk around town almost any evening when the weather is amenable and you will see and hear musicians playing. Once I came upon four women — two banjos, two mountain dulcimers — jamming on the side porch of a shop called Mountain View Music. One of them explained that the tune they’d just played, “Santa Anna’s Retreat,” had Celtic undertones because the Mexican general the song was named for had Irish mercenaries in his ranks.

The folk center is among the largest employers in the area, and many of the musicians you’ll encounter in the evenings have day jobs at the park, including two of the women in that ensemble. One of the banjo players, who is potter there, told me at her shop the next day that she also played with a different group on Saturdays: “I could do that, or I could stay at home and watch TV.”

They play on porches, on lawns, at inns and around the courthouse, but most often they play at a green space on Washington Street that people call the pickin’ park, sandwiched between a trailer that sells ice cream and a pink, Victorian bed-and-breakfast. You can sometimes find people playing there in the heat of day, but as the light wanes, many more come out to make music in one of the park’s three gazebos.

I’ve watched gatherings as small as two and as large as 15 jam together, individuals dropping in when they get off work or out when they go home to bed. They play bluegrass, folk, classic country and gospel. But the music you will hear most often is old-time string band: tunes and ballads that traveled across the Atlantic on wooden ships in the 18th and 19th centuries. These are people whose ancestors settled in the Ozarks not long after the Louisiana Purchase, but also people from off who come with their instruments just to do this. Some have known each other for decades, even their whole lives. Others have never met before.

They have, it seems, a few unspoken rules: They don’t use written music or electric speakers, and they never, ever pass the hat or open an instrument case, toss in a few seed dollars and hope you’ll follow their example. “If someone offered a tip, they’d probably get their hand bit,” Mr. Sandage, who plays guitar, explained.

Treasure for the ears

There are other things that entice people from off to motor up those slender winding roads to Stone County, like Blanchard Springs Caverns, a subterranean wonderland on National Forest land that’s also celebrating its 50th anniversary. And it’s tempting to conjure some metaphor about Mountain View being an underground treasure like those caves. But it’s not. Its luster is right out in the open, at the folk center and the pickin’ park, on patches of grass all over town and on porches, like the one at Mountain View Music.

“Just in our front yard alone, there may be a group on that little end porch, another group here right outside the front door, another group out there on the little pickin’ pad,” said Scott Pool, who owns the store with his wife, Shay. By day, they sell, buy and repair instruments, and make them to order, but after they close up, their building becomes a community hub. Elsewhere, that might be odd. Here, it’s emblematic.

“Branson is a fun place to go; it’s got a lot of attractions, a lot of theaters,” Mr. Pool mused. “But if you took away the tourists in Branson, there’d be nothing left. Here, if you took away all the tourists, it would hurt us all economically, but people would still be playing music on the square, because it’s for the love of the music. It’s just what they do.”

To hear more about Mountain View and Ozark culture, check out the New York Times Audio app.

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Brian Harman, a 36-year-old Ryder Cup rookie, has proven he belongs

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Reporters News Wire

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September 25, 2023

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Brian Harman talks like a man who has come to understand his past. That’s why he can tell you about the guy who signed all those autographs.

That was him at Whatever Tournament in Whatever Town in two-thousand-whatever. The specifics don’t matter because it was always the same. He’d finish the round, stop by the scoring tent and then head to the clubhouse. That’s where, inevitably, fans leaning over a rope awaited, dangling hats or pin flags or who-knows-what. Their faces strained, pleading for him — or anyone, really, who was playing in that PGA Tour event — to come over and sign. Of course, Harman would do the right thing. He’d wander over, pull the cap off a Sharpie and oblige. Maybe he’d nod. “You’re welcome.” Maybe he’d even push back the corners of his mouth into something resembling a smile.

But inside? Oh, that heat. The bad kind. A lid rattling atop the pot. “Internally, I’d be like, why do you want my autograph? I’m a middling tour player. I haven’t done anything. I’m not contending. I’m not one of the guys.”

All those years. All those autographs. Every time, he swirled a “B” into an “R” and scribbled whatever else he could muster. It was a reminder that the name on the paper didn’t live up to what it was supposed to.

He keeps talking …

“If I’m being honest, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by my career.”

Harman is at the point where he can say the hard part out loud because he’s only nine weeks removed from a moment of self-actualization that few ever come to. He’s still working to process it all. At age 36, after winning two PGA Tour events in 343 appearances over a 14-year professional career, he won the 2023 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool.

The numbers don’t lie… @HarmanBrian is ready to make an impact in Rome! pic.twitter.com/25VBgdV3Vs

— Ryder Cup USA (@RyderCupUSA) September 23, 2023

It happened that fast. Harman missed the cut at this year’s Masters. He missed the cut at the PGA Championship. He tied for 43rd place at the U.S. Open. Another year on a résumé everyone long ago stopped reading. He was what he’s always been — a very solid PGA Tour player with many millions of dollars in career earnings and zero notoriety. He went to Royal Liverpool ranked a respectful, albeit highly overlooked, No. 26 in the world rankings. He hadn’t won a tournament since the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship.

But then it all came together over four days. A brazen, rip-snorting performance. A six-shot victory. A new world.

Now Harman is readying to travel to Rome for his first Ryder Cup appearance. It’s a bizarre, unexpected twist on a career that was otherwise approaching its vanishing point. Harman could have very well played out these later years of his career in relative anonymity and retired to his 1,000-acre farm in rural Georgia. Instead, he’s both the oldest player on the 12-man United States team and one of four rookies. He’s old enough that his first career PGA Tour win at the 2014 John Deere Classic came over runner-up Zach Johnson, who will be the United States captain this week.

It isn’t easy to understand a new reality. But he’s trying.

“We’ve all got our own journeys and different reasons for being in different places at different times,” Harman says, looking for the right words, glancing around a converted barn near his family’s home in St. Simons Island, Ga., during a recent interview. “It’s not always apparent. But right now, I feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”

In what feels like a lifetime ago, Harman was a former No. 1-ranked amateur golfer in the world and All-American at Georgia, one of college golf’s great powerhouses. He starred on the winning 2005 and 2009 Walker Cup teams and a 2007 Palmer Cup team, playing with guys like Anthony Kim, Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler. Still, Harman was, at various stages of his junior career, the can’t-miss, no-doubt, next-big-thing. He walked across the driving range like a cold cross-wind. Everyone glanced over.

That feeling is something Harman chased for much of his 20s. The feeling of knowing he not only belongs, but that others are trying to catch him. As a modestly successful PGA Tour career played out, the shadow cast by his teenage self spread long and never missed a step. He was supposed to win, not just play.

“I used to wax poetic about, ‘oh, I was sooo good when I was a junior golfer,’” Harman says. “But eventually you come to the realization of, well, you’re not 16 anymore.”

The game, as it does, raced past. After turning pro in 2009, Harman saw players he grew up beating suddenly hoisting trophies at PGA Tour events. In time, new guys — younger, stronger, longer — showed up and started winning. There was no way to keep up, no way to stop what was coming. He was trying to slow the rising seas with sandbags. He had a reputation for being “gritty” and “a bulldog.” All kindly parlance for a smaller guy who fights like hell, but comes up short.

Today, thinking back, Harman admits to things no one wants to admit. The ugly stuff.

“The way that I felt watching some of my friends win — I hate the way that it made me feel,” he says. “I’m not proud of it. I feel guilty about it to this day.”

The problem with jealousy is it compounds. For Harman, as years passed, sediment built and settled, and built and settled. Even when Harris English, one of his closest friends, found success, Harman struggled not to see it as a reflection of his own shortcomings.

It festered in him. Worse, it distracted him.

“That jealousy will eat you to pieces,” he now says.

Harman married his wife, Kelly, in 2014. Then came three kids. The view gradually changed. From his late 20s, to his early 30s, to his mid-30s — he came to the realization that the expectations heaped upon him as a teenager manifested in him as an adult.

Then came another realization.

“I can’t believe I’ve been such an asshole,” Harman says. “So selfish. There’s plenty of success out there for everyone who works for it. Winning and being successful is a product of someone’s inner strife and hard work and dedication — all the things that I love about people.”

Harman came to understand all of this in recent years. Seeing Kevin Kisner win the 2021 Wyndham Championship hit him as a moment of joy. He realized what he’d been missing out on.

It takes something to admit all this out loud. Harman is far from the only player on tour to stress eat the ultimate question: Why not me? Golf inherently juxtaposes one’s self-worth versus that of his or her friends.

The Open Championship win gave Brian Harman enough points to automatically qualify for the Ryder Cup. (Warren Little / Getty Images)

It wasn’t until winning the Open two months ago that Harman really came to understand the weight he’d been carrying for all those years. The win wasn’t a relief. It was a release. He felt days and weeks and years of struggle and doubt and pain rise off his shoulders, swept down the English coastline. Jeremy Elliott, Harman’s agent and longtime friend, says he saw Harman leave Hoylake with “profound self-awareness.”

When he returned to action weeks later at the St. Jude Championship, Harman rolled a few putts on the practice green when a fellow player walked by to pass along congratulations.

“You know, I don’t feel any different,” Harman replied.

“Yeah,” the passerby said. “Well, you look different.”

He does, and it’s gotten him here. Harman did Zach Johnson (one of his closest friends on tour) a favor by qualifying for the U.S. team as a top-six points qualifier. He’s the oldest U.S. Ryder Cup rookie since 41-year-old Steve Stricker in 2008 and will be in a team room this week with a troop of young players he long ago watched breakthrough and had to swallow his envy. When someone like Justin Thomas walked onto the tour years back, winning tournaments and capturing an early major, Harman wasn’t exactly eager to build a bond. “Fact is, I would have absolutely killed to have a career like JT’s,” he says. But the ongoing Ryder Cup experience has brought with it some perspective. Harman and Thomas have grown close recently and are suddenly exchanging text messages regularly. Recently, Harman sent one note apologizing to Thomas “for taking so long” to come around to him. Harman has gotten to know Max Homa and Collin Morikawa, both of whom couldn’t possibly be more different. Last week, Homa sat aghast listening to a story of Harman’s catching an alligator by hand.

“I missed out on interacting with these guys,” Harman says, “and that’s on me.”

For a guy later in his career, Harman sure is learning a lot. He says “clarity has come by necessity.” All it took was nine weeks, one massive, cosmic shift, and now he’s one of the guys.

This time he’s asked, point-blank: Is this validation?

Harman pushes his shoulder up into a half-shrug. “I hate to say that now I belong.”

Spoken like a man who worked to get where he is.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton. Photos: Tracy Wilcox / PGA Tour, Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

Entelecheia Rolls-Out Its Newly Patented Security App “Crosspass” For Sending Passwords and Text Notes – Peer-To-Peer and Encrypts End-To-End

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Reporters News Wire

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September 24, 2023

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Crosspass takes a unique approach by requiring that users exchange short verification codes (PINs). These codes facilitate negotiating a symmetric encryption key and authenticating the communicating parties.

Lewes, Delaware, September 24, 2023, The digital age has brought about great advancements in communication. Unfortunately, it has created an environment for hackers, malware and ransomists. For many years, it was the same old encryption methods with slight variants. Along comes Entelecheia Inc. with its newly patented brilliant security App Crosspass. It no doubt sends a wake-up call throughout this industry sector.

Crosspass is the first secure end-to-end encryption solution that fits well with regular email. Simply include the access code of the note in the body an email message. The App personifies encryption that works naturally with email communication flows. Competing services based on sharing URLs are subject to JavaScript backdoors.

The Crosspass server, unlike servers supporting Instant Messengers, does not broker public keys. Consequently, user’s devices need to be online at the time of the transfer in order to communicate peer to peer. Because mobile phones are almost always online either through Wi-Fi or Cellular Data, Crosspass is designed as a mobile app.

The Crosspass server never sees user passwords or private notes. It relays blobs of data between two phones, but it cannot decrypt them. Also, it does not hold any encryption keys of users (no public, private, symmetric, or Diffie-Hellman shares). If the Crosspass server is compromised, the perpetrator must guess an equivalent of 11 coin flips in sequence in order to MITM a single exchange. Other server-based encryption apps could MITM without difficulty by giving out spurious cryptographic keys.

Some Crosspass features:

E2EE: One end is the sender’s mobile phone, and the other end is the recipient’s mobile phone. The encryption scheme is based on the OPAQUE protocol.
Text Notes: When users need to send more than just a password, they can use the text note option. For instance, they can use it for sending credit cards or bank account information.
Brute Force Attacks: The API server (a) does not keep any hashed passwords and (b) the app limits attempts to retrieve the password so that even it could not brute-force the PIN.
Impersonation Attacks: The app does not rely on receiving a recipient’s public key from the server. Therefore, a MITM who does not know the PIN cannot impersonate the recipient.
Free To Receive: It is always free to receive the passwords and notes which users send, so that the process has no barriers for recipients. Users can send three passwords for free. After that there is a one-time fee of $1 to continue sending.
Anonymous: Crosspass does not ask users for their phone numbers or email addresses. On the sender’s side only, it uses Push Notifications and has in-app purchases via App Store on iOS and Google Play on Android.

Crosspass helps communicate various types of confidential data:

Driving License numbers
Social Security numbers
Public keys
API credentials
Credit card numbers
Bank account numbers

With Crosspass, there is no login, no email or phone numbers required. Only a 4-digit PIN to secure a note, which like OTP can be used by someone only once. After the transfer, the note is deleted on the sender’s side and remains on the recipient’s phone for one day.

Media Contact:

Entelecheia Inc.
Attn: Media Relations
Lewes, Delaware
302-200-6074
press@entelecheia.io

New York’s Running Clubs Are an Opportunity for Exercise and Community

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Reporters News Wire

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September 24, 2023

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On a Thursday evening in early September, the Upper West Side Run Club met on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It was 6:30 p.m., and temperatures were hovering in the low 90s. But despite the extreme heat, over 25 people, ranging in age from teens to late 60s, showed up to run a four-mile loop around Central Park.

They made frequent stops at the water fountains. They also played a game called “Liars” to keep their minds off the brutal conditions.

Usually the group heads somewhere after to wind down with a coffee or beer. It was the women’s semifinals of the U.S. Open, so about three-fourths of them went to Gin Mill, a gastro pub on Amsterdam Avenue, to cheer on the American players Coco Gauff and Madison Keys. Still in their running clothes, the crew, high on endorphins, drank beers and ate burgers, some staying until the matches ended after midnight.

“Every running club is different, but ours is very social,” said Maddy Nguyen, 25, a tech recruiter who started the club in February. “It’s very loose and very easy to hang with us.”

Running clubs — in which people meet to run and often do something social after — have exploded in New York City, offering runners of all boroughs, skill sets and goals the opportunity to be part of a community.

Those who join are finding not only health benefits — it’s easier to stick to a running regimen when you have people holding you accountable and helping the miles pass faster — but social ones. They are meeting best friends, neighbors, activity partners, even future spouses through the clubs.

“I think it was the merging of two things,” said Kristopher Imperati, 36, who works in a luxury hotel and lives in West Harlem. He heads Front Runners New York, a running club for L.G.B.T.Q. people and their allies, that currently has almost 1,200 members.

“I think a lot of people took up running during the pandemic because it was one of the few things you could get up and do,” he added. “But the pandemic also spurred this desire to be part of groups, to do social things.”

Indeed, according to a report by Nielsen Sports released in the spring of 2021, 13 percent of all surveyed runners began during the pandemic. Twenty-two percent of respondents who were already running before the pandemic said they started running more once it started.

As they experience growth spurts, New York’s running clubs are struggling with how to keep their communities intact and deal with breakoff factions. Some clubs have chosen to organize with an elected board, sponsors and membership dues, while others criticize those steps as alienating or acts of selling out.

Then there are the turf wars and rivalries that naturally arise with so many runners trying to operate in the same parks and spaces — sometimes annoyingly, as when other run clubs take up an entire path — and sometimes with civility.

“There is kind of this unspoken code among run clubs,” said Ryo Yamamoto, 47, a creative director and a co-founder of the Old Man Run Club, which meets on the Lower East Side. “It’s understood that the Brooklyn Track Club does track workouts on Tuesday, so we wouldn’t take that space because it’s their thing.”

The turf issues have even extended to the all-important social media handle. Ms. Nguyen started the Upper West Side Run Club in February because she was looking for people with whom to train for a marathon. “I made an Instagram page and posted a bunch on Upper West Side Facebook groups,” she said.

The exact same week, coincidentally, Oliver Barrett, 33, a classical musician who also lives on the Upper West Side, was trying to start a club for the exact same reasons. “I actually was going to call mine the Upper West Side Run Club, and I saw it was available on Instagram, but I thought about it for too long and when I went back to grab it a week later, it was taken,” he said, laughing. He named his club the Upper West Side Runners instead.

‘You See People at Their Lowest’

Felipe Toribio, 35, who works in accounting and lives in Brooklyn, met his wife, Ting Li, 31, through a club named NYC Bridgerunners that runs on Wednesday evenings out of the Lower East Side.

“We met there once, and then she messaged me through Instagram a few days later and asked if I wanted to go on a run together,” he said, explaining they were both training for the New York City Marathon. “Then we would see each other at least once a week at the club. I definitely tried to impress her.”

“It is very easy to get to know someone through running because it’s easy to get emotional,” he added.

For Sarah Sibert, 24, a film writer who moved from Indiana to Manhattan three years ago, in the early months of the pandemic, her run club, the Dashing Whippets Running Team, which has chapters in Manhattan and Brooklyn, is her main community.

“I literally had no one in New York City — my roommate was even someone I found online,” said Ms. Sibert, who ran track in college. “Now everything I’ve experienced in New York City has been with someone from the Whippets. We go to Broadway, we go to birthday parties, we go to bars.”

She said running was particularly conducive to bonding. “You see each other without makeup; you see each other exhausted,” she said. “Running is such a challenging sport mentally, so you see people at their lowest. I think it creates this sense of security even more than you have with other friends. It’s like family.”

Too Big to Bond?

In May, Will Truettner, 32, a creative producer who lives in the West Village, started the Village Run Club because he wanted a sober activity. “In New York City, it can feel like the only way to socialize with people is to go drinking or go to a restaurant,” he said.

He came up with the tagline “New York’s Slowest Run Club.” “I wanted it to feel like the average person can come and meet new people and have fun,” he said. The club does a three-mile run up the West Side Highway and keeps a slow pace.

The run club now has eight to 10 people show up each week, which, to Mr. Truettner, feels like an ideal size. “When we have seven or eight people running, everyone has a group chat,” he said. “But when it gets more than 15, everyone starts breaking off into groups, and it becomes harder to meet people,” he said.

Indeed, other run clubs are seeing the repercussions of getting too big.

Mr. Yamamoto, from the Old Man Run Club, used to pride himself on creating such a close-knit community. “We had one member going through health stuff, and the whole running community rallied behind her,” he said. “They did a GoFundMe.”

Now that the club attracts over a hundred people for each run, he has noticed smaller groups breaking away after the run to do their own activities. “I hate saying cliques, but there are cliques,” he said. “There are six people who always go off to do something after, and it kind of bothers me, because I love the idea of family.”

To Charge, or Not to Charge

“It’s an operation, for sure,” said Mr. Imperati, the Front Runners president. The club has an elected board of directors and several committees (among them, social and coaching), and members pay $30 in annual dues. The Dashing Whippets also charge $30 a year.

Mr. Yamamoto of the Old Man Run Club feels strongly that runners in his club shouldn’t have to pay to join. “It’s a free club, a come-as-you-are kind of thing,” he said. The club, however, is supported by Nike and Oakley, so members get glasses and merchandise throughout the year, though there is no requirement to wear them.

When Stephen McGowan, 37, who works in graduate admissions at Fordham University, started the BX Pints and Pavement running club in the Bronx in 2019, he swore off dues. “The membership fee is that you show up with an open mind,” he said.

“I think it’s really important in the Bronx to have no barrier to entry,” he added. “If you have a fee, even a small one, you are holding someone back from participating, and then there is no point.”

‘I Just Found My People’

While some clubs are trying to make a name for themselves by offering free merchandise, social benefits or “owning” a day of the week, others are content just to be one of many clubs in the city.

“I think that for me personally, a rising tide lifts all ships,” Mr. Imperati said. “The more people are out there running, whether they are with our club or another club or not at all, it creates more resources for others. There are more stores that cater to runners. Some of the clubs are putting on races.”

“I know people who are like ‘Upper West Side or die, I’m never going to another run club,’ but also people who attend more than one club because it’s a great way to meet new people,” Ms. Nguyen of the Upper West Side Run Club said.

But some people just find the right fit. “The first one you try is usually the one you stick with,” she said.

That’s what happened to Shahin Behnamian, 34, who works in cybersecurity, when he joined the Village Run Club. He had been looking at other clubs, he said, but “I started with this one, and it ended up being a good one. I just found my people.”

How the $445 million Mets crashed and burned

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Reporters News Wire

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September 24, 2023

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It was May, barely a month into the Mets season, and the visiting clubhouse at Comerica Park was silent. The typical frenzy of a getaway day had been replaced by introspection, players sitting at nearly every locker, heads down as they scrolled through their phones.

In a span of 27 hours, the Mets had been swept by the lowly Tigers, their ninth loss in 11 games pushing them back to .500. That final loss in Detroit was punctuated by something that rarely, if ever, had to happen during a charmed 101-win season in 2022:

Buck Showalter called a postgame team meeting.

Showalter has long viewed the clubhouse as the players’ sanctuary, trusting a veteran squad in Queens to police itself. One day prior, in the midst of getting swept in a doubleheader, those players had held their own meeting. The simple gist, according to a veteran: “We’ve really got to play better.”

Showalter’s message that Thursday was, according to those there, “words of encouragement.” The perceived need for action, however, spoke volumes about the early direction of the 2023 Mets.

“We’re still good,” one player told himself, “…but I’m not 100 percent sure.”

This was when doubt first germinated in New York’s clubhouse — when they first diverged from the smooth sailing of 2022, hit choppier waters and learned that perhaps they lacked the instruments to navigate them.

“That series was kind of a wake-up call,” reliever Adam Ottavino said.

“Detroit was the highlight of, Hey, things are not really going the way we would like,” said Brandon Nimmo.

“It wasn’t just Detroit,” said another player — and that was the problem. The debacle against the Tigers would be the third in a run of five consecutive series losses, four of them to teams not expected to contend. June would go down as one of the worst months in franchise history. July would include a once improbable sell-off of established talent. And August would see them drop to last place.

Now, even this deep into the season, they struggle to come up with a satisfying answer to the main question that matters: How?

After nearly two dozen interviews with people who have experienced the failure firsthand, this is the inside story of how the $445 million Mets, the most expensive team in major-league history, crashed and burned.

His inability to live up to his own high expectations weighed heavily on Pete Alonso. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

It was late in June, and Pete Alonso had ducked his head into Showalter’s office — again — trying to explain himself. The month had unraveled into a nightmare for Alonso, a nightmare for the Mets. There had been a slump and a losing streak, an injury, a deeper slump and more losing. As Showalter would later recall, in those meetings, Alonso looked like he wanted to apologize for not driving in every run, for not hitting every home run.

Alonso would plead to his manager, “This isn’t who I am.”

“Pete, I know,” Showalter would kindly respond. “You don’t need to tell me this.”

Looking back in late August, Showalter said it was important at the time to just let Alonso talk.

“I guess it was more so for me,” Alonso later explained, “just showing that, listen, I am working, I am doing the best I can and I feel bad for not playing (well) — everyone has internal expectations, but for me personally, I pride myself on being as consistent as possible, and I wasn’t that.

“Especially doing all I did to come back early and do what I could to help, and I just failed. I was healthy. I was just failing way more than I was helping the team.”

Alonso’s presence in Showalter’s office served as a microcosm of a team struggling to perform under intense pressure owing to a huge payroll, high expectations and a trade deadline getting closer and closer. While Alonso’s woes received top billing, he was far from alone. Almost to a man, the Mets were underperforming.

The Mets finished June with a 7-19 record. The three teams ahead of them in the National League East standings (Atlanta, Miami and Philadelphia) combined during the month to lose just 20 games. In 30 days, New York lost 14 1/2 games in the NL East standings to Atlanta.

As Tommy Pham, the perpetually intense veteran outfielder, bluntly put it in a recent interview, “We had a terrible f—ing June.”

Often after games or during meals on the road, players discussed how they could turn things around.

After a devastating sweep in Atlanta, Pham, infielder Eduardo Escobar, catcher Francisco Alvarez and star shortstop Francisco Lindor talked about small things that the Mets needed to improve in between bites of food at a Brazilian steakhouse, Fogo de Chão, in Pittsburgh. Pham, 35, has played on seven teams, and organizations know when negotiating with him that he brings an edge, strong work ethic and little tolerance for lackadaisical effort.

For weeks ahead of the dinner, Lindor had held himself accountable after every crushing loss during a prolonged slump of his own, answering every question from every reporter every day. Pham respected Lindor’s accountability as a leader, how he worked hard and never placed blame on others. As The Athletic reported earlier this month, the conversation started with Pham explaining that he wanted New York to roll out more than one batting-practice group because he used the time to work on live reads in the outfield. With Lindor, Pham felt comfortable sharing something that roamed in his mind after observing how often some players in the clubhouse played games like pool.

Pham says he told Lindor, “Out of all the teams I played on, this is the least-hardest working group of position players I’ve ever played with.”

Opinions varied on the subject. Per Pham’s recollection, the players at the restaurant seemed receptive to what he had to say. In further explaining his comment later, he added that he held a lot of respect for the work ethics of the team’s leaders: Lindor, Alonso and Brandon Nimmo. And Lindor told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal that before Pham left in a trade to the Arizona Diamondbacks, Lindor said to Pham, “Hey man, thank you for teaching me how to work hard again.”

“Guys are super professional around here,” Jeff McNeil countered. “We go about our business, and everybody comes ready to play and does what they need to do.”

“Each person needs to assess that individually,” said Nimmo of the club’s work ethic. “You can only lead a horse to water; you can’t make him drink. Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to individuals and what they’re willing to do.”

Nimmo and others hesitated to place too much blame on any one thing. Presented with Pham’s comment, one player understood the perspective “because the team results weren’t there.” That said, “There’s a lot of reasons you could point to,” he said. “I don’t know which one is it.”

Maybe that was the problem.

One night after a loss, pitchers Justin Verlander, Brooks Raley, Adam Ottavino and others assessed where the Mets could improve. The conversation veered in too many different directions.

“We weren’t good in any facet of the game, honestly,” Ottavino said. “What’s been the challenge this year is explaining it, because there’s no one thing that broke the system. Everything underperformed all at once.”

Citing Starling Marte’s health issues and poor performance, the first-half struggles of Lindor, Alonso and McNeil (the league’s batting champion in 2022) in addition to the pitching problems, some people around the club wondered: Has any group regressed this much from one year to the next?

“That’s what makes analytical people scratch their heads,” one person said, “and realize that the game is played by human beings.”

In the span of 30 days, the Mets went from a team looking to contend for a championship to one lacking a competitive timetable — with a lot of big decisions to make ahead of the trade deadline.

While the losses in May opened their eyes, Nimmo said, “June was the killer.”

The loss of Edwin Díaz, who appeared at the Mets home opener on crutches, was a blow the team’s bullpen never recovered from. (Thomas A. Ferrara / Newsday RM via Getty Images)

It was March 15, and Showalter was getting ready for bed. In the arduous, embryonic days of spring training, Showalter typically goes to sleep early, so he didn’t have the World Baseball Classic on his TV when his phone started buzzing. He ignored it at first, until there were so many notifications that he grew suspicious. “Aw f—, what’s going on,” he thought to himself, and so he turned on the game. He wouldn’t sleep.

After closing out Puerto Rico’s win with a strikeout, Mets star closer Edwin Díaz, while jumping up and down in celebration, blew out his patellar tendon. He would need surgery on his knee. The Mets would play the entire season without him.

In the offseason, the Mets made Díaz the richest closer of all time, the first piece in Steve Cohen and Billy Eppler’s spending spree that brought in Verlander, Kodai Senga and José Quintana, among others. Now, the bullpen would be without its centerpiece, creating not just a void but also a cascading effect in his absence.

Even before Díaz’s injury, the Mets’ front office had drawn criticism for its approach to bullpen depth. At one point, the group sought optionable relievers over experience, but due to either injury or poor performance, no one from this second-tier group clicked for a long period. By then, the Mets had already re-signed Ottavino, traded for lefty Raley and signed veteran David Robertson, so even without Díaz, they believed they would have a few capable options. And they held out hope of Díaz one day returning in September to propel a postseason surge.

Throughout the season’s first couple of months, Ottavino would often tell Robertson, “Let’s just hang in there, and the trumpets are going to play and everything will be all right.”

Things never worked out that way.

Díaz’s injury was only one domino. Earlier that same week, Quintana needed to undergo bone graft surgery to repair a stress fracture in his rib; he would be out until July. Already that spring, some around the team suspected Marte, coming off double-groin surgery in the offseason, wasn’t quite right.

Aside from the physical issues, the Mets didn’t have as much time to go over the sport’s new rules because so many of their players were in the WBC. (Only the Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals sent more players.) A veteran roster was a counterintuitive detriment here; few of New York’s players had experienced any of the rules in the minor leagues. Later, people around the Mets would attribute some of the mental mistakes, poor play and high amount of rule violations in the early weeks to a postponed adjustment period.

“Buck was really good last year with getting guys to buy into philosophies and culture and carrying that into the season,” one Met said. “He tried to do it the last week of spring training, but I didn’t feel like we were in sync.

“The World Baseball Classic really hurt us.”

Others, however, push back on the theory.

“As far as the spring training went, we had a bunch of professionals who understood how to play the game and what to do,” Nimmo said. “Maybe it took a little bit of time. But I don’t even think you can argue that because we went 7-3 on that early West Coast trip, and April wasn’t an issue.”

True, but the Mets’ issues would soon catch up to them.

Persistent health issues bedeviled the Mets’ veteran rotation. Verlander landed on the IL on Opening Day; he missed a month and took another to find his stride. Max Scherzer struggled to go deep into games when he pitched, and he couldn’t take the ball as often thanks to a sticky-stuff suspension and tightness in his side and back. With Quintana also out, the Mets leaned heavily on David Peterson and Tylor Megill, neither of whom rose to the occasion.

With other relievers now pitching in different roles to make up for Díaz’s absence, the Mets’ bullpen eventually looked thin. Starters too often failed to reach even the fifth inning, adding to the toll on the relievers. Even as the Mets teetered around .500 at the start of May, the path looked challenging at best or, more realistically, unsustainable.

“We never had any margin for error. Even when we were winning, we were barely winning,” Ottavino said. “There was no breathing room.”

Díaz’s injury was far from the only thing that doomed the Mets, but as one official put it, “It may have been the biggest thing.”

Verlander earned his 250th win, and an ovation from the crowd, in what everyone knew would be his last start for the Mets. He was traded to the Astros two days later. (Rich Schultz / Getty Images)

It was late on July 31, and a group of Mets veterans had just spent a full day on a Kansas City golf course, recognizing what was likely their last off-day together.

“When you’ve gotten close with guys and there’s a chance that they are going to leave, it sucks,” Daniel Vogelbach said. “So you want to spend as much time as possible with one another.”

Those who didn’t play golf spent the afternoon watching a movie together — or as much of a film as they could before phones began buzzing.

“I didn’t get to finish ‘Oppenheimer’ that day,” said Mark Canha, the veteran outfielder who was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers late that afternoon.

Just four days earlier, despite a record seven games below .500, those vets had still believed a run was possible. When rain halted a 2-2 game with the Nationals at 9:46 p.m. that night, Robertson had been warming in the bullpen. When the game continued 97 minutes later, Robertson was a Miami Marlin. In the middle of the rain delay, he had been called into the manager’s office.

“He came out,” one Met said, “and you could just see it on his face. That was just a really difficult time. We were trying to play a baseball game.”

That was the moment the Mets folded on 2023.

“I just remember spring training and the hype of what the Mets were going to be. I was one of the kids in the schoolyard thinking, ‘Man this is awesome. We are in for something special this year,’” said one veteran. “Then fast-forward to that moment, knowing that this is the first trade chip to fall. And there will be more.”

The next night, Scherzer pitched the Mets to a 5-1 win over Washington, a victory that became a sidenote when Scherzer said postgame that he needed to have a conversation with “Mets brass” about the direction of the franchise. The impetus, which Scherzer only revealed after the fact, was the deluge of texts he’d been fielding over the prior 48 hours from players around the league asking if he’d waive his no-trade clause to join their team.

“Hearing from guys, ‘Would you accept a trade?’ it’s like, what’s going on?” Scherzer said. “That’s why my quote was, ‘I need to talk to brass.’ That’s why I said that. I couldn’t tell you people were texting me.”

Scherzer got his meetings with Mets brass the next day. At around 2 p.m., he and Eppler talked in person at Citi Field, the GM laying out the club’s new direction: It wasn’t just players who would be free agents after 2023, like Robertson, that were on the trade block. The Mets were listening on anyone whose team control did not extend beyond 2024, and they were eyeing more serious contention in 2025 and 2026. That meant they were open to moving Scherzer, Verlander and Alonso.

“So then I’m staying through a rebuild,” Scherzer said. “I just don’t have interest in that.”

Over the phone, Scherzer spoke with owner Steve Cohen, who reiterated what Eppler had just told him. By the time Scherzer’s teammates funneled into the clubhouse in the 3 p.m. hour, he was waiting in the trainer’s room to say goodbye.

“It ain’t fun telling everybody,” he said.

One day after that, as he departed what would become his 250th career victory, Verlander received a standing ovation from the Citi Field crowd. Everyone knew where this was headed. As Scherzer had, Verlander postgame said he needed to talk to the higher-ups about the Mets’ long-term direction. He played golf with the Mets on Monday. He was an Astro on Tuesday.

By that afternoon of the trade deadline, the visiting clubhouse in Kansas City was restive. On a pair of TVs in the middle of the room, MLB Network blared updates from around the league. One player paced around the clubhouse in street clothes, just waiting to be told where to fly.

The Mets lost that night in extra innings, en route to getting swept by the last-place Royals. That weekend, they were swept by the first-place Orioles.

“When we played Baltimore,” Ottavino said, “now it’s more that we’re getting beat by a better team rather than we’re beating ourselves. And that was a different feeling than before.”

In the time since the June slide and subsequent trade deadline, some of the Mets’ earlier misfortune has shifted. Alonso’s batting average on balls in play has surged. Lindor has a chance for down-ballot MVP votes. McNeil, Vogelbach and Ottavino have all played closer to their career norms. All of it is too late.

“The whole entire season has been an uphill fight,” Lindor said. “Nothing’s given. You’ve got to earn everything. And things can change very quick.”

“You don’t always have the full 162 for it to even out,” Ottavino said. “You have maybe 100 before you have to make some decisions, and we didn’t inspire any confidence at that point.”

It was the end of August, and the Mets were lining up to take their team picture in center field. There, representing Cohen’s investment of nearly half a billion dollars, was a roster that included Rafael Ortega and Jonathan Araúz, Sean Reid-Foley and Denyi Reyes.

After spending more days in first place (289) than any other team in 2021-2022, the Mets spent all of two days in first place this season, the last of them on April 2. The $445 million Cohen spent on the team was just over 10 times the amount spent on the ’92 Mets, a team immortalized as the worst that money could buy. That team won 72 games. This one is on pace to win 75.

By chance, Scherzer was there in the outfield where the stage for picture day was being set, wearing his Texas Rangers uniform, catching up with guys before they got into position. A day earlier, he’d sat in the visiting dugout and taken in the scene. He’d been away from the Mets for nearly a month, playing for a team in the middle of a pennant race. Has he yet divined what had gone wrong in Queens? Had a different perspective helped?

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “That’s a billion-dollar question.”

(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images; Greg Fiume / Getty Images; Adam Hunger / Getty Images)

In Hospitals, Viruses Are Everywhere. Masks Are Not.

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Reporters News Wire

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September 23, 2023

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Liv Grace came down with respiratory infections three times over the course of four months. Each occurred after a visit to a medical provider in the Bay Area.

Mx. Grace, 36, a writer who uses they/them pronouns, was infected with respiratory syncytial virus, which led to pneumonia, in December, after they were treated by a nurse wearing a surgical mask who complained about her children being ill with the virus.

Mx. Grace got Covid after a visit to a cancer center for an infusion in February. And there was the pale, coughing phlebotomist who drew blood in April, just before they came down with Covid again.

Mx. Grace was born with a rare immune deficiency related to lupus and takes a medication that depletes the cells that produce antibodies. The combination renders the body unable to fend off pathogens or to recover quickly from infections.

Since the pandemic began, Mx. Grace has rarely ventured anywhere other than health care facilities. But hospitals, by their nature, tend to be hotbeds of illnesses, including Covid, even when community rates are relatively low.

“People like me who are very high risk and very susceptible will still get sick when we’re sitting in, like, virus soup,” Mx. Grace said.

Facing a potential wave of coronavirus infections this fall and winter, relatively few hospitals — mostly in New York, Massachusetts and California — have restored mask mandates for patients and staff members. The vast majority have not, and almost none require them for visitors.

By Thursday, several Bay Area counties had announced mask mandates for staff members of health care facilities that treat high-risk patients, including infusion centers, effective Nov. 1.

The order does not apply to facilities in Berkeley, including Alta Bates Summit Center — a part of the Sutter Health network — where Mx. Grace was treated.

“We continue to monitor the impact of Covid-19 in our communities, and work with state and local health departments to ensure any additional masking and public health requirements are incorporated into our policies,” a spokeswoman for Sutter Health said in a statement.

Among patients, health care workers and public health experts, opinions are sharply divided over whether and when to institute masking mandates in hospitals.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of the Mass General Brigham system, currently requires masks only in inpatient settings. Yet some of its own experts disagree with the policy.

Hospitals have an ethical obligation to prevent patients from becoming infected on site, regardless of what they might choose to do elsewhere, said Dr. Michael Klompas, a hospital epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s.

“That’s their prerogative,” he said of patients taking risks outside the health care setting. “But in our hospital, we should protect them.”

In August, Dr. Klompas and his colleagues published a paper showing that masking and screening for Covid at Brigham and Women’s also decreased flu and R.S.V. infections by about 50 percent.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that hospitals consider putting masking in place when levels of respiratory infections rise, especially in urgent care and emergency rooms, or when treating high-risk patients.

But the guidelines do not specify what the benchmarks should be, leaving each hospital to choose its own criteria.

Ideally, every patient would be given a mask on arrival at an emergency room or urgent care, and asked to wear it regardless of symptoms, said Saskia Popescu, an infection control expert at the University of Maryland.

But hospitals also must reckon with the backlash against masking in large swaths of the population. “Now that we’re not in this emergent state with Covid, I think that’s going to be the most challenging, especially since masks have been so politicized,” she said.

As a result, in emergency rooms at many hospitals — like Banner-University Medical Center Tucson, in Arizona, and Kaiser Permanente Sunnyside Medical Center, outside Portland, Ore. — patients with Covid sit alongside older adults, pregnant women and those with conditions like diabetes that put them at high risk should they become infected.

A very few hospitals that predominantly treat immunocompromised patients, such as City of Hope, a cancer-treatment center in Los Angeles, have maintained universal masking. But some of the nation’s most prestigious hospital systems don’t require masks even in their cancer centers, where severely immunocompromised patients like Mx. Grace receive infusions.

“Just do whatever you want — that’s essentially what the C.D.C. guidance says, at this point, in terms of universal masking,” said Jane Thomason, lead industrial hygienist for National Nurses United, which represents nearly 225,000 registered nurses.

The guidelines give hospitals “permission to prioritize profits over protecting nurses and patients,” Ms. Thomason said. The union has called for stronger protections, including the use of N95 respirators, to protect health care workers, patients and visitors.

A recent study found that more cancer patients died of Covid during the Omicron surge than in the first winter wave, in part because people around them had stopped taking precautions.

But partial masking — say, only in units with high-risk patients — may still endanger patients, said Dr. Eric Chow, head of communicable diseases at Public Health — Seattle & King County, in Washington State. People at high risk “are scattered throughout the hospital,” he said. “They are not necessarily confined to one specific space.”

Until Thursday, hospitals in the Emory Healthcare system required staff members to mask only when interacting with inpatients. It now also requires masks for staff members working in high-risk settings, such as cancer centers.

Emory’s Winship Cancer Center in Atlanta changed its policy “based upon the currently increasing prevalence of and hospitalizations from Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses in the community,” Andrea Clement, associate director of public relations for the institute, said in a statement.

Staff members are now required to mask anywhere they might encounter patients, including lobbies, elevators and stairwells. Masking for patients and visitors is “encouraged,” but not required.

Mass General Brigham is evaluating new criteria for reintroducing masking, such as the proportion of people in its emergency rooms with respiratory illness, admissions for such illnesses and wastewater data, said Dr. Erica Shenoy, the hospital system’s chief of infection control.

In June, Dr. Shenoy and her colleagues argued in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine that the time for universal masking had passed, partly because most interactions between patients and health care personnel are brief.

In response to criticism from scientists, they later cited results from an unpublished study showing that only 9 percent of people without symptoms carried infectious coronavirus.

“The fact is that the conditions for Covid have changed dramatically,” Dr. Shenoy said in an interview. “It’s important from a policy perspective to have an open mind and to be able to reflect and revise our policies as we go along.”

But several experts, including Dr. Klompas, said that stance underestimated the long-term effects of other respiratory infections, like influenza and R.S.V.

Respiratory viruses can unmask or exacerbate chronic conditions of the heart, lung or kidneys and trigger autoimmune conditions. “It’s much bigger than simply the actual infection,” Dr. Klompas said.

The C.D.C.’s infection-control guidelines date to 2007 and are being revised by an advisory committee. The process has been fraught with controversy: Critics fear that the recommendations will be too modest to protect patients and staff members. (Dr. Shenoy is one of eight committee members, and a co-author of the June editorial, Dr. Sharon Wright, is its co-chair.)

In July, National Nurses United delivered a petition to Dr. Mandy Cohen, the C.D.C. director, that was signed by hundreds of experts in health care, virology and infection control, and dozens of unions and public health organizations.

The petition criticized the infection-control committee as lacking in diversity of expertise and its decision-making as opaque. The committee did not seem to recognize how the coronavirus spreads indoors, and the need for N95 or similar respirators that block virus particles effectively, the petition said.

The advisers were scheduled to vote on the changes at a meeting in August, but deferred the vote to November. During a public comment period at an August meeting, several people, including Mx. Grace, expressed dismay at the draft guidelines, which they said were inadequate and endangered their lives.

The repeated infections have taken a toll on Mx. Grace, triggering more frequent migraines and brain seizures and leaving them afraid to seek care even when they need it.

Before the pandemic, hospitals were less dangerous because staff members often wore masks, and people in waiting rooms and elevators were likely to be sick only in the late fall or winter, Mx. Grace said.

“It was still scary,” Mx. Grace said. But there wasn’t a “negative attitude around asking for more precautions.”

Inside IMG Academy — the high school football factory that teams love to hate

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Reporters News Wire

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September 23, 2023

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BRADENTON, Fla. — In the moments after IMG Academy once again finishes lighting up a scoreboard somewhere across the country, its players are often swarmed. Kids tap players asking for a pair of gloves worn during another IMG rout. They even ask for sweat-stained towels. Teenage contemporaries have their Snapchat apps open on their phones and ask for selfies. Those who show up to watch IMG know they’re watching brightening stars who will soon explode onto the national college football scene.

“These kids are rock stars,” IMG coach Billy Miller said.

These are also high school students.

IMG, however, is not your average prep football powerhouse. IMG’s sprawling 600-acre campus, bathed in sunshine and palm trees, includes a 5,000-seat stadium for track and football, a state-of-the-art performance and sports science center and its own 150-room luxury hotel for visitors. A Johns Hopkins University hospital affiliate manages all health services and physical therapy, according to the school’s website.

Since Florida State’s 2000 Heisman Trophy winner, Chris Weinke, helped launch IMG’s football program in 2010, the Ascenders have gone 92-7. That includes a 38-game winning streak, the 2020 national title and blowout wins over several of the nation’s top high school programs. IMG had 14 alumni on NFL rosters as the season opened, the most of any high school in the country, according to the NFL.

The boarding school with 75 former players on rosters of Power 5 college programs, including seven on two-time defending national champion Georgia, keeps annihilating opponents.

Last year, the Ascenders beat West Toronto Prep, 96-0. Most IMG games are blowouts — whether it’s a great high school team lining up across the field or an 0-7 team like WTP. This year’s team has players who are committed to programs such as Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.

Remember the Bishop Sycamore charade? IMG is the program that awkwardly stampeded over what would eventually be discovered to be a fabricated school and program on national television.

In 2020, IMG went on the road and beat nationally ranked Duncanville, Texas, 41-14. The Ascenders haven’t landed a single Texas high school team on their schedule since.

Some schools have stopped answering phone calls to play again, said Miller, who coaches the national team. Some who haven’t played IMG don’t bother to respond to emails, texts or calls at all. The Athletic reached out to programs in five different states that have played IMG in recent years and the only coaches who were willing to discuss IMG were recently approached in person at a tournament in Florida.

IMG’s ascent in the prep football world has left many football fans pondering common questions: Is IMG Academy too good? And who exactly is monitoring its recruiting practices?

The program with rock stars at nearly every position might be the most dominant school in the country, but it is not without its detractors. Some coaches have accused IMG of actively recruiting players away from their programs, selling the IMG reality that, in Bradenton, you can simulate life as a future college football student-athlete more accurately than anywhere else and practice and play alongside the best talent in the country. Others have decided to see IMG’s rise as a gold standard of sorts.

“The thing I try to teach my guys is to run to the fire, not from it,” said Messay Hailemariam, who coaches St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, one of the regular staples on IMG’s schedule each season.

IMG Academy started as the Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in 1978, a place for tennis prodigies. It’s where Venus and Serena Williams developed into legends. In the years since, IMG has expanded to 15 sports and produced hundreds of Olympic and professional athletes.

But what is now one of the preeminent high school football programs in the country started in a single-wide trailer surrounded by tomato fields. Weinke trained at IMG in the months after his stellar career at Florida State ended in 2000. Ten years later, he was hired to find a way to add football to the academy’s growing list of distinguished sports. Weinke told IMG it would take five years to get a football program off the ground. It took him and his newly assembled staff three.

There just wasn’t any place to do it at the time.

“I had to literally order my own football equipment. I did not have a football field. I had to utilize a soccer field,” said Weinke, now co-offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech. “I was on a campus that was much different today than it was back then.”

The concept for what IMG football could become over time started to materialize.

“My whole vision and goal of that program was to mirror what a college football program looked like so that players who left IMG were more prepared and ready to play at an earlier age in college than your typical high school player,” Weinke said.

IMG began to purchase more land around its expansive campus. Those tomato fields, Weinke said, soon became football-specific practice fields. Football players used to share a weight room with other athletes before the 55,000-square-foot IMG Performance & Sports Science Center was built. All this was necessary for IMG to reach that goal Weinke envisioned early on.

Now?

The football program has 155 players spread out over four teams, Miller said. It starts with the star-studded national squad, but there are also two varsity teams (IMG white and IMG blue) and a postgraduate team, which won the National Post Graduate Athletic Association championship last year. The rosters on the varsity and postgraduate teams aren’t very large so players get more playing time. That’s by design.

“The only downfall about going there is that when you leave there to go play college football, the facilities may be worse than what you just had in high school,” Weinke said, laughing.

Commitment. Sacrifice. Hard work. When you come to @IMGAcademy, it’s bigger than you.

Protect the #Brotherhood. pic.twitter.com/mftZBY8b6G

— IMG Academy Football (@IMGAFootball) August 18, 2023

Kevin Wright, who succeeded Weinke after Weinke left to be the quarterbacks coach for the St. Louis Rams in January 2015, remembers going to visit former star linebacker Dylan Moses at Alabama just a few months after Moses graduated from IMG in December 2016. Moses told Wright that life at Alabama — yes, Alabama — was a breeze compared to the strict schedule as a student-athlete at IMG.

“We’ve never had so much free time in our lives,” Moses joked with Wright.

Wright, who coached at IMG until 2019, has spent the past four seasons as tight ends coach at Indiana. He reiterated that while IMG comes with all the perks of building a modern-day star athlete, it doesn’t work without embracing the grind of the schedule and lifestyle. That’s what Weinke wanted to build, after all.

“That place is tough,” Wright said. “It is absolutely not for everybody.”

Football fans might know Josh Lambo as a kicker who spent nearly a decade playing in the NFL, but he started out as a member of the U.S. youth soccer team at IMG. Lambo lived the Bradenton life before he transitioned from soccer to football, but said the rigors of IMG prepared him for the pressures of life and the position.

“We weren’t really allowed to be kids, but being a kid is overrated,” he said. “I’d rather be successful as an adult than have fun as a kid.”

Winston Watkins has a lot going for him.

He’s the cousin of 2014 NFL first-round pick Sammy Watkins and an elite high school receiver in the graduating class of 2025 who is committed to play at Colorado for Deion Sanders.

He likely still would’ve developed into one of the most coveted recruits in his class had he not transferred to IMG in ninth grade. But there’s a reason Watkins bought the recruiting pitch when he was still an eighth grader: IMG’s top-notch infrastructure and its track record of putting players into the NFL.

“IMG gives me that exposure I need and also keeps me from all that nonsense I don’t need to be around,” said Watkins, who caught 25 passes for 393 yards and 10 touchdowns on the Ascenders national team last season as a sophomore, and who is ranked the 55th best player in his class according to the 247Sports Composite.

“I get to be around greats all the time. If I stayed in Fort Myers, I feel like I wouldn’t be as good as I am now because I wouldn’t have to try at practice. Because there’s a lot of kids who don’t care about football. Here, I go against the best of the best in practice and real games.”

Watkins transferred to Naples First Baptist last week, he said recently in a social media post, to be closer to an ailing family member. But he loved his time at IMG.

Players at IMG said they’re convinced access to world-class facilities, top coaches, a college-type schedule — practice in the morning and school in the afternoon — while living on campus prepares them for the next level in ways going to a traditional school cannot.

Alabama freshman defensive back Desmond Ricks, who transferred to IMG after his freshman year of high school in Norfolk, Va., said IMG helped him hone his time management skills. Talk to current IMG national team players, and you hear many of the same reasons they left their respective high school programs.

“I wasn’t mature enough to come and leave my family when IMG first recruited me as a high school sophomore, but at the end of my junior season I was like, I need to enroll early (in college). I need to handle my business and this is a school that I felt prepares you,” said four-star offensive tackle Jordan Seaton, who transferred to IMG from St. John’s Catholic school in Washington, D.C., in May.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t prepared back there. But this school is as close to a college as you get. Being able to breathe this life, eat this life — sleep, eat, sleep, work — doing it over and over again consistently, I feel like I’m one step closer to my big goal.”

Seaton, whom Miller compares to 2022 No. 7 pick and former IMG star Evan Neal, has trimmed his body fat down to 8.4 percent after weighing as much 350 pounds at his previous school. He’s worked with nutritionists at IMG and changed his diet. At 6-5, 300 pounds, he’s one of the top remaining uncommitted high school recruits in the 2024 cycle. Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Colorado are among his current leaders.

Attending IMG isn’t cheap. The school website listed the football program’s tuition for the 2022-23 school year ranging from $65,400 to $87,900 per year depending on age, boarding and grade of student-athlete. Some receive financial aid. Others do not. Sponsorship from companies such as Under Armour and Gatorade helps cover some of the costs.

“Everybody paid something, I know that,” Wright said. “At the end of the day, it’s a for-profit business.”

The day The Athletic visited campus, there was a sign posted in the men’s bathroom above a urinal reminding students on campus to make sure they were completely outfitted in Under Armour apparel.

Endeavor, the parent company of International Management Group, sold IMG Academy to a Hong Kong-based private equity firm in April for $1.25 billion. The academy generates roughly $80 million a year, according to Zippia, and doesn’t participate in the Florida High School Athletic Association state playoffs, in part, because it recruits players globally.

High school coaches and fan bases aren’t happy when IMG recruits their best players away to join its star-studded national team roster.

“I can tell you there’s plenty of high school coaches that didn’t like me,” Weinke said. “I can promise you that. And that’s OK. My ultimate goal was to put something in place to create opportunities for young men to maximize their potential. Bottom line.”

St. John Bosco coach Jason Negro, whose team from Bellflower, Calif., ranks 10th in the national polls, is one of those coaches. He said IMG recruited away one of his top receivers in 2018, Josh Delgado, who is now at Oregon. Delgado had the offer from Oregon before he left for IMG, Negro confirmed.

“The only problem that I have (with IMG) is there’s no governing body that regulates their ability to chase after players,” Negro said. “We are bound by rules in terms of contact period, undue influence. My kids are constantly called by people from their organization, and that doesn’t sit well with me. If I have a kid that chooses to go there or come to me, I’m not opposed to transfers. But what I don’t understand is they want to call my players and call two weeks later to play a game. That doesn’t sit well with me. Coach your guys up with your people. But don’t come and actively hunt my guys.”

IMG in the national polls

Year	Record	MaxPreps
2023	4-0	No. 3
2022	8-1	No. 5
2021	9-1	No. 17
2020	8-0	No. 1
2019	9-1	No. 7
2018	7-1	No. 3
2017	9-0	No. 2
2016	11-0	No. 4
2015	9-0	No. 9
2014	10-1	No. 16
2013	8-2	NR
Totals	92-7

Negro said he’d schedule IMG if he could, but Bosco can’t because California state rules do not allow it to play versus schools ineligible for their own state tournament. Bosco’s rival, Mater Dei, beat IMG, 28-24, in 2018 before state rules changed, Negro said.

The programs who do schedule the Ascenders, Miller said, are led by “like-minded people” who “want to play good football programs.” IMG opened the season with a 35-10 win at Nashville’s Lipscomb Academy and a 17-14 victory against Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s Prep, two schools that won state championships last year. They defeated Indianapolis’ Ben Davis, one of Indiana’s top-ranked programs, 34-14, and Glenville (Ohio) 28-6. Bartram Trail (Fla.), which went 12-1 last season, is up next on Oct. 6.

#Oklahoma 5-star DL commit David Stone with a ridiculous 94yd pick six to put IMG Academy up 27-7 at Indianapolis Ben Davis in the third. A crucial play as the home team had momentum. https://t.co/sduoLIuZjx pic.twitter.com/R0xxNO28E2

— Steve Wiltfong (@SWiltfong247) September 9, 2023

There are only two teams ranked ahead of IMG in MaxPreps national rankings: top-ranked Santa Ana (Calif.) Mater Dei and Las Vegas (Nev.) Bishop Gorman.

“(IMG) reached out to us, but our schedule was full,” said Hollywood (Fla.) Chaminade coach Dameon Jones, whose team has won five state titles in the past seven years and is ranked two spots behind IMG in MaxPreps’ national rankings at No. 5. “We played them my first year (in 2016, losing 43-0). They showed us where we had to get to.”

IMG’s Anthony Rogers, a four-star running back in the Class of 2025 who is committed to Alabama, said his old high school teammates and coaches called him a traitor when he transferred to IMG in March and told him he “wouldn’t be able to compete at this level.”

Miller waved off the notion that IMG’s ascent is a blemish on the state of prep football.

“To me, whoever has something negative to say, it’s probably envy,” he said. “You can’t say one thing until you live it. You have no idea what it’s about.”

Like dozens of his teammates, four-star linebacker Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng is in the midst of his college recruitment process. Name a blue-blood program, and it has already offered. In choosing a school, though, Owusu-Boateng is seeking out an experience that will show him there’s more to life than just football. He wants to be prepared for the time football ends.

But in order to look beyond football way down the line, he had to think about the football path he’s on first — the one that brought him to IMG this spring from Hyattsville, Md.

“It was a business move, but at the same time a great move,” he said. “Knowing the guys who came in and came out, you can just see the cause and effect.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Manny Navarro / The Athletic)

Gold Mining Is Poisoning the Planet With Mercury

By

Reporters News Wire

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September 23, 2023

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Jeovane de Jesus Aguiar was knee-deep in mud in the 100-yard gash he had cut into the Amazon rainforest, filtering brown water out of a pan, when he found the small, shiny flake he was looking for: a mixture of gold and mercury.

Mr. Aguiar had drizzled liquid mercury into the ground in his makeshift gold mine on the eastern edge of the small South American nation of Suriname, just as he had every few days.

The toxic element mixes with gold dust and forms an amalgam he can pluck out of the sludge. Then he sets the mixture aflame, burning off the mercury into the air, where winds spread it across the forest and across borders, poisoning the plants, animals and people it finds.

Left behind is the gold. That part usually ends up in Europe, the United States and the Persian Gulf, most often as expensive jewelry.

Twenty minutes along the river, the Wayana Indigenous community is getting sick. The Wayana eat fish from the river every day and, in recent years, many have been suffering from joint pain, muscle weakness and swelling. They also say birth defects are rising.

Tests show that the Wayana have double to triple the medically acceptable levels of mercury in their blood. “We’re not allowed to eat certain fish anymore,” said Linia Opoya in June, showing her hands, which ache after meals. “But there’s nothing else. That’s what we’ve always eaten.”

Driven by global scientific consensus that mercury causes brain damage, severe illnesses and birth defects, most of the world’s countries signed a groundbreaking international treaty in 2013 committing themselves to eradicating its use globally.

Yet 10 years later, mercury remains a scourge.

It has seriously harmed thousands of children in Indonesia. It has contaminated rivers throughout the Amazon, creating a humanitarian crisis for Brazil’s largest isolated tribe. And worldwide, doctors still warn against eating too much of certain fish because the toxic metal floats into the ocean and is absorbed into the food chain.

Suriname, a forested nation of 620,000 people on the northern edge of South America, is a case study in how mercury has become so intractable in large part because of society’s insatiable appetite for gold.

For decades, mercury has poisoned much of Suriname’s population. Nearly one in five births result in complications such as death, low birth weight or disabilities, according to one study, twice the rate of the United States. Yet mercury has also fueled the nation’s economy; gold accounts for 85 percent of Suriname’s exports, most of it mined with mercury.

“I could work without mercury,” said Mr. Aguiar, 51, overlooking his open pit. “But it wouldn’t be profitable.”

Suriname has banned mercury, yet the substance is easily smuggled in and widely used.

The Surinamese government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While Western countries, including the United States, have largely phased out mercury, more than 10 million people in 70 countries — mostly poorer nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America — still use the toxic element to extract gold from the ground, according to the United Nations.

These small-scale miners produce a fifth of the world’s gold — and nearly two-fifths of the world’s mercury pollution, according to the United Nations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mining is the leading source of mercury emissions, ahead of coal-fired power plants.

“This is the brutal face of poverty,” said Achim Steiner, chief of the U.N. Development Program. For many miners, “the fact that mercury might harm me in 10 years’ time is too far from the reality of survival,” he added.

Large-scale gold miners use centrifuge machines or arsenic, which does not seep into the environment. Small miners choose mercury because it is cheap, easy to use and still available.

“Mercury, for better or worse, is a very simple technology, used for the better part of 2,000 years,” said Luis Fernandez, a Wake Forest University professor who has studied small-scale gold mining. “You can learn how to be a miner in 15 minutes, and you get pretty good results.”

While many countries have banned mercury in mining, enforcement is lax, Mr. Fernandez said. Gold mining “is an economic pressure valve for poorer countries,” he said. And that has only been compounded by the 12-percent rise in gold prices over the past year, to nearly $2,000 an ounce.

In 2013, the international community signed a broad treaty to take mercury off the market. It was called the Minamata Convention, named for a Japanese city where decades of industrial mercury pollution caused neurological diseases in more than 2,200 residents and even poisoned the city’s cats, causing them to jump into the sea.

Under the convention — which 145 nations, including Suriname, have now ratified — countries pledged to ban new mercury mines, close existing ones and, with some exceptions, halt the import and export of mercury.

The United States and European Union have since banned virtually all mercury exports, leaving the United Arab Emirates, Tajikistan, Russia, Mexico and Nigeria as some of the largest exporters. Researchers believe that China, which adopted the treaty, remains the world’s largest user of mercury.

The Minamata Convention, however, did not target small-scale gold mining. “Evidence has shown time and again that if you ban something that people need and there is no alternative, you simply drive them into illegality,” Mr. Steiner said.

Where Mr. Aguiar lives along the Maroni River, which forms the boundary between Suriname and French Guiana, everyone is either a miner or works for one. About 15 percent of Suriname’s work force, or 18,000 people, is connected to the gold mining industry, one of the highest percentages in the world, according to studies by the University of Amsterdam.

At the mines, workers shoot pressurized water to wash away generations of sediment, cutting into the landscape and exposing the layer they hope contains gold. Then they throw mercury into the water so it will bind naturally with any gold below.

The mercury is not hard to come by — and experts believe that much of it arrives from China.

A few hours before Mr. Aguiar was tossing mercury into his mine, where he employs seven people, he docked his canoe at one of the dozens of Chinese merchants on the banks of the Maroni. The shops sell the same goods: Coca-Cola, instant noodles, condoms and mercury. Mr. Aguiar bought a kilogram in an unmarked prescription drug bottle for $250. If he is lucky, it will be enough to mine a half-kilogram of gold, which he can sell for roughly $25,000.

Elsewhere in Suriname, vendors posted listings on Facebook and cabdrivers offered mercury connections. People across the country said mercury sellers were overwhelmingly Chinese, and interactions with several Chinese sellers revealed that they had little concern that they were doing anything illegal; mercury was a product like any other.

The Organization of American States said this year that mercury in Suriname was probably “imported from China on container ships bringing in other goods, such as mining equipment.”

In South America, researchers believe, only Bolivia imports mercury legally.

“So the question is: Where does it come from?” President Chandrikapersad Santokhi of Suriname told reporters in May. “We know it’s smuggled.”

Dr. Wilco Zijlmans, a pediatrician in Suriname who has studied the health effects of mercury, said its impact was clear. In a 2020 study of 1,200 Surinamese women that he helped conduct, 97 percent had unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies.

In addition to the elevated rate of birth complications, Dr. Zijlmans also found that children in Suriname were far more likely today than a generation ago to have delayed brain development, decreased motor skills and worse language and social abilities.

The effects are also showing up across the border. The Wayana Indigenous community has about 1,000 members spread across Suriname and French Guiana, which is French territory. Those in French Guiana have French citizenship, and French doctors have tracked the spread of mercury in some of their villages, which are surrounded by more than two dozen gold mines.

“Eventually, this will become like Minamata, too,” said Ms. Opoya, the Wayana member, who lives in one of the villages on French territory.

Upriver, when Mr. Aguiar wants to cash in, he takes his haul to the Chinese merchants who sell him the mercury. Those merchants then head to the hundreds of small gold-buying shops dotted across Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital.

At one shop, the owner, Arnaldo Ribeiro, said he buys just about all the gold that comes through his doors but has little idea where it comes from or whether it has been mined with mercury.

He then resells it to Kaloti Minthouse, a joint venture between the Surinamese government and a gold importer based in the United Arab Emirates.

“We don’t have to prove provenance,” Mr. Ribeiro said of the gold he sells.

Kaloti Minthouse then legally exports the gold around the world.

That means gold like Mr. Aguiar’s, cleaned of its mercury residue, is shipped off to become bank bullion, a necklace or perhaps a wedding ring, all its documents in order.

Rickie Lambert, conspiracy theories – and why footballers are vulnerable

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Reporters News Wire

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September 22, 2023

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Just after clocking off time at the edge of Liverpool’s business district on Wednesday afternoon, a small but striking man with a tattoo stretching across his neck joined a crowd of 200 or so protestors outside the city’s most significant civic building.

Chris Sky is an optimistic-sounding name. His aviator glasses, gleaming white teeth and peroxide hair gave him the appearance of a Las Vegas timeshare salesman; instead, he was flogging a story to other famous men like Rickie Lambert, the former Liverpool and England forward, who had advertised this rally in advance without mentioning its special guest.

On the opposite side of the road was another group, making a stand against fascism. For a good half-hour, two men holding megaphones used the busy thoroughfare as a barrier between ideologies as cars went past and bemused commuters tried to get home.

While the anti-fascists screamed about Nazis and the real problems Liverpool’s residents should campaign against, the “freedom” movement stood behind yellow placards that advised readers to “question everything” and to “lose the denial”. There was also another warning: “15-minute neighbourhoods will be your prison.”

The 15-minute city protest in Liverpool (Simon Hughes)

That, ultimately, was what Lambert was here for: to raise awareness of the supposed threat of Liverpool becoming a “15-minute city”, where the local government stands accused of planning to essentially segregate districts in the name of climate change.

Sky emerged as an online agitator at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic by railing against restrictions at a series of “freedom rallies”. To his followers, he is a precious purveyor of truth in a world of sinister forces trying to exercise control; to many more, he is a dangerous conspiracy theorist.

There was, however, no denying he was the star attraction on Wednesday. After another “freedom” spokesman with the megaphone denied the event’s links to the far right — “This has nothing to do with racism,” he claimed — Sky and his followers ambled towards the space in front of the crown court. Then, after the rally’s organiser described those mainly middle-class-looking older women and students handing out socialist newsletters on the other side of the street as “satanic” communists trying to “steal our souls”, Sky was invited to talk.

“Hello Liverpool,” he shouted into the mic, only for his voice to disappear in a violent gust blowing in from the Irish Sea.

Sky announced that he was on a tour to change the world courtesy of speeches like this one, which included unsubstantiated claims about the return of Covid-19, the weaponising of climate change by governments in an attempt to control freedoms, and a hidden LGBT agenda that the audience needed to be aware of because according to the Bible, “pride” was one of the seven deadly sins.

Lambert, who did not speak despite his role in promoting the event, stood by, taking it all in. Most people did, but for one Liverpudlian in a vest, who piped up from the back of the crowd: “Why the f*** are we listening to some American talk about our city?”

It was at that point that someone informed him that Sky, whose surname is really Saccoccia, was in fact from Canada.

In his book, Red Pill Blue Pill, David Newert describes a conspiracy theory as “a hypothetical explanation of historical or ongoing new events comprised of secret plots, usually of a nefarious nature, whose existence may or may not be factual”.

In recent years, Newert adds that it has also become a “kind of dismissive epithet”. The majority of people, he explains, do not have the time for conspiracist beliefs and, therefore, it is easier to banish those who do as “cartoonish scam peddlers”.

A psychologist based in Merseyside, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of his working contracts, makes comparisons between conspiracy theorists and his experiences in the drug services when survivors discover salvation, prompting them to want to impart their knowledge to others by working in recovery.

“When conspiracy theorists discover something, they never keep it to themselves,” he concludes. “They have to pass it on to someone else. Now they know their place in the world, they see themselves as crusaders.”

Conspiracy theories can take root in every sector of society and yet there are compelling reasons why sportspeople — including footballers — could be particularly susceptible.

Lambert has used his social media platforms to perpetrate a variety of outlandish theories, including calling for doctors and nurses who vaccinated children against Covid-19 to be arrested, sharing posts that erroneously claim vaccine shots contain ‘cancer virus’, and saying that anyone who is “in on the globalist plan, the new world order, needs to be brought down”.

Yet he is by no means the only high-profile example. Matt Le Tissier, one of his predecessors in a Southampton and England shirt, has used social media to augment arguments among conspiracy theorists that include the denial of the war in Ukraine and actors being used to fake what is happening in front of Western cameras.

Le Tissier has sparked controversy with his views (Robin Jones/Getty Images)

Le Tissier claims he has been pushed to the fringes by mainstream media companies because of his views. Support has come from Lambert but also from other ex-footballers, such as David Cotterill, the former Swansea City and Wales midfielder, who has used his Instagram account to make wild accusations over the existence of a network of celebrity paedophiles, climate change, Covid restrictions and that a Texas school shooting was a ‘false flag’ event.

Another former Liverpool player, Dejan Lovren, appeared to endorse the conspiracy theory that the Covid-19 pandemic was devised as a ploy to force vaccinations on the world’s population. In 2020, he responded to a social media post thanking health workers by Bill Gates, the billionaire who helped fund vaccine research, by saying: “Game over Bill. People are not blind.” He has repeatedly promoted links to talks by David Icke, the former Coventry goalkeeper, who has long held a belief that the British Royal Family are a group of shape-shifting lizards.

On a similar theme, the former Spain goalkeeper Iker Casillas revealed in 2018 that he did not believe the Moon landings were real.

The key word in any cognitive reaction to conspiracy theories, according to the psychologist, is ‘threat’. They explain the brain like this: the threat part of the brain is the most potent, telling the drive system to do something about it. But the drive system is also the part of the brain that deals with reward, which makes people feel like they are eliminating a threat. This, therefore, makes people feel like they are achieving something. When that happens, it releases chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, making them feel better.

“It gives people a purpose,” he says. “The problem is, it becomes cyclical. The threat system says, ‘You’ve done something about it this time — what about next time? You feel good now but there’s another threat around the corner.’ This means the brain jumps back into drive.

“This isn’t a million miles away from the life of a Premier League football player, who has to push themselves to avoid being dropped or heckled by 60,000 spectators who revel in telling you that you’re crap at your job. In a sporting life, that’s the threat. You’ve done well in one game, but there’s always another to follow.”

Sportspeople are susceptible to this world because of how carefully they need to manage their bodies in order to perform.

“Clean eating became a fad 10 years ago or so,” the psychologist says when asked to explain what can happen when sportspeople embrace alternative thinking. “That quickly becomes, ‘Don’t trust the professionals — take charge of what you put into your body.’ This then becomes, ‘Don’t trust the professionals — they are in the pockets of ‘big pharma’’. You throw in a pandemic in the middle of all this, along with various high-profile political scandals, and suddenly it manifests into not trusting anyone, claims about who controls the planet, and extreme views such as antisemitism.”

These are big jumps, but look at the leap Le Tissier has made in a relatively short space of time, from small city champion and legendary Southampton No 7 to a war-denier in Ukraine, who in July, without providing evidence, suggested on Twitter a “communist takeover is slyly being implemented”.

The psychologist suggests retired footballers can find life difficult without the routine of training and matches. This can lead to them seeking a lost dressing room culture that can be found initially in a chat room or a forum.

“Given golf courses were closed during the pandemic and there was nothing else to do, there was a sanctuary of sorts on the internet, where people seeking explanations for questions that had no answers seemed to find them. Such groups offer the illusion of certainty and safeness.”

Golf courses closed during the Covid-19 pandemic (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

The problem, as Newert points out, is that real conspiracies do exist and have done through most of civilised history.

In Liverpool, particularly, you only need to remind people of the 1980s, when “managed decline” was suspected as a strategy of the United Kingdom’s Conservative government, before official papers were released under the 30-year rule in 2011 revealing that Chancellor Geoffrey Howe had, at the very least, proposed the policy to then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Many people who lived in the city through this period would agree that there is enough evidence to believe the policy was, in fact, carried out. The decade finished with Hillsborough, the worst football disaster in British history, when the authorities aligned to blame fans. It would take more than a quarter of a century for a cover-up to be exposed in a courtroom and only in the past few years have some police forces started paying out damages to victims.

In some parts of Liverpool, it is still believed that the heroin epidemic of the same era was another strategy, aimed at doping the city up as the rot set in — preventing people in the haze from standing their ground.

Only a few hundred at most turned up outside Liverpool’s town hall on Wednesday, but the psychologist believes the city is fertile ground for conspiracists because of its history and a wariness towards authority.

Though it has not manifested into demonstrations, the current Conservative government’s decision to send in commissioners to run an area that hasn’t had a Tory councillor since 1997 has heightened suspicion amongst those with long memories.

This month, Icke hosted a talk in Liverpool’s Greenbank Conference Centre and he wouldn’t have organised that if he didn’t think at least some people from the surrounding area would turn up.

Super conspiracies, the psychologist thinks, are intoxicating because they have no answers, which helps maintain an interest over a long period of time.

“The awakening always feels just around the corner; that Scooby Doo moment, where the villain’s sack is removed from his head,” he says. “First, there was 5G to consider. Then there were lockdowns and masks. Now there are 15-minute cities. It’s a never-ending threat and that’s why it’s so difficult to escape from.”

Lambert, whose football career ended in 2017 following 241 goals in 701 games for nine clubs across all levels of professional football in England, perhaps stands as testament to that.

On September 11, the 41-year-old used his Twitter page to start promoting the rally with a poster that could easily have been an advert for a ghost tour, where the town hall faded into the background of a ghoulish blue light.

“People of Liverpool, start researching 15 minute city’s (sic),” Lambert wrote, “because they are coming our way very shortly if we allow it.”

Then, in capital letters, he added: “WE DO NOT CONSENT!!”

A video from a garden followed three days later, was aimed at “you Scousers”.

According to Lambert, Liverpool’s council was planning on “dividing” the city into 13 zones in an attempt to create greener and safer spaces for “us, the people”.

“It is not, it is not,” Lambert insisted. “It is a controlled tactic being implemented across this country as we speak. These are initial movements for 15-minute cities, all under the guise of climate change.”

Liverpool would be under the surveillance of cameras and, eventually, permanent barriers, according to Lambert. “This is unacceptable,” he said. “Us, the people, will not stand for this control tactic.”

Lambert making his way to the 15-minute city protest in Liverpool (Simon Hughes)

While Lambert did not provide evidence for these claims, the city council is adamant that such plans have never been discussed at any committee meeting and it does not form a part of its planning or policy.

The 15-minute city, an urban design concept which could be perceived as a fairly mundane strategy that has been moderately successful in other parts of the world for more than a decade, aims to provide everything that a resident supposedly needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

Since the start of 2023, however, it has been targeted by conspiracy theorists, who believe it to be a part of a malign international plot to control people’s movement in the name of climate change. According to the protestors standing beside Sky, new cameras in bus lanes were evidence that this process had started in Liverpool.

Not every person’s life can be viewed through their social media output, but Lambert’s might be revealing in terms of what it does not include over the first three years.

His Instagram page has been active since 2017 and until 2020, nearly all of his posts related to his family and football. If he was interested in politics, medicine, or social freedoms, he did not show it.

The nature of those posts began to change six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically when Rishi Sunak told musicians they should retrain and find new jobs.

Lambert, like a lot of people, pushed back at this radical suggestion by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has since become the British prime minister.

By March 2021, he was posting about lockdowns, writing: “No new variant or blaming the unvaccinated!! NO MORE!!!”

Lambert only joined Twitter in June 2023, attracting 10,000 followers since. His bio suggests he is “fighting for my children’s future”, as an ex-footballer-turned-coach, though he does not mention he is employed by Wigan Athletic. It includes the hashtag #greatawakening.

In his first video post, he described himself as a “critical thinker” before having a stab at explaining what he thought this phenomenon was.

“No one has ever told us what the great awakening is,” Lambert admitted.

A month later, he released another, more succinct video, where he “withdrew his consent to be governed by any corrupt, compromised, belligerent parliament of government”.

“I will not comply,” he added.

I had asked Lambert for an interview in July, to speak about his views, challenge them, and to see where they were rooted. Initially, he agreed, but the night before we were due to meet, he cancelled without any initial indication he wanted to reschedule. After being pressed on another date and promising to come back with a suggestion, he did not.

It became apparent on his Instagram page that two days before our original interview, he had attended a gathering with at least four other people, including Andrew Bridgen, the Member of Parliament who, earlier this year, was expelled from the Conservative Party for comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. He had also been found to have breached lobbying rules.

Bridgen has been an outspoken critic of lockdown policy (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

At the start of September, Hope Not Hate, the largest anti-fascist organisation in the United Kingdom, distributed a picture of Bridgen in Copenhagen with Tommy Robinson, arguably the most notorious far-right activist in the United Kingdom.

The organisers of the rally Lambert promoted and attended in Liverpool were the British Lions, a group which was spawned out of the Covid conspiracy “freedom” movement.

Despite using ancient law and sovereign language, Hope Not Hate says the organisation is not explicitly far-right, but says that some of its members have been seen at other far-right events.

A leaflet handed out by the British Lions on Wednesday outlined, rather chaotically, all of the things they are challenging the government on. Some were rooted in reality, such as the attempt to criminalise rights to protest; others were unsubstantiated claims apparently designed to offer the impression of a super conspiracy.

So many of the origin stories for these groups and beliefs can be traced back to the pandemic, which Joe Mulhall, from Hope Not Hate, describes as an “unprecedented opportunity for engagement with the conspiracy world”.

Mulhall says conspiracists will ignore any differences when they meet believers of their secretive world. “The nuances seem tiny when they feel like they are conquering an external force. The enormity of the perceived threat means they will put aside political distinctions that traditionally might be a problem.”

Nine summers ago, I watched Lambert cry tears of joy as he completed his dream move. He was at Melwood, Liverpool’s old training ground, having just signed for the club.

When I spoke to him briefly in July, he described it as the best moment of his life. I remember being delighted for him, as so many Liverpool supporters were. His story until this point had been one of crushing rejection and extraordinary revival, heaving himself from the floor of his release from the club he loved as a teenager to working his way back a couple of decades later. “I can’t believe this has happened,” he told me.

Lambert fulfilled a boyhood dream by playing for Liverpool (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

On much colder reflection, his path might offer clues as to why he thinks the way he does now. Lambert was born in Kirkby, an overspill town seven miles inland from Liverpool’s city centre, living in a maisonette opposite the old Kirkby Stadium, which for junior teams in the area was the equivalent of Wembley. With a notoriously hard shot, he was spotted by Liverpool scouts aged 10 and he spent five years in the junior ranks, rejecting opportunities to join Everton and Manchester United.

It was not a shock to him when he was told by Steve Heighway, Liverpool’s academy director, that he was being released because of his lack of pace. Over the next few years, he had to adapt his game and this led to him playing in a variety of positions. He joined Blackpool as a right-back, but by the last year of his apprenticeship, he was a central midfielder. Two of those years had been under Nigel Worthington, but when Steve McMahon, the former Liverpool midfielder, took over, his fortunes changed. McMahon had been his father’s hero, but within six months of his appointment as manager, Lambert was allowed to leave the club — unable to even get a game for the reserves. McMahon had seen ability but did not think Lambert’s body would allow him to regularly play for 90 minutes.

On trial at Macclesfield Town, he was not being paid and this led to him getting a job at a beetroot factory. Aged 19, he was contemplating a career in the semi-professional ranks because he did not have a car and could not even afford the cost of the travel expenses to make it to training. Yet six months later, he was sold to Stockport County for what remains a club record fee of £300,000.

Lambert believes he was entitled to earn 10 per cent of that fee, but when he tried to buy a house, he learned that the money had disappeared into an agent’s account. By the age of 19, it would be understandable if he had trust issues given he might feel let down by the club he loved, his father’s hero, and the person supposedly representing him in this cruel, unforgiving sport.

At Stockport, Lambert found it hard to adapt to a deep-lying midfield role. The team was struggling and the fans turned on the players. As the most expensive signing, he bore the brunt and this led to him dropping a division to join League Two Rochdale, where he rediscovered a sense of purpose while playing as a centre-forward. He maintained his scoring habit after moving to Bristol Rovers and when Southampton were relegated into League One, new owners, with new money, enticed him to the south coast. There, the manager Alan Pardew asked him to lift his top up. Looking at his belly, he told him he was a “disgrace”.

Despite scoring the goals that helped Southampton accelerate back up the leagues and making friends with Le Tissier along the way, Lambert says the club wanted to sell him every summer.

He was desperate to prove them wrong and when he finally made it into the Premier League, aged 30, he had played almost 400 games across each of the divisions in the English football league. Yet in the opening game of that season, at champions Manchester City, he was left on the bench. The decision by manager Nigel Adkins suggested he didn’t truly believe in him.

Lambert always felt the need to prove himself (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

Listening to Lambert, you begin to realise how lonely football can be. He could only ever really trust himself: his talent and resilience. Regularly, those making decisions about the direction of his career did not. Even after proving himself in the Premier League, he felt as though international recognition with England only came out of respect for his record rather than his ability.

On his debut against Scotland, he was in “dreamland” after scoring the winner. He made it into England’s squad for the 2014 World Cup squad but felt like a “mascot” after just three minutes of playing time. The lack of action meant he felt he needed less of a summer holiday as he began his Liverpool career. Despite being given five weeks off, he returned to Melwood after a fortnight, vowing to become the fittest he had ever been.

It proved to be a mistake because he needed the break. Aged 32, Lambert had never played a full season extending into a summer tournament before. Back on Merseyside, he felt heavy — like he didn’t have any energy. On the club’s pre-season tour of the United States, he struggled with the routine of training, playing and travelling.

Liverpool’s manager, Brendan Rodgers, had told Lambert that he was bringing in Alexis Sanchez to replace the outgoing Luis Suarez. Sanchez, however, never arrived. In the 2014-15 season, Liverpool missed Suarez terribly. In Sanchez’s place, Rodgers bought Mario Balotelli despite vowing not to, and Balotelli’s signing was a failure.

Lambert was under more pressure to deliver. His first Liverpool goal at Crystal Palace coincided with what turned into a bad team performance and a defeat. After just five months at the club, Rodgers wanted to move him on, but Lambert rejected the opportunity to join Palace before he almost went to Aston Villa. He never fulfilled that boyhood dream of scoring for Liverpool at Anfield.

Out of the starting XI, his fitness got worse. He was less likely to affect a game if his chance did come. Spells at West Bromwich Albion and Cardiff City followed, but within six weeks, Lambert was told by Neil Warnock that he wanted him off the wage bill. One of the offers came from Scunthorpe United, but he couldn’t face lowering himself to a level of football which he had tried so hard to get away from.

Listening to him on the Straight From The Off podcast in 2021, it seemed as though he was still searching for answers as to why his career unravelled the way it did. Certainly, had he listened to any supposed “expert” at crucial points in his career, then he may have not even made it to Blackpool.

Across the Liverpool fanbase, he has become a figure of fun, but not because his time at the club ended in the way it did. In another podcast this year, he spoke enthusiastically about scientists conducting an experiment where they spent time speaking positively to a glass of water, which allegedly responded by dazzling them with the clarity of their crystals.

When a friend saw that clip, he messaged me straight away, asking: “What next, Rickie Lambert taking mortgage advice from a can of Fanta?”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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