The New Rules of Sports Reporting with Pablo Torre

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DAVID GREENE, HOST: Back in the ’90s, in the SportsCenter era, sports journalism was built on the highlight reel.

BROADCASTER: Here is the man that this crowd wants to see. Vince Carter with his first shot! Let’s go home!

DG: Athletes were larger-than-life figures whose greatness could be distilled into a dunk replayed on loop. And the job of the journalist was usually to amplify the myth, to celebrate the superhuman, to inspire awe.

BROADCASTER 1: Top 8, 2-2, base is loaded for Sammy Sosa, look out.
BROADCASTER 2: 1-0 count, 2 down, Sosa waiting, swung on, deep grand slam home run, Sammy Sosa.
BROADCASTER 3: His third grand slam in his last 34 home runs, he went 200.

DG: The distance between the athlete and the audience was kind of the point. We didn’t know much about who they were off the field, and we really didn’t need to. The spectacle was enough. Then came the internet, though, and that distance, those myths, were shattered. Social media, podcasts, and 24 7 access now give us the whole person, flawed, vulnerable, often really messy.

BROADCASTER The people of Rio, they put it on a great Games, and my immature, intoxicated behavior tarnished that a little.

DG: With the pedestal collapsed, storytellers, they need a new approach. One that looks past the viral clips to understand how athletes navigate the pressures of being human in public. It’s not about tearing down idols, but about interrogating the systems that build them. In short, it’s the perfect moment for this guy.

PABLO TORRE Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre.

DG: I really do think Pablo Torre is often the smartest guy in the room, but he would never say that, and you also wouldn’t know it based off his self-deprecating presence on camera. A Harvard grad who started by writing deeply reported features for Sports Illustrated, he quickly became a sharp, witty voice at ESPN, where he co-hosted Around the Horn, High Noon, and countless segments that blurred the line between journalism and cultural commentary. Now with his own podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out he has built a hit that feels like a natural evolution of his career, a mix of plain curiosity, internet chaos, and big brain humor that turns every weird sports story into a mirror of all of us consuming.

PT: Do you think the greatest football coach of all time is deserving of a serious examination that will also make you uncomfortable when you see his man boobs? These are the questions I present to modern journalism.

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DG: From WHYY and PRX, this is Sports in America. And today, we’re gonna mash up the sacred and the profane with one of the more unique voices in sports. We talk about his first memories of his beloved Yankee Stadium, how he uses the absurd to speak truth to power, and why he found himself on the porch of Bill Belichick’s Airbnb. Wait till you hear that. I was really excited to talk to Pablo. We actually both spent time writing for the Harvard Crimson in college, but I’ll tell you, our paths diverged from there. And sometimes I will admit I’m a little envious of the kind of insights into our world and culture that Pablo has gained through the lens of sports. We’ll hear about the times he felt he lost his way, how he developed his signature process, and why he thinks sports are more vital than ever. To break through the noise in our divided country.

DG Pablo, thanks for doing this.

PT: David, good to talk to you, man. Happy to.

DG: Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. Can we start from the beginning? You grew up in New York, right?

PT: Yes, in Manhattan, I’m a city kid, a thing that now sounds so much tougher when I say it as an adult than it felt at the time. I was naive. Are we here to talk Rudy Giuliani? Is that what we’re doing here?

DG: I mean, sure. I mean if you wanna bring up Giuliani, I’m here for it.

PT: Giuliani’s New York?

DG: I was more interested in your New York, but if you want to talk about Giuliani’s New York.

PT: Oh, well, I grew up in it. I mean, it was it was I grew up in Murray Hill in Manhattan, which used to be a place where consultants did not go to vomit recreationally. (Laughs) Now it is exactly that. And first one in my family born in the United States, born and raised in New York City, parents from the Philippines, and my New York is that version of New York that I am ever nostalgic for. A place where everything felt. Atomically diversified, the multicultural experiment in which the allegiance that I clung to most sincerely, tribally, was the New York Yankees. So that was me as a kid.

DG: So you were a Yankees fan from, like, from birth?

PT: I mean, all those trophies. How does one not get radicalized?

DG: That’s probably true. Yeah, no, that’s really true. Pittsburgh Pirates fans like me really appreciate that kind of chatter.

PT: That’s right.

DG: So what’s your first sports memory?

PT: Oh, wow. Going to the Big East Tournament…

DG: Oh, nice!

PT: …at Madison Square Garden. I remember I was looking at this the other day because my mom saves all of my stuff, which is horrifying. But as a matter of like a little notebook that I found when I used to just like write down statistics and rosters as if I was, you know, on the bench, like as an assistant coach or something. And then the more conventional, like Proustian memory, is going up the ramp at Yankee Stadium and seeing the expanse of green and being intoxicated by the fact that wait a minute This is this is a thing that exists in real life. You never forget that. So those are the two things I think of.

DG: And then, so we share something else in common, which is going to the same college and writing for the same college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. And I don’t know, I have to say, I don’t know the right words to use, but I feel like there was something about that place and writing and the craft of writing that made me who I am as a journalist in a lot of ways. And do you feel the same way?

PT: The word you’re looking for is insufferable.

DG: That’s that that is accurate, yeah! (Laughs) Sleepless.

PT: Sleepless, but so sincerely cosplaying the New York Times is the shorthand like a bunch of kids who were gonna take this as seriously as anyone at Harvard was doing anything.

DG You’re talking something covered like the New Hampshire primary as a sophomore in college, but I felt like, “I can compete with the New York Times in the Washington Post, like I’m from the Harvard Crimson.” Like, but it was laughable.

PT: I remember I got press passes to go to like Celtics games. I was like, I was probably doing too much just as a matter of like, “I deserve to be, I deserve be with the actual adults.” But it’s an extracurricular activity, of course, that became your main thing. I didn’t do journalism before getting to college. In high school, I kind of wrote for the school paper, but didn’t really mean anything. To me, apologies to the Owl, a fine institution in its own right, at Regis High School. But the Crimson is where you realize there can be a pre-professionalism that attends all these meetings. And you see the coaching tree, as it were.

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PT: I remember showing up and being like, oh wow, this is not merely playing pretend, New York Times, this kind of a feeder system to real newspapers. I was assigned a story on the heavyweight crew team. And the rowing team at Harvard, again, I’m from New York City, did not know what crew was, had never seen whatever, those vessels on the Charles River. Only to discover that I was suddenly covering what is in my now editorial record, the greatest college rowing team of all time, apparently, the heavyweights at Harvard, who would dominate globally and filled various Olympic rosters, and also involved a memorable first interview for me. And I apologize to which one it is, but it was either Cameron or Tyler Winklevoss.

DG: The Facebook guys?

PT: The Facebook guys, like some of the first calls I made was to, I forget which one, but yes, one of the great rowers in college rowing history is that pair of identical six-foot-seven-ish, you know, or whatever it is, uh, Olympians.

DG: Who would eventually get screwed by Mark Zuckerberg, but you didn’t know that when you were interviewing him about crew.

All right, a little context here. The Winklevoss twins, famously portrayed in the movie The Social Network, were those twin brothers who sued Mark Zuckerberg, claiming they had come up with the idea for Facebook. They also happened to row crew at Harvard.

PT: Oh, I was just comparing them to various members of the, you know, NBA draft. All I could do was just like, in terms of like the bad writing I was doing, it would be like, remember that draft where like Allen Iverson and Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash and all those guys went in the same year. That’s what this crew team is. And I tried to just like translate it into my sports fan language, and going back, I cringe so hard. My body turns inside out because I’m talking about I’m comparing Alan Iverson to the Winklevii, which is a thing I think literally no one should ever do. (Laughs)

DG Maybe they were the Allen Iversons of crew? Like I mean that that was you’re right, it was a big deal.

PT: I do think they loved the dress code, though. I think they definitely loved the regalia. But I was doing, again, like, crew, field hockey, wrestling, women’s ice hockey, a bunch of sports, iIn the first two, especially, field hockey.

DG: But also, you were feeling pressured to go to law school, right?

PT: (Sighs) Yes. Turns out that crew….

DG: (Laughs) You say that with.. I just brought up a difficult memory.

Some of you can probably relate to this. Pablo’s parents had high expectations of him in college, urging him to use his education towards a bankable career, maybe as a doctor or a lawyer. Pablo was torn between pursuing that kind of stable life and following his mischievous muse.

PT Well, you know, “Mom and Dad, I’m covering a field hockey.” It does not necessarily resemble the dream they had for me when they came to this country. And my parents are physicians that came from the Philippines. They worked at NYU Hospital. My dad worked at the VA and Bellevue hospital in Manhattan for 30, 40 years in the end. And so the thing I came into college aspiring to do pre-professionally was go to law school because David, that’s what you do. When you’re a person who is quote-unquote Interested in the humanities, but also quote-unquote wants to make money, right? And so that was, I was in the debate team in high school, and this was always kind of like the path I was gonna follow of respectability and predictability and structure as opposed to whimsy and chaos and field hockey

DG: But then you took the LSAT, right?

PT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, you know, it wasn’t diagnosed as a panic attack at the time. It certainly feels that way when I think about it in retrospect. I just, if you came to visit me in a library, which is where I was the summer before I took the LSAT, my junior year, you could have presented me with a genie in a lamp and I would have used one of the wishes on, like a perfect LSAT score. It was that level of of myopia and short-sightedness around what was really important, spoiler alert, but that’s how much I cared about it, effectively had a panic attack, resolved to take the LSAT again and did a second time, but in between realized I should probably take like a gap year because this isn’t going great for me, but I was supposed to be a lawyer and you know, do important things, that would be my aspiration, yeah.

DG: Okay, I have to, this is my moment of full disclosure. This is where our paths diverge, and I think you made the wise decision. I mean, I went on to be a news journalist and cover politic,s and hosted Morning Edition at NPR and had a great few decades. Totally had a few decades, but I look at people like you, I look like your friend Mina Khymes, and what you’re doing now in the sports world. Like, I am a die-hard sports fan who’s like, “God, I wish I could have applied whatever the hell these skills are to sports.” And you’ve done it so masterfully, and there’s, there’s some envy there. I have to admit, there is some envy. So you, whatever choices you made after having the panic attack in law school, you’ve, you, you did the right thing.

PT: But the reason why I so appreciate that is that now, in my retelling of this, I can opt in to having more of a risk-seeking bravery. Really, it’s because I bombed a test.

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PT: Failure, in my view, is what shunted me into a pathway towards what I can only describe as an unexpected passion project and subsequently quality of life that I did not want. That wasn’t one of the wishes I used in my hypothetical genie story. I never would have thought that. And because it didn’t go great, I was forced to be creative. And actually asked myself for a year, and it’s just a year. What do I want to do? And I just, I chose to be a fact checker at Sports Illustrated and chose to, applied for having been, for fun again, an intern writing articles for the website one summer that I thought was just like the stuff I did for fun because the Crimson was a thing that I cared about deeply but never gave myself the permission to consider as like a real full-time job. Like I was always like, look, the thing about what I see behind your right ear, that terrible towel, so much sweat. I sweated so much about, like, what am I doing here? I was constantly like Patrick Ewing, Big East-level sweat. Like, I was not confident in what this path was going to be. And now, in retrospect, I thank God every day that I bombed the LSAT.

DG: Yes, fate had intervened and sent Pablo down a different path the day he failed the LSAT. Coming up, we will hear about his early days scrapping for stories at Sports Illustrated.

[MIDROLL]

DG: Welcome back to Sports in America. I’m David Greene. When Pablo Torre left college, his half-baked plan to become a lawyer in disarray, he got a shot with an entry-level position at one of the world’s most important sports publications.

So talk me out of the gap year, like, you get into Sports Illustrated, and what is one moment where you felt that? Like at least started to feel it, like, “God, I’m really happy I didn’t go that law school route writing about sports, covering sports. This is the world I wanna be in.”

PT: So one of the first stories I successfully pitched at Sports Illustrated, and again, I was, to use the word, insufferable, I must imagine, as like a young reporter who’s in these meetings, like I’m here to check facts, I’m also here to pitch stories and like write. It’s really what I wanted to figure out if I could do. And immediately, I pitched a story on Manny Pacquiao. So, parents from the Philippines, of course. So I had some insight into his character. And I mean that as a character, like this very impressive Filipino boxer who was climbing weight classes and came from poverty and was now this wildly exciting boxer who had a nickname, which is ridiculous, but very boxing. His nickname was the Mexicutioner.

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PT: Because he would defeat the great fighters from Mexico, all of whom, by the way, through line of violence are known for just all-out offense.

BROADCASTER: The winner by knockout victory, he is the new WBC Super Featherweight International Champion, Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquiao!

PT: And so the entertainment value of Pacquiao was also part of his appeal, was just like he’s so fun to watch. He does not seem to care about defense so much. And so he goes up against great Mexican fighters, and that’s part of legend-building, but he’s Filipino. And so I pitched this story, and I go, and let me tell you, man, when your friends are 1Ls at very respectable law schools that you once fetishized and you meet up for like dinner, one weekend, and you’re trading stories about what it was like for you that week, and they come back with, “Yeah, torts.” And I come back, I was embedded with a boxer in training camp, and I’m basically living my version of Almost Famous, where I’m like embedded in this entourage and I am seeing this… bozing, man. It’s just, it’s the sport where, as money has flooded into sports, boxing has always felt this compulsive need to sell itself, which means just let whoever come on in.

DG: Well put.

PT: Whatever you want to write about, you want to see us do whatever, stick around. They’re just there to promote.

DG: The violence, the characters, the crowd. The parties.

PT: The parties, yes! Vegas, Vegas being the vector, Vegas being the place where these things happen. So I was telling stories about that. And I’m like, okay, wait a minute, from a pure just like story for story thing, I feel like I’m onto something. This at the very least, is more fun to talk about. And my friends seem to be jealous of what I get to do while they’re like, again, still studying for stuff. And that was a big…

DG: Yeah, torts.

PT: Torts, man.

DG: Okay, so you make your way to ESPN, and you actually start getting on television, like Pardon the Interruption. What is the reaction you’re getting from ESPN audiences as a young, smart journalist who’s suddenly popping up?

BROADCASTER 1: Pablo Bernard Sison, those are his real middle names, Torre!

PABLO TORRE ON ESPN: I am the third as well, Jason. Thank you very much.

BROADCASTER 2: Wait a minute, what’s this counterfeit stat boy? Give us a real stat boy!

PABLO TORRE ON ESPN: Listen, I’m trying my best here! Bears, Jaguars, Kansas, Bortles.

PT: Why is this Chinese man with a Mexican name on television? Was a big, was a big bit of feedback on the internet.

PABLO TORRE ON ESPN: Just hit a walk-off homer in the 13th inning. Back to you at the adults’ table.

BROADCASTER: Yes, the adult table. Nice job, kid.

PT: People didn’t quite know what a Filipino is, which was very funny to me because they’re kind of accidentally reverse-engineering colonialism in that very kind of intuitive question. Why is there this Spanish thing with this Asian guy? Well, I have questions and answers for you if you want to continue the conversation. But it was also the thing of I remember being at a party, and this is very early on in my career at ESPN, and I had just got hired and I said, “Oh, I just. I’m just starting work at ESPN.” And ESPN hired me in 2012, in October of 2012. And the response from a friend of a friend at this barbecue was, “Oh, to do tech support?” Like not, but like totally guilelessly, like not trying to shame me. Just like earnestly being like, “Oh, obviously, so you’re like working on the technology, the IT stuff.”

DG: Oh god. Not exactly.

PT: And I’m like, yeah, not exactly. So there was just some of the ESPN being inside of the television, which I also watched growing up, of course, as sports fans do, especially in our era, the cable television era.

DG: I remember that.

PT: It was, God, I miss it. Despite all the stories I’m currently telling, I miss it vehemently. It’s a bunch of people that made me realize that whatever I am is also an avatar for something else. And so that was immediately just like, oh wait, I am something they haven’t necessarily seen before for reasons that are sad, but also are an opportunity in terms of people might remember this guy they saw that one time, and they might ask follow-up questions, which I found useful.

DG: What were you looking for at that point, like in terms of personal fulfillment?

PT: I think I was looking to make money. I remember coming from the world of writing and not realizing that TV people made so much more money.

DG: Hard truth.

PT: That was kind of mind-blowing. And again, I miss the cable television bundle, David. I miss it. But no.

DG: I’m with you.

PT: So there was just like, I got a sense of just like how the media economy actually functioned at that time. And that was very crazy to me. But then, in a more substantive way, what I was trying to do was prove that I could be a voice that mattered. You know, I’m sort of like in these… The job I had at ESPN from the start was basically like, “Hey, can you fill in on every possible show when someone’s on vacation?” I sort ot gradually earned the trust to be a fill-in. I kind of got a PhD in the I was there full-time for a dozen plus years I kind got a Ph.D. in substitute hosting

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DG: But then you land in your own thing. I mean, you and I remember when you became host of ESPN Daily. And again, another moment of envy because I’m sitting there covering news every morning. But that felt like, I mean, based on everything you’re saying, like sort of the dream job?

PT: I didn’t see it in those terms at the beginning. So what happened was I was hosting, I was co-hosting a show called High Noon on television that existed for two years. And the show got canceled. And simultaneously, because the universe works in mysterious ways, my friend Mina Kimes, who you mentioned before, she was transitioning to be a full-time NFL analyst. She had previously been hosting ESPN Daily, which was ESPN’s, spoiler alert, answer to The Daily at the New York Times, and I came in like grateful to have a job, a full-time job again.

DG: So Pablo began to gather these tricks he’d learned along the way, turning a pithy phrase, being playful without causing harm as a host, combining spontaneity with deep research into a viral podcast that has come to compete with the biggest shows in sports, all of this entirely on his own terms.

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KATIE NOLAN: I haven’t even seen Pablo yet it’s like a reveal. It’s like I get like, what’s he wearing?

MICHAEL CRUZ KAYNE He’s gonna be in a ball gown.

KATIE NOLAN: There he is! Miss America!

PT: Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we’re going to find out what this sound is.

MARK CUBAN: If I’m wrong on this and you’re right, then Steve is not as smart as I think he is.

PT: Can I give you my political platform for how to solve the internet? I think we should all go back to 56 KBPS modems.

ILANA GLAZER: Eee-yaaah! Yeah.

PT: That, when a JPEG really meant something. and it unfurled like a tapestry on your computer screen.

ILANA GLAZER: Yeah.

DG: Then you break out and you’re doing your own thing now. Pablo Torre Finds Out, which really just, I mean, lets you follow your curiosity, and it’s an amazing show. But I guess before we dive in, like, what were you missing on that ESPN show? Like you spent a lot of time talking to other journalists, designing, as you described it, like this beautiful approach with conversation and scoring, and tape. And I feel like sports is the perfect place for that kind of approach because the stories are so rich. But what was missing? What weren’t you?

PT: Yeah, so just briefly, you mentioned it, like why is sports great for this, is because, and I think about this all the time in sports, like the stakes are almost immediately persuasive. Yeah. It’s sort of like, the drama, like the question of like when you score something, it’s like, well, it’s gonna feel like too much. If you buy that the people care about this as a matter of like almost life and death, the stakes for all of these stories can sort of exist on a higher level of urgency, which is why I kind of love the drama of sports intuitively. It’s like NFL films.

DG: But like NFL films, they could be covering some meaningless game between two, three, and 11 teams late in the season. And I would just be like, crying, like literally crying about some third-and-13 play because the music is underneath it and the voice.

PT: And the narration, oh, John Facenda, yeah, just like, you know, “The Autumn Wind is a Raider,” you know? Just like all that, just oh my God, like.

JOHN FACENDA IN THE AUTUM WIND IS A RAIDER: The game is Roger Staubach, an officer and a gentleman, saying goodbye to the team he loved.

PT: Yes, yes, that’s cinematic. It had an obviously cinematic aspect. But what I wasn’t getting to do was direct the film. When you’re around so much reporting. I think the instinct becomes, “Ooh, I wanna do some of this myself.” And so I would occasionally do episodes. I’d squeeze in episodes where like, I’m gonna do the interviews, but they were so few and far between and invariably my favorite ones to do, which speaks to, again, some solipsism, I’m sure, but also just this desire to like really get my hands into every part of this, because that was, I think, just very, very energizing.

DG: We used to have a line at Morning Edition, which an executive producer used, which was, we’re all about wonk and whimsy, which I loved. And I feel like that’s the same sort of ethos, but why is that important? I mean, the combination of serious and stupidity?.

PT: So coming from sports and coming from my sort of like habituation to sports talk, in which I’m coming in as like effectively the nerd, the young Sheldon of ESPN, is the most self-loathing insecurity that I had when I was 22. You sort of need to establish your credibility that you’re here to have fun. You’re here to entertain, like you’re not here to be the turd in the punch bowl. You’re not here to just serve broccoli to people. That’s a dangerous niche to have in sports, which is, of course, the toy department, which is why you, David, of course, never dared to fully commit to it

DG: Ever.

PT: Because it’s for children, and so, allegedly. And, so to me, like part of what this show is supposed to be is, yeah, wonk and whimsy. I think that It’s exactly what I think I am going for here. And, really, it’s to melt the cheese on your broccoli. I’m still gonna do the substance. I’m gonna hopefully…

DG: You’re getting the greens.

PT: You’re getting some nutrition, man. I can’t help that part. That’s just what I’m, there’s a wonk that is going to really unapologetically reveal itself to you. But if you can, by that point, be so, I don’t know, surprised by how fun it also is, then now I’m sort of scratching all the parts of my cortex, you know, like I’m lighting up all these parts as opposed to just like trying to be one thing or the other.

DG: As Pablo’s presence grew in the media landscape, he began to take bigger, more thought-provoking swings. In 2009, he explored why pro athletes often fall into financial peril. In 2024, he profiled inmates on death row who were rooting for the Cowboys with their final words.

He’s found his groove, holding the most wealthy and powerful figures in sports to account. No more so than with his latest reporting. It involves LA Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, NBA superstar Kawhi Leonard, and a startup that’s called Aspiration.

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DG: Let me make this as simple as possible. So Pablo discovered that Ballmer the owner, invested heavily in Aspiration, which had been struggling. Then that company paid Kawhi Leonard, the basketball player, $28 million. But no one can find out what Leonard did for this company. No appearances, no ads, no social posts, nothing. So it appears Balmer was paying his star player under the table, circumventing NBA salary cap rules and breaking labor law. Now, because of Pablo’s reporting, the league has initiated its own high-profile investigation.

You have now established yourself as one of, if not, I mean, the most influential, investigative journalist in the sports world recently. I mean, I think about your LA Clippers stories and, you know, reporting that they used an endorsement arrangement to circumvent the salary cap in the NBA. You’re dealing with like one of the richest men on earth and Steve Ballmer, the owner,…

PT: Harvard guy, Harvard guy David.

DG: Harvard Guy. Kawhi Leonard, one of the biggest stars in the NBA right now. And you take them on like, and, and you expose something important, and the NBA is now investigating. Like, how does, what’s the role of fun and stupidity when you are telling such really important, groundbreaking stories?

PT: I appreciate you framing it that way. This is a story fundamentally that on paper can seem like just broccoli. It’s a company that was founded by some Harvard nerds that was fighting climate change. That’s the story of Aspiration, the company that signed Kawhi Leonard to the no-show deal that was in totality, this $28 million no-show endorsement contract plus a $20 million equity deal. So, $48 million in totality. On the other side, there is a former CEO of Microsoft who comes in wanting to do things as precisely as measure the distances between the toilets in the new building he’s created. There is wonk all over his approach to how he wants to run the LA Clippers. There is in Kawhi Leonard and the Cardinal Sin that has allegedly, according to my reporting, been broken. Salary cap circumvention, which is a rule in a collective bargaining agreement, a function of labor law in which in a 500-page document, there’s a very important section in which you can’t pay your athletes more than has been agreed upon as a matter of your players’ union and your league. And so you go down the rabbit hole on that. And it’s just a series of extreme characters behaving in ways that, again, are quite cinematic and I think persuasively obsessive. Like they really care. And if you convey that care as well as that incompetence, it’s like, well, there’s a little Coen brothers in that. There’s a, you know, pick your favorite part, you know, high-brow farce is kind of how I think about it sometimes. And I love that.

DG: But who are you? Like, I think about the great investigative journalists who would talk about like who they’re fighting for and what they’re fighting for. It’s like you’re exposing corruption, you’re exposing corruption in politics. At the end of the day, you’re fighting for people who are taken advantage of, the voiceless. Like when it comes to investigative work in sports, like, who do you think about? Who are you doing this for?

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PT: I think about the public interest, and that is a loaded term that we can spend three hours also debating. But my view is that sports are important. And it’s not just because I want to justify it to my parents, although there is some of that. It’s also because it’s just one of the few cultural institutions that people care about anymore. And certainly one of the few institutions, if the only one, in which people from different political perspectives will gather to root for the Steelers or for the Yankees. They may not listen to the same music or vote the same way or exist in the same geographic location or be of the same age or economic strata, but they might care about sports. And so to me, sports as the giant town hall that might be the only town hall we really plausibly have left, where people are gonna gather with those they disagree. It ends up being a place where you could really get to the bottom of some of those vegetables. And the public interest here, I mean, it’s interesting. I was, I’m always trying to calibrate, like how much do I wanna make this a case based on the vegetables versus just the unapologetic, I do this because I think it’s entertaining. I think part of me just wants to do the second thing and just say, I do, this, I investigate stories because I they’re really worthwhile stories, period.

But the more I think about sports, as it fits into American culture. I mean, frankly, the Kawhi Leonard story has been this case study in a way in which one of the richest men on the planet, the richest owner in all of sports in the world, may plausibly be held to some account in a way that he cannot be, frankly, in the rest of American life, in the life that he leads. Somehow, this stupid non-law that is a real cardinal rule in sports about salary caps circumvention brings a scrutiny to a 150-billionaire that actually provides an accountability that he does not have to feel otherwise. And the reason he feels it is because sports are important to him. And because he knows how much more popular sports is broadly to the public and the public interest than even Microsoft was. It’s just crazy. I mean, and again, some of this we can wish for people to care more about, frankly, the down-the-middle straight political stories that are actually unambiguously important and civically relevant. If I have to come through the toy department, though, to make it feel like maybe there’s something resembling accountability for the richest people on our planet who have all gravitated to sports for the reasons that also are explaining why we’re in this point in time. I just think that’s a unique vantage point that I don’t want to surrender.

DG: As Pablo has developed his own show, the stories he has chosen to follow have taken some unexpected turns. We’ll hear about one of the wildest ones yet coming up on Sports in America.

[MIDROLL]

DG: Pablot Torre has a knack for finding leads that combine salacious details with larger-than-life characters. He has a fearlessness when it comes to calling out the questionable decisions of some of the biggest personalities in sports, which is how he found himself on the porch of Bill Belichick’s Airbnb.

Can we finish by talking about a reporting trip that you did to Winthrop, Massachusetts?

PT: (Laughs) I would, please.

DG So, Bill Belichick, as we all know, football coach at the University of North Carolina, and he won like maybe, a Super Bowl or two for the New England Patriots.

PT: But who’s counting?

DG: Yeah. Yeah, not me. They still don’t have more than the Steelers, but anyway, so he’s caught on a Ring camera that the world sees shirtless, which is highly disturbing, like top on the list of things I never wanted to see. In my life, but he was there with a woman, leaving at like six in the morning without a shirt on and carrying like a man purse?

PT: A murse.

DG: Okay, a little bit of context here. Some, not me, because Go Steelers, but some would call Bill Belichick the greatest coach in NFL history. He’s got eight Super Bowl rings, two with the New York Giants, six with the New England Patriots. And he was famous for his gruff, terse dynamic with the media; he would answer long questions with just two or three words. He was not friendly. He was fiercely private. He never smiled. And yet, as a flash point in the internet age, he found himself in the middle of one of the most tabloid-y stories we have ever seen in sports. He was caught shirtless on a mystery Ring camera video. Yes, a football legend with a walk of shame for the ages. It was a story made in a lab for Pablo Torre to investigate.

Fill in the blanks for me. What did we all see that horrified so many of us?

PT: We saw in miniature a vast, absurd story that I have been investigating, in which we are getting the most shockingly personal view of the most deliberately impersonal man to straddle the most important sport in America.

[MUSIC]

Pt: So Bill Belichick, it’s just, I just, look, man, some of it’s like, again, in sports, you can really think of archetypes. And we are helped by the fact that Belichick, as you, as a Steeler fan, knows, he was America’s withholding father. He was the guy who didn’t want to ever tell you, “Good job.” He was the guy who actually said, “Do your job,” as a matter of his personal…

DG: And quietly cheat a lot, but yeah.

PT: And absolutely, you know, engineer vast spy operations as well as football deflation operations, one might allege. But his whole thing was I’m gonna be, and he was, the greatest football coach of all time, and the way he did it was through this unbelievable discipline, discretion, privacy, and aggressive boringness.

DG: Right.

PT: Him at a press conference was, was…

DG: Painful.

PT: Oh my God, incomparably painful.

REPORTER: It seemed your team rallied around your quarterback to some extent to drop down to number three on the depth chart at the most important position and still be a good well well-coached team that decisively. What does that say about just where your team is right now, just how good it is right now?

BILL BELLICHICK: I don’t know.

PT: To the point of like, almost like fetishistic. Like, at a certain point, the press was sort of like they knew what they were gonna get, and the question was, could you enjoy it? And over time…

DG: He was enjoying it, I think. I think he loved being that

PT: Power.

DG: Jerk.

PT: Power. To be that powerful and untouchable, despite all the things that you just alluded to, is a rare thing. He is the best coach, the greatest defensive mind in American football history is the fair biography to give him. And so when this same guy pops up, Zoftig, shirtless, bountiful, in terms of the invasive view.

DG: (Laughs) I don’t want to think of him as bountiful. I don’t want to, but please.

PT: But you know it to be true, David.

DG: Yes, and dating Jordon Hudson and dating Jordon Hudson is like a very, a woman far below his age.

PT: And look I’m speaking of kinks I’m not here to yuck Bill Belichick’s yum he’s a free-thinking adult man and Jordon Hudson who is now 24 at last check this is maybe a 50 year or so age gap give or take?

DG: Who’s judging? Nobody.

PT: Fire con Dios, but as some on Twitter would accuse me of thinking in my Spanish-speaking brain, I would simply say that Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson, what they resemble is one of the great character developments in American life. Bill Belichick went from the guy we just talked about to this guy who wanted to be a podcaster, appear in media, a guy who was suddenly here on Instagram doing yoga poses with Jordon Hudson, his girlfriend. He was dressed as a fisherman catching her on his rod, and she was a mermaid. I can’t overstate how unlike this was to the old Bill Belichick, and simultaneous to this, the last bit of texture, I guess, is, and there’s so much available, is just that he became the head coach of the University of North Carolina. He became the highest paid public employee in the state of North Carolina, and he becomes a college coach, and wouldn’t you know it, this girlfriend, who is not merely a girlfriend, but the acting, the acting not just COO of this production company that they made together.

DG Yeah. So Jordon Hudson was in college when she met Bill Belichick on a plane. They were sitting next to each other, and then he became her boyfriend, nearly 50 years her senior. She became Belichick’s right-hand woman and self-styled publicist. Jordon started showing up everywhere. Belichick did, major media interviews on the field at Tar Heel football practice, even in a Super Bowl ad at the coach’s insistence. Pablo felt like sports fans just had a right to know what the hell was going on.

Some of what you’re saying, that’s the broccoli. Like he’s still coaching at a major college program. I mean, there’s like money being exchanged, contracts being signed, getting his girlfriend into Super Bowl ads. Like if you’re a North Carolina football fan, if you are a New England Patriots fan, if you’re just a football fan. If you’re just a sports fan. This guy’s been important for years, and it’s like we deserve to know the truth.

PT: Do you think the greatest football coach of all time is deserving of a serious examination that will also make you uncomfortable when you see his man boobs? These are the questions I present to modern journalism.

DG: But you went to, you rented the Airbnb where the two of them were staying. Like what was, tell me why that was, why that was an important component of your reporting on the life of Bill Belichick.

PT So the Ring cam video for I am I’m lost in the sauce sometimes thank you for bringing me back to like oh…

DG: No, no, I wasn’t gonna let you go without bringing up the fact that you rented the Airbnb that Bill Belichick stayed in.

PT: So the reporting around what is this ring camera video, I mean, really, it came to the fore because on Netflix Live, in the roast of Tom Brady, at the end of the roast, Tom Brady gets to go behind the dais, go behind a podium on the dais, and he gets to hit back at everybody. And Belichick’s on stage, along with the rest of the New England Patriots and many comedians and various other dignitaries of culture. And Tom Brady says,…

TOM BRADY: Everybody asked me which ring is my favorite. I used to say the next one, but now that I’m retired, my favorite ring is the camera that caught Coach Belichick slinking out of that poor girl’s house at 6 a.m. a few months ago.

PT: And I’m like, okay. So now, so like this is in front of millions of people with Belichick on stage, and he’s kind of like uncomfortably laughing, ha ha ha. And then I look up just the reporting around this, and the reporting had been, this is Bill Belichick leaving Jordon Hudson’s house. And…

DG: The investigative journalist in you has been activated.

PT: I’m a fact checker. I’m nothing if not a fact-checker. And I’m like, really? Because by the way, if I can find where that house is, maybe there are just other bits of context surrounding this whole story, like, that’s a development. Belichick was staying there when? This was happening in 2023? Let me just like make sure I’m not missing anything. And the more I look into it, the more it becomes clear that it’s not Jordon Hudson’s house. I mean, it’s just one of those stories, man, where like, the follow-up question, as I’m standing on the porch, with the Ring camera on it is who’s on the other side of that Ring cam. And down the stairs come the owners of the Airbnb, who agree to talk to me without showing their faces. So it’s just tape, and we don’t name them, and we’re careful to protect their identity otherwise. But what is so undeniable is the deep Boston accent and the fact that the husband in this pair is a Patriots fan.

DG: Amazing.

PT: And to hear his point of view, like one day this 20-something young woman shows up and under cover of darkness, suddenly she is joined by some man that they don’t really know and can’t make out because it’s dark. And then in the pre-dawn hours of the following morning, out of their home, they live above this. They live on the top floor. Out from beneath them wanders a shirtless Bill Belichick, is just one of the funniest mental images I think a person can have.

DG: It really is. Last question, what story are you most excited to tell and apply this wonderful approach to now?

[MUSIC]

PT: Gosh, you know, one of the struggles when I launched PTFO was, are we gonna have enough stories? Are we gonna, people were asking like, are you gonna run out of stuff to find out about? The joy of doing this has been the more stuff that I find out, the more people want to tell me about stuff they think I should find out, and so I want to get to some other stuff. I really do have like a again now that I’m in control of my docket in the way that I couldn’t be at ESPN. I have so many long-range projects that are box-checking in the way that you put it before. The very thing I just said earlier, I thanked God for that I have a job that allows me to do stuff like this. And now I’m again, being confronted with the question of how much do you really, really, really want to be thinking about a story that is both serious, but also phenomenally stupid. And my mileage, my mileage may evolve, but I’m here for it in the meantime.

DG: Well, I am too. I love broccoli with cheese. I’m not gonna lie.

PT: (Laughs) My daughter, my five-year-old. My five-year-old has been the focus group for that metaphor, so I’m glad it’s resonating.

DG: I love it, it resonates. Pablo, this was really fun, I really appreciate it.

PT: Uh, David, anytime, anytime you want to contemplate the life that you could have led, just know that it’s, it’s pretty weird, man. It’s pretty weird. (Laughs)

[THEME MUSIC]

DG: Next time on Sports in America.

BROADCASTER: Hardaway for 3…yes!

DG: We’re talking with NBA Hall of Famer Tim Hardaway about his new memoir and the signature move that inspired its title, “Killer Crossover”.

TIM HARDAWAY: It’s all about being tough, all about being strong, understand what needs to be done and how it needs to be done for my family.

DG: We go deep on his wild NBA career, how his life on the court has changed his relationship with his son, and why one of his proudest accomplishments was admitting he was wrong.

TH: It takes time, but you still gotta have dialogue. You still gotta talk. You know, you still gotta talk.

DG: That’s next time, on Sports in America.

This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Green.

Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler.

Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Windberg. And our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeart Radio app — you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Executive Producer: Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Engineer: Mike Villers
Tile Art: Bea Walling

Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.

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