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    ‘Imagining the Indian’ Review: Fighting Offensive Imagery

    This documentary, subtitled “The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” argues that Native-themed sports team branding fits into a history of systemic racism.In July 2020, the National Football League team in Washington announced that it would shed a name that was long considered a slur against Indigenous people. The decision was a victory in the campaign by Native American activists to eliminate disparaging sports team names and iconography.“Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” a straightforward and often repetitive documentary, spotlights this movement by arguing a handful of key points: Native-themed mascots and branding are offensive. They fit into a national history of systemic racism. And the sustained use of stereotypical images has material consequences for Native people.To deconstruct these tenets, the directors Aviva Kempner and Ben West call on a raft of experts, historians and Native activists, including Suzan Shown Harjo, a trailblazer for the cause. The sources share their personal grievances and act as guides through the annals of racist American imagery, from “The Lone Ranger” and Bugs Bunny cartoons to footage of sports fans in headdresses. The effect is a frenzied slide show of sorts, set to galvanizing music that echoes the passion of the speakers.The marriage of talking heads and troubling material from the archives is a familiar documentary format, and “Imagining the Indian” rarely breaks free from the generic quality of its structure. The speakers introduce a few fresh ideas, such as the notion that football, in which teams use violence to compete for territory, mimics white land-grabbing. But in tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American MascotingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Game Theory’ Host Bomani Jones Calls an Audible

    “Game Theory,” his HBO talk show, has pulled off the difficult feat of mixing sports and comedy with a political bite. Now he’s trying to up his game by going unscripted.You know Bomani Jones is about to say something funny, deadly serious or both when he spits out a sentence like “The question is simple” or “Let me tell you a secret” or, in this case, “Here’s the thing.”Explaining why he no longer regularly debates sports with people on television, Jones, 42, paused dramatically, his lanky frame swimming in sweatpants as he sat on the sofa of his Harlem apartment. “Don’t no one want to argue with me on television,” he said, a snap in his voice, dropping into a baritone. “Ain’t a whole lot of people going to come out a winner. As a result, I don’t come out a winner. I just come out a bully.”What’s characteristic here is the mix of swagger and self-awareness, and also how quickly he shifted angles when making a point. Jones did it again with his final thought: “You can make an argument that I should let them win now and again,” he said, before another one of those punchy setups: “I’ll be honest.” Pause. “I’m not that good at that.”Bomani Jones has been arguing with sports journalists on ESPN shows like “Around the Horn” and “Highly Questionable” for nearly two decades. “Game Theory With Bomani Jones,” entering its second season on HBO on Friday, is the first time he is sitting at his own desk alone. And while he’s got more than enough charisma and dynamism for the job, the real challenge is pulling off something that, he will be the first to tell you, almost never works: a comic show about sports.“This is something that no one has really figured out,” Jones said, adding that he included himself. Television is full of shows starring clever comedians doing topical jokes and sports journalists making smart points, but a happy marriage of these popular forms is rare.Comedy is hard, smart comedy even harder. But with sports, Jones explained, real fans won’t easily accept a comic with no credentials. “Bill Maher can be a comedian who happened to go to Cornell and be treated with the intellectual gravitas to do the show he does. Sports doesn’t work like that.”He continued, “Comedians love sports, but the ideas they have are typically the same as everybody else’s.” With “Game Theory,” his goal is to use sports to say something deeper, more probing and political. “We’re trying to make a funny show,” Jones said, “but that still has the weight and make points that advance things.”Jones in Season 1 of his HBO show “Game Theory.” The second season won’t be as scripted.HBOThis intellectual ambition distinguished the first season, particularly in his virtuosic desk pieces that were unlike anything else on television. They can remind you of the work of John Oliver, mixing long, intricate, forceful arguments with knowing jokes, and while Jones speaks gushingly about that host (whose offices are right across the hall), it’s a comparison he balks at. Jones is harder to pin down ideologically, and as he pointed out, unlike Oliver, he doesn’t do explainers. Jones aims to jump right into the issue, one his viewers already know, and make them look at it a new way.What Oliver and Jones share though is fierce intelligence and high standards on coming up with a novel perspective. “What I tell my writers is I’m always looking for the zag,” he explained to me, before clarifying that he did not mean a cheap contrarian take.This paid off at the height of crypto mania last year, when everyone from Steph Curry to Tom Brady were spokesmen for digital currency. Jones not only bluntly called it a grift, but also explained how crypto’s popularity in the sports world was tied to the decline in trust in institutions and how normalized gambling on games had become. It was an unusually assured and complicated take that appears prescient.Asked for his favorite segment, Jones pointed to the very first episode, when he commemorated the retirement of Duke’s legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski with a historical deep dive into how and why Black fans hate his teams, quipping that if they played the Ku Klux Klan, “we would have rooted for a zero-zero tie.”Jones, who went to Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college, said that while he wanted to appeal to all viewers, he paid particular attention to, as he put it, “never boxing Black people out.” If only the white writers in his room laugh at a joke, he won’t use it. But if only the Black ones do, he’ll think about it. “What I mean for that segment of the audience is different,” he said. “When I walk down the street and am stopped, it’s ‘thank you for what you do.’ It’s far more essential there.”Jones, who called this show his dream job, talks as if he’s only now getting the hang of it. He’s supremely confident in his voice, but fitting it into a talk show is tricky. This is the first time he’s used a writing staff that includes veteran joke writers along with a small news department. But he is convinced that he’s at his best and funniest when he sounds as if he’s speaking off the top of his head. “One thing Season 1 didn’t have enough of is just me cooking,” he said.You hear this most clearly on his podcast, “The Right Time,” in which he can find all kinds of unexpected laughs just thinking aloud. Jones has the cadence of a natural comic even when the subject is serious. That’s why in Season 2, “Game Theory” tweaked the format of its topical segment, changing it from a script to bullet points to allow him to riff. “That’s his superpower,” said Stuart Miller, an executive producer of the series who worked on “The Daily Show” for 13 years.Jones’s background in economics means “he doesn’t do pure hot takes,” said Spencer Hall, a former colleague. Brian Karlsson for The New York TimesOn a recent morning in the writers’ room, Miller, home with Covid, stared at a table of staff members from a laptop. On the wall were cards mapping out the season. In the premiere, Jones commemorates LeBron James’s 20th anniversary in the N.B.A. with an argument that the player empowerment movement, which James is widely credited with leading, is a myth. A later episode will make another zag when he makes the case that the N.F.L. is more woke than you think.Jones had a firm command of the room as he ran through a segment with bullet points of big stories that week, testing out the new format. At one point, he reflected on a riff about how a kid who got into a fight with basketball star Ja Morant needed better fathering, saying, “ESPN wouldn’t let me do that. Now I’m on HBO.”In a segment on a video of Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, slapping his wife, Jones adopted a skeptical voice about whether he would face any repercussions. After he finished, one of the writers suggested that the White joke needed to be set up better and offered a tweaked phrase.When he ran through it again, Jones didn’t take this specific advice but found a third way. First, he added a new joke. “Do you realize how insulting it is to get caught slapping your wife and no one is disappointed?” It got a big laugh from the writers. Then with a head of steam, he pulled the brakes. “If you want to hurt the brand,” he said very slowly, pausing after each word, “then he would have to say something bad about incels.”The day before, he met with a performance coach who mentioned the value of adjusting his pace. That informed his shift, but what mattered more was just working without a script. “Part of going to this format is that intuitively I know when to slow up and go faster,” he said. “It’s a feel thing. Once things get written, I struggle a little bit more.”Jones has two master’s degrees, including in economics, which inform his thinking (look at the title of his show). “He doesn’t do pure hot takes,” said Spencer Hall, a sportswriter, podcaster and former colleague. “That’s the economics training: He’ll say, ‘This is bad, but here’s an unexpected upside.’”When it comes to his comedic sensibility, Jones said, nothing was more influential than “Chappelle’s Show,” and explained that what he admired most was how a sketch like “Black Bush” used a simple premise (what if George W. Bush were Black?) to make layered jokes. “Dave is always coding it on many levels,” Jones said. “The joke is landing is so many different ways.”The simplicity is as important as the complexity. “If I find a basic idea that people aren’t thinking about it, that’s it,” he said. “If I need to go a long way to get there, it probably won’t work.”What makes doing political commentary about sports a balancing act is that fans watch games to escape. Jones understands this well, carefully managing the amount of humor in his arguments while trying to avoid dogmatism. “I don’t know how many interesting screeds are left,” he said, making a subtle point about how television has evolved in the last two decades. “Think of how impactful Olbermann’s screeds were in 2006,” he said of the sports broadcaster who shifted into politics. “Do it now and it doesn’t hit the same. You have to be more sophisticated.”That sophistication should not be mistaken for snobbery. Jones’s focus is not on who wins or loses games, but he doesn’t look down on anyone who cares deeply about that. “The place sports exist in people’s lives is important, and we get ourselves in trouble as high-minded commentators when we trivialize that,” he said. “No one would say music isn’t important. It’s a big part of the fabric of our lives. It matters. Sports is the same.” More

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    Damar Hamlin and the Existential Crisis of ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’

    Fans are used to seeing gruesome injuries. But there was no media playbook for what happened to Hamlin.A seeming eternity of live television had elapsed since Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on a field in Cincinnati after a hard blow to chest. “Monday Night Football” had ground to a halt, and like everyone else who had been tasked with speaking on air while emergency medical personnel tried to save Hamlin’s life, the ESPN studio anchor Suzy Kolber was at a loss for words. “There’s really not much more we can say,” she said, ashen-faced. “I think we’re all feeling the emotions, we’re all joined in prayer together.” Then she paused and, with a measure of disbelief, teased a commercial break: “And we’ll be back.”Sports fans in general, and football fans in particular, have been coarsened over time to gruesome injuries — to the sight of joints bending in unnatural ways and grown men writhing in pain while their teammates huddle up, yards away, for the next play. What happened to Hamlin on Jan. 2, in front of a prime-time audience of millions, was a chilling reminder that silence and stillness can be far worse. You could see that this time was different, because you could hear it: Hamlin fell silently, and then he lay there silently, and then the hush around him spread, fast, from the playing field to the sidelines and then over the stadium. Eventually it reached the broadcast booth, where Joe Buck, ESPN’s play-by-play announcer, tried to let the images of sobbing players and the jarring sight of an ambulance on the field do the talking, and tried not to sound too astonished that league officials appeared intent on resuming the game. A broadcast production crew has a whole playbook for these situations: which replay angles to show and a sense of how often to show them, a list of bromides announcers can use to paper over the discomfort while we wait for the fallen player to give us a reassuring thumbs-up as he’s stretchered off the field. But this time there was no thumbs-up. ESPN just kept repeating the playbook, over and over, until all we could see was the artifice of it.It was around 8:55 p.m., late in the first quarter, when Hamlin first went into cardiac arrest. The N.F.L.’s commissioner, Roger Goodell — the only person in the league with the authority to not just temporarily suspend the game but also postpone it altogether — didn’t officially do so until 10:01. This left the corporate broadcaster with an impossible hour of live television to fill: The game was, technically, still in progress, making it difficult to simply cut away to whatever was on ESPN2 or to skip ahead to SportsCenter and its flawless anchor, Scott Van Pelt. The network’s “Monday Night Football” crew performed with remarkable grace, under the circumstances. But for viewers, it was still an hour of talking heads’ acknowledging that there was nothing to say, with seasoned on-air personalities all but pleading into their earpieces to get off the air. A live N.F.L. broadcast is a preposterously large, complex and expensive operation that exists for one mass-entertainment purpose. Suddenly that purpose wasn’t merely gone; it was borderline unmentionable.The commercial breaks were a mixed blessing — a respite for the broadcasters, whose own emotions understandably kept tumbling out, but a lousy time to peddle light beer, and an inconvenient reminder that in the absence of news about Hamlin’s condition (which would not be forthcoming anytime soon), and in the absence of an actual football game (which no decent person was in the mood to resume), this advertising money was the only reason the cameras were still rolling. We were, in other words, watching a young man’s near-death be commodified in real time. The second time Buck repeated some variation on the phrase “there’s nothing left to say at this point,” it sounded less like a directive to the production truck — let someone else flail for a while — and more like a reproof to the audience. Why are you still watching? Why haven’t you changed the channel? What kind of person still cares about a football game now?More on Damar Hamlin’s CollapseA ‘True Leader’: As a professional football player and community mentor, Damar Hamlin has reached two of his life goals: making it to the N.F.L. and helping others along the way.N.F.L.’s Violent Spectacle: The appetite for football has never been higher, even as viewers look past the sport’s toll on players’ lives. Mr. Hamlin’s collapse should force a reconsideration, our columnist writes.Danger Across Sports: Mr. Hamlin’s collapse has brought attention to sudden cardiac arrest and the vulnerability of athletes from the youth leagues to the professional ranks.Faith and Football: The outpouring of public piety from players and fans shows how Christianity is embedded in N.F.L. culture in a way that goes beyond most sports.This was uncharted territory, the guy on the television more or less telling us to turn off the television. The very program itself was having an existential crisis. There was no game to show, no update on Hamlin’s condition to share, no cutting to black. The moment Joe Buck said “CPR,” “Monday Night Football” was over. Only it couldn’t end.Just 250 miles across Ohio, in a different sports universe separated only by a few TV channels, Donovan Mitchell of the N.B.A.’s Cleveland Cavaliers was pouring in 71 points against the Chicago Bulls. It was the highest single-game total in 17 years, and it makes Mitchell one of only seven players in N.B.A. history to top 70. Mitchell is powerful and balletic, with a 6-foot-10 wingspan that has earned him the nickname Spida; the Cavaliers, thanks in large part to him, will most likely reach the playoffs for the first time since 1998 without LeBron James on the roster. On the emotional spectrum of sports fandom, Mitchell’s night was the polar opposite of the tableau in Cincinnati: jubilation in the stands, gobsmacked teammates on the bench, escalating delirium in the announcers’ voices. When the Cavaliers won, in overtime, Mitchell’s teammates kept drenching him with water bottles, as if to put out flames, and then they all posed together for a photo with the night’s hero.This was all of the reasons we watch sports. But it didn’t merely happen on the same night as Hamlin’s injury; the two events unfolded in lock step, over the same hour of real time. On social media, many fans experienced both dramas at once. As I traded texts with friends about Mitchell’s swelling point total — 58! 66! 69! 70! — I kept toggling apps and scrolling through Twitter, where stats about the basketball game sat alongside uninformed speculation about blunt-impact cardiac arrhythmias and ghouls blaming Covid vaccinations for Hamlin’s collapse. This wasn’t just any regular-season N.F.L. game either: The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals are Super Bowl contenders, and their matchup had major playoff implications, and it was “Monday Night Football,” a multibillion-dollar American institution. Then, suddenly, by swift consensus, the game didn’t matter at all. It was almost generous of Skip Bayless, the Elon Musk of sports trolls, to step up and tweet a take about not postponing the game abominable enough to give the entire platform someone to unite against in disgust. (He even managed to offend Shannon Sharpe, the ex-N.F.L. tight end with whom Bayless hosts Fox Sports 1’s “Undisputed,” enough for Sharpe to stand him up for their broadcast the next morning.)But social media also created avenues for catharsis. Hamlin was an unheralded sixth-round pick coming out of the University of Pittsburgh, near his hometown, McKees Rocks, Pa. He cracked the Bills’ starting lineup only in September, after the first-string safety Micah Hyde suffered a neck injury and had to leave the stadium in an ambulance. In 2020, Hamlin set up a GoFundMe to support a toy drive back home in McKees Rocks, and as of that Monday afternoon, just before the game, he’d raised about $2,500. By Friday, the helplessness we all seemed to be feeling on Hamlin’s behalf had poured more than $8 million into his toy drive.On Monday night, though, you could find Mitchell on one television broadcast, soaked and smiling. On another was the Bills’ wide receiver Stefon Diggs, his cheeks wet with tears. I couldn’t decide if there was something subhuman about juggling these two emotions, trying to compartmentalize them on the fly, or if that was closer to the definition of being human. Mostly I thought about Hamlin. I thought about how I’d feel if I were the one on the ground, how badly I’d just want people to look away, stop filming, turn off the television, go do something else, go watch Donovan Mitchell drop 71 on the Bulls — anything but watch me fight for my life in front my teammates, my friends and my mother, on the field during “Monday Night Football.” And I thought about Hamlin waking up, opening his eyes and hearing about his toy drive.Source photographs: Kevin Sabitus/Getty ImagesDevin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Best Worst Team in Sports.” More

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    Quidditch Becomes ‘Quadball,’ Leaving J.K. Rowling Behind

    Citing trademark concerns and objections to the author’s views on transgender issues, the sport’s leading groups officially distanced themselves from their “Harry Potter” roots.Quidditch, the sport of boarding school wizards riding broomsticks in “Harry Potter,” will become “Quadball” to the humans who play the game in real life, its leading organizations said on Tuesday.The groups cited financial obstacles imposed by Warner Bros., the producer of the movie series, holding the trademark to Quidditch, as well as a wish to “distance themselves” from J.K. Rowling, the author of the books, and what they called her “anti-trans positions,” referring to her contentious statements on gender identity made in recent years.“This is a bold move, and for me personally there is definitely some nostalgia to the original name,” Alex Benepe, who helped found the real-life sport in 2005, said in a statement. “But from a long-term development perspective I feel confident this is a smart decision for the future that will allow the sport to grow without limits.”The path to the decision started in December, when U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch — the youth and professional wings of the sport — announced their intention to choose and trademark a new name. Their statement emphasized “sponsorship and broadcast opportunities” that were missed because of licensing issues.In a 2017 interview with The Quidditch Post, a news site devoted to the sport, Mr. Benepe praised Warner Bros. for being “remarkably permissive” in allowing a league to operate and sell tickets under the name.He added, however, that Warner Bros. had prohibited the sale of merchandise that used the word “Quidditch” and that the sport had been forced to sacrifice major business opportunities. Mr. Benepe argued at the time — before the latest political controversy with Ms. Rowling — for a name change.“I love Harry Potter and always will, but if our sport needs Harry Potter to survive it must not be that great — and I believe that it is great and I think our players do too,” he said.Nevertheless, on Tuesday the International Quidditch Association, the sport’s top governing body, listed Ms. Rowling’s “anti-trans positions” as its primary motive for changing the sport’s name.“We’ve tried to be clear that it’s both reasons,” Jack McGovern, a spokesman for U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch, said in an interview. “We did not intend to give a value judgment about which reason was more important than the other.”Quidditch matches frequently appeared as scenes in the Harry Potter books and movies. The real-life version of it includes many elements taken from Ms. Rowling’s imagination of the game: the riding of brooms, hurling balls through hoops and the need to evade bludgers, and eventually catch the Golden Snitch. In real life a bludger is a rubber dodgeball, rather than a flying ball of iron, and the snitch is a tennis ball attached to a person, as in flag football.Thousands of people play the game in more than 40 countries, according to the International Quidditch Association.After her comments about transgender issues on Twitter drew widespread attention, Ms. Rowling published an essay in 2020 that raised concerns about “pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender” and the rise in gender transition among young people.Many advocates for transgender rights have called Ms. Rowling’s comments transphobic, and some fans have struggled to reconcile their love of “Harry Potter” with their objections to her views.Ms. Rowling’s representatives at The Blair Partnership said there would be no comment on the decision but said that the various Quidditch leagues had never been endorsed or licensed by her.“Quadball,” according to the International Quidditch Association, refers to the number of positions in the sport (a keeper, chaser, beater and seeker) and the number of balls (two bludgers, a quaffle and the snitch).Mr. McGovern said that the association of Quidditch with Ms. Rowling had become an obstacle in recruiting new players, and he said he did not know how much the official bodies of the sport would refer to “Harry Potter” in the future.His first exposure to real-life Quidditch, he said, came in 2010 when he was in middle school. He persuaded one of his parents to drive him from Philadelphia to New York City to see a Quidditch World Cup. He said that he was struck by the “energy and life and forward momentum” of the game, and that he was a “fan of obscure sports more generally.”Almost as an afterthought, he added, “I had been reading ‘Harry Potter’ at the time.” Asked to what extent his love for the books had motivated that early interest in the sport, Mr. McGovern replied: “It’s hard. I don’t want to say more now.” More

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    Concert Drowns Out A.F.C. Halftime Analysis

    As the “NFL on CBS” crew broke down the first half of the game, a performance by the country music singer Walker Hayes was so loud, it made the commentary all but inaudible.At halftime of the A.F.C. championship game on Sunday, Kansas City led the Cincinnati Bengals, 21-10. For the Bengals to win, they would need to make some adjustments.But those hoping to listen to some halftime analysis on the CBS broadcast were unlikely to hear any commentary. It was nearly inaudible.As the “NFL on CBS” crew, made up of James Brown, Boomer Esiason, Phil Simms, Bill Cowher and Nate Burleson, were breaking down the plays of the first half, the country music singer Walker Hayes was performing the halftime show at Arrowhead Stadium.Mr. Hayes’s music was so loud, it all but drowned out the halftime analysis.When Mr. Burleson explained what changes the Bengals would need to make, the music was so loud that his colleague beside him, Mr. Esiason, couldn’t help but laugh.“I have no idea what you just said,” Mr. Esiason said after Mr. Burleson finished his comments. “I can’t hear a thing that anybody said.”The indiscernible commentary quickly drew attention online, with clips garnering tens of thousands of views on Twitter.Sarah Spain, a commentator on ESPN, said on Twitter that she couldn’t hear a word of the halftime broadcast.“Yikes, don’t think CBS realized how disruptive the Walker Hayes halftime show would be during *their* halftime show,” she wrote. Craig Miller, a sports radio host in Dallas, said on Twitter that the “halftime show audio disaster” was “highly entertaining.”CBS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday night.In a dramatic overtime finish, the Bengals defeated Kansas City, 27-24, with a game-winning field goal that will take them to the Super Bowl to face the Los Angeles Rams. Thankfully, for the “NFL on CBS” crew and those watching at home, there was no live musical performance to interrupt any postgame analysis. More