Sports

Emma Hayes first met Megan Rapinoe before she was Megan Rapinoe. Or, rather, just as she was becoming Megan Rapinoe. She was not yet a winner of two World Cups, not yet an Olympic champion, not yet captain of her country, not yet a powerful and urgent voice away from the field. Rapinoe was not even a professional soccer player back then, not quite.

Hayes’s job was to change that. In 2008, she had been appointed head coach and director of soccer operations of the Chicago Red Stars, one of the inaugural franchises in the start-up league Women’s Professional Soccer. Hayes had a blank slate to fill, a team to construct from scratch. Rapinoe was her first call.

That, perhaps, is the best measure of how brightly Rapinoe’s talent shone. When coach and player first met, Rapinoe was just a 23-year-old straight out of the University of Portland, but the power dynamic already lay in her favor. She did not need to convince Hayes. Instead, Hayes had to sell her on the team, on the project, on the city.

And so she showed Rapinoe, born and raised in California, around Chicago, hoping to persuade her that the move to the banks of Lake Michigan would suit her. It worked. The Red Stars drafted Rapinoe second overall ahead of the league’s first season.

The W.P.S. did not last. It survived for just three seasons. By the time it closed down, Hayes had long since departed the Red Stars. Rapinoe, though, was just getting started.

As much as Hayes was convinced of Rapinoe’s promise, even she would not pretend to have known just how far she would go. This weekend, Rapinoe — 38 now — will finally call time on her career. Her plan is for her exit to be framed by ticker-tape and fireworks: with one last triumph, helping OL Reign to claim victory against Gotham F.C. in the N.W.S.L final, a suitably glorious coda to a glittering career.

It is no exaggeration to say that, for more than a decade, Rapinoe has been the defining player in women’s soccer. It is not simply that she was a key part in the United States’ victory in the 2015 World Cup, and the driving force behind its repeat triumph four years later. It is that her activism, her unwillingness to shut up and play, turned the U.S. women’s team into something that transcended sports. As a consequence, she helped set the tone for women’s soccer as a whole.

It is fitting that Rapinoe’s curtain call should come just as Hayes, the woman who did so much to launch her career, should return to the United States. Not officially, of course; at this stage, the fact that Hayes will be the next coach of the U.S. women’s team is merely an open secret, a fait accompli that must — for now — remain swaddled by a warm blanket of euphemism.

Anonymous sources will go only as far as saying Hayes and U.S. Soccer have been “in talks.” Chelsea, the club Hayes has coached for the last decade to considerable success, will only say that the 47-year-old coach will depart at the end of the current season in order to “pursue a new opportunity” outside of England’s Women’s Super League and the club game. Quite what that opportunity might be is not revealed. Sure, maybe she’ll coach the U.S. Or maybe she wants to be a firefighter. It’s anyone’s guess.

There is just one established fact, even if it is by some distance the most salient one. Hayes, winner of six W.S.L. titles and five F.A. Cups and easily the most prominent manager in the women’s game in England, has quit her job. She has told Chelsea she is going. That, more than anything, reveals exactly how far those mysterious talks have progressed.

It is not hard to see why the prospect of coaching the United States appeals to Hayes. So rich is the team’s history that it remains the most prestigious job in women’s soccer. Given that she will be given salary parity with Gregg Berhalter, the coach of the U.S. men’s team, it will also be the most lucrative.

Hayes will, though, have to earn that money. The last time she took a job in the United States, her task was to help kick-start an era. A decade and a half later, that is in the job description once again. The context, though, is starkly different. This time, before the start, Hayes has to oversee an end.

It might be vaguely possible to spin Hayes’s appointment as a return — her early career résumé also includes spells at the Long Island Lady Riders (which we can all agree is not a great name for a team), the Washington Freedom and the Western New York Flash — but she has not been hired because of her familiarity with American soccer’s modern landscape. She has been appointed precisely because she is an outsider to it.

It is not simply that Hayes represents a considerable break with tradition. Almost all of her predecessors as national team coach have come from positions on the side of the Atlantic that has been slow to embrace contactless technology. The U.S. job was, in some senses, the reward for success in American soccer.

That made perfect sense. For decades, the United States was the driving force of the women’s game. Its professional league, in whatever guise, was the gold standard of the sport. Players from across the world, where domestic competitions were often professional only in name, flocked there. The national team was the pinnacle of that program, and therefore the zenith of the game.

This summer, though, made it abundantly clear that had changed. The United States exited the World Cup in the round of 16. Its impact on the tournament was minimal. What happened in Australia and New Zealand illustrated a power shift that had been coming for some time. Two European teams contested the final. Five of the eight quarterfinalists were European.

Those nations, including the U.S., who drew large portions of their squads from the N.W.S.L. tended to fall early. It was something that Hayes herself spotted. “There is still a huge amount of talent in this U.S. team,” she wrote in a column for The Daily Telegraph during the World Cup. “But with so many of the squad playing solely in the N.W.S.L., it doesn’t offer enough diversity to their squad in terms of playing against different styles.”

She would, she wrote, be “shocked” if young players continued to migrate to the U.S. to play in the college system when professional teams were recruiting — and paying so well — in Europe. In the future, she predicted, it would be “very, very difficult” for the U.S. to regain its primacy without “the right conversations around their model.”

That it will be Hayes leading those conversations is, of course, a tacit acknowledgment that her assertion was correct. By appointing someone who has built their career and reputation in Europe to overturn the reality that it has fallen behind, U.S. Soccer is effectively accepting the truth of it. One era is at an end, and it is time for another to begin.

Perhaps, then, this weekend’s N.W.S.L. final is best thought of as the moment of transition. Rapinoe has never won an N.W.S.L. title. This is her final chance to end her wait, to complete her set, to place a golden bow on her career and all that she has accomplished and represented.

That she would have that moment playing for OL Reign — a team controlled, ultimately, by owners in France — would feel appropriate, too, a nod not just to where the game has been, but to where it is going.

Correspondence

We were all too busy learning about the demographic transformation of Spain in the 20th century last week for Ben Coles to make the correspondence cut, but I wanted to return to his note this week, largely because the subject he raised is one I have been contemplating for a while. In a way. From the opposite perspective, in fact.

“Is every team from Everton on up in the current Premier League table allowed a little room for complacency this season?” Ben asked, in direct contravention of the mantra that everything is necessarily the best in the best of all possible leagues. “Not because they’ve cracked the code of survival, but because Sheffield United, Burnley, Luton and Bournemouth are so poor? It almost feels like a noncompetition.”

It is fair, I think, to suggest that the dimensions of the relegation battle seem to have been drawn unusually early in the Premier League this season. Sheffield United had to be rebuilt on the fly. Burnley and Bournemouth have both gone very — some might say excessively — heavy on young and unproven talent. Luton made no attempt to disguise the fact it was not intending to blow all of the money it made on promotion to the Premier League on the Sisyphean task of trying to stay there.

That is not to say relegation for any of them is a foregone conclusion. Things change, and change quickly, in the early part of the season. It is hardly inconceivable that, in a few weeks, Fulham or Everton or Crystal Palace have hit a slump, or that one of those teams that currently looks doomed to a season of struggle has found some form. Luton, in particular, appears to be coming to grips with the exigencies of Premier League soccer at considerable speed, as last week’s (more than merited) draw with Liverpool illustrated.

But there is one element working against those four clubs, and that is the quality at the other end of the Premier League table this season. Even allowing for the fact that Manchester City will, in all likelihood, streak to a fourth successive championship, the pool of teams immediately below them is unusually deep.

There are eight clubs — Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester United and Chelsea — that will harbor justifiable ambitions of qualifying not just for Europe but for the Champions League, given that England is likely to have five emissaries in the revamped competition next season.

The overall quality of the league may well, in fact, be higher than it has ever been. That assertion will, of course, be dismissed as recency bias, or willful exaggeration, or simply deeply ahistoric; such is the power of nostalgia that governs our relationship with sports.

There is a potent tendency to assume that what went before was somehow better: We are inclined, after all, simultaneously to remember the good parts of the past (look at that Thierry Henry goal!) and to see only the flaws (Manchester City 6, Bournemouth 1) of the present.

But it feels, increasingly, as if the Premier League is starting not only to fulfill the bombast of its own marketing material but its foundational premise: For the first time, a majority of its clubs have found a way to use the great piles of money at their disposal to become genuinely quite good at soccer. That is good for the clubs, and good for the fans, and good for the competition. It is less good for those teams thrown into it with precious little preparation.

There was no champagne courtside. So, as Matteo Berrettini embraced Jannik Sinner after Sinner’s victory over Alex de Minaur last month to clinch Italy’s first Davis Cup title in 47 years, their teammate, Matteo Arnaldi, did the next best thing: He shook a water bottle and poured it over Sinner and Berrettini.

Sinner, 22, ended the season with his 20th win in his last 23 matches. This year, he had a 64-15 record, won four tournaments, reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and was runner-up at the ATP Finals in Turin, Italy. He had wins over the three top-ranked players — Novak Djokovic, whom he beat twice in two weeks, Carlos Alcaraz and Daniil Medvedev. Starting 2023 at No. 15, he ended it at No. 4.

Djokovic sorely wanted to lead Serbia to just its second Davis Cup title. But in the semifinals, he fell to Sinner after squandering three match points and then teamed with Miomir Kecmanovic to lose the deciding doubles match to Sinner and Lorenzo Sonego. The loss sent Italy into the final, where it beat Australia.

Djokovic was devastated by the defeat.

“For me, personally, it’s a huge disappointment because I take the responsibility, obviously having three match points, being so close to win it,” he said after the match. “When you lose for your country, you know, the bitter feeling is even greater.”

It is ironic that the season began and ended with exciting conclusions at the men’s and women’s team competitions. The Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup have been under siege in recent years as many of the game’s top players, including Alcaraz, Taylor Fritz, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, shunned the historically heart-thumping, pride-producing finals because of scheduling conflicts. The U.S. women lost early in the finals, and the U.S. men didn’t even qualify as one of the top eight teams.

Still, despite the player defections and a merry-go-round of format changes, both competitions provided some of the most striking moments of the year.

Leylah Fernandez rode a wave of patriotic passion, winning five matches to lead Canada to its first Billie Jean King Cup. Her teammate, then-18-year-old Marina Stakusic, who had never won a WTA Tour match, became an overnight star when she won three matches against opponents ranked in the top 70.

If 2022 was billed as the season of King Carlos when Alcaraz went from No. 32 to No. 1 on the strength of his U.S. Open championship, then this season mostly belonged to Djokovic.

He is considered by many in the game as the greatest player ever. The statistics prove it.

At 36, Djokovic had one of the best seasons of his career. For the third time since 2015, he reached the finals at all four majors, falling just shy of attaining the Grand Slam.

In January, a year after being removed from Australia because of his refusal to be vaccinated against Covid-19, Djokovic returned to Melbourne Park and captured a record 10th Australian Open title by defeating Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final. With the 14-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal injured for most of the season, Djokovic won his third French Open in June by beating Alcaraz and Casper Ruud.

After falling to Alcaraz in a scintillating five-set Wimbledon final, Djokovic bounced back and beat Medvedev at the U.S. Open to earn his 24th major, surpassing Serena Williams. He is now just one win away from breaking the men’s and women’s major record held by Margaret Court for 50 years.

In all, Djokovic played just 12 tournaments in 2023 and he won seven of them. He did not lose from mid-July until mid-November, when he fell to Sinner during the round-robin portion of the ATP Finals. He then beat Sinner in the final after assuring the year-end No. 1 ranking for a record-extending eighth time.

Alcaraz, who won six titles in 2023 on three different surfaces and reached the semifinals at the French and U.S. Opens, in addition to his Wimbledon win, ended the year ranked No. 2. But he was candid after he lost to Djokovic in the semifinals in Turin.

“I am not at his level on an indoor court,” Alcaraz, 20, said in November. “He has shown why he is the best player in the world. I have to practice more to be a better player.”

With his 66 wins, Medvedev led the ATP in match victories. He won 19 straight, and reached the finals at Indian Wells and the Miami Open, which he won. He also won at Rome and reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and was runner-up to Djokovic at the U.S. Open. He ended the year ranked No. 3.

Two upstart players — the Americans Ben Shelton and Chris Eubanks — used their wide grins and whopping forehands to envelop the sport in a giant bear hug. Shelton, about two years away from leading the University of Florida to an N.C.A.A. championship, reached the quarterfinals at the Australian Open. He then reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open before falling to Djokovic. Eubanks, another former collegian, upset Cameron Norrie and Tsitsipas to reach the quarterfinals at Wimbledon.

There was no shortage of compelling story lines among the women. Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka spent the season battling for tour supremacy.

Sabalenka, only a year removed from serving woes so severe that she resorted to serving underhand during matches, won her first major at the Australian Open, a day she called the “best of my life.” She grabbed the No. 1 ranking after reaching the U.S. Open final.

“It was amazing to see Sabalenka, who was basically laughed off that same court a year earlier, confront those demons and take responsibility,” Lindsay Davenport, three-time major winner and former No. 1, said by telephone last month.

Swiatek took her third French Open and won six titles. But she faltered at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open before regrouping by the WTA Finals, snatching the year-end No. 1 from Sabalenka by beating her and Pegula to take the title. Pegula, for her part, was one of just two players, along with No. 4 Elena Rybakina, to notch multiple wins over Swiatek this season.

Marketa Vondrousova, who endured long stretches away from the game because of two wrist surgeries, became the first unseeded women’s Wimbledon winner when she beat Ons Jabeur in the final.

But it was Gauff and her wise-beyond-her-years attitude who transcended the sport in a way that only Williams has done. When Gauff, 19, beat Sabalenka in three sets to win the U.S. Open, the nontennis world, including the former first lady Michelle Obama, went wild. In her acceptance speech, Gauff, who had struggled early in the season, addressed her doubters.

“Thank you to the people who didn’t believe in me,” Gauff said. “To those who thought they were putting water on my fire, you were really adding gas to it.”

It was the kind of bold statement that left even former major winners stunned. One of them was Davenport, who admitted to having tears run down her face while she did match commentary on television.

“To me, the story of the year was Coco,” Davenport said. “Players come along once in a generation. When you have all the expectations on you at 12 and 15 years old and you are able to handle everything and then elevate your game to win, then you really are truly something special.”

Martin Schwartz and Matthew Mandel are having a moment. Actually two. The lifelong friends hit the sports jackpot this month when the Miami Heat and Florida Panthers both ran the playoff gauntlet and made it to the finals, where they are now vying for N.B.A. and N.H.L. titles simultaneously.

Schwartz and Mandel, lifelong South Florida residents and friends since college, have shared season tickets to both teams for years. They have had lean years — the Heat won just 15 games in the 2007-08 season — and home games filled with noisy fans rooting for the visiting teams.

They celebrated the Heat’s title runs in 2012 and 2013 powered by Dwyane Wade and LeBron James and savored the Panthers’ sporadic playoff runs. But never did they believe both teams would start the postseason as No. 8 seeds, topple top-ranked clubs in upset after upset and battle for championships.

“I was very pessimistic when the playoffs began,” said Schwartz, who was a batboy for the Florida Marlins in the 1990s and wore a Panthers jersey to the Heat game on Wednesday when they fell to the Denver Nuggets. “But we’ve come to realize it’s all about the playoffs. You gotta enjoy it. You only get one chance.”

This is the 10th time that two teams from one market have played in the Stanley Cup and N.B.A. Finals in the same year. The last time it happened was in 2016, when the Golden State Warriors and San Jose Sharks (both losers) vied for titles. The Bruins and Celtics have done it three times, stretching back to 1957 and the Knicks and Rangers twice. But never have a region’s hockey and basketball teams won in the same year.

The chase for championships has turned into a nightly affair in South Florida this week as the Heat and Panthers play four consecutive nights at home. Their arenas are about 40 miles apart, and each team has their core fans, though some like Schwartz and Mandel have gone all in on both sports. The teams are both down 1-2 in their series heading into Friday’s Heat game.

“It almost never happens, so we wanted to give it a shot,” said Raul Arias, a Miami native who attended the Heat and Panthers’ games on back-to-back nights with his brother, father and friend.

This is the first time that two teams in a Southern market have chased titles at the same time, but it was bound to happen. The country’s biggest sports leagues have been pushing into Florida for years, and for good reason: They are businesses in search of new fans, new sponsors and more television viewers, and America’s demographics have been tilting South and West for decades.

The Rangers and Bruins have been on the ice since Calvin Coolidge was president. But history is fungible and in sports, fleeting. The Heat arrived in Miami in 1988, back when Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was a hit song. The Panthers entered the N.H.L. in 1993. Since then, six teams — the Columbus Blue Jackets, Winnipeg Jets, Nashville Predators, Minnesota Wild, Seattle Kraken and Las Vegas Golden Knights — have joined the league.

The Final between the Panthers and Las Vegas Golden Knights is, perhaps to the dismay of more traditional fans in Canada and the northern states, the ultimate distillation of the N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman’s “Southern Strategy.” Bettman has defended this shift despite the financial woes of teams in Arizona and other new markets. But teams in northern markets, including the Devils and Islanders, have had financial problems. And while teams in Southern markets — Atlanta comes to mind — have lost teams, the Tampa Bay Lightning and Dallas Stars are both on solid ground.

Speaking to reporters before the first game of the Final, Bettman’s deputy, Bill Daly, noted that Ryan Smith, the owner of the Utah Jazz, has also expressed interest in bringing a hockey team to Salt Lake City.

Fans of older teams might groan if another team landed in a “nontraditional” hockey market. They already think little of South Florida fans, who are accused of showing up fashionably late to games and leaving early to beat the traffic. They’re often typecast as transplants who still root for old hometown teams. Or the ultimate burn: They just show up when the going’s good and disappear when their teams are in the tank.

All of that’s true to some degree. But fans are like that everywhere, including in New York and Los Angeles. And while Florida has been growing by leaps and bounds, adding millions of new residents in the past decade, some of the transplants here are embracing their newfound sports bounty. The playoff games have been sold out with some tickets on the resale market fetching four figures. Since May 1, sales of Heat and Panthers gear have soared 460 percent compared to the same period last year, according to Fanatics. Sports radio hosts have been yapping hoops and hockey, with some soccer spliced in after Lionel Messi said Thursday he was joining Inter Miami.

“The more they win, the busier we get,” said Norma Shelow, who for more than 30 years has co-owned Mike’s at the Venetia, a short walk from the Kaseya Center. She said business is up 40 to 50 percent during the playoffs, when fans start filling the restaurant a couple hours before game time.

Shelow said she had plenty of regulars, including N.B.A. referees who stop by after games. But she also welcomes lots of newcomers, who typically call for reservations even though the bar is first-come, first-served.

“I’ve lived here all these years and never seen this,” said Abel Sanchez, 50, an amateur sports historian. “If either of them wins a title, it’s a moment. If both win, who has the movie rights? And if you want to hop on the bandwagon, there’s room.”

It’s not unusual for transplants to adopt a new home team, or to split their loyalties. My dad rooted for the baseball Giants growing up in New York, then switched his allegiance to the Mets when our family decamped to Long Island in the 1960s. (He still loved Willie Mays and took me to see the San Francisco Giants when they came to town). When he moved to West Palm Beach in the 1990s, he adopted the Marlins, who rewarded his loyalty with two World Series titles.

Florida added four million new residents in the past decade or so, including many flocking to Miami from Latin and South America. Some of these newcomers have adopted the Heat and Panthers as their home teams even if they never played basketball or hockey. And why not? Rooting for a sports team may be the most communal activity in American life.

“I’m all in on Jimmy Butler,” said Adam Trowles, a Briton who splits his time between Miami and London, where he watches Heat games in the wee hours. “I’d marry him if I could.”

On Wednesday, Trowles looked for tickets to attend game three against the Denver Nuggets. The cost was too steep, so he and his girlfriend, Gessica Jean, watched the game at Duffy’s Tavern in Coral Gables.

For all the hoopla, football remains the undisputed king of sports in Florida. The Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes are still the toast of the town — when they win. Tampa went wild in 2021 when the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl and the Lightning won the Stanley Cup.

But basketball and hockey have their place. Transplants from Canada and the Northeast and Upper Midwest have held on to their allegiances. But over time, new fans are born, even for the Panthers, whose home ice at the FLA Live Arena, in Sunrise, Fla., is sandwiched between a shopping mall and the Everglades Wildlife Management Area. For locals, it’s been a parade of riches.

At Quarterdeck, a sports bar 10 minutes from the arena, Tyler Craig watched the Panthers beat the Knights in overtime on Thursday.

“It’s almost exhausting how many games we’ve been watching,” he said.

The PGA Tour announced on Wednesday that it had reached a deal to raise at least $1.5 billion from a group of U.S. investors, a move that raises new questions about whether a proposed alliance with a rival tour backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will come to fruition.

The influx of money into the PGA Tour, which could end up being as much as $3 billion, is led by the Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club. The tour is simultaneously negotiating a partnership with its well-funded competitor, LIV Golf.

That deal, which was announced in June, was effectively an acknowledgment by the PGA Tour that it did not have enough money to compete with the hundreds of millions of dollars the Saudi fund was prepared to put in the sport. A number of prominent players had already left the PGA Tour for the LIV tour.

The PGA Tour and the Saudi fund initially set a Dec. 31 deadline to work out details and conclude their alliance. That deadline has since been extended, and the partnership between the two tours has not yet been completed. The question now is whether the deal with U.S. investors changes the PGA Tour’s calculus.

The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, said Wednesday on a call with PGA Tour players before the official announcement that the tour “does remain in active and frequent dialogue” with representatives for the Saudi wealth fund. He added that the U.S. investors were “aware and supportive” of its negotiations with the fund, and that he was in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago to conduct due diligence on the proposed alliance with executives supporting the U.S. investor group.

The Saudi fund has made clear that it will continue to compete with the PGA Tour through LIV Golf if there is no alliance. In December, the Saudi-backed tour poached Jon Rahm, the world’s third-ranked player.

A spokesman for the fund declined to comment.

The tentative agreement with the U.S. investors is far less likely to draw fire from clubhouses and Congress than the earth-shattering decision to combine forces with the Saudis. That deal, after months of bitter rivalry, drew criticism over Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. The Saudi deal also lacked significant details, almost immediately setting off questions over its durability.

Among the U.S. investors joining Fenway Group are some of the best-known names in sports and finance: Marc Lasry, founder of the hedge fund Avenue Capital and a former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks; Tom Ricketts, chairman of the Chicago Cubs; Steven Cohen, the New York Mets owner via his family office, the Cohen Group; and Gerry Cardinale, founder of the investment firm RedBird Capital Partners.

For them, the investment is partly a bet on renewed enthusiasm for live sports driven by big technology that has led to deal-making, from tennis to cricket. Investors have long believed they could run the PGA Tour more efficiently.

The negotiations featured an unorthodox challenge: Because the PGA Tour has historically been a nonprofit entity, it has not had a traditional ownership structure.

But the tour is creating a for-profit company to run its commercial businesses. The new investors are expected to wind up with a stake in that business, which executives have named PGA Tour Enterprises.

PGA Tour Enterprises will now have a 13-person board, seven of whom will be players, Mr. Monahan said on the call. Four members of the U.S. investor group will also join the board, including John Henry, the chief executive of Fenway, and Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot and the owner of the Atlanta Falcons.

Some players will also receive equity in the new company as part of the deal, potentially quieting the uproar that followed the secret talks with the Saudis. The tour also said it was considering allowing PGA Tour members to participate in a program that would enable them to financially benefit from the tour’s success. Under that program, players would be given grants that vested over time based on, among other things, career accomplishments.

“By making PGA Tour members owners of their league, we strengthen the collective investment of our players in the success of the PGA Tour,” Mr. Monahan said in a statement accompanying the announcement.

PGA Tour executives have been scrambling for months to calm players, and even agreed to demands last year for Tiger Woods to receive a seat on the tour’s board, in an effort to limit the power of outside directors.

Mr. Woods spoke in Wednesday’s call with the players, voicing his approval for the deal with the U.S. investors. The call appeared to be an attempt to avoid the frenetic way in which the tour announced its partnership with the Saudis, an announcement that caught most players by surprise.

”Golf is an amazing sport,” Mr. Woods said. “The more we invest into the tour, the more we get the benefits of it.”

Despite player equity, star power and fresh money, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund continues to loom over the PGA Tour. Even before its introduction in 2022, it was a danger to the PGA Tour, using big budgets to poach its stars. The Saudi fund later sued the PGA Tour over what it claimed was anticompetitive behavior, and the PGA Tour countersued and framed loyalty to the tour as an act of patriotism.

Then, surprisingly, the Americans and the Saudis sketched a plan to combine their golf businesses. One of that deal’s scant details included an agreement by both sides to drop their litigation.

Soon after, PGA Tour executives went before Congress to explain the deal. Among the questions they faced was why it had not sought other investors. And the Justice Department, which had already been scrutinizing the PGA Tour over antitrust concerns, prepared to review the deal. Players were in near rebellion.

The tour then began to open up conversations with U.S. investors, eventually leading to the investment by the Fenway Sports Group and others.

Bob Huggins will keep his job as the head men’s basketball coach at West Virginia, the university said Wednesday, but will be suspended for three games and receive a pay cut after he used an anti-gay slur twice and derisively mocked Catholics during an interview with a Cincinnati radio station this week.

The university said it would rework Huggins’s contract and reduce his annual salary by $1 million, down from $4.15 million. He will be required to undergo sensitivity training and will miss the first three games of the 2023-24 season.

In a joint statement, the university’s president and athletic director said Huggins, the winningest active coach in Division I men’s basketball, would be immediately fired if he made any similar offensive comments in the future.

During an interview Monday on the Cincinnati radio station 700 WLW, Huggins described fans of Xavier University, a Jesuit institution, using a homophobic slur and underscored the school’s religious affiliation. While discussing his 16-season tenure with the University of Cincinnati and the school’s intracity rivalry with Xavier, Huggins twice directed a homophobic slur toward Xavier fans, referring to those who would “throw rubber penises on the floor, and then say they didn’t do it.”

Huggins, 69, issued an apology as part of the university’s statement, saying he deeply regretted his comments and the hurt they had caused.

“I have no excuse for the language I used, and I take full responsibility,” he said in Wednesday’s statement. “I will abide with the actions outlined by the university and athletics leadership to learn from this incident. I have had several conversations with colleagues and friends that I deeply respect and admire over the last 24 hours, and I am keenly aware of the pain that I have caused.”

Aside from the pay cut, Huggins will make a personal donation to Xavier to support its Center for Faith and Justice and its Center for Diversity and Inclusion, though the amount of the donation was not specified. He will also be required to meet with L.G.B.T.Q. leaders from across the state of West Virginia.

In August 2021, Huggins signed a contract extension through the 2023-24 season that made him one of the highest-paid coaches in college basketball. According to his previous contract, Huggins would have had options to coach “or extend his relationship” with the university through June 2027. In Wednesday’s announcement, the university said Huggins’s current contract would be amended to a year-by-year agreement that would end on April 30, 2024.

The university’s statement said the $1 million trimmed from Huggins’s salary would be used to support its L.G.B.T.Q. center, its mental health counseling center and other organizations.

“While the university has never and will never condone the language used on Monday, we will use this moment to educate how the casual use of inflammatory language and implicit bias affect our culture, our community and our health and well-being,” the statement said.

Huggins has coached at West Virginia since 2007. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022 and is one of only six men’s coaches to accumulate 900 career wins in Division I.

The latest turn of the conference realignment carousel driven by college football took me back to the Pleistocene period of journalism, when I worked as a summer news desk clerk amid the telex machines, pneumatic tubes and desk drawers full of booze at the dearly departed Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

A sign on an editor’s desk caught my eye: “Deadline is a two-syllable word.” Succinct and sly, it mocked one of the newsroom’s most sacrosanct tenets: Don’t blow deadline.

But in the digital era of continuous publishing, the notion of a deadline — which melds two of Merriam-Webster’s more unequivocal words — has somehow become malleable, a transformation that brings me back to the recent maneuverings of San Diego State University.

If the school was going to leave the Mountain West Conference for the Pac-12 in a year, it faced an 11 p.m. Pacific Time deadline on Friday to notify the Mountain West. Otherwise, its exit fee would double to about $36 million.

The problem: San Diego State did not have an offer from the Pac-12 Conference.

The reason: The Pac-12 did not have a media rights deal. (More on that in a moment.)

As the hourglass emptied on Friday, the Pac-12 chancellors and presidents convened to receive another one of their regular updates on the media rights negotiations. Later, San Diego State informed the Mountain West that it would stay put. For now.

That this unfolded on June 30 was fitting.

Last year on that date, Southern California and U.C.L.A., the Pac-12’s football and basketball standard-bearers, stunned the college athletics world by deciding to bolt for the Big Ten when the Pac-12’s television contract expires after the 2023-24 season.

This opened the door of opportunity for San Diego State, which has long pined for a move to the Pac-12 — a switch that would not only confer athletics legitimacy, but also put a California State University school on equal footing with Cal-Berkeley, a flagship school in the more prestigious University of California system.

It would require a three-step process. First, the Pac-12 would secure a media rights deal. Next, the 10 remaining members (the Pac-12 hoped) would sign a grant of rights, binding them to the conference for the duration of the media rights agreement. And finally, the conference would consider expansion.

Yet a year later, the Pac-12 is still in first gear.

The Pac-12, whose current agreement with ESPN and Fox expires after this season, found itself boxed out of several options when the Big 12 surprisingly locked in its media deal with Fox and ESPN last October, two months after the Big Ten announced its deal with Fox, CBS and NBC. The Southeastern Conference’s 10-year contract with ESPN kicks in next year, and the Atlantic Coast Conference’s deal with ESPN runs until 2036.

That leaves few openings on the broadcast schedule to showcase the Pac-12.

“The problem for the Pac-12 is all the other cards have now been dealt,” said Ed Desser, a sports media rights consultant, who noted that the only coveted spot would be Saturday night on ESPN or Friday night on ESPN, Fox, Apple or Amazon.

Negotiations have sputtered for several reasons.

First, the Pac-12 commissioner, George Kliavkoff, tried to persuade the University of California Board of Regents last fall to keep U.C.L.A. from leaving, which would have given the conference the valuable Los Angeles media market to shop around. (In December, the governing board voted not to block the move.)

Also last fall, many media companies began slashing jobs nearly across the board, particularly at Disney, which owns ESPN and said it would shed 7,000 jobs as it dealt with the continuing impact of cord cutting. And while streaming platforms like Apple and Amazon might be attractive, those companies are unlikely to view sports programming (that is not the N.F.L.) as indispensable.

It quickly became apparent that the media industry’s belt-tightening would manifest itself in second-tier rights deals. Shortly after the Big 12’s deal, which was largely considered below-market at $31.7 million per school, the Pac-12 adjusted downward by 10 percent estimates of an agreement it could reach if U.C.L.A. remained.

Then came the delays.

Expectations of an agreement by the start of the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament led to hopes of a deal by the Final Four. And then by mid-April. And then surely by the start of summer. Now, the assumption is that an announcement will be made before the Pac-12’s football media day on July 21, so that the event’s dominant story line is actually football.

Of course, what is in the agreement will have consequences.

The Big 12, which added Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston on Saturday, and could lose Texas and Oklahoma this time next year, is interested in poaching any Pac-12 school that is unhappy enough to jump if the payout is significantly below what the Big 12 is receiving.

In that case, it would not take much — Colorado and Arizona leaving, perhaps, or Utah — for the Pac-12 to disintegrate.

These are the scenarios that San Diego State had to game out. The Aztecs, who came within one final push of winning a men’s basketball championship and who regularly exhibit a quietly competent football team, are in a familiar spot. They agreed in 2011 to jump to the Big East for football, while playing in the Big West for other sports. But two years later, that agreement collapsed and they remained in the Mountain West.

Last month, the San Diego State president, Adela de la Torre, wrote a letter to the Mountain West saying the school intended to leave and asking for more time. A flurry of back-and-forth letters ensued.

In the end, San Diego State determined that its conference exit may well be negotiable, as many before it have been. And so the school concluded that if a move to the Pac-12 were to happen, it would happen in time — deadlines be damned.

Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa basketball player who has dazzled crowds with her deep shooting range and preternatural scoring ability, is one of the biggest draws in sports.

Tickets to her games this season were nearly 200 percent more expensive than they were last year, according to Vivid Seats, a ticket exchange and resale company. Fans routinely traveled hundreds of miles to catch a glimpse of her, lining up for hours before tipoff and boosting local economies.

Nearly 10 million people, a record, watched her play in last year’s championship game, a loss to Louisiana State. More than three million tuned in this year when she set the career record for points scored by a Division I college basketball player.

Now, as Ms. Clark prepares for her final N.C.A.A. tournament — No. 1-seeded Iowa plays its first game on Saturday — excitement has reached a fever pitch. It has some wondering if Ms. Clark’s effect on the popularity of women’s sports, and their economics, will linger after her career at Iowa ends.

Viewership, juiced by media rights deals, and corporate sponsorships are the key drivers of revenue for college and professional sports. In women’s sports, those have long lagged behind what men’s sports receive. In 2019, for instance, women’s sports programming accounted for less than 6 percent of coverage on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” according to a study.

But in recent years, women’s sports have had significant growth. A November report from Deloitte projected that women’s sports would generate more than $1 billion in global revenue this year, up roughly 300 percent from the company’s estimate in 2021. Globally, the number of sponsorships in women’s professional leagues increased 22 percent in 2023, compared with a 24 percent increase in men’s sports, according to SponsorUnited, which tracks company sponsorships and deals.

“You do need women like Caitlin Clark who are so great that you can’t miss them,” said Michael Pachter, a tech analyst for Wedbush Securities.

Stars do make sports. The men’s national title game in 1979 between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and Larry Bird’s Indiana State remains the most-watched college basketball game of all time. Both stars then entered the National Basketball Association, making the league more popular than it had ever been.

Before the Johnson-Bird N.B.A. era, the league’s finals were broadcast on tape delay. Today, the N.B.A. earns billions of dollars from its television deals, and star players make more than $60 million per season.

And as TV networks have tried to give viewers reasons to tune in during the streaming era, the rights to broadcast popular men’s sports, like football, hockey and basketball, have become expensive. That has spurred networks to lock in deals to broadcast sports, like women’s basketball, that don’t cost as much and whose viewership is projected to grow.

“The networks have run into an economic problem where they’re paying too much for the sports that they need to fill up their network space,” said Andrew Barrett, a managing director of STS Capital Partners who works in sports management. “You start to look at female sports because people will watch those.”

In January, the N.C.A.A. signed a deal with ESPN that valued the annual rights to broadcast the women’s basketball tournament at more than $60 million, more than 10 times what the network paid in the previous deal, in 2011.

The network pays $25 million to $33 million per year to broadcast some Women’s National Basketball Association games, while Scripps reportedly pays $13 million per year. The W.N.B.A.’s previous deal, solely with ESPN, was signed in 2013 for $12 million per year, according to Sports Business Journal. Annual revenue nearly doubled from $100 million in 2019 to around $200 million in 2023, according to Bloomberg.

“We’re not a charity,” Cathy Engelbert, the W.N.B.A. commissioner, said during a recent panel discussion with the law firm Kramer Levin. “We’re a real sports media and entertainment property.”

When Ms. Clark said she would forgo her final year of college eligibility to enter this spring’s W.N.B.A. draft, it had an immediate effect. The Indiana Fever, who are expected to select her with the No. 1 overall pick in April, saw a more than 200 percent increase in the average listed price of their season opener, according to Vivid Seats.

Ms. Clark’s success follows decades of progress for women in sports, dating to the 1972 passage of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational settings and led to skyrocketing funding of — and participation in — women’s sports. The World Cup that the U.S. women’s soccer team won in 1999 spurred interest and investment at the youth level. Serena Williams changed the audience for tennis, and athletes like the racecar driver Danica Patrick and the fighter Ronda Rousey brought new viewers to their sports.

Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, said Ms. Clark’s success was “another event in a long line of events” that had boosted the acceptance of all women’s sports.

“There’s been a positive evolution since Title IX was passed in 1972,” Mr. Zimbalist said.

Unlike previous generations, Ms. Clark has been able to immediately reap the rewards of her fame because of an N.C.A.A. rule change in 2021 that allows college athletes to profit off their own name, image and likeness, including through product endorsements and sponsorship deals. Ms. Clark’s sponsorship deals — valued at $3 million, according to On3, a site that tracks N.I.L. deals — means she earns more than most W.N.B.A. players. (Her projected base salary for her rookie season is $76,000.)

Ms. Clark is hardly the first female basketball star to generate intense interest. The W.N.B.A. was founded in large part because of the popularity of women’s college basketball. Storied programs like the University of Tennessee and University of Connecticut collected multiple championships and featured stars like Tamika Catchings, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi.

But the progress has come in fits and starts. In 1997, the W.N.B.A.’s inaugural season, average attendance was around 10,000. Three years later, the league expanded to 16 teams. In 2023, there were only 12 teams, and average attendance was less than 7,000. The 2023 finals averaged 728,000 viewers, an improvement from 2022 but fewer than the 2003 finals, which were watched by an average of 848,000.

Mr. Pachter said he didn’t think the audience for women’s basketball would reach hundreds of millions overnight. But he sees interest continuing to steadily grow, and can envision a future where a streaming service may try to own the exclusive rights to a league like the W.N.B.A. For that to happen, other stars need to step up to Ms. Clark’s level.

“You need three or four more, but they’re coming,” Mr. Pachter said. “They’re going to emerge because now we’re paying attention.”

One of the strangest quotes I can remember associated with O.J. Simpson came from the broadcaster Al Michaels during the notorious freeway chase in 1994. Michaels, a sports commentator now covering the flight from the law of one of America’s biggest celebrities, said that he had spoken with his friend Simpson on the phone earlier. “Al,” Michaels recalled him saying, “I have got to get out of the media business.”

For a man who was about to be arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, it was an odd statement. But it was accurate. Simpson, during and after his pro football career, was a creature of the media business. With the freeway chase, and the acrimonious trial on live TV, he would essentially become the media business. Simpson, who died Wednesday at age 76, was one of the most-seen Americans in history.

What did people see when they looked at O.J. Simpson? A superstar, a killer, a hero, a liar, a victim, an abuser, an insider, a pariah — often many of these at once. In his fame and infamy, he was an example of what celebrity could make of a person and a symbol of what the media could make of a country.

Simpson’s football career made him a TV star in itself, as he became the first N.F.L. running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, with the Buffalo Bills. But he found his way into mass-market stardom during the commercial breaks, doing endorsements for RC Cola, Chevrolet and, most famously, Hertz rental cars.

As the documentary “O.J.: Made in America” would later detail, race was a subtext of Simpson’s fame, even in his pitchman days. There was a sense of social relief in having white America, after the civil-rights battles of the 1960s, embrace a charismatic Black star. It felt good for the country to like O.J.

But it also required a complex negotiation, particularly in his most famous ad campaign, for Hertz. There was anxiety over how white viewers would take the image of a powerful Black man running through an airport — would it be thrilling or threatening? The commercials made sure to include white onlookers cheering “Go, O.J., go!” as if to validate his passport to mainstream stardom.

Acting roles followed, in “Roots,” the “Naked Gun” movies, the early HBO sitcom “First and Ten.” His fictional and pitchman roles would play up his image of innocuous charisma — an image that would echo surreally in his televised trial and the public reaction to it.

The murder case would show electronic media’s power to bring a country together and to rip it apart. The low-speed chase on the Southern California freeway was one of those where-were-you-when monoculture moments, like an earthbound perversion of the moon landing. It happened on a Friday night, interrupting Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals, riveting tens of millions of viewers, none of them — at home or in the broadcast studios — knowing if they were about to witness a death on live TV.

But amid this classic mass-media, global-village moment, there were signs that the case was already becoming something more surreal and disjointed, a macabre carnival that would consume TV. People showed up on the freeway with signs and cheers, as if to an N.F.L. playoff game. A prank caller, evidently a Howard Stern fan, got on the air on ABC and saluted the anchor Peter Jennings with a hearty “Baba Booey.”

The trial, once it began, was the biggest series on TV, although even that feels like an understatement. What part of TV, in 1994 and 1995, wasn’t the O.J. Simpson trial? It was “The Tonight Show,” “Larry King Live” and Norm Macdonald’s “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live.” It was the first topic of conversation in the morning and the last, on cable news, at night. It inspired a “Seinfeld” episode and a fantasy sequence on “Roseanne” in which the prosecutor Marcia Clark (Laurie Metcalf) crawls out of the TV to talk to Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), who provides her with the missing murder weapon.

The trial was all TV. It was every kind of TV. It was a soap opera. It was a legal thriller. It was an interactive whodunit before the age of murder podcasts. It was a social drama that exposed racial chasms and the flaws of the legal system. It was a dark comedy with buffoons, villains and comic-relief figures.

It was a tragedy too, of course, and viewers could not agree which part of it was a tragedy, and that too was the tragedy.

It was also a preview of coming attractions. It was the model for the all-in immersion coverage that 24-hour news would apply to everything from wars to missing-persons cases to sex scandals. All-O.J.-all-the-time would seamlessly become all-Clinton-Lewinsky-all-the-time, complete with legal commentators reprising their roles.

But even as the Simpson case showed the media’s power to plunge us all into the same story, it also revealed how different communities could inhabit different realities. We could watch the same trial, with the same testimony, but disagree not just on the proper verdict but on the stakes of the case.

It was open-and-shut or it was built on fraud. It was about domestic violence against women or it was about racism. It was about how the rich and famous were above the law or about how Black defendants were beneath it. It was about the crimes of a person or the crimes of a system.

Like the home audiences caught reacting to the verdict, some cheering and some wailing, we would become a split-screen nation. Eventually, with TV news augmented by partisan outlets and social media, people would come to many more stories — elections, wars, pandemics — encased in their own ecosystems, listening to their own experts, believing their own facts.

As for the Simpson case, TV would eventually catch up with the more complicated reality. In 2016 both the “Made in America” documentary and the mini-series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” laid out the case against Simpson as well as the trial’s racial-historical context. Taken together, they suggested that you could believe Simpson guilty without believing the system innocent.

Nuance and complexity are still possible. But they tend to work on the slow, patient timetable of history. As far as the daily news is concerned, on the other hand, we still live in the world that the Simpson trial created. This week, O.J. Simpson finally left the media business. The rest of us are stuck with it.

HATBORO, Pa. — It’s the top of the ninth inning at Citizens Bank Park, and the Philadelphia Phillies’ relievers are at it again. They have already blown one lead, with Jeurys Familia and Seranthony Domínguez giving up homers in the seventh. Now after a comeback, the game has unraveled with closer Corey Knebel on the mound.

The Miami Marlins win it, 11-9, and from his living room couch in the suburbs here, Matt Edwards sighs.

“Celebrating some of these guys is really hard,” he said.

Indeed it is: The Phillies are the only National League team without a playoff appearance in the last 10 years, and their bullpen is an annual adventure. Nostalgia can be an enticing escape (beer helps, too), and nobody celebrates the past quite like Edwards, a 45-year-old telecommunications salesman with a wife, Cheryl, two young sons, a Great Dane — and a shrine in his downstairs bathroom to retired Phillies relief pitchers.

“We’re highly aware that we weren’t one of the five starters or any of the guys on the field,” said Chad Durbin, who spent four seasons as a Phillies reliever. “But, you know, we had our moments. So when we’re remembered, we embrace it.”

Durbin logged 225 games for the Phillies, postseason included, with a 4.07 earned run average. He pitched for five other teams, but as far as he knows, none of their fans have his picture in their bathroom. As you might guess, Durbin does not have a presence at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., either.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “But I do in the Relief Room.”

The Relief Room is what Edwards calls his bathroom, because that is where one goes to relieve oneself. That’s the joke.

Edwards played third base in Little League and left field in men’s softball. His sons are not pitchers. His favorite active player is a first baseman, the Phillies’ Rhys Hoskins. But like a comedian who finds endless material by staying committed to the bit, Edwards has crafted a brand around players who get no respect, no respect at all.

“I remember opening packs of cards, and you’d see a mustache and think, ‘Oh, that’s Mike Schmidt’ — and no, it’s Dan Schatzeder,” he said in his home office, which overflows with artifacts that do not quite fit in the 3 feet by 8 feet museum around the corner.

“But that was the joy of going through cards, trying to find that guy. Well, now I don’t want the Mike Schmidts or the Bryce Harpers. I want to champion the guys like Schatzeder and Andy Carter and Amalio Carreño, because nobody does. Celebrating the little guy that nobody remembers is more memorable than talking about the stars, because everybody knows about them.

“Nobody knows about Tyson Brummett. He’s one of the cup-of-coffee guys. That’s why this was made into a cup of coffee — enjoy a cup of coffee with Erskine Thomason.”

Edwards reaches for a custom-made mug with the black-and-white visage of Thomason, who pitched the ninth inning of a loss on Sept. 18, 1974, in his only major league appearance. The definitive statistical website, Baseball Reference, uses a blank headshot with a question mark next to Thomason’s name. That would be blasphemy to Edwards.

He knows that Thomason was the subject of an NFL Films documentary and that the filmmakers, who followed him all season, somehow missed his only game and had to restage the footage. He also knows that Brummett pitched one game in 2012 and later died in a plane crash. He knows that Carter was ejected from his first major league game, and Carreño from his last.

And, of course, he knows that Schatzeder spent many years as a high school physical education instructor in Illinois.

“If you look at that guy, you can totally envision him in a sweatsuit with a whistle around his neck,” Edwards said. “That’s awesome. Who’s going to sing his song from the top of a mountain? If not me, then who?”

For Edwards, there is sincerity in the satire. He remembers when a high school classmate got drafted by the Mets, how thrilling it was that a major league team wanted someone he knew. Fewer than 23,000 people have ever played a game in the majors; you could put them all into old Veterans Stadium, with more than 40,000 seats to spare.

They all have stories, and if they happened to have pitched in relief for the Phillies, Edwards considers it is his mission to tell them. An English major at the University of New Hampshire, Edwards reads widely on his subjects, plucking fun facts on each and organizing them by date on his computer. He sends several tweets a day to a modest group of followers with a few famous names — famous to Edwards, at least.

“He loves Tom Hume,” said Scott Eyre, a lefty specialist from the late 2000s, referring to a bespectacled righty of the 1980s. “He would probably pass out if Tom Hume went to the Relief Room.”

Eyre did, in early 2020, after an autograph appearance nearby. (Edwards wore his Hume T-shirt for the occasion.) Eyre, who only knew Edwards from Twitter, became the first reliever to actually relieve himself in the Relief Room. That was natural, since he hung out with Edwards for hours, well past 1 a.m., drinking beers, opening old packs of cards and telling tales of Chuck McElroy, Dan Plesac and other honorees he knew.

A pilgrimage to see a Phillies fan’s bathroom, it’s safe to say, is nothing Eyre ever expected to do. A California native now living in North Carolina, Eyre once had a no-trade clause to Philadelphia. When the Cubs sent him there in 2008, he asked Jon Lieber, a teammate who had played for the Phillies, what to expect.

“He goes, ‘Dude, you’ll love it there, and they’ll love you,’” Eyre said. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You’re a stand-up guy and you are who you are.’ And that was exactly right. If you go out and do your job and own up to the mistakes you make, they’ll still love you. They just want to yell at you for a little bit, and that’s fine.”

Eyre came to understand the essence of the Philadelphia fans: They always expect to win, no matter the circumstances, and they also want to be heard. Failure then feels like a personal affront and gives the fans license to boo. But they embrace players who make no excuses and genuinely show that they care.

Take Mitch Williams, the only man alive to give up a walk-off homer to lose the World Series, to Toronto’s Joe Carter in 1993. Williams, known as the Wild Thing, is a folk hero to Phillies fans and duly honored in the Relief Room.

“On an easy level, it’s the mullet and the headband and stuff like that, but he busted it every single time out there,” Edwards said. “His bravado, his machismo, the way he strutted around. You could tell he didn’t want to walk anybody, he wanted to just fire strikes and get everybody out. But he was accountable, and that’s huge.”

Williams is among the few well-known relievers in Edwards’s gallery. Most made a smaller impact, like Kyle Abbott, Josh Lindblom and Wally Ritchie, who all follow Edwards on Twitter. They are among the 300 or so faces lining the walls of the bathroom, mostly on baseball cards but dozens on larger photos, like the one of Renie Martin above the mirror.

“There’s something new in there,” Edwards’s mother, Joann, told him when she noticed it. “He’s looking right at me, and I don’t like his face.”

Martin pitched only briefly for the Phillies, but Edwards loves that he appeared for Kansas City in the clincher of the 1980 World Series, when Tug McGraw closed out the Phillies’ first championship. After the second, in 2008, Edwards’s father, Jim, hung two photos above the toilet: one of McGraw and the other of Brad Lidge, both celebrating in October.

Edwards bought the house from his father a few years later, kept the McGraw and Lidge photos and added everything else — the bar of soap depicting Sparky Lyle, the commemorative Ron Reed soda can, the four-sided Kleenex dispenser with Porfi Altamirano, Warren Brusstar, Tom Hilgendorf and Barry Jones.

The handle on the cabinet is the barrel of a Don Carman broken bat; a retired Phillies groundskeeper sent it to Edwards. Greg Harris, an ambidextrous reliever, inscribed his photo: “Using both hands in the Relief Room.” The artist Dick Perez, once the official artist of the Hall of Fame, donated an original portrait of Hilgendorf — a hero of Edwards’s for once saving a drowning boy from a swimming pool.

“And then that whole ‘10 cent beer night’ thing in Cleveland,” Edwards said. “He’s brained with a chair, gushing blood — and the next game, he faces six batters and gets six outs!”

If you need some time in the Relief Room, there’s a basket with issues of vintage magazines like “Phillies Today,” with Steve Bedrosian and Jeff Parrett in firefighter gear on the front. There’s a collection of McGraw’s comic strips from the 1970s and a Guess-The-Mustache flip book. (Failure to recognize Altamirano results in the automatic loss of a full letter grade.)

There are tentative plans for Relief Room expansion, Edwards said, if he and Cheryl can move the washer-dryer out of the adjacent mudroom. For now, though, Edwards needs a spot for his newest treasure: the game-worn cleats of Toby Borland, a slender sidearmer from the 1990s. His buddies, Brian and Mike Carroll, bought them for $30 on eBay.

The cleats could fit easily on the wall above the toilet, which is mostly blank space. But that section is sacred, Edwards said, reserved strictly for relievers from the championship teams. The Phillies have improved lately but are still recovering from a slow start. They might need to summon the spirit of McGraw to make this their year.

“Cheryl’s like, ‘There’s so much space there, do something else with it,’” Edwards said. “I’m waiting. That’s the point. That’s the optimist in me: I’m going to fill this wall.”