Sports

The warning sounded over and over, first in Swedish and then in English. A fire had been detected. Please evacuate the stadium. The players left the field. Outside, fire crews were arriving. But in the stands, as a thick cloud of smoke wreathed and coiled in the floodlights, nobody moved. The fans were going to make the game happen by sheer force of will.

It was a game they had been anticipating for some time. The top two teams in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s elite league, had gone into the final day of the season separated by just three points. A quirk of scheduling fate meant that their last game was with each other. Malmo, the host, had to win to claim the championship. Elfsborg, the visitor, needed only to avoid defeat. It had been billed as a guldfinal: a gold-medal match.

The idea of a single game that decides the destiny of a league title is vanishingly rare in modern soccer, where championships are won over the course of a season rather than in a winner-take-all final. It has not happened in England since 1989, and Italy has not produced such a denouement in more than half a century.

It is also increasingly unusual for a title even to be in play as the season draws to a close. Over the last 30 years, soccer has become so financially stratified that many domestic tournaments are little more than monthslong processions for the wealthiest teams. Sweden, though, is different, a solitary beacon of competitive balance. In four of the last six editions of the Allsvenskan, the championship has gone to the wire.

How it has produced that is a story of rejecting orthodoxy, of asking why sports exist and whom they exist for. But it is also a story of how hard it is to stand alone, and how fragile even the most heartening success can be.

A Different Path

The walls of Malmo’s Eleda Stadium are full of mementos of the glory days, the era when Swedish teams could compete with Europe’s giants and, occasionally, beat them.

In 1979, Malmo, fielding a team of amateurs, made it all the way to the European Cup final. It is still the only Scandinavian team to feature in the game and its successor, the Champions League final. In the 1980s, IFK Gothenburg twice won (lesser) continental trophies. As late as 1994, IFK beat Manchester United and Barcelona in the Champions League.

Those victories proved a last stand. The game’s dynamic changed drastically as money rushed into soccer in the 1990s, first from broadcasters, then private investors, and finally oligarchs, corporations and nation states. The riches created a new class of unassailable domestic powerhouses.

“Big money fed the biggest clubs,” enabling them to construct squads full of superstars, said Mats Enquist, who served as general secretary of Svenskelitfotboll, or SEF, the body that runs Sweden’s professional leagues, from 2012 until early this year. For Sweden, as for many countries outside Europe’s major television markets, he said, it was “impossible to keep up.”

Instead of grasping at shadows, Sweden’s response was — effectively — to opt out. In 1999, the country enshrined in law a rule that 51 percent of its sports teams had to be owned by their members: the fans. In 2007, when that rule was challenged, the fans fought fiercely to protect it.

“That was the moment that the fans first realized the power they had,” said Noa Bachner, the author of a book that examines Sweden’s rejection of soccer’s economic orthodoxy.

Yet they wielded it over a bleak landscape.

“Crowds were going down, the standard of play was not good, the league had a lot of problems with hooliganism,” Mr. Enquist said. A survey that he commissioned as one of his first acts found that only 11 percent of fans regarded the Allsvenskan as their favorite competition, far behind England’s Premier League and the Champions League. “It was not a good place to be,” he said.

Mr. Enquist was an outsider to soccer when he took a leading role in it: a software entrepreneur by trade, and a volleyball and golf fan by inclination. It was his job, though, to sort it out.

His solution set Sweden on an almost heretical path in modern soccer. Unable to turn to rich investors, the SEF harnessed the country’s most obvious strength, the fans. In the face of considerable skepticism, the authorities “touched hands” with the supporters, Mr. Enquist said, and set about designing a league they wanted to watch, and watch live.

They negotiated limits on behavior, designating invading the field and throwing missiles as red lines but allowing a tacit leeway on pyrotechnics in service to spectacle. They persuaded the police to adopt a more conciliatory approach rather than “treating all fans as potential hooligans,” as Lars-Christer Olsson, the league’s president until this year, said.

A decade later, the transformation has been staggering. Almost alone among Europe’s mid-tier league, Swedish soccer is a picture of health. It has had 11 different champions in 20 years. Attendances have doubled in the last decade; this year brought record crowds. The league’s revenues have tripled in the same period. Now, more than 40 percent of Swedish fans identify the Allsvenskan as their priority.

The game of the year between Malmo and Elfsborg should have been the perfect distillation of all that work, an illustration of what makes Sweden a standard-bearer for a different version of soccer. Instead, it highlighted how fine the line is between empowering fans and losing control of them.

The start of the second half was delayed by 30 minutes as Elfsborg’s fans confronted a line of riot police officers, and then by another half-hour when Malmo’s ultras, the team’s most hard-core supporters, set off so many smuggled-in pyrotechnics that they triggered the fire alarm. When Malmo’s victory was secured, thousands of fans rushed the field. A handful raced toward their Elfsborg counterparts and hurled lit flares into their packed sections.

“There is a thin margin,” said Pontus Jansson, a veteran defender who returned to Malmo this year after a decade abroad to draw the curtain on his career. “They stepped over it.”

For Fans, By Fans

The moment when Malmo’s players and staff claimed their title — two hours later, once all the smoke had cleared — was a homespun sort of occasion. They walked out in small groups to collect their medals, in velveteen presentation boxes, from a collapsible table. There were no glitter cannon or smoke machines at their backs.

Instead, the photo that will one day grace the walls alongside all the other mementos of triumphs past captured the two elements that make up the club: the players and, massed on the field behind them, the fans.

Everything Swedish soccer has become has been constructed by, and for, the people who go to watch it in stadiums. Mr. Bachner, the author, reels off the start of a long list of examples: the absence of corporations, sovereign wealth funds and “multiclub projects” from the ranks of club owners; sustained investment in women’s teams; an unofficial ban on holding training camps in authoritarian states; a rule stating that the league has to give at least two months’ notice before moving games for television.

The clearest illustration, though, is that Sweden — alone among Europe’s major nations — has resisted the introduction of video assistant referees. The clubs, at the behest of their members, have consistently voted against the technology, a source of controversy elsewhere because of its not-infrequent errors and interminable delays.

“I think the fans have the feeling it disturbs the ambience in the stadium,” Mr. Olsson said.

There are things that Sweden’s democratic tradition cannot vote out of existence. Malmo’s championship, for example, means another potential infusion of Champions League income that might be enough to give the club — already Sweden’s richest — an insurmountable competitive advantage.

The issue of the ultras, too, poses a problem. “It feels as though there are two games taking place,” Mr. Bachner said. “One on the field, and one in the stands, where these groups are seeing how they can display their power, and they don’t mind if 20,000 other people have to wait around while they do it.”

Sweden is not the only country facing that challenge, but Mr. Bachner acknowledged concern that the chaos on the season’s showcase day would lead to calls for more aggressive policing, which could threaten the delicate alliance between the authorities and the fans.

To many, that would be a step back. “It might not be the best league in Europe,” said Johan Lindvall, the league’s chief executive, “but the atmosphere in the stands is.” Matchdays are both the cornerstone on which all the success has been built, and the proof of how far it has come.

“After we scored the goal, the noise was crazy,” Mr. Jansson said. His presence alone is a case in point. He had spent the past seven years becoming part of English soccer’s furniture. Just 32, he could perhaps still be playing there, amid the superstars of the Premier League. Instead, in April, he chose to come home to experience what Swedish soccer had become.

“That atmosphere,” he said. “That’s what brought me back.”

I first learned about padel last summer, when my partner sent me a photo from a small court during a visit to Germany.

What is that? I wondered.

“Padel. A childish version of tennis,” he texted, anticipating my question.

As an enthusiastic tennis player, I was not very interested.

A few months later, while biking in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I noticed a large building with a sign that read “Padel Haus,” which billed itself as the first padel club in New York City. This sport wanted my attention, so I invited Victor Mather, a veteran sports reporter, to join me for a lesson.

Victor was willing to try. “I am a reasonably fit guy,” he said. But he was turning 60, he said, and added: “My eyesight isn’t what it used to be, I haven’t played tennis since prep school, and I have never played squash or racquetball.”

I was just happy to be on a court with a racket in hand because it isn’t easy to book a tennis court in the city.

Here’s what we learned.

First, what is padel?

At first glance, it looks like tennis.

The sport — a blend of squash and tennis — can be played indoors or outdoors. It is always played on turf, which is softer on the knees than the paved hardcourts associated with tennis and outdoor pickleball. The padel racket, usually made of foam and carbon fiber or fiberglass, is shorter than tennis’s and has holes instead of strings. The ball is smaller as well and has less air pressure.

The scoring is like tennis’s. There are glass walls at the back and sides of the court. The walls are in play, setting up ricochet shots that bring the squashiness into padel.

The serves are hit from below the waist. Players are encouraged to rush the net after serving. Padel is played in doubles and teams can move as a unit rather than staggered.

Santiago Gomez, Padel Haus’s founder, grew up playing in Mexico, where the sport was created in the late 1960s. He spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic in Acapulco and decided to start his business when he returned to New York City, opening a club in 2022.

The sport is growing in popularity.

Elmo Coleman, 27, learned padel in Venice during the coronavirus pandemic. But he dropped the sport when he moved to New York City for lack of places to play. He played tennis, begrudgingly. Now he plays padel three times per week in Dumbo.

The sport has been growing in popularity in places like South Florida, Texas, Southern California, and New York, according to the United States Padel Association.

There were 180 courts across the United States in 2022, compared with fewer than 20 in 2016, according to a Global Padel report from Playtomic, a community of players that prepared the analysis with the consulting firm Monitor Deloitte. The U.S.P.A. estimates that there are 50,000 players and 400 courts now, not including private ones.

Globally, padel players number in the millions, the U.S.P.A. says.

“Padel is very much in its infancy in the U.S.A.,” said Martin Sweeney, the association’s president. “We do expect some exponential growth over the next few years and into the future.”

It’s appealing to fans of racket sports.

The first wave of players who visited the Padel Haus locations in Brooklyn (there are two in Williamsburg and one in Dumbo) were from other countries, Mr. Gomez said. The second wave included tennis players.

On a recent winter day, the four courts in a former warehouse with 30-foot ceilings in Dumbo were full. Sunlight trickled in through enormous glass doors, and “Can’t Stop Your Lovin’” by Panama and Poolside sounded on the speakers.

“Tennis is very complicated to play in New York,” Mr. Coleman said after playing for two and a half hours. “The demand is so high that it’s very tough to just book a court and play.”

Some see in padel a less demanding sport.

“It’s very offensive to say, but it’s like tennis for people that are not that good at tennis,” said Virgilio Contucci, 27, who works in finance. “This is, like, an easy way to enjoy a racket sport.”

The main demographic attracted to the courts in Brooklyn has been young men, but that’s changing, Mr. Gomez said.

“It’s raining men; I’m not complaining,” said Talia Campbell, a 30-year-old who works in private equity, as she came off the court.

The costs to book a court can vary widely.

The sport can be costly, at least in New York. At Padel Haus, renting a court costs $65 an hour at peak weekend times, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Members pay $37.50 per hour; membership at one location is $140 a month. The lower-cost times are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday: $25 for members and $40 for nonmembers. The hourly fees do not include racket rentals or balls. (The New York Times paid $195 for our private, one-hour lesson.)

“I feel like the only thing preventing all of us from playing more is the price,” said Will Elkins, 26, who works in finance.

There is also a pop-up padel site in Manhattan, which is not open year-round. The cost can vary outside of New York for court access, from free play to $40 to hundreds per session.

Now, it’s time to play.

For our lesson, Victor and I walked onto the artificial turf and marveled at the high ceilings.

We grabbed our rackets and stood across the net from our coach, who walked us through how to hold and swing the racket. The grip is the same one used for serving and volleying in tennis.

We alternated hitting forehands and backhands. Next, we tried to get the timing down as the coach hit balls deep into the court. We let them bounce against the wall before trying to send them over the net. That was the hardest part.

“After whacking the first couple of balls over the net successfully, I felt a surge of confidence,” Victor said later. But that “ended abruptly when I chased a lob and slammed directly into something unexpected and unyielding. Oh, that’s right. Padel courts have glass walls.”

He said that it was hard at times to pick up the ball, especially against the lights, and that “the hourlong session was a real workout.” It required rushing the net only to backpedal “again and again,” which may be hard for less-fit players.

As for me, I will definitely play again. I’ve already started asking my friends if they’ve heard of the sport. When they ask what it is, I don’t tell them it’s a childish form of tennis. I tell them it’s a good alternative when you can’t book a tennis court.

Victor Mather played padel for this report.

The niche world of hockey romance novels is getting mainstream attention after the wife of an N.H.L. player criticized book fans who she said had made comments and videos on social media about her husband that were “predatory and exploiting.”

Here’s what happened when the worlds of professional sports, romance novels and TikTok collided.

First, there was BookTok.

On TikTok, people share book recommendations and reviews under the hashtag #BookTok, and the community has become a powerful force in publishing: More than 100 authors with large BookTok followings drove $760 million in sales in 2022, a 60 percent increase from 2021, according to Circana BookScan, which tracks print sales.

Romance is a big part of the BookTok universe, as is its popular subgenre hockey romance, which falls under the broader sports-romance category.

Recent hits have included Anna Zabo and L.A. Witt’s “Scoreless Game,” a love story between two longtime friends who are players on the fictional Pittsburgh Griffins. In “Overnight Sensation,” by Sarina Bowen, an office intern for the fictional Brooklyn Bruisers moves in with a player after leaving the condo she lives in with her father, the hockey league’s commissioner.

The success of these books has been credited with driving interest among readers in ice hockey, and some professional and collegiate teams have embraced this new audience.

In Australia, where ice hockey is not particularly popular, professional teams have credited BookTok with increasing game attendance and fan interest.

Sarah Bricknall, the events and media manager for the Melbourne Mustangs, told The Hills Shire Times, a Sydney newspaper, that 15 to 30 BookTok fans had been at every home game since the team joined TikTok in May.

How did things go wrong?

On the internet, the lines between fictional players and real-life ones can blur, especially when teams use BookTok to promote themselves.

A video posted to the Seattle Kraken’s official TikTok account that has since been archived showed Alex Wennberg, a center for the team, walking down a hallway in a suit with the text “when you accidentally become a booktok account & now that’s all you can post.”

Other posts by romance fans on BookTok have talked about a specific player as a stand-in for a favorite fictional hockey player or showed game footage overlaid with quotes from hockey romance books. A segment of these posts are sexually explicit, and some fans have posted explicit comments on players’ personal social media accounts.

Emily Rath, the author of “Pucking Around,” a romance best seller on Amazon, said on TikTok that some fans had raised concerns about inappropriate behavior directed at players earlier this year.

“True hockey romance readers have been here before,” Ms. Rath said on TikTok. “We watched it all unfold in April, we were ringing the alarm bells, we were asking that it stop.”

The conflict peaked when an N.H.L. player’s wife got involved.

The issue started to attract attention from outside the romance world in July, when Felicia Wennberg, the wife of Alex Wennberg, said that some posts about her husband had gone too far.

Ms. Wennberg said on Instagram Stories that while she had initially joked about some of the videos and comments, they had since “crossed the line of what it means to fancy someone and when it actually sounds pretty predatory and exploiting.”

Her statement described what she considered acceptable, such as positive comments about her husband’s looks, and what she did not, such as chanting “krak my back” at players at games. She asked people to “think twice” about their posts.

In response, her Instagram account was flooded with harassing messages.

Mr. Wennberg then issued a statement on social media about the “vile comments.”

“We can all take a joke and funny comments but when it turns personal and into something bigger that affects our family, we need to tell you that we’ve had enough,” he wrote. “Enough of sexual harassment, and harassment of our character and our relationship.”

The Kraken has since removed its TikTok posts about BookTok.

How did TikTok creators respond?

The sexually explicit posts were made by a small sliver of the BookTok community.

One creator, Kierra Lewis, had made a video that Ms. Wennberg cited as an example of inappropriate behavior, and Ms. Lewis has since posted a handful of videos responding to the situation.

Ms. Lewis, who has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, had been flown out to a Kraken game earlier this year after she posted videos featuring explicit comments about N.H.L. players, including Mr. Wennberg.

She said that she had privately messaged Ms. Wennberg on Instagram to apologize. Ms. Lewis said that the Kraken TikTok account had unfollowed her, leaving her “confused and upset.”

In her videos responding to the controversy, Ms. Lewis expressed frustration with the team for backing away after it encouraged her, and with Ms. Wennberg for using one of Ms. Lewis’s posts as an example. She defended her videos by saying that TikTok is for “entertainment.”

Ms. Lewis did not respond to a request for comment.

The Kraken said in a statement that they had originally engaged with BookTok to connect with new audiences, but were reminded by this situation “that unintended consequences may arise.”

“It is disappointing that a small percentage of online commenters crossed a line,” the statement said. “We consider this a learning moment for the organization and have taken appropriate action.”

The winner of the Masters Tournament gets a green jacket, an elegantly engraved trophy and a lifetime invitation to play one of the most revered events in professional golf.

He also has the chance to plan a dinner the next spring for other Masters winners (and to pick up the check for one of the most exclusive evenings in sports).

“How rare is it to get everybody like that in a room where it’s just us?” Scottie Scheffler said hours before his dinner last year with 32 fellow Masters champions and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, the site of the tournament.

“There’s nobody else,” Scheffler continued. “There’s the chairman and then there’s us.”

And at a tournament where the concessions are legendary, the pressure is forever on the new champion to pick a menu that befits the moment. Tiger Woods offered up cheeseburgers and milkshakes after his debut Masters victory in 1997, but over the years built menus that included sushi, porterhouse steaks and chocolate truffle cake. Sandy Lyle went with haggis after his 1988 win. Vijay Singh’s selection of Thai food thrilled some players and flabbergasted others.

When Jon Rahm, the 2023 winner, appears for his dinner on Tuesday night, he will sit down to a meal that starts with six tapas and pintxos, including “Mama Rahm’s classic lentil stew,” a recipe from Rahm’s grandmother. Later on, there will be a Basque crab salad, a choice of rib-eye steak or turbot and a dessert of milhojas de crema y nata — a puff pastry cake with Chantilly cream and custard that was essentially Rahm’s wedding cake.

The Spanish-born chef José Andrés helped the Spanish-born golfer develop the menu.

“He called my grandma for the recipe” to the lentil stew, Rahm said last month. “If somebody doesn’t like it, please just don’t tell me. Don’t tell anyone, actually. It means a little bit too much to me to hear it.”

“I wanted to put a little bit of my heritage and my family into this dinner, which is going to make it even more special,” he added. “Hopefully I get to do it again, but I wanted to make sure the Basque heritage was there.”

The evening was not always so customized. For years, the menu included little more than a steak, a baked potato and free-flowing wine, offerings that reflected the habits, homogeneity and not-very-daredevil nature of many professional golfers. After Tommy Aaron won the tournament in 1973, he recalled in an interview in 2020, he telephoned an Augusta National official to inquire about the menu and learned that the spread was rather predictable. He chose to offer a beef dish, lobster bisque and a crabmeat salad.

“After the dinner, a couple of guys said, ‘Well, we’re glad we got something different than a strip steak,’” remembered Aaron, who forevermore ordered whatever the champion planned instead of a cop-out entree.

Scheffler recalled that he had brainstormed his menu with his wife and his agent. They started with a basic premise — Scheffler’s favorite foods — and started to narrow the list from there. After consulting with an Augusta National chef, they settled on a menu that, as the golfer put it, was “definitely not going to be on any nutritionist’s plan.”

When Augusta National allowed The New York Times into its kitchen last April, a team of cooks was preparing what would perhaps be its most scrutinized meal of the year, with dozens of dishes that needed to be personalized, timed and warmed just so.

There were starters of cheeseburger sliders, prepared with a precision that eludes most home cooks, firecracker shrimp and bowls of tortilla soup. Texas rib-eye steaks, reflecting Scheffler’s decades in the state, or blackened redfish came next, with macaroni and cheese, jalapeño creamed corn, deep fried brussels sprouts and French fries. For those with room for dessert, there was a warm skillet chocolate chip cookie with milk-and-cookies ice cream.

“I had the soup and had to sort of swab the top of my head because it was perspiring,” Lyle said right before he mocked the apparently delicate taste buds of Fred Couples, the 1992 winner.

“I like hot food — I’m used to curries and things like that, so I’m not too bad,” Lyle said. “But I think Couples was, like, holding his throat — ‘Oh, my God.’ So it caught a few people by surprise.”

Scheffler did not seem bothered. His menu, his rules.

“Everyone,” he reported the next day, “enjoyed the food.”

LeBron James Jr., the son of the N.B.A. star LeBron James, suffered a cardiac arrest while practicing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on Monday and was taken to the hospital for treatment in the intensive care unit, according to a statement from a spokesman for LeBron James and his wife, Savannah. The younger James, known as Bronny, is now in stable condition and no longer in the I.C.U., the statement said.

“LeBron and Savannah wish to publicly send their deepest thanks and appreciation to the U.S.C. medical and athletic staff for their incredible work and dedication to the safety of their athletes,” the statement said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a call for medical aid at 9:26 a.m. in the 3400 block of Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, the address of the university’s Galen Center athletic facility, a department spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The department would not disclose who needed medical aid, citing federal policy.

Bronny James, 18, will be a freshman at U.S.C. this fall. He is the eldest of the Lakers star LeBron James’s three children. Bronny James was a four-star recruit and chose U.S.C. over Oregon and Ohio State.

The U.S.C. men’s basketball program was scheduled to take a 10-day exhibition trip to Greece and Croatia beginning Aug. 5, according to a statement it released in May. It was not clear whether the team would still make the trip or whether James would go.

Cardiac arrest, when the heart stops, is different from a heart attack, which happens when blood flow in an artery feeding the heart is blocked. More than 300,000 people a year experience cardiac arrest outside of hospitals.

The survival rate for those who suffer cardiac arrest and receive bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation is just 11.2 percent. For those who receive immediate defibrillation, survival rises to 41 percent. It was not known what treatment James received.

Brain damage is likely if a person in cardiac arrest goes four to six minutes without CPR, and brain death occurs after 10 minutes. Only 8 percent of cardiac arrest survivors emerge with a good neurological outcome. Most “have some degree of brain injury,” Monica Sales, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, said in an interview in January.

U.S.C. has experience handling cardiac emergencies. During a workout at the Galen Center last summer, the incoming freshman Vincent Iwuchukwu suffered a cardiac arrest and was hospitalized. Iwuchukwu returned to play in 14 games for the Trojans last season.

Keyontae Johnson, a budding star at Florida, went into cardiac arrest during a game in 2020. He eventually recovered and resumed his career at Kansas State, where he starred last season on a team that reached the round of 8 in the N.C.A.A. tournament. Johnson was selected by Oklahoma City in the second round of the N.B.A. draft in June.

Few cardiac events have played out more publicly than Damar Hamlin’s collapse from cardiac arrest during a nationally televised football game last season. Hamlin, who is now attempting to resume his career with the Buffalo Bills, posted a message of support for James on Twitter: “Prayers to Bronny & The James family as well. here for you guys just like you have been for me my entire process.”

Montrice Wright, the mother of Kijani Wright, a freshman forward with the Trojans, said that she had not spoken with her son since James’s collapse, but that she hoped that he and the other members of the team were coping in the wake of the second such incident in just over a year.

“The concern doesn’t go away when you witness something like that,” she said. “These kids put themselves through so much; they don’t rest enough, and it’s been hot.”

Researchers at the University of Washington have conducted an exhaustive analysis of cardiac deaths in N.C.A.A. sports. Dr. Kimberly Harmon, the lead author who is affiliated with Washington’s Center for Sports Cardiology, said that Black male college basketball players have a higher risk of sudden cardiac death than other groups of players.

The annual risk of sudden cardiac death in Black Division I basketball players is one in 5,000. In white players, it is one in 16,000. Dr. Harmon said she and her colleagues had not found an explanation for the discrepancy.

“We see it again and again, not only in N.C.A.A. players, but also in high school athletes,” she said.

James is not the only son of an N.B.A. star who has experienced heart issues. Shareef O’Neal, one of Shaquille O’Neal’s sons and a friend of James, had open-heart surgery in 2018 when he was 18 after being diagnosed with a congenital heart defect that affected the coronary artery.

Since then, O’Neal has documented his recovery on social media as he has worked to return to playing basketball. O’Neal had to learn how to walk again, and he spent several months in rehabilitation, according to the American Heart Association.

In an interview on the “Now For Later” podcast this week, O’Neal said that “in 20 years, I just want to be known as that kid who fought back from something that was life-changing and made his dreams come true.

“I honestly thought I wasn’t going to play basketball ever again,” O’Neal said.

Basketball is often an afterthought on the U.S.C. campus, where football reigns supreme. But that was expected to change this season, in part because of the presence of the younger James, who has 7.5 million followers on Instagram, and who would be playing home games within walking distance of the arena where his father stars for the Lakers.

Crowds were expected to follow James, just as they had since the summer before he entered high school, when fans were turned away at the door of a gym at a premier high school recruiting showcase to watch him play against others in his age group.

As he grew and his game developed, James came to be viewed by college coaches as a complementary player with a high basketball I.Q. — a guard who was viewed as a contributor but not a star on a team with Final Four ambitions.

His recruitment, though, largely played out as “don’t call us, we’ll call you” — and he eventually took visits, though not to basketball powers like Duke and Kentucky. Instead, he toured schools where he might play more readily: Oregon, whose benefactor is Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, the shoe company that has a strong relationship with the elder James; Ohio State, the school LeBron said he would have attended if he had been required to go to college before going to the N.B.A.; and his close-to-home school, U.S.C.

The Trojans will also have D.J. Rodman, a transfer from Washington State, whose basketball-playing father, Dennis, was a pop culture sensation in the 1990s. But it is more than a team of scions of basketball stars.

U.S.C. should be quite good after adding one of the top freshmen in the country, Isaiah Collier, a point guard from Marietta, Ga. He will team with Boogie Ellis, the Pac-12’s second-leading returning scorer; center Joshua Morgan, who led the conference in blocks last season; and forward Kobe Johnson, who is the conference’s leading returner in steals.

Iwuchukwu, a 7-foot-1 center, is also considered an N.B.A. prospect.

After this season, Bronny James would be eligible for the N.B.A. draft. LeBron James has often said he would like to play on an N.B.A. team with his son, and he has even hinted that he wants to play with his younger son, Bryce, 16, who attends Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles. LeBron and Savannah James’s daughter, Zhuri, is 8.

LeBron James, 38, led the Lakers to the Western Conference finals last season, which was his 20th in the N.B.A. In February he became the N.B.A.’s all-time leading scorer, passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who had held the title for nearly 39 years.

Livia Albeck-Ripka, Adam Zagoria and Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.

Of course America loved “The Blind Side,” the 2009 movie about a homeless and hapless Black teenager rescued from a bleak future by a wealthy, white family. It was based on the true story of the Tuohy family, led by Sean and Leigh Anne, who took the future N.F.L. player Michael Oher into their home and raised him proudly as he made it to college and beyond.

It’s the type of story we’re used to in sports, one that undergirds our beliefs about sport’s power to create lifelong bonds, help its participants overcome hardships, and build character. It’s also a simplified rendering of race in America, one that hinges on the trope that white people can be magically redeemed by coming to the aid of a Black character.

Audiences sucked it up. The film took in over $300 million and Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, self-possessed belle of the New South.

But “The Blind Side,” based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, renders a complicated reality in the most digestible format. This week, surprising news of a lawsuit filed by Oher against the Tuohys spurred many to reconsider the movie, searching for answers to questions raised by the legal claim and obscured by the film’s comfortable, tidy narrative.

Oher is suing the couple for a full accounting of their relationship. He claims that when he thought he was being adopted at 18, the Tuohys urged him to sign a conservatorship that gave them control to enter into contracts on his behalf. He says that the familial bond, warmly portrayed in the movie, was a lie and that the Tuohys enriched themselves at his expense.

The Tuohys have defended their actions, arguing in a statement that the conservatorship was a legal necessity so Oher could play football at the University of Mississippi without jeopardizing his eligibility.

In a story with at least four versions — those of Lewis, the movie studio, Oher and the Tuohys — it’s almost impossible to discern who is telling the truth.

Until this week, I must admit, I had never seen “The Blind Side.” I’d purposefully avoided it. I’m leery of movies that lean on simple racial clichés — a fatigue that began as a child, when so many of my Black heroes died at the end of films so white heroes could live.

News of Oher’s lawsuit convinced me that it was time to plop down on the couch and take in the film, with the benefit of 14 years of hindsight — 14 years in which race and sports have re-emerged as essential platforms for the examination of America’s troubles.

My assumptions were proved correct early in the film, while Oher’s character was taking shape. As the story unfolds, he is shown as a lost cause before meeting the Tuohys and attending a well-to-do Christian school in Memphis. The film portrays him in easy terms: as a body, first and foremost — a gargantuan Black teen whose I.Q., we are told, is low, and who has no idea whatsoever about how life operates in worlds that are not swamped in poverty and despair.

The Oher of the film, particularly early on, has little agency and no real dreams of his own. When I saw that, it felt like a gut punch. “What?” I muttered. “There’s no way this characterization is true.”

The Baltimore Ravens selected Oher in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft. No one makes it that far in sports without a foundation of years of motivation and training, which gives credence to Oher’s long-held criticism of his portrayal in the film. He is an intelligent person, Oher has said, again and again, and he was a skilled football player well before meeting the Tuohys.

Not someone who needed the Tuohys’ young, pint-size son, Sean Jr., to teach him the game in the easiest of terms — by using bottles of condiments to show formations and plays. We watch Sean Jr. at a park, delighting in putting a clueless Oher through workouts.

The movie also shows the Tuohys using sports as a vehicle for Oher to develop confidence, enter a world of prestige and riches — and eventually to attend Ole Miss, the couple’s alma mater, where Sean Tuohy once starred in basketball.

Oher protects Leigh Anne Tuohy when they dare to go to the neighborhoods where he’d grown up — “That horrible part of town,” she says. He saves Sean Jr.’s life when the two are in a car crash by using his massive arm to shield the young boy from the force of an airbag. When Oher struggles on the practice field as he learns the game, Leigh Anne Tuohy bounds from the sidelines and drills him with firm instruction: He must shield the quarterback the same way he guarded her and her son.

“Protect the family,” she insists.

A lesson delivered to Oher by a feisty white woman as if he were a first-grader (or a servant) is a turning point. Oher begins transforming from a football neophyte raised on the streets into an offensive lineman with the strength of Zeus, the nimbleness of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the size of an upright piano.

Soon, we watch him play in a game, enduring aggressive and racist taunting from an opponent who initially has his way with an inexperienced rival.

Suddenly, Oher snaps. He does not just block the opposing player: Enraged, Oher lifts him and drives him across the field and over a fence.

“Where were you taking him, Mike?” his coach asks as Oher stands on the sidelines.

“To the bus,” Oher deadpans, his tone innocent and childlike. “It was time for him to go home.”

By the film’s end, the transformation is complete. We learn that under the watch of a wealthy white family, Oher’s I.Q. has improved to an average level! We see him become a high school champion! We watch a parade of coaches — real coaches, playing themselves in the film — fawn over Oher as they try to persuade him to suit up for their school.

It is hard to figure out, by the movie’s telling, Oher’s motivation, or his savvy, because he continues to be portrayed as a prop — quiet, docile, a young man who, for the most part, does as his newfound family says. This, by the way, makes it hard to even figure out, all these years later, the truth of his lawsuit.

What we do see in the movie is that he shines in college and the pros. There he is in the N.F.L., in his Baltimore Ravens gear. He had made it to the sports Promised Land and through it all, the Tuohy family was at his side.

This film had everything.

The dumbed-down trope about race and class in America that Hollywood has always peddled.

The simplified narrative that uncritically hails sport and its purity, the way it can change lives, always for the better, by shaping diamonds in the rough into jewels. The shadowy side of sports — the cheating, the lies, the broken promises, which, in this legal tussle, could be coming from either side — never encroaches on the fairy tale.

Bill Bradley, the basketball Hall of Famer and former United States senator known as a staunch opponent of legalized sports betting, was speaking about the topic back in January. But he might as well have been predicting the future.

“Well there hasn’t been a scandal, yet,” he said, discussing how professional sports have become ever more entwined with the gambling industry in recent years. “So the worst has been avoided, but all of the conditions are there for the untoward to occur.”

On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association confirmed the untoward had occurred, issuing a lifetime ban to Jontay Porter, a seldom-used backup forward for the Toronto Raptors. The league said Mr. Porter wagered money on his own team to lose, pretended to be hurt for betting purposes and shared confidential information with gamblers.

“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of N.B.A. competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport,” Adam Silver, the league’s commissioner, said in announcing Porter’s punishment.

There are those who worry that Porter is just the tip of the iceberg across American sports, and that unless everyone — leagues, players, unions, politicians, betting companies — gets together to prevent further betting scandals, the very viability of professional sports is at risk. The Porter case was all the more unsettling because it came just weeks after baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani, was connected to a gambling scandal when his longtime interpreter was accused of stealing millions of dollars from him to pay an illegal bookmaker.

“When sports lose the perception that they’re honest, their sport dies,” said Fay Vincent, the former Major League Baseball commissioner who played a key role in barring Pete Rose, the career hits leader, from the sport for life in the 1980s because he bet on his own team’s games.

Sports leagues and gambling companies argue that betting will take place whether or not the law allows it, so legalizing and regulating it protects the games by making it much easier to identify suspicious wagers. (Gambling on sports is now legal in 38 states.) That is what the N.B.A. said happened with Porter. Suspicious wagers on a game involving Porter were brought to the N.B.A.’s attention, according to the league, “by licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets.” A few weeks later he was gone from the sport.

Porter’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.

However, if not for the significant size of the bet, it is not clear that any actions by Porter would have been detected.

About 15 people in the N.B.A.’s offices and four or five lawyers are involved in the league’s efforts to educate players about its gambling policies, and to monitor and enforce those policies. The league has relationships with private organizations that monitor gambling, such as U.S. Integrity and Sportradar, as well as state gambling regulators and betting operators, all of whom can alert the league to suspicious activity that might involve players or other league or team personnel.

The N.B.A.’s investigation found that somebody associated with Porter bet $80,000 that, essentially, he would perform poorly in a game on March 20. These kind of wagers, known as prop bets, are not directly related to the outcome of the game. Instead they are wagers on specific in-game possibilities, like whether a player will score a certain number of points. Prop bets are often combined into a single wager called a parlay. Such bets have extremely low odds, but give high payoffs if successful.

Against the Sacramento Kings on March 20, Porter played just three minutes before leaving with what the team said was an illness. The $80,000 bet on his performance by his associate would have resulted in a $1.1 million payout if the suspicious activity hadn’t been detected, the league said.

There are few sportsbooks in the country that would even take an $80,000 bet on a prop parlay, let alone one involving a player like Porter.

The N.B.A. said its investigation also found that, from January through March, Porter placed “at least 13 bets on N.B.A. games using an associate’s online betting account.” Three of the bets were multigame parlays that involved Raptors games — he did not play in any of those games — and all were bets that the Raptors would lose.

Porter was a marginal player in the N.B.A., not necessarily the type who could be guaranteed to affect whether his team won or lost. But the individualized nature of many prop bets means more players are able to have a more direct impact on whether a wager is successful. The president of the N.C.A.A. has said that he would like to ban prop bets involving college athletes.

Mr. Vincent said he was not particularly confident that the current legal apparatus around sports gambling — consisting of different league regulations and varied state laws — combined with a public mostly excited to pull out their phones and bet $10 on a game, was an effective system to prevent or catch all problematic wagers. The N.B.A., like most professional leagues, has pushed for a federal law that would regulate all sports gambling in the United States, though that does not seem likely in the near term.

“I’m 85 years old so I won’t be around, but I don’t think the next 20 or 30 years is going to be a pretty story about gambling in the sports world because the money is going to be so enormous, and wherever the money is enormous the corruption follows,” he said.

The N.B.A. spends a lot of time educating its players on the rules around betting, especially the prohibition against wagering on basketball. The league does not allow the gambling companies it partners with to offer bets on its development league, the G-League, because it does not want to open up the possibility of players making less money than those in the N.B.A. being tempted to wager on their own sport. Last year, players in the National Football League and the National Hockey League were suspended for violating betting rules.

And yet Porter, who received these trainings and earned around $2.7 million in his N.B.A. career, which began in 2019 — and whose brother, Denver Nuggets wing Michael Porter Jr., will earn $33 million this season — still risked banishment.

Jontay Porter posted often on social media about trading stock options and cryptocurrencies, and co-founded a company to teach others to do the same. Devin Mills, a professor in Texas Tech University’s Department of Community, Family and Addiction Sciences, said it was not uncommon to see those interests overlapping with sports betting.

Mills said sports betting, similar to trading stock options and cryptocurrencies, was associated “with this kind of this characteristic where individuals study and really think they can beat the system because they know the game, they know the players, and there is some sort of trend analysis.”

Trading options, speculating on cryptocurrencies and betting on sports are all activities that can now be accomplished with a few clicks on a smartphone. They have all exploded in popularity in the last few years, especially with younger men who spend a lot of time online.

It is the crux of the problem for professional sports leagues, which encourage their fans to bet at the same time that they warn their players away from it.

“Do we have to help them identify an alternative activity to stimulate their mind and emotions, so they aren’t seeking the rush through betting?” Mills said.

Jenny Vrentas contributed reporting.

Protests at Columbia University have attracted national headlines, prompted congressional hearings and led to the arrest of more than 100 students. This week, the New England Patriots owner, Robert K. Kraft, one of the school’s most famous and wealthiest graduates, stepped into the fray.

Mr. Kraft, who graduated from Columbia in 1963 and has donated millions of dollars to the university, suggested he would stop giving money to the school until it took action to curtail the hate speech that had been directed at some students and staff members.

“I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff, and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken,” Mr. Kraft, who is Jewish, said in a statement on Monday.

Protests have roiled the campus in Upper Manhattan this month, with students arrested after refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment and crowds of protesters outside the school gates at times harassing Jewish students or shouting antisemitic comments.

Mr. Kraft’s attempts to fight antisemitism have become increasingly public in recent years, well before the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and the war in Gaza. In 2019, Mr. Kraft, who was alarmed by attacks on Jews and synagogues in Pittsburgh, Poway, Calif., and elsewhere, created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, a nonprofit group trying to counter the surge in violent language on social media.

The foundation is in the midst of a $25 million television campaign that has included running ads during the Academy Awards telecast on ABC this year. Similar ads were played during the N.F.L. season and the Super Bowl.

“This isn’t a two- or three-year problem; this is a problem that has been going on for thousands of years,” Mr. Kraft said in an interview in December in the foundation’s office down the hall from his own at the Patriots’ complex.

Many of the ads involve re-enactments of antisemitic attacks and a message that Jews and non-Jews must help each other fight back.

The one-minute ad that ran during the Academy Awards was based on an incident in Massachusetts. It began with a 13-year-old boy about to read the Torah at his bar mitzvah. A statistic flashes on the screen: “895 Jewish temples received bomb threats last year. This is one of those stories.”

A group of Christians meeting across the street sees the police lights and invites the congregation to finish the ceremony in their church. As the boy resumes his Torah reading, another message appears: “Hate loses when we stand together.”

The foundation’s mandate is to track hate speech in a systematic way and use the findings to motivate people of all backgrounds to help fight antisemitic behavior, especially when it comes to misinformation online. That work has grown exponentially in recent months as criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza has led to fierce debates that have, in some cases, led to antisemitic rhetoric.

At the foundation’s headquarters, computers in real time monitor key words, phrases and hashtags on up to 300 million publicly available sources, including social media sites like X, Instagram and TikTok, as well as blogs, online forums and websites.

He has hosted “convenings” of leaders from the sports world, including Jewish athletes like the former Patriots receiver Julian Edelman. In late January, Mr. Kraft helped bring together commissioners of the major American sports leagues at N.F.L. headquarters in Manhattan.

University presidents, politicians and executives have sought his advice, including the chief executive of Adidas, which last year cut ties with Kanye West after the sneaker giant was accused of tolerating his inflammatory remarks targeting Jews and disparaging Black Lives Matter. Mr. Kraft worked with Adidas on a plan to sell the remaining apparel and sneakers designed by Mr. West and donate some of the profits to organizations including the Anti-Defamation League.

One friend Mr. Kraft has not spoken with recently is former President Donald J. Trump. The two men were close for decades, but the language Mr. Trump has used on the campaign trail appears to be at odds with the mission of Mr. Kraft’s foundation.

In recent months, Mr. Kraft has been trying to strengthen bridges between Jewish and Black communities. The ad that the foundation ran during the Super Bowl featured Clarence Jones, a speechwriter for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and chairman of Spill the Honey Foundation, a nonprofit group that highlights the long alliance between African Americans and Jews.

In March, Mr. Kraft and Dr. Jones shared a stage at the 92NY in New York, where they discussed ways their two foundations could work together.

“The fierceness, the dedication of the Jewish people can be translated in simple, practical terms,” Dr. Jones said. “There would not have been a Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor a Voting Rights Act of 1965, none of that would have happened but for the alliance and support of the Jewish community. So I’m not going to sit by.”