Sports

When Chris Evert arrived in Paris for the 1973 French Open, she was an 18-year-old making just her second trip out of the United States. So she is still baffled as to why Philippe Chatrier, then the president of the French Tennis Federation, decided to take her and her mother, Colette, to Le Lido, the legendary burlesque theater on the Champs-Élysées.

“He took us to dinner, and it was a dance club with half-naked women,” Evert said by phone from her Florida home in April. “They had their breasts showing. My eyes were like saucers. I had never been exposed to anything so sophisticated like that.”

For Bjorn Borg, the ultimate Paris experience was celebrating his first French Open championship in 1974 with a private dinner in the Eiffel Tower.

It has been more than a half century since Borg and Evert first played the French Open, but this year marks the 50th anniversary of their winning their first major championships in Paris. Evert went on to capture 18 Grand Slam singles titles, including a record seven at the French Open, six at the United States Open, three at Wimbledon and two at the Australian Open. Borg won six French Opens from 1974 to 1981 and five consecutive Wimbledons from 1976 to 1980.

Borg was just days shy of his 17th birthday when he lost to Adriano Panatta in the round of 16 at the French Open in 1973, only his second appearance at a major after a first-round loss at the 1972 U.S. Open.

“When I started to play tennis at 8, 9 years old, I had three dreams,” Borg, who will turn 68 in June, said from his home outside Stockholm. “One was to play Davis Cup for Sweden, one was to walk on Centre Court at Wimbledon and the third dream was to win a Grand Slam tournament. Those were my dreams when I was hitting the ball against the wall. So, it meant a lot for me to come to Paris and play my first match in that beautiful stadium.”

After reaching the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 1971 and the semis of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1972, Evert made her first appearance at the French Open the next year. She reached the final, where she led Margaret Court, the No. 1 seed, by a set and was up 5-3, just two points from the championship in the second set, before losing 6-7 (5), 7-6 (6), 6-4.

“I just didn’t have that intense feeling,” said Evert, who will turn 70 in December. “Everyone thinks I had that killer instinct like I did in the juniors with the girls my own age. But when I got to the women’s tournament, for some reason I was just more relaxed, and I felt like I had time on my side. I didn’t have the fervor to win that match.”

A year later, Borg and Evert were ready.

Borg remembers being down 4-1 and two breaks of serve in the deciding set of his first-round match against Jean-François Caujolle. He then needed five sets to beat Erik Van Dillen and Raul Ramirez before facing Manuel Orantes in the final. After dropping the first two sets, Borg rallied for a 2-6, 6-7 (4), 6-0, 6-1, 6-1 win.

“Before the tournament I would definitely say I was not the favorite to win,” Borg said. “I surprised myself by being in my first Grand Slam final. I was a bit nervous, but I think he felt more pressure than I did. Plus, he got very tired. And the more we played, the more tired he got and the more pressure I could see that he felt.”

Evert has no recollection of whom she played along the way to capturing her first French Open in 1974. She doesn’t recall ousting Virginia Ruzici, who would go on to win the 1978 French Open and then lose to Evert in the final in 1980. Or that she didn’t lose a set en route to the title, which she won 6-1, 6-2 over her friend and doubles partner Olga Morozova. She does, however, remember having a vastly different attitude that year.

“I was a different person,” Evert said. “I had the experience of the year before, of letting it slip away, of not closing it out like I should have, and I learned from that. I was mentally tougher, and I knew that if I had that opportunity again, to close out the match and win a Slam, I was going to do it.”

Evert won again in 1975 and, after skipping the tournament for three years to play World Team Tennis, she won back-to-back championships again in 1979 and 1980. Her greatest victory came in 1985, when she upset top-seeded Martina Navratilova 6-3, 6-7 (4), 7-5 in a nearly three-hour final that enabled her to reclaim the world No. 1 ranking. She beat Navratilova again in the 1986 final for her last victory at a major.

Evert and Borg possessed tangible similarities. Both were introverts by nature and, for the most part, imperturbable on the court. They, along with Jimmy Connors, hit with then-novel two-handed backhands, spawning generations of players with double-fisted ground strokes. And they both almost never missed.

“I think we introduced the world to the way we played,” Borg said. “Chrissie and I liked to play from the back court. We had two-handed backhands, and not too many players did that.”

To Evert, whose two-handed backhand was encouraged by her teaching-pro father, Jimmy, Borg was always the star.

“In Paris they were a little behind the times when it came to equality and women’s liberation and celebrating women athletes,” said Evert, who won at least one major every year from 1974 to 1986. “It was all about men’s tennis. And Bjorn was like a rock star, like one of the Beatles. He had to have security guards around him. The girls were screaming and crying and trying to grab at him. I’d never seen anybody idolized like him. To this day I think he’s still the biggest star tennis has ever had.”

Even the current generation of players recognizes the impact that Borg and Evert have had.

“Bjorn Borg? I mean he was a freak,” said Frances Tiafoe. “He was unreal. Crazy records within a short span. He didn’t say a word, the silent assassin. His movement, great form, he changed the game to be played more from the back of the court. He was a full-on rock star, the kind of guy I like.”

Jessica Pegula called Evert a legend.

“She changed the game with her two-handed backhand, not just for girls but for guys too,” Pegula said. “She was a trendsetter, which is pretty cool.”

Evert said she believed that her legacy in the sport was more than her backhand and steely determination.

“My real legacy was bringing girls into the game of tennis,” she said. “Bjorn and I were the first teenagers who made it big. And we brought a new generation of kids to the game.”

As for the 50th anniversary of their first French Open titles, Borg and Evert are struck by the speed of time.

“It sounds scary when you say it, really strange,” said Borg, who will retire as captain of the Laver Cup’s Team Europe after this year’s event in Berlin in September. “Fifty years is a long time, but I remember it like it was yesterday, and it’s good to have that memory.”

“When I hear it, I can’t believe it,” said Evert, who recently concluded chemotherapy for a recurrence of ovarian cancer and will return to ESPN’s broadcast booth at the French Open and at Wimbledon. “I’m in the last trimester of my life right now, and yeah, it makes me feel old.”

Days after Mat Ishbia reached a deal in December to buy majority stakes in the N.B.A.’s Phoenix Suns and the Phoenix Mercury of the W.N.B.A., he met with top executives to learn more about the teams’ business operations, including how local fans were able to watch their games on TV.

The executives detailed three possibilities going forward, including sticking with Diamond Sports Group, which owned the regional sports network that for more than a decade had held the rights to show the teams’ games. Diamond Sports was saddled with $8 billion in debts — it would file for bankruptcy protection in March — but it still wrote big checks worth millions of dollars a year.

Mr. Ishbia, though, gravitated to the riskiest of the three options: ditching the regional sports network model that most teams followed for decades and returning to showing Suns and Mercury games for free on over-the-air channels. It might cost the teams money in the short term, but the bet was that it would help them reach more fans, including those who dropped their cable subscriptions or, like many younger fans, never had one.

“What was interesting was the amount of people that were reaching out to me on social media about how they couldn’t watch the Suns games,” Mr. Ishbia said in an interview, adding: “It’s their team. It’s not Mat’s team. To not be able to watch your game wasn’t an option that we were interested in.”

In April, the organization announced that it would leave Diamond Sports and broadcast all Suns and Mercury games on over-the-air channels with the company Gray Television. They sent thousands of free antennas to fans who needed them. They also created a streaming option with the company Kiswe.

Mr. Ishbia’s decision shook a sports media world — clubs, leagues, networks, cable and satellite providers — trying to navigate the decade-long shift in how fans watch their home teams. Those used to finding games on one channel are having to search for them elsewhere as networks and leagues reshuffle their distribution deals in response to the rise of cord cutting and the boom in streaming. Some clubs could face shortfalls as they search for ways to replace revenue lost by the end of local media deals, potentially hindering their ability to bid for top players.

More teams are expected to overhaul their local media deals in the coming months as their contracts expire. Those that choose to show more of their games on free television are returning to a world that the N.F.L., which shows more than 90 percent of its games on over-the-air channels, never abandoned.

“It’s back to the future,” said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson. “As more people cut the cord, these teams are losing their ability to reach their fans. So why not put it over the air for free and also build a streaming product that’s more accessible for younger fans.”

The Phoenix-area franchises are part of a growing wave of teams doing the same. The San Diego Padres, like the Diamondbacks, ended their agreement with Diamond Sports, the largest regional sports network provider. Major League Baseball used its broadcasting and streaming capabilities to keep the teams on the air and guaranteed they would get 80 percent of the revenue they received in their Diamond Sports deals.

Diamond Sports, which must make at least $400 million in annual debt payments, is in talks with its creditors, some of whom want to reshape the company’s business while others want to be bought out. Diamond Sports is also in talks with the N.B.A. and other leagues about reducing their rights fees.

A company spokesperson declined to comment on the talks with creditors and the leagues.

Last year, Monumental Sports Network, which is owned by Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards (N.B.A.), Capitals (N.H.L.) and Mystics (W.N.B.A.), bought NBC Sports Washington and unveiled a new streaming service. The N.H.L.’s Vegas Golden Knights said in May that they planned to shift to a free over-the-air channel. The N.B.A.’s Utah Jazz and Los Angeles Clippers are selling their games and programming directly to viewers with streaming packages, with the Jazz also broadcasting their games on a free channel.

The Jazz are “probably the largest real media company in the state,” Ryan Smith, the team’s owner, said in an interview this year. “If you actually think about the N.B.A., we’re not that different than a media or tech company.”

Mr. Smith said he expected most teams to take over their broadcasts entirely within three years.

Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. have been preparing for this possibility for years. When Sinclair, Diamond’s parent company, bought the regional sports networks from Fox Sports in 2019, M.L.B. made a bid because it wanted to control as much of its content as possible, Commissioner Rob Manfred said.

“That was a product of our belief the media was going to change dramatically,” he said, noting that 11 major league teams still have contracts with Diamond Sports.

Local media deals have traditionally been handled by the clubs, but in January, M.L.B. hired executives from regional sports networks to develop contingency plans, like taking back the rights to Padres and Diamondbacks games and showing them on MLB.TV’s subscription service, as well as an array of cable and satellite companies. The broadcasts included the same announcers.

Jason and Wendy Dow, who live in Queen Creek, south of Phoenix, canceled their cable package with Cox this summer to save money and signed up for YouTube TV. Now they watch the Diamondbacks using the MLB app, which they said had better streaming functions.

“I was kind of upset at first, but it’s turned out to be better in the end,” Jason Dow said at a recent Diamondbacks home game. “On the old feed, you basically just saw the game without a lot of extras.”

The N.B.A. began preparing for changes in 2018, creating a “next gen” service that includes a streaming service and production and distribution support that teams can use to stream broadcasts. So far, the Clippers, the Jazz and the Suns are using it.

Diamond’s bankruptcy doesn’t affect every team. Franchises like the New York Knicks, the Denver Nuggets and the Wizards in the N.B.A. and the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in baseball own their networks. Other teams are locked into long-term deals, like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who signed a 25-year, $8.35 billion deal with Time Warner Cable in 2013 and have part ownership of their regional sports network.

While the deals bring in dependable checks, some teams are reaching a shrinking viewership because of cord cutting. For others, like the Nuggets and the Dodgers, disputes with carriers like DirecTV and Comcast meant their games weren’t available to most people in their markets for part of their contracts.

The Suns first had games on cable television in 1981, and started broadcasting games on Fox Sports, which later became Bally Sports, in 2003.

“​At the time it seemed pretty good, pretty solid,” said Jerry Colangelo, who was with the Suns as an executive and then an owner from 1968 until 2004. “And they had some strong years of growth, for sure.”

Instead of outsourcing the production and ad sales to the networks, the Suns produced their own content “to control our own destiny,” Mr. Colangelo said.

The Suns continued to produce their own games and sell their own ads after Mr. Colangelo sold the team. That gave them and the Mercury a head start when Mr. Ishbia decided to change course. Most other teams will have to create those resources if they cut ties with regional sports networks.

The early results have been positive. Viewership for Mercury games jumped 418 percent last season, said Josh Bartelstein, chief executive of the Suns and the Mercury.

Mr. Ishbia said getting fans hooked on the Suns and the Mercury was the goal. He has made big (and expensive) moves since buying the team, trading for the highly paid stars Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, and investing more than $100 million in a new practice facility for the Mercury and a new headquarters for both teams.

“I’m not focused on money,” Mr. Ishbia said. “We’re focused on success. We’re focused on fan experience. And money always follows those things.”

He added: “I think other teams will follow whether they have to or whether they want to. I think this is the future.”

Gary Player of South Africa, a nine-time major winner, captured the P.G.A. Championship in 1962 and 1972 and made an impressive run for a third crown in 1984 at age 48, finishing second to Lee Trevino.

In 1972, at Oakland Hills Country Club outside Detroit, Player rebounded from bogeys at 14 and 15 to pull off one of the more memorable shots in tournament history: a 9-iron approach on No. 16 from about 150 yards that went over trees and a lake to within about four feet of the pin. He converted the birdie putt and went on to prevail by two strokes.

With this year’s event beginning on Thursday at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky., Player, 88, recently reflected on what the P.G.A. meant to him.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Was the shot at 16 the greatest one you ever hit?

No. The greatest shot I ever hit was in the [1968] British Open [at Carnoustie in Scotland.] The wind’s blowing like crazy and I’m playing with Jack Nicklaus. I take the 3-wood [on No. 14] and hit it inches from the hole.

Another one was the second shot on 17 in the 1974 Masters?

My caddie said to me when I arrived [at the ball], “I need a roof on my house.” I said, “We’re going to get you a roof this week.” As I hit the 9-iron, I just took the club and gently tossed it towards that bag and said, “We’re not even going to need a putter.” It was inches behind the hole.

What do you remember about the 1962 P.G.A. at the Aronimink Golf Club in Philadelphia?

Bob Goalby and I had a great battle down to the end. They made me an honorary member and I go to Philly for a month every year and play a lot with the members.

The 1984 P.G.A. Championship would have been a heck of a win for you?

Yeah, that would have been. At that stage, Julius Boros [also 48] was the oldest man to win a major and still was until Phil Mickelson [at age 50 in the 2021 P.G.A.].

Do you feel the P.G.A. gets enough respect among the four majors?

I rate the British Open No. 1, the United States Open No. 2, the P.G.A. No. 3 and the Masters No. 4.

You rate the P.G.A. over the Masters?

Yes, I do.

A lot of people consider the P.G.A. the least important major. Why do they believe that?

I don’t know why. First of all, it’s the toughest field of any field in golf. That’s pretty significant, if you beat the best field in golf. Also, I’m a professional golfer. The P.G.A. of America fulfilled my dream. Not only mine, but everybody that plays.

What do you think of the current run of Scottie Scheffler, who has won four tournaments since early March, including the Masters?

Fantastic. He’s a very nice man. He’s got a perfect golf swing. He gets all his weight going to the left side and that is the most important thing. He does that better than others.

Do you think the game is better off when there is a dominant player?

What happens when you have people dominating is you get tremendous coverage. If you look at the coverage that Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and I got for the tour, it’s unbelievable. Not only here but worldwide. You will always have somebody come along and dominate, and I think that’s very important.

When you play with friends, do you love the game as much as ever?

People say to me, “How much do you play?” I say, “Four to five times a week.” And if that doesn’t tell you how much I love it, then I don’t know. I love going out with my friends. I love playing with juniors. I could play every day.

What’s your game like these days?

I average par. I’ve beaten my age thousands of times. Trevino says to me, “What’s so good about that? You [can] shoot 16 over par to beat your age. When you get to 100 and you beat your age, then I’ll praise you.”

When the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team filed a petition to unionize this week, it was a reminder of how much the movement for player empowerment has grown in college sports.

The petition, filed to the National Labor Relations Board by the Service Employees International Union, was unanimously signed by all 15 players on the team, the union said. It was immediately backed by supporters of more rights for college athletes, and Dartmouth itself said it was considering how to respond.

In a statement, the Ivy League school said it had “the utmost respect for our students and for unions generally” and that it was “carefully considering this petition with the aim of responding promptly yet thoughtfully in accordance with Dartmouth’s educational mission and priorities.”

The petition was filed on Wednesday, according to the N.L.R.B. Players from Dartmouth’s team did not respond to messages seeking comment, and it was unclear in filings obtained through an open records request how the athletes were framing arguments for forming a union.

The S.E.I.U. said in a statement that it was “proud to stand in solidarity with these young people as they fight for the right to collectively bargain for a better future and blaze a path for other student athletes to follow.”

The Dartmouth team’s effort joins a long line of recent actions that have challenged the N.C.A.A.’s student-athlete model, which has come under heightened scrutiny in recent years. States have enabled athletes to be paid for endorsement deals, and the Supreme Court has said that leaders of the sport cannot not stop modest payments and benefits related to education.

In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard oral arguments for a case in which a former Villanova football player asserted that college athletes are employees. The N.C.A.A. is also facing a $1.3 billion class-action lawsuit from current and former players over the use of their name, image and likeness in television broadcasts. And the Ivy League itself is facing litigation, after current and former Brown University basketball players filed a lawsuit against the conference in March to challenge its practice of not awarding athletic scholarships.

“We are just in a completely different place with college sports,” said Jason Stahl, the founder and executive director of the College Football Players Association, which promotes the unionization efforts of college football players.

It wasn’t that long ago that such efforts were greeted with strong, sustained opposition and a desire to preserve the N.C.A.A.’s cherished model of amateurism above maneuverability for players. And though it is unclear whether the Dartmouth players can be successful in their efforts to unionize, they do have some structural advantages that past groups did not.

In 2014, players from the Northwestern football team started a similar effort, arguing that the compensation they earned through their scholarships earned them the right to collectively bargain with the university. That petition was eventually dismissed, but the players who signed union cards saw themselves as being at the vanguard of a movement.

“Right now, the N.C.A.A. is like a dictatorship,” quarterback Kain Colter said at the time. “No one represents us in negotiations. The only way things are going to change is if players have a union.”

The N.L.R.B. argued then that recognizing a Northwestern unit would have created an uneven labor arrangement with other schools in the Big Ten Conference, which were public and not subject to the board’s jurisdiction, meaning it could not force them to be unionized, too.

Michael LeRoy, a professor and sports labor expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the Dartmouth case differs from the Northwestern case in ways that could lead to broader efforts among Ivy League teams.

Because the Ivy League schools are all private, LeRoy said, the N.L.R.B.’s justification for rejecting the Northwestern union would not apply since Dartmouth is not in a conference with public schools.

Still, the effort will certainly have its hurdles. The players would have to prove they are employees, LeRoy said, which is the subject of ongoing litigation.

It is also not clear if Dartmouth’s effort could or would spread. LeRoy said that even if Dartmouth were unionized, collective bargaining could not be imposed on other Ivy League basketball programs. But Stahl said the Dartmouth effort showed that basketball had an advantage with relatively small roster sizes compared with other sports, like football.

The tide has shifted surrounding not just unionization, which has gained favor with the American public since 2015, but in sentiments toward the N.C.A.A. and its member institutions, which have fought hard against player empowerment. The institution lost some sway in Washington with the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in N.C.A.A. v. Alston and states forcing the N.C.A.A. to change its rules on endorsement deals.

Stahl said that the environment for Dartmouth players gives them an advantage that Northwestern’s players didn’t have in 2015.

“I think the argument is really on our side now,” Stahl said.

The University of Louisville football team’s fortunes are unlikely to rise and fall on the squat legs of Mario Agyen, a 5-foot-7, 190-pound, walk-on running back who joined the team in the middle of last season after an end-of-summer tryout.

Still, amid the daily reminders of where he stands in the team’s 114-player hierarchy, Agyen rarely forgets the distance he traveled to get there, leaving home in the Bronx five years ago with little more than a dufflebag stuffed with clothes, $1.98 in his bank account and an inexhaustible supply of determination to be a college football player.

Now, when he takes the elevator up to the football players’ commissary each morning, choosing what type of egg-white omelet a chef will prepare for him, and how much fresh fruit, turkey bacon, pearl sugar waffles, oatmeal or grits he’ll pile onto his plate, he often thinks about how he started.

Agyen often woke up famished, wondering if his breakfast would consist of one frozen waffle or two and where he’d be sleeping at night. Once, he was so hungry — and so broke — that he texted a former teacher asking to have a couple pizzas delivered to him.

He had traveled to Columbus, Ohio, after graduating from high school, sold on chasing his football dreams at what the rest of the country would later learn was a sham prep school operating under a name that became a nationwide punchline: Bishop Sycamore.

More than 135 players were lured by big promises, from as far as Texas, California, Georgia and New York, to play for Bishop Sycamore and its previous incarnation, Christians of Faith Academy, until it fell apart on national television.

Only one is believed to have played major college football: Agyen.

“Sometimes it blows my mind — damn, like I really came a long, long way,” Agyen (pronounced A-jin) said on a recent afternoon, walking around Louisville’s campus. “Taking the road I did and going through a traumatizing experience mentally, that could have messed me up and made me crash out.”

Bishop Sycamore’s public unraveling, which came when its team was overwhelmed by the powerhouse IMG Academy in a game broadcast on ESPN, has centered on Roy Johnson, the academy’s founder, who left behind a lengthy trail of lies, unpaid bills, lawsuits and broken dreams. He filed for bankruptcy in July, and is the focus of a recent HBO documentary, “BS High,” and a just-released book, “Friday Night Lies,” by Andrew King, a journalist, and Ben Ferree, a former Ohio high school athletics investigator.

Making cameos in the documentary are Agyen and his boyhood friend, Isaiah Miller, who were among a group of players who were recruited from the Bronx and whose experiences were chronicled in The New York Times nearly two years ago.

At the time, many were trying to put their lives back together after their experiences at Christians of Faith in 2018, an initial season in which several dozen teenage boys lived like football vagabonds. They were kicked out of two hotels, stayed in cabins at a rural retreat with no phone service, and then at an apartment complex where they slept on air mattresses in vacant units.

The rest of their experience was no less chaotic. Their schooling was through online learning accounts, but nobody monitored their work. On what was supposed to be the first day of classes, they took a field trip to play paintball. They were given key cards to a health club but never returned to use it. Fights broke out between the players and even the coaches.

The mother of one of the players did her best to put together meals. A handful of players resorted to stealing food from grocery stores.

The football was just as slapdash: Players shared helmets and there was no trainer to tend to injuries.

When that season ended in early November with Christians of Faith forfeiting a game at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore because it did not have enough players, the remaining players returned home to pick up the pieces.

Agyen, though, did not want to return to the Bronx.

He’d experienced too much by then. Coming home to eviction notices. Sleeping on the floor or a sofa. Old classmates in jail or worse. He could not shake the sight of a friend laying in a coffin and thinking, “This is the environment we came up in. It’s a cycle — like a box that we’re trapped in.”

He never let go of football being a lifeline out.

Agyen, the son of Ghanaian immigrants who separated when he was 10, has long carried himself with a puppy’s ebullience and a pitbull’s determination to prove himself to anyone with doubts. Agyen had pestered his father at a young age to take him to a park to train.

“Football is everything,” his father, Kofi Agyen, a taxi driver, said with a laugh. “He sleeps football. He wakes up and he thinks about football.”

The sport gave him direction. His mother, Nana Gyamfi, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper, said she fled Ghana in 1991 after the assassination of her father, a minister who opposed the government. She emphasized education so that her two children — Mario and his older sister, Angel — would have a better life. But for a long time, Mario wasn’t as interested in his class work as he was in being the center of attention.

“We’d go back and forth — he was such a clown,” said Tara Tripaldi, his sixth-grade teacher at Middle School 363 in the Bronx, who has remained close to him. “But you could see his hunger, his passion for the sport. Once he started seeing the connections between academics and college, he started killing it.”

Agyen, an honor roll student at Louisville, is on track to graduate in December with a degree in sports management.

He had never been to Kentucky; nor did he know anyone at Louisville. He chose the school after two years at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pa., for a simple reason: the recruiting coordinator, Pete Nochta, answered his emails.

Just as Bishop Sycamore was making headlines two years ago, Agyen tried out at Louisville. Shortly after, Nochta informed him that there weren’t any spots.

Agyen was disappointed, but not discouraged.

He sat in the stands on Saturdays, thinking he should be on the field instead. Almost daily, he packed cones, a parachute and football cleats into a backpack and walked over to the student recreation center and its adjacent turf field, intent on proving he belonged. He ran sprints, darted around the cones, lifted weights and recruited other students to fire footballs at him from close range on a racquetball court.

He also emailed Nochta once a week, keeping in touch.

“In my head, I’d say, ‘Stop emailing,’” Nochta said. “But I liked him.”

Agyen was so much a part of the furniture at the recreation center that when he returned recently with a visitor, twice he was stopped by students who embraced him with a hug. “It’s awesome to see your dream come true,” Michael Dropsey, who is studying sports management, told him. “I know how hard you worked for this.”

College football tryouts are often nothing more than a due diligence exercise. Schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of college football, have 85 full scholarships to disburse. They also have room for 35 walk-ons, with many spots reserved for local high school standouts, legacies or prospects who might need to put some meat on the bone. There’s not much room for anyone else.

“Most of the time, the guys that show up for a tryout weigh 250 pounds and want to play receiver,” Nochta said. “Or you have guys who look like they should be in intramurals. You usually don’t find guys you can put out there to compete with D-I players and not get somebody hurt.”

When the next tryout came, a year later, Agyen looked the part of a football player, catching the eye of team members who had lingered to watch. But days passed with no word. Then a few weeks. On Sept. 27, with Louisville’s running back depth depleted by injury four games into the season, Agyen got a message from Nochta’s assistant, Carter Wilson: Call me.

Agyen bolted from a sports law class and dialed Wilson, who told him there was a spot for him. Agyen was bawling before he hung up.

Agyen made an almost immediate impression on the scout team, breaking a couple of long runs against the starting defense. By the end of the regular season, he was given the scout team offense’s difference-maker award. When Louisville beat Cincinnati in a bowl game at Fenway Park in Boston, he got on the field for the first time, carrying the ball for no gain on the second-to-last play of the game.

There is no statistical record of his carry, which was credited to a defensive player who wore the same uniform number, though his roster page was recently amended to make note of it. That the oversight has not been corrected is, perhaps, a sign of his standing in the program.

Another is the need to prove himself all over again with a new coaching staff.

Chris Barclay, the running backs coach under the first-year head coach Jeff Brohm, describes Agyen as smart, meticulous and a hard worker who “likes to know the why.” Agyen showed flashes in fall camp of the shiftiness that helped him rush for more than 3,500 yards in high school. But blocking Atlantic Coast Conference pass rushers is a challenge because of his size, Barclay said, adding that Agyen’s best chance to contribute will be on special teams — something he did in last week’s romp over Murray State, along with another carry for no gain.

(Agyen did not make the 70-man travel roster for Louisville’s first two road games, including its season-opening win over the conference rival Georgia Tech and its game scheduled for Saturday at Indiana in Indianapolis.)

“He’s had to earn everything his whole life,” Barclay said. “I’ve been around those types of guys and they find a way to get on the field and help the team win games.”

Barclay and many others at Louisville have come to learn about Agyen’s path only recently, via the documentary. Jawhar Jordan, the starting running back who developed a quick bond with Agyen as a Long Island native and as someone who joined the program midcareer, said Agyen was initially reluctant to discuss his experiences at Christians of Faith.

“When you watch the documentary, wow, it’s sad,” Jordan said. “But he comes out here with a smile on his face every day. He never gave up. He kept chasing the dream. People deserve to hear his story.”

In June, Agyen, outfitted in a charcoal jacket, pink dress shirt and loafers, strolled across the red carpet ahead of a screening of “BS High” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. He met Michael Strahan, one of the movie’s producers. Spencer Paysinger, like Strahan a Super Bowl champion with the Giants and another of the movie’s financial backers, urged Agyen to take advantage of his standing as a football player at Louisville by making business contacts.

“I’m the first in my family to walk on the red carpet,” Agyen said with a laugh. “You walk in and all these people are looking at you, lights are flashing, cameras and everything. You feel like a celebrity.”

At the end of the screening, Agyen was rewarded with a rousing ovation when the audience learned in the final credits where he was now. About the only thing better, he figures, is eliciting another one, on a bigger stage this season.

Bill Walton, a center whose extraordinary passing and rebounding skills helped him win two national college championships with U.C.L.A. and one each with the Portland Trail Blazers and Boston Celtics of the N.B.A., and who overcame a stutter to become a loquacious commentator, died on Monday at his home in San Diego. He was 71.

The N.B.A. said he died of colon cancer.

A redheaded hippie and devoted Grateful Dead fan, Walton was an acolyte of the U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden and the hub of the Bruins team that won N.C.A.A. championships in 1972 and 1973 and extended an 88-game winning streak that had begun in 1971. He was named the national player of the year three times.

Walton’s greatest game was the 1973 national championship against Memphis State, played in St. Louis. He got into foul trouble in the first half, but went on to score a record 44 points on 21-for-22 shooting and had 11 rebounds in U.C.L.A.’s 87-66 victory. It was the school’s ninth title in 10 years.

Walton — not yet known for his often hyperbolic, stream of consciousness speaking skills — refused to say much after the game. As he left the locker room, he told reporters, “Excuse me, I want to go meet my friends. I’m splitting.”

He played one more year at U.C.L.A. before being selected by Portland first overall in the 1974 N.B.A. draft. He weathered injuries, two losing seasons under Coach Lenny Wilkens and criticism over his vegetarian diet and his red ponytail and beard before winning the 1977 championship under Coach Jack Ramsay.

“I think Jack Ramsay reached Walton,” Eddie Donovan, the Knicks general manager, told the columnist Dave Anderson of The New York Times. “Of all the coaches in our league, Jack Ramsay is the closest to being the John Wooden type — scholarly, available. I think Walton responded to that.”

But the question that lingered throughout Walton’s N.B.A. career was how good he would have been if not for his many injuries. Better than Bill Russell? Wilt Chamberlain? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of his predecessors at U.C.L.A.?

Walton never played in more than 65 games in a season during his years in Portland — even in the 1977-78 season, when he was named most valuable player, he appeared in just 58 games — and he missed four full seasons (1978-79, 1980-81, 1981-82 and 1987-88).

“When I’m healthy,” he said early in his Portland career, “I play real good, I think.”

He was asked whether anyone had seen the real Bill Walton.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

He had a knee injury as a teenager during a playground game. But, as he wrote in one of his memoirs, “Back From the Dead: Searching for the Sound, Shining the Light and Throwing It Down” (2016), it was “my malformed feet — my faulty foundation, which led to the endless string of stress fractures which ultimately brought on the whole mess I’m in now.”

He underwent about 40 orthopedic surgeries, mostly on his feet and ankles.

“My feet were not built to last — or to play basketball,” he added. “My skeletal, structural foundation — inflexible and rigid — could not absorb the endless stress and impact of running, jumping, turning, twisting and pounding for 26 years.”

William Theodore Walton III was born on Nov. 5, 1952, in La Mesa, Calif., near downtown San Diego. His father, called Ted, was a social worker and adult educator, and his mother, Gloria (Hickey) Walton, was a librarian. Bill was extremely shy because of his stutter and wrote that in school he almost never spoke in class and was glad when teachers did not call on him.

He recalled in his memoir that his “basketball fever spiked” after the family next door dismantled its backboard and basket and he and his father reassembled it at their home.

“I was in heaven,” he wrote. “I could play whenever I wanted, and I did.”

It was the start of a long love affair with basketball that led to two state championships for his Helix High School team, in La Mesa. The squad won 49 consecutive games at one point. He moved on to U.C.L.A., recruited when it was the dominant team in college basketball. With Walton, the Bruins had two 30-0 seasons and finished 86-4 in his three varsity campaigns.

While at U.C.L.A., Walton was arrested during a protest against the Vietnam War. He was also politically aware of his status as a white player with mostly Black teammates.

“The Blacks have gotten a raw deal for a long time,” he told the sportswriter Bill Libby after his arrest, according to The Nation. “A lot of my teammates are Black, and I really admire the way they’ve risen above their raw deal. They’re my friends, and I feel for them. I know I’ve gotten twice as much as I deserve because I’m white.”

Walton was friendly with the leftist radicals Jack and Micki Scott and appeared with them at a news conference in San Francisco in 1975. The Scotts had been in hiding and resurfaced amid accusations that they had sheltered Patricia Hearst (Scott later admitted that he had) after she had been kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Walton had briefly shared a home in Portland with the Scotts and had been questioned about them by the F.B.I. Speaking to the Scotts at the news conference, Walton said, “I am sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused you, and you can rest assured that I will never talk to the enemy again.”

With his injuries derailing his career, Walton left the Blazers to sign with the San Diego (now Los Angeles) Clippers in 1979, but, again, injuries prevented him from playing in many of their games over four seasons. In 1985, the Clippers traded him to the Boston Celtics, where he found joy as a reserve player, winning the Sixth Man of the Year Award, as the Celtics won the 1986 N.B.A. title, defeating the Houston Rockets.

“The Celtics’ jigsaw had been missing a giant piece — a center to spell Robert Parish — and Walton nestled snugly into place,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1986, referring to the team’s starting center.

But foot injuries limited Walton to 10 games the next season, the last he would play. Over 10 seasons, he averaged 13.3 points and 10.5 rebounds a game.

He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993.

Last year, ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series told Walton’s life in four parts. Despite his injury-limited career, the series was titled “The Luckiest Guy in the World.”

His first marriage, to Susan Guth, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Lori (Matsuoka) Walton; his sons from his first marriage, Adam, Nate, Chris and Luke, who is a former coach of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Sacramento Kings; his sister, Cathy Walton; his brother Andy; and nine grandchildren. His brother Bruce died in 2019.

In the 1990s, Walton moved to an improbable new career: television game analyst.

“English is my fourth language,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2000, “after Stumbling, Stammering and Bumbling.” He dealt with his stutter using techniques that he learned from the sportscaster Marty Glickman, and went on to call N.B.A. and college games for several networks, including NBC, ESPN, CBS and the Pac-12 Network. His play-by-play partners included Marv Albert, Tom Hammond and Dave Pasch.

Walton brought an idiosyncratic style to his commentary, which combined his over-the-top enthusiasm for basketball with weird flights of fancy and musical and science references. He was so garrulous and windy that if given the airspace, he could speak for an entire game without letting his partner speak.

His catchphrase, “Throw it down, big man,” which he shouted at centers and forwards, inspired “Throw It Down,” an alternate game broadcast that featured him and his co-host, Jason Benetti, in which Walton offered analysis and told stories. It started appearing on NBA League Pass in the 2022-23 season.

His opinions could sometimes be covered in unconventional verbal clothing.

“Come on, that was no foul!” he once declared. “It may be a violation of all the rules of human decency, but it’s not a foul.” Another time he exclaimed: “A thing of beauty! Einstein, da Vinci, Jobs! And now Tyreke Evans!”

Netflix is no longer simply in the “sports-adjacent” business. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a three-season deal with the National Football League that will include showing two Christmas Day games on its service this year. It’s the first time Netflix has become partners with a major sports league, and it likely won’t be the last.

The move follows Netflix’s increasingly aggressive push into the business of live events. In the past two weeks, “The Roast of Tom Brady” was its most-watched English-language TV show; a quirky six-day John Mulaney talk show went viral as part of the Netflix Is a Joke live comedy festival in Los Angeles; and the stand-up special “Katt Williams: Woke Foke” was viewed 4.3 million times.

“Last year, we decided to take a big bet on live — tapping into massive fandoms across comedy, reality TV, sports and more,” Bela Bejaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said in a statement. “There are no live annual events, sports or otherwise, that compare with the audiences N.F.L. football attracts.”

The two Christmas games will pit the Houston Texans against the visiting Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers against the visiting Kansas City Chiefs (raising the odds for greater viewership with a potential Taylor Swift sighting).

The streaming business has matured in the United States, and though Netflix is the dominant service, it still needs to keep growing. With subscriptions relatively maxed out in America, the growth of other revenue streams has become crucial to the company’s success. Advertising is chief among them.

At a time when more people are dropping their traditional cable subscriptions, live sports remain catnip for advertisers because they are one place where audiences are guaranteed in real time. That is especially true for the N.F.L., which remains a ratings juggernaut.

Last month, Netflix announced that its lower-priced subscription service, which features ads and is roughly a year old, grew 65 percent in the first quarter of the year, and said on Wednesday that it now had 40 million global monthly active users on that plan. Netflix has roughly 270 million overall subscribers worldwide.

“This shows just how serious Netflix is taking advertising, because you don’t do this unless you are fully committed, all in, on how big you think this is going to be,” said Richard Greenfield, media and technology analyst at Lightshed Partners. “This is them putting a stake in the ground saying, ‘We’re here, we’re going to grow much, much bigger in advertising and this is effectively Day 1.’”

Netflix has also committed to so-called sports-adjacent live programming. In January, it reached a multibillion-dollar, 10-year deal for the exclusive rights to stream World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship weekly wrestling show, “Raw.” And in March it announced that it would stream a boxing match between Mike Tyson and the social media influencer Jake Paul live in July.

While the N.F.L. deal is a first for Netflix, it is a continuance of the league’s streaming strategy.

Amazon began streaming Thursday night games exclusively on its Prime service in 2022. In January, NBCUniversal showed an N.F.L. playoff game on Peacock, the first time in the league’s history that it granted a streaming service exclusive rights to a playoff game. The company paid $100 million for the rights, generated 23 million viewers and called it “the most streamed live event in U.S. history.” (N.F.L. playoff games traditionally lure around 30 million viewers.)

For the past two years, the N.F.L. has broadcast three games on Christmas, challenging the N.B.A.’s stronghold on the winter holiday. As part of this new deal, Netflix will stream at least one game on the holiday in 2025 and 2026.

Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, is leaning in on streaming as broadcast television continues to recede in popularity.

“Our fans are on these platforms,” Mr. Goodell told reporters during the week of the Super Bowl. “Our fans want to access them. The technology is extraordinary. You can do things on some of these platforms that you can’t do on the linear platform. For us, it’s part of the future.”

While the Netflix games will be simulcast on broadcast television for free in the competing teams’ cities, Netflix and others are likely to make a bigger investment in the N.F.L. and other sports in years to come. Streaming, for instance, is already playing a role in current negotiations over future rights to show National Basketball Association games.

“This feels like a watershed moment for linear TV,” Mr. Greenfield, the analyst, said. “Getting the king of premium streamers to say we are in the sports business for real is a pretty big deal for television. Because it doesn’t matter what this means now — it just shows you you’ve got another serious bidder for sports rights.”

Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting from New York.