Sports

Willie McRae, a caddie who spent more than seven decades at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, the host of this week’s U.S. Open, was a beloved figure who did his utmost to help his players.

“My dad would always tell the story that his job depended on what kind of tip he got,” said Paul McRae, his son who is a golf instructor at the Pinehurst Golf Academy. (His father died in 2018 at 85.) “He’d occasionally come home with holes in his pocket so he could drop a ball for a golfer. Those other guys would say, ‘Man, you sure play good when Willie is here, but you don’t when Willie isn’t around.’ He knew how to make players feel good.”

Pinehurst is a cradle of American golf. Donald Ross, one of the most prolific golf course architects, lived in the town and tested out ideas about course design at the club. But it also has an underappreciated role in American caddying.

What was once a profession that was looked down upon, caddying has gained respect over time. It’s now an integral part of the experience at golf resorts around the world. After all, there is no one else who spends five or six hours with guests as guides, psychologists and storytellers.

“During the last U.S. Open, Justin Rose came in early and took my dad out on No. 2 so he could read the greens for him,” McRae said. No. 2 is the championship course. “My dad caddied for Ben Hogan. Hogan would ask him, ‘Where should I aim?’ My dad would say, ‘Aim at that tree.’ Hogan would say, ‘Which part of the tree?’”

Two years after the first Open at Pinehurst in 1999 — this is the resort’s fourth — Pinehurst recognized some of its most famous caddies with a hall of fame. Willie McRae, Fletcher Gaines, Robert Robinson, Jimmy Steed, Teddy Marley, Robert Stafford, Hilton Rodgers, John T. Daniel and Jeff Ferguson were in that first class of inductees in 2001.

In addition to being the course designer, Ross was also the resort’s caddie master and recruited men from the community.

“The caddie game at Pinehurst is thriving for a number of reasons, among them the facts that caddies are a part of the Pinehurst tradition, the No. 2 course is imminently walkable, and the curious design of the greens makes their local knowledge worth several strokes a round,” wrote Lee Pace, in his 2012 book “The Golden Age of Pinehurst.”

Still, the Pinehurst caddies are less well-known than their counterparts at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. Augusta required golf professionals to take a club caddy for the Masters Tournament until 1982, and that rule made golf stars out of men like Carl Jackson, who caddied for Ben Crenshaw for decades and was with him for both of his Masters victories.

“The Augusta caddies developed this niche as a great caddie pool from the Masters,” said Ward Clayton, the author of “The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National.” “Augusta is well known for its mysterious greens. But Pinehurst has a similar sense with those inverted-saucer greens that Donald Ross built. Players are a little bit flummoxed by those greens. A caddie was like having a coach in those rounds.”

This week, few players will show up without their regular caddie on the bag. But for any who do, the go-to guy is Thomas Trinchitella, who caddied for Tiger Woods during practice rounds before the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst and Rory McIlroy before the 2014 one. He’s a bridge between the past and present of Pinehurst caddie history.

“I got to caddie a little bit with Willie McRae toward the end of his career,” Trinchitella said. “Listening to those guys go back and forth in the caddie room about who is the best green reader, who could play this hole better, it was comical. They were the veteran guys. People just loved them.”

One critical thing has changed over the decades: the money. McRae finished caddying and went to work the night shift, his son said. The winning caddie at the U.S. Open will earn 10 percent of the $3.6 million first-place prize.

When Oakland University’s 14th-seeded men’s basketball team defeated No. 3 Kentucky on Thursday night, delivering the first shocking upset of this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, it cast a spotlight on the relatively anonymous university in Rochester, Mich.

And if history is any indication, the next few days and weeks — and perhaps longer — promise to be a lucrative time for the school.

Upset victories by double-digit seeds are not just a big deal for busted tournament brackets. They also raise the profile of the schools that pull off the shockers. Big wins routinely lead to spikes in applications, enrollment and, as the university community rallies around its team, alumni contributions. Media coverage leads to attention that is otherwise hard to come by, and the name recognition can be long lasting.

“It was a bit surrealistic,” said Eugene Cornacchia, the president of St. Peter’s, whose men’s basketball team also upset Kentucky in 2022. “It was exciting to win, but I didn’t necessarily understand the onslaught of the attention that would ramp up so quickly.”

After the victory, Cornacchia said, his phone was ablaze with text messages from friends, alumni and members of the media. His school, a Jesuit university in Jersey City, N.J., with an enrollment of around 3,000 students and an endowment of less than $40 million, had previously been to three tournaments and won zero games.

The team went on to win its next two games, before falling in a regional final to North Carolina.

The tournament run was good for business. In the eight months before the win by St. Peter’s over Kentucky, the university sold roughly $58,000 worth of merchandise, Cornacchia said. After the upset and through the end of that month, it sold more than $300,000 worth of merchandise and ran out of its supply in a matter of days. Yearly commitments from donors rose from $450,000 to more than $2 million.

In 2006, after George Mason’s improbable run to the Final Four, a professor at the university estimated that the school had received more than $600 million worth of free publicity and a 22 percent increase in applications. For public schools that make runs in the tournament, a subsequent jump in students coming from out of state boosts receipts from tuition.

In the initial hours after its win over Kentucky, St. Peter’s was caught flat-footed. Unlike their counterparts at larger schools who are usually detached from menial tasks, officials at the university found themselves personally handling ticket requests for the team’s next game, as well as season ticket orders for the next year.

Brad Hurlbut, the athletic director at Fairleigh Dickinson, whose men’s basketball team defeated top-seeded Purdue last year, described “lugging boxes and vacuuming trash” at his office in Hackensack, N.J., a far cry from the duties of his peers at larger schools.

University staff members, inside and outside athletic departments, are less plentiful than at the schools that typically dominate the N.C.A.A. tournament. So when a team scores its biggest win in program history, a skeleton crew of employees is left to handle media requests, craft new marketing campaigns and otherwise seize the moment.

David Vazquez was the director of budgets at Florida Gulf Coast when it defeated Georgetown in the 2013 tournament. The school followed up that surprise win with another in the next round, becoming the first No. 15 seed to make it to the round of 16. All the while, Vazquez said, employees in public relations and marketing were “burning the midnight oil because everyone wanted to learn about us.”

By the time the team arrived back to campus after its first two games, the school was already changed. The university’s “dunk city” moniker, a reference to the team’s athletic style of play, caught on. The next year, its applications spiked, particularly from out of state.

With an enrollment of about 16,000 students, Oakland is considerably larger than some other March darlings. But compared with Kentucky, it’s in a different stratosphere athletically. Oakland’s athletic department spent $15 million in 2022, about one-tenth of Kentucky’s expenses last year.

Cornacchia, the president of St. Peter’s, acknowledged that the school was limited by its size and reach, and that recreating the magic of 2022 was a tall order for future teams. (St. Peter’s returned to the tournament this year and lost Thursday night in a rout to Tennessee.)

For Hurlbut, the athletic director at Fairleigh Dickinson, the long hours after the win were worth the payoff: It meant a new locker room for the team, a naming rights deal for its arena and an agreement to have some of its games broadcast on the YES Network.

“This is just so much more satisfying and gratifying to me to be at a small school, and provide your university with all those great things that winning can do,” Hurlbut said. “You can sleep when it’s over.”

It wasn’t just a gold Pontiac Trans Am with a painted bird on the hood. It was the car that Texas A&M gave to Eric Dickerson in 1979, when he was a top high school running back prospect, in the hope that he would become an Aggie. Instead, he drove from his hometown, Sealy, Texas, to Dallas and Southern Methodist University.

At the time, Mr. Dickerson’s cars (S.M.U. gave him one, too) were a symbol of the wretched excess of big-time college sports. It was a time when boosters in the Southwest Conference doled out “$100 handshakes” and the S.M.U. faithful winked as they talked about how they had the best football team money could buy.

The S.M.U. Mustangs went 34-11-1 over Mr. Dickerson’s four years — the team’s vaunted Pony Express era. It gave the oilmen and real estate developers and business titans across Texas who funneled cash to their alma mater bragging rights at the Petroleum Club of Houston and country clubs in Dallas.

And it drove the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, nuts. The organization had rules to stop those kinds of pay-for-play shenanigans and investigators to chase down overeager boosters, who mostly eluded their grasp. Mr. Dickerson remembers that one N.C.A.A. investigator visited his home so frequently, the guy would sit at his kitchen table and eat dinner with his family.

The N.C.A.A. eventually caught up to S.M.U. (Mr. Dickerson was long gone by then, well into a Hall of Fame career in the National Football League.) In 1987, the organization handed the football team the so-called death penalty, the severest punishment it has ever imposed on a Division I school for rules violations. The program was shut down for two seasons, and the university’s reputation was tarnished.

Ever since, S.M.U. has wandered the college sports landscape looking for a home, and a way to share in the ever-increasing riches associated with top-level amateur athletics.

It took nearly four decades, $354 million in major construction and facilities upgrades, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized S.M.U.’s original sin — allowing players to profit financially from their athletic skill — but the university has found its way back. Last summer, S.M.U. was invited to join the Atlantic Coast Conference this July.

It wasn’t cheap. S.M.U. was admitted to the A.C.C. only after agreeing to forgo nine years of conference broadcast revenues, or $270 million, to avoid diluting the pot for incumbent members.

For those wanting to trace the evolution of big-time college sports over the past half-century, there may be no better example of the shifting views on the role of money — and whether student-athletes should get any — than S.M.U.

The N.C.A.A. has lost much of its authority now that players can be compensated through name-image-likeness rules, or N.I.L., which effectively allow athletes to be paid by sponsors or donor groups known as collectives. It is staring down a number of lawsuits and challenges to its longstanding amateur model. In a bid to maintain some relevance, the organization has called for a series of changes that would pave the way for the top moneymaking schools to form a new division that would more closely resemble professional sports.

In the meantime, universities’ search for television money has changed the map of athletic conferences. The Big Ten, for instance, was once concentrated in the Midwest; now it has 18 teams and stretches from Oregon and California to New Jersey. By that measure, expanding the Atlantic Coast Conference into Texas isn’t much of a leap.

“What started more than 150 years ago with football being considered an extracurricular activity that benefited student-athletes and offered a glue for a school community to come back to campus — ‘Boola Boola’ and all that — has morphed into a tremendous industry,” said Oliver Luck, a longtime college sports administrator who was a star collegiate quarterback himself and is now a consultant. “And you got to call it an industry. There’s lots of money and lots of interest.”

Mr. Dickerson was back on campus recently, marveling at the sun sparkling off the new buildings and the six-figure income that some of the current Mustang football players are earning. And these days football is far from the only sport where athletes share in the spoils of economic success. One S.M.U. volleyball player, Alex Glover, makes well into six figures as a social media influencer.

Looked at a certain way, Mr. Dickerson thought, S.M.U. had been less a rogue program than one ahead of its time. He and his teammates had merely been on the ground floor of what has become a $17 billion ecosystem of big-time college sports. The money being reaped by current college athletes, he said, was long overdue.

“Those jerseys that schools sell don’t run around the field by themselves,” he said.

‘Amateur is out the door’

S.M.U.’s new era is personified by Ms. Glover, who merged her two passions — volleyball and social media — into a side hustle as a social influencer.

“I wanted to take people on a deep dive of how a Division I student-athlete operates from day to day,” Ms. Glover said. “There’s a lot more going on than showing up for practice and games.”

Ms. Glover scripts and shoots witty, fast-paced Instagram videos for a series called “Day in the Life of a D-1 Volleyballer.” She takes her followers to the gym, to the classroom and on walks with her dogs, as well as offering fashion and beauty tips. She also was a captain on a team that won an American Athletic Conference championship, and she completed undergraduate degrees in engineering and data science. She will complete a master’s in management science in May.

Ms. Glover is not paid by a collective, but Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Ulta Beauty are among her more than 40 sponsors.

“For me, beyond the money, N.I.L. has given me a sense of freedom and pushed me to learn these different skills as far as content creation and running a business” said Ms. Glover, who has written an e-book called “An Athlete’s Strategy to Scoring NIL Deals.”

For athletes in marquee sports like football and men’s basketball, however, the experience has been more unsettling. Jake Bailey, a receiver on the football team who graduated in December with a degree in sports management, wrote a paper on the effects of N.I.L. on student-athletes. Along with the money, he wrote, came more unfamiliar responsibilities like managing your finances.

“The lump sums of money being thrown around is life changing for many players and their families,” Mr. Bailey said, adding: “Amateur is out the door. We’re pros.”

Six years ago, when he was coming out of high school in San Clemente, Calif., there was no money for colleges to dangle beyond the value of a scholarship. Instead, recruiters pitched their facilities and academics and treated him as a superstar on campus visits.

“It was about the glitz and glamour,” Mr. Bailey said.

He chose Rice University in Houston and led the Owls in all-purpose yards — yards gained on runs, receptions and returns — as a sophomore and in receiving as a junior. Mr. Bailey believed he was ready for a bigger stage and entered the transfer portal. Now schools could woo him with the promise of cash.

“I never brought money up,” Mr. Bailey said, “but the coaches would tell you where you fit on the scale of who was making this and what they were paying.”

Mr. Bailey chose S.M.U. but said he was not one of those making six figures. He does make enough to have set up a limited liability company to manage his taxes. In the locker room, he said, his teammates never discuss money. Just as it did in the Pony Express era, however, the parking lot tells all. Mr. Bailey can see who are at the top of the pay scale by the Dodge Chargers and Ford Mustangs they drive.

Last fall, Mr. Bailey was a captain and a leading receiver on a Mustang team that won the American Athletic Conference championship. With a season of eligibility left, he will pursue a graduate degree and play for S.M.U. in the A.C.C. this year.

Mr. Bailey also got a raise.

‘Back where we belong’

Gerald Turner, 78, is a native Texan with a honeysuckle drawl who offers cleareyed opinions delivered in full paragraphs. (He asks reporters to tape him to keep up.) By the nature of his position as S.M.U.’s president, they usually end with an ask. He understands what is important to Texans. He skinned-and-grinned with political heavyweights, business titans and federal officials for a decade to land the George W. Bush Presidential Center on campus.

He came to S.M.U. in 1995 with a mandate to make the university a national destination for academics and rebuild a reputation badly scarred by the football scandal. He has raised nearly $3 billion for 44 development projects, among them engineering and education buildings, five residential halls and a $140 million renovation and expansion of the highly regarded Cox School of Business.

S.M.U.’s professional schools climbed in rankings, undergraduate acceptance rates shrank as incoming freshmen’s test scores rose, and the university attracted more students from out of state.

Last summer, Dr. Turner called members of the board of trustees and donors to his conference room in the Perkins Administration Building to tell them that S.M.U. finally had the pieces in place to land a seat at the adults’ table of college athletics.

Dr. Turner understood the hold that athletics, particularly football, could have on a university. He was previously the chancellor at the University of Mississippi and an administrator at the University of Oklahoma. Shortly after arriving on campus, Dr. Turner set about rehabbing S.M.U.’s athletic facilities. In 2000, the 32,000-seat Gerald J. Ford Stadium opened on campus with a subtle design and an emphasis on community.

The football stadium was sunk into the southern edge of the campus near the Boulevard, a grassy, tree-lined parkway that welcomes visitors to the heart of campus. The Boulevard would be S.M.U.’s answer to the Grove at Ole Miss, an upscale tailgate space where anyone who was anyone had to be seen and that everyone could enjoy.

“If you’re not having winning seasons, there’s got to be something bigger than football to get fans there,” Dr. Turner said.

The Boulevard was an immediate hit. The reinvigorated football program not so much. S.M.U. did not return to a bowl game until 2009, and, since returning to the field in 1989, the Mustangs have managed just 10 winning seasons as they moved through three midtier conferences.

Still, over the past decade, the university renovated its basketball arena and built a field house, an aquatics center and a soccer stadium. All were improvements necessary to attract the attention of a Power Five conference.

The A.C.C. made the most sense. Beyond athletics, the conference offered an opportunity to stand academically alongside powerhouse state universities like Virginia and North Carolina as well as smaller, elite private schools such as Duke and Wake Forest.

Still, it was going to be a heavy lift, and Dr. Turner made sure his board members knew S.M.U. would have to give the A.C.C. an offer it could not refuse.

“Here’s what we want to offer, but, you know, I can’t do it unless you guys tell me to,” Dr. Turner recalled telling the board. “We’ll tell them that we will give up roughly the $30 million it would get from ESPN for adding us for up to nine years. They could use it for an incentive pool or whatever they wanted.”

Then came the ask. Dr. Turner believed the people in the boardroom as well as other deep-pocketed alums would make up the difference to help the university’s athletic department add coaching and support staff and increase salaries that would help every Mustang program compete at the top level of Division I.

“It’s going to cost each of you probably a million a year for the first five years,” Dr. Turner said.

In September, seven days after the A.C.C. officially invited S.M.U. to become a member, the university raised more than $100 million from 30 key donors and trustees.

“This is a core group who lived through the resentment and hurt feelings of the death penalty and understood this was a healing moment,” Dr. Turner said. “It puts us back where we belong.”

Still, S.M.U. paid a steep price for an uncertain future. One mainstay of the A.C.C., Florida State, wants out of the conference badly enough that it recently sued the league and claimed that it mismanaged its members’ media rights and imposed “draconian” exit fees of $572 million for the Seminoles to leave.

On the Hilltop, as the S.M.U. campus is known, there are no regrets. The football stadium’s $100 million Garry Weber End Zone Complex is loud and dusty, but its locker rooms, weight room, meeting rooms, and full kitchen and training table will be ready for S.M.U.’s 484 student-athletes come August.

“We understand that the ground is still shifting, and no one really knows where this is going to end up,” David B. Miller, the chairman of S.M.U.’s board, said. “But it’s still better to be inside that process instead of on the outside looking in.”

A game of liar’s poker

While gaining entrance to the A.C.C. was a negotiation between well-endowed universities and big donors, the brave new world of name, image and likeness is murky at best. How else to explain the N.I.L. valuation of $3.2 million for Arch Manning, a backup quarterback at the University of Texas, three times last year’s salary for San Francisco’s Super Bowl quarterback, Brock Purdy?

No one in college athletics disputes that the current economy of unregulated name, image and likeness is essentially play-for-pay. Alongside the transfer portal, which allows student-athletes to shop their skills for a potential starting position and more money, the best-funded institutions land the best athletes at the highest prices.

Chris Schoemann, executive director of S.M.U.’s Boulevard Collective, which doles out the university’s athlete payments, likens the current marketplace to a game of liar’s poker.

“Everyone wants to seem bigger than they are,” he said.

To that end, Mr. Schoemann is vague on numbers, allowing that a healthy collective — which he says S.M.U.’s is — requires $5 million to $8 million annually for the football and men’s and women’s basketball teams. There are benchmarks that players and their representatives either already know or Mr. Schoemann will tell them if they inquire. A top quarterback in a Power Five conference, for example, averages about $550,000 a year.

How many Mustang football players earn more than six figures?

“More than a handful,” he said.

For now, what drive the marketplace are talent and the financial wherewithal to take big risks for even bigger rewards. Rick Hart, S.M.U.’s athletic director, said it was difficult to isolate what it really cost to operate a competitive athletic program because N.I.L., the transfer portal and conference affiliation were all intertwined.

“All those things play together to create this free-agency environment that we’re in, which is challenged even further by the fact that there aren’t really any rules,” Mr. Hart said. “How much money do we need? A lot.”

‘They made us outlaws’

Mr. Dickerson was back on campus with his former S.M.U. teammate Harvey Armstrong. Both remain hurt over the blame their team shouldered for decades after the program was shut down.

“We felt abandoned,” Mr. Armstrong said. “They not only didn’t invite us back for homecoming, they made us outlaws. I could not even get an interview for a coaching job that was open.”

Mr. Armstrong’s awkward gait is a reminder of the 15 surgical procedures he has had on his knees and back. He forgets things, gets aggravated easily and wonders if he is showing early signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), the degenerative brain disease that has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L players after their deaths.

Mr. Dickerson has had regenerative stem cell therapy for nearly a decade for a bad back that often immobilizes him. Neither man regrets the toll that the game he loved took on his body. Both do regret the toll it took on their souls.

“We were indentured servants,” Mr. Dickerson said. “I call paying these kids out in the open doing the right thing. Finally.”

On an outdoor basketball court surrounded by seashell-scattered sand last month, a man coached a group of teenage girls through a drill. The staccato pounding of their dribbles alternated in the hot air with a tinnier sound in the distance: men hammering nails into wood while a bleating white billy goat looked on.

The coach, Abibou Sall, 34, instructed his players to dribble along the sideline, first with their left hands, then their right. Don’t look down at the ball, he told them, wanting the girls to learn to trust their hands.

Sall is a physical trainer for the Pikine Basket Club, which practices at the Jacques Chirac Center. About 600 children play basketball at this recreational center in Pikine, a suburb bordering Dakar. The youngest players, ages 6 to 7, are introduced to the game on mini hoops. The oldest are 18. Sall is also a die-hard fan of the National Basketball Association.

It is a picture that would delight the N.B.A. — a devotee of its league teaching basketball to youngsters on a continent in which it sees tremendous economic opportunity.

Recently, after finishing with his club duties, Sall had been staying up late to watch the playoffs — the games often start after 11 p.m. local time — even after his favorite player, LeBron James, was eliminated in the first round.

“I am passionate, I watch every game,” Sall said, playfully offended at the suggestion that he watched only James. “I never sleep,” he added jokingly.

The N.B.A. has been promoting basketball in Africa for more than 20 years, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. The aim is to cultivate an immense potential fan base, the way it has in China, while also tapping into the rich talent pool on the continent. Much of the league’s work is concentrated in Senegal, where it operates an academy for high-school-age players, an N.B.A. Africa office and the headquarters of the Basketball Africa League. N.B.A. Africa’s investors include former N.B.A. players and former President Barack Obama (who also has an equity stake). The B.A.L. was announced in 2019 with FIBA, the sport’s international governing body. Its first season was in 2021.

Although N.B.A. Africa is not yet profitable, the investment seems to be producing results. Soccer may still be the king of sports on the continent, but basketball is becoming increasingly popular. People throughout Africa play on local club teams and in after-school programs. The N.B.A. has generated plenty of good will by building courts, libraries and homes; administering basketball camps and other development programs; and supporting gender equality. But some wonder about the league’s long-term commitment and whether the support needed for basketball to flourish can be sustained.

“As much as we are investing in Africa, the opportunity is so enormous I worry that we’re under investing,” Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in an interview. “There’s so much opportunity, but it’s not always easy to know how to deploy capital, which government you should be dealing with, who the honest brokers are. And so we’re learning as we go.”

The Start

The league’s — and Silver’s — connection to Africa goes back decades.

Silver, 62, spent a month in Malawi after college with a friend whose father led the United Nations’ mission there. Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics great, visited the continent on a State Department-sponsored trip in 1959. In 1993, David Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner at the time, led a trip to South Africa, where league executives and players met with Nelson Mandela.

Today, about 10 percent of N.B.A. players are either African or have at least one parent from Africa. A vast majority of its players are African American.

The league is also conscious of population growth figures, which say that by 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African.

The league’s first African office opened in Johannesburg in 2010. Eleven years later, a second was opened in Dakar, followed by others in Lagos, Nigeria; Cairo; and Nairobi, Kenya. Investors and strategic partners like Obama were tapped in 2021 to help make N.B.A. Africa a stand-alone entity that operated its offices and the B.A.L.

Beyond money, the N.B.A. emphasized connection and expertise. Most investors in N.B.A. Africa and the B.A.L. either are African or have conducted business or humanitarian work in Africa.

Luol Deng, who played at Duke University and then spent 15 seasons in the N.B.A., was among the former players who invested. Deng, 39, was born in what is now South Sudan and fled with his family to Egypt as a child. He is the president of South Sudan’s basketball federation, which earned Africa’s automatic qualifying berth to this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris.

On a recent evening, Deng was in Dakar Arena, watching as the stands filled up with fans before a B.A.L. game.

“I went from being a refugee in Egypt, never seen a basketball game, to being in the N.B.A.,” he said. “So now imagine for these kids. This is in their backyard.”

With the B.A.L., the N.B.A. accomplished something it couldn’t do in China: help establish a league that it could operate. The 12 teams in the league play in three conferences, which include the six champions from leagues in Angola, Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia. Six teams earned their spots this year through a qualifying tournament. Seeding games were played in Pretoria, South Africa; Cairo; and Dakar, with eight teams advancing to the playoffs in Kigali, Rwanda.

Silver remembers meeting with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and selling him on the positive economic impact that building a basketball arena could have on a city, citing examples from the United States in which arenas helped revitalize urban centers.

“President Kagame, he then, right in a meeting with us, made a decision to build a new arena,” Silver said.

AS Douanes, a team from Dakar, was playing the night that Deng spoke about basketball in Africa. The team won on a buzzer beater in front of a nearly full arena. Fans roared, danced and banged Senegalese drums in celebration. The crowds were more sparse when the local team wasn’t playing.

When APR Rwanda, a team from Kigali, played earlier that day, a group of women blew horns behind the courtside seats. One of them, Denise Uwase, said that her country’s interest in basketball “grew after the genocide against Tutsi. Everyone wants to join because it’s a smart game. It’s a game that healed many people.”

Amadou Gallo Fall, the president of the B.A.L., hopes that the league can one day become one of the best in the world.

He’d also like to see it be profitable.

At the moment, it’s hard to know which goal is more challenging. There have been reports of teams not paying their coaches and players. Often, the teams with the financial resources to compete are tied to national governments, which creates other complications. A team from Burundi had to forfeit its games because it refused to wear jerseys with sponsorships from Visit Rwanda. On Instagram, players on the team said the government of Burundi had forbidden them to wear the jerseys.

As for attracting young fans — who may dream of playing in the N.B.A. — Deng thought back to his own childhood.

“When I was growing up and I was back on the continent, there’s no way I would make my mom pay $10 for me to come watch an N.B.A. game,” he said. “That’s a lot.”

He added: “We’re asking Africans and people that are struggling day to day to actually spend money to come watch this, which, in the Western world and Europe and so on, it works. But in Africa it’s not going to work.”

Deng would like to see sponsors buy tickets to the games and distribute them to local families. Perhaps they could even help with transportation to games, he said.

“These companies in Africa are making so much money,” he said. “For me, I always challenge all these companies in Africa, on the continent, what’s the impact for the work they’re doing?”

Basketball Dreams

About 40 miles inland and east of Dakar, the coastal breeze disappears and gives way to a choking heat. Bougainvillea grow near the highway, like beautiful pink, orange and red flowering weeds, and goats loll around the vegetation and red sand.

This is Thies, one of the largest cities in Senegal and home to the SEED Project, a basketball center that Gallo Fall founded in 1998. Its logo is a baobab tree — also known as the tree of life — sprouting from half a basketball. Gorgui Dieng, a first-round N.B.A. draft pick in 2013, trained here before finishing high school in the United States.

“Most of our kids come from underprivileged backgrounds, and we bring them into the system and give them an education; you give them basketball skills for them to hone further in other countries like the U.S., Europe, Asia,” said Joseph Lopez, the president of the SEED Project.

He added: “After they get their degrees and their basketball experience, they come back to their home countries, where they become contributors to their systems and they create jobs.”

SEED, one of the numerous organizations whose interest in promoting basketball in Africa predate the N.B.A.’s push, opened its boys’ academy in 2002 and now also has a girls’ academy. It served as a blueprint for the N.B.A. Academy, which started in Thies before moving to Saly, a coastal town about an hour south of Dakar. In a nod to its roots, a SEED banner still hangs in the academy’s gym.

About two miles from SEED, a man rode a scooter into a teal-and-salmon-painted gym to drop off water for women participating in a camp for referees and coaches. It was 97 degrees outside and only slightly cooler inside.

Syra Sylla, a former sports journalist who is now a communications professional working to increase access to basketball in Senegal, especially for women and girls, organized the camp. She said it included 10 women from Senegal, eight from Morocco and two from Mauritania. A German governmental organization called GIZ funded the camp.

“In Morocco, it’s normal to be in sports if you’re a woman,” Sylla said. “In Senegal, it’s normal but not so normal. In Mauritania, it’s really rare. So the idea is also that they can see how it’s working in other countries, and sometimes they can see how privileged they are or how not privileged they are.”

Fatou Bintou Mangane, 19, used to hang around her brother’s basketball practices so often that finally a coach suggested she join.

“We’re taught to be leaders, having self-confidence, to be a role model,” she said. “Coming here, I thought they were only going to teach us about coaching, but it’s not the case.”

Khary Fall, 33, brought her 8-month-old son and his nanny to help care for him while she was at the camp. She started a center to promote basketball in Mauritania, and while some have told her that the sport takes away from her ability to care for her son and her home, her husband supports her involvement.

“I don’t have a problem with what people say,” Fall said through an interpreter. “The Federation of Basketball of Mauritania, the president, understands now that many women do sports, especially basketball.”

Sylla, 40, was born and raised in France, but visited Senegal regularly as a child and moved to the country five years ago.

She visits her family village of Gasse Doro, population 150, at least once a month. There is a simple basketball court there with rims attached to wooden backboards. Some children in the village do their homework under the lights on the court because they don’t have electricity at home, she said.

Sylla has “mixed feelings” about the N.B.A.’s work in Africa. She likes that its presence shines a light on the places it visits and makes children in those places feel valued. But she wishes the league would work more with the grass-roots groups spreading the game.

“When they leave, this is the organization who’s staying with the kids,” Sylla said. “And if the kids have frustrations or something, this is the organization who’s responsible. And the N.B.A. doesn’t know what is happening.”

Joel Embiid, who won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award in 2023, grew up in Cameroon and didn’t start playing organized basketball until he was 15. The N.B.A. believes that if children play when they are younger, it will both give them a positive outlet and increase the probability that talented players develop into professionals, like Embiid.

“When we opened the N.B.A. Africa office in Johannesburg in 2010, we didn’t say, ‘Let’s launch a professional league.’ It was about making it accessible,” Gallo Fall said. He added, “We believe that when kids are exposed to basketball, if they have access, they’ll love it.”

The N.B.A.’s first official event on the continent was a Basketball Without Borders camp for teenagers in 2003. The league has since held Jr. N.B.A. programs for younger children in 19 African countries and opened its N.B.A. Academy in Senegal for elite high-school-age players from the continent.

The academy participants live on a campus they share with a soccer academy. They practice in a large gym that has two basketball courts and some workout equipment. In the summer, the air-conditioning unit doesn’t quite cool the whole space.

The players attend school, with both academic and practical lessons. Roland Houston, the technical director of the academy, said that one goal was to foster camaraderie among people from different African countries.

“I’ve made a lot of friends, brothers, these guys here in the academy,” said Khaman Maluach, a 7-foot-2 center who will go to Duke next year. “A lot of people from different places have created that bond that will last forever. It’s very special.”

Maluach was born in South Sudan, but grew up in Uganda. He played basketball in part because he became too tall for soccer.

Another academy player, Ulrich Chomche, has entered this year’s N.B.A. draft.

“We built that basketball gym on what used to be banana trees,” said Chris Ebersole, who leads international basketball development at the N.B.A. “To see that and have players go to Duke and the N.B.A. and G League Ignite, to see where it started to that, is really something.”

A Growing Footprint

Silver said that it would be “a while” before the N.B.A.’s ventures in Africa were profitable, and that the league was behind on its projections, in part because the B.A.L.’s start was constrained by the coronavirus pandemic. But he said the league was achieving attendance and viewership goals.

“We’re more focused on top-line growth, on the amount of revenue we can generate, than profitability per se,” Silver said. “Because our plan for the foreseeable future is to continue to invest any revenue we generate back into the business there.”

And the N.B.A.’s footprint does seem to be growing in Africa.

Aziz Sy, 34, grew up in Dakar and runs a business incubator. He started following the N.B.A. as a child so that he could make conversation with the cool kids at school. He soon recognized the league as an example of an arena where Black people set a cultural agenda.

“Michael Jordan in the ’90s was such a huge phenomenon,” Sy said. “With him came the idea of a Black person basically on top of the world.”

Basketball turned into an obsession while he was living in Boston for college. But it was difficult to watch games when he moved back to Senegal. He watched the 2014 finals in a nightclub that agreed to put the game on television at 2 a.m.

Now, Sy has League Pass, which is available in almost every African country. For $75 a year, he can watch every N.B.A. game from home.

As Sy watches companies and foreign governments try to establish themselves in Africa, he worries that some of them, in their efforts to capitalize on the continent’s surging population, aren’t thinking enough about the challenges African people face. The N.B.A., in his mind, has been different.

“They’ve really come in and tried to understand the country, understand the people,” he said.

But considering the league’s altruistic aims could wait for another time. It was close to 1 a.m. in Dakar. The Minnesota Timberwolves were playing the Denver Nuggets in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals. There was basketball to watch.

Ousmane Balde contributed reporting. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

A pillar of the N.F.L.’s meteoric rise over the past six decades has been its strategy of making nearly all games available mostly free to fans on national networks. The league has stuck to this approach even as Major League Baseball, the N.B.A. and other leagues moved more of their games onto cable and satellite broadcasters and subscription streaming services.

The strategy has paid off: Ninety-three of the 100 most-watched programs on television last year were N.F.L. games, according to Nielsen.

Yet N.F.L. games are not cheap and ubiquitous enough for all fans. This month, the league has been in federal court in Los Angeles fending off a class-action suit brought by millions of customers who paid for Sunday Ticket, the subscription service on DirecTV that showed all out-of-market games on Sundays.

The plaintiffs claim that the N.F.L. colluded with CBS and Fox to artificially inflate the price of the service, which cost roughly $300 a season, because the networks viewed Sunday Ticket as competition. The plaintiffs argue that the N.F.L. dismissed offers to create cheaper services that would have let fans buy games based on teams. They are seeking damages of $7 billion, which could be tripled under antitrust statutes. That could take a significant bite out the league’s annual media rights, which are now worth more than $10 billion a year.

Some businesses might have settled for far less to avoid the risk of going to trial and facing an unpredictable jury. But the N.F.L. has taken its chances in court because it wants — indeed needs — to preserve the right to cut exclusive media deals on behalf of all 32 of its teams. Congress granted the N.F.L. an exemption to do so in 1961, and it has fueled the league’s growth ever since.

The N.F.L. is now a $20 billion business, and its success is due in part to the sharing of its rights deals, which are split evenly among all 32 teams. This formula helps teams in small media markets, like the Kansas City Chiefs, compete for players with New York teams.

“This case cuts to the center of sports,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at Seton Hall University. “The N.F.L. did so well under its antitrust protection that the case is a testament to how powerful the N.F.L. has become.”

The case, which has featured testimony by Commissioner Roger Goodell and the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, is likely to be handed over to the jury this week. Repeatedly, the case has not gone well for the plaintiffs. Last week, Judge Philip Gutierrez, in a rare display, admonished them for wasting time and complicating what he said should have been a straightforward case.

“The way you have tried this is far from simple,” Gutierrez said last Tuesday. “This case has turned into 25 hours of depositions and gobbledygook.”

The jury, of course, may see it differently. If the N.F.L. loses the case, it is likely to appeal, which would only prolong a case that began nearly a decade ago. At the time, Sunday Ticket aired on DirecTV, which broadcast the service for nearly 30 years. It moved to YouTube TV last year.

However the case goes, its existence says a lot about not just the dominance of the N.F.L. — by far the biggest sports league in annual revenue — but also how fans’ expectations have changed. We live in a world of instant gratification, where viewers seek to watch whatever they want, whenever they want it, and often for little or nothing.

As millions of viewers have ditched cable and satellite TV, and subscribed to Netflix and Hulu ad hoc, the league has tried to meet fans where they are, something the streaming services also crave. A handful of games now appear exclusively on Peacock, Amazon Prime and other platforms each season. The response has been largely negative, partly because fans don’t want to have to subscribe to so many streaming services just to get games.

“This is a day and age when everyone says, ‘I want my things on my time, whenever I want it,’” said Phil de Picciotto, the president and founder of Octagon, a sports marketing firm. “But that’s impossible for businesses to deliver,” he said. “Low cost comes with mass products.”

The N.F.L. was not shy in court about defending Sunday Ticket’s premium pricing. The league, Goodell said, did not want to hurt CBS and Fox, which were each paying billions of dollars for their rights to show the Sunday games that were also fed to DirecTV.

“Well, it’s a premium product, I think, primarily because you have access to additional games,” Goodell said on the stand last week. “And that access — you know, it can impact negatively on our broadcast networks, so broadcast networks are very concerned about the impact on them in reaching the broader audience. But I think it’s a premium product because I think it’s incredible content.”

The plaintiffs produced evidence that ESPN had proposed cutting the price of Sunday Ticket to $70 and selling single-team packages. Goodell said on the stand that the league had passed on the offer because ESPN would have combined its own content with the N.F.L. games, not simply shown the games as DirecTV did.

In some ways, the business of broadcasting games has moved on from the details at question in this case. YouTube TV is entirely online, and the networks are still able to broadcast their games over the air.

Then again, YouTube has to recoup its investment, too, so consumers aren’t necessarily going to get supercheap subscriptions. The plan now costs $350 a year, on top of the subscription to YouTube TV.

Octavius Catto’s impact was mostly unknown here at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, amid the sport’s heroic feats of lore and legend, like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak, Ted Williams’s .406 batting average and Hank Aaron’s 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s record.

Catto, born a free Black man, turned to baseball in the shadows of the Civil War. He was a founder of Philadelphia’s all-Black Pythian Base Ball Club, which included Frederick Douglass’s son, Charles. (They lost their first game, 70-15, but improved quickly.) The Pythians applied for and were denied entry into Pennsylvania’s association of amateur baseball and the National Association of Base Ball Players.

The story of Catto, who was also a civil rights activist before his 1871 assassination, is among many that the museum is showcasing in its new exhibit “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball.”

“It has been documented that we’ve been playing baseball going back to the period of being enslaved,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the exhibit’s advisory committee. “Baseball has always been an important part of the African American experience in this country. It’s just the fact that it wasn’t documented in the pages of American history books.”

The exhibit is opening at a time when the percentage of American-born Black players in Major League Baseball is historically low. About 40 percent of major league baseball players last season were players of color, according to a report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, but only about 6 percent identified as either Black or African American, the lowest since tracking started in 1991. The 2022 World Series, between the Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros, featured no American-born Black players for the first time in 72 years.

“It continues the conversation, which is great,” Curtis Granderson, a three-time All-Star, said of the exhibit. “And that’s what you want to have. You want to have the conversation go from one generation to the next.”

In recent years, baseball has sought to rectify previous omissions and oversights related to its history. None is more momentous than the recent incorporation of statistics from several different Negro leagues into official Major League Baseball statistics, where, for example, Josh Gibson replaces Ty Cobb for highest batting average of all time. The Hall of Fame, which is not funded by Major League Baseball, also acknowledged in recent years that the legacies of enshrinees like Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Cap Anson included maintaining the color barrier that remained until 1947.

One player the Hall of Fame recruited for its recent advisory committee was Dave Stewart, a standout starting pitcher and World Series most valuable player with the Oakland A’s, who discussed the full spectrum of his experiences to help inform the exhibition. At the start of his career, he suffered isolation as the lone Black player on a team while busing through tiny minor league towns. Once, he said, a racist tried to run him over in a parking lot in Mississippi. But he was eventually able to meet heroes from previous generations, like Bob Gibson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and found camaraderie.

“We talked about those experiences and what it felt like to be in that situation and how I was treated or how we were treated at that time,” Stewart said. “We talked about style of play. You look at guys like Rickey Henderson and Reggie Jackson, and the style and brand of play and what they did. Were they more acceptable or less acceptable because it was Rickey Henderson doing it versus if Cal Ripken would’ve done something like that?”

As part of the exhibit’s opening, there was an exhibition game featuring more than two dozen former Black big leaguers like Granderson, Matt Kemp and Prince Fielder.

“The reason I said yes was to get a chance to be with all those guys again,” said Granderson, who played in the majors from 2004 to 2019. “It’s the first time I’d be around so many Black ballplayers that I played against, played with, watched growing up.”

It was a reminder that even recently, Black representation on big-league diamonds was more common. Among the items in the new exhibit’s section on the modern era is a T-shirt worn by Mookie Betts at the 2022 All-Star game emblazoned with “We need more Black people at the stadium.”

TOM SHIEBER, THE HALL OF FAME’S SENIOR CURATOR, read from “De Witt’s Base-Ball Guide of 1868” during a recent tour of the exhibit. The document noted that the rejection of Octavius Catto’s team, the Pythians, from the National Association of Base Ball Players was based on the rationale that “if colored clubs were admitted, there would be in all probability, some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them no injury could result to anybody.”

“It’s like, ‘What?’” Shieber asked. “It’s so weird to connect the dots that way, but they did. One thing we tell here is the color line isn’t drawn just with that moment or another. It gets heavier and bolder and bolder and stronger with all sorts of things going on.”

The new exhibit explores Jackie Robinson’s life beyond breaking that barrier, along with other, lesser-known thresholds. One item on display is the championship ring that a 19-year-old Hank Aaron received when he integrated the South Atlantic League in 1953.

Robinson’s story is universally celebrated as the tale of triumph and preservation that it is. But reintegration, as Shieber likes to call it, coincided with the collapse of the Negro leagues. The exhibit does not shy away from exploring those ramifications.

“It is absolutely a bittersweet kind of story,” Kendrick said. “Those owners and the older players in the Negro leagues essentially took one for the team. It reminds us that there is always a cost for what is deemed progress. And Black economy paid a dear cost for this progress.”

After reintegration, executives of Major League Baseball established an unwritten quota system limiting the number of Black players on rosters, Shieber said.

“This resulted in lopsided trades,” he added. “That’s not just a one-on-one trade. That’s a, ‘We’ve got enough Black players trade.’”

Near the exhibit’s end Shieber pointed out the locker once used by Willie Mays that Barry Bonds took over as a San Francisco Giants player.

One of Stewart’s cherished early memories was meeting Mays, his favorite player, as a 5-year-old. But Stewart could also look up to Gibson, Aaron, Frank Robinson and a host of other Black stars.

Today, he said, children probably emulate Betts. He struggled to name another current American-born Black star.

Under the surface, numbers are improving. The league has established several programs to encourage, identify and nurture young Black players. An increasing number of Black players have been among the top draft picks in recent years — 12 of the first 100 three years ago, 13 of the top 100 in 2022, and 10 of the top 50 in last year’s draft.

“We are going to have to be patient, though, and as a society, we aren’t very patient,” Kendrick said. “This trend didn’t happen overnight. The solution isn’t going to occur overnight either.”

Telling stories like those of Catto, from as far back as 150 years ago, will help those efforts, Kendrick believes. “It will,” he said, “be an awakening.”