by Kevin B. Blackistone | Apr 15, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, Sports
One of the first things President Donald Trump did after his second inauguration was invalidate an executive order from former President Joe Biden that prohibited discrimination against transgender people, especially those playing sports.
How did the major sports institutions react? They lined up behind Trump’s transphobia. In February 2025, the NCAA banned transgender athletes from women’s sports. Late last month, the Olympics followed suit.
Sports are not on the vanguard of social change, as we’re asked to believe every April 15 on Jackie Robison Day.
The disappointing responses from the NCAA and International Olympics Committee serve as yet more evidence that sports are not on the vanguard of social change, as we’re asked to believe every April 15 on Jackie Robison Day.
Historically, and much to our detriment, those who lead sports leagues and associations have been followers at best. The leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have showed us that.
But we in the media created a mythology that the games we love are the tip of the spear in social progress, and we’ve done that in large part by distorting Robinson’s arrival in Major League Baseball in 1947 after the league spent 80 years or so segregating itself for white men only. The MLB doesn’t deserve its reputation as a revolutionary social change agent in this country. To the contrary, much like leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have bended their knee this Trump era, it had a long, regrettable history of reactionary politics. Indeed, its embrace of segregation served as a model for other leagues that conformed to, and didn’t confront, a racially partitioned America.
Not long after the MLB’s first
by Jackie Powell | Apr 14, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, Sports
The WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association hunkered down for eight days and spent more than 100 hours working to ensure their employees would be paid properly and that there would be a 2026 season.
Monday night’s WNBA draft, in which UCLA’s Lauren Betts, UConn’s Azzi Fudd and TCU’s Olivia Miles can expect to hear their names early, is a testament to the opposing sides’ willingness to work through their differences and keep the people whose livelihoods depended on their negotiations in mind.
What a contrast league officials and union officials are to congressional leaders.
The collective bargaining agreement represents the “largest salary jump in all of sports history” and will usher in the league’s first million-dollar players.
What a contrast league officials and union officials are to congressional leaders who, almost 60 days into a partial government shutdown, still have not reached an agreement. In fact, Congress took a two-week Easter recess that ends this week. In the meantime, employees of the Department of Homeland Security, including members of the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have, for the most part, been working without pay.
The league and its players’ union worked it out — in a way that Congress has not yet been able to do.
To be clear, the majority of the process was not a bed of roses. The players opted out of their previous collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in October 2024, and during most of the intervening time, each side was directing hostility at the other. The players and their union were highly critical of what they called the league’s stalling tactics. The league took issue
by Kevin B. Blackistone | Apr 7, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, Sports
Because he’s apparently not fully occupied with the war he started that’s shaken up the world, President Donald Trump signed an executive order concerning college sports Friday that reveals yet another megalomaniacal fantasy. Just as the Final Four, the culmination of college basketball’s billion-dollar tournament, was about to tip off, Trump demanded a return to yesteryear: When players didn’t get paid. When, unlike every other college student, they couldn’t move from one school to another without penalty. When disproportionately Black basketball and football teams had to do whatever the white men ruling the roost decreed.
Trump signed an executive order concerning college sports Friday that reveals yet another megalomaniacal fantasy.
The president’s executive order says it’s intended “to bolster the effectiveness of key college-sports rules on transferring, eligibility, and pay-for-play by evaluating whether violations of such rules render a university unfit for Federal grants and contracts … establishing clear, consistent, and fair eligibility limits, including a five-year participation window … banning improper financial arrangements including pay-for-play …”
But it’s more properly seen as an attempt to put Black athletes in their place.
The University of Michigan Wolverines, who won the national college basketball championship Monday night, and the University of Connecticut Huskies they defeated will, for the first time ever, share in the millions of dollars they reaped for the NCAA’s Final Four. But if Trump’s retrograde executive order were the rule, they couldn’t.
Trump’s college sports Executive Order is theater, not a fix. Reform requires Congressional legislation–I have put commonsense bills & proposals on the table for safeguards & rules for competition. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential…— Richard Blumenthal (@blumenthal.senate.gov) 2026-04-04T02:43:25.005Z
The Wolverines would have just gotten a commemorative ring, a grab bag, a ball cap, a T-shirt and an
by Mike Wise | Apr 3, 2026 | Opinion, Sports
LeBron James turned 41 years old more than four months ago. Monday night, with 21 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists, he became the oldest player to record a triple-double. Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Lakers forward surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and became the all-time NBA wins leader at 1,229 games.
John Thompson, Jr., the late, great Georgetown coach said comparing players across eras was foolish because “The moment you pick one is the moment you diminish the entire legacy of the other.”
LeBron will be the G.O.A.T. when he retires, if he is not already.
Still, with eternal apologies to Coach Thompson, it’s becoming clear that LeBron will soon have no peer, not even Michael Jordan.
There, I said it. LeBron will be the G.O.A.T. when he retires, if he is not already.
No player in any major-revenue team sport has been this good for this long.
Before Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry and others entered the pantheon of the best non-centers to ever play the game, Jordan, Magic and Bird were hoop’s holy trinity.
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Magic and Bird each played 13 seasons, retiring at 36 and 35, respectively. Michael Jordan played 15 seasons. Because he went straight from high school to the pros, this is LeBron’s 23rd season. He has been non-committal about retirement, but even if he hangs it up after this season he will have played a full decade more than Magic and Bird and eight years more than Jordan.
During a break in a game 2023, Jabari Smith, Jr., of the Houston Rockets told James, “Hey, you played against my dad your
by Ja'han Jones | Mar 31, 2026 | Opinion, Sports
Christian extremists and other far-right evangelicals are trying to turn an NBA bench-rider into a cause célèbre after his bigoted ramblings earned him a pink slip.
Basketball fans know former lottery pick Jaden Ivey’s stock had plummeted long before his recent, bizarre and occasionally public rants rebuking LGBTQ people and the NBA for its support of them, such as when he accused the league of celebrating “unrighteousness” in an Instagram video. Ivey had filmed himself rambling on an airplane and accusing league stars such as LeBron James and Steph Curry of being insufficiently religious. He also called Catholicism a “false religion” on social media.
On Monday, the Chicago Bulls announced that the team had released Ivey, and it’s not really a mystery why. A guard with limited shooting ability who relies heavily on his athleticism, Ivey had already been sidelined by injury for the season. His contract ends when the season does, and the only reason he was even on the roster was because the team that drafted him, the Detroit Pistons, chose to trade him this year rather than sign him to a contract extension.
But a bunch of MAGA evangelicals, such as Christian nationalist Sean Feucht, leaped on the news as if it were indicative of anti-Christian bias.
Being a Christian is now deemed “conduct detrimental to the team”? You are going to regret this. https://t.co/CEOVdKE2L0— Sean Feucht (@seanfeucht) March 30, 2026
But there was more where that came from.
I hope Jaden Ivey sues the Bulls. He’s being waived because he’s a Christian.This is ridiculous. https://t.co/arR8GpwIyB— Alex Bruesewitz (@alexbruesewitz) March 31, 2026
Every Christian must speak out against this Chicago Bulls***. https://t.co/lUWSrBeYmX— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas)
by Mike Wise | Mar 31, 2026 | Opinion, Sports
Ever since 2009, when Tiger Woods first crashed his life and marriage and the mask of perfection melted away with more accidents, DUIs and arrests, the focus has been golf. It’s always golf — not rehab, recovery or some other effort to ensure that the sporting great doesn’t kill himself or someone else the next time he gets behind the wheel.
Friday night, hours after Tiger Woods’ most recent brush with death and the law, CNN World International correspondent Patrick Snell intoned, with concern, “you have to think now that this is going to have an impact on any potential return to the sport at the Masters.”
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Tiger Woods arrested on suspicion of DUI after crash
March 30, 2026 / 08:55
“It would be a crying shame if Tiger wasn’t captain in Adare Manor,” Ronan MacNamara chimed in for Irish Golf Magazine, referring to the course hosting the 2027 Ryder Cup in County Limerick.
“He’s the biggest needle mover in our sport,” Brad Faxon said on NBC.
This is not just Tiger Woods’ problem but also ours.
To recap the most recent incident: Woods was driving his Land Rover near his home in Jupiter Island, Fla., on Friday when he clipped a truck hauling a pressure-cleaner trailer on a two-lane road (speed limit: 30 mph). Woods’ SUV in rolled over. The golfing great crawled out through the passenger door uninjured. (The other driver was also uninjured.) Woods passed a breathalyzer but refused a urine test and was booked on charges of driving under the influence with property damage and refusal to submit to a lawful test.
This is not just Tiger Woods’ problem but also ours.
This is the truth
