Sports & Entertainment Spotlight

Welcome back to the Spotlight! Is it just me or are sports scandals becoming more and more prevalent? Perhaps it’s that there’s so much money changing hands, including in legalized gambling, there is more opportunity and temptation to game the system. Perhaps it’s that digital fingerprints make it easier for bad actors to get caught. Perhaps morals are loosening. Or perhaps people are just flouting Mary J. Blige’s (shoutout to the 914) pleas for “No More Drama.” Whatever the explanation (I’m pretty sure it is the last one), new indictments and punishments came down this week stemming from game manipulation for betting purposes—just weeks after similar allegations taking place in the NBA. The NCAA announced that a handful of former student-athletes were involved in schemes in which they intentionally did not score or “threw” their game.

Not to be outdone, in the MLB, Cleveland Guardians’ pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz allegedly purposely threw balls so that gamblers could bet on pitches being balls or strikes. Clase and Ortiz are both excellent relief pitchers—the former being one of the top closers in all Major League Baseball—but the ultimate relief would be that each of these allegations prove to be false. However, all indications seem to be that the allegations are credible. Unfortunately, these incidents do not happen in a vacuum and inject a level of cynicism and skepticism whenever an umpire or referee makes a questionable call, a player sits out with an injury or makes a bone-headed play. Hopefully, all of these events will in the long run serve as examples of what not to do, but at least in the near term these instances all are unsettling affronts to the integrity of the games to which these scandals relate.

• • Twelve years after Under Armour beat out a notoriously ill-prepared Nike pitch to sign then NBA superstar Steph Curry to an endorsement deal, Curry and Under Armour are parting ways, with Curry taking all of his IP out on the open market. If you listen closely, you can hear an army of brand executives rehearsing the proper pronunciation of Curry’s name.
  • Financial giant Goldman Sachs buys a majority stake of sports talent agency Excel Sports Management. As part of the deal, Excel will get a direct pipeline to capital, while Goldman will get a direct pipeline of talent to appear at its executives’ children’s bar/bat mitzvahs, christenings, sweet 16s and quinceañeras.
  • Actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey link up with AI audio company ElevenLabs, allowing virtual reproduction their famous voices. McConaughey’s voice is not yet available through ElevenLabs’ marketplace out of the company’s fear that users will overwhelm the system with requests for “Alright, alright, alright.”

For inquiries and/or unabashed compliments, please feel free to contact me at josh.bloomgarden@foster.com or add me on LinkedIn.