…A reality show following youth baseball team moms, aptly called “Team Moms,” is being EP’d by Kim Kardashian. What do we think? Would we watch this? 

Sports journalist Jesse Dougherty’s letter to his daughter, in which he explains the role anxiety and job-searching in the ever-narrowing field of sportswriting played in his readiness to have a child, made me very emotional. No kicker, no joke, it’s just a nice read. Enjoy! 

Mikal Bridges’s dog Sonny became an internet star overnight when a tipsy Mikal went live with him after the Knicks’ championship run. And every time we get a new Dogue story featuring athlete animals, I legally have to share them. Because I love them. Especially during the Dogue Days of Summer, when I’m desperate for a pick-me-up. 

Call an ambulance, but not for the NFL Network. They’re just in a rebuild. Andrew Siciliano, Colleen Wolfe, Mike Yam et al are back with NFL Media, the digital outfit you might remember as the OG NFL Network, which was sold to ESPN last January. Only now you’ll have to find the popular personalities on YouTube, Fast Channels, Roku, Prime, Peacock, and the like. 

Inflation is hitting us everywhere, from all angles — except for the most famous cocktail in sports. After rising from $17 to $23 in 2024, for the second year in a row the price of the U.S. Open’s legendary Honey Deuce is standing firm. Unfortunately, the line is still going to be very long, and you know, time is money. 

In vacation news, I’ll be going on one! The next few newsletters will look a little different, because my colleagues on the editorial team will be writing and sending them out. We’ll still keep you in the know, don’t worry your pretty little head. I’ll give you an abbreviated version of the newsletter on Monday, and I’ll officially be back (better than ever, like I never left, etc.) on Tuesday, September 8, after Labor Day. Don’t miss me too much!

Pro Athletes can be anything these days, even musicians, thanks to PAC, aka, Pro Athlete Community. More than 3,000 current and former professional athletes focused on helping their sports brethren navigate life and build meaningful careers beyond sports. The membership-community connects athletes with mentorship, business opps, and a like-minded network at their disposal. And no athlete is too big or small. 

But now to the meat of it! The org is partnering with Grammy-nominated and Emmy Award-winning (that’s 50% of the way to an EGOT, by the way!) artist Aloe Blacc as its first Artist-in-Residence. 

Here’s the skinny on the competition: Aloe Blacc wrote the melody and chorus of the next best sports anthem titled “First Round.” Athlete members will contribute original verses (16 bars minimum), and Aloe Blacc will select one lucky winner. It’s reminiscent of a music competition of yore, a la American Idol, where the prize is an official song with a major music producer. 

Without further ado, here’s my chat with The Man himself! 

Ashtyn Butuso: I'd love to talk all about the partnership first. I want to hear about your relationship to sports.

Aloe Blacc: As a youngster, I played a lot of different sports in school. But by the time the music bug hit me, I focused 100% on music. But I love going to sporting events, and I love when my music is used as the backdrop, the background, the inspiration for sporting moments and events.

Ashtyn B: I was going to ask, you went to USC? Did you ever go to football games?

Aloe Blacc: I did, and we had a huge rivalry with a few different schools, but one with the crosstown rival was UCLA, and I made a version of “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie, and I changed the lyrics to "I love USC, I hate UCLA,” and it became a huge campus rally song. And I think to this day, people still use it.

Ashtyn B: Oh my god! I have to search and find that. I'm so glad I asked that. Have you ever done anything like this before, in terms of a songwriting-based competition?

Aloe Blacc: Nothing like this, where I've created a song and everybody has the music and then can create in collaboration with that music. This is very special, I think, and something I'm hoping to expand as well. But I love that my first iteration is with PAC and the athletic community.

Ashtyn B: I'm always so curious about the songwriting process in-studio. How did you go about creating this song? 

Aloe B: Everything starts outside of the studio for me. I've been making news for so long that I'm just always documenting my ideas, recording voice memos, writing down notes, and I'm sure that I saw a TV commercial or something about the draft coming up, and an idea came to me about being the first-round draft pick, and thinking, "Wow, that's something to be!” and then words and sentences and phrases, they all have a cadence, and that cadence for me sometimes suggests a melody, and then that melody obviously suggests rhythm, and so the process started outside the studio, and I when I got in the studio, it was like, okay, what are the instruments that I want to use to really create the sonic foundation and landscape for these words? 

And for me, trumpets, triumphant trumpets, made sense. It also felt like a hip-hop vibe. The sports that I'm watching, like football and and basketball, a lot of the athletes are big hip-hop fans. So I thought the energy there made sense. But also, I have this song called "The Man,” and it became a sports anthem. And I thought, okay, in that world, this new idea can live, and so I wanted all those elements when I got in the studio.

Ashtyn B: I'm glad you mentioned the man because I've been thinking a lot lately about how I feel like we've been in a drought of sports anthems. In the earlier 2000s, we had “Lose Yourself” or the Fort Minor song. I feel like we need more of those so I'm excited for this one. What's your favorite sports anthem ever?

Aloe B: Whenever I go into huge arenas, stadiums around the world, people are using the “Seven Nation Army” melody as a rally cry, and it's really awesome. I'm going to tell you one that isn't yet, but should be. My wife and her friend invented this one at my daughter's volleyball games. Do you know LL Cool J's “Mama Said Knock You Out”? He samples– I think it's “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” at the beginning of it, and so imagine hearing an audience go “ahhhh ahhhhh.” That to me is going to be the next big rally rally cry. 

Ashtyn B: Do you have allegiances to teams?

Aloe B: For the most part, I'm an LA guy, so, Lakers and Rams have been my teams. Which then I should say one of my very favorite sports anthems, is an LA sports anthem, is "I Love LA" by Randy Newman. It doesn't really work for anywhere else, and then one of the very, very best is "All I Do Is Win”with T Pain and some other folks.

Ashtyn B: Yes! I forgot about “All I Do Is Win,” of course. So, what will the PAC member or members who wins, get out of this experience?

Aloe B: When we choose a winner, the final song that gets released will be a collaboration with myself and them. So it's an official collab. They get their name in lights with, you know, Aloe Blacc up on Spotify or Amazon Music, and if there's time, and if we can coordinate, maybe there's a music video. I didn't even think about going that far, but that would be fun. We certainly will be presenting it at a huge event, Zeta Global, in New York in early October.

Ashtyn B: How exciting. I'm crossing my fingers that it’s going to be the ESPN or Fox or ABC in-bump music.

Aloe B: Yes. There's an email chain between me and the sporting television shows where they want to license my music, and I imagine that this one is going to get some attention.

Ashtyn B: And we’ll get some lucky athletes featured on ESPN in a different way. And, by the way, correct me if I’m wrong. In theory, there could be more than one winner. 

Aloe B: I really think there could be more than one winner because if I end up hearing a verse from different artists that are really good, I might just make a posse cut — posse meaning multiple artists on one track.

Ashtyn B: And there could also be 3,000 submissions, in theory,  because there are, I think, 3,000 members in PAC. So whittling it down to 1, 2, or 3, is going to be a difficult task. How are you going to do that?

Aloe B: We're going to use a little bit of the fans. So when an athlete records and uploads their recording to their social media, there's going to be some follows, some shares, some likes. We're gonna use all those metrics, but that won't be the final decision factor. It'll be me listening through all them, and really, deciding what sounds and feels like the very best opposition as a as a collaborative work, and that will determine it.

Ashtyn B: And this isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not going to be the most famous PAC members. 

Aloe B: No, no, it's not the most famous. It's going to be the best, the best lyrics. And performance as well.

Ashtyn B: A lot of your songs, your biggest hits, thematically are hope-centric. I think they could be considered sort of hype songs, and I think this one can too. How are those themes relevant to sports culture?

Aloe B: In sports culture, there's a lot of endurance, a lot of grit, stick-to-itiveness, self determination, and self motivation. My songs, I like to pattern my songs off of a theme I call “AIM,” which is affirmation, inspiration, and motivation. You have to affirm and manifest with your words and with your thoughts who you are and what you intend to accomplish. Inspiration. 

You have athletes, and I have musicians and artists that I look up to, and that I think about that I aspire to be like, and they inspire me. Sometimes you have a team around you. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you're on your own. You know, I'm in the studio by myself making music, some guys and gals are in the gym or on the court in the field by themselves practicing. I think there are a lot of places where music and sports cross, and certainly my aim philosophy fits.

When Nneka Ogwumike announced she was officially retiring after this season, most of us didn't want to believe it. She’s given so much to the game. She was drafted first overall and won Rookie of the Year in 2012. A WNBA Champion. An MVP. She’s been an All-Star 11 times. And most notably for the sake of this convo, she’s been the WNBPA Prez for 10 years. 

We all knew this day would come, but that never makes it easier, does it? However, you know what would make it easier? If she became the league’s commissioner. 

Some are speculating it might be her next step, considering Cathy Engelbert currently sits on a seat as hot as the surface of the sun. But maybe we need to hold our horses here for a sec, because Nneka herself has said she isn’t sure she’s ready for that task…yet. 

My counterpoint there is that no one really needs experience anymore. In fact, it’s usually one of the worst things about our society, but maybe this time it could be a positive thing! Continue to scheme, internet users. Because life is boring. And because we might just be able to scheme Nneka into the job. 

Watch some women’s football. 

Hang out with KAT and Martha Stewart. At the same time. 

Buy a new tennis skirt. They’re all the rage.