The Sports Journalist Pablo Torre Has a Pulitzer, but Still Feels Like the “Turd” in the Pool

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0:37This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The sports journalist Pablo Torre once described what he does as, quote, taking stupid things seriously. Now, he's being kind of a smartass. He certainly doesn't think sports are stupid, but he does take them very seriously. In fact, Torrey just won the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. And that's a feat because the number of Pulitzers given for sports journalism in any medium is tiny. He investigated a scheme by one NBA team to circumvent the salary cap. And that story aired on his podcast, Pablo Torrey Finds Out. Now, that kind of work is hard to do.

1:18The industry of sports, the leagues, the team owners, the top players, none of them, none of them like it when a journalist asks too many questions. Too much money is at stake. Tory got his start as a staff writer on Sports Illustrated in the twilight of that magazine's tremendous reach and influence. And he later became a familiar presence on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, as debate shows were replacing old-fashioned sports reporting. I got it at the end and I could taste the exhaust pipes of what this great institution used to be. What if we argued instead of reported? Yeah. Really, it got to the point of being, I would say, it got to be such a big box office that the question became, who is left to make it deeply uncomfortable using journalism for the people in power?

2:18So now we get to the crux of the matter because there's plenty of entertainment around. I can go all over the place and get podcasts about the NBA, but you did something extraordinary this year. You won a Pulitzer Prize in audio for rigorous journalism, sports journalism. And, you know, listeners should know that I'm on the Pulitzer board. I'm raising my hand and being transparent about that. But just an amazing piece of work. Tell me about the story and take us through it, what happened and what you found out. Yeah, so I did not launch my show to investigate a guy with$145 billion. We're talking about Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft executive and innovator who now owns a professional basketball team.

3:05The Los Angeles Clippers. So I got a tip at some point that said, hey, there's a team sponsor with a very on-the-nose sort of brand name called Aspiration. And they are a big sponsor of the Clippers. You should look into them. What does Aspiration do? Aspiration is a carbon credits company, which means that they plant trees to help zero out the footprint of your company. And they were started by these two Democratic power players, Joe Sandberg and Andre Czerny. This is one of these good guy companies with a good guy name. And when I was told, yeah, check this out, I didn't really know what to do with it because I was like, OK, they have a$300 million, 23-year deal with the Clippers.

3:52to be their sponsor. And I was like, okay, this seems, I don't know, kind of banal. But then what happens as I go through my life is I see that this company eventually files for bankruptcy. And in the bankruptcy filing, which I go and I'm the type of guy who, as the show indicates, wants to find out stuff. I love documents. I went and pulled the bankruptcy filing for Aspiration and saw a list of creditors. And on the list of creditors, there is Meta, there's the Red Sox, there are the Clippers. And also there's this LLC called KL2 Aspire LLC. And I'm a basketball fan. And all you need to know about basketball in this case is that the star player of Los Angeles Clippers is this guy, this enigmatic character named Kawhi Leonard, and his jersey number is, you will be shocked to hear, two.

4:43So KL2 Aspire LLC led me to this question of, okay, so why is this LLC, if it is in fact Kawhi Leonard's LLC, owed$7 million outstanding by this now defunct carbon credits company? And you do the thing where you look for every available public record in which there is proof of some business relationship, and there is not. And one of the other things that happens when you are going through the remains of a bankrupt company is that you can start calling people, current and former employees who now might have insight and more willingness to speak about this. And what they say is, oh, yeah, this was like a really big part of our lives working at this company.

5:30Kawhi Leonard was not just an endorser of aspiration. He was the highest paid endorser of aspiration. In fact, we had other endorsers. We had Robert Downey Jr. We had Leonardo DiCaprio. We had Drake, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, on and on and on. And Kawhi Leonard as a personality, you used the word enigmatic. What were you getting at? He doesn't advertise things in general. He's kind of famous for being uncomfortable in the public. And so the idea that that guy was paid, I was told, more than four times what everyone else was making, all the A-listers were making. combined, it was like something that didn't add up to me.

6:15And I said, okay, if I'm being told about a$28 million deal in which Kawhi Leonard was his endorser, but yet there is no proof of it, the question becomes, if he was being paid as an endorser, how is it that no one ever even announced that this deal existed? And this is something that I think I've buried even in our recap here. Right. Kawhi Leonard did nothing. Not only did he not publicly endorse, he never did anything as part of this deal. It wasn't in TV commercials. It was a no-show job. Wow, like in The Sopranos. He was importing exporter. On the dock somewhere. Webistics. And so the follow-up question, the rabbit hole you fall into is, what was happening here?

6:59And so to sort of speed run through the big takeaways, it turns out that according to my reporting, Steve Ballmer entered into a secret deal to pay Kawhi Leonard through this company that he was personally invested in to the tune of$50 million, the biggest investor in the company individually. And Steve Ballmer was, according to my reporting, using aspiration to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard to circumvent the NBA salary cap. which is not a law in America. It's not a federal statute. And for that reason, it's actually fascinating because this is something that fell in between the cracks of the collapse of aspiration.

7:44It was not something that came to light because the federal government was investigating the collapse of aspiration, which they were. Joe Sandberg has since pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud. It was something that kind of fell inside of the cracks of this company because it wasn't explicitly illegal. The NBA salary cap, not a federal law. And within the ethics of the NBA is dubious at best. The NBA has some cardinal rules, and one of them, for those not familiar, is that you cannot spend whatever you want to get the thing that in this sport particularly matters the most, which is a superstar player.

8:25And for those not familiar, five players to a team. That is the fewest of any of the major sports. So a superstar is the thing you need to contend. And what I love about investigating sports billionaires and leagues and these power players is that sports, it's this industry in which the richest people more than ever, in accordance with the surging values of these teams, are hungrier and hungrier to join the most exclusive country club, which is sports ownership. And they find that once they show up, they can't merely buy the thing they want the most. Because in sports, there are rules. There are regulations around fair play.

9:13There are these norms because of fans, I would argue, that are cardinal rules, that are to be taken seriously. What do you mean? So, for instance, the salary cap. I am not saying that on a moral cosmic level, we must regulate spending in the NBA. But because that is the regulatory landscape that rules over how superstars join different teams, when Steve Ballmer allegedly breaks that cardinal rule, it's at the expense of his competitors. And so that zero-sum game in which if there's an advantage over here by rule-breaking, that there is suffering over here by some fan whose owner stupidly decided to play by the rules, well, now we're in a position in which there is something like an attention that does follow ethics and norms.

10:20And for those who don't give a shit about sports, just know that in sports at the very least, shame for rule breaking may yet remain possible.

10:36I'm speaking with journalist Pablo Torre. More in a moment.

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12:40get your podcasts.

12:48So you think you have the story, and then you go to Steve Ballmer, or his representatives, and you go to Kawhi Leonard, and you go to the company, and you present them with your evidence and your thesis, and what do they say? So we assemble in the end, before publishing part one, more than 3 ,000 pages of internal documents. And we go to the Clippers and Steve Ballmer before publication, of course, and the quote we get is that these allegations of salary capture convention are provably false. What were the extent of the denials on the side of the other parties? Steve Ballmer, et cetera. Yeah, it was.

13:27This is provably false. And we had a deal with Aspiration in which we transacted along the lines of carbon credits. They were a sponsor. And as the series went on, it became clear that Steve Ballmer wanted to establish he, in fact, was a victim of Joe Sandberg, lost his investment to$50 million, and he put in another$10 million in the spring of 2023. So what's going to happen then? Well, the NBA launched an investigation. And where is that investigation now? The investigation is ongoing. They hired Wachtell Lipton, their preferred outside counsel, a big white shoe law firm who I have visited with and talked with.

14:05And they have the joy of, I suppose, subscribing to my show and trying to make sure that they're not missing anything and vice versa. What would be the upshot if they determine that your story is true? What do you think would happen to Steve Ulmer? What we are describing here is the largest salary cap circumvention scheme in the history of the NBA and possibly professional sports. I have not done the analytics across all sports. I just know that the money here and the ambition here in which this company, which was supposed to go public, was also a team sponsor and was also selling carbon credits to the team.

14:43And the owner was personally invested. And you had Kawhi Leonard secretly being paid off to the side, allegedly, to circumvent the cap. This is a level of enmeshing with a fraudulent entity that raises questions that I should also say the federal government has recently been reexamining. And I say this because one of the things that we also reported deeper into the series is the existence of a whistleblower complaint that was filed by two Aspiration employees in February of 2023. And you're continuing to drop episodes about this. Yeah. Yeah. Now, here's the problem. We go to sports as human beings for escape.

15:30So do your fellow sports writers celebrate you for this kind of investigative work? What's the reaction? I have been very, I think, deliberate in signaling whenever possible. The water is real warm where I am. Jump in. Jump on in. The pool is empty, largely. And there's not only now substance, but there is now attention. There is juice. It is fun to talk about investigative journalism in sports. It gets to the thing that fans, I think, and I'm so grateful that they feel this way, are actually intrigued by. They are. I have been, on paper, carbon credits, salary capture convention, guy who is the most boring superstar in sports, arguably.

16:16He's up there. He's up there. Those are not the ingredients for an algorithmic viral success. And yet I have been hardened that whether it's the way that we have been reporting this story, maybe even just the basic premise of we're going to take on an entity that has one hundred and forty five billion dollars plus and telling you what they don't want you to know. that's exciting to fans, it turns out. And so I have been hardened by that. And yet when I signal and I get to part 10 and I'm backed by a whistleblower complaint in which specifically they're saying carbon credits to circumvent the cap involving Kawhi Leonard, they are spelling it out before I ever published episode one, which is so vindicating on some level.

17:00As much as I am doing that and urging people to join me in the pool, it kind of feels like I'm the guy who is the proverbial turd. At the garden party. Inside the pool itself. Like, we got out of here actually because of you. And that has been a little disappointing. You feel lonely. It is. It is And I wish it was not as lonely as it has been. But isn't that because I'm watching ESPN because I'm escaping CNN or the like? Precisely because I can't stand to listen to any more politics or corruption or the horrible parts of public life. I think that in fairness, a bunch of people, because I worked at ESPN.

17:51It did feel sometimes like – and I want to credit my friend Ethan Strauss for this metaphor. But like sports television is a vending machine that typically sells candy. And sometimes the person – You're the broccoli guy? I'm the sardine. Popped out. I wanted something sweet. What is this? What is this ancient fish? And in that regard, I get it. But I think what has been so heartening is that sports, where we are now, sports have never been more valuable. In this era of fragmentation in which sports media has been deeply disrupted in the ways that you led with, sports have never been more relevant.

18:36It's the only thing we all watch. It's the one monocultural thing that's still there. And see how everyone else is using it, right? Politically, it's being used all of the time as the MMA fight at the White House or Donald Trump and his conversation around being invited to a Knicks game by his good friend Jim Dolan, the owner of the team. All of that, as all of that suggests, sports are increasing in value. And so at some point, what I am betting on is that fans, the people who want otherwise candy, realize that knowing the truth about their favorite thing that has never been more important and more valuable and more powerful does not need to feel like just vegetables or just sardines.

19:21It can be fun to know the truth. What are some of the biggest stories in sports that have so far eluded us that you want to know about? I mean, what we are doing as we consider the demand for sports to be inelastic is we are raising the values of these franchises, of these assets to a point at which no individual can even afford them. Their value is unbelievable. I just did an obituary, wrote an obituary for Donald Newhouse, who's, you know, one of the heads of the family that owns The New Yorker and much else in many newspapers. His father had a choice between buying the Yankees and buying four newspapers in Syracuse, New York.

20:07He went for the newspapers. What would the Yankees be worth now? What would this office be like?

20:16I marvel that there was once a choice like that. Because no human individually, even Steve Ballmer, is going to be able to individually afford these teams. There'll be consortiums. And that's what we're seeing now. And so what's happening in sports is that private equity is now being welcomed in. institutional investors, hedge funds and the like. They are going to be the things that can actually afford these teams. And the reason I spotlight that is because we are watching in sports right now as the green arrow on sport continues to go up into the right. We are watching the replacement of fans as owners.

20:57We're watching them be replaced by institutional investors who are here for the growth, for the profit, for the money. because it's only going up. And so what sports is running the risk of now as they become so big, and as, by the way, there is a challenge because the cable television faucet is almost turned off because, again, media has been disrupted because the cable bill no longer supports the tonnage. You know, that was how these things got to be billion-dollar assets was, wow, media rights deals. TV networks need us. Well, now the value is contingent on the last gasps of the networks and the new buyers are going to be tech companies.

21:44Netflix, Apple, Google. These are companies. Amazon. These are companies that don't need sports existentially. They are fun to have but not necessary. And so the question becomes, in a world in which the things that desperately need this are unable to afford them, and the things that can don't care about it in the same way, what happens to the product? Pablo Torre, thank you. David, thank you for inviting me into the pool. Pablo Torre just won a Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting for his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out. Now, if you're a sports fan, we are recapping each game of the NBA Finals with the Knicks and Spurs at NewYorker.com.

22:31And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, of course, NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

22:53and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Decket. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

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