The Bill Simmons Podcast, brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. I had a Rewatchables for you on Monday. We did The Italian Job, me and Van Lathan and Chris Ryan. Super fun pod. And in fact, we're doing two Rewatchables this week, so we have another one coming on Thursday. Uh, it's a one for us, but I also think it's in the running for best rom-com of all time. It is About Last Night with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. It came out 40 years ago. It's a really important movie and a fun one to talk about. It's on Netflix right now, so if you wanna watch it before we do it, go check it out. But, uh, we're gonna be doing About Last Night, me and Chris Ryan and Malie Rubin, and that's gonna be up, uh, Thursday night. So two this week. And then, uh, on Monday, the re-Speed. Yeah, the re-Speed is happening. We did Speed. It was one of the first ones we ever did, and now we are doing Speed again. So that is what the schedule is for rewatchables on this podcast. At the top, I wanna talk about this, uh, crazy Lakers sale.
Uh, I'm just gonna solo that part. Everything I'm hearing and all my thoughts, gonna just dump 'em on you. And then Cousin Sal is, is coming on because this is something I've wanted to do this whole summer and it's finally time. The, uh, the youth sport parent rankings from 20 to 1. these are my rankings only— what I think the worst to best youth sports all the way through high school are for parents. And it's probably not going to be liked by everyone who listens to this pod, but that's the thing. It's an honest conversation, and these are all my thoughts, and I can't wait to go through them with Sal. So That's what we have in the docket today. Uh, we're gonna take a break, bring in Pearl Jam, and then, uh, my thoughts on the Lakers. All right, we're recording this part of the podcast around lunchtime Pacific time. I am in California where the Lakers just got sold again for the second time in less than 2 years in the single most shocking franchise sale in the history of the National Basketball Association, which is almost 8 decades old at this point.
Nobody saw this coming. There was no inclination, no inkling. There were no whispers. I never heard one thing about this. The Lakers and the Dodgers, who were both owned by Walter, were being for the last year morphed together into basically one super franchise where there was a lot of talk about redundancy and, and people who had the same jobs and it was gonna be a zero-sum game that the two organizations were gonna mesh in all of these different ways. There was real fear in the NBA that with the Buss family who had owned the Lakers forever, that were basically a mom-and-pop operation presiding over one of the three biggest franchises in the league, um, that we went from the mom-and-pop side to now these cutthroat analytics, tons of money, um, searching for every edge, and the Lakers becoming the same kind of franchise that the Dodgers became, who just won the last two World Series and spend crazy amounts of money and have found every single possible edge you can find in Major League Baseball, to the point that we're about to have a, a long lockout. next year because of basically what's happened with the Dodgers and a couple other things.
So the thought was that this guy was gonna preside over, but there was a couple whispers, um, just about, um, what was going on with this guy became a topic this summer in Los Angeles. And I'm thinking in the rich guy circles too, because there was a report that he had had either a mild or a legitimate stroke in 2024. Um, he was being investigated by the Department of Justice and there was some possible insurance fraud. There were always whispers about how did he come up with as much money as he came up with to buy what I think is 78% of the Lakers. Um, he'd already had a, owned a piece and he had to shell out, I think close to $5 billion to buy the rest of it. And there was always talk that he got Middle Eastern money for that. Did the league know that ahead of time? Where did he get it? I, this is, a bigger question about what's happening in professional sports leagues now, how people are paying for these giant, giant, giant franchises. The craziest thing about this story is what Ramona Shelburne reported, that Bob Iger and Josh Kushner— Josh Kushner's the one who bought the team.
He has Thrive. They have investments everywhere. And he's, I think, in the younger class of really, really, really rich people. One of the richest. Um, and he has Bob Iger on his team who just left Disney, and Iger and Kushner are buying the Lakers together. That really means that Kushner's paying for almost all of it. Iger's gonna run the Lakers. Have thoughts on that in a second. Um, that they called Mark Walton over the weekend, supposedly on Sunday, and asked if he'd be interested in selling and basically just tried to start godfathering, offering him and it ended up being for $12.5 billion. The Sparks were not involved. And Bloomberg, uh, before I started recording this, reported that he had been in talks with investors to raise money to pay down the loans he was being investigated for. Um, and there's a bunch of conspiracy theories that come out of this, but let's— I'll go in order of the things that I thought were interesting with this. One was that Iger and Kushner were considered to be the favorites for the Vegas team. And the Vegas team, the number had always seemed to be the league was hoping to get $7.5 billion.
That was the number that they had said. That's the number they sold the owners on. The owners voted to allow the expansion, talks to happen, but they didn't vote on expansion. And I think the big sale for Adam Silver was, If we do expansion, I will be able to get $15 billion from the two teams, which then, because they don't have to share with the players, every one of the 30 NBA owners would get a piece of that. So everybody gets a check for, um, $500 million if that becomes the number. What they didn't expect was Vegas became even livelier than that. You had the Celtics setting the precedent. Um, Chisholm bought the Celtics for just over $6 billion, but it was actually more than that because he had to buy out partners. The, the final number ended up being around, I don't know, maybe $7.3, $7.4 billion. Um, somewhere around there. The Celtics are worth less than Vegas apparently because a bunch of people wanted Vegas. And then this turns into what I always talk about on the, when, uh, whenever we talk about rich people buying sports teams. It becomes, you know, the eBay auction where two people want the item and they just kind of get crazy.
Well, people wanted Vegas for a bunch of different reasons. I don't really personally understand a lot of them. I don't really understand why Vegas even has to have an NBA team or why they wouldn't move another team there. People wanted Vegas. And at some point, Iger and Kushner were like, well, if we're gonna pay— I've heard the number is over 8.5, and it's between 8.5 and 9 now is what they think they can get for Vegas. Those guys are like, if we're gonna pay that much, let's make one more run at the Lakers. So they get 78% of the Lakers. I think that's the number. It's 77, 78, somewhere in there, because the Buss family and a couple other investors still in small pieces for $9.5 billion. Basically, that's what they're shelling out. Or they— and maybe they have to buy out more people. Maybe the Buss family is like, you know what, we want to be dragged into this too. So, um, How are they going to pay for this? Private equity, when you have a sale like this, can only cover up to 20%. So $9.5 billion, they can get private equity for, I don't know, almost 2.
That means they have to cover 58% of this, which is $7 billion somehow. Iger, who made a ton of money at Disney and is probably worth, you know, he's probably worth over a billion dollars. He's not, doesn't have that kind of cash. Um, but Kushner does, and Kushner is at Thrive Capital, which has had big investments all, uh, all, uh, all over the place. They were in on SpaceX, and, um, there's something bigger going on with some of the money that people are throwing around right now that I want to talk about in a second. But Kushner is going to be the money guy for this. Kushner, um, Josh Kushner, brother of Jared, who is in the news a lot. Now you have Trump ties. Talk about that in a second. The Kushner-Iger combo, this is an incredible coup for Iger. And if you remember when, when he was still at Disney and he was trying to figure out whether he wanted to leave or not, he thought he was getting the Chargers in the mid-2010s. And there were always stories about that he misplayed it, that he was a little too, let me tell you guys how, how this could work and, and was a little too full of himself in the NFL owner meetings, and the owners are basically like, who the fuck is this guy?
And steered the Chargers away from him and he didn't get it. And he thought he was going to be the figurehead of the, the second LA team. Didn't happen. Ends up, he has a great first exit from Disney, hands it off to his handpicked successor, Bob Chapek. Can't really figure out what to do. COVID happens. And he starts undermining Chapek. This has been covered ad nauseam all over the place, including on Matt Bellany's excellent podcast, The Town. And as some Disney stuff's not going great, all of a sudden he's lurking again. There's some undermining that has been— I'm sure somebody's gonna write an awesome book about this. And he ends up undermining his own successor and coming back to Disney triumphantly, we think, because it didn't turn out to be that triumphant. Um, Iger 2.0 at Disney did not go great. And, um, I don't think, you know, it was a little like Jordan on the Wizards, to be honest. And then, then last year, the stuff that happened with Kimmel, um, and Kimmel's show and, and Kimmel almost getting fired, I think was, I'll just tell you, like, for in California, it was really bad for Iger.
It was the first time it's like your, your wife is running the School of Journalism at USC and you're somebody who's famously stood up for free speech, all this stuff. Now you're running for the hills on this. And I, I don't think that was great. He kind of had this pretty flat re-exit outta Disney. I would say unceremonious is a fair word, even though he made a lot of money. And he just was, you know, obviously wanted one last act, but what was it gonna be? Which was gonna be the Vegas team. Now he's getting the Lakers. Now he's gonna, I assume he's gonna be the one running the Lakers. What an incredible next act for him. Right? This is, of all the teams you could own, um, NBA, NFL, baseball, you name it, this is the highest profile team you can own. If you want to lean into the profile, you're sitting courtside, you're charging everything. Um, you're determining where everyone sits. You are the, now the power broker, the same way Joe Lacob, who wasn't as rich as a lot of the people that were coming to his Warriors games during the heyday of the Steph era.
Was still the guy in this room that had all these, you know, the head of Oracle, the head of Facebook, name anybody. It was still like, well, you're coming into my house and sitting in my seats. Um, it's a, it's a real thing from an ego standpoint. And now it's going to be Bob Iger, um, who has suddenly revived his career yet again. Incredible career. He's been counted out a bunch of times and it's happened again. Okay, what does this mean for The Dodgers, Lakers, and their organizational alliance. Nobody knows. Walter spent the last year integrating the two organizations and trying to turn them into one bigger organization. Well, Iger and Kushner aren't going to go for that. So is Magic still going to be involved? Magic thought he was going to be involved with the Lakers and Dodgers together. Is he involved anymore? Are they going to want him? Are they going to need him? Who knows? What does this mean for the future of the Dodgers? If Walter is basically flipping the Lakers and grabbing the cash, does that mean the Dodgers could be potentially in danger as well? We'll see. What does this mean for Walter's future as a businessman and somebody who everybody thought had the deepest pockets possible, but is now flipping franchises?
'Cause either he thinks he's in trouble or, um, needs the money. Not great. Couple bonus things. Out of this. And again, I'm taping this, it's lunchtime, so things might've changed and we had to find out more information. What happens to the LA Sparks? WNBA hottest it's ever been. Um, and in some ways, um, coldest it's ever been with some of the stupid dialogue about the league, but hottest from players, valuations for the franchises. Um, the new media deal, LA Sparks not in the sale. So does that mean Mark Walter is gonna hand that over to Magic? Is Magic gonna buy it from him? They're trying to tank and get the number one pick cuz people think if they get it, Juju Watkins is gonna come out after her, um, USC season. So what happens to the Sparks, which I would say is one of the four best teams to own in the WNBA? That's one. Two, you saw Jeff Schwartz, who's one of the most successful agents of this century. Came out right after with a statement saying, quote, incredible, the Lakers sell for $12 billion. Now it's $12.5. Yet teams won't spend on older vets because the current CBA rules.
Thank you, union. So all this is gonna do is exacerbate all of this, um, post-CBA remorse that basically everybody has except for the owners. 'Cause it turned out awesome for them. All it did was supercharge franchise values. It cut down their costs. They can't, they, they kind of protected themselves from themselves. And meanwhile, you have Anfernee Simons making $6 million a year in the Sixers when he is a $50 million player. So it's, so that's gonna start to bubble up too. Why do we have a second apron, but franchise valuations are going the highest they've ever been? That's gonna be a dialogue. Then the third thing, I was surprised how many threads I was on today that somebody mentioned this to me. Bob Iger, big Chris Paul guy. Big Chris Paul guy. When I was at ESPN, the two guys that he loved were Chris Paul and Chauncey Billups. I don't think Chauncey's gonna be involved with this Lakers sale. That's one of my big predictions. You can pencil, pencil him out. Chris Paul, who just retired, trying to figure out what to do next. I just feel like he's gonna be involved in this, and a lot of people do.
Could this lead to Chris Paul running a team before LeBron James? We're gonna see. What does this mean for Rob Pelinka? Are they gonna push him out? You think Bob Iger wants to deal with Rob Pelinka? Could you see him put his own people there, including Chris Paul? Keep an eye on Chris Paul. Um, okay, Conspiracy Bill, we're gonna bring him in for this. Uh, best Mark Walter conspiracy theories I've heard. I can't vouch for any of these, I'm just telling you what's going around. Health wasn't great, had to, had to get out. I think that's a fair one considering we know he had medical issues. About to get completely fucked in the insurance fraud case, somebody texted me. Maybe had a ton of Middle East money in the deal. I think that's true. And the Middle East investors wanted the money back. Is a conspiracy. I don't know if I believe that, but I like it. That sounds like a movie. Um, the other part of that conspiracy could be he had more Middle East money in the deal than Adam Silver realized, and Adam Silver wasn't happy about it. This is why we bring in Conspiracy Bill.
He's just— he's laying out the landscape for you. Um, and then the biggest conspiracy going around right now, that Mark Walters sold to this Kushner Agger Group because Kushner's brother has major Trump ties and Trump controls the DOJ and the Kushner connection. Um, that will get them to call the FBI dogs off. That is even too hot for Conspiracy Bill. Um, who knows? It might be pieces of all of those things. It might just be this guy's— might be as simple as, I'm really worried about my net worth. I just need to flip this asset and make money. And I got a godfather offer from these guys that really wanted a team. Last piece is the most interesting. You've heard variations of everything I just talked about. If you're looking at the NBA teams that just got sold in the last 12 years, 2014, Steve Ballmer, Clippers, $2 billion. Didn't own their own arena. 2015 Hawks, $850 million. Seemed high at the time. The Atlanta Hawks, really? The Nets, 2019. $2.35 million. That included the arena and the Liberty. Also kind of seemed high, but the Sighs didn't care. He's got a ton of money.
Now we're getting into the bargain area during, uh, like right before, during, and after COVID. The Jazz, $1.66 million with the arena, 80% stake. So basically valued at $2. Ryan Smith just figured it out, got the hockey team. Now he's got a whole arsenal there. Timberwolves, $1.5 billion paid in tranches, almost like, uh, when you, when you bought a lawnmower from somebody and you want to pay them once a month for the next 3 months or something. $1.5 billion total for the Timberwolves, including the arena. Um, Glen Taylor to the bitter end, just making the worst deals possible. Really one of the worst basketball owners of all time. He couldn't even sell his team properly because Less than 2 years later, the Hornets sell for $3 billion. What's the difference between the Hornets and the Timberwolves? Two small markets, like, eh. The Suns in '23, $4 billion. Notice how we're going up. We were in the, we were in the ones. Now I'm at, now I'm at 4 with the Suns. That included the arena to Ishbia. Mavericks 2024, $3.5 billion for the majority. That includes the arena. Cuban kept the stake. Celtics, $6.1 billion.
And then when you figure in all the buyout people that they had, it's closer to the low sevens. Lakers last year, $10 billion value. Um, the actual amount of money wasn't that. And then '26, $12 billion. Did I ever think we would have a $12 billion NBA team? In basically the 2020s or 2030s? No. Especially the only one I would've said was the Knicks because of MSG and the Rangers. And you could've told me you put all those assets together. Could Dolan have gotten 8 figures? I think he could've. Well, now he's looking at this going, holy shit, that we're talking this price range now. Bigger question, why are these franchise valuations skyrocketing? Like they are because we just saw Liverpool, which the Fenway Sports Group is unraveling a sale for. They just announced like Bezos is in it. There's some reasons I asked around on this, and I think this is a pretty good list of reasons for this. There's more money for huge-ass purchases like this than ever before. And that happened for a bunch of reasons. AI supercharged the stock market. Trump administration relaxed a bunch of the Rich Guy rules. So people have more money and, and kind of easier ways to spend it.
Basically, there's more private equity out there than ever before. People are just getting better and better at the private equity thing. This has been, you know, a 40-year run here of where you had only a couple players a while ago, and now pretty much everybody's trying to do this and put together pieces of stuff and things that make sense together. Like you look at what Ari Emanuel and those guys are doing, like the stuff that they invest in, it's a lot about live event experience and, um, things that tie in together with some sort of like fan, um, event venue and how all that stuff intersects with media rights seems to be the thing that they care about. They just announced this huge thing where they bought, uh, a bunch of stuff with involved in Broadway, but that's like their angle. And a lot of these people that are coming into this space seem to have certain angles. And one of those angles with the, with the money that's out there is like, guess what never goes down ever? Professional sports teams. Guess what nobody has ever regretted ever? Buying one of the signature best trophy professional sports teams.
So look at this stuff that sold recently. Um, the Commanders, who used the, used to be the Washington Redskins, now they're the Commanders, but NFL in Washington, you're buying from Daniel Snyder. They went over $6 billion. Um, the Lakers, the Celtics, Liverpool. I think this keeps happening and at some point there's probably a bubble for it and maybe it'll be after Trump's term is over. Maybe it'll happen sooner. Maybe there'll be some black swan event we don't know about, but everyone is buying in at the highest, highest, highest possible version of this bubble because they have money to spend. You know, like SpaceX, a lot of people made a shitload of money from that, including Josh Kushner. Um, and they want to park that money. They want to put it somewhere. What better place to park it than a sports team, especially an iconic sports team where you have fixed costs. Um, you get the ego from it. Um, people are asking your life, what do you invest in? I have this, I have this. Oh, and I bought the Lakers. You bought the Lakers? Oh my God. I didn't realize you were the Lakers owner.
At some point, this is a bubble, and I don't know when it is, but these prices are so high that I'm thinking about, like, what's next? The Chicago Bulls. Is there a number now that Reinsdorf would think, all right, I gotta— what am I doing? I gotta get out of this. I could get $10 billion for the Bulls. I should do this. Chicago Bears, I think, is another one. I think the New York Jets, um, Dolan's conglomerate, and then I wouldn't rule out the Warriors just from the standpoint of we took the Steph Curry run as far as we could possibly go. We built the arena, we make the most revenue of any team in the league. Maybe it's time to, to sell high. Could this be what happens? Here's, here's where we should all be scared as fans. People are moving into these leagues with the signature teams that are doing it solely because of the financial piece and not for any other reason. Bob Iger is a Knicks fan who has Clippers season tickets. He isn't, he's not a Laker fan. I don't know what team Kushner roots for, but that's whatever it is.
That's not why they bought it. They bought it because it's one of the best things you can buy in sports. The Los Angeles Lakers. We're seeing this over and over again now with The wealthiest of the wealthy buying sports teams as assets and thinking about them like assets. So now you have a commissioner, Adam Silver, who I've been somewhat critical of, um, the last, I was, I don't know, 2 years or so because I feel like the league is so revenue driven and so franchise price driven that they're kind of not seeing the forest through the trees anymore. And you could see it with the WNBA, um, all the ways they've handled this WNBA asset, which the league owns a piece of. I just disagree with a lot of it. I didn't, I didn't like that they over-expanded. They've added 3 expansion teams for reasons that remain unclear. They did this media deal where it's on 7 different channels and it's a pain in the ass to figure out who's who. They don't have a real commissioner in place that can solve some of the issues that seem to be repeatedly popping up with this league.
Like, you know what the league needed? I'm sorry to go on a WNBA tangent, but the league more than anything else needed somebody, an adult to say, stop with all the discourse, all this stuff that has nothing to do with the basketball players we have and the product we're putting on the floor. Let's talk about our stars. Let's talk about our team, our best teams, and all of the positives that have happened over the last few years with this league instead of all the dumb shit. And anybody who's trying to dine on the dumb shit for clicks, for attention, for social video, whatever, don't have good intentions. And those people should not be spearheading and pushing the dialogue about our league. Well, nobody did that, and it's just going to continue to happen. And meanwhile, you have a game like last night where the Fever looked awesome, and afterwards it's the same old shit. It's Stephanie White having to defend herself in a press conference. Everybody in the WNBA has to defend themselves.
Why?
The league's the best it's ever been. The scoring's up. And I look at the NBA and I wonder, like, with the second apron and the player's union and these, the revenue stuff and all the stuff they have to care about with the new media deal. I still, maybe it's a pipe dream at this point. You still want to think that the people running the best teams actually care about those teams. Like regardless. The, the Chisholm who bought the Celtics, who I really like, and I will never understand why they traded Jaylen Brown, but at least I know it wasn't a financial decision, right? The, the money thing wasn't different. There was something else going on there with Jaylen and Jason and, um, them feeling like they had— maybe Brown made a trade, who knows what happened. But he at least has my trust that I do think he cares about the team that he grew up watching and caring about that he's not gonna want to do wrong by that franchise and by the fan base. You start letting these big money people in here that only care about the investment and only care about what they're getting over the players, what the economics of the league are.
Everything is seen through the prism of finance. And this is just, listen, in the 1950s and '60s, if you go back and read about the history of the league and you had, teams that own NBA teams that own bowling alleys, right? Or teams that their entire business rose or fell with how they did with like the Boston Celtics, like Walter Brown who owned the Celtics and the Bruins. And in the '70s and '80s, the NBA started, teams would get flipped over and over again. The Celtics had 6, 7 owners in the '70s and '80s. And at one point, John Y. Brown who owned the Celtics and Irv Levin who owned Buffalo, just flip teams. They just changed owners. Like, it was just crazy backroom shit that would never happen now. Um, and I think the Mavericks, when they were an expansion team in 1980 or '81, it was like $12 million. And there's been levels of when the numbers went up, and the numbers were realistic until about 3, 4 years ago. And now they're not. They're not realistic. I don't think the Lakers are worth $12 billion when they don't even own their own stadium.
Somebody thought they were worth it because they paid it. And they're gonna figure out how to turn that into an asset and advantage. But that's a crazy price. And I guess this is just where we're gonna be with, with pro sports, with these bigger things. Like you, you just, these teams are gonna get bought. And in the old days, you would be worried that you had some drunk owner, you know, or some, or a bad guy or somebody who leveraged himself and then didn't have enough money to run the team. Or somebody, this was the fourth most important thing they did and they didn't care, or they got left the team and they don't care about it. We had that with the Celtics with, with Paul Gaston, Don Gaston's son. But now we're moving into this whole other era where these things are just giant hedge fund plays. And is it gonna be good for the league? Is it gonna be good for professional sports? My instinct is no, but I'm a glass half empty optimistic person. I think this is watching somebody flip the Lakers over a year and a half like he's flipping a mansion in Bel Air or something is fucking bonkers.
This is the crown jewel of the league. The Lakers and the Knicks are the two most important teams in the league. I'm a Celtics fan. Even I would admit that Celtics have the tradition, the titles, the fan base, all that stuff. But if you're just talking about the two most important teams in the league from cities, ratings, money they make, it's the Lakers and it's the Knicks, and one of them just got flipped like a house. So what's it gonna mean? I guess we will find out. We're gonna take a break, come back, talk about U-Sport power rankings for parents. Yeah, we're going from the Lakers to U-Sports right after this. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Imagine you're running a professional sports team. Nice. That would be a dream of mine. Imagine the player contract report is due today. Not so nice. You've got performance notes from the coaching staff, you got a salary spreadsheet from your analyst, 3 rounds of back and forth emails with the agent, and all of it is scattered absolutely everywhere. Well, that's where ChatGPT Work comes in. It's a new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects.
Give ChatGPT Work access to your apps and files and can create real work documents. For instance, spreadsheets, slides, structured reports. You can bring all those to your next meeting. And when you don't need answers, you need help just getting the work across the finish line. Guess what? ChatGPT Work can move your projects forward while you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started. Just go to chatgpt.com. By selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. My friend Cousin Sal is here. We are killing a ton of time until football season. We're in football prep mode. You've been on the Ringer Wise Guys, we're calling it now, which is our old gambling show, which is on Twitch and YouTube and Spotify. Yeah, breaking down divisions. But you just came back from Cooperstown. Yes. And by the way, let's do it.
Let's just do the football. Cooperstown is fine, but let's just do the—
we're ready.
You're ready. I'm ready.
I mean, you know, So we're, we're recording The Football on August 27th, a Thursday.
Yeah.
And we're doing a two-parter. Um, and I couldn't be more excited because we are now 15 days away from that. But this was the perfect time. It's my daughter's last college soccer season coming up. You just went to Cooperstown. Your, your son's team finished 6th out of like 102 teams.
Yeah.
You just lived this whole week long like you're, you think you're in a sports movie. And one of the questions that I get the most, cuz people know from the podcast, from other stuff that I've been, you know, a soccer dad for a long time. When you meet these people who have younger kids and they're like, what would we like? Give me some advice. What do you think my, my kids should play? Where, what sport would you recommend? And I always find, so I'm finally like, fuck it, we're just gonna do this. But before we do that, so you've done your, one of your sons played football, you had a son that did wrestling, uh, and then your youngest son is in a whole bunch of stuff, but probably likes baseball the most. So what's your favorite out of all of those?
I could speak to football, wrestling, baseball, basketball, and rugby actually now, uh, as the 5 that I've competed in or my kids have. I have to pick a favorite right off the bat.
No, you don't. Save it, save it. We'll save it for the list. All right, all right. We are going to— people are going to hate this. We're going to go from, from 20 to 1. Worst sport for your kid to play from a parent experience. We are not talking about the kids. This is just, this is all selfish. This is just for the parents only. Parent only rankings from 20 to 1. And we're just gonna try to give you some, some wisdom. I have some, some guidelines here. I have 7 questions. The first one is, how does the sport actually upend your life? Which is an underrated part of being a youth sports parent. Does it regularly affect the time you wake up? Do you have to spend a lot of time driving too far? Tournaments? Are your weekends just destroyed? Is there food diet stuff that has to try? Like, you wrestled in, in high school. Like, you know, there's, there's a 2-month stretch where you're not allowed to basically eat anything. How upset will your kid be at you if you miss one of the events? And how upset will you be? And then if your weekends are gonna be ruined for years, or at least having fun or somewhat fun.
So from a parent standpoint, I think that's number one. Baseball, you've been in a lot of, it's a lot of driving.
Yeah. Well, first of all, we should clarify a little because like, what are the, what time period, right? Because Little League baseball when they're 6 is delightful. I mean, what's better than staring at them in the cute uniforms? Oh, he, Ethan hit the ball and he immediately ran to third base.
Right.
How cute. But if Ethan does that when he's 12, You're looking to fight his father, right? So, you know, I, uh, I, I guess we'll put it at— what, what range are we putting it in? The post—
it's a whole run. Yeah, we're, we're assuming that your kid is gonna at least be competent enough to play from, let's say, age 6 all the way through around high school age if it goes well.
Okay. Okay.
Second, second question. you just were in the middle of this. What's the parent culture around this sport? What type of other parents are you consistently hanging out with? How much do you actually have to hang out with them? Are there outs? Can you wander off? Can you, like, in baseball, you can be like, oh, I'm gonna go watch some of this from left field, but you're really trying to get away from aggro dad. How crazy are the parents on a scale of 1 to 10? Just day to day, regularly at practices? How competitive are they with the other kids and parents on the team for scholarship stuff, whatever? And just, can you move in and out of this? So wrestling, you go and you're in the stands, you never know, you're watching everybody else and then your kid's up and everybody's kind of pulling for everybody else in wrestling, right?
Absolutely. Yep. I would say wrestling, you're stuck in a smelly gymnasium for a tournament. I would say like a meet on a Tuesday or Thursday is a little more manageable. You know, when your kid is wrestling, you can invite relatives out for a tournament. Weigh-ins could be at 7:30 in the morning. Yeah. The tournament starts at 9 and he or she could wrestle at 10 and then 2 depending on the, the weight class. So that part of it is miserable, I would say.
And not to spoil my rankings, because these are my rankings, you don't even know what we're doing, but the unpredictability of event times—
Yes.
—is so much more important and crucial to this than people seem to realize, where it's like, my son has a track and field meet today. Well, when is it going to be? I have no idea. It could be 9:30, it could be 2:00. There could be a race here. We might have 7 hours to kill. Now I'm eating a hot dog from the concession stand or chips, right? Or stuff out of a vending machine. Oh, do we have time to drive 10 minutes to go to like Jack in the Box? The, the, the more uncertainty you have around the schedule, the less fun it is. So you have that. The next question is how expensive is the sport to become good at? So that includes special travel teams, club teams. Special expensive equipment. You know, like I think like lacrosse, hockey, some of these ones where you, oh, I, or even baseball gloves. Like, oh, my kid grew, I have to get more stuff. Oh, it's another year. Oh, the lacrosse stick is too short for him now. I gotta get that again. Oh, I gotta get another, you know, helmet for whatever. I got to get new gloves.
The whole thing of that.
It's hard to explain the reaction you have when you buy an expensive bat for your kid for Christmas and then he's using the best hitter on the team's bat by the MLK tournament, right?
And you're like, I just, this is our big Christmas gift to you. And 4 months later you, yeah, it's too small. Exactly. And then private training and private coaches because there's some of these where, you know, called privates, but like in baseball, if you want your kid to potentially play in college, you're gonna start doing privates. If your kid's a figure skater, like that's a whole other, now you have to hire a coach. Like that's going nuts. Versus like some of these other sports. You know, basketball, you could have, you could definitely have privates. You could also just be a really good athlete who could just lace on some sneakers and go out there and play for a club team. Yeah.
I think this is for, for me, cuz my kid's a tweener, right? He's not terrible, but he's not gonna play pro or anything close. And all of his friends are in that category. So what do you do with the private lessons? You don't want him to embarrass himself, but I feel like this is in the, the e-bike cell phone category, like they never need it until a couple of their friends take it and then you're screwed. So you really have to rally the parents to resist as much as you can.
I would say for soccer it is important. Is it? Yeah. That's, that's when we go through, I'll, I'll talk about the different ones, but for some of them, like just like technique, sports with technique, if you're a baseball pitcher, at some point you're gonna have some sort of private coach. Sure. Who helps you with your throwing motion, all that stuff. All right. So that's expensive is another category. So that's 3. So we have Does the sport upend your life? What's the parent culture? How expensive it is. The fourth one is physical mental health risks for your kid. I would argue this is the most important. We're talking about concussion potential. We're talking about dieting and all the crazy shit you have to do to compete in certain sports. Injury potential. Is your body gonna be the same when you're 30 years old because you played this sport?
Also, do you—
are you solo? Is all the pressure on you, or are you part of a team? I would argue it's better to be part of a team and have that dynamic and learn how to compete with other people. And the solo thing can, can get weird, but also, like, it's easier to succeed in. Does the sport get you in better shape? There's certain sports where, like, if you play soccer, you're just in good shape. Right? You could play baseball and potentially not be in great shape, but physical mental health risk. So you're a wrestler. Yeah. You, you have all the dieting stuff, all the crazy, you're running up and down the stairs, it's 110 degrees. You have the pressure of these matches of letting the team down. I would say that's like a 9 outta 10 pressure toll on your body sport, right? Yeah.
I think it's like you're sending your kid to the, uh, off to the service, like to the armed forces, you know, and without doing that, you know, without getting in a fight with your wife about doing it.
Right. But, and that's why the wrestling— like you would do it again.
It's the best and the worst. I'd put it at the top and the very bottom because it's like the mental torture it takes, the physical torture it takes. But later in life, if you have to lose weight, whatever, you got that. You are rooting for your team, but it is an individual sport. I would say from a parent's perspective, if you like to blame people, you're not going to be able to do it. Like, I know we all love to blame people. We're all in the Twitter universe, right? We like to blame or whatever. Politics, it's always got to be someone else's fault. Once in a while, a referee will call a takedown out of bounds that didn't happen, but for the most part, it's your kid effing up or your kid doing great. So the highs are as high as they could be and the lows are as low as they could be.
Yeah, anything when it's just you, cross-countries like this, track and fields like this, like ultimately it's just you. Yeah. You, yeah. You're in charge of your destiny. There's no other people to blame. You can't say, oh, the coach's kid was playing the wrong position, or he should, my, my kid should have been there and he instead they played him at the, like, you have no excuses. You're just looking at in the mirror. Right. And then, you know, there's some, you're talking about the more physical sports. There's a real toll. That happens. Like, my son in high school played as a freshman and sophomore, played football and lacrosse, and he's still— he didn't want to play. I mean, his body is still banged up. Like, he has hip stuff already. He had like two minor concussions. And, um, and then looking back, you're like, man, should we have let him play football at all? And you have the, the parent guilt. Parent guilt is almost its own category in this.
Um, yeah, I would say for that, they're just real quick, like You know, football, as far as like a spectator sport, and this is all subjective, you could like soccer better, but Friday night under the lights, nothing better. That's why they make TV shows about it, movies about it. But same time, you talk about like skipping a game, like the one of the parents kind of has to be there just in case that all god-awful thing that we read about happens. You know, the head injury or whatever. We've seen ambulances taking kids off the field. It's not as much a, a concern with, you know, golf or, you know, the field hockey, but it is for football for sure.
Yeah. And, and having been in the stands a couple times when that happens, it's the single worst feeling of like somebody got hurt, somebody's down, they stopped the game. Like, it's— and you're just like, oh, Friday Night Football, it's so much fun. And then it's like, holy shit, what are we doing? That kid's 15, he's getting carted off. Um, 3 more categories. Is there actual realistic college scholarship potential? Could this weirdly all pay off all the time you're spending, um, doing whatever privates, anything? Could you, could this be a shortcut to not having to pay for college, which can be like half a million dollars in 5, 6 years? Um, and then which sports are the sneaky best bets to get a scholarship? I factored that in the ranking too.
Oh, I thought you were saying which can you bet on, which is also—
No, we could also— which sports can you bet on? Yeah, yeah. But like water polo is a sport you and I wouldn't have been like, yeah, Ben's getting into water polo, or yeah, Harrison's a big water polo guy now. And you're like, what? Right. Water polo. And then you watch, like my son's school had all of these kids just going from the water polo team to all these, you know, pretty prestigious colleges. 'Cause it's not a sport that everybody has. So if you're lucky enough to, live in an area that has something like that. You know, as a water polo college athlete— who's that? You'll never guess this. I don't think you know the answer to this. Joe House. Really? Joe House was a big high school water polo and basketball, but then in college did water polo for a couple years until I think we shamed him and made fun of him to get him to stop. Yeah.
Oh, that's funny. Joe, how did he stop? He could have gone pro.
Probably didn't want to just be treading water in a pool in the Patriot League. Uh, All right, 2 more categories. Parent entertainment value. So this is a positive category. Yeah. How much fun is it to attend the games? Are the schedules consistent? Are you outdoors or indoors? How easy— this is a big one for you— how easy is it for you to sneak away and do a work call or some sort of other call during the event? Do you have flexibility, or you have to be locked in, scared the entire time? Are there breaks?
Let's face it, I have a bet on the undercard and the UFC in Saudi Arabia at 2:00 PM, and I have to get away and watch that match. And we'll see what little Nathan does afterwards.
Right. Well, and then can you watch stuff during the event? Other sports? Yeah. I mean, we would do Sunday pods where Zoe had a soccer tournament, and I would have Sunday Ticket on my phone. While she's playing games, trying to keep track of everything and taking notes. And, um, soccer is a little easier, but there's some other sports that would not be as easy.
And you're guilty either way. You feel guilty, right? Because you're missing your kid a little bit, or you're missing the Sunday slate, and I have to— how am I gonna go on Sunday night and make it like I watched everything?
But the only other piece for parent entertainment value is, is the actual sport relatively easy to understand. Is it fun for the parent? Do you feel like you could have some sort of opinion slash respectable thoughts about what you're watching? Or are you just like, what, go in there going, I don't know what the fuck's going on? Where this goes wrong is baseball, where everybody thinks they're the biggest expert in the world. So this is pros and cons. The easier the sport is to understand, the more people are weighing in with some of the worst takes of all time. You're in the middle of this with baseball. It was the single worst thing about being a baseball parent. Yeah.
There's people aggressively like screaming, balk, balk, every pitch, you know, it's like, no, it's not a balk. He stepped off, cut it out. There's that part of it. And then there's your wife or husband who doesn't know the game after, you know, the 9 years of this is, yeah, just like, so wait, they have to tag him at first, but don't they have to tag him on a ground ball first? Right. No, no, no. But I will say this, like, There was something comforting when my son Archie, my oldest, decided to play rugby sophomore year. And aside from like worried that he'll get kneed in the face with the ball, yeah. You know, well, 'cause they wear those, those goofy kind of protective helmets, but not nothing really on the face. There was something nice about not knowing the rules and just like kind of watching along and, you know, I didn't get loud about anything 'cause I didn't know the rules. So, you know, when they're throwing it in and one kid standing on the other's shoulders and there's a throw and like, that was fine to me. So I don't know, it's a, it could go either way.
I had this with lacrosse.
I, lacrosse is a sport I never followed in any capacity. Never watched, never cared about. And then my son got pulled onto the lacrosse team and all of a sudden was playing when he was a 9th grader. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know what was going on. And I, I, I became like, it was almost like I was a foreigner sitting on the sidelines being like, so You can— so that guy can't go past midfield and these people can run off and they're back on. And wait, why didn't that goal count? I was just confused for 2 months. I couldn't understand anything. And the goals were fast, these fouls. Then it would be like, there would be like this delayed power play where if you had the ball in there and then the guy's running off but you still have it, and it's like, well, is he off for 30 seconds or 2 minutes? And I don't know.
It was a lot. As long as it eventually makes sense. It eventually makes sense. It's not like VAR. Yeah. For all of the, this whole summer we went through.
Right. All right. Last question. Bonus question. This is a really important one. When you talk to grownups your age or a little younger, but adults about the sport that they devoted their youth to, what do they say in retrospect? Are they happy they did it? Did, would they run it back? Would they do it over again? This is the number one, gymnastics is the number one for this. I'm still waiting to meet the first person who did gymnastics all the way through high school or college and was like, that was great. I would definitely 100% do that again. The person does not exist. Even people like who won Olympic gold medals, like, yeah, I don't know. I dunno if I would run that one back. And football is another one where I think if you talk to people who played football in high school and in college, afterwards, like, yeah, football was great. Would I do it again? No. So it's an interesting one. Whereas other ones like soccer, unless you, you know, had some terrible injury or something, for the most part, or volleyball, nobody's like, oh yeah, I wouldn't, I would never play volleyball again.
You know?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, when you ask them the question, you're hoping they haven't sustained enough injuries where they're, they're not able to verbalize anything.
So that's something. They're typing an answer.
But. I do have a personal story with this. We'll bring up Tony Romo here. It's not exactly play out what you said, but I wanted my kid, I wanted Archie to play football starting in 7th grade, like tackle football. And like, we knew the Romos and we went out with them. Sorry to name drop, whatever. Yeah. And I asked, I was like, I'll, I'll get Tony to convince Melissa and his wife will agree and that'll be nice. She's like, it's like Tony, Archie could play tackle in 7th grade, right?
Right.
And he's like, yeah, he could wait till 10th. And I was like, what? You just ruined it for me. You just took 3 years of my life, right? Even though you might have added 3 to his. But that's not the answer I wanted to hear. So, yeah, you will get— you will get negative, honest feedback for whatever reason from these athletes.
Yeah, I wish— I wish we had held Ben out until 10th grade because he was 9th grade. He was starting playing You know, against 18-year-olds. I look back at that, I'm like, this is fucking crazy. But he was doing well and it seemed like a good idea. Now I really regret that. So the questions are, do they acknowledge now it's bad for their bodies? Were they more or less likely to have a positive or negative experience with a coach depending on the sport? You can have some sports where if you have the wrong coach, you never want to play that sport again. You can have other sports where it's like, oh man, that guy changed the course of my life. Or that lady, if I hadn't met that person, I probably wouldn't be doing this for a living. Um, another good question is which sport do you actually wish you had played? And then, uh, and then the big one, can you keep playing the sport after high school or college? Which I think gets lost in this whole thing where it's like, if you play football, you're done playing football. Either in high school or college, you never play it again, right?
There's other sports, like if you get into golf when you're 6, now, yeah, I'm playing golf for 80 years. I get, I get invited to Baby Doll's Country Club. I get to get to play 18 with them somewhere. I, it never ends. Tennis is another one. Like if I'm good at tennis and I have the mechanics of a serve and I can play serve and volley, I'm playing until I'm 75, you know? And, and that's it.
It's just those two, right? Pickleball, I guess if you want to count it now.
I don't know how, uh, there's some beach— that'll happen. Yeah. Pickleball did not make our list for top 20. Good, good. But beach volleyball's another one you could probably play until your 20s or 30s. My daughter's talking about this now cuz she's, she's really competitive and she's like, I'm not playing, this is my last soccer year, I'm done. What am I gonna do after? And, and I think she's gonna start playing tennis and like really try to get good at it cuz she's like, I can play tennis, I can play doubles, you can play singles. Great. Like, my wife plays 5 days a week and, you know, she's close to our age. So, um, so those are the big ones. So the 7 are— I'm going to call it life grenade. How much does this blow up your life when your kid plays the sport? Parent culture around it. Finances, how expensive it is. Physical, mental health risks. College scholarship potential. Parent entertainment value. For us personally, do we have a good time watching it? And then post-playing career regrets for the people we know. Those are the 7 calculus.
The other thing I would add, maybe, maybe we don't, maybe this isn't a separate question cuz it's all encompassing, but what percentage of the games you're rooting against your kid's team for whatever reason? Oh, to, to, to have the weekend end early cuz you have to get back cuz you have to do something else cuz they're gonna get killed by the next team anyway.
Baseball number one for that, where it's like, oh man, two more and it's a mercy rule and we can get out of here.
It is, it's number one. It's definitely number one.
Uh, one thing I didn't have on here, just so people know, is flag football, which I think 10 years from now, I think flag football will basically be football, um, for everyone under 16. And flag football is great. I had so much fun when my, uh, when my son played for his school, the Willows. They won the 8th grade title. Which was like one of my great sports moments as a parent. But super fun and not— you don't have to worry about like a major injury for the most part. You might have like, once the kids get better, you might have the collision over the middle where somebody's going for an interception and maybe they hit heads. You see some kids wearing caps, but for the most part, really safe. And I think that's going to keep taking off.
And I think you would put football number one for entertainment value and everything else and camaraderie and parents and be able to get away and all those things you talked about. If not for the injury risk, and that flag football could be just as exciting on a Friday night if you have a competitive game. Uh, my kid's been in it for like 6 years now, so it's great.
And no injury. All right, we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back and we're gonna unleash the top 20. All right, top 20 best youth sports for parents from 20 to 1, 20 being the worst. Uh, very important, these are not Sal's rankings, these are my rankings. Yeah, Sal is my conciliatory slash sounding board. I'm happy to move stuff around. Coming in last at number 20, figure skating. I think it's the perfect storm. I think it checks every negative box. Incredibly expensive, uh, horrific ice rink times, right? You're getting up, oh, I gotta get up. Julie's got, uh, figure skating at 4:15 tomorrow morning. It's the only time we get the ice rink. Um, lonely. You're relying on coaches that could be terrible or great. And the upside is, I don't know, they don't have really have figure skating scholarships, right? So the upside is my kid might be able to go pro and make money. And the odds of that, you're competing against literally everybody else on the planet. Um, And you have to buy skates every year and you can't really do it then when you're older, except for if you're doing like a Christmas stroll skate.
This is my number, number one worst. And I don't think it's arguable. What do you think? Pretty good.
I would say the only good thing is you don't have, um, you know, you're not freezing outside. The, the rain, the weather doesn't affect it cuz it's indoors. That's the only good thing.
You're right about the morning time, but the rinks are cold though.
The rinks are kind of cold. Yeah. Yeah. And there could always be some lunatic who hits your knee with a lead pipe and, uh, who the hell knows? It goes on and on for unsolved for decades. Yeah. Um, yeah, I would put that to, by the way, this is going to be, get ready for this cuz you're gonna get more backlash from your list no matter what. I haven't even heard it. Yeah. Than any other podcast you've ever done.
I'm fine. I'm gonna take it. This is, this is just my rankings only. And if gotcha, it's an opinion. Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. All right. Um, Everyone's gonna have 100. That's a problem. But yeah, figure skating also, uh, when it, when it kind of goes up in levels, now I gotta buy outfits. Yes. I have to buy the fancy little figure skating dresses. I've got to pay coaches. Like, if you're doing this, you better know from age 4 your kid is an absolute prodigy. I don't, I don't see it.
And the weight thing is a problem too, right? Like keeping the weight down.
That's— yeah, there's a whole bunch of Yeah, there's a whole bunch of eating stuff that could happen too. All right. I guess the benefit is if you're, if you're pairs, very tight relationship with your pairs partner. So you're not, you're not alone. That's true.
Find a, find a partner.
Also, when you think about scariest moment as a parent, like let's say your kid's getting good at figure skating and is in sub-tournament, but then does the tri— oh, here comes the triple axel and then falls. Is there— what would be more devastating other than like if your kid's a kicker in football in college and your kid misses the kick and there's 75,000 people there and your kid just blew everybody the game? Penalty kicks, maybe. Um, baseball, that you're just— your kid's never playing football is probably the biggest amount of people.
Yeah, I think so. And there's pick six or something, something like that. But yeah, it does individualize it as much as anything else.
Figure skating last, second to last gymnastics easily could have been number 20. Um, an actual body ruiner. There's, there's a really good book that, uh, somebody wrote like 30 years ago. I think it's called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about like, especially gymnastics, like, like has real, real effects on its stunts growth, like knee back stuff. Um, One of my wife's best friends did gymnastics and is like an advocate now for, please don't ever— don't have your kids do this. Really? Yeah. It's just, there's— you have back stuff, you have spine stuff, you have leg stuff, you could have foot stuff. You're constantly like, oh, I'm a little sore, but we have a meet tomorrow. I gotta play. Like, I'm, I'm out on gymnastics.
A lot of people like it. It's— well, everyone loves it in the summer for the Summer Olympics. Isn't it the most watched?
I mean, it's like most sports, it's the best of the best.
It's the one thing the whole family will get together and watch. I feel like, yeah, but those are like the best 50 ever.
Like, what about all the other ones who, who, uh, went through college? See, this is where people are gonna get mad.
Well, they should do it. How dare you? The Simone Biles of the world. Be like, hey, this isn't for everybody. In fact, it's just for the like 7 of us and that's it.
Don't even try. Uh, I, I think dance is more interesting for gym because we had some, some little girls, like, we had Zoe did gymnastics for, I don't know, like the first year, and they were like, you got to get her coming 5 days a week, she could be amazing. And we were like, Zoe's gonna be like 5'9". She's not— what is she gonna be, a gymnast? Um, but I think there's, there's— I would push toward dance would be my parent advice. Not saying I'm right or wrong, but if you want your little girl to be limber and do stuff like, like go the dance route cuz you're gonna get great balance from it and everything else.
I asked a friend, my, my buddy Tony, I wasn't sure if you were gonna include dance, not our, uh, mutual friend Tony, but I did, uh, he did say insert dance in there and he's like, from a parent's perspective, it's awful because you're seeing them do the same 5-minute routine over and over and over again.
Yeah, it was not, dance did not make the cut. Right. Number 18, um, swimming. Yeah. So bunch of stuff going on here. Um, the all-day meets we talked about with wrestling, especially if your kid's doing multiple things, you, you might, the first one might be at 7:30 and then the next one's at 2 and then the last one's at 5. I had our buddy Gus, I had a kid who was a swimmer and that it was the meets where it really, it's an all-dayer. With the added bonus, you can barely tell which kid is yours if you're in like the bigger things. It's like, is that— is he in lane 5 or lane 4? And then, then you're going and, um, there's a lot of chlorine exposure. Yeah. And, uh, the benefits are you get in sick shape. Yep. And there's scholarship potential. But, um, I don't know, I'm just— where do you start?
Body image issues for sure. Right. I mean, yeah, 6th grade on, you're in a, you're in a one-piece at school.
Yeah, that's it.
Or, or yeah, boy or girl. So it's, it is tough. Yeah, that chlorine killed me. My kid trained for junior guards out here to be a lifeguard and it wasn't swim meets, but it was a lot of intensive, uh, and the coaches can be crazy too. That's an underrated, uh, like, like, you know, uh, Iron Chef type coaches in the background screaming.
We just lost Zach Lowe, whose dad was a famous high school coach in Greenwich for swimming. And he's going to be furious that swimming came in 18. Look, there's no losers. These are just the rankings. I include diving and swimming. This is all anything with a pool. Also, pool time's hard. Sometimes that's another one where you might have to get up early to go swimming. So anyway, swimming's 18, wrestling 17 for a lot of the stuff we mentioned. And I say this knowing that you loved wrestling, but when you think when your kid wins a match and pins somebody, about as exciting as it's gonna get for a parent. Nothing better. And then I would say every other piece of it's terrible. A lot of it's terrible.
Yeah. The, the discipline's great for later in life. Like I said, the, the body thing, like if you're £112 trying to get down to 106, now you're talking about like, you know, 8% of your body weight and stunting growth. And those 112-pounders are Or it'd be tough for them to get to 135, 140 in their later years. The times, like I said, all over the place, scattered. Don't know when to invite people to watch your kid for a tournament. Yeah. I mean, I'm in my car for 4 hours watching EPL on my phone because the time between the weigh-ins, 7:00 AM and the, his first match is 11:00, and I don't even know if that's, that's gonna be, you know, that's another thing. If you're, if you're school or whatever, there's a whole other story. We didn't have buses. So we had to each drive our kid for the weigh-ins an hour and a half away.
Yeah, you got the weigh-ins too. Um, it's rough. Yeah. One other benefit other than when your kid wins— I mean, when you— and then when your kid loses, it's devastating. But you can use this later in life. Like, you're like a sneaky— I would trust you in a dark alley as my sidekick if we had to fight people. Like, you do have moves and I don't know, you learn some stuff. You're, you're cagey.
Yeah, there's no jiu-jitsu, uh, team in high school, right? So this is— yeah, if you want to be able to handle yourself in a fight, like a lot of these fights end up on the ground. So, but no, I don't, I don't use it for offense, Bill. You know that. I'm defensive. You're like Mr. Miyagi. I'm Miyagi all the way.
Yeah, you don't— you're not supposed to punch somebody unless you're challenged. All right, so number 17. I'm sorry, number 16 and 15 I put together— cycling and cross-country. Um, cross-country is interesting. Know a couple cross-country parents. Um, the kids by themselves just doing stuff. They're on a team and it's fun, but it's really just them. But the real problem is there's— when you actually have like a meet, there's nowhere to go. You basically have to pick a spot It's like, oh, my son runs 10K. It's like, oh, he's going to run. All right, I'm going to pick this. We'll go meet him at the halfway there in the trail. And then you wait and you wait and then he runs by and you're like, go, go, Sal! All right, go! Come on, buddy! And he's not listening because they're like locked in the cross-country. Right. Um, so fun, but also not fun at all. At least you get to be outdoors. The benefit is you get to do this after you, you know, your whole life. If you run, you run your whole life. So that's learning. Yeah. Learning good stuff.
I asked for some input here, my, from my friend Megan, who is a long-distance Olympic hopeful actually for 2028. So she's nice. The, the meets are typically further away at some random park or in the middle of the woods, or sometimes on a golf course. But again, it's a 20-minute race, so you can realistically be back home by noon. And then she said, this is what really got me, said, you would love being a cross-country dad though, because the night before you get to have pasta parties, so you get to eat all the carbs, which is right up your alley. She's right. Yes, it is. Wow.
Oh, that sounds amazing. Yeah. So, so is cross-country too— should I put it higher? I guess we'll see. Well, I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see where we put everything else. Next one's rowing, number 14. This is so douchey.
This is so East Coast prep douche. You didn't need to put this in, but go ahead.
Hey, listen, it's, it's first of all, college scholarships available. You get to be in awesome shape. You don't necessarily have to be super coordinated or a great athlete. You just kind of have to be strong and have discipline, right? So if you're like one of those, like you have a strong body, but you're, you know, if you're playing basketball, you're a mess, but rowing, maybe, you know, um, the, the downside, you have to get up crazy early. I think this might be the earliest other than figure skating. Like the kids who rowed in college, we had a rowing team in at Holy Cross. None of us understood it. It's like, why are you doing this to yourself? This is the worst thing ever. I can't go out on Saturday night cuz I have a meet on Sunday and the, but, and the meet's at 7 in the morning. 7 hours. Yeah. It really ruins your life. It is kind of a fun parent sport though. If, if your kid gets good, you get to go to these, you know, you can see it in like Oxford Blues or some of these movies that they made with the crew.
Yeah. You get to go to your spot, kind of hang out like Head of the Charles is a big thing in Boston. But mm-hmm. But, uh, the morning schedule just sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Well, I think you put it too high. You're going to hear from the Winklevoss twins here. Good luck.
I'll hear from both of them. Number 13, track and field, which is the, I think, the hardest one to figure out on the whole list because you had the scholarship potential. You have all the meets where there's 75 things going on. You don't even know, especially it's a bigger stadium, you don't even know what, where to go and what you're looking at. Um, and it Yeah, really depends on the event. Like, I think if your kid's a pole vaulter, pretty cool, right? You can, you can kind of get near the pole vault pit. Um, the running stuff's a little harder, but, um, but it's the same thing we talked about earlier with the meets and just not knowing when the times were for things.
My buddy, you know, the Parlay Kid, coaches now, uh, girls track after decades of coaching real sports like football, baseball, and wrestling. But he's like, it, it's easy to coach. But I will say, he's like, from a parent's perspective, there's a lot of warming up. You'll see these kids warm up in whatever event it is. There will be like 80% of warmups before they get to the actual race. Right. And then you can't like even delineate which is, which is which. So that's a negative, I would say.
Right. If you have like a 9:00 AM race, you're there an hour and a half earlier. Yeah. 'Cause you gotta do a whole warmup thing. Right. Track and field's fun 'cause there's a lot of different aspects and places to push your kid. And it is a good college scholarship sport potentially. So there's some benefit there. We're getting— now we're in the top 12. I have hockey 12.
Hmm.
So basically all the same physical fears that you would have with football. You know, hockey has so much concussions and people getting hurt, and I, I honestly, it's just bodies colliding. The ice rink times are truly horrific unless you're living in like a cold place. If you're in a cold place, maybe better. If you're in Canada, obviously, if you're in Minnesota, if you're in, I don't know, Wisconsin, it's that there's a reason all of the best players are all coming from the same few states. Parent culture is insane. Yeah, I know. I don't know if this is a craziest parent sport, but it's got to be top 3. Right. This is the one, like, this is the most likely if you're on the Twitter for you or Instagram to see like parents fighting, probably like just people just punching each other for no reason at a hockey thing.
And I'm going through the glass. Yeah, there's some crazy, crazy clips on there about parents fighting.
You— it's the rinks are— Ben did hockey for 2 years and he was too late because this is another problem with hockey. You have to start skating by the time you're like 4. To actually be good at. He started probably, but he, he would have been good at hockey. Um, and it was fun to go there, but the rinks are freezing. Like, they're just like, and they're not big rinks either, so you're, you're wearing like winter coats and, you know.
Is it that what, out here, the rinks are freezing?
The rinks are freezing. Yeah, hockey rinks are freezing. Um, it is really fun.
They're colder than like a Kings game or Ducks?
Yeah, because it's, it's, they're smaller rinks. They're not like, okay, you know. Um, the games themselves are super fun.
Yeah.
So that's why I, I have it ahead of football. I mean, I'm sorry, I have it below football. I have football ahead of football because, um, I, what you mentioned about Friday Night Football, I think is the differentiator. But for the most part, I think these things are pretty even.
Equipment's, um, pricey, right? Depending on what you want to do with this hockey kind of thing.
This is among the most expensive. Yeah, sticks, um, privates. It's a commitment. This is— if your kid plays hockey, probably not on— probably not doing two other sports, right? Right. This is year-round. You're doing this all the time. If you get good at it, you're, you're away every weekend. Um, there is some major—
can't not skate for 4 months. Yeah, you have to kind of keep it going.
Whereas football is like 3 months, it's more contained. You do have like the long preseason in football, so that would be the other one. But I have football 11, I have hockey 12. Oh, 11? I have football 11. Yeah. Wow. So many pluses and minuses, Sal.
Ah, this is sad for me.
I love football, but I think football with flag football could move up the ranks as we do the move into more of a hybrid model. But I would say parent culture, pretty bad. Um, yeah. Is there a position for every kind of kid with a body type? 100%. If you're like the big giant kid, you can be our left guard. Or, you know, if you're slow but you're a good athlete, hey, you could be the center, or you could be the, the defensive end. Um, But the physical toll of football is, is, it's a hard one.
I'm just looking at all these sports you're gonna put ahead of football. It makes me sad. I'll, I'll, I'll, how about this for a positive? For the most part, a no-cut sport. Everybody makes it. Yeah. Doesn't mean they play, but they're involved, right? In practices and everything else.
When do you think tackle football should actually start for kids? Cause I've heard every sort of analysis of this, cause you could argue it should be like 4th, 5th grade because you learn how to tackle, you lose, you learn like, uh, you know, basically the technique. Um, and your body learns how to, it gets conditioned to the collisions. Whereas if you do it a little when you're older, it doesn't. But then you have 10-year-olds just ramming into each other.
I think you could bump it up to 9th, 10th grade. It's the great Tony Romo who's gonna be hired by the Ringer soon, uh, said to me, I think it could be 10th. I think 9th or 10th grade is fine. I don't know, because I do think like, you know, they, they talk about CT and all this stuff. Most of it happens in these practices. It really does. I remember getting my bell rung a bunch of times between 10th and 12th grade. And then if you're in college, but you know, whatever, it's, it's only in the pros actually where you're not going helmet to helmet in practice at least. So you definitely want to keep a, what do they call 'em in wrestling? Bumps. Yeah. You want to keep that bump total down under 1,000, I would say.
You could tell me 10th grade is the cutoff. If we had a sports czar, the sports czar would probably say you can't play football till you're 16. Right. Tackle football. All right, number 10, skiing/snowboarding. Now, super expensive. I'm not sure about the team dynamic. Um, and you basically have to live near a mountain or close to something, something where you can do it or you can't do it. So I'm just assuming that's for all of those people, but it does seem pretty great. I have, uh, one of my cousins has a daughter who's a big snowboarder and they have to, they're in New England. They have to, you know, drive 2, 3 hours sometimes to go to these things, but they, they do love it. Um, injury potential. Yeah, you could wipe out every once in a while. The big thing with skiing and snowboarding, this is something you can literally do your entire life. Right? Right. Um, and there's like tournaments and, you know, there's, could, could there, but they keep adding Olympic sports. Like who knows? Um, there's some college stuff with their team dynamics, a little weird, but I think for the most part, this is pretty solid.
Harrison's friends with a kid who excels at skiing, snowboarding, surfing, and okay at other sports, but that's it. And so now he's got Instagram clips of himself, like, you know, riding the pipeline and everything and just snow. And to answer your question, like, earlier, like, which one do you wish you would've done? God, it would be great to just be a world-class skier.
Right. Just have been doing it since you were 5. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, if, if boxing's not on the list, that's, that's probably my pick.
Weekends and vacations constantly. Yeah. So skiing, snowboarding, I guess surfing would be in this too. These are all like the individual where you need some sort of either a wave or a mountain. You need to put all those together. Okay. Volcano, something. Yeah. Number 9. I was surprised to rank this high. Water polo. Hmm. Uh, college scholarship potential galore. Kind of your kids. Everybody who's doing it is in awesome shape. Kind of underrated as a sport to watch in person. It's weird that it has no traction at all TV, although with ESPN, the way they've been adding weird sports to ESPN 1 and 2, maybe water polo will have a moment. Um, the biggest, I think, parent demerit is there's a lot going on that you just don't know when you're watching. Like there's stuff going underwater, there's people punching each other. Yeah, it's sometimes it's hard to see if somebody scored. Um, and there's no juice at all, you know, with water polo. Water polo almost needs like better PR.
Well, and it's weird because it, it's, it's a loud, it's a lively gym, right? Yeah, the parents are going nuts after everything, even if it's just a passing the ball around the perimeter. But yeah, you're right, it needs a better PR team because it's fun.
The Olympics, it's one of my favorites to watch. Yeah. At Ben's school, sometimes like picking him up, they would have a game and the parents are going fucking crazy and it's packed. Yeah. You know, they, his school had a good water polo team, but I can't believe this House thing.
This is amazing. Yeah. Joe House, water polo.
By the way, anybody who can produce video footage of Joe House playing water polo at any point in his life, um, there's a bounty for you.
Okay.
Number 8.
Did he eat while he played? Maybe that was a problem.
I think that's why he had to quit, cuz he kept taking pizza up to the pool, eating.
Doesn't taste as good chlorinated. Yeah.
All right. Number 8, baseball slash softball. Oh, okay. Destroys your weekends. This is a weekend destroyer. Um, I would say a pretty unarguably bad parent culture. Because it's really one of the only sports where every parent has an opinion on everything that's going on at all times. And no doubt also inappropriate comments with, with the kids. How does he not bunt there? You know, it's like, that kid's 8, like, shut the fuck up. Um, the mercy rule stuff and the blowouts, like going to a tournament and just being like, we're gonna lose every game by 15 runs, is awful. And I, I think, uh, the highest level of parents talking out their asses. If you're good, there's a whole bunch of privates, gets expensive. It can carry over to adult softball, right? Okay. If you're good at, let's say you played at a high level softball, baseball in high school, maybe even college, you now become a ringer in office softball for like 20 years. You could also play in adult leagues when you're older. So you can kind of keep going. Um, but I think this is around the right level. Number 8. Would you agree with this?
Yeah. I mean, there's just so many pros and cons. It's what, what type of, uh, where, where you want to land on it. But I will say the parent thing is so important because you're gonna have to eat with these people. And I'm lucky enough to be part of a, a group that we, we all like each other. Yeah. So it's good because you're gonna have a 12 o'clock game and then a 4 o'clock game. And then, so from 2 to 3, you're gonna have to, eat and watch games with these people at the local sports bar. So that's important. But parents in general, baseball parents, it's funny, you talk to coaches, they're like, yeah, I only got into coaching so I could be away from the parents. There's a reason they're behind the cage, right? Animals. And I think it's gotten worse. And this is probably true for every sport, but I feel like with baseball, every 10 coach of a 10U team could start the season saying, Hey, you know what? No kid from wherever you're from has ever made it to a, to become a pro. So that's why we're just gonna go out there and have fun.
We're not gonna worry about being serious. But nowadays you can't say that because there's NIL money and everybody thinks like, this is where coaching and teaching is different. Like it used to be in the same sphere, but no one thinks their kid is gonna grow up to be an astrophysicist. Yeah. But everyone thinks their kid can make a hundred grand. Playing a sport somehow if they, if they play their cards right. And, uh, and that's why it's gotten worse.
It's a great point. You know what else it is? It's the worst sport for this. Oh, Bobby's up, and all of a sudden you got mom or dad, you know, right behind, right behind, uh, the, this, the big cage in front of home plate, right behind home plate, the fence, the one little thing. Yeah, right in there. Or, or the kid's pitching, and now the kid's pitching and there's his mom, like, with the with the phone like this, and, uh, it has, it has the most phone damage potential. Um, the softball I think would have been higher on the list before they had to put all this protective, like having these crazy helmets and stuff, and even like the third baseman and the masks, and not as much fun as it was 20 years ago. Yeah, our buddy Gus coached some some college softball when he was at Rollins. Did he really? Yeah. Wow. Back in the old day before they had all this stuff on. But yeah, I think 8's baseball, softball. Fun part is everyone can play. You can hide even the worst kids for a couple innings and put them in a couple positions.
Everybody can be part of the team. There's some fun stuff.
I don't know what you're gonna end on here. This is interesting to me that there's 7. Yeah.
Better than baseball, football, and all these. Okay. Number 7, tennis. Okay. There's wins everywhere, especially, uh, you get to do it your whole life. You get to do it with your kid. You can just go and be like, hey, let's go hit some balls and go do it. Um, you can play it anywhere. I think as long as it's not winter in some of the East Coast or the Midwest, you can put— it's a 12-month— in California, it's a 12-month-a-year sport. You don't necessarily have to belong to a tennis club. You can play in public parks. Um, the rackets are expensive. You gotta keep changing those. Incredibly fun to watch as a parent. Scholarship potential and pro potential and NIL potential. Mm-hmm. And the downsides would be the privates, which you're gonna have to do if the kid's gonna be good. And then a little lonely. It was, it was why with, with our daughter, like I, I kept wondering whether we should get her involved in tennis when she was like 8, 9, cuz she would've been good at it, but just, you just kind of by yourself a lot, right? And you're not really part of a team and it's a lot of like pressure on yourself at all times.
And some kids can handle it, some can't. But for the most part, you get to be outdoors, play it anywhere. You can play it until you're 75. Right.
And the pressure on the, the parents thing is the, what we talked about. You can't blame anyone else if they're losing, right?
So no, unless it's doubles, doubles match, maybe you could blame the Partner.
Always blame the partner.
And by the way, doubles is another great one. You play mixed doubles, you play same-sex doubles, like you have all the, all these outs with that. So yeah. I think tennis is a, is a really good one. That's one of the, that's the first one that I would really strongly recommend.
Do you think, are you gonna lump tennis with pickleball like you did? No. Like you do football with flag football?
No, just in that we don't acknowledge pickleball or padel.
Tennis isn't going away, but pickleball is very, very big.
So you think there's going to be like high school pickleball someday? I think so. I might move. That might be it for me. I don't know, move somewhere else. Move to Italy. Italy will have it too. No, they don't move from there. Hey, number 6, field hockey.
I don't know shit about this.
All right. Yeah, yeah, this is why it's number 6. Under the radar, it's really females only, uh, incredible scholarship potential and super fun to watch. And okay, some, some states are bigger than others, but man, if you're good at field hockey, the, the world is your oyster with some of this stuff. You get to run around, it's very similar to socky, uh, soccer, and soccer. Get these big sticks You have to be a little aggro. When I was at the Olympics, I actually went to a couple field hockey games and it was like incredibly fun. Really high level and always kind of slips under the radar.
Some sports don't have— Lacrosse and soccer mixed, but you can't lift your stick, right? Basically. And I guess polo?
You're bent over a little bit and you gotta like— Go ahead, stand up, demonstrate. Let's see. So field hockey, 6. Now we're in the top 5. Basketball, 5. Okay. Basketball, you can play your whole life. Um, basketball, if it's a tournament, you— it passes the parent test of I can sneak out. Oh, his next game's not until an hour from now. Um, you're there all day, but it's actually fun to watch basketball. There's different types of players. Your kid can be, you know, a 3-point shooter, be an athlete, shot blocker, like pick whatever. Um, good team culture. The AAU, if your kid's really good, that gets a little weird. The club teams start really early. The club teams start at like 3rd, 4th grade, and that gets a little expensive. But for the most part, the only expenses are a basketball and sneakers. Sure. And that's it.
Very exciting. You know when your kid's playing for the most part. Right? The game, the one thing we didn't mention, some of these baseball games can go 4 hours, right? If, if they're in a tournament and they have to go extra innings and stuff. Basketball, I know can go overtime, but for the most part it's, it's gonna be short and it's gonna be by the standards of the clock.
So I have that for the, or for our final 3. It's a huge piece to know the actual schedule and have a sense for beginning, middle, and end of an event versus baseball where you could tell me like, ah, Harrison had a 4-hour game. We went into the 12th inning. We had to call the game because it was dark, and then they lost.
Right. What's interesting though about basketball is if you look at videos of parents fighting, by a mile basketball has more, right? Like basketball brawls.
Is there just more basketball? That's why we have more videos.
Maybe there's that. Oh, there's— baseball has a lot of parents like, uh, misbehaving. But maybe it's not parents, maybe it's just like rival schools in the crowd that I'm seeing.
But basketball, from a parent standpoint, you get to play with your kids basically from age 7 on. You can play horse with them, you can play 21, you can have shooting contests with them. Then when you get older, you can actually like really play them. You can— they can go down to the park, play with their friends, play 5-on-5, play pickup. Um, there's some injury stuff with basketball, mostly knees and lower half of the body. Um, the club teams, you can— so if you're good at basketball in high school, you can be on a club team, but then you also get to play for your high school. And I would say that's one of the most high-profile high school sports to play, right? Um, so that's a win. So I think it's so competitive.
There's 5 starting spots though. That's, that's a problem. Right. So that, that's it.
You can, and you need to be relatively tall, right? That's another piece.
What's, what's the acceptable age your kid could beat you one-on-one, one-on-one in basketball? Oh man.
Game to 11, win by 2. 14, 15 probably is when it gets—
Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah.
Still feel like you can bully. All right.
So 11 and a half wasn't good for me.
I gotcha. Coming in at number 4, golf. One downside and one downside only. Insanely expensive. Yeah. I mean, probably the most expensive of all these sports. There's literally no other downside. If you play golf and you teach your kid how to play golf, you are now doing this with them all the time and this becomes your thing. Um, your kid will eventually be good at it. By the way, a lot of college scholarship potential. Um, who knows what other kind of potential. But then they're doing it for the rest of their lives, and it, it's something that's helpful, you know. It's why I always think about that I should start playing. I always get invited to play, but I'm always— I, I'm one of those, I either have to play a lot or I don't want to play at all. And there's so many fun social aspects that come from golf. There's work stuff. And, um, it's the only downside is the expense that you get to be outdoors to play all these different courses. You get to go on, when you're older, you get to go on college trips with your buddies or whatever.
It's like, it's wins everywhere except for the expenses. Yep.
And it's bucket list type destinations, right? I want to play Pebble Beach. I want to play this when I'm older and all that stuff. I'll say this, we came back from Cooperstown and I think my kid, we had a good time and I'll get into that, that story. But when you see the teams that made the finals, I think he, it was an eye-opener and he is like, oh, I got a couple years left in me in baseball and that's it. Right. He played 18 holes the last 3 days, 3 of the last 4 days of golf. He's like now switching to golf a little bit 'cause he and his buddies like love it.
So that's great. It's also the perfect age to start playing. You gotta be like 11, 12, 13. Yeah. Then you, then you can kind of figure out a semblance of a swing. And golf balls are expensive, not crazy expensive, but that's a price. Clubs, if you have a kid, you start playing them when they're 6, you have to buy clubs basically every year and a half, 2 years. Yeah. So, There's— it's insanely expensive compared to some of these other ones, but no other downside. No injury stuff at all except for maybe a back, right? Back, maybe hips.
It's about it, right? Lightning strikes happen every other time.
I mean, our agent, uh, James Babydoll Dixon, who's now 64. Yeah, smokes 2 packs a day and can still play 7 days a week.
Yeah, but he always has his elbows hanging off his arm or something, right? A bruise, right? Whatever he has, bursitis or something.
But yeah, true, he does say he'll have like a rotator cuff. I guess that would be another issue. Um, good one for phone calls if you're following your kid. Like if your kid's in a tournament, you just get to walk the course with them. You're outside, you can pop away for a phone call, go behind a tree. Um, places to go for the bathroom all over the place. Golf's huge win and not for everybody because it's really expensive. Coming in third, so this is an interesting one. I have lacrosse at 3. I think if it was men's lacrosse only, I would have it in the 10 to 12 range with football and hockey because of, of all the physical toll and the concussions. This is like the most underrated concussion sport of all the sports. Um, girls lacrosse might be number 1 if we were just doing a boys versus girls thing. Hmm. No contact really at all. Same as soccer. Less people playing it. There's an easier path for college scholarships now. It's on ESPN where they have women's lacrosse on ESPN. And it's weird because with girls, you're just not allowed to touch each other all the way through high school.
You're not allowed to collide anything. And I remember we took Zoe once because I thought Zoe would be good at lacrosse, and she would have been. But, um, you go and it's just no— people are just running around. It's like, oh, now this person has the ball and nobody can do anything, and they're just kind of trying to whack at the stick. So it's, it's a little odd. There's also like some places just don't have it. Like California has a really weak lacrosse scene. Yeah, definitely. Whereas like if you're in the East Coast where you grew up, like it's fucking everywhere. If you're in DC, Philly, um, Jersey, New York. Um, but I think girls lacrosse is— I would highly recommend that.
Really, the only expense is the stick. That's a flag football version of football.
Girls lacrosse, I would say flag football for boys, and some girls play football too, but girls lacrosse would be the other one, right? Um, I don't know anybody whose daughter played lacrosse is like, that sucked, right? Don't do it. Yeah.
Okay, and then the final two.
I'll do in alphabetical order. Soccer and volleyball I have together.
Hmm.
And incredibly fun to watch. Everyone can understand. Time-controlled games. Um, lots of scholarships available because the teams are long, so you have that possibility. You have the NIL possibility. Um, soccer's outdoors, volleyball's indoors. Volleyball, less injury potential. Mm-hmm. You'll get some shoulder stuff. Um, maybe somebody will have like, uh, I don't know, plantar fasciitis. Soccer is like, if you're, if you're a high-end women's soccer player, it's 40 to 50% chance you're hurting your knee or some other stuff. I think I would give volleyball the slight edge. It's super fun to watch. I remember when I covered high school sports for the Boston Herald in the mid-'90s, volleyball was my favorite one of all the sports. You could follow it. Yes. You know, it resets, you know, every set. You always know what's going on. You can't be like a know-it-all with volleyball and be like, oh, I can't believe the setter did— like, nobody knows what's going on. You're just there cheering. And you can play it after as an adult, or you can play beach volleyball. So I think volleyball's one and soccer's two.
Beach volleyball, by the way, for a parent might be the best experience actually. To just hang out by the beach and watch your kid. I know it's like a niche thing, but niche thing, but it's out, out. Yeah. Out here, out west, volleyball's a prestigious, if you have a position on the high school team, that's a prestigious way to go. Yeah. Obviously all the Olympians are from out here, so yeah, it's good. And so you wouldn't put soccer.
Interesting. No, I think volleyball because of, if you include the beach volleyball, And underrated concussion thing for soccer, right? So that's— it's not underrated. I think at this point people know, like, you know, especially when you're talking about collisions with, uh, goalies and strikers, or two people going for a head and they bang heads. Like, it's, uh, you know, it's been my biggest fear ever since like probably age 11. Once people start going airborne, you're just scared about it. The other Underrated one is you can just get kicked by the ball. Like, somebody could be clearing out the ball and kick it and you don't realize, and it just hits the back of your head. Like, I've seen a few of those. It's definitely concussions. That's, that's another thing, volleyball versus soccer. I think volleyball, I guess you can get a concussion if you just got— took a spike in the head. Yeah, but other than that, no. Um, and then volleyball, all different types of body types too, because you can have the setters are smaller, the other ones are You know, the, the people at the net are taller. Yeah, everybody's tall.
The set— there's small people in volleyball. Yeah, small.
Yeah, the setters are small, right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But they could take the setters out.
The soccer, um, the hell was I gonna say? Yeah, it's interesting with the soccer, with the— because I think if you go— we're mostly talking here at 13 to 18 or whatever, but if you go, it's the first sport they all play, right? So soccer from 4 to 10, 4 to 10, it's number one, no matter what it's gotta be. And I hate to say that as a, as a baseball junkie, but it just is because your kid gets to play, your kid's involved running around, kid's not making sandcastles in left field, you know? So I think there's a, there's something to that as a positive.
You just see you're in great shape from soccer. The tournaments, even though it's a long whatever and you go to these and I've obviously been to a bunch of them, you're at these locations where there's 30 fields, you gotta figure out where the field is. But for the most part, pretty easy to navigate. And you're gonna have 2 games a day. They're usually not staggered where it's like one game's at 9 and the other one's at 6. Mm-hmm. They're usually within like 4 or 5 hours of each other. So you have time to kind of relax, veg out. Also fun to just watch other soccer games that are happening, which I think volleyball is the same thing. If it's in one of those places with a lot of games, you can kind of jump around and watch. But I think that concussion piece outweighs the fact that you're outdoors with soccer. But I think these are the best two.
You might be right. The one where you have to drive past 50 soccer fields to get to your tournament, you know, 2 hours away. You have to drive past 50 baseball diamonds. Like, oh, we could have played this team in Norwalk. There's 20 20 minutes away. But by the way, that should be your number one concern for someone who doesn't wear a seatbelt, should be how close the venue is.
No, I'm wearing a seatbelt now. Everybody's shamed me. One of the reasons—
something I forgot about. I remember it like 20 years ago and I just completely forgot. I thought you came to your senses. You, you have to wear it.
But one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it with Wilds is because I know I'd be publicly shamed for not being a seatbelt guy, and I needed to, I needed to Really have the shame and had to do it. I had so much— I heard from so many people. Well, most of the time I'm just driving around LA going 25 miles an hour.
I get it. And I know you're confident in how good a driver you are. I'm an amazing driver. Everyone else has become a terrible driver. Everyone else is looking at their phone. Doesn't that scare you that they're— okay, I'm not wearing a seatbelt and everyone's staring at their phone while they're trying to pass me.
That's true. Yeah, I'm gonna start wearing it. I needed— I had my whole process. I needed to say that to Wilds. I heard people get mad.
All right, it only took 55 years.
All right, um, I'm gonna count one countdown backwards, 20 to 1. 20, figure skating. Sorry to all the skaters out there. 19, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, cycling, cross-country together, rowing, track and field, hockey, football, skiing, snowboarding, surfing, all at number 10. Water polo, baseball, softball, tennis, field hockey, basketball, Football is 5th, golf 4th, lacrosse 3rd, soccer 2nd, volleyball 1st. What's gonna be the most controversial? Again, this is for parents.
Yeah, I think like you're gonna hear from like figure skat— all the ones you put 20, 19, 18, they, they're gonna get mad at you. I personally would've moved football up a little bit just because I feel like the, the, the juice behind the Friday night stuff is just It takes it to a different level. And this is gonna sound ridiculous coming from me because I accuse everyone of being an NBA hole, but I think basketball is, is one or two.
Really? Yeah, I do. I do. If you could start over right now with Harrison and only have him play one sport from age 5, which sport would you pick?
I think it would be golf if it, if Solo sport, it would be golf at this point because he's already upset with himself that he's behind his friend who's excellent, hits the green off of every tee on a par 3.
I would've done lacrosse for Zoe. You would've done lacrosse? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But I, the soccer was great.
Yeah. But the, but lacrosse, lacrosse, I think lacrosse was for girls, like, you're removing some of the injury risk that makes soccer a little, a little iffy. Anyway, I hope that helped. Listen, again, that was good. This is just my opinion only. It doesn't mean I'm right. You can disagree. I, I don't— these aren't authoritative rankings. People could disagree with this. Yeah, people can absolutely disagree with these. Um, all right, before we go, do a Parent Corner for us.
Well, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Cooperstown. We just got back I thought it was the greatest. I mean, I really, I can't say enough about it. It was like the culmination of like 8 years of Little League. Yeah. And then you get to Cooperstown, it's beautifully manicured fields. The amount of like Americana thrown at you is like perfect. They have the opening ceremonies where the teams march out and they had like a kid who, an actual Little Leaguer who was participating and they hadn't seen his father who was deployed overseas. And then the father shows up. So very emotional. Wow. They have that. Knocked out. So, and the kids bunk together and you don't see them except for 20 minutes before and after every game. So, and then you have a few hours to hit the museum, which is fantastic. And you can hate it because of who's in and who's not, but of it, there's plenty of Pete Rose, there's plenty of Barry Bonds stuff, giant exhibits, just no plaque. So I'm sure, promise it's enjoyable. But for my parent corner story, so Harrison's team goes up there and he only wants to hit a home run.
That's all.
That's his whole summer goal. Because the fences at Cooperstown are 200 and he's used to like 225, 230. Yeah. So they like having home run derbies, he and his friends on the local fields and everything. And so we get to playing and we're blow— we have 5 pool games and we're blowing teams out in 3 days. We have 5 pool games and we mercy rule 4 of the 5 teams. Mm-hmm. But as we're beating these teams, he's not hitting home runs and his buddies are all hitting home runs. Now it's like one of 4 kids who haven't hit a home run. And, you know, he's coming back after we greet the kids after they come out after like a 15-2 win. He's like choking back tears because the other boys are posing with their home runs and the fathers chase the home run balls. And so that everybody could pose. And I was like, hey, get it together. Like, he's getting singles, he's pitching well, he's making plays in the field. Like, come on, what are you— what are you doing? So, hey, you're a winning player.
Your WAR is good.
Yeah, exactly. But the only negatives are hitting the home run becomes a priority. And also these collectible pins. So they trade these pins with other teams. Everybody has a pin represented for their teams and they trade with everybody else's teams in the, the barracks. And the Jalen Brunson pin, he's one of the few, he has no negotiating skills. So no New York aggression in the kid. So he ironically can't get ahold of this Jalen Brunson pin. So no Jalen Brunson pin hasn't hit a home run. So fast forward, we win all 5 pool games. We're ranked 6th out of 102 teams. I'm like, oh man, we could really make a run here. Wow. We win the round of 32 game by 10 runs. Round of 16, we're up 5-1 in the last inning. We made 4 errors over 3 days. We make 5 errors in the last inning. Oh. And they tie it up. And Harrison's one of the worst one. He boots like a hard hit ball to third just to start the rally. And everyone's devastated. Like, I want to go fricking hide behind the Pee Wee Reese exhibit and never come out.
So I don't, so it's the bottom of the inning, there's 2 out and a kid gets a single and they pinch run Harrison. He is one of the faster kids on the team. I'm like, okay, this could be, he could inadvertently score the winning run. This could be nice. Whatever. We'll put a, a smile on his face maybe after this whole thing. First pitch comes in, he takes off and I see he doesn't have like a great jump. So, and I'm just watching him like, oh shit, this could be close. He gets the second, he beats the throw by 6 feet. He doesn't overslide the base. The ump calls him out and I am losing my shit. This is the Dez call, the Dez catch all over again. And I'm like, what the, what, what? Are you kidding? I'm like, what are you looking at, ump?
What are you doing?
And I'm like, I'm mad at my coach cuz he's not arguing. And Harrison's got his arms in the air and everyone's like, oh my God, what happened? And I'm like, screw you. I don't even know what I was like in a different dimension. I didn't even know what I was screaming.
You left your body. Yeah.
Yeah. And that was it. And then like after like good 20 Mississippi worth of screaming, one of the fathers elbows me. He's like, I think they're calling batter's interference. And I look at the batter because I hadn't watched. I was just watching the— Oh no. Little Dean is in the catcher's lap. So somehow he like overswung and ended up in the— and that's why the throw didn't get there.
I'm like, Oh no. And meanwhile you've, meanwhile you've said 17 horrible things to them. Oh, I've showed, showed my hand.
Like, like I should be, they should just put me in a white jacket and zip me up. Like, that's ridiculous. Like, so that was insane.
You're the baseball parents we were talking about earlier. It's, it's you.
It's me the whole time. And then we lose by like 8 runs in extra innings. And that was that.
Some, some poor second base sub from Utica who's making $10 a game, just getting berated by Cousin Sal. Nothing.
He's like an Army vet who's doing it for free. Oh, God. So that's it.
So he didn't get the steal. You guys lost, and Harrison didn't get his home run or the Jalen Brunson pin.
No home run, no Jalen Brunson pin, and that's it. So otherwise, fantastic experience.
Wow. Did he come close to a home run?
No, not really. I mean, it's so funny because you end up playing different kind of baseball. It's not like, hey, move the runner over and do this. Like, everyone's just jacking it for the fence. But he got like 5 singles and whatever, but it wasn't good enough.
Sounds like Major League Baseball. That's right. Um, all right, well, I'm sorry I didn't get a home run. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing the U-Sport rankings with me. This is fun. You can—
good. I can't— I want to hear— I got to hear the feedback. I really—
I can't wait. I'm, I'm ready for it. Look, man, sometimes you got to go out on a limb with content and not everybody's gonna like it. Uh, we're gonna be back together August 27th. Thursday we're going to be doing— are we going to do NFC first or AFC first?
Whatever you want, man. We usually do— we do awards too.
And then do we do a thing where we're going to save the awards features to the— because we're doing it a week early this year so we can save stuff for the Sunday before. Um, we usually do the conference that had the Super Bowl champs. So I guess we do—
which one was that? I wasn't paying attention.
Oh, Saturday was the, uh, NFC. Um, but I've appreciated you doing the divisions. With Raheem and Dubundo and, and House and not really tipping your hand this year, which is something I'm doing as well.
It's just setting the table for them. They're doing a great job. Listen to that. We did the AFC East preview. We did the AFC North on Monday and we'll be doing the South on Friday.
So yeah, last year I felt like I did all these pods in August laying out all my opinions for the year. And then when we did our AFC, NFC, everyone kind of knew who listens to the pod, like, oh yeah, he's talked about Denver 4 times. He loves Denver. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm really trying to keep everything under wraps this year because I have some hard opinions on a couple of things. But I mean, I do too. Honestly, write down the lines.
I mean, not because people are such that— I mean, even our Ringer wise guys like really want to talk Week 1 lines. I'm like, guys, I can't do it. I cannot do it.
We're 4 weeks away now. Should we mail each other lines and then have like a point and a half leeway with the line or something.
Maybe we should.
The only one I, I told you, I already saw the Seattle-New England line unfortunately. So I know what that is. Yeah.
Patriots getting 10, right? Yeah. Well, 10, 10 and a half.
Well, it's weird that it's the exact same line as the Super Bowl, which I was not expecting. 'Cause usually there's a bump for the home team. But yeah, we might have to, maybe this weekend we have to mail each other. I, the Hall of Fame game, 7+ million people watched. I know.
And it was the most bet on game more than like any baseball, WNBA. If you can believe that. I lost. I had a teaser and I lost.
You had a teaser and you lost?
There's 32 points. I bet the under on the teaser. Of course you have to bet the under. What are they going to show? And there was like 32 points in the second quarter.
I've been watching, um, enough WNBA to have actual opinions on— oh, when we get to the playoffs. Yeah, really? Yeah, I've been watching. I've, I've actually been getting into it. The league's the best entertainment-wise it's ever been. I'm not talking about—
is that really going to make it to the playoffs? Or is there just going to be—
it might, they might have a walkout before the playoffs, but like the fever beat the shit out of New York last night. And I texted Ruko and he actually said it on the air because Ruko was doing the thing. I was like, this is like watching Nash's Suns. Like, Indiana is like, they're just balls to the wall. Like, every time they get a rebound, even off makes, they're just going. And they have these two great guards. And they're like really good. I don't— I think you can make a real case they can win the title. It's them, Minnesota, or Vegas, I think, are the three. I don't think anybody else. But, um, House's Mystics are getting a little frisky.
Yeah, I had money on the Lynx. I seem to bet them every night when they're favored by 12 on the moneyline parlay. The move with them—
yeah, if you like the Lynx at home, just do the over with the Lynx. But yeah, um, they're playing really well though. I, I think it's going to be a fun playoffs that will of course be screwed up schedule-wise as they try to go against football for some reason. And then I'll end up watching all this and then missing the key game in the finals because I'm watching fucking Cincinnati against Dallas.
A lot of basketball is your number 5.
Unbelievable. By the way, speaking of Dallas, yeah, some Cowboys buzz. Like, I think there's gonna be some smart people who are gonna pick them to win NFC.
Yeah, some dumb people too, probably. But yeah, Knockstar, they're training with the Rams and then at the end they're doing wind sprints and they're like, come on, let's do 'em with us. And the Rams like, nah, we're good. We're better than you. We don't need to do this. I kind of lie. I like the vibe a little bit.
They have some blue chippers. Mm-hmm. Team's pretty good. That'd be amazing. I mean, where's the Super Bowl? It's in LA this year, right? Yeah, it's here. I wonder if the Lakers will celebrate a podcast from there.
We're gonna have to do the last one from there.
You know, we talked about, I think we might actually do our Super Bowl podcast from, from SoFi. Does that make sense? I think they offered it to us. Yeah, we gotta do that. Good times. That'll be it. All right, Sal, great to see you. Thanks for doing this with me. I'll let you know what the feedback is or if I get threatened by any gymnastics parents or anything. Pleasure as always. Good job, you. Can't wait. Good job by you, buddy. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well. Um, don't forget rewatchables. Italian Job's up. About Last Night coming Thursday night. And then, uh, the re-speed on Monday. So, uh, this podcast will come back on Sunday. Stay tuned for that and, uh, enjoy the rest of the week. Must be 21+ in President Select states for Kansas, in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino, or 18+ in President DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Game problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut. Or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope Is Here, visit gamblinghelplineMA.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support in Massachusetts, or call 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York.
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The Ringer’s Bill Simmons reacts to the sale of the Lakers to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and businessman Josh Kushner. Then, Cousin Sal joins the pod to help Bill break down his Youth Sports Parent Rankings and have a quick Parent Corner.
(0:00) Intro
(2:19) Reactions to the Lakers sale
(30:33) Youth Sports Parent Rankings
(01:37:41) Parent Corner
Host: Bill Simmons
Guest: Cousin Sal
Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo
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