This Friday, the once-dominant American figure skater — and gold medal hopeful — Ilia Malinin delivered a subpar performance at the Winter Olympics. In the end, the global pressure proved to be too much for the 21 year old skater.
In the latest episode of Offsides, Pablo Torre and Jen discuss the psychological stress of being in the limelight.
The two also discuss the latest scandal shaking the MLB Players Association, the phenomenon of ‘tanking’ in the NBA, and the larger crisis of identity in sports.
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out .
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purpose
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Tuesday, because Monday was a holiday, it must be Pablo Torre. Welcome, Pablo.
Pablo Torre
Thanks for having me, as always, Jen. Good to see you.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, good to see you. You know, every time I see you, there is another scandal involving a players’ union. Now it is the MLB, Players Association. What’s going on with the baseball players?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so a lot is happening in Major League Baseball on the labor front. They are heading into a season in which the topic, the biggest picture topic is, will there be a work stoppage, because the CBA, the collective bargaining agreement, is expiring soon, and the head of the MLBPA, the executive director, a former player named Tony Clark, has just resigned. And so, if you’re wondering, that seems, maybe, like, bad timing. It’s worse, actually. So, the MLBPA is tied up in a federal investigation, it’s the Eastern District of New York, and it’s the same federal investigation that tied in the NFLPA, which is the thing that I’ve been investigating now for over a year.
And the NFLPA, in terms of what the accusation is over there, it’s parallel to what MLBPA has been experiencing, because they were both connected, both, actually the unions, the labor organizations running an entity called One Team Partners, and we did a whole episode about One Team Partners and the FBI investigation that resulted, but to give you the very brief premise of what went wrong here is that there are now accusations started by a whistleblower group inside of the MLBPA, actually that union executives were using One Team Partners, which was a entity that allowed players to monetize name, image, and likeness rights. It was a real business worth billions of dollars that they started together.
The accusation was union executives who were on the board of that organization were paying themselves at the expense of the actual constituency. And so this is a corruption scandal, it is ancient in some ways in the world of labor and the world of money, but Tony Clark, being now a figure who has resigned, by the way, months after the counterpart he had at the NFLPA, Lloyd Howell, who we’ve talked about before. That executive director had also resigned in the shadows of this, really, under the pressure of an ongoing federal investigation. It just indicates that things are kind of just getting started, and it’s gonna be a lot more mess to come.
Jen Rubin
It’s just an inherent conflict, aside from whether he was paid or not, to be engaged in something that is helping to monetize at least certain players, name and likeness, you know, value. The PA is supposed to be kind of the floor beneath everybody. This seems to be kind of picking and choosing, which is inherently not really what labor unions do.
Pablo Torre
Well, it’s definitely a concept that challenges the premise of what kind of business a union can get into. I don’t know if there’s any other organization like One Team Partners. I mean, the best offense of it, and in theory, by the way, I think it is very smart, the best offense of it is, hey, video game companies, for instance, they need to license all of our rights collectively as a union to use our names and images. And so that’s a lot of money. Trading card deals. They need to get permission from the NFLPAs, or the MLBPA as an entity. That makes sense. There’s a lot of money in that.
But in terms of what else is this organization doing, and really, I mean, it’s the question, Jen, of if you are Putting this organization under the oversight of people without an appreciation for labor law, and the difference between a union and any old private company. Then you run into all of these conflicts of interest around what you can pay yourself, how do you profit, who you service. These are all relatively uncharted questions in the world of sports and labor law, and so that’s what’s happening right now.
Jen Rubin
Has the PA put forth a defense for this? Have they said, well, this is all out in the open, everybody knows, we’ve disclosed all this? What’s their main defense?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, the NFLPA is an interesting case study, because they denied, denied, denied, and then, over time, it wasn’t just this scandal, but other related, I would say, instances of impropriety, whether it’s strip club expense reports, as ESPN had reported, whether it’s a buried collusion suit that was effectively the most glaring compromise of your actual integrity in recent union sports union memory, which is what I report.
Jen Rubin
Of course.
Pablo Torre
You know, it wasn’t any one thing, it was all of it together. But currently, what the union is saying is, like, look, this is a… no, they have been very, reticent. about taking responsibility for any of this. And currently, if the Department of Justice is examining it, I think the concern for them is it’s kind of a bit late. It’s a bit late to try and spin this. I mean, this has been going on since last year.
Jen Rubin
And, you know, it’s not like they didn’t have another league that they didn’t figure they were coming after them, so it’s really pretty short-sighted in just the PR, realm. Yes. Meanwhile, as we’re going around, leagues, and by the way, there’s more to sports than scandal, but since Pablo reports on this stuff, and one of the few people who does, we take advantage of his expertise. What is going on in the NBA?
Pablo Torre
Oh, so, okay. I was covering the question of tanking, which is to say, losing games as a matter of preference over winning games, since 2015-16. And by the way, it’s ancient, also. I mean, again, as you know, in Major League, well, really, in all sports at this point, there’s a draft! In which the worst teams get the best young players who are cost-controlled, and in the NBA, having one incredible franchise superstar as a rookie in a game in which there are only 5 players on the court for your team, it’s the most impactful, the most important asset.
Even more, you could argue, than in any other sport because of just the math. You can have one guy change everything. So teams will lose games, it’s a matter of preference. In order to get better picks, with the goal of eventually becoming a contender through that. That is the, let’s just say it briefly, the best case for why a team should want to tank. It could be logically worth it. The issue is that it’s always been the rudest sort of thing to signal to your fans. I mean, it’s kind of like… I used to think that, like, the first rule of Tank Club is you don’t talk about Tank Club, because it’s very… it’s inherently insulting.
Jen Rubin
The ethic to sports, the ethic of sports, which is to win, to put out the best effort you can.
Pablo Torre
Yes, and to say those things now, I mean, is to wade into this larger argument in the NBA around, then, how do we punish it? And so, what happened was the Utah Jazz, for instance, they sat their better players in the fourth quarter of a game that was still in doubt, and this got a lot of online chatter going about how offensive this is, and the NBA, which is always reactive as opposed to proactive. And is also, by the way, reacting to the pressure from gambling operators to say.
We need these games to be plausibly competitive and on the level, because people are putting money on the premise that they are. The NBA decided to fine the Utah Jazz, I believe, $500,000 in order to signal that this is no longer allowed. The thing about it is that, yes, you can deal with these cases like a whack-a-mole game, in which you find the jazz here, find the bulls there, whatever it is. The problem is that there is a larger crisis of integrity in pro sports. And the way I think about it, Jen, is that we are kind of in the midst of a post-winning era.
And it just means that whether it’s Lane Kiffin leaving his college football team, Ole Miss, when they’re about to be in the playoff. to go coach LSU for more money, whether it’s the conflict of interest that now attends every gambling scandal in which players are trying to help their friends profit, or themselves make money at the expense of the actual integrity of the game they’re playing in. Whether it’s tanking, in which people do not want to prioritize wins. in the most classic sense, right in front of you, because they’re trying to win the larger game, you create this crisis of integrity and confidence, because fans… I mean, the magic—we say this all the time, I feel like— the whole glory of sports is that it is a place where integrity and competition are sacrosanct. And now all of that feels diluted, unlike… previous eras we’ve seen, and so it’s just, I would say, tanking is one plank of a larger, like whole mess of problems that the NBA is trying to stamp out.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, one solution, at least for this portion of it, and I agree, it’s part of a larger phenomenon, would be to somehow redo the way the draft works. You know, they have gone to kind of a pool of people at the bottom of the rankings. What more could be done to discourage this kind of fun?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, the thing I’ve been talking about for years, and some of my colleagues have, is like, the only way to write this system of broken incentives is to abolish the draft. And, look, and you think about it, right? If you’re a med student coming out of, you know, Harvard Medical School, or Stanford, or wherever, you’re the number one draft pick in med school, you get to—I mean, there are ways to do it in which it’s not simply your employers draft you, and you don’t have any choice as to where you wind up. Like, think about it in any other industry. Like, the rookies, and again, there’s the labor principle here of, like, freedom of choice, and freedom of which is funny, because sports gets to be both deeply capitalistic, but also conveniently socialistic whenever it comes to controlling wages, right?
And that’s the story of the draft. But if you get rid of the draft, then there is no incentive directly tied to how bad your record is, and in its place would emerge something that is otherwise, deeply chaotic, but very interesting to consider, which is absolute free agency, in which you have a number of decisions being concurrently made, in which you are competing with, yeah, in a free market for the labor of highly paid young stars. And so, nobody wants to do that, it’s very extreme. Sort of proposal, but as a logical exercise, if you really care about it, that’s really the only way to disentangle that incentive structure.
Jen Rubin
The problem, the counter-argument would be the rich get richer then. You know, the wealthiest teams will have, you know, just get better and better, and pretty soon you’ll have, you know, 2 or 3 elite teams and everybody else. I suppose there are other ways of dealing with that, changing the salary cap and changing those sorts of rules. But clearly, you gotta get the sense, both in this system And to pick another example, the portal system in college football, that we’re in this intermediary phase, where we haven’t figured out exactly what the new steady state is gonna be. That what we’re doing right now is kind of a bastardization of the old way of doing things in a new world in which players are the star, they have incredible bargaining power. And the union shouldn’t be in the way of that. They should be facilitating that.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, and you raise a couple of good points about just, like, well, if you were to do total free agency, yes, you could do a hard cap, you would rely upon the premise that playing time is still scarce, even though, you know, there’s freedom of choice of employment. But I think what you’re honing in on is there is now a greater understanding from the fans as to how this product is not aligned with their own interests.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
And that is a really big issue in sports. And it’s what the reason I say, like, the first rule of Tank Club is not to talk about Tank Club is that the real solution for so long had been, let’s just pretend it’s not happening. And it would happen, like, here and there, and you would get teams that, by the way, got their number one pick, and their whole franchise changed, whether it’s the Spurs and Tim Duncan, or the Warriors even.
You know, like, and everyone moved on. But the incentives are so clear now, and also, it’s in conjunction also with this larger trend in sports of the data-driven understanding of everything. Where optimization, as a matter of—there once was a code around, like, this is impolite, let’s not do this. And now there’s a more cutthroat, data-driven optimization, given that incentive structure that, frankly, is just less sensitive about, oh, no, the fans care about this, so the league is trying to figure out, I guess you have to step in and do something.
Jen Rubin
That is a great point, because in the past, there was always kind of the myth that some journeymen out of nowhere would turn out to be phenomenal, so that you couldn’t actually rely on the top draft picks to always turn your team around. Now the numbers tell you differently, that they’re the top draft picks, because they are the ones that are going to turn you around. So give up your dreams that the last you know, draft pick, how many Purdies are there, you know, would become the, the leader of, the next winning team.
So, you’re right, it’s taken some of the myth out of this, and some of the—this kind of underdog, philosophy that, you know, the fifth round pick of the, you know, worst team could suddenly be the next Michael Jordan, and we kind of know that’s not happening. So… As we kind of suspected, the Winter Olympics are a little underwhelming. In part because the Americans have not had a great Olympics, and in America, everything is about America. If it’s not America, who cares, right? That’s this jingoism, which is completely antithetical, by the way, to the Olympic spirit, but we’ll put that aside.
We saw the classic case of a young man, again, the quad god, who just had a miserable performance, the kind of night… stuff of nightmares, where you fall multiple times. He was supposed to win the gold medal, you wound up coming in 8th. It is like, you know, the most humiliating kind of experience, because you are alone. The spotlight… literally and figuratively on you, and you kind of blow it. You see this all the time in sports. How do you prepare? Is there a way to prepare to prevent this from happening? Or is it just the yips, you know, that everyone gets now and then?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so I want to quote from his Instagram post, which is a very—he’s 21, you know, the quad god, and he immediately sort of says. Yeah, this is a mental thing. I’ll just read it. He says, quote, On the world’s biggest stage, those who appear the strongest may still be fighting invisible battles on the inside. Even your happiest memories can unobtain it by the noise. Vile online hatred attacks the mind, and fear lures into the darkness, no matter how hard you try to stay sane through the endless, insurmountable pressure. It all builds up as these moments flash before your eyes, resulting in an inevitable crash. And that is a pretty stark description of choking. You know? Of what we talk about often on this show.
And I remember talking to Major League Baseball, which is really one of the foremost clinics that points to the yips, it’s that in golf. You know, in Major League Baseball, you have catchers who forget how to throw back to the pitcher, you have Chuck Knobloch, who’ve it’s how to throw, you have pitchers who’ve done something a zillion times, but their body suddenly betrays them. And I’ve talked to psychiatrists who worked in baseball, about this stuff, and I’m like, so is this medical, clinical, or is this, like, a performance thing? Like, what is… what’s happening here you know?
And what they say is that it’s all one tank. Like, it’s all the same thing. Like, if it’s a medical clinical thing because some tragedy happened in your life and it affects you, it’s still going into the same tank in which you’re trying to be this, like, hyper-fine-tuned, unconsciously calibrated, repetitive machine that can do precise things a zillion times in a row better than anybody else. And so there really is no distinction between, like, was it a bad day at home, and was it a thing that sort of in sports conversation reflects something like a psychological weakness. Like, you crumbled under the pressure.
It’s really hard to disentangle those things, and the only thing that everyone agrees on, it seems, is that, and this is where it does recall some, like, old baseball cliches, like, you should think less. You know? Like, those who are trapped in their mind, and that is so many of us, non-athletes especially, should be able to relate to the greatest athletes some of them on Earth who still struggle with this, but those who are hyperfixated and are consciously thinking about what they’re doing, there is a negative correlation there in terms of how resilient you are to moments of great pressure.
Easier said than done, but we were watching in the Olympics. Yeah, like, we’re… they called it… I remember in, Gosh. It was the Kevin Costa… no, it was Kevin Costner? I forget which baseball movie, because there have been so many of them. For the Love of the Game, I think. It goes, there he goes to the baseball mound, the loneliest place on Earth, on Earth, trying to push the sun into the sky for one last day of summer, right? And it’s just, like, the loneliest place on Earth is a pitcher’s mound. I would contend that watching the Quad God choke in front of the entire Olympic world is right there. It’s really right there. And so, yeah.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and, you know, I thought of the golfers, and the golfers who have had these reputations, and eventually can perhaps overcome them, but the first time back on the ice must be, or on the golf course, must be petrifying. And this is why, I guess, sports psychologists make such a good living, because it is always the effort to remove any weakness, any doubt, but ultimately, this reminds us, sports is a human endeavor. Stuff happens. just because you’re the best doesn’t mean every single time you go out on the ice, you’re going to be the best. And there is something humanizing about it. And we forget, this guy does have one gold medal. He did win a gold medal as part of the team effort, so he’s not exactly a slouch, and presumably he’s going to have a long career ahead of him.
But again, I have to commend him. We’ve talked about this in the tennis area, where people actually have to come and give a speech. At least skaters are spared from having to give the loser a speech in front of the big crowd. But it was a very graceful statement. It was basically an admission of weakness and of just humility. It wasn’t anything that anybody else did. He’s not blaming anyone. And that’s… part of sports, too. But, I will say one thing. In watching some of these sports, particularly with the GoPro cameras, I am certain I will never do some of these sports. I don’t know what is more petrifying Some of the downhill skiing, the bobsled, the luge… I mean, who came up with the luge?
You know, there’s an element of suicidal, terror, or… adrenaline junkiness, that really comes forward in the Winter Olympics. But it, it is that time to say, you know, I can’t even imagine doing it. And there’s… we don’t talk a lot about courage in sports in the sense of physical courage. This is physical courage. This is like race car drivers getting into a 200… 50 mile an hour car, or, you know, something of that caliber. People can get really hard, and we’re reminded of that. So, it’s still an incredible experience to watch these people perform. And that’s why we stick with sports, right? For every scandal, there’s, human tragedy and achievement, and, you know, it’s, a never-ending human experience played out on the world stage.
Pablo Torre
Well, that’s the connective tissue, is that in all of these things we’re talking about, you’re really hitting on the idea that we want sports to be better than we are. We want them to be about integrity, about competition, immune to the self-interest that would lead to corruption, whether it’s a union leadership scandal, or whether it’s a tanking, or gambling, or anything, coaches over, players, sort of, like, power imbalance.
And it’s true, too, when it comes to when you’re watching a figure skater. You want them to be better than you are. And so when they aren’t, it’s this both humanizing, but also, like. kind of disturbing thing of, like, oh, God. It’s kind of… there is… there is, in the Olympics especially, there is a secondhand, like, embarrassment, I feel. Because you know they’re not going home to the mansion in the way that, you know, a pro athlete is, and you’re like, ugh, yeah.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, he’s still a brilliant, young skater and phenomenal to watch, so,here’s hoping he’ll come back in one or more other Olympics. So thank you, as always, Pablo. Good to see you. And as we get towards the end of February, I can almost see those pitchers and catchers. We’re getting closer, we’re getting closer.
Pablo Torre
Yeah. I hear the beeping of the Dodgers Brinks truck backing up. I hear that sound.
Jen Rubin
That is perfect. Well put, well put, my friend. Have a wonderful week. We will be back next week, as always. Take care.
Pablo Torre
Thanks, Jen.
