It was only last summer when the L.A. Dodgers spoke up against the National Guard occupation in Los Angeles and refused to allow agents into their stadium. Now, Minnesota-based teams, unions, and other companies are “calling for an immediate de-escalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” Considering the state of the U.S., it seems unfeasible to host international sporting events like the World Cup and the L.A. Olympics. The world is taking notice, with international sports leaders calling for a World Cup Boycott.
Pablo Torre joins Jen to discuss the growing uncertainty surrounding America’s ability to welcome international sports fans and players without threat of ICE harassment. In fact, baseball player Jung Hoo Lee was detained at LAX last week.
On a lighter note, Jen and Pablo spend time discussing their bets for Superbowl LX and the state of professional tennis.
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.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre. Pablo, welcome. It’s very appropriate you’re in a white room, since we look out our windows and we see a lot of white around Washington, D.C, so welcome.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, a lot is falling these days.
Jen Rubin
In Minneapolis, we’re seeing an unusually strong response, first from Minneapolis teams, but also, for example, from the entire NBA Players Union, which, doesn’t necessarily speak out on every issue. What do you think has changed, and what do you expect to see from other leagues and other players?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, it’s an important thing to remember that professional athletes, in 2026 at least, are a weathervane, speaking of the weather. They are not the most political group. In America. You know, we’ve been waiting, I have been waiting, at least personally, to see when are there gonna be, loud, explicit comments about the second Trump administration. Remember, 2020, Minneapolis, George Floyd, that summer, the pandemic, sports was really out front in lots of ways.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
And it has been very, very quiet since. Until now. I think that’s fascinating as an indicator, because it’s not Jeffrey Epstein, it’s not Venezuela, it’s not tariffs, it’s not any number of things that we’ve talked about here, which would have more than justified some sort of puncturing of that veil between sports and quote-unquote the real world. But it’s, again, Minneapolis, and it’s, in this case, yeah, another shooting. Another shooting of an innocent American citizen on camera, at the hands of a paramilitary force that wants you, wants everyone to believe that what they’re seeing is not reality. And so… That move by the NBAPA, by the NBA, to also reschedule the Timberwolves as Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Warriors, who has been a very, I would say, a high-integrity voice for a long time about sports and sociological issues. All of this stuff combined, as does Charles Barkley, by the way, on ESPN, acknowledging how horrific all of this stuff is, how untenable all of this stuff is. It indicates that they are responding to a degree of, frankly. Main Street… Extremism, what qualifies as insane behavior by our government that is cut through in ways that are eye-opening.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Pablo. There’s part of me that is deeply disturbed that the outrage didn’t happen when we saw Hispanics pulled off the street and shipped out to CECOT. It didn’t happen when, a serial number of African Americans were gunned down by police. But white victims, sadly, do get a level of attention, and… touch people in a way, because they can’t necessarily relate to people who don’t look and sound like them. That’s a disturbing reality. seems to be part of what’s going on. People can’t look away. Someone who’s a gun owner, someone who’s white says, oh gosh, it could happen to me too.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, look, you don’t need to speak the language of the faculty lounge, speaking about otherization, which is accurate in terms of what you’re saying to make the point. This administration, Stephen Miller especially, has tried to make this a war against the foreign other. A war against the brown and the black invaders, as opposed to the good white American citizens of this country. And it speaks, if nothing else, to just the total lack of control he has over his own paramilitary forces, that they are gunning down some of the worst victims through that political lens you could imagine. I mean, I just want to point this out very, very bluntly. In this case, you have a VA nurse who worked in the ICU, who was reading these last rites and tributes to veterans, who was there with a camera in his hand. exercising a Second Amendment right in a state like Minnesota. In an attempt, in this case, to defend a woman that we could all see on camera.
And there is just something especially cruel about and again, any of these instances of death and deportation and the stripping of civil liberties and constitutional rights are horrific, but there is something especially poetic in this truly dystopian way about a VA nurse being the person that they Seemed to have targeted this time. Absolutely. And, you know, my dad worked at the VA for 30 years. He was a doctor there, and the type of person who works at a VA hospital, it’s particularly egregious that they then try to cast that same person as a domestic terrorist. When they are taking care of the people who actively, defend this country, and these are the people who, through the other side of their mouth, this administration says they care about the most. And so, a white guy doing that job, being this victim, is beyond the pale, as it were, in lots of different ways.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. No one gets rich and famous working for the VA, as I’m sure you know from your family experience. Let me shift gears ever so slightly. We’ve been talking about, potential problems for the World Cup, that is going to be paid partially here. You have a German soccer executive talking now about a boycott. I don’t know whether European and other teams will refuse to come, but one can imagine, en masse, international fans not showing up here. How likely do you think that is now, given the recent events, and wouldn’t they be utterly justified from a personal safety standpoint, let alone from a political standpoint, in saying, you know, I’ll go to Mexico, I’ll go to Canada, but I’m not coming to the United States?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting to see a headline that has since been buried because of what happened in Minneapolis, but it directly relates to this. It’s the fact that the Giants outfielder, Jung-hoo Lee, was detained by the, you know, by the Border Patrol. That is a professional athlete coming back from overseas, in which he is held because there is some dispute now about his paperwork. And so, from a pure, just like, do you think this is possible perspective, we just had a case in which a pro athlete literally was held up at the border, at the airport, and now you have a situation in front of professional sporting events that are causing them to be rescheduled, in which no one seems to be in control.
And from that perspective, there are lots of good reasons why the U.S. should be the host of a World Cup, when you talk about this in a vacuum. The reason the U.S. is, in this case, has to do, of course, with the business relationship between Donald Trump and the head of FIFA. And the fact that they may retain that World Cup, more to the point is a function of the fact that, you know, Donald Trump got this spinning golden trophy for the FIFA Club World Cup, and Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president in question, is somebody who has been catering to him, gave him a peace prize, knowing that all of this was always possible. And so, if you don’t trust… and by the way, soccer fans already had zero trust in FIFA. And so you have the ability to, avoid one institution you distrust, FIFA, partnering with another institution that you actively are watching commit atrocities on the news in the United States government.
Jen Rubin
Yes. And then you have these examples of athletes who are now speaking out and or being detained.
Pablo Torre
It’s just like, what is the… what’s the point of trying to roll the dice with any of that?
Jen Rubin
Exactly, exactly. And, certainly, I would love to see the World Cup here, but sometimes boosterism and, love of attending a sporting event has to take second place, and sometimes the power of world opinion has to be engaged, and that’s part of what sports can do. It can engage Public opinion at a level that mere politics, really can’t. Let’s shift gear to the NFL. We had two games where the outcome was not a surprise, but the closeness of the contest was perhaps, a surprise. Now, in one case, we had a snowmobile event, as one might expect in Denver. New England prevailed, but it was really close. Why was that, and did that surprise you?
Pablo Torre
Look, these games, You know, we’re at this point in the season where anything is possible, and so the Patriots-Broncos game, it did seem like this was a coin flip till the very end. And so, the triumph of the Patriots, it owes to their defense, it owes to the elements, which you said it was a bit of a throwback. We were used to seeing the New England Patriots dominate in the snow, or at the very least, survive in the snow. It’s funny, when you see the recaps for stories like this, the headlines afterwards, they tend to use words like outlast, as opposed to dominate, because that’s how messy this game really was.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Pablo Torre
But Drake May, I mean, the reason they won is that that defense held up against the Broncos offense, which was missing its starting quarterback due to that. And so, you had in Drake May, the Patriots’ young star quarterback, a guy who called his own number, running this bootleg that he apparently didn’t tell his offensive lineman he was going to do on a key third down play in the fourth quarter. to win the game, to get the clock to keep running. And so, again, this individual act that was unplanned ends up being the difference maker in a game where, yeah, by the end, it was… it was always gonna be a mess, it was even messier than we thought.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and an older quarterback. In fact, Kershaw’s childhood friend, one for the older generation, if you can call 3738 the.
Pablo Torre
I wanna, you know, I wanna talk about that, the Matt Stafford part of this, because, in that Rams-Seahawks game, right, to go to the NFC now. So yes, I’ve known Matt Stafford as the Clayton Kershaw associate for so long. And he is the elder statesman at this point. But what happens in that game is the Seahawks have this guy in Sam Darnold, who is the quarterback who the Vikings had last season, and they let go in free agency. And, by the way, the Jets had before that, and he was most famous for saying on a hot mic, captured on a sideline, I’m seeing ghosts out there. And it was looking like his career, he was a bust. He was already done. He was a finished product, get him out of here. And he’s now… taking the Seahawks to the Super Bowl. And so the idea that you have Sam Darnold against New England Patriots, you have a Jets cast off against the Patriots’ new generation, it’s all weird. It’s all weird in ways that are—anybody who’s followed this sport closely, reminding us, again, that in a sport where the ball is oblong, you don’t even know which way it’s gonna bounce, and that’s the whole matchup we have now.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Exactly. And to give the Rams credit, they played really well. It wasn’t merely that, you know, Seattle had its issues. I think the Rams showed that they are really deserved to be one of the top teams, and I think they were really discounted the entire, season, and they were kind of an afterthought, so for them to play as well as they did, and come down, really, to the final seconds, the final minutes, was an impressive achievement for them. So now we come down to the Super Bowl. You know, it’s hard to… against New England, because they’ve been dominant. On the other hand, I’m loath to say that anything is a foregone conclusion. what do you see happening? What do you think is gonna… come about.
Pablo Torre
The last time the Patriots and the Seahawks played, remember, this was a historic game with another historic mistake, in which everybody was saying, as the Seahawks, right at the goal line, you just run the ball with Marshawn Lynch. The great running back. And they decided to be too clever by half. They tried to throw the ball, the ball got intercepted by Malcolm Butler in the end zone, the Patriots defensive back, who runs it the other way, and the Patriots… they win.
And it’s with no, with really, I mean, with no ambiguity, due to one of the worst strategic decisions, it turns out, that there’s ever been in professional sports. And so, once again, even though the cast has changed around this, Brady’s gone, Marshawn’s gone, Russell Wilson is gone, all of that. I think that it’s gonna be close. I can very easily imagine another game coming down to the last play, befitting of a season in which everybody has seemed interchangeable to the point of mediocrity, with moments, though, for rare individual heroism, and I will take the Patriots once again to eke out a victory and, you know… I just can’t wait for them to make me look stupid.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And, you know, we’re now, because the NFL has been around for a while, into a situation where certain franchises have multiple legacy errors. And, you know, this potentially could be the beginning of another one. And really, there are a few teams that we have seen in various generations who have appeared again. Is that simply because of ownership? Is that because of, you know, support from the fans? What do you attribute to the fact that certain franchises decades apart seem to return again and again to the Super Bowl and to success?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, you try to isolate what’s been there the whole time, and what’s so interesting, as you allude, as you allude to, is that we used to say, well, it’s Belichick and Brady. And then Brady left, and won a title in Tampa, and Belichick stayed, and struggled, and then became a subject of my reporting in North Carolina right now.
I would love, by the way, as a side note, just, I would love, like, a picture-in-picture inset camera, just a video feed of Belichick watching the Patriots, because he’s also watching that argument that he was the key to this franchise be flushed down the toilet. And so what remains? What remains is those two guys are gone, and the Patriots make another run to the Super Bowl. And I do think it is owed to the structure and the ownership group that remains. And I have lots of criticisms of Bob Kraft and his various political positions and all of that. But when it comes to what he has set up, which is a system in which you You try and get a really good coach, and Mike Vrabel, the Belichick return replacement has done a fantastic job this season. And you try and find the next great quarterback. you credit the people who were there both times, and that’s a front office that in some big chunks still remains, and that’s an ownership group which has decided to trust the right people. And trusting and delegating to the right people is really, really hard in sports, and that’s why we see it so rarely.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and you’ve talked to us so many times, even on an individual performance basis, trust the process. Eliminate the things you can eliminate and trust the process, whether it’s an individual athlete’s performance or whether it’s an organization. And, you can’t control everything, but what you can control sometimes is really the difference between winning and losing. We are well underway into the Australian Open. Once again, global warming that seems to be taking its toll on sports. We now have heat delays. For Australia. They might want to consider moving it from what is the depth of their summer, to perhaps another month. It seems kind of absurd at times. But so far, not very many upsets. People are playing, pretty much according to form. Do you have, any sense that, you know, perhaps we’ve settled into maybe a time of more predictability in professional tennis? More so on men’s… the men’s side than on the women’s side, but it seems like, once again, quality rising to the top.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, look, Carlos Alcaraz, I was paying attention to him, of course, because him and Jannick Sinner, as we say, both the young stars atop the sport, it seems like the most difficulty Alcaraz has had is, in his choice, in terms of… I’m reading this headline now, his choice of how to react to multiple marriage proposals from the smitten crowd during Australian Open match. That is adversity for him now. Too many people want his hand in marriage. And I say that just because that’s what it’s like to be a charmed 20-something star.
And so, yeah, I think you’re right. You know, I saw that Jannick Sinner, he had to take off, like, the biometric device that he was wearing on the court. That was another headline that came up. All of it feels like the sort of stuff… I mean, it’s… I think about this all the time in terms of just, like, the wider world, and then sports. There are peacetime problems, and there are wartime problems.
Jen Rubin
Yes, yes. Tennis is dealing with Alcaraz and Sinner with some real peacetime problem.
Pablo Torre
That’s right. I mean, it’s reliability to the point of comfort.
Jen Rubin
But I do take issue with his color choices. We’ve gone from purple to neon yellow… I don’t know. But, who am I to question the, the public, persona and the salesmanship of political, and professional athletes? It works for him, I suppose.
On the women’s side, it’s not… Sabalenka has been moving through the field. Goff has been playing well, but not, you know, perhaps at her peak. The biggest surprise was, Naomi Osaka, who always seems one tick away from kind of pulling it all together. And that’s kind of been the story of her career, sadly. She seemed to have been playing very well, and then she was out. And… But I guess the problem with tennis, the problem with a lot of sports, golf being the exception, is you got a narrow window. And if you have too many bumps, too many injuries in that window, the… Opportunity for greatness kind of disappears.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, Naomi Osaka’s 28, and she is the counterexample to the peacetime problem. She is constantly fighting battles, in this case, against her own body. I mean, it’s been the mind, it’s been the body, in this case, it’s the left. abdominal. And so, her pulling out, you know, before, just hours before a third round match. you know, there was once a time when I saw a headline like, Osaka Withdraws Hours Before Match, and I was… surprised. Now, it feels like a matter of time until the next thing derails her. And yeah, 28 can be ancient in a cruel sport like tennis, which I know you’re an enormous tennis fan. Yes. You run marathons, and you also have a boxing dynamic, where you’re, like, taking body blows, and you’re trying to throw punches across the court in crazy weather conditions sometimes, with your muscles and all of that being strained in ways that I think non-tennis players underestimate. It’s insanely grueling, and insanely physical. And so, it’s not that Osaka is a wimp, it’s merely that the toll collectively clearly is also playing a factor on top of the psychological stuff, which he’s struggled with pretty self-admittedly.
Jen Rubin
And you see those statistics about how many miles they run during the course of a match, and when you’re doing that in… really, on the court, 100-plus degree weather, you realize that this really is, a battle. Well, I think your analogy, is a perfect one. You have peacetime issues, and you have wartime issues. Perhaps the country right now is in wartime issues, the battle for our soul, the battle for our democracy. And I do think, sports can be transformative in this time. I think we can look to sports to bring us together and to make the point, that this is beyond politics.
Pablo Torre
And that point of being beyond politics, that’s where sports is special. And I just say this because last year now, last year I got to spend time with John Carlos and Tommy Smith, who, for 7 seconds of protest at the Mexico City Games in the 60s, the Olympics, are still talked about as these people who made an impact because they raised their fists in the air for 7 seconds. And the thing that I always think about, is the reaction. The reaction to what they did was so… deeply and ferociously cruel at the time, because they were imposing. It was like Tommy Smith and John Carlos were imposing their politics in a place where it was supposed to be, you know, just sports. And that’s the power of it, actually.
The power of it is, you’re putting a reality check in front of people who did not ask for it. It’s a non-political audience that has to see the ways in which the real world have always been inside of sports, but are now being inflamed, because people, again, are trying to use sports to further, in this case, in the case of this administration, a Truly autocratic regime that is beyond any reasonable debate about whether this is normal or reasonable or even legal. And so, in that regard, if and when more sports, more athletes, more coaches, more games are rescheduled. In the case that all of those bodies react to what is happening in front of their eyes, the more people will realize this is something that has gone too far. And they may not like it, but they will have to see it and react to it, and that’s power in a really, really important way in an attention economy that’s very loath to give out that attention.
Jen Rubin
I cannot say it any better than that. Thank you, Pablo. It is always great to talk to you in these moments where sports, politics, humanity collide. So, we will be watching the rest of this week and beyond that. So, great to see you. Stay warm and out of the snow if you can, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, white like snow, white like a padded room, too, sometimes, so… it all makes me feel a little crazy, but I will talk to you next week, Jen.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Take care. Great seeing you. Bye-bye.
