The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTSTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N B11

AUTO RACING GOLF

PRO FOOTBALL

When Bryson DeChambeau ar-

rived on the PGA Tour four years

ago as the reigning United States

amateur champion, all anyone

wanted to talk about were his

many eccentricities in the sport.

A physics major at Southern

Methodist, he was barred by rules

officials from using a protractor

during rounds to accurately deter-

mine hole locations, and he would

soak golf balls in Epsom salts to

determine their center of gravity.

DeChambeau signed autographs

backward with his left hand even

though he is right-handed.

“I’m a total nonconformist; for

me, it’s about going down rabbit

holes,” DeChambeau said in a tele-

phone interview Tuesday. “I have

to chase down the most scientif-

ically efficient way to get the golf

ball in the hole.”

This year, DeChambeau, 26, is

roiling the professional golf world

with his gaudiest experiment yet.

In the past eight months, in-

cluding 90 days when he was

bored while isolating during the

coronavirus pandemic, DeCham-

beau threw himself into an ex-

treme weight lifting routine that

added 40 pounds to his physique,

most of it in his upper body.

DeChambeau is now 240

pounds — the world’s top-ranked

player, Rory McIlroy, is listed at

160 — and routinely hitting drives

50 yards past the competition. His

golf ball often travels at speeds ap-

proaching 200 miles an hour, and

he envisions drives regularly fly-

ing 400 yards. Last week, when he

was hitting balls on a tournament

practice range, he was forced to

back up 15 yards because his shots

were sailing over a mammoth net

meant to protect a neighborhood

hundreds of yards away.

And DeChambeau is not done.

He dreams of getting bigger and

swinging harder during the next

off-season.

“If I could get to 260 pounds and

swing it upward of 210 miles an

hour and control the ball, that

would be amazing,” said DeCham-

beau, one of the favorites at the

Travelers Championship, which

begins Thursday at T.P.C. River

Highlands in Cromwell, Conn.

It is a prediction that might put

a fright in his colleagues who are

already gobsmacked by what they

have seen in the two weeks of

tournaments since the PGA Tour

resumed on June 11.

“It was crazy, it was nuts, it’s un-

believable,” McIlroy said, describ-

ing DeChambeau’s tee shots. “He

hit it like 375 into the wind.”

This being golf, where the ob-

ject is to knock a little ball into a

hole roughly four inches wide,

DeChambeau’s prodigious power

has not yet translated to a victory

this year, although he has four top-

five finishes in his last five events.

Accurate putting still remains an

essential skill, and a balky putter

in the final round of the Charles

Schwab Challenge in mid-June

kept him one stroke behind the

eventual winner, Daniel Berger. A

week later, DeChambeau also

blamed a lack of touch on the

greens for finishing tied for eighth

at the RBC Heritage.

But with his superhero build,

and quirky charisma, there is a

sense in the golf community that

DeChambeau, who is ranked 11th

in the world and has won five

times on the PGA Tour, may be re-

making the paradigm of a top golf-

er. Will the sport’s future players

be shaped more like N.F.L.

linebackers? And consequently,

will the next generation of young

golfers adopt heavy weight lifting

regimens to mimic DeCham-

beau’s beefy frame?

Social media has already found

a new nickname for a trending

golfer: #DeChambeauFlex.

In many ways, the link between

golf and modern strength training

owes its genesis to Tiger Woods’s

heyday. Woods added muscle in

relentless weight room sessions

and outworked his contemporar-

ies, helping to create a new recre-

ational genre: golf fitness.

Woods’s body also eventually be-

trayed him, leading to multiple

knee reconstructions and four

back surgeries.

Does a similar fate await

DeChambeau?

“I have a concern; I would look

a little deeper into the safety of his

swing,” said Joey Diovisalvi, who

for two decades has trained scores

of pro golfers — including one of

the PGA Tour’s longest hitters,

Dustin Johnson — in the bi-

omechanics of the sport. “It’s im-

portant to understand what the ef-

fects are. Let’s make sure your

body can handle that.”

Diovisalvi, who operates a golf

training center in Jupiter, Fla.,

said he admired how DeCham-

beau had highlighted athleticism

in golf but acknowledged that he

had recently heard from many

young golfers who wondered if

DeChambeau’s regimen was

worth pursuing.

“Lifting too many weights or

having too much load or stress on

tendons, ligaments or skeletal

structure at an early age is dan-

gerous,” Diovisalvi said. “You

have to remember that Bryson is a

grown man.”

DeChambeau insists he is care-

fully monitoring the demands that

his golf swing imparts on his body

with the aid of fitness specialists.

“We have a protocol that I go

through to ensure that my back

and body are OK,” said DeCham-

beau, who then recalled 2017,

when he was ranked 99th.

“I had debilitating back pain,”

he said. “Three years later, I’m 40

pounds heavier and generating 20

or 25 miles an hour more ball

speed. I’m as strong and as good

as I’ve ever been. Clearly, some-

thing is working.”

In the end, however, DeCham-

beau concedes he is doing some-

thing familiar: chasing down an-

other rabbit hole.

“And if I get bit in that hole,

that’s actually a good thing,” he

said. “I’ll learn from it. Most peo-

ple are afraid of failure. I love fail-

ure because it tells me where to go

next.”

Bryson DeChambeau, who has added 40 pounds and now

weighs 240, routinely hits drives 50 yards past the competition.

SAM GREENWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

That’s Not a Linebacker.

It’s Bryson DeChambeau.

By BILL PENNINGTON

An iron-pumping

player’s latest physics

experiment: himself.

George Preston Marshall, the
original owner of the N.F.L. team
in Washington that was the last
franchise to integrate its roster,
will have his name removed from
the team’s stadium and website.
The decision comes amid pres-
sure on the team to acknowledge
Marshall’s resistance to signing
and drafting African-American
players and his decision in 1933 to
name the team the Redskins,
which some Native Americans
and others consider a racist term.
On Wednesday, Marshall’s
name was removed from the Ring
of Fame inside FedEx Field, the
team’s stadium in Landover, Md.
The team said it would rename the
lower bowl of the venue for Bobby
Mitchell, the franchise’s first Afri-
can-American star player. Earlier
in the week, Marshall was re-
moved from the team’s “history
wall” at its training facility in Ash-
burn, Va., and the team began “de-
leting him from all aspects of our
website,” according to Sean De-
Barbieri, a team spokesman.
The moves come less than a
week after a memorial of Mar-
shall, which had stood in front of
R.F.K. Stadium, the team’s former
home, was removed by a city
agency after being defaced.
Amid nationwide protests
against police brutality and sys-
tematic racism, statues and mon-
uments of figures with racist pasts
are being criticized, re-examined
and sometimes removed. Sports
teams, too, have reassessed their
monuments, logos and honoring
of past owners.
Outside Target Field in Minne-
apolis, home of the Minnesota
Twins, a statue was removed last
week of the team’s former owner
Calvin Griffith, who had publicly
made racist statements about
black people in 1978 after moving
the team there from Washington.
The Texas Rangers, after consid-
eration this week, said they have
no plans to change their name or
sever ties to the law enforcement
agency with the same name, de-
spite its history of violence toward
Hispanic, Native American and
black people.
In recent years, dozens of
teams have dropped names and

logos that referred to Native

Americans, most notably the

Cleveland Indians, which dropped

its Chief Wahoo logo in 2018. This

year’s Super Bowl brought new

scrutiny to the so-called toma-

hawk chop used by the Kansas

City Chiefs to celebrate. The team

said it would work with Native

Americans “to create awareness

and understanding, as well as cel-

ebrate the rich traditions of multi-

ple tribes with a historic connec-

tion to our region.”

The controversy over the Red-

skins’ name is perhaps the most

fraught in American sports, yet

the team’s current owner, Dan

Snyder, has for years resisted

calls to change it, arguing that the

name represents tradition and is a

term of respect. Though some Na-

tive American groups oppose the

name, many fans of the team still

support it.

“We’ll never change the name,”

Snyder told USA Today in 2013.

“It’s that simple. NEVER — you

can use caps.”

In 2014, the Trademark Trial

and Appeal Board, part of the

United States Patent and Trade-

mark Office, stripped the team of

federal protections for six of its

trademarks. The decision was

largely symbolic because the

team could still use its name and

enforce its trademarks, using

common-law rights.

But in 2017, the United States

Supreme Court ruled that the gov-

ernment may not deny a trade-

mark registration for potentially

offensive names. Snyder celebrat-

ed the decision, which centered on

an Asian-American band called

the Slants that had lost its trade-

mark protection.

N.F.L. Commissioner Roger

Goodell, who has said he grew up

rooting for the team, defended

Snyder in the past. An N.F.L.

spokesman did not return a re-

quest for comment on whether the

league still maintains that sup-

port.

But calls for the N.F.L. to re-

move the name have grown in re-

cent weeks amid heightened scru-

tiny of racism in American society.

This month, Goodell, in a mea

culpa, admitted that the league

had not listened to players who

protested social injustice and po-

lice brutality against African-

American people.

A nonprofit group called Illumi-

Native, whose stated goal is to

challenge stereotypes about Na-

tive Nations, has urged Snyder to

change the team’s name. Some po-

litical leaders in Washington have

also pushed for a change in recent

weeks. “I think it’s past time for

the team to deal with what offends

so many people,” Mayor Muriel E.

Bowser of Washington said.

City officials have said that until

the name is changed they will not

agree to the team building a new

stadium and headquarters inside

the city, where land is owned by

the federal government and

leased to the District. Snyder has

been looking to replace FedEx

Field, where the team has played

since 1997.

The removal of Marshall’s

name and image from the team’s

stadium and its website may be a

way to soothe critics pushing for

the team to re-examine its history.

Marshall bought the Boston

Braves in 1932 and renamed the

team the Redskins the following

year. He moved the team to Wash-

ington in 1937 and was the last

franchise owner in the league to

sign a black player, doing so in

1962 only after the federal govern-

ment threatened to revoke the

team’s lease on its stadium. That

change came a decade and a half

after other N.F.L. teams began

signing and drafting black play-

ers.

Despite the fight over the

team’s name, the Redskins remain

one of the most valuable fran-

chises in sports. The team was

worth $3.4 billion last year, up 10

percent from 2018, according to

Forbes, and its value has contin-

ued to rise though it has won only

one playoff game and two division

titles in the past two decades.

Still, sports marketing experts

say that Snyder now has a rare op-

portunity to embrace criticism

while also making money by re-

naming the team, selling new

merchandise and potentially at-

tracting new fans and sponsors.

“The Redskins are on an island

and the glaciers are melting,” said

Paul Swangard, who teaches

sports brand strategy at the Uni-

versity of Oregon. “But there are

only a handful of teams across the

pro sports landscape that find

themselves with a financial op-

portunity, but also the opportunity

to do the right thing. So why not

marry those two?"

Redskins Cling to Name but Erase Former Owner’s

By KEN BELSON

Washington’s George Preston Marshall was the last team owner

in the N.F.L. to sign a black player, not doing so until 1962.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

‘The Redskins are on

an island and the

glaciers are melting.’

Darrell Wallace Jr. said he was
relieved to hear the F.B.I. say he
had not been the target of a hate
crime at Talladega Superspeed-
way last weekend, after a noose
hanging in his garage stall was
found to have been there since at
least last fall.
In a statement on Twitter on
Wednesday, Wallace, known as
Bubba, thanked NASCAR and the
F.B.I. for taking the threat seri-
ously. “We’ll gladly take a little
embarrassment over what the al-
ternatives could have been,” said
Wallace, the sole black driver in
NASCAR’s top series.
The national turmoil over race
and serial injustice has compli-
cated both Wallace’s reaction and
the public’s response to the F.B.I.’s
findings. With the government’s
investigation closed and no
charges filed, Wallace has found
himself all but forced to defend
himself from baseless speculation
that he or his supporters staged
the incident to garner publicity.
While NASCAR characterized
the noose as a pull rope for a ga-
rage door that was “fashioned like
a noose,” some people insisted the
noose was just a rope with a han-
dle, and that Wallace and stock-
car racing executives had overre-
acted. Wallace said on NBC’s “To-
day” show on Wednesday that the
noose was not functional, but that
the sight of it “makes the hair on
the back of your neck stand up.”
The debate over the episode
was hardly deterred by the time-
line of the case, the Justice De-
partment’s conclusions or the his-
tory of a sport that long has bat-
tled racism both inside and out-
side of the garage, including by
fans who proudly flew the Confed-
erate flag at competitions until
Wallace called for NASCAR to ban
it on June 8. NASCAR barred the
battle flag two days later.
Wallace wasn’t the first person
to notice the noose in his garage,
or even the fourth. The accounts
of Wallace and others within
NASCAR indicated that he was at
least the fifth person to be made
aware of the noose after it was
found on Sunday, and that he first
learned about it from Steve
Phelps, NASCAR’s president.
According to racing officials, a
member of Wallace’s crew noticed
the suspicious rope and reported
it to Jerry Baxter, the crew chief
and a fixture of the sport. Baxter
alerted Jay Fabian, a senior
NASCAR official. Ultimately,
Phelps met Wallace at the driver’s
motor home and tearfully told him
what had been found.
F.B.I. agents traveled to Tal-
ladega, less than an hour’s drive

from Birmingham, and began re-

viewing evidence. A crucial clue

was an assertion on Monday

morning by an employee of Wood

Brothers Racing, another

NASCAR team, that he had no-

ticed the tied rope at a race last

fall, long before Wallace had been

assigned to the garage stall for

this week’s Geico 500.

Through a spokeswoman, the

United States attorney for the

Northern District of Alabama, Jay

E. Town, declined to be inter-

viewed on Wednesday. But the

Justice Department said Tuesday

that officials were certain that the

noose had been in the garage

since at least October, and that

“nobody could have known Mr.

Wallace would be assigned to ga-

rage No. 4” that far in advance.

“The 43 team had nothing to do

with this,” Phelps said in a telecon-

ference with reporters, referring

to Wallace’s Richard Petty Motor-

sports team. He said that

NASCAR was still investigating

who might have tied the noose last

year, or perhaps even earlier.

Hate crime hoaxes are extraor-

dinarily rare. Just 11 of more than

7,000 reported hate crimes in 2018

turned out to be deliberately false

reports, according to data com-

piled by the Center for the Study

of Hate and Extremism at Califor-

nia State University, San

Bernardino. But researchers said

that when potential hate crimes,

reported in good faith, are found

not to have been plainly motivated

by bias or malevolence, observers

are often quick to react with skep-

ticism — and sometimes false ar-

guments — particularly online.

“We are now in a world today

where conspiracy theories have

greater currency than facts and

patience,” said Brian Levin, a for-

mer New York City police officer

who is now the director of the San

Bernardino center. “This has be-

come a game of gotcha rather

than an earnest search for truth.”

There was good reason for Wal-

lace and his team to be sensitive to

anything that could be perceived

as racist. His own parents were

concerned for his safety after he

spoke out this month, saying the

Confederate flag was a symbol of

hate, and not heritage. Those

safety concerns were focused on

the reaction of fans in the predom-

inantly white sport, but history

has shown that racism also exists

inside the stock-car circuit.

In early 1999, David Scott, one

of two black crew members in

NASCAR, described in a news re-

port that other crew members of-

ten called him names like Leroy

and Lemont, and also called him

racial slurs.

“I expected that coming here,”

Scott, who drove the motor home

for a top owner, told The Orlando

Sentinel. “I just figure that’s the

way it is.”

That harassment culminated

with an incident in July 1999 at

New Hampshire Motor Speed-

way, according to a lawsuit Scott

filed against NASCAR in 2006.

Two white employees of top

NASCAR drivers showed up at the

door of his motor home, and one

had pulled a pillowcase over his

head to impersonate a Ku Klux

Klan member, the suit said. When

Scott opened the door, the two

men screamed.

One of the men said, “Hey,

Scotty, we wanted to light the

grass on fire so it would give it a

better effect.” About 10 other mo-

tor home drivers witnessed the in-

cident and laughed, the lawsuit

said. Scott feared for his life.

“What happened with Bubba is

bringing back a lot of bad memo-

ries for both of us,” Scott said on

Wednesday, adding that his wife,

Deirdre, worked for NASCAR in

the licensing department until

2003. “We’ve lost a lot of sleep
      over the last few days.”
      The two white men involved in
      the incident were fired, and
      NASCAR reminded teams that it
      had a zero-tolerance policy for
      racism. Scott’s lawsuit in 2006
      claimed that the association had
      not given him a job he had been
      promised. A judge dismissed the
      case in 2008, the same year
      NASCAR settled a lawsuit involv-
      ing the first black woman to work
      as a NASCAR technical official.
      That official, Mauricia Grant,
      sued NASCAR for $225 million for
      racial discrimination, sexual har-
      assment and wrongful termina-
      tion. In her lawsuit, Grant, who
      went by the first name Mo, said
      she endured “virulently racist
      comments” and “ugly racist big-
      otry” by co-workers who called
      her names like “Nappy Headed
      Mo,” “Mohammed” and “Simple-
      ton.” Some fellow officials dis-
      cussed the Ku Klux Klan, she said,
      and it scared her.
      Grant, who didn’t respond to
      messages, once rode in a car with
      another official at Talladega who
      told her to duck. According to
      court documents, he said, “I don’t
      want to start a riot when these
      fans see a black woman in my car.”
      Another official at Talladega, the
      lawsuit said, “jokingly” threat-
      ened to sic the garage’s bomb-
      sniffing dog on Grant because she
      could be perceived as a criminal.
      While Wallace hasn’t directly
      faced similar daily racism within
      NASCAR, he has acknowledged
      that whatever he does or says will
      be placed under a microscope and
      criticized by fans who might not
      want him to be in the sport. While
      enduring the backlash from the
      noose episode, he has had to re-
      mind himself that he can’t please
      everybody.
      “I will always have haters,”
      Wallace said on CNN.

Noose Incident Recalls Episodes of Racism

By JULIET MACUR

and ALAN BLINDER

Bubba Wallace and his crew preparing for the start of the

NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway on Monday.

CHRIS GRAYTHEN/GETTY IMAGES

‘Conspiracy theories

have greater currency

than facts.’

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