PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — The rain pounded Royal Portrush right when Scottie Scheffler poured in a birdie putt on his first hole Friday in the British Open. No matter. Nothing stopped the world’s No. 1 player on his way to a seven-under 64 to build a one-shot lead going into the weekend.
Scheffler made eight birdies on another wild afternoon of weather at Royal Portrush, and his 15-foot birdie attempt on the 18th stopped inches short for another.
The result was a one-shot lead over former U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick, who made four straight birdies to start the back nine until he cooled on the home stretch and had to settle for a 66.
The rain was heavy at times but never lasted long. The wind was breezy but never at strength that can cause fits. The scoring was lower, nearly two shots easier than the opening round.
Except for a few chasers, Scheffler made it look like it wasn’t enough.
He was at 10-under 132 as he chases the third leg of the career Grand Slam, having won the PGA Championship by five shots in May.
Brian Harman got the best of the weather — surprising sunshine — and took dead aim in his hunt for another claret jug. Harman played bogey-free for a 64 that left him only two shots behind, along with Li Haotong of China, who had a 67.
Everyone else was five shots behind or more.
That includes Rory McIlroy, who went around Royal Portrush in his native Northern Ireland with plenty of cheers but only a few roars. McIlroy had a 69 but lost a lot of ground because of Scheffler, Fitzpatrick and Harman.
He started the second round just three shots behind. He goes into the weekend seven shots behind the top-ranked player in the world.
Fitzpatrick was at his lowest point just four months ago when he changed his caddie and coach and began pulling himself up. And now he takes that into the weekend against Scheffler.
“He’s going to have the expectation to go out and dominate. He’s an exceptional player. He’s world No. 1, and we’re seeing Tiger-like stuff,” Fitzpatrick said. “I think the pressure is for him to win the golf tournament. For me, obviously I hope I’m going to have some more home support than him, but it’s an exciting position for me to be in given where I was earlier this year.”
Fitzpatrick was rolling along until a pair of short putts he missed, from five feet for par on the 14th and from three feet for birdie on the 17th. Even so, he holed a 25-foot par putt on the final hole and assured him being in the last group at nine-under 133.
Scheffler was sharp from the start. He hit eight of the 14 fairways — compared with three in the opening round — though his misses never left him too badly out of position. But he is seeing the breaks on smoother Portrush greens, and he looks confident as ever.
None of his eight birdies were closer than seven feet. Five of them were in the 10-foot range and then he threw in a 35-foot birdie on the sixth. His lone bogey came on a drive into deep grass on the 11th that kept him from reaching the green.
The statistics led to a shrug.
“Overall, I’m hitting the ball solid,” Scheffler said. “The tournament is only halfway done. I got off to a good start.”
Harman was called the “Butcher of Hoylake” when he won the claret jug at Royal Liverpool two years ago because the British media were fascinated by the Georgia native’s love for hunting. Now it’s about his golf, and it was superb.
Harman played bogey-free, only once having to stress for par as Royal Portrush allowed for some good scoring in weather that again did not live up to its expectation.
Not that anyone was complaining. Temperatures were warm, at least by Irish standards. The breeze was noticeable without being overly punishing.
“They’re very different golf courses, but the golf is similar,” Harman said. “You’ve got to be able to flight your golf ball. You’ve got to know how far everything’s going. Then you can’t get frustrated. You’re going to end up in funny spots where it doesn’t seem fair, and you just have to kind of outlast that stuff.”
The group at five-under 137 included Harris English (70), Harman’s former teammate at Georgia; Tyrrell Hatton of England (69) and Chris Gotterup (65), who wasn’t even planning to be at Royal Portrush until winning the Scottish Open last week.
Also still around is Bryson DeChambeau, who made a 13-shot improvement from the first round with a 65. Still, he was 11 shots behind.
McIlroy wasn’t at his best in the opening round and was pleased to be only three behind. Now he has a real mountain to climb. But at least he’s still playing, unlike in 2019 at Royal Portrush when he shot 79 and then had a terrific rally only to miss the cut by one shot.
“I didn’t have this opportunity six years ago, so to play an extra two days in this atmosphere in front of these crowds, I’m very excited for that,” McIlroy said. “I feel like my game’s definitely good enough to make a run.”
That was before Scheffler began to run away from so many except a small collection of challengers. But this is links golf. And this is the Emerald Isle, where the weather seems to have a mind of its own.
Still, Scheffler has gone 10 tournaments without finishing out of the top 10 and would appear to present a challenge every bit as daunting as Royal Portrush.
ATLANTA — Seattle’s Cal Raleigh won his first Home Run Derby after leading the big leagues in long balls going into the break, defeating Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero 18-15 in the final round Monday night.
The Mariners’ breakout slugger nicknamed “Big Dumper” advanced from the first round on a tiebreaker by less than an inch over the Athletics’ Brent Rooker, then won his semifinal 19-13 over Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz, whose 513-foot first-round drive over Truist Park’s right-center field seats was the longest of the night.
Hitting second in the final round, the 22-year-old Caminero closed within three dingers, took three pitches and hit a liner to left field.
Becoming the first switch-hitter and first catcher to win the title, Raleigh had reached the All-Star break with a major league-leading 38 home runs. He became the second Mariners player to take the title after three-time winner Ken Griffey Jr.
“Usually the guy that’s leading the league in homers doesn’t win the whole thing,” Raleigh said. “That’s as surprising to me as anybody else.”
Raleigh was pitched to by his father, Todd, former coach of Tennessee and Western Carolina. His younger brother, Todd Raleigh Jr., did the catching.
“Just to do it with my family was awesome,” Raleigh said.
Just the second Derby switch-hitter after Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman in 2023, Raleigh hit his first eight left-handed, took a timeout, then hit seven right-handed. Going back to lefty, he then hit two more in the bonus round and stayed lefty for the semifinals and the final.
Caminero beat Minnesota’s Byron Buxton 8-7 in the other semifinal.
Atlanta’s Matt Olson, Washington’s James Wood, the New York Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Rooker were eliminated in the first round of the annual power show.
Cruz and Caminero each hit 21 long balls and Buxton had 20 in the opening round. Raleigh and Rooker had 17 apiece, but Raleigh advanced on the tiebreaker of their longest homer, 470.61 feet to 470.53.
“One little tweak in the system and I’m not even in the next round, so that’s crazy,” Raleigh said.
Cruz’s long drive was the hardest-hit at 118 mph.
The longest derby homer since Statcast started tracking in 2016 was 520 feet by Juan Soto in the mile-high air of Denver’s Coors Field in 2021. Last year, the longest drive at Arlington, Texas, was 473 feet by Atlanta’s Marcell Ozuna.
Wood hit 16 homers, including a 486-foot shot and one that landed on the roof of the Chop House behind the right-field wall. Olson, disappointing his hometown fans, did not go deep on his first nine swings and finished with 15, He also was eliminated in the first round in 2021.
Chisholm hit just three homers, the fewest since the timer format started in 2015.
The historic Griffith Park Pool, built in 1927 and once the largest aquatic facility in Los Angeles, has been dry since 2020. Now, as summer heats up, residents are learning that it won’t be filled again.
Instead, the city is laying plans for a $28-million project to demolish it and build two smaller new pools and a splash pad in its place while reconstructing the two-story pool house next door. City officials say they hope to begin the project in summer 2026 and complete it in January 2028.
But for now, the city’s Recreation and Parks Department website simply lists the pool as “closed until further notice.” A Bureau of Engineering spokesperson said the city has not picked a builder yet.
The Griffith Park Pool, closed in 2020, was still dry on July 1.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
The new plan marks a sharp turn for a site that was once scheduled for reopening in June 2022. In the run-up to that date, the Eastsider news site first reported, city workers found that the pool had a cracked foundation, one too severe to repair.
Recreation and Parks Department spokeswoman Rose Watson said department Assistant General Manager Cathie Santo Domingo and a maintenance team discovered the cracks in the pool. “Every time they would fill it up, it wouldn’t retain the water,” Watson said.
During the closure, neighbors have complained and signed a petition, lamenting that working-class families in Los Feliz, Atwater, Silver Lake and East Hollywood have long depended on that public pool for summer relief.
“I always wondered what was happening with that. I’ve never seen water in it,” said Christine Perez of Los Feliz, who was at a playground near the pool Monday with her 22-month-old son, Miles. “I was literally thinking last week that it would be great if there was a splash pad down here.”
“Kids need a place to go and a place to learn how to swim,” said Marian Dodge, board secretary and past president of the Friends of Griffith Park. She said the group is “actually thrilled that they’re finally going to go ahead and make the necessary repairs. … We have been assured that it is fully funded.”
A city Bureau of Engineering report says the new project will include “demolition and reconstruction,” replacing the old pool with a new competition pool measuring 25 yards by 50 meters (up to 12.5 feet deep) and a “training pool” splash pad that is 25 yards by 25 meters (up to 5 feet deep), along with reconstruction and rehabilitation of the site’s two-story Spanish-style pool house and improvements to changing and shower areas and ADA accessibility.
The new pools are intended to handle year-round use, incorporating electric pool heaters, salt water and UV light water treatment.
Long known as the Municipal Plunge, the pool at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard measures about 225 feet by 48 feet. It was the city’s largest aquatic facility until the arrival of Hansen Dam Recreation Area, built in 1940 in the Lake View Terrace area of the San Fernando Valley.
“You know the L.A. River runs right behind the pool?” said Dodge. “The water level behind the pool is so high, they were unable to concrete the river there.” As a result, when the pool was built, it “was described as a concrete boat floating on top of this sand and mud. It was kind of risky at the beginning, but they did it.”
At one point, the pool’s capacity was put at 562 people.
“They would have canoeing lessons and water parades,” Dodge said.
Now neighbored by tennis courts, a playground, a soccer field and Los Feliz Nursery School, the pool was open until late March of 2020, when the city shut multiple recreation facilities in the early days of the pandemic. It lies within City Council District 4, represented by Nithya Raman.
On May 21, the city Board of Public Works authorized hiring Perkins Eastman to do $2.4 million in architectural design and engineering work on the pools and bathhouse.
The idea of progress on the pool is comforting, Dodge said, given the idle state of the park’s pony rides and merry-go-round, both closed since 2022 for various reasons. The L.A. Zoo, also in Griffith Park, remains open but mired in a legal battle over money between the city and the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn.
In all, the city operates 57 pools (28 seasonal, 26 year-round and three camp pools) and eight splash pads. As of July 2, eight of the pools were closed.
The nearest city-run pools to Griffith Park are Echo Park,Hollywood and Glassell Park. Griffith Park also includes pools at Camp Hollywoodland and Griffith Park Boys Camp.
Moreover, the Fourth of July means we’re in the heart of boating season. There are 4 million recreational boaters in California, according to the state Division of Boating and Waterways. There’s an average of 514 boating accidents a year. And July is the worst month.
I’ve been boating at Tahoe for 55 years, and on some water since I was a teen.
These are my basic rules for safety and enjoyment, at least in a vessel up to about 30 feet. My Tahoe boats mostly have been 22 to 24 feet.
For starters, if Lake Tahoe winds are already blowing at 10 mph and it’s not even noon, be smart. Don’t venture out in a recreational powerboat. The water’s likely to get much choppier in the afternoon.
If you’re out there and see white caps forming, head for shore.
If lots of sailboats show up, you don’t belong on the water with them. Get off.
And another thing: Don’t pay much attention to the manufacturer’s claim of how many people a boat will hold. Boat makers tend to exaggerate. If it says 10 people will fit, figure on maybe eight tops.
Sure, 10 may be able to squeeze aboard, but the extra weight causes the boat to ride deeper in the water and become more vulnerable to taking on water in heavy swells. That can lead to capsizing. And all those passengers squirming around makes driving more difficult because of the constantly changing weight balance.
But most important: Monitor the weather forecasts before you even get near the water.
Lake Tahoe is big and beautiful — 22 miles long and 12 miles wide, at 6,224 feet in the Sierra mountains. It holds enough water to cover all of California by 14 inches. Two-thirds of the lake is in California, one-third in Nevada.
Weather patterns vary. Scary winds and thunderstorms can be at one end of the lake, and calmer water and blue skies at the other.
Even on calm mornings, Lake Tahoe’s weather and boating conditions can turn hazardous quickly.
(Max Whittaker / For The Times)
My wincing at reports of the multi-fatality accident and many other boating mishaps that Saturday afternoon off the south and west shores stem from repeated references to all of it being caused by a sudden, unexpected storm.
The intensity of the storm may have been unexpected — north winds up to 45 mph, producing eight-foot waves. But winds had been forecast by the National Weather Service in the high teens and into the 20s. And that should have been enough warning for boaters: Stay off the water.
The person who made the most sense after the tragedy was Mary Laub, a retired financial analyst who lives in Minden, Nev., over the steep hill from South Lake Tahoe. She and her husband keep a 26-foot Regal cabin cruiser in Tahoe Keys on the south shore. And she habitually watches weather forecasts.
She had planned to go for a cruise that Saturday but dropped the idea after seeing the forecast.
“The afternoon winds pick up at Tahoe. If they’re approaching 10 [mph] before noon, I don’t go out,” she told me. “I saw that forecast and said, ‘No way.’
“If there’s any whisper of wind, I don’t go out. We’ve been caught out there before. I don’t take a chance.”
The people who died were in a practically new 27-foot Chris-Craft Launch, a high-end, gorgeous open-bow boat. It was the vessel’s third time on the water. Ten people were aboard, mostly in their 60s and 70s. They were relatives and lifelong friends, celebrating a woman’s 71st birthday. She was among the fatalities.
They were trying to return from popular Emerald Bay to their west side home in midafternoon when eight-foot swells swamped the boat, deadening the engine and capsizing the vessel off rocky Rubicon Point near D.L. Bliss State Park. They were tossed into the abnormally cold water and presumably drowned, perhaps paralyzed by hypothermia.
A mother and daughter in the party, both wearing life jackets, were rescued by a Washoe County sheriff’s team. Whether the others were wearing life jackets hadn’t been revealed as of this writing.
One four-person crew in a 24-foot open-bow MasterCraft grabbed their life jackets, wisely abandoned the boat and swam to shore. They scampered up rocky cliffs in their bare feet to safety. The boat was practically totaled.
I called meteorologist Dawn Johnson at the National Weather Service in Reno.
She said the forecast for that Saturday afternoon had been for winds up to 20 mph and gusts to “25 or so.”
There also was up to a 25% chance of thunderstorms. “If you have thunderstorms on the lake, make sure you get off the water,” Johnson said. “You have a higher risk of being struck by lightning on open water.”
There were strong winds Friday night, she recalled, but by 11 a.m. Saturday they had dropped to 5 to 10 mph. Then they picked up as forecast.
“We see winds gust at that magnitude multiple times a month, most likely in the afternoon,” she said. “Sustained winds reach 25 to 30 mph.”
But normally they produce waves of only 2 to 4 feet, she added. “We’re trying to figure out exactly what happened.”
Four-foot waves are a hurricane in my book.
And Mother Nature doesn’t care about a boater’s weekend plans.
The dad was on his way to Morocco with his girlfriend and best pal when the pilot’s announcement left him feeling terrified – and it only got worse from there
Ellie Fry Deputy Online Features Editor, Mark O’Brien and Megan Banner
08:00, 29 Jun 2025
Ashton thought he was going to die on the flight(Image: Ashton Small)
A horrified dad has sworn off flying for life after his Ryanair flight was forced into an emergency landing not long after takeoff from Manchester Airport.
On March 16, Ashton Small, 41, from Liverpool, was among the passengers on board the RK 1266 flight destined for Agadir in Morocco.
The plane set off around 4pm but Ashton says they were only about an hour and a half into their journey before the pilot announced they had to divert back to Manchester.
The ordeal when they landed only added to Ashton’s fears, with fire engines racing towards the plane – an image that has left the dad “too traumatised” to even entertain the thought of future flights.
The Ryanair flight had to head back to Manchester after a mere hour and a half in the air(Image: Ashton Small)
Travelling along with his girlfriend Danielle Clark – who was on her first ever flight – and his best pal, Ashton told our sister paper the Liverpool Echo: “I have trauma from being on that flight.”
He vividly described the gut-wrenching minutes the sky, explaining: “We had been in the air for no more than one hour and 30 minutes, the plane just kept turning left then right, left, right, I had started to panic. I was panicking more because I wasn’t sitting next to my partner or friend either.
“The captain then told us we were going to have to land back at Manchester airport. You hear about planes crashing, I thought I was having a near death experience,” reports Dublin Live.
Ashton recounted his terrifying experience during the rough landing, saying: “The landing was horrible… I just wanted to get off. It scared me seeing the fire engines.”
“When we were landing I turned airplane mode off on my phone and rang my mum and dad straight away. I phoned them and said if anything happens I love you both. I told my partner I just wanted to go home.”
Ashton says he’s ‘traumatised’ by the ordeal(Image: Ashton Small)
He was so scared that when they finally hit the ground, he gripped his seat tightly, feeling terrified of the scene unfolding on the runway.
Expressing his disappointment over the whole ordeal, Ashton added: “The pilot or Ryanair didn’t even say sorry to us for the inconvenience. It has put me off going on holiday anymore, it was a terrible experience.
“I thought I was going to die. I have a little boy who is four and the only holiday I will be going on now is driving trips. I don’t trust planes now, I can’t, not after that.”
“You never know what is going to happen. When I got home to my mum and dad they both hugged me and said they don’t want me going on any other planes, I’m a 41-year-old man, but when I phoned them they said they genuinely thought something was going to happen.”
A spokesperson for Ryanair said at the time: “This flight from Manchester to Agadir (Sun, 16 Mar) returned to Manchester shortly after take-off due to a minor technical issue. The aircraft landed normally at Manchester Airport and passengers disembarked.
“To minimise disruption to affected passengers, we quickly arranged for a replacement aircraft to operate this flight, which departed to Agadir at 19:05 local that same day. We sincerely apologise to affected passengers for any inconvenience caused.”
Converse? Where Chuck Taylor retros reside? Sure, Gilgeous-Alexander — known simply as SGA — was a rapidly improving player on a rapidly improving Oklahoma City Thunder team. But him as the face of a fading performance sneaker outfit didn’t compute.
Fast forward to the NBA Finals. Moments after the Thunder’s 103-91 Game 7 victory over the Indiana Pacers, SGA ascended the stage to accept his most valuable player trophy with a golden colorway of his signature shoe hanging from his neck.
Then on Tuesday, SGA doubled down, enjoying the championship parade with “Trophy Gold” Converse SHAI 001s on his feet.
Who would have thought Oklahoma City would become a flash point of foot fashion. And during Paris Fashion Week no less, when big brands from Nike and New Balance to Adidas and Asics introduce new product lines.
Nothing enhances marketing like winning, and SGA is the undisputed NBA victor of the season. He’s the anointed MVP of the regular season as well as the Finals, leading the league in scoring and doing it all with an impish grin and requisite humility.
As creative director of Converse, the shoe fits.
“I’m able to essentially do whatever I want to do with the shoe. How it’s going to play out, the ball is really in my court,” SGA told Boardroom TV in December. “It’s something that I could imagine every athlete would want to ask for, to try and tell their story and show themselves to the world how they want to do it. To have complete control, it’s a blessing.”
But can SGA elevate Converse from the bargain rack? His SHAI 001s aren’t grandpa’s Chuck Taylor All-Stars, those classic shoes of timeless design consisting of a white toe cap over cotton canvas adorned with a distinctive All-Star logo.
Chuck Taylor was a semi-pro basketball player and traveling salesman for the Converse Rubber Shoe Company in the early 1920s when he designed the shoe. By the 1950s nearly everyone on a basketball court wore them, but they declined in popularity by the end of the 1970s before enjoying a comeback as nostalgic casual footwear.
A few years after going through bankruptcy, Converse was swallowed up by Nike in 2003 for $305 million. So, technically, SGA is just another massively paid shill for Nike, standing in line behind Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Selena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo and Rory McIlroy.
But by aligning himself with an all-but-forgotten underdog of a brand, SGA has an opportunity to author a chapter in the signature shoe wars that could rival his already substantial accomplishments on the court.
There is one problem. The Shai 001 won’t be available for sale until the fall. Converse can’t capitalize on OKC and SGA fans wanting to rock the golden “butter” footwear of their new hero, and wanting them NOW.
A limited release, at least, did take place in downtown Oklahoma City for two hours Tuesday before the parade.
Aligning with a current player always involves an element of risk for a shoe company. Converse learned this firsthand in 1997 when it dropped Latrell Sprewell as an endorser and spokesman after the NBA star choked coach P.J. Carlesimo during a Golden State Warriors practice.
And the risk isn’t always about misbehavior. Puma unveiled the Hali 1, its first shoe in collaboration with the Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton on the day this year’s NBA Finals began. Haliburton tore an Achilles tendon in Game 7 and will miss most, if not all, of next season.
So Converse must continue to be quick on its feet to capitalize on its so far fortunate choice of SGA to represent the brand. He’s only 26 and displays leadership and other qualities of a role model in addition to otherworldly hoop skills.
Can Converse become relevant again in the performance space? Can SGA become as linked to the brand as Chuck Taylor? First the shoes must hit the market. One step at a time.
“I wanted to create something new,” SGA told Boardroom TV. “I wanted to bring Converse into my world and have Converse through my lens.”
While military strategists scramble to learn the damage done by U.S. bombs and missiles in Iran, many scholars and Iranian Americans are wondering what this means for the people and architectural treasures of Isfahan.
The Isfahan area, which includes one of the three Iranian nuclear sites that the U.S. targeted Saturday, is also home to one of the country’s most historic cities, full of landmarks from Persia’s years as a regional power in the 17th century.
Isfahan “is thought of as a sort of treasure, like a vestige of a different Iran,” said Jasmin Darznik, who spent part of her childhood in Iran before becoming a novelist and chair of the MFA writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. “I think people have a very special feeling about the place.”
The city’s architecture includes intricately tiled mosques, several stately bridges and a sprawling square that has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. American and Israeli military leaders focus on the nuclear complex 14 miles east of Isfahan and the 2.2 million people in the city, but the list of cultural assets there is also long.
A UNESCO report recently noted that the region’s 17th-century leaders “established colourful tiling as the most salient characteristic of Iranian architecture, and this decorative style reached its zenith in Isfahan.”
Among the landmarks:
Naqsh-e Jahan Square is the second-largest public square in the world, surpassed only by Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
(Kaveh Kazemi / Getty Images)
Naqsh-e Jahan Square, also known as Shah Square and Imam Square, was laid out between 1598 and 1629, its broad central area surrounded by mosques, palaces and the Isfahan Bazaar. The open space is about 1,800 feet long and about 520 feet wide, which appears to make it the second-largest public square in the world, surpassed only by Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The Masjed-e Jāmé, also known as the Jāmé Mosque or Great Mosque of Isfahan, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012. It goes back to the year 841, its grounds showing how Islamic architecture has evolved over 12 centuries. It is the oldest Friday (congregational) mosque in Iran.
The Si-o-Se Pol Bridge, also known as the Bridge of 33 Arches, was begun in 1599 and completed in 1602. Illuminated by night, it harbors tea houses on its lower deck and has served as a gathering spot for generations. At 977 feet long, it is the largest of 11 historic bridges spanning the Zayandeh River.
Khaju Bridge is often billed as the most beautiful bridge in Isfahan.
(Rasoul Shojaei / IRNA / AFP via Getty Images)
Khaju Bridge is younger and shorter than the Si-o-Se Pol Bridge but is often billed as the most beautiful bridge in Isfahan. It was built around 1650 and made of stone and bricks with tile work above its arches. It is about 449 feet long.
As the U.S. stepped into the war between Israel and Iran, U.S. military authorities told the New York Times they targeted Iranian sites in Fordo and Natanz with “bunker-buster” bombs and Isfahan with missiles from a submarine. As of noon Sunday, CNN reported 18 destroyed or damaged structures at the Isfahan nuclear complex outside the city, which was built in 1984 and is thought to employ 3,000 scientists, making it Iran’s largest nuclear research complex.
This satellite image shows the Isfahan nuclear facility in Iran after U.S. strikes.
(Maxar Technologies / Associated Press)
There were no reports of damage or casualties in central Isfahan.
Much of the city goes back to the Safavid dynasty, which lasted unbroken from 1501 to 1722. During the dynasty’s peak years, the Safavids held power over what is now Iran, Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Armenia, along with parts of Georgia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Türkiye and other countries.
The leader during many of those peak years was King Abbas I, also known as Abbas the Great, who assumed power at age 16, ruled from 1587 to 1629, chose Isfahan as his empire’s capital and effectively rerouted the Silk Road to include the city. While Shakespeare was writing plays in England and Caravaggio was painting in Italy, Isfahan’s landmarks were taking shape and, thanks to the Silk Road trade, Persian rugs began showing up in the homes of wealthy Europeans.
Toward the end of his tenure, nervous about succession, Abbas I had one of his sons killed and two blinded. Still, the family dynasty continued for another century. Once the dynasty fell, Isfahan lost its status as Persia’s capital but retained its reputation for beauty.
The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32.
The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis’ accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show’s three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.
That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” which hangs alone in the show’s entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.’s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell.
In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting’s otherwise neutral palette. It’s easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich.
Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas
(Anna Arca)
The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn’t last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn’s back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he’s going to ride it forward.
Perhaps the canvas’ most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace.
Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis’ lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London’s Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis’ unusual exploratory strategies.
Titled “Nobody,” a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915.
Noah Davis, “Nobody,” 2008, house paint on linen
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles)
The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich’s art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.
“Nobody” weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It’s one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.
Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis’ choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker’s often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg’s hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis’ torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip.
That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. (“Nobody” almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — “somebody” — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind “Mary Jane,” a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet’s “The Railway,” is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms.
Noah Davis, “Mary Jane,” 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas
(Kerry McFate)
So is the forest of “The Missing Link 6,” where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis’ intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise.
Art history is threaded throughout Davis’ work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran’s celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout “1975 (8),” where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool.
The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, “The Missing Link 4,” has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise.
For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction.
Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In “1975 (8),” the title’s date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court’s appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled.
Noah Davis, “The Missing Link 4,” 2013, oil on canvas
(Robert Wedemeyer)
The 2013 painting’s composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis’ mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in.
Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist’s metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we’re left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna’s Italian Renaissance painting of a “Dead Christ” or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha.
The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, “Imitation of Life.” The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s.
Not all of Davis’ paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of “Maury” with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art’s messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving.
Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist’s reputation. At any rate it’s just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis’ abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show’s reality is better.
Noah Davis, “Imitation of Jeff Koons,” 2013, mixed media
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
‘Noah Davis’
Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood When: Through Aug. 31. Closed Monday. Info: (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu
EUGENE, Ore. — Buoyed by top performances in the hammer throw, high jump and 400 meters, the Georgia women’s track and field squad distanced itself from the opposition and cruised to its first outdoor national championship in team history.
Georgia lapped the field with 73 points ahead of runners-up USC (47) and third place Texas A&M (43). Fourth-year Bulldogs coach Caryl Smith Gilbert also won national titles at USC in 2018 and 2021.
Samirah Moody won the 100-meter dash and Madison Whyte and Dajaz DeFrand went 2-3 in the 200 to lead USC.
USC placed first in the 4×100 relay with a time of 42.22 seconds.
In the 100, Moody took first with a time of 11.14 seconds while teammates DeFrand and Brianna Selby finished seventh and eighth, respectively. In the 200, Whyte, a sophomore who also anchored the 4×400 team, clocked in at 22.23 while DeFrand, a junior, finished at 22.39.
Olympic gold medalist Aaliyah Butler and Dejanea Oakley of Georgia took the first two spots in the 400 meters with Butler posting a 49.26 and Oakley a 49.65. Butler’s time was the fifth best all-time for a collegian and Oakley was eighth.
The Bulldogs expanded their lead when Elena Kulichenko won the high jump for the second straight year after tying for the title last year. The Odessa, Russia, native won with a jump of 6 feet, 5 inches.
Michelle Smith, a freshman, finished third in the 400 meter hurdles at 55.20 to clinch the team title. Skylynn Townsend took sixth in the triple jump at 44-4¼.
Georgia ended the night by finishing first in the 4×400-meter relay with Butler taking the lead in the final leg with a winning time of 3:23.62. The Trojans posted a third-place finish in the 4×400 relay with a time of 3:26.01. UCLA’s team finished seventh at 3:31.14.
The Bulldogs entered Saturday competition in the lead with 26 points after Stephanie Ratcliffe won the hammer throw on Thursday with a nation-leading distance of 234 feet, 2 inches.
Washington and USC shared the lead earlier Saturday night after Washington’s Sophie O’Sullivan won the 1,500 meters and Moody took the 100, but Georgia got 18 points from Butler and Oakley and never looked back.
Georgia also got points in the javelin with a second-place finish from freshman Manuela Rotundo and a fourth-place finish from Lianna Davidson. Senior Keslie Murrell-Ross finished sixth in the shot put.
OAKMONT, Pa. — Sam Burns only wobbled twice on a soggy Oakmont course Saturday and held his nerve with a great lag from just inside 60 feet on the final hole for a one-under 69, leaving him one round away from a U.S. Open title and no margin for error.
Burns, who has never contended in his 20 previous majors, next takes on the Sunday pressure of golf’s most stringent test alongside Adam Scott, the 44-year-old Australian and the only player among the top 10 with experience winning a major.
Scott, whose lone major was 12 years ago at the Masters, didn’t make a mistake since a soft bogey on the opening hole and looked far younger than his 44 years down the stretch with brilliant iron play and enough putts for a 67, leaving him one shot behind.
This was shaping up to be a wild chase to the finish, with only four players under par. That starts with Burns at four-under 206. He has five PGA Tour titles, the last one more than two years ago. He is coming off a playoff loss last week in the Canadian Open.
J.J. Spaun, who lost in a playoff at The Players Championship in March, kept pace with Burns throughout the back nine until the end, when he couldn’t save par from a bunker and shot 69. He joined Scott a shot behind.
“It seemed like we were kind of back and forth,” Spaun said. “He would take the lead, I would take the lead, I would fall back, whatever. But it was fun. You can’t really play against your opponent; you got to play this course. There’s just so much on demand with every shot.”
The other survivor to par was Viktor Hovland, who has been smiling as much as anyone on a course that has been exasperating to so many all week. Hovland salvaged a bogey from an opening tee shot into the bushes and an exquisite shot off the muddy cart path.
But he hit the pin on the uphill ninth hole for birdie and hit an amazing wedge from the cabbage left of the 17th green for a tap-in birdie. He closed with a bogey from the rain-soaked rough on the 18th for a 70 and was three behind.
“I’m well aware that I’ve got a chance tomorrow, and if I shoot a low round of golf tomorrow then anything can happen,” Hovland said. “But there’s a lot of good players around me. Adam Scott played a brilliant round today, just didn’t really miss a shot. That forces me to play some really good golf tomorrow.”
Carlos Ortiz turned in one of the most remarkable performances by going bogey-free for 30 consecutive holes. The streak ended on the 18th, but the Mexican still had a 67 and was very much in range at even-par 210.
Missing from the mix was Scottie Scheffler, the world’s No. 1 player who had won three of his last four tournaments coming into the U.S. Open. Scheffler never found any momentum, with one critical stretch coming right before the turn.
After holing a 20-foot birdie putt on the sixth, Scheffler saved par after driving into the rough on No. 7 and hitting wedge to 3 feet. But then what looked like a tap-in par on the long par-three eighth turned into a shocking miss.
He wound up with a 70, moving him from a tie for 23rd to just outside the top 10. But he was eight shots behind Burns, his best friend on tour with whom he shares a house at the majors.
“I put myself in this position,” Scheffler said. “It’s not the position I want to be in, but I’ve done a good job of hanging in there and staying in the tournament.”
The best news for this U.S. Open was that it finished the third round without weather getting in the way. Oakmont received an inch of rain from when play ended on Friday evening. The USGA offered to refund tickets to spectators who didn’t want to traipse through the muck.
Divots taken from the fairways looked like pelts, and the greens were noticeably softer and more receptive. There was one spell midway through the round when umbrellas were out and the sun was shining.
Everyone plodded along, trying desperately to avoid rough that hasn’t been cut and greens that never seem to lose their speed.
Burns, a 28-year-old from Louisiana, had the look of someone determined to add his list to young Americans ready to capture a major. He took a most unusual route on the tough third hole with a drive well to the left, over the church pew bunkers and into the adjacent fourth fairway, allowing him to avoid a blind shot.
He picked up birdies with a wedge from the fairway to a back pin on No. 5 and a tee shot to 7 feet on the accessible par-three 13th. Equally important were the three times he saved par from the fairway after getting out of position off the tee
Then came the closing stretch. He clipped a wedge that raced toward a back pin and checked up a foot away on the short par-four 17th. And he caught a break on the 18th when his drive into the rough caught a good lie, a rarity at Oakmont, allowing him to reach the back of the green nearly 60 feet away. He gently rolled the putt down to 4 feet for one last par and the lead.
Experts looked at various factors such as the number of beaches and average hours of sunshine to determine which place in the UK is the best for a leisurely stroll
Brighton is rated as the top place in the UK for walking(Image: Getty Images)
New data has revealed the most walkable seaside town in the UK. The Co-operative Bank experts used Rightmove information to analyse factors such as the number of beaches and average sunshine hours, determining the ultimate UK location for a pleasant stroll. The experts assigned 20 towns and cities a walkability score out of 100, with the top spot achieving a perfect 100, earning it the title of the nation’s most walkable seaside town.
Brighton, home to over 277,000 residents, has been crowned as the country’s most walkable city. The Sussex resort, famous for its iconic Brighton Palace Pier and bustling North Laine shopping district, offers an ideal layout for locals and tourists to explore on foot.
It boasts pedestrian-friendly streets, lined with independent cafes, and a vibrant arts scene, making it perfect for those who enjoy wandering and soaking up all that the city has to offer.
“What is not to like about walking along the Pier, the hustle, bustle and the sound of visitors just enjoying themselves, kids will love it and it also takes their parents back in time to when they were youngsters at the seaside,” one person wrote on TripAdvisor, reports the Express.
Speaking about North Laine, another person said: “This is my favourite place to walk around when I’m in Brighton, as there are so many quirky wee shops and cafés to see.”
Bournemouth nearly clinched the top spot with a score of 97 out of 100, praised for its coastal paths, town centre shopping and stunning cliffside views, all within an easy stroll.
Eastbourne, Ramsgate and Swansea were hot on Bournemouth’s heels, each scoring just one point less. These towns are ideal for leisurely explorations.
Eastbourne is renowned for its expansive promenades and Victorian architecture, offering idyllic seafront walks and treks up to Beachy Head.
Ramsgate combines seaside allure with historical intrigue, featuring its Royal Harbour Marina and a “compact” town centre perfect for pedestrian discovery.
Meanwhile, Swansea boasts a waterfront that stretches from the marina to the beach, adjacent to must-visit museums, markets, and restaurants.
Walking holidays don’t need to involve remote landscapes and hiking boots – there’s one beautiful European city that you’ll want on the radar as it’s been named the most walkable
Rome has been named Europe’s most walkable city(Image: Getty Images)
Europe is full of incredible cities packed with heaps of history, culture and amazing food. However there’s one particular tourist hotspot that’s been hailed as a must-visit for those who love to get their steps in on holiday.
Rome has been declared as Europe’s ‘most walkable city’ by experts at GuruWalk. They explained: “The Eternal City remains a key destination for travellers fascinated by ancient history. The Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baroque squares make Rome an open-air museum that deserves to be explored thoroughly, step by step.”
Of course the Italian capital is already a firm favourite with tourists, attracting millions of visitors every year. The Colosseum is one of its most popular landmarks; the largest amphitheatre ever built, in its heyday it could hold up to 80,000 spectators who came for the gladiators, plays and other entertainment.
Meanwhile you can easily achieve your 10,000 daily steps goal with a stroll along to the iconic Spanish Steps. There are 135 steps and if you can handle it, you’ll be rewarded with unrivalled views of the city.
The Colosseum is a must visit (Image: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images)
Next on the itinerary should be a trip to Trevi Fountain. The 26.3 metre high fountain is the largest Baroque fountain in the world, and an estimated €3000 are thrown in every day (the money is given to charity each year). Legend has it that if you throw one coin over your shoulder it guarantees you’ll return to Rome, throwing in a second will ensure a new romance and, finally, a third coin thrown in will lead to marriage.
Currently the Trevi Fountain is free to visit as it’s a public attraction, but be warned that it can get very crowded especially during the summer months. In fact, local authorities are considering implementing a form of ticketing to try and manage the large numbers of tourists which it attracts.
The Trevi Fountain can get quite busy (Image: Getty Images)
From the fountain, it’s possible to walk across to the Pantheon, one of the city’s best preserved Ancient Roman buildings. The former temple has been in continuous use, and nowadays you can learn plenty about Roman culture and design.
Other must-see sights include Vatican City – home of the Pope – which is host to world-famous artwork including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, as well as the breathtaking St Peter’s Square.
For those who love a dose of culture, then a trip to Castel Sant’Angelo should be on the cards. Once Rome’s tallest building, now it’s a museum that hosts heaps of art, sculptures and Roman artefacts.
Oh, and if you’re one of those people who does think about the Roman Empire almost every day, you’ll need to leave space on the itinerary for a visit to the Roman Forum which plays home to ruins of ancient buildings, monuments, shrines and temples.
Rome wasn’t the only city to impress in the rankings of Europe’s most walkable cities. The top 10 cities were:
CLOVIS, Calif. — The stars close the show and Long Beach Poly’s 4×400-meter relay brought the crowd to its feet with a stunning performance in the final race of the CIF State Track & Field Finals, winning in 3 minutes 8.68 seconds for the second-fastest time ever in the state meet. The top four teams ran sub-3:10, making it the fastest four-lapper ever in the finals on depth.
The Jackrabbits just missed the state meet record of 3:08.42 set in 2010 by a Gardena Serra foursome anchored by Robert Woods, running the fourth-fastest time in California history.
Central East of Fresno was second in 3:09.23, Servite took third in 3:09.46 to clinch the team title with 33 points, L.A. Cathedral took fourth in 3:09.59 and Long Beach Wilson was fifth in 3:10.55.
Sprinters headlined Friday’s preliminaries but it was the distance runners who played leading roles Saturday at Buchanan High School.
Rylee Blade has made a habit of performing her best on the brightest stage and she ran her fastest girls’ 3,200-meter race ever (9:50.51) but had to settle for second when she was passed on the last turn by Hanne Thomsen of Santa Rosa Montgomery, who won in 9:48.98.
Corona Santiago senior Rylee Blade, left, hugs girls’ 3,200-meter champion Hanne Thomsen after a thrilling finish Saturday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
“I knew this would be a kicking race and give [Thomsen] credit, she had a bit more at the end,” said Blade, the Corona Santiago standout who won the state title as a sophomore and was third last year.
In a shocking development, Stanford-bound senior Evan Noonan of Dana Hills, last year’s boys’ 3,200 champion, caught a stomach flu earlier in the afternoon and had to drop out of the race, distraught that he couldn’t defend his title. Woodcrest Christian’s Eyan Turk took advantage of the race favorite’s absence, winning in 8:51.62.
Thomsen was involved in another stretch duel in the girls’ 1,600 versus another Corona Santiago runner Braelyn Combe, who did not realize she won until times were posted on the scoreboard.
Santa Margarita’s Leo Francis wins the boys’ long jump with a leap of 25-00.75 at the CIF state track and field championships at Buchanan High School in Clovis, Calif., on Saturday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
“We were shoulder to shoulder with 100 [meters] to go and pushed each other to the end,” said Combe, who won by five-hundredths of a second in a personal-best of 4:35.64, the second-fastest in the country this year and fifth fastest in state history. “I’ve never been that close to someone at the finish line. I closed my eyes and prayed and when I looked up at the board I burst into tears. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. I’m so happy. My family drove five hours up here to watch.”
Combe, a junior who took second in the 1,600 last year, credits her victory to training with Blade, whom she called “unbelievable.”
“It’s a blessing to have her on my team, she’s the best pacing partner,” said Combe, who capped off her day by anchoring the Sharks’ 4×800-meter relay, which ran 8:49.01 to establish a new state meet record. “It’s a real advantage for me.”
Long Beach Wilson senior Loren Webster wins her second straight CIF state girls’ long jump title with a personal-best leap of 21-00.25 at Buchanan High School in Clovis, Calif., on Saturday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
Looking like an Olympic gymnast, Loren Webster successfully defended her state title in girls’ long jump, achieving a personal-best of 21 feet, 0¼ inch. Transgender athlete AB Hernandez, who beat Webster at the Southern Section Masters Meet and posted the top qualifying mark Friday, finished 3½ inches behind in second.
“I’m glad I was able to win to honor my jump coach who has worked with me since my first year jumping as a sophomore,” the teary-eyed senior said of Carl Hampton, who died of cancer May 24, the day of the Masters Meet. “I PR’d by a couple of inches. I was injured most of the season but I knew what I was capable of and I knew today was the only day that mattered.”
Hernandez went on to win the triple jump and tied for first with Lelani Laruelle of Monte Vista and Jillene Wetteland of Long Beach Poly in the high jump at 5-07.
JJ Harel of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame cleared 6-09 to win the boys high jump after finishing second at the state meet last year.
“I knew I would win but honestly, I’m not happy,” said the Knights’ junior, whose personal-best was 7-0¼ last year. “I was on fire in the lower heights, getting over easily but once it got to seven feet I forgot my form.”
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1.Sherman Oaks Notre Dame’s Aja Johnson celebrates after finishing first in the girls’ shot put on Saturday.2.Sherman Oaks Notre Dame’s JJ Harel won the boys’ high jump title Saturday.(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
Giving Harel a high-five after his win was Notre Dame senior Aja Johnson, who won the girls’ shot put for the second time in three years with a throw of 45-05¾.
“It’s not a PR or anything but at least I won it for my school. … I’m happy about that,” said Johnson, who is going to college at Louisville.
Oaks Christian’s girls repeated as 4×100 champions in 46.08, edging Long Beach Poly (46.18) for the second year in a row. Servite won the boys 4×100 relay in 40.27, one hundredth of a second faster than its preliminary time.
Concord De La Salle junior Jaden Jefferson won the boys’ 100 meters in 10.27, followed by Servite’s Benjamin Harris (10.31), Alemany’s Demare Dezeurn (10.39) and Rancho Cucamonga’s RJ Sermons (10.48). Temecula Valley’s Jack Stadlman won the 400 meters in 46.02 and took second in the 200 meters in 20.82. Sermons, who had to win a run-off Friday to gain the last qualifying spot, finished sixth in the 200 in 21.05.
Long Beach Wilson successfully defended its 4×400 girls relay title.
Servite won the boys state team title, while Clovis North finished second and Santa Margarita placed third.
Long Beach Wilson claimed the girls state team title, Long Beach Poly finished second and Santiago Corona finished third.
Long Beach Wilson junior Wyatt Obando, second right, edges Lucas Alberts of Jesuit to win the boys’ 800 meters Saturday.
Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who longs for the expansion of dirty soda chain Swig so we can feel better equipped to deal with #MomTok drama (IYKYK).
It’s been a week since the second season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” dropped on Hulu, but die-hard reality TV watchers have likely already inhaled all nine episodes with the same unwavering commitment as the cast member trying to make us believe that her husband is related to Ben Affleck. (Spoiler alert: He is not. But we sure hope the actor watches while sipping on a 44-ounce iced coffee.) Taylor Frankie Paul, the self-proclaimed founder of #MomTok, the TikTok infuencer group that unites them, stopped by Guest Spot to talk about the new season of friendship and backstabbing.
Also in this week’s Screen Gab, our resident true-crime expert Lorraine Ali tells you why a docuseries about 1982’s unsolved Tylenol murder case is worth watching, and TV critic Robert Lloyd dives into the pleasures of watching professional surfers chase giant waves. Be sure to also find time to take in Lloyd’s tender tribute to “quintessential Regular Guy” George Wendt, who died this week at age 76; it’s linked below.
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Actor George Wendt, best known for his role as Norm in NBC’s long-running sitcom “Cheers,” holds a glass of beer in a barroom in Los Angeles on June 13, 1983.
Recommendations from the film and TV experts at The Times
Professional big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara in HBO’s “100 Foot Wave.”
(HBO)
“100 Foot Wave” (Max)
The continuing story of big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara, his family and friends becomes a trilogy with the third season of Chris Smith’s great HBO docuseries, crazy to contemplate yet beautiful to behold. Garrett, a maverick who put the Portuguese town of Nazaré on the map for its massive waves, set a record there, surfing a 78-footer — imagine an eight-story office building coming up behind you. But with the spot well-established and many records having been matched, the series has become less about competition than community and compulsion. (A middle-aged adolescent with a seemingly high tolerance for pain, Garrett, despite age and injury, cannot stop surfing.) Back again, with a cast of top big-wave surfers, are charismatic Nicole McNamara, Garrett’s level-headed wife and manager and mother to their three, one might say, “other children,” and her brother C.J. Macias, suffering from surfing PTSD after breaking his arm at Nazaré. The climax of the season is a surfing safari to Cortes Bank, 100 miles off the coast of Southern California, where an undersea island creates huge waves with no land in sight. — Robert Lloyd
A still showing Tylenol pills from the Netflix documentary “Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders.”
(Netflix)
“Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders” (Netflix)
If you’re not ready to switch to Advil, stop reading here. Netflix’s three-part, true-crime docuseries deftly chronicles one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history involving the 1982 murder of seven victims in Chicago who died after ingesting Extra Strength Tylenol tablets laced with cyanide. No one was ever charged with their murders.
Directed by Yotam Guendelman and Ari Pines (“Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”), the series includes interviews with family of the victims, investigators, police and prosecutors who were directly involved in the case. Together their accounts recall the bizarre and terrifying nature of the crimes, the national panic caused by the tainted pills and the stunning lack of scrutiny on the medication’s manufacturers, Johnson & Johnson.
Private citizen James W. Lewis eventually emerged as one of two main suspects in the case, and he served 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to “stop the killing.” But authorities couldn’t pin the murders on Lewis. The documentary features an exclusive interview with Lewis before his death in July 2023 in which he proclaims his innocence yet appears to still revel in the media attention. The series also calls into question the culpability of Johnson & Johnson and the possibility that the poisoned capsules may have come straight from the factory before landing on drugstore shelves, where they were purchased by the unwitting victims. The murders ultimately led to an overhaul on the safety packaging we see on today’s over-the-counter medication.
Also worth your time is “This is the Zodiac Speaking,” Netflix’s riveting 2024 docuseries chronicling a family of siblings who were intimately involved with the top suspect in the still unsolved Zodiac killings of the 1960s and ‘70s. Sleep tight. — Lorraine Ali
Guest spot
A weekly chat with actors, writers, directors and more about what they’re working on — and what they’re watching
Mayci Neeley and Taylor Frankie Paul in “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
(Fred Hayes / Disney)
“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” feels like the new wave of soapy reality TV in the way it builds off social media personas to create ridiculously addictive drama. The Hulu reality series follows the lives of a group “momfluencers” who push against traditional Mormon norms — they’re the breadwinners, some are divorced, many drink, and at least one faced the dilemma of promoting a sex toy brand. Taylor Frankie Paul, the founding member of #MomTok, stopped by Guest Spot to discuss what makes great reality TV versus social media content and the scripted show that reminds her of her life. — Yvonne Villarreal
The women spend a lot of the season saying #MomTok has veered away from what it was initially conceived to be about — women supporting women. How do you think the reality show — this additional layer of sharing your personal life with an audience — has both helped its evolution and threatened its survival?
I think it’s threatened the survival because when you share, you get vulnerable and, unfortunately, when doing so it could eventually be used against you. With that being said, it helps the evolution by doing the same thing — being vulnerable can bring people closer together as well.
What have you learned makes great reality TV and how is that different from what makes great social media content?
What makes great reality TV is sharing as much as you can — both pretty and ugly — so they [followers] can see [the] bigger picture. What makes great social media content is leaving some mystery. It’s ironic that it’s opposite!
Viewers had a strong reaction to how your family engaged with you about your relationship with Dakota, particularly at the family BBQ. What struck you in watching it back?
Watching the scene at my family BBQ made us all cry because my family loves me dearly and the approach was maybe not the best (including myself), but everyone’s emotions were heightened. A lot was happening and all I remember is feeling overwhelming pain. But I do know my family has my best interest [in mind] even if that moment doesn’t show that. I know and that’s all that matters. I don’t like seeing the backlash because they are my village and I love them so much.
I notice that I come off intimidating or harsh, however I’m very soft and forgiving. I typically need to feel safe to show more of that. I feel like I’m always on defense, and I need to give people the benefit of the doubt — not everyone is going to cause pain; in other words, [I need to] open my heart more.
What have you watched recently that you’re recommending to everyone you know?
My current go-to watch is “Tell Me Lies” [Hulu]. I’m not a reality TV girl, ironically. I’m obsessed with this show. It’s so toxic and so good. It’s a lot like my life, so it’s entertaining to watch someone else’s life.
Competing in the same stadium he trains at every day, Antrell Harris sought to defend his home turf Thursday at the City Section Track and Field Championships.
And did he ever.
The Birmingham senior won the boys 100 meters and went on to win the 200 meters about 90 minutes later. Harris won the 100 in 10.92 seconds and took the lead on the backstretch to win the 200 in 21.66, holding off Granada Hills’ Justin Hart by nine hundredths of a second.
“I especially wanted to win the 200 because it’s my best race and I had to prove it,” said Harris, who ran his personal best in that event (21.32) at the Simi Valley Invitational. “My goal for state is to make the second day.”
The boys 400 meters, one of the most anticipated races of the meet, proved to be one of the closest. Hart took the lead around the final turn and held off a late kick by Venice’s Nathan Santa Cruz to prevail by three hundredths of a second in 47.45.
“I had to keep pumping my arms and hold my form the last 50 meters,” Hart said. “I knew it would be a tough race. My goals for state would be 46.6 in the 400 and 21.10 or lower for the 200.”
Carson sprinter Christina Gray defended both of her titles in the 100 and 200 meters.
Carson’s Christina Gray, center, takes the lead in the 200-meter dash at the City Section Track and Field Championships at Birmingham High School on Thursday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
“I was happy how I ran in both races,” the junior said after she finished in 12.07 in the 100 and 24.62 in the 200 while also running anchor on the Colts’ first-place 4×100 relay team. “Negative wind stopped me from getting PRs, especially in the 200 because it’s longer. I like the state meet and I’ve PR’d up there the last two years so hopefully I can do it again.”
GALA senior DeAuna Louis also repeated as champion in both the 100 hurdles (14.87) and 300 hurdles (46.12) after posting the fastest times in preliminaries.
“I’m definitely faster this year … my PR is 14.46 and I was going for the City record in the 100 but came up short,” said Louis, who is headed to Hampton University in Virginia for academics but plans to walk-on in track. “I was seventh in the 300 and 10th in the 100 at state last spring. My goal is to make the finals in both.”
Granada Hills’ Savannah Williams won the girls 400 in 57.22 and North Hollywood’s Ananya Balaraman won the 1,600 meters in 5 minutes 3.75 seconds and later took the lead in the last 40 meters to win the 800 in 2:16.90.
Santee’s Angeles Feliciano won the girls 3,200 in 11:25.75 and Charles Simon won the boys 3,200 in 9:38.77. Carson took the 4×400 girls race in 4:02.77 and Palisades (3:23.98) barely edged Granada Hills (3:24.15) in the boys’ race.
Venice’s Lawrence Kensinger wins the shot put with a throw of 55 feet on Thursday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
Lawrence Kensinger won shot put with a throw of 55 feet on his second attempt. He has high hopes for the state meet in Clovis.
“I quit football to concentrate on shot,” he said. “I love this sport. It’s you versus you. If you make a mistake it’s on you, when you win that’s on you too.”
Kensinger was on the football team in ninth and 10th grade, playing defensive end as a freshman and defensive tackle as a sophomore.
“My goal at state is to make the second day,” added Kensinger, whose best throw was 55-9 at City prelims last year. “Sixty feet for my junior year would be a dream. That’s when you know you’re with the top dogs.”
Marshall’s Oleana Taalman Koch clears the bar at five feet, two inches to win the girls high jump on Thursday.
(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
Birmingham’s Mandell Anthony won the boys long jump with a leap of 21 feet, 9¾ inches and Marshall’s Oleana Taalman Koch cleared 5-2 to win the girls high jump.
Granada Hills swept the team titles, the girls ending Carson’s record streak of nine straight.
Longtime race starter Saul Pacheco was honored for working his 43rd City finals meet. A 1956 graduate of Banning, where he was a half-miler, and a 1961 UCLA graduate, he served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division from 1962-65 and was the track and field and offensive line coach at Carson for 25 years.
Birmingham’s Mandell Anthony wins the high jump on Thursday.
The trail is short but steep, and it smells of sage. A few hundred feet below, I see moms with strollers on a path beside the San Diego River. Above, I see granite cliffs and hear the hollers of unseen climbers.
“Rope!” says one.
“Hey,” says another. “There’s a ram’s horn down here!”
A climber tosses rope near Kwaay Paay Peak.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
This is the Climbers Loop Trail at Kwaay Paay Peak, one of my new favorite spots in the biggest city park that you’ve never heard of: Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.
No, this park is not downtown like its more famous sibling, Balboa Park. But Mission Trails, eight miles northeast of downtown and 15 miles from the beach, is the biggest city-owned park in California. Along with the trickling river and a dam that dates to the early Spanish missionary days, the landscape includes 65 miles of trails on more than 8,000 acres of rugged mountains, hills and valleys.
It looks like a healthy slice of Arizona, and it covers more territory than Balboa Park, L.A.’s Griffith Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and Irvine’s Great Park combined.
Also, it used to be my backyard. Throughout my teen years, my family lived on a cul-de-sac at the base of Cowles Mountain, the highest summit in the park and the city. The chaparral began 40 feet from my back door.
Almost as often as we loitered at the mall and ogled the guitars at American Dream Music, my friends and I wandered the mountain slopes, wading through the sagebrush and nosing around the granite boulders, sidestepping coyote scat, and generally walking that fine line between high jinks and delinquency.
Officially, the park was younger than we were, having been established in 1974. But it contained such deep and obvious history, even the teenage me could appreciate it.
For millennia before the Spanish showed up and built a dam to serve their first Alta California mission, the Kumeyaay lived in these hills.
The Old Mission Dam dates to the early Spanish missionary days.
During World War I, the Army used the area, known as Camp Elliott, for tank and artillery training. During World War II, the Marines did the same, leaving plenty of ordnance behind — including some that exploded in 1983, killing two boys. (Even now, after various cleanup efforts, signs warn that unexploded shells “might still exist.” If you see something suspicious, report it and don’t touch it.)
Once military officials decided they didn’t need the land, local leaders stepped in and began putting together a park in the 1960s and ‘70s. The city added Cowles Mountain in 1974. The visitor center followed in 1995. The Cedar fire of 2003 burned about 2,800 acres, which have long since regrown.
The park’s visitor center includes educational exhibits and a gift shop.
I had a great time brushing up on that history and wandering Mission Trails for two days this spring — my longest spell in those hills since high school. Overnight I slept in a cabin at Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve, about two miles east of the park, where several recycled-water lakes are surrounded by well-kept fishing spots, walking paths, playgrounds and a campground.
Also, I have to note that I was in Mission Trails for more than three hours before I saw any graffiti. I’m not sure that’s doable in Griffith Park.
The Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve, which includes cabins, is two miles from San Diego’s Mission Trails Regional Park.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
It’s unlikely many people outside San Diego County know this place exists. But local hikers and birders turn out in force. Climbers like Kwaay Paay Peak (elevation: 1,194 feet) and mountain bikers, equestrians and anglers have their own favorite park territories. You can camp at Santee Lakes or, on weekends, put up a tent in the park’s Kumeyaay Lake campground.
Kumeyaay Lake.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
Mission Trails has the highest peak in the city (Cowles Mountain at 1,591 feet). It has the compact Kumeyaay Lake and the larger Murray Reservoir (a.k.a. Lake Murray), which has fishing, kayaking and canoeing about three miles south of the park visitor center.
But many would say the park’s Main Street is Father Junipero Serra Trail, a paved path that runs alongside the San Diego River, mountains rising on either side.
Father Junipero Serra Trail runs alongside a stretch of the San Diego River.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
The long, flat Father Junipero Serra Trail is a great, easy hike for beginners.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
“I just started coming in the last few weeks,” hiker Sumeya Sayd, 23, told me one day as she stepped off the Serra Trail. Like me, she had hiked Cowles Mountain as a youth and overlooked the rest of the park.
Now, inspired by a Muslim American Society group chat, Sayd has been hiking the Serra and Climbers Loop trails more often and thinking about the Mission Trails five-peak challenge — five peaks in the park, each over 1,000 feet.
You can walk or pedal on the Serra Trail, which stretches 2.6 miles and connects the park visitor center to the Old Mission Dam. (Ordinarily, there’s a lane open to vehicular traffic, but because of a sewage-line improvement project, cars will be banned until summer of 2028.)
“This is Desert Wishbone-bush,” I overheard Justin Daniel saying one day along the trail. Daniel, who held aloft a purple flower, was leading a group of about 15 people from the California Native Plant Society.
Soon the group moved on to the California Buckwheat and Daniel added that “we have the most native plants in California for one county,” along with “more native bees than you can shake a stick at.”
How urban is this urban park? Not very. No museums, no zoos, no restaurants. Still, its busiest trail gets an estimated 780,000 hikers a year. That’s the route to the top of Cowles Mountain from Navajo Road and Golfcrest Drive.
When I lived in the neighborhood, many people still called Cowles Mountain “S Mountain,” because just about every fall from the 1930s into the 1970s, San Diego State freshmen used lye and white paint to make a big S near the top, 400 feet high and visible for miles.
Now the S is long gone, but through the years I’ve seen foot traffic grow. I’ve hiked it solo, with my daughter and with a friend facing a profound loss. Even though the route to the top from the Golfcrest trailhead is just 1.5 miles, every time it’s a bit more challenging than I expect — 950 feet of elevation gain, irregular steps, crumbling rocks. In the old days, I used to get up and down in 90 minutes. Nowadays, my knees complain and the round trip takes two hours.
Fortunately, the view from the top still hits me like a surprise every time: the hills of Mexico to the south, the coastline to the west, the miles of undeveloped slopes and valleys to the north. In a perfect hiker’s world, maybe there would be no line of utility towers slicing through the Fortuna Mountain portion of Mission Trails and no humming radio towers atop Cowles Mountain. But this is a city park after all. In this vast expanse of nature, that’s easy to forget.
Cowles Mountain is the highest peak in the park.
Where to hike
Mission Trails Regional Park has nearly 65 miles of trails. Here are some to try.
If you’re looking for an easy hike and you’re a newbie, start with the long, flat 2.6-mile Father Junipero Serra Trail. Two other easy routes, well suited to kids, are the Kumeyaay Lake Nature Trail (1 mile around the lake; full of birdsong in the mornings) and the 1.5-mile Visitor Center Loop Trail.
For a longer, mostly flat hike with ample shade, try the park’s Oak Canyon Trail, where a little seasonal waterfall materializes among the rock formations near the far end of the 3.4-mile out-and-back route. That trail has only 240 feet of elevation gain; park rangers call it a “moderate” challenge.
It’s 1.5 miles to the top of Cowles Mountain from the trailhead at Golfcrest Drive and Navajo Road. If you start instead at Big Rock Park in Santee, it’s a 2.5-mile climb to the top. Rangers classify both routes as difficult.
For a stiffer challenge, you can try climbing to the South Fortuna or North Fortuna peaks. (Distances vary, depending on route). Also, there’s the brief, steep Climbers Loop Trail (rated difficult, with 400 feet of altitude gain in a 1-mile round trip).
Down the road, there may be new challenges, because the park is still growing. In the last year, Mission Trails Regional Park Foundation executive director Jennifer Morrissey said, the park has added more than 100 acres through a pair of acquisitions at its northern edges. Eventually the park may also add a safe river-crossing near the visitor center — a possibility rooted in tragedy. In early 2021, 21-year-old trailrunner Max LeNail died in a sudden storm while trying to cross the San Diego River near the visitor center. His family is hoping to build a footbridge in his memory, but for now, the nearest crossing is several miles away.
The Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve includes 10 cabins.
Where to stay
The Kumeyaay Lake Campground (2 Junipero Serra Trail, San Diego; [619] 668-2748) is part of Mission Trails Regional Park. It includes 46 dry/primitive campsites, open Friday and Saturday nightly only. No RV hookups. Rates begin at $26 nightly.
Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve (9310 Fanita Parkway, Santee; [619] 596-3141) includes 290 RV spots, about 12 tent-camping sites and 10 cabins. The RV and tent camping spots rent for $62-$111 nightly. Cabins go for $137-$265. There’s plenty of fishing and boating, but no swimming in the recycled water of the lakes. The preserve has a space set aside for a lakefront restaurant with ample deck, but two concessionaires have closed there since 2021 and 2024. Preserve management has said another restaurant will open soon.
The view from atop Cowles Mountain at Mission Trails Regional Park, San Diego.
Had Clayton Kershaw been healthy, he likely would have been part of the Dodgers’ postseason rotation. He would have given them badly needed innings during their run to a World Series championship. And, in Year 17 of his future Hall of Fame career, he could have ridden off into the sunset, having little else to prove after playing an integral role on two championship teams.
“Yeah, if I was able to be a part of last year’s run and win a World Series and get to go out like that, that would have been really cool,” Kershaw said recently, contemplating what might have been if only he was available to pitch last October. “But I wasn’t. And it was still really fun to be part of. But it made it easier to want to come back, for sure.”
Back again, Kershaw is set to make his season debut for the Dodgers on Saturday after spending the first two months of the campaign recovering from offseason surgeries to address toe and knee injuries that sidelined him for the team’s title-winning trek through the playoffs last year.
Unlike previous offseasons, when the now 37-year-old Kershaw seemed to give retirement more serious thought, the three-time Cy Young Award winner made his mind up quickly last fall. Even before the Dodgers won their second championship in the last five years, he knew he wanted to pitch in 2025. After making just seven starts in 2024 with a 4.50 ERA, and missing the stretch run of the season when his long bothersome toe injury finally became too much, he didn’t want his career to end with him as a spectator, able only to cheer from the dugout as the Dodgers went on to win the World Series without him.
“For me, just getting back out on the mound is a big first step,” Kershaw said, ahead of what will be his first big-league outing since Aug. 30 of last year. “And then it’s the rest of the season, obviously. But just making it through Saturday and getting back out there is what I’ve thought about so far.”
To get to this point, the 18-year veteran had to endure a grueling offseason.
Days after the Dodgers’ World Series parade, Kershaw had two surgical operations: One on his left knee, where he had suffered a torn meniscus; and another on his left foot to address arthritis, a bone spur on his big toe and, most seriously, a ruptured plantar plate.
“If someone asked me, ‘What all did they do to your foot?’ I don’t know if I can answer all the way, but I know it’s not been fun,” Kershaw said, underscoring the complicated nature of a foot surgery, in particular, that he noted “only one or two baseball players” have had before.
“This one was painful,” he added, contrasting it to the relatively straightforward shoulder procedure he had the previous offseason. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is what people talk about when they talk about bad surgeries.’”
The worst part was the recovery, with Kershaw spending the better part of the next two months on crutches or in a walking boot.
“Trying to be on crutches and have four kids, it’s not easy,” he said. “Your offseason is supposed to be like, where you’re around and get to help more. And those first six weeks, I wasn’t much help. So it’s kind of a helpless feeling. And I don’t sit still well in general. So it was a hard process.”
Still, Kershaw’s commitment to come back never wavered. He was into a throwing program by the start of spring training. He began a minor-league rehab stint in the middle of April. And he posted a 2.57 ERA in five rehab starts, feeling he’d “turned the corner” with his foot over the last couple outings.
“Those last few rehab starts, I was more concerned about throwing well and getting guys out than I was [about] how my foot felt or anything like that,” he said. “So I think that was a good sign for me physically. And now, it’s just a process of figuring out how to get guys out consistently again and perform. That’s a much better place to be than seeing if you’re hurt.”
Exactly how Kershaw will fare back in the big leagues is an unknown. During his rehab stint, his fastball sat in the upper-80 mph range, a few ticks down from the already diminished velocity he’d had in recent seasons. He struck out only 16 batters in 21 innings, relying more on command and an ability to induce soft contact to navigate his way through starts.
On the other hand, Kershaw’s arm is as healthy as it’s been in years, now 17 months removed from his 2023 shoulder surgery. Even without eye-popping stuff last year, he proved to be competitive, owning a 3.72 ERA before leaving his Aug. 30 start early when his toe flared up. And simply having him back in the rotation will come as a boon for the Dodgers, who have been shorthanded recently with fellow starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki all nursing shoulder injuries.
“It’s a big shot in the arm,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Clayton has worked really hard to get healthy, and the bar is high for him, you know. He doesn’t want to just come back to be active. He wants to come back and help us win baseball games and be good. And so I know he’s excited to contribute.”
In a break from his typically stoic facade, that excitement was evident from Kershaw all week. Except when reflecting upon the departure of teammate and close friend Austin Barnes, Kershaw was smiling almost everywhere he went around the ballpark in recent days. “Is that unusual?” he deadpanned when a reporter noted the observation Thursday. He also downplayed his pursuit of 3,000 career strikeouts — he is just 32 Ks away from becoming the 20th member of the illustrious statistical club — in favor of amplifying the gratitude he felt about simply pitching in the majors once again.
“I think when you haven’t done something for a long time, and you realize that you miss it — you miss competing, you miss being a part of the team and contributing — there’s a lot of gratitude and gratefulness to get back to that point,” Kershaw said. “I definitely feel that. Now, if I go out there and don’t pitch good, it’s gonna go away real fast. So there’s a performance aspect of it, too. But I think for now, sitting on the other side of it, just super excited and grateful to get to go back out there again.”
When asked if he ever planned on hanging it up, Kershaw then laughed.
“Somebody will tell me to retire at some point, I’m sure,” he said.
But, after finishing last season injured and grinding through a long rehab this winter, that point is not now, not yet.
Eighteen years later, Kershaw still feels he has more to give.
“At the end of the day, you just want to be a contributing factor to the Dodgers,” he said. “You don’t want to just be on the sidelines. So I’m excited to get back to that.”
