Milestones are routine for LeBron James these days. He turned 40 on Monday and the next day became the first player in NBA history to appear in a game in his teens, 20s, 30s and 40s.
Anything left to accomplish? Well, playing alongside not just one, but two of his sons comes to mind after Bryce James committed to Arizona. Bryce, a 6-foot-5 senior shooting guard at Sierra Canyon High in Chatsworth, is rated a three-star prospect by 247 Sports.
LeBron gave a verbal thumbs-up to Bryce’s college choice.
“It was his decision to make, and he went where he felt comfortable,” LeBron said Thursday after the Lakers’ 114-106 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. “Coach [Tommy] Lloyd is a straight shooter. Gave him exactly what they believe [about] him, what they thought about him as a person, as a player. We’re happy to be part of the Bear Down community now.”
Like Bronny, Bryce’s high school stats are modest. He’s averaged 6.3 points and 2.8 rebounds per game in four games as a reserve after returning from an undisclosed injury. During the summer, he averaged 6.9 points and 2.2 rebounds in 14 games playing for LeBron’s AAU program, Strive for Greatness.
Adam Finkelstein, 247 Sports’ director of scouting, assesses Bryce thusly:
“He may not be the dynamic athlete or playmaker some expect at first, but he is a fundamentally sound player with solid perimeter size and a good early skill-set. He possesses clear shooting potential with naturally soft touch, compact release, and the ability to make both threes and pull-ups.”
Evaluators doubt that Bryce would be ready for the NBA after only one season at Arizona, meaning that LeBron would need to play beyond his current Lakers contract, which expires after the 2025-26 season, to take the court with both of his sons.
Two years ago, LeBron admitted that he has thought about being a teammate of both sons, telling Sports Illustrated, “If my mind can stay sharp and fresh and motivated, then the sky’s not even the limit for me. I can go beyond that. But we shall see.”
Savannah James, LeBron’s wife and the mother of their children, referred to the possibility in an October 2023 social media post. At the 1:31-mark of a two-minute video promoting Beats by Dre, Savannah is delivering a pep talk to LeBron and says, “Tell them you aren’t done until you play with your son, then do that, again.” The camera fixes on Bronny, then on Bryce.
LeBron makes no secret of his love of horror movies, and him taking the court too old to compete with two sons who aren’t NBA caliber would elicit shrieks. A lot will depend on Bryce’s development in Tucson. If it takes him, say, three years to become NBA-ready, his father will be pushing 44. Also, Bronny must continue to improve.
Maybe LeBron doing his part is the least of the worries. He certainly doesn’t doubt himself.
“To be honest, if I really wanted to, I could probably play this game at a high level probably for about another — it’s weird that I might say this — but probably about another five to seven years, if I wanted to,” James told reporters last week. “But I’m not going to do that.”
Forcing the father-sons event as a going-away gesture probably wouldn’t be wise. But it doesn’t seem like a notion the James family is willing to let go.
And for now, it’s all just more fuel for LeBron, who it merits mentioning is averaging 23.4 points, 7.7 rebounds and 8.9 assists while playing 35 minutes a game in his 22nd season.
This is some wild stuff happening between the circles. Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels is guarding Steph Curry nose-to-nose more than 40 feet from the basket, no space between them, two guys sharing a shirt. The other eight players on the court might as well be in another galaxy; this dance in the exurbs is its own game. The player who has the ball is somewhere behind McDaniels, far outside his sphere of interest. His mandate appears settled: He will go where Curry goes, and he will turn his attention to the ball if, and only if, he sees it in Curry’s hands.
Curry is doing what he does when this happens. He’s chopping his steps and raising his arms as if he’s fighting through rough surf, trying to pry himself free. He swims his left arm, the one closest to McDaniels, and runs him into a Draymond Green screen. And there it is: a free patch of hardwood, a moment’s peace, a place of his own. He takes a pass and sends it toward the basket, not so much a shot as a redirection, and tosses it in from about 28 feet, the ball settling in the net as if squeezed from a dropper.
This season, it feels as if each Curry basket is a victory over nature. He has always been the focus of everything around him, but never before as he is now, on a flawed Warriors team that is contending with a paradox: determined to use him less than ever at a time when it needs him the most.
“I want to do this for as long as I can,” Curry says. “But the clock’s ticking. We all know that.”
One after another they come at him: McDaniels, Dillon Brooks in Houston, and a young guy in Memphis named Jaylen Wells, who crouched next to Curry before the opening tip six days before Christmas, the top of his head even with Curry’s armpits, and followed him around just like that for the rest of the game. Curry has seen just about everything, but the look on his face indicated this Wells kid — 6 inches taller, 21 pounds heavier and 15 years younger — might have stumbled onto something new. No defender, judging by Curry’s expression, had looked at him as if he were food.
Curry is 16 seasons into this and 36 years on Earth, and they’re still there, one generation seeping into the next, making him fight for every inch. Nobody else, not Luka or Kyrie or Tatum or LeBron, puts up with this much aggravation. There’s pressure from baseline to baseline, that’s a given, with double-teams routinely starting at half court, from a bunch of guys either trying to make their name or keep it. “It’s fatiguing, but I love it,” Curry says. “It’s the game within the game, and you have to find some lightheartedness in it to deal with the pressure.” There are times when he’ll see the second half of that double-team — always taller, always heavier, always younger — storming toward him at half court and laugh to himself. Are we really doing this tonight?
His movement is constant, and they track every twitch and quiver, knowing the dangers of hesitation and indecision. Lose sight of him for a second and risk humiliation. He might start one way and suddenly head the other, his body foreshadowing nothing, his dribbling quick and effortless enough to make the ball an afterthought. Or he might stand just past the 3-point line with the ball and pump-fake — the most infinitesimal movement, the effort involved in its execution masking the effort involved to create it — at precisely the moment you jump forward, convinced this is the one time he will not pump-fake but will instead shoot the ball directly into your outstretched hand. Or he’s going to stand in that same spot while you hold your ground, determined not to fall for it again, only to watch him forgo the pump-fake and flick the ball into the air and through the faraway hoop as if he can read your mind.
“He doesn’t need much space,” Warriors guard Gary Payton II says. “All he needs is a fingernail.”
The theme of the Warriors’ season is the team doing whatever it can to maximize whatever Wardell Stephen Curry II has left. But what’s left of Curry is often obscured by what is left around him. There is no other scorer to fear, no Klay Thompson or Kevin Durant or even the Jordan Poole of the 2022 championship run. He is, in the view of the rest of the NBA, alone. A solo act. Curry does it, or it doesn’t get done.
And when the soloist has a bad night, the show can’t be saved.
Curry is sitting in a folding metal chair outside the Warriors’ locker room at Chase Center during a practice day about a week before Christmas. He has just finished a marathon body-work session he calls “the full car wash.” It is a concession to age and an effort to forestall it: weight work, court work, soft-tissue massage, cold bath, hot bath, more than three hours in all. He runs off the list with a slight hint of embarrassment, as if this level of pampering is someone else’s idea. He doesn’t get these days as often as he’d like, but he says, “At this point, you need one of these days every once in a while.”
It’s another dot on the evolutionary timeline. After he felt as if he got thrown around in the 2016 Finals against the Cavaliers, he dedicated himself to the weight room, transforming himself from a young player who couldn’t fill a tank top to a veteran who could moonlight as a bouncer. Now, he’s looking ahead for a few down days on the schedule so he can have what might be described as an active spa day.
This is Curry’s new phase. When I ask whether the season is 82 one-act plays or one long novel consisting of 82 chapters, he says, “Oh, man — I love that. I feel like now it’s 82 one-act plays where it used to be the other. You have to give so much attention to preparing yourself for every individual game.” Each game forges its own identity; no longer does one bleed into the next.
Two days earlier, the Warriors lost to the Mavericks, and two days later, Curry will be held without a field goal — for the first time in his career when he plays at least 12 minutes — by the crouching Wells in a blowout loss to Memphis. It’s the middle of a confounding stretch in which the Warriors will lose 14 of 20 games in every conceivable way, vaporizing the optimism generated by a 12-3 start. Their season feels like a hangover that hits before the first drink.
Curry sits in the folding chair for close to 45 minutes, barely moving, thoroughly digesting each question before giving a considered answer. The questions he likes the least — pretty much every one that can be perceived as putting him above the team — cause him to scrunch his mouth in a way that causes one of his eyes to nearly close. Eventually, the conversation veers to athletic mortality. He is acutely self-aware, especially for someone of his rank and privilege, and he says, “It’s tough at times. It’s scary at times. I know there are a lot less days ahead than there were before.”
All those long postseason runs, the four NBA titles and six conference championships, the constant battles with the younger, taller, heavier defenders, he admits it has extracted a toll. “The scales have tipped, for sure,” he says. “It’s more of a measured approach now. I feel like I can still get to the same peaks, but is that an every-single-night-type thing? Maybe not, but it’s picking and choosing your spots and trying to manage an 82-game schedule and hopefully get to a playoff series where you’re fresh.”
It has led to this: The Warriors play games in December and January with an eye on April, May, and June, with coach Steve Kerr adamantly refusing to extend Curry’s minutes to win nonvital games. (If Curry remains at his current pace — 31.1 minutes per game — it will be the least he has played in a full regular season.) It’s a tricky game to play, and not without its dangers: The Western Conference is so tightly packed and evenly matched that a bad week can send a team from the No. 5 seed to out of the playoffs. Four or five minutes fewer each game without Curry can easily be the difference between a playoff spot and a play-in spot, or a play-in spot and no spot at all.
“I’ve been doing this for years,” Kerr says. “I took a lot of heat during the pandemic season because I was sticking to my guns and playing Steph 34 minutes a game, giving him about an eight-minute break in each half. And I used a line that became infamous around here when I said, ‘We’re not chasing wins.’ And people were like, ‘Then what the hell are you doing?’ and the answer was, ‘We’re saving Steph. We’re preserving him for his career.’ I probably shouldn’t have said the quiet part out loud, but I’m fine with admitting a big part of my job is not running Steph into the ground.”
But what if, in the end, there’s not enough Steph to go around? At what point does chasing wins become the only way? There is no scorer consistent enough or reliable enough to persuade teams to ease off Curry, and the acquisition of Dennis Schroder has yet to change that. When the Warriors are good, when Curry is conducting the team like an orchestra — knowing the individual sounds of each teammate, and calling on each accordingly — there’s nothing more melodic in sports. But when they’re bad, when they’re leaving their feet with no discernible plan, when they’re throwing outlet passes into the third row, when they’re committing the reverse miracle of turning one turnover into four, it’s nothing more than a protracted screech.
Case in point: At the beginning of the Warriors’ stretch of losing, they lost to a depleted Brooklyn Nets team at home. It was the kind of game the Curry-era Warriors win almost reflexively, and it had that look when they led by 18 before an eight-minute stretch in the third and fourth quarters went so bad it looked almost intentional. The answer to all of the Warriors’ bad shooting and ridiculous passing and jumpy pace sat calmly on the bench, three seats to the left of Kerr, who assiduously avoided even the thought of summoning him.
“I’m not going to do it,” Kerr says. “For me, it’s more like this: We want to put ourselves in position to give him a chance in the playoffs. We did that when we won the title in ’22; we caught lightning in a bottle and the matchups worked our way and Steph does what Steph does. We want to give him that chance again. We want that at-bat.”
Kerr’s methods are not punitive, nor are they selfish. If he were selfish, he would go full Tom Thibodeau and run Curry and Green out there for 40 minutes a game. The soft limit on Curry’s minutes comes from collaboration. “Every day,” Kerr says. “We discuss it every day.” And Curry says, “That’s his job. He saves me from myself a lot. There are times when I’ll push the envelope, and those conversations go one of two ways: either it’s no conversation at all because of his feelings about where we are that night, or there are times when I can sense an opening. When I hear, ‘Tell me how you feel,’ I think we can be a little aggressive here. It’s kind of unspoken. It is frustrating at times when you feel you can play more, but that’s why we’ve been successful. We all feel like we’re Superman every time we go out there.”
The Warriors have remained relevant for nearly every one of Curry’s 16 seasons. Now, however, every game is a referendum on the impermanence of the future. A world with Curry remains fixable. A world with Curry retains possibilities.
“It’s a little scary to think about what comes after this,” Warriors GM Mike Dunleavy, Jr says. “Our philosophy comes from understanding we have a generational player who is still at or near the peak of his powers. And given his time horizon, it’s different than if he was 25. If he was 25, there would always be a next year, but now you have to approach it like there may not be a next year.”
The philosophy is sound in principle, but if this is the final stage of Curry’s remarkable career, have the Warriors done enough to craft a roster good enough to allow him to give them a chance? “This team has the potential to be a championship team, but we’re not there yet,” Kerr says. “We’re competitive every night, and we feel confident in our ability to be competitive every night. Now, whether we can do that for four rounds in the playoffs remains to be seen.” The occasional dissonance on the court is a result of the franchise’s attempt to infuse the team with youth while maintaining the core group of Curry, Green, Thompson and Kevon Looney, thinking they could create a seamless transition from the Curry era to whatever comes next. The “two timelines” concept, which ran aground when the Warriors selected James Wiseman with the No. 2 pick in the 2020 draft, created a reluctance to trade young talent for established stars. The idea was to rebuild on the fly, or rebuild without the pain of rebuilding.
“I think the postmortem on some of the two-timeline stuff is not great,” Curry says. “We picked Wiseman, who’s had a rough go. It’s not his fault, but we had an opportunity when we were at the bottom of the standings and had the No. 2 pick, and picked Wise. We thought there was going to be a way to bridge that gap, and it didn’t work out that way. But to hear the way people talk about the 2022 championship is still fascinating to me. Because the ‘surprise championship'” — here his hands provide the sarcastic air quotes — “was a crowning achievement based on that team we had and what we’d been through since the ’19 Finals.
“So, ‘Did they do enough?’ That’s not for me to answer, but this is a collaboration, and I just want to win, and they know that. Until it’s all said and done, we want to have at least one more Steph Curry and the NBA’s most confounding paradox to speak for. And that’s it. That’s what’s left for me. That’s all of it. I still love to hoop, but I love to win even more. So if we don’t get it done, maybe when it’s all said and done, I’ll be able to answer that question better. Right now, we’re still trying to figure it out.”
The tenets of normative decision theory — the concept of maximizing expected value — mean the Warriors should go all out to make the most of a generational player. That might mean trading only for Schroder — who knows? — but more likely it means making a run at someone with more heft, the second scorer who isn’t on the roster, the Booker to Durant, the Kyrie to Luka, the Lillard to Giannis, the Young Klay to Curry.
The clock ticks. The work continues. He is a young man, his boyish, unlined face known throughout the world, his fortune building every day. He has television shows and commercials, his own shoe brand and a bourbon. (“Nice little heat to it,” he says as if reading from the distiller’s notes. “Not too overpowering, some flavorful notes, some caramel.”) The talk of an end, of any end, is difficult to compute. He is old in just one place: here.
“It’s a very weird thing,” he says. “I go to my kids’ schools, and my wife [Ayesha] and I are the youngest in the parent group. And then you come here and you got young dudes calling you ‘Yes, sir’ now. It’s very strange. I haven’t really settled that yet.”
Imagine for a moment being the best in the world at something. Not arguably the best — that infernal phrase — or one of the best, but objectively the best in the world. Imagine, for the sake of the exercise, you are the best typist in the world: fastest, most accurate, whatever other analytics pertain to the field. (WAR: Words Above Replacement?) And imagine typing is a team game, that part of your fate is determined by the performance of less-accomplished typists. They’re over there pecking slowly, misspelling words, constantly backspacing to correct mistakes, and they’re bringing you down.
How hard would that be? How tempting would it be to push them out of the chair and say, “Here. I’ll do it”?
This is Steph Curry and shooting a basketball. He is the best shooter in the world, by every available statistical measurement. He has made the most 3-pointers, a resounding 24.2% more than second-place James Harden. He has led the league in 3s a record eight times and has the highest free throw percentage (91) in NBA history. He is among the game’s most inventive finishers around the basket, and he possesses a remarkable ability to alter his shot when the situation necessitates. In the final seconds of the Christmas Day loss to the Lakers, he hit a 3 from deep in the right corner with LeBron James closing fast, and he did it by somehow altering his release in midair, shooting from his right ear instead of his chin.
“The things he does on the court are ridiculous,” Warriors forward Trayce Jackson-Davis says. “Stuff nobody ever thought of before. It’s his gravity, man. It’s insane.”
There are years of hard work involved in getting there, and years involved in staying there, but still: How can he do what he does and not wonder how more people can’t do it? Does he ever want to push the bad typists out of their seats (metaphorically, of course) and assume control of the keyboard?
He laughs and looks over my head and toward the Chase Center court, forming the most diplomatic answer in his mind before he allows the words to enter the world. “There are times,” he says, a little ruefully. “There are times you see people with unorthodox form or guys who haven’t gotten better at shooting the ball year after year. So, yeah, you ask yourself those questions. Most of the time you have to understand how to work and what to work on. You take that for granted at this level. But sometimes, yeah, sometimes you want to help, to offer some wisdom or whatnot.”
He doesn’t, though, unless asked. To do otherwise would be presumptuous and possibly arrogant, so Curry is fine with asking himself those questions and leaving it there.
“He probably looks at the rest of us and wonders, ‘Why am I the oddball?'” Payton says. “But it’s a good odd. A very good odd.”
You would not watch Curry play for the first time and call him humble. He is a flagrant but joyous showboater, and watching him perform live in front of his home fans — first in Oakland, now in San Francisco — is to experience thousands of people watching him with a pilgrim’s awe. The place seems to expand and contract like a massive lung with each of his makes and misses.
There are impromptu moves and recurring classics. He made a ridiculous shot against the Nets, got fouled and knocked to the floor, and lay there for a good five seconds doing straight-leg crunches or some secret-menu Pilates move while shooting his index fingers in front of his chest. Particularly important shots initiate the shoulder shimmy, which traditionally takes place with his mouthpiece curving out of his mouth like a fishhook. His signature, of course, has become the “night night” move, for game-clinching shots, when he tucks his hands under his tilted head, mimicking peaceful slumber. On its face, it’s a wildly disrespectful gesture that somehow offends nobody.
That’s the magic of Curry. His excellence feels allowable, his celebrations earned.
“This combination of humility and cockiness at the same time? Players love that,” Kerr says. “How many guys can get away with doing the night night and the shimmy? And the opponents never do anything about it because they respect him so much. After the game, he’s the most compassionate guy. He takes accountability. He’s so poised. He just handles himself beautifully. He’s a family man, he’s an incredible humanitarian. The number of lives he’s impacted, and it’s all genuine. Everyone can tell the authenticity. And because of that combination, everyone sees him and loves him” — here Kerr stops and laughs, throwing up his hands at the audaciousness of all this glorification — “and all I know is this: I don’t know a single person who can say a bad thing about Steph.”
In a recent postgame news conference, Green shared a story about an NBA All-Star who wanted to connect with Curry during the offseason. Once he secured Curry’s number, the unnamed All-Star told Green he wanted to ask Curry a question, and he wondered how he should do it. Green told him, “What do you mean? Just ask him the question.” This odd interaction, Green said, is just one indication of how “guys in the league look at Steph as this mythical superhero.”
Opponents hated Michael Jordan; his excellence was seen as borderline sadistic. LeBron’s is more punishing and incessant and less relatable, even at 40. Curry is treated with a reverence that is rare among competitors and teammates. He can bark at the referees (“It exhausts me,” he says. “One thousand percent more than any defense. You get distracted and waste energy yelling at the refs.”) and he occasionally loses it completely. (“I’ve thrown a mouthpiece or two … or three … or four.”) And yet nobody seems to begrudge him anything.
“The level of adulation is very uncomfortable, honestly, and surreal at the same time,” Curry says. “I was never the dude who was, ‘I want to be the best player.’ Not that I didn’t want that, but to think you could be the best player in the world or have a skill set that is recognized as the best in the world, it never felt real. I love to win, so the competitiveness was always there, and the showmanship and entertainment value of what I bring out there — having fun. I get all that. I’m 6-3 — average human measurements — and out on the court, I’m very approachable and coachable. When you mix that with the levels I’ve been able to reach, it’s very surreal. I don’t think I’ll be able to appreciate it until I’m done playing.”
He plays with such freedom, ebullience and unflappability that it might come as a surprise, as it did to me, to learn that Curry suffers from performance anxiety, that he approaches every game with an unsettled fear of what lies ahead. He does not appear to be suffering from any existential angst as he’s scoring 17 points in the fourth quarter against the Lakers on Christmas Day; he looked equally unaffected hitting eight 3s against France in the Olympic gold medal game; same for the countless times he has tossed his conscience aside and led his team by making shots from previously unimagined distances.
“Oh, for sure I have anxiety,” he says. “A lot of it is baked into the expectations I’ve set and the level I want to play at. It’s your own expectations and awareness of what a good game is. It’s a healthy insecurity of having to prove yourself every single night, which is cool. It keeps you going.”
Asked to explain Curry’s popularity, Payton thinks for a few seconds and then raises an index finger to indicate he has come up with something he likes. “Your favorite athlete’s favorite athlete is Wardell,” he says. “Doesn’t matter what sport, everyone is infatuated with Wardell Curry.”
Midway through the third quarter against Minnesota, Curry drives under the basket and hooks a left-handed pass to Jonathan Kuminga, who catches the ball on the right wing, about 20 feet from the basket. As Curry releases the pass, McDaniels relaxes ever so briefly, just long enough for Curry to sprint along the baseline and position himself for a corner 3.
This has been the Warriors’ offense for more than a decade: the ball moving, Curry zipping everywhere at once, the defense chasing but never catching. Eventually, that fingernail of space is created, and Curry can catch a return pass and loft another 3 through the net. But this time, as has been the case more often than not this season, the ball never finds its way back. Kuminga takes a long 2-pointer, and makes it, and Curry is left in the corner, his hands waist high, ready for a pass that never comes. On its face, a successful possession; for those indoctrinated in the Warrior Way, though, the sight of Curry left open but empty-handed is a lost opportunity.
As Kerr says, they’re not there yet. The burden is there, the burden his teammates put on themselves to make the most of what Curry has left, and the way the burden shifts to him as he tries to justify their loyalty. “I count it as a blessing,” Curry says. “I’ve been playing for 16 years, and to have an expectation that your best self can be championship-worthy? I believe it. I appreciate it.”
They’ll keep coming at him, taller and younger and heavier, sometimes one, sometimes two. When will the body’s ability to enact what the brain is seeing cease to keep up? When will the balance tip all the way over?
“I don’t like wasting the rest of his time,” Payton says. “I’m sure he can go for another five [years], but I don’t know if he wants to do it. I treat every game like, ‘Let’s do this for 30.’ Every game we give away is one he won’t get back.”
They carry each other’s worlds around with them, gathering forces for his last stand. None of them, not even Curry, can account for the unknowable: Will there be enough of him left when they get there?
The 2025 LIV Golf schedule will include 14 tournaments in nine countries, including six in the U.S., and a new location for the season-ending team championship, the circuit announced Tuesday.
LIV Golf revealed the sites and dates for the last four tournaments Tuesday, including a return trip on April 4-6 to Trump National Doral Golf Course outside Miami, which is owned by incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. That’s the week before the Masters, the first major championship of the season.
“Our global calendar continues to expand with a focus on playing the very best golf courses and delivering a unique and memorable experience for fans,” Ross Hallett, LIV Golf’s executive vice president and head of events, said in a statement. “The 2025 slate features courses that have hosted multiple Presidents Cups, the Ryder Cup, and the Solheim Cup, where team golf has shined.
“We have a strong blend of historic venues rich with tradition, and contemporary clubs establishing new traditions of their own, and this season will be another incredible showcase for the LIV Golf League, our teams, and our players.”
The season-ending team championship will be staged Aug. 22-24 at The Cardinal at St. John’s in Plymouth, Michigan, which opened in June 2024.
Ripper GC, led by captain Cameron Smith, is the defending team champion. Spain’s Jon Rahm is the reigning individual champion.
The LIV Golf schedule opens Feb. 6-8 at Riyadh Golf Club in Saudi Arabia, followed by tournaments at The Grange Golf Club in Adelaide, Australia, on Feb. 14-16; Hong Kong Golf Club in Fanling, Hong Kong, on March 7-9; and Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore on March 14-16.
LIV Golf will also have international tournaments at Club De Golf Chapultepec outside Mexico City on April 25-27; Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea in Incheon, Korea, on May 2-4; Real Club Valderrama in Sotogrande, Spain, on July 11-13; and JCB Golf and Country Club in Uttoxeter, England, on July 25-27.
Other stops in the U.S. include Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, the site of last year’s Solheim Cup, on June 6-8. The circuit will return to Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, on June 27-29.
The final two tournaments before the team championship will be played at Bolingbrook Golf Club in Bolingbrook, Illinois, on Aug. 8-10, and The Club at Chatham Hills in Westfield, Indiana, the next week.
It was date night for me and my husband, the first since our daughter was born. When we returned to my mom’s house for the baby — hurriedly, being first-time parents — I heard a strange but familiar voice.
It was that of Raffi Cavoukian, known simply as “Raffi,” who rose to fame in the 1970s with such folksy, reassuring numbers as “Baby Beluga,” “Bananaphone” and “Mr. Sun.” It had been more than 20 years since I had heard any of his songs, though I found they were still etched in my heart, like the words of “Goodnight Moon” or the feel of the tattered old blanket my grandmother knit for me.
In stark contrast to Raffi’s catalog, much modern kids’ music has been criticized as “nauseating,” “terrible” and “enough to drive any loving parent to complete insanity.” It’s a problem for children as well as parents, especially considering the importance of music in early life.
Research suggests music plays a crucial role in reducing infants’ stress and developing the regions of the brain that process speech. Studies also show that music can cultivate sharing, empathy and trust in young children while offering a healthy outlet for them to deal with and express their emotions.
Still, most popular children’s songs today continue to owe a debt to “Baby Shark” — the “trash heap” that cracked the Billboard Top 40 while amassing millions of streams a week in the run-up to the 2016 election. Despite its torturous aspects, the song generated enormous interest and investment, encompassing themed merchandise, a 100-date tour and a show on Nickelodeon.
Viral sensations such as “Baby Shark” come and go, but some songs — and some artists — transcend their eras. Today we all walk around with the equivalent of portable jukeboxes in our hands, able to access virtually every song known to man for ourselves and our children. Our options are endless, yet my husband and I keep returning to Raffi, who has become one of the most played artists in our home.
Born in Egypt in 1948 to survivors of the Armenian genocide, Raffi spent most of his childhood in Toronto, where his family moved when he was 10. Inspired by artists such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, he tried for years to make it as a folk singer, though according to his autobiography, he “hated singing to inebriated audiences who couldn’t care less if [he] was there or not.”
In the mid-1970s, Raffi was invited to play music for children at the school where his mother-in-law worked. He was hooked. Over the next two decades, he produced more than a dozen studio albums and hit after hit, becoming by some accounts the most popular children’s singer in the English-speaking world.
Unlike much of today’s children’s music, Raffi’s is known for his gentle, James Taylor-esque tones and simple, acoustic instrumentation. His voice is clear, soothing and sweet without being cloying or campy. He is not only a great kids’ artist but also, as one critic put it, “a great modern folk singer who just happens to sing children’s songs.”
For all its tranquility, Raffi’s music was born in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, a time with parallels to our own. Like a Cat Stevens for kids, Raffi makes music that emphasizes love, kindness and the dignity of every person, reflecting his decades of advocacy for the environment and children’s rights. His biggest hit, “Baby Beluga,” offers kids a blueprint for becoming an individual — swimming “so wild” and “so free” — while still feeling safe and loved by their parents. “One Light, One Sun” implores its listeners to treat the Earth as precious, while “Everything Grows” explains that we are all ever-changing, even the “mamas” and “papas.”
Implicit in Raffi’s songs is an awareness that we should not shield children from the hard topics. Yet it is love, not sorrow, that prevails as Raffi’s motive and message.
“In a state of shock, life goes on,” he wrote on social media the morning after the November election before quoting Leonard Cohen: “There are children in the morning, they are leaning out for love, they will lean that way forever.”
Raffi is still popular today, though perhaps not to the extent that he should or could be. A 2015 Vulture profile noted that when the producers of “Shrek” wanted to make a movie based on “Baby Beluga,” he said no because it would have involved advertising directly to children. He also declined to play Madison Square Garden, fearing that the venue would be too intimidating for his audience.
Raffi, now 76, is still touring. For my daughter’s first birthday, I looked into buying tickets but was met with a disclaimer: “A Raffi concert is best suited for children old enough to talk, sing or clap long. … While babies are welcome, they may not enjoy a loud concert singalong.”
“All righty,” I said to my daughter, still goo-ing and ga-ing. “Now we have something to look forward to.”
Cornelia Powers is a writer who is working on a book about the golfer Bessie Anthony, her great-great-grandmother.
As Discogs marches towards its 25th anniversary later this year, the music discovery platform has announced new milestones in collection trends among its physical music-loving users.
According to fresh figures released Tuesday (Jan. 7), Discogs members cataloged over 105.7 million pieces of music in 2024 — an average of 2 million vinyl albums, CDs, tapes, 8-tracks and any other catalogable format you can think of per week.
Since its inception, more than 830 million items have been cataloged, with average collections — which are predominantly vinyl — hovering around 195 items per user, the company said. Collectors made sure to log a lot of copies of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, the year’s most collected album at more than 130,000, followed by releases from Charli XCX and Billie Eilish. The most collected artist of all time continues to be four lads from Liverpool and the most collected master is Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The most collected individual release is the original 180-gram version of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, from 2013. (Incidentally, the label that released RAM — Columbia — is the most collected imprint out there.)
Jeffrey Smith, Discogs’ vice president of marketing, emphasized the significance of reaching 105.7 million records cataloged in a single year, noting that each record represents a “deliberate choice” by a real person to “hold, own, and listen to music with intention.”
“Discogs continues to exist because people care deeply about music as something tangible and meaningful,” Smith added. “This collection milestone reflects a global community driven deeply by passion, connection, and an unwavering commitment to the music that shapes their lives.”
Discogs’ other function, as a viable place to buy and sell those physical music collections, is also hoping to hit a milestone this year. In early 2024, the company toldBillboard that it wants to boost its online database to 25 million marketplace listings by its 25th anniversary in November 2025.
Here are some stats on Discogs’ collections:
Average collection size: 195 items
Average collection value: $317
Most collected album ever: The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
Most collected albums of 2024: The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift (130,000-plus) Brat, Charli XCX (40,000-plus) Hit Me Hard And Soft, Billie Eilish (40,000-plus) Short N’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter (30,000) Songs Of A Lost World, The Cure (27,000)
Most collected record ever: Original 180-gram vinyl of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories
Record label with the most items in collection: Columbia
Most collected formats: 1. Vinyl 2. CDs 4. Cassettes
The late Dr Michael Mosley, creator of The Fast 5:2 diet, championed one vitamin in particular for its potential in fending off a prevalent chronic condition. During an episode on his Just One Thing podcast show, Dr Mosley discussed the benefits of vitamin D supplements in preventing dementia with Professor David Llewellyn of Exeter University.
According to them, vitamin D aids in clearing abnormal proteins like amyloid plaques and tau from the brain, which may offer protection against dementia. Dr Mosley, who sadly passed away last year, advocated for vitamin D supplements, believing they could potentially prevent or delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, reports Surrey Live.
In a previous column for the Daily Mail, Dr Mosley shared his personal vitamin D regimen: “I take 25 mcg (1,000 IU), which is within the limits of what’s considered safe (anything under 100 mcg a day for adults or 50 mcg for children, according to the NHS).”
He added: “But closer to the sort of doses studies show you need to take to ward off infections, cancers, and maybe even dementia.”
The NHS deems anything under 100 mcg daily for adults as safe. Dr Mosley also mentioned: “I eat a lot of oily fish and eggs, both rich in vitamin D, and I also go outside for lots of walks, so my vitamin D levels should be well topped up.”
Many vitamin D supplements are reasonably priced. Boots sells 180 capsules for £4, approximately 2p per pill.
In research dating back to 2014, scientists found that people with low vitamin D levels faced a worrying 53% heightened risk of dementia, with those severely deficient at an alarming 125% increased risk. Another set of findings in a study indicated a 19% to 25% rise in risk for all three types of dementia among those lacking in this essential nutrient.
Adding to the evidence, a third study correlated high levels of vitamin D with a fall in the rates of dementia. Cutting-edge research from 2023 also suggests that vitamin D supplementation could be instrumental in preventing or delaying dementia, although more rigorous clinical trials are needed to cement these preliminary conclusions.
The warning signs of a vitamin D shortfall are evident and should not be ignored. Common signs of vitamin D deficiency include:
Muscle pain
Bone pain
Increased sensitivity to pain
A tingling, “pins-and-needles” sensation in the hands or feet
Muscle weakness in body parts near the trunk of the body, such as the upper arms or thighs
Waddling while walking, due to muscle weakness in the hips or legs
Dr Mosley underscored in earlier discussions that, aside from its protective role against dementia, vitamin D is pivotal for bone health, aiding the body’s ability to absorb calcium.
He particularly highlighted the UK’s dreary winter months, where daylight scarcity makes it near-impossible for people to produce adequate vitamin D naturally. In these dark times, taking supplements can significantly benefit one’s well-being.
As the cold bites and sunlight wanes during the UK’s winter season, the prominence of vitamin D soars as a guardian of bone and muscle health, potentially diminishing the risk of respiratory infections.
It’s crucial to consult your GP before introducing any new over-the-counter medication into your routine. While there are promising studies suggesting vitamin D could combat dementia, it’s important to remember that more clinical trials are needed.
There isn’t a cure for dementia, but various treatments and support options are available to assist those affected. These can range from medication to non-medical therapies, as well as support groups and online communities. While having a family history of dementia can raise your chances of developing the condition, it doesn’t mean you will definitely experience it.
It’s beginning to look like the circumstances leading to the indefinite Real Housewives of New Jersey pause are more complicated and left more ladies in limbo than previously thought.
The veteran ladies – whose split into Team Teresa Giudice and Team Melissa Gorga during Season 14 seemingly brought the show to a standstill – aren’t the only Jersey ‘wives waiting on news, it seems.
Bravo and the RHONJ producers allegedly planned to reboot the show. According to a source, an entirely fresh cast had already been chosen. However, they say showrunners have scrapped those plans for now. The newbies are also in the dark about the fate of Season 15.
A source: Bravo is “still deciding” how they’re going to proceed with RHONJ Season 15
Photo Credit: Jocelyn Prescod/Bravo
Even though Andy Cohen has asked fans to “stop asking” about RHONJ’s future, people are still talking. A source recently told OK! that producers chose a completely new cast to bring fresh life to the show, but are now pumping the brakes.
According to the source, “When Season 14 wrapped, Bravo decided to pursue taking the show in a new direction.”
That new direction was a reboot. The source revealed, “Bravo offered a group of new, younger women positions to be on the show.”
The source explained, “Bravo ended up not being sure what direction they wanted to take the show in, so they put the new women on pause, as well as the old women.”
As of now, the source says Bravo is “still deciding” what they’ll do. Currently, there are “no plans to film anything for RHONJ until at least December 2025.”
Basically, RHONJ is a big question mark. The source shared, “This means the old cast could come back in some capacity or it could be an entire new cast. Truly no decisions have been made.”
When RHONJ comes back, we’ll either have to get to know a whole new set of women or continue to endure Teresa and Melissa feuding over the same tired familial issues. Let us pause to take a moment and remember the table-flipping “prostitution whore” good old days.
Owens, whose career began in 2012 when he was cast as Days of Our Lives’ Cameron Davis, had some jitters about returning to the medium. “I’m not going to lie to you, I was a bit nervous,” he admits. “I know the speed at which the soaps move, so the preparation is key. I remember that being one of the issues I had when I was on Days, it being the first acting job I ever got. I was so green; I didn’t really know how to operate in that space and I kind of drowned a little bit because it was a bit difficult at that time. But I’ve seen a lot since then, so now I know the preparation that it takes.”
Though he only spent a year in Salem, Owens says he took a lot from the experience. “It really showed me how to prepare yourself in this industry in many different ways,” he reflects. “I was a lot younger at the time, and I wasn’t as focused as I think I should have been for something so big. I think my time there really gave me better insight going forward, about preparing and focusing and having discipline to make sure that you’re there and professional and a good scene partner. It really gave me a lot of tools for the rest of my acting career, not just in soaps. And I made some really good friends.”
Paul Skipper/jpistudios.com
After his Days run wrapped, Owens landed on Marc Cherry’s comedic drama, Devious Maids. “I was auditioning a lot after I left Days,” Owens recalls. “I actually did an ABC showcase in that interim period, which really put me on the map, I think, with a lot of the ABC shows. Thankfully, the folks at Devious Maids saw something in me and scooped me up for a couple of seasons, which was really fun.”
Owens played Jesse Morgan, a fitness instructor. “I liked the fun that you could have with the dramedy,” he shares of being in the campy series. “The cast was so amazing. We would do our dinner nights, and we really got to explore Atlanta when we were in production there. That was pretty cool because that was my first time ever being there for a longer amount of time.”
He also toiled with All My Children legend Susan Lucci (Erica Kane), who played Genevieve Delatour. “She was really cool,” Owens relays. “She’s a very sweet human being and we had a blast.”
Curtis Baker/Lifetime/Everett Collection
Owens feels the show gave him a good career boost. “It put me on the prime time path,” he explains. “I was exposed to a lot more eyes on me, so I got more opportunities. One was travel. I remember I was in Colombia and I was going through security and somebody spotted me and said, ‘You’re on Devious Maids, right?’ And this was a couple of years after the show had already been canceled, so I was like, ‘Wow, ok.’ But it turns out they have a massive fan base in a few pockets around the world. That’s actually happened multiple times in a lot of different cities.”
Owens next landed on The CW’s Batwoman playing Ocean. “That was a whole other experience in and of itself because it was during the pandemic and it was in Vancouver,” he says. “The quarantine that was involved with that just really tested the mental fortitude of everyone. We all became very close because we kind of leaned on each other through those trying times.”
For the actor, a superhero fan, the gig was “like a dream come true. I used to collect comic cards and comic books growing up, so that was a trip to me, especially when we would go to set and see what the wonderful team had done there as far as the set design and creating the bat cave and all that jazz. I geeked out on all the set designs and the intricacies and the details that they put in. So, stepping on any of those sets and knowing that it was the DC world was amazing.”
He’s also done a handful of Christmas movies. His latest one, A Season to Remember, aired on OWN last month. “That was really wonderful,” he raves. “And then the one prior to that,The Christmas Sitters, I worked with another Y&R cast member, Melissa Ordway [Abby Newman] and her husband [Justin Gaston, Chance Chancellor]. That was a cool little surprise when I showed up on set and I got to see her.”
Now, he’s hoping to run into a fellow Days alum. “I haven’t seen Eileen Davidson [Ashley Abbott] yet, but she was over at Days [as Kristen DiMera] when I was there, which is pretty cool. I’m looking forward to seeing her.”
Owens reports that Y&R’s cast and crew have been very welcoming and made him feel at home on his first day. “I shook a lot of hands, met a lot of different people,” he remembers. “Everyone was incredibly warm. From the point I parked, I really didn’t know where to go, and I ran into one of the makeup artists, Amanda [Goldstein]. She literally walked me to where I needed to go. Everyone was very kind and inviting. That’s what really stood out to me, the warmth from everybody. The folks that I got to work with on day one were amazing. Sean Dominic [Nate Hastings] is one of them and he was great.”=
Owens can’t say a lot about his new part, which will become clearer as the weeks unfold. “He plays a very delicate role in this scenario, and he’s a very mysterious guy,” Owens winks. “He holds his cards close to the vest and he keeps things tight. I like diving into the mysterious world my character has. I very much enjoy this character and the depth that he can bring to the show.”
The Young and the Restless, Weekdays, CBS, Check Local Listings
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Remember what it’s like to get thrown into a new job with no previous experience?
I just got a vivid reminder — by taking parental leave after becoming a new parent. I stepped away from my business for a few months to help care for my son, spending the summer sleep-deprived and knee-deep in diapers.
But what a joy — and an eye-opener. As every parent knows, finding yourself responsible for another human being is humbling and life-changing. With less than 5% of new dads in the US taking two or more weeks of parental leave, I know I’m in the lucky minority.
For me, time away from the office as a full-time dad has also yielded a few lessons about being a leader. That’s an unexpected bonus from that beautiful experience, which has given me a new perspective on work.
It’s early days, but here are five things I’ve learned so far.
1. Empower your team
For leaders, stepping away can be an opportunity to let their people step up.
My kid needs me day and night. My employees? Less so — and that’s a good thing. Sometimes, leaders and managers overestimate how much their people rely on them.
In my case, I’m lucky that the business has matured to the point where it’s resilient enough to carry on just fine without my constant attention. Stepping away showed me I don’t need to oversee everything and everyone. Without me hovering, team members can take ownership and thrive.
Besides, delegating is good for a business, especially when it’s scaling. Only 25% of company founders excel at delegation, but those who do generate a third more revenue than peers lacking such skills.
For me, fatherhood has flipped the script on work. I can’t be the only one who thinks that compared to looking after a small child, going back to the office feels like a break.
Now when I think about my parental duties and the impact I have on my kid, I’m not sweating the office “problems” like I used to, which makes me a better leader. I approach work challenges with a clearer mind — knowing I have more important things to keep me up at night. (Thanks, son.)
Likewise, my new role as a parent has forced me to become more disciplined. I arrive at the office focused and ready so I can make it home at a reasonable hour. In other words, I no longer surf the web or read the news at my desk. Instead, I look at what needs to happen, ensure my calendar reflects those priorities and get to work.
With more than half of managers feeling burned out on the job, anything leaders can do to reduce their burden is welcome. You don’t need to be a new parent to put work in perspective and look for ways to do things more efficiently. Success at the office feels a lot more meaningful when it leaves space for the people and moments that matter most.
3. Know when to pull back on tech
As the leader of a digital agency who’s also now a time-strapped parent, I’m all for technology as a productivity booster rather than a mindless distraction or a make-work project. In my business as well as my personal life, I try to set a good example by limiting its use.
Some tech tools simply create more screen time, while others help you cut back. In the latter category are my prized dumbphone and my new favorite app, Read AI. After a meeting, it spits out a transcript, plus key takeaways and how long each participant spent talking.
I don’t like my son seeing me use screens, so I’ve been reviving old-school communication methods like the landline phone. Conversely, GenAI has helped shrink screen time at home, too. Rather than Google parenting questions, I can ask ChatGPT verbally without looking away from my boy.
For me, as a leader, parenthood is a reminder of how easy it is to get sucked into the digital world. Technology should be there to support people — but in a recent survey, three-quarters of employees said AI was increasing their workload, thwarting productivity and contributing to burnout. So rather than fall for the latest shiny new toy, make sure your tech stack is actually helping your team.
For any good leader, team members are people first and employees second. Becoming a parent has given me more compassion and respect for colleagues who face the many challenges of raising a child while also keeping it together at work.
To be clear, I’m proud of our company’s policies. Besides offering four or five weeks of vacation to start, we encourage extended maternal and paternal leave, top-up government benefits in some cases and make sure people’s return to work is smooth.
Thanks to my time away, I’m even more committed to helping employees balance work with their other responsibilities. Does your company’s parental leave policy give people the space and time they need to adjust to that new phase of life? If not, it could be time for a rethink.
Showing your people you care also leads to better business outcomes. Employees with highly empathic senior leaders report much higher levels of creativity and engagement than those with less empathic bosses.
Like any dutiful first-time dad, I bought all the stuff, only to realize that most of it was unnecessary. Besides a few basics, a baby just needs a steady milk supply and clean diapers — and, most of all, your attention and energy.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, it’s the same at the office. Leaders should remember that with their people, the most powerful tool they have at their disposal is being present.
My efforts to ensure that I’m not distracted with my son encourage me to give the same focus to my team. That’s why, despite the demands of my “other” job, I do my best to show up at meetings fully engaged. When I’m there, I’m there. Now, if you excuse me, I have a team member who urgently needs feeding.
Investing.com — President-elect Donald Trump is set to announce a significant $20 billion foreign investment aimed at building new data centers across the United States, according to a report by CNBC on Tuesday.
CNBC said a source familiar with the matter told them that the investment will be made by billionaire Hussain Sajwani, a close Trump associate and the chairman of DAMAC Properties.
The announcement is expected to be made from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence and private club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday.
Eamon Javers, CNBC’s Senior Washington Correspondent, tweeted about the upcoming announcement, stating, “A source familiar tells me President-elect Trump is expected to announce new foreign investment into the U.S. economy in his Mar a Lago remarks next hour.
“The investment will be $20b to build new data centers across the country. The investor is billionaire Hussain Sajwani, chairman of DAMAC Properties, who has long done business with the Trump family.”
