Front Burner - The year in sports scandal with Pablo Torre

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

In 2025 news of the biggest, most sensational sports scandals was broken not by ESPN or Sports Illustrated, but by a podcaster named Pablo Torre on his show Pablo Torre Finds Out.It was Pablo who investigated Kawhi Leonard’s alleged multi-million dollar under the table no show deal. And it was Pablo who uncovered potential collusion involving NFL player salaries.Pablo Torre is with us today to talk about the year in sports scandal, the state of sports journalism, and gambling grip’s grip on the whole industry.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. In 2025, news of the biggest, most sensational sports scandals, was broken not by ESPN, not by Sports Illustrated, but by a podcaster named Pablo Torre. on his show, Pablo Torre finds out. It was Pablo who investigated Kauai Leonard's alleged multi-million dollar under the table no-show deal, and it was Pablo who uncovered potential collusion involving NFL player salaries. Pablo is with me today to talk about the year in sports scandal,

the state of sports journalism, and how gambling fits in to all of this. Pablo, hey, thanks so much for coming on to Frumperner. Thank you for having me. Thank you for paying attention to a strange but very energizing year for me. I'm still kind of reeling from all of it. We have quite a few people on our team. We're big fans of your work, so we're pleased to have you on. Thank you.

I'm sure some of our listeners are also big fans of your work and listeners of yours, but for those who aren't, this is kind of more like a general news podcast. Can you kind of give me the conceit of your show and tell me like the kind of programming that you're doing? Yeah, I think of us as a news magazine at this point. We do three episodes a week, but the premise is that we use journalism to solve mysteries. And so what does this mean? It means that we are going to take on billionaires, it turns out, often the richest people in sports, but also we're going to solve our own self-imposed curiosities, like which athlete has the best self-branded weed strain?

that was also an episode that we did very rigorously and investigated just as rigorously, I dare to say, as salary caps or a convention. My husband was talking about when you did where you found the Airbnb that Bill Belichuk was staying in with his like 29-year-old girlfriend. Yeah, I stayed at that Airbnb. I rented it. I employed an army of geogessers, which is a whole other episode. Who are geogessers? What are they? They're the people who can like take a snapshot of Google Maps and tell you, oh, that's, That's there. And so long story short, here in America, there's this guy named Bill Belichick, and he's the greatest football coach of all time. And he's also basically business partners and romantic partners with a woman who is now 24. Just get the math, right? 24 years old. Sorry. I think I said 29. 24. How dare you? Yeah. How dare you? And one of the viral videos that came out was a shirtless Bill Belichick wandering like a bear on a porch. passed the ring camera. And there was a Netflix roast in which Tom Brady himself made fun of Belichick for this. Everybody asked me which ring is my favorite.

I used to say the next one. But now that I'm retired, my favorite ring is the camera that caught Coach Belichick slinking out of that poor girl's house at 6 a.m. a few months ago. It was all over the internet and no one really, it turns out, knew the truth of what that was. And turns out that the truth was an Airbnb in a seaside town, Winthrop, Massachusetts, owned by a couple that was happy to have me there asking questions. And again, journalism as a way of getting to something that can be both serious and thoughtful, but also very stupid sometimes. And that's kind of my view of sports in a nutshell. Yeah. And we're going to get to some of the more serious stuff a little bit later, though I am pleased that we got to do that one. I mean, it was impressive, those geolocating tools. Just I want to go through some of your specific investigations. Before we do just, I want to spend a tiny bit more time talking about the state of the industry kind of writ large, right?

And one really interesting and illustrative example, I think, is what's happened to Sports Illustrated. And so I watched a video from former Sports Illustrated sports writer Jeff Perlman, who talked about the moment that he realized that sports media was near death. When I worked at Sports Illustrated, they used to. have in their building in New York City, the greatest sports library you'll ever see, ever, ever see. And it was this room, this enormous room. Columns after columns filled with sports folders, alphabetical. So if you wanted articles about Mickey Mantle, there'd be like five different folders filled and not just articles, notes, reporter notes. You might find a receipt for coffee that Mickey Manor reporter had, stapled to a piece of paper. And I was complimenting one of the

higher-ups at the magazine about the library. And he goes to me, yeah, we're probably going to sell it off pretty soon and break it up and destroy it. It also, I think, had some of the best magazine rating, you know, in history. But one day, the magazine decided to sell and essentially dismantle the archive. This lack of interest in sports history, this destruction of sports history, this ripping a part of it all exemplified to me, honestly God, the moment when I knew we were really in trouble when we stopped valuing stuff like that. You are also a former Sports Illustrated writer, and why do you think the people running that magazine

would ever see something like that as a good idea? Because they misunderstood what value is when it comes to media. So typically, when you think about a modern media organization, you think about, okay, we're going to talk about how to make things pop on social, we're going to pivot to video, we're going to compete for the short attention span theater of everything. And a long-form vault, it was called the vault, the s-i-dot vault, which was the warehouse for everything. There's also a physical library at the office, by the way, which was like, again, just the sort of thing that you had at a magazine once upon a time, a physical library. But the online library, which was the repository you describe, that wasn't monetizable through the framework of young people don't want to watch or read long things anymore.

And this is entirely text-based. And it seems musty. And what I've always found to be most enthralling is just a consumer of things, as a reader of Sports Illustrated. And with the tradition of literary sports journalism that Sports Illustrated perfected, was that the best stories were deep and reported and narrative, as well as just undergirded by legitimate journalism. Like it was basically you got writing that was worthy

of any great piece of fiction, but the heart of it, I mean, truly the skeleton of it, everything of it was true. That's the magic of a great magazine.

And so when the Zambified Sports Illustrated reemerged and it was just missing the greatest collection of that, I mean, I was offended as a former employee

whose work could not be Googled anymore. But mostly I was mad because that still works in modern times. And it is something that people, I think, media executives have gotten very lazy about because it is seemingly antithetical to modern media principles. But I think about how I constructed my show. And I'm not saying that I figured out the solution because I have not. But we do deep dives that are magazine inspired all.

of the time. And what we are able to do is self-aggregate, which means that, like, you could do both. It's not A or B. It's a yes and story of, like, advertise the things, market the things that can be short bites, but also drive people towards this thing that I think the viability of documentaries has proven. Like, it's a hard business, but people still want to click on them and watch them. And so there is a way to not let all of this just be disposed of because it seems hard to monetize. Like, we all want an evergreen. I mean, this is we being media people. Everybody says they want an evergreen vault of IP, of intellectual property. SportsTales traded had a century of it. And it just got crashed effectively because they didn't

realize that this thing, the oldest story in media, hell good stories. could still be found in what felt like an ancient sort of vault. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. Look, it's hard being the pop culture friend. You're the one who knows exactly what new show is the most watched show on Netflix right now, or you're on top of the film festival calendar. Whether you are that friend or you desperately need a friend like, that allow commotion to enter

your group chat. It's a podcast hosted by me, Alameen Abdul Mahmoud, where I talk to people about the arts and entertainment stories that you need to know, and we share all the recommendations of what you should be reading or watching or listening to. Find commotion wherever you get your podcasts. So give me your best

example for you from this year of what you put out that you think was deeply researched, good journalism, well told, and that people liked. Yeah. Like, what would you What would you choose? It would be this Clippers thing.

And the Clippers thing is the investigation we did into Kauai Leonard and Steve Balmer, who was one of the ten richest people in the world. And it took seven months and got 3,000 documents. And the question was, on paper, right, this is a pretty nerdy story. I could sell it to you and you would not be interested in it. So it involves carbon credits. It involves salary cap circumvention. It involves a former tech CEO.

It involves a lot of just arcane. terms having to do with like climate change. But when you see it through the lens of what sports uniquely provide, which is, as I put it, like the cheese you can melt on broccoli, you realize there's great drama here. And so what this really is, is as you alluded to, it's a story of one of the most mysterious athletes in the world being paid according to lost secret contracts and extra $50 million in violation of the rules around fair play and integrity that frankly reflect upon Steve Balmer in the way that his conduct at Microsoft reflected upon Steve Balmer, which is to say, how do you circumvent the rules? How do you use all of the money in

the world effectively to get what you want? And in sports, uniquely, you can't just buy the thing you want the most. You need to compete for it and earn it because there are these rules governing it. It's funny. Like, Steve Balmer, just to be blunt about this, the degree of public pressure he's received as a result of this scandal we've reported is so much more mainstream than what tech CEOs typically have to answer to in their own businesses. But because it's basketball and fans and there is the candy of sports, it's popular. And that to me is an interesting pressure point. Yeah, it's a really interesting point. Just for people who might not be. familiar, just explained to me a little bit more exactly what you found bomber did here.

Yeah. So this company called Aspiration is a climate change oriented company. And their whole thing was, we will plant trees in order to zero out your carbon footprint. And so what the Clippers did was that they got Aspiration as a sponsor. There was a $300 million deal. They were the founding sponsor of the Intuit Dome, which is the most expensive basketball arena ever built that Steve Ballmer constructed. But what they didn't want anyone to know was that, according to my reporting, seven sources, 3,000 plus documents, there was a secret deal which we got and we published a secret contract in which Kauai Leonard was paid, in this case, $28 million to do effectively, absolutely nothing.

And the reason I found this out was because there was a bankruptcy filing, spoiler alert, aspiration, the climate change company went broke, its co-founder has pled guilty to wire fraud. It's the story effectively of Steve Balmer entrusting a company to deceive the NBA by funneling money, helping him funnel money to Kawhi Leonard because there are rules governing how much money you can pay your players. And so he used this side sponsorship in which Kawhi Leonard did literally nothing to get him eight extra figures into his bank account. That was the deal. But what happened was Steve Balmer, it seems, was defrauded by that same company. And so it's a yes and story. He tried to get away with something only to be burned by the people he entrusted

in a real, like actual real world outside of sports sense. And so it became a giant mess. And at the heart of it was this question of like, what did Steve Balmer know and when did he know it? And to answer that question, you need to understand what he tried to do with this company and Kauai Leonard in the first place. I know there's like an ongoing MBA investigation going on right now, but all of this. And like what do you think could come of it? So yeah, I mean, the day after the first episode dropped, he's done six parts now. It's kind of like a true crime series for us, for better than for worse at this point. The day after it dropped, Steve Balmer went on.

ESPN and gave an interview in which he declaimed everything and said I was conned and I knew nothing about this. How would I be able, look, they conned me. You're one of the richest men in America. They con me. I made an investment in these guys thinking it was on the up and up, and they conned me. At this stage, I have no ability to predict why they might have done anything they did, let alone the specific contract with Kauai. Over time, I would say, my reporting has picked various chunks of that apart, to the point that Wachtell Lipton, this high-powered New York City law firm, was enlisted by the NBA to investigate Steve Balmer for cap circumvention, which is, for those non-MBA fans out there, the cardinal sin of basketball, which means that

he tried to pay more than he was allowed to get the most valuable commodity, which is an athlete, a star player, onto his team, Kauai Leonard. And so right now, we are waiting and watching for the results of their investigation. We're at the point where this very high-powered law firm with way better rates than me in terms of billable hours, they are trying to basically retrace the seven months of my reporting as fast as they can to figure out, do we have to punish Steve Balmer? And so, yes, it is the NBA effectively investigating itself. And I'm in the position of not merely making sure that my reporting is done correctly and clearly for public view. But Now I'm also covering that.

I'm trying to make sure that when an NBA commissioner is empowering a law for him to investigate his boss, because owners in sports are bosses of the commissioner, that they do that in good faith. And so there's a bit of a meta story now, too, about the investigation being investigated. To state the obvious, many people listening will have been particularly interested in this story because it deals with Kauai, who, of course, left our beloved Toronto Raptors to go to the L.A. Clippers. Yes. And just before we move on, like, has Kauai or Balmer kind of responded to you directly? This, you know, podcaster who's really given them quite a hard time this year, probably, I've been imagine.

Yeah, and I have never felt more kinship with Toronto in terms of having to think about this guy and his motives. Kawhi Leonard and his motives. Yeah, so Kawhi Leonard was finally asked questions about this in public at Clippers Media Day, and he basically referred to me as a conspiracist. Oh, I mean, it's easy for me. I mean, I'm going to re-headlines. I do conspiracies, theories, or anything like that. So it's about the season and what we got ahead of us right now.

And, yeah, tomorrow we'll start Kent and see what we got. Steve Ballmer has acknowledged the show in the interview he gave to ESPN. In the court documents and in Pablo's podcast, they report it was $28 million. Pablo's podcast, I don't know anything about the court documents on this. I haven't seen them and I don't know. I'm not trying to be who I don't know. I really don't know. Adam Silver, the commissioner, has said in public that this investigation was started

because of this podcast, which is a strange sentence, right? Like, that's not typically how journalism had been done before. As we are seeing in this investigation here, it began with Pablo and his podcast. This was not something that was on our radar to even be thinking about. And whether it should or shouldn't be, I mean, and when this concludes, you know, we'll take a fresh look at our rules in terms of. So they, to be very clear, deny it. Do you have any reaction or statement regarding some of the things that have been alleged over the last month? No, I mean, the NBA is going to do their job.

None of us did no wrongdoing. We, the Clippers, have abided by the salary caps or convention rules because that's the right thing to do. And we have done that? Yes, yeah. And I, to be clear, stand by my reporting and continue to add to the corpus of reporting that I think disproves their denials. Another one of your scoops that I wanted to talk to you about this year involved the NFL's Players Union, right? A body that is supposed to represent the best interests of NFL players

and alleges that they were actually working with the league to keep secret details, including that league executives had urged team owners to reduce guaranteed player pay. Can you want me through this story and what made it so? significant for you? Yeah. So this also is a story about a document. And the document here is a 61-page PDF. It's an arbitration ruling that was mutually suppressed by the NFL and the NFLPA, the Players Union. And the reason that sentence is striking to me is because these are adversaries, typically. The NFLPA is kind of the only check on the most ascendant, most profitable

business in sports. And they're for mainstream American culture. The NFL rules everything in America. And the union is supposed to hold it in check. And so there was this secret arbitration ruling that was published, but never released by either side. And the fact that the union never did is shocking, was shocking, because what it contained was, at the very least, a partial victory for the union in which it said that the billionaires in the NFL attempted to collude to suppress guaranteed wage. for NFL players. And so in this document, you have discovery, right? Like the greatest word to any investigative journalist is discovery. I mean, you get private text messages sent between NFL owners.

You have general managers, executives, now on the record, how they really talk behind closed doors. And they are, yeah, they are attempting to do in private what the union had alleged they were doing this whole time. But the union decided to suppress this, according to our reporting, because they wanted to do something that lots of unions are doing lately, which is be, quote, unquote, pro-business. Because the pie of money is growing so large in sports, there is now an instinct among various sports unions to just go along to get along with the league because you're going to get more by being cooperative as opposed to being adversarial. And so this is now a story about, frankly,

labor negotiations and labor law and what it means to be adversarial with your employer. And so the union, as a result of all of this, and there were, again, a multi-part series aspects to this, the entire executive structure of the union had to resign. So the executive director, this guy named Lloyd Howell, who was his own rich character, with a deep and sort of sorted past, had to resign.

The chief strategy officer and the former president of the NFLPA, a guy named J.C. Treter, also had to resign. And so the domino effects of, like, sunlight on this big thing that should have been celebrated and taking the Capitol Hill, just like grandstand it upon, look at what they've done. They decided to hide it because they thought they could be effectively partners with the league instead of an antagonist of it. And that is something that, I dare say, is a naive strategy when it comes to a labor negotiation.

As soon as the reporting came out that we did, they were basically cornered into suing the NFL, right? And so basically, the strategy was, we're not going to do anything because we think it's a good strategy. And then we report this thing existed. And then they immediately were like, actually, new strategy, we're going to take this seriously now. And so the entire principle of like what were you doing and why were you doing it, it very clearly, and again, there's so much more here to summarize, but it redounded to this strategy of we can get rich if we keep our members in the dark. And they think, as lots of people think, I dare say, that like, there's a bit of a great man theory of politics here. we as the people in charge know what's best trust us will deliver you to the promised land and that did not happen you've also done some reporting on a series of gambling scandals that have you wanted to ask you about so earlier this year former all-star player

Terry Rosier and Hall of Fame player and then coached Chauncey Billups were both arrested as part of a federal indictment. Other current players like Malik Beasley have been subject to FBI investigation. Former Raptor Jonte Porter was arrested by the FBI last year for an alleged part in a gambling ring. And what is going on here, you think, with the NBA in gambling and then kind of you could expand it to if you wanted to? Yeah, I'll connect it to our conversation, right? So a big issue in sports. has been, where is the money coming from? And so, historically, it came from these giant media rights deals in which the leagues themselves signed billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar deals with places like ESPN, for instance. As cable television has been disrupted and eroded

to the state of managed decline now, the monies really come from other places, and it mirrors where it's coming from in U.S. politics. We're talking about crypto, we're talking about Silicon Valley, talking about the Middle East, and we're talking about gambling. So gambling as this new fountain of money to drink from, on some level, is entirely legal, right? Like, it's legal now. You can do it. Great. The issue is that in the world of legalized gambling, there are these things called prop bets. So a prop bet is basically a thing that did not exist before when it was just like your bookie on the corner, taking bets about who's going to win or lose the game. Now, there is a legal menu, many, many pages thick in the case of every single game, in which you can place

micro bets. And so what's been happening with Dante Porter, as well as the alleged players that you just referenced, is that they have been doing the thing that is easiest to do, given that incentive, which is personally undermining their own performance and allowing people to profit off of that inside information, allegedly, right? Yes, allegedly. I was going to say, Yeah. So in that regard, what the NBA is grappling with is a set of incentives that are very easy to game in which the public is in the dark again. But behind the scenes, people can make lots of money. And that's been, in broad strokes, the story of these gambling scandals. gambling itself it has always had some presence in the world of sport right but it does feel like it's gotten to the point where these two worlds have really synergized into one thing as you just explain and also you know outside of sports too right it's becoming so ubiquitous in our society you can just bet on literally anything now and and and financialize it right um but but like i guess the question is for sports Is it too late, you think, to institute any kind of guardrails or changes here? Can the toothpaste be put back into the tube?

So what can be put back into the tube is this broad knowledge that there are bets you can make that didn't exist before, but now you know about in which you can ostensibly make it big. The odds have always been terrible, obviously, in reality, but the sales pitch has never been more effective for, let's just be demographically accurate for lots of dudes especially that are living in the Western Hemisphere, right? Like that's been revelatory and problematic as a matter of addiction and as a matter of just like financial risk and harm. And my concern, if I can zoom out now, is that sports is so valuable. It's kind of like the Sports Illustrated Vault problem almost. sports is so valuable for reasons that are ancient and well-established, and what we run the risk of is misunderstanding why they're special. What do I mean by this? I mean that if you create a

conflict of interest in which people are caring about games in opposition to the actual magic of them, if you are creating a world in which the outcome of a game in terms of you care about these teams doing well, as opposed to you care about these micro bets, cashing in, if you endanger why we fell in love with sports in the first place, you actually risk poisoning the well of sports entirely. The metaphor I often think about now is just fracking to be environmental again. It's the thing of there's money if we just drill even deeper into this thing, because yes, there is money there. You can have people bet on all these other things that sports houses.

But if you do, you might risk poisoning the water supply. You might risk endangering the actual value that sports created, which is premised, unfortunately, on integrity and fair play and a certain purity in which you believe credibly that people are there to whip. And that has never been more at risk. And if you think, like if we start to see more cases of athletes allegedly, you know, being involved in this gambling and possibly undermining their performance, if you think that that's happening, then you can't trust what you're seeing with your own eyes. That feels like

an existential crisis to me, for sure. You know, like we've been kind of talking through this whole conversation about how sports media is really turned away from deep reporting generally. I'm not saying there aren't some brighter lights in some places. Yeah. And I mean, that is kind of also applicable, you know, to the news industry at large, I think you've mentioned it. You know, you turn on CNN or Fox News or really any cable news programming and you will likely find a lot of the stuff that you see on ESPN right now, people arguing and debating the news, right? Rather than the original reporting, like a format that is really kind of dependent more on like performance and virality.

not necessarily the truth, right? And I just wonder before we go if you might want to ruminate on the deeper implications of all of this that you see. What does it signal about us as consumers of news and information? Yeah. So I did these sports debate shows on television at ESPN. And when I watch cable news, of course, I see the mutant offspring of it. The toy department argued all the time and that was fun. And then the serious political journalists and news people started doing it too. and it became disturbing, frankly, because it was substituting out that reporting that you referred to. To me, though, there's a selfish case to care about journalism. The selfish case is people are starving for it. And I think there is a crisis in trust when it comes to every institution, basically, in our Western civilization. But media especially has been bad at arguing for itself, arguing for a theory of difficulty that it takes to do this work, arguing in the right places, such that you access audiences that are foreclosed otherwise to even understanding what it is to be an adversarial investigative reporter.

But the bull market for it is that the same premise of why something goes viral is that it is eye-catching and shocking and just like a thing you didn't know before, right? that is still what investigative journalism churns out at its best as reliably as anything else. I mean, we are living in a world, of course, of aggregation in which anybody can take something else and frankly plagiarism as much as aggregation. And what I hope people realize is that if you protect the source material, like it is a body of water or reservoir we drink from, you don't need to do it just because you're being warned that it's going to be bad for your health,

it's going to make you sick. Do it because you could sell it. I just think that the internet is right for old things to be sold to new audiences in new ways. And so what I do being whatever, like this weird podcaster journalist type, I didn't reinvent really anything. I'm just doing stuff that existed in other mediums

for now, an audience that is unfamiliar with them. and I'm just presenting it to them in their language. And I think that has made me very confident in what journalism is supposed to be. But it's no doubt, as you put it, that when you watch the news, watch politics, it seems like the other thing is happening. And that's also, yeah, it's a shame. Pablo, that was great. That was really, I loved listening to your answer to that last question, especially. It was really fun to have you on.

Thank you so much for this. Anytime. Anytime. Thanks for asking good questions. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. c.ca slash podcasts.