The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Sports Journalist Pablo Torre Has a Pulitzer, but Still Feels Like the “Turd” in the Pool

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

The sports journalist Pablo Torre recently won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting for an investigation on his podcast, “Pablo Torre Finds Out.” Torre talks with David Remnick about the challenge of investigative reporting in professional sports—where leagues, owners, players, and sometimes even fans don’t welcome hard questions. “As much as I am doing that and urging people to join me in the pool,” he says, “it kind of feels like I’m the guy who is the proverbial turd” in that pool. But as private equity invests massive sums in teams, he says, the work is even more necessary—and that fans do care when misdeeds are revealed. Further reading:  “Lessons in Fanhood from the Knicks,” by Vinson Cunnigham “The Knicks: The Only Game in Town,” by David Remnick   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and the New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The sports journalist Pablo Tori once described what he does as, quote, taking stupid things seriously. Now he's being kind of a smart ass. He certainly doesn't think sports are stupid, but he does take them very seriously. In fact, Tori just won the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. And that's a feat because the number of Pulitzer is given for sports.

sports journalism in any medium is tiny. He investigated a scheme by one NBA team to circumvent the salary cap. And that story aired on his podcast, Pablo Tori finds out. Now, that kind of work is hard to do. The industry of sports, the leagues, the team owners, the top players, none of them, none of them like it when a journalist asked too many questions. Too much money is at stake. Tori got his start as a staff writer on Sports Illustrated in the twilight of that magazine's tremendous reach and influence, and he later became a familiar presence on ESPN's pardon the interruption as debate shows were replacing old-fashioned sports reporting. I got it at the end and I could taste the exhaust pipes of what this great institution used to be. What if we argued instead of reported?

Yeah. Really, it got to the point of being, I would say, it got to be such big box office that the question became, who is left to make it deeply uncomfortable using journalism for the people in power? So now we get to the crux of the matter, because there's plenty of entertainment around. I can go all over the place and get podcasts about the NBA. But you did something extraordinary this year. You won a Pulitzer Prize in audio for rigorous journalism, sports journalism. And, you know, listeners should know that I'm on the Pulitzer board. I'm raising my hand and being transparent about that.

But just an amazing piece of work. Tell me about the story and take us through it what happened and what you found out. Yeah. So I did not launch my show to investigate a guy with $145 billion. We're talking about Steve Balmer, the former Microsoft executive and innovator who now owns a professional basketball team. The Los Angeles Clippers. So I got a tip at some point that said, hey, there's a team sponsor with a very on-the-nose sort of brand name called Aspiration. And they are a big sponsor of the Clippers.

You should look into them. What does Aspiration do? Aspiration is a carbon credits company, which means that. that they plant trees to help zero out the footprint of your company. And they were started by these two Democratic power players, Joe Sandberg and Andre Charny. This is one of these good guy companies with a good guy name. And when I was told, yeah, you should check this out. I didn't really know what to do with it because I was like, okay, they have a $300 million

$23-year deal with the Clippers to be their sponsor. And I was like, okay, this seems, I don't know, kind of banal. But then what happens as I go through my life is I see that this company eventually files for bankruptcy. And in the bankruptcy filing, which I go and I'm the type of guy who, as the show indicates, wants to find out stuff. I love documents. I went and pulled the bankruptcy filing for aspiration and saw a list of creditors. And on the list of creditors, there is meta. There's the Red Sox.

There are the Clippers. And also there's this LLC called KL2 Aspire LLC. And I'm a basketball fan. And all you need to know about basketball in this case is that the star player of Los Angeles Clippers is this guy, this enigmatic character named Kawhi Leonard. And his jersey number is you will be shocked to hear too. So KL2 Aspire LLC led me to this question of, okay, so why is this LLC if it is, in fact, why Leonard's LLC owed $7 million outstanding by this now defunct carbon credits company. And you do the thing where you look for every available public record in which there is proof

of some business relationship. And there is not. And one of the other things that happens when you are going through a, the remains of a bankrupt company is that you can start calling people current and former employees who now might have insight and more willingness to. to speak about this. And what they say is, oh, yeah, this was like a really big part of our lives working at this company. Kawhi Leonard was not just an endorser of aspiration. He was the highest paid endorser of aspiration. In fact, we had other endorsers. We had Robert Downey Jr.

We had Leonardo DiCaprio. We had Drake, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, on and on and on. And Kawhi Leonard is a personality. You use the word enigmatic. What were you getting at? He doesn't advertise things in general. He's kind of famous for being uncomfortable in the public. And so the idea that that guy was paid, I was told, more than four times what everyone else was making. All the A-listers were making combined. It was like something that didn't add up to me.

And I said, okay, if I'm being told about a $28 million deal in which Kawhi Leonard was as endorser, but yet there is no proof of it, the question becomes, if he was being paid as an endorser, how is it that no one ever even announced that this deal existed? And this is something that I think I've buried even in our recap here. Right. Kawhi Leonard did nothing. Not only did he not publicly endorsed, he never did anything as part of this deal.

Or it wasn't in TV commercials? It was a no-show job. Wow, like in The Sopranos. He was importing exporter. It's on the dock somewhere. Webistics. And so the follow-up question, the rabbit hole you fall into is what was happening here? And so to sort of speed run through the big takeaways, it turns out that according to my reporting, Steve Balmer entered into a secret deal to pay Kauai Leonard through this company that he was personally invested in to the tune of $50 million, the biggest investor in the company individually.

and Steve Balmer was, according to my reporting, using aspiration to funnel money to Kauai Leonard to circumvent the NBA salary cap, which is... Ding, ding, ding. Not a law in America. Right. It's not a federal statute.

And for that reason, it's actually fascinating because this is something that fell in between the cracks of the collapse of aspiration. It was not something that came to light because the federal government was investigating the collapse of aspiration, which they were. Joe Sandberg has since pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud. It was something that kind of fell inside of the cracks of this company

because it wasn't explicitly illegal, the NBA salary cap, not a federal law. And within the ethics of the NBA is dubious at best. The NBA has some cardinal rules, and one of them, for those not familiar, is that you cannot spend whatever you want to get the thing that in this sport particularly matters the most, which is a superstar player. And for those not familiar, five players to a team.

That is the fewest of any of the major sports. So a superstar is the thing you need to contend. And what I love about investigating sports billionaires and leagues and these power players is that sports, It's this industry in which the richest people more than ever, in accordance with the surging values of these teams, are hungrier and hungrier to join the most exclusive country club, which is sports ownership. And they find that once they show up, they can't merely buy the thing they want the most. Because in sports, there are rules. There are regulations around fair play.

There are these norms because of fans. I would argue, that are cardinal rules that are to be taken seriously. What do you mean? So, for instance, the salary cap. I am not saying that on a moral cosmic level, we must regulate spending in the NBA. But because that is the regulatory landscape that rules over how superstars join different teams, when Steve Balmer, allegedly, breaks that cardinal rule, it's at the expense of his competitors.

And so that zero-sum game in which, if there's an advantage over here by rule breaking, that there is suffering over here by some fan whose owner stupidly decided to play by the rules, well, now we're in a position in which there is something like an attention that does follow ethics and norms. And for those who don't give a shit about sports,

just know that in sports at the very least, shame for rule breaking may yet remain possible. I'm speaking with journalist Pablo Tori, more than a moment. So you think you have the story, and then you go to Steve Balmer, or his representatives, and you go to Kauai Leonard, and you go to the company, and you present them with your evidence and your thesis,

and what did they say? So we assemble, in the end, before publishing part one, more than 3,000 pages of internal documents. And we go to the Clippers and Steve Balmer, before publication, of course, and the quote we get is that these allegations of salary capser convention

are provably false. What were the extent? of the denials on the side of the other parties? So Steve Balmer, etc. Yeah, it was, this is provably false. And we had a deal with aspiration in which we transacted along the lines of carbon credits. They were a sponsor. And as the series went on, it became clear that Steve Balmer wanted to establish he, in fact, was a victim of Joe Sandberg, lost his investment to $50 million.

And he put in another $10 million in the spring of 2023. So what's going to happen then? Well, the NBA launched an investigation. And where is that investigation now? The investigation is ongoing. They hired Wachtel Lifton, their preferred outside counsel, a big Wichu law firm, who I have visited with and talked with. And they have the joy of, I suppose, subscribing to my show

and trying to make sure that they're not missing anything and vice versa. What would be the upshot if they determine that your story is true? What do you think would happen to Steve Lommer? What we are describing here is the largest salary caps for convention scheme in the history of the MBA and possibly professional sports. I have not done the analytics across all sports. I just know that the money here and the ambition here in which this company, which was supposed to go public, was also a team sponsor and was also selling carbon credit to the team. And the owner was personally invested. And you had Kauai Leonard secretly being paid off to the side, allegedly, to circumfutable.

bent the cap. This is a level of in meshing with a fraudulent entity that raises questions that I should also say the federal government has recently been reexamining. And I say this because one of the things that we also reported deeper into the series is the existence of a whistleblower complaint that was filed by two aspiration employees in February of. of 2023. And you're continuing to drop episodes about this. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, here's the problem. We go to sports as human beings for escape. So do your fellow sports writers celebrate you for this kind of investigative work? What's the reaction? I have been very, I think, deliberate in signaling whenever possible. The water is real warm where I am. Jump in. Jump on in.

The pool is. empty, largely, and there's not only now substance, but there is now attention. There is juice. It is fun to talk about investigative journalism in sports. It gets to the thing that fans, I think, and I'm so grateful that they feel this way, are actually intrigued by. They are. I have been, on paper, carbon credits, salary capture convention, guy who is the most boring superstar in sports, arguably. He's up there. He's up there. Those are not the ingredients for an algorithmic viral success. And yet, I have been hardened that whether it's the way that we have been reporting this story, maybe even just the basic premise of we're going to take on an entity that has

$145 billion plus and telling you what they don't want you to know, that's exciting to fans, it turns out. And so I have been hardened by that. And yet, when I signal and I get to part 10 and I'm backed by a whistleblower complaining which specifically they're saying carbon credits to circumvent the cap involving Kauai Leonard. They are spelling it out before I ever published episode one, which is so

vindicating on some level. As much as I am doing that and urging people to join me in the pool, it kind of feels like I'm the guy who is the proverbial turd. At the garden party. Inside the pool itself. Like, we got out of here, actually.

because of you. And that has been a little disappointing. You feel lonely. It is. It is lonely. And I wish it was not as lonely as it has been. But isn't that because I'm watching ESPN because I'm escaping CNN or the like? Precisely because I can't stand to listen to any more politics or corruption or the horrible parts of public life?

I think that in fairness, a bunch of people, because I worked at ESPN, it did feel sometimes, like, and I want to credit my friend Ethan Strauss for this metaphor, but like sports television is a vending machine that typically sells candy. Yeah. And sometimes the person. You're the broccoli guy? I'm the sardine. Popped out. I wanted something sweet. What is this?

what is this ancient fish and in that regard I get it but I think what's been so heartening is that sports where we are now sports have never been more valuable in this era of fragmentation in which sports media has been

deeply disrupted in the ways that you led with sports have never been more relevant and the only thing we all watch it's the one monocultural thing that's still there and see how everyone else is using it Right. Politically, it's being used all of the time as the MMA fight at the White House or Donald Trump and his conversation around being invited to a next game by his good friend Jim Dolan, the owner of the team.

All of that, as all of that suggests, sports are increasing in value. And so at some point, what I am betting on is that fans, the people who want otherwise candy, realize that knowing the truth about their favorite thing that has never been. more important and more valuable and more powerful does not need to feel like just vegetables or just sardines. It can be fun to know the truth. Well, what are some of the biggest stories in sports that have so far alluded us that you want to know about? I mean, what we are doing as we consider the demand for sports to be inelastic is we are raising the values of these franchises, of these assets to a point at which no individual can even afford them. Their value is unbelief.

I just did an obituary, wrote an obituary for Donald Newhouse, who's, you know, one of the heads of the family that owns a New Yorker and much else in many newspapers. His father had a choice between buying the Yankees and buying four newspapers in Syracuse, New York. He went for the newspapers. Yeah. What would the Yankees be worth now? What would this office be like?

I marvel that there was once a choice like that. Yeah. Because no human individually, even Steve Balmer, is going to be able to individually afford these teams. There'll be consortions. And that's what we're seeing now. And so what's happening in sports is that private equity is now being welcomed in. Institutional investors, hedge funds and the like, they are. are going to be the things that can actually afford these teams.

And the reason I spotlight that is because we are watching in sports right now, as the green arrow on sport continues to go up and to the right, we are watching the replacement of fans as owners. We're watching them be replaced by institutional investors who are here for the growth, for the profit, for the money, because it's only going up. And so what sports is running the risk of now as they become so big. And as, by the way, there is a challenge because the cable television faucet is almost turned off. Because, again, media has been disrupted because the cable bill no longer supports the tonnage. You know, that was how these things got to be billion dollar assets was, wow, media rights deals. TV networks need us. Well, now the value is contingent on the last gasps of the nests of the nettles.

networks, and the new buyers are going to be tech companies. Netflix, Apple, Google. These are companies... Amazon. Amazon. These are companies that don't need sports existentially. They are fun to have, but not necessary. And so the question becomes, in a world in which the things that desperately need

this are unable to afford them, and the things that can don't care about it in the same way, what happens to the product? Pablo Tori, thank you. David, thank you for inviting me into the pool. Pablo Tori just want to pull it surprise for audio reporting for his podcast, Pablo Tori finds out. Now, if you're a sports fan, we are recapping each game of the NBA finals with the Knicks and Spurs at New Yorker.com. And you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well, of course, New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick.

for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max

Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deckett.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.