Connect with us

Culture

From F1 Academy firsts to unique roots, Chloe Chambers breaks the motorsports mold

Published

on

From F1 Academy firsts to unique roots, Chloe Chambers breaks the motorsports mold

This article is part of our Origin Stories series, an inside look at the backstories of the clubs, drivers, and people fueling the sport.


As Chloe Chambers navigated the final lap of Race 2 in Barcelona on her way to her first win in F1 Academy, she took a different approach.

The American driver was laser-focused, making sure to keep the lap clean. But with the gap she built to the rest of the field, she could take the final corner around Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya slower than usual.

“I just drove that last lap and took the time to realize what had happened in the race because, of course, while you’re racing, you don’t really think about that,” Chambers said. “You just think about the next thing coming up the next corner. And so I was able to use that last lap to think about things, think about what I was going to say on the radio. That’s always important.”

Chambers is proof that a driver can thrive in motorsports without making the full-time Europe jump. Haas supports the 20-year-old in F1 Academy, the all-women racing series that is the latest addition to the Formula One pyramid. She climbed to that point while still residing in the United States.

Advertisement

Waiting for her in parc ferme after her first F1 Academy victory, aside from Campos Racing and members of Haas, was her father, who she describes as “a very emotional guy.” She added, “I don’t know if you saw the video of him in Barcelona, but he was a mess after my win.”

The hard work and waiting for the right moment paid off. Chambers sits fourth in the standings with four races to go in 2024 but feels finishing in the top three “is a reasonable goal.” And she already knows she’ll be on the grid next season, sporting blue as part of Red Bull Ford.

Chambers has found a way to live a balanced life, furthering her education while pursuing her motorsports career. Her goal? Reach the pinnacle of motorsport—her own way.

“I hope that (my story) gets people involved in motorsport. I think a lot of people assume that you have to be rich and come from money and be from Europe to be involved in motorsport, especially on the F1 side,” Chambers said to The Athletic, later adding, “This year has been the best year for my racing, and, of course, for me having fun as well. I’ve had the most fun this year driving than I ever have.”


Chloe Chambers has had a successful first season in F1 Academy. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Chapters of Chambers’ life may surprise fans.

Advertisement

She appeared on a 2019 episode of David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, which also happened to include Lewis Hamilton. Most know Letterman for his T.V. work, but Chambers knew him for his IndyCar ties. She and one other karter raced with Letterman in go-karts, spending an entire day at the track.

“He was really trying,” Chambers recalls. “He was trying so hard. He even spun out and hit the wall, and they actually showed it on the episode.”

Then, before she jumped to single-seaters in 2021 for a partial season in the F4 United States Championship, she became a Guinness World Record holder at 16 years old for the fastest vehicle slalom. Looking back, she realized, “I don’t think I’d ever driven any car at that point.” She only had her permit when she drove a Porsche 718 Spyder at a record-breaking time of 47.45 seconds.

Chambers says many people notice that she comes from an adoptive family, likely because she attends most of her races without them by her side.

She was born in Guangdong, China, a southeast coastal province that borders Macau and Hong Kong. At 11 months old, she was adopted and originally started living in Texas. Her younger siblings are also adopted — her sister is from northern China, and her brother is from Ethiopia.

Advertisement

“I can remember when they started the process with my brother, but with my sister actually, it’s kind of a unique thing where it actually ended up taking them, like, seven years or something like that, to get it all finished,” Chambers said. “I can’t remember exactly what happened, but originally, my sister was supposed to only be a couple years younger than me. And then I think that was about the time when there were a bunch of just issues happening in China with the social climate and everything. So they halted adoptions for a little bit.”

This detail of her life story remains at the top of her mind as her motorsports career grows, as she’s been an ambassador for the Gift of Adoption Fund since 2021. “We try to help out wherever we can,” she said. “Of course, having their logo on my suit and being able to spread the message as I go through my travels and everything has been something that I’ve been able to continue on with.”

After living in Texas for a year, Chambers’ family moved to the northeast, spending over a decade in New Jersey and New York. This is where Chambers’ motorsports journey began. Though living with an American family, NASCAR and IndyCar weren’t the series that caught her eye. Her family didn’t watch much of either, aside from the Indianapolis 500, of course.

But Chambers remembers watching F1 with her father.

“My dad was always a big motorsport fan since he was young,” she said. “He grew up in the U.K., so it was a little bit more in their culture than it was for us, but I grew up with it.”

Advertisement

Her dad took her to her first karting outing, and Chambers remembers it being right before the track closed for winter. She was seven years old, “when you’re trying out every sport ever to see which one you like if you like any.” She fell in love with it and asked throughout the winter months when she could return.

“My dad took me to some indoor tracks during the winter time. I didn’t like that very much. And then, as soon as the track opened again in April, we were there, and we did that full season together.”


As Chambers puts it, her father was “a mess” after her first F1 Academy win at Barcelona this year. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Chambers began competing at age eight and won numerous regional and national championships across the next nine years. But motorsports wasn’t the only sport in her life. Though shorter in stature, swimming has also been a passion.

“I liked the racing, so to say. But I wanted something a little more and something that wasn’t so heavily up to physical attributes as swimming is,” Chambers said. “I knew I was never going to be the tallest person ever, so swimming was probably going to end at some point. So that’s where I found racing, and it kind of made up for all the things that I was lacking when I was swimming.”

From swimming, she learned the coaching style that works best for her. Chambers said she went through numerous coaches, some of whom she liked more than others, and learned how key it was to have the right people surrounding you to extract the best performance.

Advertisement

Unlike other drivers across different series, especially those who end up in the F1 pyramid, Chambers never made the jump to living full-time in Europe. Instead, she competed in karting mainly in the United States and  Canada and lives full-time in Indiana. She described European karting as “the pinnacle of karting” but says, “I think that there are a lot of drivers in the U.S. as well that have a lot of talent and can race on the same level as the European racing can.”

Not making that jump to Europe did raise a few questions. Chambers’ partial F4 season happened at the end of her junior year of high school and the beginning of her senior year, prime time for college applications. The world was still bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My parents and I said we’ll continue on racing as long as we can, but being in the U.S., not quite making it over to Europe yet, and being able to get some of the European sponsorship as well, we weren’t sure how long I would be able to race for. And even if I did continue on, you’re not going to be able to drive forever.”


Chambers delivered Haas its first Formula series win this season. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

So she continued applying to colleges and ended up at Arizona State University, pursuing a fully online degree in Business Administration and Management. Chambers grew up managing her career alongside her parents, so this degree was a natural fit. Given that she did not know the future of her racing career, Chambers did apply to different universities as if she would be in person. However, the online format provided flexibility for when W Series eventually came knocking for her to test at the end of 2021 in Arizona.

Her racing career continued with the W Series in 2022 when she teamed up with series champion Jamie Chadwick at Jenner Racing. The following year, she competed in the 2023 Porsche Sprint Challenge North America and Formula Regional Oceania Championship in New Zealand. In the latter series, she became the first woman to secure pole position and win in its history. She believes that moment helped her get to F1 Academy in 2024 with Haas F1 Team and Campos Racing.

Advertisement

But she is still pursuing her college degree, balancing the travel, competition and pressure of online exams.

“I find the great importance in (that balance),” Chambers said, “and it’s also something that’s very unique within racing drivers.”


F1 Academy debuted in 2023, and Marta García won the inaugural championship. Many questions surrounded F1 Academy, especially considering the other all-women series, the W Series, didn’t finish the 2022 season and entered administration in 2023.

Chambers wanted to see where F1 Academy would go in its first season, a decision she still stands by. The category only allows women to compete for two years, and over half of the grid, including points leader Abbi Pulling, will not compete in 2025. Chambers is the first move in the drivers’ market for next season, moving from Haas to join Red Bull Ford.

She’s been sitting on the news for quite some time. Conversations with teams about 2025 began to pick up around mid-season, around when Chambers’ F1 Academy results started picking up. She finished third and fourth in Miami and came in third and first in Barcelona in June.

Advertisement

Chambers will race F1 Academy for Red Bull Ford in 2025. (via Red Bull)

But she had been on Ford’s radar before her first F1 Academy win. Chambers competed in the first round of the Mustang Challenge earlier in June, stepping in for a driver who was injured earlier in the year. She said, “When given the opportunity to go drive a race car, I always say yes. So I went and did that just for fun and, of course, to get some experience in a different kind of car. And it turned out to be something even bigger.”

It was the first race of the year, and numerous “big people from Ford” attended that weekend. Jim Farley, the CEO who also competed, and  Ford Performance Motorsports Global Director Mark Rushbrook met Chambers and hosted a dinner for the competitors.

“It’s also big news when an F1 Academy driver goes and does other racing elsewhere. So I think, of course, there were a lot of eyes on me that weekend regardless.”

Chambers said you must adapt your driving style to a heavier car like the Mustang, similar to jumping between open-wheel racing and another motorsports category. While there is the hope of competing in other series outside of F1 Academy, she said there haven’t been a whole lot of discussions around it. However, “Ford being Ford, I think (they) would love to have me back in Mustang again. It’s one of their most iconic cars ever, an American race car as well.”

Chambers put pen to paper in August, before F1 Academy’s race weekend at Zandvoort. But she had to keep it under wraps aside from sharing the news with her family and close friends. She said the company filming a docuseries on F1 Academy, Hello Sunshine, knew and did attempt to fish it out of her.

Advertisement

A big move is on the horizon for Chambers. And she’s got aspirations to race for wins and championships at “the pinnacle level of motorsport” — in any given series. The American driver’s current focus is the open-wheel racing path, like F1, but she’s open to the World Endurance Championship, IMSA and the prestigious Le Mans.

She’s a racer at heart.

“My idea of success is having a nice long career, maybe some good results here and there. But I’m not somebody who thinks winning is the only way to see success for me,” Chambers said. “Ever since I started racing karts, my dad always told me that the weekend will be a success in our book as long as I drove to my full potential. So even though that weekend might not have been my best weekend results-wise, if I drove to my full potential and didn’t leave anything else on the table, then that’s a good weekend for us, and I think that kind of can be said for my career as a whole.

“As long as I continue on with my career and continue performing at whatever my potential is, then I think that’ll be something that I’m happy with.”

Origin Stories series is part of a partnership with Chanel.

Advertisement

The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

Top photo via Red Bull Racing

Culture

Julie Stewart-Binks on a career derailed by alleged sexual assault: ‘What could my life have been?’

Published

on

Julie Stewart-Binks on a career derailed by alleged sexual assault: ‘What could my life have been?’

Last week, Julie Stewart-Binks sat in an empty lounge on the rooftop of a hotel near her apartment in New York City. She is about to watch a clip from her time as a Fox Sports host and reporter. It is a moment that she thinks about often, but one that she has never wanted to relive in full. She hits play on the video, then her hands jerk back toward her chest, as if bracing for a blow.

In the clip, Stewart-Binks, then a 28-year-old Fox Sports 1 on-air personality, is on the set of a pop-up show – “Jason Whitlock’s House Party By the Bay” – for the 2016 Super Bowl in San Francisco. The set is meant to evoke a Super Bowl party. Red Solo cups. Beers chilling in an ice bucket on the coffee table. Whitlock and the day’s guest – New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski – are behind a desk; Stewart-Binks is on a gray couch flanking them.

The group is discussing Gronkowski’s disclosure that he moonlighted as a stripper in college. Stewart-Binks then says: “If you have a chance to make some more money, using maybe me as an example, do you want to show us a little ‘Magic Mike?’” (A reference to the 2012 movie about male exotic dancers.) Gronkowski, a little surprised, asks Stewart-Binks if she wants a lap dance, to which she replies: “Yeah.” Gronkowski seems to be stalling. He asks about music and remarks: “Where are your friends? I would need, like, a bachelorette party?” Stewart-Binks keeps urging him on, as does Whitlock, and Gronkowski eventually moves from behind the desk, over to the couch. He dances briefly in front of Stewart-Binks, then straddles her and thrusts his hips toward her, grinding on her as the cameras roll. Stewart-Binks, laughing, takes out some crumpled dollar bills and hands them to Gronkowski. The dancing lasts about six seconds.

As she watches the clip, Stewart-Binks’ face reddens and her chest breaks out in hives. She begins to cry. “I will spend my entire life trying to make up for this,” she says, wiping away tears with a shaking hand. “I will die trying to make up for this moment that’s clearly not who I am.”

The Gronkowski segment was the defining moment in Stewart-Binks’ four years at FS1 (2013-16). As the clip spread across the internet, FS1 was derided as a “circus act,” but Stewart-Binks took the brunt of the criticism. She was accused of setting back the efforts of women working in sports journalism and betraying feminism entirely. Some of the criticism came from friends and colleagues.

Advertisement

Now, she wants those critics to know why she participated in the segment, and providing that context requires sharing what she says happened to her in the days beforehand.

On Friday, Stewart-Binks, 37, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Fox and Charlie Dixon, an executive vice president and head of content at Fox Sports and FS1, the company’s sports network. In that lawsuit, she alleges that about a week before the Gronkowski segment she was sexually assaulted by Dixon during a meeting at a hotel that he organized under the auspices of talking about her Super Bowl week duties. Dixon is also a defendant in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by former FS1 hairstylist Noushin Faraji. In Faraji’s complaint, she claimed that “executives and talent were allowed to physically and verbally abuse workers with impunity,” and she alleged that Dixon groped her at a co-worker’s birthday party in January 2017, among other allegations.

Dixon did not respond to text, voice and email messages seeking comment. Fox Sports said in a statement: “These allegations are from over eight years ago. At the time, we promptly hired a third-party firm to investigate and addressed the matter based on their findings.”

Days after the alleged assault, when producers in San Francisco told her that FS1 wanted a viral moment out of Gronkowski, she said she never considered the implications of the stunt, only what would happen if she refused with Dixon watching from the set. “I was in a really f—ed-up place that I could not tell people about,” she said.

In her complaint, Stewart-Binks said she detailed the allegations against Dixon to a Fox human resources official in 2017 but that Fox “egregiously made the deliberate decision to protect Dixon and allow a sexual predator to remain an executive at Fox for nearly a decade.”

Advertisement

“They knew and didn’t do anything about it,” Stewart-Binks said in an interview earlier this month. “It meant they didn’t care about the damage done to me and how it affected others.” She then added: “This has been accepted for so long. I’m sitting here wanting it to be different.”


Fox Sports executive vice president Charlie Dixon in 2018. (Travis P. Ball / Getty Images)

Stewart-Binks grew up in Toronto, and her mother was a broadcast reporter and her father worked in the medical device industry. She played right wing on a boys’ house league hockey team and also trained as a figure skater and a cellist.

She attended Queen’s University and obtained degrees in both drama and physical and health education but developed a passion for broadcasting and later got a master’s degree in international broadcast journalism from what is now known as City St George’s, University of London.

Her entry into sports journalism in Canada was scrappy and unglamorous. She covered Ontario Hockey League games on a volunteer basis, staying at a friend’s house in Kingston, then taking a bus to Niagara, where she’d bunk with her grandmother in a retirement community. Later, as a reporter and anchor for CTV in Regina, Saskatchewan, she drove across the Canadian prairies shooting and editing sports television packages on curling and anchoring the nightly newscasts. To save money, she lived out of a friend’s basement.

In 2013, she was plucked out of relative obscurity by an agent at Octagon (the late John Ferriter) and flown to Los Angeles to meet with Fox Sports executives and screen test for the launch of FS1. She was hired by the fledgling network as an update anchor and went on to host “Fox Soccer Daily.” She also worked as a sideline reporter for Major League Soccer, hosted FS1’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics and covered the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. She spent 65 days on the road that summer and was tabbed as one of Awful Announcing’s “Rising Stars.”

Advertisement

But, according to her complaint, by early 2016, her allies within FS1 — executives like Scott Ackerson and Rick Jaffe — had departed and a new regime — Dixon and fellow executive Jamie Horowitz — were in place with a new vision for the network.

Stewart-Binks still liked her job. She got to cover soccer and hockey – sports she loved – and work as an anchor and a host. She was part of a tight-knit group that helped launch FS1. But her future was uncertain. The network had until April 1, 2016, to pick up a one-year option in her contract. If it did not, she would lose a high-profile job. She felt she needed to show the Dixon-Horowitz regime that she was a versatile and dynamic talent.

When Whitlock requested her to be a part of his show during the 2016 Super Bowl week, she felt she had an opening to do that. And then Dixon asked her to come to his hotel, writing that he wanted to “go over expectation(s)” before a group meeting the next day, according to her complaint. After receiving that text, Stewart-Binks shared her excitement with a friend about getting face time with her boss and curated her outfit for the meeting – a suede jacket and designer heels – hoping to convey style and professionalism.

The lawsuit sets out in detail how they met at the bar at a hotel in Marina del Rey, Calif. She ordered a single glass of white wine. Dixon asked what she had been told about her role on Whitlock’s show during Super Bowl week. He then told her he didn’t think she should be going to the Super Bowl at all and that she was ill-suited to host and wasn’t funny or interesting or talented enough to draw in viewers.

In an interview, Stewart-Binks said she was shocked and confused by Dixon’s remarks. Why was he denigrating her so strongly, and, just before she went on an important assignment for the network? She tried to stay calm, even when he remarked, according to the complaint, that the only way anyone would be willing to watch her was if she “got up on this bar and took your top off” and then added: “You’re not hot enough to be a hot girl on TV.” She said in her interview with The Athletic that she responded to Dixon: “I didn’t get my master’s degree in ‘hot girl.’”

Advertisement

Stewart-Binks said Dixon’s tone then changed. He stopped criticizing her and asked about her professional aspirations. The complaint states that Dixon then ordered two beers from the bar and urged her to come to his room and drink them, adding that he had a great view from his balcony. She didn’t think it was a good idea, she said in her interview and in the complaint, but she felt she couldn’t say no to her boss.

“You have autonomy over yourself to say ‘no’ and leave. But you don’t, and you say ‘yes’ because he held the power to everything,” Stewart-Binks told The Athletic.

The legal complaint describes Dixon’s shirts – colorful tees with slogans and pictures – laid out on one of the beds in his room. Dixon suggested they step out on the balcony. Once outside, Dixon, according to the complaint, “swiftly pushed her against the wall of the hotel and pinned her arms to her side. With her arms forcefully held down and his body pressed against hers, Dixon tried to force his tongue into her mouth.” Stewart-Binks’ mouth remained shut but Dixon “ignored her, continuing to press against her body and lick her closed mouth. While keeping one of her arms pinned, he moved his other arm from pressing her upper elbow against the wall to her body and towards her chest. Stewart-Binks seized the moment of partial freedom to push him away, say ‘get off of me’ and rapidly leave the hotel room.”

Once in her car, she called the same friend with whom she had earlier shared her excitement about meeting with Dixon. “I remember getting a very upset phone call,” the friend told The Athletic. “It was the overall disappointment of ‘I can’t believe an executive did this.’” Stewart-Binks later called her mother, according to the complaint, and the two women concluded that it would imperil her career if she spoke out about what Dixon had allegedly done.

Stewart-Binks went back to work frightened about the implications of fending off Dixon and also what his remarks about her lack of talent meant for her career going forward. At a meeting the day after the alleged assault, she said Dixon ignored her. She believed her future was “very much hanging in the balance” as she arrived in San Francisco for Super Bowl week. Her anxiety was ramped up by producers there who were hell-bent to “make a moment” that would garner attention, she said.

Advertisement

“I was told … that I was not capable of being able to do a moment like this on television. And that I was not interesting, funny, talented, smart. And so I felt the need to prove that I was all in, and that I was not scared to do something like (the Gronkowski stunt). Had I not (done it), I would have felt like I failed and that I would have confirmed what (Dixon) told me.”

The reaction to her role in the Gronkowski segment surprised and stung her, she said in an interview. People she knew in the industry, some whom she considered friends, were among those voicing their disappointment with her choice to participate. Her co-worker and friend, Katie Nolan, told GQ that she disapproved of the bit. (Nolan later apologized to Stewart-Binks in a podcast and clarified her remarks.) Stewart-Binks recalled receiving a text message from Grant Wahl, the late Sports Illustrated soccer writer she admired, that read: “That’s not who you are.”

Fox promoted the Gronkowski segment on social media and elsewhere. The network got its viral moment. But when the backlash grew strong enough, Fox stopped, and the same men in the production meeting eager to “make a moment” went largely silent. Stewart-Binks’ bosses didn’t address the incident at length until six weeks later; Horowitz said at that time that he was supportive of Stewart-Binks for doing a “fun bit” and thought Gronkowski “maybe … took it a half step too far.”

In her lawsuit, Stewart-Binks said the network instructed her not to comment on the incident, and her agency, CAA, advised her to ride it out. Less than two months after the Super Bowl, Stewart-Binks was informed that Fox would not pick up her contract option with one executive telling her that there was “nothing for her to do here,” according to the complaint.


According to the complaint, Stewart-Binks was contacted by a Fox human resources official in June 2017 and asked about Horowitz’s behavior when Stewart-Binks worked at Fox Sports. Stewart-Binks didn’t have anything substantive to share about Horowitz, but the complaint states that she disclosed to the HR official what Dixon allegedly said to her in their January 2016 meeting and what allegedly happened in his hotel room afterward.

Advertisement

Horowitz was fired following the probe, but Dixon remained at the company.

After Fox, Stewart-Binks worked as a part-time soccer reporter for ESPN, a rinkside reporter for NHL on TNT, a host for BetRivers Sportsbook Network, did stand-up comedy, was a host for the CBC’s 2024 Olympic coverage, among other jobs. She’s continued to scrap to find work but believes the Gronkowski segment has impacted her ability to get other jobs.

When the Faraji lawsuit against Fox and Dixon was filed, Stewart-Binks received text messages from people she had told about her interactions with Dixon. On page eight of the 42-page complaint, there is a reference to a host who reported Dixon to the company. She believed that Faraji, with whom she worked at FS1, was referencing her. Reading about what Faraji allegedly endured was a “tipping point,” Stewart-Binks said. “I didn’t want to hold onto it anymore.”

Stewart-Binks said she has experienced bouts of self-doubt since leaving Fox Sports, Dixon’s criticism of her abilities still ringing in her ears. “I had a different view of what my life would be like than what it is. And I’m very grateful for everything I have. But sometimes I think … well, what could my life have been had this not happened?”

(Top photo: Hatnim Lee for The Athletic)

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Culture

Book Review: ‘Something Rotten,’ by Andrew Lipstein

Published

on

Book Review: ‘Something Rotten,’ by Andrew Lipstein

Things are complicated further when Mikkel, immoral as he may be, reports a story that exposes a conservative politician as a pedophile. What does this mean for Reuben, who’s developing a view of virtue and manhood derived from his admiration for a man seemingly characterized by his “depravity”? Reuben ruminates on this deeply, even undertaking an audio project in which he purports to interview Mikkel on “cross-cultural ideas of masculinity.”

Decoding Reuben’s (or Lipstein’s) thesis on this topic would take a term paper the likes of which this English major thankfully left behind years ago, but attempting to untangle its threads is part of the fun of the novel: Reuben, like the privileged and morally unmoored men of Lipstein’s previous two novels, “Last Resort” and “The Vegan,” is exhaustingly self-involved, and endlessly self-analyzing. If his revelations sometimes feel a little glib (“the right and the left were just counterweights to each other in the same tired, morally facile system”), Reuben’s plight feels urgent all the same.

The real fun of “Something Rotten,” though, lies in the concentric deceptions that Reuben and Cecilie both uncover and perpetrate. At heart, this is a book about deceit, about double-crossing and discovering the difference between abstract and tangible truth. I’ll not spoil the vertiginous plot turns, but suffice it to say, by the time Reuben declares, “I’m just going to be true to myself,” you’re as convinced that this is as solid a credo for living a virtuous life as you are when Polonius presents the idea to Laertes and tells him to give it a whirl.

The name Reuben means “behold, a son,” and “Something Rotten” asks us to behold many of them, each with a complicated father or father figure of his own. Mikkel is a deadbeat dad of sorts to Jonas and Reuben, but Reuben’s own biological father, absent and unknown, looms large over the proceedings, as do the fathers of Cecilie and her Danish friends.

The jacket of the book depicts a close-up photo of a squalling baby. This could be Reuben and Cecilie’s son, the focus of his parents’ hopes and anxieties. It could be an allusion to Reuben, after Mikkel gets him to shave his head. Or it could be a proxy for any of us, unthinking and needy and crying out over some minor need unmet, blissfully unaware of all the pain and complication to come.

Advertisement

SOMETHING ROTTEN | By Andrew Lipstein | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 340 pp. | $28

Continue Reading

Culture

Five stars, seven figures, zero eligibility: Why are the Bewley twins still paying?

Published

on

Five stars, seven figures, zero eligibility: Why are the Bewley twins still paying?

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It’s a scene inside the Lemerand Center on an unfairly cold Wednesday night in early January.

A junior college men’s basketball game is happening in a 1,000-seat gym. Everyone is here for that, including two players who were never supposed to be. But play has been paused. Security is defusing an altercation between the Daytona State College and Santa Fe College women’s hoops teams, who faced off earlier and are now pointing and yelling at each other across the bleachers. One of the Santa Fe players holds back a teammate by yanking on her shirt.

Some of this owes to Daytona State’s baseball squad raising the temperature by sitting behind the visitors bench and trolling them ruthlessly. And now, here come the Santa Fe women, who have been relocated to a section right next to them. The baseball dudes knowingly simmer down. “We don’t want no trouble, guys,” one of them concedes.

But if there’s a trigger to all of it, it’s a tie-up during the first half. A missed shot, some wrestling for the rebound, some choice words and Daytona State’s Ryan Bewley shoving a guy who got in the face of his brother, Matt. That’s when the mercury really jumped. And it brings us to the pertinent question.

What in the world are Matt and Ryan Bewley doing here?

Advertisement

Once upon a time, the 6-foot-9 Bewley twins were the first to hit a new switch on the traditional track for elite basketball talent: Top 15 phenoms who signed with a then-nascent operation called Overtime Elite, exchanging their last two years of high school for training, exposure to scouts and millions of internet eyeballs plus compensation. This was May 2021, one month before a Supreme Court ruling tore down barriers to college athletes profiting off their name, image and likeness (NIL). At the end of two years with Overtime, the Bewleys weren’t ready for the NBA nor eligible to play in the NCAA, fishhooked by the fine print of their choice.

The timing was excruciating.

Why it matters anymore is the issue.

Matt and Ryan Bewley, now 21, started by awing grassroots crowds across Florida. They then went from a throbbing 100,000-square-foot training facility in Atlanta to the far South Side of Chicago and court-ordered basketball purgatory to, on this night, a junior college with 16 women’s golf banners hanging in its gym. They are playing again. There is a joy in that. It helps wash down the thought that NCAA programs blithely use NIL money to make millionaires every year, and it’s completely fine. And they’re the ones paying, still.

“People think me and him just fell off the face of the earth,” Matt Bewley says. “It low-key feels like we’re the only people in the world that are going through what we’re going through.”

Advertisement

If the Bewley boys from Fort Lauderdale were not a figurative tag team, born a minute apart and bonded at every step in their basketball lives, they might have been an actual tag team. They were professional wrestling fans growing up, and that might be underselling it. “Bro,” Matt says, “that’s all we did.” They each can recite their top five all-time grapplers (the Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin make both lists), and their enthusiasm occasionally broke the barrier to reality, among other things. Neither is sure who tried to powerbomb whom. They do remember the smashed window, their father asking what happened, and both of them shrugging and saying they didn’t know.

“We got in trouble so many times,” Ryan says. “Broke the bed. Broke the window. Couple of walls have holes in them.”

Given that, and given that they were both 6 feet tall by age 10, it is no shock their mother, Marlene, decided to funnel her kids’ energy into something constructive. They started organized basketball at age 11 in a rec league at the city of Tamarac Community Center. Within a couple years, the Bewleys caught the eye of a local trainer who started working with them daily. By eighth grade, they’d joined Team Breakdown, a prominent Florida grassroots program.

During the summer before their ninth-grade year, they played up against 17U competition at AAU events, leading the world in double-takes induced and creating their own mythology. The Bewleys received power-conference scholarship offers from Iowa State, Florida and South Florida before they attended their first high school class. “They were like grown men playing against little kids,” says Eddie Placer, a guard from Orlando who is now a teammate at Daytona State. “That’s what it looked like out there.”

“We always compared them to the X-Men,” says Gerald Gillion, who has known the Bewleys since they were 13 and who served as Chicago State’s head coach for their one year on campus. “Really powerful mutants that, in the right situation, can do some very, very good things.”

Advertisement

Following two dunk-filled seasons at two different Florida high schools, the road forked. A new venture built by the media company Overtime, one that counted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and more than 25 NBA players among its initial investors, made its pitch: Complete a high school education while training and playing at an academy in Atlanta, receiving exposure from a brand with a combined social media audience of more than 50 million people. Overtime Elite offered a minimum $100,000 salary plus bonuses and company stock to any player willing to take the leap. The aggressively untraditional terms were no secret. System disruption was the entire point.

Ryan Bewley was on board, primed for something more than Florida high school competition. “Iron sharpens iron,” he says now.

Matt Bewley was not, struggling with the idea of leaving home and friends behind. “I just felt like I was growing up too fast,” he says.

A visit to Overtime Elite’s facilities and reconsidering how reported seven-figure contracts would impact, well, everything in life recalibrated his thinking. The family likewise took into account the uncertainty of post-pandemic basketball in Florida and weighed it against predictable high-end training — “A path to getting to the league,” their father, Prince, says — combined with a centralized education structure and small class sizes. “It encompassed everything we needed,” Marlene says.

On May 21, 2021, the news release dropped: Five-Star Prospects Matt and Ryan Bewley Make History as First Signings for Overtime Elite. “Signing these two great pillars for our program is an exciting beginning,” Brandon Williams, the organization’s head of basketball operations, said in the statement. Every report about the deal included a note that the Bewleys were forfeiting high school and NCAA eligibility. (In the very next recruiting cycle, Overtime Elite offered prospects a plan for joining while also maintaining an ability to play Division I basketball.)

It can be true that teenagers may not be altogether concerned with details — “I don’t think anybody at that age can understand the repercussions of anything,” Matt says — and also that obliviousness is not an out. “Going into it, the eligibility part of it, maybe at that particular time, I didn’t completely understand,” Marlene says.

Says Prince Bewley: “What sold me was, every day, the training, the facility, the coaches, the environment was to train these guys like an NBA-type thing. But they’re high school players. That’s it.”

Exactly one month later, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in NCAA v. Alston that cleared the way for college athletes to profit off NIL. It might’ve been a footnote in the Bewleys’ story had their chosen route worked out. It didn’t. Overtime Elite fulfilled its promise of development and exposure; 20 of the original 26 players to sign have spent time on professional rosters somewhere worldwide. (And one is a football player at Georgia.) The Bewleys simply did not rise to that level. They scored and rebounded but also averaged less than an assist per game and didn’t make a single 3-pointer between them in the 2022-23 campaign. They were not pro prospects. Not yet. They were, in fact, provided the option to spend a third year with Overtime Elite. Instead, they decided to make a run at Division I college basketball, against the headwinds of their choices, insisting that they do not regret them.

“Obviously, there are situations you go through in life where you’re like, damn, I should have made a different decision,” Matt Bewley says. “But nah, I feel like it’s just part of the story. That’s all it is. Wherever else we go, wherever this takes us, it’s just part of the story.”

Advertisement

They turned the corner and ran over traffic spikes. The Bewleys signed with Chicago State, a Division I program with a sympathetic coach in Gillion and zero winning seasons since 1986. They were heralded as “once-in-a-generation-type talents” who would have an “immediate impact.” The Bewleys applied for amateur certification in June 2023 and, later that month, the NCAA informed the school they were unlikely to get it. On Oct. 31 — one week before the first regular-season game — the NCAA made it official: non-certified. In short, the NCAA ruled the Bewleys had made too much money, beyond its acceptable limits for amateurs.

The Bewleys filed a federal antitrust lawsuit the next day, seeking a temporary restraining order and injunction against the NCAA. A judge in the U.S. District Court of Chicago denied them on Nov. 14. After a December hearing, the judge then denied the Bewleys’ request for reconsideration and a preliminary injunction on Jan. 14, 2024, concluding that they “have not established a likelihood of success on their claims that (the NCAA’s) bylaws are unreasonably anticompetitive or restrictive.”

The door wasn’t dead-bolted shut. It was removed and replaced with a concrete wall. The Bewleys were seemingly the only people to sue the NCAA and lose.

“You know how you have that passion for something?” Ryan Bewley says now. “And that love for something? And it just gets taken away from you? … And you keep trying and trying and trying, and people are in your ear saying, it’s going to get better, it’s going to get better — and it doesn’t get better. It’s like, aw, man, your hopes are too high.”

They now couldn’t play competitive basketball while marooned on a campus a good 30-minute drive away from anything interesting. “Some days, I cried,” Ryan says. The judge’s initial ruling bruised them so badly, they declined to accompany Chicago State to the Cancun Challenge in November; by 2024, they couldn’t travel with the team even if they wanted to. “Me and him were legit depressed,” Matt Bewley says. When they did join everyone in the gym, the Bewleys served as high-end scout-teamers. “Practice dummies,” as Ryan puts it, and they admit their personal investment levels dropped accordingly.

Advertisement

“It was so bad I used to be scared to even go to the park and play a pickup game,” Matt says. “Because I’m just like, yo, I haven’t done anything.”

At the end of the school year, the Bewleys returned to Florida and entered the NCAA’s transfer portal. Maybe they could join Gillion at Long Island University, where he’d taken an associate head coach spot. High-major coaches called, Marlene says, trying to sort out the twins’ status. But weeks went by. Nothing changed, and no one wanted to risk another year of idle exile. Matt considered quitting basketball. He figured he’d find something, he says now, that tall people could do.

It was mid-summer when Joey Cantens, the head coach at Daytona State College, logged into a database that ranks the available players in the portal. He noticed two familiar names near the top of the list.

On a whim, Cantens called Gillion, whom he’d known for almost two decades.

“Hey,” Cantens asked, “what are the twins doing?”

Advertisement

A few weeks after competing in a U20 European championship tournament in July as Great Britain’s point guard, and a few days after settling in for a year of junior college basketball in the United States, Tyrese Lacey arrived at the doors of the Lemerand Center to let his coach in the building. The sight of two extremely large humans flanking Cantens staggered him. On the elevator ride to the second floor, Lacey confirmed that, yes, in fact, these extremely large humans were related.

The elevator doors opened. The tour continued. You know they’re the Bewley twins, the Birmingham, England, native was told, expectantly.

“I’m like, ‘Who the hell are the Bewley twins?’” Lacey says now.

That was the question, wasn’t it?

In August 2024, two former five-star prospects were at the doorstep of an 11,000-student commuter school with a $3,100 tuition for Florida residents. Three years removed from famously upending an ecosystem. A year and a half removed from competitive basketball. Walking existential crises. When the Bewleys first entered the transfer portal in the spring of ’24, junior colleges across the country reached out to gauge their interest. The brothers didn’t reply. “I’m like, obviously me and him are never going to juco,” Matt says.

Advertisement

But eligibility in this realm works differently. The Bewleys could play. Immediately. Unless they intended to spend another season in suspended animation, they were out of alternatives.

“This is literally the purpose of community college,” Cantens says, “is to serve kids like them.”

Daytona State offered a soft landing to boot. Cantens was an energetic 38-year-old with experience as a Division I staffer at both Florida Gulf Coast and USC, whose Daytona State teams had won 55 of 63 games the previous two years while deploying a high-tempo, 3-pointer-heavy modern offense. Most critically? The Miami native played for the same AAU program as the Bewleys. He knew the people they knew. “That’s just family,” is how Matt puts it. As for the infrastructure, the twins could do far worse. A $16 million residence hall, opened in 2022 and steps away from the gym entrance, housed athletes. The cafeteria, not much farther away, served three meals a day. There was a stash of nutritional snacks available every day and an athletic trainer who whipped up post-workout smoothies. No strength coach or video coordinator. No zero-gravity treadmills or charter flights. But hardly a basketball skid row.

In a lower corner of the whiteboard in Cantens’ office, there’s a program mantra scribbled in black ink: This is a transient program for future pros. Not a dead end program for losers. “We start practice and if you’re not here an hour and a half early, doing your lift routine, your stretch routine, your shooting routine, if you’re not getting protein after practice — I have a problem with you,” Cantens says. “Because you’re not setting yourself up for success.”

The Bewleys signed on. How it would go was a cliffhanger for everyone.

Advertisement

Weary after the previous three years and wary of more disappointment, the twins kept to themselves in the early days. “You could tell there was still a dark spot there,” Lacey says. They’d sat on the couch in Cantens’ office and insisted that all they wanted was to be part of a team and chase a championship. Cantens didn’t totally buy it, suspicious the Bewleys were parroting some well-rehearsed lines from Overtime Elite media training. Someone like Isaiah Dorceus, a guard who didn’t have gaudy rankings and who isn’t 6-9 and who had one year left to prove worthy of a Division I roster spot, simply didn’t want anyone to wreck the good vibes.

Pickup games riddled with trash talk chipped away at the twins’ shells. So did team trips to the beach. Two players who admittedly don’t get up early for much of anything submitted to 5 a.m. workouts. They also forged ahead when it became clear their conditioning levels were not 5 a.m. workout-ready. (“I think the first workout, I made Matt throw up,” Cantens says.) It wasn’t long before the Bewleys were just two more players at Daytona State with bendy-straw career paths.

“They live in the dorms like everybody else, they eat in the cafeteria like everybody else, they get yelled at by me like everybody else,” Cantens says. “And they do a good job of cheering their teammates. And when you see that, you realize, OK, this is real. They really just want to be part of something that they missed.”

As Ryan Bewley puts it, simply: “I’m having that joy again, you know?”

To be clear: They absolutely want something more. They believe they are future NBA players.

Advertisement

But functional jump shots and defensive awareness, not pro roster spots, are the next rungs on the ladder. Seeing the Bewleys play is seeing the possibilities everyone sees. Matt’s end-to-end speed and chin-at-the-iron vertical on lobs. Ryan’s raw feel that, if honed properly, could make him an enviable offensive facilitator at his size. It is the stuff that draws coaches from Illinois, LSU, Penn State, St. Bonaventure, James Madison, Vermont and more to this outpost on the Florida coast, just in case.

It’s also seeing the hitch at the top of Matt’s jumper and realizing he hasn’t attempted a 3-pointer all season for a reason. It’s seeing Ryan hoist shots from the side of his head, almost like a catapult, casting at least a little doubt on the translatability of his 35.7 percent 3-point shooting. The numbers — 10 points and six rebounds in 18 minutes per game for Ryan, 9.5 points and five rebounds in 12.8 per game for Matt — are fine. They don’t obscure the truth.

“If you don’t allow them to play at a four-year school, their only chance to get developed is at a juco, for two years,” Cantens says. “At that point you better be ready to play for money overseas, somewhere. Unfair to them. Everybody else gets four or five years. (They) only get two to figure it out.”

Matt and Ryan Bewley can’t play major college basketball.

And they probably need to.

Advertisement

In a second-floor conference room that’s also used for film study and reheating leftovers, at a junior college occupying a few acres between a spring break mecca and the world’s most famous speedway, a modern college basketball conundrum is relitigated.

The Bewleys believe what they received for what they did at Overtime Elite — playing basketball that a media entity turned into content, signing Topps cards via Overtime’s licensing agreement with that company, doing photo shoots for other sponsors, and more — is equivalent to NIL compensation. The courts didn’t buy it. The Bewleys voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit in April 2024 but plan to refile based on the upcoming House v. NCAA settlement, after which schools effectively will pay student-athletes via revenue sharing. “That wedge the NCAA wants to put between Matt and Ryan and other athletes is getting smaller and smaller as the NIL world continues to develop,” says Dominique Price, the twins’ Chicago-based attorney. The Bewleys likely have exhausted the NCAA’s traditional paths to eligibility reinstatement already. (An NCAA spokesperson says the organization cannot comment on individual student-athletes.)

In the meantime, the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2025, forward AJ Dybantsa, will play for BYU next season after receiving an NIL package reported to be worth at least $5 million.

“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” Matt says. “I never said this out loud, but I’m going to say this: It feels like everybody is living their life because of me and Ryan. You see NIL. You see all this other stuff. I think the reason why there even is an NIL is because of me and Ryan.”

“They’re getting paid to play,” Ryan says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Advertisement

The saga isn’t a regular conversation topic among their teammates. But there are thoughts on it at Daytona State, where the idea of opportunity is a little deeper and a little more desperate.

“It’s messed up that they’re going through this,” Placer says.

“Nothing should be stopping players from being able to play at the next level, in something they love to do,” Dorceus says.

“They’ve made money. But (other) people are making money as well,” Lacey says. “So what’s the issue now? What’s the difference? Because they signed it a bit earlier? They did their punishment. They did a year off. They didn’t play that year, and people were getting money that year. What is the difference now? Let the boys play.”

The next night, after all the hostilities end against Santa Fe College, Matt and Ryan Bewley walk past a locker room whiteboard framed by motivational placards — “WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BREAK YOU” is a little on the nose — and inspect the box score. Once Cantens finishes his postgame remarks, the twins bring some concerns to assistant coach David Watkins.

Advertisement

Ryan is confused about having zero blocked shots. Matt insists his rebound count is too low. Watkins laughs. He promises he’ll check the film, but it doesn’t appear the Bewleys will let this go. All they have is what they do here.

Maybe something changes. Maybe all the gray burns off and lets some light in. “I’m spiritual anyways,” Prince Bewley says. “I’m hoping for a miracle.” Failing that or a favorable judge’s ruling, they’ll reassess and consider testing the NBA Draft waters for feedback or exploring overseas options or just staying put. For now, though? There is nothing else but what happens in a place they never expected to be.

“Hey,” Matt Bewley says, “we’re all trying to claw to the top together.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of Daytona State College; Michael Conley / Associated Press)

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending