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Max Verstappen’s father: Red Bull could be ‘torn apart’ if Horner stays

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Max Verstappen’s father: Red Bull could be ‘torn apart’ if Horner stays

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Fractures within Red Bull Racing appear to have grown after Max Verstappen’s father, Jos, warned the team was “in danger of being torn apart” if Christian Horner remained in charge amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the team principal.

Horner remains in the spotlight after a turbulent few days in Bahrain to start the new Formula One season. Although Verstappen scored his eighth consecutive grand prix victory with a dominant display, beating teammate Sergio Pérez by over 20 seconds, his father spoke publicly about divisions within the team as the situation remains the biggest story in the sport.

The situation became public in early February when Red Bull GmbH, Red Bull Racing’s parent company, announced it had launched an investigation into allegations made against Horner of inappropriate behavior, which it said it took “extremely seriously.”

On Wednesday, Red Bull announced that the investigation, conducted by an outside party, had led to the grievance being dismissed, noting the complainant had the right to appeal. The next day, a cache of messages allegedly between Horner and the female complainant was anonymously leaked to high-ranking F1 officials and the international media. The Athletic, which received the email leak directly, has not been able to verify the contents, and Horner has repeatedly declined to comment on the messages.

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In an interview with the Daily Mail, Jos Verstappen warned: “There is tension here while (Horner) remains in position. The team is in danger of being torn apart. It can’t go on the way it is.

“It will explode. He is playing the victim when he is the one causing the problems.”


Chalerm Yoovidhya (center), whose family holds a 51% shareholding in Red Bull, joined Christian Horner (second from right) and his wife Geri Halliwell-Horner (right) for the Bahrain Grand Prix podium ceremony. (ANDREJ ISAKOVIC / AFP)

Jos Verstappen raced in F1 between 1994 and 2003 and has been central to his son’s career and success, though he has no formal role on the team. He made similar comments about the controversy in a separate interview with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, also published Saturday night after the race.

Asked about Verstappen’s comments, a Red Bull spokesperson said, “There are no issues here, the team are united and we are focused on racing.”

Tensions escalate

Jos Verstappen’s comments publicly put the father of the team’s star driver in opposition to its team principal.

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He attends the vast majority of his son’s races. Although he is not an employee of Red Bull Racing, his closeness with Max means he is regarded to hold a certain degree of influence. On Thursday, he was seen wearing a Red Bull team jacket while watching the second practice session in Bahrain, during which the anonymous email was circulated.

After the race, Horner said he was “not going to comment on what motives, whatever person may have” for the leak.

Jos denied to both the Daily Mail and De Telegraaf that he was involved in the leak, telling the Daily Mail, “That wouldn’t make sense. Why would I do that when Max is doing so well here?”

There have been growing suggestions of friction within the team ever since the death of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz in October 2022. Mateschitz was the undisputed leader of the company’s F1 efforts, and his absence has led to increased tensions between senior figures within the company.

Following the race, Horner said he was “absolutely” confident he would remain in charge of the team and that his “focus is on the season ahead and the races we have ahead” after the completion of the investigation process.

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“The grievance that was raised was dismissed,” Horner said. “End of. Move on.”

He said it had “not been pleasant, the unwanted attention,” but spoke of the “tremendous support” he felt from within the team and the wider Red Bull company.

On the grid ahead of the race, Horner spoke with Chalerm Yoovidhya, the son of the Red Bull co-founder, whose family holds a 51% shareholding in Red Bull GmbH. Horner and his wife, Geri Halliwell-Horner, were joined by Yoovidhya and his wife to watch the podium celebrations after Max Verstappen’s victory. Jos stood a couple of rows behind them during the ceremony.

Max Verstappen has maintained throughout the investigation into Horner that he is fully focused on what is happening on the track and that the situation has not distracted him from his preparations for the new season.

Asked by The Athletic after taking pole position on Friday whether he still had full faith in Horner’s leadership, Verstappen said: “When I look at how Christian operates within the team, he has been an incredible team boss.

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“So absolutely, from the performance side of things, you can’t even question that.” Verstappen said he spoke “a lot” to Horner and that the Red Bull team principal was “fully committed to the team.”

His father’s comments, nevertheless, will lead to fresh questions about the dynamic with Horner ahead of the second round of the season in Saudi Arabia in a few days.

Max is under contract at Red Bull until 2028 after signing one of the longest and most lucrative contracts in F1 history following his maiden championship success in 2021.

The nature of the brewing tension at Red Bull led to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff (who has called for transparency in the probe) being asked if there was a chance Verstappen could drive for the team for 2025 as a replacement for Lewis Hamilton.

Wolff said: “A driver will always choose the quickest car. That is fundamentally what it is all about. At the moment, Red Bull is the quickest car, so that will in my opinion, that will always be the priority.”

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(Lead photo of Max Verstappen with his father Jos Verstappen ahead of the Bahrain GP: Clive Mason/Getty Images)

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

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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.

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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.”

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“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.”

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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.’”

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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.

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“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.

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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)

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Book Review: ‘Something Rotten,’ by Andrew Lipstein

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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.

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

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

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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?

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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“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?”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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)

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