EUGENE, Ore. — Somewhere in those 6.5 hours of perpetual pain, Dan Lanning’s phone lit up. But he didn’t see it. He was wincing. He was breathing deeply. Alec Turner, the artist tasked with completing the massive tattoo on the left side of Lanning’s chest, saw the name on the screen, and his eyes bulged.

The incoming call? Phil Knight.

So Turner removed the needle piercing the ribs of Oregon’s gregarious football coach and deadpanned: “Hey, man, you should probably answer this.”

When Phil Knight calls, you stop what you’re doing. Lanning sat on the table, swiped his phone screen and took a respite to talk to the founder of Nike and Oregon’s most famed alumnus and donor. Lanning told Knight where he was and what he was cramming into one session.

The permanent portrait of Lanning’s wife, Sauphia, is sprinkled with various homages to their journey through life —and football — together.

Before Turner dipped the needle in ink on Jan. 4, 2023, he offered Lanning numbing cream. Lanning declined but now admits that, as the hours dragged on, he regretted that decision. He thought to himself: I’m a football coach, right? I should be able to handle this.

“I just didn’t have a big window of time,” Lanning says. “Pain is weakness leaving the body. Let’s go. Knock it out.”

He had just finished his first year as head football coach at Oregon, where the Ducks won 10 games, were in the College Football Playoff conversation most of the season and had a top-10 recruiting ranking for the 2023 class. He was already hooked on life in Eugene.

These were the first steps in Lanning’s project to not only build Oregon into a winner his way, but to sustain it for years to come. His second season with the Ducks in 2023 was another step forward, showcased by a record-setting offense that wowed even a fan base accustomed to them.

But nearly a year to the date he had his map charted in ink, the ultimate test of allegiance arose.

On Jan. 10, 2024, Alabama’s Nick Saban announced his retirement, rocking the college football universe. Lists of candidates to replace the seven-time national championship-winning head coach were formulated by the sport’s insiders almost immediately. Most put Lanning at the epicenter of the speculation cycle.

The Lanning-to-Alabama conjecture lasted not even 24 hours, despite false reports that he was in Tuscaloosa interviewing to replace the legend for whom he’d once worked. It ended with a close-up of Lanning, puffing smoke from a cigar, announcing that he was — as he says again and again — “10 toes down” in Eugene.

Ask Lanning if he turned down Alabama, and he flashes a grin. “When you’re in a situation where your answer is already going to be no, people don’t ask you those questions.”

At Oregon, Lanning enjoys a fully guaranteed deal that pays more than $7 million a year through the 2029 season and requires a $20 million buyout to leave early, in addition to the perks of running a program with the support of Nike’s deep pockets. But conventional wisdom posits that most coaches linked to the highest profile and most illustrious job in the sport would at least open up a lane for communication.

Lanning, turns out, isn’t all that conventional.

The digital clock inside Lanning’s office runs vertically on the wall to the right of his vast desk. The Ducks-green seconds tick away alongside the minutes and hours to tell Lanning how much time he has. On this visit, he would turn 38 the next day, but Lanning would rather talk about anything else.

“Twenty-one is the last time I celebrated a birthday,” he says.

So what about how, at 19, on a waiter’s salary at Outback Steakhouse, he purchased a house on Elizabeth Street in Liberty, Mo., while balancing life as a Division II linebacker at William Jewell College? He had four teammates move in who helped pay the mortgage. It’s been nearly 20 years since they huddled together for Nintendo 64 tournaments. If a roommate was short one month, Lanning would cover for them. But he wouldn’t forget about it.

Leaning forward in a chair, Lanning says, “Realizing early you can create your own success with hard work is something that stuck out with me.”

Trent Figg, head coach at Division III Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., is one of Lanning’s former teammates and roommates. Figg says Lanning hasn’t changed since he’s ascended college football’s coaching ladder. Figg’s scouting report of his friend Dan Lanning (not head football coach Dan Lanning) is succinct:

• He’s a social butterfly and the life of the party at all times.
• He loves action movies.
• He likes to smoke a cigar.
• He likes to cook steak on his own stovetop.
• He still wears white Nike dress socks to work every day.

“That,” Lanning says, “is mostly true.”

Lanning’s former roommates and former employers offer up a common theme: He carries with him a unique devotion to people who believe in him.

“He’s the most loyal person I’ve ever been around,” says Figg. “Like, if you talk about why he stayed in Eugene instead of going to Alabama, he sees the value in how people have invested in him, and he fully believes in himself. He’s a very confident person. And he totally believes in what he has at Oregon.”

It’s been over a decade since Lanning left his post as recruiting coordinator at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas. Longtime head coach K.C. Keeler remembers when Lanning approached him and said he got a call from Saban to join Alabama’s staff as a graduate assistant for the 2015 season. Lanning’s body language was telling, Keeler says; he wasn’t grinning. He felt like he was going to let Keeler down.

Keeler told Lanning he had to go, because that’s where he’d meet someone who would eventually notice him as a future head coach.

“It doesn’t take you long to figure out Dan Lanning’s style,” Keeler says. “I remember telling my wife back then, ‘I’m going to have this guy for a year.’ This guy was always on a different path.”

That path is forever detailed on his ribs, shown through Sauphia’s portrait.

The Oregon symbol on her neck features a yellow ribbon in the center, commemorating her battle with an aggressive type of bone cancer in 2016. Their three sons, Caden, Kniles and Titan, are there. There’s the state of Texas outline for Sam Houston State, the Sun Devils pitchfork from Lanning’s time as a graduate assistant at Arizona State, the Pitt emblem for his year with the Panthers and Alabama’s signature “A.” There’s a boomerang honoring Outback Steakhouse, where Dan and Sauphia met as co-workers. The “816” is the area code of Lanning’s hometown in Missouri, and 33-18 is the score of Georgia’s win over Alabama in the national championship after the 2021 season when he was the Bulldogs defensive coordinator.

“It definitely hurt,” Lanning says.

The tribute to his life’s work isn’t meant as an ode to himself. It’s to his wife, his kids, his faith, his journey, the night shifts at Outback when he was courting Sauphia by paying for her 18th birthday dinner. It’s also a reminder to Lanning that the work is just starting.

“The seat I sit in now, I remember what it was like when I wasn’t sitting in it,” Lanning says. “Loyalty to me is giving the best you got every day, 10 toes down on the job that you’re responsible for and owning that and realizing success will come from that. I get to live my dream. I get to do exactly what I signed up for and what I’d hoped.”

Existing in one’s dream doesn’t mean it’s without its constant demands. The home office where he does video calls lately doesn’t have an impressive array of trophies and photos in the background; the office is his closet. It’s where he can tap in when needed to talk to players, parents or recruits. And when that’s done, it’s done, and he’s out on the couch informing his three boys the night’s movie is “Field of Dreams” or “Back to the Future.”

“In a lot of ways in our jobs now, you’re a doctor on-call,” he says. “Something can happen at any moment and it requires your attention. What I think I’m getting better at is making sure I take advantage of those moments when it does arise. I’ve been poor at that. I’ve gone through basketball seasons where I got to see my son play once. That’s not something I’m proud of. I want to get better at it.”

He may sound like how a football coach is supposed to sound when he’s dissecting depth charts in media scrums, but Lanning is not a caricature of a football coach. It’s helped, he says, that the stops that brought him to Oregon have meant working for Saban, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Florida State’s Mike Norvell and others.

“Great head coaches have to be themselves,” Lanning says. “If they try and be something else, or if you do what you think everybody else is doing, then you catch yourself in a trap.”

One avoids such traps by staying a step ahead. And Lanning, his friends and colleagues say, always has been. Since he was a 26-year-old on-campus recruiting coordinator at Arizona State, he possessed a preternatural ability to recruit.

And apparently he doesn’t miss when a window into his world swings open. Before Oregon’s 42-6 trouncing of Colorado last September, Lanning allowed ABC cameras into the Ducks’ locker room to capture a speech that went viral. Speaking of Deion Sanders’ Buffaloes becoming the topic du jour of the sports world, Lanning told his team, “They’re fighting for clicks, we’re fighting for wins.”

It was a flashpoint in the 24-hour news cycle. The payoff was a glimpse for recruits to see that what you see with Lanning is what you get.

For much of the past decade, Oregon fans felt slighted, because they invested in two head coaches who vowed that Eugene was the place for them, that they’d guide the Ducks to title contention, only to leave for other jobs. Willie Taggart spent one year as head coach in 2017 before leaving for Florida State. His replacement, Mario Cristobal, coached four years at Oregon and ultimately left to coach his alma mater, Miami.

So imagine the level of paranoia when college football pundits listed Lanning as their guy to replace Saban. Lanning quashed it with the minute-long video. “When good things happen, speculation occurs — and there’s been a lot of good things that happened to us at Oregon,” Lanning says.

Before it saw the light of day on social media, on the night of Jan. 10, Lanning was on the phone with the mother of a recruit who was afraid that their decision to choose Oregon would be fleeting. She’d read the headlines connecting him with the Alabama job.

“I said, ‘If I made an announcement for you, would that make it clear exactly what we’re going to do?’” Lanning recalls. “The mom said that, ‘Yeah, that makes it really clear.’ And then I told her, ‘Hopefully at some point they’ll stop asking the question.’”

New Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel says even though he’s been on campus for only four months, Lanning’s confidence in his program is infectious.

“How cool is that? That’s who I committed to,” Gabriel says. “That coach is the guy everyone wants for the right reasons. He’s great at connecting with people, he listens, he understands, he can translate that into action from a guy who’s been in it for a long time. Everything he’s said has come to fruition. He just keeps it real, and I think you can appreciate that. He just does the easy things at an elite level. He’s mastered it. That’s exactly why people want him.”

The Ducks are 22-5 in two years under Lanning and have cultivated one of the sport’s most explosive offenses with offensive coordinator Willie Stein calling the plays. With Heisman Trophy finalist Bo Nix at the helm last year, the Ducks ranked No. 2 in the country in total offense. Oregon’s defense finished top 25 in overall team defense, too. But the undoing of the team’s College Football Playoff aspirations were two agonizingly close losses to rival Washington.

The Ducks now prepare for a new era as they enter the Big Ten alongside the Huskies, USC and UCLA. Asked why he thinks this year’s Ducks have a shot at contending in the expanded 12-team playoff, Lanning says they’ve always been aggressive in looking to increase the talent on their roster, through recruiting high school players (the Ducks ranked No. 3 in the 247Sports recruiting team composite rankings in 2024) and in the NCAA transfer portal.

During the winter portal window, they added Gabriel (Oklahoma), cornerbacks Jabbar Muhammad (Washington) and Kam Alexander (UTSA), wide receiver Evan Stewart (Texas A&M) and former five-star recruit and UCLA QB Dante Moore. In the last week, the Ducks have further bolstered their defense with safety Peyton Woodyard (Alabama) and defensive lineman Derrick Harmon (Michigan State). Lanning staying put and believing he’s in Eugene for the long term has set up Oregon for both the present and the future.

“Dan likes to prove people wrong,” Figg says. “Dan knows he can win a national championship at Oregon, and he wants to show the world he can do it.”

Oregon is no longer an upstart. The Ducks made a national championship appearance, though it was nearly a decade ago in 2015. Lanning believes the program can win it all in this quaint remote town thousands of miles away from where the Southeastern Conference has reigned supreme the past two decades.

“I love being part of a program that’s proactive,” Lanning says. “They’ve always wanted a great product. This is a place where you can create that.”

Lanning talks about making the jump from good to great. The Ducks being agonizingly close in big games has to change in the Big Ten era. Ohio State visits Oct. 12, and three weeks later, the Ducks go to The Big House to face reigning national champion Michigan on Nov. 2.

With his ribs aflame with pain after being tattooed, Lanning posed for Turner so he could share the work done in one sitting on Instagram. Turner was born and raised in Eugene. For years, he has tattooed Oregon players and the “O” symbol on fans. Never could he have imagined Chip Kelly or Mike Bellotti walking into his shop. But in talking to Lanning, Turner says he felt like the head coach is sold on the life and pace of his hometown.

Before Lanning walked out the doors, he told Turner something the artist now fully believes.

“He told me he wanted to retire here,” Turner says.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Tom Hauck / Getty Images)

This was Jalen Brunson’s moment. Donte DiVincenzo would make sure of that.

The two New York Knicks sat in front of reporters following Brunson’s Game 1 blowup against the Indiana Pacers, a 43-point performance that has become run of the mill for the All-Star point guard. These days, a Brunson scoring outburst is about as rare as a Tom Thibodeau broken blood vessel.

Brunson has now gone for 40 points in four consecutive playoff games. The only other players in league history to accomplish the same feat are Jerry West, who had a six-game streak, Michael Jordan (four) and Bernard King (four).

As a reporter listed off Brunson’s impressive company, DiVincenzo noted one standout and interrupted.

“Michael Jordan,” he said excitedly, turning to Brunson as a wide smile overpowered his cheeks.

Brunson looked at his buddy as if DiVincenzo were teasing him about a 0 of 20 dud.

“If you know my friends,” Brunson said the next day, “You should know that they’re all a——-. … Usually, they’re all sarcastic and so I just tried to stop him before he kept going.”

The best of friends show kindness only behind each other’s backs. And behind Brunson’s is a shrine of accomplishments that is exciting DiVincenzo more by the second.

Brunson is the first player in NBA history with 40 points and five assists in four consecutive playoff games. He’s just the second guy ever, behind only West, with five straight playoff games of 39-plus.

He’s averaging 36.6 points during the postseason, which leads the NBA, to go with 8.6 assists. The only player to have those numbers for a postseason run was Russell Westbrook, who did it in 2016-17 on far less efficient shooting and in only five games, four of which his team lost.

“I’m so proud of him, just knowing what type of person he is,” DiVincenzo said of Brunson. “He doesn’t take praise and accolades and all that stuff. He doesn’t take it well. He’s always trying to get better. He always knows there’s going to be more doubters, more things to improve on. That’s his beauty as a person.”

The Pacers, who trail the Knicks 1-0 in their second-round series, are witnessing the basketball beauty.

Indiana tossed various defenders at Brunson in Game 1, a 121-117 New York victory. The long, physical Aaron Nesmith manned him to start. Andrew Nembhard, a hard-nosed guard, took over later. Point guard TJ McConnell, who Josh Hart so affectionately referred to as “an annoying little s—” earlier this week, squared up Brunson, as well.

None of it led to much success.

Brunson’s 43 points came on 14-of-26 shooting; he sank all 14 of his free throws. The Pacers were one of the worst fouling culprits during the regular season. It showed.

These are the types of shots the Knicks can expect from Brunson in this series. Indiana’s defenders notoriously stick to potential shooters who line the perimeter. It prevents 3-point attempts, which the Pacers rarely give up. And it funnels drivers into center Myles Turner, one of the league’s premier rim protectors. But it also leaves the middle open.

No one allowed more shots in the paint during the regular season than Indiana did. The trend continued into Game 1, including for Brunson. Fifteen of his shots were inside the paint, many of them in the floater range that Brunson can feast from while neutralizing Turner’s shot-blocking.

Brunson may have gotten hot during the previous series when the Knicks downed the Philadelphia 76ers in six games, but it wasn’t because Philly gave him the middle.

The Sixers surrounded him with long defenders, many of whom collapsed onto him whenever he neared the hoop. Eventually, he figured it out, going for 39 points in Game 3, 47 in Game 4, 40 in Game 5 and 41 in the clinching Game 6.

Few people have reached these numbers — not that Brunson would boast about himself any more than his friends would to his face.

“I understand what’s going on, so it’s definitely obviously pretty cool, and it makes it better to know that it comes off a win most importantly, but honestly no matter what the situation was, whether it was positive or negative, I have to come back and be better,” Brunson said. “Last series, the first two games I was awful, and for me, I do have to be better, so I have to put that in the back of my mind. This is the same thing.”

The Pacers trapped Brunson in moments, but he got rid of the ball quickly. They full-court pressured him, which the Knicks expected, especially since Indiana did the same against the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 1. The strategy is an attempt to tire out Brunson while also bogging down the Knicks offense. If it takes New York a few extra seconds to get into its first action, it won’t be as likely to score.

Yet, Brunson picking apart the Pacers in Game 1 wasn’t despite his team’s success.

The Knicks shot 53.7 percent from the field and 11 of 23 from 3. They dropped 121 points on only 98 possessions, an elite figure.

“The thing that’s impressive, it’s always within the context of winning and his teammates and that’s always the most important thing to him,” Thibodeau said. “And I love his mentality because his mentality is that he’s not satisfied.”

And now, he’s showing up on lists with Michael Jordan — even if he won’t acknowledge the accomplishment and even if he worries his friends will use it as pure jeer fuel.

“He knows what he’s doing but he doesn’t address it. He’s just trying to get better every single day,” DiVincenzo said. “Not being him and looking on the outside, I love it. I sure as hell love it. I will celebrate every day of the week. That’s who he is as a person, not just a basketball player.”

(Top photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

If there were any lingering doubts about the 2024 clique in the elite of women’s tennis, Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina have erased them in the past three weeks.

It’s a couple of days since Swiatek and Sabalenka produced one of the sport’s great matches on Saturday evening, in the final of the Madrid Open.

Swiatek’s 9-7 triumph in a third-set tiebreak left the world No 1 flat on her back on the red clay of the Caja Magica. It left Sabalenka, the world No 2, slumped in her chair, a towel over her head and face, the very recent memory of three championship points running through her brain.

She hadn’t lost them. Swiatek had mercilessly taken them from her.

This was two days after Sabalenka had toppled Rybakina in a semi-final duel, in another third-set tiebreak that required 12 points for the Belarusian to complete her grinding comeback, 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(5). And it was two weeks after Rybakina had knocked out Swiatek in a semi-final in Stuttgart that also went three sets — at a tournament Swiatek has owned for two years.

These women are thisclose right now, and they know it. In such rivalries, wonky measurables like who hits the more powerful forehand or finishes a higher percentage of points at the net don’t determine who wins and who loses as much as intangibles. It becomes a question of who can execute the best shots on the biggest points and, lately, all three of them have done it. In 2024, the top of women’s tennis is tighter than ever.

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“It was more about, you know, who’s going to be less stressed and who’s going to be able to play with more freedom,” Swiatek said in the aftermath of Saturday’s mayhem.

“For most of the match, she played more, like, I felt like some decisions were pretty… how to say it… like, courageous. I was sometimes, you know, a little bit back. So at the end, I just wanted to not do that and to also be courageous.”

This was that rare, special tennis where both players play at their peak at the same time, for long stretches, with a title on the line. A little while after the sting of the initial disappointment, Sabalenka knew what everyone watching did — that she played about as good a match as she could, that nearly every point was a coin-flip, that she had been part of one of the greatest women’s finals ever.

“She just played a little bit better on those key moments,” Sabalenka said. “That’s it.”

Men’s tennis went through nearly 20 years of three guys winning just about everything — Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, with Andy Murray making it a four-way battle during a chunk of the 2010s.

If she can figure out her serve, Coco Gauff could be crashing the current three-way battle at the top before too long. She’s actually world No 3, one place ahead of Rybakina, but hasn’t managed to hit this trio’s heights consistently since winning the U.S. Open by beating Sabalenka last September; in 2024, the other three have forged past her.

It’s been a while since women’s tennis had something like this.

Serena Williams had some worthy adversaries over the years for certain periods — her sister Venus, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, Victoria Azarenka — but a sustained troika at the top never really evolved. Since 2017, 18 different women have won 24 Grand Slam titles. The repeat champions – Simona Halep, Naomi Osaka, Ashleigh Barty and Swiatek — have never played the same opponent twice in a Grand Slam final.

Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka are also waiting on that. The only time two of them have met in a final was at the Australian Open last year, with Sabalenka prevailing over Rybakina, again in three sets, in arguably the highest-quality women’s final we’d seen before Saturday in the Spanish capital.

Sabalenka has a 6-3 career win-loss record against Rybakina (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Maybe that is about to change. Judging from what happened on Saturday, and what has been happening for most of the last two years, there’s a decent chance it will.

“We push each other,” Rybakina said after her loss to Sabalenka, a match in which she was a forehand sitter in the front of the court away from likely locking it up. “We push each other to improve.”

This dynamic will be familiar to fans of that Big Three/Four era in the men’s game, which turned into what tennis writer Matthew Willis accurately coined an ouroboros, each meeting between them, and the different stylistic and psychological battles therein, taking the players involved to greater and greater heights, further and further away from the rest of the field.

This all could last 10 minutes, or 10 years. Sabalenka, who is from Belarus but largely lives in the U.S. city of Miami, Florida, turned 26 on Sunday; Rybakina, Russian by birth, Kazakh by nationality, is 24; Swiatek, the first true great from Poland is 22. (Gauff is 20, and improving every year.)

Injuries, the strain of a relentless schedule, a new crop of young talent, a back-in-form Osaka… many things could render this triangular rivalry obsolete very quickly. It may not even fully develop, with Swiatek having streaked ahead in rankings and titles, collecting 18 in a three-year period in which Sabalenka has four and Rybakina six.

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At the moment though, there is something irresistible about the dynamic between these three athletes, who all bring something different onto the court at first glance, but also subtly carry many of each others’ strengths.

The grass suits Rybakina over Swiatek and, marginally, Sabalenka (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Sabalenka comes with brute force and unmatched intensity, but also a quickly improving net game and the capacity to swipe a match away that she shares with Swiatek.

Swiatek speeds across the court and through her matches with that frightening efficiency, displaying an innate versatility that the others are still trying to acquire — but her prodigious topspin disguises the sheer speed and force of groundstrokes usually attributed to Sabalenka.

Rybakina’s elegant, effortless power and at times gossamer touch make her glazed-eye calm seem less titanium than Swiatek’s focus, but in reality, like her tactical nous, it is just as immovable.

Where this all goes over the next several weeks as the tour moves to Rome and then Paris for the last and biggest clay events of the year, and then shifts to Wimbledon’s grass, is anyone’s guess. 

Madrid, where the harder court and the altitude make the ball fly, figured to favor Sabalenka and Rybakina, who are power players, over Swiatek, but she remains queen of the clay. This made that title a key triumph for the Pole — the lone big event on clay she had never won.

Now tennis moves to the slower, more traditional clay courts at the Italian Open and the French Open, which she favors. She’s won at Roland Garros three times in four years. That could spell trouble for her foes.

Conditions in Rome and Paris suit Swiatek (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Then again, Rybakina is the defending champion in Rome. Her breakout win came against Serena Williams in Paris in 2021; Sabalenka was a point away from the French Open final last year before tightening in the crucial moments. She doesn’t do that very often anymore. 

After the clay, comes the grass. Swiatek is still a novice on the surface and is the first one to say so. She has said that, at some point in her career, she will dedicate more time to growing more comfortable with its speed and low bounces, but she has not done it yet.

Rybakina won Wimbledon in 2022. Sabalenka frittered away a lead in the semifinals there last year. Her power is a lot to handle anywhere. On grass, it can overwhelm.

Then it’s back to Paris and Roland Garros for the Olympics, and then on to the hard courts in North America, which should favor Sabalenka, the two-time defending champion on the Australian Open’s hard courts and a U.S. Open finalist last year… though Swiatek is the only one of the three to have won at Flushing Meadows, in 2022.

Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka get asked about this second Big Three stuff a lot these days. Usually, they try to shrug it off. That other Big Three have won 66 Grand Slams and may not be done yet. They are on seven. There’s a long way to go, but it’s where they hope this is all headed.

“I’m really happy to be one of these Big Three,” Sabalenka said Saturday night, when she had come second and was trying to grasp a silver lining.

“It’s really motivating me a lot to keep working and to keep improving myself just so I stay there, and then kind of, like, you know, just be there and get as many wins against them as I can.”

(Top photos: Daniel Pockett; Quality Sport Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)