San Francisco, CA
Laver Cup Heads to San Francisco as Federer’s Role Evolves
Roger Federer and the Laver Cup are headed to San Francisco in 2025, with the international team tennis event to the Golden State Warriors home Chase Center.
Federer played his last matches before retirement at the 2022 Laver Cup, but his current role with the event he co-founded has yet to be defined. One certainty: He will not be a team captain just yet.
“He does not have an official role,” Godsick, the president and CEO of TEAM8, said in a video call. “There is never a big decision that [Laver Cup CEO] Steve [Zacks] and I do not bounce off of him.”
Federer’s role is less undefined as it is unprecedented, as the 20-time Grand Slam champion makes the transition from competitor to brand ambassador, investor and now, founder. “I’m obviously forever connected to the event,” Federer in an interview. “I’m gonna miss playing in it.” But he also enjoys being around fans and sponsors and doing clinics. “I also enjoyed such as sitting down and watching the game [in Vancouver].”
The tournament’s unique format brings 12 top male tennis players to compete against each other, led by two team captains, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe. Zacks and his team set up the venues for a whole week to bring the signature look, with cameras on the sidelines, where the captains’ interactions with the team are audible. September’s tournament in Berlin will be the last year Borg and McEnroe will lead the teams.
“I could see myself being a captain,” Federer said. But Godsick says it is too early for that. “We’re going from generation to generation, and we haven’t quite gotten to his generation yet,” he said.
Federer and Godsick launched the tournament in 2017. Patterned after golf’s Ryder Cup, with a unique scoring system and the concept of pitting six players from Europe against six players from the rest of the world, the Laver Cup has successfully gained a foothold in the busy tennis calendar. Its black court is already being copied by others, most recently by last Sunday’s Netflix Slam exhibition.
Named after the Australian tennis legend Rod Lever, the only tennis player to win the calendar-year Grand Slam twice, the three-day team event has been an officially sanctioned ATP Tour event since 2019 and enters its seventh year with a 10-year broadcast contract with Discovery, a growing list of sponsors and interest from institutional investors.
“From the first event and every year, including now, we’ve had people ask to acquire, invest in, or buy a piece of our event,” Godsick said.
In addition to Federer and TEAM8, Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann, the USTA, and the Australian Open are also investors in the project. Lemann is also an investor in Federer-backed Swiss shoe company On.
“We have a long-term view of this; now, it is not time to bring on any partners,” he said, but added that if the right partner “can add value, we’ll look at it.”
The event is a brand-building opportunity for Federer, allowing him to stay connected with current and past stars, and a chance to bring the game to locations where some top players may never play.
“I think very interesting to see where the next world locations will be,” Federer said. “The world is a big place, so I think that’s going to be something on the top of the agenda.”
San Francisco, CA
VIDEO: Car crashes into SF Castro restaurant, driver flees scene
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Dramatic video shows a car smashing into dining parklets and a restaurant in San Francisco. The crash happened happeend before 2 a.m. on Sunday, and no one was injured.
As of Sunday night, police are still trying to locate and identify the driver who ran away. In the video, after airbags were deployed from the crash, the driver was seen leaving the car behind.
The car crashed into Castro Indian Restaurant and bar owner Ajay Khadka says he got an alert and arrived within 15 minutes. After reviewing his security video, he says he saw people standing in the area just moments before the crash.
“People were just walking around like that second, not even a minute; no one was there. So thank god nobody got hurt; otherwise it would be devastating,” Khadka said.
Police responded to investigate but were unable to find the driver. The victimized restaurant has been part of the Castro for nearly two decades and is now boarded up.
Manager Narmela Khordians says she got a call from the landlord about an hour after closing and rushed back to the restaurant.
“I’m hurt; it was an emotional feeling last night,” Khordians said. “I hope the police will arrest him. He needs to pay the price for it because this is not fair for small businesses for people. I’m glad we were closed because it could have been worse.”
Despite damage to the front of the restaurant and its parklet, Cafe Mystique reopened Sunday.
“Normally, we are very busy for Sunday brunch, so it affected our business as you see,” Khordians said. “Even though we tried to open, we had some customers who wanted to eat. Still, it’s not what we usually do. So it did affect our business, definitely.”
The restaurant is facing repairs that may cost as much as $25,000, according to Khadka. As of now, no arrests have been made.
KRON4 followed up with police asking if the car was stolen but did not hear back in time for this report.
San Francisco, CA
Tony Vitello just lost the only Giants allies he has left
Bullet point summary by AI
- San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello faces mounting criticism after his recent public remarks about his team’s performance.
- Vitello’s approach has begun to fracture the unity within the clubhouse just as the season heads toward a critical juncture.
- The front office now weighs whether to make broader changes or let the rookie manager work through his growing pains.
The San Francisco Giants lost five straight games heading into Sunday’s contest against the Colorado Rockies. While Rafael Devers has turned his season around to some degree, the same cannot be said of manager Tony Vitello, whose antics have put him between a rock and a hard place. Vitello’s hiring was a controversial one to begin with, as he had no big-league experience but thrived at the collegiate level with the Tennessee Volunteers. Buster Posey surely couldn’t have seen this season’s struggles coming.
Vitello hasn’t maintained his composure well this season, and it’s starting to impact the Giants clubhouse as this season fades into obscurity. Posey himself has stayed relatively quiet on Vitello’s future, and if Giants fans had their way he’d likely be a one-and-done manager. Vitello’s players, to their credit, have stayed together…until now. Over the weekend, the first-time MLB manager questioned his players’ effort and pride, a tactic that may have worked for him in Knoxville but will surely backfire in a larger market like San Francisco.
Tony Vitello betrayed the trust of Giants players
The Giants took a 6-3 lead in Friday’s game against the Rockies, but eventually blew that advantage in an 8-6 defeat. They fell behind quickly on Saturday in Colorado as well.
There’s only so much a manager can do to shoulder blame when his players aren’t performing up to par. However, blaming them to the media isn’t going to sit well in the clubhouse.
“We need to take a little more pride, I think, in how we…It’s ideal to not have last night occur, but bounce back,” Vitello told the media. “I got the vibe like we were in a position to do that. The first six outs we had at the plate would say that, but getting in a hole makes it a little tougher after that.”
Vitello isn’t necessarily wrong in his commentary of the Giants’ play of late, and even what he perceives as a lack of effort. However, he’d be wise to keep that criticism internal and call clubhouse leaders into his office to better apply that feedback.
Are bigger changes coming for the San Francisco Giants?
Speaking of fair criticism, this is one the players could surely push back onto their first-time manager: Vitello is in over his head. The Giants have already reassigned third-base coach Hector Borg in a wake-up call of sorts. If that doesn’t work — and the five straight losses suggest it hasn’t — then perhaps larger changes are looming.
Posey could opt to sell at the trade deadline. While Devers and Willy Adames are likely here to stay thanks to their large contracts, Robbie Ray is an attractive trade asset for contending teams and is on the final year of his deal. FanSided’s Chris Landers ranked Ray ninth on his trade deadline big board just last week.
“Ray…is an open and shut case: He’s in the final year of his five-year contract, and while he’s no longer the power pitcher he was in his prime, he’s still got gas left in the tank as a No. 4 starter who could even pivot to a valuable bullpen role in the postseason,” Landers wrote.
Posey and the Giants should not rush to panic and fire Vitello in season. Doing so defeats the entire purpose of hiring him. Vitello is learning on the job. Perhaps he’ll find his footing in the dog days of summer. Criticizing his own players, who thus far have had his back, isn’t a step in the right direction.
More MLB news and analysis:
Follow
San Francisco, CA
I’m a San Francisco bar operator. Young tech bros are going sober — but they still want to sip on mocktails
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.
There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.
There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth; it’s something people remember.
The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”
That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.
-
West Virginia6 minutes agoKentucky Baseball melts down vs. West Virginia: Game 7 on Monday
-
Wyoming9 minutes agoSevere thunderstorms, tornado risk threaten southeast Wyoming today, Tuesday
-
Crypto14 minutes agoStrategy Sells Bitcoin for First Time Since 2022, Dumps 32 BTC to Fund Preferred Stock Dividends
-
Finance21 minutes agoThe Most Innovative People in Finance 2026
-
Fitness24 minutes agoBristol fitness expert offers free exercise for Parkinson’s
-
Movie Reviews39 minutes ago‘I Love Boosters’ Film Review – Capitalism is the Real Surrealist State
-
World51 minutes agoConecta Magaluz-Mallorca: Buzz Titles, AI, What’s Shocked in TV, Latin America’s Microdrama Bonanza and Other Takeaways
-
News54 minutes ago2026 Midterms Tracker: The Key Senate and House Races