🔎 Why This Glass Basketball Court Will Help Teams Make Millions

I’m back home after 10 days at Churchill Downs, where I was creating TikTok and LinkedIn content for the Kentucky Derby.

And if I learned anything after over 40 posts, it’s that people really care how you say Louisville.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Why This Glass Basketball Court Will Help Teams Make Millions

📉 Biggest Loser: How a Gatorade Gummy Ruined an Olympic Career

🏆 Winner’s Circle: He Made the Most High-Tech Tennis Racket Ever, Then It Got Banned

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🗞 The Big Story

This is the most high-tech basketball court ever created, and it could help your favorite basketball team make millions of dollars every single year.

Background: In the early 2000s, a German flooring company called ASB GlassFloor developed the first-ever glass outdoor squash court. Their goal was to create a playing surface that was both safer and more durable than traditional wood or concrete courts, but what they stumbled on actually turned out to be much more impressive.

That’s because the glass playing surface allows for ASB to install 4k-quality video displays underneath each panel. Now, when you think of a glass court, you might assume that it’s incredibly slippery and fragile, but ASB actually claims that their playing surfaces perform better than traditional hardwood in almost every category, including:

• Shock absorption

• Grip

• Durability

By utilizing thousands of small ceramic dots, ASB can provide better traction than normal wood courts, even when wet, and without any skin burn from sliding.

But that’s not even the best part.

After being tested in Europe and during the 2024 NBA All-Star Game, ASB built a special facility in Orlando called the “Athlete Lab” to allow visiting players, coaches, and business executives to see the court in action.

According to the company, players and coaches seem open to the idea of playing on a big video board, and the NBA is currently testing athlete performance on the glass playing surface to make sure it’s as safe as hardwood.

Meanwhile, front office staff love it because of the massive revenue opportunity it presents.

Advertising Opportunity: One data firm conservatively estimates that ASB’s glass courts can increase the average duration of on-court advertising by:

• 16% for NBA games

• 130% for college games

This could result in teams earning millions more dollars annually in advertising revenue.

To read more about how these glass video courts could change how we watch basketball, check out Rob Schaefer’s recent piece in the Sports Business Journal.

📉 Biggest Loser

This is the fastest teenager in the world, but his career might have just ended because of a discontinued Gatorade product. Here’s the wild story…

Issam Asinga: In 2023, at just 18 years old, Issam Asinga became the first U.S. high schooler to run the 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds. His 9.89-second time set a new world junior record, and he beat Noah Lyles in that very same race.

Naturally, this made Issam a gold medal favorite for the upcoming 2024 Paris Olympics, but less than two weeks after setting that record-breaking time, his whole world came crashing down.

That’s because Issam tested positive for a banned substance called Cardarine, which is known to boost endurance and aerobic performance.

This resulted in:

• A four-year suspension from all competition

• Effectively ended his college career at Texas A&M before it even started

• Prevented him from competing in any Olympic events until 2028

Now, Issam denies ever knowingly taking this banned substance, but his explanation for how it ended up in his system might be one of the craziest I’ve ever heard.

Gatorade Gummy: In a lawsuit filed last year in New York, Issam and his lawyers claim that Cardarine was only found in his system because of a Gatorade recovery gummy he had sampled the year prior when accepting the company’s National Player of the Year award.

Issam and his team say that Gatorade had falsely claimed that the gummies were “certified for sport,” but when they were asked to submit a sealed bottle for further testing, they couldn’t find one because the product had been discontinued.

Eventually, Gatorade provided a sealed sample from a different batch than what Issam had sampled, where no trace of the banned substance was found.

The Plot Thickens: This led Issam’s team to claim that Gatorade had purposely delayed sending a sample for further testing to pass this second test. However, as you read more into this story, you learn that at the same time Issam was facing suspension, his coach at Montverde Academy was also facing suspension for possessing two different banned substances, including Cardarine.

And while we’ll likely never know for sure if Issam knowingly took the substance or was given it by his coach without his consent, what we do know is that we missed out on seeing this guy run in the prime of his career.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This is the most high-tech tennis racket ever created, but not in the way you might think.

Tennis Rackets: Although tennis has existed since the 12th century, the general design of rackets didn’t change for almost 100 years, starting in the 1870s.

To be fair, a handful of companies in the early 1900s rolled out different prototypes, and since there weren’t any rules about what a racket had to look like or be made of, that led to some pretty quirky designs.

Still, none of them stuck, but that all changed in 1972 with the introduction of this thing:

On the surface, this might look like a regular tennis racket, but it was actually the creation of a frustrated amateur player in Germany named Werner Fisher.

The Spaghetti Racket: Looking to improve his game, Fisher, a horticulturist by trade, restrung his own racket, but instead of weaving the strings together like every other racket does to create a more predictable ball strike, Fisher created a double string system that was free to move side-to-side.

The result of this design was balls hit with extreme and unpredictable top spin and velocity, making them almost impossible to return.

By 1977, Fisher was ready to sell the very first samples of his new “Spaghetti Racket” but it wasn’t until later that year when the 200th ranked American player named Michael Fishbach saw the racket in a European camera store and used it in the upcoming U.S. Open where he upset tennis legend Stan Smith during his cinderella run through the tournament.

Fishbach’s success led to 25% of players using the Spaghetti Racket the following week, leading to even more upsets by little-known pros over some of the sport’s top players.

Quickly Outlawed: However, one of these players grew so upset with his opponent using this new racket that he forfeited in the middle of the match, leading the International Tennis Association to ban the racket less than a month after it’s first use in professional play, claiming that the double-strung rackets technically constituted a “double hit” and were therefore illegal.

Unfortunately for Fisher, he had just ordered 2,000 Spaghetti Rackets to meet the sudden rise in demand, but after the ban, he went bankrupt and had to return to his job as a horticulturist.

I wonder what he ended up doing with all of those extra rackets…

⏱️ In Other News

• Did The Wall… work?

• The Pope is a White Sox fan (bummer).

• Is the $5,000 Mint Julep the best deal at the Kentucky Derby?

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I’ll link a few of my favorite posts from my trip to Louisville below.

• Who is Harley the Track Pony?

• The History of the Starting Gate

• Meet Toby Keith’s Horse, Render Judgement

It’s hard to describe the experience of watching the Kentucky Derby from the racetrack, but I heard one jockey describe how he has to physically brace himself as he rounds the second turn because the wall of sound from the crowd could literally knock him off his horse.

That’s the best way I’ve heard anyone describe the energy of 150,000 people crammed into one, 2-minute race. It truly is the Most Exciting (and fastest) Two Minutes in Sports.