What do the Royals know?

By Mar 31, 2016, 10:08 AM EDT

SURPRISE, Ariz. — Baseball, like all sports, is a game of imitators. When someone figures out a better way of doing something, everyone follows. When Dick Fosbury perfected a new way of high jumping — and won Olympic gold with it in 1968 — well, the Fosbury Flop almost immediately became the dominant jumping technique. When Lawrence Taylor began devastating offenses as a blitzing linebacker, every team in the NFL tried to get their own Lawrence Taylor (with mixed results). After Michael Lewis wrote the book “Moneyball” about the Oakland Athletics’ use of data to find inefficiencies in the marketplace, every team hired Ivy Leaguers and built their own analytics department.

So the question: When will teams start copying the Kansas City Royals?

And: How would they even go about doing that?

Right now, when you talk to people around baseball, you just don’t hear much about the Royals, even if they are defending World Series champions and two-time defending American League champs and all that. Everyone is respectful. Everyone praises the Royals’ defense and their bullpen and their spirit. But few people around baseball seem to see the Royals as a blueprint for success: They won those back-to-back pennants without great starting pitching, they won it while hitting the fewest home runs and drawing the fewest walks in the league, they won it with almost-impossible-to-believe late-inning comebacks.

Nobody I’ve talked with uses the word “luck.” But almost everybody dances perilously around the word.

“I do wonder,” one baseball executive told me, “when people around the game will figure out that maybe the Kansas City Royals know something that we don’t.”

* * *

What do the Royals know? To this, Royals general manager Dayton Moore shrugs; he is uncomfortable with the question.

“You know, we’re not smarter than anybody else,” he says. “This game has a lot of really smart people in it — a whole lot smarter than me. Let’s not kid anybody. We are not going to outsmart anybody.”

We are sitting in a dugout by one of the practice fields at the spring training home of the Royals in Surprise. Everything is upbeat and, yes, a bit surreal. After all those dark years, yes, that World Series against the Mets really happened. Moore goes about his days, though, as if nothing has changed. He wears the same Royals sweatsuit every day; he has it washed nightly. The only difference for him is that it now the sweatsuit says “World Series Champions” on it.

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“We work hard, but I certainly would not say we work any harder than anybody else,” he continues. “People all around this game live it just like we do.”

He continues along this modesty thread for a while. The Royals do not have a better plan than other teams, he insists. The Royals do not have better judgment than other teams. The Royals have no “I told you sos” for all those who have and continue to doubt. Hey, those doubters are pretty smart too.

Then, Moore stops talking about a moment and watches a couple of Royals clubhouse guys get into a golf cart and head over to run some errand. He watches them as they ride off.

“Look at those guys,” he says. “They do their job. They’re out here, they are moving fast, their body language is good. You watch these guys, and you know how the organization is going. If people are treating them poorly, treating them with disrespect, using them basically, then they’re beaten down. Their attitude and their body language is very poor. That tells you everything about your organization.

“But when you see them like that, just ready to go, upbeat, good body language, that’s everything. They’re focused, but they’re having fun. It’s baseball. It’s supposed to be fun. We all got into this game because it’s fun. It’s the one thing every one of us shares. And your team morale — people think it begins with the players and the manager. No. It begins with your clubhouse guys, your groundskeepers, your medical team, your strength and conditioning coaches, your hitting coaches. When they’re having fun and doing their jobs enthusiastically, that’s when you have something.”

He smiles sheepishly: Here endeth the lesson.

“We just wanted to build a good organization,” he says. “Winning the World Series, you know, that was great. But that’s not success. Success is building a good organization.”

* * *

1. Signing Gil Meche to a five-year, $55 million deal

What do the Royals know? Dayton Moore discusses five moves — all of them somewhat contentious — that he thinks were the most important. He begins with his first high-profile move: The signing of pitcher Gil Meche almost 10 years ago.

The Meche deal was the largest free agent deal in Kansas City history … and it was roundly mocked. Two reasons, really. One: Meche had a career 4.65 ERA in six years with Seattle, and he had never thrown 200 innings in a season. He was walk-prone, home run-prone, somewhat injury-prone, and there did not seem much reason to believe he would be a particularly effective starter.

Two, the Royals were preposterously bad. They had lost 100 games three years in a row. They were coming off a season when their lone All-Star pick was pitcher Mark Redman, who finished the year with a 5.71 ERA. What possible good could come from giving Gil Meche all that money? It seemed about as useful as buying a diamond necklace for a party on the Titanic.

Well, sure, the critics had a field day. Jon Heyman’s line that “Meche might be French for ‘Money down the toilet'” is representative.

And how did the deal turn out? Well, that’s the interesting part. As a pitcher, Meche turned out to be a mixed bag. He had two very good years at the beginning of his contract — the two best years of his career. He made the All-Star team in 2007, and he finished among the league leaders in innings, strikeouts and wins above replacement in 2008. Then he struggled with injuries and inconsistency and retired one year before his contract expired, forfeiting $12 million. The last part was odd, but it will be important later. Meche said he gave up the money because: “When I signed my contract my main goal was to earn it. … Making that amount of money from a team that’s already given me over $40 million for my life and my kids, it just wasn’t the right thing to do.”

So from a pure baseball perspective, it was probably a break-even deal. Fangraphs has Meche’s value at about $52 million, and he got paid about $41 million. Of course, in the bigger picture, the Royals were terrible before they got Meche, they were terrible with Meche, they were terrible after Meche. It didn’t seem to change anything.

Only one thing did change. While people watched Meche’s contract, the young Zack Greinke emerged.

“We knew that if we ever were going to get Zack Greinke back, a lot of things had to go right,” Moore says. “That’s why we were so aggressive and maybe overpaid to bring Gil Meche in. We felt like Gil could take the pressure off of Zack. We felt like Gil could be a bit of a mentor for Zack. We obviously thought Gil could help us a lot as a pitcher, but Zack was the big reason for the move. We needed Zack Greinke.”

Understand: At the time, there was no reason at all to believe that Greinke would come back. He was a mega-prospect for the Royals, their best pitching prospect in decades when they rushed him up to the big leagues at age 20. As a rookie, he pitched pretty well for a terrible team. But then it all fell apart. In 2005, Greinke had a staggeringly bad season, going 5-17 with a 5.80 ERA — the league hit .309/.363/.483 against him. It was a disastrous season on the field, but more to the point, Greinke was struggling with still-undiagnosed anxiety issues. At spring training the next year, he walked away from the game. He considered becoming a professional golfer. He considered trying to come back to baseball but as a shortstop. His pitching future was very much in limbo.

As he came to grips with his social anxiety disorder and began taking medication, he hesitantly returned to baseball. The Royals put him in the bullpen, and he liked that a lot better; that way he could pitch more (Zack always felt more comfortable on the mound than just about anywhere else). The Royals tried him back in the rotation at the start of 2007, and it was disastrous. Greinke made seven starts, the Royals lost six of them and the league hit .338 and slugged .579 against him. The Royals rushed him back in the bullpen.

By the end of 2007, though, Greinke was back in the rotation and pitching well. Moore believes — will always believe — that Gil Meche was a key part of that. Meche insisted on taking the pressure off Greinke. He served as a mentor. He led by example. In 2008 Meche and Greinke combined to be among the better one-two combinations in baseball. And then in 2009, Greinke had a season for the ages and won the Cy Young Award.

“Zack did it,” Moore says. “He gets all the credit. But I don’t think there’s any question that Gil took a lot of pressure off him. Gil was just a pro, came to the ballpark every day, ready to pitch, ready to perform. He was upbeat. He set a great example. We think he played a major role in helping Zack get back. … You can say that there’s no way to prove that, and you’re right. We can’t prove it. It was just something we instinctively felt. And we’re obviously happy with how it turned out.”

How it turned out: Greinke was probably the most sought-after young pitcher in the game, and the Royals traded him to Milwaukee for a couple of players — shortstop Alcides Escobar and outfielder Lorenzo Cain — who are now the heart of the championship Royals.

* * *

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2. Putting the Royals’ future on the backs of Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer.

There was nothing at all controversial about the Royals drafting Moustakas (with the second pick in the 2007 draft) and Eric Hosmer (with the third pick in 2008). Both were big-time prospects that were high on every draft board around the Major Leagues.

What was somewhat unusual, though, was that Moore and scouts gave both of those players a little bit of a Royals history lesson.

“You might not know this,” Moore would remember saying, “but the Kansas City Royals used to be a model franchise. And you are the player who is going to make us a model franchise again.”

Royals history had been a bit of a contentious subject in Kansas City in the 1990s and 2000s. It is true; the Royals were once a dominant franchise. They made the postseason seven times in 10 years, won a couple of pennants, took the World Series title in 1985. They were led by Hall of Famer George Brett, but the team overflowed with the sorts of players that John Updike once called “gems of slightly lesser water:” Frank White played balletic second base; Willie Wilson blazed around the bases; Bret Saberhagen pitched with the command of an orchestra conductor; Hal McRae hammered doubles into the gap and took out second basemen who did not get out the way fast enough.

The trouble was that after a couple of losing decades, nobody wanted to hear about those Royals anymore. Even Frank White himself used to say, “I’m sick of the stories, and I lived them.”

“I had a lot of people tell me that I shouldn’t talk about the old days,” Moore says. “They said, ‘you need to divorce yourself from ’85 (the last time the Royals had won the Series). You’ve got to move forward.’ I said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to embrace our history.’ I want these guys to know our past. I want them to be proud to be Kansas City Royals. I want them to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.”

When the Royals drafted Moustakas and Hosmer, Moore wanted them to know: The team was counting on them to not only be good players but to bring the Royals back. “It’s your job,” he used to tell them. “We in the front office can talk all about bringing back the Royals, but you are the ones who have to actually do it.”

“I believe in honesty,” Moore says. “I wanted Eric and Moose to know — they were going to be the ones to bring us back. You could say that’s putting pressure on them, but I think those young men appreciate a challenge. They hunger for it. We believed in the leadership qualities of those guys, and so we were challenging them to lead us.”

Moustakas and Hosmer came up in 2011, both went through some difficult transitions, but by 2013, the Royals were a good baseball team. In 2014, they went to the World Series. In 2015, they won the World Series. “We’re the Royals,” Hosmer would say in the aftermath of that World Series championship. “We find a way to win.”

* * *

3. Trading Wil Myers for James Shields … and getting a throw-in named Wade.

Moore knew he would get hammered by some media types — including yours truly — when he traded top-10 prospect Wil Myers to get a couple of years worth of James Shields. The Royals were still dreadful then; they had lost 90 games for the eighth time in nine seasons. Myers, according to many scouts, was the Royals’ BEST offensive prospect, better even than Moustakas or Hosmer. A building team just doesn’t trade away a young player like that for a high-priced pitcher who will undoubtedly leave after a couple of years. Yes, I was among the vast majority that loathed that trade for Kansas City.

But once again, the Royals knew something. For one thing, they knew that the team was ready to blossom; it just needed a boost.

Moore: “We really did think that when we acquired Shields, everyone on the team would look around and think, ‘Now, we can compete with anybody.'”

That worked. Shields pitched well in 2013, and the Royals improved by 14 games, going from a dismal 72-90 to 86-76, their best full-season record since the 1980s.

“He brought a toughness, a swagger, an edge that I really thought we needed,” Moore says. “Our guys wanted badly to win. And here was a guy, in James Shields, who had been a part of winning teams. Again, I know that you can’t quantify it exactly, but we all felt like our team really needed then. They needed to be around someone who knew exactly how to win.”

As it turns out, of course, the real key to the deal was not Shields at all. The Royals expanded the deal so they could get a young pitcher with a chance to be a good starter — Wade Davis.

“I’m not going to lie, what I liked about Wade, what we liked about him as an organization, was that he had a chance to start,” Moore says. “We knew he could dominate in the ‘pen. That was always a pretty good fallback position. But we definitely thought he had the arsenal to start.”

The Royals did try Davis as a starter in 2013, and it did not work out all that well. He was moved to the ‘pen during spring training of 2014, and he put up two of the most dominant seasons in recent memory. In 2014, he pitched 72 innings, did not allow a home run and had a 1.00 ERA. Last year, in many ways, he was even better, holding the league to a .144 batting average. In seven World Series appearances, he had struck out 18, walked zero and allowed zero runs. On a pitching staff with average starting pitching, Davis has been the difference-maker.

“Do I make the deal if I knew that Wade wouldn’t be a starter?” Moore asks. “Probably not. But I still think he can do it.”

“Wait,” I say. “You still think about Wade Davis as a starter?”

“Absolutely,” Moore says. “Not right now. But just like with Zack going to the ‘pen and figuring things out, I think Wade would be a much better starter if we gave him a chance. They’re all evolving pitchers. You never know.”

“Come on,” I say.

“You never know,” he repeats.

* * *

4. Signing Salvador Perez (and then renegotiating the deal)

Dayton Moore loves to say that catcher Salvador Perez was signed for his smile as much as anything else. Perez was a quirky prospect at best (Baseball America named him the Royals’ 17th-best prospect in 2011). He was slow. He was relatively unathletic. He could catch and throw well, but many scouts — even some within the Royals organization — felt sure he would never hit at the big-league level.

But Perez was such an enthusiastic player, so full of life, that the Royals insisted on believing in him. They called him up in 2011, and he hit .331 in a limited tryout. Perez immediately wanted a long-term deal. Security meant everything to him.

“We weren’t sure he was going to hit,” Moore says. “I felt at the end of the day that we all knew he was going to play defense. We knew he had leadership qualities. We knew he had a great heart to play. We also knew that he was very persistent about a long-term deal, to the point where, I’m not going to say it consumed him, but it was very important to him. We felt like a deal would help him become a quality player.”

The Royals offered him a deal that now looks almost comical by baseball terms — five years, $7 million with a couple of very team-friendly club options tacked on at the end. But at the time, the Royals were making a bet. Perez signed a long-term deal after only 34 days of Major League service. Moore is pretty sure that no catcher in baseball history got a long-term deal so soon after debuting in the big leagues.

“I didn’t know he was going to become a three-time All-Star, three-time Gold Glove winner, whatever else,” Moore says. “We just wanted him to feel comfortable.”

Well, Perez did become those things. Here is a list of all the catchers in baseball history who had three All-Star appearances and three Gold Gloves by age 25:

— Johnny Bench (6 of each)

— Ivan Rodriguez (6 of each)

— Bill Freehan (4 All-Star Games, three Gold Gloves)

— Salvador Perez

Not bad. Perez is also the only one of the four to lead a team to a World Series title by the age of 25 … and he did lead. No one ever doubted that Perez, who has caught more games than any catcher in the American League the last two seasons, was the soul of the Royals. Of course, when you take all of that into consideration, well, suddenly a five-year, $7 million deal doesn’t look all that appetizing for the player. Early in the offseason, Dayton Moore was asked if maybe the Royals would renegotiate even though they were under absolutely no obligation to do so. “I don’t know that there have been examples of restructuring deals like this one,”  Moore said after the World Series title last year. “But you know, we love Salvy. He’s family. We’ll see.”

Three months later, the Royals did restructure that deal, giving Perez a new five-year, $52.5 million contract.

“Of course, he was an underpaid player,” Moore says. “So we realized that as we continue to fight for our culture — every team has to do that, every team has to fight for its culture — we asked ourselves: ‘How are you going to bring other players into the clubhouse if you don’t do right by Salvy?’

“It was the right thing. That’s why we did it. Everybody in the organization believed it was the right thing to do. You can sit here and say players when they underperform they’re not going to give the money back. I don’t expect them to … though Gil Meche did give money back. We’ve been a recipient of this too.

“In the end, I know this: Managers, leaders get paid to make sure that things are done right. I think giving Salvy the new deal right thing for us to do.”

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* * *

5. Signing Ian Kennedy to a five-year, $70 million deal

OK, this just happened in January, and nobody knows how it will turn out. But when the Kansas City Royals signed 31-year-old Ian Kennedy to the deal, there were some feelings of déjà vu. The response felt an awful lot like the response after the Royals signed Gil Meche. Why would the Royals give Ian Kennedy all that money?

Kennedy had a strange year. On the surface, it was a bad year. He gave up so many stinkin’ home runs (31 in just 168 innings) that his season was semi-disastrous. His 4.28 ERA was among the league’s worst for starters, and it looked even worse because he pitched half his games in San Diego, annually one of the league’s best pitcher’s parks.

What do the Royals know? When you get through everything, it might just come down to something Moore repeatedly tells his scouts and executives and coaches, something that doesn’t sound especially profound: “I tell our people all the time that it’s our job to LIKE players.”

It’s our job to like players. Now, really, what does that mean? Well, in baseball, it’s easy to dislike players — not personally, but as players. See, baseball is a hard game to play. There are only a handful of celestial beings out there who do everything well, only a few Mike Trouts or Bryce Harpers or Andrew McCutchens. The rest are mortals with lead feet, holes in their swing, limited defensive range, inconsistent changeups and a lack of control.

Almost every player has huge odds against him. Look at Baseball America’s top 10 prospect list from 10 years ago. Remember, these are the 10 BEST prospects, the 10 who looked like they would be stars. How many became stars? One: Justin Verlander (No. 8). Matt Cain (No. 10) became a semi-star in his mid-20s before fading, and Francisco Liriano (No. 6) has been good and occasionally great. But the No. 3 prospect was Brandon Wood, who couldn’t stick. No. 4 was Jeremy Hermida, who couldn’t quite become a big league starter. No. 9 Lastings Milledge flamed out quickly. And the No. 1 prospect, Delmon Young, mostly disappointed. It’s such a hard game, even for those who seem to have the gifts.

In other words, it’s easy to become cynical, easy to check the “No” box on every player. But the Royals’ philosophy is to LIKE players, to see the possibilities. Kennedy had an excellent strikeout-to-walk ratio last year (174-52). The Royals say: We can work with that. Kennedy has one of the best changeups in baseball. The Royals say: Kauffman Stadium is a great changeup park because even when you make a mistake, it’s a tough park for home runs. Kennedy is a fly-ball pitcher. The Royals say: That fits because Alex Gordon, Lorenzo Cain and Jarrod Dyson should make up the best defensive outfield in baseball.

And as far as all those home runs last year, well, the Royals have an analytics department too, and those guys crunched some numbers and found that last year was an anomaly season for Petco Park — there were a lot of home runs hit there, especially early in the season. They believe Kennedy’s homer numbers will come down in Kansas City.

When I tell him that many feel the Royals wildly overpaid, Moore smiles. Maybe they did overpay. “But we like Ian Kennedy,” he says. “We think he’s a great fit. We like pitchers who work quick, command the fastball, field their position, hold runners and have good changeups. I’m not saying we’re smarter than anyone else. We just like Ian Kennedy a lot.”

Yes, to hear Dayton Moore tell it, the Royals don’t KNOW more than anyone else. They might just believe a little harder.

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    Once more, with feeling

    By Nov 22, 2016, 6:45 PM EST

    NEW YORK — Again and again, over and over, they ask him how he FEELS. Well, this is the question to ask, isn’t it? The bus crawls through New York traffic and takes Jimmie Johnson from office building to office building. People wait inside. Kelly Live waits. Charlie Rose waits. USA Today … Mad Dog Radio … NFL Radio … TMZ. They wait for him on top of the Empire State Building. They wait for him outside the Time Life Building.

    How does it FEEL, Jimmie?

    How does it FEEL to come from nowhere to win your seventh NASCAR Sprint Cup championship, Jimmie? How does it FEEL to tie the two enduring legends of your sport, “The King,” Richard Petty and “The Intimidator,” Dale Earnhardt? How does it FEEL to be the best at what you do, to be inside a race car, rushing at the speed of chaos with 39 maniacs around you barely holding on? No, really, break it down for our audience, how does it feel to be you, Jimmie Johnson, championship race-car driver, part-time triathlete, millionaire philanthropist like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, loving husband, adoring father, everybody’s best friend and somehow, still, the nicest guy?

    How does it FEEL, Jimmie?

    “Insane,” he says. “It feels insane.”

    “Awesome,” he says. “It feels awesome.”

    “Wonderful,” he says.

    “Surreal,” he says.

    “Incredible,” he says.

    “I don’t know that I have the words,” he says.

    We’ve known each other a long time, Jimmie and I. We’ve talked about a lot of things through the years, about family and sharks, about food and dreams, faith and football, about kids and ice cream and how hard it is to not care when people boo.

    “Let me ask you something,” I say as the day crawls on, and he has been asked the question two or three dozen times, and his eyes begin to close because he’s worn out. “All these people keep asking you how you feel.”

    “Yeah,” he says. “Part of the job.”

    “I know,” I tell him. “But if you keep talking about how it feels, how do you keep anything for yourself?”

    He smiles at that and shrugs and looks out the window of the bus.

    * * *

    There is a giant hill near the small house where Johnson grew up. People tend to know he grew up around San Diego and so they might think about the sun and the beach, colorful sailboats and yachts. He gives off the impression of royalty. But that’s not the San Diego where he grew up. His town was called El Cajon. There are no yachts in El Cajon. His father operated heavy machinery. His mother drove a school bus. They made do. Jimmie would escape down that hill on his bicycle.

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    That hill — El Cajon mountain — is a road that seems to go straight down. Even in a car, it is a bit daunting. And for the young Jimmie Johnson it held all the secrets worth knowing. He would rush too fast down that hill, then faster, then faster still, until his parents would tell him to chill, and his friends would nervously call him crazy. Then he went faster again. At that speed, he found that he could feel everything. Fear. Breathlessness. Joy. Hope. Love. Pain. Oh, sure, there was always some pain. There was always another crash. Jimmie Johnson was the kid who showed up for just about every class photo wearing a cast or leaning on crutches.

    Well, he couldn’t help it. He needed that speed. He needed to race. There was something about being on the edge — barely in control and barely out of control — that called to him. He would do ANYTHING for that feeling because being on that edge was the thing that made him feel most alive. As the years went on, he realized that to get that edge, he needed to make connections. So he made connections. He realized that to get to that edge he needed to know people. So he met people — the Herzogs, the Chevy people, Jeff Gordon, Rick Hendrick, the people who could help him get where he so needed to go.

    He is just one of those people who cannot leave his fears alone. He needed to explore the fears, dance around them, poke at them if he can. It’s still true. Even after he made his name as a race-car driver and could do more or less anything he wanted, he still spent a vacation diving into the water so he could be thisclose to sharks. Why would a sane person do that?

    “Because I’m absolutely terrified of sharks,” he says, as if that explains it.

    * * *

    Richard Petty. Dale Earnhardt. Jimmie Johnson. It does boggle Johnson’s mind that he’s now in that company, officially and inarguably, one of NASCAR’s holy trinity to win seven championships. People can argue who is, in fact, the greatest of all time — and there will be those who believe it isn’t ANY of the three but instead is an Allison or a Gordon or a Richmond or someone like that. Johnson doesn’t care. He’s so happy to be in the discussion.

    Johnson never did race against Petty or Earnhardt, though he raced plenty against their sons. He did meet the legends. Well, he has met Richard Petty quite a few times, but he doesn’t really have any good stories about it. “What can you say about him that hasn’t been said a million times?” Johnson says. “He’s the King. He treats everyone with respect. He’s our greatest champion. He’s always been very nice to me, but he’s nice to everyone, you know? I don’t really know that I have more to add than that.”

    Johnson does have good stories, though, about the two times he met Dale Earnhardt.

    As part of Johnson’s effort to know people, he became friends with Ron Hornaday Jr., a four-time World Truck Series Champion, and a friend of Earnhardt’s. And one day, Hornaday sees Johnson and says, “Hey, you want to meet Earnhardt?” And of course Johnson says yes because Earnhardt was a legend by then. “People my age,” he says, “there was no one on earth cooler than Dale Earnhardt.”

    They walk in together, and Hornaday introduces Johnson. Earnhardt sizes up the kid; Johnson was 21 years old then. And then Earnhadt reaches for a little box and gives it to Johnson. “Here,” he says with no warning or explanation. Inside is a little pocket knife with Dale Earnhardt’s name on it. Johnson is overwhelmed.

    “OK,” Earnhardt says. “So what did you get me?”

    Johnson kind of stumbles around. “Um,” he says, “I didn’t know …”

    Earnhardt growls, “You know it’s YEARS of bad luck if you give somebody a knife and then don’t get a gift in return.”

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    Johnson begins to turn red, “I mean …”

    Earnhardt goes on: “I don’t need your bad luck. I still haven’t won Daytona. I give you a knife and you don’t have anything for me, and now you’re telling me I have to walk around with your bad luck …”

    Johnson panics. He rushes outside and, using all the ingenuity he could muster up, gets a penny. He goes in and gives it to Earnhardt saying, “It’s a heads-up penny for good luck.”

    Earnhardt doesn’t say a word.

    “You know,” Johnson says now, almost 20 years later, “I wonder if he was messing with me.”

    * * *

    Did you see Johnson going crazy?  In the minutes after Johnson won that race at Homestead on Nov. 20, the one that clinched the seventh championship, he lost his mind. He danced. He jumped around. He hugged everyone and everything in his path. He screamed — screamed so loud and with such force that even days later he did not have his voice back.  He had won six championships before this one, and he celebrated those heartily, too. But this was different. This was unchained. This was Spinal Tap’s eleven.

    “I don’t even know who that guy was,” Johnson says as he looks at footage of himself going bananas.

    Shock, of course, had something to do with it. Johnson went into Sunday’s race needing to finish ahead of three drivers — Carl Edwards, Joey Logano and Kyle Busch — to win the seventh championship. And all race long, he could not beat any of the three. They all had better cars. They all had better track position. Johnson’s crew chief, Chad Knaus, had tinkered and gambled and even tried making a few rather desperate changes, but none of it mattered. Johnson just didn’t have enough car. Those three guys pulled away, and Johnson was left sitting in his car thinking of ways to be gracious when the inevitable loss happened. “I knew I wasn’t going to win,” he says. “I accepted it.”

    (All the while, his wife, Chandra, was a mess. Chandra is famous around the track for her relatively serene approach to watching Jimmie race. On Sunday, she admitted, she was in the fetal position).

    And then in the final 10 laps of the race, suddenly, a whole series of wacky things happened. Carl Edwards was in command of the championship when the caution flag came out. Poor Carl Edwards. He’s had a glorious NASCAR career, winning 28 races and more than $80 million in prize money, but something has always blocked him from being THE GUY. There was the time he tied Tony Stewart and lost the tiebreaker. There was the year he won nine races, including the last one, but fell short on points. And then there was this one, the time when he had the championship in his hand but a caution flag came out with 10 laps to go and it all went to hell.

    Edwards restarted on the front row, and he had Joey Logano behind him. Jimmie Johnson was behind Logano. And for the first time all day, Johnson thought: “Well, hey, maybe there’s a chance.”

    Logano, as is his style, made a bold move inside to try and beat Edwards on the restart — nobody in NASCAR restarts quite as aggressively and forcefully as Logano. He went so far inside that his car rolled over the painted area near the interior wall. And it was a winning move — his move would trap Edwards between cars, and there’s no escaping that spot. Edwards knew it, knew his race was over if he let Logano by, and so, in a desperate effort to block Logano, he swerved left. “I was a bit optimistic,” Edwards said ruefully afterward. He bumped Logano, and then lost control, leading to a fiery wreck that ended Edwards’ hopes and shut the race down for 30 minutes.

    “As soon as I got by that wreck,” Johnson said, “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. What’s happening here? I might actually win this.'”

    Well, that was certainly the thought in the Johnson camp, where Knaus was pumping his fist and Chandra was losing her mind and so on. During that 30-minute, red-flag delay, Johnson’s crew, his fans, and the many people around NASCAR hoping to see a bit of history were going out of their minds. It was going to happen! Jimmie Johnson! Seven championships! Impossible!

    And, inside the car, Johnson fell asleep

    “I guess I was calm,” he says, and even now he’s surprised.

    There was one more break to come Johnson’s way — he expected to be lined up in the third position, which would have been him on the inside lane with his championship competitor Kyle Busch on the outside. If there was one thing that was clear all day in Miami it was this: You did NOT want to be in the inside lane. That was the lane where Carl Edwards AND Joey Logano saw their dreams end. “You just can’t hold your speed on the inside at Miami,” Johnson says.

    But, NASCAR determined that Busch, not Johnson, should be in the third spot. Johnson broke free from Busch on the restart and took the lead.

    * * *

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    There’s an irony about NASCAR: It is the ultimate thrill ride — 200 mph on sheet metal and horsepower and all that’s left of your tires — but you don’t get to NASCAR and you don’t win championships through daredevil feats. You get to NASCAR through great racing, yes, but also by building relationships, by impressing sponsors, by pitching the Lowe’s-Budweiser-M&M’s-FedEx-Napa Parts-Chevrolet-Toyota-Ford car and by working within a team. You win championships by driving like the devil when your car is loose and seems to be on a sheet of black ice, yes, but also by understanding what you don’t know and trusting your crew to handle things. You win championships by controlling your car, but also by relinquishing control. It’s the shakiest of balances.

    And balance is what Johnson does better than anyone in the sport.

    So when everyone asks Johnson how he feels after the seventh championship, well, he tries his best, he uses the balanced words that come closest, but really, in a private moment, he will tell you: He doesn’t really know HOW he feels. It’s all too much to take in.

    “All my life,” he says, “I just wanted to race cars. It was never about the numbers. I didn’t want to win seven championships. I didn’t really want to win one championship. I mean, yeah, I wanted to win, but what I really wanted was to drive a race car.”

    Before this race, he said the thing he wanted was to feel like he did when he was a kid, to strip away all the money and all the fame and all the past glory and just feel that thing he used to stay up all night dreaming about, that thing that pushed him to go down El Cajon Mountain just a little bit faster than felt right.

    Did he?

    “When people ask me how I feel,” he says, “I tell them best I can. I want people to share in this feeling i have. … But I don’t tell them everything.”

    * * *

    The second time Johnson met Dale Earnhardt, well, it’s a much shorter story. Johnson was hanging around with some buddies at Earnhardt’s garage when they all saw The Intimidator’s car roll slowly by with its windows pulled up. Suddenly the car stopped, and it backed up, and the window came down.

    “Hey,” Earnhardt said to Johnson. “You work for me?”

    “No sir.”

    “Then get the hell out of here. I don’t need no lawsuits.”

    And the window rolled back up and Dale Earnhardt drove away.

    At the end of that magical race at Homestead, there was one final restart, and after that Johnson heard “Clear” from his spotter, meaning the race and that seventh championship was his. Then came the disbelief and the crazy dancing and screaming and joy and hugs from his wife and children and the greatest compliment a driver could ever get.

    “Jimmie,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. would say to his friend as he pulled Johnson close, “Dad would think you’re such a badass.”

    The fourth wheel

    By Nov 18, 2016, 12:51 PM EST

    MIAMI — Carl Edwards has to know that he’s sort of the odd duck in this year’s Chase. Here, you have Kyle Busch, defending champion, force of nature, superstar. There, you have Jimmie Johnson, six-time champion, legend of the sport.  And third, completing the triangle, you have Joey Logano, 26 years old, phenom trying to insert himself into the story, everybody’s favorite young villain, the future of NASCAR.

    And here is Carl Edwards, 37 years old, a former dirt-track driver who ground out 28 victories in an excellent 13-year career but has never quite crashed through, never won a championship, never quite broken out of the pack of those excellent and professional drivers who make up the heart of NASCAR. People who know him probably know him as the guy who does a backflip when he wins. That’s fun. But it isn’t exactly what he wants.

    When you look at a list of the drivers who won the most races without winning a championship, you see this:

    1. Junior Johnson, 50 wins

    2. Mark Martin, 40 wins

    3. Fireball Roberts, 33 wins

    4. Denny Hamlin, 29 wins

    5. Carl Edwards, 28 wins

    Edwards knows this, knows it better than anyone. He knows there’s a difference in how people look at you when you’ve won a championship — knows there might even be a difference in how you look at yourself.

    Watch: NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship (Sunday at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBC, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports App)

    “Winning a championship,” he says, “it just means that, you know, you go to bed Sunday night and know, hey, you did it. You beat the best in the world. And we’re the champions … at least until they start racing again. I guess that’s what it comes down to. That’s about the longest a win can last in this sport.”

    Edwards has had his share of championship heartbreak, beginning with his loss to Tony Stewart in 2011. The two were actually tied in points after an epic duel at Homestead, but the championship went to Stewart because he won more races than Edwards that year. NBCSN has shown that race this week, and Edwards admitted that he watched maybe 10 minutes of it. After that, he was so motivated he was ready to jump in a race car immediately.

    There were other close calls, but now, he’s back, and he will not pretend that it’s just another week. When someone asked all four drivers if they were going to try and treat this week differently from other weeks, the other three guys said, “No.” They talked about how you have to treat this race like any other, prepare the same way. Edwards had a different answer.

    “For me,” Edwards said, “I’m going to be honest, this week does feel different. I mean, yes, we do have to go do the same job, like these guys said. But for me, each moment, I almost have to pinch myself, like, ‘Hey, this is really it, we’re getting to do this.’ So this is more excitement for me personally.”

    “Would winning a championship change your self-perception?”

    “Well, yeah, it would be great. I think it would be great … you can print that. It would be great for a different reason for me at this point in my career, though. I’m starting to just realize how difficult this is.

    “As far as self-perception, probably like most race car drivers, I kind of have an ego problem already. So that could put me over the edge, honestly.”

    Edwards’ advantage could be the track. He has won the pole twice at Homestead and has won the race twice, finishing top five five times in his 12 starts. He just won at Texas, which is a similar track that uses a similar tire setup. “There’s not a better race track,” he says. “Statistically, this is as good as it gets for me.”

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    And his dirt-track background sets him up well too. The toughest part of competing in a winner-take-all race is that you have to find a way to win no matter what gets thrown your way. In other races throughout the season, you just do the best you can with what fate deals you. There is always more than one winner in a regular season NASCAR race. There’s the driver that takes the checkered flag, but there are also those who had to overcome numerous problems, mechanical issues, tire trouble, poor pit stops, whatever, and somehow finished seventh or 10th or something like that. Every week, you will hear drivers and crew chiefs say happily, “We got the most out of our car today.”

    But for the four drivers left in the Chase, that’s not really an option on Sunday. It’s all about winning.

    “Carl’s real good at driving through the limits and being able to compensate for something not being right the with the car,” his teammate and competitor Kyle Busch says. “He’s able to make more out of it. So that sets him up pretty well.”

    “I think that comes from his dirt background,” Johnson says. “He’s used to dealing with cars that just weren’t exactly right.”

    “Yeah, that’s nice for people to say,” Edwards himself says. “But this is NASCAR, you have the best drivers in the world, they’re ALL good at making the most of their car. The other three drivers in the Chase are incredible. I don’t really think I have an advantage in that. All of us are good at that.

    “I do feel like, yeah, I like the challenge. I feel like if they would spray the track down with water and said, ‘OK, everybody race,’ I would enjoy that struggle. … But I’ll enjoy this week no matter what. It’s fun. This is what I like.”

    One for the history books

    By Nov 18, 2016, 8:52 AM EST

    MIAMI — There is a funny thing about sports dreams. You know, the kind you have when you’re a little kid. You dream about hitting the game-winning home run. You dream about catching the game-winning touchdown pass, or swishing the game-winning basket, or scoring the game-winning goal, or making the putt that wins you the Masters.

    Few of us ever get to do it, of course. But that’s not the funny part.

    The funny part is that the people who DO get to do it, well, they find that it isn’t exactly like the dreams. Take Jimmie Johnson. He has won six NASCAR Sprint Cup Championships. Six. Only two men — Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt with seven — have any idea what that’s like. But to be realistic, even they don’t know EXACTLY what it is like because the sport has grown so much bigger, the money has grown so much bigger, the pressure has grown so much bigger. So many people are counting on you. So many people are rooting against you. Gigantic companies have many millions of dollars at stake.

    And so even though this is all Jimmie Johnson ever wanted — to be the best race car driver — those first five championships felt nothing at all like his childhood dreams. He didn’t even ENJOY them, not in the way we understand the word “enjoy.” Yes, he was very proud of what he and his team did. Yes, he thrilled in the racing, the speed, the challenge, the victories, the opportunities that came with being the best stock-car driver in the world. But it wasn’t fun, if that makes sense. It wasn’t that innocent joy that went along with all those childhood daydreams, that feeling of the world going in slow motion, that intoxicating blur of champagne and happiness and wonder. He would stay up at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how he could stay on top.

    In 2013, when Johnson was 38 years old and won his sixth championship, the feeling was closer to what he had hoped. By then, Johnson had let go of a lot of things, a lot of the insecurities. He had stopped worrying so much about pleasing everyone. But even that wasn’t EXACTLY what he had dreamed about.

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    “You’re like, ‘Wow, this is nutty, this is stressful, can I do it?'” Johnson says. “You have all of these things weighing you down. When I won those first few championships, it wasn’t fun AT ALL. There was always more to do, you know? In ’13, it definitely felt different. I felt different. That was the most fun I’ve ever had racing for a championship by far.

    “Still, some days, you wish you could feel that thing you wanted as a kid, you know, that place you see in the movies or hear about in stories, and it is surreal, and the world stops and time stops, and it is perfect.”

    So that’s what this time is about. Johnson is 41 years old. He’s a legend of the sport. He has won six championships and 79 races and more than $150 million in prize money. He has won multiple races every year since he was a rookie. The legacy, if such a thing matters, is secure.

    And so, this race is for him.

    “I feel different going into this championship than I have ever felt before, there’s absolutely no doubt about that,” Johnson says. “As weird as it may sound, I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I’ve ever been. And that’s a major player. I have nothing to prove to anyone, and I don’t care what other people think. I really don’t. I’m racing this weekend for me and my family and my team. I don’t have any outside baggage that’s on me. That was other years. There was plenty of that stuff. None of that matters to me anymore.”

    He endured an odd year. It began like most Jimmie Johnson years do — he won in Atlanta in the second race of the year and followed that up three weeks later with a win at Fontana. And then he and his team went into a bit of slump. In a 15-race span, he finished in the top five four times while finishing 20th or worse six times. He and his crew chief Chad Knaus struggled week to week. There was the talk — which has grown louder the last couple of years — that Johnson was close to the end. “I definitely missed driving up front,” Johnson says.

    Watch: NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship (Sunday at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBC, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports App)

    Then came the Chase and it has been absolutely perfect. He breezed into the second round, then won the first race, Charlotte, to automatically move into the third round. He promptly won the first race of the third round, in Martinsville, to qualify for Sunday’s final four. Johnson’s team has had two stress-free weeks to prepare the car for this final race, and while nobody knows if that will make a difference, well, it can’t hurt.

    And Johnson is just enjoying it. “I’m excited,” he says. “And I’m fresh. I don’t know if it will change as we get closer to the race, if the nerves will come. But I don’t think it will.”

    He is well aware, of course, that winning this title would tie him with Earnhardt and Petty for most championships — so aware of it that ever since he won the race in Charlotte he has been wearing a helmet with Petty and Earnhardt’s photos on it and the words “Drive for Seven.” He says that if he could tie those two legends of the sport, it would mean the world to him because it would connect him to history.

    But, again, he promises not to let that inflate into pressure.

    “I never race for stats,” he says. “I’ve never raced for stats, for fame, for money. I’ve just always loved racing. I feel like I’m more in touch with that, in tune with that, than I’ve ever been in my career.

    “I think about those dreams I had as a kid, dreams all of us have in our own way I suppose. I guess I want that moment. I’ve done this for a long time. And I’d love to have that moment.”

    Promises, promises

    By Nov 17, 2016, 11:02 PM EST

    MIAMI — Two years ago, Joey Logano showed up for his shot at destiny … and he was scared out of his mind. He doesn’t like to say it that way. He would prefer to just say, “I was nervous. Because I didn’t know what was happening. And I think that’s where nerves are going to come from.”

    He was just 24 years old then and he was trying to join Jeff Gordon and Bill Rexford as the only two drivers to win a championship before turning 25 years old. But it was different for Logano. He’d been preordained to be NASCAR’s next superstar ever since he was a teenager. “Sliced bread,” they called him — as in “best thing since …” — and while he sort of got a kick out of the nickname and the expectations when he was a kid, those things soon felt like an anchor tied to his waist.

    “Sliced bread,” people would mutter savagely every time he finished out of the top five.

    “Sliced bread,” people would taunt him because he won just three races in his first five full seasons.

    “Sliced bread,” other drivers would mock when they felt like Logano pushed his aggressiveness too far.

    Then in 2014, it finally came together for Logano. He won five times. He came to Homestead with a real chance to win the championship … only he readily admits that his head just wasn’t in the right place. “I couldn’t settle my mind down,” he says. “I was thinking about what could happen … or what’s going to happen … what’s the week going to look like … what’s the feeling on Sunday going to be … what is it going to feel like like getting in the car … do I have what it takes?”

    Here Logano smiles. He’s famous for that smile.

    Watch: NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship (Sunday at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBC, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports App)

    “I think that’s the big one. ‘Do I have what it takes?’ I didn’t know then. I know now.”

    “What do you know?” 

    “I know the challenge ahead. I’m prepared for that. I’m ready for that, ready for the pressure. I’m more than ready, I’m excited about it. I’m genuinely pumped. It’s like a complete 180 from last time I was here.”

    There are times when it feels like Logano has been racing forever — and he HAS been racing full time since 2009 — but he’s still just 26 years old. He’s five years younger than Jimmie Johnson was when he won the first of his so-far six championships, three years younger than Dale Earnhardt when he won his first of seven. And he’s five years younger than any of the other drivers in the Chase this year.

    And it’s the combination of youth and experience that makes him unique … and dangerous. NASCAR people will tell you: Young drivers go FAST. The great Junior Johnson used to say, “They don’t know no better — they haven’t hit the wall yet.” So younger drivers push closer to the edge than might be prudent out of youthful exuberance and daring. That makes them go extremely fast, yes, but then they tend to burn out (or spin out or get spun out).

    Logano has that speed. But he has more or less stopped burning out.

    “When you’re flirting with the edge, you’re going to step over it from time to time,” Jimmie Johnson says. “And he has. I think he’s figured out how to inch his way up to the edge instead of flying over it like he did three or four years ago.”

    “For me,” Carl Edwards says, “a switch has gone off the last couple of years for Joey. He’s just so fast everywhere. I have a feeling he’s going to be VERY fast on Sunday. He’s hungry. He wants this very badly. You could argue that he doesn’t have a lot of experience or whatever but I’ve been around long enough. I’ve watched how he’s been approaching this. I think he’s got a ton of confidence.”

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    The other three drivers talk a lot about handling whatever adversity comes this week, being patient, always, in the immortal words of NASA legend Gene Kranz, “Working the problem.” Logano talks about these things too, but more he talks about being aggressive … and being aggressive … and when that doesn’t work, to keep being aggressive.

    “Attack all day,” Logano says of the gameplan. “That’s it. It’s the way our team is. It has been for the last three years or whatever. That’s what we found to be successful for us. Race aggressively. Attack every minute. I start the race and say, ‘I’m here to win,’ and I have that ‘I will not get beat’ attitude throughout the race. Whether that’s good or bad, well, it’s different for other people. Probably it’s a lot different. But it works for us.”

    And when you ask him how he will deal with the frustration that might come with a poor pit stop or a car that won’t quite adjust to conditions or the ever-changing conditions of the track, he smiles again.

    “Frustration is OK,” he says. “It’s OK as long as it’s channeled in the right way. But there’s never that feeling of ‘We’re just not going to win today. It’s just not our day. We suck.’ There’s never that feeling. Because I know we don’t suck. I know I’m a very good race car driver. I know I have a very good race team. And I know we can handle this.”

    The Magic Man

    By Nov 17, 2016, 10:07 PM EST

    MIAMI — The wonderful thing about the press conference for the NASCAR Championship Four — just three days before the big race — is that you have all four of the contending drivers sitting on the stage side by side. And because they are sitting next to each other, you can get just a small feel for how they feel about each other and their chances and everything else coming into the winner-take-all final race.

    Joey Logano, for instance, is totally pumped up, super happy. Why not? He won last week to become one of the four drivers to have a chance to win a championship Sunday. This is the dream, man.

    Jimmie Johnson seems calm, beyond calm, like he’s done this whole thing a million times before, which is pretty close to true.

    Carl Edwards looks a bit dazed, but in the best of ways. He’s 37 years old now and he has won 28 races and more than $80 million, but he has never won a Sprint Cup Championship. He looks like a guy in a dream.

    And then there’s Kyle Busch. He looks, um, lethargic.

    “Do you guys like each other?” someone asks the group.

    “Kyle,” Logano says, “we’ll let you answer that.”

    Watch: NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship (Sunday at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBC, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports App)

    Busch looks out with a bit of a bewildered expression, as if someone has just woken him up from a nap. “I am exhausted,” he would say later. And when asked why, he would say, “I am always exhausted.”

    “Do you like each other?” was the question to the group.

    “Right now, yes,” Busch says. “In about 25 seconds, no.”

    Kyle Busch has the aura now. For so many years, he was the guy with unlimited potential, the impossibly talented driver who won a lot of races but always should have won more. Busch himself bought into the hype. He lashed out. He got into numerous dust-ups. Fans loathed him. He beat himself up continuously. In the words of his team owner Joe Gibbs: “He always felt like he was letting himself and his team down, like he wasn’t living up to his great talent.”

    Last year, it all changed. What a year that was. Busch got into a wreck at Daytona that threatened to end his entire season — for a brief time it seemed like his career might be in danger. Even once the doctors got a handle on his condition, Busch was supposed to be out for a minimum six months. Three months later he was standing — wobbly but standing — in the hospital room when his wife Samantha gave birth to their son Brexton.

    Then he came back to the track … and he was essentially unbeatable. In a beautiful five-week span, he won at Sonoma, at Kentucky, at Loudon and finally at the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis — his first major victory. He won so much that he easily qualified for the Chase even though he’d missed 11 races. Then he made it to the final four, and he ran away to victory at Homestead for his first championship. In the last few laps, he was singing the theme song for “Vocabularry” — his infant son’s favorite TV show.

    A magical year like that, yeah, it changes a person.

    “No,” he says now, “it doesn’t feel a whole lot different.”

    A magical year like that, um, it sort of changes a person?

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    “Well, look, it hasn’t been terribly different on the racing side,” Busch says. “Personally, with Brexton at home and stuff like that, that’s different. Having him come to all the races, that’s pretty fun. We certainly enjoy the time that we have on the road. But, you know, I’m just me.”

    So, OK, maybe a magical year like that doesn’t change a person — but don’t tell the other drivers that. They see a different Kyle Busch. There was always a saying in the garages about Kyle Busch during those years when he could not quite put everything together: If he ever wins a championship, watch out.

    Now that he’s won one, yes, watch out.

    “He just has so much confidence now, you can see it,” Johnson says. “I mean, he was always a confident guy, but it’s different, I think. Now, he’s a champion. Now, he KNOWS.”

    That is exactly the thing that is apparent as Kyle Busch sits off to the side during the press conference — it’s like he’s separate from the other three. He knows. He’s the defending champion. He’s the closest thing this Chase has to a favorite. He’s the guy in the best position to take over this sport, to be the new Dale Earnhardt, the new Bobby Allison, the new Richard Petty. A year ago, after he won his championship, he boldly said he’d like to win 10 in a row. When people laughed, he made it clear that he wasn’t joking.

    “It’s not about what we did last year,” he says. “We’ve already got that one. It’s in the bag. This is about going out there THIS one. It’s one race. It doesn’t matter what the situation is this week, doesn’t matter what comes your way, you have to figure out a way to win.”

    That, more than anything, might be what makes Kyle Busch the favorite. Right now, there is no stock-car driver anywhere who can make more out of less than Kyle Busch. Just last week in Phoenix, he had a tepid car that was running around 15th for most of the race. Through sheer relentlessness, a few adjustments on the car and a bit of driving brilliance — especially on restarts (Busch is a wonder on restarts) — they somehow finished second and could have won.

    “Oh, Kyle can make some magic,” Johnson says. “And knowing him, I’ll bet he will on Sunday.”

    No more fun and games

    By Nov 17, 2016, 10:55 AM EST

    Cam Newton, at his best, is a magical player. He does things that blow minds. He throws 30-yard darts that slip by defensive backs before they can react. He avoids sacks not so much by eluding them as by simply standing up through them, a brick house in the Big Bad Wolf’s wind. Newton takes off running and in the open field he is both halfback and fullback, able at times to split defenders in two the way Gale Sayers could, able at other times to blast through a defender, not unlike the way Neo blasts through Agent Smith at the end of “The Matrix.”

    This is Newton at his height, when the conditions are right, when his team is playing great and the opponent is in retreat and, as the Magic 8-Ball says, “All signs point to yes.”

    This was Newton last year for a 15-1 Panthers team that went to the Super Bowl.

    Something has changed this year, of course. That part is obvious. It isn’t that Newton is playing badly. His numbers are down, yes, and the Panthers are 3-6 and in last place. But he’s still among the top five or 10 quarterbacks out there. And there have been a few familiar moments. He threw for four touchdown passes against San Francisco. He has had a couple of dazzling runs. He has put his team in position to win for the most part, including last week against Kansas City. It isn’t like Newton suddenly forgot how to play football … he’s still Cam Newton.

    But something has obviously changed.

    What? There are a few clear possibilities. The Panthers’ defense was otherworldly last year, forcing turnover after turnover, setting up Newton and his offense with golden opportunities time and again. That has more or less stopped this year. The Panthers are starting inside their own 20-yard line more often. This has affected the Panthers’ offense generally and Newton specifically. He’s thrown only 10 touchdown passes this year. All the numbers are down.

    On offense, the line has been beat-up and inconsistent, and that has knocked Newton off his game. He has thrown off his back foot more often, and that usually leads to bad things. It did last week when the Panthers seemed about ready to put away Kansas City — a retreating Newton threw a pick-six that put Kansas City back in a game that should have been over. Newton has dealt with injuries, too — he missed the game against Tampa Bay, and he wasn’t himself in others.

    Watch: Saints vs. Panthers on Thursday Night Football (7:30 p.m. ET on NBC, NBCSports.com and NBC Sports app)

    And, perhaps most of all, teams have been taking their free shots at him at every turn. Newton is 6-foot-5, 245 pounds and a great runner, so teams obviously have to tackle him hard. But there’s no question opponents have taken this to an extreme this season. They have hit Newton late a few times, stolen some shots to the head, unloaded some knockout blows. And, for the most part, there have been no penalties to accompany the hits, possibly BECAUSE Newton is so big and powerful.

    This has driven Newton to distraction. Newton seems to believe the whole world is ganging up on him. A couple of weeks ago, he flatly said that the late hits are “really taking the fun out of the game for me. At times I don’t even feel safe.”

    Newton has a beef. But more to the point here, all of this leads to this rather simple theory that I have about Cam Newton.

    He needs to be having fun to play his best football.

    And this year, he’s just not having any fun.

    Great athletes tend to feed off different motivations. Some want to be loved. Some seem to get a huge kick out of being despised. Some are motivated by fear, others by anger, still others by fame and fortune. Tom Brady, for instance, STILL seems to motivate himself by disrespect (you might have heard that he was selected in the sixth round of the NFL draft) even though it has been years since anybody disrespected him (Roger Goodell aside). Meanwhile, a player like Carolina’s impeccable linebacker Luke Kuechly seems to motivate himself through the daily challenge of figuring out how to break up an offense — it is like a puzzle for him.

    Newton apparently grazes off joy. He wears the hats. He does the dances. He gives away the footballs. The bigger the lead, the more fun he has, the better he plays. The louder the crowd, the more fun he has, the higher he soars. This is part of what makes Newton such a joy; through it all, he PLAYS football the way kids PLAY football. It’s a game. And it’s so much fun when everything is working and everyone has come together.

    This is something people around the Carolina team have noticed for years. There have been times that people inside the organization have wondered if Newton could be serious enough to become a great NFL quarterback. Soon enough they realized that it was the wrong question, realized that being serious doesn’t suit him or his play. You probably noticed how serious Newton looked in the Super Bowl last year. That didn’t turn out well.

    Marty Schottenheimer is one of the many coaches who noted that you can’t have fun in the NFL if you lose. The Panthers are coming off one of their worst losses in recent franchise history, a complete giveaway to the Chiefs. Their playoff situation looks pretty dire — Carolina might have to win out. The key will be getting Newton to start having fun again.

    The remarkable rise of Andy Murray

    By Nov 8, 2016, 5:09 PM EST

    For years, there was this fun argument going on about Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. The argument assumed that both men are the best who ever played golf and tennis (an open debate, obviously). And it led to one question: Who is better at their sport?

    The argument never really went anywhere because for every point (golf requires beating the WHOLE field rather than one opponent at a time), there was a counterpoint (one mediocre/bad day in golf does not sink a golfer’s chances, but it can end a tennis player’s tournament).

    For every factor that points to the difficulty of golf (it is so mentally challenging that even the great golfers will miss cuts with some regularity — Phil Mickelson missed 11 in his career) there is another that points to the difficulty of tennis (it is so physically grueling that many of the greatest players — John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Martina Hingis, Justine Henin, Mats Wilander, on and on — won their last Grand Slam singles title by the time they turned 25 years old).

    Anyway, it was fun to talk about, even if it never really led anywhere. But there is something that does seem to be emerging about the wonderful dominance of Woods and Federer. You might call the two effects “dishearten” and “hearten.”

    All of this, eventually, will take us to Andy Murray. Hopefully.

    Tiger Woods was such a force in golf that he disheartened his opponents. He broke their spirit. They could not beat him, not when he was on his game, not when he was slightly off his game and, quite often, not even when he was very much off his game. There’s an old Jack Nicklaus line that is even more true for Woods: He knew he would beat you, you knew he would beat you, and he knew that you knew he would beat you.

    FIfty-eight times, Woods was either in the lead or tied for the lead going into the final round. He won 54 of them. He won the first 14 major tournaments he led after 54 holes.

    And how did this uncommon mastery of a sport that is supposed to defy mastery affect other golfers? It crushed them. Sure, there were supremely talented golfers in Woods’ time, several who are in the World Golf Hall of Fame. But let’s put it this way — from the time when Woods broke onto the scene and breezed to the 1997 Masters title to when he won the U.S. Open on one leg, there were 46 major championships.

    Tiger Woods won 14 of them, as mentioned.

    The other 32 majors? Well, 25 different golfers won those 32 majors. Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson won three. Mark O’Meara, Retief Goosen and Ernie Els won two each. Those five terrific players — four already in the Hall of Fame with only Goosen waiting — won fewer majors than Woods COMBINED. And the other 20 majors were won by 20 different golfers. It’s a clear pattern: Everyone would show up at the majors with the hope that Woods was way off his game. Then, and only then, did they have a chance.

    His magnificence was unassailable. It was meant to be enjoyed and feared but not challenged. The best golfers on earth not named Tiger Woods had to console themselves with the huge sums of money that Tiger brought into the sport and the hope that maybe someday he would stop winning everything and leave some tournaments for everyone else.

    So, yes, Tiger Woods was disheartening.

    Roger Federer, somehow, was the opposite. He was every bit as dominant as Woods — the numbers are even more striking. From 2003, when Federer won his first Wimbledon to 2010 when he took the Australian Open, there were 27 Grand Slam tournaments. Federer won 16 of them, more than half, and reached the final in another six. The only other tennis players to win Grand Slams in Roger’s time: Rafael Nadal, who won six, and five others who managed one each.

    But it was different somehow. There was something magnanimous about Federer’s beautiful game, something that opened up possibilities in the minds of other tennis players. Golfers would see Tiger Woods hit miracle shots out of trouble and make every important putt he looked at and they would think: NO SHOT. But Federer would hit some implausible running forehand winner or spin a drop-volley with such touch that it would not even bounce, and the other tennis players would think: I WANT TO DO THAT!

    That begins with Nadal, of course. He seemed to be just the latest in a long line of Spanish and Latin American clay-court specialists — Sergi Brugera, Gustavo Kuerten, Gaston Gaudio, Albert Costa, Juan Carlos Ferrera — who would show up at the French Open to win and then disappear like top-spinning swallows of Capistrano.

    Nadal, though, was stirred to take his game to a higher place. He has spoken eloquently about how the inspiration of Federer took him there. Nadal has won all four major championships and 14 Grand Slam tournaments in all — he has his place now in the inner circle of all-time tennis greats. His rivalry with Federer might just be the greatest in tennis history. Nadal has controlled it for the most part with shots that kick up high and attack Fed’s backhand like wasps. Still, their tennis has lifted the sport.

    Novak Djokovic was next. He had both Federer AND Nadal to contend with, something that certainly could have left him entirely discouraged. At times, he did indeed seem discouraged. Djokovic does not have quite the grace or touch of Federer nor the ferocious power of Nadal. He found his own path — foot speed, instincts, hitting balls on the rise, imposing return of serve and sheer ambition. He has now won 12 Grand Slam titles, including the career Grand Slam. He has a winning record against both Federer and Nadal. He too has a place in tennis’ inner circle.

    All of which brings us to Andy Murray. He has been around a long time. It is tempting to think that Murray is younger than he is, but he was born in the same month as Djokovic (Murray is actually a week older). He is less than a year younger than Nadal. He played in his first Wimbledon in 2005. He has endured more or less the ENTIRE period of Roger and Rafa and Novak’s dominance.

    He did not just endure that dominance, he was repeatedly smacked down by their dominance. The first 10 times he reached at least a Grand Slam semifinal, he was knocked out by Nadal (four times), Federer (three times) or Djokovic (two times)*. If anyone had good reason to grudgingly accept that he was born at just the wrong time, it was Murray.

    *He was also beaten once in a semi by Andy Roddick, another slap in the face — he couldn’t even be the best ANDY on the court that day.

    And Murray seemed, well, to put it delicately, just the type of person who would grudgingly accept that he was born at just the wrong time. Murray in 2008, when he was 21 years old and had not yet won a single significant tournament (no offense to the Qatar Open) nor reached the final of a Grand Slam event, wrote an autobiography called “Hitting Back.” Nobody was entirely sure WHY he wrote an autobiography at that time, but he did indeed hit back — at British tennis, at the media members who doubted him (he was refusing to even talk to the BBC at the time) and at the unfair obstacles he seemed sure that everyone was putting in his way and his way alone. He came across as a very angry young man, though nobody was entirely sure why.

    Then, maybe the answer why was obvious. Federer was majestic then. Nadal was ascendant. Djokovic won the Australian Open that very year. There seemed to be no room in the tennis world for Andy Murray, and he seemed to know it.

    So what happened from there? The book kept getting updated as Murray began growing up. The paperback version of that book was called “Coming of Age.” And then the book title was updated and titled  “Seventy-Seven: My Road to Wimbledon Glory.” That happened in 2013, after Murray broke the 77-year British drought and won Wimbledon. By then, he was a different tennis player and a different man. He had won the Olympics in London. He won the U.S. Open that year. He had found himself.

    And I would argue that it was, once again, the inspiration of Federer, who inspired Nadal, who inspired Djokovic, who inspired Murray. Andy improved everything about his game. And he did it by building up every single part of his game. He doesn’t really do anything specifically better than the rest of the world. But you know those Sprint commercials where Sprint basically admits it’s not QUITE as good as Verizon, but it’s 99 percent as good for half the price?

    Murray doesn’t quite have Djokovic’s return of serve (no one in tennis history does) or his pure speed — but it’s probably 99 percent.

    Murray doesn’t quite have Nadal’s bullfighter tenacity — win or die with honor — but he’s probably at 99 percent.

    Murray doesn’t quite have Federer’s ability to hit the “gaga shot” that tilts an opponent’s head the same way shaking a pinball machine does — but he’s probably at 99 percent.

    In other words, at least as I see it, Murray created a game that is like an homage to those masters he has been trying to beat. He does a little bit of everything, and he brings along some of that youthful rage and intensity, and here he is: Murray is now the No. 1 player in the world.

    It is unclear if he will stay at No. 1 for very long. Djokovic seems worn down by his own extraordinary rise, but he has still made the final of nine of the last 11 Grand Sam tournaments, winning six of them. Djokovic also dominated the head-to-head matchups between them, winning 24 of 34 matches and eight of the 10 times they played in Grand Slams. It seems a pretty good bet that he will be back, and so this could be just a Murray blip, a fluke of timing.

    Or it could be more. Either way, for Murray to reach No. 1 after all these years is an extraordinary thing.

    When Tiger Woods hit the golf scene, you will remember there was a lot of talk about the generation of golfers he would give rise to, the young golfers who, seeing what he was doing, would find a way to take golf even higher. We might be seeing that with golfers like Rory McIlroy and Jason Day and Jordan Spieth, though it is too early to tell.

    Federer’s impact is clearer. He came into the sport during a lull, just as the Pete Sampras-Andre Agassi era was ending, and he played sublime and previously unimaginable tennis. And his tennis genius has helped create three of the greatest tennis players who ever lived. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do that. But, hey, who DOESN’T want to be Roger Federer?