In May, reports suggested ‘high-roller’ guests would need to spend $1.5m (£1.1m) for special access, and while UFC sources confirmed to BBC Sport the existence of such packages for the event, they did not confirm how much they cost.

Trump has a long-standing friendship with UFC president Dana White and the event coincided with his 80th birthday.

Andrew Schleimer, chief financial officer of TKO Group, told investors on Monday they incurred significantly higher than normal costs for Freedom 250, which they “partially offset with sold-out global partnerships inventory.”

He added: “Given the event’s profile, which as anticipated, resulted in an approximate $30m loss, our margins at UFC as well as on a consolidated basis were meaningfully impacted.”

Last year, TKO Group signed a $7.7bn (£5.7bn), seven-year contract with Paramount for the US channel to become the new home of UFC starting in 2026, with the White House event shown exclusively on its subscription streaming platform Paramount+.

The event attracted an average of 34 million viewers worldwide, making it one of the most watched mixed martial arts events of all time.

TKO reported UFC’s revenue increased 29% year over year to $535.7m (£398.66m) for the second quarter of this year.

This includes a $64.7m (£48.15m) increase in media rights driven by the TV deal with Paramount.

LeBron James, it’s been said, couldn’t get over a final hurdle to join Golden State. After four faceoffs in the NBA Finals against the Warriors — with Steph Curry’s squad winning three — and after numerous riveting showdowns since, joining the Warriors would never not feel like joining the enemy.

“I ultimately don’t think Bron was ever able to get over the history, and I understand it,” Warriors forward Draymond Green said on his podcast.

“We live in a day and age,” he later added, “where everybody who doesn’t have anything to say has something to say. (LeBron’s) gonna get crushed if he comes to the Warriors. … And I think ultimately, that weighed in on the decision a lot. That played a big role in the Warriors not landing LeBron.”

It’s for the best. As titillating as it would’ve been to watch them play together, it’s probably better for them to remain how we remembered them. Because while basketball remembers partnerships, it immortalizes rivalries.

The superteam era aside, the NBA is built more on collisions than collaborations. We don’t hold as much regard for stars who find each other as much as we do the ones who stand in each other’s way. Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Michael Jordan and the Detroit Pistons.

LeBron James and Steph Curry became the titans for a generation. Between 2011 and 2022, the NBA Finals featured LeBron or Curry 11 times. Their dominance collided at the top. They forced each other to find higher levels and, thus, they represent their era’s contribution to the great battles that make the NBA special.

LeBron already occupied the throne when Curry came out of nowhere to challenge him for Larry O’Brien trophies. Nearly every championship run went through them. So many signature moments they authored. And, it must be said, they reigned as social media hijacked basketball discourse. Their respective loyalists converted fandom into partisan warfare online.

That’s what made the idea of them as teammates more fascinating than necessary.

In a sense, all basketball fans may have won by LeBron opting not to take his talents to North Beach. The idea of LeBron and Curry finishing their careers as teammates has appeal, if for nothing else than sheer lack of precedent. The fantastical scenario of the two rivals winning their fifth titles together was a script worthy of a fight between LeBron’s SpringHill Company and Curry’s Unanimous Media.

But perhaps basketball history is better served by LeBron remaining a frenemy of Curry, not a teammate. In the grander scheme of NBA lore, preserving the sanctity of rivalry. It shields our memories of their masterful primes. Who they are in the story of the league and what they meant to a generation remain intact without the intrusion of a new context.

And we’ll always have Paris.

We don’t need more than the bliss of the 2024 gold-medal push of the Americans. The Avengers gave us LeBron, Curry and Kevin Durant — with stakes, a global stage and moments we’ll never forget.

For two weeks, the Olympics gave us permission to stop choosing sides. We watched LeBron orchestrate and Curry mesmerize. The rarity of their union, the budding of their friendship and the pressure of the challenge gave it all the feels. It was epic enough to be emotional.

Even with that, the best version of the LeBron-Curry bond happened as foes.

Of course, basketball gives us reasons to want to see the two of them, along with Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler, as teammates. LeBron’s mind and athleticism. Curry’s gravity. Butler’s versatility. Green’s presence. Especially if Anthony Davis came to the Bay with LeBron — which was one of the ways the Warriors could’ve enticed LeBron but didn’t like the price to get AD out of Washington — Golden State would have been an instant must-watch. The high levels they could reach any given game surely would create some special moments. Steve Kerr would be inheriting perhaps the smartest collection of basketball minds the league has ever assembled. It would’ve been catnip for hoop fans.

It would’ve been beautiful. But that part’s easy to imagine. Harder to grasp is the potential cost.

Rivalries give eras their significance. They provide meaning to the championships that anoint legends and fuel our reverence. Curry and LeBron deserve to exist in the same space as Magic and Bird. They gave us four consecutive showdowns between two of the game’s most captivating players of all time. A 3-1 comeback that altered history. The birth of a dynasty and a new standard of excellence, including one of the greatest teams of all time.

LeBron and Curry became the defining protagonists — and worthy villains — for a generation because they denied each other. And they provoked basketball evolution in the process. Sporting mythology gets fuel from friction.

Them joining forces at this point in their careers wouldn’t erase that reality. But it could change the way we remember and regard their epic wars, or even leave us with an encore of a partnership not nearly as compelling. It could’ve even exposed their legacies to an unforeseen stain, especially since their teaming up would’ve created hysteria in the basketball world.

We’ve watched them go from bitter rivals to adoring colleagues. We’ve watched them age more gracefully than any players we’ve ever seen, and do so in a way that promotes the beauty of the game and the camaraderie of sports. At certain points, it seemed they’d never get here. The enmity between their legacies and their fanbase once felt too thick to ever dissolve.

But they’ve managed to rise above and become the ol’ heads their careers deserve. Friends. Ambassadors. GOATs.

They’ve earned this version of each other. The embraces. The admiration. The conversations courtside. The gold medal.

History has a way of softening the edges of even the fiercest rivalries. The respect grows louder. Eventually, appreciation becomes the glossy coating. Curry and LeBron have arrived there.

They don’t need another chapter together to complete the story. Maybe it’s supposed to end this way — as admirers who became combatants, who bonded as only emperors can, then became close.

Their friendship is a fitting epilogue. But their rivalry will always be the story.

Why does tennis drive its most successful players mad?

Why do the stars of this sport appear more embroiled in its psychological knots than those they defeat? And how do they untangle those knots as those careers progress, learning how to protect their minds as they do their serves?

The Athletic’s Matthew Futterman attempts to answer these questions in his new book, “The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis”, which published Aug. 4. Through the kind of probing interviews with players that subscribers will be accustomed to, he finds the codes to the game that they use, and how they respond when even their trusted methods can’t quiet the hum of pressure that comes with chasing greatness.

In the following excerpt, he sits down with 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic as he eats dinner at the U.S. Open, to go inside the head of the greatest men’s player of all time.

The rain pours down as though it hasn’t rained in weeks, covering the ground instantly like a shag rug. This is Noah’s Ark–style rain. Drops the size of small coins, dumping on New York on a late-summer evening. An early-September release just as the tournament has ended, the last major of the year, the end of the summer of 2023, seemingly Novak Djokovic’s last season of magic.

An eight-year-old boy looks out at the rain from beneath the cover of a tent in a garden. There are fifty people huddling near him to stay dry. He has no interest in that. He wants to dance in the soaking splendor.

He searches for his father. A pack always surrounds that man. You’ve got to fight your way to get to him, even if you are his son. The boy slithers through the horde and grabs his father’s hand, tugging him away. The father has no idea where they are headed.

It takes a few steps to get there, into the driving rain. The water soaks them within seconds, just as the boy grabs his father’s other hand. They lock eyes. Then the boy — Stefan is his name — starts to jump. No, it’s more like bouncing, and his father begins to bounce along with him. Then comes the laughter, the rolling, shrieking kind. Two boys, one small, one big, laughing and dancing in the rain.

This is how Djokovic celebrates a Grand Slam title at this moment in his life. It’s a moment no one else can understand the way he does. He is celebrating his twenty-fourth Grand Slam title in the players’ garden next to Arthur Ashe Stadium. No one in the modern era has won the most important tournaments as he has.

What does it feel like to win like this, to be so much better than even the greatest of the greats?

Only he knows.

Probably, it feels like dancing in the pouring rain with your eight-year-old son.

So what does it take to feel like that?

It’s the $200 million question around the locker room, both the men’s and the women’s. That’s roughly how much prize money Djokovic has collected. It’s not about the money, though. At this point, there is this sense that only he understands how to crack the sport’s super-secret codes that ultimately are not so secret.

For three years, while researching and writing “The Cruelest Game”, I looked and listened to the best of the best in and around tennis to figure out who might have mastered those codes during their careers, and who might be getting closer to unlocking them.

Three nights before Djokovic’s dance in the rain, I was walking through the catacombs of Arthur Ashe Stadium during the delay in Coco Gauff’s semifinal. A protest in the stadium’s upper-level had brought it to a stop.

As I turned a corner on a walk down an empty hallway to the tournament referee’s office, I saw Gauff walking alone toward me.

She had this mischievous grin on her face.

“It’s the climate protesters, isn’t it?” she said.

I told her I thought it was.

Gauff, then just 19, was giddy with the idea that the protestors had chosen her match to amplify their message. That officially made her a big deal, and she was loving it. She’d found the joy in the lunacy of it all. That had to be some sort of code, didn’t it?

A few months later I landed on the side of a private home court in the San Fernando Valley, where Naomi Osaka was training for her comeback from childbirth and maternity leave. She knew the game had changed in the 15 months since she had last played. She needed to learn new shots, including the quasi-acrobatic open-stance background. She needed to learn how to move her body into and out of awkward contortions as she never had before.

Next to me was a former ballerina named Simone Elliott. Elliott teaches great athletes how to refine their movements. Osaka had become her latest pupil, open to help wherever it could come from.

Another code.

In September of 2025, I’m watching courtside with Roger Federer at the Laver Cup, his inter-continental competition based on golf’s Ryder Cup. It’s 15-15, early in the set. A moment of minutiae in a match.

Not at all, Federer tells me. These are the points that matter most because everyone thinks that they don’t. This is the moment a match might be won or lost.

Yes, there was a code for sure.

At that moment, Federer appeared to have everything. His health. A beautiful family. A bespoke $1.5 million white gold Rolex on his wrist. Worldwide adulation. But a few minutes before, he’d watched these two players walk through the tunnel and onto the court for a crucial match and gotten wistful. How cool would it be to be able to play a match like this one more time?

Federer had played until he couldn’t play anymore, losing his last set of singles 6-0, on Centre Court at Wimbledon, the grass he once ruled.

Why?

Because there is one code that eludes even the greatest of the greats.

No one can figure out the right way to leave.

They all want one more joyous dance in the rain — even Djokovic, who, in the 2020s, in the Hunger Games environment that tennis has become, appears to have mastered more codes than anyone else. There’s one I want to know about more than any other.

A little more than two weeks before that dance in the rain, Djokovic and I sit at a small table in that same garden. I want to know what it’s like to be inside his head in the crucial moments of the biggest matches in the sport, when the headwinds, or the exhaustion, or the doubts smack him in the jaw, when he searches for a way to crawl back to his feet? How does he fight that urge to run and hide?

Everyone wants to know how the gears work in there. Come on, take us inside.

It’s a good moment to ask. Three nights before, Djokovic had played what the highly respected commentator Jim Courier called probably the greatest three-set match he’d ever witnessed.

Djokovic against Carlos Alcaraz in the 2023 Cincinnati final was a four-hour battle with three overtime sets, two tiebreaks, buckets of sweat, searing cramps, medical time-outs, and two desperate champions trying to wrestle each other into submission. It was their first duel since Alcaraz had bested Djokovic in five sets in the Wimbledon final.

He does have to eat, though, because it’s early evening, closing in on six thirty. He always wants to be done eating by seven, if his match schedule permits. Sleep comes easier that way. It also gives him a nice long overnight fast.

As we talk, Marco Panichi, his trainer at the time, delivers the night’s protein- and carbohydrate-packed feast — two salmon steaks and two baked sweet potatoes, each as big as a small Nerf football. Small yellow potatoes and chickpeas cover the rest of the empty space on the plate.

Gluten-free penne with olive oil and fresh vegetables fill a large bowl next to the salmon and potatoes. There is no cheese on the pasta, no butter on the potatoes, no sauce on the salmon.

He takes some healthy bites of the salmon. He cuts off a chunk of the sweet potato and stuffs it in his mouth. The pasta waits on the side. That’s for later.

He finishes chewing and takes some deep breaths before answering my question.

Novak Djokovic’s 2023 U.S. Open win over Daniil Medvedev is his most recent Grand Slam triumph. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

“Oh my gosh, it’s a roller-coaster ride in every sense of that word and that term. You go from the highest level of confidence and self-belief to the highest level of self-doubt. From the high level of frustration and anger to the high level of . . . Just peace within and the flow.

“So it’s really an incredible lot of variables that you go through. Maybe people can’t see it. Maybe sometimes players show it. Sometimes they don’t. I try not to because obviously I know that at this level, players watch each other and see everything that is happening and every sign of weakness or whatever gestures that you’re showing out on the court. It can be used against you.”

As he forks another wedge of salmon and deposits it into his mouth, Djokovic goes right back to the most recent Sunday evening in Cincinnati. Inside that head, on that night in southern Ohio, there was . . . acceptance. Understanding that the next couple of hours would be hard, that he would have to go to some dark places. He might not win. He might fail. But he won’t know if he doesn’t go. So just keep going.

“I did struggle a lot physically for a set and a half,” he says about the Cincinnati match. “Asked for a medical time-out. Got some things to hydrate me and kind of mineralize me a bit more and feel a bit better.”

As he refueled, and breathed, he looked for the sign of hope. Then he found the thing that would allow him to last to the end. To see the fight through to whatever outcome awaited.

He saw the sun. It was dipping, minute by minute. Soon the highest ridges of the stadium would block its heat from the court. He just needed to last until the shade arrived. He knew God would make that happen for him.

“Once there was not much sun on the court, when we got into the third hour of the match, I felt better.”

He smiles. He’d been present enough to see the sign that a chance to start again would arrive. He just had to get there, and then make it happen.

Easier said than done of course. Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, they are something different from what he has seen and felt on a tennis court in a long while.

That brashness. That willingness to charge into the ring chin-first — like he did. Djokovic can see himself in this next-next generation. They’re closer in age to his children than to him. Spiritually, though, he’s one of them.

He spears up some pasta and broccoli with his fork.

“Of course, you always have respect for the big names and players, but, you know, I want to win and I’m going to communicate that publicly and I never had an issue to say what I think…There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I am capable of winning big tournaments. I’m capable of winning against him. I know what my strengths are. I know who I am and I’m here for a reason.’

“I like that with young guys. They’re bold enough to go and take what they think they deserve.”

Is that what it takes?

Maybe. But he knows there’s something else.

At some point a match will head sideways. The ball will begin to abuse you instead of the other way around. Then the mind starts to run. God knows where. Off it goes. And then what?

Djokovic is just about done with his pasta. A good thing, because it’s past seven. He’s moving on to a little fruit cup for dessert.

So what happens when the match spins off its axis? When Alcaraz has chased down everything and has you on the run? When a point, or a game, or a match feels like so much more than it is? When it feels like your identity is on the line? How on earth do you pull it back?

A bite of pineapple. Some grapes. Some melon chunks. “Look,” he says, “it’s like, psychosomatic.”

“Whether it’s conscious breathing, or certain kinds of movements, or a certain pattern of thinking, it’s letting go of your thoughts that are occupying your mind, or trying to deal with what’s in your mind. I’ve always found that it’s more efficient if I would let my thoughts go. Whatever is arising, I just don’t try to connect myself with that too much. I think of the very next moment, and just be present.”

What matters to Djokovic? Now. This moment. And now this one. The ball you just hit, the point you just played, the match you won or lost the other day or last week or last year or the last time you were on Centre Court, they’re over. They’ve got nothing to do with now, with what’s coming in this next second.

He focuses on the feel of an ice towel, how his neck and shoulders feel as he rotates his head.

“On the court it’s really just following your instincts and being on autopilot. But yes, sometimes this autopilot takes you in the wrong direction. You have to intervene and intercept that wrong trajectory. And you don’t have much time. Your heart rate is so high and you know, you’re running out of breath and you’re dealing with the emotions, you’re dealing with the crowd that’s getting into it. There’s so many outside factors that are affecting the way you feel.

“And then, you just have to train yourself…that your reaction to them is less” — he pauses to search for the right word — “radical.”

This is the Djokovic few see. The one who is nearly unrecognizable from the impetuous guy who roars like a caveman, who screams at crowds, who snaps rackets around net posts. The one who thinks — about everything.

“Tennis,” he explains, “is a combination of a sprint, a marathon, and gymnastics all at the same time. You do have to be explosive and dynamic because it is an explosive and dynamic sport. But it’s not a full sprint, because if you play two, three, four, five hours, you’ve got to be ready to somehow manage your energy expenditure in a proper way, an optimal way, so that you are able to perform for hours at the same level. Or, if you drop, then you come back quickly. And that’s something that, I feel like, differentiates the top players from others. It’s the ability to really be consistently playing on a high level through-out the entire match and the whole season.”

Or in his case, roughly twenty of them. Like he says, easier said than done.

Once you know his playbook, you see the patterns everywhere. You see it in how slowly he chews his banana in the middle of the second set, his eyes squinting as he tries to feel the fiber and the potassium between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

You see it when he takes an ice towel and holds it on the back of his neck, rotating his head as he tries to feel the cold in each thread on his skin.

You see it when he goes quiet in a match against another all-time great. There are no roars or poses. Sometimes there’s barely even a fist pump. Anything like that would expend energy that he needs to hang on to.

You see it in the way his shoulders rise when he needs an extra-deep breath after a gut-sucking point, when the clock is ticking down and he needs to hit another serve.

You hear it when he’s up 5–4 and his opponent is serving and it’s 30–30, and he starts moaning as he reaches for each ball, a little louder with each one, because not all points are created equal and this point can make all the difference.

And then, a little more than two weeks after our talk in the garden, after he’s got a twenty-fourth Grand Slam title and he’s celebrating in the same garden, you see it when his son drags him into the pouring rain to dance.

His heart, his head, his body, his soul, they’re all right here, in the rain with his son. Nowhere else.

Excerpted from “The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis”. Copyright © 2026 Matthew Futterman. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.