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Jason Kelce, maybe leave this one to Jim Nantz.
Professional golf’s premiere event, The Masters, brands itself as “A tradition unlike any other.”™ (A Nantz line from the ’80s, but Augusta National owns the rights to anything said during Masters broadcasts.) There’s a little bit less tradition thus far this year.
ESPN shoehorned Kelce, a retired (terrific) NFL center and the brother of active (terrific) NFL tight end Travis Kelce, into its early Masters coverage — an effort to make its broadcasts and streams of a stuffy golf major championship more enticing for our doomed doomscrolling culture. (How buttoned up is The Masters? The winner literally gets a sport coat.)
Through no fault of (Jason) Kelce’s, America could probably use a break from the bearded big fella. ESPN has gone to new heights deploying the New Heights podcast co-host in every possible way. Some say in too many possible ways.
Kelce, officially an ESPN NFL analyst, is at the exclusive Augusta National Golf Club this week in Augusta, Ga. “conducting interviews with players and their families,” according to an ESPN press release. This is ESPN’s 19th year of live coverage from the Masters Tournament. Its rights include main telecasts (ESPN and ESPN Deportes) of the first two rounds, plus “Featured Groups coverage,” as well as Holes 4, 5 and 6, Amen Corner, 15 and 16 (streaming). On Wednesday, ESPN presented exclusive live coverage of the Masters Par 3 Contest on the ESPN app and Disney+. That’s where this first went wrong.
Donning a full Masters-caddie jumpsuit and rooting for holes-in-one, in a brief TV hit that was not especially a hit on social media, Kelce attempted to fire up the crowd and earn a few yucks — two things he is good at. Problem is, to borrow a title from Netflix (which itself just bastardized baseball in the name of self-promotion), nobody wants this. Golf fans want The Masters to be The Masters, and The Masters is anti-“fun” by design.
At Augusta National, spectators cannot bring in their cell phone or wear (overly) branded clothing. They can’t sit on the hallowed Bermuda grass (overseeded with Perennial Ryegrass) or run, and wearing a hat backwards is strictly prohibited. It’s like church, just with no tipping (another rule). Yet every year, roughly two million applicants will enter a lottery system for a long shot to join the congregation. Golf fans are lured to Augusta because of the lore, and TV viewers want the closest possible facsimile.
To be fair to ESPN (and Kelce), the Masters Par 3 Contest is the lightest fare here, but even that comes with convention. Typically, the children or grandchildren of the tournament’s competitors and legends carry the pros’ bags — or they try to — and they’re adorable in the effort. No offense to Kelce, but his act just isn’t cute here.
Attempts to reach ESPN for comment on this story were not successful. Again, no cell phones.
There is a counterargument to be made — and it’s not unreasonable. Golf needs to find a new generation of fans as its old one, gets, well, really old. The game is late to adapt, but it’s tried.
There’s the LIV Tour (a Saudi-funded, team-based alternative to the PGA Tour), TGL (a sophisticated virtual golf league started by Tiger Woods and the reigning Masters champion Rory McIlroy), Grass League (a franchise-based par 3 startup), Top Golf (a hi-tech alternative to driving ranges that’s fun… once), footgolf (a dumb combination of soccer and golf that ruins golf courses more than geese) and disc or frisbee golf (which hit its peak as “frolf” in 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Summer of George”).
YouTube Golf has been a successful outlier — DeChambeau has 2.65 million subscribers — TikTok and Instagram too. But even the founder of Good Good (2.07 million YouTube subscribers) Matt Kendrick will tell you it will never replace the real thing. Or at least that’s what he told me last year.
As it turns out, the best golf is golf, and the best representation of golf is The Masters (1934-2025). The solution to golf’s viewership problem can possibly be solved with time: Let young people get old. That’s definitely going to happen — it is a traditional unlike any other.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Access Canada Summit will return for a second edition during the Toronto Film Festival in September.
And organizers of the Canadian industry conference have teamed up with the inaugural TIFF: The Market during Toronto’s 2026 edition to offer joint programming sessions and a dual pass option to allow global creators and decision makers to attend both events.
“At a time when the industry is rethinking how it connects and does business, collaborations like this feel both timely and necessary. Bringing TIFF: The Market and Access Canada Summit into closer alignment creates a more focused and effective environment for creators and decision-makers to engage and helps move the global conversation forward”, Maer Roshan, editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, said in a statement on Thursday.
The formal collaboration includes a more affordable Market + Access Canada Summit Combo Pass for the Access Canada Summit, to run Sept. 14 to 16, and the Sept. 10 to 16 TIFF: The Market and co-programmed sessions for both events.
“Access Canada Summit, powered by The Hollywood Reporter, and TIFF: The Market each play a unique and important role in the industry, and this initiative is about creating a more seamless pathway between them. At a time when the industry is demanding more value, more efficiency, and more access to decision- makers, this joint offering delivers exactly that,” Access Canada president Ferne Cohen added.
In September, the Toronto festival will stage its first official marketplace, where buyers and sellers will set up shop to movies, TV, gaming as well as XR and immersive content under one roof. Ahead of the inaugural run, TIFF has aligned with Access Canada Summit to attract more industry professionals.
“Building a market that supports creators and decision makers across film, series and innovation has always been our goal. Creating more opportunities for series professionals, both in Canada and globally, in partnership with Access Canada allows us to achieve our common objectives and put the needs of professionals first,” Charles Tremblay, head of TIFF: The Market, said in an another statement.
The inaugural Access Canada Summit last year, in partnership with THR, focused on Canada’s content industry as it drives onto a global entertainment stage and was backed by keynote speakers and panels and dealmaking between top creatives and decision makers.
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Confusion over competing United States and Iranian proposals to end the war is deepening uncertainty about the fragile two-week ceasefire between the longtime foes, with officials presenting sometimes differing accounts of what has been agreed.
At the centre of the dispute is an Iranian 10-point plan, which is the basis for the upcoming negotiations with the US in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, this weekend. President Donald Trump has called the plan “workable”, despite initially handing Iran a 15-point plan that Tehran dismissed as “maximalist”.
list of 4 itemsend of list
However, hours after the ceasefire, US officials, including Trump, offered mixed responses to Iran’s proposal and what Washington understood the key points of the document to be.
Vice President JD Vance dismissed the publicised version as little more than a “random yahoo in Iran submitting it to public access television”.
Adding to the confusion, the Persian version of the plan notably diverges from the English one on a key sticking point between Washington and Tehran – Iran’s right to enrich uranium.
The Trump administration presented Iran with what officials described as a 15-point framework aimed at ending the war, and potentially achieving a permanent end to hostilities between the longtime foes.
While the full details have not been publicly released, reports by US media outlets and others included the following elements:
Donald Trump on Wednesday said that “many of the 15 points” in the proposal had been agreed upon, signalling optimism about a broader deal.
“We are, and will be, talking tariff and sanctions relief with Iran,” the US president added.
However, Iran rejected the US framework, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei confirming that Tehran had received messages from the US via intermediaries. He dismissed Washington’s demands as “maximalist” and “illogical”.
Tehran advanced its own positions in a 10-point counterproposal, which included demands of compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war, a commitment to non-aggression by the US, Iran retaining its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment.
Trump on Wednesday said the US has received a 10-point proposal from Iran, which he called a “workable basis on which to negotiate”.
However, later in the day, confusion over what the official US position was started to become apparent.
Trump turned to his Truth Social platform to attack those he accused of spreading inaccurate accounts of supposed agreements.
“There is only one group of meaningful ‘POINTS’ that are acceptable to the United States, and we will be discussing them behind closed doors during these Negotiations,” Trump said, without providing details. “These are the POINTS that are the basis on which we agreed to a CEASEFIRE.”
The US president, in a separate post, said there will be “no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust’”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed certain reports about the Iranian proposal and said that Trump would reject any uranium enrichment by Tehran.
“The president’s red lines, namely the end of Iranian enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt told reporters. While Iran says it is not seeking nuclear weapons, it insists on enriching its own uranium as a national right.
Moreover, Leavitt said Iran’s initial 10-point proposal was “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump’s team, but Tehran later put forward a revised “more reasonable and entirely different” plan, one which could be aligned with Trump’s own 15-point proposal.
“The idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd,” she said.
Trump’s second-in-command, Vance, dismissed the publicised version as little more than a “random yahoo in Iran submitting it to public access television”.
“We don’t really concern ourselves with what they claim they have the right to do; we concern ourselves with what they actually do,” he added in remarks made to reporters in Budapest.
He said he had seen at least three different drafts of the proposals. “The first 10-point proposal was something that was submitted, and we think, frankly, was probably written by ChatGPT,” Vance said.
In short, yes. At least two different versions of that same plan appear to exist, one in English and the other in Persian.
In the Persian version, made public by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, it said the “US has, in principle, committed to” a series of demands, most notably the “acceptance of enrichment”, signalling that any deal must recognise Iran’s right to continue enriching uranium.
However, this phrase was allegedly omitted from the English-language version.
Iran has consistently framed uranium enrichment as a sovereign right, while the Trump administration and its ally Israel call the demand a non-starter and a red line.
For years, Tehran has maintained that its nuclear activities are strictly civilian and that it has no plans to build nuclear weapons.
In 2015, it reached an agreement with the US to curb its nuclear programme in return for relief from sanctions. In 2018, however, Trump pulled Washington out of that landmark accord and reimposed sanctions on Iran.
Just hours after the United States and Iran announced a ceasefire in the war that has dominated news headlines around the world and pushed oil prices to new heights, Israel bombarded Lebanon on Wednesday, killing hundreds, injuring thousands and prompting Iran to reimpose its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
The bone of contention: whether or not Israel’s relentless strikes on Lebanon were included in the ceasefire at all. Pakistan, which brokered the agreement, said they were. Israel said they weren’t.
list of 4 itemsend of list
Later on Wednesday, the US sided with Israel, with President Donald Trump calling the violence in Lebanon “a separate skirmish” even though Hezbollah had entered the war in defence of Iran.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under intense political pressure since the US and Iran signed the ceasefire, which had little or no active involvement from Israel.
None of Israel’s war aims, which Netanyahu had assured his country were the basis for what he framed as an existential battle with Iran, had been achieved, angering those who supported the war.
Furthermore, under the terms of the truce published yesterday, a 10-point peace plan put forward by Iran has been accepted as a starting point for negotiations due to begin this weekend in Islamabad.
Under early descriptions of the Iranian plan, Iran would retain its nuclear stock and could benefit financially from levies charged on shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and from tariffs and sanctions relief promised by Israel’s ally, US President Donald Trump, on his Truth Social account.
This is far from the 15-point list of demands the US previously put forward to Iran, which would have seen the strait completely reopened without conditions, and Iran giving up its enriched uranium stocks, ending its ballistic missiles programme and promising to stop arming proxy groups in the region, such as the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and a flurry of armed groups in Iraq.
Arguing that Lebanon is exempt from the ceasefire agreement, Israel launched the most extensive bombardment on its neighbour in recent months on Wednesday. In the space of about 10 minutes, the Israeli military carried out more than 100 strikes on what it claimed were Hezbollah targets, hitting Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, killing at least 254 people, 91 of them in the capital, Beirut, alone.
The attacks have been condemned by numerous nations and international organisations, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the United Nations and Pakistan, which brokered the ceasefire deal and stated explicitly that Lebanon was included.
Responding to the strikes, Iranian state media announced that its government was now considering walking away from the truce and has already announced that restrictions on the economically vital Strait of Hormuz will be reimposed.
For its part, Israel says it is not trying to kill the ceasefire by launching strikes on Lebanon. Charles Freilich, Israel’s former deputy national security adviser, told Al Jazeera that the motivation for the strikes arose solely from the “opportunity to hit numerous mid to high-level Hezbollah fighters, not spoil the ceasefire, which both the US and Israel maintain does not include Lebanon”.
Some analysts are sceptical, however.
“Israeli officials will no doubt claim that this was a super sophisticated operation against necessary security targets, perhaps embellishing those arguments with claims of deep intel and technological penetration and sophistication, and you will probably have the usual mainstream Western media outlets slavishly parroting the Israeli line,” former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera, before explaining that such operations typically combine two principal features.
“The first is, sadly, an Israeli devotion to death and destruction, largely for its own sake, to spread terror and upend state capacity in various places in the region, and to upend civilian life,” he said. “And, secondly, a very transparent attempt to prolong the broader war against Iran, to collapse any ceasefire prospects, and to act as provocateurs-in-chief.”
Politically, support within Israel for the war may have weakened, however. Many of those who initially supported the war on Iran have been unsparing in their criticism of a potential pause in the conflict negotiated by the other two parties at Israel’s apparent expense.
Posting on X, opposition leader Yair Lapid claimed that Prime Minister “Netanyahu has turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters pertaining to the core of our national security”.
Democrats leader Yair Golan was equally scathing. “Netanyahu lied,” he wrote on X. “He promised a ‘historic victory’ and security for generations, and in practice, we got one of the most severe strategic failures Israel has ever known.”
“Netanyahu is in real trouble, and he thinks he has to wreck the ceasefire to get out of it, just as he did previously in Gaza,” Member of the Knesset Aida Touma Sliman of the left-wing Hadash party, which has opposed the war from the start, told Al Jazeera. “The ceasefire has lost him a lot of support, even among those who backed the war. None of his war aims have been achieved and it looks like he is losing control to the Trump administration,” she said.
“Don’t forget, we’re heading towards elections,” she added, referring to the vote currently slated for October, “and Netanyahu’s dropping in the polls. He needs something he can claim is a victory.
“And that’s why he did what he did,” she said, of Wednesday’s barrage on busy Lebanese neighbourhoods that killed hundreds, including women, children and medical workers, according to emergency workers on the ground. “He conducted a massacre in Lebanon.”
AlphaTON secures about $43 million from Vertical Data to build sovereign AI and privacy computing infrastructure for $TON, Telegram and Animoca‑linked applications.
AlphaTON Capital has entered a strategic financing agreement worth approximately $43 million with Vertical Data to accelerate its AI and privacy computing infrastructure build‑out. The $TON‑focused financial firm said the collaboration centers on AI hardware deployment to speed up its “privacy computing” roadmap and sovereign AI infrastructure stack. According to AlphaTON, the goal is to support integrated development across AI, digital assets, and confidential computing on top of the $TON ecosystem.
The company added that its planned AI and privacy computing infrastructure will provide base‑layer computing power for applications built by partners such as Telegram and Animoca Brands, positioning the stack as shared infrastructure rather than a siloed product play. In its announcement, AlphaTON framed the project as a way to align high‑performance AI hardware with end‑to‑end encrypted and privacy‑preserving computation, arguing this is necessary to reconcile regulatory demands with scalable AI and Web3 services. Vertical Data’s role, as outlined in the deal, is to bring capital and hardware deployment expertise to the partnership as demand for AI compute continues to outstrip traditional data‑center capacity.
By explicitly branding the stack as “sovereign AI infrastructure,” AlphaTON is tapping into a growing narrative that AI models and data pipelines should run on infrastructure that is both jurisdictionally aligned and privacy‑preserving. This overlaps with the rise of confidential computing, which uses hardware‑based enclaves and cryptographic techniques to process sensitive data without exposing it in the clear. In the context of digital assets, such infrastructure could underpin use cases like private on‑chain recommendation engines, encrypted identity scoring, or AI agents that can transact while shielding user‑level data.
The participation of partners like Telegram and Animoca Brands signals that AlphaTON is targeting high‑volume consumer and gaming applications rather than purely institutional workloads. Telegram brings a massive messaging and social graph, while Animoca Brands sits at the intersection of gaming, NFTs, and metaverse‑style experiences. Their involvement suggests AlphaTON’s infrastructure is expected to support not only generic AI workloads but also on‑chain gaming, social, and digital asset applications that need both throughput and privacy guarantees.
For internal linking, you can connect this piece to three relevant Crypto.news articles, for example: a feature on confidential computing and crypto vouchers, a report on AI‑driven Web3 infrastructure raises, and an article on Telegram‑linked $TON ecosystem development (all linked on single keywords like “confidential,” “AI infrastructure,” and “$TON”). Additionally, for any tokens mentioned (for instance, Toncoin or others used in the final edit), link their names to the corresponding Crypto.news price pages from the market‑cap section, ensuring each token name in the body is a single‑word link to its price page.
Ethics reportedly remains a threat to the CLARITY Act’s progress, despite the stablecoin yield clash currently taking center stage. This development comes as Democrats probe the $TRUMP Coin conference holding later this month, with U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly set to attend.
Odd News // 3 weeks ago
Prosthetic leg, surfboard among Los Angeles Metro’s Lost & Found
March 13 (UPI) — The Los Angeles Metro revealed some of the most unusual items in its Lost & Found, including a surfboard, a prosthetic leg and a 55-inch TV.