The Minnesota Timberwolves will evidently remain in the control of owner Glen Taylor, after he announced Thursday that a deal where Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez would have acquired the controlling stake in the team has expired.

Taylor agreed to sell the Timberwolves for $1.5 billion in 2021 to Lore and Rodriguez, who then began the purchase by acquiring 20% of the franchise. Lore became Walmart’s e-commerce chief in 2016; Rodriguez is one of baseball’s all-time home run leaders and has become an investor in a variety of businesses since, plus is a trustee at the University of Miami.

The closing of the deal, with Lore and Rodriguez finally making the last payment to acquire the controlling stake, was required to happen by Wednesday — and Taylor said Thursday that “under certain circumstances” a limited extension could have been offered. That did not happen.

“I will continue to work with Marc, Alex and the rest of the ownership group to ensure our teams have the necessary resources to compete at the highest levels on and off the court,” Taylor said. “The Timberwolves and Lynx are no longer for sale.”

It was, by design, a drawn-out acquisition process in part so Taylor could mentor Lore and Rodriguez on what’s involved in ownership of NBA and WNBA franchises; the Minnesota Lynx were also to be part of the deal. It was also an unusual process, with Lore and Rodriguez making payments in installments — the most recent known payment was a $290 million one, for roughly another 20%, in March 2023.

Taylor, a lifelong Minnesotan, purchased the team in 1994 for $88 million, doing so at the time in part to keep the franchise from relocating to New Orleans or elsewhere.

Rodriguez said he and Lore — who unsuccessfully tried to purchase the New York Mets before striking the deal with Taylor — also were committed to Minnesota. In an interview with The Associated Press in 2022, Rodriguez said the NBA had welcomed him into the ownership world with open arms.

“It’s all about the fans in Minnesota. I think they deserve a winner,” Rodriguez said in that interview.

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Gophers men’s basketball coach Ben Johnson wanted the improvement in his 2023-24 team to be a stepping stone for more success next year.

That projected upward trajectory suffered a big setback Thursday when sophomore center Pharrel Payne entered the NCAA transfer portal, a source confirmed to the Pioneer Press. It was first reported by 247sports.

Payne, of Cottage Grove, was a building block for the future after he averaged 10.0 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.4 blocks in 31 games last season. The 6-foot-9 post player is the second player to leave the U this week, following  backup forward Josh Ola-Joseph on Wednesday. The Gophers now have two vacant scholarship spots for next year.

Johnson knew players had personal decisions to make once the season ended in the second round of the National Invitation Tournament on Sunday, but he wanted to emphasize what the U could be next season in a possible run to the NCAA Tournament.

He was “hoping” the bulk of the roster would remain together for next year. “I think this is a really good group,” Johnson said March 5. “I think it’s a fun group. I think it’s a group, again, still with an offseason can get better and be more consistent and has a chance to really be improved next year.”

The uncertain futures of forward Dawson Garcia and guard Cam Christie was the primary uncertainty going into the offseason. The storyline centered on: Could those two leading scorers jet to the NBA?

Payne was not at the top of this list. He made progress from his freshman year, becoming more comfortable and assertive on the court. He moved into the starting lineup midseason and saw his statistical averages jump over last season.

The Gophers were welcoming North Dakota State transfer big man Andrew Morgan for a visit this week. The idea was he would back-up Payne next season. Now the U will have to go into the portal for multiple post players for the 2024-25 season.

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I am not a hero.

Unfortunately, this revelation wasn’t born from introspection but forced upon me through an unexpected reality check. Believe me, there was a point in time where I was convinced that I could play the role of the knight in shining armor, rescuing the damsel in distress or scaling a tree to save a stranded cat.

But when I was actually presented with a moment, the outcome was very different.

It’s the summer of 2020, and like most of us at that time I am overcome with a mix of emotions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. I’m cycling through moments of pain, anger and a desire to be part of something that creates a better society by the hour.

On May 31, I catch word about a protest taking place and I go. It was the largest gathering of people I had ever been a part of. The atmosphere was charged with a shared commitment to justice. However, my emotions took an unexpected turn when our route led us from University Avenue to the ramp of I-35 North.

Standing on an expressway for the first time was an eerie experience. The space is much larger than it appears from a car, and even the ground felt much different than standard pavement.

I was uneasy.

We took a knee on I-35 N, and that’s when the moment appeared. I’ll never forget the sound of a semi-truck barreling toward us. I ran for safety, heading to the median to cross over to the I-35 S side. When I got to the median, I was confronted with a 10-foot gap between the I-35 N and S. Stranded along the median, I watched in fear as the truck continued toward us.

I remember looking back and seeing people still in the way and I feared for them. But as the truck came closer, I witnessed people transition from individuals to heroes. Immediately they sprang into action. Some people jumped on top of the truck, others threw their bikes, while some grabbed people and moved them out of the path of the semi.

What I saw was a group of strangers take immediate, collective action to address what felt like an imminent threat. In that moment those individual strangers became collective heroes.

That united response has served as an inspiration to me to this day.

And now, as the executive director of Black Men Teach, I have an opportunity to be part of a group of collective heroes facing a different threat.

On April 2, 2024, Black Men Teach will be a part of launching a Collective Impact Coalition.

The coalition’s goal is to increase the proportion of Black male elementary school teachers to 20% of the teaching staff in partnering elementary schools (schools with 40% or more Black students) by the 2034-2035 school year. There are roughly 100 elementary schools that meet our partnership criteria with over 2,200 teaching staff.

To get to there, the Collective Impact Coalition is gearing up to facilitate the recruitment, preparation, placement, and retention of over 400 Black male educators. The impact of the coalition’s efforts extends beyond the quantitative increase in Black male teachers. We aim to increase academic outcomes, foster a more affirming learning atmosphere for K-5 students, and enable school environments where Black men not only survive but thrive.

Achieving this goal will be historic. Currently, across K-12, Black men constitute less than 0.05% of teachers in the state. Even more surprising, there are fewer than 50 Black men teaching in elementary schools in Minnesota today. Achieving this goal is also not optional.  The enormous gaps in the learning of our children threaten the well-being of us all. Most children in Minnesota can grow and graduate from our schools without ever having a Black male teacher. Yet if a Black student has a Black teacher the benefits are robust; they are more likely to graduate high school and to attend college, be held to higher expectations, attend school more frequently, are less likely to be perceived as excessively disruptive, less likely to be suspended, and, particularly in the case of low-income Black boys, are less likely to be referred to special education.

Addressing the scarcity of Black male teachers isn’t a challenge that BMT can tackle alone. It’s a community-level issue that has persisted without resolution, necessitating an unprecedented, united community effort to surmount. Roughly 20 organizations have walked alongside BMT every step of the process; examining data, meeting with Black male teachers, proposing solutions, and co-creating this ambitious but necessary goal and the means to achieve it.

As we prepare to embark on this historic journey, the parallels between the coalition and the protesters on I-35 become more evident to me. In both cases, the power of collective action is at the center. And it is my belief that the coalition’s collective effort will demonstrate that transformative change is not only possible but inevitable when individuals converge with a shared purpose.

Markus Flynn, a former classroom teacher, is executive director of Black Men Teach, a Minnesota-based non-profit headquartered in St. Paul. Members of the coalition include leadership from Education Minnesota, PELSB, Metro State University, the University of Minnesota, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis College, Wallin Education Partners, Great Minnesota Schools, Minneapolis Public Schools, Saint Paul Public Schools, Excell Academy for Higher Learning, Serve Minnesota, Teach for America Twin Cities and more.

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“Has San Francisco lost its liberal soul?” So asked a New York Times headline earlier this month, after voters there approved ballot measures aimed at tackling crime and drug addiction. As Republicans campaign against urban dysfunction and Democrats stare down the possibility of a second Trump presidency, there has never been a better time to reconsider what it means to have a liberal soul.

To begin: What do the ballot measures in San Francisco actually do?

One measure gives more flexibility to the police department to fight crime, allowing it to install street cameras and use drones. It also aims to reduce the paperwork burden on officers, in part by making use of body camera footage, and it eliminates a ban on chasing violent-crime suspects fleeing in vehicles.

The other requires drug screening and treatment for single adults who are suspected of drug use and who receive cash assistance and other local benefits — to avoid subsidizing addiction and contributing to fatal overdoses.

Stunning? Not to people who live there

The Los Angeles Times called their passage “a stunning rightward shift” for the city. But it wasn’t stunning to Mayor London Breed, who championed the measures, or to voters, who are fed up with crime and heartbroken by drug addiction. Overdose deaths have soared to an average of more than two per day.

The referendum was of a piece with San Franciscans’ 2022 decisions to recall both a district attorney who scaled back prosecutions and school board members who seemed more concerned with removing the names of historical figures from schools than educating students.

So, the result wasn’t all that stunning. But was it a soul-losing moment and a “rightward shift?” It was, if the essence of liberalism is the old Cole Porter line, “anything goes,” where tolerance for transgressions and hostility to authority are its defining qualities. That has been the dominant perception of liberalism for decades, with devastating consequences for the Democratic Party.

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably summarized this problem more than 30 years ago, when he bemoaned the trend of excusing street disorder and rejecting social norms as “defining deviancy down.” Liberalism became such a damaged brand that many Democrats began calling themselves progressives, without wrestling with the fact that progress is often at odds with permissiveness.

In the Progressive, New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society eras, the soul of liberalism — what breathed life into it as a political force — lay not in permissiveness toward individual lawbreaking, but in the advancement of collective freedom and equality through government action. Liberalism meant empowering public officials, not handcuffing them. And it meant holding high expectations of government, not low expectations of neighbors.

San Francisco voters, wanting their government to be more active and effective, are embracing what was long the essence of liberalism. What happened to those roots?

Tyranny of rules, fear of lawsuits

Much of the answer lies in “Everyday Freedom,” a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.

But to do so, as Howard explains, rather than adopting guiding principles that would allow for governmental flexibility and public accountability, lawmakers and regulators began writing millions of pages of prescriptive rules for every imaginable facet of life. That red tape, along with a corresponding expansion in litigation, greatly curtailed government’s freedom to address problems. Collective action was subjugated to an ever-expanding array of individual legal rights, and the idea of freedom, Howard writes, was reduced to “a solitary activity — ‘the right to be left alone.’”

It is not just technology that has turned alienation, loneliness, and isolation into social epidemics. Liberalism, instead of delivering the Great Society, has helped trap us at Walden Pond.

“Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible,” Howard writes, owing to fear of lawsuits and a tyranny of rules. That loss of authority — which is also a loss of freedom — has paralyzed government, demoralized the public, eroded public trust in institutions and fueled the anger and division promoted by Donald Trump and his most extreme supporters.

Rebelling against the loss of freedom

The good news: some Democratic leaders are beginning to rebel against this loss of freedom, and not just Mayor Breed. A state senator from San Francisco has proposed rolling back environmental regulations that have long blocked the creation of new housing, part of a new movement of YIMBYs (“Yes In My Backyard”). The city is starved for housing, and its density and mass transit mean that new development would yield major environmental benefits. The inability to build it is among the countless examples of regulations stymieing their own goals.

The problem of lost freedom is so endemic that we often fail to notice it, which is why Howard’s book is invaluable. At only 84 pages, it can be read in one sitting. I did, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever felt frustrated by government– and anyone who believes, as it seems most San Franciscans do, that the true soul of liberalism is worth saving.

Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.”

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