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New York Times
20-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How the 49ers struck gold with Brock Purdy — after a big swing and miss
Excerpted from The Why is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry and Revolution. Copyright © 2024 by Michael Silver. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Editor's note: The San Francisco 49ers and quarterback Brock Purdy agreed on Friday to a five-year, $265 million contract extension. That makes the last pick from the 2022 NFL Draft — No. 262 — the owner of the richest contract in team history. The following is the backstory of how Purdy found his way to San Francisco and proved himself worthy of being the 49ers' franchise quarterback. Advertisement The conversation began with a question about accuracy, a sensitive subject for Kyle Shanahan in the summer of 2022. His newly anointed starting quarterback, Trey Lance, looked inconsistent during the first week and a half of training camp, missing easy throws and sending errant passes into the hands of 49ers defenders. It had been a trying offseason for the second-year quarterback, who tweaked his mechanics, shortened his throwing motion, and experienced arm fatigue that caused concerned coaches to hold him out of drills. Now, in summer practices open to media members and fans, Lance looked less like a franchise QB than a work in progress. That 'hidden horsepower' Shanahan had been intent on releasing remained concealed, if it existed at all. It was one thing to miss an open receiver on a rollout swing pass. Missing on a quarterback drafted third overall, especially when it had taken three first-round picks to acquire that selection? That could be ruinous for a coach, and for a franchise. The 49ers were all in on winning a championship in 2022, and seemingly all in on Lance. His predecessor, Jimmy Garoppolo, was still technically on the team. However, Garoppolo had already said goodbye in an emotional farewell press conference in early February. Given his $24.2 million salary and its impact on the team's salary cap, the presumption was he'd be traded or released before the start of the regular season. In the meantime, Jimmy G, still rehabbing from the offseason surgery to his throwing shoulder that had derailed earlier trade scenarios, was spending his late-July and early-August days throwing passes to Cam Bustos, who worked in the team's health and performance department. Garoppolo conducted his daily hour-long routine on a turf field behind a set of bleachers, west of the practice fields where the rest of the 49ers were getting ready for the season. It was a literal sideshow. At times, curious fans at the top of the bleachers turned their backs to the action and instead observed Garoppolo zipping balls to Bustos, shouting their encouragement. Teammates coming to and from practice walked right past their former starting quarterback, dapping him up as he got his arm ready for his next NFL home. It was Lance's show, and Shanahan didn't really have a Plan B. The 49ers had signed former Eagles backup Nate Sudfield to a fully guaranteed one-year, $2 million contract in March, but it was clearly Lance or bust. And so far at camp, there were plenty of moments that suggested 'bust.' That the second-year player might not fulfill his promise wasn't a popular opinion in those parts. The fan base had embraced Lance's potential with a protective fervor, even before he was drafted, and many reacted angrily to any suggestion of his struggles. When I'd reported over the offseason about the young quarterback's arm fatigue issues, the blowback on social media and elsewhere had been intense and sustained. Shanahan, it could be reasonably surmised, also was not a fan of such storylines. Yet, when I caught up to him as he walked to his office after a spirited training camp practice, he confronted the accuracy question without deflecting or equivocating. Yes, Shanahan conceded, Lance's accuracy was a concern. The coach attributed much of the problem to the fact that Lance was often asked to throw on the move in high school and college. The faster one travels, Shanahan explained, the trickier it is to make the ball go where you intend it to go. He didn't portray the issue as insurmountable, but he also didn't act like it wasn't a thing. What Shanahan said next opened a portal into his mind, revealing something foundational about how he viewed the game. All quarterbacks, he said, have weaknesses that must be navigated and mitigated. The key is to build a team around the quarterback capable of reducing his massive burden, and of compensating for his failings in key moments. The conversation veered into an assessment of how much is put on an NFL quarterback and how many obstacles appear — especially in the postseason, when games tighten up and every play can feel monumental. In those settings, Shanahan felt, asking the quarterback to 'do everything,' to be the primary driving force whose actions determine victory and defeat, is typically not a winning strategy. He referenced the previous January's 13-10 playoff victory over Matt LaFleur and the Packers at Lambeau Field, and how much of Green Bay's operation revolved around Aaron Rodgers. 'That's why they don't win,' he said. Similarly, Peyton Manning, a quarterback he believed had the greatest-ever command of the position, had suffered a slew of postseason disappointments during his career, albeit while capturing two championships. 'There are just too many variables you have to deal with that are difficult to predict,' Shanahan said, citing Bill Belichick's strategic blueprint for consecutive Patriots playoff victories over the Colts in 2003 and '04 — when he had defenders play tight, hyper-physical coverage on Indy receivers and dared the officials to penalize them repeatedly — as an example. 'It's too much on one guy. There can be (bad) weather, injuries, so many things. … The only quarterback who has ever been able to handle all of it, in my opinion, is Tom (Brady). For anyone else, you need to give him some help.' Advertisement The overarching point was this: Shanahan was accustomed to managing his quarterback's imperfections and crafting a plan to overcome them. He fully anticipated having to do so with Lance, but for critics to focus only on the second-year player was to ignore how Shanahan had navigated the previous four and a half seasons with Garoppolo, who sometimes struggled going through his progressions, seeing the field the way Shanahan wanted him to, and throwing deep, among other shortcomings. The 49ers had been to a Super Bowl and come close to reaching another because of Jimmy G and in spite of him. Shanahan and Lynch had constructed a talented, well-rounded team whose players valued attention to detail, selflessness, and relentless physicality and effort. Because of the two decision-makers' belief in the soundness of that approach, they'd pivoted to a model of trusting a young quarterback on a rookie contract to be good enough to allow the 49ers' comprehensive excellence to prevail. It wasn't a bad plan, assuming Lance could find some consistency. And if he couldn't? Well, the model was still sustainable. The coach and GM would be proven right, though in a way they never could never have anticipated during training camp. The first public clue that Shanahan was losing faith in Lance came in late August, when the 49ers made the shocking announcement that Garoppolo was coming back. It was a fulfillment of what The Athletic's Tim Kawakami had dubbed 'The Garoppolypse,' in reference to the universe's seeming unwillingness to keep this franchise and this quarterback apart. Shanahan and Lynch tried to spin it as a signing of convenience: lacking more enticing options, Garoppolo had agreed to a revised one-year contract that reduced his base salary to a fully guaranteed $6.5 million (with up to another $8.95 million in incentives) and included a provision that he couldn't be traded or given the franchise tag after the season. Spin aside, the 49ers' interest in approaching Garoppolo with an offer clearly represented a change of thinking, given that the team's former starter hadn't been asked to attend meetings or film-watching sessions during the preseason and had yet to even meet first-year quarterbacks coach Brian Griese. Jimmy G's return to the roster as a backup was sure to put more pressure on Lance, but Shanahan clearly wasn't averse to taking that risk. It was, quite plainly, a hedge. It aligned with something a former 49ers assistant coach had predicted to me months earlier: 'I think Kyle is just trying to figure out some way to bring Jimmy back, somehow, because he knows it could go really bad with Trey.' The day after the Garoppolo news broke, in a move that attracted far less attention, the 49ers included Sudfeld in their final roster cuts to reach the 53-man limit. Garoppolo's return may have made such a transaction seem inevitable, but there was a twist: Shanahan and Lynch kept three quarterbacks on the roster, which had not been their intent at the start of training camp. The third was a rookie they'd planned to release and then bring back onto the practice squad, allowing the Niners to keep the young quarterback in the fold while paying him very little, and to use the valuable roster spot on a player at another position. However, the rookie — whom the 49ers had selected with the 262nd and final pick of the draft — had impressed Shanahan from the moment he arrived in Santa Clara. More to the point, he'd unleashed a few bold and savvy passes during the preseason that Shanahan feared would be noticed by other teams' coaches and scouts. Shanahan felt that cutting the kid and sneaking him onto the practice squad was too risky; another team could claim him and sign him to its active roster. So, Shanahan and Lynch decided to keep Brock Purdy on the team. Purdy's ascent may have appeared unlikely to outsiders, but in the locker room, most people got it. He'd made a good impression in OTAs and minicamps, and, once training camp began, had made the most of his limited opportunities. Because of that, his opportunities increased. He was ultraprepared, went through his progressions faithfully, saw the field well, and exuded calm in a manner that belied his status. Best of all, he had what is known in 49ers internal parlance as 'some s— in his neck.' Nearly from the outset, the 22-year-old acted like he belonged, and then some. It helped that Purdy was used to being underestimated. Growing up in Queen Creek, Ariz., he was a sports-loving kid who dreamed of playing major college football despite the improbability of that actually happening. Earning a scholarship was important to him, and not just symbolically. In 2008, the Purdys, like so many American families, had their lives upended by the housing crash caused by the subprime mortgage crisis. His father, Shawn, a former minor league pitcher, and mother, Carrie, struggled to make things work while prioritizing the athletic pursuits of Brock, younger brother Chubba, and older sister Whittney. 'At the time, I didn't really understand what was going on,' recalled Purdy, who was 8. 'But I knew we lost everything, and we were moving from house to house, and my dad had to open up his business in another name. And all that stuff, I didn't understand any of it. When I got through high school and (started to understand), I was like, 'Maaaan.' You look back and (think), 'They put everything into us, still, even with all that.' No matter what their situation was, they still gave all that they had to us, in terms of the time spent, my dad coaching us — everything. They showed me what sacrifice was. They showed me what real love was.' On the recruiting trail, love was harder to come by. Purdy, who stood 6-foot-1, didn't have an overwhelmingly strong arm and wasn't exceptionally athletic. He got no attention from big-time programs until late in his senior season, when he threw 57 touchdowns and earned Arizona Gatorade Player of the Year honors. He finally attracted interest from some Power 5 conference schools: first Iowa State, and then mighty Alabama, though coach Nick Saban wanted him as a 'preferred walk-on.' Shortly after Saban pivoted and offered a full scholarship, Texas A&M extended a similar overture. As things heated up, Arizona State, and then Arizona, came in belatedly. Advertisement Sometime after the initial signing day in December of his senior year, Purdy got a text from a Sun Devils staffer, something that once would have caused him to hyperventilate with excitement. He wasn't sold on its sincerity; it felt like a face-saving measure. 'It was respectful,' Purdy remembered, 'but it wasn't like, 'We want you to be the guy,' or anything like that. It was more like, now I had offers from Alabama and A&M and 'the whole state's telling us to sign you.'' Purdy politely passed. In February, he signed with Iowa State because Cyclones coach Matt Campbell had made him feel wanted in a way that others hadn't. 'There were a handful of teams at the end that offered me. But Coach Campbell called me and said, 'Man, I want you. We're not trying to recruit any other guys. If you come here, great. If not, we're set with who we got.' That, to me, was like, 'Man, this guy really believes in me.' Whereas all these other schools, if they didn't get their guy, they were gonna go get another guy. Campbell didn't do that. And then, from day one, once I got there and started playing, that dude gave me the keys to the program and trusted me and believed in me.' The belief was validated the following October, when Campbell turned to Purdy and the true freshman led Iowa State to high-profile upsets of Oklahoma State and West Virginia. By the time his four-year career was done, he held 32 school passing records. He believed he was ready, again, for the next level of competition. And yet, once again, it seemed that very few people believed him capable of meeting that standard, especially after he ran a relatively slow 40-yard dash (4.84 seconds) that didn't properly showcase his pocket elusiveness. Before the 2022 draft, Purdy was realistic. He knew he had no shot of going in the first three rounds, so he set his sights on Day 3. His mom wanted to host a big party at the house, but Brock, nervous and overwhelmed, insisted that the gathering be kept small unless and until he was actually drafted. Carrie Purdy persisted in her optimism, preparing enough food to feed a small village. As the final four rounds played out, it appeared as though there'd be a whole lot of leftovers. The morning of the draft's third and final day, Purdy got a call from 49ers headquarters that raised his hopes. Griese, who'd succeeded John Elway as Mike Shanahan's starting quarterback in Denver, and assistant QBs coach Klay Kubiak — whose father, Gary, had given Kyle his first opportunity as an offensive coordinator in Houston — told Purdy the team might select him at some point during the day. The 49ers had become intrigued after area scout Steve Slowik — brother of Bobby, the team's passing-game coordinator — alerted them to Purdy's abilities and to Campbell's glowing praise; as the coach put it, 'This guy changed our program.' Griese had initiated some Zoom sessions between him, Kubiak, and Purdy to discuss scheme, the quarterback's processing style, and his backstory. All of that was cool, but hardly a guarantee that the 49ers would select him. So, Purdy watched anxiously and waited. And waited. Finally, sometime during the sixth round, he retreated to his childhood bedroom and slept, exhausted from the stress. 'That last day was just so tiring, so draining,' he recalled. 'Throughout the day, I was following the Niners, and anytime they didn't pick me, I would be, like, drained in a sense. So, I remember my dad and I literally took a nap at some point in the sixth round. I was so tired from all of it.' Shortly after waking up, he got another call from 49ers headquarters. 'They said, 'Hey, we have one more pick in the seventh round and we're gonna try to take you — it's between you and a safety.' I said, 'Alright, sweet.' I hung up and Googled what pick they had, and it was the last pick. I was like, 'You've gotta be kidding me.'' Advertisement The wait seemed endless, especially given all the compensatory picks that lengthened the seventh round. Purdy hoped another team might swoop in and snap him up before the Niners were on the clock. As he watched that hope evaporate, he and his agent fielded calls from various teams angling to sign him as an undrafted free agent. Purdy jotted down notes from those conversations, assessing his options and anticipating the mad scramble for such players that occurs upon the draft's completion. At that point — at least logically — going undrafted was a preferable outcome. That way, Purdy could choose the team that best suited him and theoretically optimize his chances of sticking around in the league. However, it wasn't the outcome Purdy craved. Finally, as the round neared its conclusion, the 49ers called again: they were taking Purdy at 262. A wave of joy engulfed him; bedlam ensued. 'I was the last pick,' Purdy said, 'and we celebrated like I was the first pick.' Now Carrie had the green light to host the party. 'We had almost everybody from my life in football and family friends come over,' Brock said. 'Probably over 100 people within the next hour. We were all excited.' In 1976, former USC and NFL wide receiver Paul Salata coined the term 'Mr. Irrelevant,' bestowing that moniker upon the final pick of the draft and feting him with a series of events during 'Irrelevant Week' in Newport Beach, California, including the awarding of the 'Lowsman Trophy' — a play on the Heisman Trophy, only this time with the bronzed player fumbling a football. It became an annual tradition. It was kind of funny at first, then bemusing. By 2022, it was played out. Realistically, it hadn't been amusing for at least a couple of decades. As thrilled as Purdy was to hear his name called on draft night, he wasn't particularly captivated by the spoofing of that pick and the opportunity to play along. On a conference call with reporters covering the draft at Levi's Stadium, Purdy chafed at the Mr. Irrelevant queries, saying, 'For me, I'm looking at it as an opportunity. I got my foot in the door. A team believed in me, and now I get my opportunity to go and play football. … From the outside looking in, yeah, I guess it's a funny thing.' Fighting for a roster spot was a serious matter, and Purdy intended to win one. In Shanahan's eyes, he was a younger version of Nick Mullens, the scrappy backup quarterback who'd once worn headphones around the facility, listening to the coach call plays so that it would all seem familiar on game day. When Purdy showed up for rookie minicamp, he was a bit awestruck, overwhelmed by the 49ers' aura, 'the history of it with the Super Bowls and the quarterbacks — and obviously, I'd grown up watching Kyle Shanahan coach.' He had to quickly digest one of football's most intricate playbooks and become versed in Shanahan's scheme. He shone in OTAs and got his head coach's attention early in training camp. About a week into camp, Shanahan, while walking off the practice field, approached CEO Jed York and told him, 'I think our third-string quarterback is our best quarterback.' York gulped. As he'd later explain, 'One thing that owners don't love to hear when they've invested money and/or draft picks into people is that the last pick in the draft is the guy that we think is the best. That's generally not great news.' When pressed, Shanahan told York he had no plans to change the depth chart, 'but I think Brock will end up being our quarterback.' By the second week of camp, Purdy's fearlessness and penchant for playmaking had started to become a thing. The day before the 49ers hosted the Packers in their preseason opener, two of their best players, linebacker Fred Warner and offensive tackle Trent Williams, were walking off the practice field together. 'Man,' Warner said to Williams, 'I can't wait to watch Purdy play tomorrow.' They didn't realize it, but Purdy was walking behind them, within earshot, thrilled that such accomplished teammates even knew his name. Recalled Warner, 'Even though (Purdy was playing with) the third team, he had command of the third team. I just kind of admired him from afar — just little things he did out there.' Advertisement Purdy made some eye-catching plays during the preseason, fitting balls into tight windows between linebackers and defensive backs, but he also drove Shanahan, Griese, and Bobby Slowik crazy at times by trying to do too much. Purdy got a taste of Shanahan's temper, too, including once when he deviated from the coach's script during a training camp drill. 'I remember there was this one play, it was a play action. I rolled out, and we had (tight end) Ross Dwelley leaking backside and I ran for, like, 10 yards. On the jog back (to the huddle), I'm like, 'Alright, that was a good play.' (Shanahan was) just cussing at me through the mic: 'Are you kidding me? This is not how I taught it!' He was heated.' On cutdown day, however, Purdy felt the warm embrace signified by a roster spot. To some people, possibly including Sudfeld, that was a surprise. To one very accomplished offensive strategist, it made all the sense in the world. Mike Shanahan sat on a couch in Room 753 of the J.W. Marriott in downtown Chicago, about 10 miles east of the Oak Park neighborhood where he was born. Like everyone in the 49ers' traveling party, he was anxious to see how Trey Lance would do the following afternoon in his first regular-season game as the team's starting quarterback, especially with driving rain in the forecast. That was one of many topics of discussion the proud father was eager to discuss. Something made the elder Shanahan a little more serene than he should have been — the presence of a quarterback whose virtues he'd been openly extolling for months. 'When you have a guy like that on your team, a guy with the traits he has,' Shanahan said, 'you don't let him out of your building.' Mentally, at least, I did a double-take. We were talking about Brock Purdy, and this two-time Super Bowl-winning coach was doing so in a tone normally reserved for elite and accomplished passers from his past. It made sense, though, given our previous conversations in May and June, during which Shanahan had made numerous unsolicited mentions of the 262nd pick's many positive attributes. Like Slowik, Griese, and Kubiak, Shanahan had watched Purdy's college tape before the draft and become intrigued. Once the retired coach got his hands on the 49ers' OTA film, that intrigue morphed into intense adulation. Whether Mike Shanahan was serving as a shadow GM for his son (that was probably overstated) or simply staying involved in the game during his golden years was a matter of some debate; he told me the main reason he liked watching practices and meetings was to keep abreast of his son's cutting-edge schematics, which had evolved a great deal since the Washington days. Whatever the case, Mike, from afar, saw something early in Purdy that even Kyle hadn't yet spotted. What stood out most was Purdy's comfort and recognition of what he himself was seeing on the field. 'He's played,' Shanahan said, referring to Purdy's 48 starts at Iowa State. In that sense, Purdy was almost the anti-Lance. Could it be that the Niners had taken a massive swing and miss — and that they'd get away with it because of the equivalent of an infield hit on an errant pitch that nicked the back of the bat?
Sydney Morning Herald
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The Hollywood legend who spent her career passing as white
CINEMA Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star Mayhukh Sen W.W. Norton & Company, $29.99 Who was the most beautiful actress ever in film? Merle Oberon of course. This is not an opinion, but a statement of fact. I learned this when I was comparatively young, and it has stayed with me for decades, including the one in which I managed to meet her at Ghalal, her Acapulco home, confirming in 3D the evidence I'd had from her long screen career. However, there were other critical matters in her life, apart from her pristine beauty, most importantly the suppression of the details of her birth in India, the life-long strain of which Mayhuk Sen's biography bears out in a thoroughly researched and persuasively recorded exploration of a complex life. For many years, it was widely believed that Merle was born in Tasmania, whereas the true biological history was very different. She was the daughter of a very young Indian mother, Constance Selby, and Arthur Thompson, her British rapist-father, who was almost totally absent from her life. She was seen as a 'charity case' at school in India, and her poverty-stricken Anglo-Indian background was subject to awful racism and class distinction, as would, of course, have been the case in the UK or the US when she first ventured there. In re-inventing herself as being of Anglo-French origin and working on her skin colour, she opted for a Tasmanian birthplace, presumably because of its vast distance from where she wanted to make a career. Sen offers a moving account of the poverty and pain in which she lived when she first moved to London. As Queenie Thompson, she longed for a movie career, and to London she was accompanied by her grandmother Charlotte, as her housekeeper – her actual mother now excluded from the scene – and after trying some possibilities Queenie had arrived at her professional name as we know it. The early 1930s was not a very inspiring era of British filmmaking, but Merle garnered a few small roles in what were known as 'quota quickies', 'supporting' films, famous for their lack of distinction. A modest turning-point for her was the role of Anne Boleyn in Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, memorably concerned that her hair will 'hold together when my head falls'. It is a small role, but Merle imbued it with a touch of courage and poignancy. After her success opposite Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she was invited to Hollywood by studio boss Joseph Schenk, and made her way to stardom in the romantic drama The Dark Angel. In the rest of the decade, despite American racist attitudes, she would come and go between the US and the UK, but undoubtedly, it was her role as Cathy in William Wyler's classic version of Wuthering Heights that made her a world star, even if co-star Laurence Olivier was displeased that she had outdone Vivien Leigh for the role.
The Age
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The Hollywood legend who spent her career passing as white
CINEMA Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star Mayhukh Sen W.W. Norton & Company, $29.99 Who was the most beautiful actress ever in film? Merle Oberon of course. This is not an opinion, but a statement of fact. I learned this when I was comparatively young, and it has stayed with me for decades, including the one in which I managed to meet her at Ghalal, her Acapulco home, confirming in 3D the evidence I'd had from her long screen career. However, there were other critical matters in her life, apart from her pristine beauty, most importantly the suppression of the details of her birth in India, the life-long strain of which Mayhuk Sen's biography bears out in a thoroughly researched and persuasively recorded exploration of a complex life. For many years, it was widely believed that Merle was born in Tasmania, whereas the true biological history was very different. She was the daughter of a very young Indian mother, Constance Selby, and Arthur Thompson, her British rapist-father, who was almost totally absent from her life. She was seen as a 'charity case' at school in India, and her poverty-stricken Anglo-Indian background was subject to awful racism and class distinction, as would, of course, have been the case in the UK or the US when she first ventured there. In re-inventing herself as being of Anglo-French origin and working on her skin colour, she opted for a Tasmanian birthplace, presumably because of its vast distance from where she wanted to make a career. Sen offers a moving account of the poverty and pain in which she lived when she first moved to London. As Queenie Thompson, she longed for a movie career, and to London she was accompanied by her grandmother Charlotte, as her housekeeper – her actual mother now excluded from the scene – and after trying some possibilities Queenie had arrived at her professional name as we know it. The early 1930s was not a very inspiring era of British filmmaking, but Merle garnered a few small roles in what were known as 'quota quickies', 'supporting' films, famous for their lack of distinction. A modest turning-point for her was the role of Anne Boleyn in Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, memorably concerned that her hair will 'hold together when my head falls'. It is a small role, but Merle imbued it with a touch of courage and poignancy. After her success opposite Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she was invited to Hollywood by studio boss Joseph Schenk, and made her way to stardom in the romantic drama The Dark Angel. In the rest of the decade, despite American racist attitudes, she would come and go between the US and the UK, but undoubtedly, it was her role as Cathy in William Wyler's classic version of Wuthering Heights that made her a world star, even if co-star Laurence Olivier was displeased that she had outdone Vivien Leigh for the role.
Express Tribune
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Diana in Drag? New Biography details how the Princess of Wales' snuck into a gay bar with Freddie Mercury
A new biography of Princess Diana is making headlines for revisiting a decades-old story that blurs the line between royal myth and cultural legend. In Dianaworld: An Obsession by Edward White, the late Princess of Wales is said to have disguised herself in drag to visit the Royal Vauxhall Tavern—a well-known London gay bar—accompanied by Queen frontman Freddie Mercury and television personality Kenny Everett. Photo: W. W. Norton & Company The account, originally shared by actress Cleo Rocos, describes Diana's ensemble as a camouflage jacket, leather cap, and aviator sunglasses. According to Rocos, the group managed to enter unnoticed, with Diana's disguise convincing enough that she passed as an eccentric male model. They stayed briefly for a drink before returning to Kensington Palace, and Diana reportedly returned Everett's clothing the next day. Though never officially confirmed, the story has resurfaced over the years as a symbol of Diana's unique relationship with the LGBTQ+ community and her desire to experience life outside the confines of royal protocol. The book places this anecdote within a broader narrative about Diana's search for identity, privacy, and connection—especially following her separation from then-Prince Charles. Author Edward White revisits Diana's early years, her evolving public persona, and her lesser-known escapades with empathy and detail. The biography portrays these moments not as isolated episodes, . Dianaworld: An Obsession is out 29 April.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Inside the Russian Occupation of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (opinion)
Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone, by Serhii Plokhy, W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages, $29.99 The Chernobyl exclusion zone is the closest we have to a real-life postapocalyptic wasteland. After the infamous 1986 meltdown of a Soviet nuclear reactor, around 1,000 square miles in northern Ukraine were evacuated due to radioactive contamination. Video games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Call of Duty imagine the zone as a lawless wasteland, with bandits and spies fighting in Soviet-era ghost towns while dodging radiation patches. In reality, Chernobyl is less abandoned than outsiders might imagine. The ill-fated nuclear reactor and the containment shell around it require ongoing maintenance. The area as a whole is monitored constantly for levels of contamination. A legion of Ukrainian workers regularly commutes into the exclusion zone from the nearby city of Slavutych, built after the meltdown for evacuated Chernobyl staff. And in February 2022, there were soldiers. Chernobyl, sandwiched between Kyiv and the Belarusian border, was directly in the path of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. For a little more than a month, Russian troops occupied the exclusion zone, where they found themselves prisoners of their own occupation. Although the Russians had all the firepower, they had to rely on the Ukrainian staff to protect them from radiological danger, which gave the Ukrainians leverage in the bizarre power struggle that went on there. Chernobyl Roulette, by the Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, is a good first draft of this history. Along with the wild chronology of events, Plokhy provides brief yet vivid sketches of the people involved, from the Russian commanders and Ukrainian caretakers to the infantrymen, janitors, tour guides, and squatters in the exclusion zone. Plokhy can be heavy-handed in pressing his belief that the international community abandoned Ukraine, but he is more fair-minded about the dilemmas between collaboration and resistance that Ukrainians faced. Much of the story is told through the eyes of Valentyn Heiko, the Ukrainian foreman on duty when the invasion began. Heiko neither welcomed his new Russian overlords nor resisted them. Instead he treated the foreign soldiers as unexpected visitors to his plant. Heiko explained to Col. Andrei Frolenkov and Gen. Sergei Burakov that their troops would have to wear guest badges and follow safety instructions, just like any other delegation of outsiders. The officers had no choice but to comply, since they needed Heiko's expertise to stay safe. The staff often played on the soldiers' fear and ignorance regarding radiation. In one instance, they loudly joked in front of a group of soldiers that everyone in the plant was "screwed" because they had run out of their nonexistent "anti-radiation pills." Another time, when plant worker Serhii Dediukhin overheard a soldier fantasizing about shooting the staff, he asked out loud if the soldiers would prefer to go home in lead coffins. Even their dead bodies, the threat implied, would be a radioactive hazard. This isn't to say that the Russian army was powerless or that the Ukrainian staff had total control. Several times in March 2022, the power lines from Kyiv to Chernobyl were cut, which shut down the cooling system on the plant's nuclear waste containment unit and threatened to cause a new meltdown. Russia offered to supply Chernobyl with electricity from Belarus, a close Russian ally, which would bring the plant under tighter Russian control. Heiko agreed, on the condition that Belarus supplied electricity to Slavutych as well. For the first 26 days of the war, the siege of Slavutych also prevented the next shift of workers from coming to Chernobyl, forcing a single night-shift crew to work for nearly a month straight. When those workers started to break down mentally, management asked the Russian army to facilitate a shift change. Russian commanders were happy to oblige—both because they feared what would happen if the staff became unhinged and because it was an opportunity to flex their own muscles. Ukrainian workers then had to travel between Slavutych and Chernobyl through Belarus under armed Russian guard. The army didn't strictly have to follow the experts' warnings. They could, and did, push their luck, to the horror of the Ukrainian staff. Russian officers had their troops dig trenches in the highly irradiated Red Forest, named for the mutated, strangely colored trees growing there. Senior engineer Valerii Semenov remembered following the troops around, "warning that you may run into something that will leave you an invalid," to no avail. The soldiers even set up an open-air field kitchen in the Red Forest, cooking and eating in the cloud of contaminated dust they had kicked up. At the time, Ukrainian propaganda claimed that hundreds of Russian troops were rushed to the hospital with radiation poisoning and that one died. (Independent experts say the level of radioactivity was not high enough to do that kind of short-term damage.) Plokhy does not address those rumors, but he reports that Heiko chewed out Russian Gen. Oleg Yakushin for exposing his men to permanent health risks. "You will probably reproach yourself to the end of your life," Heiko told Yakushin. "Or not. I don't know." Semenov, the engineer, divided the Russian army into two categories: two-thirds reasonable professionals who were there to do a job, one-third "obsessed" nationalists who really believed they were liberating Ukrainians from fascism. In a bizarre echo of American propaganda leading up to the Iraq War, Russian propaganda claimed Ukraine had been developing weapons of mass destruction from leftover nuclear materials in Chernobyl. Russian forces began rummaging around for evidence of this Ukrainian weapons program, and Semenov recalled having to stop them from running an excavator through a mound of radioactive waste. Some of the troops also took the opportunity to fill their own pockets. "Those who had come with an exalted mission to free us," Semenov said, "they freed us only of things," including office supplies and tablet computers. The soldiers and workers were not alone in the exclusion zone. A few hundred squatters live in the less irradiated areas; most of them are older residents who refused to abandon their hometown. Before the war, there was also a subculture of youth who snuck in to explore the exclusion zone. They were called "stalkers," a term borrowed from Roadside Picnic, a 1972 Russian novel about scavengers in a wasteland left by alien visitors. (Andrei Tarkovsky adapted the book as the film Stalker in 1979, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series reimagined Roadside Picnic in real-life Chernobyl.) More recently, the Ukrainian government started developing legal, guided tourism to capitalize on the popularity of the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl. In real life, as the invasion began, a group of four stalkers showed up at the gates of the Chernobyl plant, unsure what else to do. The Ukrainian security guards, who thought the young men with camera equipment and survival gear could be Russian spies, locked them in a basement. When the Russian army took the plant, the stalkers became the prisoners of the prisoners. They eventually proved their goodwill by running the plant cafeteria and keeping everyone well fed. The Russian forces, for their part, were shocked to find anybody living in the exclusion zone. From Moscow's perspective, it was supposed to be empty territory. "Where did you all come from?" hotel owner Oleksandr Skyrda remembered the soldiers asking before forcing him to the ground at gunpoint. Unlike the plant staff, the squatters had little power over the soldiers' safety, freeing the Russian army to act with brutality. "They broke into everything," the elderly squatter Liudmyla Besedina told reporters. "They robbed. They carried everything out." But it was unarmed resistance that drove the Russian army out of Slavutych. After Russian soldiers overwhelmed the paltry Ukrainian militia defending the city, thousands of people—including a priest waving a giant wooden crucifix—poured into the streets. Taken aback by the reaction, and probably afraid of what would happen if nuclear plant workers or their family members were killed, the Russian commander agreed to pull back from the city. Hard power arrived on the heels of the nonviolent revolt. As the Ukrainian army advanced north from Kyiv, the Russian forces at Chernobyl began to pack their bags. Around noon on March 31, 2022, Yakushin's men ordered the power plant management to sign a document praising the "reliable protection" of Chernobyl and stating that there were no complaints with Russian conduct. During the next few hours, the troops grabbed as much as they could before driving off. Shift leader Volodymyr Falshovnyk saw them struggling to fit a stolen room heater into a car. It would be inaccurate to say guns did not matter during the struggle for Chernobyl. After all, it was part of a war, and the Russian army came and went with Russia's broader battlefield fortunes. But guns were not the only type of power that mattered. For a few tense weeks, the Geiger counter was as mighty as the sword. The post Inside the Russian Occupation of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone appeared first on
