Utah MMA fighter Josh Tyler took on TV’s “Ultimate Ninja Challenge” — and it’s not what you might think. It definitely does not involve any teenagers, any mutants or any turtles.

“Our modern-day culture has painted ninjitsu as in this weird light of turtles and pizza — kind of this really hokey silliness, right?” Tyler said. “And the reality is it was a very serious occupation. These guys were very much like our modern-day special forces.”

The “Ultimate Ninja Challenge,” which premieres Sunday night on Discovery, is also very different from the similarly titled “American Ninja Warrior,” which features competitors attempting to complete a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses. This is sort of like “Survivor,” only nobody gets voted off and the challenges are amped up beyond belief. The nine contestants are dropped in the wilderness of British Columbia for 24 days, where they have to survive ridiculously harsh conditions with no food, no water and minimal equipment.

“It was incredibly physical, being out and surviving for that length of time,” Tyler said. “It absolutely took a toll on the body — being cold, wet, exhausted for that duration. But then it also becomes very taxing on the mind. You start to doubt yourself and second-guess yourself.”

The eight episodes each feature a challenge based on a ninja principle. In the premiere, it isn’t easy for the contestants — divided into three teams of three — just to survive. Calling it grueling would be an understatement.

Tyler said his toughest challenge came in a later episode.

“Picture British Columbia in October,” he said. “It’s raining. It’s cold. It’s right on the verge of snowing. You’re soaked to the bone. You’re freezing. You’re exhausted. You’re starving.”

He had to chop a “massive log” with an ax “that may as well have been a sledgehammer. It was the dullest ax that they could’ve have come up.” Tyler swung the ax more than 2,000 times “and still didn’t make it through the log.”

Then he had to build a shelter, start a fire and stay awake through the night — because if he fell asleep, he'd get booted from the show.

“That was absolutely the hardest part of the whole thing,” Tyler said. “I really had to dig deep and push through.”

And yet he says some of his friends mocked him for signing on to the series.

“There were kind of snickers when I talked about it. A few people even made some jokes,” he said. “But I think when the show comes out, I hope that they'll look at the ninja in a little more serious and somber tone.”

It’s hard to believe anyone would snicker at Josh Tyler. When you talk to him, sure, he sounds like a great guy — friendly, personable and funny. But when you see the ripped MMA fighter in the cage, he’s sort of scary.

The Virginia native grew up a wrestler, competing in high school and college; he’s been competing as an MMA fighter for the past decade. He moved to Utah seven years ago to train at the Elite Performance gym in Sandy and spends as much time as possible in the wilderness. Which came in handy on “Ultimate Ninja Challenge.”

“It’s kind of the same thing as fight skills. If you don’t use it, you lose it,” he said.

He said he took on the “Ultimate Ninja Challenge” as a way to figure out his future.

“I’ve had success as a fighter” — he’s 16-5 — “but eventually we all come to a point where we can no longer continue to fight. It’s not a long-term occupation,” said Tyler, the married father of two. Should he continue to fight or devote himself full-time to his business interests, including Savage Gentlemen, which is based on the belief that there are two sides to men, and which sells a variety of products online?

“I like to think of myself as pretty mild-tempered, but there is a savage side to my gentleman,” he said. “It takes a lot to rile me up and get me going, but once that happens, I can flip the switch and be as savage as necessary.”

He can't give away much about how the filming went back in October, but Tyler did say, “The self-discovery that took place there — I just don't know that I would've been able to get that anyplace else.”

Provo • On successive plays Friday night at BYU’s preseason training camp, freshman quarterback Zach Wilson lofted passes to tight ends Matt Bushman and Moroni Laulu-Pututau, the latter reaching high to snare the football over the outstretched arms of an overmatched defender.

The Cougars could have used that kind of one-two punch at one of their marquee positions last year, but the 6-foot-5 Laulu-Pututau — known as MLP to teammates, coaches and media members who have trouble pronouncing his full name — missed the entire season with a Lisfranc foot injury.

Then-offensive coordinator Ty Detmer didn’t like to use excuses for his abysmal offense in 2017, but in one moment of weakness the former Heisman Trophy winner wondered aloud what might have been if Laulu-Pututau hadn’t injured his foot three days before the opener against Portland State.

“Having them both on the field was a big part of what we were trying to do,” Detmer said.

New offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes has inherited that luxury, and it is already evident through a couple days of camp that he plans to get all he can out of the freshman All-American Bushman and the uber-talented Laulu-Pututau, who played receiver his first two seasons before moving to tight end. He caught 27 passes for 277 yards and two touchdowns in 2016.

“Yeah, I was going to be a big part of the offense last year,” Laulu-Pututau said Friday. “You can always speculate, but I think I would have been a big part of it, based on the stuff we worked on in fall camp. When any player goes down, it hurts the offense, especially a pro style offense that runs through the tight ends.”

Last summer was glorious for the former Mountain Crest High product. He got married and ate pretty much anything he wanted in an attempt to gain weight to play tight end, going from 210 pounds to 245.

That all changed on Aug. 23, three days before the opener, when he felt a pop in his left foot while running a routine non-contact passing route. At first he thought the pain he felt iwas a cramp in his foot, or a defect in his cleats.

“There was sharp pain, but I thought it was temporary,” he said. “Turns out, it was way worse than anyone imagined.”

It was the curse of the Lisfranc fracture, a mid-foot injury that really isn’t a fracture. One or more of the metatarsal bones in the foot is displaced from the tarsus, so it is more like a ligament tear than a break.

“I just know it hurts, and it is serious,” said the construction management major who knows all about the dangers of putting too much load on a structure not equipped to handle it.

And it severely hurt the offense, which couldn’t even move the ball across the 50-yard-line in the second game, against LSU.

“We missed him a lot,” said head coach Kalani Sitake. “But he is doing great in this camp. Having Moroni and Matt Bushman out there together has been great. … Moroni is a guy that has gotten tons of reps for us and done some great things and the injury was unfortunate. We just hope he stays healthy and we can use him for the first game.”

Laulu-Pututau said he couldn’t have made the return without the support of his wife Kiralyn and the help of BYU’s trainers and medical staff.

“You think about a lot of things when you get injured,” he said. “But I have always known that I wanted to do this, and pursue a [professional] football career, so I kept at it. My wife has been a big help. It helps a lot to have someone to go home to who understands what it has been like. She keeps my mind on track and keeps me motivated.”

Laulu-Pututau said he has been fully cleared by the medical staff and has done everything so far in camp, but is still being “cautious and smart” after what happened last year.

“I can’t tell you how great it feels just to be out here,” he said. “I’m back to being myself and doing what I have been doing most of my life. It just feels awesome.”

Watching from the sidelines has given Laulu-Pututau plenty of time to think about that awful day.

“It was a mixture of everything — putting on the additional weight, maybe wearing the wrong cleats. Who knows?” he said. “You could point to a lot of things, but this year we have maintained my weight — about 240 — and I am going to stay there and not gain more weight. I have had a full year to stay at the same weight, so I feel a lot better about that.”

For MLP, the more pressing matter is learning Grimes’ new offense.

“He will be the third offensive coordinator I will play for,” Laulu-Pututau said. “But I feel like we’re ahead of schedule. We’re going to make amends for last year and rebuild the program to what it should be.”

Samson Nacua's endorsement of his favorite high school football player included his tweeted analysis that the Orem star was on his way to “bigger and better things than Utah schools.”

The evaluation proved accurate this summer, when receiver Puka Nacua committed to USC. The only flaw of Samson Nacua’s commentary is he’s a scholarship athlete for the University of Utah — one of those schools he judged as smaller and worse than USC, applying that logic.

Oh, brother.

I want the best for my brothers! I’d love to see and play with one of them. Being able to line up with him would be a dream come true. But I know he can do bigger and better things than Utah schools! Just wait on him🔥😭🙏🏾

— Lørd Įmpälêr (@lionel_nacua) January 7, 2018

The Ute receiver would have some explaining to do. “Everyone was thinking that I didn’t want to be here, that I thought our team was horrible,” Nacua said last week, as Utah began preseason practice. “But I could never speak about my team like that.”

Nacua said he just wanted to express support for his brother, a four-star recruit who's ranked No. 2 in the Utah class of 2019 by 247Sports, behind East defensive lineman Siaki Ika. “I was trying to build him up,” he said. “Even though he's a big star right now, I'm still trying to get him bigger than I am, always.”

Nacua hopes Utah performs so well this season in the fight with USC for the Pac-12 South title that his brother, who caught 87 passes for 1,692 yards and 24 touchdowns as a junior, will change his mind and join him in Salt Lake City. Samson Nacua made 29 receptions for 294 yards last season as a redshirt freshman.

The Utes feature the Barton brothers of Salt Lake City — Jackson is an offensive tackle, Cody is a linebacker — as seniors in the starting lineup. They’ve added the Kuithe twins, freshmen from Texas (Blake is a defensive end, Brant is a tight end). The Kuithes, who were among three sets of twins on their Cinco Ranch High School team, had planned to play together at Rice before the Owls made a coaching change. They committed to Utah on the same day in January.

But the Utes can’t expect to sign everybody and their brothers. Johnny Capra, a fourth-year junior who’s competing for a starting spot, next season will be one of three family members from northern California playing as Pac-12 offensive linemen. Utah offered scholarships to Jacob Capra, who’s contending for playing time at Oregon, and Joey Capra, a high school senior who recently committed to the Ducks, switching from Arizona State.

“Selfishly, everyone wants their brothers to come play with them, but at the end of the day, I want my brothers to be happy,” Johnny Capra said. “I was excited to see them being offered the same opportunities that I was, and they had the unique opportunity of having someone to talk to in me, in that I had already gone through the process and I was able to counsel them and give them advice.”

The Utes will host Oregon in November, but an on-field reunion of all three Capra brothers in 2019 could come only in the Pac-12 championship game, due to the conference’s scheduling rotation. Javelin Guidry, Utah’s nickel back, will meet his brother Elisha in October when the Utes play at UCLA.

The Nacua brothers are projected to take the field in Los Angeles next season, when the Utes visit USC. Samson Nacua and his brother Kai, a star defensive back, were on opposing sides of the Utah-BYU game in 2016, when Samson was redshirting after joining the Utes from Timpview High School in Provo.

Bridgewater, N.J. • President Donald Trump on Sunday acknowledged that the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Kremlin-connected lawyer and his son was to collect information about his political opponent, casting new light on a moment central to the special counsel’s Russia probe.

Trump, amid a series of searing tweets sent from his New Jersey golf club, tore into two of his favorite targets, the news media and Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into possible links between the president’s campaign and Russia. Trump unleashed particularly fury at reports that he was anxious about the Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr. and other senior campaign officials.

“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump wrote. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

But 13 months ago, Trump gave a far different explanation for the meeting. A July 2017 statement dictated by the president read: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago.”

But since then, the story about the meeting has changed several times, eventually forced by the discovery of emails between the president’s eldest son and an intermediary from the Russian government offering damaging information about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Betraying no surprise or misgivings about the offer from a hostile foreign power, Trump Jr. replied: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Sunday’s tweet was Trump’s clearest statement yet on the purpose of the meeting, which has become a focal point of Mueller’s investigation even as the president and his lawyers try to downplay its significance and pummel the Mueller probe with attacks. On Sunday, Trump again suggested without evidence that Mueller was biased against him, declaring, “This is the most one sided Witch Hunt in the history of our country.”

And as Trump and his allies have tried to discredit the probe, a new talking point has emerged: that even if that meeting was held to collect damaging information, none was provided and “collusion” — Trump’s go-to description of what Mueller is investigating — never occurred.

“The question is what law, statute or rule or regulation has been violated, and nobody has pointed to one,” said Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, on ABC’s “This Week.”

But legal experts have pointed out several possible criminal charges, including conspiracy against the United States and aiding and abetting a conspiracy. And despite Trump’s public Twitter denial, the president has expressed worry that his son may face legal exposure even as he believes he did nothing wrong, according to three people close to the White House familiar with the president’s thinking but not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Sekulow acknowledged that the public explanation for the meeting has changed but insisted that the White House has been very clear with the special counsel’s office. He said he was not aware of Trump Jr. facing any legal exposure.

“I don’t represent Don Jr.,” Sekulow said, “but I will tell you I have no knowledge at all of Don Jr. being told that he’s a target of any investigation, and I have no knowledge of him being interviewed by the special counsel.”

Trump's days of private anger spilled out into public with the Twitter outburst, which comes at a perilous time for the president.

A decision about whether he sits for an interview with Mueller may also occur in the coming weeks, according to another one of his attorneys, Rudy Giuliani. Trump has seethed against what he feels are trumped-up charges against his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, whose trial began last week and provided a visible reminder of Mueller's work.

And he raged against the media's obsession with his links to Russia and the status of Michael Cohen, his former fixer, who is under federal investigation in New York. Cohen has indicated that he would tell prosecutors that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting ahead of time.

Despite a show of force from his national security team this week as a warning against future Russian election meddling, Trump again deemed the matter a “hoax” this week. And at a trio of rallies, he escalated his already vitriolic rhetoric toward the media, savaging the press for unflattering coverage and, he feels, bias.

“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!”

The fusillade of tweets came from Bedminster, Trump's golf course, where he is ensconced in a property that bears his name at every turn and is less checked in by staffers. It was at the New Jersey golf club where a brooding Trump has unleashed other inflammatory attacks and where, in spring 2017, he made the final decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, the move that triggered the Russia probe.

Trump was joined for his Saturday rally in Ohio by former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who departed the administration earlier this year. Her unannounced presence raised some eyebrows as Hicks has been interviewed by Mueller and was part of the team of staffers that helped draft the original statement on the Trump Tower meeting.

Multiple White House officials have been interviewed while still working at the White House and have remained in contact with the president.

Berlin • A vintage propeller plane plunged near-vertically into a Swiss mountain, killing all 20 people on board as they returned from a two-day trip to southern Switzerland, investigators said Sunday.

The Junkers Ju-52 plane, operated by small Swiss company Ju-Air, went down Saturday on the Piz Segnas mountain above the Alpine resort of Flims in the country's southeast, at an altitude of about 2,540 meters (8,330 feet) above sea level.

There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash, and officials said they expect a complex investigation given that the 79-year-old plane was not equipped with black boxes.

Police said Sunday they had determined that the 17 passengers and three crew members on board the plane all died.

The victims were 11 men and nine women between the ages of 42 and 84— seven couples from various parts of Switzerland, a couple from neighboring Austria and their son, and the three crew members. Their names were not released.

The fully booked plane was flying the passengers back to its base at Duebendorf, near Zurich, from a two-day trip to Switzerland's Italian-speaking southern Ticino region. It crashed shortly before 5 p.m. Saturday, less than 50 minutes after taking off from Locarno's Magadino airfield.

Photos released by Graubuenden canton (state) police showed the crumpled wreckage of the plane lying on the mountain, with only the upside-down tail more or less intact.

Police said they were not aware of any distress call from the aircraft before it crashed.

“We can assume that the aircraft hit the ground near-vertically and at relatively high speed,” Daniel Knecht of the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board said at a news conference in Flims.

He and senior police official Andreas Tobler said the vintage plane lacked “black boxes,” the crash-resistant cockpit voice and data recorders that more modern aircraft have.

Knecht said officials expect the investigation of the cause to be “relatively complex, because we have to compare various indications, information and evidence and evaluate them.”

There also are typically few radar recordings in mountainous areas such as the one where the crash site is located, he added.

Officials can essentially rule out a collision with another aircraft or an obstacle such as a wire, Knecht said. There also was no indication of any “external influence,” he said, indicating that authorities don’t suspect foul play.

The plane did not catch on fire before or after it hit the mountain, and investigators have not found any signs the aircraft lost parts or broke up in the air before the crash, Knecht said.

The area around the crash site, which is popular with hikers and skiers and includes a glacier, was closed to the public. Knecht said authorities would probably need “a few days” to complete recovery work.

Officials appeared dubious about suggestions that unusually hot weather in Switzerland, like other parts of Europe, might have been a main cause of the crash. Knecht said that while heat can affect an aircraft’s performance, experienced pilots could deal with that.

Knecht also dismissed the idea that the plane's age was necessarily a problem.

“Older planes, if they are correctly maintained, can be operated safely,” he said.

Nearly 5,000 Ju-52 planes, a product of Germany’s Junkers, were manufactured between 1932 and 1952.

Ju-Air’s Ju-52 planes are former Swiss military aircraft, built in 1939, that were retired by the air force in 1981.

Ju-Air started operating flights with the old-timers in 1983, and the plane that crashed — with the registration HB-HOT — had been in service with the company since 1985.

Chief executive and co-founder Kurt Waldmeier said the planes “are flown exclusively by very experienced professional pilots, and strictly checked and maintained by our own technicians.”

The plane that crashed had logged 10,187 hours of flying time, he said, adding that it underwent maintenance after every 35 hours of flight — most recently at the end of July. He said it had its full annual service during the winter, and “we know of no technical problems with this aircraft.”

The two pilots, who were 62 and 63 years old, both had extensive experience with the Ju-52 and had long worked as airline and Swiss air force pilots, Waldmeier said.

The aircraft have three engines, one on the nose and one on each wing. Waldmeier said the pilots fly by sight along pre-planned routes.

“We cannot yet explain what led to the tragic accident on Piz Segnas,” he said.

Ju-Air offers “adventure flights” for people wanting to experience Switzerland’s landscape from vintage planes.

A brochure on the company’s website listed the cost of the 2-day Locarno trip as 1,130 francs ($1,136), including meals and a night in a hotel.

The company, which operates two other Ju-52s, suspended flights until further notice after the crash.

Mataram, Indonesia • A powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian tourist island of Lombok on Sunday, killing at least 39 people and shaking neighboring Bali, one week after another quake on Lombok killed more than a dozen.

The latest quake, which triggered a brief tsunami warning, damaged buildings as far away as Denpasar on Bali, including a department store and the airport terminal, where ceiling panels were shaken loose, authorities said.

Video showed screaming people running in panic from houses in a Bali neighborhood and vehicles rocking. On Lombok, soldiers and other rescuers carried injured people on stretchers and carpets to an evacuation center.

Muhammad Rum, head of the disaster management agency in West Nusa Tenggara province, which includes Lombok, told Indonesian TV the death toll had risen to 39. Earlier, officials had said at least three people had died.

The quake, recorded at magnitude 7.0 by the U.S. Geological Survey, struck early Sunday evening at a depth of 10.5 kilometers (6 miles) in the northern part of Lombok.

“I was watching TV when I felt a big shake,” said Harian, a Lombok woman who uses one name. “The lamp was shaking and people were shouting ‘Get out.’ I ran out into the dark because the power cut off.”

A tsunami warning was lifted after waves just 15 centimeters (6 inches) high were recorded in three villages, said the head of Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, Dwikorita Karnawati.

National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the quake was felt strongly across Lombok and Bali and had damaged houses on both islands.

Iwan Asmara, a Lombok disaster official, said frightened people poured out of their homes to move to higher ground, particularly in North Lombok and Mataram, the capital of West Nusa Tenggara province.

The Bali and Lombok airports continued operating Sunday night, according to the director general of civil aviation. There had been a half-hour evacuation at the Lombok airport following the quake because the electricity went off. TV showed crying women consoling each other outside Lombok’s airport.

The island was already reeling from a magnitude 6.4 quake on July 29, which killed 16 people.

Like Bali, Lombok is known for pristine beaches and mountains. Hotels and other buildings in both locations are not allowed to exceed the height of coconut trees.

Indonesia is prone to earthquakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. In December 2004, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

New York • The executive producer of the CBS news show “60 Minutes” is delaying his return from vacation until an investigation into sexual misconduct claims at the network wraps up.

Meanwhile, CBS Entertainment President Kelly Kahl told reporters on Sunday that CBS isn’t saying it’s perfect and that there’s room for improvement in any large company.

The executives are dealing with fallout from a scandal after allegations against the executive producer, Jeff Fager, and CBS CEO Les Moonves appeared in a New Yorker article last month.

CBS hired two outside law firms to investigate claims of sexual misconduct from several women spanning three decades at the company. While most of the article focused on Moonves, the article also contained allegations of inappropriate behavior by Fager.

Fager has denied any wrongdoing.

CBS is keeping Moonves in place during the investigation. CBS has not said whether the investigation involves Fager, but on Sunday it said he will not return from his scheduled vacation on Monday as planned.

“Having heard the investigation will be wrapping up soon, Jeff has decided to stay on vacation,” CBS News said in a statement.

The company declined to comment on when the investigation might end.

Against that backdrop, Kahl appeared Sunday at the Television Critics Association’s summer meeting in Beverly Hills, California. He was there to promote the network’s fall season lineup, including its much-anticipated reboot of “Murphy Brown.” Instead, he fielded a barrage of questions about Moonves and the effectiveness of CBS policies involving misbehavior.

“I’ve had many female colleagues come to me this week who’ve been saddened about what they’re read about our company. They said it does not represent their experience at CBS,” Kahl said. “I’m not saying we’re perfect. No large company is, and there’s always room for improvement.”

Calling Moonves an “excellent boss and mentor,” Kahl said it’s been difficult at CBS since the allegations emerged, adding that everyone at the network and its producers are working hard to air the “best shows we can.”

When reporters questioned the effectiveness of CBS’ policies given the Moonves and other allegations, Kahl defended them as sound.

The New Yorker article, published July 28, said six women who had professional dealings with Moonves say he sexually harassed them between the 1980s and the late 2000s. Four of the women described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, it says, while two said Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers.

Moonves has acknowledged he may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances years ago but says he never misused his position to hinder anyone’s career.

The article also described a culture of misconduct that extended from Moonves to other parts of the corporation, including CBS News. It said men in that division who were accused of sexual misconduct were promoted, even as the company paid settlements to women with complaints.

In November, CBS fired veteran news host Charlie Rose over allegations he had groped women, walked naked in front of them and made lewd phone calls. Rose has apologized for his behavior but questioned the accuracy of some of the claims.

Diane English, executive producer of the original “Murphy Brown” sitcom and its upcoming revival, said during a critics’ association panel on Sunday that all those involved with the show “support the investigation fully.”

“None of us have had any negative experience in that regard at CBS,” English said. “I have never experienced any kind of sexual misconduct personally, or misogyny, and as far as I know no one on my crew has.”

The sitcom developed an episode about the #MeToo movement months ago, an indication of how seriously she and others with “Murphy Brown” take allegations of sexual misconduct, she said.

Keith Johnson's favorite task as manager of the Salt Lake Bees was informing players they were being promoted to the Los Angeles Angels. And now it has happened to him.

The Bees have lost their manager with a month remaining in the Pacific Coast League season, the Triple-A team announced Sunday. Johnson, 47, is joining the Angels' coaching staff in his specialty, working with infielders.

Eric Chavez, a 17-year major leaguer (including 13 seasons with Oakland) who has worked as a special assistant to Angels general manager Billy Eppler, will replace Johnson with the Bees. Chavez has never been a coach or manager.

The move comes amid a report from The Athletic that longtime Angels Manager Mike Scioscia would step down after the season. Scioscia told reporters Sunday the news was “poppycock,” saying that “nothing's changed since October” regarding his job status or personal plans.

Yet the new job descriptions for Johnson and Chavez inevitably led to speculation that one of them is being groomed as Scioscia's successor.

Johnson has managed the Bees for most of seven years, in two stints. He spent the 2015 season as roving instructor in the Angels' minor league system.

Coaching third base was one of Johnson's usual duties with the Bees. He occasionally managed from the dugout and had Ray Olmedo coach third, as happened this weekend.

The Bees took a 60-52 record into Sunday’s game at Omaha, trailing El Paso by 2½ games in their division of the PCL. Salt Lake will open a seven-game homestand Thursday vs. Tacoma, with El Paso coming to town for three games beginning Aug. 13. The PCL’s regular season runs through Labor Day, Sept. 3.

Washington • Politics is regularly described in terms of “left” vs. “right.” But other binaries can be more relevant. “Forward” vs. “backward” often define a choice facing an electorate better than the standard ideological categories. And the most powerful face-off of all may be “reform” vs. “corruption.”

Much commentary on the 2018 midterm campaign has focused on a drift or a lurch left in the Democratic Party, the measurement of the portside tilt varying from analyst to analyst. In fact, more moderate progressives have done very well in the primaries so far, but Democrats are certainly less enamored of centrism than they were in the 1990s.

What's missed in this sort of analysis is that many, maybe most, of us don't think in simple left-right terms, and countless issues are not cleanly identified this way. The same is true of elections. When the returns are tallied in November, the results may be better explained by the reform/corruption dynamic than any other.

New York magazine's Jonathan Chait was one of the first journalists to suggest how important corruption could be in this year's campaign. Writing in April, Chait argued that it "should take very little work" for Democratic candidates "to stitch all the administration's misdeeds together into a tale of unchecked greed."

The advantages of the corruption issue are (1) "corrupt" really is the right word to describe the Trump administration; (2) a concern over corruption transcends philosophical dispositions; and (3) the failure to "drain the swamp" is one of President Trump's most obvious broken promises. Instead, Trump has turned the swamp into an immense toxic-waste dump. The stench emanates from Cabinet officials driven from office by egregious behavior and from Trump's own violations of long-standing norms limiting business dealings by presidents and their families.

But the corruption issue goes beyond meat-and-potatoes sleaze. Our democracy itself is in danger from the overpowering influence of money on our politics, unchecked foreign intervention in our elections and an increasing willingness of Republicans to bias the system in their favor through gerrymandering and restrictions on access to the ballot.

And Trumpian corruption has shown that we counted too much on the decency of public officials. Alas, we now know that basic expectations — from the release of tax returns by presidential candidates to the avoidance of blatant conflicts of interest — need to be codified. Scandals are like that: They teach us where existing laws fall short.

A program to renew self-rule is coming to a congressional campaign near you. In late June, Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., introduced a resolution outlining a broad agenda that has been co-sponsored by 163 House Democrats. It's a promissory note to the electorate outlining areas where the party is working on legislation it pledges to enact should it win a majority.

They would start by restoring the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013; providing for nationwide automatic voter registration; ending purges that illegitimately disenfranchise many citizens; and outlawing gerrymandering by requiring states to establish cross-party commissions to draw district lines.

A high priority would involve creating a campaign-finance regimen aimed at encouraging congressional candidates to rely on small contributions while also restoring the public-finance system for presidential campaigns. Sarbanes and Rep. David Price, D-N.C. — two of the leading foes of the tyranny of big money in politics — have joined forces to harmonize proposals each has offered over the years.

Responding directly to recent abuses, the package would codify ethics expectations of public officials — including presidents. To fight foreign meddling, it calls for "real-time transparency of political advertisements on all advertising platforms," an idea championed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

Sarbanes said in an interview that the goal is not simply to have a campaign theme that appeals to conservatives, independents and progressives alike, but also to commit his party to specific actions. "This is not a message you wear," he said. "This is a message you own."

Even if Democrats won the House, enacting their program into law would likely involve a struggle beyond the 2020 elections. But the transformative eras of the past — the Progressive, New Deal, civil rights and post-Watergate periods — were all the product of a long gestation and continuous organizing.

They were also sparked by a disgust with the status quo. "There are moments in history," said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21 and veteran clean-government advocate, "when scandals create the possibility of fundamental reform." This would be a happily ironic coda to the Trump presidency.

E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is a government professor at Georgetown University, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio and MSNBC. He is most recently a co-author of “One Nation After Trump.”E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Watkins Glen, N.Y. • Like father, like son.

Mired in a confounding losing streak since the start of his NASCAR Cup career in 2016, Chase Elliott finally broke into the win column Sunday, holding off road course ace Martin Truex Jr. at Watkins Glen.

The son of Hall of Famer Bill Elliott, who also won his first Cup race on a road course (Riverside in 1983 in his 124th start), Chase celebrated a triumph he will cherish forever. Out of fuel after the finish, he was pushed to victory lane by the banged-up No. 48 Chevy of seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, a teammate and one of his staunchest supporters, as his father raced to join the celebration after spotting.

Toss in the raucous cheers of the sellout crowd and it doesn’t get much better than that.

“It’s something I’ll never forget,” said Elliott, who has finished second eight times in Cup. “I was going to do a burnout, but I ran out of gas. Certainly glad that we were on the front end today.”

Elliott’s victory came in his 99th Cup start and was the 250th win for Hendrick Motorsports, breaking a 37-race losing streak for one of NASCAR’s signature teams. It also assured Elliott a spot in the playoffs as he became only the fifth driver to win a race outside of the “Big 3” of Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick and Truex, who have combined to win 16 of 22 races.

Truex ran second to Elliott for most of the final stage and began to steadily close as both drivers tried to save enough gas to reach the end of the 90-lap race. It was a two-car breakaway as the rest of the field was more than 11 seconds back.

Truex closed to the back bumper of Elliott’s No. 9 Chevy as his car bobbled slightly out of the first turn on the final lap around the 2.45-mile natural terrain layout. But Truex’s No. 78 Toyota skidded, Elliott regrouped and pulled away and Truex sputtered home, out of fuel.

“I just tried all I could to chase him down, and I got there with plenty of time,” Truex said. “It’s just every time I’d start putting together some good corners and get close enough to him to even think about making a move, I’d get sideways behind him. He did a good job of putting his car exactly where it needed to be and not making a mistake.”

Truex was bidding to become the first Cup driver to win three straight road races since Tony Stewart accomplished the feat just over a decade ago (2004-05). Kyle Busch finished third, 20 seconds behind, followed by Daniel Suarez and Erik Jones, a triumvirate of Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas. Pole-sitter Denny Hamlin finished 13th.

The race promised to turn into a fuel mileage race as the laps wound down, and nobody has been better with the strategy than Truex and crew chief Cole Pearn. All three of Truex’s road course wins were won with strategy, including last year at The Glen and this year at Sonoma in California’s wine country.

“You feel satisfied,” Elliott said. “It’s a huge deal. It has not been an easy year. We were getting closer, closer, closer and finally got it done.”

Elliott won the race’s second stage and brought the crowd to its feet with a pass of Busch. Elliott pulled out to a half-second lead while Truex was fighting to get back to the front after a restart mired him in 12th.

Midway through the segment, the Big 3 were running in the top 10, but Elliott dominated and beat Busch by 1.3 seconds.

Busch’s day was ruined when Matt DiBenedetto brought out a caution just past the midpoint of the race. The fuel probe malfunctioned on the ensuing pit stop and the crew only got a few gallons into the No. 18 Toyota. That forced him to pit again, dropping him out of contention after dominating the opening segment.

“Every year we come here, we have a fast car and fail to execute, whether that’s just called bad luck or whatever,” Busch said. “Last year we had a lug nut get stuck in the caliper, this year we had fueling problems. It never ceases to amaze me.”

Solitude • For more than a decade, Dewey Yeargin has come to Utah from Greenwood, S.C., and attended the Taste of the Wasatch, an annual event of wine tasting, beer drinking and food sampling from dozens of elite chefs.

He liked his first experiences so much, the event is now central to his annual trips to Utah. He and his wife, Despina, started bringing their friends and, on Sunday, they all sat in the shade of a tent, while hundreds of attendees ate and drank in the sun at Solitude Mountain Resort.

“It’s for a good cause,” Despina Yeargin said. Dewey Yeargin noted he was told 80 percent of the proceeds go to area charities fighting hunger.

That thought helped the Yeargins stomach the “irony,” they said, of eating a lot of food: their $110-per-plate entry fee was helping to feed the hungry.

The Yeargins hadn’t heard the recent news that 3 Squares, the nonprofit that organizes the event, hadn’t given the beneficiary of last year’s event, Utahns Against Hunger, a promised $50,000 from the proceeds. The leader of the Green Urban Lunch Box, another Salt Lake City nonprofit, said his group was also promised money it never received from the event three years ago. UAH said it was also shorted $10,000 in 2016.

“If they keep doing it under a pretense," Dewey Yeargin said, “that might put a bad taste in my mouth.”

The money helped cover expenses for 3 Squares, including the salary of its executive director, Karen Zabriskie, who declined to talk with The Salt Lake Tribune on Sunday.

Zabriskie previously told The Tribune the shortfalls happened because she was trying to expand the role of her organization, which provides cooking classes for low-income children. She hoped to create a kitchen that could be rented by others in the community to generate money for 3 Squares.

Zane Holmquist, board chairman of 3 Squares and a vice president and corporate chef of Stein Eriksen Lodge, said Saturday that Zabriskie has offered to resign. The full board is expected to discuss the issue in coming days.

Several attendees said they were upset their money wasn’t helping Utahns Against Hunger as promised.

“I bought a whole table here,” said John Eckert, who along with his son purchased two tables in the VIP section of the event for $2,800. “I’m not going next year unless they pay their debts.”

“The volunteers I’ve been talking to today say they’re all hurt,” said Michael Kauffman, who directed traffic in the lower Solitude parking lot as cars streamed in for the four-hour event. “We used to be a charity program. We can’t say that anymore.”

Zabriskie previously told The Tribune attendees didn’t all attend to help feed children, and some who came Sunday agreed.

“I would come even if it weren’t for charity,” Brandy Siniscal said. “But I think you need to be transparent.”

This year marked the first time Stephen MacKay’s Park City-based Old Town Cellars had enough employees to stay open at home and staff a booth at Taste of the Wasatch. He said he viewed the event as exposure and was happy to serve the people who’d already bought tickets before the controversy came to light. But he’d like the proceeds to go to charity.

“That’s the whole reason we’re pouring $5,000 worth of product for free,” MacKay said. “Everyone’s gotta have an economic benefit if it’s not a charitable cause.”

Among the booths Sunday were empty ones left vacant by Salt Lake City businesses that backed out shortly before. The owners of Copper Onion, Whiskey Street, 3 Cups coffee and Flourish Bakery didn’t take part.

“We originally wanted to participate in this event because we saw an opportunity to support a community organization that addresses another very real barrier to total-life recovery and rehabilitation: food scarcity,” Flourish Bakery wrote in a post on the event’s Facebook page. “In lieu of participating in this event, we will be making a direct contribution to fulfill this promise in the coming days.”

Kauffman has volunteered for the event for years. While he was conflicted about coming, he said he wanted to make sure the event that hundreds had bought tickets for went on for a 19th year.

He just hopes changes will be made before the 20th now that the issues are generating headlines.

“I guess there’s going to be some soul-searching going on,” he said.

Canton, Ohio • Just as the demonstrations during the national anthem have become a means of expression for NFL players, the stage at the Hall of Fame inductions often turns into a political platform. It certainly did Saturday night.

Ray Lewis did so with his words, and Randy Moss with his tie.

There even were political tones with a different target 600 miles away during Terrell Owens’ speech at his personal celebration of entering the pro football shrine.

Lewis was a man on the prowl as he concluded proceedings in Canton, just as he was on the field as the greatest linebacker of his generation. He eschewed the lectern, wearing a cordless microphone for his 33-minute oratory focusing on “hope, faith and love,” on “family, honor, legacy.”

And then on the division in this country.

“Our country needs real leaders,” Lewis said. “We need people that are willing to step up and take action. We need people willing to fight for what is good and what is right.

“How do we react to challenges in our country right now? Think about this,” he added, looking around at his fellow Hall of Famers. “We can go from being legends to building a legacy bigger than football, bigger than sports. I want us to work together to really take on these challenges, to look at our goals and what unites us. Surely, there is something.”

While he never specifically mentioned anyone or any political party, Lewis delivered a message about unity that stretched far beyond the football field. It echoed the powerful speeches in recent years by LaDainian Tomlinson, Tony Dungy and Cris Carter.

“How about stopping our kids from dying in schools?” Lewis asked. “Can we please put prayer back in schools? Please. How about protecting our children from a terrifying life of being sex trafficked? How about helping our neighbors that can’t afford their medicine?

“How can we do this? How can we come together? The answer is simple. The answer is love. ... The love that sacrifices and is defined by action taken for others. The actions of stepping up and being a leader. It’s no different than we all did to get here. We rose to the challenge, week after week for the love of the game and for the love of our team. That love just doesn’t go away when we retire. It’s still in us burning to be used.”

Yes, the loudest cheers during Lewis’ time onstage came when he mentioned Baltimore or paid tribute to former teammates and coaches. But Lewis admitted to being hopeful that the words at the end of his speech would have a lasting impact.

Instead of politicizing his speech, Moss wore a tie he said bore the names of 13 black men and women who have been killed by police in recent years. Late Saturday night, he explained his reasoning for wearing it to NFL Network.

“You see the names on my tie. Being able to use a big platform like this here at the Hall of Fame ... what I wanted to be able to express with my tie is to let these families know that they’re not alone. I’m not here voicing; but by these names on my tie, at a big platform — it’s the Pro Football Hall of Fame — there’s a lot of stuff going on in our country. I just wanted to let these family members know that they’re not alone.”

Owens was alone, not among Hall of Famers, after making the unprecedented decision to skip the Canton inductions. He gave a bunch of reasons in Chattanooga, ranging from the process by which people get voted in to his being badmouthed unfairly — one Hall of Famer has called Owens “a cancer” — to being a groundbreaker for future hall candidates.

“It’s not because of how many times it took for me to be voted to the hall,” said Owens, who got in on his third try — the same as Joe Namath, Willie Lanier and Fran Tarkenton, for example. “It’s about the mere fact that the sports writers are not in alignment with the mission and core values of the Hall of Fame.

“These writers disregarded the system, the criteria and bylaws in which guys are inducted, and ultimately the true meaning of the Hall of Fame and what it represents. I wanted to take a stand so the next guy coming after me will not have to go through what I and others have gone through. Whether it’s three years or 45 years, you should get what you rightfully earned.”

One thing Owens apparently earned is the enmity of many men who own gold jackets. While they preferred not to speak on the record about his absence, a significant number in Canton said Owens might never be welcomed into their fraternity.

Columbus, Ohio • Ohio State says an outside firm has been hired to conduct the investigation into football coach Urban Meyer’s handling of a domestic abuse complaint against a former assistant.

The university also said in a release Sunday night that it expects the investigation to be completed within two weeks. Decisions about any action resulting from it will be made by Ohio State President Michael Drake.

Meyer was put on paid leave last week amid questions about what he knew and did about accusations of abuse made against fired assistant Zach Smith by his ex-wife.

Meyer released a statement Friday saying that he followed proper procedures when he found out about the 2015 abuse allegations. He also admitted lying to reporters about his knowledge of it.

Smith has never been charged.

Christen Press scored in the 77th minute and Katie Stengel scored in the 83rd as Utah Royals FC overcame a halftime deficit and defeated the Houston Dash 2-1 on Sunday night at BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston.

The Royals, who entered on a four-game winless streak and seventh in the NWSL, leapfrogged over the Dash with the victory.

Houston scored first, with a header by Veronica Latsko off a free kick in the 41st minute.

Press tied the score at 1-1 when she stole the ball from Amber Brooks — who had just received a pass from Houston goalkeeper Jane Campbell — and quickly fired it into the net.

A pair of substitutes combined on the winning goal. Erika Tymrak, who entered in the 58th minute, chipped the ball over the Houston backline to Stengel, who lifted it just over the outstretched arm of Campbell for her fourth goal of the season.

Stengel had entered the game 15 minutes earlier.

The Royals were outshot in the game 9-5 despite having a big edge in possession, 65 percent to 35 percent. Both clubs put five shots on target.

London • Ireland’s first Women’s World Cup field hockey final ended in defeat as the Netherlands retained the title with an emphatic 6-0 victory on Sunday.

Ireland, the second-lowest ranked country in the tournament, was unable to produce a fairy-tale ending at Lee Valley Hockey Center.

Goals from Lidewij Welten, Kelly Jonker, Kitty van Male, Malou Pheninckx, Marloes Keetels and Caia van Maasakker capped a dominant performance from the Dutch as they won the competition for a record eighth time.

The Netherlands team hasn’t lost since the Olympic final two years ago.

This was Ireland’s first World Cup since 2002, and its previous best result was 11th in 1994. Ranked 16th, Ireland topped a group including Olympic champion England and was first into the quarterfinals.

Graham Shaw’s Ireland began brightly but did not manage a shot at goal until the final quarter and the Netherlands, which lifted the trophy on home soil four years ago, soon showed its superiority.

Welten put Alyson Annan’s team ahead in the seventh minute, turning to hit a powerful shot through a crowded circle and past Irish goalkeeper Ayeisha McFerran at the near post.

Jonker found the bottom-left corner to double the lead in the 19th, while superb blocks from Irish pair Shirley McCay and Roisin Upton following penalty corners prevented further goals.

The free-scoring Dutch, who registered 29 goals in five matches to reach the final, put the result beyond doubt with two quick goals in the final stages of the second period.

Tournament top scorer Van Male smashed in her eighth of the competition from close range and, moments later, Pheninckx was allowed too much space to fire the ball high into the net.

Shaw called for his players to “be proud” at halftime but they were outclassed by the world’s top-ranked team and powerless to stop Keetels tapping home a fifth and Van Maasakker adding another from a penalty corner.

Earlier Sunday, Spain beat Australia 3-1 in the bronze-medal match.

Spain went 2-0 ahead in 14 minutes with goals from Maria Lopez and Berta Bonastre.

Kathryn Slattery pulled one back for Australia in the 40th before Alicia Magaz extended Spain’s lead in the 51st.

Former White House counsel Bob Bauer explains on lawfareblog.com some basic election law:

"The ban on foreign national involvement in federal elections is exceptionally broad. It applies to any spending to affect an election: The prohibition applies to 'contributions,' 'expenditures,' 'donations,' and 'disbursements.' A 'contribution' for this purpose includes any 'thing of value.' The rules reach 'promises' of such spending whether express or 'implied,' and to campaign spending provided either directly or 'indirectly.'

"This basic prohibition extends even to foreign national 'participation' in the decisions that a U.S. national makes about election-related spending. . . .

"Congress has enacted and reenacted the foreign-national prohibition in 1966, 1974 and 2002, seeking on each occasion to strengthen it. So the lawyer reviewing a contact between the campaign and a foreign national - particularly a foreign national with apparent ties to a foreign government - would understand that the rules in question are not among the backwater provisions of the law, under-enforced relics of the aged and discredited regulations. The lawyer would also be familiar with the congressional investigations and criminal investigations that arose out of allegations that China developed and implemented a plan to influence the course of the 1996 presidential election. And, finally, he or she would keep in mind that the Supreme Court recently affirmed in Bluman v. Federal Election Commission the constitutionality of these draconian legal controls."

Then there is the U.S. side of the equation. There is a reason - aside from common sense and patriotism - why no other major presidential campaign of which we are aware had 80-plus contacts with Russians and sent the most senior advisers to a meeting to get dirt on its opponent:

"Federal election law pairs . . . these prohibitions on foreign national electoral activity with restrictions on the behavior of the would-be U.S. beneficiaries. U.S. nationals, including campaigns, cannot 'substantially assist' a foreign national in any of these activities, and Americans cannot solicit, accept or receive any such illegal foreign-national support. Viewed together, these prohibited activities - assistance, solicitation, acceptance, or receipt - certainly capture the essence of what some might understand by references to 'collusion.'"

In Bauer's mind, no competent lawyer would let anyone on the campaign go to that meeting:

"The Russians did not merely offer information, plucked from the sky: In the first place, they had to have procured it. To have done so would normally require the expenditure of funds 'in connection with' a federal election: opposition material assembled on a U.S. presidential candidate. Certainly the Russian traveling party spent money to travel to the United States for the meeting. Both the material they proposed to provide and the expenses associated with creating and arranging to deliver it raise the serious question of in-kind contributions to the campaign. Moreover, the hypothetical campaign lawyer would have to be concerned that urging the campaign to invest its own resources in a specific line of attack on Hillary Clinton would constitute illegal 'participation' in the campaign's decision-making on its own spending.

"In addition, the lawyer would consider that any meeting with a foreign government to discuss mutual goals in winning an election could constitute an illegal 'solicitation' of unlawful foreign national spending. The 'acceptance' of the meeting could be such a solicitation if the foreign national dangled the possibility of a benefit and the U. S. campaign, in pursuing the discussion, made clear that it was in the market and open for business. The willingness to discuss Russian government support on this one occasion could be an additional ground for exposure under the solicitation ban. By taking the meeting, the campaign would be signaling an interest in whatever the foreign government might have to offer in the future."

And those are just the campaign finance law issues. Let's not forget, as Bauer points out, that other crimes may have been committed by "signaling to the Russians through WikiLeaks - or directly from the candidate - that their hacking and carefully timed distribution of stolen material was welcome and valuable to the Trump candidacy. Evidence of this encouragement and guidance could support a case of illegal 'substantial assistance' to the Russian electoral intervention." This is not even a close call because we are talking about Russians having "direct discussion with the campaign, such as the one at Trump Tower, and other channels of communication that could have guided their understanding of how the campaign might benefit from Russia's use of online political messaging and the release of stolen materials."

Put Trump to the side for a moment. Everyone in that meeting - Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner - has some serious legal exposure, even apart from any untrue statement he might have later made to investigators and/or Congress.

That leaves us with a couple of possibilities: (1) Either Trump had no knowledge of the meeting whatsoever but engaged in a course of conduct designed to prevent inquiry into that incident (and/or others) or (2) he knew in advance, approved of the meeting and then tried to disable the investigation. We are not doubting as to whether there was cooperation, most likely illegal cooperation, between senior campaign officials and Russians; we are now down to arguing over when Trump learned about the Russian confab. No wonder Trump is freaking out.

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Washington Post, offering reported opinion from a center-right perspective.

A few weeks ago, during a campaign rally in Montana, President Donald Trump was praising the effectiveness of his sloganeering when he made a quick, unfortunate detour. "Thousand points of light?" he quizzed the crowd, referring to the phrase George H.W. Bush popularized to evoke the power of voluntary service. "I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out?"

The remarks earned quick rebukes from an older generation of Republican stalwarts, not merely for the lack of respect they showed toward the ailing 94-year-old former president but for the insult to America's sacrosanct tradition of volunteerism. Even Jesse Jackson, who had sought the Democratic nomination to run against Bush for president in 1988, rushed to defend the "points of light" phrase, explaining that it represented "a thousand ways people could serve and share."

Trump's comments might have stung, but they should not have come as a surprise. That's because, since the beginning of the 2016 campaign and during the first years of his presidency - a period when presidents have traditionally promoted personal service and charitable effort to unify the nation - such themes have been almost entirely absent from Trump's public rhetoric. If he hopes to "make America great again," he's made it clear that acts of service and sharing won't play much of a role.

His silence reflects a broader one: In today's GOP, high-profile public commitments to volunteerism are out of fashion. At least since the Progressive Era, the defense of voluntary service, of private associational activity in all its varied forms, and of charity and philanthropy has been a key conservative trope. Figures from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon to George W. Bush celebrated volunteerism for its own sake, and as an alternative to tax-funded public welfare.

Sure, some of these politicians used a mollifying dose of Tocqueville to mask the severity of their regressive policies; after all, private charitable efforts have never been adequate to address the nation's most pressing social ills. But for many conservative luminaries, this "voluntarism fantasy," as the Roosevelt Institute's Mike Konczal has termed it, was not simply a ruse. It reflected a consistent ideological commitment, one that led its proponents, from Teddy Roosevelt onward, to champion the essential place of charitable and voluntary efforts and to propose means of encouraging them. But you don't see a vigorous embrace of that attitude from leading GOP officeholders today. And Trump and his supporters don't seem to mind.

Ronald Reagan's speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 was a typical paean to civic involvement. It pledged to restore "the American spirit of voluntary service, of cooperation, of private and community initiative." Once in office, Reagan established a White House Office of Private Sector Initiatives to help do so. George H.W. Bush went beyond hymning the "thousand points of light" to oversee the establishment of the Commission on National and Community Service. His son defined himself as a "compassionate conservative" on the campaign trail, promising billions to help charities serve "the least, the last and the lost," and he sought to make good on that vow in the White House with the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Through such pledges, these presidents drew into their orbit, if sometimes only at the edges, a corps of policy advisers and intellectuals publicly committed to the volunteerist project.

Often, the rhetoric outpaced reality - money and manpower were not always available for the GOP volunteerism cause. The party's enthusiasm for civil society generally took a back seat to the conservative priorities of shrinking government, lowering taxes, deregulating industry and boosting the military. So even while Reagan celebrated the American tradition of "neighbor helping neighbor," the budget cuts he championed slashed federal support for many nonprofits at a moment when demand for their services was dramatically increasing. Some prominent advocates of civil society dismissed George H.W. Bush's efforts to promote community service as "voluntarism lite" that asked little of citizens and committed few resources. And the billions that George W. Bush promised to foster charitable and community initiatives never fully materialized. In June 2001, tax incentives that had targeted charitable giving were stripped from a trillion-dollar tax cut bill to make way for the repeal of the estate tax. Meanwhile, according to the deputy director of Bush's faith-based initiative, the project floundered because it never had more than a "minimal" commitment from the president or "snoring indifference" from the rest of the GOP, and so couldn't overcome "knee-jerk Democratic opposition."

Yet even such disappointments now hold a certain retrospective allure. That's because these days, the Republican leadership does not seem committed even to a show of support for volunteerism. At a recent event at the American Enterprise Institute, Marvin Olasky, the Texas writer and academic who helped sell "compassionate conservatism" to George W. Bush, lamented that while the acolytes of the conservative Gingrich Revolution in the 1990s publicly underscored the importance of community empowerment through the strengthening of civil society, the tea party movement has shown little interest in those ideas. That's true: Right-wing political rhetoric has recently focused almost entirely on the rollback of governmental authority without signaling support for the voluntary action that, Reagan argued, would fill the gap.

As Trump's Montana remarks suggest, his White House has doubled down on that neglect. "Trump is a complete outlier in American history," notes John Bridgeland, who served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under George W. Bush and wrote a book that traces how presidents have promoted America's volunteerist tradition. "In the first years of presidents on both sides of the aisle, there's been a long tradition of awakening the nation to the recognition that it is through their (private) actions and through civil society ... that they have the opportunity to serve."

This would be an especially good time to get that message out: After a post-9/11 spike, volunteering rates for adults have declined over the past decade, dropping by more than two percentage points, to 25.5 percent, from 2006 to 2015, according to a recent study by the Do Good Institute.

If themes of service and sharing haven't made it into Trump's public rhetoric, his first two budget proposals showed how little regard he has for the presidential tradition of boosting them. For instance, he's twice proposed eliminating the Corporation for National and Community Service, which houses the agency that administers AmeriCorps, among other programs, and has favored slashing funding to federal departments and agencies that channel billions to the nation's nonprofits - from organizations that provide affordable housing to those that support arts education to those that promote conservation.

True, Congress ignored many of these suggested cuts when crafting its own budget. But lawmakers' support for volunteerism has been largely defensive and remedial; few aggressive legislative champions of civil society have emerged in recent years. (One exception might be Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who spearheaded the Social Capital Project to measure declines in social cohesion and associational life in the United States over the past few decades. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., is another.)

The devaluation of volunteerism was on display during the debates over the tax bill passed in December by the GOP-led Congress. Leaders of the nonprofit sector from both the left and the right mobilized an aggressive lobbying effort to persuade lawmakers to extend the charitable deduction to all taxpayers, not just to itemizers. But the campaign fizzled on Capitol Hill, and the final Tax Cuts and Jobs Act contained provisions, such as the doubling of the standard deduction, that reduced tax incentives to give and that some analysts predicted would lead to dramatic drops in charitable giving. So far, it's unclear if these dire forecasts will be borne out - though preliminary signs are not especially encouraging. A recent report from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, for instance, estimated that giving was down 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2018, compared with the same period last year.

One could forgive nonprofit leaders if they seemed demoralized after the tax bill's passage. It also featured other provisions that highlighted the contempt with which many lawmakers regard some of the nonprofit sector's most prominent institutions. The law, for instance, targets elite private colleges and universities (some 30 schools that have more than $500,000 in endowment per student, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Amherst, are now subject to a tax on their endowment income) and imposes excess-compensation taxes on nonprofit executives. In the bill, right-wing economic populism seems to have been directed almost entirely toward nonprofit institutions.

Nonprofit leaders attributed these indignities to the sector's lack of influence with the GOP. As Diana Aviv, then chief executive of one of the nation's largest charities, Feeding America, explained, "We clearly didn't have the clout." They also reflect the marginalization of conservative and libertarian intellectuals and policy advisers like Richard Cornuelle, William Schambra and Stephen Goldsmith, who, in the past, made the case for volunteerism in the public square. But the diminished status of volunteerism isn't just a function of changing power dynamics within conservative circles. It's also a result of forces altering the entire political spectrum.

One is an increased spirit of partisanship that has infiltrated the nonprofit sector, as it has nearly every other realm of American life. The past half-century has witnessed what the political scientist Jeffrey Berry calls an "advocacy explosion," a massive proliferation of private, professionalized, Washington-based nonprofit organizations specifically designed to shape national policy; these groups, some research suggests, have increased polarization. In the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of progressive advocacy organizations developed, dedicated to protecting environmental resources and promoting the rights of consumers, women and minorities. These in turn inspired conservative policy groups; the ensuing decades have produced a philanthropically funded partisan arms race, with each side appropriating the other's organizational innovations, such as the establishment of separate institutional arms to handle lobbying.

This has made it increasingly easy to regard the nonprofit sector as a realm in which to seek partisan advantage and to settle partisan scores. In the deliberations over the tax bill, for instance, Republicans advocated weakening the Johnson Amendment, which since 1954 has prohibited charities from engaging in direct electioneering. They did not succeed, but they are still pushing for this change. (It is no mystery why why this nonprofit issue, one championed by the Christian right, is the only one that the president has taken up with enthusiasm: He sees civil society as another battlefield in an all-encompassing partisan war.)

For the right, that political tribalism has been amplified by a long-running tension between conservative celebration of individual voluntary action and ambivalence toward nonprofit institutions. The latter was stoked when nonprofits went through an intensive bout of professionalization, beginning in the 1960s, largely as a means of securing government grants and contracts; many of the Great Society programs, for instance, were implemented through nonprofits. This funding surge contributed to what Irving Kristol lamented as the rise of a "new class" of professionals, who, allied with the "upper levels of the government bureaucracy," were supposedly hostile to capitalism and favored a more expansive welfare state. Conservatives increasingly characterized nonprofits as merely another special interest group "feeding at the public trough," in the words of former Heritage Foundation president Edward Fuelner.

Conservative resentment helps to explain the endowment income tax on elite universities and the excise taxes on nonprofit pay above $1 million. True, the impulse to suppress volunteerism that threatens one's political interests isn't new: Federalists and Jeffersonians battled over the public charters and funding of charitable institutions. More recently, the Nixon and Reagan administrations sought to "defund the left," in the words of conservative activist Richard Viguerie, by targeting federal support of progressively aligned nonprofits. But unlike in the past, that impulse is now no longer counterbalanced by public exhortations to other forms of volunteerism or charity.

Politics in the nonprofit world isn't the only problem; another is the blurring of boundaries between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Over the past decade, charities, their financial backers and their political sponsors (Democrats as well as Republicans) have increasingly been drawn to social entrepreneurs who sought to harness the power of the market for philanthropic ends - whether through promoting microcredit or through incentivizing the production of low-cost drugs for the developing world. These philanthrocapitalists have done significant good. Yet in the past, the distinction between nonprofit and private efforts helped voluntary associations publicly articulate their civic purpose. Those dichotomies are now less clear - and that purpose is harder to defend. Indeed, when the market is considered the most effective philanthropic instrument, it's easy for the championing of the free-enterprise system to serve as a substitute for the vigorous promotion of civil society.

Progressives might be tempted to welcome the right's waning public support for volunteerism; perhaps stripping away the mask reveals Ayn Rand's leer behind Tocqueville's smile. That's an understandable response, given the chasm that's opened between conservative rhetoric and action on the issue. But it's flawed for two related reasons.

First, it’s too absolute a dismissal of conservatism’s genuine attachment to volunteerism and of the possibility for bipartisan policies that could nurture it. Support for civil society represents a promising point of overlap between the anti-statist localism of the right and the grass-roots community empowerment of the left. Second, it fails to see the real advantages of the current empty bully pulpit.Given the toxicity of the political discourse Trump generates, if he did frequently invoke service and sharing, those concepts might become tainted during his administration. The fact that volunteerism isn’t closely aligned with the “make America great again” agenda creates the space for lower-profile if significant work across the aisle. In late July, for instance, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Houseintroduced the Everyday Philanthropist Act, which would allow for the creation of “flexible giving accounts,” a pre-tax payroll deduction for employee giving. Trump didn’t comment on it.

So maybe it's not so terrible that the president seems to care so little for the American tradition of neighbor helping neighbor. "The good news is that there are extremely visible and unprecedentedly strong efforts to promote civil society," notes John Bridgeland; they just aren't breaking through to the chyron on CNN. He points to the Service Year Alliance, an organization on whose board he serves, which is seeking to make a year of community service a common expectation for Americans; its grand ambition is to grow national service opportunities to 1 million positions by the nation's 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. The group's advisory leadership council contains a mix of Republican and Democratic luminaries - Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, Robert Gates and Jack Lew. After Trump's election, Bridgeland believed that the cause of national service could help bridge the political divide, "bringing people together in common purpose." He reached out to the Trump White House but had no luck piquing its interest.

Bridgeland hopes to fill 100,000 service positions in the United States by next year. "I see more energy than ever in the civic and nonprofit sectors," he insists. "What we are lacking today is political leadership." It's a testament to our strange civic moment that those two statements are not necessarily at odds.

Benjamin Soskis is a research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and a co-editor of HistPhil.

Energy in any form is essential in our daily lives. In Utah, we have both fossil and renewable energy resources and we are a net energy supplier to neighboring states. Put simply, our resources are valuable, and any legislation regarding these resources should focus on decreasing costs and improving efficiency to make the essentials in our lives more affordable and accessible.

Yet, House Climate Solutions Caucus members, Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., recently introduced a carbon tax bill that would create a new energy tax on more than 80 percent of the energy we use. It would also immediately increase our gas prices by five cents per gallon and would continue to increase the tax every year after that. This bill would be detrimental to Utah families and businesses, because it stands to increase energy costs while offering no measurable environmental benefit. Because of the harm this legislation would cause to Utahns, Rep. Mia Love, and her fellow Climate Solution Caucus members should strongly oppose it.

Love has a strong record of advocating for solutions that benefit Utahns. She voted in favor of a simpler tax code with lower rates and supported decreasing regulations to promote innovation and business growth in our great state.

However, Love voted against a resolution introduced by Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., that denounces a carbon tax and declares such a tax to be detrimental to our economy. Essentially, the purpose of a carbon tax is to make much of our energy — like gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas — more expensive, so that people will use less of them and be forced to switch to more expensive alternatives. This could cost an average family hundreds of dollars every year in higher energy taxes and is the wrong approach.

Love's rationale for voting against the Scalise resolution might be that she thinks trading a carbon tax for getting rid of EPA regulations could work. And indeed, the Climate Solutions Caucus’ carbon tax bill would establish a "rolling moratorium" on EPA's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions regulations to go along with the new economy-wide tax. However, the moratorium included in the bill could possibly be revoked every four years, creating extreme regulatory uncertainty. Furthermore, it would expire with certainty in 2033, which would leave all the impacted industries with both an economically harmful carbon tax and the burden of EPA GHG regulations.

Another possibility for Love voting against the resolution might be that she thinks a “revenue neutral” carbon tax could work. But even if one could create a perfectly revenue neutral tax (something no one has ever managed to do), it would still damage our economy by growing our bureaucracy and creating market inefficiencies. It would never shrink – only grow.

A carbon tax is poor public policy and the Curbelo-Fitzpatrick bill would be detrimental to our state. It would increase the cost of most kinds of energy — namely, the kinds that American families, truckers and businesses rely on every day — and would unfairly burden many unrelated industries to pay for our highway system. Utah deserves better policy that improves the health and economic wellbeing of our state and our country as a whole. Love, and the whole Utah federal delegation, need to consider how a carbon tax would affect their constituents and work to ensure that Utah families and manufacturers continue to have access to the affordable, reliable energy they need.

Billy Hesterman is the vice president of the Utah Taxpayers Association.

Prominent members of Utah’s Asian community worry that a major mixed-use and hotel development planned in downtown Salt Lake City could effectively wipe away a century-old cultural enclave known as Japantown.

Most of the historic neighborhood, once a hub for Japanese residents whose ancestors came to work the region’s mines and railroads, was razed in the mid-1960s to make way for a previous version of the Salt Palace Convention Center. But the Japanese Church of Christ and the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple remain on or close to the block bounded by 100 South and 200 South from 200 West to 300 West, known as Block 67.

Officials with The Ritchie Group, a real estate developer based in Salt Lake City, envision four new buildings on a 6.45-acre footprint running diagonally through the block, including more than 650 residential units, two hotels, an office tower, retail space, a tree-lined midblock street and an underground parking garage.

The project would replace the post office building and surface parking now occupying the block.

Opponents say the new development at 230 W. 200 South threatens to smother the area’s cultural legacy and the two religious sites. Resulting traffic from the project’s parking garage, they say, is also likely to overwhelm the adjoining stretch of 100 South, which was dubbed Japantown Street more than a decade ago and is used today for public festivals.

Japantown supporters have been working quietly for months to block a zoning change that would increase the allowable height of buildings in the project, a change that developers consider crucial to its success.

Repeat of history?

In recent testimony, Michael Kwan, a Taylorsville justice court judge and president of the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, likened Japantown’s potential fate to that of a once-thriving Chinatown in Salt Lake City, centered on downtown's Plum Alley.

“Over time, it was taken and it was lost," Kwan told the Salt Lake City Council recently. "And now we’re struggling today on how we tell that story, of how we have been a part of this community and the nation at large since the 1860s.

"Once you lose Japantown," he said, "you'll never have it again."

State Sen. Jani Iwamoto, D-Holladay, warned of a replay of the Salt Palace demolition in 1966, when a string of stores, markets, restaurants and pool halls at the heart of Japantown were torn down.

"We hope you can understand and empathize with what this area — what is left of this area — means to our communities and to honor the past, to embrace diversity, to work with us hand in hand and not to repeat history," Iwamoto said.

She and others said concerns over historic preservation had only been considered, as Iwamoto put it, "at the back end" of the Block 67 development.

Retired judge and longtime community activist Raymond Uno said he sought to appeal to council members’ “hearts and minds” to oppose the new zoning “so that our culture can be preserved in this small sliver of diversity in Salt Lake City.”

‘A viable compromise’

Officials with The Ritchie Group said they hope to reach a compromise that lets the project proceed. Jayson Newitt, a company principal, was optimistic about an upcoming meeting with community leaders to address the dispute, brokered by the city’s Redevelopment Agency.

"We look forward to finding wins for them and wins for us, make the project work and still pay homage to their past and their great history," Newitt said.

After hearings before the city's Planning Commission, the zoning change was set for a City Council vote as soon as Aug. 14, but after hearing residents' concerns, council members opted instead to continue their hearings on the issue.

Councilman Derek Kitchen, whose District 4 includes Block 67, said the move would let the council “keep our thumb on this a bit” and encourage talks toward “a viable compromise.”

With its proximity to the convention center, The Gateway shopping mall and Vivint Smart Home Arena, the Block 67 project is seen as a key part of the city’s vision for an active sports and entertainment district on the western edge of downtown Salt Lake City.

The arena recently underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation, and the mall is in the midst of one.

Higher buildings

Officials with The Ritchie Group, who hope to build their project in two phases beginning this year, are seeking approval to construct a tower at the corner of 200 South and 200 West up to 375 feet tall as part of the project’s second phase.

Current zoning now limits that maximum height to 75 feet by default and to 120 feet with additional review and approval.

Instead of a full rezone that could permit skyscraper-style heights comparable to those in the downtown core, city planners are instead recommending what’s called a zoning overlay, allowing some additional height on that block while keeping other restrictions in place.

According to city documents, the overlay was first created to allow for a long-sought convention center hotel at the adjacent Salt Palace.

Council members have voiced support for using the overlay on Block 67, but some have suggested an additional buffer zone on its northern edge to lessen visual effects on the downtown skyline of a much taller building surrounded by smaller structures.

Parking dispute

Opposition has also emerged over the project’s proposed 424-stall residential and commercial parking structure, for which the developer would reportedly receive a sizable taxpayer subsidy from Salt Lake County, to be repaid over 25 years through a deal with the city’s RDA.

Salt Lake City Councilman Andrew Johnston said the county subsidy was being made in recognition of the regional impact of the project.

But Dave Iltis, editor in chief of Cycling Utah magazine, called the arrangement “insanity,” given what he said is a surplus of surface parking across the downtown area.

"We don't need more parking," Iltis told the council. "Parking induces driving. We don't need more cars downtown."

Newitt, with The Ritchie Group, countered that while parking was available elsewhere, "proximity is an issue when you do a development.

“Just because there’s an abundance of parking several blocks away,” he said, “that doesn’t mean a project can be successful at a certain location without proximity of parking.”

You’re in downtown Salt Lake City without a car and need to get from point A to point B. What do you do?

You have options. You could hop on TRAX — free within the downtown area — rent a GREENbike or e-scooter, call a Lyft, or keep it old school and walk.

Or, if you’re the staff of The Salt Lake Tribune, you could try all the above with a slightly juvenile race.

The Catalyst

When the dockless e-scooter companies Bird and Lime arrived in Salt Lake City — seemingly overnight — last month, it made something of a splash in The Tribune’s newsroom.

Reporter Taylor Stevens has been covering the so-called “Scooter Wars” that have left flocks of black Birds and bushels of bright-green Limes on the city’s sidewalks. Naturally, the war begs the question of which scooter company is superior, and the topic was a point of casual debate on The Tribune’s government desk.

At some point, a suggestion was made that The Tribune stage a race between the two scooter options. But unlike many — many! — other harebrained schemes reporters have joked about in the past, no one quashed the scooter race idea. As a result it grew to its logical extreme, and things got a little weird.

The Rules

Six racers agreed to participate. Digital News Editor Rachel Piper would use the ride-share app Lyft. Columnist Robert Gehrke and reporter Taylor Stevens would ride a Lime and a Bird, respectively. Reporter Benjamin Wood, a recreational cyclist, would take GREENbike. Reporter Lee Davidson, who covers the Utah Transit Authority for the Tribune, would ride TRAX. And managing editor David Noyce, known for his brisk stride, would walk.

The race began at the Salt Lake City Public Library — at 400 South and 200 East — and ended at The Tribune’s office building in The Gateway mall at 100 South and 400 West: a distance of one mile as the crow flies. With the exception of a checkpoint at the intersection of 300 South and Main Street, racers were free to choose any route.

A “winner” would be determined by a point system weighted for cost: one point per minute and two points per dollar spent.

And, like golf, the participant with the lowest score at the end of the race would be the champion.

Beyond those guidelines, and the need to stick to their assigned modes of transportation, the racers were free to do as they pleased.

Scooters

Advantages • Faster than walking; cheaper than GREENbike and ride-share apps; no need to find a docking station at destination; leisurely fun.

Disadvantages • Glitch-prone; unreliable availability at departure point.

This project started as simply scooter vs. scooter, and in the end, our Lime and Bird riders both experienced technical difficulties that significantly affected their performance.

Gehrke, on Lime, was the second racer to arrive at The Tribune. But after he parked his scooter and tried to end his ride, his app failed to close the transaction and the resulting usage charge cost Gehrke the victory.

He’d also been forced to backtrack early in the race, after the Lime he located on the app was grabbed by someone else before he could reach it.

“Things got off to a rocky start,” he said.

But Gehrke’s bad luck was nothing compared to Stevens'. She was forced to complete almost the entire course on foot while struggling to locate and successfully unlock a Bird scooter. Her journey took twice the time of her Lime-riding counterpart’s.

She, too, was unable to find the first scooter she went after — it seemed to simply not exist where the app’s map said it was. And when she located a different Bird nearby, she realized the app would not allow her to unlock the scooter without her driver license, which she had left behind at the office to streamline her travel.

“I knew that you had to be over 18 with a valid driver’s license," Stevens said. “But I hadn’t read anywhere that they required proof of that.”

Even if Stevens had convinced a stranger to lend her a driver license to unlock the app — and we’re not confirming she did — it was little help. The second scooter she tried to use was damaged and inoperable.

So were the next 11, which she found as she made her way back to the office on foot.

None of the damaged Birds was on the app’s map, Stevens said. But part of the e-scooters' appeal, she said, is that a pedestrian can ostensibly hop on any scooter he or she finds in the city.

“It’s totally plausible that a potential Bird rider would be walking down the road, see a scooter and try to ride it,” she said. “Without considering opening the app.”

Four blocks away from The Tribune, on her 15th attempt, she successfully caught a Bird.

After the race concluded, Gehrke took a Bird back to his car at the library. He said he preferred the Lime scooter he’d competed on; it was a sturdier and smoother ride.

Lime • 15 minutes (2nd); $3.45 (4th); 21.9 points (2nd overall).

Bird • 42 minutes (6th); $2.20 (3rd); 46.4 points (6th overall).

GREENbike

Advantages • Docking stations at most downtown points of interest; reliable availability; speed; exercise.

Disadvantages • Perspiration; must walk to docking station and final destination; cost is meant for multiple uses over a longer period.

Full disclosure: the writer of this report is the GREENbike racer, so I’ll dispense with third person for this section.

The race route, from the library to The Gateway, gave me a significant advantage on time. Both my starting and ending points have docking stations, requiring only a short jog on either end of the race. And because I get way into things like this, I pedaled my guts out.

What spiked my score was the cost. GREENbike’s pricing is built around multiple trips and routine use. Its cheapest option is $7 for unlimited rides over 24 hours. Other options include a four-day pass for $15 and an annual membership for $75 (active and retired military, students, teachers and senior citizens qualify for discounted rates).

In terms of only speed, I came in first, which suggests GREENbike is the fastest way to get around downtown if physical exertion is not an issue. But when factored through the calculation for our race, I finished middle of the pack.

GreenBike • 11 minutes (1st); $7 (5th); 25 points (3rd overall).

Lyft

Advantages • Minimal effort; bespoke service; multitasking potential; air conditioning; speed.

Disadvantages • Driver roulette; cost; contributes to traffic congestion and pollution.

You might expect the Lyft to have beaten the bike and scooter to the finish line. In most cases, you probably would have been right.

Piper had two things working against her. First, her competitor on the GREENBike was something of an unhinged maniac (back to third person). Second, she lost the classic ride-share game of driver roulette.

After her car arrived, Piper was shuttled on — to put it delicately — a circuitous route, which took her south before turning around and going north, and then taking her west before circling back to the east and finally going west again. Had the Lyft driver’s GPS instructed him to turn into a lake, Piper said, he likely would have complied.

“I suspected that Ben on his bike would beat me, since he was wearing Spandex and has probably seen ‘Premium Rush',” Piper said. “I did not think I’d lose to a dad on a motorized scooter.”

Editor’s note: Benjamin Wood has, in fact, seen “Premium Rush,” although he doesn’t necessarily recommend it.

Piper said she is typically an excellent back-seat driver, but the pressures of the race affected her performance — she awkwardly said “thank you” to one of The Tribune’s staff photographers — and her instructions to go through the checkpoint at 300 South and Main Street may have added to the route confusion.

The extra distance added both time and cost to Piper’s performance, plus a guilt-motivated double tip for the driver. She was able to edit stories and complete some work during the trip, but for the same cost, Piper said, she could have purchased two overpriced coffees or the e-book edition of “War and Peace” to read in its entirety while waiting for/riding TRAX.

“Pulling up to The Tribune and seeing Robert Gehrke already there, looking smug in his Hawaiian shirt, is one of the darkest moments in my life," Piper said. “But I don’t blame Lyft.”

Lyft • 15.5 minutes (3rd); $8.75 (6th); 33 points (5th overall).

TRAX

Advantages • Free (in the downtown free-fare zone, which stretches from 600 West to 200 East and 900 South to South Temple); dependable routes and schedules; multitasking potential.

Disadvantages • Speed; limited stops, multiple transfers; fellow-passenger roulette.

Like the GREENbike docking stations, TRAX operates a stop at both the downtown library and The Gateway. But it also requires transferring from the Red to the Blue line at the Courthouse Station, which can either be a seamless transition or a significant delay, depending on how well the trains line up.

On race day, Davidson was lucky to catch back-to-back trains.

His fellow travelers may not have felt so lucky to have a media star onboard — particularly one man who objected to the reporter filming himself during the ride.

“If you point that camera at me, I might just break it,” Davidson recalls the man saying.

After Davidson explained he was part of a transit competition, though, the man’s demeanor changed and he asked to share his perspective.

“TRAX is free here,” the man said. “It’s great.”

TRAX • 26 minutes (5th); free (1st, tie); 26 points (4th overall)

And the winner is ... the pedestrian?

Advantages • Exercise; environmentally friendly; free.

Disadvantages • Slow; exhausting; bland.

Noyce was the clear front-runner for the first 50 meters or so of the race. While the other competitors scattered to find their modes of transportation, he was free to simply head for the office.

Before long, however, he was passed by the cyclist and the Lime scooter.

“I saw Ben pass me — all decked out in his cycling gear like it was the Tour de Tribune — about halfway down 300 South just before Main [Street],” he said.

Noyce said he passed several scooters on his path, and for the good of the competition resisted the urge to hop on (he did bring his driver license). After reaching West Temple, he started moving in a zigzag pattern toward The Gateway, letting traffic signals dictate his route.

“I may have left more leather shoe prints,” he said, “but I definitely left the smallest carbon footprint.”

His brisk pace and free mode of travel combined to give Noyce the fewest points and the victory.

Despite that, Noyce later made several remarks that his cycling rival had unfairly run to and from the GREENbike docking stations. Unfortunately, The Tribune did not have a score for sore winners.

Walking • 21 minutes (4th); free (1st, tie); 21 points (1st overall).

Tribune employees David Noyce, Rachel Piper, Robert Gehrke, Taylor Stevens and Lee Davidson contributed to this report.