Regular readers of this site know that I am the resident FC Dallas fan. I admit that I was not a very good at that job in the 2020 season because, well, 2020. I became a bigger fan of making it through each week, and a few things got lost in the sauce. I’m going to try to get right in 2021, but I make no promises. I can’t. At any rate, maybe you also have some catching up to do. Here then are a few notes about FCD’s offseason thus far. New season starts, God willing and the creek don’t rise, in March.

• Bryan Reynolds heads to Juventus, via Benevento. The Serie A giant has finally, after talking about it for seemingly forever, signed the 19-year-old FC Dallas right back. But they don’t have room on the roster at the moment for another non-EU player. So he had been loaned out for the rest of the season to Benevento, who are in only their second season in Italy’s top flight. But they do have an absolutely cracking badge and nickname (The Sorcerers). When Reynolds does make his way to Juventus, he will join Weston McKennie, who came up through the vaunted FC Dallas academy. FCD will get $10 million in the deal.

• Michael Barrios is traded to Colorado Rapids. The pocket-size (5-foot-3, not counting bleach-blond mohawk) winger joins former teammate Kellyn Acosta, in exchange for an international roster spot and a SuperDraft pick swap. It’s a good deal for the club, but it does bum me out, because Barrios was one of the last links to the 2016 squad that won the Supporters’ Shield and U.S. Open Cup, and would have likely won the MLS Cup, too, save for an injury to Mauro Diaz. But he was superfluous because they had already signed his replacement.

• Jáder Obrian joins from Colombia’s Rionegro Águilas. The 25-year-old scored 13 goals in 22 matches this season, and plays on the right side, where Barrios used to roam. He is super fast, plays direct, and is nicknamed “The Soldier.” But I assume you already knew that based on our shared familiarity with Colombia’s Categoría Primera A. As it happens, Obrian began his professional career in 2015 at Uniautónoma FC alongside … Michael Barrios.

The Dallas Express was once an important newspaper here. When you google “Dallas Express newspaper,” you get pages and pages of results that address that outlet’s role in the city and beyond. From UNT’s Portal to Texas History:

Self-proclaimed as “the South’s Oldest and Largest Negro Newspaper,” the Dallas Express traces its roots to 1892, when William E. King began publishing the Dallas Bee. Renamed the Dallas Express in 1893, the paper served as an advocate for blacks in Dallas and throughout the South for over 70 years.

Although little exists to document the paper’s early years, the Express became one of the most influential black publications in Texas in the decades leading up to the Great Depression.

So it is maddening to see what has now landed at the URL dallasexpress.com. It is a pay-to-play “news” site run by a Chicago-based operation called Metric Media News that owns hundreds of such bogus news sites all across the country. The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review both exposed this. Our Peter Simek wrote about it when another Metric Media site called Dallas Media Wire popped up here. Read Peter’s post for a fuller understanding of how nasty this stuff is. The industry term for it, “pink slime,” is an apt one (that’s also the term for a meat-processing byproduct).

People, be careful with what you read and share. And watch out if a “reporter” from what sounds like a community newspaper calls you. Check their site at the very bottom. When there isn’t any information under the “contact” or “about us” links, that’s your first clue. If the site anywhere has the words “Metric Media” on it, that’s your second clue.

Don’t consume pink slime.

During last year’s miraculous run to the Stanley Cup Finals, the Dallas Star’s Russian netminder Anton Khudobin quickly emerged as a fan favorite thanks to his dazzling saves on the ice and equally charming performances post-game. Khudobin’s playoff heroics are part of the reason why the Stars felt comfortable relying more on Khudobin this coming season. In the past, he has platooned with Ben Bishop, who is out this season due to a knee injury. But according to a story in The Athletic (sub. req.), Khudobin — or “Dobby,” as he is affectionally known by fans — nearly didn’t make it back from Russia for the start of the 2020-2021 NHL season, which kicks-off tonight.

First, there was a hand injury that led to a difficult post-season rehab. Then, the goalie contracted COVID-19, and his symptoms were anything but mild. Finally, as the virus surged in Dallas, immigration delays and Russia’s plans to cancel flights to the United States nearly left Dobby stranded.

Here are some highlights from the wild tale:

When we were trying to figure out what we were going to put on the cover of the January issue, one item was on just about everyone’s lips: booze. A few of us were in the process of cutting back on consumption, but others (like me) had taken advantage of the quarantine to up our cocktail games. So what if bars were closed: we were taking solace at home in a well-crafted G&T or Manhattan. We found ourselves using the ritual as a signifier of the otherwise vague transition from workday to evening, removing the laptop from the dining table and pulling out a cutting board and fresh citrus, a muddler and shaker, performing both an exorcism and a forearm exercise of sorts before changing into couch socks and settling in for an episode of The Repair Shop.

Some of my efforts were also partly research for the cocktail section of my cookbook. I was ordering obscure bottles for home delivery from Bar & Garden, experimenting with brands and flavors. I’m a sucker for a pretty bottle, and one day I spotted a beveled glass beauty from a distillery I had never heard of. It was a bourbon whiskey from Blackland Distillery in Fort Worth. I ordered it; I loved it. That led me to wonder how many other regional distilleries I was missing. Sure, I knew Balcones, Herman Marshall, Firestone & Robinson. But what I didn’t know or understand was that since Balcones and Garrison Brothers started the Texas whiskey revolution a little over a decade ago, North Texas is now dotted with nearly two dozen distilleries, crafting everything from Scotch-style single malts to Japanese-style non-chill filtered vodkas.

What is being crafted here reflects a world of influences, but also a distinct North Texas terroir and an independent Lone Star point of view. At the southernmost point, in Waco, you have Balcones, the standard bearer for Texas whiskey, which first made a name for itself with its Baby Blue blue corn whisky and then stunned the world in 2012 by beating out the top Scotch houses with its Texas Single Malt. At the northernmost point, virtually on the Oklahoma border in Denison, you have Ironroot, the more recent upstart from the Likarish family, which produced the world’s best bourbon (made from locally grown heirloom corn) in 2020, the first non-Kentucky bourbon to ever be so honored.

But it’s not just the booze that’s worth seeking out. A number of these distilleries have cool tasting rooms staffed by distillers who are more than willing to go into detail about the differences in flavor between Atomic Orange and Bloody Butcher corn or the effect of a 30-degree temperature change (like last weekend’s snowfall) on increased tannin extraction. So we’ve put together a guide on the best liquors to try and distilleries to tour, which you can read here. It is our January cover story and it’s online today. And we’ve added some ideas for overnight trips because, of course, you can sample more if you don’t have to drive.

The Mavericks were supposed to play the Pelicans Monday evening, even after Josh Richardson, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Jalen Brunson had entered into the NBA’s “health and safety protocols,” the league’s linguistic sleight of hand for “COVID-19 exposure.” There was word that Maxi Kleber would join them, and now he has, along with Dwight Powell. The rest of the team traveled yesterday to Charlotte, where they will play the Hornets tonight at 6 p.m. I wish they weren’t.

Given that five of its rotation players are out, I do not have high hopes for the Mavs’ delivering any sort of payback for the 118–99 home loss to the Hornets a couple of days before the new year, a game that wasn’t even that close and caused Luka Doncic to come back out to get some shots up after it was over. But that is not why I wish they had postponed this game. It’s not just the Mavs. The Heat, Sixers, and Celtics are all dealing with “health and safety protocols” absences, and you have to imagine that it is going to get worse before it gets better. Tonight’s Atlanta-Phoenix game was postponed this morning; it’s the seventh game to be postponed so far, and the season is less than a month old.

Yesterday, the league added more to its already lengthy health and safety guidelines, requiring team personnel to stay home for the next two weeks “at all times” except for team activities and store runs, and forbidding guests at team hotels. Will that be enough? I don’t think so. Without a bubble and without vaccines, it looks like the season will have to proceed a week at a time, if they insist on keeping going.

I don’t know what the solution is. A few different bubbles scattered around the country? Pushing pause for two weeks while teams get healthy and out of quarantine and trying to come up with best practices going forward? I really do not know. But I’m expecting a lot more games will look like what the Mavs roll out tonight, with Boban Marjanovic as the only true big man on the roster (maybe James Johnson counts) and a lot of rookies and little-used players on the court. [Update: I totally blanked on Willie Cauley-Stein, who has started the past few games and thus far has been a welcome addition to the team. Sorry, WCS. Still, a very thin big-man rotation.] That could lead to injuries (worst case) or just bad basketball.

Either way, not a great future. But I suppose that is sort of what everyone is dealing with, so why should this be any different?

Approximately 2,500 liquor bottles line the display case—six shelves tall, three feet wide, four or five bottles deep—that takes up half the kitchen and spills into the living room of Chris Trevino’s Fort Worth home. Part of the collection resides in closets, and he owns doubles, but he guesses that the total number of unique specimens hovers around 1,300 or 1,400.

Before he obtained his Certified Specialist of Spirits status and was certified by the Tequila Regulatory Council of Mexico, before he became LiquorHound, with a YouTube subscription base of 25,000, a view count of 6 million, and a Patreon channel where he releases reviews weekly to subscribers, Trevino was just a guy with a friend who’d brought a bottle of tequila back when he visited family in Mexico. It was 1994, and Trevino was 21 years old.  

Soon, tequila segued to rum and then vodka, which led to gin, bourbon, and scotch—each spirit the object of a year or two of study in a collection that quickly encompassed hundreds. During the first few years, there wasn’t a YouTube channel to post to. Trevino just studied, tasted, and collected. He made it his mission to divide North Texas into pie wedges that he would sweep and reconnoiter, visiting dozens of liquor stores in each sector, eventually taking in the whole state in an exhaustive (and exhausting) pursuit as he sleuthed for rare bottles.  

The spoils of his time-telescoping hobby include a bourbon called Black and Gold, distilled in 1917 and allowed to rest in barrels until 1933, that waited out Prohibition. There is an 1819 Rhum Clement from Martinique, an Agricole rum distilled from the juice of the sugarcane rather than the traditional molasses, and an original imperial wicker-covered gallon demijohn of rum, bottled for the British Royal Navy in the days of daily rum rations. There’s the 1940s Pernod Fils absinthe created in Tarragona, Spain, where Pernod had moved production after France banned it in 1915, and a bottle from a 2,400-bottle batch of Booker’s “Friends and Family” Bourbon, given as holiday gifts by iconic Jim Beam distiller Booker Noe in 1986. Each is a history lesson.