Names and faces
■ The LA Bowl has found a big name to be its very first title sponsor: ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. The inaugural edition of the Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl will be played Dec. 18 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, the host announced on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Wednesday night. The game will air on ABC. “This is not a joke,” Kimmel said during his opening monologue. “This is a real bowl game named after me, so mark your calendars. … It’s like an early Christmas gift for all of us.” SoFi Stadium confirmed that it has reached a multiyear deal with Kimmel to put his name above the title of the LA Bowl, the first college football game to be played at the year-old arena. The game’s debut was delayed from 2020 until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it will match the Mountain West champion against the Pac-12’s No. 5 bowl selection. “Never before has a bowl game been named after a human being (as far as I know, I didn’t check),” Kimmel, 53, said in a statement announcing the news. “On December 18, my dream of being forever enshrined alongside orange, rose, cotton and peach comes true.” The LA Bowl was established to create another big annual event for SoFi Stadium, which was built by Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke as part of a large multiuse development on the former site of the Hollywood Park racetrack. The multibillion-dollar arena opened last year, when the Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers played a full NFL season without fans in the stands. The stadium recently announced that both teams will play at full fan capacity in the forthcoming season.
■ Three years after workplace-misconduct allegations cost veteran TV and radio talk-show host Tavis Smiley his job and a national forum, he’s ending his silence. Smiley, 56, who continues to deny the claims of unwanted sexual behavior that led PBS to drop his long-running show, is attempting to rebound with the purchase of a Los Angeles radio station that will offer a Black and progressive perspective on the city and nation. Smiley decided to make his own opportunity with reformatted station KBLA Talk 1580 Los Angeles. It debuts with a preview on Saturday, the Juneteenth holiday commemorating when the last slaves learned they were free. “While I was watching this racial reckoning last summer, it was so clear to me that people were being heard to some degree, but there were no African American-owned platforms where people had their voice on a regular basis,” Smiley said. While the media can lose interest when protests stop, the issues “that matter to us don’t go away,” he said, adding that he also chafed at being isolated. The upside, he said, that it allowed for introspection, and “a lot” of it, as he put it.