It's The World Cup of Good Vibes 🏆🤙

🤿 Reunited five years later. Five years ago, a Thai youth soccer team visited the Tham Luang Nang Non Cave in Northern Thailand. Shortly after they entered the cave, heavy rainfall started. Quickly, they found their exit blocked by floodwaters.

What was supposed to be an hour long visit became days. In fact, it was nine days before volunteers from an elite British diving team located the boys.

Among those volunteers? A man named Rick Stanton.

Over three days, the team brought the boys to the surface. It was a miraculous rescue, not without casualties among the rescuers.

One of the boys, Adul Samon, just graduated on a full scholarship from The Masters School outside NYC, where he captained the soccer team.

The commencement speaker? None other than Rick Stanton. Finally, a five year reunion where the attendees won’t have reminisced about the good ole days but will instead have looked to the bright future that wasn’t always guaranteed.

Samon will head to Middlebury College in the fall. He had this to say: “We have to keep adjusting to the environment where you are in order to survive. You have to keep adapting your life. This is just incredible, it is this miracle. I never thought I would come this far, and I would be sitting here in the United States.”

Let that sink in - incredibly wise words from a grateful young man.

🎤 In her generosity era. Look, if you’re not a Swiftie, you’re probably pretty tired of hearing about the Eras Tour at this point. If you are a Swiftie, then you could go on about it forever. Both sides win in this case, because what we’re about to share will make anybody see the epic production in a new light.

At each stop along the tour, Taylor Swift has been making significant donations to local food banks. That included the Food Bank of the Rockies, which recently reported her generous donation would allow them to purchase enough food to provide 75,000 meals. Seventy. Five. Thousand. Meals.

She’s doing this all over the country! When the tour ends, she’ll surely have provided well over one million meals to those in need.

~ Activates local news voice ~

Karma is shaping up very kindly for Taylor Swift - she’s ensuring it won’t be such a Cruel Summer after all.

I'm John Johnson [awkwardly long pause], Case of the Mondays TV.

🎸 Grateful to the Dead! You ever wonder why older musicians keep on touring well past those prime years? Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s for the music, but Dead & Co has added a new answer in recent years: purpose.

Since 2015, the group has raised more than $4 million for charities, and the most recent tour - the final tour - was the most successful yet.

The tour wrapped this month in San Francisco, and the total funds raised from selling memorabilia exceeded $2 million. For example, the official tour guitar sold for $275,000.

Dead & Co also donated $2 from each ticket sale to various charities, including Headcount, a non-profit promoting voting rights. Another beneficiary of the charity efforts was Reverb, an organization which works to reduce concert and tour footprints, among other music-oriented and environmentally-focused efforts.

It’s encouraging to see a group with such a loyal and engaged following motivate that community into action and betterment. Dead & Co’s legacy isn’t dead at all, in fact quite the opposite. It will live for far longer thanks to these efforts. [Billboard]

💊 Alzheimer’s should be nervous… Last week, we profiled Larry Kingsley’s trumpet playing efforts in support of Alzheimer’s research. This week, we’re pleased to note that an experimental drug from Eli Lilly was shown to be effective in slowing the progression of the disease significantly - by about a third.

Coincidence?! Well yeah, probably, but it’s way more fun to assume Larry’s efforts are already beating Alzheimer’s into submission.

The drug has actually proven to be even more effective when given to a patient as early as possible, particularly when cognitive impairment remains mild. Now, this is just a trial for the time being, but the results are massively encouraging.

Think about the time with loved ones and the memories that could be saved by slowing down that terrible disease We’re approaching the day when Alzheimer’s will no longer make people forget, but instead, we’ll be able to forget about Alzheimer’s.

When that day comes, we hope Larry will be playing the happiest trumpet tunes out there.

🔔 Cancer should dread MJ. Michael "MJ" Dixon was diagnosed with leukemia at age 8. That's never great news, and it got harder upon discovering there was only a 23% chance of finding a bone marrow donor.

Unfortunately, they never did find a match for MJ.

The illness took his ability to walk and play with friends, but MJ was really fuming when chemo took away the dreads he proudly grew for two years. Now you crossed the line, leukemia, because like the other MJ - Michael Jordan - MJ Dixon took that personally.

Thanks to a trial drug, support from the community, and even Lil Boosie in his corner, MJ beat the odds and is finally cancer free after three long years.

Now it's time for him to get back to being a kid. When he rings that bell at his ceremony in early August, it'll be because he knocked cancer out cold.

MJ's story is a great reminder to support organizations like "Be the Match". You never know what awesome kid you could be helping. [KWTX]

On this day in 1982, Eye of the Tiger started a six week run at #1 on the charts.

You know what, let's do it! Everybody throw it on and turn it up on a Monday morning.

Now try to tell me you're not fired up to take on the week! No wonder it was #1 for so long. If it helped Rocky take down Clubber Lang, it can help you clobber whatever sits in your path.

When 8 year old Lyla Thomas attended a Tulsa Parade and saw a homeless person clearly not enjoying the experience, she was heartbroken.

That's why she launched Fair Share, an organization that will provide unhoused individuals with a night at the Tulsa State Fair. That’s right: an 8 year old saw something terribly out of balance with the world she wished to live in, and she launched an organization to make it better. An 8 year old.

The night out is about making a group who might be at their lowest feel included, accepted, and valued in a setting that promotes joy and fun. There's real humanity and dignity in being a part of that environment, something we might take for granted.

Thanks to Thomas, 30 people could have the chance at not only a fun night but a fresh perspective. Case workers will join them that night as well, in hopes of extending support beyond the occasion.

Lyla’s incredible compassion underscores a truth in life: when you need to be reminded about the core goodness in humanity, look to the children.

Here's hoping Lyla wins a comically enormous stuffed animal at the fair. As for the rest of us, while we can’t all be total superheroes like Lyla, maybe we can take some small step this week to make someone feel accepted and valued. [Fox 23]

🏃🏿‍♀️ You gotta have Faith. Over just the last two months, Faith Kipyegon has utterly rewritten the women’s middle-distance running records.

In early June, she broke an 8 year old record in the 1500 meters, running 3:49.11, lopping 96 hundredths off the prior mark.

Just a week later, she shocked the world, running 14:05.20 in the 5000 meters, besting the previous mark by 1.42 seconds and beating the prior record holder in the process.

Then, on Friday, she recorded her most staggering achievement yet, obliterating the women’s mile record with a time of 4:07.64. The previous record was 4:12.33!

The 29 year old mother is already a two-time world champion and two-time Olympic champion, but this is an unmatched hot streak. What’s behind it? I don’t know, but if my name was Faith, I’d steam around the track singing “You gotta have Faith, Faith, Faith” in my head until records simply fell by the wayside.

Of course, she’s an Olympic gold medalist, while I struggle mightily with shin splints.

🏸 That’s a bad man! We’re gonna cut right to the chase: nobody - AND THE ROCK MEANS NOBODY - has smacked a shuttlecock as hard as Satwiksairaj Rankireddy.

Satwik’s smash clocked 565 km/h, or 351 miles per hour, breaking a decade old record. Feathers exploding off the strings of Satwik’s racquet move faster than a Formula 1 car at top speed and some freaking airplanes. Absolute HEAT!

Dude puts the bad in badminton. You step on the court with Satwik, you better have goggles on, because a shuttlecock moving 351 miles an hour is simply not a shuttlecock you want anywhere near your face.

Why, oh why, haven’t they renamed the equipment?

🇳🇿 A Kiwi comeback story. There were several reasons to be excited about New Zealand’s 1-0 upset victory over Norway to open the Women’s World Cup. At the center of defense in that shutout effort was Rebekah Stott. It was only two years ago when Stott received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, putting an impressive football career on hold. After four rounds of chemo, she received the wonderful news that she was in remission, but she was still left with a challenging task: rebuilding her body.

Mission accomplished.

What a feeling it must have been to play in the World Cup on home soil after all she’s been through…and to deliver an upset shutout in the process. It only makes it better that the match was the most attended football match - men’s or women’s - in New Zealand history.

The New Zealand team galvanized and inspired an Auckland crowd that was left shaken by a deadly shooting of three in the city earlier that day. If you needed another story to root for in the World Cup, Rebekah Stott and the Kiwis just might be your answer.

🐐 A neat start for Messi. We talk a lot about fairytale endings, but you don’t often hear about fairytale beginnings. That’s what we were granted on Friday night, though, when Lionel Messi cemented his Inter Miami debut with a match-winning free kick straight out of his greatest hits compilation.

We know you’ve probably seen it in a million places, but that’s because it was so purely awesome. From the kick itself…

….to his immediate celebration with his family….

….to his gentlemanly acknowledgement of an injured teammate postgame.

This is the greatest player of all time, and he already not only knows his (relatively unknown) teammates’ names, but he went out of his way to honor one in a moment that could’ve belonged only to Messi.

There’s just something so awesome about a person and an event living up to impossibly high expectations.

⚽️ First day of school vibes. Watch this video and tell me it doesn’t make you smile. This is MinJae Kim, a new signing for Bayern Munich, meeting his teammates for the very first time.

fcbayern

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Look at how excited he is to be there! In a society that sometimes prefers its professional athletes to play it cool, it’s so rewarding to see one treating it like the absolute dream come true that it is.