Volume 2, Issue 81: I'll Fight
"If I die, I'll die alone, on some forgotten hill, abandoned by the mill."
Everybody from my particular generation growing up had that kid who only hung out at your house because you had a better video game system than they did. Their parents were stricter than yours were, or they lived in a poorer part of town than you did, or they didn’t have a divorced dad like you did who bought them too-nice birthday presents because he felt guilty about not seeing you enough and also what happened with Mom. You might have been friendly with this kid, but he (always he) wasn’t one of your closest buddies or anything and otherwise wouldn’t have had much reason to be over at your house at all. But there he was, every day all summer, in your living room, begging to play Excitebike and Metroid, and you had deal with him just because he lived down the goddamned street.
So you know: I was absolutely this kid.
The Leitch family had a brief flirtation with the now-forgotten Atari 5200 system when I was nine years old. The Atari 5200 was released as an upgrade to the 2600 system, but it wouldn’t play any 2600 games and had a strange controller that was so loose you couldn’t center it; it was discontinued only two years into its run and is thought by many to be the reason Atari ultimately lost all its market share to Nintendo and Sega. But in the Leitch household, the Atari 5200 was a magical box that the entire family would climb into and hide from the world. My father, sister and I would stay up all night playing it, games like Centipede and Pole Position and, our favorite game, Kangaroo, in which you, for some reason, played a Kangaroo who wore boxing gloves and punched strawberries while trying to dodge apples thrown by monkeys. (As one does.) I just now looked up this specific game, which has not come up once in my life since I played it, and discovered some footage of the game on YouTube. It instantly transported me back to 1984, in the den of our old house, thinking about nothing in the world but that game. I even remembered the exact sound the ringing of the bell in the game, tone for tone, 35 years later.
The Leitches, my father included, played so much of the 5200 that it was decided, with total justification, that it needed to leave the house; homework was sitting around unfinished, and leaves were starting to stack up in the yard. We never had a video game system after that. Which meant I had to go annoy the neighbors.
I played Excitebike with my cousin Denny and R.B.I. Baseball with J.P. Kirk down the road, but the game I most obsessed over, and the game that occupied my mind so much that it began to invade my dreams, was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. Taylor had that game. Taylor was a good-hearted kid who couldn’t help but always get into trouble at school, nothing serious but still consistent. He was a couple of years younger than me and the son of the nice woman who had just married my dad’s brother. (I think this made me his stepcousin? Are there stepcousins?) It was thought among the extended family that Will, who always obeyed all the rules like a chump, could spend more time with Taylor, maybe be a positive influence on him. I’m not sure that was true—though I was the one always talking him out of going out looking for his stepdad’s gun when he was at work or asleep—but I was always eager to go see Taylor anyway. I liked him, he was a sweet kid, but I loved that he had Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.
We would play that game for hours upon hours. One time my parents let me spend the night over there, and I think we played Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out for 14 hours straight. We played it so intensely that when my father came by to pick me up the next morning, the first thing I said to my Dad was, “wow, I never noticed how much you look like Piston Honda.” I don’t think I got to spend the night there for a while after that.
(Taylor and I stayed in touch for years afterward I left Mattoon. He ended up struggling with a serious drug addiction in high school, but he got himself clean and straight, and he got married and raised two awesome little kids of his own. A few years ago, he fell asleep in his easy chair, had a heart attack and never woke up. They found no drugs in his system. His body may have been just worn down. Taylor was a good dude, he really was.)
The game was addictive in every possible way. The little tricks to beat each guy, the way it legitimately became more difficult as it went along, the concentration and practice it required to take out every new boxer. And at the end, Mike Tyson, Iron Mike, the baddest man in the universe, awaited you. And he was so, so hard to beat. (Famously so: Video game experts consider Tyson one of the most difficult final bosses in video game history.) I was not, and am not, a particularly skilled or dedicated gamer, but most games, if you work hard enough at them, you can solve them. But beating Mike Tyson required absolute focus and single-mindedness: You could practice for months but if you made just one little mistake, you lost. Beating Tyson became my white whale, my Sisyphean task. I would play all night, fail and then lie in my bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying my mistakes in my mind over and over. I had to beat him. I had to make all these nights worthwhile.
I only beat him once. It was, in a cosmic coincidence so weird that I'm a little afraid my memory has made it up, the night he lost to Buster Douglas in 1990. I was 14 years old. I think I cried when I did it.
By 1990, I was more interested in girls than video games, and I didn’t play that game, or any others, for many years. I played my fair share of Madden in college, and some wrestling video games during the early stoned, underemployed years in New York, where I even had a brief flirtation with my old pal Tyson when some fellow drunken idiot brought over his old NES. But otherwise: I hadn’t thought about Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out in decades.
****************
We do not play video games in this family often. We have a PlayStation 4, but just for MLB: The Show, which we don’t play as much as we watch it simulate games against itself. (This house has a bit of a baseball addiction.) But last week, Amazon popped up a random deal in which you could buy something called an “Extreme Mini Game Box 8 Bit,” where you just plug a little HDMI drive into your television and, suddenly, you have every old Nintendo game known to man. It has Tecmo Bowl and Excitebike and The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania and all of them. It even has Contra, and yes, the UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A SELECT START code that gives you infinite lives does in fact work. This little device cost 25 bucks. We wasted so much money back in the ‘80s. We knew so little.
And it has Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.
My kids are (almost) eight and five years old now, which is too young for most video games. (I’m hoping to avoid giving them smartphones until they’re 37.) But I invited them upstairs to my office, where the little television is and where they’re usually not allowed, to show them the game that Daddy used to play. Maybe you’ll like it. It’s a fighting game!
It all came rushing back. Instinct brought back maneuvers and strategies I hadn’t thought about in more than 30 years. You beat King Hippo by punching him in the mouth and then his stomach. You have to block all of Great Tiger’s punches and then punch him when he’s dizzy. You have hit Bald Ball at the precise moment of his charge, and when you face him the second time, you can only knock him down with an uppercut. All you have to do to beat Don Flamenco is just hit him left-right-left-right-left-right until he just falls over. I had not thought about any of these things in decades. But my hands and my mind had just been waiting to use those old skills again.
My older son William saw how instantaneously his father was mesmerized by this machine, so he of course asked to play himself. I told him he could wait, and he did, patiently, so long that Daddy noticed that his his son was starting to look like Piston Honda. I finally gave him the controller so he could start his own journey. I watched him flail and flail against Glass Joe—Glass Joe! Glass Joe is so terrible!—and I felt myself go red, teeming with pure anguish that he was struggling so much, and suddenly I was Mitch Williams on the Little League field, veins bursting out of my head, just like with Taylor back in the day, come on William, block block uppercut uppercut OK NOW DUCK and I realized maybe it was time to shut the game off for a little while.
But he’s gonna beat him. William’s going to take him out, and I will be so, so proud.
William told me this morning that he stayed up last night thinking about how he could beat Glass Joe, how he just wasn’t dodging fast enough, he thinks he can get him today. He’s gonna do it, Daddy. We can do it together.
We pass on our weaknesses to our children much more than we pass our strengths. We can only hope they have the fortitude to overcome them. I pray for you, boys, and wish you godspeed. You will need all the good fortune you can get.
I’m going to get this cursed object of my house. Soon. I’m going to do it soon. I just gotta beat Iron Mike. I just gotta practice a little bit harder. I just gotta get this rock up this hill. I just gotta make it all worthwhile.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality. You may disagree. It is your wont.
Leave Bryce Harper Alone! MLB.com. The Ewing Theory isn’t real, and it was frankly always sort of dumb?
LeBron James, Just Another Employee Like the Rest of Us, New York. Two straight weeks of writing about this NBA/China story.
Data Decade: Best World Series of the Decade, MLB.com. It killed me not to make 2011 No. 1. But I just couldn’t.
When a Team Is Down 3-0, That Team Is Toast, MLB.com. This column was proven correct immediately, sad to say.
Data Decade In Print!, MLB Publications. If you happened to be at any of the NLCS or ALCS games and grabbed a program, you could find a piece I wrote in there.
Debate Club: Best Stephen King Films This Century, SYFY Wire. There were fewer of them than I had anticipated.
The Best Postseason Home Run Reactions, MLB.com. There was no way I was leaving Tom Lawless off this list.
CC Sabathia, and the Active Leaders List, MLB.com. Verlander fever, I guess.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, Grierson and I praised the fantastic Parasite, very much did not enjoy Ang Lee’s Gemini Man and had just as much of a blast watching El Camino as you did.
Seeing Red, Bernie and I stuck around to the bitter end.
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, yikes, that South Carolina game did NOT GO WELL. Anyway, we reviewed that disaster and previewed the Kentucky game, but mostly just talked about the disaster.
GET THIS LUNATIC OUT OF HERE 2020 POWER RANKINGS
I’ve been watching Bernie Sanders campaign for more than four years now, and I have to say: I’ve never been more impressed by him than I was at the debate the other night. Maybe he should have had a heart attack years ago! He was hectoring, as usual, but he was also forceful and smart and funny and appropriately, justly self-righteous. Here’s a great mashup of his night:
I didn’t vote for him last time and I’m probably not gonna vote for him this time. But I bet history is going to judge him very, very well.
Also: As someone who was once the guy’s biggest fan, lemme say: Time to go take some time off and figure out what, exactly, you’re trying to do, Beto.
By the way, I also thought the most compelling case for Joe Biden I’ve heard yet came from John Dickerson on the Slate Political Gabfest. I’ll just quote him:
If the President is not re-elected, whoever comes in next comes into a different kind of Presidency than previous Presidents would have come into. So there is going to be a lot of repair, and a lot of norm-resetting, and alliances are going to have to be handled and dealt with … there’s going to just be more reclamation work because this President has gleefully and self-proclaimedly run a disruptive, chaotic Presidency.
Perhaps the person who knows where the family heirlooms go when you walk back through after the hurricane has hit, who knows that the vase goes up on that shelf, who knows how to turn on the boiler the special way by using the funny switch in the back, perhaps that is what you want. This big full turducken of change, and this massive reorientation of the capitalist system and everything we have understood, it may be more of a reconstruction project than the other candidates will understand or be up for.
I do get this. The tornado has already leveled the house. I wonder if there is value in bringing in the person who best understands what it looked like before.
1. Elizabeth Warren
2. Amy Klobuchar
3. Cory Booker
4. Joe Biden
5. Bernie Sanders
6. Kamala Harris
7. Pete Buttigieg
8. Michael Bennet
9. Julian Castro
10. Beto O'Rourke
11. Steve Bullock
12. Andrew Yang
13. Tim Ryan
14. Tom Steyer
15. Mark Sanford
16. William Weld
17. John Delaney
18. Marianne Williamson
19. Tulsi Gabbard
20. Joe Walsh
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
Write me!
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Hold Me Anyway,” Wilco
As you might be able to tell here, I am very bad at taking pictures at rock shows, which is for the best: I’d rather, you know, be watching the show than staring at my phone. But I saw Wilco play at Brooklyn Steel on Sunday night, and not only were they terrific, it made me appreciate the new album a ton more than I had previously. I’ve now been listening to it non-stop since Sunday, and I am fully, wholly on board. This continues the streak of Wilco albums I was lukewarm on at first and ultimately became obsessed with. (The streak consists of “all of them.”)
The show I went to was streamed live on YouTube, and you can watch the whole thing below. It also contains the best version of “Impossible Germany,” I’ve ever heard.
Look at this disease I have passed onto my son:
It even says “Please Subscribe!” at the end. I am sorry to have cursed you with this too, William.
Have a great weekend, all.
Best,
Will