Volume 3, Issue 1: Sometimes It Happens
"You wonder if these things matter, and then they cease to matter."
On Thursday night, Ohio State celebrated the 60th anniversary of its beloved 1959-60 men’s basketball team. That team won a national championship, but lots of teams have national championships; that’s not what makes that team special. What makes it special is that is had three of the most famous human beings in the history of basketball:
Jerry Lucas. One of the most intelligent players ever, Lucas made seven NBA All-Star teams, was part of NBA’s 50th Anniversary all-time team and teamed with Oscar Robertson to beat the favored Soviets at the 1960 Rome Olympic games. (He is most well-known for being a guest on my old Sports On Earth podcast.)
John Havlicek. A 13-time NBA All-Star, an eight-time NBA Champion and fellow member of the NBA’s 50th Anniversary team. He is one of the most beloved Boston Celtics ever and died last year at the age of 79.
Bob Knight. The legendary and highly controversial Indiana basketball coach (and avid Donald Trump supporter) was a backup forward for that team, one who an Ohio State assistant coach, amusingly, called “a hot dog.”
They are all now old men: Knight, in particular, is beaten down and broken, that notorious fury and fire extinguished. (He is reportedly gravely ill.) But they were not always these legends. Back in 1960, they were just kids. Back then, they had no idea how this was all going to turn out.
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I’ve always wanted to be part of a crew. It’s harder to have a crew when you’re a grownup. The only real crews I know of as grownups are people who have stuck with the exact same crew since college, usually old fraternity brothers trying to relive college over and over, and this is often more indicative of arrested development than some sort of lasting bond. As an adult, you stay in touch with all your old friends, and you spend time with them every chance you get, but lives inevitably diverge. Packs scatter. I hung out with the same four people essentially every day from 2001-05, and I’ve seen them, combined, a total over about eight times in the last five years. I’m not sure you really live a full life and keep a crew together indefinitely.
But there is something exciting about the concept, the idea that you and the young, hungry people who surround you are a part of something special and lasting, something that they’ll be talking about for decades. It’s not just a crew; it’s a movement.
Here’s something really cool to say in the year 2020: I’m going to talk about a Woody Allen movie for a second. (For newcomers, see Newsletter 153 for thoughts on Woody Allen.) One of the many appealing things about Allen’s Midnight In Paris is how it captures the fascination we have with imagining what it would be like to have everyone we know end up being a part of history. In the case of that movie, Owen Wilson’s Gil wakes up and is living in the dazzling 1920s Paris arts scene, the moveable feast, where Picasso and Dali and the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and Degas and Josephine Baker and Gertrude Stein and Cole Porter and T.S. Eliot are all sleeping with each other and on each other’s couches, absolutely convinced they are the most fabulous people on the planet, people whose every movement biographers would document for future generations. Every group of creative young people thinks that. This one just happened to be right. Who wouldn’t want to be around to see that? This makes the movie’s overarching theme, that nostalgia is poison, hit home that much harder: Lamenting what is in the past will destroy you, even if what is in the past was incredible.
But it’s such a romantic idea! When I moved to Los Angeles after I graduated from college, I would always hang out with Grierson and all of his USC Film School buddies. Because we were all dorks, we would spend every weekend seeing movies; on Friday, the big studio release, on Saturday, the indie, and we’d go to a diner and all talk about them afterwards. It was so exciting! I’d find myself looking around the table, wondering which member of our group was going to be George Lucas and which was going to be Steven Spielberg. At 21 years old, you’re sure everybody’s going to end up doing what they dream they’re going to do. I imagined being the Roger Ebert among them, the critic who documented all their brilliance, who knew them from the beginning, before their films changed the world. But the world doesn’t turn out that way. The world turns out that just about all of them became lawyers. (Exceptions include Grierson, filmmaker Lucky McKee and this guy.) But that sensation is intoxicating. When you are young, you want to feel that you are a part of something larger than yourself. You want this all to matter.
The closest I’ve ever come to this was probably being a part of Gawker Media in its early days. This will seem impossible to believe now, but there was briefly a stretch, when that place was really rolling, when it was just cool and smart and messy and everyone was hungry, when being involved with Gawker Media made you feel like you were on the vanguard of an entirely new media ecosystem. I didn’t ever work in the office, so it’s not like I sat alongside these people on a daily basis, but just to be a part of a place with that much talent everywhere you looked was staggering. Choire Sicha. Gina Trapani. Jessica Coen. Mark Lisanti. Alex Balk. Ana Marie Cox. Anna Holmes. Maura Johnston. I honestly thought we were going to take over the world.
We did not actually take over the world, as it turned out. (You can get a document of how all this stuff went down in a Kindle Single, “Gawker: An Oral History.”) I hadn’t thought about this time in a while, actually, until reading my friend Emily Gould’s sad, disturbing piece for The Cut a couple of weeks ago, “Replaying My Shame.” Reading that piece did not make me nostalgic for the old days. It made me feel gross about them. And it informed me of a whole scene there that I knew nothing about … and that I was retrospectively fortunate to be ignorant of. Sometimes they do end up writing about the important times you were a part of. But those times don’t always turn out looking so good.
When I look back now, what matters isn’t that I was ever a part of any sort of big moment in history, at the forefront some sort of revolutionary era. None of that ended up lasting. But the people I met from that time, people who, 15 years later, are still a part of my life, that’s what lasts. Maybe we’re not all in lockstep all the time. Maybe we don’t check in on each other as much as we should. Maybe life hasn’t necessarily ended up the way we all thought it might. But something, for whatever reason, has still stuck after all these years. We are still connected, still bonded, still … friends. There are no movements, no vanguards, no revolutions. There are just people, decades later, stumbling around in the dark just everybody else, like they always have, trying to find someone who has been there with them, someone who understands, who can help them through. That’s all the legacy we ultimately need.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.
The Mascot Wars Will Never, Ever End, New York. It remains astounding that, 20-plus years after we Daily Illini staffers were exhausted about fighting over Chief Illiniwek, and 13 years after he officially went away, we are still fighting over Chief Illiniwek.
Mike Petriello and I Did an 2020 MVP Prediction Draft, MLB.com. We’ve got more of these coming, weekly, until the season starts.
Five Takeaways From the Christian Yelich Extension, MLB.com. I do enjoy doing quick news reacts like this. I type really fast.
Review: “Onward,” Paste Magazine. My now-monthly movie review, I guess.
Takeaways From Fangraphs’ Preseason MLB Playoff Odds, MLB.com. The NL Central is very confusing.
The Thirty: The Highest-Paid Player in 2020 on Every Team, MLB.com. The Diamondbacks one is remarkable.
Debate Club: Best Non-Fast/Furious Vin Diesel Roles, SYFY Wire. Sure.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, two shows this week. First, Grierson and I discuss The Invisible Man, The Graduate and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Then, in a Grierson & Leitch: Conversations episode, I preview the MLB season with Joe Sheehan and Rany Jazayerli.
Seeing Red, Bernie and I discuss what exactly the Cardinals are going to do with Dylan Carlson.
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.
MAILBAG
We take one question a week around these parts: Send yours to williamfleitch@yahoo.com. This one comes from “an old Saluki football player who appreciates Cardinals baseball as much as you do, who's been to your hometown multiple times and can verify it's a slice of workingman's heaven, mostly, and as one who thinks your writing is usually a bright spot in a nation that, sadly, is increasingly dim.”
is this the saddest song you ever heard and, if not, what is?
Wooof. For those of you who don’t know Tom Waits’ “Georgia Lee,” it’s a song about Georgia Lee Moses, a 12-year-old African-American girl from Petaluma, California (where Waits was living at the time) who was abducted and killed in 1997. When Moses’ body was found, she’d been missing for nearly two weeks, and no one had even reported her disappearance. No one knew she was gone until her body was found. The case, to this day, remains unsolved. The song is despairing, with its haunting “Why wasn’t God watching?” chorus, but this is the part that just knocks me to the floor:
Close your eyes and count to ten
I will go and hide but then
Be sure to find me, I want you to find me
And we'll play all over
We'll play all over
We'll play all over
Again
Yeah … it’s tough to beat that one. Other options off the top of my head:
“Country Feedback,” R.E.M.
“Elephant,” Jason Isbell
“Exit Music (For a Film),” Radiohead
“If You See Her, Say Hello,” Bob Dylan
“Waitin’ for Superman,” The Flaming Lips
I’m open for suggestions. Let’s wallow together.
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
About to go to Florida for a week for the rugrats’ Spring Break. I’d love letters to be waiting. I miss you all.
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Paper in Fire,” John Mellencamp. Every time I go home, I go through a bit of Mellencamp run for a month or so. It happens. Nothing to be alarmed about. Just stop picking at it.
In eight days, Illinois’ name will be mentioned on Selection Sunday. This has taken way, way too long, but the wait was still worth it.
Have a great weekend, all.
Best,
Will
Andy Kaufman and Deon Thomas!