Volume 3, Issue 71: Common Sense

"One moment I beg, I bolt, on a thousand legs."

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The track record of the oral history has become increasingly spotty in recent years—I have never actually reported out an oral history, myself, though I’ve been part of the focus of one—but there’s a particularly great one this week in The Ringer, by John Gonzalez. It’s the oral history of “Pros Vs. Joes,” the old Spike TV show that aired 15 years ago (and is in the process of being rebooted, albeit in a more family-friendly way.) The piece is excellent, but what Gonzalez does the best job of is pointing out just how dangerous “Pros Vs. Joes” was. In theory, the idea of retired professional athletes displaying their physical supremacy over regular schmucks is mildly amusing, but in practice, you have these top-tier athletes, still not quite adjusted to their careers being over and desperate for the bloodlust of competition, performing in an unregulated competition against a series of dopes and jackasses who have no idea the monster they are unleashing.

Of the many, many great anecdotes, here was my favorite, involving boxer Arturo Gotti:

The heyday of “Pros Vs. Joes” happened to coincide with my time founding and running Deadspin, and, for no other reason that my own morbid fascination, the show was the one time I broke the Deadspin rule of not engaging with public relations or advertising people. The producers of the show did a series of promotional events and invited me to compete every time. I never said no. I’d go, compete, fail and then write about it on the site. Hey, sometimes it’s good for bloggers to get out of the house.

The first event was the smallest, but ultimately most consequential: I went to Bryant Park to attempt to hit off John Rocker. It did not go well—I struck out on three pitches—but I ended up talking to Rocker at the event and setting up an interview. That interview, with his bodybuilder girlfriend, became what remains my favorite section of God Save the Fan.

The second event was at Grand Central Station, where they’d set up a tiny football field where commuters, along with myself and my then-Deadspin deputy A.J. Daulerio, could play a short pickup game against Andre Rison and Kordell Stewart. They smoked us both right quick. The highlight was when I attempted to guard Rison on an out pattern and he not only burned me, he ran the pattern in a matter that made me run face first into a pylon in the middle of the field. This pylon:

(Terrific photos from Aileen Gallagher, the only friend I have who would get up at 5:30 in the morning to take photos of two idiot friends making asses out of themselves.)

The final humiliation was at Madison Square Garden, as part of the book promotion for God Save the Fan. It didn’t really matter whom I was playing against—I was playing basketball at Madison Square Garden!—but it was Daulerio and me again, suiting up against Charles Oakley and Antonio Davis. The goal was to avoid Murder by Oakley.

What I find remarkable about both Gonzalez’s oral history and going back and revisiting those old “Pros Vs. Joes” sojourns is how incredibly old it all seems now. I was 32 years old when we played against Charles Oakley, and the idea such an event could occur—the idea that I’d go diving for a loose ball and land on John Starks’ feet—without everyone involved either being encased in bubble wrap or surrounded by lawyers seems absolutely crazy. Gonzalez notes in his piece how the idea of any of these Joes getting, you know, concussed was hardly even considered; liability waivers were signed, but you can only do so much when Arturo Gotti has smoke coming out of his ears. (There were also no female Joes, which, if they remake this, may be the exact opposite of what happens in a potential reboot.) A new version would be much more scrubbed down, much safer, much more careful. Reading about the show now feels like your grandparents telling you how cars never used to have seat belts, or how people used to die of whooping cough.

Times have just changed so much, and so fast, in so many ways. “Pros Vs. Joes” was only 15 years ago, and running the show now like they did then is utterly unfathomable. It feels like we just did this, and now we’re looking back at it like it came from some mesozoic era.

The world turns and turns and turns, and things that seemed acceptable yesterday are violently not so today. It can be disorienting, to see the ground shift underneath us, to learn that the way we thought the world was turns out to be considerably different. But this is how it’s supposed to work. Time is supposed to make us smarter. You think everything is fine, no problems here, and then one day you look back 15 years later and you see Arturo Gotti punching some random person in the face on national television and you think why in the world did we think this was OK? This is what getting older is supposed to be, I think, but rarely is. Not looking back bathed in warm nostalgia, but instead in bewildered, head-shaking befuddlement. We all used to be involved in a lot worse things than “Pros Vs. Joes.” The goal is to learn, to realize that the way things have always been aren’t the way they’re always supposed to be. We’re smarter now than we were then. And thank God, and Charles Oakley, for that.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Extremely Selective Outrage About Cheating in Sports, New York. This is something I’ve been trying to nail down for a while, and I got somewhat close here, I think.

2. Your All-Star Game Voting Guide, MLB.com. This one annoyed Reds fans, though the joy of not spending all day on Twitter is that you only hear about all that later and it doesn’t affect your life one whit.

3. America Is a Covid Outlier Again (In a Good Way), Medium. It’s OK to be happy when things improve. It really is.

4. This Week in Genre History: War of the Worlds, SYFY Wire. Kind of a big anniversary coming up.

5. Let Giannis Take His Time Shooting Free Throws, GQ. This was written back when he was, you know, standing upright.

6. When Do We Call the Pandemic “Over” in the United States? Medium. Not yet. But maybe soon?

7. Your June MLB All-Stars, MLB.com. I did not pick Shohei for every position, but I wanted to.

8. Internet Nostalgia: Snakes on a Plane, Medium. I lived through this and honestly thought it was going to be the biggest thing in the world.

9. Ten Surprising Teams, For Better or Worse, MLB.com. Cardinals fell on the wrong side here.

10. The Thirty: Every Team’s Most Surprising Player, MLB.com. Positive surprises only on this one.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “F9,” “False Positive” and “I Carry You With me.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I had our best, most frustrated show ever, I think.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week. But going weekly very soon.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Donald Trump’s January 6,” Michael Wolff, New York. Is Michael Wolff shady? Yes. Definitely. I still injected every word of this into my eyeballs. I feel guilty about it, but I will not lie about it.

To wash that stink off, here’s January 6 Revisited done correctly, from The New York Times video team, with the utmost journalistic rigor … and it’s even more compelling and upsetting.

ARBITRARY THINGS RANKED, WITHOUT COMMENT, FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON

Baseball Months

1. October

2. April

3. September

4. May

5. August

6. June (unless Shohei Ohtani goes absolutely nuts during it)

7. July

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

I finally am making some real progress on the bookplates. (Perhaps yours arrived this week.) I will be done with them soon, and then we may recommence our correspondences.

I promise. Keep writing. I will get caught up!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“True Dark,” Murder by Death. Someone who ordered a bookplate, and whose email requesting one I finally got to, told me to start listening to Murder by Death and … down that rabbit hole I’ve gone. I think I’m finally using Spotify correctly: To just immerse myself in the discography of a band for days at a time. I have been living with this band all week.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

You can tell it is now summer because the children are attacking.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will