Volume 4, Issue 2: Will Clark

"To get to go out on top, on your own terms, Will the Thrill got to do that."

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This week, a man named Mark Whicker retired from his job. I do not know Mark Whicker, but as I’ve gotten older, I find myself thinking about him quite a bit.

Mark Whicker, until Tuesday, was a columnist for the Southern California News Group. “Southern California News Group” is the sort of blanket name you see all the time in media today, the name you give a shell corporation that basically houses the husk of what were once great American newspapers. “Southern California News Group” includes the Los Angeles Daily News, the San Bernardino Sun, the Orange County Register and many other once-unique regional newspapers that now generally have three or four full-time reporters and fill the rest of the paper with Associated Press copy. What has happened to the local newspaper over the last 20 years is a tragedy, and potentially disastrous for our democracy. It hurts the soul to think about it.

Whicker was the very definition of a dinosaur in the industry: He was a newspaper sports columnist, one of the few still left standing. He wrote his first column for the Orange County Register 35 years ago, and he timed his retirement so that he could write his final column on the anniversary of that one. His last column is wistful and heartfelt, and one I found weirdly nostalgic. It is written in the sort of free-flowing, leisurely, just-filling-column-inches-here style that newspaper sports columnists employed for decades before that format, and that lackadaisical structure, would be obliterated by the Internet.

I am sure that columnists like Whicker would argue that filing that many words on deadline three times a week is harder than it looks, and while I will grant that writing is inherently challenging for all sorts of different people for all sort of different reasons, I will also confess that the idea that writing a rambling sports column without a clear thesis, foundation, supporting evidence or specific voice is somehow harder than doing literally anything other than that is not easy for me to comprehend. But hey. It was a different time. The guy did it for 35 years. Lots of people would have loved to have done that for 35 years. They didn’t. He did. Good for him.

But when I saw that Mark Whicker was retiring, I didn’t think of his career, or that last column, or the crumbling, private-equity-parasitic world of local newspapers. I thought about that time that Mark Whicker Left The Yard.

It was September 2009, roughly 15 months after I left Deadspin, when Mark Whicker wrote the infamous Orange County Register column with the purposely bland headline “Many odd things have happened in sports the past 18 years.” (As Tommy Craggs, whose takedown of the piece was Deadspin legend back when people weren’t ashamed to say the word “Deadspin” aloud, put it: “For my money, the hero here is the poor copy editor, who had the unenviable task of writing the headline atop the single worst piece of sports journalism ever committed to the page: ‘Many odd things have happened in sports the past 18 years.’ A fine choice — almost intentionally bland, as if to tell the reader, ‘Nope, nothing to see here, might I suggest you check out the lifestyle section?’")

Whicker’s column was tied to the 2009 freeing of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who in 1991, at the age of 11, was abducted by a man named Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender, and his wife Nancy. Dugard was walking toward her school bus in Lake Tahoe when Garrido jumped out at her, tased her and dragged her into his car. He drove to the Garrido home 120 miles away and enslaved her in his backyard for 18 years. He raped her repeatedly and impregnated her twice, the first time at the age of 14; he was only caught, in 2009, because he took Dugard’s two daughters to the Cal-Berkeley campus hoping to hold a special event there about how he had cured his “deviant sexual desires.” Berkeley officials were suspicious and called the police, who then entered Garrido’s home, discovered Dugard and ultimately freed her. Two years later, Dugard wrote a bestseller, A Stolen Life, about the horrors and how she survived them. She now runs The JAYC Foundation, a highly influential organization dedicated “to helping families and individuals that have experienced a severe crisis.” But in 2009, we didn’t know any of that. We just knew about this horrible thing that had happened to this poor girl.

Whicker, surely on a deadline, surely knowing that if he didn’t come up with something to write about that day there would be a big blank space in the newspaper (or else they’d find someone to fill it if he couldn’t), looked around for an idea and couldn’t find one. So he looked at the Dugard story and thought, sports angle. A primary trope of sportswriting is the forced perspective of time: Because there are so many sports going on constantly, and these sports often have random and unpredictable outcomes, you can always point to a time in the past and say, “who would have thought, way back when, that this would have happened?” (You saw a lot of this in the last week: Who would have thought in 1998 that Drew Henson’s backup at Michigan would end up the greatest quarterback of all time? The answer is always “no one,” but this question is nevertheless asked constantly.) So Whicker decided that he’d write about all the things Dugard had missed in the world of sports while she was locked up in a shed for 18 years, being raped and imprisoned by monsters.

It begins “It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.” And it goes downhill from there. Other highlights include “She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while.” and “Dugard's stepfather says she's going to need a lot of therapy - you think?” and, the piece de resistance, the kicker:

Ballplayers, who always invent the slang no matter what ESPN would have you believe, came up with an expression for a home run that you might appreciate.

Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.

Craggs, in his takedown, was careful to note that Whicker “is not a bad columnist by any means.” (Craggs was actually gentler than he was given credit for at the time, and perhaps gentler than Whicker deserved.) But the backlash—largely because of just how massive and influential Deadspin was at this specific moment—was overwhelming. Such was the reaction that Whicker actually apologized that day, saying, “It’s impossible to unring a bell or to bring back a column that has already been transmitted. In many ways the damage is done. I’m hopeful that I can be forgiven for this lapse of professionalism by those who were affected most profoundly. I’ll try to earn back the trust of those customers in my future endeavors.”

On that day, Whicker was, as we now think of it, “Twitter’s main character,” the person everyone all jumps all over and mocks and dunks on. But of course we weren’t all using Twitter at the time. People blogged about it—not as well as Craggs did, obviously—and made fun of him, and I’m sure it was a deeply unpleasant experience for him. It’s not fun to be in the middle of one of those shitstorms, trust me.

But it happened, and then it was over. And he kept going. Whicker just kept on writing columns like he always did. Sure, the Leaving The Yard column shows up higher on Whicker’s Google search than he’d probably like it to, but you don’t write for 35 years and stay sane by constantly worrying about where you show up in Google Search. Deep down, who really cares what’s on your Google search? You still have to get up in the morning and breathe air all day like everybody else.

Whicker put his head down and kept working. For 13 years after that column, the one all the punk kids like us made fun of, the one called “the worst sports column of all time,” he held onto a freaking sports columnist job at a newspaper, a job that has evaporated as quickly as any in American industry over the last 13 years. And you know what? He outlasted everybody. He outlasted Craggs. He outlasted Deadspin. He outlasted blogs. Were all the columns brilliant? No. Did he write something so lasting that the Leaving the Yard column vanished forever? I would submit that he did not. But who among us ever makes something brilliant and lasting? Who among us even tries? Mark Whicker got up every day and wrote, over and over, some of it good and some of it bad, for 35 years. And then, at the end, he got to decide when he was going to retire. He decided when he was done. He didn’t get laid off and forced to go work in some other field. He didn’t watch his career go up in flames. He grinded it out, for 35 years, and then decided he was done. He made it to the end.

There as a time I would have mocked that, I would have found the idea of grinding out a career writing uninspired, safe, but consistently competent columns for 35 years deeply depressing. But I’m older now. I still think I’m ambitious and inspired: I’m still out there trying to make something great, even if I never get there. But that life and career that Whicker put together? I dunno: That sure seems like victory to me now.

I’ve been a professional writer for, oh, 17 years now, or 21, depending on your definition of “professional” and “writer.” (I’d mark it as beginning with Deadspin in March 2005, but the business publications who paid me to be a pretty-lousy staff writer for them from 2002-05 might not love that I didn’t consider their writing work “real” writing work. It sure did pay the “real” bills more than any “real” writing was at the time.) I’m 46 years old now. I say yes to everything, every assignment, every opportunity, because you never know when it’s going to all go away, because I remember what it was like when no one wanted me to write for them at all and no one wanted to read anything I was writing and I never want to take any of that for granted. But I’m getting older now. I still write at the same insane pace I did for Deadspin 17 years ago. I love it. I’m so lucky to get to do it. Writing all day is literally all I ever wanted to do with my life, and now I get to do it. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift I ever asked for.

But: Am I sure I want to push like this forever? Do I want to be 74 years old and constantly sprinting around, pounding away on every assignment, saying yes to every opportunity, barely sleeping and always working? Do I really want to die at my desk? Or is there a point that I want to take a break? To travel; to take a breath; to relax? I do not know if I will ever hit that point. I do not know if I want to. But I do see the appeal of, someday, saying, “I made it. I set out to make a career as a writer, and then I did it, and now I’m going to sit back and play with the grandkids and watch the sun go down.” It seems normal. It seems like victory.

Mark Whicker got that victory. The day he retired, I saw his announcement and immediately texted Craggs.

“He’s leaving the yard,” I texted him, with a link to his farewell column.

“This makes me sad,” Craggs texted back.

And he was right, of course. It made me sad too. But it didn’t make me sad for Whicker. It made me sad for something that we’d lost—a time when things were different, a time that was fun but had to end. And it made me sad that I hadn’t seen then what I can now see, no matter how bad that column might have been: There is value in just working through it, in just picking them up and setting them down, in outlasting everyone and everything until you decide it’s time to move on—to go be a normal person like everybody else.

There was a time when I would have sent out something on social media, something snide, something that reminded everyone of Whicker’s Dugard column, something that would have made me feel clever and ironic and wry. But I am not that person anymore, and I am glad not to be. Whicker posted his retirement column and received thank-yous and plaudits from colleagues, many of whom I know and respect, as well as hundreds of people who had been reading him over the last four decades. He got to have his day, and I wasn’t going to step on it, and I was glad no one else did either. He had earned it. It’s the freaking American Dream. I’ve never met Mark Whicker. But I was happy for him. I was proud of him. May the rest of us someday be so lucky.

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

1. Everybody Loves Tom Brady (Now), GQ Magazine. I was in the middle of something when word broke Saturday that Tom Brady was retiring, but when GQ asked if I’d write something up, I told them I had 45 minutes. So this is what I came up with in 45 minutes. That’s not too bad for 45 minutes, is it?

2. Tom Brady Was Never a MAGA Guy, NBC News. Sorry, but he wasn’t. I wish it were true too.

3. The Rise of Joe Burrow, GQ Magazine. It is the opinion of this “commentator” that we are not as a nation collectively happy enough for Bengals fans.

4. The Six Different Ways People Are Handling Covid Right Now, Medium. Just a little observational riff here.

5. Old Guys Are Having Their Day in Sports, New York. Who needs PEDs? (OK, probably them too.)

6. Player of the Week History: Rob Deer, MLB.com. Still got a backlog of these to run.

7. Spotify-Like Protests Are the Future of Online Protests, Medium. You can’t just make people hate the brand; you have to make them hate the product.

8. The Best MLB Players Born on November 21, MLB.com. One of the ways we’re trying to keep ourselves busy is by filling in all 366 days on the calendar with the best players to have a birthday on that date. This is my son William’s birthday, so I took this one. Also it would be awesome if baseball came back.

9. The Friday Five, Medium. I know I say this every newsletter, but it really is nice having a final punctuation mark for one’s week.
   

   PODCASTS
   

   

The Long Game With LZ and Leitch, we talked about Brady, the conference championships and the least anticipated Olympics anyone can remember. Anyway, listen, and also note that you can watch our Twitch show live at 12:30 ET on Tuesdays.

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, back next week.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week, back after the Super Bowl.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Rampaging Pigs of the San Francisco Bay Area,” Thomas Fuller, The New York Times. This piece is pretty straightforward, but I have to say, the fact that feral pigs are destroying whole swaths of the East Bay suburbs is … kind of hilarious? Sorry?

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Lights,” Band of Horses. Of the three songs that have been released off the upcoming Band of Horses album—which has been delayed, seriously, because of the vinyl shortage—this is my favorite one. If you are ever amidst a disagreement with someone about what to listen to, just put Band of Horses on and it will be immediately resolved.

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

It’s going to be OK, all. Have a great weekend.

Best,
Will