Volume 4, Issue 6: Dennis Eckersley

"From a frontline starter to a Hall of Fame closer ... a career arc like none other."

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

As the children who live in this house get a little older, they grow a little more autonomous. When I returned from my last trip from New York, my older son not only was already done with school, he had already walked himself home, let himself inside and started watching basketball highlights in the house by himself. (When he saw me for the first time in three days, he shrugged and snorted, “‘Sup, Dad.’” He’s 10.) But one thing they still require is someone to make their breakfast. Eventually, not long from now, they will sleepily pour Sugar Pops or something equally disgusting into a bowl next to three empty beer bottles and some cached vapes from the night before. For now, though, they still require their parents to take care of the most important meal of the day.

William likes toasted mini-bagels with cream cheese, an order temporarily interrupted by the cream cheese shortage of late last year. (When we look back at the disruptions of the pandemic, we must make sure to remember the widespread cyber attacks against our nation’s largest dairy distributors.) But Wynn is more straightforward: He just wants cereal. He just wants Honey Nut Cheerios.

Any new parent can tell you about the utility of Cheerios, a cereal I’d not thought about for 25 years until I discovered that it was one of the first solid foods your new baby is allowed to eat. (Even if now, inevitably, there’s a backlash against the idea. There has never been a technique for keeping an infant alive that didn’t end with someone telling you’re making an incredible mistake for using it.) Cheerios have been a regular part of my life for a decade now, and I know all the variations at this point, from your original recipe to Multi Grain Cheerios to Frosted Cheerios to Chocolate Strawberry Cheerios to a monstrosity called Pumpkin Spice Cheerios. But we’re a Honey Nut Cheerios family. They’re gonna tempt your tummy, with the taste of nuts and honey. It’s a honey of an O. It’s Honey Nut Cheerios.

When you have a child who eats as many Honey Nut Cheerios as my son Wynn eats, you begin to learn the intricacies of the packaging, the nutritional information, the weird coupon promotions they have every couple of months. But a month ago, the Honey Nut Cheerios box had something new and unusual and all together surreal. The back of the box did not have a picture of children on a playground, or a recipe for some weird casserole you can make using Honey Nut Cheerios, or even some sort of connect-the-dots game for kids.

No. It had a picture of Ice-T.

This picture of Ice-T:

Hit the road with coaches Ice-T and Buzz Bee! May we all live long enough to see Ice-T as the spokesperson for Cheerios. There’s even an advertising campaign, which features Ice-T as you’ve never seen him before: A mall walker.

The strangest thing about this campaign to me—and there are many strange things—is that, of all the things I think about Ice-T, “heart-healthy fitness enthusiast” is probably not among the first 30 factoids that come to mind. I mean, he doesn’t look bad or anything: If I’m hanging out doing workouts with Buzz Bee at 64—which is how old Ice-T is, by the way—I’d be perfectly happy with Ice-T’s current physique. But it seems, as an image consultant might put it, brand-adjacent.

But more to the point: There was a time in this world when Ice-T was, to much of America, one of the scariest figures on the planet. I was in high school when he, with his band Body Count, recorded the song “Cop Killer,” a brutal, impressively straightforward description of a man getting violent revenge on police officers for what they had done to his community. The song includes the lines, “I got this long-assed knife, and your neck looks just right … I hear your family’s grieving, FUCK ‘EM.” The song does not beat around the bush.

As you might expect, this sort of forthrightness about murdering police officers, released by a major label like Warner Bros, did not go over well. Then-President George H.W. Bush called the song “sick” and briefly called for a boycott of Time Warner. Record stores stopped stocking the song because local police departments said they would no longer respond to emergencies if they sold the record. And you know who was really, really mad? Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston was so mad.

That might seem funny now—Charlton Heston was always good for some unintentional comedy in the ‘90s—but it was certainly no joke at the time. Ice-T himself became so controversial that he was, amazingly, elevated to No. 2 on the FBI’s National Threat List. The song got so big that it made it all the way to Mattoon, Illinois, where I used to blast that Body Count album from the speakers on my old Ford Escort on the way to scholastic bowl practice, feeling tough, feeling brave. It was also the source of one of the biggest fights I had with my father, who could not believe that the generally respectful and well-behaved son he’d raised would listen to trash like that. But it wasn’t just a generational thing. I remember my friend Andy, when I defended the song to him on First Amendment grounds (probably because I’d read an essay in Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone, an essay I was surely parroting word for word), and he responded by saying, “Will, the chief of police here was your Little League baseball coach. You loved him! You should go recite those lyrics to him next time you see him.” It was a major cultural flash point when I was in high school; it was what we did back then, back before the parents of today discovered the efficiency of simply banning books.

Ice-T—who up to that point I only really knew through Public Enemy, which had called him “The Soldier of the Highest Degree,” and I revered Public Enemy (also thanks to Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone) so much that I knew that he must be cool—never seemed particularly rattled by any of this. This interview he did with Arsenio Hall amidst the controversy, I’d argue, holds up incredibly well today:

He was also on the cover of Time magazine at the time. He gave an interview and was impressively circumspect about his purpose: “I write to create some brain-cell activity," he insists. "I want people to think about life on the street, but I don't want to bore them. I want them to ask themselves, 'Does it matter to me?'"

But what’s most fascinating, to me anyway, about Ice-T isn’t the “Cop Killer” controversy, or how he handled it, or how, as he has pointed out in recent years, the song and the viewpoint of its (fictional) protagonist have grown both more vital and more understood over the last two years. (Even if the song itself has essentially vanished from streaming platforms.) What’s fascinating is how this global controversy—they banned him from performing in New Zealand—did not define him. Ice-T was at the center of the universe, introduced to millions and millions of people who didn’t know anything about him other than to hate him, but he just kept going. He just kept doing things, kept making things, kept on keeping on. He ended up launching a successful acting career, playing a cop no less, one of the most famous cops on television.

(While I have you, here is your reminder of John Mulaney’s classic Ice-T Discovers Things bit.)

The notion of Ice-T being on the side of a cereal box, alongside a cartoon bee, encouraging cardio exercise, surrounded by active seniors, would seem absurd to anyone who was around in 1992, including Ice-T himself. The explosion that happened in 1992—his instantly becoming one of the most famous and hated people in the world—did not stop him from living the life he wanted, the way he wanted to live it. He became an actor. He hosted television shows. He got married, is still married, for 20 years now, where they live in a big dumb mansion. He Tweets constantly. He did a voice on “Bubble Guppies.”

ICE T @FINALLEVEL

Yep, that was me on BubbleGuppies.. 👊🏽

He’s even still performing “Cop Killer.”

He just keeps making stuff, exactly the way he wants to. He’s still a little surprised by all of it too.

“There was a phase in my life that, of course, nobody would touch me,” he says. “I was toxic, way back from the ‘Cop Killer’ days. And when you’re dealing with these corporations, it’s a lot of people who have to sign off on endorsements. It’s not that simple, because connecting to the wrong person could fuck up their shit. I was down to do some endorsements, but people just didn’t think I could do it.

“And when we did the GEICO thing, everybody braced for impact like, ‘OK, they’re going to attack GEICO for using Ice-T.’ And nothing happened. It was a well received, happy commercial. And what happened was, we realized that all the people who were scared of Ice-T are gone.”

Ice-T just kept picking them up and setting them down, for 30 years, and he ended up outlasting everyone. He changed his own story, on his own terms, simply by living a long time and never stopping. There’s a lesson in that. Your life is never stuck where it is, no matter what happens to you. The arc of life is vast: There is always time left.

I’m reminded of the great obit of Miss Blankenship on “Mad Men:"

“She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

Ice-T went from the FBI’s Threat List to the back of a Cheerios box. The world keeps on turning. It can turn whatever direction you want it to. It can turn whatever direction you make it. There is always, always time.

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

1. Batman Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Batman.

2. Getting Used to the New Post-Mask World, Medium. My older son still wears his mask to school; my younger son couldn’t burn his fast enough.

3. Player of the Week History: Mike Felder, MLB.com. Little people unite!

4. How the Sports World Has Reacted to the Ukraine Invasion, New York. Something people can agree on, apparently.

5. Who’s the American Movie Version of Version of Zelensky? Medium. I went with Steve Carell.

6. Your Friday Five, Medium. Cracks knuckles, stretches.

PODCASTS

The Long Game With LZ and Leitch, we discussed Ukraine, MLB labor issues and Phil Mickelson.

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “The Godfather” and “Brewster McCloud.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

Matt Norlander Archive, CBS Sports. I pretty much have college basketball tunnel vision right now, so if you’re getting caught up just in time for the tournament, you’ve got to read everything Matt Norlander writes. Norlander is the most plugged-in, underappreciated college basketball reporter on earth, and just the personification of why I love the sport. Also my son regularly falls asleep to his and Gary Parrish’s podcast.

Also, I’ve praised Slate’s Lili Loofbourow’s terrific essays here before, and I think this piece about the Ukrainian information campaign—and how it successfully, and justifiably, plays on “the West”’s nostalgia for simple World War II narratives—is absolutely masterful. I wish I could write like she does.

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! (And I’m finally all caught back up on these.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Forgotten Eyes,” Big Thief. The Big Thief obsession continues. The best music to me has always sounded like it sprung directly from my brain … which is to say, it sounds like what life sounds like. This band makes my feet vibrate.

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

We had Super Bowl-winning Rams coach Sean McVay on The Long Game podcast this week. Someone in this house noticed he was on the screen and slowly, quietly, sneaked up behind me to see. This certain someone ended up making a cameo on the podcast and even got to ask coach if he would quit the Rams and coach the Browns instead.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Best,
Will