Volume 5, Issue 64: Amour Fou

"I would dig a hole, I would climb into it, and I would not come out."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

Everyone is trying to make it through this tumultuous, disorienting, increasingly terrifying period of American history in their own way. Some people are binge-watching television. Some people are obsessively hiking. Almost everyone I know is trying to find any space of quiet calm they can. My strategy for finding that comfortable mental space is to watch a lot of sports. That might seem like an odd strategy for someone who writes about sports professionally; don’t you do that all the time? But while I’ve always tried to construct my career in way that assures and protects the joy that sports has always provided me—described in detail in a previous newsletter—at a base level I’ve still always kept a certain reserve, if just as a result of a basic human maturation process. When I was a child, or even when I was in my early ‘20s and had no real life obligations nor tangible professional arc, I could delve wholly in sports, immerse myself in them, be the guy at the sports bar all day for the first rounds of the NCAA Tournament, know every player on every team, have strong and loud opinions about everything because there wasn’t all that else important in my life and thus in many ways sports was all there was. This is how my son William watches sports, how I see a lot of young sportswriters just starting out approach sports: Like it’s the only thing that matters in the world. As you get older, it’s just impossible to do this: There’s too much else occupying your hours and your mind. You just can’t sustain it like you used to. It’s why people in their ‘40s and ‘50s get a lot worse at fantasy sports and filling out their tournament brackets; it’s also why they get so nostalgic (and, at their worse, reactionary) about The Way Sports Used To Be. They don’t miss what sports once were; they miss who they were, back when they loved sports, and needed sports, the most.

But lately? In 2025? When it comes to following sports, I’m a kid again. Sports, as a matter of their core appeal, are an escape, and I have very much needed that escape hatch over the last two months. I am still paying attention to what is happening, I couldn’t hide from that if I wanted to, but I’m also diving deep, maybe too deep, into the arcania of sports in every way possible. I can name you the rotation for every Big Ten team, as well as the KenPom rating for every team in the tournament. I’ve never been more prepared for my annual fantasy baseball draft as I am right now. I have a magnetic standings board in my office for the MLS. Oh, it’s worse than that: I actually have constructed an actual updated magnet board for the NCAA tournament, updated after every game. Here’s what it looked like after Thursday’s games:

I don’t have every team, so we have some replacements, North Texas for Troy, George Mason for Robert Morris, that sort of thing. Don’t judge me.

This is sicko behavior. But it has worked. I have been able to watch a game and have the madness of the current moment exist outside of that present reality. We are all finding our escapes—hopefully we are, hopefully you are—wherever we can, to stay sane, to stay centered, to stay healthy. This is mine. (Also: Writing, obviously. I have no idea how people keep their wits about them without being able to try to make sense of everything, to work through it all, on the page. It’s the only thing that has ever worked for me.) I am careful not to allow it to put blinders on; I am extremely aware, almost too aware, of everything happening. But I understand why, if you wanted to, sports, or anything else, could absolutely serve as those willful blinders. One of the most confusing, disconcerting aspects of living through this current moment is the sensation of seeing everything around you being torn down—of a country you love (or at least consider home) turning away from anything it has ever claimed to stand for and toward totalitarianism and relentless cruelty—and trying to figure out, to understand, how everyone else is just moving along in their lives like nothing’s happening, like everything’s normal, like this is all just part of the regular course of things. If you don’t want to know what’s happening, there are ways to make sure you don’t find out. Which of course is its own problem: The more things you don’t want to know about, the more bad things they can do. Our inattention, our desire not to have to constantly look, is what they’re counting on.

But the thing is: Real life has a way of sneaking in around the edges. Which brings us to Jackie Robinson.

On Wednesday afternoon, an article on the Department of Defense’s Website about the military service of Jackie Robinson was taken down from the Internet as part of what the current administration claims is a desire to scrub all government acknowledgments of diversity, inclusion and equality but sure looks like straight up ham-fisted racism. (It should be noted that “a desire to scrub all government acknowledgments of diversity, inclusion and equality,” however executed, should also be classified as “ham-fisted racism” in and of itself.)

This resulted in immediate disgust among the entire world of sports—led, it should be said, by ESPN’s Jeff Passan and Mina Kimes, who of course faced instant backlash from people on their own network for “politicizing” sports—and forced the administration to put the page back up in a matter of hours, claiming it was a “human mistake” to take down the page. An Outkick.com story attempted to explain this “human mistake,” in a way that merely confirmed how deranged this project was in the first place, noting that “a group of DoD employees were instructed to flag any pages that were considered to be DEI content” and that they simply made a “mistake” by flagging a page about Jackie Robinson as “DEI.” But of course there was no mistake made at all. Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, when asked about the “mistake,” said that “DEI is dead” and that while the Department of Defense “loves Jackie Robinson,” it wanted to make sure to “not view or highlight [him] through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex." The absurdity of such a statement is impossible to wrap your mind around. As if it is humanly possible to talk about Jackie Robinson without highlighting the prism of race. Hey, he just happened to be a Black guy who played baseball! No context required around that fact whatsoever!

But what mattered most about this story was not that there was outrage. It’s that this story was impossible for anyone—even those, especially those, burying their head in sports—to miss … and to not be disgusted by. And, faced with that repulsion, the administration instantly caved. (Even Ullyot, after that ridiculous statement, has been sidelined.) It has been discouraging to see so many of our institutions fail to meet this moment, particularly when those institutions are important and valued, and ones you still want to have faith in. But there is hope in the people; there is hope in this. There is something in this to build off.

Because this Robinson outrage is of course one of many—it’s actually one of the more minor ones. Hundreds of people have been arrested and shipped to a El Salvador megaprison known for human rights abuses—one they may never escape—because the administration claims, without providing any evidence other than some social media posts and a few misunderstood tattoos, they’re members of violent gangs. (One of those sent to this prison is a professional soccer player whose “offending” tattoo appears to be a variation of the Real Madrid logo.) People are being taken from their homes and their families and sent to prison simply because of their political beliefs. Judicial orders are being openly defied. The budget for cancer research is being slashed. (And kids in the middle of chemo for brain cancer are being deported.) The world no longer trusts us, or believes in us. Measles are back. Elon Musk has your social security number. Your public school may be about to lose the vast majority of its funding, as may every local charity that has ever been a part of your community. This dipshit is selling Teslas on the White House’s front effin’ lawn.

Also, this can’t be great:

This is happening. It is not a rumor. It is not a “fear.” It is all going on, right now. And it may all just be the start.

But it doesn’t have to be. Because the Robinson story tells us three things:

1. These are stupid, venal people who are are going to keep doing stupid, venal things.

2. No matter how hard you try to bury your head in the sand or pretend this isn’t happening, it will eventually find you. And it will affect your life.

3. These people will cave under even the slightest pushback.

The Robinson thing was horrible, obviously. (Passan’s word choice, “ghouls,” was correct.) But it was also instructive. It tells us that there will be mass responses to this madness, and that they can work—that they will work. It tells us that people can’t help but learn more about what’s happening, even if they actively don’t want to. And that learning can’t help but lead to disgust. After all: They also tried to take down pages about the Navajo Code Talkers, and the Tuskegee Airmen, and Colin Powell, and the anniversary of the military’s integration. People trying to hide in sports might not have seen those stories. But it all comes around to everybody in the end. In the words of Hans Gruber, sooner or later, they’re going to get to someone you do care about.

This is going to take a while, much longer than it should, and countless will be hurt in the process—countless already are. But in the despair of the moment, I will confess to finding some hope in the pockets of pushback we are seeing. I believe this pushback will be widespread—is in fact growing by the day. In the first two months after the election, many many people, from all sides of the political spectrum, checked out, for their own mental well-being, to try to figure how they’re going to keep their head above water in this new reality. But that is not sustainable. What is happening is too far-reaching, and too ghastly, to be ignored for long. The center can’t hold. People will respond. They already are. The turn is coming.

I just hope this place is still standing when it gets here.

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

1. Men’s College Basketball Is Having a Resurgence, and It’s Because of NIL and the Transfer Portal, The Washington Post. I actually think this piece is … pretty persuasive? I hope?

2. Cate Blanchett Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Black Bag.

3. What to Know Before You Fill Out Your Bracket, New York. Kinda good to remind people about the Florida coach situation, I think.

4. The Dodgers Are Already the Dodgers, MLB.com. A little quick column after the first MLB game of the year.

5. Illini Power Rankings: NCAA Tournament Edition, Illini Board. Outdated now, but it was mentally healthy to write this this year.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week.

Morning Lineup, I did Tuesday’s and Friday’s shows.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I did a Happytalk show, where we tried to find the silver lining in everything. It’s spring, after all.

HOW CAN I HELP?

As established, we’re compiling the stories of individual people who are trying to find ways to make the world a little bit better in whatever fashion they can, no matter how small. Send yours to howcanonepersonhelp@gmail.com. Today’s entry comes to us from V.:

I have, over the years, done small things to show appreciation to folks I encounter. I overtip all waitresses, even the bad ones. I worked as a waitress in college and know just how hard that job is. That bad waitress is probably having a lousy day.

I write reviews of all the businesses I frequent and post them all over social media. Good reviews, that is, for good work.

I smile and say hello to everyone I meet while walking my dog. Makes me feel good and connected.

We have a lovely lady who cleans for us. She takes every December off. We give her a generous cash gift and pay her for all the days she would have cleaned for us had she not been away.

I tell the people I’m close to how much I love them whenever I can. You just never know when you won’t have a chance to do that again. I wouldn’t want to leave my feelings unsaid.

I donate pet food to the local animal shelter…and small cash donations too.

I donate monthly to World Central Kitchen, Doctors Without Borders, the ACLU (cause we need them more, now than ever), PBS, and a variety of local organizations.

Terribly small acts I know but hopefully I do some small good. I’ve had acts of kindness come my way many times in my life and I remember them all, the big ones and the small ones. My favorite one was a hug on one of the worst days of my life from someone not given to such acts. She said everything was going to be okay. It was eventually. She’s no longer here but that I still remember that hug. It gave me hope.

We have gotten so many of these already. Please send me yours.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Americans Who Want Out,” Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Atlantic. Anecdotally: Seeing a lot of this.

Today most of Major’s clients are American. Volek’s firm has more clients from America than from the next four biggest feeder countries (Pakistan, Nigeria, India, and the U.K.) combined. Fifteen years ago, the firm did not see much point in opening a U.S. office. This year, it’s launching its tenth. “I never would have imagined my No. 1 source market would become America,” Major told me. “But now the top brass of America is hedging.”

Hedging is the operative word: Few of these Americans are actually moving abroad at the moment. It’s about having options, Volek said: “It’s purely the realization that, ‘I’m wealthy and diversified in terms of assets, bonds, and equities, so why on earth would I have one country of citizenship and residence? It makes no sense.’”

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

“Gideon,” My Morning Jacket. They’ve got a new album out, and it’s excellent. I’m still more of an old school My Morning Jacket person, though. They also might be one of the greatest rocking-out-on-a-talk-show bands of all time.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Also, currently working on a Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride Playlist.

Oh, and: We had some fun last night, did we not?

Two days in, here are your bracket leaders:

Men’s:

Women’s:

First place in the men’s bracket is currently … Asa the Turtle, the stuffed turtle my kids have had since they were babies. (He also makes a cameo appearance in The Time Has Come.)

Congrats, Asa, you are a very smart turtle.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will