Volume 5, Issue 78: Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

"Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men?"

The book is out. People tend to like it, I think. I hope you have bought your copy. If you have not, there is no time like the present: Buy now. If you have already bought the book, you are encouraged to leave it a review on Goodreads or Amazon, or both. It helps.

Longtime newsletter readers know that the winners of the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament brackets we hold every year get to assign me a newsletter topic. The person who won the men’s bracket, “sergestorm,” has yet to claim their prize—if it’s you, please let me know—but the winner of the women’s bracket was my friend Robert Wolfe, a Georgia football diehard and a dedicated listener of the Waitin’ Since Last Saturday podcast. Today, I fulfill his newsletter assignment.

Here it is:

I always thought I would get you to write about the top 20 things Trump has done well as President, but I am just over politics in general and I don’t want to cause any anxiety. Hopefully this will be more light hearted and fun. I would like for you to rank sports by skill level. You can expand or limit it as much as you want. For example, you could keep it to Olympic and professional sports, or you could include social games like pool. I would at least like to see a top 10. I go back and forth as to whether I would put golf or hockey at the top. I mean there are tons of good golfers, but in my mind golf takes a lot of skill and only elite players play at the top level. Takes a lot of skill to hit many different types of shots. Hockey players have to skate on thin blades, forwards, backwards, follow a speeding puck, have good puck control to receive passes, and be able to fight. On the flip side, darts, bowling and pool do not require much skill. Curling may be entertaining during the Winter Olympics, but does it require a lot of skill? Football requires speed, size, and physicality, but skill? You rank them, it is your newsletter.

I am appreciative of Robert—whose political views, fair to say, do not align with mine—not wanting to cause me anxiety, though I’d argue the problem with his “20 things that Trump has done well” is less about agita and more about being able to stick to basic human facts and truth. Coming up with 20 is inconceivable; I could maybe cobble together five if you let me count his first term, perhaps 10 if I include things he indirectly did in an entirely accidental fashion. (I feel like I should somehow credit him for ridding us of Michael Avenatti, for example.) I find it telling that Trump’s signature achievement, which I think he not only deserves unreserved credit for but in fact is a triumph that he pulled off in a way that, say, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden never would have, is something that he now entirely runs away from: The rapid production of a life-saving vaccine to help get us out of the worst public health crisis in 100 years. His push for Operation Warp Speed—which Hillary and Biden would have been far more cautious about, and which many people, myself included, mocked at the time, largely because of that very stupid name—saved millions of lives and is the sort of uniquely American accomplishment (that required cooperation between government, scientific expertise, engineering and capitalism) that once distinguished this nation as truly great. But, of course, because his conspiracy-brain base now has gone full vaccine-defiant, Trump now pretends that didn’t happen, that he wasn’t responsible for this incredible feat of American production—just one of the many cruel and idiotic ironies of this wretched time: Even when he does something right, his relentless ego and ingrained instinct to destroy ends up going back on it to make things 100 times worse. Honestly: This fuckin’ guy.

This is to say: 20 was never gonna happen. So yeah. Let’s talk about difficult sports.

I think we have to limit to professional sports. This is not because Olympic sports are not real sports and that they don’t count. Quite the opposite: They’re so insanely difficult, and so resolutely specialized, that they seem impossible. The people who master them are so incredible that they’re almost unrelatable. I mean, look at what Simone Biles does here:

(That video was swiped from Tim Burke, by the way.)

A human being should not be able to do that. Again: That’s impossible. How could that not be No. 1? Then again, how could I not pick, say, Olympic water polo, which requires:

a: Being a top-shelf swimmer;
b: Having the arm of an MLB pitcher;
c: Being able to tread water for hours.

I’m amazed there are enough people on the planet who can do all those things to even field one team, let alone an entire competition.

So I’m going to just pick the following sports, and rank them.

• Baseball/softball.

• Basketball.

• Football.

• Golf.

• Hockey.

• Soccer.

• Tennis.

You may find this list too limiting, and I don’t necessarily disagree. But I can’t write about every sport, so let’s just stick with the ones I know well enough to rank.

Also, a note on methodology. You can go about this two different ways. You can rank them by difficulty to play, or you can rank them by difficulty to master. Maybe basketball is easier to play than hockey—walking is easier than skating, after all—but to achieve at the highest level, to be LeBron James, strikes me as even harder than being Wayne Gretzky. (Again, you may disagree.) I think I’m going to hedge and pick something in the middle here, under a single guiding principle: Which sport is hardest to be competent at? Some sports I can get better and better at simply by repetition, but there is an inevitable ceiling: You either have it or you don’t. To get from “never played this sport” to “hey, they know what they’re doing playing that sport” … what’s the hardest to get to? That’s how I’m ranking these.

But to be clear: These are all very hard.

7. Tennis.

Of all these sports, this might be my single favorite sport to casually play. It’s a sport that comes naturally, I think: You just hit the ball back to where it came from. Mitch Hedberg had the classic bit about no matter how good you get at tennis, you’ll never be as good as a wall:

There’s a simplicity to tennis that is irresistible to me, and it’s always a terrific workout: That’s why pickleball has always struck me as missing the entire point. The fun part of tennis is that you get all this exercise without really realizing you’re doing it. You’re too busy just trying to hit the ball back to understand how much activity this really is.

To get really good at tennis requires decades of dedication—it’s why you have to start when you’re, like, 10—but as a basic, “can I show up and play often enough that I look like I know what I’m doing?” to me, tennis is the easiest of these seven sports. That’s what I love about it: Can you do what a wall does? Then you can play tennis.

6. Soccer.

I did not grow up a soccer fan, and was in fact an ugly American about it, in the way of Chuck Klosterman in Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, which includes a famously anti-soccer screed that I now disagree with but still find pretty hilarious. (“It's not necessary to wholly outlaw soccer as a living entity. I concede that it has a right to exist. All I ask is that I never have to see it on television and that it's never played in public.”) I’ve grown to love the sport, and of all the sports on this list the one that’s not played on ice, it’s the one I’d personally be the worst at playing. (I’m a horrible soccer dribbler. I either lose control of the ball after five seconds, fall down, or both.) But one of the reasons soccer is the most popular sport on the planet is that it is in fact quite easy to play: That’s what makes it fun, and the bar to entry so low. Another line from Klosterman’s essay, I’d argue, is a reason to love soccer, not to hate it:

A normal eleven-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions.

That’s a feature, not a bug. Soccer at the highest levels is obviously hard. But getting started? That’s easy. That’s a good thing!

5. Basketball

I’m always a little surprised when I make an outside shot when I play basketball. It seems like it should be much harder, right? It’s a little ball, and an only slightly larger hoop, and I’m standing 15 feet away. And yet a surprisingly high percentage of the time, I’m able to successfully put it in the basket. Sometimes I even swish it. To consistently make shots from 35 feet away, with huge humans standing in your way, is something only the truly blessed humans can pull off. Of all the sports, basketball might have the narrow range of physical requirements: If you are not 6-foot-5 (which is extremely tall) or taller, there really isn’t much serious chance of you playing basketball at a particularly advanced level. (This is why it must be really annoying to be, like, 6-8 but not play basketball. It has to be the first thing everyone asks you the second they meet you.) But the actual act of putting the ball in the basket? Of looking like you have done it before? Of not looking like a complete fool? It’s not that hard. Even a dog can do it.

4. Football

Football is a particularly difficult sport to rank here because there are so many positions that are so dramatically different than one another. No quarterback can be a lineman, no lineman can be a running back, no running back can be a cornerback and none of these people know how to kick. This is another sport that rewards an extremely specific set of athletic attributes. Even someone like Cam Skattebo, who was praised for being a gritty, undersized running back powered by grit and gristle, is in real life a 5-foot-11, 220-pound chiseled monster. (No one ever looks at a football player in public and can possibly believe they’re anything but a football player.) The actual activities football players take part in are not inherently challenging: You run, you throw, you kick, you block. The real test of being a football player, and why the sport ranks as high on this list as it does, is that that you have to do all these things while massive human beings are sprinting toward you so that they might kill you. No thanks.

3. Hockey

First off, the fact that you have to be able to ice skate—forwards, backwards, sideways, while swinging a stick, while being chased, while being punched—automatically pushes this way up the list. If you cannot skate, this sport is, obviously, impossible. As someone who cannot skate—as someone who can only propel himself forward by standing on one foot and simply stomping the other foot repeatedly into the ice, like a bull about to charge—playing an actual hockey game is unimaginable to me. (Moving four feet on ice without falling down is unimaginable to me.) But if you can skate, and millions, maybe billions, of people can, the skills needed here are basically a mix of soccer, golf and boxing, only with less required precision. But you gotta get past the skating part, and also the whole business of losing most of your teeth.

2. Golf.

No sport will make you look more foolish than golf does. (Especially in front of your father in law who loves golf. Theoretically.) Every golf shot that isn’t perfect looks idiotic—like you are a complete and total doofus. It is also extremely hard to improve at, no matter how hard you work at it, as witnessed by the number of people I have known in my life who play it constantly and still seem to suck at it. I personally dislike golf—though you can probably sell me on Topgolf if you’re buying the drinks—so I have no interest in getting even slightly competent at it, but that it is so difficult that it drives otherwise calm, rational humans into complete rage monsters when they try to play it is undeniable. It seems invented to cause heart attacks.

1. Baseball/softball.

Have you ever seen a 95 mile per hour fastball? How about an 85 mph one? Do you realize how fast that is? And they’re throwing it at you from 60 feet away, and all you have a small piece of wood to strike it with. You have to start swinging before they even throw the ball. It’s absurdly difficult to hit one even if you know it’s coming, even if a machine is throwing it right down the middle. All right, now try to do it when the ball can change speeds. Or when it can curve. Or when it can drop. Or when the pitch before was directly at your head.

As Ted Williams put it, “baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” It’s so hard.

I’m including softball in this, by the way, because sometimes I wonder if it’s even harder. The plate is only 43 feet away from the mound, giving you even less time to react, and the pitch, because it is thrown underhand, can move in even stranger ways than in baseball. And it all happens so fast.

Every single thing that happens in baseball is a statistical improbability. Every home run is a miracle. I can’t believe anything ever gets to happen at all. Which is why it’s so thrilling when it does.

I hope you enjoyed this exercise as much as I did. Thanks, Robert. It was much easier than if I you had made me pretend things weren’t falling apart.

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

1. Uh, the World Cup May Turn Out Badly Next Year, New York. Look out below.

2. Five Teams Who Should Improve in the Second Half, and Five Who Might Not, MLB.com. Cardinals on the naughty list here.

3. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. Hitting the dog days of summer at the very beginning of summer.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, big show, with “28 Years Later,” “Materialists,” “Elio” and “The Life of Chuck.”

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

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I did a live show this week! Look!

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“When Zorhan Won,” Ross Barkan, Political Currents. My colleague at New York, Ross Barkan, ran for New York State Senate back in 2018, and lost. His campaign manager was a 26-year-old idealist named Zorhan Mamdani. Ross’ piece about the scope of Mamdani’s victory, the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and what possibilities are on the table now is the definitive look at one of the most shocking things I’ve seen in politics.

Also, Ross’ new novel Glass Century came out the same day as mine, and it’s excellent. You should buy it.

Also, I loved my old editor Chris Bonanos’ awesome piece about the typeface of Mamdani’s posters.

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

“Where Do I Begin/Cold Slope/King of You,” Wilco. I am a sucker for a multiple-song suite at a concert, and the new Wilco Live album has a classic, stitching together three pretty-good Wilco songs into one great one.

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!

Thanks for everybody who came out to the great Left Bank Books this week to see me and Bernie Miklasz talk Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride and, of course, the Cardinals.

You can actually watch the whole thing here, if you dare.

A reminder: Next month, we hit Los Angeles, California, and Bethesda, Maryland.

See you there. And have a great Fourth.

Best,
Will