On The Space Shuttle, 25 Years Later

One of the challenges of writing a book about sports that's actually a book about American culture is figuring out a way to transition from one element to the other. I'm not sure how successful I was at it, but it was surprising to me how seamlessly the pieces often seemed to fit together. For instance, most people probably don't remember that the 1985 Bears never made it to the White House to celebrate with President Reagan because a couple of days after they won the Super Bowl, the Space Shuttle Challenger imploded in mid-air. I have vivid memories of both, and I didn't think I could write a book about the era without writing at least a little bit about the Challenger disaster, an indelible event that occurred twenty-five years ago today. It was actually one of the hardest sections of the book to write, as I wanted to capture the moment without sacrificing the tone of the book--looking back on it, I have no idea if it actually worked. So here is the end of Chapter 5 of Bigger Than the Game...and the beginning of Chapter 6. 

 

...people stood and gawked at the big screen in Marshall Field’s, this time at the images of a space shuttle carrying seven astronauts—among them a New England schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe—launching into the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida, and then fracturing into pieces. The city froze; the nation froze. At a restaurant in downtown Chicago, a law-school student stared lockjawed at a television set and uttered a single baleful sentence.

“I thought the entire system was infallible,” he said.

--- 

 At a news conference, Mr. Reagan . . . also blamed the January 28 loss of the Challenger and the seven astronauts aboard on “a carelessness that grew out of success.”

—The New York Times, June 12, 1986

   

On the morning of January 28, 1986, President Reagan took a meeting with the Democratic House speaker Tip O’Neill, during which he relied entirely upon partisan talking points gleaned from four-by-six cue cards prepared by his staff. It was a tactic that Reagan had used before, and even his Republican allies found it distasteful; this was Reagan at his worst, robotic and detached. He lamented the work ethic of “the fellow on welfare,” telling O’Neill, “These people don’t want to work.” O’Neill and Reagan were generally civil, even friendly, but this time, the Speaker came back at him hard, his patience worn thin. “I’m sick and tired of your attitude, Mr. President,” he said. “I thought you would have grown in five years.”

On the Allure of the '80's*

I saw a movie called Adventureland this weekend, and I cannot recommend it highly enough: I like to think of myself as a megafan of the "teen/college/post-college angst" genre (see: My first book), and this one was different from anything I'd seen in recent years. The humor was subtle. It did not overreach, and it did not resort to slapstick**. It was perhaps the best entry in the category of "overwrought youth romance" since Dazed and Confused.

Of course, I have an ingrained bias. Adventureland was set in 1987; the book I've been writing for the past two years is set in 1986. I have a colleague who recently wrote a book that was set in 1984. There is an obvious allure to setting stories in this time period, if only because this was the moment when so many of us Gen X-ers came of age. But it is also the last moment when youth culture was only superficially engaged by technology, when cable television remained a novelty (there is one scene that incorporates MTV, and it is perfectly placed), when even a cordless phone seemed an unnecessary luxury. Adventureland is set in a dreary old amusement park in Pittsburgh, of the sort I used to visit with my friends amid the doldrums of midsummer in central Pennsylvania. It is a movie about youth culture in the age before youth culture became tangled up in technological spiderwebs, and, perhaps because we've all been so swept up in these changes, this movie--despite a plot we've seen before--somehow seemed simpler and sweeter and less contrived. Also, the soundtrack is absolutely perfect, and afterward, I had a yearning to go to a record store and browse and purchase the remastered versions of the Replacements' Tim and Lou Reed's Transformer. I wanted to buy the actual CD's. After watching that movie, I felt like I needed a tactile experience.

And then I remembered that there are no longer any record stores in my neighborhood.

It wasn't really that long ago, and yet, given how fast we're moving, it somehow it feels like it was.

*This post has absolutely nothing to do with sports, but as the great Charles P. Pierce once wrote, "my column is like my house...If you don't like my paintings, my food or my music, don't come to my house."
**Unlike director Greg Mottola's previous film, Superbad. That film was entertaining, but in a completely different way--as is everything written/directed/produced by the Apatow mafia, none of which I would describe as subtle.