On The Top Twenty-Nine of Everything, 2010 (An Arbitary and Undefinitive List)

SIn no particular order.

1. Michael Raymond-James on "Terriers," as that guy we've all known.
2. The claustrophobic office sets on "Rubicon."
3. The Marc Maron-Louis CK podcast.
4. Bully.
5. Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Shannon and Michael Pitt on Boardwalk Empire.
6. Abed.
7. The Hunger Games scenes from the first book of the trilogy.
8. This quote, from David Foster Wallace, in David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: "I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion."
9. "Swim," by Surfer Blood.
10. John Legend (?!?) on "Blame Game."
11. Spike Jonze, "The Suburbs."
12. 400.
13. My friend Sean Howe's L.A. Burnout mixtape.
14. Jamey Johnson, "Lonely at the Top."
15. Fly.
16. You Are Not a Gadget. 
17. The shock and awe and cultural re-examination engendered by The Decision.
18. Deer Tick, "Twenty Miles."
19. The harmonizing in "Let's Go Surfing," by the Drums.
20. Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross. 
21. The Suitcase.
22. Vampire Weekend, "White Sky."
23. Michael Vick, rolling to his left.
24. Drive-By Truckers, "The Fourth Night of My Drinking."
25. The last shot.
26. 30 for 30.
27. Roger Greenberg: The thing about you kids is that you're all kind of insensitive. I'm glad I grew up when I did. I'm freaked out by you kids cause your parents were too perfect to parenting. All that baby Mozart and Dan Zanes songs. You're all ADD and carpal tunnel. I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.
28. The shock and awe and cultural re-examination engendered by Cam Newton.
29. The End.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

 1. 6/17/94

In researching my latest book,* I spent several days in the basement of the University of Maryland library, watching raw footage of Len Bias. I watched documentaries, I watched game tape, and--most fascinating of all--I watched several hours of spliced-together news footage depicting the aftermath of Len Bias' death. This was a revelatory moment; on those tapes, you can actually witness Bias' death slip from the realm of absolute mystery into the realm of self-inflicted tragedy, and then slowly became a societal signpost, a proxy for a larger War on Drugs.** I saw the whole story unfold before my eyes; it was all there on those tapes.

This is what's brilliant about Brett Morgen's 30 for 30 documentary, June 17, 1994. Sometimes the raw footage is all you need to depict a critical moment in history. Morgen eschewed narration; he didn't interview anyone, because he didn't have to. The story was right there, and even those of us who lived through it tend to forget the emotions it invoked, and none of us understood, at the time, what a watershed moment this was. Only in looking back do we see those threads. This is why that episode of Mad Men last season, in which the characters mostly sat around watching televised reports about the Kennedy assassination, worked for me, while I know it didn't work for so many others; because sometimes the best way of depicting reality is to capture its reflection.

2. The Strasburg Bubble

Seriously, who still pays this much for a baseball card? Is Bernie Madoff able to access EBay from prison? Are we about to enter another period of rampant and irresponsible speculative maneuvering, as witnessed in the 1980s?***If so, I have a ream of Dan Gladden cards that could use a good home.

3. America Number One!

Let me reiterate: I'm not anti-soccer; I've actually enjoyed this World Cup quite a bit, especially the parts where Alexi Lalas isn't permitted to say anything. I'm just anti- American soccer. And let me be clear, all you Fox News acolytes: This does not make me anti-American; it just seems that we, as a country, have no pressing need to be good at this, any more than we need to win a gold medal in hockey or a Nobel Peace Prize. If Ghana wins the World Cup, then it is the biggest thing that has happened to Ghana since...well, since Ghana. They would dance in the street for weeks. If America wins the World Cup, it is a three-day story, and some drunks in Detroit might overturn a few compact automobiles, and then we immediately start talking about Alabama's offensive line and Trevor Hoffman's struggles and Tiger's sex life. So this is my argument: Why should I root for temporality when I can root for immortality?

I expect my IRS audit shortly.


*Only a few more weeks to pre-order, while (yet to exist) supplies last.

**You can also witness an early television appearance by Tony Kornheiser, whose hair, even when he had more of it, was truly an unfortunate hereditary accident.

***And depicted in Dave Jamieson's excellent (and highly recommended) book, Mint Condition.

On Allen Iverson, Packer Fans, and the Creative Process

This is some sort of rambling experiment. If you're more interested in sports than in abstract and potentially nonensical discussions of art and creativity, feel free to skip it.

1. So I'm watching Steve James' 30 For 30 documentary about Allen Iverson (which is excellent, maybe the best of the entire series so far), and there's this moment where he sits down with a local activist, an African-American woman who--understandably, I suppose, given the racial tensions that Iverson's name still evokes in his hometown--expresses the reasons for her reluctance to speak. She isn't sure she trusts James to tell the story properly, in part because he is white. In a way, I get this, but I also found myself thinking, This is the guy who did Hoop Dreams, which is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and which is certainly one of the best portrayals of the inner-city black American experience in the modern age. Yet even this doesn't earn him any leeway?

I suppose that's proof of James' thesis, which is that the brawl that landed Iverson in legal trouble was the most racially divisive event in his Virginia hometown since the civil rights movement. But James' documentary--which is purposely filtered through his own perspective as a former basketball player whose mother is a prominent resident of the town--also reminded me that creative perception is always, on some level, entirely subjective.

2. I haven't read David Shields' Reality Hunger yet, though I want to. The book is comprised entirely of passages that Shields lifted from other texts and from himself, and one of major points of it (I think) is that we spend far too much time attempting to draw a firm line between fiction and nonfiction, when in fact, there is no real line. Every piece of writing, every documentary, every feature film, is, at some level, filtered through the subjective lens of the author. Maybe we don't want to believe this, but it's true.

3. My third book comes out in four months. This makes me very nervous. I'm nervous for the obvious reasons--I'd like it to sell, so I am able to write more books and pay my electric bill, and I'd lke it to be well-received, to validate my own perceptions--but I'm also nervous because it still seems incredibly strange to spend two years entirely immersed in a project and then one day just spill it out into the world. When you spend that much time doing anything, you have a tremendous train of thoughts about what the themes of your project might be, about what the controversies might be, about what certain people will like and dislike. You need to have these ideas in order to guide whatever thesis you might be going after, but at some level, you know that whatever you think will be seen as wrong. Other people will view your book in completely different ways than you do. They will perceive certain subtextual elements that you never could have imagined.

With this book, I imagine there will be people of my generation who will have seen the '80's in completely different ways than I did. They may have grown up in Green Bay, hating Jim McMahon. They may have been raised in Tuscaloosa and found Bo Jackson an arrogant prick. They have their own biases, their own memories, their own points of view, and when their memories meld with my own, they may equate to something I never could have imagined. They will write reviews on Amazon, and on Goodreads, and they might raise points that are far more complex than mine, or they might just firebomb my entire thesis.

4. This is the first sort-of media mention of my new book. It was in Library Journal, and it's just a one-sentence description, and the most exciting thing about it was that I found myself listed directly below a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I didn't mind their blurb at all; I thought it was accurate. Still, just seeing an outside party describe my book at all felt like being detached from my own body; how do they know what I'm writing about? How can they encapsulate two years of work in a single sentence?

For such a long time, this book was mine. It existed only in my own head, and it was colored only by my own thoughts. I suppose the beauty of working in a creative medium is that we get to foist our perceptions on the world in an attempt to somehow contribute to society, but this is also an unceasingly strange way to live, because people will never quite perceive our perceptions the way we perceive them.* It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you're Steve James. When you choose to create something, and then allow it into the world, you're always on your own.

*Huh?

On the Great Biographical Narratives of 2030

I've never seen the movie Ali in its entirety. If ever there were a biopic that seemed unnecessarily redundant, it was this one, for not only is Ali the subject of perhaps the greatest sports documentary of all time, not only is Ali is the subject of one of the greatest sports books ever written* ... but even his opponents and contemporaries have been the subjects of transcendent literature, from Nick Tosches' intense biography of Sonny Liston to Gay Talese's sympathetic magazine profiles of Floyd Patterson. There was no need for an Ali biopic because Ali pulled into his wake some of the greatest non-fiction chroniclers of the 20th century. Fiction could not compare to the truth, especially when Jamie Foxx was involved.

In this age of miniscule attention spans, I find myself thinking about these kinds of things quite often. What are the stories that serve as metaphorical proxies for their era?** Will we still be discussing the sexual vagaries Tiger Woods in ten years, or will he slink back into a protective shell? Is this a truly meaningful moment in the national narrative, as Bill Simmons hypothesizes? Or did the shock of it all simply amplify its importance? It's too early to tell (though I'd probably lean toward Simmons at this point).

Anyway, here's my point: Certain athletes of this era seem representative of some larger issue, of an evolutionary or technological or societal tipping point. And it's not always the obvious people. So yes, in ten or twenty years, there are many excellent biographies I expect to read (or write) that might capture the Zeitgeist of the early 21st century. But here are the underdogs--if I were forced to sign a contract right now to write a biography in 2030 of an active athlete/coach who isn't Tiger Woods, LeBron James, or Kobe Bryant, these are some of the people I might choose:

1. Allen Iverson. Has there been a more polarizing moment in recent sports history than The Practice Speech? Iverson is the progenitor of a new era in the NBA, of the narrowing authoritarian boundaries between player and coach, of the age of personal expression. That he seems headed for the inevitable tragic fall only makes him that much more compelling.***

2. Donovan McNabb. Not just because of Rush Limbaugh, and not just because he possesses the most famously sensitive digestive system in NFL history--in a city with a checkered racial history, McNabb has come to represent the tribulations of the black quarterback in the modern age. He is an undeniably great player, and yet he is never quite good enough.

3. Peyton Manning/Tom Brady. It would have to be a dual biography, because it is already virtually impossible to separate the legacy of one from the legacy of the other. There is no better rivalry in the modern era. This is essentially Magic/Bird without the racial undertones.

4. Mark McGwire. Jeff Pearlman made a valiant effort to capture the soul of Barry Bonds a few years ago, but the problem is, Bonds doesn't appear to possess a soul. Of all the principles in the steroid era, McGwire still seems like the most sympathetic figure to me, more rent with guilt than any of the others. His return to baseball could prove either triumphant or tragic--I really don't know where it's going.

5. Rick Pitino. Because no one embodies the role of coach as slicked-up mercenary quite like Pitino. He was a trendsetter. Not to mention there's plenty of sex involved.

*I'm currently reading David Remnick's King of the World, which is also predictably excellent.
**One of the reasons I chose to write Bigger Than the Game (now available for pre-order!) is because Bo Jackson always felt, to me, like one of those people who transcended his era.
***I expect Steve James' 30 for 30 documentary on Iverson will be one of the highlights of the series.

On Leonard Bias

I've spent an unimaginable amount of time in the past two years studying the life and death of Len Bias, both for this story and this book, and so it's kind of hard for me to have an objective viewpoint on anything even remotely related to this story; I have so much information swimming through my head that I've essentially lost all perspective. I did know Kirk Fraser's documentary, which aired last night as part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series, was coming, and I did know he had gained extraordinary access to a number of people; most notably, Fraser interviewed Brian Tribble, the friend of Bias who was later accused (and acquitted) of providing him with the cocaine.

Anyway, I've just watched it, and I admire the work Fraser's done here, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to try to shoehorn every angle of the story into a 60-minute package. And of course, knowing as much as I know, having studied as much as I have, it was hard not to concentrate on the aspects of the story that I felt were overlooked--on the overwhelming complexities of this moment, on the decisions that may or may not have led to it, on the culture (both locally and nationally), on the death of Jay Bias, Len's brother (which seemed especially limited by time constraints), and on the societal changes (both good and bad) that it fostered. I hope I got at these elements in my own work, but I'm sure there are things I've missed, as well, so I'm not going to delve too deeply into criticism here, out of respect for Fraser and his medium and the considerable amount of work he did do (and I know first-hand how hard it is to delve into this story). But I will admit that there are some things that I hoped would be answered that instead raised more questions: For instance, I listened to Tribble conduct a radio interview with ESPN Radio's Scott Van Pelt today, and Tribble assured Van Pelt that he was, in fact, scared away from cocaine and never did it again upon Bias's death--and yet, a few years later, after Bias's death, Tribble was sent to prison for distributing cocaine*. That doesn't exactly compute with me. But then, I often think maybe that's just the nature of this story: None of it ever seems to piece together the way it should, which, given the nonsensical nature of the death itself, seems strangely fitting.

It's late, and I know I'm rambling, but all I'm trying to say is that this is a hell of a complicated story--it's never taken me longer to write a single piece than it did with this one, largely because I needed to somehow reconcile all these disparate pieces. Fraser did his best with the hour he had (I believe his original cut was somewhat longer), but there are so many layers here. And I hope my book--which focuses on several major characters and storylines in that time period, and not just Bias--can complement and expand upon the work that Fraser's done, not to mention the labor of reporters like C. Fraser Smith and Sally Jenkins and all the others who spent months (even years) chasing details and staking out courthouses and holding authority figures accountable and desperately searching for the truth. This is, after all, the kind of story that goes on and on, and builds upon itself, and I've always felt kind of humbled by the hugeness of it. That feeling was reinforced tonight.

*Tribble also declined to say whether he provided the cocaine to Bias that night, and seemed to imply that he never would say, out of respect for the fact that Bias could not speak for himself. And I have to say, I'm not sure what that means.