The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 49: Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: January 14, 2016

HBO's Bill Simmons talks with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about the big LA football news & St. Louis's pain, Bob Iger's curious involvement (22:50), the stupidity of publicly-funded football stadiums (28:25), changing landscape of broadcast TV (35:00), do's & don'ts for sports owners (38:00), the injury plagued NFL (42:55), the loss of "big" TV shows (50:25), David Bowie & MTV (56:40) and Tiger vs. Federer (1:10:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You can mail your packages without relying on anybody else. Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in BS. That's stamps.com. Enter BS. Well, when I think 90s West Coast rap, I think of one man. Malcolm Gladwell.

How are you? I'm very well. I'll plug you. New Yorker. Longtime New Yorker writer. Not writing as much lately. That's not true. I'll plug you. New Yorker. Long time New Yorker writer. Not writing as much lately. That's not true. That's not true.

Five pieces in the last five months? That's a lot. Although I've written zero. I've written zero pieces in the last ten months. I was going to say, you're one to talk. Author of multiple books, including the latest one, David and Goliath. Probably secretly working on another book right now that Lord knows what it's about. You always keep this thing secret. We have a lot to talk about.

We do. I want to talk about first this LA football because it brings so many things to the table for you and me from a topic standpoint. I don't even know where to begin. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Were you following this story? Were you surprised that Kroenke was able to get the hell out of St. Louis and get to LA and all these billionaires involved? It just seems like a tsunami of things that you're interested in, would you think? It was a billionaire mashup. There were so many billionaires in the

game that my head was swimming. Okay, let me just start with this about Kroenke. I want to say a few words of condolence to St. Louis. Me too. So here's what he does in St. Louis. Let's not let this fact be forgotten. A bunch of years ago, he gets them to build whatever it is, the Edmund Jones... Edward Jones Dome. Edward Jones Dome, for which he... Edward Kroenke, comma, a man worth $6 billion, comma, for which he pays a grand total of zero, right?

Taxpayers of St. Louis build that thing. He has now left St. Louis, and they're still paying for it. Yeah, they owe $100 million. So it's like, what? I read that, and I was like, it seems to me you have a choice if you're an owner. You can pay for the stadium yourself, at which point you're free to leave whenever you want, right? You should be able to go where, if you're business, you have a right to move a business wherever you want. But if you're going to take public money to build the infrastructure for your business, you can't just waltz out the door first chance you get, leaving them holding the bag.

I mean, that's crazy. Well, it was a bad omen. And I forget how many, it might have been two and a half years ago. He bought all this land in the old Hollywood Park that was right next to where they were building the forum, which is excellent, which is they revamped the forum. It's a state of the art concert place, basically. And I think it opened like a year and a half ago, but he bought all this land for no reason at all. Other than the reason was that he wanted to put a football stadium there. Everybody's like, Oh, Stan Kroenke, mate. Well, gee, that's interesting. He bought all the

single woodland. It's like, Hmm. And I remember tweetingke, mate. Gee, that's interesting. He bought all the single woodland. It's like, hmm. And I remember tweeting about it at the time. You know, my little spidey senses went off. I think a lot of people did. Like, this is a move you make when you're planning on moving your football team to a new place. So there's a whole bunch of variables going on here. I think we all realize how stupid it is to build a football stadium and how little benefit it has for the public unless you're getting a whole community around it and you're getting all these businesses. And I think a very small scale version of, of how this worked was when they

redid LA live, which is the, where the Staples center is where the Lakers and Clippers and the Kings and concerts, all this stuff. So that place used to be in the middle of nowhere. I had Clipper tickets in 2004, I think I got them. It was just in the middle of nowhere. Downtown was like a wasteland. It was like where Michael Mann filmed movies every eight years. And when they had this plan, it was like, yeah, we're going to have a hotel and we're going to have restaurants.

It was like, oh, yeah, good luck. And now you go down there and it's kind of reinvigorated that downtown. So I'm not saying this can't work. When it doesn't work is when they do it in a place like where San Francisco built their football stadium, right, which is in Santa Clara, which is in the middle of nowhere, and they got rid of all these kids' soccer fields and just put it in this place that is impossible to get to

and is going to be the biggest Super Bowl cluster F that we've ever had from a traffic standpoint. That doesn't make sense to me. Englewood, which is off the 405, it's near LAX, it's got the forum already, it's got a place where people, it has potential to be like a Brooklyn-type scenario for LA where people might actually move there and buy houses

and hope the houses go up, things like that. It makes sense to me. So there's a lot, there's, they make sense when there is a larger logic behind, cause you're spending a billion plus. What's the total price tag for Cronky's idea? Well, so probably five, I heard 500 million for relocation. Yeah. Um, they're claiming the, the stadium's going to cost $1.8 billion.

I think I've heard it's going to cost like $2.5 billion. Yeah. And also he bought all the land. But here's the thing. He's paying for all of it. It's not costing the public anything. So part of me is thinking like, you know, this is America. Can you really blame this guy?

He's moving cities he has this incredible business opportunity where he can own the premier football stadium in LA for the cost of three billion dollars in the second biggest TV market we have that's going to be a home for all these Super Bowls and all these different things and probably it's going to be the focal point of the 2024 Olympics if we get it in L.A. and all the concerts that could be there. Can you blame him for doing this? No, you can't. But it goes back. Last time we did this, we did your podcast.

We talked about, remember the don't be an asshole rule? Yeah. There's a clear don't be an asshole rule here, which is, I totally agree with everything you said. I'm delighted Kroenke's paying for this out of his own pocket.

But the league should follow the don't be an asshole rule and go to St. Louis and pay off the outstanding $100 million on the

Jones Dome. Yeah, that seems fair. That, they're already, because the league does, gives you, as a matter of policy, gives anyone moving stadiums $200 million

in financing, right? Yeah. In this case, I just take half of that and give it to the city of St. Louis. The city of St. Louis, it's not like it's rolling in cash, right? The struggling city, like many cities around this country. Just rolling in cash, right? The struggling city like many cities around this country.

Just make them whole, right? I don't understand why it's so hard for the single wealthiest professional sport in the world to act like a decent human being when it comes to dealing with struggling communities. Well, and then the other interesting thing about, well, there's a million interesting things, but St. Louis, it's a place, the Cardinals are the team in St. Louis, right? Yeah. the Cardinals left St. Louis. You're losing 81 home games. You're losing decades and decades and decades of history and one of the best baseball teams. And like, that is one of the most traumatizing, that would have been one of the most traumatizing events

in sports, recent sports history if they left. The Rams, it's like, you know, the LA Rams moved to St. Louis because Georgia Frontier, her husband died. And by the way, she'd be a great documentary. I always thought Georgia Frontier would be a really good sports. She was. Yeah, she was a piece of work and very attractive once upon a time.

But so she moved St. Louis. She sells 30 percent of the team to Cronky. They get that. They get the Rams. The Warner era is really fun. And now the last 10, 12 years, they've just been terrible. They're only playing in St. Louis eight times a year, plus two exhibition games that nobody goes to,

plus the playoffs, which they haven't been in 11 years. So it's eight times a year. Now, I've lived in L.A. since 2002, November. I've been to maybe four Pats home games in the last 13 years. I love the Pats more than ever. I'm not sure it matters where your favorite football team plays. Do you think it even matters anymore? Well, it matters.

I think that the question of how much it matters is a function of the size of your city. Yes. The smaller your city is, the more it matters. My one reservation about this idea of relocating all these teams to L.A. is that how much does L.A. really care about getting one more on top of a million other things that L.A. has going for it? Whereas if you're St. Louis or you're Green Bay or you're a city like that, having a sports franchise, a professional sports franchise,

matters a whole lot, right? I mean, it's like, that's what you, it's the same, I had some, I was talking to someone the other day about Winnipeg in Canada, and about how when a band, when a relatively big deal music band comes and plays Winnipeg, it makes a huge difference. It's like a cultural happening. Yeah. Why? Because it's a small city in the middle of nowhere, and there's a limited number of people who come from the outside to visit. In Toronto, that same band, or in New York City, that same band playing, no one cares.

So I wonder whether there's a kind of, we shouldn't have, I'm continuing on my sympathy for St. Louis here. The Rams were always going to mean more to St. Louis than they're going to mean to LA. There's just no question about that. True, but it's at the same time, like when the Browns left Cleveland, when you talk about the generations of history they had there, it was completely devastating. The cards would be, cards would be

That would be an unspeakable event if that happened Yeah I think they were like a Level 2 or level 3 For what the team meant to the community Like I think put it this way Even though I feel terrible for St. Louis They'll be fine You know like I think if the Vikings left

Minnesota Or if Green Bay If they left Wisconsin or if Buffalo left Buffalo. That would be a. Now you're talking about a totally different level of teams having their identity wrapped up. And this is why I was so interested in Sacramento when Sacramento was nearly moving to Seattle. The Kings move out of Sacramento. Basically, then they're no different than Fresno or five other cities in California at that point. It's like what happened when the Whalers left Hartford.

The Whalers left Hartford. The Whalers were the one thing that Hartford had that made them kind of stand out in the Connecticut area. It's like, well, we have one of the four sports teams. We're a real city. Then they leave, and it's like, well, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, whatever. You're just kind of in the mix. So from that standpoint, St. Louis is fine.

But how did Hartford, can I just pause and say, how did they get a franchise? Oh, because they were part of the... WHA. Oh, that's right. They got in on... Because Hartfordford I'm sorry like the idea that Hartford

would have a professional sports franchise is kind of hilarious but now if you flip it around you'd think they should have

kept the Whalers and Hartford they could have been like ESPN's official team ESPN could have they basically could have played

in the ESPN dome ESPN could have bought a 50% stake and kept hockey and turned them into their official team but you brought up about L.A. Trust me, nobody cares.

I think there's a certain generation of Rams fans here that are maybe 35 and older. People that win, like the Ferragamo team, Eric Dickerson. So that was the 80s. You had to be at least 10 during that stage. So anybody maybe over 35 to 60 might have cared but nobody under 35 cares and what's going to be interesting is

see my theory is just the way football is now and you can see it in the whole SeatGeek era notice how SeatGeek are presenting sponsor but the secondary ticket market era you see these football games now,

and there's 25,000 fans from the other team at these games. And my theory on L.A. is it's going to be the all-time go-see-your-team when they're in town because L.A. is the all-time transplant city. When the Patriots play here, there's going to be 60,000 Patriot fans at an L.A. game. Same thing for Chicago. Same thing for Minnesota and green Bay and whoever. And it's going to be this traveling.

Uh, I think it's going to be one of the most bizarre recurring things that we have in any sport where it's just like basically this facility for transplants to see their team when they come to town once every couple of years. Like hockey, like hockey in the South. Oh yeah. Same thing. Same the South. Oh, yeah. Same thing happens.

You see it with... I mean, that's what Clipper games were like before Chris Paul and Blake. There was this two-year stretch before the Clippers kind of became a contender where it was just... If Miami came to town in 2011, all of a sudden there was 30%

Miami fans there. And you see it when Golden State comes. Don't you worry, though. My concern is long-term. The way that professional sports build dedicated, loyal fan bases is by making that kind of strong local connection. You're a Celts fan because your dad took you to Celts games for years and years and years and years and years. It was the team in your hometown, and you could afford tickets. You went to a lot of games, and that forged an emotional connection that stays with you for the rest of your life.

These kinds of moves are getting away from that, and they're turning – they're forsaking the building of those kinds of long-term emotional bonds for immediate economic returns. Now, maybe that's fine, but I worry, I think, I've always thought that people's allegiances to sports are more fickle than we realize, and if you don't do the hard work of building those kinds of everyday emotional ties with a fan base, one or two generations out, you're in trouble. Well, I thought about that when I moved to L.A. because if I had moved to L.A. 15 years earlier, I definitely wouldn't have stayed because I wouldn't have been able to see my teams. And I think the one thing that's really changed

is the accessibility that you have to your teams, whether you go to the games or not, you know, like when I was in like 2000, the year 2000, if you had said, what's the one thing if you had the money or the access or the connections, what's the one thing you would want in life? I would have said Red Sox tickets. I would have said great Red Sox tickets on the third base side, about 10 rows up to the right of the third base back.

That would have been my number one pick in a fantasy draft. I'm just like, I'm going to go to 81 Red Sox games. And now you think 2015, 2016, it's just so different. You know, it's sometimes it's just more fun to stay home. I wouldn't want to go to 81 baseball games. I'd want to go to like 15. You had so much time to kill in that period of your life. Oh, well, yeah, that's the other thing. I had some shitload of time, yeah. If you want to go to 81

baseball games, basically you're saying to the world, I have no social life, and I have no professional life. It would have been fantastic. Fenway, what's better? This was 2000. Like, I had less choices.

I would have gone to maybe 60. So I would have maybe gone to 60 to 81. But it would have been awesome. But, like, you know, I would go to, I would try to go to 20 to 25 Celtic games a year. Stealing my dad's tickets, things like that. I just wonder if, you know, like, look at the poor people in St. Louis, right?

They're still going to watch every Rams game. It's just a question of not going to the games, but it's like, you know, if you've talked to anybody who has football season tickets, what's really changed is it's less fun to go to the games because they've cut down on the tailgate before and after almost every team has done this where you're only allowed to be in the parking lot for like three hours before the game before it used to be like this 18 hour event you know my buddy j-bug at the pats games they would be there by like 7 30 in the morning you know and they'd be grilling by 8 30 and they'd be there for five hours and they go to the game they come out and they'd be there for five hours and they'd go to the game, they'd come out and they'd be there for another couple hours.

They'd drive home at like nine o'clock. And now it's like you got to show up at, I think, 10 o'clock. You got to be out of there by within like an hour and a half, two hours after the game. And it's just, I don't think it's as fun is my point. Yeah. So, um, wait about the LA thing. The billionaires involved, right? So explain this to me.

Bob Iger, Disney chairman, gets dragged into this whole thing, or drags himself into it once, and backs this Carson bid that you wouldn't know this. But Carson, it's a half hour outside LA. It's where the soccer is. It's a place that if they had put a football stadium, I don't think it would have blown up a new community out of nowhere. You didn't think that that plan was as logical as Englewood?

Didn't think it was nearly as logical. Made way less sense to me. He gets involved in this bid, the Chargers and Raiders, Carson. And, you know, when he got involved it was like oh because i always thought inglewood was a done deal this is happening the whole thing then iger's involved oh that's interesting because you know i knew from personal experience that he wanted to get involved in an la football team that was one of the reasons i had so many problems that he just pinned the last year um then he doesn't, not only does he not get it,

it's a 32 vote for Inglewood. And Iger's on the outside looking in. Why was he in this? Just from your opinion, looking from afar, why would somebody who has made so many good decisions over the years and has so much money and power, why would he back the wrong people? There are several things that confuse me.

One is, from his perspective, if you're the chairman and CEO of a company that is a broadcaster of NFL games, how do you turn around and then personally get involved in an NFL bid, in an ownership bid? That's a great point. I don't really... I didn't... Now, maybe there's nothing wrong with that. And probably there was very little wrong with it, otherwise he wouldn't be able to do it. But it just struck me as weird.

I didn't know what happens when your professional responsibility as a broadcaster starts to conflict with your, maybe his notion was he would be gone from ESPN by the time anything, that move actually happened. I don't know. But that was sort of weird. Well, it would only be weird if you were covering that team, or if you're covering that league objectively, and then somebody that worked for the network was criticizing the commissioner and then found out he wasn't at the company anymore on Twitter.

But go ahead. That's your Grassy Knoll moment in this discussion. It's a fact. It's what happened. My other thing is what you just said is totally interesting. It wasn't that this was some kind of close call. It was a slam dunk for Kroenke over the Carson bid, right? And that's, like, the thing about sports at this level,

when you get 32 billionaires in a room, it's all personal. They're not running spreadsheets and deciding that, or talking to urban planners and saying, the Englewood bid has the chance to revitalize the community. That's not what's going through their heads. What's going through their heads is, I know that guy. I like him. He backed me the last time we had a dispute about X, Y, and Z.

And I don't like this other guy, right? You know that they were going to screw the Raiders if they could. Of course. That was the part that was crazy to me. Al Davis sued them for years and years. You have these old, arrogant billionaires who are like, oh, I can stick it to the Davis family. I'm doing that. Yeah. So that was, that was, but yeah, I didn't, I, did he miss, did he misread it? I don't know. It's like a, it's a, it's a tough one. I, I thought that any bid that involved him would get a lot more support than he ended up getting. It was like, whoa, it's like a runaway for Kroenke.

Can I throw a conspiracy theory at you? This is a 100% conspiracy theory. Yeah. Let's say there's a world in which once Kroenke buys that land, they all know they're putting the football stadium there. But they have to go through the charade of pretending for the next two plus years yeah that it's not it's going to actually be a fair process and st louis has a chance and there's multiple places all this stuff they go through the charade they convince Iger to come in, either he knows that it's going to Inglewood and he's basically being used to throw people off the scent, or they genuinely convince

him Carson has a chance because they want to throw Iger off the scent. It's one or the other. Why do they need to do this? Well, all right. Just preserve the notion of due process that we don't have. It's not like we have a fix in for our friendly billionaires. Well, here's what will be interesting. The Chargers are going to end up in L.A.

That's happening. When the Chargers end up in L.A., is Bob Iger going to be a minority owner of the Chargers? Oh, you think his interest gets repurposed? Yes. And he becomes the best. I don't think he's going to come out of this with nothing, just looking like a butthead who backed the wrong horse. He's Bob Iger.

That's not happening. I think he's going to end up with that Chargers bid, is how that plays out. You like that theory? Well, you know, given that this is the most completely untransparent league, nothing they do, we don't know what goes on behind those doors. But it's like 31 old white guys basically divvying up the world. And no matter how the great thing about the NFL is, and about professional sports in general, but particularly the NFL, is you don't have to be smart or good to succeed. Whenever you have a situation where you can be a jerk, stupid, and a complete asshole to the world and still make a lot of money, then anything's possible. The nature of the broadcasting rights right now is that simply by virtue of being lucky enough to own an NFL franchise, you get more and more money every year.

Right. It doesn't matter what you did. It doesn't matter what you did. I mean, some of these people, they could be brain dead, and the checks still keep coming. under that kind of circumstance, do you dream up these elaborate conspiratorial scenarios whereby you convince the public you're doing X when you're actually doing Y? Sure you do. I mean, what else do you have to do? Well, here's the other smoking gun in this

whole thing, and this is when I knew Inglewood was going to get it, and I started tweeting about it, I'm going to say two weeks ago. Once Cranky started throwing in Cranky, once he started throwing in all these bells and whistles... Well, oncey started throwing in, Cranky, once he started throwing in all these bells and whistles, well, once he started throwing in the bells and whistles for the owners with this LA project,

you knew it was done, right? He's like, Hey, we'll put the NFL network there. I'll give you all the office space and the sets and all that stuff. The NFL, the new home of the NFL network guys right there.

Hey, scouting combine. We'll have it in LA. Won't have to pay Indianapolis anymore to do that. Hey, the NFL Network, guys, right there. Hey, scouting combine. We'll have it in LA. Won't have to pay Indianapolis anymore to do that. Hey, the Pro Bowl, you know, that's been a big issue for us. We'll just do it in LA. Done. You can have it.

Oh, Super Bowls? Yeah, let's do that too. He laid out basically, when you think about it, the NFL never really had a home. It's just the Super Bowl bounces around. Maybe Miami, New Orleans, and San Diego got a couple more than the other places. But it's bounced around. There's no real headquarters.

New York has a headquarters for the NFL, but then L.A. does too. And NFL Network's in L.A. And the Combine's in Indianapolis. And the Pro Bowl's in Hawaii. Now they're going to have this central location that's going to be like the NFL and you're going to have two teams here and all these other things and the Super Bowl every four years

it's just logical like how is St. Louis going to compete with that it's impossible there's no way I'm going to read you I want to talk about how dumb it is for anybody to build a football stadium unless somebody's paying for it themselves these are this is

2015 this was in billboard these were the top 10 stadiums that had concerts like actual shows like if Taylor Swift is selling out a football stadium right yeah so you think when you build a football stadium oh it'll be great we'll have like San Diego

they're talking about we'll build this football stadium in San Diego. Well, why would you do that if you're San Diego? You're going to get eight regular season Chargers games, two preseason games and maybe a playoff game if you're lucky. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, here here here's how many concerts played in stadiums, right? Can you guess who the number one stadium was for concerts in America last year? Meadowland? Yeah, MetLife. 35 shows. That's it? That's it. Guess what?

Number two, we had a tie between Soldier Field and Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. Guess how many shows each those two places had. I'm going to guess around 20. Seven. Seven each. Seven. You're number four. Gillette Stadium.

With a whopping five. Five concerts for Gillette Stadium. Heinz Field and Lincoln in Philly. They had four each. AT&T Dallas. Oh, Dallas must have a ton of stuff. Not three. They had three concerts.

Kansas City had three. Minneapolis had three. And San Diego, Petco Park had two. So if I'm building a football stadium and I'm allegedly going to revitalize whatever and this is great for the city and you guys should do this and hey, taxpayers, throw in your 400 million,

what am I getting? I'm getting maybe a convention center? I'm getting maybe a winter classic on January 1st? What am I actually getting? 14 days a year is what you're getting. Yeah. How am I revitalizing anything? Yeah.

And then on top of it, I don't know if you've ever been to Dallas Stadium, but it's in the middle of nowhere. It's not in Dallas. It's not downtown. It's like a half hour out of there. Like I remember when cousin Sal and I went there to a game, you couldn't really go to where that,

where it was. Cause you can't park, you can't really hang out. So we went to get barbecue 10 minutes away and kind of killed time till we could drive to the stadium. I don't know what communities were revitalizing is my point. Um, and so San Diego,

it's like, Oh, you lost the chargers. Well, you know what you gained isizing is my point. Um, and so San Diego, it's like, oh, you lost the chargers. Well, you know what you gained is like $400 million you can spend on other stuff. Spend it on schools. I never said why is there, there was an idea in New York when they, when New York was, was toying with the idea of building, um, the new giant jet stadium on the West side of Manhattan. By the way, do you want to talk about a traffic tsunami, that would have been the worst traffic. That would have been like epic level kind of Mexico City at rush hour traffic.

But when they had that idea, there was some notion of combining the convention center and the football stadium. That's the only part of it I liked. That made sense to me. Like, why can't you, isn't there some clever way to repurpose, maybe roll away some parts of the seats? I don't know how they were planning on doing it, but their notion was they were integrating the convention center with the stadium.

And that was the first time I thought, now someone's thinking, these are two kinds of white elephants that we can combine and make a slightly smaller white elephant. Right. So Bob Kraft, when he ended up building Gillette Stadium, then he bought the soccer team and built Patriot Place around it, which is a place you can even go to on off days. Put the practice complex there, did all these things. When you add everything up, probably made sense, probably a good deal for him. He could probably sell it, whatever. It didn't revitalize the community of Foxborough though. I can tell you that much.

Foxborough is the same. It always was. So, um, but even that like made a little more sense cause he had an MLS team and things like that. Uh, in San Diego, I can't even imagine what they would do to the stadium. Oakland's interesting because my prediction with Oakland is I think they stay. And I think they build a stadium. I think they get some extra money because they got shut out of the LA thing. And when you think about it, Oakland's basically the Brooklyn of California. Like it's, it's the fastest growing city because San Francisco got so huge. They just

have nowhere to put anyone. Everyone's drifting to Oakland. And Joel Anderson at Buzzfeed wrote a great piece about how it's changing Oakland and how they're actually pushing the people that lived in Oakland for years and years. Those people are just getting shoved out because the rents are going up. And you can make a case like, yeah, the Bay Area might actually be able to handle two stadiums, but... They're still paying off the renovations from the Lascaux renovations.

Well, that's the thing. And if you live in Oakland, is that a way you'd want to spend money so you can keep the Raiders for eight games a year? That's a good use of $300 to $400 million? Yeah. That seems crazy to me. Anything else we got to hit on this?

No, I think just one last, you know, we should just do a little shout out to St. Louis. My heart is with you. But you'll survive. Do you feel like it's a tiny bit okay if the team that got stolen away got stolen away by the person who had it or the city that had it before? It's almost like when... Yeah, there's a little bit of karmic. It's a little bit of... You're right.

This is a special case. It's a little bit of karmic. It's a little bit of, you're right, this is a special case. It's a little bit special. If this was the Vikes or the Packers or the Bills, it'd be a whole different conversation. But so this is, our feelings towards St. Louis are modified a little bit by the fact that they'd only had the team for, this is not their historical franchise.

It's like when Richard Burton and Liz Taylor remarried. Shout out to everyone over 40 who got that joke. Now, and the other thing you don't get is if your team wins the title, then the parade's in this new city, and that's when it hurts, I think. I think that's when, or if there's like an NFC title game

and it's the LA Rams and not the St. Louis Rams. But you know, that team just was terrible for 12 straight years. And yeah, I don't know. I feel bad, but I do feel like they're just going to throw themselves in the Cardinal season. And hold on. We got it. We got to say hi to a sponsor. Wanted to give a shout out to our friends at squarespace.com. Our buddies who build gorgeous websites for normal people who do not know how to use websites. What a valuable tool this is. My friend Louis K just launched his own PR branding business called Covert Creative.

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All right. You want to talk about broadcast rights and the fact that live sports is actually gaining steam in the second screen era. Yeah. The football ratings, football, even though people seem to be more horrified and confused by football than ever before, it has not hurt the ratings. There's been no attrition at all. The issue with professional sports, remember, is not just ratings. It's advertising rates.

So if you have a situation where no one is watching any kind of broadcast TV anymore, it means advertisers don't know where to go. So there's this huge pool of advertising money that wants to go somewhere, to pay for something. And if no one's watching the network offering at 8 o'clock on a Wednesday night, what are you going to do? Well, all you're left with, the only thing that you can command that makes sense to reach a broad section of the American public in a reliable way is live sports, right? If we're not all watching Seinfeld at 10 o'clock every night on Tuesdays, what's left? What's left is NFL football and NBA and baseball. You left out one thing. Award shows. And award shows, yeah.

So any kind of must-watch live event where no one's going to tape it and watch it later can now command a premium from advertisers they couldn't command before. So that's what I said before about how if you're an NFL owner now, you don't have to do anything. You just have to sit there

and you'll get a bigger and bigger check every year from these rising advertising rates. And the more broadcast television disintegrates, and that seems to be happening faster and faster, the more the people who own those rare pieces of live, must-watch programming are going to make. So it's this win-win-win-win-win. It's like all the smart... It's why all these smart billionaires started snapping up sports franchises in the last 10 years,

because they could see which way the winds were blowing in terms of advertising dollars. Well, it's also why there are no teams available right now. The only times teams come available anymore, especially in football, is when the owner is like 98 years old. Yeah. It's like, hey, this guy's about to when the owner is like 98 years old. Yeah. It's like, hey, this guy's about to die.

We need to sell the team. That's the scenario now to get an NFL team because anyone else would be insane. And if you think about it, just look at what the NFL just did, right? The easiest solution here, the solution that would have not screwed over St. Louis, is to add a 33rd team. Just say, you know what? We don't want to do this to St. Louis is to add a 33rd team. Just say, you know what? We don't want to do this to St. Louis. Not cool.

We don't want to do this to those great fans there. We're going to add a team. And guess what? All of those owners are like, we're not adding a team. Yeah, why would we dilute our stake? Yeah, we have a one 30 second, one 30 second?

Yeah, stake in all of our media rights forever, why am I going to change that to a $130,000? Because you're going to give me $30 million? I'd rather have the stake I have now. No thanks. And instead, they're getting a relocation fee that they're going to split for like $15,000, $16,000,000 anyway. Wasn't the relocation fee like half a billion dollars? Yeah, it's at least 500. I heard 500.

Some people are reporting 600, but that's 500 divided by 32. It's just, hey, here's your free 17 million. There was a time 25, 30 years ago where the expectation was if you bought a professional sports franchise, it might not end up costing you money, but it was something.

It was like buying a fancy car. It was like a little toy that you had that was a sideline and you had to make your money elsewhere. Right. And that is like so changed. It's really interesting. We've, we've discussed this a little bit in the past, but it really is one of the greatest investments you could ever make. You can write off a ton of it. You have all the antitrust laws, all that stuff is, is in your favor. It's never going to go down and it's a total ego purchase. You know, it's, it's like, uh, I don't know the best way to describe it is when you buy a brand new car, the price is what it is, right? So let's say you bought some hundred thousand dollar car. It's a hundred thousand dollars. If you drive it for four months,

it's now worth like $75,000. That $100,000 car mentality, when you actually have, there's not a lot of cars available, now it's like, now ego is involved in all this stuff and these guys just don't care. They just want the teams, they want

the ego, they want to say they're the guy. They want to puff their chest out. Which is the most fun sport to be an owner in? Basketball. You think basketball, it'd be more fun to be a basketballer than a footballer? Because you're courtside. Yeah, you're like the man. Like, look at, the other thing, and we've talked about this

before, but like, did anyone know who Joe Lacob was five years ago? Do you know who he was? People knew that Steve Ballmer was the Microsoft guy, but did they know what he looked like? Yeah. Now he's underneath the basket. Cuban is the great example of someone who

is living the dream. Cuban would have been the guy who just sold broadcast.com for a ton of money and sold it at the perfect time right before the bubble burst. And now he's a completely different entity, you know, and it's because he bought that team. You have more chances to meddle in basketball too. I mean, this is why whenever people attack owners for meddling,

I always think, yeah, but if I was a donor, I would totally meddle. I wouldn't be. Why would I be the hands-off owner? What's the point of being a hands-off owner? I would be the one who would want to make, I'd want to, like, you know, interfere and make all kinds of personnel decisions. Why? Because I own the team.

Well, we had an interesting test case for that. Somebody that you knew really well that you wrote a chapter in one of your books about. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Your favorite topic. Now, I don't know if we've talked about this on the pod, though. Have we talked about this on the podcast? I think we mentioned it last time.

I don't think we've had a conversation over the last five years where you haven't brought up... When he got the Kings, though, you were excited. You thought he was going to be way out of the box and awesome and innovative and basically what we just talked about, which is like, yeah, why wouldn't he medal? I own the team. I'm going to medal. This is my business. I still think, I still think he's going to end up being a great owner. Okay. I believe that. Cause he's not, here's the thing. You look at the group of

owners, you can divide them down the middle. There's the group who made their own money and there's the group who inherited their money. And the ones who made their own money are the interesting ones. They tend to be a lot smarter. They're a lot more with it, a lot more open to new ideas. And they're the ones who, like Peter Guber and the Warriors, right? Guber, I feel like there's a guy who is super, super smart, completely in touch with modern culture. It's not a coincidence that he's part of an ownership group that buys the Warriors, and then the Warriors sort of enter this kind of golden age. That's a whole different kind of – there's all kinds of, I'm guessing, really, really smart decisions that were made behind the scenes that have made the Warriors who the Warriors are. Because they got a genuinely intelligent guy as an owner.

And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Kings. It might take a little longer, but that was also a much more troubled franchise. This is the best news Sacramento fans have had in some time, that you still have confidence in Vivek. I'm still. They're grasping for straws, confidence in Vivek. I'm still- They're grasping for straws, so this is great. I'm still-

You know what's great? Here's how smart Peter Gruber is. I think he put up like $25 million with the Warriors. I think Laker put up like $200, $250 million. Laker put up- My point is Laker put like 10 times as much money, or eight times, or whatever it was. Way more money than Gruber did, but yet when they they're accepting the trophy it was the two of them together and i was thinking like man it's got to kill lake up he put up so much more money than goober did it's got he

just must want to hit him over the head with the trophy but that's goober being smart uh but we're but when you talk about broadcast rights and all that stuff, and especially the NBA, because I think the NBA is the best purchase of all these leagues. Because right now, the NFL, who knows? As we've discussed many times, youth football, parents not letting their kids play football anymore. We don't know if football is going to like 20 years. It might look exactly the same, but we're not positive. Here's my thing about football. This season was the first season where I felt like the narrative about football was almost entirely about injuries. It was about, there was not a single game where at some point, or more than one point, where there wasn't a kind

of discussion about the outcome of the game that was entirely about how the game would have gone differently if injuries hadn't happened. Think about it. If there were no injuries in the NFL this season, how many of the eight teams we have left would still be there? Or how would that order be different? And also they're diagnosing the injuries much better now, which is another factor. Like before, it's like if you got your bell rung, you went back out. Yeah.

I think the tipping point for this was the Chiefs-Colts game in the playoffs, I'm going to say three years ago, maybe two years ago, Jamal Charles in the first quarter of that game got his bell rung. Yeah. Came out. It was the first time I remember watching a football game when they showed him in the sidelines going, Oh, he's gone. He's out. And if you're a chiefs fan, you're thinking like, get back in there, Jamal. Oh no, I can't think that way anymore because he's a human being and he might have longterm damage. Maybe you should stay out. This is terrible. We're going to lose. And you're just tormented with all these things.

I never remembered thinking about those things before that football game. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I thought of this and I was surprised it didn't come up more watching the Texans and the chiefs. Yeah. Brian Hoyer has had two concussions this year. Oh, I know.

He played the, he played a game that bore no resemblance to his abilities as the quarterback. Yeah. That was the game of someone who is not all there.

Right. He shouldn't have been. You can't have two. I don't think anyone who has two concussions in a single season should be allowed to play for the balance of the season.

I thought it was... And there was a case where that's the only explanation I can come up with for why he played that way. I got knocked out. I was just going to say I got knocked out when I was 16. I didn't feel right for like three and a half months. Yeah.

Like light was bothering me, all that stuff. I can't imagine getting two concussions in the same season and then playing quarterback again. That's crazy. Yeah. Anyway. imagine getting two concussions in the same season then playing quarterback again that's crazy yeah anyway and he and there's a case where so the you can't talk about that game without talking about uh the injuries that affected the players on the field Hoyer and J.J. Watt right yeah and you know the what ifs about what if Jamal Charles had still been... I mean, isn't it weird that you have a sport where the first thing you talk about when you talk about games is the injuries to the players? Has this ever happened that a sport has been so completely dominated by talk about the impairment of the athletes? Because the opposite has happened in basketball.

In basketball, injuries were a way bigger deal 20 and 30 years ago. Right. Now the science has gotten better. And you were done. Bernard King is never the same, right, after his knee injury. And that has a profound effect for, who's he playing for at the time? The Knicks? Well, Durant's a great example of this, right?

In 1981, Durant breaks his foot twice and he becomes Andrew Toney. Yeah. Or Bill Walt. Or Bill Walt. Maybe he never comes back. And now it's like you... And I was worried about him coming back. I was very dubious at OKC because I wanted to see Durant play a couple months in a row.

Durant's back. If you watch that guy, that guy's 100%. And I don't know if that happens 30 years ago. You're right about football though. It just seems like it lingers over everything. And we were talking, I watched with a bunch of guys on Saturday. And one of them was saying how just every play, somebody should get injured. Like you just watch like even a run play and you see guys who are between 290 and 400 pounds just blocking each other and falling down and falling on each other's legs.

And it just seems like somebody should always get hurt. Yeah. I can't watch Gronkowski. On every single time he catches the ball, I assume someone's going to take out his knees. This is the, this has been, it's weird because he's because he's one of the five best Patriots of all time. He's the best tight end I've ever seen. And every time they throw the ball to him, I'm terrified. And I've talked about this before, but nobody knows how to tackle him,

so they just go right at his knees. And there are these plays when they throw over the middle to him where he catches the ball facing the quarterback and then turns around, and there's about a second there as he's turning around, if the timing gets screwed up or the safety's just at his knees before he sees it. Yeah. And it's just terrifying.

It's not a mistake to say that the Patriots would rather have lost the last two games of the season than done anything to jeopardize his health because they basically stopped using lost the last two games of the season than done anything to jeopardize his health because they basically stopped using him the last two games. Oh, yeah, they spread him out as a wide receiver. They used him once. There was a fourth and nine play when they thought they had a chance to just steal the game that went in overtime, the Jets game.

They sent him over the middle once, and he got crushed. And they were like, we're not doing that again. Gronkowski never went over the middle again. But in the playoffs, he's going to go over the middle, and the got crushed. And they were like, we're not doing that again. Gronkowski never went over the middle again. But in the playoffs, he's going to go over the middle and the Chiefs are going to go after him. And they're going to want to put that fear in him that if you go over the middle, we're going to go at your knees. And it's legal in the way it goes. But wait, going back to the football ratings, I've noticed that there's so much content now. And I'm not just talking about TV.

I'm talking about shows. I'm talking about shows. I'm talking about podcasts, like whatever you want. There's just a glut of everything. And it's so hard for something to break through and stand out, which is what was interesting about Making a Murder on Netflix, which I don't know whether it was because when they released it or it was something about the holidays or whatever, but it seemed like a disproportionate amount of people watched it

compared to everything else that's just on television. It's harder and harder to stand out. And usually when that happens, that's better for the established people. So football is established. It's on Monday night. It's on Thursday night. The playoffs are in the first two weekends of January, four times. It's really hard to screw that lead up.

If anything, you're going to extend it. That's what made it so funny when the NCAA, they have this college football playoff. Now, that's a perfect example of extending your lead, and yet they put it on New Year's Eve, which was one of the five, I mean, everybody's talked about it, one of the five i mean everybody's talked about one of the five dumbest programming moves of this decade but if you just put that on any other night it becomes

the night you know and i don't i don't i think it's going to be harder and harder for stuff to get seen and listened to and heard and all this stuff because even yesterday like the the power ball somebody won the Powerball who lived in Chino and my head immediately raised to, uh, the lead character in the OC who was from Chino. And it was a big plot line in, in the OC. Like they didn't respect him cause he was from Chino. He's a kid from the streets of Chino and, uh, leading to the guy on the beach telling

him like, welcome to the OC, bitch. But when that show came out, which was, I don't know, 10, 11 years ago, it felt like everybody, there was a cultural connection with it. It just felt like everybody in a certain demo saw it, talked about it, consumed it. And I wonder, 10 years later, if it came out, I think it would just get lost in all these other things that are out. Does it make sense? We don't have these,

the shows you go back 30 years, uh, there were these national conversations around shows, right? Everyone, when there was, when Seinfeld came on at its height, everyone watched Seinfeld. I mean, you just look at the ratings back then. A failing show 25 years ago had ratings that were greater than the biggest hit show today. I mean, it's like it's hard to wrap our minds around the fact that everyone was tuned

into the same thing. I remember when Miami Vice came out. I didn't know. Or 90210, or Mel, even a bad show, a legitimately bad show like Melrose Place. How dare you?

That really hurt my feelings. I felt like that was a personal attack. I watched, I watched, I used to do a, back, this is the earliest

internet, I used to do an email synopsis of every episode of Melrose Place. Oh, my God. And I had a list of like 100 people I would send it out to. It was like on Wednesdays, and I would have it up by Thursday mornings.

Like that was – and why did I do that? Because I was absolutely sure that everyone I knew, all of us in our 20s or late 20s or 30s, everyone I knew was watching Melrose Place, right? There is not a single show that I had the same certainty about today. The only thing that comes close was Serial last year. Basically, I had certainty that everyone I knew was watching, was listening to Serial. I don't think, you don't think like Game of Thrones is there?

I don't feel like, I think it's as close as we're getting. It's as close as we're getting, yeah. Even Game of Thrones is watched by a fraction of the people who watch Melrose Place at its height. Well, remember Monday nights was 90210 followed by Melrose? It was Monday. For a while. Yeah, it was like, I don't know, it was at least for a couple years.

Then they split them up. But think about this. That was a night. I had a full-time job. Yeah. And I was so invested in this in a kind of ironic way. But still, I was so invested in this. It was a bad show.

You would never watch it today. Again, you're hurting me. You're hurting my feelings. I was so invested that I would take two hours off on the morning after that show and write up this thing and laboriously send it out to a hundred people

I mean it's just you'd never do that today for a for like a network show I mean it seems the whole thing is sort of crazy

in retrospect well that and then Thursday night was big too because that first year of Friends and this was pre-internet so you're talking 94 and it was friends in seinfeld were on the same night and er first year was on the clooney sit

the just er was amazing er is the most underrated drama in the last 25 years yeah but that was all the same night and everyone i knew watched tv that night and if you were out that night you taped it and you watched it later because you didn't want to feel left out yeah and there's there's just not a lot of things like that now you know what reminded me of that actually i think star wars was like that you just felt like an idiot if yeah like i haven't seen star wars yet i feel like an idiot i feel like every single person i know has seen star wars and has an opinion on it and i'm totally left out of all the conversations my nephew had seen it three times before I basically even considered going. Yeah, no, no, it was, no, it's there.

The number of those things, that's why it's basically sports. And two or three times a year, there is a non-sports cultural happening that everyone in, if you live in New York city, it's the, it's the musical. Hamilton has that same, right? Basically everyone is, if they haven't seen it, they're like trying to see it. But those things are very right. They're increasingly rare. My, uh, my wife and daughter were in New York city last week and I got them Billy Joel tickets and I got them Hamilton tickets and they knew nothing about

Hamilton, like zero. And I was like, don't research it. Don't, don't nothing. Just stay out. Just go. And I was like, don't research it. Don't, don't nothing. Just stay out, just go. And it was like, their heads almost exploded. They just didn't, my daughter, I think she set the record for most questions I ever asked during a Broadway musical. And they were just so blown away. They thought it was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen. I was told not to see it unless I was prepared for the fact that I would never want to see a Broadway show again, because no Broadway show would ever live up to Hamilton. It does feel like it's one of the great cultural slash creative creations that have happened in a long time.

Well, the last one I remember that's had this kind of buzz is Book of Mormon, right? Oh, yeah. And that was what, six years ago? That was what, six, five, six years ago. Yeah, these things come along with that kind of relative infrequency. Hey, speaking of cultural events, Game of Thrones is coming. We're three months away. And miraculously, you don't need cable or satellite to watch HBO anymore. Just download the HBO Now app and start a free one-month trial. HBO Now, basically a library for 90% of the best things HBO is either showing

or has ever shown. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sopranos, Late Shift, and The Band Played On, it's all in there. Ton of movies. Game of Thrones coming in three months. At some point in 2016, you might even be able to watch this podcast on HBO Now. Who knows?

This world might exist. So do yourself a favor. Download the HBO Now. Who knows? This world might exist. So do yourself a favor. Download the HBO Now app today. Wasn't that a seamless live read? I'm really proud of myself. No, I was, for a moment I thought we were. We were just talking. We were talking.

I was expected to chime in. Can we talk David Bowie really quick? Yes. Just an incredible outpouring of pieces and videos and all this stuff. What was interesting at Grantland, Chuck and Papademos, I had this idea called the no-bituary. It always bothered me that whenever somebody died, that's when the outpouring happened and the person who died never got to see it.

And I was like, what if we called it like the no-bituary? You run them early. But we never actually did the idea and then there was a rumor that bowie died that that bowie died and chuck and alex started this whole email chain but then it turned out he hadn't died but then they kept the email chain going we made that an obituary yeah and. And it was amazing. It was like 13,000 words. I hope you read it. The New York Times does your obituary, if you're

famous, they do your obituary while you're still alive so you can answer questions about yourself. Is that true? Yes, totally. They call you up and they have a file. If you're Bill Clinton or if you're Bill Clinton, or if you're, I mean, think about it, or anyone, even a much lesser kind of person who might be a potential obit,

they will call you up, and they'll say, they'll check facts, and they'll ask you questions. So you have a private version of the obituary. I remember when I was working at the Herald in the mid-90s, and, you know, very primitive computer system, and they had all these different little categories and subcategories, and I was just so bored, like, waiting for high school coaches to call scores in or whatever.

And I'm just surfing around all these, like, secret categories they had. And I found this obituary, basically and it was all pre-written it was all written obituaries about people who hadn't died yet that it's like oh if Bill Russell dies we just get this up in 20 minutes I was so traumatized I was like this is terrible this is such bad karma Red Auerbach is in here I was almost thought about deleting them I was so upset it just felt like bad juju. I'm surprised you didn't change the Bill Russell one to make it more positive. I might have actually gone in there and tweaked a couple sentences for a couple of them.

Don't tell anyone. But anyway, with Bowie. You know what's amazing to me about Bowie? I mean, there's so many interesting things, but that generation of British rock and rollers, it's like completely, I mean, what an extraordinary group of people. Yeah. The entire history of rock and roll from that era is essentially these middle class art school, middle and lower middle class English art school guys in one form or another. I mean, they, and they are the list of them and they're all brilliant. And they're all from within, well, some, some are from Liverpool,

but if they're in London, they're all like in South London and East London and they all randomly read into each other when they were 20 years old and such and such a place. It's just an unbelievable group of talented people coming out in one era. And it struck me because one of the things that came out of the Bowie coverage was this crazy interview he did with Mark Goodman of MTV when Bowie kind of flipped the tables on him about the first year and a half or so on MTV. They didn't really play any black artists at all.

And he kind of went at Mark Goodman with it and mark goodman's answers if they happen now i don't think he'd ever work again he was basically like we can't play them in middle america they'll be afraid of those black faces like it was insane like i was alive in 1983 i don't remember things being that blatantly racist but uh obviously i was in new england so maybe i was a little coddled. But Wesley Morris, my old friend who writes for the New York Times now, wrote this awesome piece about Bowie and how the different effects he had on black culture and everything. But it got me thinking, MTV comes out, really it's created in 81, but 82, 83 is when it took off. And it almost reminds me of a chapter that you never wrote in one of your books

where it's just the perfect storm of all these types of people from all these different generations. Either somebody whose career hadn't taken off, but MTV was the reason it took off, or somebody who was famous already but hadn't really gone to the next level yet, and MTV pushed them there, like Van Halen, Michael Jackson, those type of people. And then the people who were able to reinvigorate their careers with MTV, like Bowie. Yeah. Because he had the Let's Dance album, and his videos. I can't tell you how many times I watched the China Girl video.

It was one of my favorite Bowie songs, but it was such a weird, crazy video. And I wasn't, there's all of a sudden he's talking about swastikas. And I wasn't positive what he was trying to say. Like, it would really freak me out when I was 14. And he had this second life for me because of his MTV. And my question is, if MTV comes along like seven years later, it's a completely different thing because it wouldn't have caught this weird collection of unforgettable people at these awesome points in their career. If it comes along in 1989,

it misses basically everybody from the seventies. And then it comes along at this terrible time for music when we were in like this vanilla ice, you know, this terrible stage. So it's just, I just think it's amazing that MTV happened right there, right at that specific point and no other point. Well, it gets lucky with, there was a great piece by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker about Bowie in which he points out that Bowie is best understood not as a rock star singer, but as an actor, and that he has the career that an actor had, only he happened to be, his medium happened to be music, but he behaves like an actor, and he took on roles, and his appeal and approach was essentially cinematic. It's really kind of a

brilliant sort of explanation of what Bowie was and why he worked the way he worked. Do you think he invented reinvention for major celebrities? Who did that? He was always something different. Who did that before him? No one did it

I think as well, or at least in the modern age, this idea of these playing of roles, which Madonna does a little bit of that later, but not as self-consciously. But that goes to your point about MTV comes along and gives someone who's already thinking in cinematic terms a cinematic outlet, right? He makes perfect sense. So to your point about how MTV is coming along at the perfect time, it is MTV benefits from catching someone like that who's a way that many rock stars are not in that. And so he also catches the wave at the right moment. I mean, I always remember, I can't remember where I read it.

I think it's in that history of MTV when they talk about Billy Squire. Yeah. How he's the guy whose career is destroyed by MTV, right? Because he does that video and he's wearing some kind of effeminate outfit and he's supposed to be a macho. Masculine dude, yeah. Yeah, masculine dude. So there's a guy who comes along and MTV catches him and destroys him.

Why? Because he doesn't understand the language of the medium. So he's the opposite. He's the flip side of Bowie and Jackson. He doesn't get that there's a different set of rules when you add this visual component to pop music. And the other one that missed it, but not in a way that it hurt them in any way, but they didn't embrace it and use it the way Bowie did

was the rolling stones because yeah very similar point in their careers to where bowie was where in and they were a bigger band and you know it's not like they needed the help at that point but you would have thought that they would have appreciated what this new medium was and used it in ways and really you look back at the videos they did and they were like, eh, undercover video wasn't bad, but it wasn't like the Bowie videos,

like let's dance and China girl were freaking incredible. You know? And then you look at, uh, what a band like dire straights did where, you know, they vaulted themselves to a whole other level because of how cool their videos were.

And they'd been around for a while, you know, they'd been bouncing around, but, you know, they'd been bouncing around, but yeah, it's a really, I think it's the most interesting time ever for music, 81 to 85 for everything. That MTV book, that oral history that was done. Yeah.

I've forgotten who the writers were. It's fantastic. It's just one, it's one amazing story after another. Because you also, you threw in cocaine into everything else that was going on. Well, I mean, across the board, I mean, well, that's the other thing I was going to say, you know, when we were talking about the NBA, we said there was a time 25, 30 years ago when the conversation in the NBA was very much about injuries because guys got one knee injury and they were gone or one foot injury and gone. It was also very much about injuries because guys got one knee injury and they were gone or one foot injury and they were gone. It was also very much about drugs.

So there was – it's really funny. You remove – so drugs – between drugs and injuries in the 70s and 80s, the story, the narrative about basketball was constantly about loss. It was all about the things that never happened because David Thompson does a lot of cocaine and blows out his knee. And, uh, you know, Bill Walton breaks his foot and what could have been if he'd stayed and how

many more championships would he want to put in? So many of those guys, yeah. Any of the, that whole, I mean, what could have, uh,

you know, uh, I'm, you know, the, the list of extraordinary talented players, Len, I mean,

starting with Len Bias and onwards, there's no, today there's none of that. Today we basically, you see a talented young player and we get to see them play out their career. We don't have an expectation that we're going to lose 25% of every bright young player who comes on the scene. In the 90s, we're like that too. I think we lost a lot of dudes in the 90s

because everybody got paid too much money right away. And it just screwed all of them up. Like Derek Coleman, Ken Harrison, Big Dog, all those guys. That was another lost generation. It wasn't until when they put in the rookie salary cap and then on top of it everybody realized, all right, drugs are bad, all these different things. Drugs are bad. We can fix injuries and you shouldn't give 19 year olds $20 million.

Those three things come together and the game becomes sane again. And maybe some medical advancements. Yeah. I'm going to let that thought bubble hang in the air. Now, you always would talk about Jamaica and how the capitalization rate of sprinters in Jamaica, how Jamaica capitalized the available talent in the best possible way. And I do feel like America has reached that point now with basketball. You're not missing many basketball players. No, you're not.

And it's the only thing that can really hurt the basketball players. No, you're not. And it's the only thing that can really hurt the basketball players at this point is AAU. I think AAU can do so much damage in so many different ways to these guys. Yeah. But other than that, it's, there was a, there was a moment in the seventies, eighties where you could have constructed a hypothetical team of players who never made it in the NBA, who you could argue might be able to take to be better than the players who played in the NBA. So if you wave a wand and you say, here's the guys we lost to drugs, injuries,

being shot on the playground, or head cases, and if we magically resurrect them, that team maybe has more talent than the guys playing in the league. Well, I always thought cocaine could have been like a 50-part series because it didn't just hurt the NFL. I mean, the NBA. It hurt every sport.

We don't even know some of the people it hurt because they're probably not talking about it. It definitely hurt sports like tennis, baseball. What's the all-cocaine team in the NBA? Or are we going to get in trouble? No, I wrote about some of this stuff in my book because there were some insane stories. I think the two saddest for just how good they were

and people not being able to help them were john lucas and michael ray richardson bias is the worst because he never got to play but he's talking about like lucas and michael ray richardson um tarpley tarpley's a bad one monster there's a bunch of guys we probably can't mention legally that I think in the NBA circles people know about, but I don't know if the public knows about. But you think with acting and comedy and music, even more damage. And then you have the overlay.

Like Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor, that guy did not have the career he should have had. Yeah. But there's a million guys like him too. I mean, Jesus. And remember the same area you overlay HIV. And so you've got, I mean, Just get wiped out.

Yeah. You have this big black hole in the center of American popular culture that stretches from the early 80s to the mid 90s. And it's the combination of all those things. And there's not a, there is not a creative or athletic endeavor that isn't, that wasn't permanently harmed by that loss. Yeah. All those things in combination.

It's kind of weird to think about how we lived that era and we had no idea what we were missing. Last thing. And then we have to go. You wanted to talk about Tiger versus Federer. Yeah. I just, I just see that we're... Here are these two guys at the end of their career

and I always lump them together in my mind because you can make a case they're the greatest of all time in their prospective professions. And they... The longer you look at them and sit with them and watch them, the more they diverge.

They're really polar opposites. You know, one is Tiger is power replacing grace. Federer is grace replacing power. Tiger just seems to have fallen off a cliff. Federer is playing it out gracefully. You know, Tiger was defined by his misbehavior. Federer is defined by his misbehavior. Federer is defined by his incredibly wonderful behavior. I mean, they're two very different models for what it means to be a

modern elite athlete. And I keep wondering, are we going to go more in the Tiger direction or more in the Federer direction? Right. They're very, they're They're very – it's not a simple matter of saying that Tiger is the modern form and Federer is the throwback form, which I think was the early narrative on those guys. It's different. It's very different approaches to their sports, ways of – I mean, I don't know. It's like – and I have a kind of – and both of them were in their heyday, at their peak. Both were electrifying, but in different ways. You had to be, Tiger was someone who brought, I knew nothing about golf.

I still know nothing about golf, but I watched golf when Tiger was at his peak because he made it accessible to me. I could understand how great he was. Federer is, to appreciate his genius, you sort of have to know something about tennis. You have to have read the David Foster Wallace piece, and you have to have long conversations with tennis heads. And then you understand the extraordinary ability and genius of the way he plays the game. And is that, you know, which of those two is where we're headed? You left out one piece. What's that? Federer, I think the coolest thing of Federer's career is,

I think he's the best tennis player ever. And people I trust who know tennis more than I do, or better than I do, are just adamant, like he's the best. Like, stop. Nobody else can be mentioned. Although McEnroe, I spent time with McEnroe. There's a strong case to be made.

McEnroe is the greatest innovator this sport has ever seen. Yeah, he's the most creative player ever, but I spent some time with him. We did this Vanity Fair Summit thing in the beginning of October. We were stuck in this room for an hour. really hit it off and i loved him but we but he said he gets the greatest player question a lot and for him it's a surface he's like you

can't just say who's the greatest player ever because you know it depends on what the surface is because some surfaces are fast that favors this guy and he's so he's like it's an impossible question say you can't say somebody's the greatest player ever if they could get their ass kicked on clay by somebody else so for him it was like surface specific but what did he say what did he say well he was saying Federer but he also said Sampras on grass was insane yeah you know and he's like he's like as great aserer is, it'd be really hard to beat. Nobody against Sampras on grass was feeling good about that matchup. But anyway, he was saying how one of the things he really appreciated about Federer and the thing that he didn't have with his own career as much was Federer had this post-prime, this extended prime prime really after his prime which is what we're seeing with

tom brady now actually where it's like really the greatness of an athlete depends on how long their prime was right so you talk about like bill walton's prime was a year yeah but yet we still revere him because his ceiling was so high it was so up in the air um but yet, Bird's prime, Bird played nine years. His real prime, prime apex was from 84 to 87, wins the three straight MVPs, goes to the finals the next year. LeBron's prime,

LeBron's in year 13. He's played as many seasons as Larry Bird did. Larry Bird retired after his 13th season. Now he came into the league five years after high school. LeBron came into the league right after high school.

But what LeBron does right now, I would say through the rest of the decade, will determine where he goes on any list, any pyramid, any greatest player ever discussion because these are the key moments for him. Anyway, with Federer,

what was great about him was his extended post-prime was so awesome. He could still win a major. He still won a major and was still fighting these guys tooth and nail and Djokovic and Nadal.

He was not at his apex anymore but could still hang with these guys and potentially beat them. And some of his greatest matches happened after his prime. Whereas you look at Tiger, 2008 US Open, wins it with a torn ACL. That's it. There is no extended prime. And his body breaks down.

And why his body broke down, I think, is something that nobody has really talked about that much. Everybody said, oh, when he had the car crash, his wife, all that stuff, that's why his career fell apart. No, I think his career fell apart because he put too much muscle on his body and his body broke down. Federer was able to just navigate this amazing long career.

If Federer won Wimbledon this year, would you be shocked? No, I mean, listen, he, he has in almost every year, since he last won a major, he's almost won a major. He's come within, you know, two or three, uh, uh, strokes of winning a major. I mean the margin of difference between him and the very top players of the game is still vanishingly small. Right.

So I'm looking up, he turns 35 in August. Yeah. You know, it's impossible to be in your mid-30s and battle these dudes and play five sets and play for five hours. And, you know, so I think we're going to, I think we'll remember Tiger in this way of like, Oh my God, that was amazing. Remember when we had the chance for him that we thought he was going to be Ollie or Jordan for golf and it kind of happened, but then all of a sudden he disappeared. Like he was vaporized. Um, Federer never reached that point of an impact but I think his career will be remembered

in a more amazed type of way we're going to be like Jesus I think it's to your point is that maybe what will happen is that we will come to appreciate longevity far more because you know 30, 40

50 years ago the expectation was you were over and done in whatever sport you were in by the time you were 30. Now we have these guys like LeBron and Federer who are expanding that definition, and I think that means that we are revising our definition of greatness and saying we care a lot more about how long you draw out that post-peak.

So, I mean, Federer, really the example is Duncan. Federer won Wimbledon in 03. He beat Mark Philippousis. And then he won again in 2012. He beat Andy Murray, which was like playing on the road, basically. So he won Wimbledon's 10 years apart. But then was the runner-up in Wimbledon in 2014 and the runner-up at the u.s open in 2015 yeah um yeah that's in this that is a and it probably is gonna be one of the people

involved this time around you know i i think i think we we could see another tiger type i think this jordan speed Tiger type. I think this... Jordan Spieth might be Tiger. I think that you need to, when you go back and you redo the book of basketball and your rankings of the all-time great basketball players, this has to be a much more explicit focus in your rankings. Longevity.

Longevity. Because it changes a whole lot when you start thinking about these players in those terms. Yeah, but you and I, we've talked about this in the past, though, that there's so many more advantages for the modern guys. If Larry Bird was in this generation, he would have played for 19, 20 years. But you can still go back and you can see, you can credit people for longevity within the context of their era, right? But you can see, you can credit people for longevity within the context of their era, right? But you can still do that kind of contextualizing.

Yeah, you'd almost have to curve up. But to me, Jerry West versus Kobe, most people think Kobe would be higher on any list, right? And a two-guard list. And I have to agree. The longevity is what pushes him over Jerry West. But Jerry West played from 1961 to 1974 and did stuff like...

That's an amazing thing. He had some injuries in the last couple years. And if you had injuries in your mid-30s and you were a basketball player, that was it. They'd take you behind the stadium and shoot you, basically. Yeah.

And if you just flip their careers, Kobe wouldn't have played longer than Jerry West did, but Jerry West might've played for 20 years. It's so tough to say 20 years of Kobe was more impressive than 14 years of Jerry West. When Jerry West was, as we've talked to the past riding coach, tape taping his own knee,

putting his own ice on guys are smoking next to him at halftime. He's eating a cheeseburger before a game. Like, how can you compare that? No arthroscopic surgery. Yeah, yeah. What are you working on? Anything? Just working on my podcast, Revisionist History.

I'm off to interview Rick Barry this weekend. Oh, don't say hi to him for me. That's what, although I reread your, uh, your entry in the book of basketball and Rick Barry and, uh, actually you, you were much more respectful towards him than I had remembered. Yeah, I agree. And the other thing is, I'll always say this and we, I mean, we are running way, way, way, but, um, Yeah, I agree. And the other thing is, I'll only say this, and I mean, we are running way, way, way. But I asked you this question in the email.

I want you to tell me the answer. You point out that he wasn't widely liked by his teammates. He was hated. But nor was Isaiah. Isaiah was hated so much they didn't want him on the dream team. Like, that's a level of hate that goes way beyond. There is no one in that era, in Rick Barry's era, who wouldn't have won him on there. If you're putting together a dream team in 19-whatever, 70.

I don't agree. Rick Barry really bugged people. But to go to the extraordinary length of saying, as they did with Isaiah, we don't want him. Those were opponents saying that, though. Like, Isaiah, if you watch the Bad Boys documentary, the Pistons teammates loved Isaiah. Isaiah was like the leader of that team. I don't know if Rick Barry had that. I find that thing about Isaiah, that is, to me, of there are many troubling things about Isaiah, that's the most troubling.

Because it's one thing, sure, you have a competitor, a fierce competitor you play against. He rubs you the wrong way. But you know, you say, that's because we're in competition. I'll give him that. I still want him on my side. They didn't want him on their side. They didn't want him on, they didn't want him on their side. But it wasn't a they,

it was Jordan. Jordan was like, I'm not playing if Isaiah's on the team. This is a fact. He's just like, I'm not playing. So, I mean,

you can have Isaiah on the team, but then I'm not going to be on the team. That's it. It wasn't a they, it was just him. They hated each other. You gotta, you gotta, actually, that's what makes me't a they it was just him they hated each other you gotta you gotta

actually that's what makes me love Jordan even more but you know Rick Barry I think the players voted in 1974 for the MVP

Rick Barry was like fifth and he had by far the best season like you look at like he was on the best team he was 30 points a game

six assists like he was the best passing forward other than bird rick barry's basketball career i always have that that thing if if you if you just had a computer simulate somebody's career 10 times how would it have played out i think his played out like the the worst of the 10 possibilities because like he went to the aba yeah to sit out a year he blew out his knee that That cost him another year. Like he had all these obstacles against him.

And then for this one year, it all came together in 74 and they won the title. They sweep the bullets. What a player. I mean, one of the best forwards ever. And nobody would say that anymore. But extraordinary. But I gave him more. I gave him more.

I mean, I'm really looking forward to meeting him, but I think I'm much more accepting of difficult personalities at elite levels. I just think on one level, if you're going to be really, really, really good at something, you're going to, by definition, be difficult. But basketball is the worst sport to be difficult in because that's the sport that relies the most on the chemistry with your teammates. sport to be difficult in because that's the sport that relies the most on the chemistry with your teammates you can be difficult in baseball because it's an individual sport but i think you're seeing that now with houston where they have this team built

around these two guys who are just you know atypical harden and howard And whereas like you look at the Warriors and your leaders are Steph Curry and Draymond Green and you have Steve Kerr as your coach. Like it's no wonder, like the spirit of that team is so incredible. Like those guys, they're just awesome teammates. Anyone would want to play with those guys, you know? Draymond to me is, I know we have to go. I just love Draymond Green. I told, I was talking to Zach on the phone the other day. Zach and I just do our podcast now just on the phone. We just have phone calls. We don't release them.

It's really sad. It's tragedy. But I was saying Draymond would be my number two MVP because, first of all, he played the best game I've seen all year in Boston, where he just single-handedly beat the Celtics. Yeah. And did more and just cared more than anyone I've seen all year in Boston, where he just single-handedly beat the Celtics. Yeah. And did more and just cared more than anyone I've seen in a game all year. Like, he just, he wanted it so bad. I guess Westbrook's like that every game, but Westbrook's an alien.

But Draymond, he's so competitive. And his competitiveness just game to game is what fuels that team. Like, that team really wants to win 75 games, and it's because of him. You saw it last night in denver he's not there and it's just that that edge just isn't there when he's not there that guy is the alpha dog in the league right now other than westbrook you know he just stalks the court he really wants to like he treats it like a boxing match yeah but uh when you think of that versus somebody like rick barry who's this mercurial guy who's super talented, by all accounts difficult, hard to relate to, and they kind of coexisted with him that one Warriors season,

then it fell apart the next season. You've got to ask him about it. I think he's very defensive about it. Yeah. I had him, what did I have him, like 25th? I had him high. You had him high. No, you absolutely had him high you had him high uh no you absolutely had him high no I um it was my quarrel is with some of the people who are ahead of him but

uh I'll do it at some point it'll it'll be uh after my third divorce after a couple failed shows that's when it'll happen uh thanks to HBO now for sponsoring today's podcast you don't need cable or satellite to watch HBO anymore. Just download the HBO now app. Start your free one month trial today. Streaming right now on HBO. Now the new Mad Max movie just got nominated for an Oscar coming in April game of Thrones. And at some point in 2016, maybe this podcast, who knows? Uh, do yourself a favor.

Download the HBO now app. Thanks to Squarespace. Thanks to stamps.com. And thanks to SeatGeek, the presenting sponsor of the BS podcast and channel 33. Subscribe to both podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud. Channel 33, Chris Ryan and I did. Oh, no, we did that for the BS podcast. Chris Ryan and I broke down heat for like an hour.

I loved that. You heard that one. Oh, so fantastic. That's my favorite podcast I've done since October. Joe Jurevicius reference. Spoiler alert. There's a reference to Joe Jurevicius. Knock him.

Thank you. This was awesome. Always fun to talk to you. Thanks, Bill. We about this bitch. Anytime y'all wanna see me again Rewind this track right here Close your eyes And picture me rollin'