The Press Box - Remembering Roger Angell With Jason Gay. Plus, How to Cover a Golf Tournament

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by the 'Wall Street Journal'’s Jason Gay to remember the great writer Roger Angell. They reflect on his style of writing, longevity, and discuss some of their favorite stories (5:16). Then, Bryan talks about his experience at the PGA Championship in Tulsa (31:46). After that, Jason comes back to join David in trying to guess the Strained Pun Headline of the Week. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Jason Gay Associate Producer: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, Rachel Lindsay here, and I am teaming up with your favorite Ringer podcasters to deliver the Bravo drama and news that you've been craving on Morally Corrupt. It's the show about all things Bravo, from the Housewise to Summer House and everything in between. We'll be mentioning it all every week. Check it out on Spotify and the ringer.com. David? Yes. Coming to you from the great state of New Mexico.

today. I have been out here for a couple days for a literary conference. The first ever edition of the Santa Fe Literary Festival. Wow. Which was put on by my pals, Claire Hurtell and Mark Bryant. It was awesome. It had an incredible lineup of heavy hitters. Margaret Atwood was there. Colson Whitehead, John Grishie. John Crackauer, Emily St. John Mandel, Sanjusis, Narrows. I could go on and on. They brought me out here because they asked me to interview Don Winslow and Lawrence Wright on stage. But not at the same time.

It would have been interesting to do a looming tower, Savage's crossover. We didn't quite get there. But the cool part for me was I actually got to be at a literary festival, something that have not done anything resembling in two years. Got to sit in a room with a group of people who like you and, me love books and love authors. I got to do that thing where you feel like a real person of letters just by osmosis and contact with actual people of letters. Absolutely. On the downside, I bought a ton of books and got them all autographed, which is only bad news because I'm going to have to

hire a U-Haul to get from Albuquerque to California with this huge load. But what I wanted to tell you is that I had my notebook out, and I wrote down some of the smart things author said from the stage. Go on? I want to give you five quotes about writing and reporting I thought you would really dig. Okay, great. First one comes from Douglas Preston.

Oh, yeah. Who wrote many novels with Lincoln Child, including Relic, which is awesome. I bought a copy of his nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God. Here's what he said. When you're a journalist, anything that doesn't kill you is

going into the story, which I thought was a great quote, because when you're on one of those adventure stories, long form into the jungle pieces, you kind of want some things to go wrong. You don't want something to go really, really wrong, but you want something to go. Or maybe put it like this. If something goes wrong, you really don't mind. Because that makes for an exciting story. Someone asked Joy Harjo, who is the three-time, three-term, excuse me, U.S. Poet Laureate, about what's a nice writing day like for you.

Joy Harjo responded, I would like to have a nice writing day. That's great. So that was so good. Because our writing days ever really nice writing days. Sometimes they're productive. Sometimes it's awesome. The result is awesome.

But nice writing day, not sure that's in any writer's vocabulary. I also got to meet Craig Johnson, who's the author of the Walt Longmeyer Mystery Series. Yeah, I love those. He was on a panel honoring Tony Hillerman, and he said this about winning over people who could be potential sources for you. There's no more seductive words in the English language than, tell me a little more about yourself. I thought that was great.

Good advice to any journalist who's trying to win people over. John Crackauer was there. I've been a guest on this podcast. Yeah. He said, to get an article right, you have to do as much research as you would for a whole. whole fucking book. Oh my God. That's perfect.

I love that quote. I once heard Mark Singer, I think it was also at a conference, the old New Yorker writer, and he said something like, I do all this work to write a New Yorker profile. And it's so much work to get it right. And then at the end, I don't have a book. I have a magazine profile. I thought that was funny. Yeah.

And finally, Sandra Cisneros, and how cool was it to be a few feet away from her, she was talking about representation in fiction. And this quote certainly applies in that context, though. I suppose it could also be universal. She said, I wrote the book I wanted to see in the library. Yeah, I've heard lines like that before. That's great. Isn't that the best reason to write a book ever?

I wrote the book I wanted to see in the library. You have written a book you wanted to see in the library. Yeah. I love that quote. Coming up on today's show and speaking of great writers, we pay tribute to the New Yorker's Roger Angel, with a little help from our friend Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal. Plus some notes on covering a golf tournament, all that more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network.

Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Isaiah Blakely here. Roger Angel was a baseball writer. He was a baseball blogger. He was a New Yorker fiction editor. And he was the embodiment of that magazine's history and values and quality. He died Friday at age 101. Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal is here to help us commemorate his life. Jason, you not only read Roger Angel, you talked to him most recently on his 100th birthday

last September. What was Roger Angel like? Well, listen, there's the old adage, right? You never want to meet your idols. And Roger Angel was definitely an idol of mine ever since my father gave me a copy of the summer game a long, long, long, long time ago. And I read that and I read five seasons and on and on. But you never want to meet those idols because they might disappoint you.

Well, this was a rare case of, you know, he just lived up to every expectation and hope. He was incredibly game. He was incredibly cogent, fired up about the season, fired up about things that were happening in the world. If we could have half of his humor and clarity at the precipice of 100, we will take it. I mean, he just is an extraordinary life and individual, and to have the privilege to be able to interview him at 100 was incredible. What do you think, in looking back at his career, what do you think was, what, do you think that it was a case of a writer that, you know, who's, he was known for for writing about baseball, obviously? Yeah. The fact that he went his entire

career being known as a great writer who wrote about baseball, does that, can you attribute that more to him as a writer or as the singular place that baseball occupied in the American imagination for so long, or is it a combination of the two? David, I'm going to use a term you've never heard before. It's called a perfect storm, okay? But just it was a confluence of a lot of amazing things that happened in his life. Obviously, he grew up in this literary family. His mother was fiction editor of the New Yorker before him.

His stepfather was E.B. White. He had, you know, a complete literary tradition growing up. However, you know, he was not someone who came to baseball at an early age knowing that that's what he wanted to do. One of my favorite things about Roger Angel's baseball writing career is kind of a late bloomer. He doesn't get to it until he's in his early 40s. It's William Shaw, the editor of the New Yorker at the time, says, we got this new team in town. They're called the Mets. Casey Stengel's the manager.

It's 1962. Why don't you go down to Florida and check it out? out. And he is the, you know, the ultimate fish out of water, Roger Angel, the New Yorker. This is the age of, you know, six daily newspapers in New York City, people wailing at Royals and Underwoods in the press box. And he feels completely out of place. But he's matched with this magazine that has this incredible literary tradition, which will let him write dated, very long pieces about baseball and about other things besides baseball. And we've all that narrative. together, give him the space he needs to do it. There's no one in the world at the time who's doing this sort of thing. I mean, that context is important because nowadays in the era of the limitless internet, you know, in theory, everybody has the luxury to write long like that. But he stood alone in that respect. And the pieces, you know, it's not strictly a case of having the perfect situation, of course, because he also just was tremendously good at it. And he got great advice early on from Sean,

said to him, sports writing has two pitfalls. It can be mean and it can be sentimental. Don't be either one of those two things. He wasn't. McPhee gave him all the great advice, which was act stupid when interviewing people, which we've all probably been told. And some of us, including myself, have an easier time doing. But it's excellent advice when you want to talk to people who have expertise in a field.

You don't know anything about. Roger Angel did not come to baseball as some guy who had like an 11-year pro career and like knew everything about the game. And one of the things that made him so wonderful was he was not afraid to ask those dumb questions, which led to some incredibly insightful writing about the mechanics of baseball, managing, pitching. I think he's written about pitching as well

as almost anybody's written about anything. It really was that confluence of things happening, but then also just this remarkable talent on top. One of the dreariest arguments we have on Twitter is when a sports writer comes forward and says, I don't like it because all these sports writers these days are just fans. They're fans. They're not supposed to be fans.

And I always want to just take an 8 by 10 photo of Roger Angel and be like, you see this guy? This guy was a fan and he wrote like a fan. How do you think that permeated his writing, Jason? I mean, I think he was a fan literally in the respect that he sat with the fans, at least initially. He felt uncomfortable in the press box. Again, these are the cigar smoking era, the heyday of baseball. baseball writing. He felt out of place in that environment. He sat in the stands owing to also John Updike, writing the famous piece about Ted Williams sitting in the stands at Fenway. He wanted to get

that kind of action and vibe in the piece. So he wrote from a fan's perspective, I wouldn't say he was a homer and he certainly wasn't in the tank for anybody. He's had some famous lines over the years about how, you know, everybody has a little Yankee and Mets fan in them and were mostly at heart Metz fans because it's just the way that team is sort of chemically addled, or not chemically out, just like prone to misery and all kinds of disaster. And he certainly wrote with great enthusiasm for the sport, but I would say it's a little bit different than like pinning your face and putting on a hat and going there in Tom Seaver, Jersey.

I don't think he did that. No, I think it goes back to what you were talking about a second ago, that almost, that just innocence. I don't know if that's the right word. you'd read those spring training pieces. And I went over to the clubhouse to hope to get a word from Pete Rose, which is, by the way, a real New Yorker thing. I remember when Nick Lemon was covering Washington, D.C.,

but I went and knocked on the door of Senator So-and-so to get some answers. Right. And it's important to sort of point out what a luxury that is in writing, the fact that you can kind of do a slow build. I think nowadays, I mean, we still have, you know, 5,000, 10,000 word stories that get published in tremendous ones, but they're almost kind of put together like Michael Baymoor. where something big has to happen every 500 words,

some car has to blow up to keep us engaged in the story. And I think with Roger and the New Yorker especially at that time was not afraid of the slow build. And you did have that kind of ambient quality of him walking around and sort of like, you know, why not go and talk to somebody about the knuckleball for 45 minutes? And I make that of 1,200 words seen in a broader piece about the end of the season.

I mean, Roger Angel wrote a base baseball rap that published, I believe, six to eight weeks after the completion of a baseball season. Now, if you or I were to go to our editors and suggest that, we would be chased out of our respective offices. That's not something that gets assigned terribly often at all anymore. And yet, he was up to the challenge of that. It was funny because you say that, because the one semi-semi-semi-churlish thing I have ever heard anyone say about Roger Angel, because nobody just likes Roger Angel.

But the only thing I ever heard anybody say was a sports writer one time who worked in the 60s and 70s told me he'd see Roger Angel at the World Series, probably wearing a tweed jacket in the press box. And, of course, this sports writer would pound out a column under a fearsome deadline after game one. And then he would pound out another column after game two. And then an off day column. And then game three, game four, the series ends. He's probably covering Army Navy or whatever college football game is going on. And then a roundabout Thanksgiving, here would come Roger Angel and the game. the New Yorker.

Sure. And everybody would say, God, Roger Angel writes about baseball better than anyone in this sports writer while loving Roger Angel. Let me not say anything untoward here. It would be like, oh, my gosh, I have supplied so much content, as we would now call it, between now and then. But here's the thing. I'm comfortable saying, I said this actually in a piece the other day, that no one got

that complaint more than Roger Angel. I think he understood that he was doing something completely apart from what a deadline writer did. He marveled at the skill set of somebody who was able to compose something on deadline. He knew he didn't have that in him. He was kind of, you know, driving the road that he was given here. And I think that, listen, there's a lot of writers you can say that about with, and nowadays we're guilty of this too. If you look at sort of the superlatives that get tossed around about writing in sports writing and anything else that, you know, a lot of it is sort of given to the large takeout project where somebody gets to like go away and, you know, focus on one thing

for a period of weeks or even months. And not as much attention is given to the person who's sort of cranky it on a deadline. That's an old thing. They said it about Angel. They said it about Dan Jenkins. They said it about a lot of great writers along the way. What, do you think that Dan Jenkins is a good point of,

is a good point of comparison. Are we just, with Angel's passing, are we just, are we past the point of having writer institutions like him? as far as like a big name writer that can cover one beat who are in professional sports to to that level of acclaim and and to be respected both inside clubhouses and, you know, by the general public and by the sort of, well, you know, highbrow readership, whatever we want to call ourselves. Right, right.

I think so. I think so. I want to hope so. And let's not forget the other part about Roger Angel, which I would hope that or I would think that all three of us would agree on was that when you picked up an issue of the New Yorker and you found Roger Anian. angel piece in it. It was like a Wonka ticket. There was this like great thrill. You're like, oh my gosh, there's a Roger Angel this week. This is so great. We weren't in the era of like having this

story flagged to us, you know, five days out. We just picked it up. We're like, oh, great, there's Rogers and this is fantastic. So it was kind of like a little treat, a little bit of a dessert. Granted, an 8,000 word dessert in your New Yorker. But, you know, I think about what you're saying, David, and I think that the risk is, of course, that, you know, people who get into this profession might be incentivized to go in another direction. We see all the sort of fame, glory, money is headed towards the era of, you know, the insider, the newsbreaker, the person who's giving you stuff, you know, that you can utilize in your knowledge and your betting and your fantasy league and all that kind of stuff. And that's certainly where the market is heading. However, I just hope that there are a lot of

people who still get into it for artistic reasons. And they'll become kind of like, I don't know, you know, when Daniel Day Lewis decided he wanted to cobble shoes, you know, there was something just, you know, very admirable about the fact that somebody wanted to devote themselves to something artistic that takes a lot of time and might not get the kind of hosanas that the sort of quick biarrhythmic stuff gets. I think I texted you guys this the other day, but I was looking at the ESPN homepage after Angel died and the two headlines next to each other were longtime New Yorker writer, editor Angel dies.

And then the next one was will four star NFL running backs bounce back. Yeah. Kind of the two faces of sports writing. Right. And we probably don't want to look at the traffic numbers on that either. I am amazed at what a repository of history, baseball, and otherwise he was. He often, he wrote about and was often remarked of him that he saw Babe Ruth play in the late 1920s, which is amazing. There is, of course, the repository of New Yorker history.

David Remnick in his tributes that I once came to. him complaining about how hard it was to find writing that was truly funny. And Roger, as if we're calling a recent Tuesday, replied, Harold Ross said the same thing. Harold Ross being the founding editor of the New Yorker who died in 1951. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, absolutely. And he knew Harold as like his mom's boss. You know, he didn't know him just as his boss. You know, these kind of oracles we lose. And they're really critical connective tissue to the sport.

I think it's important to say that Roger Angel, though he had great affection for the game, never sort of fell into that corn syrupy place that we know that sports writing and especially baseball writing can get to. He was not somebody who was pulling at the heartstrings. He was not somebody who was

terribly interested in reminding you about playing catch with your dad. He got into the brass tacks and the details. He just happened to write long about it. And I think that was what distinguished him as well. And there's that other little great anecdote in the Remnick piece, which is wonderful. But it was, I think, of the 1999 World Series, the Subway Series. And he's there with Torre in Torre's office.

And Tori makes some sort of observation that's historical. And is unsure and turns to Roger and Roger nods, you know, as if to just confirm the fact that, well, no one's done this since Connie Mack. You remember Connie Mac, Roger, you know? When you talked about, when he talked to Roger, you said that he was excited for the upcoming season. Was he more excited in the micro or the macro? I guess as someone who's just watching from afar and usually just watches baseball from a sort of macro perspective, is he the sort of person that would say that would get really excited about players batting trends or something like that?

Or are we talking about the future of the sport sort of excitement? Sure. No, he got excited about all the above. Keep in mind, this was about a year and a half ago. So baseball was still in its COVID era. So we had these surreal scenes of ballparks that were empty or half empty. And players were trying to cope with the strangeness of that. We had the ghost runner.

We still have the ghost runner. We had all these kind of like, you know, changes, seven- inning double-headers. So there was all of a sudden a lot of strangeness around baseball, which I think really interested him. After we did that original interview, a couple months passed, and Jacob de Grom went up, and had a great beginning of the season for the Mets. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to call Roger.

See, we'll talk to you about DeGrom. I mean, he knew Seaver as well as anybody, and DeGrom might be the best Mets pitchers and Siever. Sure enough, he was all over. DeGrom knew everything about him. Also a late bloomer. Jacob DeGrom did not become a pitcher until sort of mid, early career.

You know, he was somebody who was still very current with the game. He was a Keith, Gary, and Ron guy. He was very big into the three of them. thinks they're the best in baseball. But the other thing is that Roger was losing his eyesight. So he couldn't really see what was happening. And I was thinking about this because I was looking through the notes of the original interview and he said that I can't really tell what's going on, but I can sort of see shapes. And baseball, unlike a lot of other sports, actually has a few sort of static things on the screen at a given moment. You have the pitcher, you have the catcher,

the hitter and the umpire. Four characters, they kind of are stationary, you know, know, for a given moment, and I can kind of make out what's happening. So it has still some sort of visual registration for me. But that just shows the length to which he was a fan, to which he was excited about the game. The fact that, you know, he had his vision, you know, deeply compromised at this point, and yet was tuning in for, you know, 100 games a year. Will any writer ever have a better 10th decade than Roger Angel did? Oh, man. Oh, man. I mean, if we had called it quits, if he had called he quits at 40, you know, he's, he's, he's one of the greats. No, when you were sort of like talking about the legacy that he had, I mean, we should talk about late Roger because he pivots to the

internet at 90, you know, he makes the full forward pivot to the internet and starts blogging about baseball in his 90s. He writes a book at I believe age 95 called This Old Ben, which began with an essay in New Yorker that it was like a 105 mile an hour heater on the outside corner. It was so well written. I turned to it all the time as an example of vivid, great writing. You know how you do that to sort of get your juice flung? He was so good, so late. That to me, you know, I do not understand how someone can do that, get up for that.

And I marvel at it. and if I could get half that runway, I'd be thrilled. I saw this line from Let Me Finish, which he published back in 2006. Memory is fiction. An anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. I mean, just, whoa, speaking of heaters, right over the play.

I also thought both old readers and new readers at a time like this love a reading list so they can go back and enjoy. I saw the piece he wrote about the 1975 World Series cited many times titled by the way Agencourt and after what a perfect New Yorker headline

I don't think the Cincinnati Inquirer went with that one at any time in 75 David Shoemaker guesses the 1975 New Yorker headline I would take about a thousand guesses what else Jason's on your angel reading list

okay I'm going to go with one that I wish I could remember the name off the top of head, but he wrote it, I believe, in 1981, and he goes to watch Yale play St. John's, where there are two phenom pitchers, Ron Darling for Yale and Frank Viola for St. John's University. This alone would be an incredible story because they end up having a no-hitter versus a one-hitter that goes into the 10th inning. But Angel makes the move to contact Smokey Joe Wood, the famous Smokey Joe Major League legend, who coached Yale baseball, who is 91 years old, and Angel convinces him to come out to the So you have this incredible pastiche of Smokey Joe Wood observations amid, you know,

these two guys turn into celebrated all-star pitchers in Major League Baseball. We all know who Ron Darling and Frank Viola turned into. They were terrific pitchers. That one is as good as it gets. A lot of people have sent me their favorites. One of the ones that gets mentioned a lot is his martini homage. If you are a drinker or even if you're not a drinker, if you're not a martini guy, if you are a martini guy or martini gal or anybody,

that might be right up your alley. And then lastly, I think the one that, you know, I love the most, you know, sort of in terms of, it's one of the things that just has gotten a lot of coverage in this sort of modern sports riding era. His coverage of the 1986 Mets World Series over the Red Sox, which as much as the Buckner thing is the, you know, takeaway memory of that event,

true Mets lunatics know that it was that NLCS extra innings game against Mike Scott, which is the epical game of that Mets run. And that's the part that actually Angel devotes most of the space to. And then it just kind of reads like this 75 mile an hour cab ride around New York City during all this. And again, there's a way to tell that story that's a little corny. It's not that at all. You know, it's so vivid.

It's so precise with details. he tells this little moment of seeing a limousine at Harold Square, its door open, the grainy little, well, I know you guys boys grew up in limousines, you know, the little TV that's in the back, you know, showing the bets game and a crowd gathering around this enormous limousine. Lots of little things like that and this kind of collective sigh that finally goes over the city when the Red Sox are defeated. It's, you know, there are many, many pieces to draw from, but those jump out. David, did you look up the Viola Darling headline while he was talking?

The web of the game? The web of the game. There's a New Yorker headline if there ever was one. Yeah, yeah. Truly fantastic stuff. I mean, that's the beauty of it. I mean, listen, we are obsessive, so we appreciate it. It's easy to make fun of, and we definitely all make fun of it.

But there is just something so anachronistically wonderful about the fact that this was a piece that just kind of winds its way into where it's going. And we don't see that anymore. Again, we've sort of all gone to the Michael Bay School of grabbing somebody. We're just feeling that they are going to lose their attention at any given moment. And if we don't give them something exploding, we're going to lose them. I think that when you talk about reading Angel to kind of get your juices flowing, I think the three of us could probably go toe to toe with any other trio in the writing sphere in terms of having essay collections on our bookshelves that there's just nothing exists in the English language like it anymore.

What do you, as a modern writer, when speaking to other writers, think that you can learn from Roger Angel's writing? I thought you were going to say that there weren't three writers in the universe that could go toe to toe with us. And I was like, I can name 45,000 guys. I mean, come on, who are we kidding here, right? All right? We're making fast food and plenty of it.

But in buying books, maybe not. Maybe not. I think that sense of currency, okay? So, again, these things were being published months sometimes after the final outs of these series. In my case, I was reading about the 1975 World Series in 1983. I was reading, you know, these stories that were now, you know,

seven, eight, nine, ten years old. And they had this, you know, again, sort of using the tools of detail, vivid language, they truly came to life. There's a way that baseball sometimes gets rendered that anything that happened before the year 2010 feels like it happened in scratchy wool uniforms, right? But it didn't, right? And they had incredible currents. I mean, you think about the 70s in baseball were kind of a wild era, right?

you know, the Starjill era, the Weaver era, you know, a lot of exciting things happening. And to see those people come to life, to see life breathe into a Steve Carlton or a Tom Seaver or Phil Necro, that's where the specialness is. And I think that it holds up. And I think that in any genre of writing, it's important to say that this is not like for baseball dorks only, although it helps. It has real lessons for anybody. Another one I'd add to your reading list is this piece from 1979 called Sharing the Beat. He wrote about women who had been banned from locker rooms by several teams. It's such an interesting angel piece because it is way outside the scope of what we're talking about.

But it is such a good story and he did it so wonderfully. And it's kind of a wonderful miracle that that story exists. I'm really glad I always enjoy picking that up and reading it. 100%. And what also makes that, he's rendering these characters as full people as they are. And it's not just, you know, here's the thing that happened. And I'm going to try to give you the quick details in 700 words here. You bring the whole thing to life.

And that was the benefit that he had by working at where he had, but he also had the skill set. Did you see Tom Boswell's column where he had a memory of Roger Angel going rogue in the press box? Yeah. I'll read. If people haven't heard, this is Tom Boswell in the Washington Post. when Roger Angel was in his 80s, I was proud to be his human shield in a spitball assault in which Roger pummeled a pompous pundit with paper wads in a Yankee Stadium press box. Lean forward just a little so I can throw behind you. I think I can hit him in the head,

said Angel, the best baseball essayist ever. Roger's Target was a famous but obnoxious TV know-it-all on both sports and politics, no hence folks, who was standing in the auxiliary, repress box aisle, making loud comments to a pair of sycophants on all subjects except the playoff game in progress. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, amazing. Just like, you know, the idea of Boswell on Angel. We are really running out of, you know, people who shook Ralph Hogue's hand, okay? And it's important to recognize the contributions of each. So we're going to have Posnansky on Boswell someday, not anytime soon, I hope. But the chain is breaking down, folks. Kepner on Posnanski.

Like, can we, can we keep going with this? We're going to run out of... Pesan on Kepner, on Posnowski, on Boswell, on Angel. Yeah, yeah, on Murray. I'm blanking on the Great Daily News. Yeah, Dick Young. Jason, since Roger Angel would have appreciated, in fact, did appreciate wordplay.

Would you like to come back in a minute and help David Shoemaker guess the Strainpun headline? Yes. Oh my God. You know, I have two children, but this will be the honor of a lifetime. Yes, absolutely. All right, Jason. We'll bring you back in just a second, but first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the Press Box Pod where they're always gratefully received. Today's winner, David Springs, from a tweet about a new car that is going to be made by Apple. the tweet, Apple's self-driving car could feature virtual reality technology and no Windows.

It was an extremely overworked Twitter joke to write. Apple is really taking the beef with Windows too far. Thanks to the many, many people who sent that in. If you remembered Windows enough to make a joke about it, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. David in the notebook dump, I want to tell you about a few things I did last week. Yes, please do. I went to the PGA Championship.

It was in Tulsa. I went with the ostensible purpose of interviewing Jim Nance. You can listen to that podcast. But I came away with an observation, which is that in terms of pure experiential pleasure, I'm not sure there's anything better in sports writing than covering a golf tournament. Go on. So here's the thing.

I get there. It's Thursday morning. I go out on the course. I am sticking close to ESPN's Kevin Van Valkenberg because let me tell you, one of the keys of covering a golf tournament is knowing where to walk. Because you can walk inside the ropes at a golf tournament. You can be pretty close to the golfers during a golf tournament. But you don't want to be in the way and you don't want to be in the way of, you know,

a ball or sit in the wrong place. So anyway, I was getting some advice. But we go out, it's like 8.15 in the morning, pleasant and breezy. We're standing at the bottom of a hill, Van Valkenberg and I, and we look up at the hill and we see standing above us, Jordan Speath, Rory McElroy, and Tiger Woods, who are playing together. And they're just right there. I mean, right there.

And that was the first thing that struck me is that when you're covering a golf tournament, If you dare to venture out of the media center, and that's a calculation everybody makes. But if you venture out of the media center, you kind of have the best seat in the house. You are with the competitors while they are playing their sport. You are 30 feet from the competitors. When they're teeing off, you can be ducked down on one knee, maybe 10 feet behind the competitors. Like Tiger Woods would tee off and then grab his knee. or wince, and I would be, you would be right there.

So are there clear rules about where you're allowed to be, or is it all just a experience, like a, you know, once you've done it a few times, you now have the intuition of where you're allowed to be, or is it just golf theory to stand the way of the shot? It is all the above, but let me tell you, the old hands have a certain intuition. One player hits, the other player hits,

you walk with them down the course and then you pick a spot to sit that's usually right around the spot where they hit right so you're you're walking as far down the course as they have walked but here's the key david there are tons of spectators lined up along the ropes these people aren't walking with the players they've staked out this awesome spot and they are really excited that famous golfers like tiger woods are now have now appeared in front of them So when you get to that your spot, you have to immediately sit down in the grass so that they can see over you. So you're walking along the ropes, inside the ropes, you find your spot and then you sit. This is the key to golf riding as far as I can turn.

The walk and the sit. And I happen to be wearing these pants that I got at REI a couple years ago. You know, those kind of like athleticy mountain climbing pants that breathe really well. Does it zip off at the knee, those pants? Yeah, I don't think there's a zip off at the knee, but in spirit, yes, there's a zip off at the knee. And let's just say, I've not done a lot of mountain climbing in the last couple years. This was really the first outdoor activity those pants have ever experienced. But I was so happy because I could sit down in the grass and then I could get up again, walk another couple of feet, sit down in the grass, walk and sit.

To your point about, what are you worried about getting in the way from? I ran into our old Grantland colleague, Shane Ryan. Oh, yeah. Wow. Has a new book out, the cup they couldn't lose. And I asked him, what is the key to knowing where to stand, where to sit when you're covering a golf tournament? This is what he said. So the first event I ever covered, they said they gave me an inside the ropes pass, the PGA tour.

And I thought that meant you could basically walk side by side with the players, maybe talk to them. You can't do that. I learned that when a PGA tour official came running out because he had seen me on TGA. in the middle of the fairway, not a good look. So I almost lost the pass as soon as I got it. So the first thing you know, inside the robes means, yeah, you get to be inside the robes in front of the gallery, which is great, but, you know, within an arm's length of the rope or there could be consequences.

Here's another funny thing, David. So you're walking along the ropes as a nominal sports writer. And let's face it, I am a nominal sports writer at a golf tournament. And you're close to the fans. You're in a press box at a football game. You're not close to the fans. No, not at all. Probably don't even talk to the fans.

But here, you are sitting down literally at the fan's feet. Well, let me tell you, first off, you hear what the fans say during a golf tournament. I actually heard the words, it's about beer 30 from a fan of the BJ championship. It was 847 a.m. when those words were uttered. The other thing you hear a lot is sports writer trolling from the fans. Fan might say, you a sports writer? Another fan saw me scribbling in my notebook and he said, are you taking notes?

I wanted to say, yeah, yeah, I'm taking notes. Golf writers I talked to said they hear a lot, how do I get one of those passes? Because we were wearing little lanyards around our neck that said you could get inside the ropes. To which you want to respond. No, no, this is not like a first-class seat on an airplane. You know how many think pieces I had to write in order to be able to qualify for one of these?

Oh, my God. But what struck me about the whole experience, and again, I say this as a pretend golf writer for one day, is that press boxes at football games and baseball games have gotten worse and worse. They used to be at the 50-yard-liner behind home plate. Now teams have kicked those way down the baselines at baseball. games. Mm-hmm. Or if football games put them close to or inside the end zone.

They've also, in a lot of cases, completely windowed them off from the rest of the stadium. So you feel like a turtle inside a terrarium more than a sports writer at a... Yeah, for sure. At a game where you can hear the fans, the opposite of what you and I were doing at WrestleMania, for instance. Mm-hmm. In a lot of ways, you have the worst seat in the house, if we're allowed to complain to

sports writers. but golf, I would say it's as much closer to guys that were covering the game decades ago. Dan Jenkins. And again, there's a calculation. Do I go out and walk with people, observe golfers at close range and potentially miss the story that's happening somewhere else? You have to make calculations when you're doing this. Hopefully, maybe your publication has more than one person at a golf tournament. But I thought that was really interesting.

Speaking of Dan Jenkins, the other interesting part was I went to one other PGA championship in 2014 when I was with Grantland, and it was so cool to walk into that media center because Jenkins, the man, his own self, was in there, Dave Kendred was in there, Tom Callahan. We're talking to Jason about sports writers connecting to the past. That was awesome. Those guys aren't there anymore. I think I saw Art Spander, but that whole sort of sports writerly generation, Speaking of going into press boxes and being able to see somebody and connect with them, that was really cool. And I will always remember that. It's time for David Shoemaker.

Guess is the Strain Punt headline featuring Jason Gay. Thursday's headline about a woman who turns motorcycle service into fine art was art in the den of motorcycle maintenance. Today's headline came from a whole bunch of people. I'm awarding it to Bugsy Tarkhanian, wonderful name. It's from CNN.com. It involves last week's primary elections. North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorne lost his primary race after alienating the Republican Party, including claiming he had been invited to orgies.

But alienation is our theme here. What was CNN.com strained pun headline? No, man, it's an island. alienation, man. Madison Cothorn. Madison. You really thought I'm here. I'm really helping out.

Gosh, Madison, Wisconsin, Madison. Madison. I know you guys are old enough to remember a very famous bestseller that might have had Madison in it. What? Madison. Madison. Love story. Clint Eastwood.

Oh, the Bridges of Madison County. It's got a hack. And if you've alienated people, it is the Burk Bridges. Of Madison, Cothorn. Cawthor. That's great. There we go.

There we go. Well done, CNN. Huge thanks to Jason Gay. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Isaiah Blakely. We got a big week coming up here at the little press box podcast, David. While I was in Santa Fe, I wasn't just mingling with big-time authors.

I actually... got one of them to come on this podcast. You might be familiar with his work. His name is George R.R. Martin. Oh, he's a genre novelist of note, I believe. I believe he has written some genre novels, yes. George R.R. Martin said to me very kindly that he did not want to be asked about the winds of winter, which he has pestered about in every interview.

But he was happy to entertain my questions about the two journalism degrees he got at Northwestern, his views on the media more generally, living in New Mexico, the 2022 NFL draft, which he apparently watched quite a bit of, and his thoughts on this season's New York Jets. So coming tomorrow, a chat on the press box with George R.R.R. Martin. plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.