The Press Box - Riding the Tiger: Julian Assange and Ernie Banks | The Press Box

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Tiger Woods’s shocking victory at The Masters (03:00), last week’s arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (25:30), and Ron Rapoport on the art of writing a sports biography (36:00). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Season 8 of Game of Thrones premiered on Sunday, and you can deep dive with the ringer staff as we make our way through the final episodes of the series. On the podcast side, listen to Binge Mode Game of Thrones with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion, the watch with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, and a pre-capable series on the recapables feed

where we'll make predictions on episodes to come. In addition to our Sunday night Twitter after show called Talk the Thrones, we'll be releasing tons of videos over the course of the series. So make sure to check out our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash the ringer. And for even more Game of Thrones coverage, head over to the ringer.com. David, last week, Bernie Sanders

did a town hall on Fox News, drawing good reviews even from his lefty fans. What I want to know is, what other Pilgrim in an unholy land moments would you like to see on TV? Oh, man. Oh, man. I'm not sure what I think about Bernie going on Fox, but now I kind of wish just,

everybody would go on Fox. It's such as like a bizarre, it was, it was just, just incredible television. First of all, we should say, in-house shout out to our co-worker, Roger Sherman, who stared down the challenge from Rich Eisen's Tom Flory and went right on his show and made, made friends with him. Yeah, I have no idea. I mean, like, do you try to make jokes and they all either go to Trump or, you know, I'm trying to leave like various barstool or PMT references out of here.

But listen, I think that the answer is, you know, there's a lot of places you could see Trump. It isn't just like the final answer right now. Just like just Trump having to sit on the stage for a Comedy Central roast in 2019 and just saying how badly that whole thing would go. Wouldn't that just be amazing? Oh, a whole other level of bad than the usual Comedy Central roast? Yeah. I couldn't help when hearing about the Bernie thing of just thinking that there are two types of Democrats. who do well on Fox News.

There are former Hillary advisors who do well because they're fake Democrats. And then there are people like Bernie Sanders who are in total don't give a fuck mode. So essentially when the Fox host challenges them and says, well, it sounds like you're for radical redistribution of wealth. They say, yes, that's exactly right.

I'm also for radical ideas about changing government, about mandatory safe spaces at every 7-Eleven in America. It's just like they've sort of figured out how to go in because their strategy is to just say, yes, whatever nightmare fantasy you've concocted about me is actually probably mostly true. Yeah. And at least on the ideological level. And I'm happy to own the ideas. And then the sort of Fox host is sort of flummoxed. Yeah, I think that the Fox thing, I mean, that kind of goes for all cable news, but you're right.

I mean, I think that it's really interesting. I wouldn't mind saying like Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddaw doing a home and away. you know, just to like, just to see how that would shake out. We are the Francis Ford Coppola hosting S&L of media podcasts. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to use the headline Tiger Roars. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here, David in Brooklyn.

Brian in London, where I'm making my temporary residence for the next month and change. How are you, David? I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. My temporary residence is the same as my usual residence. Three topics to discuss today. First, some media notes from Tiger Woods is a shocking victory at the master. Should we and how should we root for Tiger?

Second, we talk about last week's arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a threat to journalism or just a threat to Julian Assange. And finally, here on the press box, we try something a little different. We have an interview with author Ron Rappaport, who has a new book out about Ernie Banks. about the art of writing a sports biography, plus the notebook dump and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, the best way to explain just how universally big Tiger Woods winning the Masters was is that every British newspaper I saw yesterday from the Guardian to the

sun had Tiger on page one. And I guess the place I want to start with this is, you know, I feel in the Twitter era, we have a lot of fake everybody's watching this moments, you know, kind of like when a bunch of our colleagues are all watching a Philadelphia 76ers regular season game. And it seems like everybody on Twitter's watching, but really it's like six people. This was one of the, to me, other than, you know, Super Bowl, Oscars or the obvious stuff, was one of the few where everybody was sort of locked in. And also crucially, I think everybody was not only making jokes, they were making plenty of jokes,

but they were sort of having or at least pretending to have an emotional reaction. to what they were watching. Do you agree? Yes. I mean, I think for me, part of the surprise was the depth and and honesty and reality of the emotional reaction. Because I,

a lot of times in sports, obviously, we, at least in sports journalism, we focus more on the sort of charade of emotional response, as opposed as opposed to the actual emotional response. And Tiger's story over the past decade has been so, you know varied and expansive that it's that I didn't I think I didn't really I didn't really register

how much that people had an emotional connection to them anymore you know I mean I I thought it was just more of a sort of more more of a just sort of you know totem to to sports era's past or any or something like that that but but yeah the emotional response was real and also to take a more sort of you know right angle on the whole thing. We all have this experience where we watch, where something happens, and you're talking about experiencing it in real time on Twitter, how many times over the course of a sports year

do you have, you know, the George Costanza-style tweet that occurs to you 20 minutes after the fact, and it's just like, you just like back pocketed forever? If you ever had, if you had ever prepped a Tiger Woods tweet that didn't end up being relevant or that you missed the moment for, this master's was your chance to get it back out there into circulation, right? Like every every Tiger Woods joke,

pun headline, you know, every moment that didn't quite come to fruition, it finally all happened at the Masters and we all were there to experience it in social media style together. I agree and I'd also add just old media because this to me was the

comeback of the overused tiger headlines that I hadn't seen since the early aughts. On Twitter, Jeremy Reponich predicted the comeback of Tiger Roars and in fact it was everywhere. Also, from the London Times, one I had really noticed for about,

you know, 15 plus years now, which was tiger burning bright. You know, if you quote William Blake in a sports headline, you have to do it. Remember when that was big? That was like the,

it was also like a tiger burning dim period when he would, when he would fall in hard times. Yes. A couple of things that ended yesterday, one, or Sunday. One was,

um, the death of the, I hope, of the CBS executives tweet. Now, you know this is one of my bugaboos on Twitter, right?

When people are like, CBS executives must be so happy right now. And these are people who aren't sports media critics. They couldn't even name a single CBS sports executive. They've just been,

they've been taught and brainwashed so much by sports media critics that they think that's what you're supposed to do instead of just enjoying a big sporting event for its own. Well, guess who, guess who came in on the CBS executives front? Donald Trump.

who tweeted going into the final round quote great playing by at tiger woods at the masters and by the way he he wrote you know at ampersand the masters and then in parentheses wrote at the just in case any of his followers didn't understand what that meant and then he writes ratings gold good luck to all so um donald trump was thinking of the ratings rather than thinking of the special sports moment that should that should be shaming for everyone on twitter also i'd like to say rest in power to the control plus v talk radio segment, Tiger will win again or Tiger will never win again. It's now over. You have to have a different take. Why did anyone agree anyone but someone who is super plugged into golf and just knows something biomechanically about Tiger? Why did anyone agree to participate in one of those debates ever? What was the point? But other than getting you through the day?

possibly could be the point of Tiger Will never win again. What do you win if you're correct? No, I mean, I think just the entire Tigerwood story had become so dire in so many different directions over the years that you just had to go to the full extreme whenever you were debating them or it all seemed just sort of beside the point.

Rusillo and Simmons had a great conversation about this on Bill's podcast on Sunday, I guess. And I mean, I just encourage everyone to listen to it just for the conversation. I mean, if nothing else, for the conversation about Rissila, about Rissol made the point that this might be the one unziggable sports moment in recent memory where all of these people who are doing talk radio and TV are trying to zig where everyone else is zagging. And this,

and Tiger Woods put together maybe the one, the one sports moment that we could possibly think of where there is just not, there is not, you know, a dissenting point of view or there's not, there's not an arch point of view on this one. It's just Tiger Woods won. Let's all take a moment.

to appreciate it. I want to dig deeper into how people reacted to it because I think it's sort of fascinating. And it actually surprised me because I think there's a couple of things I expected. One is that this is one of those moments in sports where sports writers remember that their job is actually really exciting. And that, you know, things will happen that aren't just go to golf tournament, someone's wins golf tournament, you write story. And I saw a couple of those columns. This reminds you of how exciting sports is. Okay.

Got that one. You have your conventional or semi-conventional redemption narrative. Tiger was on top of the world. Tiger was not on top of the world and seemingly doomed. And then Tiger wins again. Okay. That I expected. There was some different stuff, though.

I saw at least one, and I think more sports writers, relating to Tiger Woods as a divorced dad. You remember that scene at the end of the round where he hugs his kids and he's elated and captured it for the TV cameras? And a couple of people were saying on Twitter, you know, I've fucked up in my life and I want my kids to still love me however imperfect I am. And that's the moment they latched on to when Tiger is hugging his kids. I thought that was fascinating. I would never have thought of that.

And it's not because I'm perfect either. But it's sort of like that was the part of Tiger. And it's like it's funny because he seems to me like such a distant figure. and he always has. And that was such a kind of a personal thing to latch on to that I thought that was really, really interesting. Yeah, no, I think we can all relate to that. And we can all relate to the emotion of the moment.

And I think that that's part of what, I think you're right, the distance is a real thing. As human as some of, as a lot of his story, the tragedy of his story has been, he's always seemed, you know, I mean, for someone who has been a part of our lives for so long, there did seem to, I mean, it was sort of easier to make, it was sort of easy to make jokes about him. Like, you know, I mean, I guess the same thing could be said about any other, you know, Hollywood celebrity, someone, anyone of his stature,

that he does seem so distant that, you know, you don't feel, you know, you don't feel as bad when you're, when you're like, you know, tossing bombs his way because he's, because he does seem distant. But in that moment, you know, in some ways that that was the great victory, right? the sort of like the triumph of humanity in that moment. And that was that was that was almost

bigger than the sports triumph. But I think that to go back to what you were saying before, part of what made part of what made this a great moment for sports journalism. And part of what I think contributed to a lot of the way that we talked about him, the way that people talked about him over the past decade was there is this very, there is this narrative, you know, there is this narrative arc that there's certain expectations, especially someone with, you know, of Tiger's level and with the amount of attention that we've given him over the years and that he's earned over the over the years is part of what really drove everything was this angst of the incomplete sports narrative. And I know this is sort of like two meta a take maybe for this for this moment, but

but this was, you know, there was there was the the giant rise, the beginning of his career, his complete domination of the sport for such a period of time, then him coming crashing down, he resumed his career and he resumed some level of success, but the idea that it wouldn't, like I said, it's the angst that he wouldn't ever regain the glory that he did in fact regain this weekend. I think just it was, it's really hard as a sports writer

to put that into concise and understandable terms because we're used to these narratives. and what he was able to do this weekend was really put a capstone on the story of his career and of his life. That's exactly right. And I think you saw CBS trying to do that when they showed footage from 97 with him hugging Earl after he wins the Masters and then running that next to him hugging his kids on Sunday afternoon. And not only did you have the kind of full circleness now we don't have an athlete cut short in his prime, but we also have. you know, Tiger was the son hugging his father and now Tiger is the father. Tiger is the tiger is a man.

You know, that was, I mean, to me, that was the not so subliminal message at that moment. Look at how he's grown up, whether he wants to or has, has done so by his,

you know, his fought at every step of the way or not. You know, now he's this dad, balding. Once he takes his cap off, he can see how much hair he's lost. And,

um, and that. I was, by the way, I was totally, I, I, um, I saw people as diverse as Jim Nance and Clay Travis, uh, talk about tearing up when they watched him hug his kids. I am a father. I watched the last hole with my six year old son after kicking him out for the previous 17 holes because he was too loud and I couldn't concentrate. Just this is actual parenting kids. This is the unromantic kind. Um, I, I was

not touched by that. And I don't, and I'm not, I'm not about saying that is in moral superior, in the moral superiority sense of the term at all. I just wasn't. It was to me it was what all the golfers do when they win a tournament as they hugged their loved ones. And I think it kind of goes to this thing that I saw Sarah Spain of ESPN tweeting about, which is winning a golf tournament doesn't mean that everything Tiger did gets washed away. And what's funny is I have a complicated feeling about that because when Tiger had his, serial philandering now many, many years ago, I was one of those people who said,

this is pretty gross behavior, but we should probably put this in the context of what exactly this is, you know, versus this is not, Tiger didn't kill anybody. This is awful. This is,

Tiger seems like a pretty disgusting person in his marriage, but there's probably, this should probably be thought of, uh, you know, again, among a host of sins and not as, as,

you know, as the worst possible thing in the world. But at the same time, I agree with Sarah Spain because I was like, him winning, him winning and the way he conducted his life aren't on the same scoreboard or they shouldn't. Right.

But in sports, they always wind up on the same scoreboard. It's like when the Patriots, you know, have deflategate and then win the Super Bowl. That means deflate gate didn't count. What did? It's the same.

It doesn't mean it didn't happen. But yeah, there is this kind of sports narrative thing where you, um, you try to smash those things together. Yeah, and I think that's really hard. I mean, that's part of the difficulty of the job and the way that we talk about these things. And that should never go away.

I frankly was surprised by the degree to which, you know, that part of his life was sort of set aside. And I think that, and I'm not sure that it shouldn't be. But I think I was just surprised as, you know, an outsider looking in that I was sort of surprised that that, you know, we as a culture were ready to ignore that just for the sake of the triumphant moment. That's not what I would have expected. But I do recognize the difficulty both as a, you know, as a sports writer and as a human being and sort of balancing those two things at the same time. Yeah.

To go back to your point about the hugging the kids, I mean, I thought I was, you know, I was caught up in it. I had a tear in my eye. Of course, I'm a new father and, you know, have a tear in my eyes. What do you know? Yeah, about 75% of the time, you know, I mean, I get a tear in my eye when like a sandwich is delivered to me at a restaurant these days. But I do think that there is, I mean, when you say that's what all the golfers do and they win, well, I mean, that just goes to show that you watch golf, right? And I think that what, you know, tigers, the story of Tiger Woods said, again, setting aside the tragedy or even taking into account is that he transcended golf, that we, you know,

he obviously had some, you know, his personal demons to use the abstract, to use the abstraction, um, were extreme, but, you know, we don't, we, we, we were, we were paying attention to his because he's Tiger Woods, not because, you know, not that we, not that we would have, we wouldn't have been paying attention to any other golfer to that degree, right? And the same, and the same thing with his triumphs in his career and leading up into Saturday, he transcends the sport, right? And I think that, one of the most interesting things is to kind of realize how old he actually is at this point, you know, to, you know, to, realize that he's up there, you know, the story of his, that's meta-narrative has dragged,

has stretched out for so long that you sort of forget that like he would be in his twilight regardless, you know, regardless of all the human, the human failures and regardless of all the injuries and everything else. And that, I think more than anything, speaks to how he overshadows the sport, that we're waiting for, that we're more, that we as a culture are much more interested in their narrative of Tiger Woods than of, you know, the actual narrative of what's happening in the sport of professional golf. One of the, I think maybe my favorite thing about the whole day on Sunday was Tiger wins a Masters. He makes the journey to Butler Cabin as all the champions do. And then this really funny thing happens where Jim Nance is

interviewing Tiger. And Jim Nance is a true believer in this, in golf, in fathers and sons in these kinds of stories. And Jim Nance seemed more emotional about Tiger Woods winning than Tiger Woods did and seemed in a way sort of flummoxed that Tiger wasn't more openly emotional about his victory. And it was just such an amazing moment to me because I don't fault Nancy for it because I know exactly what he was thinking, which is, oh my gosh, you know, this is incredible. And everybody at home is sort of rung out. And I think he was probably a pretty good stand in for how.

everyone at home was feeling. And then you get on Tiger and he is kind of, you know, I think you'd say a slightly less chilly Tiger Woods than he normally is. But he was very recognizably Tiger in those interviews. And that was so funny. It was just like, it was just almost like, gosh, oh,

you know, if you're ever going to let your guard down and feed, uh, those in the sports media who just want to love you and just want to give you and a moat along with you, this is the moment. He didn't really do it. It was very funny to watch. No, and I think that that goes back to the hug

and the way that it echoed the first hug, because I don't want to call it a tragedy, but what's lost, and I think in a lot of what's happened in Tiger's personal life since then is that, like, the original narrative was this sort of oddity of the way that he was raised by his father

and sort of built to be a golf robot, right? And that still is very much who Tiger Woods is, right? And a lot of the questions that people have, you know, why is he playing if he's not 100%? Does he, I mean, I think it kind of goes back to the overarching question is, why is Tiger not as aware of his meta-narrative as the rest of us are, right? I mean, why is he not, why is he not? And that, and that answers so many questions about him, right? I mean, over the, I mean, over the, I mean, over his entire career. And, and, and yeah, I mean, I think that was, that was the, that was as clear as any other time, right? I mean, that he, that he's, he's, he's,

He is so invested in himself as a golfer and in the sport of golf that he's sort of blind to everything else that we care about as sports writers and sports fans. All right, David, now it's time for 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. Did you see the updates, David, in the college admissions scandal last week? news was that Felicity Huffman is planning to plead guilty, but Lori Loughlin had other ideas. According to E-News, Loflin thought the DA was bluffing so she rejected their first plea deal and now faces additional charges of conspiracy to commit fraud, etc.

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Lori Loughlin thought the district attorney had a pair of fives, but he really had a full house. Thanks to our friends Paul Boston and Ken Barrett for that one. I know, I know. Some good stuff from last Monday in the NCAA tournament where the Virginia Cavaliers beat Texas Tech to win the men's college basketball title. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say, who said the Cavaliers can't win a title without LeBron? Thanks to T. Anderson for that one.

Last week, David, we had another Bafo reputation obliterating interview from the New Yorkers, Isaac Chotner. He got Brett Easton Ellis to add to his many trophies on the wall. It was an overwork Twitter joke to imagine. how Chotner would get you in an interview. So Barry Pichesky tweets, Isaac Chotner is somehow getting me to admit in an interview that I killed Franz Ferdinand. And I saw the writer John Lingen tweeted this, Chotner, colon, you've written a book about country music, me, colon,

I run a snowball stand, a launder money from my cockfighting habit. I have a secret family in Tulsa. Every word I've ever written is plagiarized. I somehow feel compelled right now to say aloud that I support Trump. So good stuff, Isaac Chotner. Big, yeah, big news from the world of billions and billions of stars on Wednesday. Astronomers announced they had captured an image of a black hole, a remarkable moment for scientists. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say, this is the image of a black hole and post something like a photo of Mitch McConnell, a photo of Trump's mouth, the Lakers logo.

And finally, a screen grab of the words, www. Twitter.com. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And lastly, David, this, this, this is one of the overworked all-timers. It's from a tweet from Jezebel. And I'm sure you saw it, quote, Kristen Cavalari says Jake Cutler unclogged her milk ducks by quote, sucking harder than he's ever sucked. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say, actually, he sucked harder in Denver, Chicago,

and Miami. So many, many people set that in, but the first was Michael Kester. Thank you, Michael. If you, if clogged milk ducks made you think of Jake Cutler throwing a duck, Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Yeah. All right, Dave, before we move on to Julian Assange, let's take a quick break. It can be a little frustrating, especially if you're in a hurry or running late,

to find yourself at a railway crossing waiting for a train. And if the signals are going and the train's not even there yet, you can feel a little bit tempted to try and sneak across the tracks. Well, don't, ever. Trains are often going a lot faster than you expect them to be, and they can't stop. Even if the engineer hits the brakes right away, you can take a train over a mile to stop. By that time, what used to be your car is just a crushed hunk of metal, and what used to be you is, well, let's not think about that.

The point is, you can't know how quickly a train will arrive. The train can't stop even if it sees you, and the result is disaster. If the signals are on, the train is on the way, and you just need to remember one thing. Stop because trains can't. Topic number two, Julian Assange. So last week, the WikiLeaks founder was ejected from the Ecuadorian consulate. here in London and arrested former guardian editor Alan Russ Bridger

noted that Assange has a giant gray beard and looked like a befuddled Old Testament prophet by the way it was yet another award Twitter show to compare him to Bill Murray or David Letterman. Thanks to Don Steele for that one. A couple notes before we get to the press freedom portion

of the conversation. The Washington Post notes that he had the embassy where he'd been staying since 2012 had banned most of Assange's visitors and he hadn't been able to see a doctor to treat his quote extreme shoulder and tooth pain. So he's going to get to see the doctors in prison. There's also a lot of stuff about the fate of his cat. Did you see this? Which was named Embassy Cat who has a Twitter account and wears a tie. Ecuadorian President

Lenin Moreno explained that Assange treated his host disrespectfully and neglected to provide for the well-being food and hygiene and proper care of his pet. And then WikiLeaks. tweeted that we can quote we can confirm that Assange's cat is safe Assange asked his lawyers to rescue him from the embassy threats in mid-October they will be reunited in freedom hashtag free Assange hashtag no extradition

so the cat and the muckraker have come will at some later date come back together okay the serious part we are now set up for a big battle about his possible extradition to the United States and failing that extradition

to Sweden where a rape case against him was suspended a couple of years back. It's interesting. I thought one sort of smart thought about this was from Jack Schaefer and Politico who talked about whatever happens from here, Assange is going to get this giant platform first in the extradition case to argue that it's a big setup. And then as Schaefer says, if he loses that round and the case comes back to the United

States, he might well get the government to serve him up by law, a kind of massive document hall he loves, meaning by discovery. So there's that. We are, there's a 1,000% chance. This will make Julian Assange just the kind of free press murder he clearly craves to be. Correct? Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think that the, that, you know, the interesting question, well, I mean, I think there's a lot, there's a lot of interesting questions here.

Seeing him dragged out, I mean, as soon as the story broke, I was having a conversation with someone here in the office and I was like, man, if I spent seven years trapped inside, not, I mean, trapped whatever inside of an embassy, you would think that I would just be insane, right? I mean, there's like, regardless of how well I had been taken care of or whatever, I mean, that's, it's, there's a point where it's not significantly different than being in prison and that's, and that's, you know, and that is literally maddening for many people. And, uh, you know, his, his general look and, I mean, you know, everything, the way that he

looked and he was being dragged out didn't, didn't dispute that, you know, just total conjecture. of mine. I think, so I'm intrigued to see how he presents when he's, when this platform is afforded him, right?

I mean, he's, he's, I mean, he has been, obviously, more than just the face of WikiLeaks. He is WikiLeaks. And I think that, that, you know, obviously

public perception of him, at least in many quarters, has evolved a lot over the years. And I think part of that is the question of whether, or to what degree, you know, he's kind of the spokesman for WikiLeaks or whether he is WikiLeaks, like I said before, and how much it's a, you know, is WikiLeaks a cult of personality? Is it, is it, you know, a vanity operation? You know, what, what are we dealing with here? And, and, and yeah, I mean, it, we'll see, I guess. And there's obviously a much bigger question about, about, and all that, I guess all that is separate from the question of free press, right?

For sure. And that's the second part of this, is that the government very carefully charged him with what is essentially a computer crime rather than espionage. So the first kind of, I think, the jerk reaction is, well, they're not, they're sort of going out of their way. at least at this date to sort of not make this into something that could then be applied to any journalist who publishes information from leaked classified files. Okay. I was persuaded, though, by Michelle Goldberg's column in the New York Times, where she talks about some of the things the indictment says that apply to all or could apply to many, many investigative journalists, things that they either do or walk right up the line. She says, the indictment says it was part of a conspiracy that Assange and Chelsea Manning took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the

disclosure of classified records to WikiLeaks, right? That's something all investigative journalists do is try to conceal their source. It's part of the conspiracy that Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records. Well, this is something journalists either do with their sources or walk right up to that line. Yeah. It's part of a conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks. Of course, everybody, Goldberg notes has secure drop at this late date. So what what she says, and again, I find this persuasive, is that the government isn't trying to turn, isn't trying to paint with a broad brush, but they are walking right up to it. And they're using an indictment to kind of, you know, cast a shadow over a

lot of regular investigative techniques. And that to me is worrying enough on its face. That's a that's reason enough to be worried. Whatever you think about Julian Assange, whatever you think about this case, that's the thing that's your ground. I go, uh-oh, because again, they're not charging them with that as a crime,

but as soon as you put that stuff in the indictment, you've clearly got, you know, a government, in this case, an administration that thinks of that stuff as criminal. Yeah. One interesting kind of sidebar to this,

and maybe it's the whole story, is the way that you talk about, you know, the administration, it's the, in theory, this should place on a collision course, the Trump administration and the sort of conspiracy-loving base of the Trump electorate, right? I mean, maybe not. Maybe these things exist in totally separate, totally separate stratospheres, but, you know, if you spend any time on, you know, conspiracy Reddit, as I am want to do at times, you'll see that this is a, you know, that they are all in on this and, and Trump is, you know, as a person has been, I mean, all the conspiracies are about Obama and Clinton and everything else, right? I mean, it's, it's, it'll be interesting to see how if, if the Trump administration does indeed, you know, pursue charges to the degree that it looks like they may, how those two things will sort of, you know, interact. Now, how do they square the circle that Assange obviously helped Trump?

in the 2016 election rather than helping Clinton and that the Trump's Justice Department is now seeking to charge Assange? Mm-hmm. How do they, how do they make sense of that? Yeah, it'll be really interesting. And I think that'll probably have a lot to do with what the, you know, I mean, how the charges are finally laid out. Yeah, I mean, it's, listen, it's a troubling situation. And like, and, and, you know, you said regardless of what you think of Julian Assange, I mean, but that's the point, right? I mean, all of these, I mean, almost every court case of this potential magnitude, you know, it comes with a caveat like that, regardless of what you think of this person.

Yeah. It's like Larry Flynn and a hustler back in the day. I mean, this is just, this is every single free press trial, I feel. Yeah. Yes. I, and I think that that's what we as a public and also we as a sort of, you know, journalistic, I mean, like a journalism block will be wrestling with. same time, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's regardless of what you think of him. But then there's a real case here. And, and I think that the most noble thing that the U.S. government could do is to be straightforward with its charges and, and see how it shakes out, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's going to be a lot of, you know, conflicting opinions out there. So I hope that it's, I hope that it's, I hope that even, even those of us and, you know, we can count many of the listeners of this podcast in that number.

No matter how many of us have a negative opinion of Julian Assange and his activities and motivations over the past 10 years, you know, no matter what we think about. And we get to pay attention to the bigger issues at play because, you know, it's not, this isn't about one rogue actor. All right, Dave, before we move on, let's take one more quick break. Hulu's paying some of the league's best players a lot of money to do some pretty crazy stuff. Joel changed his nickname from the process to Joel Hulu has live sports and bead.

Damian Lillard got a tattoo that says Hulu has live sports. Clearly, they really want you to know that Hulu has live sports. Get over 60 live and on-demand channels, tons of shows, movies, and exclusive originals with Hulu. Get rid of your cable and make the switch for only $45 a month. Watch your favorite teams in the biggest games all season with no cable required.

on the go on all your favorite devices. Live TV plan required. Restrictions apply. Learn more at Hulu.com. Topic number three, the art of sports biography. For our third segment, I thought we traced something a little different this week. Last week, I interviewed a writer with a new bookout who has been tangling with some of the issues we like to talk about on this here podcast. I think you'll like it. Here's my chat with Ron Rappaport. My pal Ron Rappaport wrote sports columns in Chicago and Los Angeles, and he's the author of a fine new book on Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks called Let's Play 2, The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks. Those two things which you try to disentangle within this book.

Fair estimation? Yeah, there are two Ernie. It is a fair estimation. There were two Ernie's. There was the one we saw. Hi, how are you? A beautiful day for a ballgame. Let's play two.

How's your wife? Are you married? You like to do that one with eight-year-old kids. kids. But, and the thing about it is that he got, he, he portrayed it for so long for many, many years that it became a part of who he was and nobody ever, it just, he, he just kept it going. And that kept the real guy underneath.

And of course there was a real guy underneath away. He just never wanted to go there. And so my, my analysis of it is that Ernie played defense by going on offense. People would come up and talk to him. and maybe nervously approaching the great Ernie Banks, and it would come always saying, I talked to my boyhood idol, I talked to the great Ernie Banks, then they'd pause a minute and say,

but all we talked about was me. That was Ernie. So what the book tries to do, the legend of Mr. Cobb, is what you saw, the life of Ernie Banks, is trying to get beneath that to talk about the real guy who lived the real life with real problems.

And had four wives, he was estranged from his children, who went through life. And as he grew older, there was a melancholy and loneliness and towards the end dementia. And I tried to deal with all of this, with both sides, the happiness and the joy

and the great baseball player that he was and the real guy living a real life with real problems. What was the first form this book took back when Ernie was still alive? Originally, I thought I had convinced him to write an autobiography, and it worked out perfectly because I was retiring from the Chicago

were sometimes in moving to California, and Ernie lived at Marina Del Rey. I was in San Fernando Valley 20 miles away, or as we say out here, right around the corner. I would go to his house, and we would have serious conversations about some of these things that I was talking to about the real Ernie. And we got into it. He told me a lot about growing up and segregated Dallas, very poor, second of 12 children, living in a shotgun house, outhouse in the back, about playing for Buck O'Neill in the Negro League, He's about going to Chicago, the difficulty he had adjusting to being in a white environment after going up in a black environment all of his life, playing for those god-awful Cub teams, the poisonous relationship with Leo DeRosher, far worse than anybody than he had ever let on.

And then the difficulties of adjusting to life after baseball. We were really doing well. And then he decided he didn't want to do it, which really upset me. He didn't want to write the book. He didn't want to write the book. He said this happened. and twice. First, we were going to do it. Then he said, no. Then a year later, he called and said, let's do it. And then he said, no, he said, my wife didn't want me to do it. Well, I called his wife

after he died. I unburdened myself of all the frustrations that I had in an article for Chicago magazine. And I called Liz. And I said, Ernie told me you didn't, no, that's nonsense. Ernie didn't want, Ernie liked the idea of a book, she said. And then maybe. be something to that. But when he died, I decided that after I'm burdening myself and being surprised as some of the response, people were writing in, Facebooking and responding to the article and saying, I didn't know that about Ernie. You know, you were friends with Ernie and you discovered these things. And I realized that maybe there was a biography out there waiting to be written. And that's the course that this took. his sunniness.

If people know one thing about Ernie Banks, they know that he was Mr. Happy. Let's play too. So you have some really funny examples in here when he does this little vaudeville routine, you know, at the batting cage back in the 60s a lot. Nothing could be finer than baseball by Airlina. That was his life.

And when he was asked to pick someone he disliked, it was he picked mousy tongue. He had to think about it for a minute. That was one person on earth. I don't like. It's Chairman Mao. That was Ernie. And it was real, especially on the baseball field.

It was real. It was not a creation of sportswriters? No, he loved playing baseball. It was real on the baseball field. He loved playing the game. It was his life to him. He just loved everything about it. He had fun playing it.

One of my favorite incidents is Jack Hyatt told me this, the former catcher for both the Giants and the Cubs. He said, the Giants would come to Wrigley Field, and this would be when both Willie and Ernie, who were about the same age, Willie Mays and Ernie were in a very much. mid-30s. Willie was getting a little older. He didn't play 162 anymore. Ernie did. Yeah. And, and, Willie, would take a day off on a hot day in Wrigley Field, one or two

time of the three games. Now, first base is very close to the, to the visitors dugout. Okay. Very close. And Ernie would razz Willie. He'd be standing at first place saying, Willie, why aren't you out here playing God's Sunshine? Come on. You're not too old to play the game. And Willie, who is shy by nature, complete opposite, would be cowering. in the dugout Hyatt said, going, Shh, stop, stop, stop. And Jack Hyatt said it was just priceless to watch.

But that was Ernie during a ball game. Joey Amalfitano, who was with the Cubs as a player, coach manager for many years and played with and coached Ernie, said that he would yell at him in the middle of a game. Joey, you love being out here, don't you? You love this. Don't this? The ball game's going on.

He did love playing the game. You write in the book that he would hint to sports writers, even in 1969, which is this legendary and then legendarily disastrous Cub season where they're in first place for 155 days and then blow it, lose the Mets, lose the division of the Mets. He would hint that he might not be totally happy with what's going on, maybe not totally happy with Leo DeRosha, maybe not totally happy with something in his life. Was it something that those writers couldn't write, didn't want to write? Why didn't that get into the newspaper back in the 60s? There was no thought of them writing it. George Langford, who was covering it for the Tribune and who was covering the Cubs for the Tribune in that 1969 season, told me that this story that Ernie would come to him and take him away from the Cubs side of the field, take him over to the visitor's side where nobody connected what the Cubs could hear.

In fact, nobody could really hear. But nobody could see them talking or pay much attention and express his frustrations in very elliptical terms. He was never very clear that damn Leo or they spent too much money thinking, talk maybe about his wives. It's different sports writing era, Brian. Not only did, Ernie didn't even have to say now this is off the record. They knew, George knew, Jerry knew. These are fine writers who did a good job covering the team. It was a different era of sports writing.

And there were certain things in certain ways and especially if it was Ernie that you just knew he was using you to vent to talk to somebody. he was approaching you as a friend, as somebody who he knew, would not betray his confidence. It's hard to think of in this era, but that's the way it was now. Because it's funny when we think of the NBA right now at this moment in time, the singular story of the NBA as so-and-so player is slightly to very exasperated with his coach team GM. Look at what just happened with the Lakers a couple of days ago. And he was feeling that to whatever degree, but it wasn't a story. And it wasn't considered a story.

Wasn't. It was off limits. I remember this took place in 1969. It was when the Cubs were riding high. You know, they were going good. Ernie was playing well. He drove in 106 runs that year. That's the most ever by a 38-year-old man.

Third and a league. He was really playing great, but even then, even when things were good, he wanted to express, it's the closest of all the stories I've heard, I've heard of him expressing unhappiness with baseball at the time. You know, this is the 50th anniversary of this. that year. We're reading a lot about the Amazin Mets.

Amazin is not the adjective they use in Chicago. It was a tragic thing. There were several tragedies in Ernie's career. One was that between 1955, 1960. He was the most productive power hitter in baseball. He drove in more runs, hit more home runs than Willie Mace, Henry Aaron, Mickey Madel, Eddie Matthews, anybody else you got. Which is remarkable. They were all going to multiple World Series. Ernie's Cubs in those years finished 123 games out of his place. It's funny, but it's a tragedy.

He was the finest player going. He was a great shortstop. Reinvented the position. Nobody had ever heard about home run hitter playing shortstop and playing it very well. The other great tragedy was 1969, where they were almost there. They were going to get the monkey off their back. And they blew it in the most horrendous way. The last two games of the season after the Mets had eliminated the Cups, I mean, this is almost too

much to bear. The final two meaningless games were the Mets against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. And Ron Soboda has been on Facebook. He's been Facebooking and some of the comments. And he says to the title of the book, Let's Play 2. So Boda says, I heard Ernie say that every game we ever played them, except those last two games of the 1969 season in Wrigley Field. I mean, it was a tragedy. It was just awful that Ernie never really made it. And when it was over, He drove his car to the lakefront and cried. Wow, which is incredible. There was a hole in his life, you know.

He'd go to the... And nobody knew about that until later. No, he didn't really. He tried to pretend, oh, it was just another thing. Ernie's whole life was avoiding controversy, avoiding drama, avoiding conflict. If you understand that about him, you kind of understand him. It started when he was a young boy in Dallas. It went through his entire career.

But he would then go to Cooperstown. Every year, the players would go back and he'd look around the room and see that. he was the only one there who'd never played in a World Series. He was the first, first ballot Hall of Famer, never to have played in a World Series, since been joined by Rod Karoo Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, at the White Sox. Yeah, you have that in the book he'd joking around with Reggie Jackson and feeling ultimately a little uncomfortable being around all these guys in Cooperstown, even though he's as good or better than most of them.

He told me he had dreams about hitting three home runs in a World Series, and then he'd go up to Reggie, who had, hit three home runs in a World Series. And Reggie, Reggie, that was me doing it. Reggie would say, oh, Ernie, you were playing for the cops. You were never going to get to a World Series. It was so painful he saw a psychiatrist. When I ask you about the art of writing a sports biography, Ernie's a big subject.

He's important in baseball history. What's the first thing you do when you set out on an assignment like this? I started at the beginning. I went to Dallas, where he was born and raised. And Dallas is kind of a black hole of Ernie's life. People don't write about it. In Dallas, they hardly knew he was there. They finally put up a statue outside of his old high school.

Last September, I talked, I was able to find five of his high school classmates, which was a real coup, I thought. They were very helpful and explaining the neighborhood and the dynamics, which were fascinating in the book. I thought I'd write a chapter about Dallas. I ended up writing four. So I went there, and they helped me a lot. And luckily, Ernie, as I said, was the second of 12 children. The first was his sister Edna, who turned 90 last month and who I love gossipy old ladies. She just filled it up for me.

So when I left Dallas after talking to the classmates, talking to his older brother, older sister and younger brother, Walter's still around, and some Dallas historians and able to try to recreate, talk to the Dallas City archivist, and a man named Darwin Payne, who's written a number of books about Dallas. It was then when I left there after about 10 days that I knew I had a book. You know, you start a biography like this and you wonder, are you going to be able to gather the material?

Now, remember, I talked to Ernie about a lot of it, and Ernie's comments infuse the whole book. I do wish we'd had a little more time, but he gave me a lot. But once I saw how eager Edna and Walter and the five classmates and the historians were to help you resurrect this era, construct this, bring it about, then I knew I was going to be okay. My concern was that Ernie had been private.

that Ernie had not wanted, had bowed out of an autobiography. My concern was that maybe his friends and family would feel that way too. That maybe, no, we're going to respect Ernie. It's privacy. The contrary was true. I think in the long run, they were as frustrated as I was that he had been able to get away with this sunny, happy, optimistic, cheerful veneer, which was true. But it was only a veneer.

It was a maskey war. It was a caricature he created for himself. And they were eager to help me get to the bottom of it to the point where they started pointing me to other people who I wasn't aware of. Have you talked to him? He was his next door neighbor at Trump Tower when he was living out his life. Have you talked to her and her? They were at his last games at Wrigley Field. Have you talked to this one and that one on the other one?

These were people whose names I didn't know. But they were very helpful. It became kind of a treasure hunt. It was fun. Yeah. I mean, if Ernie had been a mid-century novelist, you'd go back and look at his letters and his publications and things like that. Does that kind of public record exist for a ball player?

Or is it you interviewing people and looking at old sports pages, essentially? Well, the interviews were key. In the end, they talked to more than 100 people. But I'll tell you what, I read hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles and magazine articles and books. But the key to it all was the sporting news. They're all online. You join Sabre. You give him a little bit of money, and you can read everything.

Ernie first appears in the sporting news in a one note playing for Kansas City marks or the Negro Leagues leading the league in the hitting. By the time he got to the Cubs, there was something in him every week. You could follow his career in real time. It was fabulous. And you can see the pages. You could see what else was going on. You'd pick up notes that way.

because they'd be writing other things about the Cubs. I spent, there are 2,500 entries for Ernie in the Sporting News. Now, some of them are Wheaties ads and Rawlings' gloves ads and Louisville Slugger ads. But you could follow his career and that of his teammates and the fate of his team. And it was very useful to me. I'm effusively thankful to the sporting news and the notes that I have. But you know what? There was a little bit of sadness and reading this because the sporting news in that format is gone.

No, yeah. It's only there digitally. And they don't have a report on every team, every week anymore. But to write about a player from that era, it was extremely helpful. I got a lot. Just a good sense of what his career had been like from reading that and from reading the Chicago papers. Ernie's personal life was, I think, messy would be a very fair adjective. He's married four times.

It's been his final days as you write in this book in the company of a caretaker, essentially a woman who was helping him out, was much younger than him and helping him out with a lot of his affairs. How do you as a biographer navigate that world? Well, Ernie had four wives, and all the marriages ended disastrously. He was never divorced from Liz, but they had restraining orders against each other. I was able to get to the – I found one of his attorneys who showed me some of the legal documents. He had represented him.

Let me see his third divorce. But then I went to the L.A. Hall of Records and found more. It was, you couldn't shy away from this. I mean, towards the end, it was his sons. I talked to both of his twin sons, and they told me very frankly about his problems with his wives and about their problems because they were devoted to their mother, who was his second wife. So they didn't like the other two that came along. So I tried, I had all the information, and I wrote it there, and it's all in the book.

I tried not to get carried away to turn the book on its side. make it about something else. Yes, he had difficult personal life, and yes, it's reflected in the book. But I wasn't going to reprint pages and pages of court records. He said, she said, it's all there, but I didn't want to belaborate it. It's all balance, isn't it? And I think this is so funny, because we see a lot of sports biographies that make the kind of private sexual, et cetera, part of the subject, a big part of the book. And that's fine. It's a choice in some subjects, God knows, warn it more. You don't shy away from anything. You write that Ernie was a essentially a kind of kleptomaniac late in his life where he would see something he liked

that belonged to somebody else and just kind of take it. You talk about his marriages and his difficult relationship with his children. But it's all balance, isn't it? Because you could have made that a giant part of the book, but you make it, I would say, a relatively small part of the book at the end and sort of bring it in when it's worn. Well, I brought it in where it was worn. And as I say, it decided to just tell it and then move on. You know, the whole problem with writing a book like this is pretty elemental. For one thing, how much baseball do you put in? I mean, do you want to put in a lot of baseball? Or how much, you know, how much of his personal life? How much of Dallas? Well, I decided I would put it in a lot of baseball. How much do you

want to talk about his teammates? There have been some comments on Amazon that Ernie recedes from the biography that I'm talking too much about Billy Williams and Ken Hobbs and about the College of Coaches. And it's a fair comment. it's fair. And I knew I was leaving myself open to him. But I thought this was one chance we were going to have to reconstruct Ernie's life in the important context of the teams he played for and the people he played with. So yes, I have a whole section about Leo, where he came from, how he started, and then it all culminates in this monumental clash between these two men. I feel that you can't know, Ernie, unless you know the 1969 season, which I have three chapters on, one from the

The Cubs point of view from the series that the Mets were playing against the Cubs and then what wrong. You can't understand it unless you know Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins and Ron Sato and Don Cassinger are. So it's a fair comment, but I just decided that was the way I wanted to go. And I guess my related question to how much baseball is, how long can a book like this be? Like what do we think a reader, how much will they tolerate? Because I'm sure you had reams and reams of material. How much will they tolerate on a subject like Ernie? Well, the book turned out to be longer than it was contracted for.

I called my publisher and said, it's going to go long. God bless, I've had shut books. They were fine. Had a wonderful letter for editor, Morrow DePretta and Brent Rumble, two great editors. They said, write what you think it needs to be. So the book grew by about a third. And some people think it might be too long, but I just feel that if you're a baseball fan, this is what you're going to want to read. And if you're not a baseball fan, well, maybe you can skip the part about the college of coaches or how or any reading.

invented hitting with Frank Aaron by using a light or bad. Maybe that doesn't appeal to you. But there will be other things in it about trying to describe what Chicago was like and trying to describe what Dallas was like. I have a whole chapter about the etymology of Let's Play 2. I have a whole chapter about his racial attitudes toward race. I want to ask you about Let's Play 2 because that fascinated me because he, like a lot of ballplay gave about eight different answers. Not only, we can imagine that he would remember, re-remember, the first time he said it, which he did,

like a lot of famous sports phrases. What fascinated me, though, is on the one hand, he used it to mean it's a hot day outside. My teammates are dragging. I'm going to be ridiculously optimistic and pump them up. On the other hand, he used it at a different time to say, I'm in a rotten marriage. And let's play too, because the ballpark is the one place on earth

that I get to do what I want to do. and nobody's telling me what I want to do. Now, that is two radically different interpretations of the phrase let's play two. Well, he would have internalized the second one. He would have never said that except in his mumblings to George Langford or Jerry Holtzman. But what was funny in tracing it was that Ernie not only told four or five different stories, but they were specific. It was 1967, and I was driving on Lake Shore Drive, and it was a beautiful Dan. I thought, let's play two.

No, it was 1969. Gave you the date, July, whatever. and I was driving to the inner city and it was a hot, terrible day when it got to the ballpark, I saw my teammates dragging and I said, let's play two. I think I traced it back farther than that. Cubs played a double-hitter against the Houston Colt 45s,

1960 in this terrible old stadium that they played in before the Astrodome came along, and then they became the Astros. And it was so hot, the Cubs are playing a double-headheader, Ernie Fates in the first game, can't play the second game. And Billy Williams, who was playing for the Cubs, and Al Spangler, who was paying for the Colt 45s and later would play for the Cubs.

Both told me that they were razzing about let's play two, let's play two. You couldn't even play one, so it had to come back before that, beyond that. But what fascinates me about it is this is Ernie's enduring contribution to the American vocabulary. It will outlive us all. Yes. I have a Google alert for it. I got one yesterday. And it's not always in a sports context.

Hillary Clinton would use it after supposedly beating Donald Trump in the first. Debate saying, that's great. And as Ernie Banks, you grew up outside of Chicago and Ernie Banks fan. Let's have another debate. Let's play too. I got another one today about people using it. And it's always in, always in the immortal words of Ernie Banks. Or as Ernie Banks what's said, these three words will outlive anything he ever did on the baseball field and any way he's ever remembered.

It's a great thing, a great contribution to the lexicon. Last thing I want to ask you, when you thought about the first. first version of this book, the as-to-version where you'd get deeper with Ernie, hopefully, that he had ever gotten with other writers before and a little bit more real versus the version that you wound up writing now after his death. What's the biggest difference do you think? What's the thing you brought to the second version of this book? Well, I think we were able to make it more rounded. I do say that I wish we'd had a little more time, Ernie and me, because what he had told me was so probing and so analytical, so unearney-like, in public, the public. The

public earn, he kind of went away. I wish we'd had a little more time. But I think this book is deeper just because we have the observations and the analysis and the stories from the people who were with him from the day he was born, his sister, Edna, till the day he died, his friend and caretaker, Regina Rice. Between her and Tom Bongiorno, I have a TikTok of his last horrible months, days, weeks, days, hours. I mean, we were able to bring that in. Well, I, obviously, that was nothing we could have gotten from Ernie. I think this is a more rounded book. And I wonder what Ernie would think of it.

I've been thinking about that to myself. I think there he might have said in a few places, I wish you hadn't written that. But I'd like to think that he'd say that this is an honest, true story of his life. Ron Rappaport, let's play to The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks.

Thanks for coming in. Great to be with you, Brian. All right, David, back with the notebook dump. 2020 news for you. You saw that Eric Swalwell, 38-year-old congressman from Northern California, is running for president. I don't know who this is.

But I did enjoy Matt Flegenheimer's piece in the New York Times about running for president for fun and profit. Because he does this whole story about how this improves your career. And my first thought when I read the first sentence was, what did these obviously, pretty fake presidential candidates say to the reporter when he called up and wanted to talk about how they had clearly run for president, at least partly to revive or make their careers, right? Well, he gets Newt Gingrich on the phone. And Newt Gingrich is totally open about it. He says,

it gives you a certain statute of the rest of your life, kind of like having once been speaker of the house. They introduce you and then say, and former presidential candidate, it's not bad. Al Sharpton, whose presidential campaign I had basically forgotten about, was also. open about this. He said it opens doors. I was taken more seriously and what I represented was taken more seriously. He knows he got to host Saturday Night Live because he was running for president, something he would not have probably been able to do when he was sort of a more of a local New York civil rights leader. The one guy who did not go along with the humor of the piece, you'll never guess this one. Rick Santorum. I was on the national stage before, Santorum said,

suggesting that his presidential campaign had little effect on his future prospects. I did Fox for five years after I left the Senate. I did books. If you're someone who's relatively obscure who's not had a national profile, I don't know. You can ask them. So a little defensive, shall we say. Who do we think in the 2020 class is the, I hate to say Rick Santorum. I won't put that on anybody.

Who is the Al Sharpton and Gingrich of this group? Or Ben Carson, maybe better. who winds up with a bigger, higher Mike Huckabee-like footprint and media after it's over. Oh, man, that's really hard. Are you going to get me, do you have any ideas here?

Well, it's weird because a lot, most of the Democrats running have actual jobs. Right. Or somebody like Bettereric is kind of like, you know, recently had a job. I really think Pete Buttigieg is kind of the one, right? And, you know, when you say his name,

he's been he's been linked with so much sincerity lately and we gotta do it we got to do a whole segment on him next week he's been linked with so much kind of sincerity and roll up your sleeves honest of goodness good government mojo that it's it's hard to imagine him you know being like a

MSNBC guest and calling it a day but I think he has the most gain right yeah I mean I think a lot of this would kind of like come out in the wash I guess is the phrase but but we don't there's some people I mean you know I mean, Julian Castro, obviously, you know, he's not pulling super high. And, you know, there's people like him, other people like him in the race who have had real careers and have real jobs.

And you could certainly see them going in a more, you know, cable news direction afterwards. I mean, there's the wildcard like Andrew Yang out there who's doing the Joe Rogan podcast. And he could be, he could certainly raise his profile to some degree. I think there's also some people like, you know, you got Corey Booker who, you know, may just keep plugging along if he doesn't win, or this might kind of be the capstone of his elected, you know, elected official elected office career and that, and maybe he'll just take a turn towards, you know, something more, you know, pop cultural afterwards. But I think it's really hard to say now. I think, I think looking at the numbers, I mean, you know, better or work is the, you know, is the real wildcard because like we've talked about before. And like you said, he doesn't have a day job. So he's going to be really out there. And if he doesn't get the nomination or the vice presidency,

then the vice presidential nomination, you know, he could do anything, you know. He could put his band back together and start touring the country for all we know. We knew, David, that Fox was obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Media Matters has put a number on it. AOC was mentioned 3,181 times. on Fox Business and Fox News in a six-week stretch from February to April. The APs, I know, and then Ocasio-Cortez tweets, Fox News brought me up 3,000 plus times in six weeks.

That's how hard they're fighting against dignified health care wages, justice for all, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's pretty amazing. It's amazing when you quantify it. I'm not even sure I thought it was that much. No. Two weeks ago, John Harris stepped down as editor of Politico. He'll become a columnist error.

Politico's own media newsletter noted in a staff email Tuesday, Harris said that since Politico's beginning, he hoped the publication would one day no longer require daily management from its founders. I just want to note, this is a mandatory line when you found a publication and then step down from it. is I just I'm just so glad that this publication no longer needs me to run it from day to day. It's my greatest.

I remember Mike Kinsley saying something like that the day he stepped down from Slate. There's like a manual somewhere that someone says you have to type that line. And I just found that funny. I just think every time a founder of a publication steps down,

my greatest joy, and in fact my biggest accomplishment is this publication no longer needs my help. For our celebration of pun headlines, this week. I was just going to read to you, David, a few good ones from the British papers that I am nose deep in. This is about Tiger Woods. The main headline in the Times of London was just a walking miracle, which refers to Tiger's back surgery. Just fine. I mentioned Tiger Burning Bright again, William Blake reference there. For some reason, the use of the singular sport rather than

sports always makes me laugh. So another headline was a redemption story that only sport could make so compelling. And then the collage of tiger shots over the years. But this is my favorite one. Biblical epic rocks Augusta as golfing gods favor woods. And since I'm in London favor is spelled F-A-V-O-U-R, biblical epic rocks augusta as golfing gods' favorite woods. that's old time sports writing right there

I love it I love it Granny Rice could have written that calm All right David That's the press box He is David Shoemaker I'm Brian Curtis Research by Chris Almata

Production by Jim Cunningham Back next week With more lukewarm takes about the meeting You see you then buddy See you later man David Mm-hmm Sucking harder than he's ever sucked

Oh man that's really hard Total don't give a fuck moat You would think that I would just be insane There's a 1,000% chance. Wow. Wow. It's like Larry Flynn and a hustler back in the day. Right.

Yeah, what do you know? I did books. See you later, man. Rest in power.