The Press Box - RIP RBG. Plus, Jason Gay on Pandemic Sportswriting.

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87. Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss Ginsburg’s reputation on the Supreme Court and her impact (2:10). They then say their farewells to columnist and critic Stanley Crouch who died at 74 (22:08). Then Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay joins to discuss his experience being a sportswriter during a pandemic (34:18). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, Georgia Senate candidate Kelly Loughler bragged in a new ad that she is more conservative than Attila the Hun. What I want to know is when did this become something to brag about rather than an insult? I mean, I guess if the entire election is about making the trains run on time, then, you know, Mussolini voters, I mean, Mussolini's got a voting consistent voting block, right? Is this like making the stallions run on time? time, what is Atila the hunt about? I have no idea. It's a, if all you want is someone who's just like a bloodthirsty, brutal, I mean,

I don't even understand what the, someone who's not going to change their mind, someone who's going to, I mean, is it just, is it just evil? Are we at the point now where we're not even like, we're not even identifying with specific like motives or political stances. It's just like, if you are, like, if you're looking to vote,

if you're looking to cast a vote for like, pole pot or E. E.D. I don't even know. Like, but those people, but those people aren't on the ballot. Here I am, right here in front of you. You need that.

I mean, it's, it's, I don't understand. I want to see a campaign out that just says, David Shoemaker, pure evil. I'm David Shoemaker and I approve this message.

I might vote for somebody who's pure evil. If I, if they were, if they were, you know, if they, if they, if they,

if they, if they, if they, if they, if they'd be, ruthless and, and driven. You're saying it's a clear campaign message.

Also, it fits on a bumper sticker. Exactly. It's time for the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here with a big show for you today. We'll say goodbye to columnist and critics, Stanley Crouch, who died last week at 74. And fresh from the U.S. Open, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay stops by to talk about what it's like to be a sports writer during the pandemic.

All that, plus David guesses a strain pun headline. the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But first, David, R-I-P-R-B-G. I'm devastated by this, Rachel. Just losing her is young adulthood, my becoming a lawyer, both practicing and teaching law, looking up to her. But much more than that, it is a loss for justice and equality. What Ruth Bader Ginsburg did was to to make it abundantly clearly, wherever possible, be interpreted for the equal rights of men and women. That's Hillary Clinton talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday from complications of pancreatic cancer at age 87. She served 23 years on the Supreme Court after being appointed by Bill Clinton.

A couple things I want to talk about, David. one is the idea of Ginsburg as this pop culture media phenomenon. Oh, yeah. That existed in tandem with her reputation on the Supreme Court. It begins in 2013 when Ginsburg writes a dissent and the court's decision in Shelby County versus Holder was struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ginsburg's dissent read in part that the decision was like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

That spurred law student Shana Niznick to start a tumbler dedicated to the character of the notorious RBG which sort of portrayed Ginsburg as a meme version of herself sort of the original resistance hero

and then in 2015 Niznik and Arin Carmon published the book The Notorious RBG there are t-shirts, Mugs, Needle Point. I found a Politico headline when I was researching this that read I did the Ruth Bader Ginsburg workout. It nearly broke me.

She became the obey giant of constitutional law or something like that, did she not? Yeah. The obeyed giant of constitutional laws, I think they're a pretty good way to put it. I mean, I don't think either of us have lived long enough to really, to fully comprehend

and even, you know, graybeards like us have not lived long enough to comprehend the real depth to which she shifted our perception of the Supreme Court. And a lot of that was, you know, I mean, when we were young, the Supreme Court was an historical institution, right? That like you knew, certainly there were, the big rulings happened in the present, but you learned, the Supreme Court was almost only ever discussed in history class, right? I mean, about the, like, the things that the Supreme Court had done right at some point in the past, you know, big shifts that they had made.

There's a, I mean, a lot of it has to do with the politics of the modern era and the way that both parties in different ways have geared their political coalitions towards the judiciary. But Ruth better Ginsburg was certainly the most notorious, I guess, to borrow a phrase, of the, of the act of justices during our lifetime. and and sort of embodied that whole shift. I mean, listen, we've read magazine profiles of Stephen Breyer. I mean, just like everybody, right? Sorry, just one thing to interject, we have.

I'm saying. Everybody has been given some sort of public exposure, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg, maybe, I mean, and not without a ton of, I guess she was pretty accessible, But Ruth Bader Ginsburg certainly became this sort of larger-than-life figure. And yeah, it came to symbolize the larger-than-life personalities that the modern court is occupied by. I was amazed after she passed away on Friday to look at just my Facebook feed and all our pals from high school and how many RBG posts there were. And again, as you point out, like, what other Supreme Court justice in our lifetime?

will possibly receive that treatment and possibly receive that kind of just pure popular attention as she will. I think the answer is nobody. And one interesting question is, how did she come to get that? Listen to Erin Carmon explain her appeal. I think that this is something,

there's something more going on here than just fun memes. I think specifically what Justice Ginsburg has, devoted her life to and what she represents. At a moment in which important civil rights laws and the women's rights gains that she had devoted her career to are on the shopping block, at a point in which there are still too few women in positions of authority and power. She is a woman who has devoted her entire career

to bringing along other women and other people who are historically disadvantaged. She has done so with intellectual integrity, with grace. And as we learn from writing this book, she knows of which she speaks. The causes she's devoted her life to have also inflected her own life. Despite suffering from health problems, Ginsburg declined to retire while Obama was president, which would have ensured that she would be replaced by someone who was ideologically similar. That decision contributed to the RBG mythos as well.

Amanda Hess wrote in the New York Times earlier this year, This National Death Watch is an absurd and distressing phenomenon. And yet Ginsburg's physical frailty is central to her pop cultural cachet. The whole appeal of her little old lady archetype is that it situates her as an underdog and makes for a heady contrast to her intellectual might. I thought that was a really good way to put it right. It is all wrapped up in a single package, is it not? For sure, for sure.

I mean, the death watch aspect of it, and I'm sure we're going to circle back this a million different times, it's not, it's certainly there is a, I mean, it felt really morbid at the time, and all these discussions have an air of morbidity around them before a death after a death. I mean, but I think it all kind of goes, also going hand in hand is the death watch with the sort of political gamesmanship aspect of the whole thing, right? I mean, to the degree, like I said, when we were growing up, the Supreme Court Court existed in history books. Now it's like basically exists in like betting sites. You know, I mean, it's it's about, I mean, both political parties are like constantly, the ultimate goal is

realigning the Supreme Court, right? And they're making these, those sort of plans from the grassroots on up. And I think what's more important is that, or what's more central of this conversation, is that so many voters are so aware that this is the way that the politics is operating right now. Right? I mean, that certainly helps the profile of these justices like RBG. But it also makes, it also turns every discussion into a, into a breakdown of the tape. You know, like every time there's a ruling, it's the conversation shifts to like, well, what's the next, how are we? What's the next time this is going to be in front of the Supreme Court? Who are the justice going to be?

And it seems crazy to look at someone like Ginsburg, you know, five, six years ago and why don't you retire? But that's sort of the world that goes part and parcel with the world that, you know, the Supreme Court era that we're in right now. It was interesting because the Ginsburg as meme thing often papered over some of the reality of her. She voted with a majority in favor of the fossil fuel industry against criminal defendants and asylum seekers. This was one I forgot until I saw it on Twitter yesterday. She called Colin Kaepernick kneeling disrespectful and really dumb in 2016. Later apologized for that.

According to her granddaughter, Ginsburg said in her final days, my most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed. Will enter Donald Trump on Fox and Friends, who naturally wondered whether that final wish was in fact

a hoax. Well, I don't know that she said that or was that written out by Adam Schiff and Humor and Pelosi. I would be more inclined to the second. Okay, you know, that came out of the wind, it sounds so beautiful. Yeah. Ah, man.

Prepping for today, I was on the fence about whether to get into conspiracy theory territory. Thank God the president did it for me. I've heard well-intentioned people in the past several days say, could they not have somehow, you know, hidden her death for the next couple of months? The crazy thing about that is there's like a huge contingent of conspiracy theorists online who believe that she has been dead for a long time and they've been hiding her death for a long time, right? So, I mean, which is really kind of beside the point, but can we just put, like, if George Soros and his secret cabal are not competent and powerful enough to hide the

death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for 45 days, let's just stipulate now that the giant left-wing conspiracy probably doesn't exist to the point that, that some people think it does. But to what the president said. It's a wild comment because it would have been really easy to disregard what she said. Even had she, if there was proof of her, I mean, if there was tape of her saying, right? But the fact that he took it seriously enough to try to reframe it as a, as a, as a, as a, as a lie at the, you know, that the evil Democrats, congressional Democrats have put forward, um, I think goes to show that for whatever reason, he doesn't. have a sort of real personal respect for Ginsburg and for what she's done and for her memory.

And I think, or maybe it's just an acknowledgement that the world sort of has such a great respect for across the aisle, you know, or on either side of the aisle, I should say. And yeah, regardless, it was kind of surprising that he even felt the need to be conspiratorial about it. Yeah, well, it ties in his favorite subjects, right? Adam Schiff somehow winds up in the Ruth Shifty shift, yeah. A Friday night, Mitch McConnell released a statement vowing that a Trump nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,

quote unquote. On Monday, Trump said he would probably nominate a replacement for Ginsburg on Friday or Saturday because he wants to wait until her funeral services are over. You emailed us over the weekend talking about this because, of course, everybody writing and thinking about the election now is like, okay, the election was about coronavirus,

it was about these other things. now the election is about the Supreme Court, or at least a lot about the Supreme Court for the next couple of weeks. What do you make of that, the way we shift over from one thing to the other? Well, I mean, it's not just that it's about that, but it's about, I mean, going back to the gamesmanship thing, the conversation immediately becomes about how the conversation is going to shift. Not that the conversation doesn't shift. The conversation becomes about conversation shifting. That's true. And yeah, I mean, and no one really knows how to game it out, especially in the moment, especially, you know, late at night over the weekend, do we know that, you know, the conventional

wisdom was Trump is happy to change the subject from coronavirus. And, you know, certainly we should not forget that this terrible scourge is still a huge presence in our lives. I think it'd be pretty hard to forget it. But politically, you know, I guess the conventional wisdom is that, yeah, Trump's happy to change the subject. The Biden campaign, I think would be happy to let things keep going the way they were going. But the degree to which this is going to energize one side of the other to vote, I think is sort of unknowable. And, you know, you can make the case either way. Certainly that, you know, the voting calendar makes it all even more confusing than it was before, right? And the, you know, the fact that so many people don't plan on voting in person because of the coronavirus era.

There's, I don't know. I mean, do you have an opinion on this? There's a lot of, a lot of different factors going into this. And I haven't heard anybody, I mean, I've read, there's compelling arguments in every direction. There's compare, I mean, there's, there's competing polls as to what the American public thinks the president should do right now. You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of, it's just sort of wild. In terms of which, which base it will fire up more. Yeah. In terms of boating. I mean, I, it's really hard to know, right? I mean, this, this does feel like one of those bum, pundit, you know, predictions that's wrong, like five minutes later related to, you know, Kenosha is going to help Trump, right, and all these other kinds of things that were predicted over the last couple of weeks.

I mean, we know that a lot of Republicans voted for Donald Trump in 2016, despite not liking him because what of what he could do for the Supreme Court, right? Conservatives tend to be very focused on the Supreme Court. But I think Bill Clinton himself even made this point over the weekend, which is that Democrats don't talk about the Supreme Court or haven't talked about the Supreme Court lately a lot because of the fact that, They were doing it out of consideration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nobody wanted to be morbid about this idea of what happens if something happens to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That subject was just off the table. I don't think it's knowable at all.

And I also don't think it's knowable because we don't know what's going to happen over the next couple of months. We're going to get a vote on this before the election. Is this a lame duck thing? We've heard from people like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins who don't think the Senate should move forward with a vote. Yeah. Will there be pressure on lots of other things?

people who are up for re-election, one of whom is Donald Trump that causes them to do something differently? I don't know. I have no idea. And I'm sort of suspicious of anybody who says that they do. No, yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm pulled in a lot of different directions about this. I mean, it's, it's, um, I mean, the degree to which her death becomes a conversation entirely about gamesmanship. I keep circling back to this. It's sort of like a perfect metaphor for the times that we live in, right?

But when you're talking about motivating voters, I just, I don't know. I mean, I wonder if there's... I mean, certainly, right, you can imagine the voters who are going to be motivated, right? I mean, obviously on the left, there's a lot of people who are deeply concerned

about the court turning right and taking away, you know, a woman's right to choose. something that basic. And on the left, I mean, on the right, this is what a lot of them have been building to for so long. But like, I mean, there's got to be some voters on the right, too, that are as nihilistic or previously kind of voted within the sort of nihilism that Mitch McConnell preached, right? That, like, the point is just to win and the point, and we get your tax cuts and everything else.

And now it's like, okay, but, but if we win this one, then, like, we're literally going to outlaw abortion. like all the all the social all the uh the social liberal economic conservatives out there that have been voting republican to help to get their tax breaks for so long like this is like this is this is this is real deciding time right i mean this is when like you can't just be like well i live in a big city so it's okay like you've just you've given the reins over to this voting block that doesn't agree with you on absolutely anything and now they're going to get their way and that could mean like you know we could be living in handmaid's tale in 15 years you know like we like we like get like it could get really bad. So like is it still okay? So you get three percent more off your

off your investment taxes or whatever? No. I mean it's it'll be interesting to see if anybody actually thinks deeply bad. My feeling is that they probably won't. It was interesting to watch too Biden who has you know really really worked to make Trump's handling of the coronavirus. Mm-hmm. The signature issue of the election just pivot very quickly not to putting out his own list of justices right that would sort of counter Trump's list. But, to just say that the reason the Supreme Court is important is that this is about protecting the Affordable Care Act, right, in this time of coronavirus. We have to protect. I mean, he really did try to make message B as similar to message A as possible so that it's not just about the Supreme Court as a separate and abstract thing. It is about what I've been talking about is the way Trump handled the coronavirus.

And in that, in that atmosphere, we must protect Obamacare, right? We must have a Supreme Court majority to protect Obama. I did want to leave you with this, David. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's reaction to people who got tattoos of her image. This is a Rin Carmon who was able to get her reaction to that phenomenon. And actually another occasion in which I saw her, she had just read the book and she said, you know, there's something I have to tell you. And I was so worried, you know, she has famously high standards. And she said, listen, no one should have.

ever get a tattoo with me. This has gone too far. That was it. That was too far. We could do the needlepoint. We could do the hand towels, but the tattoo, that was the place. We cut it off. All right, David, 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. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. Breaking news as we tape this podcast. The Wall Street Journal's Ben Mullen tweets,

Quibi, the streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, is exploring strategic options, including a possible sale, sources say. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Ironically, Quibi lasted for exactly 10 minutes. Thanks to Mitchell Tyler for that. Kind of a surprise COVID-pundit, David's singer Van Morrison. Oh, my God. has accused the government of, quote,

taking our freedom in three songs bashing the worldwide COVID-19 lockdown. It was an over-war Twitter joke to write, Hey, where did we go? Days when the Plague came. We would have also accepted you, my, brown-lunged girl, thanks to Joaquin Nagel. How do you think those songs,

the anti-COVID-19 songs from Van Morrison actually sound? I don't even want to know, man. We'll play those. on our year-end podcast. Oh, great. And finally, David, we're doing. Last Thursday, we had news from Red Lobster.

Today, it's Chuckie Cheese. Chuckie Cheese. According to Bloomberg Law, Chuckie Cheese asked a bankruptcy court to allow them to destroy $7 billion paper prize tickets that have built up in the company's supply chain as a result of the pandemic.

Those tickets you get for winning ski ball or winning that cool game where the quarters fall off the ledge, they have seven billion of them. Oh my God. Which they would like to destroy. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, boys, it's time for one last job.

Thanks to Andrew 3,000. If you found the heist movie that will be the sequel to the one about the McDonald's Monopoly GameCaper, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. David let us start the notebook dump by listening to Stanley Crouch,

in his unmistakable voice, dismiss every, blogger on planet Earth. So what do you think of the blocks? Basically, fluff. This is garbage. See, what they really turned out to be is if we were unfortunate enough to have recordings of what people talked about when they had ham radios, when that was the trend, those conversations

would probably be as interesting as much of what you. you actually see on blogs because the people don't know what they're talking about most of the time. And it just gives, you know, Americans always have a lot of time to waste. And the blogs, the whole internet is proof of the fact of how much time we have to waste. Croucho was a jazz critic, a critic of basically everything, a columnist, a novelist, died last Thursday at 74. You'll find people who are better equipped than us to interrogate his ideas. but David, I wanted to talk to you about the role Stanley inhabited in the world of letters over the last 40 years.

How do we begin to explain who Stanley Crouch was? Well, I mean, unfortunately, you hadn't been terribly, they didn't have much of a public platform over the past decade or so, at least not to the degree that he did before. I mean, when we were coming up, he was sort of a professional curmudgeon, but a brilliant one. And a joyous one, right? And there was joy in that in that curmudgeonly, you know, sort of aura, was there not?

There was joy. I mean, it was like when you get a laugh at a somebody that never laughs, you know, that it feels like you've earned it so much better when he, his, his, I mean, that's not true. He was very, there was a lot of joy in certain subjects at certain moments, you know. I wouldn't say he had the most joyous personality. But like I said, he was more, he was more of a curmudgeon in those days than than he had been, I think before. I don't know.

I think that he was, he was certainly one of the most influential and original thinkers of his generation. But, and he embodied this role of the critic in a way that, I mean, you sort of put words to it. He was just kind of a general purpose critic,

and that's part of a lineage that doesn't really exist anymore. Where, you know, my shelves are full of like first edition, hardbound books of like, you know, mudrick. And, you know what I mean? It's like the idea that you would be able to, I don't know, the idea that you'd be able to make up a career out of just being a old-fashioned critic is just sort of hard to imagine

now. But I guess in some ways, that's what bloggers have become. I mean, they've sort of usurp that role. Well, I think, I think that's what it is, right? It's that media world that sort of welcomes that kind of figure in, right? you have a piece in the back of the book of the New Republic. You're on Charlie Rose, you know, a couple of nights later, right, doing 30 minutes. You're on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb talking about your new essay collection.

You're at the 92nd Streetwide. I mean, that is the world that he flourished in, right, where he could sort of go around and do all those things. Because he was also, by the way, in addition to being a writer, he was a really interesting interview and somebody who was constantly sort of in demand. for interviews. Yes. In all forms. Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, he was the sort of thinker

that, I mean, that you would, I mean, even for our generation, it was like, you would hear that like some, like, great writer or critic would be on like Dick Cavett a lot. And you're like, what? Like, why would they be talking to him there? He's the sort of person that you would, like, look forward to hearing what he had to say in those situations, you know?

And he made, and he validated that sort of, that sort of booking decision, even though we would never do that today. His popularity and celebrity are just incredible to think about. I was looking over some pieces last night. Robert Boynton wrote a big profile of Crouch in the New Yorker. This is what actor Michael Moriarty, remember Michael Moriarty from Law and Order and other things, said to Boynton. Whenever I act, it's for Stanley.

He's one of the few people who understand what I'm trying to do. What? That's amazing. Ethan Iverson had this great tribute at NPR's website. and he writes, the first time I took Stanley to lunch, he was stopped on the sidewalk by Wallace Sean, who said something to the effect of Stanley, I loved your latest daily news column, and thanks for all you do. Stanley was casually gracious and made no further comment about random praise from a celebrity. I also learned this from Mod Newton's website.

Crouch and Richard Ford, the novelist Richard Ford, once took a trip up the Mississippi River to talk about race. That actually happened. That's so unbelievable. Right. I mean, doesn't that feel like just from another world? Yes. That that would happen? It feels like we live in another world from one in which that would happen.

But we're like two worlds removed. I can't believe that happened. But if that happened today, it would definitely be like a Netflix docu series. So, yeah, I mean, we're very far away from that. It would be a reality show that we would probably really, really not want to watch. Style, right? He wrote very catchy. incendiary lines, one of which I found

was the million man march quote will be remembered as the water world of Afro-American politics. A lot of money and publicity, but it didn't work. That was a crouch line. He said of his politics, I'm neither in the right wing nor the left wing. I'm in the free wing. When he wrote his novel, don't the moon look lonesome,

he declared, my intention with this story is to change the direction of American fiction, quite frankly. Ethan Iverson also told another funny story. He did interviews for his website and he interviewed Stanley Crouch and what he would do is when he finished the interview who would give the transcript to the interviewee and say, you know, can you make any edits to this that you want, right? And Iverson wrote that almost every interviewee took the transcript and

toned down several of the things that they had said. But Stanley Crouch, he writes, doubled down on the insults and polemic. He took what he had said in real time and made it much meaner and more insulting than he had. And he said it was a real insight into his style, which it totally was. I know he was writing for basic books when you were there. Did you have any encounters with him? I met him a couple of times. I mean, he wrote for basic Civitas line, which is the sort of brainchild of our

then editor of the then editor-in-chief, Liz McGuire, rest in peace. She was beloved by all. and especially for the big personalities amongst which I count Stanley Crouch, she really was able to humanize them and take the edge off. It's like, you know, if you're friends with Liz, then, you know, you're okay. But he was, I mean, he was a character, he was a huge personality in our office even when he wasn't present. I mean, it was, people would talk about Stanley, like, like, you know, he was the neighbor down the hall. And, but he was an incredible, I mean, he was just such, like we've already said.

I mean, he was a force of nature on the page and in real life. And, and his style and his, I mean, his thoughts are really missed. I had the pleasure of editing him. And let's put giant air quotes around editing because what am I going to tell Stanley Crouch to do nothing? at the Daily Beast early in this decade. Tina Brown had brought him along to write a column, essentially for the Daily Beast. And it was so, in retrospect,

it was very, you know, pulled the heartstring to watch because he is coming into this media world that's saying, hey, Sarah Palin said something crazy today. Can you write 500 words about that that we can put a clickable headline on? And Stanley did not work that way. So he would turn in these columns where he was, riffing on one of his favorite themes and I'd read it and I'd be like wow this is really interesting I don't know how I'm going to sell this column to my bosses right I don't know how to put a

daily beast clickable headline atop this column but he was always incredibly fun to work with he signed some people mentioned this and some of the obituaries he signed every email VIA which meant victory is assured I remember once telling him I was from Fort Worth and he He said, oh, oh, the great jazz musician Ornette Coleman is from Fort Worth. I should introduce the two of you. Now, there's something, right? Somebody who can say, I should just introduce you to Ornette Coleman. He's my friend living in New York City at the time.

Another parts of the Stanley sort of mythos, he had these unproduced works. There was a 500-page novel called First Snow and Kokomo that I read about. I don't believe that was ever brought out for publication. He worked for decades, I mean decades on his biography of Charlie Parker. finally bringing out the first installment in 2013 did not write the second installment. There were feuds in terms of criticism on the page with Tony Morrison, with Bell Hooks,

with Spike Lee, with basically all of rap music. There were also actual physical feuds. Crouch told Robert Boynton, I have a kind of mailer-esque reaction to the way some people view writers. I want them to know that just because I write doesn't mean I can't also fight. In 1988, he was fired at the village voice after fighting with another writer.

And this one, you and I remember, 2004. Oh, my God, yeah. Crouch is having lunch with ZZ Packer. First of all, this is already an amazing story. Having lunch with ZZ Packer, he sees Dale Peck, the critic who had savaged his novel, Don't the Moon look lonesome in the New Republic. Crouch approaches Peck's table and says,

Are you Dale Peck? Peck apparently says, so what? Crouch then slaps him on both cheeks and this turns into this giant media story of a con. I mean, there could have never it's hard to imagine.

I can't say that would be like fill in the blank today. I mean, that would be exactly like what it is today. I mean, it would be just, it was just as galling then, but it was just so unbelievable.

Talk about something that felt like out of another time. For sure. Mayloresque is really the right word, right? Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, this is, even before that, this is like, you know, like you slap someone aside the face with your gauntlet or whatever and, you know, challenge someone. This is like Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton or something. I mean, it's, it's a, well, I mean, I guess we should say for people who don't know, um, that Dale Peck was like,

Dale Peck was his job was to try to evoke people to, I mean, try to get people to slap him. He's basically the insult comic of the literary criticism world, right? I mean, he would just go in those days in the New Republic. hard. It was performance art. I mean, he would just tear people to shreds performatively. And I probably would say probably the only reason he didn't get slapped more than once is because people saw that he was doing a bit, you know? But, and for sure, you know, he kind of quit, he kind of closed up shop not long after that. But, but the fact that, I mean, the fact that someone did, you know, see him in a restaurant and decide to, they took exception.

to the point that they were actually going to slap him. I mean, it's, it was only going to be Stanley Crouch. And it was amazing that it happened. Absolutely. David, I called up Jason Gay today. We had some sports writing to talk about. Imagine that, him and me. Here's our conversation.

Jason Gay is a sports columnist at the Wall Street Journal, friend of the podcast, friend of mine. Jason, is you coming on here like Johnny Carson bringing Don Rickles onto the Tonight Show to stir things up back in the day? That is wild flattery. I am thrilled to be your wrinkles. You know, we should probably explain to the youngans. You know, I know the press box skews young here, but the, you know, the ritual of these great late night shows always had that guest that was a phone call away, right? If something, you know, happened, a guest got sick or canceled. Last minute they needed somebody to just hop in a cab and show up. I think Letterman had Tony Randall. And then after that, Regis, Terry Gar was that person. for a long time. And then of course, that Carson had,

I think Buddy Hackett was also, anybody who could fly in from Vegas, I think was good on the Tonight Show. I remember Letterman walking backstage one time and Marve Albert was in like a glass booth and there was an axe. So we just went to the Jason Gay booth and hit it with the axe.

Here he is. I want to start with a humble brag. Last time I saw you face-to-face was in Miami. Night before the Super Bowl, we had dinner. A little over a month after that, the pandemic shuts down. sports. What has your sports writing life been like during that period? It's just been rubble.

I mean, just rubble ever since that great dinner. I mean, I wish I could say the Super Bowl was the last big sporting event I went to before the pandemic, but I took my son to the Daytona 500, which really, if you're going to pick your last sporting event before the pandemic, it doesn't beat that. I mean, there's 100,000 people there. The president came. It was bonkers. But, you know, everybody's life. I mean, this is not specific to sports writers. Everybody's life has been wildly disrupted here. And I think that now we are what? How do we chart this? Do we say six months since Rudy Gubert or like, how does it work in terms of how we chart the evolution of sports and the pandemic? But we are, you know, close to a half year into this thing. And I think that to sound a

positive note, I've just been staggered and impressed by the levels to to which people in our profession took it. You know, a lot of people kind of dropped what they were doing. You know, they stopped covering beat teams and went out and did medical coverage and did coverage of people who were battling this. And there were a lot of examples of that. But then also, you know, throughout this, I think, you know, listen, I remember going out and I'm sure you had these experiences,

having conversations with people as this thing was starting to fall apart. And they were looking at us like we were like Betamax repairment. You know, like this is just, you are not going to have a job. job, buddy. And I think there was that anxiety. We have to be honest about that. But this has really been one of the most remarkable periods, certainly of my career, but I think in the history of sports. And I know that we're in a hyper hyperbole profession where we say lots of meaningless stuff. But I really do think that when we look back upon this period of time, not just the shutdown, but the insanity of what we now see with this like onslaught of games. I mean, just this past weekend with the ridiculous volume of stuff that's happening. I mean, it's never been a more while or time. You ventured out to the U.S. Open. Yeah. Into the press box? What was that experience?

The tennis open, I should specify, because we also completed the U.S. Open in golf. So that was my first experience with a sports bubble. I was sort of in the bubble, I don't know, the outer bubble, which meant I was regularly tested as a press member. It wasn't tested at the volume of, you know, say a lines judge. or a player, certainly. But you were tested, you were entered into this program, and then you were, you know, allowed to wander the grounds of the U.S. Open or the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

And I think it's funny because what how this whole six-month period has been this process of things that were just completely surreal, evolving to some gradient of normal. And there's nothing like actually setting foot in a place that you know in ordinary circumstances is completely nuts. and seeing how this pandemic has flattened it to really bring home how radically things have changed. And that was definitely the case of being at the U.S. Open. I mean, the U.S. Open within the context of tennis is the fun, crazy major.

It's the one that's the loudest. It's probably the drunkest. It is really just rocking. And they play deep into the night there. And the crowd is the thing. and when you see it just shift to an empty stadium, Arthur Ashe Stadium, which is the main court there, capacity close to 25,000. I think at best maybe they had 80 people watching these matches,

if you include all the personnel. I've never seen anything quite like it. I actually took a moment during the women's final between Naomi Osaka and Vika Azarenka. I'm a loud typer. I'm somebody who has been scolded aboard trains and planes for typing too loud. And I actually got a little nervous because I was having to write the gamers for these finals because I was writing the columns in the gamers. So I had to write something right immediately at the end of the match.

So I had to write during the match. And I was terrified I was going to disrupt the match. That somehow the players were going to look up. Matt Futterman, Matt Futterman, an old colleague of mine is over at the Times. he told me he opened a Coke can at one point. And one of the players looked up at him and said, hey. And I don't know if you was having to see that. Alexander Zreif scolded Brad Gilbert mid-match and said,

buddy, I can hear everything you're saying. You know how Brad is kind of the court side guy whispers? Like, I don't like the body language here. Sure. Zarev turns around and says like, hey, buddy, I can hear you. So all of a sudden, you know, tennis is not exactly, you know, rugby in terms of crowd noise during the actual action. but I actually took my computer and went up to the high levels to the upper deck to type because I was afraid people were going to hear me.

So if that doesn't bring home to you how wildly different the atmospherics are, I don't know what can. It is truly terrifying to think players could hear what sports writers are saying in the press box. Not because it's particularly offensive because it's just so stupid and it's so pedestrian. Yes, although both of us have been around enough press boxes to know that like if they're actually paying attention at all is quite an accomplishment. So like the athletes might be a little bit relieved to know that Brad Gilbert has checked in. Yeah. I have been perusing sports writing from actual working sports writers. People go into games all the time, unlike us and having to, you know, really grind on gamers and stuff like that.

I have been struck by how, let me, let me choose my word here, normal the sports writing scene. Sure. How complete it seems. I mean, these people are not going into the locker room. They're doing their coach interviews by Zoom. In some cases, they're not going to the game at all, especially road games. Are you struck the same way about the kind of normalcy or semi-normality that sports writerdom has been able to achieve?

I mean, I think that sports writers kind of get a bad rap. because we have a job that, you know, people would do for free. And it is a rather lovely profession when things are going nicely, which isn't always the case. But I am always staggered by the ability of sportswriters to sort of make something out of nothing. And just to be able to take whatever scraps that they can get in the environment, which is getting increasingly more stifled before any of all this craziness was happening. And write beautiful, elegant, intelligent things.

the fact that people have risen to the occasion here doesn't surprise me a great deal. I think the thing that is just mind-blowing about it, though, is that, as you said, they are not having that kind of face-to-face interaction, which both of us would agree is the most vital thing to understanding and developing relationships and sort of your long-term future and covering anything. Forget about sports, anything. Covering Congress, covering town affairs, anything. So I feel like that people being able to raise their game here doesn't surprise me at all. I like you, I know this has been a topic of conversation on the show before, but like where the pendulum swings back to, I don't know. You know, what our future will look like in the event that this all lifts. You know, I'm wary of making sort of sweeping generalizations like, you know, we're never going back to the old days of like locker room scrums.

although if like the elimination of locker room scrums was the the main byproduct of this i would take that as a silver lining i don't know i mean i i just you know again i want to stick up for you know my brethren i think they have done amazing things but they're used to doing amazing things we don't get the credit brian absolutely not no and and i and i completely agree in the sense that i'm not amazed that given you know a tiny amount of tools compared to what they normally have that they've been able to do such a good job. That's what scares me is that they've been able to such a good job. Sure. Right. Okay. For two reasons, right? One, the team say, well, why did we need to let you into the locker room again? Why can't every interview be via Zoom now? Fair. And the second thing,

maybe even more dangerous is our bosses who say, you know what, that was pretty good. Of course. All that beat writing you did from afar. Why am I paying $1,000 to put you on a plane every week? Of course. And, you know, these evaluations are happening in every quadrant of the economy, right? There's no part of the world that a person isn't watching Zoom meetings and Zoom interaction and virtual travel and all this kind of stuff and saying, like, how can we do this? Maybe it won't be 100%, but it'll be enough of that 100% to certainly justify the cut costs that have happened here. I think like anything else, there's going to be some middle ground. I mean, you've seen that, I don't know, who's the head of Netflix, Reed Hastings? came back and said like, you know, I want everybody back in the office. It's like Netflix, the most virtual movie studio in the history of the planet, you know, saying like we recognize the value of interpersonal relationships, that sort of like office kismet that happens. And I just feel like that kind of thing will happen in sports writing. And now the question is, of course, like, who will pay for it, how will pay for it? And, you know, at what scale will it be?

Are you also interested in the cognitive dissonance we've been able to plow that? through as sports writers during this period, right? We did this with NCAA amortism. We did this with brain injuries and football. We, and now we do it during a worldwide pandemic where players are being sent out for, at least partially for our amusement. We, we wrote the columns. We wrung our hands.

Right. And then the sports started and we went, ooh, oh, this is fun. Sports is back. Here we go. Right. And you were on this early, I believe. I think you wrote a column a couple of months ago. I think when baseball was starting up about,

just sort of that question. Like at what point do you just start covering what's happening between the lines and you're not, you know, focused in on the overarching existential question of the future of mankind? I think, and it is kind of strange to see things covered between the lines. There are parts of the experience, even as a home viewer, where, you know, that touchdown pass goes sailing high and you look up and there is nobody there, and you want the announcer to be like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. And some of them are acknowledging it.

I think it's important to acknowledge that. That was my prevailing walkaway from covering the U.S. Open was not Naomi Osaka winning the women's final or Dominic Taming winning the men's final. It was definitely one of the most, if not the most bizarre atmospheres I've ever been around, not just in sports and anything. The idea of, you know, 110 people or 60 people or 40 people watching world-class tennis played for a major Grand Slam is just remarkable. So I think that,

like, it doesn't surprise me that people have been able to do it. What's interesting to me is that the public has been willing to sort of go along with the flip switch. Like, when you were first doing this kind of thing, one thing you had to be very alert to the fact that, and there continues to be the case. There are great many people who are suffering here, suffering medically, suffering economically, you know, have major questions about their livelihoods and futures. And the idea of just being like, hey, let's talk some fantasy football. Like, totally, that felt a little strange. I feel it feels less strange now. I think people have been willing and eager to make that adaptation in their lives because they were so, you know, hungry for some kind of distraction. Absolutely. And I put myself in that

category, by the way. Yeah. Watching Patriots Seahawks last night, unless they showed Bill Belichick with the mask on, or as you say, a shot of the empty normally loud stands in Seattle, I didn't think about the coronavirus. Yeah. I wouldn't think about that. I wasn't thinking about the great moral questions of having players out there on the field.

I admit it. Yeah, I do from a, from an audience standpoint, I do want to have a version of the feed where there is no souped in noise. Like I put aside any kind of like, you know, moral ethical questions about, you know, pumped in crowd noise and stuff like that. I just want to have a surreal feel, feed rather, where you can actually, like I have these big canned headphones, which I'm wearing now before you, but I wear them when I'm watching television. And you can actually hear, like in an NFL game, like golf level chatter, like chatter among chit chat among the players after tackles and some coarse language in there, Brian. But it's fascinating, and I want more of that. Like, why not just like, instead of like leaning in the other way of trying to create a

similar acrum of like, you know, what we were used to, let's lean right into like the weirdness of it. Let's have that version too. Yeah, well, and the noise just sucks at some of these NFL games. And I know it's NFL films are doing it or the NFL, the league doing it. It's not the networks. But it honestly sounds like someone has their hand on a dial. And like a half a second to a second too late, they twist the dial.

Yes. Well, okay. And you may have had this experience, as I've had, where you have the game on, and it doesn't matter what game it is, basketball, hockey, football. You have the volume up and you used to be able to, when you were doing your other thing, whether you're attending to your children or cooking in the kitchen, that you could judge by the volume, I got to run back and look at the TV. Like, something just happened. People are going nuts. And now there's no rhyme or reason to it. I mean, they soup it up for touchdown passes and things like. that, but like there is so many sort of brief, like staccato moments of crowd breathtaking or eruption that you really see, and especially the sort of the tense moments of games, that there's just no way to replicate it. There's probably some way to do it with AI. You know, it really is. But I, but, but it's certainly not there under our human control.

I brought up brain injuries and NCAA amateurism because I think we've sort of done the same thing, right? We wrote our column. We, we worried about this. And it was a genuine worry, I think. It was not performative worry. It was genuine worry about whether playing through a pandemic was the right thing to do on multiple levels. Yeah.

And then we kind of go back to sports. Is that enough? Is that sufficient in our role? You know, you and I think about this, I think, from time to time. What are we a sports writer just supposed to do? What is the right thing to do? Is that enough? Is that fine?

Right. Well, you know, I can speak to it for myself. that like, you know, my job is to cover these things as they happen. And so if they keep on playing NCAA football and they keep on playing NFL football, I'm going to be obligated to write about and cover it, which is not to say that it won't cover the, you know, uncomfortable topics and truths that exist in it. But yeah, you have to sort of keep at it. And I do feel like with this, I feel is structurally a little bit different because you're dealing with something that has touched every life. I mean, this is not, you know, amateurism, NCAA, you know, brain

injuries of NFL, you know, those are very specific acute issues to those worlds. Or I should say brain injuries are specific to any kind of contact sport. But this is not the kind of thing where the pandemic is like, this needs to be raised. Like, I mean, there's no question that people are aware of it. You know, awareness is 100% in the general public of a pandemic. It's not incumbent upon who's ever broadcast in the game. to remind people of that, you know, on some sort of like, you know, quarterly basis. I don't think.

You and I are products of state schools. I say proudly you, the U of Wisconsin, me, the U of Texas. You just learned your team is coming back in October. Where do you fall on the continuum between happiness? Because I know you genuinely enjoy college football, as do I. Sure. And queasiness about that prospect. Right there on the middle.

Right there. I'm sitting on that fence. Right. I mean, I think, like, one of the things I think has happened a little bit in, you know, sports media, but media culture and just general, like, social media culture. Like, we've become such a hyperbinary environment now where it's like, if you feel this way, you can't feel the other way. And it's entirely acceptable to both be excited for the idea that Big Ten football is coming back and worry wildly about the health and welfare of not just the students. who are involved in football, but the student population at large, the campus towns themselves. And also the terrible optics and precedent of the idea of prioritizing big-time football players at a university at a time when many of these universities are struggling with, you know,

epidemics or breakouts on their campus. The University of Wisconsin, at the time this decision was announced, had quarantined two dormitories, which were about the size of the bellagio. I mean, they had just had students upon students, quarantining themselves. And so, you know, if you're not feeling a little bit conflicted about the idea of Big Ten football coming back, that's a bizarre to me. But I think it's acceptable to have both of those opinions. I think that like this idea that we somehow have to always, you know, land on one side of the other, that's not applicable here. No. And I agree. And I think also there's

this sense that you're right. Certain Twitter actors, certain political actors push us to feel one thing, right? The big 10, the big thing, the big 10 must come back, but the big 10 must never come back. Yes. Yes, exactly. You know, no one's ever gone viral with, hey, you want to hear my nuanced take? Like, let's just never work. Okay. That's not what the algorithm rewards here. And, and, and we're all worse off for it, I think. When I look at college football writers in particular on Twitter. I think they are aching and in a lot of cases producing that nuance take, but it's just in an environment that's very hard to do it in, right? You're competing with the guy who runs the rival site. You're competing with Trump. You're competing with Clay Travis, right?

There's just, it's very, it's very hard to express yourself and not get shoved into a corner, I think, by these external actors. Yes. And it really became this wild storm of not just like, you know, people's regional and scholastic attachments. But as you said, you know, politics and state politics and federal politics and the president's dropping into this thing. And it becomes a campaign issue. Biden does a commercial. A lot is being asked of our college football reporters. And I've been amazed at the skill with which many of them have been able to sort of slide back and forth on that, you know, ruler that you were describing before of being able to cover these leagues and what's happening on Saturdays, but also the big picture of what's happening

with regard to, you know, numbers. I think they've been busier than anybody, maybe during the whole pandemic. I think so. And I think that, like, you know, and you and David have taken it on a number of times, so we don't have to do it here, but like just this absurdist notion

that, like, somehow these reporters were actively campaigning for seasons to not happen by, you know, reporting inconvenient truths does not, is not tantamount to rooting against something. I just want to underline that. That's what the reporter's job is. And what I see out there, or college football reporters doing their jobs,

not like taking stances or positions or things that might be inconvenient for some. Let's talk about Roger Angel, the famed, the fabled New Yorker baseball writer. He turned 100 on Saturday, and you interviewed him for the journal. What's it like to interview Roger Angel? Humbling.

I mean, how can it not be? How can it not be? I mean, he's my origin story. My father, who was sick of seeing me bring home like picture books about Pete Rose, was like, you want to read a real sports writer and handed me a copy of the summer game and a copy of another collection called Five Seasons. And I dove right into them.

And like a lot of people, I just didn't know you could write about sports like this. I didn't know that you could do almost these novelistic backstories of, you know, dramas and personal lives and just this whole kind of like world. I mean, it almost was like he's like it has less in common with like traditional sports. sports running than it is with like Tolkien, you know? Like Angel has layers upon layers. And, you know, one of the fun parts about doing this, I had about 24 hours notice to get ready for this. I went back and read a whole bunch of the stuff. And, and it's remarkable. I mean, not only is it all hold up, but it is so full of life and so inventive and so, I mean, like, he created this. This is

his thing in the same way that we look at, I don't know, who genre writer, you know, science fiction or anything like that. But he is the person who gave rise to all of this. And no one, you know, like a lot of, you know, legends, no one did it as well. There's a lot of pale imitators, myself probably included. But he is really, you know, he stands alone. And, yeah, it was very humbly to speak to him. What I love is every few years somebody pops up, somebody younger than Roger Angel,

but not all that much younger, and says, you know, sports writers in the old days, they weren't fans. They weren't fans in a certain place. fans of the teams. I'm like, did you read Roger Angel? Yeah. Because what he was doing was sitting in the bleachers doing fan fantasy camp for sports writers. You know, he would write this piece. I'm in Florida. I was sitting in the bleachers in the sunshine. And then I wandered back to the clubhouse and found Pete Rose standing around. And we did a little interview. You know, he was, he was being, he was being the guy, right? He was that bridge between fan and writer and he's such a humble presence, right? Yeah. It was none of that, you know, high-dudgeon kind of thing.

He, in a way, helped create fan-driven sports writer. Well, he's candid about the fact that he was quite shy when he started. Like, he hid from the players. Like, he sat up in the press box for quite a while, he said to me, because he didn't want to go down the field. He was scared of the players. Another part about Roger Angel, which I think is a really fun thing to underline,

a late bloomer as a baseball writer. Yeah. He was a New York staff writer. He was the fiction editor for decades, but he did not get going. in baseball writing until his 40s. Okay, this was not somebody who grew up writing baseball stories. He got into

this as a large adult man. And that is just a remarkable thing about him, that he was able to have this life and legacy and with something that was a mid-career adjustment for him. Is he have the single highest approval rating of any sports media person

of our lifetimes? There's not been like a Stanley Crouch character to come along. Let me tell you about Roger Angel, the real story here. Well, Yeah. No, I mean, I haven't encountered it. And I always, you know, I get a good deal of feedback from readers and there's usually one crank in the bunch. And I haven't gotten anything with a graduate Roger. What I have got are a lot of amazing anecdotes about encountering him at spring training or in the bleachers at a game and having conversations with him. And, you know, even people who knew him long before he got going in baseball, people who, you know, I heard from one reader who Angel wrote about his father who was a bomber during World War II. Wow. It's just a remarkable life. He said to me, at one point, Brian, I asked him, you know, sort of the basic, like, you know, this is your life question of, like, if you could get into that time capsule and go back and watch any players that, you know, who would they be?

And he said, well, I'd probably start with the ones that I've seen Ruth and Garrig. And I was like, wait, wait, but do the math. He did see them. He saw Ruth. He saw Garrick. I mean, what an incredible life he has led. And I have to also say that, like, as sharp and clever and funny and pointed as ever, he is, his eyesight is going.

And that's, you know, caused him to stress specifically because he's a big movie buff, but he still watches a great deal at baseball. He says that's actually a little easier for him to follow. And I had a lot of thoughts about this wacky pandemic season we're having. Not a big fan of the runner starting on. second base, Brian. I know that might shock you. Roger Angel, not into that. That would have been a huge headline

if Roger Angel had endorsed the runner starting at second. Roger Angel endorses seven inning double headers. Yes, that would really be heretical. All right. Jason Gay, read him in the Wall Street Journal. Hear him here on the press box when we wander backstage to the glass

booth and bring out the X to free him and to let him run. Thank you so much, Jason, for being here. I'm great. for the opportunity. Can I just say one quick thing as a fan of the show, you know, you guys have done incredible, I can't imagine what it's been like to do this show for the last

six months and you've had many, many remarkable moments, but I love nothing better than hearing your kids in the background. You know, those crying babies and broken plates and all that kind of stuff. When you guys go angry dad, that is to me. That's the true symphony of the press box. So thank you

for that. It's reality, baby. We put the truth here at the press box. Thanks, Jason. Bye-bye. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the Strain pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's pun headline about a failed mass transit project was a streetcar named expired. Today's pun headline comes from Brian Sunter, Nico, and Dan Stan Zanzik.

It's from The Guardian. Here's the story, David. Police in Canada believe a sophisticated network of criminals is targeting transport trucks across the country after seven hot Tubs were stolen in a brazen daylight theft. Seven hot tubs stolen in a brazen daylight theft. What was the Guardian's strained pun headline? If it's not Hot Tub Crime Machine, then I give up. Folks, we're done here.

All right. Hot tub crime machine. Do you think, I know the Guardian covers the world, but do you think that this particular hot tub theft in Canada was so important to the papers readers? Or do you think somebody saw this on the wired was like, I got it. Hot tub crime machine. I think that this is the problem with these master criminals. If they were really master criminals, was that what they called them? If they, if they were really these brilliant criminals, they should have been able to foresee that the crime they were committing

lent itself too well to a tabloid headline. And that there, and that maybe under, if they were just stealing, you know, sofas or something, they could fly under the radar for much longer. But the daily mail is someone who's going to write hot tub crime machine. You have to know that if you're stealing hot tubs. And that's, you know, just begging people to come after you. I got you. This is like the old ways you would like send a taunting letter to the newspaper about your crime. And here you just predict what the strain on headlines is going to be.

I was saying it was a bad decision for them to steal hot tubs because they should have known it was going to happen. But you're right. Maybe this was a message. Maybe this is to put them on the map. He is David Chumaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almead, a production magic by Erica Servantes back Thursday with a Joe Biden-D Donald Trump debate preview.

Yep, it's time, folks. New York Times TV critic James Pony Wazick joins us. And David and I will be getting matching tattoos of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. See you then, David. See you later, Ryan.