The Press Box - The Jordan Doc, the Death of the Indie Bookstore, and More Media Hell | The Press Box

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss their first impressions of the Michael Jordan documentary 'The Last Dance' (1:40). They then go over the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (35:20), the death of the beloved indie bookstore (38:05), and more from the Hall of Shame, with updates on media companies hit hard by the pandemic (48:32). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Press Box on the Ringer podcast network is brought to you by World Central Kitchen. Their relief team is working across America to safely distribute individually packaged fresh meals in communities that need support. They're now serving tens of thousands of meals daily in some of the biggest cities like New York and L.A. And they're launching initiatives across America to deliver fresh hot meals to hospitals and clinics, fighting on the front lines, while keeping local restaurants in business as well. You can directly help the heroes in hospitals and clinics who are fighting for us, and you can help keep your local restaurants alive. Go to the ringer.com slash WCK to donate, please. We're trying to raise $250,000.

And if you have the means, it's an unbelievably great and useful cause that helps our hospital heroes, emergency workers, and local restaurants. Please give whatever you can the money goes directly to World Central Kitchen, and it's a charitable donation. Once again, that's the ringer.com slash W. Hello media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. We've got a lot of great stuff to get to today. We'll talk about the slow death of beloved indie bookstores during the coronavirus. We'll talk about the latest round of COVID media hell. The cuts and furloughs now reaching writers like SB Nation Spencer Hall. Plus David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's begin here. I'm not sure if you've read any articles on the ringer about this. But there was a Michael Jordan documentary on ESPN last night.

Yes, I'm aware, dimly aware. It's called The Last Dance, the first two of ten parts aired on the network last night, creating a mother load of Twitter content. Let's listen to one clip from episode one. I am cursed this mentality of competitiveness. Competition was an addiction. Every day was a battle. Dennis, get up there.

Boom. They don't hear her and see Dennis for 48 hours. No matter what we did, it seemed like it was a story. Scottie was being selfish. When the trust is broken, it's sort of shocking. I never hated Scott. It's six championships in eight years. We were the greatest team ever.

What time is that? I'm going to ridicule you until you get on the same level. It was his team. My mentality was to go out and win at any cost. David, let's do our disclosures. Jason Hare, who is the director of The Last Dance, directed the Andre the Giant Doctor. for the ringer. And you, David, were one of its primary talking heads. First impressions of the

last dance. Ooh, listen, I think I went in, and maybe you can sympathize with this. I think so much of my time in isolation, or not isolation, in quarantine has, I think, made me less jaded than I was before, but I did go into, somehow I was able to rekindle that flame of jadedness at the beginning of this one. I think my expect to, I think just hearing everybody else so excited about it, I think affected my, me at the entry point. But it took me all about 45 seconds to completely throw all that aside. It was, um, you know, I feel totally comfortable in saying it's exactly what the, this, this tortured world needs right now. So, I mean, I, I, I, I enjoyed it. It felt very, and maybe it has to do with the fact that it was obviously based largely on this archival footage from the 97, uh, NBA season.

but it you know I don't want to go like contribute a quote to the movie poster or anything but it because I don't mean this to be too over the top but it did feel sort of timeless and the fact that like it felt it it felt like despite the fact that I could see the age of Michael Jordan being interviewed in front of us it felt like it could have existed five or ten years ago but it also felt partly because of the presentation and partly because of well just my knowledge it felt very very modern and you know forward looking as well. I agree. I thought hair has a really good way of blending new footage and old footage together. There's a very subtle technique in that, right? So you don't feel like you're doing a lot of sports docs where it's like, here is talking head and then here is old old footage. Here is talking head.

Here is old footage. It all kind of blended together. Did you have that moment when Michael Jordan's parents popped up? And I was like, man, his mom looks great. And then it was his dad. And I was like, I remember his dad. dying. And then I was like, wait, is that, I couldn't, I didn't even Google. I was like, I don't know if his mom's alive or not. I don't know if this is a new footage or old footage of his mom,

but it all just sort of went seamlessly from brothers to parents back to Michael Jordan. And for all I know, everything except Jordan was 20 years old. But you sure couldn't tell. A couple of initial impressions when it started that viewer discretion is advised bit we got before the first episode. We had a real watching NYPD Blue in the 90s. energy to it. That's a timeless qualifier as well. It's a timeless warning. It was wild just to see present day Michael Jordan. You know, you and I and the ringer verse at large has been in this place where we've heard Magic Johnson and Larry Bird basically participate in in sort of profiles and TV stuff and books and all that for decades now since they stopped playing in the NBA.

and Michael Jordan has not. And I think there's something kind of amazing when someone who's reluctant to participate in their own nostalgia finally gives in. I don't know why I had this analogy came to mind during the show, but like Harrison Ford, remember for years, Harrison Ford was like,

hey nerds, I'm not Han Solo. Like, please never mention Star Wars to me or just really, or indie or anything. I just don't, like, I'm not that guy. I don't want to do that. this, I'm way too cool for that. And then Harrison Ford hit that point. I think when his career finally needed him to hit that point where he's like, hey, I was, I'm Han Solo again. I'm back. And I will to some level like, you know, talk to you about what that was like. And I feel like

Michael Jordan hit that moment in this and it was weird to watch. Well, yeah, I think the real, the real perfect moment in the Harrison Ford, well, I don't know if Renaissance is the right word, but it's not just when he started portraying Han Solo again, but it's when he started responding to interview questions about what Indiana Jones would do, like about like the character, like about the, about the, about the, how true the new script pitches were to the character

or the new, the new like, you know, the reboots or whatever. And he was like, or no, when he, he was like, guys, you don't understand. I am Indiana Jones. There cannot be another Indiana Jones. There can be no prequels. There can be no spinoffs. I, you know, that was, that was, I think, that putting, planting his flag in a place that,

no one ever thought he would. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different people talking about, I mean, a lot of people are talking about the Jordan side of that. And certainly there's a lot of different reasons. You're right about Michael Jordan. I mean, sorry, about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. There was always the feeling. I mean, Magic Johnson is Magic Johnson.

You know, I mean, he's presumably available for whatever documentary or, you know, retrospective that you pitch him. Larry Bird always had a little bit of reluctant to sort of built into his character, right? And there was a part of me, I think, that always just assumed that there reluctant, that his availability was based on his, the fact that he was still being paid by the NBA, right? I mean, he was working for the Indiana Pacers for so long. But Michael Jordan's, you know, been a team owner forever.

I mean, he's not like he's a separate thing. And it sort of, I guess you look, when you think about it, that's what that's a picture of what real sort of reluctance to be going camera looks like, right? And, you know, there's moments where, like, at his Hall of Fame induction, a sort of notorious moment for Michael Jordan, where you kind of think, it's probably best that he's not out in front of the public eye a whole lot. Or maybe this is like, you know, it's some sort of mutually assured destruction situation where we're just choosing everyone who's just chosen not to put him on camera. But then you see him, you know, like Hobie's memorial and you're just like,

no, this guy, I mean, he should be in front of us all day every day, you know? I mean, he's, he is such an icon and he still embodies that so fully. I think that, I mean, maybe we're seeing the most real version of Michael Jordan in this documentary, but there is something kind of amazing to see him, you know, there's comfortable and then there's comfortable, but sitting in that plush chair and just sort of like bullshitting

with the director. Don't forget the whiskey to his right. With the whiskey is the I mean, that's real comfort in a very kind of literal way. And it's interesting to see him that way. Can I indelicately say that I didn't think Michael Jordan looked great in a couple of those

just physically great? In a couple of those things, at least compared to Scotty Pippen and other members of his era. He looked extremely middle-aged. Yeah. Which is a real mortality of your hero's moment for me. Yeah, I got to be honest. Maybe this is part of my skepticism or my, you know, whatever, my, trepidation going in. I thought he would, I thought he looked great compared to what I thought, what I was expecting. He looked better than I was anticipating. I remember when Michael Jordan retired and I believe it was his, for his last. retirement where someone asked him what he was going to do and he said his like top priority was to

grow a pot belly. It was like for like for all of his life he had been so physically active that just like having a gut was like unthinkable. It was just impossible and he was really looking forward to that. It's good to see that he sort of, you know, finally achieved his dreams and more. These documentaries, especially when they're about a period that you and I knew so well and experienced. I mean, this is you and I going to the Luby's cafeteria line and just having our own childhood and teenage years served up to us piping hot on the tray. Oh, my God. Tapioca pudding, just like high fives all around. Exactly. One thing they do is they take moments that we know and they kind of resell them to another. generation. And the big one in this early episode was Jordan in the 86 playoffs against the Celtics,

scoring 49 and then 63 points in games one and two. And it was funny because I was like looking at Twitter last night, Larry Bird used the phrase God disguised as Michael Jordan. Now that is a super famous quote that Larry said at the time. Right. In fact, it's so famous that like two years ago, there was an undefeated piece about the quote. But for this whole other generation that, does not know Jordan's career in that kind of granular depth. It's like, oh, oh, wow, that's the greatest quote I've ever heard. And it's like, yeah, guess what? Larry said it after the game.

So I just love, I just sort of love watching. I mean, sometimes that's annoying to me to be like, come on, you know that, right? But last night, that was almost touching because not only did he bring up, Larry said it anew, right? Larry was willing to to reboot the quote himself in real time. Yeah. Well, I mean, from my personal experience, I've definitely been there sitting in a chair. I don't even remember if it happened with Jason on Andre or not, but certainly I've sat in the chair where the interviewer was like, hey, you wrote this thing.

Do you mind just saying it? Either explicitly or implicitly, you know. This is how the sausages made, folks, right here. I don't fault them at all in this documentary for really like milking all of the, you know, metaphorical. significance out of that phrase because if what we saw on screen was correct, it looked like the actual news piece about that interaction was just headlined something to the effect of bird impressed by Jordan. So, and they like popped up on the screen when he had the greatest quote of all time and the Boston Herald or whatever was just like bird impressed. And I love

deathless newspaper headline to really capture the moment. The other thing documentaries like this do was sort of make an implicit argument. And I think the one we saw at the beginning of episode two was Scotty Pippen was really freaking good. And the one bad note to me was somebody saying he was Robin to Michael's Batman. I guess that's right. But it's almost like, you know, Batman to Jordan's Superman, right? He was mortal but barely, you know.

And people forget how great Scottie Pippen was. You know, he has been, he was, he was forgotten at the time, as we found out from his salary thing, where he was making less money than Luke Longley that year. But that argument to me is important. The documentary didn't underline it so much, but it definitely made it. I think that that's what everybody's talking about, or that's one of the big takeaways from night one. And so I think that it made the point clearly enough to let people to run with it. You know, Jordan, I mean, you could probably read into it a million different ways, but Jordan himself didn't seem to make the case that loudly, right?

I mean, he sort of was like, we kind of came in, if memory serves, at the tail end of a sentence or a thought about it. And he's like, and that's why I've always considered him my best teammate, where it's like that's, just the framing of that is already sort of putting him in the second category. That you, Brian Curtis, have just argued that we should be lifting him out of. And what the documentary is arguing we should lift him out of as well, right? Everything else. And if you read, the ringer ran a piece from Bill's book, the book of basketball,

about how good Pippin was today, or last night actually to kind of go along with that release. And there's a lot of cool quotes from Team USA, from the Dream Team, where he just kind of went in as one of the, they told the story that he just kind of went in as one of the guys. And within like a couple days, it was clear he was, you know,

the second best player on the team. And everybody saw it, right? I mean, like Stockton Malone. Like, everybody there was just like, oh, shit. Like, this guy's the best. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think you could say it loudly enough. I think that you're right that they did sort of, you know, but they left a little bit of room for negotiation, I guess, for the viewer.

But, you know, that was the second episode of a giant documentary. It was the point was made. There are moments of, to me anyway, I don't know that I've read a lot of Michael Jordan biographies, like the Roland Lazenby thing that came out a couple years ago. I've read more of the Jordan rules kind of in the moment, all hot off the presses kind of books. So that idea that his competitiveness

was stoked by competing with his brother for his father's attention. That was a real rosebud moment for me. I'm sure that's been out there in the world. But this idea that you're kind of a younger sibling and his dad even joked. Like I would say Michael was hopeless with a wrench, you know, and Michael would get mad, you know, essentially and be like, I have to be a great basketball player. So my dad will pay attention to me. And this was not, you know, your classic like absent father, which we hear about with a lot of athletes.

or father who just, you know, was a bad guy. Jordan was close to his dad by all accounts. But it was just this subtle little thing of sibling rivalry. That was fascinating to me. Yeah, I don't know how many times it's been rehashed since then. Like you have, I don't think I've read any full-fledged Jordan documentaries. I mean, biographies, but, you know, I've consumed just about everything else I could have. I don't know how many times Jordan himself has talked about it.

But it was sort of amazing the degree to which he was sort of clear-eyed and open about it, too, right? that not it wasn't just his his brother and his family telling the story it wasn't just sort of just you know just introductory you know montage with a you know old-fashioned violin playing in the background i mean this was just this was jordan himself saying like yeah that's why i'm so nuts and that part of it was uh sort of surprising as a child of the 90s i think we look to documentaries like this because they recreate sensations you felt oh yes while watching and for me it was Hearing the song, Serious by the Alan Parsons Project, which is what played in the introductions of every Bulls game. Can we hear just a couple of seconds of this? Please. A man,

when that note comes in, even last night, even that is almost such a cliche of 90s, Bulls, documentaries, nostalgia, everything. I was off the couch.

I was like, oh my God. Yes. The Ringer also wrote a great piece about that introductory music like six months ago. Jake Malooley wrote it. We ran it. I gotta say it has an incredible lead art by Eric Foster, one of my favorite artists I get to work with. But yes, there's nothing that evokes at. It's the music, just the way that they just kind of let you stew in it for about 30 seconds. And then, you know, when the bass kicks in and they start the introductions, all the

way down to just the vanilla like at guard, six from North Carolina, 6, 6, Michael Jordan, where it's like he's just a man. You know, he's just a dude playing who plays a sport. But we all know that like buried underneath that like straight man, you know, delivery is like, oh, we're about to see like a Greek god walk down the, walk down the ramp or whatever, walk out of the tunnel. I mean, it's pretty incredible. I mean, there's nothing that can recreate.

I mean, they can go to that feeling. Very few things in life feel the way that that felt for us that lived through it. And you're right. It is, I mean, you implied this. I saw Scott Van Pelt actually say it after, you know, on Sports Center after the show. He's like, you know, there's a lot of people who are just discovering this information for the first time or all these feelings or whatever else. And I don't know why, but it was kind of like halting to hear him say it. But it is interesting. I mean, I just can't even wrap my, maybe, I mean, maybe Almeida or somebody can answer the question. I can't even wrap my head around the experiencing some of these things for the first time. Some of the big beats of the first two episodes were things that I already knew. I remember all the conversations. about Scottie Pippen salary, but again, I was, what, 12 when those conversations were going on? I mean, I'm guessing it. I don't even know. And then, you know, there were, you know, all the conversation, I mean, all this backstory where there were so many moments where it was like the, the documentary took a turn on the thing that I knew so well, but it didn't feel overheated. It felt like I just felt this great sense of like a personal accomplishment that I remember the

thing that I knew what the original feeling was like and we're reliving it now. I don't know. it's just such a wild sensation. When he's different, right, than a lot of older subjects like that, because, like, if you do a documentary about Bo Jackson, which 30 for 30 actually did, you know, Bo Jackson is kind of a memory to people now. Michael Jordan is still a shoe. He's still a silhouette, right?

You know, there's a thing of, like, he's just much more present than a lot of people that get recreated in this way. Mm-hmm. And I just think that is, that's like a really interesting facet of this. I did want to spend a second talking about the documentary's treatment of Jerry Krause. He was the general manager of the Bulls, a short, dumpy guy we hear in the documentary, who built those great Bulls teams. And then in this final season, 1997 and 1998, forcibly tore them apart for reasons that still kind of remained mysterious,

even after watching the doc. Jerry Krauss died two years ago, three years ago, so he is not around to defend himself from the stomping he gets from everybody in this doc. What did you make of those parts of the show? I don't know if I don't know if I came away more sympathetic to him than I went in. But he certainly was humanized in the documentary,

both from like the kind of part with Scotty Pippen hurling insults at him from the other end of the bus to just seeing him on camera I sort of like conduct, like living and breathing. You know, that was actually some of them, of all of the things that I went in knowing or I went in remembering or having experience, actually seeing videotape of Jerry Krause was one of the one thing that I did not,

I realized very quickly. I had not seen a lot of video of him, seen a lot of photos of him. Most of them, you know, dot matrix or whatever. I mean, like half-tone photos, I mean, from the newspaper. But, but yeah, there was, he certainly gained a sort of level of humanity in my eyes. But you're right.

I mean, there's still the mystery as to why did it, I think that we're used to all these second and third degree interpretations. I don't know that there's any insight into his mind or soul that would be, that would change the just the general feeling that you get from understanding what, I mean, from the surface read, which was, I don't want to be, I don't want to have a 20 year rebuild. So I'm going to reboot this as quickly as possible, which is something that he actually said on the record later on. That's sort of as damning as something more nefarious would be, right? I mean, it's one thing to say, I mean, listen, I, As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I lived through this when we won a championship.

And then Mark Cuban was like, I'm not going to overpay to keep all these guys around and try to go back and take another run at the ring. You remember this very well, Brian. I know. Yep. But, you know, we were talking about letting, you know, J.J. Berea. I don't even remember who was walking out the door. Tyson Chandler. Tyson Chandler was the big one.

But there were, you know, there were other names as well who sort of walked up. Deshaun Stevenson, right? I mean, there were some other guys who kind of walked out Pesia, I think, was something. But, like, there's a difference between even that, which was just crushing. heartbreaking and it turned out totally wrongheaded and doing it when you have the greatest player of all time and potentially the two best players in the NBA.

You know, like what, like, it's kind of amazing. And the idea that Jordan was going to, decided not to play in large part because Pippin and then Phil Jackson, the coach, weren't going to come back. Isn't it sort of amazing that there wasn't like, like the Washington Wizards when they took Jordan on as a, you know, as a decision maker slash player

sometime later, part owner, it's kind of amazing that there wasn't the Charlotte Hornets or someone didn't just say, like, we'll just hire all of you at once. So let's just run it. Let's run it back over here, you know. Totally. And by the way, looking back at that era with binoculars from 2020, isn't it amazing that Jerry freaking Krause could tell Michael Jordan what to do? Because if that happened today, and we only have to look at the example of LeBron James, that GM would be fired. As soon as that GM displeased somebody of Michael Jordan stature, forget it, Scotty Pippen stature,

that dude would be gone. That dude would not have power over the most famous athlete in the world or even the 100th famous, most famous athlete in the world. And I almost wish the documentary, again, we've seen 20% of this. So it's a little hard to even review this. It's like reading the first couple chapters of a book. But to me, there's a great opportunity here to just plant your foot and explain because that's one of the biggest things that's happened. I've read, you know, oh, the Jordan was different because it was a world of TV and newspapers versus the internet and Twitter and all the stuff. But to me, that's, that is the most profound and obvious difference is that Jerry

Krause could tell Michael Jordan what was going to happen and not the other way around. I could read a 20,000 word long form extravaganza about that one moment in the documentary where Jordan sees Jerry Krause pass by off camera as he's like, they're getting ready to go out for warmups or whatever and he's like hey jerry you're gonna come warm up with us and jerry's like like yeah of course you know as a joke and then and jordan's like they got to lower the rims but there's but even jordan said it you could tell in the moment that jordan was the only person within a hundred yards that could have possibly said those words to him even as a joke but that even jordan had a certain sort of like juvenile uncertainty or reluctance to the way he was speaking

and like he's talking to his teacher like he's talking to his boss like he's trying to clown know, whatever. And, and, yeah, it was, there was a lot there. It was really, really telling. And I think that, I mean, you know, certainly Jerry Krause has been, you know, dogged in history and in the media at the time and seems to be a little bit impervious to it. So I don't know, you know, if there's what we could say, that would change, you know, that would, even with him, not there to defend himself, I don't know how much defending he really needs, but, but it, it is, it is a very, I mean, he is a, he is a singular figure in a lot of ways because you're right. It is impossible for him to have existed, to exist in the modern era. Also, I think in a documentary like this, and this is not Harris creation, this is real,

he's the villain. You need a villain. And, you know, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and company winning a sixth NBA title is a pretty smooth, you know, glide path. So you need... Especially when the documentary begins or more or less begins with Michael Jordan saying, we're going to go win our sixth championship. And then you know, at the end, ending is going to be. We all know this happen, right? I mean, I will say this, and I think I may depart from some people, at least I've seen on Twitter, maybe even some people at the ringer. I'm with Darnell Mayberry of the Athletic on this. I don't feel 20% of the way in that I have seen a truly great transcendent documentary yet. I'm not saying this won't get there. But, you know, to me,

I thought that first episode to me was a little kind of flat and almost kind of picked up around the 40-minute Mark. I think that's when he had that great game against Milwaukee as a rookie. And I kind of like, woke up a little bit. It had the kind of prestige doc thing of where you bring really famous people on to say something you really didn't need to make them say. Like Billy Packer, the old CBS announcer, came on and said that the North Carolina Georgetown NCAA title game where Jordan hit the winning shot was a really good game. That's fine. We could have just left Billy on the cutting room floor. No offense to Billy. And I'd argue if you have. have Jordan, Jordan the guy, you really don't need that as much.

When we did Andre the Giant, Andre's long gone. Rest in power, Andre the Giant. So you actually need people to tell you how great Andre the Giant was, right? You're not going to have his viewpoint in the documentary. Whereas this, I might have just said, look, I've got Michael. I want Scotty. I want Rodman. I want all that.

I want Phil. I want all that stuff. But I almost want to just chop away a lot of. what we have. If we need to bring Barack Obama in and Bill Clinton, great. But I almost want to make this a little bit leaner and almost go very Jordan. If we're going Jordan-centric, I want to go really Jordan-centric. Yeah, I mean, I have no idea if time considerations are part of any of that. Certainly, you know, as a writer the same as a documentarian, if someone's just like take up as much time as you need, I mean, you know, fill up as much time as you feel as necessary, then you're going to

run long, right? And part of, I think, showing the, power of Michael Jordan to a new generation is both showing the sort of age of some of the people who are around and involved, you know, the sort of breadth of the story, but also just to, I mean, you have to get Bill Clinton, you have to get Barack Obama. You have to get everybody that you can in there, just because their availability speaks more to his significance to a new, you know, a younger viewer, I think, than anything that you could say that Billy Packer could say, or even Michael Jordan could say about himself. Yeah. And it brings up this bigger idea I wanted to ask you about two before we get out of here on this topic.

This whole idea of the authorized biography style of sports documentary. Essentially when you make a sports documentary these days, you need footage, right? So in a way, you were kind of saying, hey, I'm going to have to get the sign off of the NBA or the sign off of whatever league it is because I can't do a sports documentary without showing the people playing sports. In this case, there was all this archival footage that was sitting in a vault and it was only going to be released with Michael Jordan's express permission. Yes.

So if I'm writing a book about Michael Jordan, I can just go write that. I don't need Michael Jordan's help. It'd be nice, but I don't need Michael Jordan's help. When you make a documentary, it almost has to be an authorized biography, unless you're just going totally off road, right? So what's interesting is I thought a lot of the pieces that talked about how the filmmakers got Michael Jordan glossed over that fact a little bit. They got Michael Jordan and part of getting Michael Jordan was making Michael Jordan's business associates, the executive, two of the executive producers of this project.

Right. You are getting, you are not going to get Michael Jordan like Wright Thompson got him for an ESPN magazine piece a couple of years ago. You are going into business of a sort with Michael Jordan to make this documentary. That's not a bad thing necessarily. Authorized biographies can be really revealing. And this one already is, I think. but I think as this thing kind of unfolds, it's worth thinking about the picture that's being painted and how it comes out of that transaction as much as anything else. Yeah, a couple of things.

I mean, sometimes those, I mean, just for the record, sometimes those producer, executive producer, whatever credits are a little bit ceremonial and more about like the amount of money that the person gets on the back end than about what their actual involvement is in the production. Though I will say Jordan Associate Curtis Falk,

who's one of those executive producers, producers told, or excuse me, Curtis Polk, told Richard Deich that they were essentially giving notes and back and forth on early cuts of the episodes. So I think it's fair to say that Team Jordan had influence on what we were seeing on the screen. And Sam Smith, I think it was on SportsCenter after the second episode, said, speaking in joyous terms, rapturous terms about, you know, the existence of this documentary, said, this is the first time that Michael Jordan has gotten to tell the story his way that other people have written these books he had hauber sam had but this is the first time jordan's gotten to do it his way which is i think about all you need to know i mean to

in that regard um i think you're right i think that it's not necessarily a bad thing it's no it's not it's not necessarily you know some the wrong way to do things certainly there can we're going to get we're going to we get we get jordan on camera for hours you know and we wouldn't have had that uh otherwise And a good documentarian, and again, you know, all qualifications aside, Jason Hare is a great documentarian, and he, and there'll be a good documentarian can, can get someone to say something that they wouldn't have otherwise said, but that maybe they can get someone to say something, they don't even realize how revealing their being or how surprising they're being or how, you know, what I mean, just because Jordan gets a sign off doesn't mean that he's going to necessarily mute all

of the interesting things that the documentary could have to say. I do think, and this has nothing to do with any conversation about with Jason, Hare, the director, or at all. I shouldn't want to make that really clear. I do think there's a degree to which we, I mean, you and I and people listening to this show should be very cognizant of, you know, the kind of third rail of journalism that's always going to be very, very touchy, you know, when you're dealing with a situation like this.

And I think it's important maybe even more so because of what I'm about to say, which as which is, I don't think, I mean, for the most part, most of this generation are 30 for 30 generation of documentarians didn't go to J school, you know, I mean, they're not, they're not journalists in the, in the traditional sense that we think about them. And certainly the audience does not expect some sort of median level of journalistic integrity, you know, maybe if you want to complain about something, maybe that's the first thing you would fall back on to complain on. I mean, the first ground you would complain on. But, you know, people don't watch the tiger King on Netflix and expect that it's going to be the same thing that like a New York Times

piece about him would give us, right? So I think we should hone in on it a lot. But I also don't think we should confuse that with like that being kind of the point of this, even this ESPN. I mean, who like, do we expect some sort of like integrity out of the way that they're going to present it? I mean, you know, they put a lot of stuff on that network. You know, it's, it's, it's an interesting question anyway. Yeah. And I don't want to, I don't want to reduce a really interesting documentary to a sleepy journalism ethics summit, which I hope I never do. I just think there's a couple things here. One is that sports journalism, sports content, full stop has been in a way taken over by the participants themselves, right? The Players Tribune. So many kind of

branded participatory profiles you see in other places, right? Where it's like clearly like it's a, it's the player's company has kind of offered him up to the journalist. in order to advertise the company or whatever it is, right? We just, there is so much of that going on right now. So I think we often, we often just get so ever present that we just forget, right, that that's not a traditional journalistic encounter. And that's fine. I'll really to remember.

I think it's more interesting here is when you see certain things happening. Like there was a moment last night where Scotty Pippen, who we mentioned is wildly underpaid. He chose to have ankle surgery, not during the summer when he could recover and come back to the Bulls, but he chose to do it at the beginning. of the season because he was pissed off at the bulls for not paying him enough money. Now, it's interesting. He says that in the documentary. And Michael Jordan comes back to Michael Jordan.

And it says, Michael says, I think that was selfish of Scotty to do that. Michael was being paid $33 million this season. Scotty Pippen was being paid $2.5 million. Okay. And he says, that was selfish of him to do that. And when I hear that, I want to go, now I want to ask Scottie Pippen, what do you think? What's your complicated response to that? You get to play with Michael Jordan.

You know who Michael Jordan is, right? You know that Michael Jordan just wants to win a sixth title. But what does it say to you that there's not 5% of Michael Jordan's, Michael Jordan that can come back and say, I understand that my guy here is incredibly underpaid and that maybe he has a right to do that, even if it's a temporary inconvenience to me? Because I'm getting paid tons of money by Nike and everybody else, right? I'm making so much more than Sky.

Scottie Pippin. So I just want to, and again, this could unfurl into the next eight episodes. I don't know, but it's almost like, I don't just want to hear the Jordan-centric view of the world there. I want to hear what Scottie Pippen thinks about that. And I want to hear what people think about Michael Jordan, you know. And again, 20% in, maybe it unfurls, but that's just something, again, a way of thinking about this documentary when we see what's on the screen, trying to connect it back to how it was made. I totally agree. Totally agree. I think that, That's an interesting case. I could talk about the ends and outs of it.

I feel like for 20 more minutes. But let's roll on. I agree. Let's keep an eye out for the Jordan-centricness of the whole thing because I want as much Jordan on my screen as humanly possible, but you're right. I don't need his opinion on everything, especially when his opinion just seems sort of obvious.

David, let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod. David, in the last dance, there was a shot of Bob Costas, circa 1980. I have stuck that in our Google Doc if you'd like to take a gander. He was working for WGN in Chicago,

and his hair had that very late 70s, early 80s, rounded kind of look. People had some gentle fun with that as they do whenever they see picks of celebrities in another era. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write how Bob Costas was still able to build a sports casting career in between all his job. Jedi training on Dagaba will always

amazing. Also, from the Michael Jordan Content Paloza, David, what would all this be without new shoes coming out? Nike's surprised America by dropping the Jordan 5 Fire Red last night. I believe it was actually during the opening credits of the documentary. A range of

responses. There was the pissed off response. I was dead ass in the shower when it dropped. there were the sort of usual assortment of goat tweets Jordan's been retired for nearly two decades and his shoes still sell out in minutes when they drop. That's legacy. And finally, the tweets that grappled with a shoe drop during a pandemic.

I heard y'all used all y'all stimulus money. Thanks to Erica for that one. And finally, David, I'm pleased to report that we're still doing Bono jokes. Here is a headline. Bono helps Ireland search for coronavirus medical, applies. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Is this wise? He doesn't have a great record of finding what he's looking for. Thanks to Bill Shikin. If you haven't given up the Bono bit,

thank you for your service. And congrats. You've made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. David and I are going to talk about the fall of the indie bookstore. But before that, a quick break from the ringer. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Jamel Hill. And I'm Van Late. We're proud to introduce our new podcast, The Wire, Way down in the Hove. We're going to recap, breakdown, and analyze every episode of the iconic HBO hit series, The Wire, starting from the beginning with season one. First episodes hit you on April 15th. Every podcast episode will include recap, signature moments, foreshadowing, key character deep dives,

little-known facts, and also awards, such as we love this show, but the Stringer Bell Fuckboy Award, my personal favorite, who won the episode and more. So subscribe to The Wire, Way Down in a Hole, on Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you in West Baltimore on April 15th. All right, David, in the notebook dump. I want to recommend that everybody go read

Alex Shepard's piece that ran last week in the New Republic. It's a piece about people and things that are ravaged by the coronavirus you may not have thought of. The piece is called, is this the end of the indie bookstore? And on the Zoom call right now,

I can see your heartbreaking in real time. at this idea that these places that you and I spend way too much time and money in. Yeah. Treasure as unique snowflakes in the world of commerce and books could be hit by this. But guess what? It's happening. And like all the cuts we've seen with media, it's probably only going to get worse. Here's something from this piece that I guess maybe I knew, but I'd forgotten.

Maybe I didn't know it all. the indie bookstores had this big renaissance over the last 10 years. Oh, yeah. And it all starts with Barnes & Noble and Borders essentially wiping out a generation of bookstores back in the 90s. Then you had the Great Recession in 2008 and Amazon, which take a huge bite out of borders and Barnes & Noble. So all these Indies kind of rise up to fill the void. Barnes & Noble bought a bunch of borders, or bought all the border stores, closed down most of them, and then proceeded to close down some Barnes and Nobles too.

So there actually is geographically. geographically there was an opening. Shepard notes that there was a 49% growth in the number of bookstores between 2009 and 2019, which is incredible. And I think what I love about these Andy bookstores, and I'm sure you feel the same way,

is that they were filled with books that have been chosen by actual humans rather than the computer sales algorithm that so many of those big stores seem to be filled by. Yeah. I mean, I remember having the instinct first. I mean, because we, I grew up around, I grew up with actually an incredibly good indie bookstore, which actually, it was a chain I believe is gone now called Holly Coke Bookstores.

And it was in Louisville, Kentucky where I grew up. And so that was, you know, but that was before Barnes & Noble. It was before borders and kind of had a low, had, you know, they were big stores. They felt almost, you know, when the borders and Barnes & Noble's rolled in, they felt a little bit familiar. And then I worked obviously, obviously to you had Politics and Pros bookstore in D.C. but I remember having this conversation these are conversations when it comes to indie bookstore I mean a used bookstore is more so than indie bookstores

but the idea of like you know we love we we love the strand in New York City right it's like the biggest one of the biggest used bookstores in the world and you could just shop in there for days without you know ever retracing and we did but there's something just incredibly gratifying about finding that perfect used bookstore that either has your exact sensibility

or just an identifiable sensibility that you respect. And the idea that like instead of spending three days in the fiction section, you can spend 30 minutes reading every spine in the fiction section and feel like you've gone,

that you've swallowed the whole thing and you still, and you come away with actually more books in your hand because you've got to engage with everything there and it's all so well curated. And that's what a great indie bookstore can do that obviously a big, big box store could never do, right?

I mean, the feeling that you could just, man, 20 minutes to kill before I meet somebody and I'm at, you know, McNally Jackson or whatever. I'm just going to go to a random shelf. Like literally, like, I don't care what the subject is. I don't care what part of the alphabet we're in. I'm just going to like gaze at this shelf from top to bottom for 20 minutes and I'm going to feel, you know, like I've accomplished something by the end of it. And here's the companion point to that. Books may be the last unaggregatable part of American culture, right? you're not going to stumble onto a movie or a TV show in the same way that you can still stumble onto a book.

I remember going, I was up there. In fact, I saw you, we were doing some debate podcasts up in New York and I went to Books or Magic there on Smith Street in Brooklyn. Sure, great story. And they had this Jay Hoberman book on movie culture in the age of Reagan. And I was like, this book is for, and it was put out on the front table. Imagine that by a human. And I was like, wow, this is like, exactly. a book I want that I didn't know existed by an author I love that I didn't know had happened.

That doesn't happen in any other part of culture to my knowledge at this point in history. No, you would not be surprised by in the same way of a blog post or a TV show, like you said, anything like that. Yeah, I mean, and it's the feeling that when you walk in and you, when you see the front table speaks to you, even again, like I said, if it's not exactly your sensibility, it speaks to you as like, like someone you know. It makes you feel like you're part of, you know, you're part of a common culture.

And it seems almost like silly or cliche to say at this point. But in a way that like everybody commenting, everyone making the same Twitter joke does not make you feel as much a part of a common culture as feeling like, you know, oh, this is the book that my friends are talking about. Maybe I should read it. Or maybe this is

a book that I want to talk to somebody about. And I have a feeling that like, because this bookstore is a representation of representative of our, you know, mental headspace that like if I read it, then someone else will too. As you can imagine, these places are being hit really hard during coronavirus. Layoffs at the Strand and McNally Jackson, two of our old haunts in New York, layoffs at Powell's in Portland, which is a truly amazing store. And what these booksellers are trying to do, Shepard points out, is kind of maintain

that level of actual human interaction during this time when we cannot really interact. act with other humans particularly easily. Our old pal Tom Robers, who was at 100 Brian and David parties back in the day, now owns riffraff, a bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island. He says, I don't want to make it out like I'm doing some community service, but people being able to email a business and talk to somebody, even if it's just email and interact when they're otherwise just shut up in their apartments, that is valuable. Novelist Ann Patchett, who runs Parnassas books in Nashville.

I had this quote, she said she wrote a. a piece for for airmail and she said when a friend of mine stuck in his tiny New York apartment told me he dreamed of being able to read the new Louise Urge Ridge book, I made that dream come true. I can solve nothing during this pandemic. I can save no one, but damn it, I can mail Patrick a copy of the night watchman. That is the touch of a small independent bookstore. It's true. And that I think it shows you exactly why they're all suffering so badly right now is what they can contribute is not a thing that you can, as valuable as all that stuff is. It's not an easy, you know, A to A-to-A conversion in this new economic climate, right? I mean, I know we said McNally

Jackson a couple of times. I knew Sarah McNally back in the day. We were great friends. I haven't talked to her in a while. Certainly not since this stuff happened. But I know that she had to lay, lay off all of her staff, you know, at the beginning of, I mean, this coronavirus thing. And did it in conjunction, you know, after conversation with your union and from the workers union and from what I gather, she's keeping them all on, on, keeping their medical insurance all active and plans to rehire them all the moment that she can, but sort of, I think, allowing them, but cutting them, you know, laying them off allows them to collect unemployment and then, you know, she'll keep their insurance and, and there's a lot of small businesses that are sort of finding that, by, you know,

for whatever, that that's the best way forward. Yeah. And we should, you know, make, and this is obviously, like, you know, we can talk about, we can talk about. We can talk about. tax relief. We can talk about how Republicans have redefined the term small business over, you know, for, for three days. But, you know, this is an actual small business. You know, I mean, this is a small business in the sense that these, these are the kind of companies that are really going to suffer right now and are generally exempt from our, from our coronavirus wall of shame. This is not Shake Shack that got like a small business loan. They got a $10 million loan and they had to return the whole thing because they didn't need it. But the, but, um,

But yeah, I mean, the best, I mean, everybody knows an independent bookstore. Everybody, like, I mean, I would assume everybody listening to this doesn't have any question about what we're talking about. But I always think about coffee shops. I mean, they're often connected to the stores. But, like, you always want marvel at how coffee shops stay at business, right? And it's like the best coffee shops are the one. And some coffee shops, you see that the way they stay in business is because they put a little placard by the front register that says, like, you know, no laptops between so-and-so hours or no laptops. the weekends because that's the key to like how to go out of business the best the best coffee

shops the ones where it's just like there are laptops open there's no rules about laptops and yet somehow it just the flow is constant the like the the vibe is awake uh people are you know people are are always in and out and ordering and there's no need to to you know put anybody on alert because everything seems to be working okay you know um even even with the laptops going and that's sort of like how the great used bookstore is it's like it's a marvel that it ever worked right it's a Marvel that I mean and that you could that you would go in and actually just like an employee would be there to help you, you know, and you could like have a conversation with a human being. Yeah. And by the way, you hear in a lot of, you've seen a lot of these stories something that I experience over and over again full of the first hand working at indie bookstores is that half of your time if you're working the floor is spent talking to people have no intention of buying a book either. Right. I mean, it's the sort of people that just like that inhabit the bookstore, you know, or they just are wandering by or. or want to see what's out. But yeah, I mean, it's a wonder that it's a wonder that they ever worked.

And it's a, they always provide an incredible service service or a society, even if they, you're not in the book buying market. And, you know, in some ways, they were always going to be more precarious than everything else. It was only the massive success of entrepreneurs like Sarah McNally, who made it seem so feasible to everybody else. But it's also part of this sort of like, the shabby-shek economy sort of,

that we all want this like old-fashioned sort of retro thing. We're driving, riding around with bicycles with giant front wheels and we're going to bookstores, you know? And it's a miracle that it worked as well as it did. And I can only hope that it will continue. I actually think that in whatever economy results out of this, that in so much as we're, like, leaving our houses to shop at all, there'll be more room for places like that. I just hope that there's more of a safety net in place, either from our government or from local economies that'll make them make it a less precarious enterprise. One quick additional note of media hell before we get out of here. this is the sports writer edition.

Last Friday, SB Nation furloughed 20 employees, one-fifth of the site's full-time staff for three months, right? Three months, that's 25% of your pay in 2020, gone. Box Media also cut 40 additional non-editorial employees. Furloughs begin May 1. I bring this up because I think we're now hitting another stage of the sports writer period of awfulness, right? We had hit this one stage where you began to see people at fan graphs, you began to see people at local newspapers suffering furloughs at Gannett and other chains like that.

Now you're hitting the kind of super famous tier of sports writers like Spencer Hall, who was one of these people who got caught up in this over at Banner Society. And I don't, and I don't, I don't mean to put him on a pedestal that's that his situation is any more important or worse or whatever than anybody else is because I don't, I don't believe that. I just think this is where this is going next, right? It's going to be people that are really big that you're like, how did that person get furloughed? All right, David, let's do the, let's do David Schumacher Guesses Strainpon headline. Tuesday's headline about stay-at-home scofflaws in Australia was we'll fight them on the breaches.

Today's headline comes from our great friend and spiritual advisor Michael Solomon from the New York Post. David, a Las Vegas-based gentleman's club called Little Darling's tried to remain open in the early days of the pandemic. I'll spare you the details as of how, but that experiment is now over for obvious reasons. Little darlings put up a punny sign to announce they're no longer open. And that sign was borrowed by the New York Post for a headline.

What was the New York Post strained pun headline? Ooh. Okay. Sorry. We're... We're... It's not closed, I hope. We're...

Cloth. Cloth. Cloth. This is a gentleman's club. Sorry, we're... Clothed for business? Sorry, we're clothed. Sorry, we're clothed.

That's fantastic. We're back Thursday, folks. We're going to talk about the NFL draft as a content machine sequel to the Jordan Dock. Plus answer your listener mail. Send it now. And of course, we'll have more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.