The Press Box - The Last Days of Donald Trump's Presidency. Plus, Author Rich Cohen.

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the last days of the Trump administration. They address the National Garden of American Heroes, the MyPillow guy’s support, and Trump's ranking as a U.S. president (2:45). Then later, Rich Cohen joins to discuss his new book, ‘Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent' (22:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Rich Cohen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, Donald Trump wants to create a national garden of American heroes on his way out of the White House. And one of those heroes is going to be former president Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland. What I want to know is, should we read anything about Donald Trump's future political plans into the inclusion of Grover Cleveland? Oh, God. Because he ran for office, he, like, lost him. ran again? Is that where we're going with this? I guess.

I mean, do we think Donald Trump really loved Grover Cleveland on any other terms other than as a possible model for a political comeback? Remember when he was talking to the Georgia Secretary of State or whatever, and he just complimented that dude's name? That propos of basically nothing? Do you think he just like... Yeah, the guy's name was Germany? Yeah, do you think just Grover Cleveland is on his list of cool names and that was it?

By the way, Grover Cleveland's real first name. name was apparently Stephen, and he elected to go by Grover, I guess Stephen Cleveland would have been a whole different thing. But yeah, maybe Trump just like that. Can we just go ahead and say how much you've lowered your goals as an American president when you say, I want to be the next Grover Cleveland? Not the next Washington, not the next Lincoln, not even the next U.S. Grant. I want to be the next Grover Cleveland. Also, we know Donald Trump is a baseball fan. Are we totally sure Donald Trump did not confuse the former president with Grover Cleveland Alexander, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. I hope you exit this segment by saying this is the Chester

Arthur of political podcast. Coming up on the Chester A. Arthur of Media Podcasts, we talk about these strange final days of Donald Trump's term in office. We have Rich Cohen, long-time magazine writer who has a new book out about being a hockey dad, all that and more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. Happy Martin Luther King Day. And thanks to everyone who listened to our Thursday podcast with John Crackhour,

who stopped by to talk about his book, Into the Wild. We've got a lot of great notes on that. We have more cool special press box episodes coming, David. In fact, the next one is on the schedule for the first week of February, and we will announce that soon. Hint, it's not about a book. Well, let us begin. Yeah, intriguing.

But let's begin, David, with a fact that kind of took me a back this morning. This is the last podcast we're going to record during the Donald Trump administration. We hope. At least the first Donald Trump administration. Donald Trump is no longer going to live rent-free inside this media podcast. We're moving on. We'll never mention his name again. Just kidding.

We'll be talking about him every time. I want to go over some scenes from the strange final days of the Trump administration, David. Okay. Nothing stranger than the executive order that has come down this morning. On building the National Garden of American Heroes, Donald Trump wants to make a monument. I have so much to say about this before we even mention any of the names on it. First of all, I think off the top, it's important to say,

it's important to acknowledge when people grow and evolve and learn. And it's impressive. We should acknowledge that it's impressive that after four years in office, the Trump administration has learned how to keep a secret for longer than 15 minutes. Now, maybe this list came together with the last 15 minutes, but I saw, I heard lots of reports of huddles in the Oval Office, of angry Trump considering pardons and whatnot. No one mentioned the hero guard.

or whatever the hell this thing is, the National Guard of American Heroes, and now it is a reality or it is an executive order. So kudos. We were so focused on self-pardon that we didn't realize that Donald Trump had one more trick up his sleeve. I got to say, I've always wanted a national monument in this country where I could introduce my kids simultaneously to Sojourner Truth,

Alex Trebek, and Sy Young. Was Alex, I know why are we starting here, but was Alex, do you think, what do you think? Not American, right? Was the way into Alex Trebek that somebody said, we need to get some people who became American, like immigrants who later gained citizenship to round out the number? Or do you think he was mentioned as, would you think his first mention was under the assumption that he was an American? I don't know if Donald Trump ever really considered either.

of those two ideas. I think he's like, yeah, he's a big star on television. He just died. I'm in. I read Claire Meenier's book and I'm in. I'm convinced. That's what Trump thought. It's a good enough reason. I'm a little confused at some of the names on this list like Jonathan Edwards. Is this the sinners in the hands of an angry God?

Not John. This is not Donald Trump's personal attempt at reconciliation bringing the party together by putting disgraced Democratic candidate John Edwards onto the end of the garden. Nor is this the soothsayer. What is it? Medium. John Edward. This is, I believe, the old-time theologian, Jonathan Edwards, the revivalist of note.

I haven't thought about him since you and I were in sophomore English in high school. I studied religion a lot. But Jonathan Edwards is still, even in those confines almost a footnote. He's a big name that I don't feel like people spend much time on. Maybe I just had a really specific education. Were you surprised to see Laura Ingalls Wilder on the list? Never surprised to see Laura Ingalls Wilder on any best lists. She deserves everything she gets.

Yeah, my kids will be excited. Anybody else stand out to you, David? Elia Kazan, Steve Jobs. It really feels like when you go to the kid section of the bookstore, you know, and they have that series called Who Was? Yes. About celebrities. And it's like everyone from Jesus to Derek Jeter.

it feels like somebody in the Trump administration went to Kramer books and just went to that section like, okay, here's a great list. I'm just going to copy all these names down and everyone's going to get a statue. Yeah, yeah. And when your kid's just like, I want to read about Catherine Dressor Drexel and you're just like, I'm sorry, I don't know who that is either. So yes, let's do it. Let's get that for the library.

I just, I know we're just making fun of this, but I'm so excited that there is a monument that includes both Sam Houston and Whitney Houston. that is not a joke I think the Winnie Houston documentary really like kind of brought her back into the hero's list

fully ensconced her there I mean I know this she's a hero she's always been a hero in this household but that did a lot to burn her her reputation um

uh yeah there's a lot of there are a lot of names on here that bear mentioned I will say in a general sense I have long been a fan of just like inane products of

national grandiosity. I mean, given the amount of money that, you know, we've spent going to the moon, which is, okay, I'm sure there's some scientific upside to this, but like, you know, we all know the history of the space race. I mean, a lot of this was just basically just a metaphorical monument we built. We spent trillions of dollars on sending people out in the outer space. I think it would be super, I've always thought it would just be a great idea. If you're going to spend $100 billion on something meaningless, just to build like a freaking

golden pyramid in the middle of the the Yellowstone National Park or something. I mean like just do something that all the like second and third world countries would be just like oh I want that like tourists will come to this thing. It's freaking awesome. My only note is looking at these names shouldn't this be a wax museum? Then they're kind of a wax museum quality. Someone referred to this as Madame Tussauds. Like outdoor Madame Tussosos. Yes, it is. It's it's crazy.

I mean it's I'm excited to actually see the statues. Like someone is going to get the, you know, the contract that produced all of these statues. And I just can't wait to see what they look like. Do you think they'll look as much like the real person as those NFL pro football Hall of Fame statues do? You know, it kind of vaguely resembles the person.

You have to look at the, at the little name tag to actually figure out who you're looking at. I'm just amazed. Should we, we cannot possibly go through all these names. But since this is some, to some extent, immediately. podcast. Who do you think is going to be the first outlet who ranks all of these people in order of deserve, deserving. I thought Riley McAtee was already on that. The Power Rangers Garden of American Academy. Riley could pull it off, right? Riley, maybe one of the few. Oh my God. I totally

trusted with that with that task. David weirdly, this was not perhaps the strangest act of the Trump administration in its final days. Mike Lindell, aka My Pillow guy. dropped by the other day. Did you see those high-res close-up photos of the notes that he was carrying into the West Wing? It was really funny because there was a name written on it. Frank Cologne

was written on the notes and it suggested that Cologne could be acting National Security Advisor. Well, our friend Ben Jacobs called a civilian military attorney named Frank Cologne who is apparently the person referred to in the notes, quote, who expressed confusion at

apparent plans for him to be involved in a coup. seemed befuddled why he would be floated to the president in any senior role and said that he never met Lendell, although I've seen him on TV. So even the person in the notes was not aware that he was part of whatever thing Mike Lindell was cooking up in the West Wing. Also, and I know this will hit you right where it counts, right after Donald Trump was impeached last week, he gave the National Medal of Arts to country music superstars Toby Keith and Ricky Skaggs.

You think he's familiar? I guess he must have known who Toby Keith was. Yes. Could he name a Toby Keith song? Does he know honky tonk badonka don't. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think Donald Trump would ever be caught singing. I'm not as good as I once was. But, you know, there might be some relevance there.

Excuse me, by the way, Mr. Southerner. it's I ain't as good as I once was. All right. I'm always editing. Yes, you're right. Ricky's gag is legend and an icon. Toby Keith, you know, Toby Keith has some pretty good songs. Yeah, there was a tweet from journalist Helen Kennedy said, can we impeach Trump for a third time for giving the National Medal of Arts to Toby Keith?

She brings up a good point. She really does. I also thought, I ain't as good as I once was. Isn't that kind of the rebuke to the press box idea? have the old guy still got it? No, because the second half of the line is, but just once I'm as good as I ever was. That's the whole point.

Oh, I got you. So you got one more movie, one more book left in you. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, I got it. By the way, in other news, Garth Brooks is going to perform at the Biden inauguration. Yeah.

He says this is not a political statement. This is a statement of unity. So we are solving or decoding American life right now through the behaviors of its country music superstars. there's something like if it's a real statement of unity is he going to is he's going to have chris gains join him on stage and reunite i'm not quite sure how this works together again republicans and democrats working together uh david there's a question of whether trump would carry out the traditions that american presidents typically do when they leave office we know he's not attending the inauguration we know he didn't go thank the troops as presidents usually do he left that to mike pence there has been a question however about the note, a handwritten note that presidents usually leave on the desk of the Oval Office. You're shaking your head like there's zero chance that Donald Trump's going to leave a note. Well, there's so many reasons why.

One, if he did do the note, left up to his own devices, if he thought it was an important thing to do, you know that the note would end up being an autographed newspaper clipping of himself and that would be it, right? I mean, that's what we know about Donald Trump. But the fact that we're having the conversation at all is all I need to know that he's not going to do it because it's either done. It's either there is a, there are several staff members who are taking care of this and, you know, along with the president. And it doesn't even bear discussion. Or it's just not going to happen.

And this isn't a knock on Donald Trump. Every single job I've left, I've planned on writing a long memo to my, to my successor, right? I have a list of, a mental list of things that I'm going to take. care of on that at some point in the last week or the last month. And then it's the last day. And then you're like, you know what? I'm just going to kick off at 11 o'clock today and go start drinking. It goes through to boozy lunch, you know, and then you never get the letter done. It's just not going to happen. I like how you're sympathizing with Trump there. I did not know that this was started by Reagan, January 1989, when he's handing the presidency to his vice president, George H.W.

Bush. And he picked up, and that every parent in the audience will perk up at this, he picked up a notepad, the AP says, emblazoned with a cartoon by humorous Sandra Boynton that said, don't let the turkeys get you down. And that's what he scribbled the note. Talk about a last minute. Like, I don't even have the, I don't even have some stationary here. I'm going to pick up a Sandra Boynton notepad. Very, very funny.

And of course, I had no idea. By the way, if you want the ultimate Twitter content for like people that are like, why can't we all just get along? it's the note George H.W. Bush left for Bill Clinton. Every couple months, people rediscover it and put it on Twitter. It's like, now, this is what class looked like. Oh, yeah. This is what a real American president did.

Trust me, for our entire lives, we will be rereading that note from H.W. Bush. A couple of final questions, David, about Donald Trump's final days. There are sort of media adjacent. are you grimly fascinated by the people working for Donald Trump who are trying to spin Donald Trump's accomplishments on the way out the door? Yeah, just like with everything else of the Trump administration, there is no subtext, right? It's like you read an article that says that they're going to try spinning stuff on the way out the door, and then the next thing you know, Mike Pompeo is tweeting, here is a list of our

accomplishments. You know, I mean, it's like there's no, it's all. it's so surface it's almost galling but you know i guess shouldn't shock anyone george w bush's administration did this and by the way we were reminded this week that george w actually had lower approval ratings than donald trump does in many polls when he left office imagine that for a second but i remember on their final days in office there they were going and sort of cherry picking things from his two terms that were not the things he emphasized they were like, you know, we did a ton for AIDS research in Africa.

That was a big thing they picked and we're like, wait, I just, I never heard George W. Bush talk about this. Like the things we heard of talk about were like the Iraq War and things like that. That stuff was off the table, but they were looking for things that would play well in the future. Yeah. And even if you go to like the Nixon library here in California now, it's all this stuff about the environment, you know, it's like what? Nixon's environmental legacy, you can go through almost any administration. I'm not sure Trump's, but only, almost any administration and find a few things, no matter where they were on the list during the actual administration. It's really, really interesting. The other thing I'm

fascinated by David, Trump's historical ranking among presidents. Now, we know it's going to be really, really low, but is it last? Is he the worst president of all time? Or is he like third worst or fourth worst? I'm interested in that. fact. I really am. I find it hard to imagine. If I have to entertain this question, I find it hard to imagine that in our or our children's lifetime, he would be anywhere but last, because I think that the general tenor of the conversation will be if we have to, is that entertaining the discussion of comparison is, does it just justice to anyone he would be compared to? Like, he's sort of just going to be off on his own column rather than actually being.

ranked. But I mean, he's sort of the guy that blows up the list, right? I mean, because he, because you can really, I mean, if you could make any case form at all, it sort of, yeah, it just sort of throws the whole. And you can. I mean, you can all the, all the, whatever, you know, the things Pompeo is saying. I mean, like, obviously, I think he's terrible. But, like, there are, like, ancillary things that, like, obviously Republicans are very excited about that conservatives on the court and everything else, you know? And yeah, I just think it blows up the whole process. I mean, I don't even know if it matters, but you would think that this would be a tougher process than like vulture ranking the best Western movies of all time. But this actually

happens. Sienna College, which we know from its basketball team that plays in the NCAA tournament and its polls during presidential elections, actually surveys historians every couple years and does a presidential power ranking. The last one that came out in 2018 had Trump third from the last. He's behind. or ahead of Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. So it was Andrew Johnson worst, James Buchanan second to worst,

and then Donald Trump. To the extent that this matters at all, I'm also fascinated, David, was Donald Trump dead last on January 5th the day before the storming of the Capitol? Or did the storming of the Capitol in his second impeachment materially lower Donald Trump's

the way historians will think of Donald Trump's, the way historians will think of Donald. Well, I mean, I don't know what, I don't know what, uh, I can't predict the future. And I, and I don't, I mean, I would have given you a different answer a week ago than I, then I could, then I would give you now after seeing, such an incredible chunk of the Republican establishment, try to hand wave all that away. But I do think that like for anyone who is, definitely for anyone who is not a fan of Trump's, I think that. of formally removed him from the, from the column of like, we're going to laugh about it, but if you want to say something in his favor, that's fine, you know,

and just, you know, moved it to the no laughing matter column. But yeah, I should think that that, that, I don't know if that moved him to one or ensconced him there,

but, you know, one or the other. By the way, the fourth worst president in American history, Warren Harding, fifth worst, Franklin Pierce.

And if you can tell me one fact about Franklin Pierce on this podcast, I will give you $1,000, David. One fact. Anything? No, it's over. I keep my money. 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. Do you watch that Chiefs Browns game yesterday, David?

Oh, yeah. You know that after the Chiefs quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, suffered a concussion. He was replaced by Chad Henney, who guided the Chiefs to victory. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, Henny Given Sunday. We would have also accepted from our friend Jason Gay, Henny's from Heaven. Thanks to Greg Connors, Joseph B.N. Khan, Scott McAfee, Jeff Van Cleave, and Jay Indiwala.

Did you hear the horrible story about the manatee? in Florida who had the word Trump etched into its skin? No, that's terrible. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write Florida man, a T. Thanks to M.D.F. Doyle for that one. And finally, David, page six reports that, quote,

Bruce Willis was asked to leave a Los Angeles right aid on Monday after he refused to wear a mask. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, die hard with a ventilator. Thanks to Lindsay Thornton and Dutgeonmaster. If you reminded us that a Bruce Willis diehard sequel

is probably definitely happening. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, a month ago, a listener asked you and I what we were reading, and you mentioned you were reading a Rich Cohen book. Which book was that? It was the last pirate of New York.

I'm going to pull it up this subtitle now so everyone can hear it. A ghost ship, a killer, and the birth of gangster nation. There we go. There we go. Well, I have a treat because Rich Cohen is on this podcast. He's got a new book.

It's not about a pirate. It's about something even more sinister. It's about being a hockey dad because Rich Cohen has found himself in Connecticut as the father of a pee-wee hockey player. And that story is in his new book, Pee-wees. We talked about that, about his career in magazines, about the times he got to talk to Joseph Mitchell in the office of the New Yorker. Here's Rich Cohen. All right, so your son, Micah, was an 11-year-old left wing when you wrote this book. Do you start by sitting Micah down

and saying, son, is it okay if I write a book about one of your youth hockey seasons? No. I mean, I told him all along that I was doing it. It was no secret or anything. He knew that I was, I come from a family of, it's like the blues song, don't start me talking. I'll tell you everything I know. So I just think that it's fair game in this family full of writers and storytellers that if it happens, it's getting told. As they say in magazines, you had the participation of the subject. Yeah. Now, you have parents of Micah's teammates who are characters in this book. You have as coaches. Did you tell them you were writing a book? No, but I didn't, but I didn't keep it secret either. I was just something that I was doing. Maybe I told them as I was

writing it and maybe I didn't. I mean, it was just, I didn't really, you know, it's like to me, divided into parts. The part is the living it, the writing it, the publishing it. There's three discrete parts of your life. Yeah. It's funny because I've had a little experience with youth sports parents and I find they are very eager for you to write about their children because they think their kids are superstars, but then they're extremely interested in what exactly you are going to write about their children. Excuse me. Was that your experience? Yeah, well, a weird thing because I wrote a book about my friend's growing up called Lake Effect, one of my early books. And I was very careful about like this book with disguising everybody's identity, changing everybody's name.

And I was worried what they would think. And they wound up getting angry at me for not using their real names. And the people that weren't in the book at all got really pissed off of me. Because the fact is, whatever else you think, this is kind of an interesting thing. And that this book will be around. So it becomes kind of like a photo album. You know, it's sort of like as hockey parents, as sports parents, not that much of note happens. This book is something a note if you're involved with this team. So as a Texan, I'm familiar with the archetypal football dad. What are the qualities of a hockey dad?

When you walk into a rink, you can see the teammates' parents because they stand in a circle all facing in. I call it the holy hockey circle. And as an outsider, you try to pierce that circle and it's very, very stressful. And what team your kids make? Because our program, a lot of them have four programs, you know, from top to bottom. And they're numbered with very obvious numbers, AA, A1, and the dreaded B. you know so whatever team your kid makes determines the status of your place in the whole hierarchy and your place in the life of the team so you wind up rooting for your parents for your kids because

you wanted to do well because you're attached to it and because you want to have a good season among the top parents sort of kidding but it is true too you feel like you could fall like your status can drop and i remember coming across a parent once and they were like weeping and i said what's what happened he goes he didn't make the top team and now uh the Those are all my friends and they're not going to, I'm not going to get to hang out with them anymore. Who am I going to sit with during the games? What am I going to do? And that's the way it's expressed.

Like I'm going to, you're going to talk to me when I'm sitting in the stands during game. I'm going to have access to the cool parents. Right. But it's interesting because watching your kids play hockey, I played hockey because it was a perfect sport because of the plexiglass. It keeps the parents out of the tank. You know, it's not like football. The parents can't run out on the field. They're in their own terrarium and we're safe from them as hockey players.

But as a parent, I watched all the. different strategies that the parents have for dealing with their stress of the game and the stress of their kids. And there's, you know, the group that heckle. And then there's the group that need to be alone because they're going to be swearing and cursing the whole time and don't want anybody to hurt, you know, hear them. I'm of the group that sort of I move from place to place as if I see it from a slightly different location, it will look better to me. So when a game is bad, I'll move to a different part of the rank. It's like changing seats at a blackjack table. There's a scene in the book where another dad thinks you look so stressed out that he gives you a

marijuana edible. Yeah, well, that was the beginning of the book because that's the way, and you need to know before you get too caught up that this guy's high a lot of the time, which is he said, you look like you're going to pass out. He had this medicinal marijuana. He gave me this edible. I don't know if I took too much, but I swear to gosh, I was high for like three days. And I'd go to sleep high and I'd wake up high. And I was scared that this was never going to end. That I became convinced that this wasn't an accident. This was not, this guy wasn't helping me. He was giving me kind of a chemical lobotomy so I wouldn't coach my kids. kid to be the best and make that top team. That's how nuts I got about it. But I knew because

three days after I took it, I think I was okay. I'd be eating McDonald's French fries. And I think these are the most delicious things I've had in my whole life. And I was like, wait a second, these aren't that good. I'm still hot. You have four sons, Rich. And Micah is take three for youth hockey. You tried it with two sons and this is the third time around. Yeah, I call him the youngest in group A. Because the three are bunched, it's a very bad patterning if you, you know, are involved in anything. So it's the three oldest are all, you know, very close in age.

And then there's one that's a lot younger, the childhood of my old age, I call them. I got you. I got you. I love these rules for the association, from the association there in Connecticut. Four hockey parents. I'm quoting from the book here, no cash gifts. I guess this is to, what, to coaches or to refs? It's funny.

Every one of these rules, you know, stems from a. a particular incident, which you don't know. That's what's funny about it. They're not, it's not the bill of rights where it's like some abstract thing. Something happened requiring a rule. I got you. No comments regarding gender, religion, or ethnicity. We can imagine what sparked that.

Also, no secret meetings. What is a secret meeting entail in youth hockey, do you think? Well, you know, on a lot of these teams you have, see, there's a weird thing that happens where they have the tryouts in the spring right at the end of the season. So as you get near the end of the season, you get this incredible camaraderie. and society with the other parents, and you feel tremendous closeness to them because you're with them more than you're with your own family if you're traveling all around and play hockey. And then suddenly the tryouts loom and the team starts to dissolve because everybody starts

to think about where their kid's going to be next year. And it's a tremendous, really stressful, and it really gets to the heart of the whole thing, which is not even the joy of making the team, but the fear of not making it, the fear of not being left behind, which to me is like the thing going on in all of America right now, And that's where it's like kind of a microcosm. And the parents who think their kids are going to make it and want to lower the stress themselves and start planning in advance become like the coming administration. And you find out that if there aren't, there are meetings that you're not invited to,

your kids probably on the outs. So they wanted to stop that. So that's the no secret meetings. I found or I figured almost that while you're doing this, it would almost be hard to understand whether you were getting good material. Since you're so close to this, this is a story of. you, it's inside your brain for this entire hockey season. Were you able to sort of figure out, I'm getting good material, I'm getting bad material

as you're going along? Well, originally when I wanted to write this book, the reason I wrote it was I got so deep into this world and I was so at seeing it and I wanted guidance and I wanted help and I looking for a book or a movie. It could be about football parents, soccer parents. I couldn't find it. So I decided to write it and I made an agreement to write it. And then I didn't for a while, and I had a different season in mind, and then this season happened.

And this season was so perfect in its ups and its downs. And in the way the team had these winning streets and losing streets, and the way the parents would get involved and then uninvolved. And the way we had this almost like our kids are on a single A team, and they all felt they should be on the AA team. And they had a dream of catching the AA team in the state tournament. And they did. So to me, I'm like, gosh, this is like the bad news bears meet slap shot. I mean, this is like a perfect season. So you kind of thought you can have a book that's kind of about hockey, parenting,

but also it's just a great sports book because if you had kids we play, you know, there's no more intense experience as a watcher of sports than watching your kids play. And you mentioned the bad news bears. There are players on Micah's teams that do have a true bad news bears quality. Right. Well, some of the best players in the whole program were kids who were judged by one person or another bad kids because they couldn't be coached or they were disobedient or they swore they did bad stuff. So they were sent down to our team as kind of a punishment.

So we ended up with like a team of Kelly Leak tights to go back to the bad news bears. Like a team of kids who'd be smoking in the locker room, you know. So it gave us this kind of Oakland Raiders in the 1970s vibe. And because of that, our team, the first time I saw them play, I was like, whoa, this team is way better than it should be. You know, and that made them, and they had this edge because they were pissed off because they thought they we're the best team. I also love this idea you have there of looking through the glass and you see another kid from an opposing team skate onto the ice and he's got a mustache.

Yeah. You know, and these players are supposed to be like 11, 12 years old. So the immediate suspension, wait a second. Right. Is that a ringer? Absolutely. Well, when you see kids who are really big and aren't great skaters, you think this kid's being held back, you know, and usually like a lot of the really good kids are the smaller ones zipping all

around and they have these bohemets. And the parents always have the same jokes. It's almost a ritual. So one of these kids will skate out, somebody always say, hey, maybe you'll get me a beer, or maybe I can borrow with Razor after the game. You know, because this is right at the edge where they start to sort of grow and go through adolescence. So you have this huge disparity in size and weight, and you never can really tell how old someone is.

I was also happy to see the obligatory Russian coach show up sort of toward the end of the book. One team was definitely going to have a Russian coach who put them through the face. Well, there's a surprising amount of Russians. And a lot of the instructors, private instructors, are, Russians and Russian figure skating coaches. Because the figure skaters are always the best skaters. And people want their kids to learn from figure skaters and the Russians are the best. And we played this game in New Haven and we were waiting and I just saw this Russian coach

come off and he was screaming at his son, the worst things you'd ever say. And it was just completely shocking. And then he went into the locker room and our kids could hear him swearing in Russian for about 10 minutes. This is a big time. You say that youth hockey is a thing for the kids of people that. that are in finance. Is that a Connecticut thing or is that,

do we think that's a thing everywhere? I think it's a New England thing. I mean, what, a great thing about hockey is it's economically, incredibly diverse. So I start the book by describing the parking lot because you have every kind of car.

I mean, you have the $200,000 car. You have the, you know, the Teslas, you have Lamborghinis, and then you have pickup trucks and old beat-up jeeps.

So it draws all these different kinds of people, but for some reason it's just a faith, I guess it's probably because the really best hockey's played at boarding schools. They're played at Choate, Tate, Gunnery, these kind of New England boarding schools, and even kids I grew up with who really good went out east to play.

So I think that that just is a feeder into Wall Street. Part of the appeal of youth hockey, you say, is that it's not football, right? As much as we know about football with brain injuries right now, this is a refuge away from that. But there are some kids in this book that get hurt. One of Mike's teammates gets a mild concussion.

Mika gets knocked pretty good one time, doesn't wind up having a concussion. Were you worried when you sat in the stands day to day? Not really, because I remember all the many injuries that I had as a hockey player that probably were concussions that were just you saw stars, you know, and I feel, you know, but it is always a worry though. It is a contact sport. I think people are drawn to it because their kids might play football and there's a lot of fear about football now and not even the concussions, but the low impact repetitive blows.

and they want their kids to play a sport that has some grit and that there is some contact and it is physical. But in hockey, it's just an aspect of the game. You could play a very good version of hockey without any hitting, any checking. They're sort of doing it right now because of COVID. So whereas football, I always felt football was the hitting. I mean, football, and when you watch different levels of hockey,

there even isn't a lot of that much hitting. So I thought hockey is a good, medium. But the weird thing is there's a lot of guys now who are hockey parents who didn't play hockey. They played football. And they've now got their kids either into hockey or lacrosse is another big one. So it's a new culture to them like it was to my father who grew up in Brooklyn and played basketball. So having him is playing hockey was great because my father was a basketball coach and he was a pain in the ass as a coach, but he couldn't tell me anything because he didn't know anything about hockey. And that is one of the stories here is that you are you are handling

sports parenting slightly different than your dad handled it with you when you were playing hockey as a kid. Yeah, my dad came to two of my, he didn't care, just didn't care. My parents would drop me off, usually not even in the parking lot because they didn't want to get stuck in traffic. They didn't know the other parents. And when I got home, my mother would say, how to go? That was the extent of it. And the only time my father came to a game, two games in my entire life, and he only ever said one thing, which is I had been laid out after a play and I was lying on the ice and I heard him yell, get up, you're not hurt. that was the extent of his one thing I loved about this book is you were tough on the team's assistant coaches who are coaching Micah was there any trepidation in doing that I didn't I mean I tried to

I disguised it all and mixed it all up but you know it's one of these things where you're either going to it's like playing hockey like you're going to do it or you're not going to do it you can't do it halfway so if I was going to write this book I felt like I had to write what really happened and what it's really like and the fact is the weird thing is, and it's a change in the culture, is the whole way of parent coaches. We always had them.

They're different. And in my experience, when I was a kid mostly playing literally baseball, the parent coaches were the toughest on their own kids. So if there was like a great kid playing right field and batting last, you could bet that was the coach's kid because they didn't want to show any favoritism. They bent over backwards to sort of be tougher on their own kid. And now it's sort of flipped where nobody can let any advantage go. If you're the parent coach, you're probably the parent coach to make sure your kid has the most playing time develops the most and follows all those Malcolm Gladwell rules from the outliers that I think messed up so much of this. So to me, that really is the thing that changed. And you couldn't really write this story of hockey right now,

at least as I've experienced, without having the coaches. And that happens at a certain point in Micah's season. The head coach of the team kind of disappears for a while under slightly murky circumstances. and then these assistant coaches basically start playing their kids to the exclusion. And in my opinion, you know, they build a kind of a new kind of playing strategy, which is built around the skills of their kids, whereas the whole idea of hockey is to sublimate your own kids' ability for the good of the team. And look, to me, there's two kinds of hockey parents, probably sports parents.

There are those who look at their kids and see only perfection. They're the best. And there are those that look at their kids and see only the flaws. their kids are the worst. And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. These aren't kids who are going to play in the NHL or even college hockey. And parents are so focused on where their kids are going to be next year that they're kind of missing the hockey crew.

The hockey career is now. It's not when they're 18. It's when they're 12. This is what they're going to remember. And the funny thing is for all the emphasis put on the games, my son loves playing hockey. He doesn't care where they play him or what team makes. If you were to ask him, what's his favorite thing about playing hockey?

he would say staying in the hotels of his friends and eating the breakfast buffets in the holiday. That was my favorite part about you sports too. I'd probably say the Capri Sun that I got, you know, when the game was over when we got to run over to the sidelines. But yeah, that was pretty much... I know. When he found out about that COVID, they weren't going to be playing games.

His first reaction was, does this mean no hotel buffets? Come on. I'm going to miss that whole year of my life. And here's a question you ponder in this book. What do you get out of watching your son play hockey? I don't know. It's like, what do you get out of watching the Bears? Honestly, it's like this is like I was such a big sports fan as a kid and I still care about it,

but I don't feel the intensity I felt when I was 10, 11 years old watching the Bears play. I went to these games not expecting much. This is my younger son. My older son had sort of played and wasn't that into it. And he had some ability for it, my son, and he was scoring. And it was so exciting to me. It's sort of embarrassing to admit, but I feel almost like there's a part of your brain I call the hockey. cortex, you know, which it's been there, but it's been inactive for 30 years and suddenly it got lit up again. And I got so excited that it became like the most excited. It's like watching his team play, watching them succeed, watching them work together, watching them win, became the most exciting sporting experience of my life. And with all that came all the nuttiness. And I know that I'm a

completely ordinary person. So if I felt this way, so did all these other parents because they're exactly like me. And that's what I got from it. Incredible stress, enjoyment, and learning that basically I'd been violating my father's key rule for life, which is he always says the key to a good life is to care, but not that much. And I started caring me too much. Biggest, best sporting moment of your life. And you won a hockey championship, a state championship in Illinois as a kid. But this, the stuff with Micah was, was bigger and better than that? Yes. I mean, when I was like a squirt, I scored the winning goal, the state championship in Illinois. They showed it on TV and all that.

I watched the Bears win the Super Bowl in 86. I watched the Cubs win the World Series in 2016. I watched the Bulls win six championships. There was a play that Mike had made where he tried a wrap around goal twice and been pushed back. And the third time he went around the goalie, stopped behind the net and came back around the way he started, completely fooling the goalie, scored completely by cleverness. and I was so happy another parent came down and hugged me. And that's when I realized that I always thought people got really into their kids because it was living vicariously. Like he can do what you couldn't do as a kid.

He could go further than you could go like Mickey Mantle's father. But I found it at that moment that really what it's about is when your kid does better in a sport, you get treated better right now. It seems obvious and your status increases, but it was like a big realization to me that what's really going on. Now did Micah read the book? He's listened to it. We drive around and have it on tape. I mean, it's hard for me to listen to, but his only qualm, and it was a big quorum, he's pissed,

is when I said that he was a peewee, which is, you know, 11 and 12-year-olds who look like a squirt, which is nine and 10-year-olds. He said that that's just not right. That's just not nice. It was the physical description. Yeah, of course. What else do you care about? You know, my father, he could be on TV being completely scolded.

And how did he say, do I look for it? bat in that picture? That's it. That's all he cared about. I didn't know if he had any notes for you. You know, dad, you know, you kind of opened chapters a certain way. Maybe you could kind of do something like that. I mean, he's so a great thing about him is I have it in the book where I was mad about he'd been moved around and he was on a bad line. I got, I broke the 24 second rule, which is I talked to the coach about it. I mean, 24 hour rule. If you have a beef, you're supposed to wait 24 hours till after the game. I broke that rule. I was pissed off. And I looked at Mike and he's just smiling eating his Mike and Ike and I'm like, why aren't you pissed off? Why am I, I,

the only one he's pissed off. And he said, ah, I don't care where they put me. Where are they put me? It's still hockey. You know, and he just loves playing hockey. So this is my thing, not his. A couple of questions about your career before we go. This is your third sports book. You wrote about Chicago Bears. You wrote about Chicago Cubs. Did you have ambitions at any point in your career to be a straight up sports writer? I mean, not really. I loved sports writing as a kid. I read a lot of sports writing.

Those are my favorite writers. Even a little kid, I read Ring Lardner and Red Smith and A.J. Leibling on boxing. and I always, I just kind of went the way it went, but I always wanted to write about sports, but I always saw it more in the long form kind of magazine article kind of way. And basically what I discovered as I wrote all different things is that I like writing about sports the best, I think, because in most of life, everything is hidden. Everybody has to hide things just to be a normal person. In sports, everything's exposed.

all those events that are happening in public. A lot of the hockey parents, you see him trying to hide their emotions because they don't want it to happen in public. But it all happens in public. And there was a moment which you probably remember, I mean, my memory is starting to go, I feel like, but a couple of years ago, a Dodgers pitcher threw basically a perfect game into the ninth inning. And there was an error.

And then he lost the game of the home run. You know I'm talking about? Yeah. Yes, I do. My brain's going too. But yes. I was watching it. And he had to walk off the field, hug the catcher.

and walk out, I'm like, my God, man. I admire that guy so much to be able to stand up and walk off the field with dignity and thank his catcher. I mean, that's it. That's like what you want to be as a person. And that was all out there in public, and that's what I love about writing about sports. You were a messenger at the New Yorker earlier in your career,

and Joe Mitchell was still at the New Yorker, old Mr. Flood, Joe Mitchell. How'd you introduce yourself? Well, I was a messenger. and then one of the jobs of the messengers is you sit in for the receptionist or the receptionist would go out. So then I became a receptionist, but then I was a, I had been called the worst receptionist in the history of the New Yorker magazine. Somebody correct me and said it was actually the second worst receptionist.

So they moved me down to the writer's floor because no one ever came to the writer's floor. This is the old New Yorker building. And on that floor were all these old guys who I didn't know that much about, like Brendan Gill Herbert Warren Wind, great sports writer, who was very old, Joe Mitchell. And he was just very friendly. He was like a very courtly southern guy who wore a searsucker suit

and a fedore hat with people don't wear anymore. And somebody came up to me, an older person, and said, do you know who that is? And I said, no, it's Mr. Mitchell. And they went back and they got a copy of his story, the professor Siegel about Joe Gould. And he was not allowing reprints of those stories. So she had Xeroxed it from the original magazine and gave it to me.

And I read that story and it changed my life because I thought this is really what I want to write. And then I started to befriend him and then we became friendly. And I used to go back and sit in his office and talk to him for hours and he became kind of like a mentor to me. And very encouraging to me. That was in the last five years of his life problem. And this is when Joe Mitchell is taking his very famous hiatus from actually publishing anywhere. Yeah. He, his book, his collection, which he allowed that stuff to be published, came out like just

like two years after I'd been there. And if you wanted to get his books, you had to either buy him at like secondhand bookstores or collector shops, and they were like 100 bucks. There's a ton of money. Or do what I did, which was go into the New Yorkers library and actually make these Xerox copies, which were passed around like a secret underground, you know, and the world hadn't quite rediscovered him yet. Yeah.

And he was going in and typing every day. I think you wrote in one of your books. So he's sitting in front of a typewriter. Right. You can hear him typing, but he never turned anything in. And he hadn't turned anything in since 1963. And I have a theory that his best friend was like Joe Liebling, and I think Liebling used to just say, just turned it in already.

It's never going to be perfect. Just turn it in. Leibling died. He never turned anything else in again. And now a few years ago, they found that he was writing a bunch of stuff. Some of it's been published in The New Yorker, and it's brilliant and it's crazy. and you kind of see what happens when somebody's too smart

for their own good kind of what can happen. It's good to be a little bit stupid, I think. You did lots of stuff for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Do you feel you caught the last great part of the glossy magazine era? Yeah, I definitely did.

I mean, I was at Rolling Stone when it was so thick. It was like 500 pages long. You could write about anything. They let you go on at length about anything. They sent me on the road to travel around with the Rolling Stones for a year and just hang out

and absorb what was going on. I mean, when could you do that now. I wrote a lot of crazy sports stories for them. And then, you know, so that's completely gone. That world is completely gone. And I feel like that's the position of sort of gen X. Like we sort of see the end of something in the beginning of something else. We just don't know exactly what it's going to be yet. All right. One more for you, Rich, before we let you go. How did you come to have middle of the night phone calls with Marlon Brando? Okay. So my first book was about, again, just like with this hockey book, I said this book doesn't exist, so I'm going to write it. My father used to tell me,

my father grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where a lot of the old gangsters live. And he used to tell me stories about Jewish gangsters who lived in his neighborhood who were long gone. Guys like Abe Twist, Relis, and TikTok Tanimbaum and Bugsy Goldstein. They actually lived there. They lived in Brown, a lot of them lived in Brownsville. And when I got to New York, and I just really wanted to write a book, I really wanted to write about the Jewish gangsters, because I felt like it was a way to write a gangster story that had never been written. These weren't like Meyer Lansky. They weren't accountants to the mob.

These were the guys with the guns on the streets. And so he wrote this book about Jewish gangsters. And somehow Marlon Brando got it and he loved it. And so first he calls my publisher and they call me up and they go, Marlon Brando's calling looking for you. And I'm like, yeah, right. And then my mom called and she's like, Marlon Brando's been calling the house looking for you.

I'm like, come on. And then sure enough, the phone rings the night. I got a message and it was Marlon Brando. I still have it. He's like, hello, Rich. This is Mon. I've got great shit for fantastic stuff. And then we started having a series of late-night phone calls

where he would tell me about how he knew the Jewish gangsters when he was working on Broadway with Stella Adler and working on the Ben Heck play once a birth of a flag and all these crazy, crazy stories. And it turns out he's actually from kind of where I'm from because he grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, where I grew up, first part of my life. And he took swimming lessons at my high school,

which was Newture High School. So we had this kind of connection. He was like this voice. It was like Kurtz. It was like I'd gone up river and I was with Captain Kurtz. And I was just a grocery clerk sent on a simple errand. That's all. And he was always in the middle of the night.

So he's up. Oh, yeah. He was, I mean, I got the sense he just talked on the phone all night long and you probably find hundreds of people who had similar phone calls. Yeah, he's just dialing for dollars. They're looking for companionship. Yeah, he said like a shut in at that point, like 600 pound shut in. All right.

Rich Cohen's new book is Peewee's Confessions of a hockey parent. Rich, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me. All right, it's time for David Chumaker. Guess is the Strain Pund headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about businesses making COVID-related moves was bright lights, flee big city.

Today's headline comes from Duncan Brook. It's from the New York Times, David. It's about a plan to bring a leopard into a national park in Mozambique. They are trying to restore the wildlife to the park after a civil war. But the key word is, leopard leopard what was the new york times is strain pun headline

leopard i mean a leopard can't change its spots right i mean that's not but you're getting you're getting the leopard can't oh it's like it's in a new spot or it's leopard is back to its old spot a leopard can change its spot a leopard can

is changing its spot what if i give you a slightly different thing to play off of how the leopard got its spot how the leopard got back to its spot just give me a little reversal and how the leopard got its spots how the leopard spot

got I have no idea I'm so perplexed now how the leopard how the leopard how this spot got its leopard oh I was trying to flip the back end of it I couldn't figure out how many ways I could do that how this spot got its leopard that's fantastic

And by the way, because it's the New York Times, they did how this spot, perin, in Mozambique, perin, got its leopard. Come on. You just, just leave it, leave it be New York Times editors. He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production magic by Erica Servantes. Note a slight schedule change here. We're back Wednesday, a day early, right after Joe Biden's inauguration with our reaction to all the events of the day.

David, I have never hoped for a more boring and peaceful presidential inauguration in my life. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. Later, Brian.