The Press Box - The Modern Blockbuster, Joe Biden, and John Schulian | The Press Box

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

The new Avengers film and the “importance” of box office numbers (03:00), Joe Biden’s campaign launch and the disappearance of Beto O’Rourke (30:00), and an interview with John Schulian on newspaper-sportswriting magic (45:00). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Avengers Endgame premiered and up on the site under the Avengers tab, you can find everything from the Ringer staff's exit survey full of reactions and takeaways, an emergency big picture podcast with Sean Fennessey and Mallory Rubin, as well as lots of other coverage on the Marvel Universe as a whole. Also up on the site, Robert Maze and Kevin Clark are breaking down the NFL draft, and Haley O'Shaughnessy, Jonathan Charks, and Dan Devine are keeping you up to date with the NBA playoffs.

You can check all of these things out on the ringer.com. David, listener Ben Duckworth writes in to note that last week, the April 25th edition of the Conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney, Australia, accidentally included the editorial page of the more liberal Sydney Morning Herald. The liberal editorial page was inside the conservative newspaper. What I want to know is, what publication would you like to see accidentally crossbred with another publication? Oh man

Oh man I mean listen I'm sitting here in Brooklyn There would be nothing better Than to have like To open up the New York Times And get the New York Post Just and not realize what you were getting

I mean that would just be such a That would be so much Not even the editorial page Just like the front of the book You know I mean just The content The sort of you know All of the tabloidy stuff

Just thrown on in the New York Times Letter setting would be Just amazing Man I don't know Is there an obvious answer for this? What were you thinking? I don't have an old media answer, but what if we could somehow combine old Gawker with New Gawker?

So New Gawker debuts with whatever kind of silly, dumb thing they think they're coming back with and then just buried right in the middle of the first page is an Alex Boreen shitpost. I mean, just, just old style. Like that's where we're going back in time, baby. I think I'd be really happy with that. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of old internet, new internet that would make up, that would be just so mind. I mean, imagine just going to ESPN.com now and seeing like a few magazine features and like page two content. You know, you would just be like totally, you wouldn't understand what you were seeing.

What's Scoop Jackson doing here? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the old internet and the new internet would be, is a mashup that I don't think we spend enough time thinking about. We are the printing error in the first edition of the Corrections of Media Podcast. How about that poll? This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to talk about that Barry Weiss profile.

Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here with three topics for your pleasure and amusement. First, David, we got to talk about those Bafo box office numbers of the new Avengers movie. What do we make of them? And where does good film writing exist in 2019? Second, a 2020 campaign check-in for, featuring the appearance of Joe Biden and the disappearance of Beto O'Rourke. What Gives? And finally,

another very special press box interview, my chat with former sports columnist and author John Shulian on the magic of newspaper sports writing. All that plus the notebook dump and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, if you're not familiar with the Avengers movies and no spoilers here, I promise. Here's my summary. They're a story of a group of superheroes who work together to convince America,

that box office figures are actually important. I'm only sort of kidding because the most important story in the world this week is that the Avengers made the following amounts of money. $350 million domestic, $859 million overseas, total of $1.2 billion global, $330 million in China, which alone, which used to be like a big gross total, and $20 billion in the franchise since 2008. The New York Times reports that AMC theaters added 5,000 last minute showtimes in the United States, 63,000 showtimes total, and 19 AMC locations played the film around the clock, which is kind of amazing. So first of all, you know how I feel about fetishizing box office numbers?

Yes. Do these tell us anything beyond the fact that this is a huge, giant. world-changing superhero movie, or is this just another big number? Wow, that's a great question. It does feel different. I'll say, I mean, I don't know if this is too far afield, but I did feel as soon as these numbers started coming in, I felt a little bit stupid for not having registered this more clearly when Captain Marvel came out, because Captain Marvel on its own could have been, I mean, wasn't necessarily a huge success, right?

and it broke many, many records on its own, just as sort of being positioned as the semi-necessary prequel to this, right? The backstory that you need. And that was pretty much all we were given. I mean, there was a lot more into the marketing campaign, but that was the great significance of it.

And just on a personal note, I'm sitting here in Brooklyn and was getting excited for the movie this weekend and I was talking to my stepson about it, and he was like, oh, you can't get tickets. And this is like, you know, a week out. And I was like, oh, of course you can. because I have all these experiences with like, you know, certain friends,

some may be on the other end of this podcast connection who will buy Star Wars tickets six months in advance when new movies are coming out. And I'm always like, damn, I'm going to miss the movie. And then on like the day of the show, I pop on Fandango or whatever and realize that like there's a million screenings that are half full, right? This one was actually, this one in like all of the,

all of the movie theaters near me was legitimately nearly sold out. all weekend long. And I ended up going late on Saturday night because that's where his seat was available. But yeah, I mean, this is a huge thing. So to go back, to circle back to your initial question, it does feel different.

It does feel like, you know, I mean, the other big thing that happened this weekend that did not gross, you know, over a billion dollars, but the other big cultural touchstone, obviously, was the Game of Thrones episode on Sunday night. And I feel like there's a connection here. that, you know, Game of Thrones has sort of been discussed a lot, especially on the ringer.com,

as the last TV monoculture that we have. And the Marvel, the MCU does feel like, in some ways, it is, you know, our culture, the global culture, like searching for a monoculture, right? I mean, we're all coming together for this thing that is, I mean, as a comic book nerd, we say it over and over again, this sort of success for this sort of movie would have been absolutely unthinkable. you get laughed out of the room for suggesting this 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago. Absolutely. I think your monoculture point is exactly right on. Alison Herman's written about this in the ringer. Alyssa Boresnack has written about this in the ringer, both with regard to Game of Thrones.

But it feels to me like what's less important are those giant numbers that we really don't understand. And raise your hand if you know how much money Disney is actually making. once all this is over because I don't and I've never read anybody explain to me how much money they actually make in this stuff but it's people it's a lot of people getting excited uh that in a rare instance now people in the world are all doing the same thing at the same time they're all having the same media experience whether it's the huge Game of Thrones episode on Sunday or whether it's this movie so that to me is definitely one thing that's interesting about these numbers beyond the mere totals.

Here's the second one. And the New York Times piece by Brooks Barnes touched on this a little bit. It's the sense that the movies can command our attention. It's not just Game of Thrones and television, which is drawn us away from the movies in a lot of ways. But a movie theater event can get everybody to go on the same weekend. And, you know, again, maybe comic movies are the last, Star Wars movies are the last remaining instance where that can happen. But there's a lot of this

sort of, you know, I always felt like movie criticism like 10 years ago was always critics trying to justify their place in society. I feel that has kind of ebbed a little bit. And now we've gotten into this sort of era of movie criticism where it's all about justifying that the movies are still relevant at all and that the movies are still this thing that can kind of get us all to pay attention at the same time. And this weekend, was one of those moments. Maybe the biggest one for a while. It did feel a little bit like, I mean, like a callback.

I mean, this is maybe a forced comparison. But, I mean, I certainly wasn't alive to have experienced it. But to the earliest days of the movie theater, you know, when everybody would go if you could afford the nickel or whatever, and everybody would see the same movies because there was only, they're very limited number of films out, you know. And then it variegated to the point of our childhoods where like, every time you went to the theater,

you would just go to the theater with $10 in your pocket and see what there was to see. But yeah, I mean, this is sort of like just the permeation of Avengers Endgame. I mean, literally, just movie theater is only showing that, or almost exclusively showing that

and just screening after screening after screening on any given day over the weekend. That's kind of all you could really do, you know? And it's sort of like just going down to the town square to see, you know, gone with the wind. You know, the great train robbery or what's up, Doc, or whatever.

You know, I mean, it's, it's, It's, you know, we all have to see the jazz singer, because that's what everybody's talking about. And, uh, and, and, and there was, there was sort of that feeling, you know, I mean, this was, I got to say for a movie this nerdy and to be seeing it like a, you know, a late screening on a weekend night, it was the least, I mean, and this is totally anecdotal, the least nerdy feeling a crowd I've ever experienced in a superhero or sci-fi or anything movie.

I mean, there was no like, you know, rapturous applause when Thor first appeared on the screen or anything like that. I mean, it was just, it was just a film-going crowd. And everybody was, you know, along for the ride. Hold that thought for a second because I do want to go there about nerdiness and mainstream crowds in a second, but a couple of funny tweets. One was from Massachusetts theater owner Michael Colpitz. Did you see this one?

He said, I love Avengers Endgame as a movie lover. I hate, hate, hate it as a movie theater manager. We just simply are not equipped to handle this kind of business and it's killing us. not enough staff, not enough registers, not enough ovens, ovens, not enough space for cues, it's insane. The moral there is never order a pizza in a movie theater or anything that goes in the oven. Tweet from Indie Wires David Ehrlich. So the major corporation that's eating the rest of the entertainment industry alive made

1.2 billion at the box office this weekend and you're celebrating it as a personal validation of your fandom. That's really funny. By the way, and that's also in there. this. We'll get to this again in just a moment a little bit more, but the whole sense of, I think, comic book fans, especially grown up media comic book fans, kind of taking a bow. There's a little bit of that in these numbers too. This, this Marvel trip through the Marvel universe has led us to this place. And it all kind of worked out. There were some movies that weren't great. There were some movies that, I guess, not really flop, but sort of semi-flopped, at least by Marvel standards.

and here we are, and it's this big, rich, payoff that everybody is seeing at the same time. Yeah, and to go back to your earlier point about the inscrutability of the box office numbers, I mean, I saw a lot of tweets about that this weekend. There was one that was being passed around about how the Marvel movies had now made $20 whatever billion, and Disney had initially bought Marvel for $4 billion way back when, and sort of as evidence of what a great success this was, this whole series. was. But then there was a kind of an in note like well of course each movie

had its own production costs and you know marketing costs associated with it so this isn't like a clean profit but it's like yeah that's entirely the point we don't know no has any idea how much this is but it does but the numbers are representative of this of this bigger moment and I think that

I think that all of those tweets sort of speak to that too. I love the semi-annual appearance of this guy named Sean Robbins who is the chief analyst at box office.com. That's his official title. His unofficial title is he's your box office numbers dial a quote if you're a reporter and you have to write newspaper style where you can't just explain what the numbers mean you have to get this guy to call. And so he's quoted in every

article. He sells CNN. This is Sean Robbins. We're watching a monumental moment in the history of cinema unfold, one that the entire world is experiencing together to variety. I'd postulate endgame has a higher degree of immunity than most films to piracy because it's a movie that demands to be experienced on the big screen with an audience. I love this guy. I mean, this is his moment. You know, if we did all those category rankings like the rewatchables did, he just,

he won the week. I mean, forget, forget Disney, forget Bob Eiger, this guy. I mean, his phone was never ringing more than it was this week. So congratulations to Sean Robbins.

On a fair, on a more serious note, our pal Dan Diamond over Politico asked this. He says, one question I've had, what commentary from this period will hold up? Many so-called serious film reviewers held their noses during the early boom of comic book movies. But if the MCU is effectively this generation Star Wars, which means the filmmakers of tomorrow will be influenced by it and react to it for decades, doesn't it deserve the best criticism? What do you think about that? I mean, I think we should unpack this a little bit.

here's where I'd start with it. Remember in 1999 when the Phantom Menace came out and remember how there were a whole bunch of people who were getting Star Wars back in their lives for the first time in a long time and they went to the nation's leading movie critics and kind of found them wanting. It felt like they were a completely different generation. They didn't get Star Wars. They weren't nerdy enough. they were only going to write like one 800 word review instead of like three billion words of

commentary about Star Wars and getting into all the details and all this other stuff and they get driven to the 1999 vintage critics on the web like ain't it cool news and film threat and all those other places are kind of gone now but is that how has that changed I mean, I feel that movie criticdom, even though there are some people who held their noses that the whole comic book movies take over the world thing, that criticdom just feels a lot younger now. It feels a lot of hipper. And the biggest thing is, it just feels like there's a lot more movie critics. I felt like every outlet had one movie critic 20 years ago. And now they all have like six.

Like New York Magazine seems to have a hundred. Anyway, what do you make of that? there's a lot to unpack here and I think that you make the you're headed in the right direction you know these are I mean I mean there is this huge comic book

reading or a fan base or a fan base of you know just kind of vaguely defined nerdiness people who've read the comic books over there at some point in their lives people who love this sort of movie I mean I guess I was listening actually to to Kevin Smith's podcast about Avengers End Game which is you know his big

I think it's his Fat Man Beyond podcast where he was giving his review of the movie. But as far as I got, I got about an hour and he was literally just describing the movie as Kevin Smith, I mean, if you know Kevin Smith, it makes perfect sense. He was just, he was just describing the movie beat by beat. But in his introduction, he compared taking his, you know, watching this with his kids to seeing, or doing this kid to watching Indiana Jones with his dad. And there was a very, it made me think about Indiana Jones and about Star Wars, which were, you know, callbacks to an earlier form of movie making in a way that these, that the Marvel

movies sort of reference both our childhood, you know, the sci-fi movies like Star Wars that we watch, but also the comic books. But those Star Wars Indiana Jones movies, like they, they, I mean, there's a million reasons why they've stood the test of time, but they were well regarded in their day because they transcended their genres. They transcended the trappings of the movies that they were referencing, right? Do these Marvel movies transcend in the same way? I mean, who the hell knows? It's impossible to know, right? I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, you can say, it's not hard to find a million great, like, very wonderful things to say about the Marvel movies. They, I mean, and this, you know, Avengers Endgame in particular, they came in with the weight of a 20 movie backstory and stuck the landing, right? I mean, that's almost impossible to do no matter how great your filmmaker, a filmmaker you are, how well-planned the series is. I mean, this is a really impressive feat. And it should be said that this was both, in many ways, the best of comic book movie, the best of comic book movie has to offer,

but also the most comic bookie of any of these movies in a lot of ways that have come before it. It wasn't just trying to be some, you know, postmodern genre smashing thing. I mean, it was very much, it was like a big movie crossover, I mean, a comic book crossover. But I think you're right.

Going back to your point about the movie, about the critics themselves, This series, as we've discussed, has gone wide, right? I mean, this is part of the monoculture now, but the reviewers, compared to what Star Wars was getting, Indiana Jones was getting any movie back then, the reviewers themselves are just sort of like niche reviewers, right? I mean, even at the Ringer, and you can say this about Game of Thrones, too,

because we have a huge presence on that side. Our reviewers are the people who are most familiar with the text, with the source texts, right? I mean, are the people who are discussing Avengers' Endgame by and large are the nerds. I mean, the comic book heads, people like me, you know, and who have, who have been steeped in this stuff their whole lives. So, and it's weird because-

They're not Andrew Seris coming in going, what the hell is this? Exactly. And it's not, and it's not Pauline Kale or Roger Ebert deciding to give like a respectful nod to the, to what's been going on. I mean, to the achievement, you know, I mean, this is a, these are, what people are reading are largely these, like, these like deep dives into all of the backstories into all of the Easter eggs

and to everything else. And, and, and, I mean, like I said, you know, we have, we at the ringer have reviewers of Game of Thrones who know every detail about the books. And, and you see this with Avengers, with Game of Thrones, with everything else. There are people reviewing the books who are taking issue with minor grievances,

you know, with minor different, you know, diversions from the source material, even though the audience is so big that it cannot possibly care about, you know, Captain America's, you know, brief time with Hydra or, you know, on the throne side about, you know, Lady Stoneheart or whatever the hell.

But, you know, Marvel fans are obviously in some ways more comic book fans are more forgiving than Thrones fans because it's, the canon is much looser, but it's still fan boy writing. And, you know, maybe all, I guess what I came to is that all writer, I mean, almost every writer is a fanboy in a way, and maybe it's just because there are so many more,

like you said, that it's just a matter of identifying the people on your staff who are most excited or most appropriate to be doing these reviews, you know, and I guess appropriate. I'm using in a kind of loose way there, but this, it is a very specific. It's sort of like the ain't it cool news.comization of, you know, criticism. And that's exactly what happened. That's what vulture is. It was taking that particular form of writing and bringing it into mainstream media. I'd say, I guess I think that happened and I think the other thing that happened was was sort of probably, you know, a whole generation of mainstream quote unquote film critics who just were never going to get this and had no interest in getting this just kind of died off

or went away. And then, you know, I think another generation that was capable of getting it, but maybe wasn't interested, kind of got pressured to get on board. I mean, I think of Dana Stevens at Slate and she had some years ago had this thing where she was that, Dan Diamond points us out that she wasn't on the bus and oh my god look at all these comic book movies and then later she said her sarah quoted saying i definitely have a kind of stockholm syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in it's like christianity in the middle ages that was her quote very funny um but i think i think there's this pressure on movie critics that you either get on the train and have readers and people pay attention to you or you risk

nobody paying attention to you because it's not like it used to be. You don't have the power of your publication in the same way. So it's like the Oscars. All these movie critics I read get into the whole Oscar thing. And with half of them, I think they're just getting into it because they know everybody's watching it. It's just there's no other reason. They don't believe in the awards.

They don't really care about the awards. But hey, everybody's paying attention. So I might as well play along. And I think there's some of that probably with the Marvel movies. yeah i mean i mean yeah to be really crass about it the the you know who's going to win at the the oscars piece and the and the the the postmortem the eight big misses at the oscars i mean that's what people are going to click on that's what readers are going to click on and and it's not you don't have

uh you don't have the ability to publish a review of of you know the newest high regarded art film and just have that be what's in the that that have that be the movie review in the newspaper this week right i mean not that was there was really ever an era for that but you don't have the ability to, to, you know, force that upon, force anything upon your audience because the audience finds what the audience is going to find. And if this many people are going to go see a movie, then that's the audience that you're going to be writing for. That's the audience that you're going to be catering to and you're going to try to find, you know, the most appropriate ways to attract those readers. I'm trying to think if there's even a critic now who just completely

floats above that. I mean, A.O. Scott, the New York Times, Times is pretty engaged with this whole world. He is not somebody you'd call a super duper fanboy, but he is happy to come in and review these movies on their own terms. It's like Anthony Lane. That is. I'm trying to think of somebody who is just like, I'm just going to be a film critic full stop in the old sense of the term.

And I'm not going there. I mean, he may be a clue. Even Richard Brody has his moments. Remember when he wrote that love letter to attack of the clones? So I don't know that I'm just trying to think of somebody who you would say was actually separate from the fanboy style of writing who was just completely off that reservation. I don't know who it is. Well, I mean, Richard Brody has written about Avengers Endgame and it was not exactly a love letter. You don't have to love it.

It's just that you have to engage it on its own terms, I think, right? Sure. But I think the title was what Avengers Endgame could have been. I mean, I would quote some of it, but it was incredibly dense. We could always reference the legendary Armand White, who wrote in his current home, the National Review, that it was nostalgia for arrested adolescence. And that was, I think, the kind of most anodyne's sentence in the entire review.

You know, there are people who are a little bit above the fray, but they're almost like inherently in a position of of combativeness, you know, because they're, I'm sure they see themselves as sort of battling against this, this cultural monolith. And, you know, from that point of view, there's a lot to take exception to, I guess, but it still feels a little bit beside the point, which is not what I was expected myself to say. I just pulled up Anthony Lane's review and he references Rosencranton, Gildenstern in the opening paragraph. so I think that sort of proves the point. All right, David, now it's time for the overwork 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.

At the opening night of the 2019 NFL draft, David, the league being the NFL, awarded a Giants fan named Greg Hampton season tickets for the next 100 years. It was an upward Twitter joke to say that 100 years from now, Eli Manning will still be the giant starting quarterback. Thanks to Sean Gelman for that. Also, listeners Sam Arkapriety,

hope I'm pronouncing your name right, and BM point out that all the other gold from that bit. A couple of examples. Congrats to everyone who didn't win a hundred years worth of Giants tickets. A hundred years worth of Giants tickets violates a Geneva convention. And what an incredible moment. Imagine winning the chance to sell your Giants tickets on Seat Geek for the next 100 years. So anyway, great stuff.

from that. David, did you see the controversial finish of the Spurs Nuggets Game 7? The Spurs and TNT announcer Brian Anderson seemed not to understand that they were down for and needed to foul or the game was going to be over. Looking for the bright side, the official Spurs Twitter account tweeted, quote, fought hard until the final buzzer. It was an overworked Twitter joke to respond, fought hard between the nine minute mark of the fourth quarter and the 29 second mark of the fourth quarter. Thanks to our pal Jeff Eisenband for that one. And finally, after announcing he was running for president, Joe Biden was cornered in a Delaware train station and was asked this.

If you are the best choice for the Democrats in 2020, why didn't President Obama endorse you? I asked President Obama not to endorse. And he doesn't want to this. We should, whoever wins this nomination. should win it on their own merits. I asked President Obama not to endorse. I asked him. He did not say, but I asked him.

I do not endorse. Our pal Tyler Tourville noted the bumper crop of tweets using that format. I asked Rihanna not to DM me. Ina Garden was going to come cook dinner from me, but I straight out told her not even to consider it. I asked Paul Rudd not to pay me so much attention in public. And finally, I asked publishers clearinghouse to get off my port. By the way, is that still happening?

I know Ed McMahon is no longer with us, but is there some medium celebrity bringing publishers clearinghouse checks to someone's house? I kind of want to know. Do you even sell magazine subscriptions anymore? I have no idea. PCH.com does appear to exist. So that's all I can contribute to that question. We're devoting the whole show to them next week. All right, David, before we move on, let's take a quick break.

Hulu is paying some of the league's best players, a lot of money to do some pretty crazy stuff. Joel changed his nickname from the process to Joel Hulu has live sports and bead. Damian Liller got a tattoo that says Hulu has live sports. Clearly, they really want you to know that Hulu has live sports. Get over 60 live and on-demand channels, tons of shows and movies, and exclusive originals with Hulu. Get rid of your cable and make the switch for only $45 a month. Watch your favorite teams of the biggest games all season with no cable required.

Watch on the go. and on all your favorite devices. Live TV plan required. Restrictions apply. Learn more at Hulu.com. It can be a little frustrating, especially if you're in a hurry or running late, to find yourself at a railway crossing,

waiting for a train. And if the signals are going and the train's not even there yet, you'd feel a bit tempted to try to sneak across the tracks. Well, don't, ever. Trains are often going a lot faster than you expect them to be, and they can't stop.

Even if the engineer hits the brakes right away can take a train over a mile to stop. By that time, what used to be your car is just a crushed hunk of metal. And what used to be you, well, better not think about that. The point is, you can't know how quickly the train will arrive. The train can't stop even if it sees you. And the result is disaster. If the signals are on, the train is on its way.

And you just need to remember one thing. Stop. Trains can't. All right, David. Topic number two. Joe Biden is finally in the presidential race, though via a bizarrely punctuated. to tweet that messed up both the M-Dash and the ellipses. Do you think Biden, David, has lost the copy editor vote?

Is Craig Gaines going to take his vote elsewhere? Here's the thing that's interesting to be media-wise, so much to talk about with Biden. But let's focus on that weird tweet. Biden, the candidate, is just sloppy. He's not locked down at all. I mean, you saw that he invoked the Charlottesville protests and Heather Hire in his announcement video but didn't tip off hire's mother who found out

about it from reporters after the fact. And I always think it's interesting because when reporters grade candidates, they often mark down candidates that aren't professionalized campaigns that aren't completely on message. But this is a treat. Because Biden is going to be a reporter's

dream. This is, you know, the sports writers always say he said all the right things. He's going to say all the wrong things. And I think, And I think this is going to be one of those. If you're in a newsroom, you are putting up your hand to cover the Biden campaign. Yes. I mean, I think that's exactly right.

Biden's campaign so far has been such a weird, I mean, there's been such a weird dissonance between the, you know, candidate that we should have expected to the candidate we did expect to the candidate we got kind of coming back full circle. I think that, you know, there's a lot of, how to put this. you know, a lot of vice president seem to be chosen for a specific demographic, for a specific purpose to sort of balance out the ticket in a certain way. And Biden certainly, I mean, was seen as that when he was chosen by Obama, but he seemed to sort of, you know, rise above that designation pretty quickly and became, you know, an equal part of the, of the, or a somewhat equal, more equal than the normal part of the, of the Obama presidency, of the Obama White House. And, you know, I think that there's a lot of people out there that look skeptically upon the notion of him as the heir to the Obama legacy.

But there was, I think, still the prevailing feeling that he would have, that he would have inherited some of the kind of no drama, clean messaging, heavily managed aspects of the Obama campaign, right? and that doesn't appear to be the case at all. Well, right, but there's also this feeling that, I mean, obviously, he was run for president before, and there's a million stories about how he's a less than ideal candidate. But I, you know, there's part of, I think there was somewhat, some of a perception that he kind of was a little bit of the, of a, you know, maybe Gary Hart type, although completely different circumstances where, like, he was a, he was a, he was a no downside candidate that was derailed for some particular, you know, some just like single instance or, you know, just some

unrepeatable problem and that's clearly not the case at all. I mean, he's a problematic candidate on and from a purely politics point of view, he's problematic and just sort of untold ways. I just think the American public and maybe even political reporters

hasn't heard Joe Biden speak a lot. Yeah. Partly because he was muzzled by the Obama White House just by the job of being vice president and partly because he's kind of picked his spot since Trump's election. But let's listen to a little bit of Biden on the view,

which is now TV's version of a diner in Iowa or New Hampshire. Listen to Biden, try to tell a story about connecting with the working man. But I don't think anyone's ever said that I invaded their space in a way that was designed to do something other than making them feel uncomfortable, but not anything having to do with harassment or anything else. They have said that, but they have also said we'd like an apology.

Well, look, I'm really sorry if they, what I did in talking to them trying to console that, in fact, they took it a different way. And it's my responsibility to make sure that I bend over backwards to try to understand how not to do that. Nancy Pelosi wants you to say, I'm sorry that I invaded your space. So I invaded your space. I mean, I, and I, I'm sorry this happened. But, but, but I'm not sorry in the sense that I think I did anything that was intentionally designed to do anything wrong or be inappropriate. It was inappropriate that I didn't understand. Yeah.

Wow. That was not a comfortable watch. And there were other parts of that that were not a comfortable watch either. I just don't, he, he does not speak in sound bites, particularly. and again, nothing wrong with that. I just think people, people sort of have an idea of Joe Biden that is filtered through the Obama White House media lens

that may not line up with actual Biden. He, of course, is raising a lot of money. A tweet that said his campaign said raised $6.3 million in the first 24 hours, higher total than Beto or Bernie, to which professional Democrat Ron Clayne responded. It appears that there are some Democrats, who are not on Twitter.

I almost think the Twitter is not real life thing has now become such an easy way to dunk on people that the phrase is actually undervalued because surely what people on Twitter say about Joe Biden is going to matter. I just don't think you win the Democratic nomination just completely flying over those people. I think we're now at a point where we're like,

ha, see, it doesn't matter at all. This campaign will not be one on Twitter It's like, you're right. But if so many leading liberals have a problem with you, it's going to be really tough to win the nomination. Or it's going to be really tough to win the general election. I just feel that's not nothing. Yeah, I mean, I'm starting to feel like about these like opening, like early campaign donation numbers like like, you know, superhero movie openings. Like I'm not exactly sure what they mean.

I'm not exactly sure how these numbers are all lined up because I know, I mean, I'm plenty of fans. I mean, I'm surrounded by fans of various candidates, and I don't, and people who've donated in the past, I don't know anybody that lined up on day one of a campaign launching to throw money in the hat just for, you know, for, for, for out of eagerness to contribute or to add to the day one totals. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I agree with you. I think that, I think that the, the Biden campaign is going to be, especially if they, you know, if, if, if this, I mean, one of the, one of the problems that we have that, I mean, the candidates have now is that things like, what Biden's dealing with now, you can't sufficiently answer the question, right? Because every person who has a microphone wants to have their own version of the answer. And so it just perpetuates

and you end up creating more problems than you had initially, I mean, at least from a PR point of view. And yeah, I think that they, I think that there are plenty of, there are, there are, I think the expectations on the Biden campaign from a media point of view,

I mean, and from a public, in a public point of view, might have been too high. Someone at the ringer said it, and I'm going to forget who it is. It might have been Kate Nibbs that the weirdly sleepy Joe, Trump's nickname for Joe Biden, is maybe, or no, maybe it was Claire McNair, maybe the most effective, the most effective of his nicknames, because not only does it kind of cut to a part of Biden's, you know, delivery of his persona, but it also runs just like completely counter to what to our expectations of Biden that you know before he got in the race he was being talked about as this like blue collar fighter who would go toe to toe with Trump and all these border I mean all these uh these purple states and

and purple voting blocks and and uh and yeah I mean he just sort of appeared and appeared on the trail as he seems just a little bit tired's not the right word but there is just something kind of like metaphorically sleepy about his about his presence and you can tell by Trump's tweets that he's excited to he's excited for this to be his his uh his opponent he also said on hannity he's not the brightest light bulb in the group it's interesting because i think when that same kind of image of Biden that may mask what kind of campaigner what kind of speaker he actually is will also run counter to this trump thing don't you think because do we think the american people that have been sold as you know Biden as obama's ubercom

competent right hand man, occasional emotor-in-chief, Uncle Joe will think, oh, he just seems really, really sleepy, or he seems dumb, like not a bright bulb? I don't know. That feels like that's doing a lot of work. Low energy, Jeb Bush felt like it kind of meshed with, you know, just felt like nobody had any sense of who Jeb Bush was anyway. But Biden, there's just a lot on the record to go through. With Hillary, he was, Trump was leaning into what the media critique of Hillary already was with Crooked Hillary. Sure. This one, I don't know. It just feels like it's a little against a grain to me. But we'll see. Well, I think it remains to be seen what the, what the media critique, you know, is going to be once we, I mean, if and when he, we get past

the current controversy. Yeah, I mean, it'll be, it, I think that, I think that there are, there were, you know, a lot of, a lot of people in the media, I mean, that's who we've been discussing. I mean, had a certain expectation of Joe Biden, and that's not being met. So, I mean, it'll be up to this point. So it remains to be seen whether they, you know, how the, what narrative the media actually settles on. Are you concerned, David, about the disappearance of Beto O'Rourke. I refer you to a very good Washington Post piece by Jenna Johnson, who notes that six weeks after the famous slash infamous Vanity Fair cover, the former congressman has gone from Buzzy Celebrity candidate to just another day.

Democrat in a crowded field. O'Rourke has stopped jumping at top counters and chairs at events. Recently, he did step onto a small wooden box at the University of Virginia, but decided mid-event to step back down. That's kind of sad. He has pushed back against assertions that he's a blank slate who lacks experience and has added a vision section to his campaign website, which is almost reminiscent. This is me talking of the H.W. Bush vision thing bit.

also O'Rourke is doing almost no cable news preferring to do face-to-face events. So from a media perspective, how did the media's favorite candidate become someone who is completely gone and a complete blank in media terms just a couple of weeks later? Well, I mean, I think that not doing, you know, national media is a huge part of it, right? I mean, people will cover what they are given the opportunity to cover. And I also think that there are so many candidates now for the Democratic primary. And they're all kind of grasping to have issue pertinent or pertinent or poignant issues that will let them, I mean, they're not going to be the expert on Avengers box office that gets a call every time something happens. But, you know, issues that they will get that call when an issue, I mean, when that issue is being discussed on cable news or on a national platform. platform. And I think that Beto's, you know, lacking that. There's only so many, so many different ways

you can talk about the sort of destiny or, you know, I mean, the, the majesty of a, of a, you know, grassroots campaign when that campaign doesn't seem, you know, doesn't have any real handle. Yeah. I do find it funny. The Vanity Fair cover is just being used as a cudgel against him. Yeah. I guess because you're like, how did you get that much free media and not get more of a boost off of it? Johnson in her piece also notes that O'Rourke staffers think his Senate campaign really changed after that viral moment where he talked about kneeling NFL players. Remember that one? And so now on the trail O'Rourke is doing all these impassioned sort of speeches hoping to go viral again. I mean, that is the most 2019 thing I've ever heard that as a presidential candidate, you're just kind of in full dudgeon all the time and hoping that it gets passed around on the internet.

I don't even, that just, that just like, I mean, that makes total sense in the world we live in, but that just blows my mind that that's happening. Yeah. I think that the last time that we talked about, Beto, right after the camp, right around the time of the campaign, launch, I think we were both a little bit shocked at the amount of attention he was, attention he was getting. And I think maybe the, the booms for these, you know, moments in the news cycle are bigger, but the tail is shorter, right? And so maybe what we're seeing now is just sort of the reaction that we were all, you know, having with our friends and loved ones to the Vanity Fair cover, to, you know, the HBO thing, like whatever. Like, we were all discussing this and maybe it just took a little bit to trickle down to the newsrooms or to the decision makers in the media.

And like I said, he's got a lot to, he's got a lot to battle with. Listen, I, they're all looking for those moments, right? I mean, it's impossible to not, to not view politics through that lens. I mean, even if he weren't, even if every time he jumped up on a table, he did it organically and, and, you know, with true passion, we would all be looking at it, you know, with a raised eyebrow, right? I mean, it's like when Elizabeth Warren, who is, if nothing else, I would have said the most

like, the most the straight shooter of this crop of candidates, you know, the most impede, the most who personally believes in everything that she says. When she calls her, you know, impeachment proceedings to start on President Trump, it's hard not to say like, you know, she's doing this specifically to break out of the

to break out of the crowd, right? And regardless of whether or not she believes it sincerely, sincerity is just sort of lost in this sort of campaign with so many competing voices. I want to talk about Elizabeth Warren next week. We needed a whole section on her because the whole policy, I am going to flood you with policy and dare you not to pay attention campaign is sort of the opposite of walking around and trying to go viral. All right, David, topic number three.

We played around with an author interview a few weeks ago, and I wanted to try it again. So here it is. Among people who practice sports writing for a living, John Shulian is one of the most admired and beloved figures I know. He was a great sports columnist who know has a new collection out about the joys of newspaper sports writing. Here's my interview with John Shulian recorded in Hollywood a few weeks ago. My pal John Shulian is here. He was a big time sports columnist in Chicago. in Philadelphia.

And then for reasons that only he knows, he decided to move to Los Angeles and become a screenwriter. And creator, co-creator of Zena Warrior Princess? Co-creator. Co-creator of Zena Warrior Princess. Very touchy thing with the writer's guild. Co-creator, among other things, of Zina Warrior Princess. And now he has returned to his roots, at least a little bit for a new book, which I love,

the Great American Sports Page, a century of classic columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins in fine bookstores everywhere. Thanks for doing this, John. My pleasure, Brian. All right. So I think for our audience here in the Ringer podcast network, we're going to have to back up just a little bit. And the thing I want to ask you about it, because we're talking about newspapers. And when newspaper sports pages were the place where sports writing was done in America,

you did this. What was so cool about writing a sports column? for newspaper? Well, it was important. I mean, you got your picture over your column, your byline was in bigger print than everyday reporters. Most of all, you got to write in your particular voice. You had a kind of stylistic freedom that wasn't allowed a lot of other people, or you had a gift that other people didn't in a lot of cases. But it was, you know, I mean, I was married and working in Chicago and my wife would come home and say, you know, she saw somebody reading my column on the L train. And there was something nice about that. Or if you got a paper that was fresh off the presses,

the ink would still be wet on it. And you could get the whole sports section on your hand if you weren't careful. I think a couple of things are amazing to younger people. One is that when you broke into journalism, you weren't allowed to write however you liked. You know, newspaper writing was very, you know, formatted, programmatic to a certain extent. Two-arm bandists held up the Bank of America yesterday, you know, period paragraph. So there's a small elect couple of people that can write like they want to, more or less, within the confines of a family newspaper. And the second thing I think that's just amazing now, where everybody sort of starts out as a blogger with a lot of voices,

in every city there were four, five, six people who got to, who had a person. public forum to share their opinion about sports. Right. Right. Right. Well, you know, there's always been this sort of mixture in the newspaper sports writing of reportage and opinion. You're sort of, it's almost like you're reviewing a play, you know, instead of, you're not, if you get a fellow, you know, with one guy, you know, the next guy is dropping a pop-up and so you try to compare the two. Right. You talk about the nature of sports writing in your introduction of this book. Sometimes it veers into something that really smells like literature. And I always thought it was, in rereading a bunch of the columns in this book, I always thought it sports writing really compared well to pulp literature or pulp fiction. Literature really wasn't the point. But occasionally, despite the fact that it was written fast and the writers were terminally underpaid, it achieved that sort of effect. Is that a fair moment of? Oh, I think very much so.

I think it's what, I remember reading a profile of Stephen King and the New Yorker, and they talked about how you wrote in the American Voice. And Stephen King is writing horror books, just the way Raymond Chandler wrote Private Eye Fiction. And Louis Lamor and Ernest Haycox and people like that wrote Western novels. That there was, it is a, it's more of a working man's kind of thing. I think. And then if you read Red Smith, Red Smith could appeal to both people with PhDs who were teaching, you know, Shakespeare at Harvard. And he could appeal to a guy who was carrying a lunch bucket to work on a high rise at the same time.

Yeah. And that's always so funny to me. There's a lot of continuums you can find in this book that sports writing exists on. There's right for the English department at Harvard, and there's right in a very sort of Jimmy Cannon, you know, the end of the street vernacular way. And they both worked on the same sports page a lot of the time. They could run, you know, a couple of inches apart from each other. Well, Smith is, Red was really from the New York Herald Tribune. I mean, that was where he blossomed.

He toiled in the vineyards in St. Louis and Milwaukee and Philadelphia. and then Stanley Woodward, the genius sports editor at the Herald Tribune, summoned him to New York, and Red was already in his 40s when he came to New York, and he took a certain part of the town by storm. The part he didn't take by storm was the Jimmy Cannon devotees, and Jimmy Cannon wrote for the New York Post and later the Journal American, and was the son of a Tammany Hall politician and grew up in Greenwich Village, and had been a copy boy, and I don't think he'd finished. high school, and he had this punchy, beautiful style.

I mean, it was the difference between his chamber music and blues in a whorehouse, basically. How do you start when you come up and you start to put together a book like this? Well, I knew that there were certain writers who I wanted to have in it. Smith and Cannon, Damon Runyon, Haywood Bruhn, you know, legends, the people who are the mark for all of us who followed them. And I don't think any of us ever matched them. But that begins there, and then you start filling in places. One of the things I wanted to do with this book was show that great sports writing

wasn't entirely the property of New York or the Boston-Washington corridor. Certainly there's been an abundance of great sports writing from the the papers there. But there's great sports writing in Seattle with a guy named Emmett Watson. It was a beautiful, beautiful piece in the book about a fighter at the end of the road. He was a new name to me, Emmett Watson. Yeah, and he didn't write sports for a terribly long time. He became a three-dot columnist with a literary flair in Seattle and was an interesting guy. And down in Texas, you had the Blackie Sherrod, who was sports editor.

of the Fort Worth Press, which was the only people who read the paper worked there. And that he had all these genius young sports writers. He had Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, Gary Cardwright. So one day, he's looking for a baseball writer, and Shrake says, well, I think I got a guy for you. So he brings the job prospect up to the office. And the guy says, point out Sherrod. He points out of him. The guy runs across the newsroom, does a hook slide in front of Blackie's desk.

It's Blackie sits there editing copy. And Blackie doesn't even look up. He just says, you're hired. That's like a scene out of Billy Wilder, isn't it? It's incredible. You know, it was a better world then. Who were some of the other people that, I guess let me give you a couple names from people that don't get on the roll call of the, you know, the sports column just kind of mind. One is Jerry Eisenberg, who I think just gets.

It's a little bit forgotten, mostly because he spent a lot of his career after the Herald Tribune writing in New Jersey. Right. What kind of sports columnist was Jerry Eisenberg? I think he's a great one. I've edited three books now for anthologies, rather, for the Library of America, and he's been in all of them. Great social conscience, a great, just a real pulse, knows everybody, knows a million anecdotes. He got his copy of the book the other day, and right away he called, me. He said, I wanted to see what you wrote about me.

And I wrote as flatteringly as I possibly could because I think the world of Jerry. I just think he's one of the really good ones. A student of Red Smith for a while, Red was kind of his guy, but wound up writing in a very much more strident, you know, conscious style and much less, how should we say, delicately literary style that Red was in. Yeah, I wouldn't call it. Jerry wasn't a poet, you know, but he could certainly. make you feel things. Another guy I've always been fascinated by who gets left out of our East Coast centric and L.A. centric sports

writing sort of, you know, lens is Wells Twombly, who you include a number of columns for in San Francisco. He was amazing. He was just as, you know, he always gave you the weather report in the first paragraph. But he could really

write. He was Florida. Florida is a great word, yes. And a very literary he was almost self-consciously literary sometimes, but he really made it work, and he died very young. He died not long after I got my column in 1977, and he was only 41 years old. He's an interesting guy to me, too, because he's an odd combination of ornate and very stridently, socially conscious. Yeah.

Right? He was always... It was almost like Lewis Lapham or something, you know, who's like, I'm. I mean, I don't know who you, because usually when you think of the socially conscious guys, they're very punchy, right? They're grabbing you by the lapels. Twombly was, you know, kind of, you know, lifting off the page, but then would come in for the gut punch. And he really found, I think he went to, he bounced around the country. He'd worked in Houston and Detroit.

And in the San Fernando Valley here in L.A. had a little, what was, I think, basically a cut above a shopper. But then in San Francisco, he went to work for a sports editor named Dave Bergen, who was a real rebellious, progressive kind of guy. And that was where Twombly flourished. And this was at the... San Francisco Examiner. He had a great line about soccer.

He was defending soccer from people who said it was on America. Do you ever be aware of this line? So soccer is generally considered to be a foreign plot designed to sublimate one of our great native games, such as armored rugby or modified rounders. I thought was really, really good. Who did you reevaluate? Because I find when you go up to the volume sometimes, someone who a sports writer who you think sounds a certain way,

sounds differently, excuse me, when you go back to him. Well, Granlin Rice is always tough for me to swallow. I mean, he's revered. He's a hallowed name in sports writing. He was Red Smith's idol. But, you know, and he's famous for his four horseman, again yesterday, which is, I think, much better when Gary Cartwright parodied it and said,

the Four Horseman wrote again yesterday, death, passed on his famine and Don Meredith. But Granlin Rice wrote every, if he was covering a low classification of high school football game or Notre Dame an Army, which is where he made his name, it all was the same. It was all, always the greatest game ever played. And these were the most heroic gridiron gladiators on the planet and whoopee. I mean, it was wear you out, you know, and he would go on endlessly. Yeah, they were long. Real long.

I find that had like a double effect almost because the thing we, I think we talk about with Grant Alan Rice, a lot of times it's gauding up the ballplayers, turning all these guys from the 20s into sort of superhumans. But it also got it up sports writing, didn't it? It made sports writing seem awfully important within the confines of the newspaper to write that with that world historic kind of tenor to it. I think one of the things you have to think of, and probably give Granlan Rice a break, is that there was no television when he was writing about this stuff. radio was not that big a deal still it was coming into its own probably there were lots of homes in america that didn't have radios and and so he was trying to paint a picture of the scene as best he could did he slop on a little too much paint yeah he did for sure but he's trying to draw as vivid a picture

as he possibly could and i think you when you read these old guys you hey you sort of have to try to transport yourself back to their time and try to look at the world the way they did. When talking to one of his biographers, Charles Fountain, a Granny, Granny Rice's, and I said, you know, what's Granny's legacy today? Who, you know, nobody writes in that style. And he had a great point, which is that I think Granny Rice has been replaced by television. You know, a television intro to Sunday night football is in the key of Grantland Rice.

Right. You know, it's a world historical event. You don't want to miss this one, folks. Yeah. And big things are happening tonight, and it's going to be big. And that's probably right, you know, in a way. Yeah. You sort of replaced by technology.

Yes, I think that's exactly right. One writer who did applied his trade here in L.A. That I was always fascinated with is Jim Murray. And I think we remember, at least I remember Murray, it was being the king of the one-liner, the guy who, you know, and he wrote them better than anybody else, right? and Rick Riley's mentor and the guy who spawned in many ways, Rick would be the first one to say, Rick Riley.

But he also, you have him in here flashing something of a social conscience, too, when he's writing about the Masters. You know, Charlie Sifford can't play at the Masters. And he really, and Jimmery liked golf and he liked golf people, but he was really tough on the Masters. And for its antebellum racial policies, And you don't expect, it's sort of a jolt. If you come to Jim Murray expecting the gags, you know, Frank Howard has a strike zone so big it should be subdivided.

And then you get this guy saying, hey, wait a minute, you know, let's tear down some of the barriers, let's have a little equality here. You know, I mean, that made his column, when he got serious, it made it all the more powerful. Because the jokester got serious. Yes. And like, oh, well, if Jim Murray's pissed off. Yeah. This is a true moral emergency. Right.

Yeah, that's interesting. The other thing it's like when I look at the writers and the table contents here is, so we talk about one continuum being flowery versus man of the street pros. Another one to me in sports writing is a true sports nerd. Somebody who's in the business because they love sports and they can't imagine doing anything else with their lives. And then the kind of sports writer who sees this as a vehicle. for their literary aspirations or a way to get famous. And I think you have both of those kinds of people in the book, too.

Would you agree? Oh, definitely. I mean, to be very honest, and I hope this doesn't make you think less of me than you already do. Come on. You know, I got into sports writing because I wanted to write, and I looked at the sports page as a laboratory for writing. And there was that freedom that you didn't get in other sections of the newspaper. I mean, when I wrote, I spent the first five years of my newspaper career working on Cityside in Baltimore.

And so I wrote about cops and robbers and politicians. And I wrote a rock and roll column once a week for a couple of years and had a great time and it was a great education. but still when I went to work at the Washington Post as a sports writer, the gloves came off. It was just, I had that freedom, and it was only how good can you make this? How, you know, I mean, sometimes you're up against a brutal deadline and you're just glad if you spell all the words right. This would be before a spell check. So it was always, you know, you wanted to be special and here was a place where you could do that. And I don't think there's any wrong answer on that divide between true sports nerds and people who view it as just a vehicle, you know, for great writing.

I don't think there's actually a wrong answer to that question. When Dan Jenkins and Frank DeFord died so close together, you know, that was that continuing to me. Dan desperately cared about golf and college football. Right. Who won the Heisman? Frank DeFort couldn't have cared less about that kind of stuff. No, Frank. He wanted to get the interview over with as quickly as possible

so he could go back and write because the writing was where the fun was. Yeah. Who would you, in this book, could you just not heard of at all that you discovered and elevated to the Pantheon, as it were? Was anybody in that vein? Well, you know, I knew about W. O. McGeehan,

who is a trip. And actually, for a guy who was writing in the 20s, has a very modern sensibility, as he proves with a piece about Gertrude Adderle, is getting ready to swim the English Channel. And calls her, you know, calls her one of the world's great athletes and talks about feminism in the course of this piece. Wow.

And, I mean, there are sports writers out there today, a lot of them probably, who feminism would never, once appear in their copy. This is a guy who didn't have any female co-workers that were writers at the time. There was no Me Too movement when W. O. McGeehan

wrote about Gertrude Ederley. The thing I love about this book is that you bring sports writing in, you bring sports writing and columnizing into the 80s when you were doing it and then left the trade. What was, because a lot of these guys, I think we know primarily from television now,

so Tony Connheiser, at least younger people, do Tony Carniarner, Mike Wilbon, Mike Lupica, did a lot of television. television work too. What was writing a sports column like in the 80s where the media was at that point in time and newspapers were at that point in time? It was great. I mean, because there's a nice simple answer. Everything is great. But it was the last golden age of newspapers, right? It really was. You know, a lot of people have given me credit for bailing out because I saw something coming. I didn't see anything coming. I just thought it was.

my time to leave. But, you know, we had great travel budgets. We went everywhere. I mean, there were big, glorious sports sections, particularly at the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Daily News and the LA Times. And then later, the Dallas Morning News and the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Herald. God, I hope I'm not forgetting any papers. I hate pissed off sportswriters.

About covers the waterfront, I think. But, I mean, you know, and at the Philadelphia Daily News where I worked for about a year and a half before I came out here, some days we would be a third of the newspaper, was a tabloid newspaper, and we would have 30, 34 pages of sports writing. Amazing. And for columnists, and we had four columnists on the paper, we had Stan Hockman, who was sort of, the emeritus guy who was great. He had been a great baseball writer and took over the column when Larry Merchant left to go to New York.

We had Mark Wicker, who was a total pro, could write about any sport and do it incredibly fast. Ray Dinger, who'd been a great, great pro football writer and became a wonderful columnist. And then I don't know what they needed me for, but they brought me in. Well, they need a fourth horseman, as he said earlier. You know, and honestly, any one of us at the Philly Daily News at that time

could have just been carried the section by himself, as alone sportscomists. But they had the luxury to have four of us lunatics running around. And when it was a big event, say the Hearns-Hagler fight, we had a whole page to fill up of a tabloid newspaper, Which is one reason why the P.P.S. I chose on the Hurons-Hagler fight, run so damn long. sports columnist David Israel, who's a friend of yours and a friend of mine, and has a couple of columns in this volume. He had a great line. He also left the trade to become a screenwriter. He once told me, he said sports writing was a great way to make a lousy living, and screenwriting

is a lousy way to make a great living. What was when you, when you crossed that Rubicon, what was the difference for you, both in terms of the actual application of it and also the status of the two. Well, all I remember is I came out of my first story meeting and I was lucky enough to get a chance to write a script for L.A. Law,

episode number nine in case you're looking at reruns. And I came out of a story meeting with Stephen Botchko and his co-creator Terry Louise Fisher. And the first thing Stephen's assistant said to me was,

John, where would you like us to send your paycheck? And I said, I think I'm going to like this business. Have you ever asked that at the Philadelphia Daily News? No, no, they sort of begrudged me my paycheck. You know, I loved sports writing, and at that point in my life, I'd really seen enough airports and hotel rooms and airplanes and all that sort of thing. And I wanted to try something different, and here was a great opportunity.

And that was the way I looked at it. I just wanted to see if I could do it. And when I came out here, you know, as a sports columnist, I was regarded as one of the best in the business at that time. And when I came out here, I was just one of another bunch of writers. There was nothing to distinguish me from some poor guy who was living in his car. So I had to learn how to check my ego at the door, keep my mouth shut, and try to learn as much as I could, as fast as I could. And it was a great experience, and it was a humbling experience. You've written and edited books about sports, and you've written uncertainly sports story since you came out here.

What did you miss most about sports writing? Sports writers. The company of them. You know, when I think of just the laughs you have just hanging out, waiting for a press conference to start, or sitting in a press box, a dull ball game in the middle of August, and, you know, somebody just would start something silly going. They're great guys, and sports writers really do, for the most part, think about a lot more than sports. They tell you about good books and good movies and good music. And there are guys you really like going to dinner with or having a drink with.

And it was just always, you know, they're the best company. They were really wonderful guys. And women, too. The women who we haven't touched on here, you know, the Diane Shaw's. and the Jane Levy's. And, you know, one of the greatest dinners I was ever at was in Montreal, the 81, the baseball playoffs. And we wound up in the old quarter in Montreal. And at the dinner table, we had Jane Levy, Mike Downey, me, and two older gentlemen, Roger Angel and Red Smith.

Wow. And I wish we'd had a tape recorder running that night. because just the casual wisdom that sort of came out and read had a drink or two too many. And he started talking about the annual Christmas program that the Newspaper Guild used to put on in New York. And they would alter Christmas songs to give them a newspaper application. And he said, Hark the Herald. He started singing Hark the Herald Tribune. drunk Redsmith.

I mean, that's incredible. A lovelier man never lived in Redsmith. He was such a gracious guy. The first time I went to lunch with him, I reached for my wallet. And he said, oh, no, this is my town. Wow. And then at the 1977 World Series, he and Dick Young were feuding. Dick Young had successfully tried to run Tom Seaver out of New York

because Seaver had the ten. temerity to ask for a raise. And Red had stuck up for Seaver in print. And Dick, who I got along with quite well, even though his politics were sort of Genghis Connie. Dick, in print, called Red a dried-up husk of a once-great writer. Wow. Which was unbecoming.

Anyway, somebody put me between the two of them for the world's series game. And so here comes Red, and I said, Red, how are you? John's, good to see you. Dick comes from the other direction, sits on the other side of me. Hey, Dick. Hey, John. How are you doing?

Okay. And that was it. They never looked at each other, never spoke to each other. I was afraid I was going to have to referee a scrap between these two senior citizens. Oh, that's fantastic. All right, the new book, The Great American Sports Page, A Century of Classic columns from Ring

learned it of Sally Jenkins. John Shulian, thanks for coming by. My pleasure, Brian. All right, David, back with the notebook dump. The first item comes from you, Mr. Shoemaker. Extreme makeover, Kirsten Nielsen's image edition. New York Times broke the news that Nielsen, who was Trump's Homeland Security Secretary, had tried to get Trump to work on preventing Russian interference in the 2020 election. And as the time reports, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney advised Nielsen not to bring it up. It wasn't a great subject, quote unquote, in the paraphrase of one official.

And in an extremely related story, we learned from Politico's Andrew Rostuchia and Daniel Lipman that, quote, Nielsen and her allies are working to rehabilitate her reputation, arguing she's not the heartless villain depicted by liberal critics for the family separation policy and other things. So as we've seen with former Trumpies John Kelly and Don McGahn, as soon as you leave the White House seek out the first available journalist and tell them actually I was trying to stop Trump

I really I was you might have thought I was implementing his policies but actually I was arguing against him the whole time yeah this whole that I mean the the cycle of the Kirsten Nielsen

image makeover post White House makeover has been has been I mean was very brief but I mean it was a pretty spectacular boomlet and I'm very excited to see every future former Trump White House staffers go the exact same way. Yeah, it just feels like we should have some graphic representation of the purgatory they're in and who can crawl out of purgatory. You know, and what is crawling out of purgatory? Is it getting a job on Fox News or is it getting the Sean Spicer gig on extra?

Is that really, you know, what means that you've made it back to the world? Our pal Chris Almeida's David sent this one in about Damian Liller just after he murdered the O KC Thunder in game five of their first round NBA playoff series the other night. Nathaniel Friedman, aka Free Darko tweets, once upon a time when a thing like that dame shot happened, and it was a game winning three-pointer for those who didn't watch, everyone would rush to blog about it. Now you fire off a few tweets and swear you'll get around to writing something in the more. morning or the afternoon or the day after. So have we reached a point in NBA journalism slash blogging where we just don't write about it anymore that we just put the clip up and tweet about it? And I mean, is this kind of like a micro era that we don't even, you don't even do like

the 300 words and post the clip? You just assume that's kind of already done and move on to something else? Yeah, I think so I mean, and I think that you see that in the sorts of that sort of like different silos that writers break themselves down into now. I mean, the reactive writing

that's done the night of the games. I mean, we have fantastic writers covering the stuff at the ringer and every day I feel like it's necessary to pat them on the back and say that like, I can't believe you wrote that well at that hour because if you don't get it out that night, then it seems sort of beside the point and especially for more seasoned,

I mean, you know, for more seasoned writers who have negotiated themselves more humane work hours that you do get kind of left behind by the whole thing. And there's also the sort of like Nathaniel Friedman was talking about, the sort of overall just sort of like feeling of hopelessness when it comes to being a writer about, you know, about important singular moments in sports and basketball in particular when it's happening this late. I will say on this Damian Lillard front that that guy, he should just run for president. I mean, that's, he, I don't know if he has a PR team around him, but he, but he, he,

he had this quote after the after the game when people someone asked me if he was if he felt pressure about for for round two and he was like he was like no that you know we get paid well to play basketball there's no it's not it's not an issue of pressure you know it's a it's the single mom who was trying to provide for a family that feels pressure it's a homeless guy trying to figure he was going to sleep that feels pressure i mean he's he's he's amazing and he's he's done talk about an image makeover um i i was joking after the after the thunder series that my opinion of him had shifted so much i wanted to revisit his hip-hop career. I mean, he's, he's an incredible, an incredible dude. And that shot was

amazing. Well, no wonder, Beto's not going viral because Dame Lillard's taking up all the auction. That's amazing. All right, time for David. Shoemaker, guess is the terrible pun headline. Are you ready, David? Oh, God. Yes. Last week, we had the Observer Magazine piece here in London. on the Frenchman who sailed across the world with his chicken. The headline was, why did the chicken cross the globe? Listener Zach Rapanchic tweeted to say that he thought the pun headline was going to be chicken of the sea. By the way,

which is pretty good. And I'm kind of mad. You and I didn't come up with that. Oh, no. Since I've been here in London, David, I've been dumping my life savings at use bookstores,

as is my want. Is this our want? Oh, yeah. And you know this because I've been texting you the cover of all these first editions right before I spend 50 pounds on them. Anyway, I've been making notes, and I've got a British book title pun for you this week. British book title pun.

Now, I could have gone with John Bounds and Denny Smith's book about a road trip in search of the Great British Seaside, which is titled Peer Review, but I didn't go with that. I could have gone with Joe Bennett's Mideast travelogue, which is titled Hello, Dubai. but instead, you know Kingsley Amos, David, the great British comic novelist. Your challenge this week, what is the strained pun title of Richard Bradford's biography of Kingsley Amos? Richard Bradford's biography of Kingsley Amos.

Now, you might think a proper literary biography would just have a stately title, Kingsley Amos. No, no, no, they went pun. Oh, man. and especially for say he was a biographer and I mean at times too I'm trying to think man I'm trying to look at my own shelf but I think the only

Amos that I have is new maps of hell and although that would make a funny you could make some funny riffs off of that I'm guessing that's not the way they went How about the Amos book most people have read? Right I'm no I'm trying I'm trying okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna go like backwards through some The old devils I mean I guess you could go

with something like the old devil I'm guessing that's not it I'm gonna let's see the anti-death league probably nothing there I'm gonna guess that we're I'm gonna guess that you're gonna say that you're steering me towards lucky gym

although although uh wait a second the other Kingslamist book I have on my shelf is the King's English which should have been the title but now I know that's not the title

of this biography that would have been good but he took that himself though so I guess that's Okay. So Lucky Jim, I don't, I don't, I can't even wrap my head around what this pun could be. Lucky, I mean, Lucky Kingsley doesn't really have a ring to it. What am I? Let's say that, let's say that Kingsley Amos has had a very fortunate life. Lucky, lucky, lucky. It is not, is it lucky him? Lucky him is the title of Richard Bradford's biography of Kingsley Amos.

Lucky him. Oh, no. Wow. What was their second choice? I don't know. I don't know. There was definitely a meeting where the editorial board is present. And they were like, are we going with Amos,

a biography or Lucky Him? And that was the road that they chose. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Jim Cunningham produces this podcast. Chris Almeida helps us with research. More lukewarm takes about the media next week. See you then, David.

See you later. Ryan. David? Oh, God. Yes. What gives? Wow, that's a great question. So I invented your space. Oh, no. Violates a Geneva convention. Wow.