19 12 / 2011
![Thirty-two years ago this week, my uncle was featured on the cover of New York. As profiled by Nik Cohn (who wrote the ‘75 New York cover story that became Saturday Night Fever), my uncle was once a 27-year-old roughneck who raced souped-up muscle cars with his friends for sport. That’s him on the cover, first row, second from the left, with his beard and lock of hair falling down over his face, which is how he’s always looked, as far as I can tell. He’s actually taller than you might suspect, and the joke around my grandmother’s house was that once he grew beyond her height, she’d often ask him, only half-jokingly, to “bend down so I can smack you.”
That’s one of his cars in the background, The Miss Mary D (named for my aunt, to whom he is still happily married after all these years). I never knew him as a greasy, surly 20-something. I only knew him as Uncle Greg, who always made sure to have plenty of Budweiser on ice for backyard family gatherings. No, I never knew him as “Hawkeye,” the fearless drag racer cheered by thousands during the sweltering New York summer nights of the late ’70s:
Each week, before he raced, Hawkeye observed a ritual preparation. All day he kept silence, steered clear of the smallest distractions. In the afternoon he drove to Freeport alone, while Don and Big Pete followed. His family name being Hansen, he liked to see himself as a resurrected Viking, and when he rode out to race, it was as if he were going forth to battle, to vanquish or be destroyed, in the style of a Norse avenger.
In the pit, he stood apart from the crush, he brooded. If strangers spoke, he averted his face, no reply. But if they approached his car, let alone presumed to touch it, he drove them off in fury, like blasphemers from sacred ground.
Among the Bombers, most of the machines looked like losers in a demolition derby. But Hawkeye’s, a ‘69 Camaro, was immaculate. Freshly painted, a gleaming black, it moved like a swan among geese: “A car must be like a woman, sleek and glossy, absolutely gorgeous,” Hawkeye said. “Or else it’s diseased to drive.”
Tonight he started twenty-fourth out of 28 in his heat. The only way he could hope to win was to smash straight through the pack, sideswiping and blindsiding, barreling into the slowpokes ahead, blocking off the heat behind, until he arrived at daylight. Which was precisely what he did. Place by place, he shot to kill, and succeeded. With two laps to go, he was up to seventh. One lap later, he’d made fourth. Finally, a hundred yards from the finish, he cut sharply in front of his last two rivals, causing them to lose control, collide: “What did I tell you?” his mother said, subsiding. “A good boy.”
I go back and read this story from time to time, for reasons that never really become clearer. Maybe it’s because I’m now older (31) than he was (27) when this story was written. Maybe it’s because it’s a trip to see members of my family being described as if they were characters in a Jonathan Lethem novel and not people I hung around with as a child. I never could imagine my grandmother cheering from the stands of a nighttime car race, spilling her unfiltered feelings to a well-known magazine writer. Cohn, odd as it feels, captured a moment in my family’s history that I’ll never see, never witness on my own terms.
Maybe I keep going back to remind myself that time can be a cruel bastard. I wish I could’ve known Hawkeye. I wish I could’ve stood in the stands and cheered my uncle on as he weaved his way around the race track, eluding opponents like an underground Junior Johnson. I wish I could’ve sat in the driver’s seat of that ‘69 Camaro just once, but by the time I knew him, the muscle cars of Uncle Greg’s youth had long been left behind. Or maybe it’s simply because, as a writer, I’m always looking for stories like this one.
Either way, I feel privileged to have such a riveting snapshot of the family that came before the one I experienced. When Cohn talks about “racers [congregating] outside to mess with their machines,” that’s the same patch of Queens sidewalk where I would build flimsy snowmen when P.S. 55 went on Christmas break. And when Cohn observed that Hawkeye’s “younger sisters practiced their flirtations, while infants splashed in the pool,” he’s talking about my mother and my aunts with their children, various cousins who arrived just before me. And when he conjures up images of how “Mrs. Hansen, majestic, presided over all,” well, that just blows my mind, since my memories of her are few and fading. She used to let me watch her LaserDisc of Cujo. (I was too young to grasp the intense gore and psychological underpinnings. All I knew was there was a cool dog in it.) I remember holidays being generally happy and festive occasions. And I remember when she was diagnosed with diabetes, had her leg amputated, lost her voice, and died six months later. I was 10 years old. The “majestic” woman that Cohn describes? He got to know her, but I didn’t.
As a teen, around the time I realized I wanted to become a writer, I would often see this exact copy of New York floating around my parents’ house. Sometimes, it sat alone on the lower shelf of the white lamp table in the basement. Sometimes, I’d find it tucked in some bureau somewhere, along with miscellaneous magazines, VHS tapes, and vinyl records. I never actually read the story until I was much older, several years after I had graduated from college. I often wonder what would have happened if I had the initiative, the instinct, to crack open that magazine and read of my family’s exploits when they were still relatively fresh in everyone’s minds. How often do we read a book or longform magazine piece and wish we could ask one question of the characters? How would having that ability, which so few rarely get, have influenced my own views on narrative nonfiction?
It’s not something I regret. But that disconnected sense of seeing what amounts to an undiscovered family scrapbook pop up on Google Books? It makes you think about who people used to be before you came along.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwgsplkIfB1qcipqno1_500.png)
Thirty-two years ago this week, my uncle was featured on the cover of New York. As profiled by Nik Cohn (who wrote the ‘75 New York cover story that became Saturday Night Fever), my uncle was once a 27-year-old roughneck who raced souped-up muscle cars with his friends for sport. That’s him on the cover, first row, second from the left, with his beard and lock of hair falling down over his face, which is how he’s always looked, as far as I can tell. He’s actually taller than you might suspect, and the joke around my grandmother’s house was that once he grew beyond her height, she’d often ask him, only half-jokingly, to “bend down so I can smack you.”
That’s one of his cars in the background, The Miss Mary D (named for my aunt, to whom he is still happily married after all these years). I never knew him as a greasy, surly 20-something. I only knew him as Uncle Greg, who always made sure to have plenty of Budweiser on ice for backyard family gatherings. No, I never knew him as “Hawkeye,” the fearless drag racer cheered by thousands during the sweltering New York summer nights of the late ’70s:
Each week, before he raced, Hawkeye observed a ritual preparation. All day he kept silence, steered clear of the smallest distractions. In the afternoon he drove to Freeport alone, while Don and Big Pete followed. His family name being Hansen, he liked to see himself as a resurrected Viking, and when he rode out to race, it was as if he were going forth to battle, to vanquish or be destroyed, in the style of a Norse avenger.
In the pit, he stood apart from the crush, he brooded. If strangers spoke, he averted his face, no reply. But if they approached his car, let alone presumed to touch it, he drove them off in fury, like blasphemers from sacred ground.
Among the Bombers, most of the machines looked like losers in a demolition derby. But Hawkeye’s, a ‘69 Camaro, was immaculate. Freshly painted, a gleaming black, it moved like a swan among geese: “A car must be like a woman, sleek and glossy, absolutely gorgeous,” Hawkeye said. “Or else it’s diseased to drive.”
Tonight he started twenty-fourth out of 28 in his heat. The only way he could hope to win was to smash straight through the pack, sideswiping and blindsiding, barreling into the slowpokes ahead, blocking off the heat behind, until he arrived at daylight. Which was precisely what he did. Place by place, he shot to kill, and succeeded. With two laps to go, he was up to seventh. One lap later, he’d made fourth. Finally, a hundred yards from the finish, he cut sharply in front of his last two rivals, causing them to lose control, collide: “What did I tell you?” his mother said, subsiding. “A good boy.”
I go back and read this story from time to time, for reasons that never really become clearer. Maybe it’s because I’m now older (31) than he was (27) when this story was written. Maybe it’s because it’s a trip to see members of my family being described as if they were characters in a Jonathan Lethem novel and not people I hung around with as a child. I never could imagine my grandmother cheering from the stands of a nighttime car race, spilling her unfiltered feelings to a well-known magazine writer. Cohn, odd as it feels, captured a moment in my family’s history that I’ll never see, never witness on my own terms.
Maybe I keep going back to remind myself that time can be a cruel bastard. I wish I could’ve known Hawkeye. I wish I could’ve stood in the stands and cheered my uncle on as he weaved his way around the race track, eluding opponents like an underground Junior Johnson. I wish I could’ve sat in the driver’s seat of that ‘69 Camaro just once, but by the time I knew him, the muscle cars of Uncle Greg’s youth had long been left behind. Or maybe it’s simply because, as a writer, I’m always looking for stories like this one.
Either way, I feel privileged to have such a riveting snapshot of the family that came before the one I experienced. When Cohn talks about “racers [congregating] outside to mess with their machines,” that’s the same patch of Queens sidewalk where I would build flimsy snowmen when P.S. 55 went on Christmas break. And when Cohn observed that Hawkeye’s “younger sisters practiced their flirtations, while infants splashed in the pool,” he’s talking about my mother and my aunts with their children, various cousins who arrived just before me. And when he conjures up images of how “Mrs. Hansen, majestic, presided over all,” well, that just blows my mind, since my memories of her are few and fading. She used to let me watch her LaserDisc of Cujo. (I was too young to grasp the intense gore and psychological underpinnings. All I knew was there was a cool dog in it.) I remember holidays being generally happy and festive occasions. And I remember when she was diagnosed with diabetes, had her leg amputated, lost her voice, and died six months later. I was 10 years old. The “majestic” woman that Cohn describes? He got to know her, but I didn’t.
As a teen, around the time I realized I wanted to become a writer, I would often see this exact copy of New York floating around my parents’ house. Sometimes, it sat alone on the lower shelf of the white lamp table in the basement. Sometimes, I’d find it tucked in some bureau somewhere, along with miscellaneous magazines, VHS tapes, and vinyl records. I never actually read the story until I was much older, several years after I had graduated from college. I often wonder what would have happened if I had the initiative, the instinct, to crack open that magazine and read of my family’s exploits when they were still relatively fresh in everyone’s minds. How often do we read a book or longform magazine piece and wish we could ask one question of the characters? How would having that ability, which so few rarely get, have influenced my own views on narrative nonfiction?
It’s not something I regret. But that disconnected sense of seeing what amounts to an undiscovered family scrapbook pop up on Google Books? It makes you think about who people used to be before you came along.
13 12 / 2011
2011 Year in Review, Sports Media Edition
• January - Realtime sports news-aggregation site Quickish launches
• February - Rob Neyer joins SB Nation after 15 years at ESPN.com
• March - Boston hosts the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
• April - FreeDarko shuts down
• May - Those Guys Have All the Fun, an oral history of ESPN, publishes
• June - Bill Simmons’ Grantland launches
• July - Sports Illustrated unveils its inaugural Twitter 100
• August - Bleacher Report hires five high-profile writers
• September - Bruce Feldman leaves ESPN for CBSSports.com
• October - Deadspin hires Tim Burke of Mocksession as video editor
• November - Tommy Craggs promoted to Deadspin site lead
• December - Donations-driven sportswriting collective The Classical goes live
Sportswriters to Watch in 2012
• Jon Bois (SB Nation)
• Andrew Bucholtz (Yahoo! Sports)
• Emma Carmichael (Deadspin)
• Ben Cohen (WSJ)
• Andy Hutchins (SB Nation)
• Matt Norlander (CBSSports.com)
• Sebastian Pruiti (Grantland)
• Andrew Sharp (SB Nation)
10 Best Sports Longreads of 2011
* The first nine are in no particular order, but the final entry was clearly the best longform sports piece I read all year.
The Last Act of the Notorious Howie Spira (Luke O’Brien, Deadspin)
Most sportswriters, especially those who specialize in longform narrative, dream of that story where they can just dive in, word count be damned, and be totally ensconced with a single subject, digging for those details that live just under the exterior. Deadspin staff writer Luke O’Brien, it’s fair to say, got all that and more when he chronicled the shady rise and humiliating downfall of Howie Spira, the Bronx gambler who got Yankees owner George Steinbrenner temporarily banned from baseball in the ’90s. Spira showed up at the Gawker offices one day hoping to gin up interest in a book-and/or-movie deal covering his life’s escapades. Instead, Deadspin readers were treated to a taut, 11,000-word meta-tale of what happens when your subject tries to become bigger than the story itself.
Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer (John Branch, The New York Times)
Despite the rise in coverage over the past few years, concussions in sports are still one of the great underreported stories of our time, despite the heroic efforts of writers like the Times’ Alan Schwarz, a recent Pulitzer Prize-finalist for his series on this growing epidemic. Schwarz left the sports beat this year to become a national education correspondent for the Times, but his colleague, John Branch, took up the topic and spent six months investigating the life and death of NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard, who died earlier this year from an accidental overdose of alcohol and painkillers. A subsequent examination by Boston University researchers revealed that his 28-year-old brain was already damaged from severe blows to the head and that he likely would have suffered from dementia had he lived long enough. An emotional, 15,000-word, three-part saga that takes readers through all phases of Boogaard’s all-too-short life, Branch’s reporting is itself worthy of a Pulitzer when the next awards are announced in April.
Why You Should Care About Cricket (Wright Thompson, ESPN.com)
I’m a sucker for oversimplistic headlines, but Thompson delivers the goods here with his epic tale of Sachin Tendulkar, who is to Indian cricket what Michael Jordan was to NBA fans. By using Tendulkar’s star as a window into the fanatical cricket fandom of the world’s second-most populous nation, Thompson also gives us a glimpse of, universally speaking, what it means to be a fan of any sport and the overarching notion of hero worship. Mostly, though, it’s about the unending pressure heaped a single man. Tendulkar “has carried the burden of a billion people for more than 20 years,” as Thompson describes it. Who of us could handle that life? Would we even want it, if given the choice?
Corruption, Murder, and the Beautiful Game (Brian Phillips, Grantland)
There is perhaps no finer soccer writer on the planet than Brian Phillips, proprietor of the excellent Run of Play site and national correspondent for Grantland. While the historical corruption of FIFA has been well-documented, Phillips sheds a fresh perspective here on the decades-long laundry list of bribes, under-the-table handshakes, and vehement denials that have become commonplace in the sport’s hierarchy. But it’s Phillips’ exhaustive research and turns of phrase that’ll leave you with chills, knowing just how precarious the upper echelons of soccer teeter on a daily basis, and that on any day the top could come crashing down on us all.
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose (Robert Mays, Grantland)
In a cultural sense, the biggest sports story of 2011 took place on a field not within some downtown stadium but at a fictional high school inside our televisions. The ending of Friday Night Lights, after five up-and-down seasons, signified the most bittersweet of celebrations. Never appreciated by the masses while it was on the air, FNL became beloved by its loyal fan base as much for its depictions of small-town Americana as its athletic sequences. Months of interviews went into Rob Mays’ comprehensive oral history for Grantland, and the result is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
A Day With Mike Leach (Spencer Hall, SB Nation)
“I had joked about it. Oh, I’ll go fishing with Mike Leach. The pirate on the high seas ha ha ha.” Of course, much to the benefit of readers, the joke was on Spencer Hall, who spent eight hours sailing through Key West with the year’s most controversial college football coach. Hall’s timeline-centric structure is perfectly suited to conveying the wackiness and unexpected homeliness of Leach, who is as much an Xs-and-Os genius as he is an OCD-driven Luddite. Hall, by the end of his high-seas adventure, writes that he never expected Leach to be so “normal,” leaving us all to consider our own relative definition of the word.
The Confessions of a Former Adolescent Puck Tease (Katie Baker, Deadspin)
Before she left her job at Goldman Sachs and headed west for San Francisco, Katie Baker was Deadspin’s longform specialist and resident hockey nut. She deftly combined these two talents in recounting how she spent her formative years bouncing around Internet message boards under an assumed persona, talking puck with anyone she could. Effortlessly, Baker details her own experiences interacting with shady online types and hockey aficionados alike, until one day the experiment veers into unknown waters. Part confessional, part mystery, Baker’s cautionary tale for the Internet Era resonates with anyone who’s ever found themselves thinking they’ve clicked on one hyperlink too many.
The History and Mystery of the High Five (Jon Mooallem, ESPN the Magazine)
Sometimes, the best stories are born with the simplest of questions: Who invented the high five? Jon Mooallem, a San Francisco-based freelance writer who regularly contributes to The New York Times Magazine and the live-action Pop-Up Magazine, delves deep into the kind of sports history we all too often take for granted. The brilliance of Mooallem lies in his ability to make you think you know where the story is headed — and then hang an abrupt U-turn when you’re not looking.
The Wheels of Life (Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated)
There’s a reason why no one writer has won more National Magazine Awards than Gary Smith, the undisputed dean of longform sportswriters. No matter the subject, he gets you to care about what you’re reading. You can’t help it, so you don’t fight it. He sucks you in, makes you feel like you’re there onsite with him and his notepad. His piece on Dick Hoyt, a 70-year-old man who has completed more than 1,000 races with his wheelchair-bound son over a 33-year span, is but another feather in the sportswriting world’s most overstuffed cap.
But my favorite sports longread of 2011 was …
The Shame of College Sports (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic)
This ambitious, 14,400-word Atlantic cover story by civil rights historian Taylor Branch digs deep and works hard to peel back the stink that sullies much of modern collegiate athletics. Section by section, Branch methodically exposes how college athletes are being exploited by universities and organizational executives, who collectively pocket billions of dollars a year while the student-athletes themselves get bupkis. At times so shocking as to be laughable, Branch conducts a master class with his narrative, exposing the hypocrisy behind the NCAA while lobbying for sensible (and feasible) reform.
12 12 / 2011
Skip Bayless’ autotuned tribute to Tim Tebow - “All He Does Is Win” (by ESPN1stTake)
Words fail me.
02 12 / 2011
Every year for the past nine years, a growing gathering of hardy souls has been meeting at a park outside of tiny Emerson, Iowa, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Their goal: play some goddamn football. That goal quickly deteriorates into just drinking as many Pabst Blue Ribbons as humanly possible.
Brilliant.
02 12 / 2011
Our exclusive report tonight: Researchers have uncovered astounding new evidence that some of the world’s least influential people actually help sell the most expensive crap! More at 11.
30 11 / 2011
What we talk about when we talk about …
How do talk about 9/11, ten years later? What stories do we tell? What ideas grab us?
It lays bare a philosophical choice in District government that’s played out over the course of three decades: Whether city contracts should go to the lowest bidder, or whether companies that are small, local, or “disadvantaged” should get a preference, even if their bids are substantially higher.
ACORN is not a nebulous puppetmaster causing all of your woes.
It seems likely that no film since Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” has gotten so many moviegoers talking about the history of race and racism in America as has this summer’s hit “The Help.”
Let’s set aside the notion that the links that people post on Twitter and Facebook have to come from somewhere, and in many cases those links came via a person who uses an RSS reader. I don’t have any idea how to quantify that, and I don’t know what its importance is.
Once conservative and inflexible institutions, museums today are urban landmarks, playgrounds for bold architectural games.
“The only thing that makes me sad about veal is when it’s overcooked,” I said. I was trying hard to be funny.
Dan chuckled, though I didn’t believe him. “This isn’t veal you’re grilling,” he said. “Tell me it isn’t.”
In short, we are on the front lines of this conflict and have direct hands on experience with it.
Tino Sehgal, a London-born artist now working in Berlin, creates work that is tempting to call performance art. But Sehgal doesn’t perform; he organizes situations. Instead of working with objects, he uses people, their voices, their bodies, their movements, and their interactions with each other to create social experiences set in museums.
Texas Rangers third baseman Michael Young
Young is a proxy. He’s a Rorschach test. While no one thinks he isn’t a good player, he does things well that a certain sort of person values more highly than another sort of person.
The general question of culture seems to lurk behind many contemporary confusions over diet; such anxieties are particularly pressing, moreover, in a country that has long identified its culture by the very lack of one and that has often been justifiably ambivalent about this condition.
Climate change doesn’t play well politically these days, so many politicians have taken to pushing clean energy policies without pointing out one of the strongest reasons to pursue them: the need to decrease carbon emissions.
Students cluster into majors like English and Psychology voluntarily, choosing them over engineering or computer science. They do that despite a well-orchestrated campaign telling all and sundry that tech is where the jobs are.
Not unlike its linguistic predecessor “reality television,” “smart phone” works to undermine the very definition of both its words by creating an oxymoron which, with widespread usage and acceptance, models reality after itself by denuding the nature of the concept “smart” and exponentially increasing the power of the idea “phone.”
The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians and sociologists for nearly as long.
In the pre-2001 period, it was used most often by theologians affiliated with postmetaphysical or postliberal theology or with Radical Orthodoxy. As such, it was often associated with other “posts,” especially postmodernism.
“Hipster,” as it is commonly used today, is a slur, a vague, derisive catchall for a cool-kid monoculture that fetishizes novelty but makes nothing new, that drifts through life in a nihilistic haze of irony, cannibalizing the culture, high and low, only to regurgitate its mediocrity.
