Thursday, October 31, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt four)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Gorgeous George lived hard, both in and out of the ring. He was an alcoholic and a womanizer, purportedly a connoisseur of strippers and prostitutes and the father of illegitimate children the country over. By the time of the Watson match, George was already in his forties. When he was forced to retire a few years later—his liver pummeled by his drinking—he was a haggard shell of his old self, and even his blond curls couldn’t hide that fact.

Less than two years after he retired back to his California farm, he died of a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. It’s probably true that Americans didn’t mourn his loss like they would mourn Lucille Ball. The fad of wrestling on national television had passed for the time being, and George himself had been removed from the wrestling spotlight by a younger generation of stars largely built in his image. He built the stage; he wrote the role; he made the character a star. And America changed the channel, and Gorgeous George was gone.



Wednesday, October 30, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt three)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

The transition from the old school to the modern model was not a steady evolution in style, as one might suspect. It was an overnight paradigm shift ushered in by an overnight sensation by the name of Gorgeous George. That he was born George Wagner in Butte, Nebraska, hardly matters, and neither does his upbringing in Arizona and Iowa and Texas, and frankly, neither do the first few semisuccessful years of his career. Before Wagner became “Gorgeous,” he was someone else entirely: He was just another clean-cut nobody. The one thing that stands out at all is his training. He learned not at the knee of Farmer Burns or some other reputable trainer but at Houston’s Sylvan Beach Park. At the time when Gotch was taking the sport to new heights of cultural significance and athletic legitimacy, distancing the enterprise from its sideshow roots, George Wagner was being broken into the field by carnies.

Stories of the genesis of Gorgeous George vary, but it’s the fact of the genesis that matters. When Wagner grew out his hair into Pollyanna-ish curls, bleached blond and held up with bobby pins; when he started coming to the ring in sequined robes with a purple spotlight trailing him, “Pomp and Circumstance” blaring on the loudspeakers; when his valet (Jefferies and Woodrow were two) sprayed perfume in the ring to accompany his arrival; when he posed in the ring, addressing the booing crowd with his arrogance, infuriating them by the simple (if rather excessive) fact of his existence—that is precisely when wrestling entered its adolescence.



Tuesday, October 29, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt two)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

By the early ‘50s, Thursday and Saturday night pro wrestling were two of the top shows on DuMont and a certified national phenomenon. The stars of DuMont—guys like despicable pretty boy Gorgeous George, northeasterner Antonino “Argentina” Rocca, Canadian big man Don Leo Jonathan, Italian superstar Bruno Sammartino, reviled showboat Freddie Blassie, African American trailblazers Bobo Brazil and Sweet Daddy Siki, and fighting ballerino Ricky Starr—were among the biggest sports stars in the nation. Kohler signed many of his wrestlers to exclusive contracts—a first in the sport—because his local guys were becoming more famous than many of the NWA’s entrenched headliners and Kohler wanted to keep a leash on them. He sent them to wrestle in other NWA regions and took a cut of everything they earned. Pro wrestling was more popular than ever, but the new fans wanted to see the TV stars. For the longtime fans, who had for years been taught to accept the primacy of their local product, this new national phenomenon must have been a rude awakening.



Monday, October 28, 2013

Eric Unverzagt, the fourth interview in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



I have been talking, and will be talking, with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over head injuries.

today we feature our interview with former Seattle Seahawks (by way of Wisconsin) linebacker Eric Unverzagt.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt one)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

That period of wrestling in the 1920s—the higher-profile championship-level matches in particular—had its share of fixed bouts, sure, but they were in the service of a more fascinating reality. Mondt was hired by Sandow to be Lewis’s sparring partner and enforcer; he would take on opponents before they got in the ring with Lewis to make sure they were “worthy” foes, but in reality, Mondt—sometimes regarded as a better pure grappler than Lewis—would soften them up for his colleague. Perhaps it was the fatigue from this role as the heavy lifter in the outfit that led to him rethinking the whole thing, or maybe he was purely a futurist, which is how he’s usually painted. Regardless, Mondt could see what nobody else could, that the sports fans weren’t just tired of wrestling—they were oblivious to it. They couldn’t appreciate the minute maneuvers that made up a marathon heavyweight match. So Mondt conceived of a new style of wrestling that would combine classical Greco-Roman and freestyle catch wrestling with boxing and the sort of brawling that was popular on lumberyard campsites to birth a new hybrid that was wholly entertaining and, as such, the direct antecedent of what we know today as professional wrestling. Mondt created submission holds—some seemingly from thin air, many of which are still used today—that were meant to project out to an audience member thirty rows back. Moves, in other words, that were meant as much to impress onlookers as inflict agony on opponents. He also conceived of the idea of a touring show, in which a stable of wrestlers would travel together from town to town, mixing and matching opponents or just repeating matches, night after night. This would allow the promoters full control over the card and cut out the need for local fighters to be hired and wages negotiated at every venue. It would allow managers to set prices more definitively. And it would allow wrestlers to spar with comfortable partners, in bouts with predictable endings.

An implicit part of this new method was the fixed match. In order to appeal to the fans’ sense of drama and spectacle, the matches had to build powerfully to the endings, and the endings had to be fulfilling.



Sunday, October 27, 2013

from Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever

from To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe:

When I came into the house, my mother was listening to the postgame show on the radio. "Well, some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue," Tom Brennan, the Vermont coach, was saying. "Nobody has done that to us in two years."

"That's the kind of game I like," my mother said. "Not too close."

We sat into the night, watching an old detective drama on TV. "You don't see Perry Mason much anymore," she said.

"That could be because he's dead," I said.

She shot me a look that may have said, "Welcome home." Then again, it may not have said that.

I was tired. It felt good to lean back on the couch in my mother's house, my childhood home, the lulling voice of the dead Raymond Burr droning on about some wicked socialite with a talent for murder. My mother and I were going to spend a season watching basketball together. How many mothers and sons got to do that?



the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt sixteen)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

Training camps start in late July and I’m not on a team. But I have no other plan. I will train and I will wait. Someone will call. Meanwhile, the therapy sessions with Derek are unearthing more misgivings that I have with the NFL. I rail against what I now see as years of mishandled injuries, against the emptiness of fornicating with the jersey chasers, against my own inability to turn from the game, against my monetary motivations for still wanting to play it, against the media’s petty ownership of the players, and against the entire bastardized commercialization of what to me is the most beautiful game on earth. And here is the crux of it: I still believe in the beauty of the game. This above all else is true. But to be a fly on the wall, or to be Derek, is to be struck in the face with how delusional a man scorned by his lover can be. Here I am telling him all the reasons why I hate her, in between sets of an exercise specifically designed to lead me back into her arms. I am sick.



Saturday, October 26, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt fifteen)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

We make a right and pull through devil’s alley: the long, narrow road that leads to the bowels of the stadium. The zombies swarm us like, well, zombies. The music pulses through my headphones: background noise to a delightfully rowdy scene. The line for the port-o-potties usually indicates the drunkenness of the fans. In Oakland the lines are the longest: a piss-taught collection of venomous derelicts snaking through the asphalt. A night game means five extra hours of drinking. The parking lot is a pit of vipers.

Because of the scene in Oakland, my mother stays at home and watches the game on television, even though it’s less than an hour’s drive from our house. The Black Hole is no place for the mother of the enemy. Raider Mamas are treated like queens. Bronco Mamas: prima nocte. But I still had to get more than thirty tickets for friends and family. People assume that we get free tickets to the games but we don’t. We get two complimentary tickets for home games; the rest we pay for. For away games we pay for all of them. Taking hits on game tickets is part of the gig. I get ticket requests for every game I play in, and it’s rarely accompanied with an offer for reimbursement. People assume. People always assume. The football player obliges and goes broke.



Friday, October 25, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt fourteen)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

The offensive linemen are the most devout Christians on the team. They attend Mass on game day and during the week. They attack their religious study as though it might offset the brutality with which they attack their jobs. Jesus levels them out. They’re a thoughtful bunch: my favorite group with whom to break bread.



Thursday, October 24, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt thirteen)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

The Bills kick off to start the second half. Wide receiver Domenik Hixon receives it and pushes up the field behind the wedge of offensive linemen holding hands and leading the charge. The wedge breaks down on the right side and Domenik bounces the kick outside the wedge, meeting Bills tight end Kevin Everett in a routine-looking football hit. But the result is not routine. Everett collapses to the ground and does not move. The crowd falls silent. Tony and I stand next to each other on the sideline.

--He looks dead.

We don’t know how right we almost are. Everett has sustained a fracture and dislocation of his cervical spine. We’ll later find out that his life was saved by fast thinking and perfectly executed medical treatment, which stabilized his spine and whisked him off to the hospital so we could finish our football game in peace, without the realities of what we were risking getting in the way. The show must go on.



Wednesday, October 23, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt twelve)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

Football has been subverted into a made-for-television event. Everything is so clear. Except it’s not. The third dimension is what makes it real, violent, and dangerous. Consuming the product through a television screen, at a safe distance, dehumanizes the athlete and makes his pain unreal. The more you watch it, the less real it becomes, until the players are nothing more than pixelated video game characters to be bartered and traded.



Tuesday, October 22, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt eleven)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

We always have the same rotation of flight attendants. They are the queen bees of the United flight attendant hive. And on this flight they don’t have to go through any of the standard preflight safety instruction mumbo-jumbo. Everyone knows God loves the NFL too much to crash one of its planes. They also don’t have to enforce the FAA’s draconian passenger guidelines: seat back up, seat belt on, electronics off, bags under seats, no congregating in the galleys, no yelling obscenities or throwing grapes or looking at nudie magazines.

I say hello to the ladies on the way in and find my seat, labeled with a sticker with my name on it. The plane is big and spacious. Coaches up front in the luxury seats. Operational staff, media, marketing, equipment guys, trainers, etc., are crammed in next to each other in the middle cabin. We are in the back. I stretch out and listen to some music and pretend to read a book.

After a four-hour flight, the airplane lands and pulls up next to a fleet of buses. I descend the stairs in slow motion. I look magnificent. Somebody look at me! But there is no one to welcome us. We are shuttled, bused, and flown to the doorstep of every destination, escorted in through back doors under cover of police escorts and velvet ropes.



Monday, October 21, 2013

Liffort Hobley, the third interview in our Would You Do It Again? series



I have been talking, and will be talking, with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over head injuries.

today we feature our interview with former Miami Dolphins defensive back (by way of LSU) Liffort Hobley.

once again, my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt ten)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

As the day unfolds, I find out what happened. After the game, while some of us were at a bar called Spill, another large group of teammates and friends and family were a few miles away at a club called the Shelter. There was a fight in the street after the club let out and security broke it up. Some of our group jumped into a Town Car, but most of them got into a white Hummer limo. The guys they were fighting ran off and got into a white Ford Bronco.

A few blocks from the club, the white Bronco pulled alongside the white Hummer limo. The driver reached across his passenger and opened fire on the Hummer with a .40-caliber handgun. The limo was full and the music was loud so no one heard the shots.

D-Will was sitting next to Javon Walker, who was keeping track of D-Will’s chain through the scuffle. Javon was in the middle of a sentence when D-Will slumped over into his lap. Javon was confused, laughing midsentence and trying to pull D-Will back up. Then the windows shattered and everyone heard the shots and dropped to the floor. The limo pulled off the road. The Bronco sped off. Two other people were hit, neither of them badly.

But D-Will was hit in the jugular. Javon pulled him outside of the limo and tried to resuscitate him but the wound was too much. He bled to death in seconds. Darrent Williams died on New Year’s morning of 2007 in the Denver snow, ten hours after playing in an NFL football game.



Sunday, October 20, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt nine)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

Jay’s ball came nose down with an aggressive spin. Jake’s was nose up and a little softer. Unless you catch it clean with your fingertips, the ball’s movement will determine its ricochet, which in turn determines how a receiver positions his body for a ball that’s coming in hot. Knowing where the ball will come down before the defender knows where it will come down is 90 percent of the battle as a receiver. If I react first to the ball in flight, meaning, if I understand the ball’s flight better than you, then I will be there sooner, and will create a wall between you and the ball with my body. Now all I have to do is catch it. Nose-down ball means it is diving and I need to get my hands underneath it. Nose-up means it’s rising and I need to get my hands on top of it.

But we understood the difference in their balls from practice. The main adjustments were game-day stylistics. How does he feel? What does he like to do? What does he see when he scrambles? What parts of the field does he like to exploit? What do his looks mean? What routes does he prefer? How does he communicate? This stuff comes along slowly.

The next week we go to San Diego and lose to an especially game Chargers team. We are powerless to stop LaDainian Tomlinson’s mojo. He scores three touchdowns in the game, which gives him twenty-nine for the season: an NFL record. The crowd chants “M.V.P.! M.V.P.!” He’ll go on to play eleven seasons in the NFL, quite a feat for a superstar running back. Running backs have very short careers. The better they are, the more they’re used, the faster they fall apart. The human body can’t absorb that punishment for very long. A thirty-year-old running back is a rare sight in the NFL. LaDainian will play into his thirties and walk away before someone tells him he has to.



Saturday, October 19, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt eight)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

The shot gets me back on the field but I’m a shadow of my former self. It’s hard to watch myself on film. I’m slower than everyone else. My “mild hamstring strain” won’t heal. Ice here, heat there, stretch here, rub there, inject here, pills there: nothing is helping. NFL athletes are so fast and explosive, that if you’re not at your best, you are vulnerable on the field. It’s a dangerous place to be a gimp. Desperate to get healthy, I spend more and more time at an off-site chiropractor’s office. Rod introduced me to Dr. Nelson Vetanze a few years prior, and I’ve been going to him for periodic adjustments. He’s worked with the Broncos in the past but had a falling-out with Greek over treatment philosophies. Now Nelson sees some of us in his private practice. Greek knows we see him but as long as we don’t talk about it, it’s not a problem. Nelson has a more holistic approach than the assembly-line philosophy used in the NFL. When I tell Nelson what they are telling me at work, he can’t believe it. He knows it’s not a “mild hamstring strain” but there’s nothing any of us can do about it, Greek included. The only thing that would help isn’t an option: rest.

But I learn to deal with the pain, the instability, the imbalance; just like every other NFL player does. My story is not unique. Every other football-playing man deals with the same cycle of injury and rehab, separated by periods of relative health. Some bodies are better suited for the demands of the game than others. They stay healthy longer, play more, smash skulls more, die younger. I should see my inability to stay healthy as a blessing in the long run, because it’s sparing my brain the extra punishment. The fact is, no one will remember any NFL game I’ll ever play in but me.



Friday, October 18, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt seven)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

It is a difference in schools of thought. One school, Blade’s school, trusts the instincts of the pro football player, because he trusted his own when he played. He allows more improvisation. He supplies the general parameters and steps back. The nuance of the game’s technique is decided by the player’s athletic instinct.

The other school, the one more common in the NFL, is the more rigid, systematic assembly line of angularly identical patterns. It believes that every football play has one right answer. If you choose the question you get to choose the answer. It is a tightly structured philosophy and has evolved steadily over the years. Blade and Kube both played in the NFL, but they had very different experiences. Blade was a wide receiver and played in every game. Kube was a career backup quarterback who knew the system inside and out but rarely got to play. With all of that studying and no playing, the game becomes conceptual, and as a coach, Kube trusts the concepts over the instinct of the player, who comes and goes. But Kube skillfully toes the line between player-speak and coach-speak, and knows how to communicate in terms we understand. And he serves as the prefect buffer between the rigid offensive system and our often unsystematic instincts as players.



Thursday, October 17, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt six)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

General Manager Ted Sundquist takes the podium first and introduces his scouting department. We don’t see these guys often. And they don’t see anything but football. They’re overweight and underf*cked. Sometimes they stand around and watch practice but mostly they are regional scouts scattered around the country, in charge of gathering information on college prospects. I sit in my chair and glare at one of the scouts named Bobby, hoping he’ll notice me noticing him. His father is also a scout. I didn’t know who Bobby was until I got back from Europe. My old Menlo coach Dave Muir is coaching at Idaho State now, and Bobby came to campus to scout one of their players for the upcoming draft. When Dave asked Bobby about me, Bobby chuckled and said I wasn’t worth a sh*t: the number five receiver at best, probably won’t make the team. Dave is feisty and very loyal. He told Bobby to go f*ck himself. I knew Bobby knew I knew. I tried to get him to look in my eyes but he wouldn’t. I always find it funny when a scout says a professional athlete is a piece of sh*t. By his own standards, he must be a Mount Kilimanjaro-size pile of sh*t.



Wednesday, October 16, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt five)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

I love Mayfield’s enthusiasm. And I promise myself I will adopt his approach: Stay positive. Stay motivated. Every day has a purpose. But it’s easy to start feeling sorry for myself in Birmingham. We stay at a Shoney’s Inn in a nondescript commercial neighborhood south of the city, across from a U.S. Treasury office, a Dollar General, a handful of other depressing hotels, and an animal hospital. Unlike most Shoney’s this one doesn’t have a restaurant attached. Instead we have a shuttle service to take us to our meals. Breakfast and lunch we eat in the hospital cafeteria.

Years later, when I’ll close my eyes and picture this city, I’ll see an overweight woman walking slowly across a street as I sit in the passenger seat of the Shoney’s Inn shuttle and wait. At the wheel is Catman. In the back of the shuttle are seven more hungry, injured football players. It’s dinnertime and Catman is our ride. The most energetic man in all of Alabama. Catman is one of three Shoney’s Inn shuttle drivers. He’s a military veteran, maybe, in his forties or fifties, or sixties, with fading tattoos on his forearms and long gray hair slicked back. He weighs 120 pounds and has three prominent teeth, all on the bottom row, all abnormally long and knifing up toward his nose. He got his name because he meows like a cat. He brings his hands to his mouth and twirls his hips while staring down the object of his feline affection. Catman is my support system in Alabama. When things get weird, he’ll be there to let me know: That ain’t weird, this is weird.



Tuesday, October 15, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt four)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

On Tuesday, our first day off of the regular season, I buy a new Denali. It’s a foolish purchase but I can’t help myself. I could picture it with my eyes closed as soon as I signed my contract. I love the Denali’s angles, the chrome grill. I love the idea that I can buy a giant luxurious machine with only my football skills.

Still, practice squad players have less security than anyone on the team. They are shuffled around constantly. If someone on the active roster gets hurt, the scrambling and rearranging often squirts a practice squad guy onto the streets. But I had no vehicle, not even my green Civic, and when I looked around at the players’ parking lot, I glimpsed the spoils, at minimum, that my talent might afford me. No point in saving every penny. Might as well try to keep up with the Joneses, just this once. And the Denali does make me feel like I have accomplished something. It gives me a tangible reminder of my hard work. Every morning when I jump onto the soft leather seat and turn over that sweet engine, I tell myself that I better have a great day at practice or I won’t be making the payments. I’ll be “workin’ a nine-to-five with a thirty minute,” just like our special teams coach Ronnie Bradford says will happen to us if we keep f*cking up the plays.



Monday, October 14, 2013

#2 in a series: Would You Do It Again?



I have been talking, and will be talking, with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over head injuries.

we started with former New Orleans Saint defensive lineman Derland Moore and now we speak with former defensive lineman Chidi Ahanotu, who spent the vast majority of his professional career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

once again, my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to Mr. Moore, Mr. Ahanotu and all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt three)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

Not only did last night’s number 14 disappear like a ghost in the night, but the guy who wore it before him was a dirty word in Denver: Brian Griese. Griese took over for John Elway and Elway won two Super Bowls, dropped the mic at the fifty-yard line, and galloped into the sunset on a white horse. His residue still shines on all things Denver. His name is everywhere: in the newspapers, on the backs of children, on the lips of every talk radio personality in the area, and, of course, on car dealerships. In the three years since he retired, the Broncos have struggled to find his replacement. How do you replace a legend? You don’t. But in the NFL, you f*cking better! Griese didn’t measure up so it was off with his head. Before it stopped rolling, Coach Shanahan signed highly esteemed free agent Jake Plummer, who arrived from Arizona in the off-season My neophytic opinion after day one is that the locker room had obviously accepted him. Plummer’s the guy, part of the crew: no seams or cracks. I want to be a part of it, too.



Sunday, October 13, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt two)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

I hang up and drive. My Bronco life, like a stack of images being shuffled, flashes in front of my windshield. I always knew this moment would come but there was no way to prepare for it. In the NFL, you are alive until you are dead. There is no in between, and no way to put yourself on the other side mentally. You fight every day to keep your job by convincing yourself that you belong. And every day you return to work and see your name still posted above your locker is proof that you deserve that locker. Then one day, fate sneaks up behind you, taps you on the shoulder, and breaks your nose—or blows out your knee.

Then it’s over.

When I get back to my parents’ house, my mom tells me there is a message for me on the machine.



Saturday, October 12, 2013

the last book I ever read (Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up, excerpt one)

from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson:

I stand on the sidelines as Jay Cutler finishes the drive with his third touchdown pass of the quarter. It goes to Brandon Marshall. After the score B-Marsh reaches for something in his pants but Brandon Stokely, another star receiver, stops him, fearing a flag for an unlicensed prop. The Browns receive the kickoff, can’t score, and we win. A much-needed win; we had dropped the previous three. The locker room afterward is raucous with reenactments of the end zone shenanigans. B-Marsh has been reaching for a homemade black and white unity glove he had tucked into his game pants, and now, in the safety of the locker room, Stokely’s standing on a bench doing his best Tommy Smith impression from the 1968 Olympics. It is two days after Barack Obama’s election and B-Marsh wanted to honor the moment. His president is black and he is proud. And like many proud black men who came before him, he got bear-hugged by whitey. Great gesture, bad timing. They call it the No Fun League for a reason.

On the airplane ride back to Denver I sit completely still and sip a cocktail. We used to have beers on the flights but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell banned them. Legislate all you want, demand finds its supply. And booze is easier to smuggle past a tarmac TSA screening than a thirty-pack.



Friday, October 11, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt fourteen)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

From the outside, the Guggenheim Museum looks like a cylinder, or an inverted ziggurat once one notices the outward slant to the top. A series of stacked volumes grow wider as they rise to a glass dome; these layers are separated by a continuous glass band meant to bring daylight to the spiral ramp inside. A ledge along the ramp was to be used like an easel for the display of paintings that were to received natural light from the encircling glass. A round service core that Wright called the “monitor” intersects the larger circle of the ramp on one side. He wanted the visitor to take the elevator up to the top and “drift down” the spiral to the open space on the ground. From there, the full ramp is visible, its drama culminating in the skylit done. The building makes no bow to the neighboring apartment houses. Its freestanding sculpture establishes a powerful presence on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park, but the rounded contours suggest the “organic” nature of the park across the street. A block-long horizontal base on which the slightly receding cylinder appears to rest anchors its strong forms and establishes a relationship to the street and the site, at a mediating scale.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt thirteen)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

Comic relief was provided by Ayn Rand, a writer who had emigrated from the Soviet Union and had plans to write a novel about an architect, inspired by articles she had read by and about Wright. The book she subsequently published, The Fountainhead, was a wildly successful best seller and then a movie starring Gary Cooper; the architect-hero, Howard Roark, commonly believed to be modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright, has made generations of young women swoon. Roark is portrayed as a brilliantly creative, fiery genius, embattled by the establishment, who defiantly blows up his consummate work of art, a skyscraper, rather than see his talent and integrity compromised. Wright never felt any real affinity with the fictional Roark and at first rejected any identification with the character—except for the talent and integrity part. He said that Rand failed to understand him and that she never got it right. When asked if he was the model for Roark, he replied, “I deny the paternity and refuse to marry the mother.” Only after the book and its hero became sensationally popular did he allow that perhaps he could identify with the impossibly arrogant and idealistic Roark. As Meryle Secrest perceived, Rand was pretty far off the mark—Wright would never have blown up one of his own buildings.



Thursday, October 10, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt twelve)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The Autobiography was published in 1932, in the context of a world that was moving on to other intellectual and artistic fashions. It was not that Wright’s genius was unrecognized, or that his work lacked respect, but that his achievements were considered part of the past. He was sixty-five, an age at which most men retired. Thirty years of producing innovative and celebrated buildings could be considered a full and finished career. He had demonstrated an endless capacity for change and development, but no one expected him to continue. A younger generation saw him as an eccentric, irascible old man whose “time had come and gone.” In 1932, he was without work or prospects, but that was true for most for the profession. He had no money—no novelty for him—but neither did anyone else. He was expert at avoiding those to whom he owed substantial sums, convinced that they, not he, were at fault in their computations or untimely demands. He always believed that money would be found or come his way, and in the meantime he begged and bluffed, with insolence and charm, to maintain himself as he saw fit.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt eleven)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The affair began almost immediately. Following an apparent night of ecstasy in the Chicago house, Miriam wrote him a letter of postcoital ardor elevated to dramatic classical and literary heights, in which she addressed him as “Lord of my Waking Dreams.” Citing Alcibiades and Agathon, she offered to crown him with violets and bind his hair with fillets of gold. She declared herself enslaved. “I kiss your feet,” she wrote. “I am your prisoner.” She would make his life a living hell.



Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Would You Do It Again?



today marks the first installment of a new interview series for Deadspin.

I have been talking, and will be talking, with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over head injuries. we begin with Derland Moore who played 170 of his 171 NFL games on the defensive line for the New Orleans Saints.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to Mr. Moore and all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt ten)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

In the morning, Wright’s workmen made plain wooden boxes for the dead, and Edwin Cheney loaded one small box with the remains of his two children into a car for the return trip to Chicago. Mamah’s body remained with Wright. The rest is best told in his own words, as he recorded the events in the Autobiography. “Black despair preceded a primitive burial in the ground of the family chapel. Men from Taliesin dug the grave deep. . . . I cut her garden down and with the flowers filled the strong plain box of fresh white pine to overflowing. My boy John, coming to my side now, helped lift the body and we let it down to rest among the flowers that had grown and bloomed for her. The plain box lid was pressed down and fastened home. Then the plain, strong box was lifted on the shoulders of my workmen as they placed it on our little spring-wagon, filled, too with flowers . . . we made the whole a mass of flowers. It helped a little.”



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt nine)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

Most of the windows and doors of the dining room had been locked and, as the men tried to escape, their clothes and bodies ablaze, each was brutally bludgeoned by Carleton, standing behind the door. The scene found by the returning men was bloody carnage. The main part of Taliesin was a smoking ruin. A makeshift morgue was set up in a house nearby that Wright had built for his sister Jane and her husband, Andrew Porter, where the wounded were also carried. The moans of those who had not died instantly could be heard throughout the night. Wright also remembered hearing a whip-poor-will, a sound that would always evoke a terrible sadness. The search for Carleton, begun immediately, yielded nothing; he was found the next day hiding in the fire pit of the cold furnace. He had drunk acid, which had not killed him; taken to jail, unable to eat or speak, he died a month later.



Tuesday, October 8, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt eight)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

In truth, the learning experience was largely his. And while it is generally known that a writer transforms experience into art, it is less well understood that an architect process images in much the same way. Instead of reinventing the fabric of life as narrative, like the novelist, the architect is preoccupied with the look and nature of things in the physical world and how they translate into built form. All that Wright learned would be incorporated into the creative process, moving the art of building forward, advancing and changing the way architecture is experienced as a defining factor of life and place. This transformation is the indisputable basis of his genius, a word he never hesitated to apply to himself, usually preceded by the word “misunderstood.”



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt seven)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

Infidelity is classic midlife therapy, and Wright undoubtedly found solace and pleasure in the attention and affection of an attractive and cultivated woman. The affair had apparently started while he was working on the Cheney house, as his marriage was disintegrating. Mamah Cheney was a college graduate who had been a librarian before her marriage; she spoke French and German, and was an admirer of the Swedish feminist Ellen Key, whose books has circulated among the Chicago intelligentsia. Catherine had become totally immersed in her children and the difficulties of running that ambitious and impecunious establishment. The pretty girl Wright married just out of high school, who bore him so many children that the joke ran that he was unable to identify them when asked to do so quickly, had neither the time nor the desire to keep up with his rapidly broadening world. She had joined literary groups and social causes as part of their joint community role, but it seems that she did not share his interested at the same level of knowledge and intensity. In later years, she became a social worker; she never sought a profession in the arts. There were conflicts of priorities, and bitter disagreements. Inevitably, the two withdrew into their own hostile worlds. Wright and Mamah Cheney had done little to hide their affair. Both Catherine and Edwin Cheney knew, and it was common gossip even before their departure made it tabloid news.



Monday, October 7, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt six)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The collegial arrangement of marital and professional togetherness that he had conceived as a utopian way of life had become a pressure cooker of domestic and professional responsibilities. A staff had to be fed and paid. With strong wills and minds of their own, the children were constantly underfoot. Catherine started a kindergarten on Froebel’s principles, adding more children to the chaos. Creditors came in person and by post. Patience and tempers wore thin, with frequent quarrels and a growing estrangement between husband and wife. The children—Lloyd, in particular—took their mother’s side, much as the young Frank had done at the time of his parents’ divorce. Wright became acutely aware of his lack of paternal instincts; he knew he was not a good family man. He never fancied himself in the role of father; he confessed in his memoirs that he hated the sound of “pa-pa.” They were all so young, he said later; he felt as if they were children together. He was more like a delightful and playful uncle, when he had the time. After extensive mea culpas of this sort, he managed to come out on top of his guilt or regret. Work was his life, his buildings were his children, he confessed in the Autobiography, although it was less confession than something he simply accepted as fact. “The architect absorbed the father,” he concluded, which, in his mind, seemed justification enough.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt five)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

Given the resources, confidence, and liberty provided by moneyed clients, Wright was able to dictate every detail, inside and out, even designing clothes for the women to wear; an elegant tea gown seemed to be the preferred garment. Photographs show suitably attired clients, or clients’ wives, in their Wright-designed and –furnished homes, posed next to masses of leaves and Japanese prints hung by, and probably bought from, Wright. Social position was still equated with elaborately furnished and gilded gloom; Wright’s rooms, even with their dark wood and autumnal colors, swept it all away. And while they owed something to the domestic revolution in Britain in the houses of C.F.A. Voysey and Edwin Lutyens, they were quintessential Wright. A few have been rescued as owners and tastes changed; the living room of the later Francis Little house in Wayzata, Minnesota, was installed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York when the house was demolished, where it retains a timeless, disembodied, Wright-charged presence.



Sunday, October 6, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt four)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

Wright’s fame and skill were growing rapidly, and whatever claims he made to a superior, maverick position, he was no longer an outsider. His Chicago and Oak Park connections had contributed to his acceptance by young, affluent, artistic, and intellectual clients. His own office was well established, and he was about to receive an extraordinary proposition. His work had come to the attention of Daniel Burnham, the distinguished Chicago architect who was the guiding spirit of the White City of the 1893 world’s fair. They moved in intersecting circles of successful businessmen and patrons of the arts. The Wrights were invited to dinner at the home of a mutual acquaintance, Edward C. Waller, who apparently believed, with Burnham, that the young man was exceptionally talented, but that his talent was misdirected. As Wright recounted the story in the Autobiography, he was escorted into the host’s library after dinner, where the door was locked and a rather startling private conversation took place over coffee and cigars. Burnham offered to send Wright to Paris for the three-year course at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, since Wright had no formal architectural education, and then to the American Academy in Rome for another two years. He would pay all expenses, and take care of Wright’s wife and children during that time. On Wright’s return, Burnham promised him a partnership in his firm. It was an amazing offer, carrying a guarantee of a prestigious career.

Wright refused. If pure, personal ambition had been all that fueled him, he would never have turned the offer down. If success were all that mattered, Burnham’s proposition would have been instantly accepted. If he was being arrogant, he never pretended to be anything else; he believed completely in himself, his work, and his ideals. If he was as opportunistic and unprincipled as some insist, his reaction is the telling incident of his character and career. Any other young architect would have jumped at the chance to study at the finest schools in Paris and Rome and become a partner in one of the country’s best firms. Wright’s integrity was a flexible thing, depending on opportunity and desire; he could rationalize almost anything if it suited his interests, but this put his innermost beliefs, everything he had constructed, to the test.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt three)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The figura he cut for the rest of his life was as important to his image as the history he invented; he dressed in the nineteenth-century manner of the artist as aesthete and dandy, and he played it to the hilt. Although today’s artists have dropped romantic apparel for the international youth uniform of jeans and T-shirts, preferably paint-spattered, architects continue to dress in a way to set them apart from the rest of the world—a fashion statement that matters as much as one about art. The sartorial journey has been from flowing tie, to bow tie, to no tie, to hip, trendy all-black, with the occasional personal statement of a distinctive scarf or hat. Wright progressed from his mother’s makeovers to custom tailoring; eventually, he set his own style, beyond fashion, in a cape and beret or brimmed porkpie hat, wielding an imperious cane as much for effect as for assistance, using it as pointer and weapon and coda to all of his critical remarks.



Saturday, October 5, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt two)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

After the divorce, William seems to have been in perpetual motion, moving back and forth, from Nebraska to Missouri and Iowa, and finally to the home of a son by his first marriage, near Pittsburgh, where he died in 1904. In the last part of his life, he passed through twenty towns and seven states. The children of his first family remembered a sweet and cheerful man reduced to depression and despondency with the continuous downward spiral of his life. Those who saw Anna as the unfortunate victim of a bad marriage dismissed him as a self-centered dreamer pursuing personal fulfillment. It is more likely that he was a charming and impractical man whose real virtues and abilities lay in the music and literature he loved, pursuing an elusive livelihood in an unremunerative profession in hard times, with none of the survival skills later perfected by his son. When William was buried in Wisconsin with his first wife, Frank did not attend the funeral; it is known, however, that he made solitary visits to the grave in later years. One can read in Wright’s memoirs the mixed memories of the father who grew more remote, the two joined only by the music they shared.



the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt one)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The life starts with a lie: a changed birth date, from 1867 to 1869, the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men. Like most age changes, it was done later in life. Two years hardly seem worth the trouble for all the chronological complications such things cause. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s case, it had the desired effect—it made a case for a precocious talent with an impressively youthful, early success in Chicago in the 1890s, and it kept him shy of the dreaded 90-mark during his brilliant late work in the 1950s. Wright was just two months away from his ninety-second birthday when he died in April 1959, a fact successfully evaded by this small subterfuge. If no one was the wiser, the true date was easy enough to find, once scholars tried. The change did no harm to anyone, although it annoyed his sister Jane all during her lifetime, since it was her birth year that Wright usurped.



Friday, October 4, 2013

the last book I ever read (The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey, excerpt six)

from The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey:

Seeing people get eaten by alligators makes you think. Your first thought is, Boy, what a waste of pirates. Then you think, I’m glad that’s not me. Then you think, I should take a video of this. Then you think, Damn, I left my camera at home. Then you think, Oh, yeah, it’s broken anyway. Then you think, I wonder where I can get it fixed. Then you think, Radio Shack?

You can’t help thinking about the families of the pirates. Every night a pirate’s “old lady” would be patiently waiting for him at the back door. But never again would she hear the gentle tap of his peg leg on the porch, or hear him blaspheme when he saw the dog chewing on his spare peg.

She would gather her children round and try to explain, as gently as she could, that their father wouldn’t be coming home, that he was stabbed in the belly, then he was shotgunned in the back, then an arrow went through his head, then he was blown up, then he was grabbed by an alligator and shaken back and forth like a rag doll before a giant eagle stole him from the alligator and carried him off to her nest, where he was pulled apart and fed to the eagle babies. Who excreted him.



Thursday, October 3, 2013

the last book I ever read (The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey, excerpt five)

from The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey:

I decided to change tactics with Leilani. Let the honey come to the bee. Let the cheese ball come to the toothpick. Let the triangle come to the triangle clanger.

As we chugged upriver, I stared off into space, like I was thinking of something. Leilani seemed to notice. But the boat hit a rough patch of rapids. It’s hard to pretend you’re thinking deeply when you’re bouncing up and down, trying to hold on to the railing, your head jerking back and forth.



Wednesday, October 2, 2013

the last book I ever read (The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey, excerpt four)

from The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey:

I came to Doctor Ponzari’s laboratory. I started to jimmy the lock on the door, but it was already open. Don’t you feel stupid when that happens? I went inside.

Lying loose on the window seats were clamps and matching curtain rods. I assumed the clamps were used to hold people down while experiments were done on them. I shudder to think what the curtain rods were for.



Tuesday, October 1, 2013

the last book I ever read (The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey, excerpt three)

from The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey:

Doctor Ponzari was seated at a table in his flower garden. As soon as I saw him I could tell that he was pure evil. I’ve only had that feeling a few times in my life. I’d say about forty or forty-five times. My mailman is pure evil.

He was wearing a crisp linen suit. I wondered how many hundreds of people had died making it. His movements were elegant and refined, like some evil shitbird from Hell. He was eating a banana, elegantly.