When we started the Deadspin Book Club, the idea was to cover sports books not just as critics, but as fans. This month we discuss Will Leitch's "God Save the Fan." Obviously this month's book club is a little close to home, since the author is also the editor of this site. I want to make it absolutely clear from the outset, that none of our relationships - whether in real life or "internet friends" - with Leitch influenced our discussion, nor did Will at any time ask, beg, or bribe us to give GSTF a positive review. (We coldly jump right in with what we didn't like, so be ready.)

Joining me on this month's panel are Precious Roy, published author and contributor to Unprofessional Foul, and Signal to Noise, journalist and editor of eponymous blog. Yes this discussion runs very long, but GSTF sparked quite a conversation, which is what books are supposed to do.
- TheStarterWife, Black and Gold Tchotchkes

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TSW - Okay, I am getting this out of the way first since I already brought up having problems sticking with GSTF and I want to move past it as soon as possible.

As I said earlier, I had some problems with the "Players" section and had a hard time moving on to the next sections. I don't know if either of you heard Will's interview with NPR's Scott Simon, but the issues that Simon had were the same issues I had; ill-advised race and gay jokes.

Not that I disagree with race or sexual orientation jokes. They just do not sound natural in Leitch's voice.

Precious Roy - What does it say about me that I don't even remember any inappropriate racial jokes? A couple of things did sound or read awkward in Will's voice, but I chalked it more up to the fact that he goes out of his way not to use profanity on Deadspin.

I would like to start by making maybe some more general comments, then going from there. And let me preface this by saying I am often obscenely critical of almost everything. But I sort of felt like Nelson in that episode of the Simpsons where he walks out of the movie theater where the marquee reads "Naked Lunch" and he says, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title."

The title of the book implies that it's some sort of manifesto for how to make sports better for fans, how to take it back. But it's not really that at all. And if anything, I actually like sports less after reading the book.

TSW - I had the same problem. It seemed that at the very end the was only a nod to (And How We Can Get It Back) part of the title, and that solution was that everyone should start blogging instead of watching ESPN.

And as I am sure all three of us know, the second you start blogging about sports, the less time you have to read other blogs about sports. Eventually you'll reach a point where everyone has a blog and no one is reading a damn thing.

S2N - I had no problems getting through the book, much of it is at least interesting and amusing to consider while reading. I do have objections to those cracks brought up in the NPR interview, and I'd like to get to those later.

What I sense throughout is that it's really a collection of essays about the problems of how sports are perceived by the fans and the media that cover them, yet doesn't really challenge us with a solution. I know Will wrote that part of the whole reason of starting Deadspin is to avoid the mentality of "I'm an expert and this is what you should think," and that's noble — but essentially saying that through the simple filtering, blogging, etc. will get our enjoyment back and maybe level the field a bit reads hollow.

It kind of undercuts the biases and absurdities he points out about how athletes and fans are perceived and treated. The solution encourages us to become a bit more cocooned rather than addressing the actual issue of how the leagues, media, etc. are wrecking parts of the games for the fan.

PR - It is sort of a self-defeating proposition. Although, watching less ESPN is probably a good prescription for anyone wanting to enjoy sports more. I wonder if, as avid Deadspin readers/commenter, we're not actually well suited to review GSTF as, what, 60%? 70%? of what's in the book has been on the site in some shape or form (or at least a condensed version of it).

S2N - That does cross my mind, whether we've read so much of Will's writing that it numbs us a bit. But even with quite a few of the essays being condensed forms of general things floated about on the site, there are a few that stand out and work for me: the best example I have is the one about Gilbert Arenas and LeBron James, not because I didn't know about Agent Zero and his eccentricity, but I had never thought to run a comparison between the two.

PR - Strange that you would pick out the LeBron - Agent Zero essay because if there was anything in the book I just patently disagreed with it was that particular piece.

By that I mean I don't think of LeBron and Arenas as opposite poles of some axis that are only defined in relationship to each other. I love Agent Zero and I love LeBron. Okay, I really love Agent Zero but it has nothing to do with LeBron or who he is trying to be. I mean I wasn't pulling against LeBron in the playoffs as Will said most people he knew were.

That wasn't until the finals, and only then because of geography. I'm from Central Texas, so if I'm a fan of NBA team it's probably the Spurs. Against any other Wester Conference team I would have pulled for the Cavs.

TSW - I definitely wondered to myself on several occasions how someone who has not read Deadspin would react to the material, but that leads me another thought as I read the book: Are fans really disgruntled? Fans-at-large.

We came to Deadspin for various reasons (for myself, it was drunken Ben Roethlisberger pics in the week leading up the Super Bowl) and stayed for the writing style, comedy, and the anti-ESPN rants.)

S2N - I don't know how many fans outside of the audience that frequents blogs are disgruntled. People are still in the seats every year without fail for most franchises, and while many bitch about athletes getting into trouble, owners raising ticket prices, etc., no one really ever gets turned off completely.

I think Will tried to have it both ways: he wrote the essays towards people who probably have never heard of Deadspin, but the glossaries are where the in-jokes go.

Believe me, I wasn't pulling against LeBron myself either — I love watching him play — but aside from that, I have no particular interest that makes me want to pull for him outside of amazing skill. I guess that should be enough on its own, but Arenas' oddities do make him seem more human. Maybe that's part of the problem in and of itself.

TSW - That does speak to the point that Will makes about superstar athletes being the type of people that we would not like if we knew them in person, and odds are they would not like us. Arenas hangs out with fans so he gets a cool pass. LeBron's been a superstar since the day he was drafted and he's expected to embrace everyone he meets? It is an unfair comparison. (For the record I root against LeBron, but only because I am a Pistons fan.)

Just an aside since we're talking about basketball. There was cheap shot at the NBA in the Ankiel essay that really stuck out at me. A weird joke about MLB player having a shit father, which would more expected of an NBA player. It really didn't fit.

You guys want to go over the Rocker/Pros vs Joes stuff? Or are we ready to move on to the owners?

S2N - Hm. I may be just as guilty as the media figures I hate of holding James to a standard he can never live up to (and why should he?) I'm going to go check the mirror and see if I've turned into Skip Bayless yet — the man has been fitted for the "Next Jordan" mantle since he was in high school, yet I want him to be human, to be a Transcendent Athlete.

The NBA cheap shots were problematic, since I remember Will making a point in a later essay noting those perceptions and what they're rooted in. It may have been a joke, but it wasn't a very good one.

The Ankiel bit still disappoints me; although Will admits to giving him leeway he'd never give Barry Bonds, he still winds up doing so in a way.

TSW, I want to hear what you thought about the homosexuality essay — especially since part of it focused on your team's former QB. I remember the ruckus over the 49ers video — got a lot of play on the news because it was so bizarre — and while Will (and probably all three of us) views pro sports' "don't ask, don't tell" stance about being openly gay as silly and archaic, the ordinary fan may not see it that way.

I'll make one note on the Pros vs. Joes: I see so many retired or over-the-hill athletes pitching products in satellite media tours to morning newscasts looking to fill space. (My email at work gets assaulted with these on a daily basis; Charlie Batch has an SMT for some product I've forgotten about coming up.) So, it's a good question to ask: what do you do when you can't do what you've been trained to do all your life? There are plenty of former pro athletes with successful second careers (seems like a lot of them are in real estate), but I understand the point.

TSW - Kordell Stewart. That poor man never stood a chance in Pittsburgh. Every person in that town had a story about their cousin/brother-in-law/guy-they-knew-from-the-Lithuanian-Club that was on some supposed bust in Shenley Park where they caught Kordell giving a blow job to some guy. And everyone repeated that story over and over and over again. (Ed. note: Guilty as charged)

I actually think it is a bit insulting to gays when Will joked about making googly eyes at Stewart hoping to figure out if he was gay or not, but since that is how most 20 and 30-something straight guys joke, I was not surprised.

PR - Anyone want to take the lead on Owners?

S2N - I'll gladly take the lead on the Owners section.

Here's the thing: I don't think the NFL is the only sport that gets away with everything. NBA arenas and MLB stadia still get filled reliably. Peter Angelos proves that you can wreck a fanbase yet make the franchise more valuable somehow. MLB may take heat for steroids and HGH and the NBA always seems to have an "image problem," but neither of those things is making serious dents in the bottom line, despite the mass media's myopic focus on TV ratings.

Also, I don't know how Donald Sterling avoided the Worst Owners list. The last two years of actually trying to have a competing Clippers team does not erase the past, although I won't object to having those others in front of him.

TSW - The strongest essay in the Owners section is easily the Angelos piece. It makes the best argument for why some owners really have no need to react to their fans wishes. The money still comes rolling in.

S2N - What's the incentive to react to fan wishes if you do everything to turn them off and they still show up? That's tied to the essay comparing how fans view labor disputes between players and owners — we hold players to a standard we either can't or won't hold owners to at all.

PR - Well, if sports pages started printing owners' net worths the way the do player salaries, that might change how fans align themselves in labor disputes.

TSW - Kevin McClatchy / the Nutting family with the Pirates are way worse than Sterling any day. It would have been helpful if the book at given more examples of good ownership groups. What is the template for a good franchise to run off of?

S2N - That's a good question: how would we be able to define a good owner or ownership group? I'm probably thinking about the Rooneys and the Maras as the best examples.

TSW - What is funny about that is how often Steelers fans complain about how the Rooneys are not always responsive to their pleas. I've always thought they were "tough love" parental types not giving into their children's whining.

There were only three essays in the Owners section that were directly about owners. I didn't quite get how a fan experience at Yankee Stadium, the Olympics, and beer advertising fit into the theme.

S2N - The advertising straddles a media/ownership line to me because sports owners and leagues have so many deals with beer companies and other corporations — how they view fans and how owners view fans are similar.

The other two, I don't know, although I can make tenuous connections. And he obviously acknowledged that the Carl Monday thing has no place in the section.

PR - I can make a case for the Yankees piece as it should be required reading for owners (and I got a kick out of it as it was about 90% accurate of my 1 trip to Yankee Stadium... God that place is a shithole). Do owners think about not just the cost involved in getting to a game, but the effort? It can be a royal pain in the ass just for the privilege of ponying up $200 for a couple of hours of entertainment.

S2N - Of course they don't consider it, because no one abandons in droves large enough to make a dent. For every fan who's fed up with the Yankee Stadium experiences, there are several willing to take his place in the stands. Even if I still lived in L.A., I couldn't afford to go to a game often, if at all.

TSW - Well, that is a whole other argument to be made for the fan experience. I love going to games, but for the same money as going to a handful of baseball games, couple of hockey and NBA games, and one NFL outing, you can have a 50-inch LCD screen and all the HD coverage you want.

PR - That's what was so funny about that Pirates protest, what, last season. They paid for tickets to the game so that they could make a show of walking out!?! How about just nobody go to a game. Nobody. And don't watch it on TV. Even if you are the most spineless fan, you can't sacrifice 1 game to make a point? Stupid.

I would have liked to see something on owners holding cities hostage demanding they build a stadium for their team. It's such a total scam and cities cave all the time. Economically they are a terrible deal for tax payers. I don't want to get too high-horsey about this, but the fact that people willingly vote to pass an additional tax on themselves to subsidize a facility for a billionaire owner irritates the fuck out of me.

Especially because the preferred method of doing this now is to put the tax on hotel bed and rental car taxes. So when I go to, say, Houston, and stay in a hotel I have to pay a huge surcharge to build Minute Maid, the Toyota Center, Reliant Stadium. Yet I don't live in Houston, so I didn't get to vote on this tax I'm paying there.

This is called taxation without representation if I'm not mistaken. And it's also the reason we started our little country here.

TSW - Yeah, but those types of taxes are on many things. When I lived in Florida I didn't pay state income taxes in part because of bed taxes that the tourist paid. I wish I could find the Richard Florida pieces on building public stadia.

PR - No, the entire tax isn't for stadia but in many cities a large portion of it is. I went to a wedding in Phoenix in November. My rental car was laughably cheap, like $17 a day. The tax on it (per day) was like $19. I paid more in taxes than I did in stuff I was being taxed on.

Some of that had to be for the Pink Taco, the BoB [now Chase Field], the America West Arena and wherever they play hockey.

TSW - Funny enough, I just read about the tax exemption that the new Yankee Stadium is getting for parking.

S2N - A full essay on Jeffrey Loria rather than a simple mention would have outlined that stadium issue beautifully, although it would have been incomplete at the time of publication — he just got his $600 million dollar boondoggle in Miami.

More on why cities give away billions of dollars of taxpayer money to owners would have been a nice essay in and of itself, and could certainly have replaced the Carl Monday one, which I'm not sure why it was included at all other than to illustrate the appeal of the site.

TSW - Again asking the question - Are regular fans really disgruntled? (Pirate fans are a bad example by the way. They've long been beaten into submission.)

PR - For some reason I want to say they are disgruntled but stadium and TV revenues would seem to indicate otherwise.

S2N - I do seriously doubt how disgruntled regular fans are, yet again.

Before we leave the Owners section: The whole Tony Dungy glossary entry in this section pissed me off. I mean, you can crack on him about his clearly anti-gay associations with area church organizations, but winning "despite not being black, not really"? Come on.

TSW - Anyway - We were still on the owners? And looking for role models for great owners, and generally agreeing with Will's essay that Yankee Stadium really is one of the worst fan experiences out there? And Carl Monday just really did not fit into the section at all?

S2N - Yes. I was considering putting Mark Cuban in the ranks of "great owners," but most great owners have a title to their credit, and great owners don't allow their GMs to make dumb trades for Jason Kidd like he did. I am rooting for Cuban to own the Cubs, because someone needs to show baseball owners what it's like to be at least fan-receptive, if not fan friendly.

PR - No doubt Cuban knows how to treat his players and the guy wants to win, but I am so not in the Cuban-as-visionary camp. The guy won the lottery with broadcast.com, how that translates into him being some sort of forward-thinking genius is beyond me.

He's not a shithead. And I'm sure some of this is envy as I would totally do exactly what he did if I got a billion dollars for my start-up (namely buy a sports team and start making movies) but he hasn't had the impact on his sport as say, Jerry Jones has had on his. Jones however is a dickhead, but from a business standpoint, his thumbprint on the NFL has had a much greater impact.

Here's a question: Do we think of the Packers as having good owners?

I mean the community doesn't make the day to day decisions—and maybe this is a discussion for another time—but given that GSTF is supposed to be about fans taking back the fun in sports, this would have been a great place to talk about community-owned teams (the Packers, FC Barcelona... and the possibility of Liverpool. Heck, there was even some guy who tried to start a fan-investment group to buy the Cubs). I don't think it lends itself to dick jokes, and maybe we are generally taking this book way to seriously, but, seeing how this section seems the least coherent and most cobbled together, it seems fair game to talk about what it could have been.

S2N - The Packers are an absolute anomaly. I think of that franchise more as a trust, with a president who oversees the general use and the guy who heads up football ops. By that standard, they are doing very well by the trust —- they never fail to sell out, and that fanbase is devoted through really crappy seasons because they feel like the team really belongs to them. But that's a good point — if we look at centralized ownership, why not a look at the alternative, or at least a mention of it?

I'm not lauding Cuban as some form of genius; he just runs a team like a fan with business savvy would. Jones has had a greater impact, but only recently has he had his "most meddlesome NFC owner" mantle swiped by Dan Snyder.

TSW - Oh I agree PR, the Packers are a great example here in the US about community ownership. But seeing how we can barely agree to pass laws that benefit schools, public transportation, and military funding, the last thing I want to see is how cities would be ripped apart over team management.

PR - Okay: Yankee stadium sucks, Stupid Angelos, this section isn't really coherent, mixed on Cuban, wish maybe there was a nod to community ownership.

Agreed? We moving on?

TSW - Sounds good.

The Media. I actually thought this was the strongest section. Not for the ESPN rants, which we've already all heard from being fans of the site, but for the beat reporter work he did in college.

PR - Yeah... I thought the first essay in this section was maybe the best in the book if only because it's about something that should be patently obvious but isn't to most people.

TSW - It is not that the people (athletes, directors, actors, writers) are boring people, but there is such an overwhelming amount of media space to fill and only so many questions a person can answer before they shut down. That is true of any human being that that are thrust into the spotlight for any reason, even under the best of circumstances.

The fear that athletes have about being misquoted came up in the Rocker interview, which is another very legitimate reason for keeping your guard up around reporters. Unfortunately, after a game you have very little choice in the matter about facing the press while you are still just trying to get dressed.

Sports writers know all of this, which in turn makes for a great excuse for them to dread that grind of following a team around from city to city.

PR - I'm going to go the other way on that. The 'misquoted' defense is the biggest bullshit claim in all of sports. Athletes are just too stupid generally to realize someone is always listening to anything they say, so when they say something stupid, that's the most likely thing to get quoted. But it is almost never misquoted or taken out of context.

Not to make this about me, but I got in a couple of "I was misquoted" situations from my journalist days. To which I was like, "Oh really. Okay, here's the entire quote and here's the tape of our entire conversation." When athletes want to back-peddle they blame the messenger.

Of course, then half of them end up joining the ranks of the people they demonized while they were a player.

S2N - Ah yes, the enduring and life-altering image of Robert Traylor's dick. That's the most notoriety the Tractor has gotten in some time. That was the best written piece in the media section. There is the same old garden variety interaction between writer and subject because if an athlete goes off script, he'll get a bunch of press attention he doesn't need.

I did one piece of rock journalism in my life, and I hated going through the tape so much because the most interesting stuff on my recorder was about everything else besides the music: essentially, what they did on tour to amuse themselves, what their day jobs were like, etc. Asking them about their music and how they viewed it gave me very little that was actually interesting about them as people. Asking people in sports to define their performance seems just as fruitless the majority of the time.

I both understood yet disliked the essay about sports and 9/11, because that treacle written post-attack really does need to be taken down a peg as much as possible. However, I cannot really shake the idea that "sports do not matter" in the grand scheme, despite the effort that it has little actual impact upon my life personally outside of an escape. The problem I have is, that for many in the U.S. and in other parts of the world — the ability to rise above stations through sport is a big thing, to get a chance to make it out and survive. In that grand scheme, sport does matter, and sometimes, to say so reflects a purely middle-class perspective.

PR - I really dislike the social science revisionism of sports. The Yankees saved New York by making it to the World Series after 9/11 or when the US beat the Soviets in Lake Placid, America turned around and that led to the defeat of communism.

It's silly. I mean yeah there is escapism, but people are pretty resilient creatures and I tend to think most of the things they accomplish would go on with out without sports. Yes, a handful of lives are transformed by the money but, outside of that, I think we more often than not overstate the importance of sports in daily lives.

Plus, I was happy to see someone else call out that poem by Jack Buck as a piece of shit (especially impressive knowing what a Cardinals homer Will is).

S2N - Generally I think most writers pick the wrong kind of social significance to look at, it's rather general as opposed to looking at the context of sports in America's complicated history. (I'm thinking William Rhoden's 40 Million Dollar Slaves here.) Instead, they re-write rather mundane sporting events to attach meanings that weren't ever there.

PR - There is some great sportswriting done when you take what's going on in world politics and you talk about how that translates to what goes on in the arena. I mean certainly the Miracle on Ice is what it is because of the Cold War and the fact that it was a bunch of college kids facing a bunch of pros. There was also a vicious water polo match at the Melbourne Olympics between the Soviets and Hungary known as the Blood in the Water match. In fact there was a great documentary made about that (and I think it was produced by Lucy Liu of all people).... Anyway when those events come into the arena it makes for great sport and great drama, but when you take the results back outside the event afer the fact, sometimes I think too much is made of them.

TSW - My 9/11 experience is very much tied to baseball since I was working at PNC Park at the time, and was actually supposed to be in NYC for that one day only to attend a table reading of a friend's film. Obviously I could not make the trip, and then had to face what it was like to work in a large venue in the aftermath.

What I remember most is the day we did go back to having games, since the Pirates were playing the Mets at the time. Building security did not have all the new check points worked out at the time, so players and staff had to use the same entrance, and everyone without exception had to show identification. I'll never forget Mike Piazza nearly welling up with tears when he was asked for his ID, and shaking the hands of all of the guards. (Much like I will never forget some of the Pirates players pulling the old, "Don't you know who I am?" bit. Fuck, I worked there and I didn't know who you were.)

Those games, they did matter. Not everyone was sure what they were supposed to do in the few days after 9/11, but people certainly knew they wanted to be together.

PR - Hopefully I made that distinction. Sure because of what happened in NYC on 9/11, it made those game memorable and changed your experience of them. But to then take it outside the park and say, "Okay, baseball has helped save us," or "New Orleans is now better because the Saints won a Monday night game," to me is ridiculous.

In fact in the latter instance was probably on balance a disservice because maybe some people actually thought, "Hey the city is going to make it back okay," instead of, "Man, those people are still completely fucked and our government at every level has failed them."

Jesus, we really are taking this book a little too seriously. Maybe to go meta it's good in that at least it's serving as a jumping off point for this kind of talk.

TSW - But then that chapter undercuts the whole point of the book. If none of this ultimately matters, why do we care if it all goes to shit?

As far as New Orleans is concerned, the book did take to task -albeit lightly in the Owners glossary section - Tom Benson for his handling of the Saints post-Katrina. Much like Angelos, a whole chapter on his organization would have been much more interesting to read on poor handling of a team.

S2N - Yeah, if sports don't matter, then why is the fan worth saving somehow?

TSW - What did everyone think of the "24 Hours of ESPN" section? I think it would have worked just a little better if he had done it on a weekend, when there would have been a better chance of having a live sporting event in the first place.

S2N - The experiment is revealing, but maybe not to us. I don't know how you can subject yourself to that when there is very little in the way of new content until 3pm ET in the afternoon. I don't think it tells us much — as avid viewers who take in more than the average person — it may give a person who just checks ESPN every so often for the scores insight into the network's redundancy and tendency towards repeats.

PR - Seemed like almost any Deadspin commenter could have written that section without even sitting through the 24 hours.

S2N - Agreed. So much of why we find ESPN problematic is tied up in game coverage, and having the only mentions of it being women's softball and WNBA doesn't give us a whole lot to chew on.

PR - Moving on?

TSW - To the Fans section? Sure, but not before I ask how Charles Barkley was completely skipped in the Media glossary section. He's still one of the biggest forces in the NBA today.

S2N - Not sure how Will couldn't get a crack about Barkley in the glossary, especially when there are many jokes about being in someone's five there to use. I maintain my problems with describing Greg Gumbel as somehow being more "white" than his brother, that pissed me off in the same way the Dungy glossary entry did.

PR - Not that length is necessarily an indicator of anything, but I will point out that in a book entitled GSTF, the section on fans is the second shortest. With glossaries excluded, it runs about 43 pages to the owners' 36 (didn't check my math).

Of course, there are only 4 sections.

TSW - Although much like the Media section, the Fans part of the book works the best when he's telling stories from his own experience as a fan. The chapter on finding fellow Cards fans in New York is touching.

S2N - I thought the chapter on Willie McGee and the viewing of black and Hispanic players would be useful to people on the outside. It was one of the strongest parts to me.

PR - I enjoyed the bit on finding the Cardinals fans in NYC as well for a couple of reasons:

First, it sort of made another point that is counter to the book's stated purpose. And that is: being a fan is it's own reward sometimes. The fan doesn't need saving during that 2 hours that is the game.

Second: Sports can be a great social lubricant. I can walk into a bar showing fútbol on a Saturday morning by myself when I should be sleeping off a hangover but if I find a guy in an Arsenal jersey, I know I've got a friend. We might not have anything else in common, but for those 2 hours, we are brothers. It's like being part of a free fraternity. All it requires is some time investment, and that's time that I usually enjoy.

S2N - Wasn't that essay really the best example of why sports actually matter? Not on the macro level, but with our own interactions with people — even ones we'd never met?

PR - And think about how few things bring that many people togther.

On Saturdays in the fall there are, what, 30 stadia in smallish towns across the US just packed to the gills with college football fans. And another 20 have several thousand people in them.

Music doesn't do that. Not unless you bring 30 bands together in Tennessee for Bonarroo. Does politics? What else do we get together for in such large numbers on a weekly or even daily (baseball) basis?

TSW - Of course. It goes towards finding people who are of our own "tribe" so to speak. Ask Bryan, I point out every Steelers, Pirates, or Penguins license plate frame I see in LA. I would say the only other comparisons for group experiences like sports would be work and religion.

PR - Right, but I can actually verify the existence of sports gods.

/waits for lightning strike.

S2N - I want to address the God essay — it was actually instructive for me, because I'm a complete agnostic/heathen type, and I tend to take those expressions of faith in public and dismiss them.

PR - I did not like the Jesus piece at all. But I am on the side of separation of Church and Sport.

S2N - I'm on that side, too, but after reading it, I was reminded why these players express those sentiments publicly when given the opportunity. It makes sense to me; I still don't care for it and it almost always comes off as favoritism, but I understand it a bit better.

PR - While Jesus might be their lives, and they thank Jesus for everything, the fact that they think Jesus gives a shit whether or not that potential game-winning field goal goes between the yellow sticks or not is just something I will never get my head around.

They refuse to understand my agnosticism, yet I have to understand their quaint superstitions?

TSW - Such things never offended me and thought the essay was a good answer to those who don't understand why athletes thank Jesus or God or Allah. But I fall into the camp of "life is fucking hard and you believe what you have to believe to get through the fucking day without losing it."

PR - That's fine. I just thought it was a bit pedantic in it's "You just don't understand how these people think." Well, obviously I don't because we have completely different belief systems to begin with. And I'm sure if some athlete came out and said, "I'd like to thank secular godlessness and myself and only myself for my hitting that game winning home run," there is no end to the amount of shit that person would take from religious groups. Yet Christians get to go on national television and give it up to Jesus and nobody every says anything about whether or not it's even appropriate. Just saying.

S2N - Understanding isn't necessarily approval. I accept it, but I still find it silly.

TSW - Can we talk about how the NHL is almost completely ignored in GSTF?

Leaving hockey out of the Fan section was rather shocking to me. Shocking because it would have been a great example of why the media is not a good reflection of the sport. Just because it is on a third tier cable outlet now does not mean the sport is dead with the fans. Hardly.

PR - Yeah, no hockey was kind of shocking, but it's not in Will's wheelhouse. Although if ever you needed a story of both players and owners screwing themselves, when they killed the season, they hurt themselves in a way that they might not recover from ever.

TSW - Especially when those holes in programming are filled by more motorsports coverage. It would have made for an interesting study in how ESPN shapes the casual sports fan interests.

S2N - There are so many opportunities to lambaste ESPN over hockey coverage, explain how a sport with a thriving fanbase gets marginalized in the big picture....near ignoring it when it can make for a central part of your thesis.

TSW - Does anyone else hear "Eleanor Rigby" play in their heads when they read about Barbaro?

S2N - My oh my, now I'll never be able to separate the two. I'm dying of laughter over here.

PR - Yep, now linked forever. Thanks TSW.

TSW - Sorry, I cannot stand the Barbaro mania. Sorry if I ruined the Beatles for you, but the endless discussions over a fucking horse by the "underground" reminded me of what was wrong with mainstream sports media to begin with - same story, different day.

S2N - I never understood it myself.

PR - I loved Barbaro. Not because I give a shit about the horse itself, but because it gave me exposure to an entirely new group of weirdos that I had never seen before. And I fucking love weirdness. The whole Dee Mirich thing, priceless. That's fucking crazy. Writing poems to a dead horse. Really, you can't make shit like that up. For that reason I loved Barbaro. In fact I was sad to see the horse die not because it was the death of a horse, but because it took away the UPenn message board and my window into all of those weird people's lives.

TSW - Which leads well into the conclusion. Having the "Underground".

S2N - I feel like this "Underground" is giving me my usual Groucho Marx complex: "I want no part of a club that would have me as a member." So, with the talk of "revolution", taking things back, and the concept of an "underground," I'm getting a bit queasy.

Of course, that's a question as to whether the whole "underground" thing is serious or an in-joke. I can't tell sometimes.

TSW - I don't think it is either. All other forms of mass entertainment have gone through massive DYI movements. There is no reason why sports would be different.

PR - I'll agree to that. I think I read somewhere that Deadspin got 1 million unique visitors one month. How underground is that?

Lots of people read it. It practically sets the table for sports talk radio in this country every day. It's a voice that's not ESPN. If that's all it takes, then the three of us might as well be the Dictators to Will's Sex Pistols. More obscure, but still potentially subversive.

S2N - I'm imagining myself as Handsome Dick Manitoba and laughing.

PR - Sorry, had to get my head away from "All the lonely people, where do they all belong..."

S2N - I have to admit that the insanity of the people who were commenting on Barbaro and sending all the missives gave me a serious kick, but the problem is that the outpouring resulted in NBC tributes and TV movies — and I'm still pissed at horse racing for forcing an NHL playoff game off of network TV.

PR - Right, but that to me is just another kind of fucked up. Like, "You're really going take this kind of tone and talk about a horse?" It was all part of the trainwreck.

TSW - Both of those things - NBC grabbing at horse racing because they thought it was suddenly hotter than it was and talk radio seizing on Deadspin - might be more of what old media is still trying to figure out from new media; Which story is really the big story? Which hot internet meme really is going to reach mass markets?

Which means we can (and obviously we are too close to it) overstate the importance of the Underground. Perfect example of false internet hysteria- "Snakes on a Plane".

S2N - The tone of the conclusion seems to overstate this "Underground" yet go to the simple conclusion of "keep doing what you're doing, enjoy the games, and ignore the talking heads." How revolutionary is that? I mean, it's what I was doing beforehand, but now I'm part of a community that shows its solidarity about those ridiculous elements online. But, are we too close to this again to judge the thesis and conclusion accurately?

PR - Should we go for final thought?

TSW - Well, we touched on it very early on, but the solution that GSTF presented was basically that fans had to make the games their own. Report on them on their own. DIY and make their own blogs. Which is great, for awhile. Eventually the pressure of keeping that going can really take away your enjoyment of the games, especially if you are a lucky enough to have a successful blog.

PR - If we could truly make the teams our own... I'll stick with: As a how-to, it wasn't really much of a practical how-to. I enjoyed most parts, others less-so, and even though as a Deadspin regular had seen most of this in some form still found it a good read and an easy one. And while I think it really might have made me like sports less, it facilitated this discussion, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And I just sounded corny as all fuck right there.

TSW - I know from the discussion it sounds like I didn't like GSTF. I did enjoy quite a bit, but maybe I wanted just a little bit more out of the book. It was an easy read that picked out some easy targets. The "aww shucks, I'm no expert" tone did not work, mostly because Leitch is an important voice that should be heard. Make a stand Midwest boy!

S2N - I enjoyed it, although I'm not quite sure how much I agree with Will's central tenets and conclusion, and I still have problems with some of the jokes about race and homosexuality. I would recommend it to someone unfamiliar with Deadspin or the way sports media operates on its own. I think it works better as a discussion piece than as a book on its own; given Will's preference to not be seen as an expert, maybe he might have been going for that.

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S2N - It's actually kind of interesting, having to look at the merits of this book well after Ed Orgeron has been shitcanned and replaced by Houston Nutt, who is probably just as insane as Coach O, yet in completely different ways. I have the fortune of reading this book about recruiting not too long after tackling 40 Million Dollar Slaves, and so it's like reading an entire season of the Conveyor Belt.

It was smart of Feldman to outline the recruiting calendar and what the periods actually mean from the get-go, otherwise there's no way we're able to follow this and the gyrations necessary by the coaches to avoid NCAA sanction. What was remarkable is just how many athletes college coaches run after who obviously have no business being there academically. This is no surprise to any of us, I'm sure — but it was interesting to read just how many high school prospects had to either be sent down the junior college/prep school route and the tricks used to get them eligible.

Obviously, the book depends on the character and legend of Orgeron to drive it. We have the benefit of hindsight, knowing that he's out of a job and all the efforts in the book weren't nearly successful enough, but I'm interested to read what you both think of the myth and the semi-reality presented by Feldman.

UM - I really enjoyed the book, which didn't come as much of a surprise given my affinity for the recruiting game. Feldman did an excellent job of breaking down a process that most casual fans never really understand. Instead of getting lost in the back stories of all of coaches and recruits, he kept his focus on the process and the work that goes into building a competitive program.

You said that the efforts of Orgeron and his staff that were documented in the book weren't nearly enough to keep them employed, but I'm not sure about that. The coaches were fired because the team couldn't get anything done on the field, but not because Orgeron was unable to bring in talented recruits. Houston Nutt will almost assuredly win more games next season, but it will be thanks to the quality of talent that has entered the program.

S2N - That's a good point. It's interesting to see the process evolve based on the events of the current team. I'm thinking of the 10 or so players who got busted during the season for pot in an apartment — as a result, the recruit pool is then further limited, as character guys become a priority, and Ole Miss finds itself in need of linebackers more than originally thought.

TSW - I have to get this out of the way - I am at best a casual college football fan. I did not go to a big football university, my sister did not go to a big football school, and my parents did not go to big football schools, so I have little connection to what life is like on a big campus for game day. I've long been somewhat astounded by the fervent, cult-like behavior of SEC fans. So to Orson at EDSBS and my Ladies cohort Holly; please don't kill me if I say something wrong.

Moving on.

I absolutely loved this book. Bruce Feldman did such an outstanding job handling Orgeron's backstory, I ended up completely in awe of what he was building as first time head coach. Much like S2N pointed out, Feldman did great job at laying out how the recruiting calendar worked, and how Orgeron had his days around the calendar planned out down to the minute.

UM - Speaking of Orson, I was pleased to see Feldman quote Spencer Hall instead of "Orson Swindle." It's probably the only book that thanks a blogger and Colin Cowherd on the same page.

TSW - And while UM said that the book did not get too bogged down in the players' and assistant coaches' backstories, Feldman knew which players to give the reader more on, like Rishaw Johnson. So when player's names were woven in and out of the time line, you rooted for them to go with Ole Miss.

UM - Absolutely, unfortunately I already knew which players would be committing in the end. Although I paid a bit of attention to the battle for Joe McKnight I never realized how close Ole Miss was (or thought they were).

I thought Feldman was wise to keep his focus specific, but I would love to read more on the balancing act between year-round recruiting and all of the actual coaching.

TSW - Agreed. I kept waiting to get to the chapter that would talk about how they prepared for a game with the players that were there already. I understand why Feldman kept it all about recruiting, but I kept feeling like the players that were on the team in school had been abandoned. But maybe that is what Feldman wanted us to feel.

S2N - I do wish I knew more about how the coaches balanced the recruiting focus with the need to game plan every week during the season. LSU is the beast to beat — both for Orgeron personally as someone who grew up a Tiger fan, and as a coach.

UM - That's why I think I'd really enjoy a book that combines the two. After seeing how much effort goes into targeting and wooing recruits, it's hard to imagine having time to gameplan for South Carolina.

And before I forget, the cockfighting story was one of my favorite passages in the book, especially Orgeron's reaction, both to the recruit's family and to Feldman.

TSW - The whole passage on Ian Williams that ended Chapter 11 just broke my heart.

TSW - What did you guys think about how much (and sometimes how little) stock the coaching staff put into the coverage from Rivals and Scout?

UM - Modern coaches might hate the internet but the great recruiters know how important a site like Rivals can be when tracking a player (even if the star system is totally arbitrary). What I found laughable were the fervent fans plastering a player's MySpace page with comments telling him how great he'd be on their team.

TSW - No crazier than people showing up at a diner to tell a kid how great he'd be at their school.

S2N - Well, as Feldman noted in the beginning, college football doesn't have the advantages college hoops does when it comes to the top recruits. So, that sort of love/hate relationship with the recruiting sites is a must. What I thought was interesting was how Orgeron (and I suppose other college coaches would do) basically discounted a lot of the information (height, weight, 40 times) unless someone on his staff actually got to measure it.

The MySpace and blog comments in the Tampa Trib for Stephen Garcia were great. How far can you go on these things?

UM - I was surprised that the subject of negative recruiting didn't come up more often. It's obviously going on in college athletics (especially SEC football), but Feldman only mentioned it in passing. I would think that when Ole Miss was going up against the LSU's and USC's of the world that negative recruiting would become a big issue for Coach O to overcome.

Well maybe not from USC's side, given Orgeron's relationships there.

I wonder what Mississippi State said or did to get Elliot out of his commitment. I bet it wasn't flattering towards Ole Miss.

S2N - Negative recruiting kind of gets short shrift — but it's there as far as going against Ole Miss, particularly the rumors about Orgeron's caveman persona (which the Rebs' coaching staff thinks comes from either Memphis or Tennessee.) But Orgeron, when it came to USC, wouldn't do it himself — he refused to talk shit about Pete Carroll to Joe McKnight; maybe that's respect for a friend and former boss.

I think MSU talked Elliott out of his commitment because Ole Miss felt like it was in the hunt for Joe McKnight — maybe they used the "they're taking you for granted" angle.

TSW - Since I know that neither of you are from SEC schools, I have to ask you this - Did you find yourself rooting against LSU while reading this book? (Conversely, I would imagine if you were a LSU fan you'd be saying to yourself every other page, "Damn right everyone wants to be a Tiger.")

UM - I'm a Florida fan since way back when, so anytime LSU loses out on a player I'm happy.

I expected to see a bit more recruiting from the current players themselves. Feldman made references to committed high schoolers trying to woo the remaining available players, but there was nothing about players helping in the process. When you've got high profile guys like Oher and Patrick Willis it makes recruiting quite a bit easier. I found myself wondering why Feldman hadn't spoken to them about fostering relationships with recruits.

S2N - I'm curious to see what you guys think about the juco/military academy system, especially with regard to Jerrell Powe.

UM - The NCAA has done a better job in recent years of shutting down the notorious diploma mills, but places like Hargrave certainly serve a purpose. It may not seem like the most kosher of systems to those of us who went through a more traditional high school experience but prep schools are able to help both the students and the colleges they will eventually attend. Sure, Korleone Young made a dumbass decision, but typically the school proves beneficial for the "student athletes" and the college programs that are recruiting them. Obviously in a case like Powe the system is just a complete failure and nobody is around to regulate it.

TSW - The Powe case was incredibly sad to me just because it felt like he'd been yanked from place-to-place on nothing but promises.

I had only a cursory knowledge of the number of online courses recruits could take for admission to college, so for me it was a little bit of a shock to see how... "easy" is not the word the word I am looking for, because obviously the education system had failed these kids and any sort of schooling was not going to be "easy" for them, but maybe how readily available this "out" of junior colleges, online classes and military schools were for recruits.

This is not to say they are not without merit. Feldman was wise to give examples of student athletes who turned their academic careers around in the right system.

TSW - I hate to be the woman who brings this topic up, but since we covered negative recruiting, I thought Feldman was pretty even-handed when talking about the Ambassador Program at Ole Miss. (Even though it seem to be spitting-hairs to differentiate where their program diverged from the Texas Angels and the Bulldog Belles.)

It just struck me that the harshest thing said about any of the schools came from one of their own Ambassadors who said, "Around here, the real head turners are the ugly ones."

UM - As long as they aren't providing lap dances (or promises of lap dances to come) then I see no harm in the female hostess program. It's good training for their future careers as pharmaceutical reps.

TSW - Oh, I'm not against it either. Feldman could have been much more critical of the tactic, and I thought it was very fair of him not to judge. (Disclaimer - Texas Gal from Ladies is a former Texas Angel, and I cannot think of a better, more knowledgeable sports booster than her.)

TSW - So do want to wrap this up and let the readers discover the tension of Signing Day - which I thought Feldman brilliantly captured - for themselves?

UM - If we're wrapping it up, I'd like to see an epilogue added to the book.

S2N - I'm fairly sure the majority of the people participating in the commentariat will have read the ending. I don't sense there's too much to spoil.

I don't know why, but despite the obvious knowledge that Joe McKnight would end up at USC, I thought Ole Miss had a legit shot at him — or at least were delusional enough to aim high and think they had a legitimate shot at him.

TSW - I felt like Ole Miss had a legit shot at any player not from Louisiana. That is the appeal of Orgeron, he was the ultimate salesman.

S2N - I should state that I enjoyed this book a whole lot — I'd not read a whole lot about recruiting in college football, and the look inside the process was fascinating, even the semi-questionable parts and the whims of teenage boys.

I just had to laugh when Robert Elliott signed with Mississippi State mostly because he wanted his No. 2 jersey.

Coach O could probably sell us all the bridge, and we wouldn't feel like we'd been cheated.

TSW - Honestly? I felt bad that he had lost his job this past season after reading Meat Market.

It really was a great, quick read. Something I could easily see someone inquiring about Meat Market's book rights (and the life rights to Orgeron) because it would translate well into film.

S2N - If the Orgeron did not exist, we would have to invent him. It would make a great movie.

The book is Meat Market, by Bruce Feldman, published by ESPN Books. It's "inside the smash mouth world of football recruiting." We'll have the same panelists next time, but if you want to follow along and play, go buy the darned thing.

Because you've done enough buying things for other people.

Meat Market [Amazon]
Deadspin Book Club

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Friedman brings together essays written over the last 20 years into a fascinating anthology. The individual pieces concern sports as varied as bowling, cycling, basketball, boxing, and golf, but they are linked by a common theme: the pursuit of excellence as a path to self-destruction. For example, take Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree, a man so determined to excel that he built his own bike (out of washing-machine parts and other scrap metal) and pitted himself against the giants of the sport. He won, too, and kept winning until cycling's regulating body changed its rules to prevent him from competing; so he changed his technique, and they changed the rules again. Finally, after he started coughing up blood months after a race, his career came to a close. His story—and the book is full of stories just like his—perfectly illustrates the physical and psychological toll that the drive to win can take on a person. An apt counterpoint to the multitude of winning-is-everything books, this one says that winning is nice, but it isn't everything (and maybe, in some cases, it can be lethal). - David Pitt for Booklist

S2N - More like "the agony of reading this damn book."

UM - So yeah, I completely understand everything that these crazy fucking hikers, bikers and competitive masochists have gone through.

S2N - I understand it despite the author's regular attempts to obscure it through his own bad attempts at writing exercises. Usually, I do two reads of a book in order to make sure I'm not missing anything too crucial, but the second read through these stories was absolutely excruciating. Once I picked up the general gist of the stories and had to figure out how Friedman is trying to tell them, I had to force myself through it.

I really don't like his writing style; it managed to make characters like Pete Weber and Scott Williamson dull, and somehow managed to dilute Marshall Rogers' story, which is one of the saddest you could think of. In the hands of a better writer, it'd have more impact. No one would object to the general premise weaving through Friedman's essays: that the drive to achieve at high levels comes with a psychological cost, and we touched on this when we discussed the last book — how talent or drive like this is a trade-off bringing certain peccadilloes, vices, etc.

UM - The Marshall Rogers story was butchered. Given the subject-matter I assumed it would be one of the best stories in the book, but it was easily the most disappointing.

After a while all of the stories began to run together a bit. They certainly share similar themes, but after a while it just became repetitive and tedious. And the foreword made me want to cut myself.

TSW - Not only did I find his writing "exercises" a bit self-indulgent, by the end of either the fourth or fifth essay I started to feel like he was a bit condescending to his subjects. I found myself picking this book up, reading half a chapter, putting it away, starting another chapter later on, and then going back to finish the essay I was reading before. It simply was not engaging in anyway.

As far as too many similar themes and story threads, it is only because he centered on the sadder characters in niche sports. Three or four extreme hiker/runner stories? Two cyclists? Two bowlers? An astronaut? An NBA washout, which as UM already said, was a story barely allowed to evolve in his piece?

UM - The book totally lost me after the second bowler. By the time I got to the second hiker I was tempted to start skipping forward, but it was just more of the same.

TSW - Should we maybe just list each essay and give a few thoughts?

UM - Sure.

S2N - In Friedman's defense, he had this backlog of niche sport pieces because those were the publications he was writing for — Bicycling, Runner's World, Backpacker, Outside, etc.

Going Nowhere Fast : Graeme Obree, Cyclist

S2N - I liked Obree's story, and once I tried to zone out Friedman's voice about the whole chicken rogan josh and chicken korma thing (what the fuck did that have to do with anything, I ask you), it's compelling if you start writing the tale in your own head. Obree must be sitting back and laughing these days as he notes the state cycling is in, if he was knocking the dopers years ago.

TSW - Obree's story was an interesting example of an athlete believing he can reach the impossible, even if it costs them their health. Unfortunately, it also set the tone for the rest of the book: Athletes who spend their careers trying to outrace their childhood traumas.

UM - Ah, I'd forgotten about the Obree story. I came in knowing absolutely nothing about him and I did draw a good deal from Friedman's feature. Regardless, everybody knows that nothing beats a good chicken korma, that shit is like manna from Vishnu! Damn, now I want to go eat Indian food in Scotland. I bet the accents are high-larious.

Kingpin : Pete Weber, Bowler

S2N - I confess that I've watched a few PBA tourneys before when there was nothing else on, and Weber's flamboyant nature is compelling even though the game does nothing on TV.

TSW - Actually, this was a story I was more forgiving of once I read the final essay about Friedman and his father's golfing week. (More on this later.) And while Weber is self-destructive in different ways, I kept thinking of the expectations and legends of Bobby and Barry Bonds while reading this story. Just like Obree's story, much of the Weber piece came from interviews with his wife. Both women were rather protective of their husbands, which made me wonder how much Friedman left off the page.

"It's Gonna Suck To Be You" : The Men and Women of the Hardrock 100, Ultra-marathoners

S2N - I just wasn't particularly interested in this in any way; the masochism involved didn't do anything for me here.

TSW - Could have had more impact if instead of trying to profile several of the participants, he stuck with just one person, no matter if they failed or succeeded. I was interested in the piece just because I've done a lot of high-altitude hiking and I know how easy it is to suddenly lose your barrings if you overexert yourself, but if I didn't have have that experience to relate to, I wonder what you would get out of the piece other than "look at those crazy Colorado outdoors-y hippies trying to run the mountains."

Lost and Found : Gerry Lindgren, Runner

S2N - Whether through reluctance of his subject to explain himself, Lindgren's story felt incomplete, despite the attempts to link the childhood of Lindgren (parental abuse, etc.) with his desire to run away from everything in his life on the track — which eventually led him to running away from his family. Friedman never really was able to tie it all together, which might have something to do with his subject.

TSW - This was actually the first essay I read from the book on my first pass, and was the only essay that I wish the publisher would have noted when and were this piece was first published, because Lindgren has not been as reclusive as the article suggests in quite some time. (I believe his own ghostwritten book came out a few years ago.) Chapter Two in the "athletes running away from childhood trauma" theme.

UM - I agree on Lindgren. The background story was what I had hoped for, but he really got nothing out of that trip to Hawaii. Maybe he just went for the sake of a tax-deductible vacation. Perhaps that's a story that would be better captured on film.

The Unbearable Lightness of being Scott Williamson : Scott Williamson, Hiker - Backpacker Magazine

S2N - I hate this essay because of the second-person "you" and the drawn-out process of deciding where the essay ought to start. Yes, Williamson's story is interesting, but the writing style used for this piece just got in the way. It's as if he wrote it for a creative non-fiction class. He never really got into what drove Williamson to want to hike from Mexico to Canada and back, why he really wanted to spend seven months doing this. The only explanation I have is that his good friend would have wanted to.

TSW - I actually thought this is actually one of the strongest pieces in the collection, despite the back and forth on the second-person story telling. Maybe it was the idea of chucking everything to escape modern responsibilities or maybe it was the obligation to an accidental friend that Friedman connected with, but I felt as a reader, this was the most human of all the profiles.

UM - Scott Williamson story probably interested as much or more than any of the others, despite the author's off-putting writing device.

Falling Star : Marshall Rogers, Basketball Player

S2N - Marshall Rogers, again, is one of the saddest tales I've read, and yet it was diluted by useless italics (which encompassed quotes and details that could have been woven into the essay or ditched entirely). It's sad because it's a higher profile example of a few high school and college basketball players I know who don't know what to do with themselves when the dream is over. Friedman just made it seem so, well, pedestrian.

TSW - As we already discussed, there was nothing to be gained from Friedman's take on Rogers. His story is already one we are already familiar with and his gimmicky asides almost seemed to mock Rogers' mental illness.

Up From The Gutter: Rudy Kasimakis, Bowler

S2N - I yawned through a lot of this one, because after reading one book about a hustler last month, this was just boring. Friedman's bad at creating atmosphere; this could have been improved by spending more time describing the action in "action bowling." Without that, I'm not sure what makes Kasimakis interesting, if anything at all.

TSW - This one wore me out pretty quickly, but that might be because we had just finished the Kid Delicious story.

UM - After the story on PBW, the story on the hustling bowler seemed pretty inconsequential. With Weber we learned a fair amount about the person behind the persona (of course everything i knew about him before came goofy ESPN ads) along with the world of competitive bowling. Yet the story of Rudy the hustler read like a bland and rather superficial profile on somebody I don't care about.

Tough : Danelle Ballengee, Runner

S2N: This was one of the few that I thought Friedman acquitted himself well on. Having the perspective of the subject, what she thought about and what she did to try and avoid dying after falling off the cliff was fascinating — I imagined myself there with few problems, and getting the tales of her neighbor and the people who went searching for her made for an interesting read.

TSW - If I was the dog in Friedman's article, I would wonder why I didn't receive top credit along with my owner since my side of the story is given just as much time as Ballengee's.

The Tragedy : Marco Pantani, Cyclist

S2N - I cannot emphasize how much I disliked Friedman's interjections of his own history with drug abuse into the very sad story of Pantani, and the inability of his family, friends, or anyone else to help him after he fell so far from the heights of cycling. What the author went through wasn't needed for the conclusion — that no one was truly responsible for Pantani's death save the cyclist himself, dying because he was a drug addict. It interrupted the flow of the story and added nothing to it. We could have reached the conclusion that Pantani did himself in without it being spelled out for us.

TSW - It is the Hunter S. Thompson effect. And unless you are Hunter S. Thompson, I don't want to hear about your own drug use in an article.

UM - Especially if you're going to come off as such an ass. I basically stopped reading after the Marco Pantani story. His interjections were inappropriate and completely irrelevant to the story of the man's downfall.

Sixteen Minutes From Home : Willie McCool, Runner

S2N: I loved McCool's story, but I just don't know whether it actually fits into the theme behind the collection at all. I suspect the fact that Friedman has to even address that midway through in a sense — noting that McCool's life wasn't that simple with the abusive biological father. But I sense this is more of a new profile, or interesting appreciation, of a man who died in a tragedy seen around the world than someone who suffered or was tortured by his or her desire to beat back the despair through individual achievement.

Lost in America : Steve Vaught, Hiker

S2N - At about this point, I feel like I'm running into the same kind of story, or at least a script similar to others we've read before. The interesting twist is what happens to Vaught when his impulsive idea to lose weight becomes a mini-media phenomenon that, ironically, winds up being something that he cannot control — just like the fluctuations of his weight. Problem is, I'm reading the same kind of "filling the void" language that I've seen so much of previously, and it's losing its luster.

TSW - I remember all the hoopla around Vaught - documentaries were HOT HOT HOT at the time and everyone and their brother owned an SLR - and always felt that the poor man never stood a chance against the media onslaught that surrounded him. Friedman's take read like the footnote to the Oprah phenomenon.

A Moment of Silence : John Moylan, Runner

S2N - It's an interesting story, but I wound up feeling like I couldn't take away a whole lot from Moylan's survival story. Maybe it's because I couldn't fathom being in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the trauma it would cause, but when I read about him not being able to run for a while after the attacks, I didn't feel a whole lot for him.

TSW - There is something so numbing in a 9/11 story - to me at least - that they hardly register with my emotions any more. It sounds horrific to say, but it is like my soul only has capacity to grieve for and worry about the people directly in my life who were hurt by that day. Yes, it was sad he could not run. Yes, it was a symptom of something greater. I just could not connect with that fear from Friedman's story.

G-D in his corner : Dmitriy Salita, boxer - New York Magazine

S2N - My favorite of the book, actually (as much as "favorite" can be used, considering how tough it was to get through a lot of this.) He's limiting his career to be observant, obviously, not participating in the staple that is Friday night fights, and the careful walking of a line between the adherence to faith and career aspirations. I do think there's something to examine here that I wish Friedman might have — if participation in American sport lends itself to the sort of cultural assimilation that's described with prior Jewish boxers.

I'm actually eager to hear what you think of Salita's story, UM, since you're the one of us who knows boxing well.

UM - Somehow I hadn't realized that I'd already read Friedman's piece on Salita over a year ago when it was linked by my friend I-berg at No Mas . I remember enjoying the article that ran in New York Magazine as much or more than most of the other Salita profiles I'd come across, but it's woefully out of place in this collection. It just doesn't fit in with the stories of people with unclear or abstract motivations to push themselves further. Salita is a boxer who boxes because it's his career of choice.

S2N - Do you think Friedman's trying to tie in Salita's desire to box more with his religious observance than is warranted?

UM - No, not necessarily, I just felt like the bulk of the other stories deal with people who are driven by some invisible compulsion. Salita's story isn't like that, he's a Jew and a boxer but he's just a regular person who doesn't seem to suffer from the "Agony of Defeat" and not just because he's undefeated.

Driving Lessons : Barry Friedman, Golfer

S2N - I wish he'd left this one out, not only because I think the last line of Salita's story was a great way to end, but because it just seemed like so much navel-gazing on the author's part — trying to figure out what drove his father so much, and attracted him to golf to fill his time. I can see where it fits in the concept of the collection, but whether it was really necessary to include to prove that point, I don't know.

TSW - Actually, for me this was the piece that pulled the whole book together. It was easy to see Friedman's road heading to confrontation with his own childhood and his own father by reading the essays in order. The collision between the obsessive athletes (albeit amateur in this case) and their families needed to be told from the spectator's (innocent bystander's? victim's?) side to make the book complete.

Conclusion

UM - I'm not even sure how much more there is to say. I enjoyed a few of the stories which I guess makes reading the book a worthwhile enterprise, but the rest was either uninteresting or downright banal.

TSW - Maybe it was reading two books in row for the Deadspin Book Club that were less than inspiring that has us so down. Maybe it was the lack of context from original dates and publications. I enjoyed the Scott Williamson story (and the afterward that tied together his love life) despite itself and wished Friedman could have been as hUMane in the rest of his essays.

S2N - I would recommend skipping this; there's not a high enough percentage of hits to offset the misses here for me.

So we should probably tell you what book we should all be reading for the Book Club. Therefore, the next Deadspin Book Club discussion, which will be up just after Thanksgiving, is Steve Friedman's The Agony Of Victory. Friedman will also be reading at the Varsity Letters Reading Series in New York a week from tonight, if you want to wait to buy the book then.

So yeah: Now, when the book club returns in a few weeks with their full report, you'll know what the heck they're talking about. Makes sense.

The Agony Of Victory [Amazon]
Introducing The Deadspin Book Club [Deadspin]
Varsity Letters Reading Series [Gelf Magazine]

TSW: What did everyone think of the overall push at the start of the book that pool is a sport? Wertheim is quick to get that out of the way right at the start, and it is never questioned again, despite the fact that at the end of his career, Kid Delicious's size does become a problem.

UM: I'm so sick of the argument that so-and-so either is or isn't a sport. Everybody seems to have different classifications and definitions. I don't see what the problem is in labeling pool a sport. It doesn't require you to be at peak physical condition, but who's to say that's a requirement for sports?

TSW: I don't disagree that pool is a sport. It was a good choice to address that issue within the first few pages of the prologue before even jumping into Kid's story.

S2N: Oh, it's obviously a sport — and I suppose Delicious' girth (and defiance of the wisdom stated that a heftier player gets tired more easily) is kind of a way to describe the "natural athlete," such as it exists in the pool hall. Wertheim has to get this out of the way first, though, in order to sort of justify his even writing the book in the first place.

TSW: And with that natural athleticism came crippling depression.

S2N: Trade-offs. You get a gift, you get a nasty side effect (curse, blah) to go with it. Wertheim described those voids and panic attacks very well throughout the book with the scenes of not leaving his parents' home and sometimes not even his room unless it was to eat. Food is Delicious' other source of self-medication, aside from the table — which is actually a fairly common thing.

TSW: I think Wertheim did a great job telling the story of Delicious' parents for the ride. If he would have had stricter parents, or less forgiving parents, or parents that medicated him early on, he would have never been allowed to develop his talent much less on the road hustling.

UM: One question I had throughout...to what degree can we trust the story itself? The story of Danny's [Basavich, aka Kid Delicious] journey from teenager to professional is never short on specific conversations and detailed descriptions of his individual scores almost as if the writer is riding shotgun with the protagonist. But of course the pool hustlers weren't traveling with a reporter chronicling their every move, all of it was told from memory whatever sources could be tracked down (I'd imagine).

TSW: But don't we accept that in most sports there are memories that are etched so deeply by the moment you cannot help by remember - in fact relive over and over again which would be common for someone suffering from a bipolar disorder - every last detail? I kept waiting for Delicious' story to take a fantastical turn. That guns had been drawn on the road, that Greg "007" Smith in Chicago was setting him and his partner Bristol up for a trap, that he played some million dollar game that would set him for life. But the reality seemed that it road was a long, hard grind. Great pool, interesting characters and some excitement when things went well. And maybe that is where the truth comes out in the book. Lots of long car trips and eking out an existence while being one of the very best at the game in relative obscurity.

UM: Yeah, if anything I felt that the book managed to gloss over the real grind of being a road player. One minute Delicious was struggling, then he splashes water on his face goes on a great run, and that's that. It seems as if he's either he's flying high or he's struggling through a period of depression at all times. He spends six months in Alabama, and we hear about two games he plays that netted him a few grand. It's a short book, so there's no reason they couldn't go into some more detail about the life he lived on the road outside of the competition.

S2N: I still feel like I don't understand just how up against it a player can be at times when the bankroll is thin; that kind of detail. What Wertheim was better with was the lows as they applied outside of the tables themselves — we've noted Delicious' depression, but there's also [Delicious' playing partner] Bristol Bob's meth addiction, borne out of the frustration of not being a player of Delicious' skill and fruitless attempts to change his playing style. As far as veracity goes with regard to the hustling and the road trips: That's something we just have to trust. One of the biggest things I thought that the book had going for it was that it read like fiction; those accounts of hustling being dependent upon the memories of the participants only added to that particular aspect.

TSW: It reminded me a lot of the card players you see day in and day out in the card rooms in Los Angeles. There is an ebb and flow, and you can expect to see so many of the same players moving around from the Bike, to the Commerce, to Hollywood Park, to Hawaiian Gardens, to Normandie's, .. etc, etc, etc. That look of a grinder, who plays on cruise control a majority of the time. (The footnote to that thought being that Wertheim makes a point of mentioning that the poker boom had drained away much of the action from pool several times.) While you were looking for more, I thought he had done a fairly decent job stretching out the material that had started out as magazine article.

S2N: I wound up being kind of floored by the whole trip to Fargo, which revolved around Delicious' falling in love with Tanya Harig, the woman who ran the pool hall — because it gave us that truth about how intimate relationships are tough to come by for this nomadic and financially unstable world. I almost feel a bit cheated by it, though, because Wertheim likely spoke to Harig and the whole sequence lacked what that relationship meant on her end. Yeah, it's a book about the hustler — but I thought a bit more appreciation for the other side in that relationship would have helped me understand just how doomed it was from the start.

TSW: I didn't mind Tanya's view being left out. While she meant a great deal to Delicious at the time, it was what it was. I saw it more as a fling just to fill the void of his road partner Bristol not being with him on that trip.

S2N: Am I the only one particularly annoyed by the caps-lock accenting of Greg Smith's [the "pool detective" who sends Delicious and Bristol Bob to pool halls to hustle] dialogue? I admit it made me imagine his accent as something Ditka-esque, but eventually it wore on me as an unnecessary tic that got overused.

UM: You aren't alone there, it drove me a bit nuts. For some reason the voice I hear in my head when he's speaking is Bill Hader doing a Peter Falk impression.

TSW: The ALL CAPS letters for Smith did not bother as much as it should have. I'm either allowing for the fact that language is becoming looser or I've allowed reading TOO MANY conversational pieces and BLOGS. I heard Joe Pesci in Casino, which I know is totally the wrong part if the American dialect spectrum.

UM: I think I would have preferred it if the author had spent some time talking about the travels he himself underwent in order to track down some of the characters Delicious met along the way. It reads as if the author sat at a table for hours on end listening to him telling stories of the road from his own perspective. I'm sure there were contrarian views to be found, although I doubt he'd be tracking down any of those dealers in Philly.

TSW: The "journalist-being-part-of-the-story" often slows down the story and more often than not, allows the wrong ego to come into focus. Playing it straight, especially with such a likable character as Kid Delicious, was the way to go. If anything, I think Wertheim identified with the depression a little too often, without coming out and talking about any struggles he might have been having.

S2N: What do we think of the actual scenes of pool playing itself?

UM: It was all very quick. It's not like the writer stopped to break down the poetic nature of a given shot like John Feinstein would want, but I'm not sure that would have added anything to the overall effect of the book.

S2N: If Wertheim had stopped and broken down every aspect of play, it probably would have taken away some of the interest — because it's less about playing the game itself than the life surrounding it. As it was, I thought he got to the emotions and anticipation in the matches fairly well — especially in Philly, where Delicious is taking a mobster for $20,000, and at the end, with his match against Earl Strickland, which is set to be the climax of the story; the last triUMph where he is an unknown.

TSW: The only room I really got a feel for was the "training ground" up in Connecticut.

S2N: The Chicago Billiards chapter was probably one of my favorite parts — where do you go to learn the skills to take people for thousands of dollars by honing your game? You need an eccentric rich dude [Ralph Procopio] who runs a really seedy place in New Haven. It seems so fantastical, as if that place could never really have existed at all (or maybe I just don't venture into enough pool halls to judge.)

UM: It was almost like the difference between reading Positively Fifth Street and reading a book written by a poker pro (in terms of the more hardcore analysis).

TSW: [Poker] is a different type of math. In poker a person not there to see the hand can calculate odds based on seat position, chip stacks, and what was in hand. (Or at least attempt to.) In pool, you'd have to be there to see exactly how many inches the cue ball was from the eight ball and at what angles and distances the surrounding balls were located. It is hard to see geometrical abstracts.

UM: And thank god he didn't include any diagrams. That would have been painful. I liked how he described Bristol's car keys in the corner pocket trick. I'll have to try that out.

TSW: So at the end, did you guys think you were supposed to think of Kid Delicious as a tragic figure? I really could not get a feel for what the parting emotion was supposed to be. Here he was, a great that could go no further because of notoriety and because of a lack of pro-circuits, and yet he seemed willing to stay in the world of pool.

UM: I had that feeling the entire way. I got the impression that the author could have driven the story to either end of the spectrum, but ultimately the good and bad of the lifestyle seem to offset one another. It kind of fits in with the bi-polar diagnosis.

S2N: We can consider it tragic because of his depression — he had no other options or allowed himself no other options with his particular character tics. However, I just can't go there with him as a tragic figure, and I think it goes back to what we were talking about regarding the lack of understanding of some of the real lows of the pool world. At times, Delicious seemed nearly too carefree and cavalier about the losses, just going back home to start over and wondering when the opportunities would dry up. Maybe that's just part of being a hustler; if you gamble for a living, you certainly have less concern and regard for money than the rest of us. I suspect the intent was that we were supposed to feel happy for him — he had reached a personal pinnacle of notoriety, but sad that it couldn't earn him a living. I suppose we were all left as emotionally confused and distant from the outcome as any outsider who got attached and felt involved in the life of this guy. We're all Tanya.

Our Verdicts:

UM: I enjoyed the book quite a bit, but it's not something I'd classify as a must-read.

S2N: I thought it was an interesting look inside a subculture and sport that I'm not familiar with, and probably never will be. The subject matter grabbed me from the start, but for most people, I'd say that it's worth checking out from the library first.

TSW: It was a pleasant and quick enough read. I certainly know more about the fraternity of pool hustlers now than I did before. The story lost steam for me at the end and I don't think there was the payoff I was looking by the time I finished.