Recently, I joined Deadspin as their social editor. My sister, Megan Reynolds, has worked at Jezebel for a little over a year. This means we both now spend at least 40 hours a week together under the same roof. And now that we are together in this professional environment, I realize there are a lot of things I cannot…
Carmelo Anthony’s time with the Houston Rockets seems to be coming to a quick and humiliating end. This comes after an agonizing season with the Thunder and a productive but mostly disappointing tenure with the Knicks. It’s been true for long enough now that it can be said without qualification: Carmelo…
When last we visited Wild Card’s inexplicable and weirdly conscientious set of trading cards from the 1992 presidential election, we were taunted. Not just in the usual way that the past tends to taunt in a Remembering Some Guys scenario—all the reminders of things come and gone, the wreathing ambient heaviness of…
Where Wild Card’s set of trading cards for the 1992 presidential election is concerned, the question is less how the set came to be than why. The how part is easy: Given a smallish photo budget, a sufficiently defective sense of judgment, and no meaningful pressure to sell any of the cards, a company could…
Football in 2018 is sleek. It is about scoring and speed. The players do not want to be encumbered by extraneous protective equipment. Shoulder pads have gotten smaller and smaller, and the frontier is being pushed every day. Michael Bennett wears kicker shoulder pads.
No one was more unprepared for the brief and preposterous baseball card boom of the 1990s than the companies that manufactured and sold those cards. This is not to say that I, as a tweenage idiot, was capable of assimilating and comprehending the fact that the baseball cards I’d stockpiled out of rote guppy-brained…
What a world, what a world. How, you might wonder, is someone to live in a world like this one, all crumbling and cruel and forsaken and loud? It’s a great question and honestly buddy I’ve got nothing for you there. But I can tell you this much: if you have in your possession a box full of random old baseball cards…
Remember when Madonna and Dennis Rodman were a thing? What ever happened to that couple?
May 19, 1990 was WCW’s Capital Combat pay-per-view, and the event was promoted with an added bonus: RoboCop himself would be there. The tagline for the show was actually “Return of Robocop,” though RoboCop hadn’t really appeared in wrestling before. But RoboCop 2 opened a month later. The poster for the event even…
It has been exactly one month since the World Cup ended. This might cause you to believe that it is far too early to engage in any remembering of guys who participated in the tournament, but that would overlook one of the central truths of guy remembering: Any guy can be remembered, at any time.
“Ripping packs of baseball cards was one of my favorite things to do as a kid,” my colleague David Roth wrote in June in an essay accompanying a video of the baseball card-opening series that I’ve now somehow both wormed my way into and made about professional wrestling. “I like the experience of opening something…
Nick Aldis is now the NWA world’s champion. Not just that, he’s a fighting champion: He defended his title 20 times recently. Sure, wrestling is scripted, but that still means Aldis has wrestled near the top of the card at 20 shows this year. Aldis is part of a wrestling family in the spotlight: His wife, Mickie…
We should begin with the important stuff. There is a league that plays at Louisville Slugger Stadium, in Louisville, over the course of a brief eight-team tournament held at the height of summer. It’s called the Bluegrass World Series, and seven of the teams in its field have rosters made up of collegiate players. The…
Remembering Guys does not necessarily have to involve trading cards. It’s a pursuit that can be equally at home anywhere on earth—a crowded train or a vast and silent desert work just about equally well for these purposes. I am Remembering a Guy right now. It’s the beefy former Mets corner infield prospect Butch…
One of my favorite villainous wrestlers when I was a kid was Rick “The Model” Martel. The gimmick was simple: Martel was a model, and he thought he was better than you.
What brings us back? What makes us Remember, whether it’s Guys or any of the other things that are out there to remember? Is it the fundamental human urge to open what is closed, or to return to places in which we have felt happy or safe in the past, or to create “snackable” video content to put onto a website?…
My uncle introduced me to pro wrestling. I think I was seven. He clued me in on the gag right away: Guys pretended to fight, and it was hilarious.
There’s a thing that happens to old ballplayers, a strange and salty suspension that leaves their approach to the game frozen at precisely the moment they left it and tends to lead them to spend the rest of their days grousing spicily about everything that happened since. That never happened to Davey Johnson, for a…
If you’re not remembering, are you forgetting? It’s a question that has vexed and divided the Guy Remembering community for centuries. Our work, in Remembering, is fundamentally about sustaining—about keeping alive the memory of Steve Jeltz’s very wet hair, or a terribly rude song that someone sang about Rob Deer like…
You can’t really know what your life’s great work will be when you begin it. Our days are full to overfull with work, but so little of that feels important. This is not to say that all of it is bullshit, although for most everyone some significant portion of it is invariably bullshit. It’s just that, when you pick up…
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