This is a nice little story about some great undone business of Deadspin, and an allegory about male delusions of competence.
Once upon a time, in a shitty downtown bar years ago, Deadspin editor emeritus Tommy Craggs declared that he could beat me in a game of one-on-one basketball. It was a nice thought. Tommy made a lot of three-pointers in a high school basketball game once, so he had a lot of ideas about how he’d stack up against my skills, even though I’d played a few years of college basketball to his zero years of college basketball.
This became a regular bit. We’d have a few rounds and then Tommy would say to some unsuspecting stranger, “Who do you think would win in a game of one-on-one?” The stranger usually sized us up and said, “Emma,” and Tommy would pout and protest about his three-pointers for a while, and then say something vaguely offensive about women’s hoops, and then I’d get worked up and tell him to fuck off, and then one of us would storm out of the bar and the stranger was left with a drunk idiot talking about their glory days. (Yes, Tommy and I are both very fun at parties.)
Anyway, we never actually played that game of one-on-one. This was part of the bit. We could have played any time, sure, but mostly we wanted to argue over the concept. We spent so many years arguing over the concept that, eventually, I got hit by a truck. About six weeks into my ordeal, I got an email from Kyle Wagner, my friend and former Deadspin editor famous for rarely blogging. The email was titled “worthwhile dunking initiative,” and it included a link to a video.
I wanted to come up with something that would hopefully make you feel better. The video linked down at the bottom was the best I could come up with, and it took much longer than it really should have. This is from everyone here (and also Greg’s gigantic friend). Love ya!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6hmsQ…
P.S. here is a photo of craggs’s dumb face
The link didn’t work. There was a follow-up email:
HERE IS A LINK THAT WORKS BECAUSE THEY TOOK DOWN THE YOUTUBE I AM SO SORRY
THE PASSWORD IS CRAGGS
The password didn’t work. There was another follow-up email:
except it’s “craggs” in lower case and without the quotation marks
This time, it worked. No one ever blogged the video—partly because Kyle never blogged, and partly because they had a copyright issue with the chosen backing track—so I’m sharing it with you on this day, Jezspin Day. (Devin Clark from our video team has added “a ridiculous song in our music library with little kids rapping about not doing drugs” to make things kosher.) Shout out to these guys for doing something exceedingly nice for me during a very rough patch, and shout out to the many levels of male incompetence at play in this story.
Thanks for your continued support of Jezspin. We really had a blast. Please enjoy this video of Tommy Craggs getting dunked on. For the record: I’d still win.