Transcript
You know what's not refreshing? When your team concedes a last minute equalizer or feeling pressured into joining in the Mexican wave or when you spot your best friend at the match even though he said he was busy, Kevin. But a cold pint of Heineken brewed with just 3 natural ingredients. That's refreshing. Get the facts. Be drink aware. Visit drinkaware. Ie. The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Frank Keane BMW showroom on Dundeehl to find your next car. Dundeehl Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit dundeel.ie today. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. So many interests. Well, actually, when I got to know you was when I wrote the Rolling Stones book, and I'd taken guitar lessons when I was a kid. And I got back into it because I wanted to try to play those songs that I was writing about. And how did it work out? Did you did you learn the songs? I realized it was so good that I hadn't played guitar when I was in college because all I would have done is get high and play guitar. That's it. Yeah. You know, it took a more, adult less, addictive personality. So it's so fun, you know, and it's such a good way to sort of see how simple most of these songs actually are, you know, and how they're it's the same song kinda over and over again. In in what sense? Because they have, like, similar chords and but they're words. I remember a thing from the Rolling Stones. I think it was I can't I'm probably gonna get the songs wrong, but I think Bill Wyman came in with the riff for, like, maybe it was Brown Sugar. It was one of those songs, which is unusual for Bill Wyman, and they were all excited and they played it. And Keith just said, you recognize it, don't you? It's just honky tonk woman backwards. Well, you know, it's go ahead. It's, like, 3 3 or 4 chords, most of those songs. And I want, you know, as you, of course, know, and you're and you you've written about, like, you know, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were basically taught about songwriting from John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They they couldn't write that first song. They ran into John Lennon and and Paul McCartney in the street, and then John and Paul basically wrote their first hit song for them. Yeah. They probably were showing, you know, like, sometimes I remember when I was skiing once, I was, like, seeing a really difficult hill, and I didn't know how I was gonna get down. It had huge moguls, And a friend that I was with came up behind me and just went right down. I was like, oh, that's how you do it. You just have to go right down and figure it out as you go along, you know? So, I think that that's what they showed him, which was, you know, they don't have to write well, I think a big liberating thing is if we're writing too is you don't have to write a great song. You don't have to worry about that. You know? Just write a song, and every now and then, you'll write a great song. I think that's the story with the wrong show. I never thought of it that way. Do you think that's true for the the Beatles as well? Because they have so many great songs. Do they have is it a quantity thing? Well, I don't mean Like, yesterday is such a classic song. It doesn't it feels like or let it be or whatever. Like, it seems like the average band at that time wasn't writing those songs. Well, you know the story of yesterday. Right? No. Paul McCartney dreamed it and was stuck in his head, and he was trying to figure out, you know, who wrote this song, who wrote this song, and he kept asking everybody and they all said, we don't know, we don't know. And then finally, John Lennon said, maybe you wrote it. So it kinda came to him in a dream. I don't think I don't I don't mean that it's quantity and some percentage is gonna be good. I mean that it's sort of the tyranny of trying to be good, you know? Like, it's like a problem when you try to do something good because you're not ultimately in control of that. Like, you just gotta do the activity and then hope it works. Do you know what I mean? It's like otherwise so there's a great writer that I love that inspired me to be a nonfiction writer, Joseph Mitchell, who was at the New Yorker and Yeah. And the famous story about him was that he returned in his last story in 1963 and was in the New Yorker until the mid nineties typing, writing, and never turned anything in. And finally, when he died, they found some of his stuff and published the stuff he'd been working on. I kinda knew him. And to me, he's an example of somebody whose taste got past his ability. Mhmm. So every time he reread something he wrote, it didn't look right to him, so it's never finished. Even though I've had this discussion with other writers, like, I feel that's true for all writers. Like, when I look at things I even wrote a year ago, I could see the problems, the flaws. Like, as you continue learning, and there's so much to learn in writing, you you're always gonna not like your older stuff. Like, if you look back at some of your first books, I'm sure you feel the same way. I just had a I reread my I read my first book on audio and I thought and it was a very successful book, maybe established my whole career. I mean, without it, I wouldn't have been able to do what I do. I don't think it was tough Jews about Jews, and I just didn't think it was good. Well, it's a great book too. I know. It's just because you just evolve little by little and you don't even it's like growing. Like, you don't even realize. And then there's a scary thought that I just have to kinda believe you're always getting better or kinda what's the point. That's what you're talking about about the guitar, which is when I was a kid, I'd try something new. My first thought was, I'm gonna be the best person in the world that ever did this. You know? And it would make me not enjoy things because I realized I wasn't that good. And, like, when you get older and, like, play guitar, you realize you're never gonna be good, so you don't have you can just enjoy it. The the flip side though is with writing, you can get better and better as you get older. It's one of those things that that works better with age in many ways. That's my point, which is at some point, maybe you will have done your best thing. Maybe. Because when you look back at other writers, you think that was their best book. Maybe they're 40 or something, and you'll never it's it's depressing to think about. It's like thinking about your like, maybe I just, like, turn in my mind, like, maybe the best is already in back of me, which is a scary, scary thought. But you look at writers or artists who do the really, really, really great stuff when they're really, really old, and that's very, very inspiring. Well, and look, you're the exact same age as me. We were both born in 1968, and I do think writers hit their peak ages probably more in their in their sixties than in their forties. Now, of course, there are many examples of writers who have written their best work in their forties, but, I mean, how old was Ernest Hemingway when he wrote a movable beast or old man in the sea? Yeah. But he the stories that he's really famous for that made his reputation that were revolutionary were the first ones, which is, I'm a huge Hemingway fan. Hemingway grew up in suburban Chicago where I grew up, so it's like, you know, a suburban kid, like, really. And, his first book, you know, In Our Time, which is just it was like some of the Nick Adams stories, World War 1 stories. And if you go back, they're masterpieces, almost every single one of them, and he wrote them when he was in the mid twenties. And I think that he wrote Farewell to Arms, and he wrote Sun Also Rises, which I mean, I love A Moveable Feast. Absolutely. But the Sunless Horizons is probably his best novel. But, you know, I I would challenge you on that. Like, I would re I would reread the Sunless Surprises. I feel like he has if you compare that to Old Man in the Sea, which I know is almost just more of, like, a big short story or a novella, But the sun also rises, I feel, has a little bit of ego in it. Too much ego. He's he's getting out some personal revenges in the sun also rises. Yeah. Definitely. And he loses that later on. Although movie piece has an element to that. But Old Man in the Sea is like a pure book without his ego. But what's amazing about Farewell to Arms, let's say, is take the first paragraph of Farewell to Arms. If you were to go back and read it or read it out loud, it's like a it's a magic. It's like a song, and you cannot figure out how it works. It's so beautiful. It's like a painting, and you could I feel like you can almost take it and type the exact words down on the page yourself, and it won't sound the same. Something happened, you know, that never really happens to anybody, And it was just that he got it. You know, he had this very intense experience in the first world war where he was blown up. I don't know if you know that he was a ambulance driver. Yeah. Yeah. He got but basically blown up. And, and I think he was I know the stories are very, very, very, very intense. We mentioned it too. Like, the intensity is there to mask any inability. Not that he was incapable of writing a book. Obviously, he was a great writer even then. But I think the intensity of the experience, it was so in his head that that was able to masquerade any thoughts he might have as a as a writer then. Not again, not that he was had any thoughts or was a, he was a great writer. I just think somehow or other for me, Old Man of the Sea is more sublime than those earlier books. Although those earlier books were more grand. Well, it's kind of an it's an old man book and a young man book, you know? And it's also you kinda feel like it's a little tiny bit. Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize, was the best selling writer, super celebrity like no writer is, felt a little sorry for himself, you know? And so this idea that every writer has that he did this incredible thing, which is he caught this giant fish, and he gets devoured by sharks. Yeah. You know? That's just like when you feel like when you write a book and it starts getting attacked. You know? It's like jerking the g*****n sharks. So I really think he was exercising his anger towards I never thought of it that way. Yeah. That's how I see it. It's like now. That's so interesting. Well, you know, the the it it's interesting because I'll segue into your your your current book which is which is was a fascinating read and I I highly recommend it. Sports and basketball compared to writing are very interesting things because, again, writing sort of improves with age and experience to a large extent, but there's this always feeling, like you say, that maybe the best is behind you. But sports and you refer to this in in the book. You say, but every athlete dies twice. There's the the actual death that everybody experiences, but there's that earlier death when the thing you've done since you were a child and that you've done it every day, you love it, and you're the you're the best in the world at it, sport. At some point, whether it's age 25, age 30, age 40, at some point, you're not gonna physically be able to do it anymore at that level. Yeah. Experience does not help. What you lose with age, you can never gain back with experience. Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a young man when he retired. He's over a decade younger than you and I are now. Right. And yet he was an old man, an old old he was the oldest man in the league. Right? Yeah. And he had to retire and, like, what was it, 1989, the year after the the season you write about. Yeah. Yeah. And he was, I think, he was 41 or something. I mean, I think that, first of all, the Hemingway thing, it's interesting, the connection, because Hemingway writes about sports all the time. He writes about Joe DiMaggio in the old man in the sea. Right? He's comparing himself to the great DiMaggio. I think Hemingway really saw it. He grew up in Chicago, and during the white sox through the world series, there's a thing, an anonymous piece by him where he interviewed one of the great players, maybe Joe Jackson, heading west for spring training when he was working in Kansas City. And, also, he has a description in one of those early stories just about a guy hitting a home run. And as far as physical action, because Hemingway was so interested in writing about physical action. I mean, you can write about what somebody looks like, what a park looks like at night, what it looks like under the lights, what the player's uniform looks like, that's writing. And what I always liked about writing so much about sports is I feel like there's this real bifurcation between, like, literary writing, which I try to think of myself as, and sports writing. And once you start writing a lot about sports, you get thrown in the sports bucket, but I always thought sports, some of the greatest American literature, whether or not you realize it, is sports right. So and I think that, I think that the thing about sports is all the stuff that people keep hidden, that they do in their house that you never see, are out exposed in the public to think about and write about. So what you're talking about, you know, the fact that these guys in the middle of their prime or anybody else, they lose their ability. They lose their magic. And they have to and and they move from basically being in the center, participant to being observer, a civilian like the rest of us, you know? But we never experienced it, so we never lost it. I mean, more than anything, most of the people I know would rather have been a professional athlete. You can't think of anything cooler than that. And, and you send that's why the guys who are old, who find a way still to contribute, even when they're old, sometimes by changing their game are so inspiring. Like, Michael Jordan is a great example. No one was more physically gifted than Michael Jordan in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1986, but he retired and he came back and he wasn't quite physically the same. He couldn't jump as high, you know, he couldn't hang like he'd hung, and so he reinvented his game where he suddenly became an outside player. He started, you know, where he would play from the outside, which would then have to give him room, and then he'd go inside. Whereas early in his career, he just went inside every time. So it's, like, really interesting to watch when people change like that. And, a lot of players can't do it and some can't. The amazing thing about Kareem was he still played the same way, but he would pick, he was old for basketball, and he would pick his spots. So, like, if it was a game that was over, blah, blah, he would take it easy. That's why the really funny thing in airplane where they say Kareem isn't running back on defense, he didn't run back on defense. He had to conserve his energy for basically offense or big moments. But in those playoff series, the season I wrote about, 80 7, 80 8, the Lakers played every round except the first round with 7 games. So they almost played like an additional season by the time they got to the last 2 or 3 games in the final. And Kareem would disappear when not needed. And when needed, for a big moment, he'd suddenly get the key blocker, do the key thing. So he very much learned to conserve his energy and pick his spots, which is inspiring and a lesson to take for the rest of us getting older. Yeah. And it's it's it's a little it's interesting too also because as you get older in a sport, like basketball is a great example, it's not just that you have to play less. At some point, you really can't play at all or you're gonna get hurt like an old man. Right. And and so, yes, Kareem, Michael Jordan, they all had to kinda reinvent. They had to slow down their game. But, again, in a fairly young age, middle age, they they have to just stop. They can't just sort of, like, play with their kids or grandkids or whatever, because they might get hurt when they jump. Yeah. Well, I remember when Wayne Gretzky retired, and he still seemed like a really great player. I mean, he was leading the league in assists or had a lot of assists. And they asked Mark Messier why he was retiring. He said, because this is the NHL. And if you slow down a little, you can really get hurt. Mhmm. It's like dangerous. So now it gets to the point where you're actually putting yourself in a not even sports danger, like actual actual danger. That's why sometimes you get these outliers and think about it, who play, like, Messier played almost till he was 50. Gordie Howe played until he was in his fifties, you know, and even Kareem played till he was 41. Those guys are freaks in nature because think about all the people who played sports at a high level that you knew. Like, a lot of them were quit in 3rd grade. Some of them quit in 7th grade. Some of them quit in the middle of high school. Some quit after 2 years of college. Some of them quit after 2 games in the NBA. These guys, some the rest of them quit at age 33, 34. So when you get a guy that plays till 40, there's like he's like 2 or 3 out of, like, 1,000,000 who can actually end up doing that. So first off, I really love the book, when the game was war, the NBA's greatest season, the 80 7, 88 season. You made a claim that this is the greatest season, and after reading your book, I have to agree. Like, it was such an intense, season. But, you know, I've never watched the basketball game on TV ever. I've been to 1 basketball game in my life. That's probably the only game I've watched. And yet, for some reason, I've been fascinated. Like you earlier, you said sports writing is often the greatest literature. Lately, I've been fascinated by all the content out there about basketball. Like, there's the the the HBO show, Winning Time, about, the the beginning of Magic Johnson's career with the Lakers in the in the early eighties. Of course, there was the documentary, The Last Dance. There's the TV show that's on right now, Swagger, which is fictional show, but produced by Kevin Durant. There's probably 2 or 3 documentaries on Netflix or Amazon right now that are in the charts for for basketball. And what is it that makes such great drama? What is it that that I like about it? Like, I really love these shows, and I'm not a basketball fan at all. Well, one thing around basketball that's different than the other sports is there's only 5 players on the court at a time. So it's not like football where you got 11 on a side. You know, you got 22 because you got 11 on offense, and you got 11 on defense, and then you got special teams, so maybe it's more like 30 people or more. So and they're wearing masks and helmets and you can't see them. Basketball players are very visible, and they're talking trash, and they're saying crap to each other, and you can hear it, and you could watch it. And the personalities of these guys are so evident in their playing style. So, like, Larry Bird from French Lick Indiana, Southern Indiana, his father committed suicide when he was a kid. He sort of didn't really make it at, Indiana University with Bobby Knight. You sort of see all that. You know, you see it in their game. Michael Jordan getting humiliated, on the driveway in front of his house by his older brother, game after game after game and burning first just to beat his brother, which then translate into beating everyone in the world on this incredible chip on his shoulder. So I think with basketball, starting with the fact that you could really see their faces, unlike just about any other, I guess, baseball, you can. Baseball is kinda I love baseball, but baseball is a national game of an America that doesn't exist anymore. You know, basketball is like the national game with the the speed and the intensity, and it's the baseball, basketball, I'd say, is really the game of the individual. You know, where it posts up into a 1 on 1 game. And the era I'm writing about, a lot of the shows you're talking about, like The Last Dance and Winning Time, are about the same era. I think it's because it was the last it was a real golden age of basketball, partly because it was before everything went online, and there became so many highlights and replay of every single moment. To me, that's like inflation. Like, the more dollars you print, the less each dollar is worth. And the more highlights you see, the less each highlight means. We had to wait all day, watch those games live, and you saw them once or you missed them forever. And there would be a a recap on the news, 3 minutes of sports just before the weather guy. So, basically, because we only saw it once and then a replay or 2, it those moments were so intense and they burned so brightly, and the the cities were really different than each other. I think in a way they're not anymore. Everything's become a little bit homogeneous. So the Detroit team, the Pistons, the bad boys, really seem to personify the working class, tough auto industry mentality of Detroit, and the Lakers were Showtime. That was LA. That was Hollywood. The Celtics were really Boston, and the Bulls were what was the new Chicago that sort of boomed after the seventies when, you know, the city kind of fell apart a little bit. So I think that all that was on display and the fans were really involved with the players, and it's just an era that's gone because everything's gone on to our phones in some way. Hey. You know, I think also with basketball, you have these, like, almost magical feats of physical showmanship, like just the concept of a dunk and and or, you know, Michael Jordan, you know, flying through the air as, you know, you it's it's like an amaze it's like a magic trick or something. Whereas with baseball, yes, you could see a ball go over a fence. That's the magical feat there. So you're not even seeing a human. And like you say, with the with the NFL, it's it's amazing. The passes, the catches, the amazing runs for the touchdown, but it's still you don't see their faces. So I guess you're right. There is something that a little you see the people, you see the drama, and and then you see the magic actually happen in front of you. And, also, think about the highlights, which I talked about. Like, baseball, the reason why it's so satisfying is because a lot for a long time, nothing happens. And if you care, the tension builds. And it's very, very, very frustrating. If you need your team to score and your team can't score, and then finally, after 2 hours, there's a hit. And it's just a hit. It scores a run, and it's like when you experience it, it's so cathartic that it's like the most ex you cry. The most exciting play you've ever seen. If you go back and watch it on a highlight, you're like, when is this a hit? Because I've seen a 1000000 hits like that. And with basketball, though that's true, sometimes those plays, those individual Michael Jordan plays are in isolation. Unbelievable. But what he could do physically was unbelievable. And one of the really cool things was when he came into the league, the best player in the league at that time was either Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, maybe Larry Bird, and Larry Bird said, he's incredible. I've never seen anyone like him. He's doing stuff that no one has ever done. And I don't I think, physically, Phil, no one really does what he did. It's not just that he scored and did all that stuff. He did it made it look so cool. He did it with such beauty and grace. He was like a rock star. You couldn't take your eyes off to him, and it was kinda hard for a while for me to watch NBA after he retired because it was like the stars out of the movie. Some of that's because I'm from Chicago and the bulls are finally really good, but also just because I mean, think about it. Everybody before him wore these short shorts. He just changed the way everybody in America dresses. I mean, you go into a Banana Republic, 2 years after he changes into long shorts, you're only selling long shorts. That's when guys started guys balding started shaving their heads. When I was a kid, people didn't shave their heads. They did a comb over. They hung onto everything they had, man. They worshiped the little bit of hair they had. They prayed to it. Jordan shaved his head, looked like the coolest guy in the world, and now everywhere, there's bald guys. I I I give that credit to Jordan too. You know, and and it it's interesting that the drama and personality, like, you know and you see this in the show winning time also, the the the, rivalry between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. And then you have, you know, all these amaze these charismatic or wild personalities, like like Dennis Rodman, I Isaiah Thomas. Like, I I didn't know this until I read your book. I didn't know the story that Dennis Rodman wasn't didn't start playing professional basketball till he was 25 years old. You know, everyone gets recruited when they're in college or drafted when they're in college, but he grew 10 inches around at some point. He was like a small guy, and then he grew 10 inches kinda late, you know, late in the early years. Like in in a year, which means you if you put your ear next to his door at night, you could probably hear him growing. I mean, that and it and it was after high school. So but that's an interesting recurrent thing that I noticed in basketball and probably in a lot of sports, which is the guys who grew late, if they purse if they persisted, because they would be pushed out of the game, whatever the game is. If you're real small, you get pushed out. If you wanna be like Isaiah Thomas who's under 6 feet tall, the only player in the top 50 under 6 feet tall, you gotta be better than everybody else. There's no mediocre 5 foot 10 players in the NBA. They're all great. So a lot of the guys who are shorter in basketball, they get pushed out. But if you persist, you actually can become a great player to grow. So, like, Jordan grew late too, relatively late. He grew in high school, and he had to develop all these skills to beat much bigger people. And then he grew and he had these incredible skills, ball handling, jumping, faking people out, except now he was 6 foot 6, not 5 foot 10 or 5 foot 11. And, also, Magic Johnson, he didn't really grow that late, but when he was a kid, he played guard, and he really was an excellent ball handler and developed his ball handling dribbling skills. People forget dribbling's like the basic alphabet of basketball. And, and then he grew, and now you had a guy insisted on saying a guard. You had a guard who was, like, 6 foot 8, which never existed, which meant everybody covering him was, like, 6 inches shorter than him, which gave him this incredible vision, which resulted all in all these incredible passes. Because back then, especially, you didn't have guys that go that fast with the ball, handling the ball, and make passes on the fly like he did. Why is that? This is a naive question, but why why is a guard shorter usually than other positions? And Isaiah Thomas was also a guard. Right? Yeah. Well, traditionally, you want the guy outside who's sort of carrying the ball up, setting up the play, making the passes, initiating the play, and can shoot from the outside. But inside, you want big guides because in, you know, you're fighting for rebound. So when you're fighting for rebounds, height is a is a big deal. So if you have a guy that's very tall, you put him in the forward position so he can get rebounds. Now, I mean, obviously, think about how I mean, it's silly to say, but think about how important rebounds are. If you get twice as many rebounds, you only have to make half as many shots. You know? Especially offensive rebounds in basketball, you get a do over if you get the rebound. So it's changed a little bit now because of the 3 point shot, but Red Arrowback who built the Celtics team and built 3 different dynasties in Boston, he always looked he said, you can't teach height. You know, I can't I can teach you anything, but I can't teach height. So, the thing now that the bulls that was really new back then that you see now is, like, Bill Lamber was just about a 7 foot center for the Pistons, and he could hit a 3 point shot. Now you see that. That was unique. Scottie Pippen, who was another guy who grew very late in college, came up playing guard and then grew like a foot and they put him at forward. But because he'd grown up playing guard because he had been short, he could sort of be a swing player where he could swing between forward, almost playing a center at times, back to guard, which is incredibly versatile if you have a guy that can sort of play all over the floor. So so, you know, the other interesting thing is you have these great individual athletes like Matt Johnson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Larry Bird, but ultimately, it's a team. And you do you go through this in the book. Like, the dynamics and the bonding of the team are just as important for winning that championship as is, you know, whoever your greatest player is. Like, you know, there's there's plenty of examples of teams that have, you know, the greatest player in history where they can't win because there's no team around them. I mean, the the Lakers, if they didn't have Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson and, Byron Scott and all the all these or Bryans. I I forget all these names. If they didn't have the team, it wouldn't have worked for them. Yeah. Well, a good example of that is Jordan himself, who took many, I think, I can't remember, 6 or 7 years before he finally won. He's the best player in the league. He won the MVP, but the Bulls would get eliminated in the usually, as soon as they ran into the Pistons in the playoffs. And the the the the criticism of Jordan was he's not a play a team player, and they asked Larry Bird that. His response was, yeah. Well, he doesn't have a team. And when I was a kid, they called the Bulls Jordan and the Jordanaires. You know, the Jordanaires were Elvis' backup band. And, basically, the they had to build the team. What interested me was I was a history major in college. And when I we would study the United States and how the United States became so heavily armed in my childhood, You couldn't really understand it if you didn't understand the Soviet Union and Russia. You know, it wasn't in a vacuum. They were responding to something. And when I tried to figure out why the Pistons played the way they did, which was the bad boy, very violent, very physical, And I didn't really get it. You go back and you look, they were built specifically to beat the Celtics because before they could get to the finals, they had to beat the Celtics. And the Celtics had the biggest frontline, maybe in NBA history, size wise, Larry Bird with the smallest one, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale, 3 Hall of Famers. So they had to get me to beat the Celtics, and the Celtics had to get big in me to beat the 70 sixers. So that's sort of how basketball evolves. And for the one of the great things about the Pistons was, Isaiah Thomas, he was a great, great player who's kinda undervalued now because of his shoot with Michael Jorgen and the Magic Johnson, but he was such a great player. He realized that he was the best player on the Pistons, and he could probably score 30 points a night. But he realized that if he scored 30 points a night, his team would not win. He had to sublimate his own talent, score less, and spread out the scoring. And the great thing about those Pistons was they were so balanced, they became impossible to stop. Not only their first team, they had a second team that was arguably better than their first team. On their second team, they had Dennis Rodman and John Sali and Vinnie Johnson, all all stars, almost all hall of famers coming off the bench. So when they play a team like Larry Bird, the the Celtics might beat the first team. But as soon as the Celtics sat down to rest, the second team came in and ran up the score. So then the coach had to send the first team back out, and those guys were old. And they just couldn't play that many minutes that the Celtics made him play and that's physical minutes. And when I was a kid, one of the sadder things I remember watching was Larry Bird at the end of his career would come out of he was still great, but he'd come out of the games and has to lie on the sideline because his back hurts so much. His back was spasming. And it was and if he ever had a back spasm, that's just, like, excruciatingly painful. Then you'd see him lying on the sidelines waiting till the spasm died down and then coming back in scoring 5 or 6 points and going back and getting back down on the sideline. It's like watching a combination between doctor j and my uncle Ralph. That's what it seemed like. You know, I wonder if, like, you mentioned Michael Jordan was the best player in the league, but they were he was having trouble or the team was having the Bulls were having trouble, you know, winning titles. This seems particularly true in the season you're right about, 1987, 88. You mentioned how the coach had all these plays or Phil Jackson had somebody working from him, had all these plays for all the other guys, and eventually they would run out of steam and then it was Michael Jordan for the rest of the game. Is this why they weren't they weren't really that much in contention in in years like 87? Yeah. And also, again, true in all sports, which is the game in the regular season and the game in the playoffs is completely different. Which is in the regular season, they're playing, you know, a team here, a team there, and they play their game. You know? But when they get to the playoffs, it's these long series, and they work out a strategy for just this team. And now you have to face a team that's figured out how to beat you. And in that case, Jordan and the Pistons did it. And the Pistons, it was Joe Dumars who did it. He would and they were very smart about it. So, Jordan, they said, we're not gonna stop Jordan from scoring. What they would do is let him score in the first three and a half quarters. Then in the Q4, they'd put the screws on him, and they'd also they would play a they'd play make him play a lot of defense to try to tire him out. Right? And then they put the screws on him in the 3rd in the Q4 in the crunch time, which meant they would foul him a lot. And each guy had 5 fouls, so they'd each take fouls. They'd spread around the fouls. They'd be draped all over him. They had the Jordan rules where, basically, once he gets into the paint, which is the area, you know, right under the basket, they'd knock him foul him hard, knock him down. And by the time they got to the end, Jordan was exhausted. He was beat up, and now he'd start looking for help. And he'd pass the guys like Will Purdue, who was on that team, or Sam Vincent, guys you haven't heard of maybe, who were on that team. And those guys hadn't really shot all games, so they were all cold. So, basically, it was kind of a really brilliant strategy, and Jordan still scored a lot of points, but his average was, like, down 10 points against the Pistons. And that's what was so frustrating. And the coach then was Doug Collins, who'd been a superstar player, had a superstar player's mentality, and he was kinda with Jordan and Phil Jackson came in, and he had the Isaiah and Isaiah Thomas mentality, which said, you've gotta sublimate your own talent, develop these other guys. That's the only way you're gonna win. And he got Jordan to buy into it, and they got the players. A lot of them are already there in the year I wrote about, but they were on the bench, like John Paxton, who became the famous, you know, guards for the team and and Pippen and rot and, Horace Grant were both great players and they were rookies that year. So the team was just about there, but, they hadn't quite figured out how to win, but it was ultimately so satisfying as a Bulls fan because the season would end with this basically beat down where the Pistons would just beat the crap out of the Bulls. You go outside and you cry. It was so upsetting. But every year, the Bulls got closer and closer and closer. And when they finally beat the Pistons, the Pistons collapsed. They swept the Pistons, and then they went on, and I think they beat the laker Lakers in 5. And, and it was just so satisfying. That was the 1st year they won, so 80 89, 91. It was spring of 91. So, it was kinda like a dragon quest. It was like we've been with the Bulls as they slowly built this team and struggled. You know, it was like Lord of the Rings or something. I mean, it wasn't just basketball. It was like epic. It was an epic, epic thing. And that's another thing you don't get as much anymore because of free agency. And because all these guys know the guy across from me on the court is the guy I might be playing with this in the next year. So the idea is, like, Bird didn't wanna be friends with anybody. And there's a famous story where Magic, who considered Bird his friend because they played together in high school, went to shake Bird's hand and Bird cut him, you know, just walked by because Bird some players have to hate the other team, they think, to perform. They have to decide the other team is evil, unjust, and must be stopped, and play with kind of a righteous anger. Magic wasn't like that, but Bird was, and Rodman was, and Isaiah was. But it's it's interesting though how when Magic Johnson in 1991 had, you know, announced that he had AIDS, Larry Bird was one of the first people to call him, and Larry Bird was just, like, you know, really sad about it. Well, Bird had softened because the famous story is that they did a commercial together, a Converse commercial, where, Magic came out to Bird's house in French Lick, Indiana where he lived with his mom, and they kinda became friends. And then the thing is, I wouldn't say Bird didn't like Magic, but he saw him he felt that if baby came friendly, then when it was time to stick the knife in, he wouldn't do it. He just didn't wanna be friendly because he thought it it took away an edge that he needed to perform. You know? And and, and but and but he realized that magic was a crucial part of his time and his career, and they needed each other. So to me, it's like one of the reasons why this was the greatest season is because there were 4 great dynasties, each in different stages of rise and collapse, And they pushed each other and they tested each other over a series of seasons, really. So to me, it's like you don't really have Muhammad Ali if you don't have Joe Frazier, if you don't have Larry Holmes. You know, I grew up when I was just out of college, Mike Tyson was this devastating boxer, but you felt like you never faced a great, great boxer, so you never really saw how great he was. You know? And, I feel like Bird understood that Magic was his great rival and it was together, that rivalry, that made them both great players starting, you know, when they played against each other in the NCAA final the year before they went into the NBA and then continue to play against each other for their entire careers. How much of a basketball player's ultimate skill is talent versus work? So, like, so let's say Michael Jordan. You know, he he grew, and then he had this unbelievable talent. Larry Bird says, I've never seen anything like it, but we know he worked really hard. Is it true, like, Michael Jordan was the first person at the court, you know, working out and and practicing and the last person to leave? You know, were were guys like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and so on. Here's what I realized as I've gotten older. The work is the talent. You know what I mean? Like, obviously, you need some physical talent, but sort of the ability to work and to play and to perform at that level intensity, night after night, is a talent. You know? And Jordan and all these guys, they had that talent to turn it on and to push themselves further than anybody ever pushed themselves. I spoke to this guy who was, like, maybe the number one draft pick in the NHL or in the top ten. And he by Tampa Bay and his career, nothing happened. He played, like, 30 games and then he wanted the minor league hockey and now he's, like, giving skating lesson. Okay? And I asked him, what the hell? I mean, obviously, you played against these guys in college or juniors or whatever. What happened? He said, at the NHL, you have to basically play your best game every single night. He said, I couldn't do it every night. I could do it, like, once or twice a week. You know? But the, ability to to go that hard, that's why it's so hard to play so long. And one of the things I found really interesting was I always think that there's, like, 2 considerations when somebody's playing a sport like this. 1 is, like, the long term, the career. Like, what am I doing right now gonna jeopardize my career? And the other is right now. Like, I don't care about what happens in my career. All that exists is right now, and I'm gonna do whatever I gotta do right now. And in though that era, a lot of those guys chose the right now over the longevity. Bird is an example. Maybe the great example is Kevin McHale, who's a forward for the Celtics who played a an entire playoffs and most of the season on a broken foot. Sure meaning he was an excruciating pain every night he played, and surely shortening his career. So did Isaiah. Isaiah, in the playoffs I write about, was knocked out cold twice, and both times came back and delivered the decisive blow. It was almost like, not that he could still play well after he got hurt. It's like he played better after he was hurt because he would piss. You know? And, I think that that is that is a talent, and it's because all the time you hear about guys, oh, he would be great if he worked harder or if he try, you know, da da da da, but, like, the that is just a part of the makeup that is part of the talent that allows you to to go at the top of the level, which is it is true about Jordan. I wrote a story for Rolling Stone a lot of years ago about Keith Van Horn who'd been the top draft pick by the New Jersey Nats. And it was when Jordan was older, like, 30 in his late thirties or whatever, on the Washington Wizards or the wash yeah. And I went by to meet Van Horn, like, at 10 in the morning the day before a game that night, like, at 7. And I walked into the arena and Jordan was all alone in the arena just shooting free throw at 10 in the morning. And Larry Bird, that was the thing. Like, Larry Bird, they'd say, just shoot, like, 300 shots a day. And the other really cool thing about Bird is, this is a good lesson for writers too too. After every season he played, he would go back, evaluate his season, evaluate his post season, see what he was lacking, and develop a new shot. And every, you know, fall, summer when they come back to camp, he'd come in with a new shot that nobody knew about, that nobody could defend. So the idea of keep adding new tricks as you get older is just sort of a brilliant thing. That is that is really interesting. I didn't, it and it is similar to writers. Like, you know, I would say writers challenge themselves constantly with experimenting with different forms, different, you know, different points of view and and so on. What was it about 1987, 88 that really stood out for you? I mean, obviously, it's like a hall of fame, you know, extravaganza in terms of all the players and names and personalities. Like, every everybody you you write about in the book and you kind of give their stories, you give the team stories, you give the game stories, but all of these people, again, to me, they're people I've heard of heard about even though I had never followed basketball at all. I think that I mean, we mentioned the fact that there were more hall of famers playing then than ever before, and and they and age wise, they span the entire history of the league because you had Kareem who was 40, and he played with players that played before there was an NBA. And he also played with and against players that played almost up until now. So he's kind of at the focal point of the whole history of the NBA. He played for so long, but he played with everybody past and future. And then, you have, you know, the young players like Reggie Miller, Scottie Pippen, you know. So there's that, but also I think, like, that was the moment when I fell in love with pro basketball. And it was a specific game, which I write about. It was game 6 of the 1988 NBA finals where the Pistons were trying to close out the Lakers, would be the first team to win back to back titles in a long time in the LA Forum. They were cruising along and Isaiah rolled his ankle, and it looked like he broke his ankle, if you watch it, and it looked like he was out for the game. And it was like as if he knew that I have a little bit of time before I can't walk anymore. You know, if you ever had an injury like that, the you're gonna start to swell up and soon you're not gonna fit a shoe on, and I'm gonna do I'm gonna carry this team. And he scored, like, 25 points, I think, in the Q3, which is still a playoff record. He was hitting shots almost. It seemed like he was hitting shots in the locker room. I mean, he was all over the place, and it was so exciting to see a guy play hurt like that. I mean, it was just inspiring, and then they ended up losing the game on a very questionable call, sort of a phantom foul that Bill Ambeer probably did not commit against Kareem, and Kareem went to the streets were aligned at the end. So I wanted to go back and think about what it was about that era that involved me this emotionally to such a degree. And part of it is, like you mentioned, there were these 4 different dynasties. And normally, you know, like, I've written a book about the Cubs, Chicago Cubs, and I wrote a book about the Chicago Bears, and I wrote a book about my son's pee wee youth hockey team. But it's like every one of those, you try to build this thing that existed. And in this case, sort of get to build 4 teams, and then it's like having 4 different toys, and then they go to war with each other. And I had this idea that it's only 4 games. I only write about 4 games, plus the postseason, plus the finals, that in each one of those four sections, I'll describe all the players on each one of these 4 teams. And by the time you get to the 4th game, you know everybody on the floor. You know? So it's sort of like pulp fiction. It's how I imagined it, where in one scene, Bruce Willis is the center of the action, and the next scene, he's in the background. Normally, a player a guy in the background, you don't know in a movie. You already know all about him because he's now a bit player instead of the star player, and it gives you a sense of a whole complete world. So that was what I was trying to do organizationally. Yeah. No. It's it's a book that almost I don't wanna say it writes itself. Obviously, it requires a great writer, but you had so much material, so many great dramatic stories to kinda weave together to get to that final, you know, very dramatic playoffs. It's a Lakers consecutive. You know, Pat Riley had made the statement the year earlier that we're gonna we're gonna definitely win the the consecutive titles, what no which you know what I've done in something like 30 years. And and then you, again, you you start with the players and their stories. That builds the story of each team until finally we have the story of the season. So it was really, you know, well done. You know, I'll tell you one thing. They used to have this show on in Chicago, Public Access TV or maybe called the sport and then it was picked up, I think, called the sports writers. You ever seen that? No. Go look it up on YouTube. It's hilarious, man. It's these great old Chicago sports writers, press Rick Telander who is young. I wrote a story about it for Sports Illustrated, and it's sort of the, you know, the soup the superfans on Saturday Night Live that are imitating Bears fans? Yeah. Yeah. They're based on those guys. Those guys are like that for real, and they had this whole discussion about Pat Riley at that era. Because after they won that second title, Pat Riley trademarked the term 3 Pete. K. Right? Which they never did. So they were talking about how they're gonna need what what all that means, Pat Riley trademarked 3 Pete, is that we're gonna have to pay him a royalty when the Bulls 3 Pete. And the Bulls did. The Bulls repeated twice. That's funny. Did they pay a royalty? I'm sure they had to. It's a term. Seems like a weird term to to trademark. Yeah. Well, he always said you know, he's writing those business books and the how to books and the guru books and everything. So, I mean, he built great team. What do you think of Adrian Brody as as playing Pat Riley in winning time? I like I mean, the the weird thing about playing anybody like this is what I always feel about all kind of biopics. A lot of these guys were playing roles. So Pat Riley was on display. He was playing Pat Riley. You know? I mean, if you look at Pat Riley 2 years before he became to the Lakers, he had blow dried hair. He wore glasses. He was a sideline announcer who'd been sort of a middling player. I mean, and then he sort of realized where he was and he reinvented himself. So he was already playing a role. So to me, it's always hard. I never think an actor does the role as well as the actual guy doing the role. Another one famous examples are Will Smith playing Muhammad Ali, you know? Or Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman. Andy Kaufman was playing Andy Kaufman. You know, so now you have Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman playing Andy Kaufman. So I think you I think Adrian Brody is great. I'm a huge Adrian Brody fan. I think all that cast is great, but I my mind always goes back to the real people. It's like when you read a novel and then they make a movie out of it and the care the people the actors never seem right, you already got them in your head. Right. Yeah. I think that's why books always seem better than the movies is because you've already cast and played the movie in your head many times while reading the book. Not only that, I mean, what's so great about books, like, I always think movies are go from the outside in, and books go from the inside out. So in in when you read a book, you're actively engaged in creating the book. So you're part of the creation. When you read it, you're imagining everything. You're putting it all together. You're connecting the dots. And so it's just it that's why a lot of times I'll have a a memory and I'm trying to remember where that happened and I realize it's from a book. And it's so vivid. It's like the actual experience and it's very hard for movies to do that because all they do all the works for you in a way and your brain isn't engaged in the same way. That's how I feel. How do you think basketball, and this is kind of equivalent to all other sports and and competitions, how do you think it's evolved in the past 30 or so years since since those playoffs? Like, it seems like, the players and, again, this goes for for every sport. The teams are a lot more physically trained. Like, you you you see a lot more weightlifters among athletes now. Like LeBron James compared with Kareem Abdul Jabbar. It's like a different a completely different set of training made those, you know, athletes. How do you think the training and the and the sport itself has evolved? Well, I think all sports, all the pro sports, they become much more precise in how they train players and the the fitness and everything. And as a result of that, the the the bad players now are bad's the wrong word. The the players at the bottom of the roster on these proteins are better than the players at the bottom of the roster back then. Maybe the middle roster, but the great players then would be the greatest players now. I have no doubt about it. And even with the weight lifting so, like, you hear this a lot about hockey as a hockey parent. Somebody just posted a picture of Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull with their shirts off, tying their skates. Those guys were as strong as anybody who's ever played in the NHL. I don't know how they did it. I don't know. They grew up on farms. Maybe they lifted weights, but they were just as strong as anybody playing in the NHL now. There's no they wouldn't be a, lesser player. And, they would have better skates and they would have maybe worked more on certain parts of their skating, but they would still be the I believe would still be the best players in the league. And with basketball, I still think Michael Jordan would be the best player in the league. And and, Scottie Pippen would still be be a an all star and a great player, and Magic would still be the best guard and the best passer and all this stuff. So or, you know, best handler of the ball. So but I think that the game here's how the game really changed, which is the Pistons with a brilliant strategy, the Jordan rules, and the way they played physically, figured out how to beat more physically talented teams by keeping the score down and really tightening the screws. And the league didn't like it because one, it inhibited scoring. It people wanted to see highlights and they were worried that their their marquee players like Michael Jordan were gonna get hurt. So they changed the rules, and they disallowed a lot of the defensive tactics that kept those games close. And now the game's become so focused on offense. The other thing that they did is the 3 point shot was in existence, of course, in the whole era I'm writing about. Larry Bird's first game as a Celtic was the during that game, the first 3 point shot ever was made. So his career is basically the first, whatever, 12 years or whatever it is, 14 years of the 3 point shot. The 3 point shot was meant as sort of something to keep games close late. So if you're down by 9 points with the minute left, instead of fans streaming out and the game being over, there's still a way you can hit 3 quick baskets and get back in it. Keith's game is close at the end. It'd be like now if they sort of said a whole a whole court shot's worth 10 points. You know? Yeah. The idea would be that's that's team would just only take those shots. But somebody, I think the algorithm guys came along, and they figured out that we and it happened after this era. We're better off statistically shooting almost only threes, threes or give mes, give mes under the basket, shooting only threes and making 30% than shooting a lot of twos and making 60%. We will win with the threes. That's interesting. And and as a result of that, so now all the players certain players that would dominate in the league, there's no place for them if they can't shoot an outside shot. And now everybody's pulled to the outside. So when this era, everybody was in underneath the basket fighting for the rebound. That was a game within the game. It was like a mosh pit. You never really knew what was going on inside there, but it was a battle. And now partly because everyone's pulled to the outside and partly because when you miss a 3, you you get a completely different kind of rebound. You get a long rebound. It doesn't go right down underneath. You don't get the same kind of putbacks you would get. The whole inside of the interior of the court, which for a lot of us was basketball, is now sort of hollowed out, and it seems like there's no way the league intended this. It's just an unintended consequence. Like, when you make one little change, somebody's figured out the way to game the system, and everybody else followed, and now we have a completely different kind of basketball. And what do you think of guys like you ever watch, this guy on YouTube, the professor? He's like this amazing dribbler and does all these tricks and, you know, plays streetball, basically. I mean, the truth is the history of the NBA is, you know, early on, the game was kind of a gym game played by very precise rules, was very boring with a lot of set shots and stuff. And then there was street ball played by mostly black players, and it's the kind of stuff you're talking about. And it was only when you kinda let the street ball become pro basketball that pro basketball got great. So anytime anyone's out there doing crazy stuff, it's like, basically, when I was a kid, we had kind of the boring bowls, little kid, and then you had the Harlem Globetrotters, would do incredible thing, and you go watch them. And they'd go on Scooby Doo. And they'd go on Scooby Doo, and they'd throw a bucket of water in a guy, turned out to only be confetti. You know? And they had a Saturday morning cartoon I used to watch. Yeah. You know? And, and now and then the bulls became, like, what the pro players could do by the time I was 15. They could do everything the Globetrotters could do while in the process of winning a basketball game. And they didn't have to play the Washington senators every night. They played actual good teams that were trying to beat them. Yeah. It's it's so interesting to me that I'm interested in it having really never watched a basketball game. So well, go up and look up, Pete Maravich, YouTube highlights. He was a guy, unbelievable, Played before his time, averaged, I think, over 40 points a game in college, maybe more than that. But there's a thing where red arrow back is showing how Maravich passes, and he passes one direction and the ball goes the other direction. You know? That's part of the problem with the way these guys play, Magic too, which is when he first showed up, Magic sort of the master to this day of the don't look pa*s. If you're open, I'm getting it to you even if you don't know you're open. And when he went to that those first Lakers practices, the other guys didn't know how to play that way, and he would pass the ball and would hit guys in the back of the head and side of the head. They had no idea the ball was coming. They were completely fooled by it. So they had to have a education period where you learn how to play with these guys. You couldn't have one guy who could play that way. You needed a team of guys who played in this really clever way that's all about, you know, getting you going one way, and then you go the other way, which is the whole key to basketball. I just playing with my father, the first thing he would always do is figure out your weak hand and make you go that way every single time. You know? And that's just a but that's a at the small level, that's basketball. It's not letting people play the way that they want, letting them play the way that's to your advantage. How would you apply that to writing? I think in writing, a good way is just the opposite, which is play the way you want and write the way that's your strength. So one of the things you have to do is when you get caught up writing a whole bunch of crap that you don't like and isn't good, you should cut all that stuff. Just do the good stuff. Yeah. I always tell people, after you let's say if you write an article or a a small story, the first thing you should do, even if you know this rule, the first thing you should do after writing, a small piece, a relatively small piece, is remove the first paragraph and the last paragraph and it'll read better. Because the first paragraph, you're sort of struggling to figure out how to start. And last paragraph, you're sort of struggling to figure out how to conclude, but that's not your natural style. The natural style is everything in the middle, in between those. So if you just do the whole article, even knowing this rule, even while you're writing the first paragraph, knowing you're gonna cut the first paragraph later, it still works. I I find it works, like, 95% of the time. Yeah. I've actually I always thought writing a book is kinda like being a sculpt a sculptor, but before you do the sculpting, you gotta first create the marble. So, like, the first draft is the marble. Yeah. Like, my first drafts, this book is 75,000 words. The first draft was probably a 150,000 words. Mhmm. I cut usually more than I write. And, but while you're writing it, you can't you have to sort of forget that. It's like women forget childbirth. Because if you don't forget it, then you realize I'm spending a whole day doing something that I'm later gonna throw out. That'll drive you insane. So while you're doing it, I feel good about it. You you have to learn how to feel really good. That that good feeling you get when you cut something and you realize, it's better now. Like, you you can't have any attachment to to something you wrote a sentence away. It feels like losing weight. Yeah. And there's nothing like the feeling where you have something about a book isn't working and you cut, like, 10000 words, and suddenly it flies. You know, that's just a great feeling. So and, you know, that other stuff that you write, I always think, like, it's not a waste because, like you said, the throat clearing at the beginning of a story that you cut, the first paragraph, that was necessary to get you going. Yeah. It wasn't no reason. You couldn't have gotten to the second paragraph without going through the first paragraph. You know, you have to go through the bad paragraph to get to the good paragraph. So what's next? What are you working on next? I've been just, you know, writing this, monthly column for the Wall Street Journal, which is called, back when, and it's sort of about stuff I was obsessed with when I was a kid. And my idea is that at the end of this, you put all these pieces together, you get kind of a portrait of my whole generation as a young man. So, like, I wrote one about model rockets. We're really into blowing off model rockets when I was a kid. I wrote one about risky business, 40th anniversary of risky business. I wrote one about the fireworks we use when we were kids that are now illegal, like the m eighty. And, about shopping malls and about wiffle ball and about stick them in the NFL and about the song, You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone. This is kinda what I've been doing. It's fun. I have to I have to check that out. It'd be good to see a collection of those. Because that's like a it is like a summary of Gen x, all those things you mentioned. I know. Well, I just think about, like, what was I into? What was I into? And then I sort of that's the only way things just pop up, you know? I still feel like I'm living a version of my life when I was a kid now. Oh, I think I think that's the great thing about growing older is that you could still you can go back to the things you were nostalgic about and really explore them from a whole different angle. And I think the idea of looking at everything, like looking at the generation like, I look back at Gen x. You think about, like, 1994 where you have, or or 1992 to 1994, you have things like Douglas Coupland's book Generation x. You have the movie Reality Bites. You have the movie Slackers. This sort of showed this picture of Generation x as being, like, this this slacker generation that's never gonna do as well as their parents, and yet we kinda destroyed it. Like, gen x did a lot better than people predicted. For for, where did you grow up? I grew up in New Jersey. Okay. What town? Right near New Brunswick. North a town called North Brunswick. Okay. So, basically, we're the same age. When's your birthday? January 22nd. Okay. So you're early. You're, like, one of those kids that Malcolm Gladwell says is gonna go pro and everything. Yeah. I mean, you're a professional hockey player. Yeah. So, basically, I think that, I, like, I never believed in the idea of a generation because, well, if you think about it, somebody's born every minute of every day, so it's just a continuous stream of new people. So how can there be a generation? But yet as I get older, I realize there really are generations because you are, influenced by the culture of your time, which you then help create, and then also at the same time, you're you necessarily react to the world that's around you when you're a kid. Now I'm the youngest, and I have much older siblings. And, the whole kinda I was, like, at the burnt end edge of the hippies. Like, I saw that hippie thing at the end of it when it was bell bottoms and what seemed to me like bad music and people getting losing their s**t over stuff that was really unimportant and all these causes. And and so my reaction to it was, I don't want any causes, man. I just want a story. Don't tell me. You know? Just give me the f**king story, and don't give me any causes. And I just see as I get older, I see a work of art, and I'm like, that person's my age. That person feels exactly like I do. I see it over and over and over again. I realize and and it's part of it, I think, is, like, because we came after the baby boomers, there were so many of them, their stuff was so much in our face because the whole marketing culture was geared towards them, and now here come the millennials. There's even more of them than there were the boomers, and now everything's geared towards them. We're like this small group between the big groups, and when I look back, I can see it echoed again and again. So my father's generation, he's in the Korean War. They call it the silent generation because they made no noise, but they made no noise because there weren't that many of them. And they had no president. There there's not a Right. He always says that. They had no president. Yeah. We had no president. And, and then if you look back going back to where we started, I think Hemingway's lost generation was like that too, and I think one of the things he said after World War 1 in in terror of the arms, I forget the exact quote, but he says, we didn't wanna hear the words glory, sacrifice, honor, justice, ever they all became bulls**t, basically. And by the end, the only thing that seemed true were the names and numbers of the roads. And I just recognize that sensibility where you've seen this adherence to this kind of ideology that came before you without any sense of humor about it. You know? So I always said Gen x is the hope of America. We gotta gonna have to step forward and save them. Well, you know, it's also interesting because we grew like, you mentioned how we're we're at the tail end of the causes of the hippie movement, but we were also trained to to look at the hippie movement in a different way because we had shows that basically normalized in this weird way, the whole sixties counterculture movement. Like, we had the mod squad where these hippies were basically FBI agents. We had the Partridge family where they sort of were counterculture, but they were also just like the first teen idols. And, you know, we had all these TV shows that basically normalized and simplified. Yeah. Well, they they co opted it. Yeah. And they and they merchandised it, and they sold it back to them. So we grew up with the sort of the the and that's how all counterculture movements are destroyed. They become absorbed in the mainstream and turned into kitsch. You know? Yeah. And basically, that's and that whole reaction, like, the whole punk rock reaction against that music, you know, which by the way, now that music I like listening to, which I hated, like, I just didn't I I I just didn't like the overwroughtness of the music at the tail end of the sixties seventies where everyone was clearly trying to take the place that had been vacated by The Beatles. You know? So these orchestral rock songs, I, now I kind of enjoy them just because for the nostalgia purposes, man, just because they were on the radio when I was a little kid. You know? But, basically, by the time it got to us, it had coloneled. Yeah. And it just seemed bad. And you just wanted something stripped down, sleek, and cool. And that's the Clash, you know, and that's all the everything that came out of that era. Well, like, hip hop were was born out of that era. Definitely hip hop in the early hip hop. We also didn't have the worries, like, kind of Reagan pushed aside a lot of the worries and and the focus was on money and junk bonds and this and But I was worried about getting blown up in a nuclear war, man. I remember wor I remember think knowing what I would do. Like, the day that it happened, I knew what I was gonna if I found out the missiles were on the way, there was a girl down the street. I was gonna go tell her I loved her, which I've been waiting to do. I was definitely gonna do that. I had, like, this whole list of things I was gonna do, and we used to have discussions, like, would you rather be at the epicenter and just leave your shadow on a wall, or would you rather be in the outskirts? You know? And that was, like, genuine worry. Yeah. And yet though, the year you became, you know, a drinking adult, the iron curtain came down. So, you know, that whole worry was just gone. And we had this this peace dividend of the nineties that we became adults in. Yeah. And we had well, because it seemed like well, that was the moment of history has ended and all that Francis Fukuyama, all that stuff. But in fact, what happened is is the world went back to its normal condition, which are a series of nations competing with each other. Whereas after world war 1, it was world war 2 was just the United States alone for a really long time because Europe had basically destroyed itself. You know? Yeah. So, you know, but it's, there's a quote, a great quote where I think it might, like, a Walter Benjamin quote where what you see of history in your life is basically a car sliding into and hitting another car, but it's actually like a 10,000,000 car pile up. And you're just seeing one little instance of it, and then you're gone. Right. You know, so basically, we had really good luck in that. We were so scared, and then we did see unbelievable. You would if you asked me when I was a kid how long the Soviet Union would be around, I'd say another 1000 years. It seemed this indestructible thing, and then it just dissolved. You know? And, then you had, you know, MTV and the Berlin Wall and people ripping off chunks of the Berlin Wall. It was just a unbelievable thing and not many years before, there was a TV show on. I don't know if you remember it. I think it was an Eds Wick TV movie called The Morning After. Yeah. Of course. Right. And their ad campaign is like, don't watch this movie alone. You'll be deeply, deeply traumatized, which is like a brilliant ad campaign to scare the crap out of everybody into watching it. My whole family gathered to watch it. Me, my mother, my father, my brother, my sister was in law school, and I looked around about an hour into it, and everybody else was sound asleep. I was like, oh my god. Technically, I'm alone. I'm gonna be watching this thing alone. Do I wake these people up, or am I gonna be traumatized or what? And then just a few minutes later, we were, you know, MTV and the end of the Berlin Wall and the east and and and the east and west Germany united and Russia not caring seemingly not caring about it, letting us do it. Yeah. It's interesting. And then, of course, I think that does lead up to your your book, which is sort of right at that same exact year, basically. Yeah. Or the year before. And that was I mean, there's a great Larry King who grew up with my father, and I knew him as a kid. He used to say sports are the most important, unimportant thing in the world. And that's really about this. It's like, they're really it was such a good American moment in that we weren't scared existentially in a way for a few years. We would be. Now we are again because of climate change and everything else. But for a few years, that perpetual fear that we're all about to die is sort of lifted, and you could just really think something like the Bulls' journey to unseat the Pistons was the most important thing in the world. It that's really interesting because I always wonder, on the one hand, you can say it's a game. It's a it's a bunch of guys running around with a ball, trying to throw it into a hoop, or you can say the same thing about hockey or soccer or baseball or whatever. So on the one hand, it can easily be described as something frivolous, and yet and yet these to to pursue it like these professional players do and to be a fan of it and to be an industry around it, it really is worthwhile. Like we're always taught, you know, you either do something frivolous or you work hard, You know, be an accountant, work hard, or be a lawyer. But there really is something important about the the frivolous and and excellence and the pursuit of excellence in something that could also be described as frivolous. It's like great it's like great art in a way, you know. It's like world at a removed. It's not your life, but it feels like your life. And it's, you know, these moments of incredible identification with these players and these teams, and it's incredibly cathartic. And it's good for the players that they get to be free agents and make ton of money, but a huge part of the thing of being a fan was that these players spent their whole careers with these teams, and you watched them when they were young, and you watched them reach their prime, and you watched them grow old, and then you watched them retire. And you felt like you saw the entire life cycle, you know, played out in these one careers. That's why it's so upsetting when you see somebody like Michael Jordan come back in a Washington Wizards uniform. It makes you wanna, you know, vomit. Like, the Yankees were lucky, Yankees fans, and Derek Jeter played his whole entire career for the Yankees, but it almost never happens anymore, and it's something that we really miss. I always joke that when I go buy a jersey, like, a Cubs jersey now, I ask them to put the name of the general manager on the back because that's the only person that's still gonna be around in a couple years. Yeah. It's interesting. Like, like, I think of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the seventies. Those guys all just spent their whole careers on that team. You know, like, congratulations. Right? I love that. I love that. Yeah. Jack Lambert, Jack Hamm Lynn Swan. And Mike Webster, who was the first sort of CTE guy. Lynn Swan, Derek Stalwer, John Stalwer. Rocky Bleier. You ever see the Rocky Bleier? So you ever see the Rocky Bleier story on TV? No. Dude, you would talk about a TV movie the week. Rocky Bleier was in Vietnam, and it's like, the movie ends with him, like, with a 3 yard touchdown carry in the Super Bowl, and they intercut it with him, like, running across a minefield under fire. That's great. Well, Rich Cohen, author of When the Game Was War, the NBA's Greatest Season. Such a great book, riveting stories. And again, this is coming from someone who has never watched a basketball game ever. I I I went to 1. I don't even know if I watched the one I went to, but I I love I love this stuff and and thanks so much for writing this book and for coming on the show to talk about it. It was really, really great book and has a lot of life lessons in it. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And when the the Knicks finally make it, I'll get us tickets. We could go see the Knicks play in the finals. Alright. Great. Yeah. You know what's not refreshing? When your team concedes a last minute equalizer or feeling pressured into joining in the Mexican wave or when you spot your best friend at the match even though he said he was busy, Kevin. But a cold pint of Heineken brewed with just 3 natural ingredients, that's refreshing. Get the facts, be drink aware. Visit drinkaware. Ie.
Comments