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yourmandevine · 3 months

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It was somewhere around the middle of 2019 when both of my daughters joined Sara's years-long campaign of just sort of thinking out loud about how great it would be for us to have a dog. Which means it was somewhere around the middle of 2019 that it became clear to me that the matter had officially moved from "What if?" to "Get ready to start Picking Up Dogshit in the Cold, Buddy."

The next question, as far as I was concerned, was what kind of dog would make sense in a two-bedroom apartment that already housed four people and a cat. I'd never owned a dog, so I opened negotiations with what made sense to me: "Um, a small one?"

Sara, on the other hand, had grown up with dogs.

(The first one I met: a boxer named Bernie, who sprinted to the front door of her parents' house to greet her the first time I ever visited her family for the holidays. Sara had trained him to rear back on his hind legs, stand up and hug her; when she walked in, he was very happy to do his trick. And when I walked in behind her, he was very excited to do it for/to me, too. But while Bernie had exuberance in spades, he lacked both second-jump-ability and spatial awareness, which is how he wound up just rocking me straight in the balls with his front paws. Truly a perfect start to Meeting The Parents.)

Sara explained to me that we were going to get a big dog, because big dogs are bigger and thus better than little dogs, who tended to be yappy. Also, we were going to look for one that wasn't a puppy, because that kind of energy with two small kids in a comparatively small space seemed like a recipe for disaster. Also, a recipe for me, the one who works from home and would need to do most of the heavy lifting in taking care of the dog, losing his mind very quickly.

OK, so: Big, chill, older dog who's great with kids, who doesn't mind cats, and who's mostly fine with laying around an apartment as opposed to running around a yard. Where were we going to find that?

Luckily, we knew a guy. That guy was my mom, who volunteers at a shelter.

She said there was this one dog that was so good they used to bring him out to adoption outreach events in the community as, like, an example of how good the shelter dogs could be. In spite of his evident inherent goodness, though, they could only find a foster spot for him, not find a full-time placement.

Maybe it was because he was seven, "a senior dog." Maybe it's because, while the paperwork said "mixed breed," that face screamed "pitbull," which tends to scare folks away.

Maybe we could come meet him at the next event, she said. His name's Lugar.

We didn't wind up doing that, but we saw pictures of him — like this one ...

Look at that goddamn rockstar. (Photo via Animal Care Centers of NYC)

... and watched a couple of videos of him playing at the animal shelter, and holy crap, did that dog seem pretty great.

We set up a formal "meet-and-greet" appointment with his foster host at the shelter in Manhattan. After he padded out to meet us, the first thing he did was walk up to the girls, lay down in front of them, roll over, and show them his belly.

At that point, two more things became clear to me:

This dog was a genius;

If I didn't sign whatever papers the staff at the shelter put in front of me, Sara and the girls would ensure I did not make it back to the apartment alive.

We'll take him.

*****

When we first brought him home, the folks at the shelter told us to be patient — that he'd likely be skittish at first, but that eventually he'd feel comfortable enough to start thinking of our home, and of us, as his.

It would take some time, though, they said; keeping his stuff around him as much as possible might help ease the transition. So, that first night, we dragged his bed to the foot of ours, hoping that might make him comfortable enough to sleep in our room.

When we started getting ready for bed, he walked into the bedroom, stepped on his bed ... and immediately launched off of it onto ours, did a quick turn, and plopped down at the foot.

Guess he's comfortable.

He would spend every night of the next four-plus years on the bed. (Many days, too.)

Over time, aided by me frequently working late nights, he became more brazen with claiming bed territory — up to and including literally just sleeping on my side of the bed, head on the pillow and everything.

It's not always easy to move a dead-weight 75-pound pitbull in the middle of the night in the dark. Sometimes, I had to settle for shoving him over juuuuuuuust enough that I could, like, ride the edge of the mattress.

Sometimes ... OK, look, sometimes that meant I wound up spooning the dog. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm proud of it. But I'm not going to pretend I'm ashamed of it, either. This was a very huggable dog.

(Don't you look at me like that. You think you can sit up there, all elite and cloistered in your ivory tower, and judge us working men who sometimes spoon their pitbulls? I judge you.)

*****

We only brought Lugar to dog parks a couple of times. People told us we should — that it was good to give him the chance to get off the leash, run around, play with other dogs.

Both times, he sprinted straight for another dog's ball and, in short order, wound up growling, barking and tangling with that other dog. Running, grabbing him, back in the harness, apologizing, hustling away, heading home. Does not play well with others.

We never knew what his life was before he got to the shelter. Based on what we could see, though, we figured it wasn't good. He came to us with broken teeth and mangled ears that got infected a lot — "cropped," they said the term was, but this version of it apparently done by someone who A) didn't really know how to do it without hurting the dog, B) didn't really care about hurting the dog, or C) both.

Instinct or experience led him to lunge at almost every dog he saw, which meant walking him around the neighborhood in meandering dotted lines, like the kid from Family Circus. Sometimes, though, he wouldn't growl and lunge. Sometimes he'd see another dog and just lay flat down on the ground, mewling. He did that at the vet a lot. He fucking hated the vet.

Maybe whoever had him first raised him to fight other dogs. Maybe he did it, and it hurt him. I have no idea what capacity a dog has for hate or fear or anxiety. It just seemed like the best thing I could do was keep him close, keep my hands on him, keep him safe. Sorry, he's not really friendly.

*****

Which, by the way, was bullshit. Get him around people, and he was the sweetest goddamn thing you ever saw in your life.

Gleefully padded up to every child he saw, bowing his head for pets and scratches. Helicopter-tail for the older ladies on our floor, who'd tack an extra few minutes onto every walk because they were so happy to see their friend. Rolled over to show his belly for everyone.

Accosted everybody who came into our apartment, not because it was his job to guard us, but because every new person was another potential source of attention. Pet him once, and he would not leave you alone, trying to become your new 75-pound lapdog.

Some people would go white as a sheet as soon as they saw him, which I understood; lots of "No, you go ahead, I'll take the next elevator." Some, though, were nervous, but curious: Is he friendly?

He looks like a monster, but he's a total mush.

Sometimes, they'd reach out and pet him, and his tail would go bananas, and they'd laugh. Two days made.

*****

He kept making days, even as he entered his Age-12 Season. But things also started to get harder.

It used to be that, when he would suddenly start throwing up or stop pooping, you could pretty easily figure out what the problem was: the girls fed him too many sticks on that walk to the train spot, he'd swallowed a piece of rubber from the tennis ball he'd torn apart minutes after it was given to him, etc. A couple times last year, though, we couldn't quite figure out what was going on.

He'd stop eating in the morning, or sometimes altogether. Which would lead to a trip to the vet. Which would lead to tests and dietary changes. Which would lead — eventually, for the most part — back to normal.

When we got to Sara's mom's house for Christmas break, Lugar began not eating very much. OK, no problem: boiled chicken and plain white rice, just like the other times something didn't seem to be agreeing with him.

Except he wouldn't really eat that, either. And soon he went from "not eating much" to "not eating anything" to "not moving very much" to "can barely get up or walk" and "constantly shivering."

So, while I went to a co-working spot to record a podcast, Sara took him to the vet. While I stayed there to write a column, she let me know: Not good. We'll talk when you get home.

Every word of the news was bad. Nasty unidentified growth on his spleen. Enough internal bleeding that he'd need a blood tranfusion just to be able to potentially withstand surgery to biopsy the growth. If it was malignant, then chemotherapy to try to treat the cancer. And, if all that works, you've put your geriatric guy through hell, just so he could get from 11 to 12 — with no guarantee it won't come back, that you won't have to do it all again, that you're not just heaping pain on pain just to delay feeling the pain yourself.

So we decided to swallow hard, and just feel the pain.

*****

Olivia wanted to know if this meant she couldn't play fetch with Lugar anymore. I told her yes, it did, but we still get to keep loving him, thinking of him, remembering him, looking at pictures of him, and talking about him if we want to, even if he's not physically with us.

The main thing Siobhan wanted to know, though, was why I wasn't crying. Why everyone else was crying but me.

I gave the answer I had: Well, kiddo, everybody processes their big feelings differently. I do feel very sad, but that hasn't come out as tears. I'm sure it will, but it just hasn't yet.

If I'm being honest, though, I was wondering that, too.

I don't think I cried much when I found out my brother died. He'd been sick, the kind of sick people typically didn't shake, and I knew that. And then, one morning nobody was in the house, and the phone rang while I was watching ... Wimbledon? French Open? ... and it was my dad calling from my brother's place to tell me the news, and what to tell people when they called the house to ask what was going on, because that would be a big help.

I don't think I cried much when I found out my friend Sean died. I knew it was coming — he'd told us he was done fighting the cancer, that it was all over but the shouting, and I'd cried that day — but when it actually happened, I was writing, and his mother-in-law called to tell me. She asked me to call a bunch of our mutual friends to let them know, because that would be a big help.

If I'm remembering right — and I might not be — I didn't cry much on the morning my father died. I remember being in the car on the way to the hospital, my brother driving (different brother, it'd be a fucking crazy story otherwise). I remember both of us frantic, laughing at whatever thing we were listening to on the radio or whatever we were saying to each other to fill the space between the place where our dad was alive and the horror movie where he wasn't. I remember being in the waiting room, and then us circling his hospital bed, and not being sure if he was already gone or was about to be, and saying goodbye. The only thought I remember from that time was, "Help Mom."

So when Sara told me what the vet said, and we made the decision that this was it, I went straight to what needed to happen next.

Talk to the girls now, make space for whatever they feel. Call the vet in the morning, set it up. Talk to the girls again after that, tell them it's OK to feel sad, and to make sure they give Lugar lots of love for the next couple of hours in between playing iPad games. Carry Lugar out to go to the bathroom, then down the stairs to the car, set him up in the hatchback, wrap the blanket around him. Make sure everyone else gets a chance to say goodbye.

Make it lighter for them. Make it your problem. Be a big help.

*****

When it was time, the vet asked me if I had any questions.

Can I be with him when it happens? I don't want to leave him alone, because, no offense, he fucking hates the vet.

The vet didn't take it personally, said of course, started explaining. We bring him into the back to put an IV catheter into his arm, but then we bring him back out, and you get as much time as you need with him before we do it. Whenever you're ready.

OK, ready. Well, as ready as we're gonna get.

He could barely walk, but he went with the assistant, came back with the IV. Didn't even have the energy to try to chew off the bandage holding it in. Just laid down, sprawled out, sighed in my general direction. I took his collar off, scratched behind his ears, grabbed the fur on the back of his neck, kissed him on the top of the head.

Knock-knock. Whenever you're ready.

First, the sedative to calm him down. Probably unnecessary, since it looked like all the fight had left him; maybe he at least caught a buzz on the way out. Next: what the vet very directly described as "a massive overdose of barbiturates."

Before the second shot, though, the vet stopped, said: You know, right now, he can still hear you.

So: lean in. Any famous last words for the trip over the Rainbow Bridge?

I'm really sorry. I love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You did good. You worked hard. Go get some rest.

I knew he was gone before the vet told me; his tongue had never come out of his mouth like that. No more shivering, no more shaking, no more pain. No more playing, no more scratching, no more spooning. No more anything.

I waited a minute after the vet left, but I didn't really need to. Whatever he was — whatever he'd been to us, been for me — wasn't there anymore. I wrapped his collar around my wrist and drove back to tell the girls it was done.

*****

One thing I think we're getting right is that we're letting the grief unfold and evolve, hit us in waves when it does. We gave away a lot of his stuff: some treats and assorted accessories down in the lobby to be picked through by the dog owners in our building, some of his geriatric diet food and not-chewed-up toys to the shelter. But we didn't just get rid of everything. We're not ready for that.

Liv took his red Kong bone and a picture of the two of them together playing fetch, put them on her windowsill, told us she was going to start praying there every night. We're lapsed Catholic heathens, so I'm not sure exactly how she's praying; I'm pretty sure she's praying for him to come back, though.

Siobhan skipped praying and went straight to deciding that Ghost Lugar was going to sleep with her, because now he wasn't too heavy for the top bunk anymore. Silver linings.

His bed's still laying in the living room, with his collar and his harness laying on it. Whenever someone bumps into it, I hear his tags jingle, and I get this catch in my breath. But then I remember.

*****

I miss having to push him down to the foot of the bed. I miss the way he'd jump up on the bed after I'd set up the podcast shit, and how I'd have to worry he was going to bark or moan or shake his collar and we'd have to stop recording the show. I miss being proud of him when he'd be so good we didn't have to, a perfect silent audience for my bullshit.

I miss him letting the girls lay on him, watching him just kind of sigh beneath them, like one of the animals who got used as household appliances on The Flintstones that would turn to the camera and say, "It's a living." I miss the times he'd get so wild at bedtime that it was impossible to keep the girls from getting riled up, too.

I miss the way that walking him would organize my day, help me organize my head. I miss how Sara would try to get him to come in to the bedroom while I was still watching games, and how he would stop at the door, turn to see me sitting on the couch, and trot back over to join me.

I miss taking pictures of him. I miss taking pictures of us together — just about the only time I really took pictures of me, because it felt like there was something worth looking at, worth remembering.

I miss being out in the neighborhood with him, even when it's cold or rainy or both. I miss the occasional feeling of hilarious invincibility that came with walking a pitbull through Flatbush while blasting Cam'ron or Wu Tang or PUP or whoever in my headphones. (I've been listening to "Sleep in the Heat" a lot. The last two Virtute songs, too. Steer into the skid.) I miss how that invincibility would get punctured when he would get scared by another dog — how I'd grab his harness and hold him close, how I'd tell him that he was all right, that we were going to keep moving.

I miss when he'd keep moving.

I process things by writing about them, but that doesn't always get me anywhere; I wish I had some grand unifying point to arrive at here, but I don't think I do. (Maybe it's that you shouldn't be afraid to adopt an older dog? Yeah, this part sucks, but the stuff before was pretty great. I don't know.)

I'm sure we will get another dog at some point, and I'm sure I'll love that dog a lot, too, because now I know how. I had a Premium Teacher.

Thanks for showing me, Lugar. I'm really sorry. You did good. You worked hard. Go get some rest.

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yourmandevine · 2 years

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And in case I don't see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight (or: some personal news)

No sense burying the lede:

One month shy of four years after joining up, and with something like 570 columns, features, blog posts, and blurbs in the rear-view, today's my last day at The Ringer. Barring some unforeseen Friday afternoon news, my final piece will have been about the Knicks' best-laid plans not quite panning out the way they intended. Let it never be said that the basketball content gods don't have a sense of humor.

I'm grateful to have spent four years sharing a masthead with some of the best writers on the Internet, and to have carved out a niche on what I've felt was, pound-for-pound, the best NBA team in the business. I'm grateful I got to co-host a podcast with two great friends for a while, to everyone who took the time to listen to it, and to everyone who said (and still says!) nice things about it. I'm grateful to have gotten the chance to be part of the Ringer Union, and to have played a small role in trying to make a company I loved a little more fair and equitable.

I'm grateful to have gotten the opportunity to grow and develop as both a writer and analyst. I feel like I'm better at this job than I used to be, thanks in no small part to the freedom and support I've enjoyed. I'm grateful to everyone, past and present, who has made The Ringer the sort of place where someone like me could level up.

I'll still be writing about the NBA on the Internet. (And talking about it into a microphone again, too.) I'll say more about that soon. Right now, the only thing I want to say is: thank you.

Specifically, I want to thank some of the many people whose names never showed up on the things I published, but who were indispensable to every one of them—and, beyond that, to so much more of what The Ringer makes. As much as this company is about the on-air personalities on your favorite podcasts, it's also about the literal scores of people who bust their asses every day to try to make sure we're making the best stuff we can.

It takes a lot of people to make us look good. Here are the names of the ones who helped me.

MY EDITORS

Nobody edited me more often than Matt Dollinger, Justin Verrier, or Chris Almeida—three very different dudes, but all patient, professional, and kind, despite the sheer tonnage of words I dropped on their heads. Many thanks also to culture czar Andrew Gruttadaro (without whom the Stevie Nicks' Fajita Roundup and Pete & Pete pieces wouldn't have happened), Aric Jenkins, Ben Glicksman, Chris Ryan, Danny Chau, Donnie Kwak, Justin Sayles, Mallory Rubin, Megan Schuster, and Riley McAtee for pinch-hitting over the years. I'm sorry I never once hit a word count. I hope it all still hung together OK.

THE COPY DESK

I can't stress enough how comforting it has been to know that everything I write will pass through the hands of copy chief Craig Gaines and his crack team of copy editors and fact-checkers. It never ceased to amaze me that they would routinely and graciously take thousands of words about, I dunno, the Pelicans defense, and treat it like it mattered, and make sure I didn't sound dumb (or, at least, any dumber than usual).

Mil gracias to: Abou Kamara, Amaar Burton, Analis Bailey, Charlotte Goddu, Chris Grismer, Damian Burchardt, Dan Comer, Daniel Chin, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, Iza Wojciechowska, Jack McCluskey, Jacqueline Kantor, Jordan Ligons, Julianna Ress, Julie Kliegman, Kellen Becoats, Kjerstin Johnson, Lex Pryor, and—last alphabetically in this group, but certainly not least—Shaker Samman.

THE ART DEPARTMENT

One of the fringe benefits of working here has been knowing that, when my post is ready to go up, I'm going to get to see whatever rad thing David Shoemaker and his team have crafted to put up at the top of it. (Pro tip: If you write a long enough thing to get the feature build, they give it the bigger and wider art, which looks even friggin' cooler, IMO.) It's a true delight to know that, even if the words aren't all that good, the pictures will be. Thanks to David, Alycea Tinoyan, Matt James, Neil Francisco, and Jonathan Bartlett for making sure that's true.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

I know, this sounds crazy, but apparently it's not always easy to get audience members excited to read a bunch of words about, like, the Spurs' bench? And yet, the perennially underappreciated and over-yelled-at-on-the-Internet social team never stopped working to find ways to do it. Shouts out to Alex Stamas, Amelia Wedemeyer, Bridget Geerlings, David Lara III, Jomi Adeniran, Julie Phayer, Keith Fujimoto, Kiera Givens, Logan Rhoades, Nicole Bae, Pat Muldowney, and Rubie Edmondson for tirelessly running up that hill.

AUDIO/VIDEO

Isaac Lee and Steve Ahlman produced Heat Check, and they were absolutely wonderful to work with every single week. So were Bobby Wagner and Jim Cunningham when they got spot starts with me, Gonz, and Haley. Isaiah Blakeley, Jessie Lopez, Jonathan Kermah, and Sasha Ashall were always great when I popped up on other shows, too.

Jason Concepcion and Jason Gallagher put me on NBA Desktop twice, including once when they encouraged me to say the phrase "step your pen game up, you word-broke motherfuckers," which stands as one of the proudest moments of my career.

I didn't do much other video stuff here, but when I did, I greatly enjoyed working with, learning from, and joking around with Cory McConnell, Dylan Berkey, J. Kyle Mann, Jackson Safon, Mose Bergmann, Richie Bozek, Ronak Nair, and Sean Yoo. (I haven't yet crossed paths with Aleya Zenieris, Chia Hao Tat, or Donnie Beacham, but they're getting thanked, too. It's a thank-o-rama.)

And, one last thanks:

ALL OF YOU

I'm not sure what I've done to deserve the kind, considerate, passionate, and conscientious readers and followers I've accumulated over the years. All I can do is promise to try to keep doing it, and to try to reward your time and attention a few times a week.

Thanks for sticking around. See you again soon.

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yourmandevine · 3 years

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Some stuff that made me happy in 2020, in no particular order

God send you no greater loss. It’s something my grandmother said a lot — a bit of highly Irish Catholic wisdom intended to remind you, warmly but sharply, that whatever you’re currently suffering through isn’t all that bad compared to what lots of other people are dealing with. That it probably isn’t too much to complain about, in the grand scheme of things. That you should, instead, be grateful for what you’ve got, big and small and everything in between.

God sent a great many people a great many unfathomable losses this year, and as hard as it felt at times, our family wasn’t among them; we’re lucky, in the big picture. In the past, people have recommended I try writing those reasons down, to give myself a list of stuff to be thankful for, for the times it’s tough to summon up the gratitude. I figured the end of the year was as good a time as any to make that list, to highlight the stuff that helped me get through this year — the reasons big, small, and in between.

So: here goes.

Peanut butter and jelly

I haven’t counted how many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’ve eaten since March 11, which is good, because that would be an absurd thing to do, and a sure sign that I have succumbed to a very specific kind of madness. It’s also good, though, because I would undoubtedly be ashamed by the number; the figure would be titanic, like the unsinkable ship of same name, or the iceberg that sunk it.

Or, at least, I would be ashamed under normal circumstances. This fuckin’ year required whatever flotation device you could find, and you know what I found in the fridge and cupboard? A couple of slices of bread, some strawberry jam, and some goddamn Skippy.

Need a weird mid-morning “brunch” after not having breakfast because you went right from waking up to remote school with the 6-year-old? Crank up a PB&J with that third cup of coffee. Need to pack something in the diaper bag to feed everyone while you’re out at the playground for the afternoon? Stack ‘em up, son. Need a late snack after working the overnight shift filing weird bubble playoff columns? Three letters, one ampersand, one love.

I need to eat better in 2021. But I kind of needed to eat sort of like shit to get through 2020, and time and again, when your man needed it most, PB&J was there.

Sunday night Zoom sessions with college friends

I know that most of us started something like this back in March; I’m not sure how many have stuck with it. I hope the answer is “a lot,” because honestly, knowing that I’m going to end the week by seeing a few friends — some here in Brooklyn but mostly beyond our reach for safety’s sake, some who’ve moved away — has felt like a stabilizing agent on more than a few occasions. It’s important, and no small blessing, to have people in your life who really know you, weird messy ugly bits and all, and in front of whom you can let everything go.

That gallery view’s provided a place to vent, to seethe, to laugh, to cry, and to try to find some semblance of center before heading back into another week. I’m grateful for it, and for the people in those little boxes. Except for the time they reminded me that, when I was 18, I was pretty sure I was a Pacey, and they were all extremely confident I was a Dawson. They were right, but still: a bitter pill to swallow, then and now.

Olivia calling herself “Dr. Bloody”

She took out her little toy doctor kit and just turned into a cackling villain.

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A post shared by Dan Devine (@yourmandevine)

Deeply disconcerting, yes, but also adorable.

All Fantasy Everything

What got me in the door was the conceit: three very funny stand-up comedians (Ian Karmel, David Gborie, Sean Jordan), often with a very funny guest but sometimes without, pick some topic or another and engage in a fantasy draft of their favorite aspects or representations of that topic. (It is, crucially, a serpentine draft. Now what is that? That’s a great question.) Some favorite examples: Mikes; Words That You Think Make You Sound Smart, vols. 1 and 2; Things You Yell After You Dunk on Someone; Fictional Athletes; Crimes We’d Like to Commit. Yeah. It’s that kind of podcast.

What kept me around was the friendship. Listen to an episode and it becomes really clear really quickly just how much the three hosts love each other, how much fun they have being around each other and making one another laugh. The warmth radiates, just pours out of the speakers; in a year where I sorely needed some good vibes, I appreciated my regular check-ins with the Good Vibes Gang to just ... unclench for an hour and a half or so.

Drinking beer

OK, I’ll admit: This doesn’t sound great for me. It’s true, though. I really like beer. (We brewed one in our kitchen, which I realize is something of a “bearded guy in Brooklyn” cliche, but here we are. It was exciting to complete a project, and it tasted OK-ish.) At some points this year, it didn’t feel like there wasn’t much to look forward to, and sometimes drinking some High Lifes or Narragansett tall boys — with my wife in our living room, with friends on the computer, whatever — helped take the edge off a shitty day/week/month/year. I look forward to being able to do that outside with people again.

The Good Place

I am sure some very smart cultural critics and political thinkers and social revolutionaries have forwarded compelling arguments for why this show is Bad, Actually, because that seems to be more or less true about most things, whether because said thing is Actually Bad or because the economics of the attention economy on the internet functionally necessitate the composition and publication of pretty much every position on pretty much every issue, and especially ones that present a counterargument for why you shouldn’t like the thing you like, and might be kind of a piece of shit for liking it. But I liked this half-hour comedy about the way the universe might be put together, why we should try to take better care of each other, and how doing so might be a pretty great way to take better care of ourselves.

Andrew let me write about it a little bit for a big project we did before the series finale aired, which was really nice of him. I found myself thinking about this part a lot this year:

I also thought a lot about Peeps Chili, but that happens every year.

Taking pictures of my dog

Check out this flumpy goddamn champion:

“Lugar is a good boy” is the main takeaway here. They don’t all have to be complicated.

Schitt’s Creek

I know we’re not alone in this, but we inhaled this show this year. A half-hour comedy about people being laid low, learning how to deal with who they actually are, and finding some grace and community and opportunities for growth kind of hit the spot, I guess.

One of the most wholesale enjoyable ensemble comedy casts I can remember; Catherine O’Hara was already in Cooperstown, but what she made with Moira Rose only polishes her plaque. I’ll never be able to describe with any specificity the thing Chris Elliott does, but I know it has made me laugh since I was a child too young to understand the Letterman bits or see Cabin Boy in the theater, and it’s probably going to make me laugh until I am dead.

I love that people who, for years, never got to see themselves or people like them on screen got to see David Rose on screen and maybe recognize themselves a little bit. The idea that seeing the David/Patrick relationship might make them maybe feel a little more at home, a little safer and more whole, makes me happy. Sad, about the before, but happy, about the now and the what comes next.

Past that, I just love how what was ostensibly a family-and-friends production for a Canadian channel just got absolutely everything right—the tone, the look, the sound, the theme song, the cast, the jokes, my goodness, the jokes—and before long, the rest of the world just got it. Like catching a fastball square on the barrel. Something the show clearly knew a little bit about.

Finding new outdoor places it was safe to go

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the need to give the kids a place to be that wasn’t unnecessarily dangerous but also wasn’t inside our two-bedroom apartment led us to do more exploring than we had before. Shirley Chisholm State Park is great. Canarsie Pier was a fun place to spend a Sunday morning; so’s Canarsie Playground. If we got there early enough or made our peace with some rain, the beaches at Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden were pretty rad this summer. I lived in Staten Island from ages 8 through 18, and during breaks throughout college, and don’t think I ever hiked in High Rock Park — that’s dumb, because it was nice!

Even if all those little excursions did was kill a little time and reduce the overall stress level of the four humans stuck in our four walls, that’s not nothing. Some days this year, it was everything.

Cobra Kai

I know I’m late here; I didn’t rush to seek it out because I don’t consider myself a huge fan of The Karate Kid, or at least not a big enough fan to sign up for YouTube’s premium service. I checked it out when it came to Netflix, though, and I honestly can’t believe how much I enjoyed this show. Give me “dumb, but with heart” every day of the week.

I believe in Miguel Diaz; I believe in Johnny Lawrence; I believe I will be firing up Season 3 next month, and perhaps drinking some Coors Banquets in its honor. (I cannot, however, believe how the “get him a body bag” thing came back around, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Closing unread tabs

I’m a serial hoarder of links, and I am bad at finishing all of them. I’ve tried to get into Pocket and Instapaper, but I’ve never been able to turn that sort of workflow — open link, save to third-party service, go back to third-party service later to read, then delete from there — into something that felt instinctual, natural, or habitual. So: lots of tabs. Like, lots of tabs.

This was a dicier proposition than usual in 2020, because cutting my work week in half to be able to more effectively coparent two kids who didn’t have school or day care for most of the year meant less time to read things.

I tried to do my best to keep up with the important stuff for work, and to read at least some stuff about how other parents were dealing with their anxiety/anger/depression/frustration at having to be on 24/7 and work, and to stay abreast of (at least some of) what was happening in the world. Sometimes, though, I would wake up and realize I’d been holding onto blog posts about Really Interesting Rotation Decisions on the 11th-Seeded Team in the East or whatever for literally nine months, and I would go against my nature and just hit the eject button on a 25-deep window, and something amazing would happen: I wouldn’t get fired for being shitty at my job. I would move on with my day, and I would feel about 10 pounds lighter.

I still keep too much stuff open. (As we speak, I’ve got three different Chrome windows open on two different laptops. I choose not to count the total tabs.) But I do so knowing that, if it gets too heavy, I can experience the momentary joy of surrendering to the inevitability that I can’t catch everything. In that moment, I feel OK with my decay.

Reading writers I wasn’t familiar with before

Two in particular stand out in my mind: Nekias Duncan, now of BasketballNews.com, who does excellent film breakdowns and statistical analysis, and Katie Heindl, who writes basketball stuff of all types all over the place, and strings sentences together in a way that scratches an itch inside my brain. I’m grateful I got more chances to read them this year, I look forward to bigger and better things for both of them, and I’m hopeful that, if things calm down and our schedules go back to something approximating normalcy, I’ll have more bandwidth to hunt out more new voices in the year ahead.

The time I ambushed my wife as she was trying to break down and put away the girls’ space tent

Pretty good.

Siobhan learning to ride a bicycle (with training wheels, but still)

The moment passed pretty quickly; Not Exactly A Mechanic over here can’t get the training wheels to reliably work right without either loosening them too much or tightening them so much that she can’t pedal it. In that first moment, though, and for as long as it lasted, it was really great to see her get excited about doing something new, big kid shit, for the first time.

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She was proud. I was proud of her. And then we went to a playground for a few hours. Pretty good day.

Tyler Tynes roasting me

Tyler did some incredible work this year — The Cam Chronicles is getting deserved praise as one of 2020′s best podcasts, and his reporting on the Movement for Black Lives was exemplary. It’s hard to top this, though:

You know what the messed up part is? I was excited to tell him what I was doing, just because I knew the reaction would be so violent. Like a body rejecting a transplant. So lucky to have such a dear, dear friend.

PUP

I’m late on everything, so I didn’t start listening to PUP until the spring of 2019, but I haven’t really stopped since. This year has been too sedentary too often; this band is too kinetic to allow me to stay there.

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“Bloody Mary Kate and Ashley Kate” is never more than about 20 minutes away from returning to the front of my mind. I would fucking love for it to be safe enough to watch these guys live at some point, and I am absolutely going to take Steve up on his offer.

Someone sending me a shirt based on a joke I tweeted

First:

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Then:

I’m not sure you should be rewarding my behavior, SnoCoPrintShop, but I appreciate it all the same.

Which reminds me:

Family dinner/family movie night

My wife works in Manhattan and commutes back on the train, and we've tried to prioritize getting the girls to bed early since they were little, so that doesn’t leave much of a window between when she gets home and they go in the tub for us all to connect; before everything shut down, we almost never really ate together. We’re still not great about it, but for a while now we’ve carved out Saturday as family dinner night, where we sit down to eat and talk about our “up” from the day — something that happened that made us feel good or happy, or something we’re looking forward to. (We used to talk about our “down,” too, but that kind of seemed like overkill. Why try to focus on more bad shit right now, you know?)

Then we settle in for a movie, with who gets to pick rotating each week. It’s mostly been Pixar, which has been great but also has its drawbacks; after she caught me crying during one of them (maybe the Bing-Bong scene in Inside Out? or Miguel singing to Grandma Coco?), Siobhan straight up told me, “You need to get yourself together, man.” We just watched My Neighbor Totoro, too, which they loved, so we’re probably going to try some more Miyazaki soon. It’s a really simple thing, but it’s one we rarely made time for before, and it’s been really nice to manufacture something positive that we can share and look forward to together.

Sometimes looking like a shiftless drifter

No shade to anyone who felt strongly about getting a lineup or whatever, but I haven’t really felt like going to the barbershop was worth the risk, and I continue to refuse to believe that my wife can actually pull off the fade she’s long wanted to give me. (It is also possible that she just means she’s intending to run my fade, and that I will before long wind up cold-cocked and slumped by my bride of nine years.) So I’ve just kind of been growing out my hair like it was when I was single, and sometimes been letting my beard get kind of out of control too, and, well, I sort of like looking a little bit like a Wildling, it turns out.

I have since trimmed things up a little. It didn’t go over well with my youngest. Oh, well. I’ll try to do better next time.

My wife and daughter singing the Pixies

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We don’t know all the words to too many lullabies, so we sing the ones we do know the words to. This will probably come back to bite us in the years ahead. For now, though: Pretty good.

Doughboys’ Tournament of Chompions: Munch Madness: Mac Attack

I can’t believe how invested I became in Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell’s quest to determine the best menu item at McDonald’s in a 64-seed tournament that spawned hours and hours of delightfully funny audio featuring all-time home-run guests like Jon Gabrus and Nicole Byer, who gleefully feed into the often warm, sometimes antagonistic, always entertaining chemistry between the two hosts. I have also never found myself wanting to go to McDonald’s more in my entire life. I have hit the drive-thru a couple of times since, and the boys are right: The McDonald’s fountain Coke does just hit different.

Sound Only

I’ve lost track of whether or not a 38-year-old is considered a millennial, but I’m quite confident that I’m not exactly plugged into “the millennial lifestyle” as my teammates Justin Charity and Micah Peters discuss it on their podcast, which relaunched this summer. Doesn’t matter, though, because I love hearing Charity and Micah talk to each other even if I don’t know what they’re talking about.

Their conversation about Dave Chappelle was great. After listening to their Travis Scott episode, I felt like I kind of understood who he is and why he occupies the space he does in pop culture now. I had no idea how they were going to get me to give a shit about set photos from The Batman, but this they not only got me there, but wended their way toward blaming 50 Cent for needing to know who Groot is to have a conversation on the internet, which is something for which Abraham Lincoln did not die. The show is good, it's getting better, it’s fun to hear them talk their shit, and Charity’s regular bellowing of “I, TOO, AM AMERICA” has made me smile for four straight months.

Siobhan’s letters and notes

She’s in first grade now, and she’s taken to communicating her feelings through the written word. A lot.

I won’t pretend that I loved all of these in the moment. I can only get so upset, though, when she’s already writing with such a clear voice. (And trying to use proper punctuation. (And drawing little cartoons to drive the point home.)

Palm Springs

I’m having a hard time remembering too many specifics about it right now, which probably means it’d be a good thing to rewatch over the holidays. But, as I’m sure many people noted many months before we got around to watching it, a comedy about living the same day over and over again, and about trying to figure out how to make your life mean something when everything seems meaningless, scratched a pretty particular, and particularly important, itch this year. It could’ve been twice as long, and I would’ve eaten up every second of Andy Samberg and Cristin Miloti together.

I’m pretty sure I cried, although this year, that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Also, put Conner O’Malley in more things.

Joining our union’s bargaining committee

I won’t say too much about this, but I will say that becoming an active participant in the process of a labor union negotiating its first contract with management has been an extremely educational experience. It’s pushed me to have conversations, sometimes difficult ones, about our priorities as a staff and a company. It's helped me get closer with the other past and present members of the BC, and has led me to start developing relationships with members of our staff that I otherwise might not have had much of an opportunity to get to know.

The organizing work takes time, effort, and energy, but trying to do what I can to help take better care of my colleagues has been well worth all of that. Here’s hoping that in 2021 we can reach a deal that helps make our workplace even better, stronger, and more equitable for all of us.

Publishing a story about Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup

I swear this is true: After I accepted my offer to work at The Ringer, but before I started, I told a friend that one thing I was excited about was that you had the chance to work on offbeat stuff here, in both the “kind of weird” and “not about the NBA” senses. That, I thought, might maybe open the door to me getting to write a story about a Saturday Night Live sketch I saw when I was a teenager about Stevie Nicks from Fleetwod Mac running a cheap Tex-Mex restaurant in Sedona, Arizona — a sketch that I wasn’t sure anyone else remembered, but that was stuck in my head forever.

That story ran on May 26.

A lot of people seemed to like it.

Accomplishing this goal was, as dumb as this might sound, a highlight of my year, and, honestly, a highlight of my career. I’d like to do some more stuff like this next year, time permitting; we’ll see. Whether or not I do, I got to do this. I’ll always have that.

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yourmandevine · 3 years

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Rejected Nicknames

Ron Karkonice

Dump

Switchblade

Uncle Yikes

Snitchblade

The Hefty Cinch Sack of Ballet Dads

Creeps Van Horn

The Fabulous Doula

Young Ten Pounds of Shit in a Five-Pound Bag

The Grand Funyon

Mega-Dink

Blart Vibes

Buseyteeth

Batdan v Superdan: Dan of Justice

MC Ehhh

American Grimace

Tubz

Captain Aerosmith

Scrumptious D

Betawolf

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yourmandevine · 3 years

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A metaphor

It’s not the most excellent version of its style of thing, and it’s not good for you, strictly speaking, but it is fun to consume, can be extremely satisfying when it hits right, and tends to be best when it is very cheesy.

Cobra Kai is nachos.

Thank you for your time.

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yourmandevine · 4 years

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Really enjoying the second season of Ramy.

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yourmandevine · 5 years

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Come on, come on, come on: get through it

NOTE: A lot of people who have read this have shared their condolences and well wishes, which is really nice. Some have also asked if there was anything they could do for Sean’s family, which is amazing. If you’re able and feel moved to, there is: There’s a college fund for Winnie. Thanks to everyone who has reached out.

***

One of the best friends I’ll ever have died on November 29, after a fight with cancer. He was 36, and he leaves a wife and a young daughter, all of which is an infuriating sin. I’ve been trying to find a way to sit with that. I’m not sure how well I’ve been doing.

I gave the eulogy at his funeral mass. Whenever I’ve talked to people about that, they have apologized to me, have said they were so sorry that I got asked to do that, that I had to do that. It’s weird: I never looked at it like that.

I feel so lucky that I got to know Sean Enos-Robertson -- to really know him, what he cared about, what he loved, what made him so special. You rarely get to know anybody like that, and when you do, sometimes you don’t wind up liking what you see. That never happened with Sean; he was a font of joy, someone who lived to make the lives of others just a little bit better. His wife asked me if I’d write something down and talk to people about this beautiful, amazing person I was so lucky to know. That wasn’t a burden. It was a privilege. An honor.

And now, a few weeks later, as I’m trying to figure out how to process this, I keep thinking that I’d like to share that.

You guys won’t get to know Sean, which is so, so decidedly your loss. But maybe this lets you know how much he meant to me, to us, and to so many other people, and it makes you think about the people who mean this much to you. And maybe you tell them.

Maybe you tell them while you have the chance, because telling people you care about them, and who they are in your life, and why you love who they are full stop is one of the best things there is, and there’s never a wrong time for it so long as it’s before the end. I got to tell Sean how I felt before he died, and I got to tell his family, and his friends, and his students -- my God, his students -- and now I’m telling you. Sean Enos-Robertson was brilliant, the best, a light in a lot of lives. I miss him, and I love him, and I always will. Here’s why.

***

Hello, everybody. My name is Dan Devine, and I'm a friend of Sean's. I am a friend of Sean's. I'm not going to use the past tense for that; it didn't stop being true last Thursday, and it's never going to.

On behalf of Courtney and Winnie, and of the Robertson and Enos families, I'd like to thank you for being here. In a broad sense, Sean believed in community: in the power of people uniting for a common good. More specifically, Sean believed in love. He loved his family — his wife and daughter, his parents and in-laws, his brother and grandmother. He loved his friends. He loved his students and colleagues. He loved the people he leaned on, and who leaned on him — those of us here today, and many others who couldn't make it, but are sharing their love, and our grief.

Sean was one of my favorite people. He was magnetic. He was invigorating. He was cool as hell.

Sean radiated. He was a candle: someone who lit up and warmed every room he walked into, every person whose life he touched. This ... this is a tough room to light up. So we're going to have to do it together.

Before we do it, though, I want to acknowledge a hard truth I've been sitting with, and that you might be sitting with, too. It is deeply, impossibly unfair that Sean is gone — that he was taken from us so soon. Too soon. Way, way, WAY too soon. That's real, and it's OK to feel that.

In my better moments, though, I can set that aside and make room for gratitude — that Sean walked into my life in the first place, that I got as much time with him as I did, and that I got so much exposure to such a shining example of how to love.

There's a song by Tom Petty that I really love called "Walls." There's a line in the chorus that goes, "You got a heart so big, it could crush this town." That was Sean. Sean loved openly, fearlessly, completely — he hugged like you could win medals for it. He loved with everything he had, with his whole body. And if you don't believe that, then you never saw my man dance.

He loved music, and especially sharing it — I don't think anybody made me more mix CDs to try to put me onto something that I hadn't heard. (I'm pretty sure I have about five different "best of Blur" mixes. Sean really loved Blur.)

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I met Sean at Providence College in the fall of 2000, right near the start of our freshman year. I'd seen him around at meetings for people who wanted to apply for shows on the college radio station, WDOM, but we didn't become friends right away. I know exactly when that happened: October 29, 2000. (I looked it up.)

That night, Mike Doughty, the singer from Soul Coughing, played a solo show at the Met Cafe in downtown Providence. I took the PC shuttle downtown by myself to catch the show, and somewhere around the weird acoustic cover of "Real Love" by Mary J. Blige, I saw that tall, skinny dude again. We awkwardly sidled up to one another to watch the show, and wound up walking back to campus together. We talked about bands and school and the station and whatever else two 18-year-olds talk about, all the way back home, and that was that. From that moment on, that was my man.

We hung out a lot, as evidenced by the staggering number of old photos I've looked through recently in which one or both of us had extremely tragic haircuts, facial hair, or sideburns. We lived together for two wonderful years in an awful apartment in Cranston, R.I.

The first year, we lived with our friend Todd. We had two parking spots for three cars, so one of us would always be blocking somebody in. Whenever it was time for the blocked-in person to get out, he'd ask, "Are you behind me?" And always, every time, Sean would answer, "100 percent, man."

It was this small, dumb thing, but it always made me laugh. Sean was really good at that.

We learned how to be adults together, finishing school and trying to figure out how to pursue our passions. After searching a little, Sean found his. In 2007, he took a job teaching history to middle schoolers at Harlem Academy. He shared with scores of students his belief in civic responsibility, in actively engaging with our nation's past, in interrogating history to learn about how we got where we are and how we might make decisions about our future. He loved teaching, and he was incredible at it. In 2016, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History named him the New York State History Teacher of the Year, and they don't just give that out.

Sean's commitment to his students went beyond the classroom. I got a much clearer picture of that when Courtney sent me a note she received after his passing from one of his students, sharing both condolences and her memory of Mr. Robertson as someone who "would always reach out to me when he thought I needed it." One day, in eighth grade, this student confided in Sean that she thought she wanted to be an artist. She braced for stereotypical adult dismissal, the classic speech about "getting a real job."

Instead, she got a giant smile and an inspiring conversation about Courtney's job as a graphic designer, about that being a real path, and about how she might be able to realize her dream. Courtney invited her to visit her job to see firsthand how it was done, and that it could be done. She's kept that dream throughout high school, and now into college, thanks in part to Sean's willingness to listen, to care, and to open his life to a student in need. I'm willing to bet there are a lot more stories like that.

The student concluded her note with a beautiful sentiment: "I pray that you and Winnie and the rest of Mr. Robertson's family and friends are able to find peace and comfort, and I pray that you are able to think of him and feel peace and joy, because I genuinely think that's what he would want." I think she's exactly right. Sean wanted to lift people's spirits, to lighten their moods; on the day he invited some of us Brooklyn friends over to tell us that his fight was coming to an end, he kept moving back and forth among playlists of incidental music, setting a soundtrack to hum underneath all the laughs and tears and reminiscing. Even then, dude was still DJing.

We learned how to be somebody's partner, and eventually somebody's husband, together. Sean met Courtney in 2002, and as I remember it, he knew very, very quickly that he'd hit the jackpot. I'm sure that they had their share of tough times over the years, especially recently, but they always seemed immensely supportive of one another. Their love, from the outside, always seemed easy, in that way that let you know it was right, secure for the long haul.

Something Sean and I had in common, and that I've always felt grateful for, is that we always knew our magnetic north. Everything in our life oriented around the person we wanted to spend it with, and wherever work or school or whatever tossed us, we could always go back to that, back to our person, and get pointed in the right direction. Courtney was his compass, his best reason for doing everything.

When they were going to get married, Sean asked me to stand up with him as his best man, and to give a toast. I dug that toast out of a box last week, and here's the part that matters: "I think that all guys — the honest ones, at least — will admit that the women in our lives do a lot of the heavy lifting in helping us become decent, valuable men. And this is no exception [...] When Sean called to tell me that he and Courtney had gotten engaged, the first thing I remember thinking is, 'They deserve each other.'"

Their time together deserved a better ending than this. But what came before — the 16 years of knowing this great a love was possible, the nine years of marriage, the two and a half years of Winnie's life? That was exactly what they deserved.

Courtney is one of the strongest, fiercest, most remarkable people I've ever met — a woman who has faced unimaginable challenges and kept putting one foot in front of the other. I can't fathom what today is like for you, Courtney, but I want you to know: we are going to be awesome for you and Winnie right now. And tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days after that. I'm sorry, but you're stuck with us.

We learned how to be fathers together. Sean was there for me when my Siobhan was born, ready to cradle this tiny thing in his arms and envelop us with love, and to look me in my bloodshot, frantic eyes and let me know that I didn't have to be OK, because I was never going to be alone with it all. I wanted to do the same for him when Winnie was born, but Sean never seemed to need it. He was just ready: all open arms and full heart and perfect love.

Winnie is amazing, and brave, and funny, just like her dad. She's one of my favorite people, too, and I ache for her. But I'm also so grateful that there are so many people who will line up to tell her just how fantastic her father was. She will always know how special he was, and how special she was to him, and how much he loved her. We'll make sure of that. It might be the most important thing any of us do once we leave here today.

This hurts. This is hard. It's not supposed to go like this. But we don't get to make these kinds of choices. All we can do is deal with the fallout.

I'd ask you to remember the words of Sean's student: "I pray that you are able to think of him and feel peace and joy." Sean Enos-Robertson spent 36 years doing everything he could to bring peace and joy to everybody he met. Sean loved with his whole soul, and we can do that, too. We can do that for him. Let's be candles. Let's radiate.

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yourmandevine · 6 years

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Au revoir, adios, aloha (or: some personal news)

OK, so: the news, in two parts.

1. Today’s my last day at Yahoo Sports. Nine years after my first freelance piece and 6 1/2 years after accepting an offer of full-time employment, and after what I can only assume is something like 13 million words’ worth of blog posts, I’m leaving the first and only professional sportswriting home I’ve ever known.

That -- actually seeing those words laid out like that, and knowing the reality underneath them -- feels crazy, and at least a little scary. But those feelings are tempered by no small amount of excitement, because ...

2. ... starting on Oct. 10, I’ll be joining The Ringer as a staff writer covering the NBA.

We’re still hammering out the specifics of what all that might mean. I’m hopeful I’ll get the chance to chip in on some of the many fine shows on the Ringer Podcast Network. (How, for example, has there not yet been a Rewatchables about “Kingpin?”) I also pray nightly that I will one day get the call to Come On Desktop.

At a minimum, though, I’ll still be writing about the NBA every day, bringing Whatever It Is I Do (and maybe, eventually, some different stuff than what I’ve done in the past) to a coverage team that includes some very talented people I already know a little bit and some others I'm eager to get to know, all under the editorial guidance of folks like Danny Chau, Justin Verrier, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey and Bill Simmons.

I’m excited to become part of a team I’ve admired from afar, one I believe to be committed to trying to write the best possible version of a thing and to making cool stuff online. I’m really looking forward to doing whatever I can to make a site I’ve read regularly as a fan just a little bit better ... or, at the very least, to not ruining it completely. (Fingers crossed.)

This is not the kind of thing I ever thought I'd get to write. After getting my foot in the door at Ball Don’t Lie, I just sort of always figured that my next chance would be my last one. That feeling has lasted the better part of nine years.

Things worked out differently, though, and instead I got to share mastheads, Finals seating, arena-closing writing sessions and off-night beers with the likes of Adrian Wojnarowski, Marc Spears, Dan Wetzel and Michael Lee. That’s thanks to the kindness, guidance and faith of a lot of people I’ve been lucky enough to work with.

J.E. Skeets let me pitch that first post, decided he liked the result enough to run it on BDL, asked me to do more, and fought for me to get paid. When Skeets went off to become a TV star, Trey Kerby kept me around, told me he wanted me to write every day, and gave me the confidence that I could actually do that.

When Trey left to join Skeets, Kelly Dwyer -- a writer whose style, output, knowledge and talent I admired so much that I was literally scared to email him -- welcomed me with open arms, and made feel like a partner rather than a sidekick. Eric Freeman wrote things so funny and smart that I would have felt constantly jealous of him ... if it wasn’t impossible to harbor any negative emotion for someone who saved your sanity four times a week, at minimum, for a half-decade.

When they were all gone, Ben Rohrbach worked his ass off to fill the void, to live up to the standard they’d set, and to keep pushing me to do more, to try harder, to do better. I have every confidence that Ben will keep doing that as an integral part of the next iteration of Yahoo’s NBA team.

I will always feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten to be a small part of the life of Ball Don’t Lie, the best basketball blog there ever was, and to have tried to carry forward some of its spirit after the powers that be decided its time had passed. The Yahoo Sports Blogs, en masse, housed a staggering array of talent over the years, and while a lot of those folks have also moved on, one of the hardest things about today is leaving those who are still there -- Kevin Kaduk, Jay Busbee, Jeff Eisenberg, Mike Oz and his baseball crew, Frank Schwab and the NFL team, Henry Bushnell, Ryan Lambert, the college football dudes, et al. -- who work their asses off to be smarter, funnier and better, day in and day out.

I'm extremely grateful for the support and encouragement of the many great bosses I've had at Yahoo. Jamie Mottram, emailing me to let me know he liked the "30 for 30″ reviews I was doing as I was figuring out my voice. Mark Pesavento, talking me through a “the Yahoo.com front page needs that Kobe/’Call of Duty’ post immediately!” situation as I was writing at the desk of the old 9-to-5 job that I was flagrantly not doing. (Time well spent, it turned out.)

Matt Ryan, going through 10 rolls of red tape to actually get me the full-time offer that would make things stable enough for me to make the leap. Bob Condor, protecting and advocating for me and our other writers in some ways I know about, and probably a million I don’t.

Joe Garza, the unsung hero of The Vertical and Yahoo Sports NBA, the most tireless extra set of eyes in the game, an always available sounding board. And, most of all: Johnny Ludden, who believed us bloggers deserved just as much recognition as the senior insiders and columnists, who saw for me something I never saw for myself, and who’s the best boss I’ve ever had.

A lot of people never get any higher-up who believes in them like that. To have gotten a half-dozen in a decade -- and to get to walk into a similarly strong support structure at The Ringer -- is something I do not take for granted.

Nor is the fact that enough of you out there kept reading the things I was writing to keep getting me the next chance, and the next one, and the next one. And, now, this one.

I don’t really know what the hell happens now, but that’s part of what’s thrilling: all the opportunity for growth that comes with a big change after being in one place for so long, coupled with the validating realization that, as a friend once told me, “Don’t worry, man: They didn't hire you to be good. They hired you to be you.”

Now, with a fresh vote of confidence from a new set of teammates, I get to figure out what that means all over again. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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yourmandevine · 7 years

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‘What can I get you?’

I was 15 when Norm Macdonald got yanked from his spot as the anchor of “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live.” I didn’t know why he had; all the stuff about Don Ohlmeyer and O.J. Simpson was a little over my head. All I knew was that this really funny, really dry, really different and really talented guy I’d come to enjoy wasn’t hosting the fake news anymore, and that Colin Quinn was.

I’ll never forget how Quinn opened his first run at the anchor desk:

You know how you go to your favorite bar, and your local bartender isn't there? You ask, "Where's Jeff?"

"Jeff no longer works here. I'm Steve."

And you're thinking, "Hey, who's this idiot? I like Jeff."

But you still want your drink? And even though Steve doesn't mix your drink the same way you're used to, like Jeff, you still like the same bar. You don't want to have to go to a different bar.

And even Steve might feel kinda bad, because Jeff trained him. Jeff showed him how to work the cash register. Where the tonic was on the soda gun. Who tips, who doesn't.

Well ... I'm Steve. What can I get you?

For the past month, I've been feeling a lot like Steve.

One month ago, the company I work for got acquired by another company and merged with a third company. (I’m pretty sure I have that right. I am bad at business.) This had been in the works for a while; I expected that some things would be different once it all finished. I did not expect that the significant layoffs would include Kelly Dwyer and Eric Freeman, two of the best basketball writers in the world and my co-workers of many, many years. Kelly’s last day was June 14. Eric’s last day is today.

Kelly’s last post was a corrective/history lesson. Eric’s last post was about how failure can be beautiful and spectacular. I take a small amount of solace in knowing they went out strong, and as themselves. Cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.

Lots of people lost their jobs in this deal, in all aspects of the workforce, because it is my understanding that that’s what happens when gigantic companies become parts of other gigantic companies. Every site, department, office, etc., lost smart, capable, valuable and talented people. I know that, and don’t mean to come off as overly selfish or maudlin. I just miss mine, is all.

Kelly’s one of maybe three or four people who can lay legitimate claim to having defined the way people write about the NBA on the Internet. His Behind the Boxscore columns helped teach so, so many of us about the teams we never saw, about history and context and how to watch what happens, about something called “efficiency” and “pace-adjusted stats” ... about everything. (Oh, and about Queen. And Steely Dan. And Alex Chilton, and “Alex Chilton.” Kelly's columns never traveled far without a little Big Star.)

Even after he shuttered BtB -- as it turns out, not even the dude who’s the best at this can watch 15 games a night and write 4,000 digestible and insightful words about all of them for 10 a.m. Eastern the next morning, every morning, forever -- and stepped into the editor’s chair, he worked his ass off to bring that expertise and attention to detail to everything he wrote. Libraries full of NBA writing have landed in KD’s recycling bin because it wasn’t good enough if it didn’t get the words right, even if it might’ve been better than 75 percent of the stuff the rest of us write. Kelly loves the NBA, and loves writing about the NBA, in a way that has frankly made me question many times over the years if I even like the NBA. His enthusiasm was obvious from the outside, way back when I was commenting on BDL live blogs and writing about nothing on my own independent blog, and only grew clearer when I spent seven years engaging with it every day.

Eric joined the team in 2010, bursting through the screen like Monta. Eric had been great for FreeDarko and The Sporting News’ The Baseline -- his clarity of expression and sense of humor made him so much fun to read, and so daunting to compete with, even at a time when the burgeoning corporate basketball Internet felt less like competition and more like a great broad swindle we couldn’t believe we were getting away with. And then, Sporting News shuttered its blogs and laid people off, and all of a sudden Eric was available, and then he was with us. I felt so unbelievably lucky. I still feel that way.

Eric could write work-a-day blog posts like serious art criticism, but he also really wanted to do stuff that straddled the line between dumb and brilliant, like writing about robots playing basketball or writing fiction about journeyman center Earl Barron that presupposed he was an actual earl. He could be incisive and ridiculous, in-depth without feeling overbearing, polished without being precious. I have always felt smarter about something after reading Eric’s perspective on it.

He’s also possessed of such generosity of spirit that he used his favorite baseball team winning the 2010 World Series to let me know that he wishes good things, and only good things, for me and for mine:

There’s still a website, of course. Ben Rohrbach and Henry Bushnell are working their asses off, and I’m trying to steer the ship. We’ll keep trying to do things that are good-and-smart and good-and-dumb as best we can, because that’s all you can really do. It’ll be different, though. It is different.

The seven-plus years I worked with Kelly, and the six-plus I worked with Eric, weren’t perfect, because no long-term relationship ever is. Everyone has his off-days. But I never took for granted how much they cared, or how goddamn good they were, or how rare it was for any group of dopes on a website to get to work together for as long as we had.

Ball Don’t Lie has been a special thing on the Internet for a long time, thanks in large part to Kelly Dwyer and Eric Freeman, two unbelievably talented people who gave me support and instruction and friendship. They made our site better, and they made me better, too. I look forward to them doing the same for someone else, someplace else, very soon.

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