Jackie Robinson, and What Will Make People Notice

We can’t hide forever.

Everyone is trying to make it through this tumultuous, disorienting, increasingly terrifying period of American history in their own way. Some people are binge-watching television. Some people are obsessively hiking. Almost everyone I know is trying to find any space of quiet calm they can. My strategy for finding that comfortable mental space is to watch a lot of sports. That might seem like an odd strategy for someone who writes about sports professionally; don’t you do that all the time? But while I’ve always tried to construct my career in way that assures and protects the joy that sports has always provided me — described in detail in a previous newsletter — at a base level I’ve still always kept a certain reserve, if just as a result of a basic human maturation process.

When I was a child, or even when I was in my early ’20s and had no real life obligations nor tangible professional arc, I could delve wholly in sports, immerse myself in them, be the guy at the sports bar all day for the first rounds of the NCAA Tournament, know every player on every team, have strong and loud opinions about everything because there wasn’t all that else important in my life and thus in many ways sports was all there was. This is how my son William watches sports, how I see a lot of young sportswriters just…