Doc and JJ and LeBron
How icons in their fields connect — and what we can learn from them.
Dear readers,
For the main event today, Ian has a dispatch on how sports media is actually doing something right — for once. He’ll use the first person in that piece. But before we get into that I (Calder) — the other author of this newsletter — want to talk quickly about a remarkable sports experience that I had since we were last in your inbox.
I was fortunate enough to score tickets to attend Dwight (Doc) Gooden’s retirement ceremony at Citi Field with my parents. My dad and mom, from whom I learned the curse of Mets fandom, took in the ceremony just like they had watched so much of Doc’s career in real time. The two of them saw him in 1985, when he put up quite plausibly the greatest pitching season Major League Baseball has ever seen (24-4 with a 1.53 ERA and 16 complete games), in 1986 when he helped lead the Mets to their most recent World Series, and in all the times afterwards, when he’s been beset by declining performance and off the field troubles with addiction issues.
The three of us were all curious about what Doc would say in his speech — whether he would focus on the remarkable athletic feats or whether he’d lean into the difficult. But instead of exactly doing either, he delivered a treatise on why athletes and sports remain so compelling. Doc, who left the Mets in 1996 after a year-long suspension, discussed how he tried time and time again to come back to play for the Mets. The erstwhile owners (the awful Wilpons), wouldn’t let him do it. There was no space on the roster, he heard again and again, even when he wanted to simply sign a one-day contract to retire with the team. He used those experiences to talk about timing. How even in a ceremony meant to honor the past, rather than dwell on that, he would rather think about how 2024 was finally the right time for him to get the finish to his career in orange and blue that he had always wanted.
By using his retirement speech to shine the light on this idea of timing, Doc showed why he’s so endlessly fascinating. He was a larger-than-life athlete who had all the struggles and more of a normal man. He was capable of incredible feats but also managed to sabotage himself at almost every turn. And while the Wilpons wouldn’t let him back in the fold after years of difficulty with drugs, the Mets new owners understood Doc for who he is — someone who, in many ways, is so much better than we are, but also someone who needs the rest of us. Without the people in his life sticking by him (and no one’s more loyal than a Mets fan), there would be no Doc today. He delivered a beautiful speech, and we all felt lucky to be there. Now, on to our main piece.
-Calder and Ian
A few years ago, I (Ian) went to a talk featuring a famous rapper and a well-respected writer/public intellectual at a theater in New York. Both men were undoubtedly brilliant, but the conversation — which was nominally about the rapper’s legacy and his contributions to the history of the genre — got off to a notably awkward and halting start. The writer kept asking the rapper to explain his music like a literary critic might explain a novel, and the rapper couldn’t get his arms around the questions. The conversation proceeded along these lines for a while, with the two men basically talking past each other, until the writer changed tacks. Instead of asking the rapper about his music, he started asking him about his life — what his childhood had been like, what it had been like to navigate the vagaries and uncertainties of fame — and suddenly, the rapper just opened up. He started unspooling these incredible answers that explained his life by way of his music, offering some extremely poignant insights into his music along the way.
It was, from a journalistic perspective, a fascinating object lesson: Artists are, at least sometimes, not very good at talking intelligently about their art, but they are good at talking about their life experiences, which are the basis of their art. So if you want to learn about their art, ask them about their lives, and you’ll ultimately get the type of answers you want.
This is all to say that I was somewhat skeptical when I started the first episode of Mind the Game, the new podcast/YouTube series featuring LeBron James and JJ Redick. The show follows a pretty basic premise: JJ Redick, a decent ex-basketball star turned mediocre T.V. commentator, would sit down with LeBron James, arguably the best basketball player of all time, to talk about basketball and drink wine. I had seen positive reviews of the show, and I’m a sucker for the dude-chat style of podcast, so how bad could it be?
Well, as it turns out, it’s not so bad at all. In fact, it’s very — almost unbelievably — good.
For some context, I am what you might describe as an extremely lukewarm basketball fan. (Calder has me beat in the hardo category on this one.) I occasionally watch games, and I dabble (poorly) in pick-up every so often, but I don’t follow the NBA closely, and I don’t know much basketball lingo beyond “pick and roll”. Given that a significant portion of the show is devoted to digging into the minutiae of basketball strategy (Episode 2, titled “The Hardest Action to Guard in Basketball,” includes an extended discussion of something called “Pick the Picker B.O.B [AKA America’s Play],”) you would think this would diminish my enjoyment of it — but you would be wrong.
The joy of listening (or watching, depending on your preferred medium) in fact has very little to do with having any pre-existing knowledge of basketball (or “Basketball IQ,” as LeBron and others like to call it). It’s cool to pick up little pieces of knowledge along the way, but the real joy is hearing the back-and-forth between two people who (despite their notably unequal on-court abilities) both know a ton about basketball and are willing to unapologetically geek out about it. And because both men are so steeped in the sport, there’s none of the stiltedness of that rapper-writer exchange. From the get-go, both men are locked in and able to explain their craft with an uncanny degree of clarity and specificity (which makes you wonder whether there’s an essential difference between the sort of knowledge behind art and the sort of knowledge behind sports, but that’s for another time).
During the episodes, LeBron and Redick occasionally take a break from talking basketball to talk wine, which is mostly just a sideshow, but there’s also a sort of odd thematic coherence to the whole thing. Listening to the two of them discuss the finer points of basketball is a bit like listening to a sommelier discuss the tasting notes of a wine: You had no idea that there was this much to talk about, but it’s kind of fun to listen along. And in the case of basketball, there’s no doubt that they’re not just bullshitting their way through it, because they actually put their knowledge into practice on the court.
There’s no formal division of labor in the episodes, but by default, Redick assumes the role of the interviewer and LeBron becomes the subject — as it should be. Whatever you may think of LeBron as a person (or persona), he is without a doubt one of the best — if not the best — person to ever play the game of basketball. But he’s not just good at it; he’s also a genius about it, and there’s something fascinating about listening to smart people talk in depth about things that they are very good at. Imagine if we had multi-part podcasts with the most talented practitioners of various fields throughout history — three hours with Michelangelo on art, or a mini-series with Shakespeare on playwriting. That IP would be worth millions of dollars. You can get this — for free — on YouTube!
The other thing that makes Mind the Game so amazing is that, given the current trends in sports media, it probably shouldn’t exist. As Jonathan Mahler explained in the New York Times Magazine recently, so much of today’s sports media has assumed a default tone of obnoxious outrage, machismo chest-thumping and over-the-top, testosterone-soaked bloviating. It sucks, but it gets ratings, so people keep doing it. Mind the Game, which is produced by LeBron’s brand/media company Uninterrupted, cuts against the grain. It’s just two dudes at a table, talking like normal people, geeking out about basketball and drinking wine. It’s a TV executive’s nightmare, yet it’s totally engrossing.
So three cheers for Mind the Game. As seemingly every consumer product both online and off seems to get shittier, here’s something good, smart, pure. Seriously — check it out.
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