An Alternate Universe
In an alternate universe version of my professional life, I became a sports broadcaster.
In college, I spent much of my time calling Yale games on the radio for WYBC. I did play-by-play, mostly hockey and football, but also some baseball, lacrosse, and soccer. I was good at it and enjoyed doing it.
The other students in the WYBC sports department became something akin to a fraternity for me (there were some young women but mostly men), though instead of going to keg parties on weekends, we would travel to other college campuses to call games.
It was an unusual way to go through college, but I never questioned whether it was the best way to spend my time. It was fun.
Concurrent to this, I was also writing a lot. For the Yale Daily News, the Yale athletic department, and various other publications. Not to mention all the papers I wrote for my classes, of course. And in my senior year, I took a seminar with Professor Fred Strebeigh that was essentially a magazine writing class. It was probably my favorite course in my four years.
It was a heady and optimistic period for me. And I determined that I wanted to pursue a writing career.
The idea of writing seemed more intellectually stimulating, more creatively fulfilling, and maybe even more romantic than being a broadcaster. All of that made it feel cooler to my college-aged self. (“Which path seems more fun?” was not a question it occurred to me to ask myself.)
My first job out of college was essentially a writing job, as an Olympic researcher at NBC Sports. And as my professional life has unfolded, I have largely remained in broadcasting, but mostly behind the camera as a writer, producer, and programmer.
I haven’t regretted the path I chose more than two decades ago. But I’m intrigued by the idea of where my life might have gone had I, at 22, pursued a minor league baseball or hockey broadcasting job in a small town somewhere.
The Best…
…Podcast Episode I Listened to This Week
Pablo Torre Finds Out — “The Best Voice in Sports Goes Deep,” August 22, 2024
The thoughts above were inspired by a recent episode of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out. In it, Pablo talks with Jon “Boog” Sciambi, one of the best play-by-play announcers working today.
Boog is the TV voice of the Chicago Cubs, does baseball and college basketball games on ESPN, and is ESPN Radio’s lead announcer for the World Series.
Boog said he asked to be on the podcast because he wanted to rebut a point made by Pablo and ESPN’s Mina Kimes on a previous episode. Mina and Pablo argued that because Tom Brady was the greatest quarterback of all time, he will be a good analyst in his upcoming debut season calling NFL games on Fox.
Boog’s response was that Brady’s success as a player will have virtually no bearing on whether he’s successful as an announcer. Because, he says, while Brady’s mind is one of the best ever at processing formations and plays, he’s never had to efficiently articulate the most relevant of his thoughts in a live broadcast situation while also knowing and saying the first and last names of the players involved.
As someone who calls games for a living, Boog’s opinion is especially valuable and insightful. But the debate will only truly be resolved when we all get to hear and evaluate Brady’s performance.
What I found even more interesting than this discussion was where it took the conversation: to really nerdy announcer stuff. Like whether baseball front offices evaluate players using old fashioned stats like pitcher wins and RBIs (spoiler alert: they don’t), and how that impacts the way Boog integrates stats on the air.
Most interesting of all, though, was their discussion of “the unseen stuff,” as Pablo calls it, that Boog does to prepare for games. Like getting to the ballpark early to talk to players, coaches, managers, and executives from both teams, trading notes with other announcers, watching batting practice, and maintaining his digital archive of game scoresheets.
This part of the podcast was like gold for me, because it brought me back the days when I would interview coaches and players during the week, study line sheets and pronunciations on hockey roadtrips, pore over team trends and stats in hotel rooms the night before football games, and then figure out how to communicate the most important information I learned to the listening audience during a broadcast.
Doing the games was great, but for me, the preparation was the most nourishing part of the job. And after to listening to Pablo and Boog’s talk, I couldn’t help but think — that alternate universe of mine sounds pretty fun.
…Series I Watched This Week
Dark Winds (Seasons 1 & 2) — Created by Graham Roland
Streaming on Netflix and AMC+
I’ve been having trouble getting through TV series with 10-episode seasons lately. I think it’s because, more often than not, producers are stretching six episodes worth of story into longer seasons.
I’m pleased to report that Dark Winds, which originally streamed on AMC+ but is now on Netflix, does not fall prey to this trend. So far, the series has had two six-episode seasons and has arguably tried to pack too much story into each season. But I’d rather have that than the alternative.
The show, based on a series of books by Tony Hillerman, is set in present-day Arizona. It centers on police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (played by Zahn McClarnon) and his team, investigating various complicated — and sometimes personal — crimes on a Navajo reservation.
The stories sometimes get too complicated or strain credulity, but I liked the world of the show well enough to roll with it.
I have two favorite aspects of Dark Winds.
First, I love watching McClarnon work. His performance as semi-competent cop Officer Big was a highlight of Reservation Dogs. In Dark Winds, he’s again a cop but a very different, more serious one. And this time, he gest to be the lead character. (I also enjoyed his work as bad guy Hanzee Dent in Season 2 of Fargo.)
Second, the show is often set amidst the famous butte formations of Monument Valley, near the Arizona-Utah line. John Ford’s films made Monument Valley an iconic locale in Western films, and I appreciate how Dark Winds reclaims the area as a place where Native Americans are the protagonists.
…Movie I Watched This Week
Smoke Signals (1998) — Directed by Chris Eyre
Engaging with Dark Winds inspired me to go back and watch the 1998 movie Smoke Signals.
Directed by Chris Eyre — who directed several episodes of Dark Winds — Smoke Signals came out in 1998, during the heyday of indie filmmaking. At the time, it was a rare example of a feature film that was written, directed, and produced by Native Americans, with a largely Indigenous cast and shot on an actual reservation in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
It also helped that the movie, which is basically a coming-of-age comedy, was good. (Its poster notes that Siskel & Ebert gave it “Two BIG thumbs up!”)
A quarter century later, it’s still a good and worthy film, exploring feelings of guilt, shame, forgiveness, and love through the eyes and experiences of 22-year-olds Victor (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams). The film begins as a portrait of life on the reservation before becoming a road picture as Victor and Thomas travel to Arizona to retrieve the ashes of Victor’s absentee father (played by Gary Farmer), who has recently died.
I took pleasure in seeing the cross-pollination of cast and crew across Smoke Signals, Killers of the Flower Moon, Reservation Dogs, and Dark Winds, though perhaps, more than anything, this shows a lack of opportunities for a wider range of Native people in Hollywood.
There’s another complicating factor with seeing and thinking about Smoke Signals in 2024.
The screenplay was written by Sherman Alexie, a Native American writer whose book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven provided the source material for Smoke Signals.
As I discovered after watching the film, Alexie, in 2018, was accused of sexual harassment by several women. You can read about it here. I thought maybe I should refrain from writing about Smoke Signals at all. But obviously, I decided that I would, while including this additional context. Others can decide for themselves whether or not to accept the film as a piece of work worth seeing, independent of Alexie’s subsequent history.