Just Get to the Good Stuff
A champion athlete, a lost baby elephant, and a singing Harrison Ford walk into a bar...
With the NFL season ending last Sunday’s Super Bowl, I had a whole long thing written about Tom Brady’s retirement, using the longevity of his football career as a timeline for things that have happened in my life. But you know what? I got bored with it, and we’ve got a lot to cover this week.
So if you want to know about the first time I ever heard of Tom Brady or how many times I’ve moved since the Patriots drafted him or what his record is when I’ve seen him play in person (okay, I’ll tell you: 0-3; two Super Bowl losses to the Giants and a regular season loss to the Jets) or other such minutiae, feel free to ask me.
Otherwise, on to the list…
The Best…
…Memoir I Read This Week
Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World (Penguin Press, 2023) — By Lauren Fleshman
I could take so many different angles in writing about Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World by Lauren Fleshman, but let me get the most important point out of the way: I couldn’t put this book down. I devoured it in two days, and I highly recommend it. (And not just because the author’s last name is similar to mine, as people have been pointing out to me for 20 years.)
The book is part-memoir, part-cultural study, part-manifesto, and all the parts are written in an entertaining and heartfelt way. Fleshman, a former elite runner who is now a coach, entrepreneur, and brand ambassador, honed her writing style for years as a popular blogger and later at Runner’s World before undertaking this project.
She charts the path of her own running career, from top high school performer to NCAA champion at Stanford to U.S. champion as a professional. But she explains how this path was far from linear, because of the significant changes women’s bodies undergo from the start of high school through the end of college.
These changes require physical and emotional attention, she writes, and simply expecting female runners to get progressively faster — as scholastic and collegiate men often do — is incorrect and potentially dangerous.
Fleshman details how this mentality can easily lead to physical and mental health issues that can chase talented runners out of the sport. These issues not only impact who wins races but also who gets sponsorship funding, marketing attention, and coverage in the media.
For me, the book answered questions about female runners that I’ve been carrying around since covering women’s cross country as a freshman in college. Now, a quarter century later, I finally have sophisticated and complete answers, thanks to Fleshman’s book.
As a memoir, the story is both heartwarming and bittersweet. As a cultural study of a sports subculture, it is eye-opening. And as a manifesto, well, I can only hope that the book helps change the way parents, coaches, governing bodies, the media, and corporations approach the care and coverage of female athletes — especially runners.
…Documentary Short I Watched This Week
The Elephant Whisperers (2022) — Directed by Kartiki Gonsalves
Streaming on Netflix
A few nights ago, I sat down to watch last year’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. But my heart just wasn’t in it. I could only think about past World War I movies, particularly Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), skeptical that there was anything new to say about the horrors of trench warfare.
And… I stopped watching about 45 minutes into it. The film looks beautiful, and I was intrigued by the theme of the natural world being disrupted and destroyed by the darkness of man. I’m sure it’s a worthy nominee, I just didn’t have it in me that night.
But on my way out of the Netflix store, I stumbled upon another Oscar nominee, this one for Best Documentary Short: The Elephant Whisperers, directed Kartiki Gonsalves.
I think I can sell this one pretty easily: indigenous couple in South India raises a lost baby elephant. It’s that simple. Beautiful nature cinematography, a lovely story, 40 minutes of your time. And no Europeans killing each other.
…TV Moment I Saw This Week
Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams perform a sing-along duet on Shrinking
Streaming on Apple TV+
I know I keep mentioning Shrinking every week, but I couldn’t resist commenting on this scene from the show’s most recent episode (“Potatoes”). I never knew I needed Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams doing a duet sing-along to Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning” in my life, but now I don’t know how I ever lived without it. (Unfortunately, I find the clip Apple chose to use as a teaser to be incomplete and kind of confusing. You can see it here, but it’s better to watch within the show.)
Now if you’ll indulge me in a tangent, here I go.
The director of this episode, James Ponsoldt, was a classmate of mine in college. I knew his name (he was on the football team), but I didn’t know him personally. Nor did I know — during my senior year — that he was one of the students behind a mysterious undergraduate club called “Porn ’n Chicken.”
Anonymous members of Porn ’n Chicken made it known one day in the winter of 2000-01 that they were going to be making an adult film at Yale. Open casting was underway, and they had already chosen a title: The StaXXX.
Finding this story irresistible, just about every media outlet from coast to coast picked it up (beginning with The New York Times), creating a national phenomenon and an incredible amount of free publicity for the club.
I joined in on the frenzy in my Yale Daily News sports column, comparing Porn ’n Chicken’s week (successful) to the performances of several Yale teams that same week (unsuccessful).
In retrospect, it was probably a little cheap and certainly sarcastic. But I was a 20-year-old kid who a) thought he was pretty clever; and b) was short on column ideas with a deadline fast approaching. And I certainly didn’t intend for anyone to take it personally.
Well, members of the swim team took it personally. I had lumped them in with some of the higher profile teams on campus because they had just lost badly to Harvard and Princeton.
A few swimmers protested by writing letters to the editor, noting that several team members had recorded their personal best times at the meet.
Others lodged their complaints in more direct ways.
While I was out one night, an unknown number of people entered my dorm room and dumped snow on my bed. Another person launched a DDoS attack against me, which ended up shutting down the entire Yale email system for hours.
It was a strange experience.
I don’t think I reported these retaliatory acts to anyone in authority, and I’m not sure I learned much of a lesson at the time. I mostly remember being both amused and bemused.
But I can now understand how members of a team that usually gets no media attention might be upset when a fellow student takes a shot at them in print, even if it was meant in jest.
The StaXXX turned out to be a hoax. But James Ponsoldt and friends reportedly sold the rights to the story to Comedy Central, which produced a movie called Porn ’n Chicken (with Ponsoldt credited as an associate producer).
I don’t know whether that was the springboard, but Ponsoldt has gone on to a lengthy Hollywood career, directing several films including The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour (in which Jason Segal, the star of Shrinking, plays David Foster Wallace).
As for me, I suppose I was scarred enough to go 22 years without writing about fictitious adult films or Ivy League swimming. Until today.
…YouTube Clip I Watched This Week
Marc Summers on the Tonight Show with Burt Reynolds (October 17, 1994)
One last item for anyone who remembers the game show for kids called Double Dare, which premiered on Nickelodeon in 1986. The host, as you may recall, was an affable young guy named Marc Summers.
If you’re like me, Summers’s face is seared into your brain so deeply that when you’re old and gray, and you can’t remember your own name, you’ll still remember Marc Summers.
So on Monday morning, when I saw that Summers was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts (WTF with Marc Maron), I couldn’t wait to listen.
In the intro, Maron directs his audience to pause the podcast and watch the clip I’ve posted above. It’s amusing (and mildly embarrassing) to see a huge star like Burt Reynolds deign to go after the host of Double Dare.
It’s not as epic as Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry Lawler on Letterman’s NBC show, but it’s worth a watch.
(By the way, for the Olympics obsessives out there, the Letterman guest who followed the Kaufman vs. Lawler segment was none other than David Wallechinsky! He was promoting The Book of Lists.)