Greetings and salutations Cauldron readers! It’s been a while, but I never really felt right about not telling you the complete story of The Cauldron’s demise after we shut down. Well, consider that wrong righted!

Cheers, Jamie

So, What Really Happened To The Cauldron? was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thinking about launching your own media startup? You might want to consider my crazy story first.

The call came in late winter of 2013 from a New York City number I didn’t recognize. I had relocated to North Carolina two years earlier, but recruiters were still trying to lure me back to the Big Apple. I wasn’t remotely interested. The South had become home much faster than I ever expected — the people, the weather, the pace of life, the exponentially lower blood pressure.

The woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as Kate Lee. I had been recommended to her by someone in digital sports media, she said, and her company, something called Medium, was a recently-launched digital platform that was looking to incubate promising publications.

(Translation: She needed content. Good content.)

To that point, I had done a little blogging for the New York Times and Major League Baseball — more as a side hobby than anything else — and built a relatively small, but loyal social media following. No journalism degree. No experience as a Publisher or Editor-in-Chief. My coverage of the New York Knicks had led to a few guest appearances on WFAN-NY and ESPN Radio in New York, but I certainly wasn’t well known in the industry.

Five-thousand dollars a month. For three months.

That was the total funding Medium offered to conceive of and execute my vision for a sports website that would ultimately become The Cauldron. With just a three-month runway, it certainly wasn’t a lot of time or money to launch a national media startup. (And it was the primary reason why someone a lot more proven than me hadn’t already taken them up on the challenge.)

I had been working as a Wall Street lawyer for over a decade at the time, so it wasn’t about the money. Anything Medium paid me would be invested directly into the business. To be fair, it wasn’t even really a “business.” Not at first, anyway.

It was more of a scatterbrained concept:

Finding the time and energy to make a legitimate go of it would be no small feat. My wife was also working full time and sharing the demands of our toddler son and newborn daughter. And yes, there was my pesky day job as in-house counsel to a global investment bank to attend to, but no matter; I was determined.

We launched The Cauldron on June 1, 2014.

By we, I mean Andy Glockner and me, along with the dozens of freelance writers we initially commissioned to write stories and create content for us. Back then, our design sensibilities were, shall we say, nascent.

The practical reality was that The Cauldron never should’ve survived beyond the initial three-month run. Consider the competition we were up against: ESPN’s aforementioned Grantland, VICE Sports, Deadspin, and countless other fully-staffed and fully-funded media outlets with resources and distribution we had no way to emulate.

In fact, our funding was stretched so thin at inception, we couldn’t even afford an image license. Instead of posting pictures of the athletes and sports we were covering, we sourced nondescript royalty-free photos and clip art.

Still, even Deadspin’s resident wiseass noticed.

Sean Newell on Twitter

Remember when The cauldron's logo was literally a clip art cauldron?

Somehow we managed to beg and borrow just enough content from sympathetic and hungry freelancers — some of whom had already established themselves in sports media, others who just wanted the opportunity to have their work seen on a national level.

Notice how I didn’t say steal, though. We paid our experienced contributors as best we could; some getting $50 per post, others up to and exceeding $1,000 per month in exchange for a weekly column. We also published aspiring amateur writers, too. The vast majority of them were unpaid, but we worked tirelessly to help them hone their craft and ensure that their work would be seen by a larger audience.

Andy and I published content at a breakneck pace; at least five 1,000-word-plus pieces a day (and often more than that), doing our best to not make any egregious errors — all while trying to ensure that our product was different than anything else out there.

It didn’t hurt that 20 or so of our better-known contributors trusted me with the keys to their social media feeds, allowing us to post “organic” links to our content directly from their accounts. People like Robert Silverman, Kevin McElroy, Howard Megdal, Greg Hanlon, the Kamenetzky Brothers, Colin McGowan, T.D. Williams, Tim Ryan, Tim Baffoe, and many others.

Can you imagine giving someone carte blanche to post from your Twitter account to build their business? Hell-to-the-no. Those writers’ collective faith in Andy and me enabled us to hit the ground running, and in retrospect, I’m not sure The Cauldron would have become what it became without that access.

Our use of writers’ social media accounts for distribution was never a secret. It was something we needed to do to succeed, and we never abused the privilege.

Andy and I dumped virtually every penny of the $15K of Medium funding into operations during those first few months. And while we started to gain some traction — we averaged around 250,000 unique monthly users by month three of the initial deal — it became painfully obvious that reaching Medium’s performance benchmarks was going to be next to impossible.

Back then, prior to the first of Medium’s endless company pivots, Ev Williams was focused on something called the total-time-read metric (“TTR”), a worthy, if ultimately fleeting content strategy designed to lure brands by touting how engaged the platform’s readership was. You see, if people spend a lot of time at Medium, then they surely will buy the products your company is hawking. Or something.

The problem with Medium’s TTR, however, was that The Cauldron’s traffic, however strong, wasn’t worth much to our bottom line unless people were spending significant time reading each piece. While that may seem like an insignificant detail, the rules surrounding Medium monetization at the time meant that we could only cash in on long-form pieces. Unlike other sites that relied heavily upon short-form aggregation of news and/or poaching content creators’ original work as click-bait, we couldn’t simply duplicate the seemingly successful business models of USA Today’s For the Win and The Big Lead, or Deadspin.

Posting real-time, short-form content simply wouldn’t have created revenue through the Medium arrangement.

In hindsight, though, we should’ve spent fewer resources on publishing so much daily long-form content. At the time, our audience just wasn’t large enough to digest five or more 1,500-word articles each day. And while it felt great to be paying journalists and aspiring bloggers to write, we were essentially lighting our meager funding on fire.

Investing exclusively in athlete-direct and viral videos would have given us a lot more bang for our buck.💡

Making matters worse; though we had demonstrated clear growth since launch, it was communicated to me by Evan Hansen at Medium that unless we exceeded certain TTR expectations by the end of our second three-month term, the Medium funding would not be renewed. Six months had come and gone in an instant, and we were essentially finished before we even had a chance to get started.

And then it happened.

Former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, unbeknownst to him, singlehandedly saved The Cauldron.

You probably saw it. Everybody in the tech and gaming world sure did. Kluwe’s epic, expletive-laced breakdown of the Gamergate controversy, published on October 21, 2014, went viral, garnering over 1.5 million page views.

I paid Chris $2,000.00 for that story. It was the ultimate gamble, mainly because that money represented the very last of the funds in The Cauldron’s bank account. Medium had planned to pull the plug on Halloween, just 10 days later.

Only, The Cauldron’s demise was not meant to be — not then, anyway. That one story paid out a $40K return on investment(!), and in an instant, Andy and I went from bankrupt to flush with cash to fund November operations and beyond.

We were literally that close to going out of business.

The next twelve months were an absolute blur. 19-hour days, very little sleep, a barrage of submissions from a rapidly growing legion of 1,000-plus crowdsourced contributors, and a relentless obligation to keep churning out content.

To the average websurfer, how the sausage is made doesn’t really matter. But for any publisher, keeping pace to ensure the audience comes back for more is a daunting challenge. It just doesn’t stop. Ever.

Even when I wasn’t actually creating or editing content at The Cauldron — or singlehandedly running the company’s social media accounts prior to the arrival of the indispensable CJ Fogler — I was busy recruiting even more writers and multimedia content creators. All while establishing and maintaining relationships with professional athletes, their agencies and management firms, brands, and larger media publishers.

Owing to the magnitude of the athletes I was able to secure, traffic to the site was way up, too.

There was Josh Flash Gordon, the troubled Cleveland Browns wide receiver, who pushed back on what he felt were unfair criticisms of him by the media. His story went absolutely nuclear, and took over coverage of Super Bowl XLIX in 2015. The Cauldron was all over ESPN, FOX Sports, Sports Illustrated and virtually every national sports media television show.

There was two-time NBA MVP Steph Curry, who explained how being typecast as weak and small only fueled him to prove the doubters wrong.

There was Stanley Cup Champion Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who shared just what motivates him to keep atop the NHL mountain.

There was NFL All-Pro running back Le’Veon Bell, whose story at The Cauldron led to a video profile at the NFL Network.

There was UFC fighter Chael Sonnen, who went public with his steroid use. And unabashedly defended it.

There was NFL offensive lineman kasey studdard, whose deeply personal story of having been called “retarded” as a developmentally disabled child inspired countless readers.

There was the enigmatic-but-always-entertaining Cleveland Cavaliers guard JR Smith, who finally learned why winning was the best medicine for his controversial reputation in the NBA.

And there were scores of other big names, too.

With our best-in-class athlete-direct content, we broke news, revealed deeply personal insights, and delivered raw, compelling stories that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

When The Players’ Tribune announced its intention to enter the market with the undeniable cache of Derek Jeter, Kevin Durant, and Kobe Bryant — and millions of dollars of Excel Sports Management’s investment capital — we were still in full bootstrap mode, wholly reliant upon the quality of our output and the relationships we had built with our subjects.

That’s not to say that we were better than TPT (or anyone else), but given our limited resources — in manpower, experience, funding, distribution, and total content output — our traffic and engagement dwarfed the competition’s.

And it wasn’t just athlete-direct content, either. We published stories that received industry-wide recognition and acclaim.

Like Julie DiCaro’s chilling and personal account of online harassment, a trend that has only gotten worse for many (female and male) journalists since her piece was published.

Or Colleen Curry’s incredible story about what it was like covering the Jerry Sandusky trial for ABC News for a year.

Or Claire McNear’s amazing journey into the NFL heart of darkness, or, as everyone else knows it: The Oakland Raiders’ Black Hole.

Or this crazy Trevor Kraus story about sneaking into the Super Bowl, the World Series, and just about every other major sporting event.

And so many more.

And we created quite a few videos that received millions of views, too:

Eventually, our ceaseless labor paid dividends, and by late 2015 we’d secured a distribution relationship with Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated. And while SI.com had long since been eclipsed in the digital sports media landscape by ESPN, Bleacher Report and Yahoo!, Andy and I felt validated by the arrangement — buoyed, really, by the credibility such an affiliation granted The Cauldron.

SI.com, by all accounts, should’ve been a perfect partner for us. We were excited to access their significant distribution to raise our brand’s profile, and in turn, they got to run a variety of groundbreaking content that would, in theory, be easily monetizable, and attract a younger audience — something the suits at Time were keen to do.

For a variety of reasons, though — Time’s internal restructuring, changing editorial directions, management turnover, a lack of vision, crippling corporate bureaucracy — the relationship never created a sustainable revenue stream for either side. That’s not to say the parties didn’t operate with the best of intentions, at least initially, but large organizations like Time are ocean liners: They don’t turn on a dime. In this case, it didn’t turn at all.

Ultimately, despite Sports Illustrated’s clear interest in and excitement about The Cauldron’s potential, an outside publication not wholly owned by Time was simply never going to garner the necessary internal support — the sales team’s buy-in, specifically — to fund and grow the business.

And I knew that from the beginning. Each side was getting something out of the arrangement, and I was content with what it was.

As far as I was concerned, The Cauldron had arrived.

Hang around social media long enough — especially as a member of the weird and wonderful world of sports media — and you’re bound to suffer, eventually, the slings and arrows of the trolls. (This is where our story gets a little sidetracked, but I feel it’s important, for the sake of context, to tell the entire story of The Cauldron.)

Google my name, and you’re sure to find — rather prominently — search results painting me as a key figure in a lightly-reported (and even less interesting) 2015 online “feud” with something called Barstool Sports.

Not familiar with Barstool, you say? As far as target demographics go, the site falls somewhere on the scale between “offensive, crass, and occasionally funny” and “OMG, please pour bleach directly into my eyeballs!”

Robert Silverman wrote a damning story for The Daily Beast about the culture at Barstool.

Deadspin Founder Will Leitch explored for New York Magazine what, exactly, Barstool is, and attempted to understand how something so awful can thrive.

Put a bit more diplomatically, Barstool has established itself as a player in today’s digital sports media world by cultivating a significant and loyal audience. And though their content isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, there is no denying that the company’s model has proven durable and lucrative. In fact, there was a time — before the Age of Trump — when I considered Barstool’s popularity to be a good thing for sports media as a whole.

Unfortunately, however, the people who run Barstool — and the readership they incite — don’t take very kindly to criticism, no matter how valid it may be.

On January 7, 2016, I greenlit a piece by Nick Stellini titled, “How Barstool Sports Uses Social Media As A Weapon.”

Some people liked it. Others thought it was a hatchet job. A public, rambling, incoherent airing of private direct messages soon followed. As did physical threats made in video form and copious amounts of manhood-measuring — all of which fomented a perception by some that #BarstoolVsCauldron was a “thing.”

Actually, here … see for yourself:

Amazingly, on the same day the Stellini piece went live, Barstool announced it had been sold to the Chernin Group, supposedly for multiple millions of dollars. And the man behind Barstool, something called Dave Portnoy, felt it necessary to take time out of what should’ve been the best day of his life to inform me of his fiscal well being.

David Portnoy on Twitter

Hey @JamieOGrady I'm not sure if you heard or not but I made millions today.

Back then, Portnoy was already well known for being the attention-seeking egomaniac who once posted photos of Tom Brady’s naked two-year-old son online, but his infamy had only grown.

You see, a story at The Cauldron that questioned Dave’s self-anointed greatness — on his day of Internet triumph, no less — meant nothing less than an act of war. An act that could only be responded to in kind: By unleashing his Twitter army to deliver a seemingly never-ending torrent of invective on social media directed at the author of the piece, at my staff, and at me, my wife, and my children.

The irony of Portnoy, his staff/minions, and social media sycophants launching into a full-on assault of online harassment was thick, to say the least. Particularly in light of the topics that had been credibly addressed by Stellini’s story hours earlier.

Still, I tried not to take the defacement of my Twitter mentions personally. These were the juvenile musings of the so-called “Stoolies,” a predominantly white, 20-something, Boston-centric digital army of Bros who were and remain desperate for some sense of digital validation by Barstool’s founder.

While Barstool’s staff launched an endless barrage of @s and subtweets intended to put me and The Cauldron in our place (I guess), Portnoy saw fit to flex his one-upmanship muscles.

Naturally, only a Ford Bronco would do.

David Portnoy on Twitter

My new Nantucket car arrived today. Hey @JamieOGrady you like it? pic.twitter.com/jOk58yeTBM

This was Dave’s car just for when he goes to Nantucket. Where people with money go. Because he had money. Nantucket money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not surprisingly, Portnoy and his cohorts habitually disclaimed (and still do) their cabal of loyalists while simultaneously blaming the rest of us for “not getting” what Barstool does, as evidenced by a revealing interview Portnoy gave to Entrepreneur back in 2013:

“We don’t back down from controversy — we fan the fires. People think we go out of our way to create it, but we don’t. We’re not trying to gain new readers by being crazy-outrageous. Our readers get what we do, and I don’t think about what it’s going to look like to the outside world. I don’t really care.”

We fan the fires. His words, not mine.

But Barstool’s success isn’t the story of some well-meaning web dreamers whose creation took on a life of its own. They’re proud of who they are and what they’ve become. As Portnoy himself admits, it’s as much about the community — Donald Trump’s “so goddamn sick & tired of all this liberal PC bullshit” community — as it is the clickbait that fosters it.

In reality, Portnoy’s mission has never been to carry the flag of the anti-PC, fun-loving millennial crowd with valorous altruism. His primary goal — beyond achieving some degree of celebrity, if you can call it that — is to publish stuff and try to profit off of it. Which, in and of itself, is totally fine. This is the exact same thing any other media company does — except most of them don’t end up fueling loud, misogynist hate-armies on Twitter.

You know, by publishing things like this:

Barstool Radio on Twitter

Yo @JamieOGrady, we know you're already dead but now you're dead again https://t.co/KYNhUG9SAW

Now, years later, it remains undeniable that the underlying point of Stellini’s piece has been validated a thousand times over. I didn’t err by approving the story, I was wrong to extend what I thought was a modicum of professional courtesy by giving Barstool a head’s up about the story in advance.

I owed no such courtesy.

Someday, karma will bite Portnoy in the ass. It’s inevitable. You simply cannot be that awful a human being and not have it catch up with you eventually. And when it happens, I hope someone lets me know.

On February 22, 2016, I received some rather dispiriting news. While The Cauldron’s partnership with Sports Illustrated remained intact, word leaked that Medium had landed a very big fish to add it its portfolio. Bill Simmons was coming to Ev Williams’ shiny publishing platform, and a large contingent of the former’s ESPN/Grantland staff was presumably coming with him.

The Ringer, it was going to be called.

“I’m really sorry we couldn’t let you know in advance,” mid-level Medium staffer Saul Carlin reassured me on a hastily-arranged call. “This was negotiated at the senior-most levels of the company, and we had to keep it under wraps. We wanted to tell you before the official announcement, but trust me, this will be a good thing for The Cauldron. The more people that come to Medium for sports content,” he said, “the easier it will be for you to grow your audience.”

I was not at all reassured.

How in the hell was I supposed to compete with Bill Freaking Simmons, his audience, and his deep pockets? Would there even be room for two sports publications on the Medium platform? Wouldn’t Medium be motivated to get some return on its investment in him, making sure his content received preferential placement and social promotion? (As it turned out, the answer to that last question was an unequivocal yes.)

In fairness, I understood completely that Simmons represented a major coup for Williams and his top lieutenant, Edward Lichty. I knew that neither had any obligation to inform me of Medium’s plans in advance. Still, the news stung. Not only had I brought dozens of professional athletes to a Medium platform that wasn’t yet mainstream — you try explaining to DeAndre Jordan, Derek Fisher, or Dick Vitale what Medium was! — I’d also successfully deployed one of the first external-publisher URLs (thecauldron.si.com) in the Medium environment, a model that the company had hoped would exponentially grow the platform’s reach and utility.

And yet, no head’s up. No introduction to Simmons. No consideration given, it seemed, to the idea of marrying his content plan with my own to form a product that could upend the existing sports content marketplace.

Impossible? Overly optimistic? Unrealistic?

Perhaps, but I certainly felt like The Cauldron’s traffic and brand awareness at least warranted a discussion about the potential synergies.

(Not surprisingly, the marriage between Medium and Simmons ended up flaming out in short order.)

Even worse, on a personal level, working 19-hour days in two full-time positions was taking its toll — physically, mentally, emotionally, and on my ability to be present for my family. I was having trouble sleeping, my mind ceaselessly racing about what I could do to grow the business; about what keys I was missing to ensure that The Cauldron would “make it.”

Like many inexperienced startup founders, I was incapable of appreciating what I’d already accomplished because I was too busy worrying about what came next.

And when the reality of the business failed to fit within the neat little paradigm of expectations I’d set for myself, I began to lose confidence.

What I didn’t understand — what I didn’t fully understand — was that nothing in this life is handed to you. You have to go out there and bend the world to your will. Early success does not portend scalability, profitability, or sustainability. No one owed me anything; not Medium; not SI; certainly not Simmons; no one. I simply needed to regroup and turn what felt like a missed opportunity into something positive.

Lo and behold, four days later, opportunity came knocking.

There are certain days in your life that stand out from all the others. Your college graduation. Your wedding day. The days your children are born. The day you find out you’re going to be a millionaire.

I literally almost fell out of my chair when the email hit my inbox.

Here I was, having worked myself to the brink of exhaustion for over 18 months, having missed the vast majority of my two-year-old girl’s life, and everything was about to come up Milhouse. This wasn’t just any $2.5M offer, either. The Cauldron would be acquired by — and I would work for — one of the industry’s most respected companies, a firm with a massive foothold in sports, entertainment, media, advertising, and content creation.

Still, while I was obviously excited at the prospect of landing a deal of that magnitude, I did my best to temper expectations. Until a deal is closed, it isn’t.

Sadly, the next 60 days would see a slow and steady withering of the deal parameters; the goal posts consistently being moved from one day to the next by the acquiring party. Due diligence requests were expediently fulfilled, only to be met with ambiguous and illogical assertions that The Cauldron’s performance did not meet the acquirer’s arbitrary performance benchmarks. There were conflicting accounts of not wanting to use The Cauldron’s assets for anything more than marketing, and that the company mostly just wanted me.

Naturally, it struck me as odd that the party offering to buy my company was on one hand effusively praising what Andy and I had built, and on the other invalidating its worth. My incredulity eventually morphed into discontent as the negotiations slid further and further into oblivion.

Despite initial assurances that key staff members would be able to join me at the new enterprise — Andy and SportsPickle’s DJ Gallo, specifically — backtracking ensued, and a decidedly confrontational tone was conveyed by the acquiring party’s lead negotiator, ostensibly over why I needed to remain loyal to those who had help me build The Cauldron.

Discussions broke down entirely when I was presented with an untenable revised offer — for around 10% of the original deal. This, after I’d shared my existing business plan and a variety of new content creation concepts, some of which were subsequently deployed by the acquiring party.

It was a fairly devastating experience, not only for me, but for Andy, too. Despite the platitudes, the acquirer had only considered us vessels to advance their own interests. There was no legitimate respect paid, nor was there a shared interest in building something great.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t other whales out there to chase.

Anyone who’s ever tried their luck at fundraising knows it takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and patience to convince investors to part with their money. And meetings. Lots of meetings. Endless Powerpoint-tinkering with investor decks leads to conference calls and in-person pitches, most of which conclude with outright no’s or lukewarm maybes. In short, securing funding for your startup is not for the faint of heart. (Or those who don’t handle rejection well.)

I had one such meeting in mid-2016 with Vasu Kulkarni of CourtsideVC, a venture capital firm that “invests in early-stage founders that are transforming the intersection of sports, technology and media.” Kulkarni, as it turns out, had been an admirer and supporter of The Cauldron from the beginning, a revelation that initially made me optimistic that Courtside would invest.

Sadly, that wasn’t in the cards.

The problem, Kulkarni told me, wasn’t that The Cauldron wasn’t an excellent media publication; it was that we couldn’t provide the 20–30x return on investment his fund needed to justify taking an equity position. He conceded that I’d built something unique with very little resources and was impressed that I had done it while working another full-time job as a lawyer, but he didn’t sugarcoat things, either.

He went on to explain that I was likely to be met with the same resistance from other venture capitalists and/or angel investors, too. The Cauldron, though having undeniably carved out a fine niche in the sports media world, was really just a content creation experiment — largely dependent upon my ability to get athletes and influencers to contribute.

Sure, we had a robust social media presence and had produced a bunch of viral videos, but at the end of the day, there was no there, there. No technology. No standalone, proprietary platform. No way to reach critical mass on the distribution side without Sports Illustrated or another large partner.

His assessment was bleak, but all was apparently not lost.

Kulkarni offered to introduce me to someone with his own sports media company — let’s call him James Yoder — who was also trying to fundraise. According to Kulkarni, Yoder had purportedly built up a decent-sized user base for Chat Sports, his mobile phone app company. (The app was a relatively unsophisticated and nondescript knockoff of Bleacher Report’s Team Stream aggregation application.)

Actually, Yoder’s numbers were more than “decent sized,” if you take his word for it. 🤔

100 million monthly users?! That’s, like, Bleacher Report, ESPN, and Yahoo! traffic territory. And no, I had never heard of Chat Sports, either.

Anyway, according to Kulkarni, Yoder’s biggest problem wasn’t average monthly users or site traffic, but credibility in the sports media marketplace. That, and an inability to create the kinds of compelling in-house content that appeals to brands and advertisers.

If we could figure out a way to combine forces — combining Yoder’s existing technology and supposedly endless connections with investors with my existing brand equity and athlete relationships — Kulkarni surmised we just might just be able to kill two birds with one stone to create an attractive, turnkey investment opportunity.

It seemed like a workable theory: Athlete-Direct Content + Existing Technology = A sports-loving venture capitalist’s wet dream, basically.

Only, you know, best-laid plans and such.

After the initial introductions were made by Kulkarni, Yoder and I discussed high-level parameters for a deal by phone, text, and Slack almost immediately. He was extremely enthused about the possibility of joining forces — almost overly so — so it seemed perfectly reasonable when he suggested flying to North Carolina to meet in person.

When I picked him up the airport, Yoder seemed normal enough. Clean-cut, nondescript white dude, early 30’s with a just barely-still-there midwest accent. He fashioned himself a tech insider, habitually name-dropping the “heavy hitters” he knew or had access to. He spoke at length about organizing seminars with the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, billionaire Dan Gilbert. He said he had a personal relationship with Jim Harbaugh, coach of the Michigan Wolverines.

His Facebook pictures seemed to back it all up.

None of this is to say I picked up a bad vibe from Yoder, exactly, but it was immediately clear that he was not cut from the same cloth as me, and at no time during the hours we spent together — or anytime thereafter — did I get the sense that he knew much about creating good content.

And that was fine by me; we were joining forces to fill out the pieces of a greater puzzle. He didn’t need to be a “creative” — I had that side of things covered.

And, admittedly, my fundraising abilities had thus far proven, well … unproven.

By the end of Yoder’s N.C. visit — after walking through our company’s respective business plans and performance metrics, and fleshing out how a union might look — we loosely agreed upon the terms of Chat Sports’ acquisition of The Cauldron:

• Sale of The Cauldron and all of its assets for $XM (in cash and equity in the new post-merger company that would be formed).
• I was to be installed as Chief Content Officer of the new company with a generous compensation package, including salary and bonus structure.
• The new company would open a North Carolina office and make five to seven initial hires — primarily focusing on athlete-direct video, podcast, viral and written content. The goal was to leverage massive player distribution over social media to entice brands to spend with us, essentially executing The Cauldron’s business plan that was disseminated to investors in early 2015.
• The new company’s first two hires would be DJ Gallo and Jim Cavan, each of whom were original staff members of The Cauldron, and individuals I considered indispensable to any resultant enterprise. Andy’s role was TBD; not because I didn’t want him with us, but because relocating from Denver was not a plausible scenario for him.
• The deal would be wholly dependent upon Yoder’s ability to close a ($YM) Series-A fundraising round for the new company — an entirely reasonable condition, given the need to secure funding in order to execute any of the planned content expansion initiatives.

Yay, we did it! 🤔

Only, nothing went according to plan. Unless the plan was supposed to include convoluted lies, forged term sheets, fake lawyer emails, defamation, and tortious interference.

In that case, #AchievementUnlocked!

In late February, Daniel Roberts of Yahoo! wrote an exhaustive investigative piece on everything that happened after the initial deal was signed. It remains a well-reported piece, and it’s worth your time.

Yoder’s side of the story used to exist here, but it has long since been deleted:

Chat Sports has actually been in the news before (via Awful Announcing):

This isn’t the first controversy for Chat Sports. They took a lot of fire back in December 2015 for a story about Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer being offered the “largest contract in NFL history” to coach the Cleveland Browns, something that was picked up by major media outlets, including ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption. That story came from “Mack Ferguson,” who had one tweet and 10 followers, so he seems like a good candidate to be one of those fake writers Yoder talked about. They’ve also been criticized for plagiarism and fabrication.

And last week, the University of Michigan’s Athletic Department took the virtually unprecedented step of publicly warning its student-athletes to stay away from Yoder:

As you probably guessed by now, the deal ultimately fell apart. It would probably be fairer to say that there never was a deal; that Yoder was essentially spinning yarn on the hope that he could land funding before I found out what he was up to.

Nevertheless, I wish that I had been a better judge of his character. I wish Kulkarni had instead recommended me to the founders of The Athletic, a company he had actually invested in that would have been a much better fit for a partnership with The Cauldron. And I wish that the Sports Illustrated executives I had treated with respect and professionalism saw fit to reciprocate by letting me know that Yoder was defaming me in written communications to Time Inc.’s senior management.

Unfortunately, when you’re running a startup, 20/20 hindsight doesn’t mitigate your prior miscalculations. All you can do is learn from those experiences and apply the lessons to challenges you will face down the line.

In the end, it doesn’t much matter who believes who in the sordid mess that was The Cauldron’s final days. I know who I am, I know what I stand for, and I know how I comported myself.

So what happens next?

I’m certainly not the first to say it, but the digital media business finds itself in an extremely tenuous position. Unless you’ve got deep pockets, built-in distribution, and a way to generate revenue without relying upon clicks, it’s a cold, dark world out there for startup publishers.

Andy and I assumed that good content would win in the end. Maybe we will be proven right someday. Maybe The Athletic’s subscription model will be the answer. Maybe ESPN and Bleacher Report will be the last men standing. Honestly, I haven’t the slightest clue how the industry will evolve.

Running The Cauldron for three-plus years was a dizzying, wild, validating, rewarding, frustrating, disappointing, challenging, and mettle-testing experience. I gained invaluable experience as a publisher, editor, and manager of a large staff. I met and worked with world-famous athletes, their agents, and professional sports team owners. I navigated the topsy-turvy world of digital media, and eventually figured out what to do (and not to do!) when you’re trying to land funding.

And despite the failure of The Cauldron, I remain extremely proud of what we built. I am hopeful that Andy Glockner, DJ Gallo, and Jim Cavan are proud, too; I could not have done this without them.

I also hope that everyone — there are far too many to list individually — who was involved with The Cauldron at any level came away with a positive experience. I did the best I could with what I had to be responsive to our content creators and to help them hone their craft.

As for our loyal and amazing audience, I remain grateful for the support. I hope that you found The Cauldron to be engaging, thought-provoking and unique; just like we set out to do at launch.

✌Jamie

So, What Really Happened To The Cauldron? was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Predicting the future for the New Orleans Pelicans duo is no harder than looking to the five-greatest big man tandems in NBA history.

Fact: By pairing DeMarcus Cousins with Anthony Davis, the New Orleans Pelicans have assembled the best (on-paper) front court in the NBA. Further, the Pelicans now exist on the same plane as the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers — no, not because they are contenders to win a championship this season, but because those are the only three teams with at least two of the top twelve players in the league.

Boogie and The Brow are just hitting their respective primes, with the 26-year-old Cousins averaging 27.8 PPG/10.6 RPG/1.3 BPG, and Davis, just 23, averaging 27.7 PPG/11.9 RPG/2.3 BPG.

Only nine times in the past 30 years has a team featured an All-Star at the Center and Power Forward position: The 1987 Houston Rockets (Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson), 1989 Cavaliers (Brad Daugherty and Larry Nance), 1990 Boston Celtics (Kevin McHale and Robert Parish), 1999 San Antonio Spurs (David Robinson and Tim Duncan), 2011 Sacramento Kings (Chris Webber and Vlade Divac), 2006 Detroit Pistons (Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace), 2007 Jazz (Mehmet Okur Carlos Boozer), 2009 Phoenix Suns (Shaquille O’Neal and Amare Stoudemire), and 2015 Atlanta Hawks (Al Horford and Paul Millsap).

Of those nine, only five can stake a claim to being better than Cousins and Davis. For now, anyway.

5. 1989 Cleveland Cavaliers

Brad Daugherty — 18.9/9.2/0.5; Larry Nance — 17.2/5.8/2.8

The Daugherty-Nance duo is best remembered for losing to the Chicago Bulls in the playoffs five times in seven years, but for a period of time, it was also considered the best front court in the league. Running the offense through 7' Daugherty, the Cavs relied heavily upon the high-flying athleticism of Nance. Despite his 6'10" frame, Nance only averaged 5.8 rebounds per game, but he made up for his deficiencies on the boards by leading the league in blocked shots. The pair received multiple All-Stars bids, but the performance didn’t come close to matching the the next four tandems.

Advantage: Cousins and Davis

4. 2001 Sacramento Kings

Chris Webber — 27.1/11.1/1.3; Vlade Divac — 12/8.3/1.1

Growing up in the 2000's, there were three teams that scratched the surface of Basketball nirvana — the Lakers, Spurs and Kings. Sacramento is seldom discussed as one of the best teams of that decade, however, in large part due to the lack of championships. Still, that 2001 team was legitimately great, and it was due to the play of Vlade Divac and Chris Webber.

If not for questionable officiating in the 2002 Western Conference Finals, followed shortly thereafter by Webber’s career-altering injury, who knows what heights the duo might have scaled.

Advantage: Cousins and Davis

3. 1990 Boston Celtics

Kevin McHale — 20.9/8.3/1.9; Robert Parish — 15.7/10.1/0.9

For as much credit teammate Larry Bird gets for the Celtics’ success — and rightfully so — Boston wouldn’t have dominated in the 1980s if it weren’t for its own twin towers , Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. McHale’s legacy remains one of the most overlooked in league history; his clutch performances, low-post moves, and passing ability stack up against the greatest power forwards to ever lace ’em up. McHale’s repertoire combined with Parish’ ability to snatch any rebound within range culminated in the most successful PF/C championship tandem in league history.

Advantage: McHale and Parish

2. 1999 San Antonio Spurs

Tim Duncan — 21.7/11.2/2.5; David Robinson — 15.8/10.4/2.5

The 1999 Spurs are the only team in league history to have rostered two bigs who happened to be two of the top 25 greatest players of all time — at the same time. Unfortunately, Duncan’s prime happened as Robinson was exiting his, but that didn’t stop the duo from snagging two championships in their too brief time together.

Advantage: Robinson and Duncan

1. 1987 Houston Rockets

Akeem Olajuwon — 23.4/11.4/3.4; Ralph Sampson — 15.6/8.7/1.3

In 1986, after upsetting the defending-champion Lakers in the Western Conference Finals, the young Houston Rockets seemed destined to run off a slew of championships. The Hakeem Olajuwon (7') and Ralph Sampson (7'4") duo actually spawned the term “Twin Towers.” And though the pair was just 24 and 27 years when they lost to the Celtics in the Finals, a dynasty never materialized after Sampson suffered a knee injury halfway through the following season.

Advantage: Cousins and Davis

Injuries, coaching, roster construction and plain ol’ luck will be major factors in determining just how successful Boogie and The Brow can be together, but it’s undeniable that their talent is collectively as good as any big men pairing in recent NBA history. It’s going to be a treat for basketball fans to watch how it all unfolds in New Orleans.

Just How Good Will The Millennial Twin Towers Of Cousins And Davis Be? was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Donald Trump is passing on ESPN’s Bracketology. That’s great, but he shouldn’t have been offered the opportunity in the first place.

Tough news this week for anyone who wondered whether Carnival-Barker-in-Chief Donald Trump thinks 2017 might finally be Gonzaga’s year. ESPN confirmed that, despite the network’s invitation, the White House recently relayed that Trump is passing on the opportunity to make selections for this year’s NCAA basketball tournaments, thereby ending the not-so-long-running tradition that began under Barack Obama.

“We expressed our interest to the White House in continuing the presidential bracket,” said ESPN in a statement, “They have respectfully declined.”

As many have noted, it’s not exactly surprising to see Trump turn down the opportunity, given that college basketball seems to fall outside his area of interest. (If anybody is creating a “Which Cable News Network is the Fakest?” bracket, sign him up!) As ESPN’s article notes, Obama was an avid hoops fan, and something tells me that our current President doesn’t have a whole lot of insight to offer on, say, the VCU Rams. (“I would have carried Virginia if it wasn’t for all the rampant voter fraud! Sad!”)

Then again, it’s also possible that there’s an entirely different explanation for why Trump is passing.

Matt Ufford on Twitter

brackets too similar to stairs https://t.co/SJqK3FoJqp

No matter the reason, Trump will not be welcoming Andy Katz back into the Oval Office to make his selections, and we’ll be spared the awkward possibility of him picking CSKA Moscow to win the whole thing. But before we simply move on and file “Baracketology” alongside the other things we’ll miss from the Obama administration — like reality-based briefings, the confidence of our allies, and a basic respect for the rule of law — it’s important to take a moment and recognize one important truth that shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

An ESPN appearance never should have been offered to Trump in the first place.

It goes without saying that there are far more important things going on in our country right now than whether our Commander-in-Chief spends a few minutes filling out a bracket.

After all, we’re less than a month in, and we’ve already lost the National Security Advisor, a whole bunch of leadership at the State Department, and the fast food burger guy that was going to be our Labor Secretary. (Serenity Now!) In the face of this, let’s call it “rocky,” start for the new administration, it’s easy, and fair, to ask why in the heck anyone should care whether he takes the time to pick a few upsets on the way to the Final Four.

But let’s not minimize the significance of the opportunity, either.

ESPN is still, after all, one of the most viewed cable networks, and the most powerful sports media outlet by virtually any measure. Heck, it’s a company that, over its almost 40 year history, has extended well beyond its core audience, and has become a household name for all Americans, regardless of whether they happen to be sports fans.

Despite this fractured, a-la-carte, new media age, ESPN continues to offer one of the biggest platforms available, the kind that despite its sliding ratings and revenue-generation issues, remains quite valuable and important for its parent company, Disney. (Full disclosure: I was an ESPN employee, in studio production, from 2006 to 2013.)

It is also easy to understand why the network felt compelled to offer Trump the invitation in the first place. After twice hosting a Democratic President, surely the same courtesy must be shown his Republican successor, lest anyone be able to accuse ESPN of bias, of having an agenda, of drawing a distinction between the two men.

And that is precisely where that entire line of reasoning falls apart, because, to put it plainly, of course there are differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump — the kind that go well beyond their political affiliation.

One was an imperfect, but serious man, who treated the office he held with dignity, studiously considered intelligence, respected the role of the media and those who opposed him, and governed with an commitment to equal rights, religious pluralism, freedom of the press, and the sanctity of our legal system.

The other is a preposterous, childish figure who launched his political career by falsely assailing the sitting President’s birthplace, stoked racism throughout his campaign with inflammatory rhetoric, insulted his critics and perceived “enemies” in the media in the most shameless of fashions, and was caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault.

Since taking office — again, less than a month ago(!) — Trump has shown no inclination to eliminate conflicts of interest between the Presidency and his businesses, he has required intelligence agencies to dramatically simplify his daily briefings thanks to his short attention span, he has appointed a cadre of wholly unqualified cranks and cronies to serve underneath him, and he is likely leading the country into a constitutional crisis.

All in record time, too!

All of which is to say that no, there isn’t actually much that Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common, beyond the Office of the Presidency itself. The Office alone does not justify offering the two men the same courtesies or the same treatment (or the same invitations to pick a 12/5 upset in the Midwest Regional).

Respect for the Presidency is all well and good, but our nation was built upon the premise that the holder of that office is accountable to us, not the other way around. In this most unprecedented of situations, that means continuing to hold Trump responsible for his wholly unacceptable behavior and not normalizing things like this:

There’s been plenty of discussion about the normalization of President Trump. And with good reason: His lack of intellectual depth, his affinity for chaos, his total flouting of political and social norms — and quite possibly the law — make him a uniquely troubling, and dangerous figure. Everyone from John Oliver to Dan Rather to Charlie Pierce to Tavis Smiley agree, and that means that it’s critical to avoid the urge to cover him, discuss him, and treat him like any President before him.

So while it may not seem like a big deal, allowing Trump — through a bracket challenge, or any other high gloss, soft focus appearance — to present himself as “Sports Fan-in-Chief,” rather than a malignant, destructive force on our democracy, would be a disservice to the thoughtful, diverse, and distinguished individuals who make ESPN what it is.

It’s important to note that it wasn’t too long ago when ESPN distanced itself from then candidate Trump because of his antics. Back in July of 2015, just days before the event, the network announced that it would be moving the annual ESPY Celebrity Golf Classic from Trump National Golf Club to Pelican Hill in Los Angeles. The decision came after Trump’s infamous remarks decrying Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “killers,” and in a statement released at the time, ESPN was fairly clear that such rhetoric was the impetus for the tournament’s relocation.

“We decided it was appropriate to change the venue, and are grateful for the opportunity to stage the event at Pelican Hill on short notice. This charity outing benefits The V Foundation’s Stuart Scott Memorial Cancer Research Fund, providing resources for important cancer research for minority populations, including Hispanics and African Americans. Our decision reflects our deep feelings for our former colleague and support for inclusion of all sports fans. Diversity and inclusion are core values at ESPN and our decision also supports that commitment.”

So what, exactly, has changed from then to now?

Certainly, Trump has not become more inclusive. Nor has he dialed back the inflammatory rhetoric, apologized, atoned, or asserted a commitment to the “core values” of diversity and inclusion.

No, there’s really only one thing that’s different: That that the racially insensitive candidate of 2015 is now our racially insensitive President.

That is why it is so vital — not just for ESPN, but for our entire country — to not allow the trappings, grandeur, and power of the Presidency to whitewash the reality of the man who occupies the office. It was not long ago that Trump was thought of as a buffoonish charlatan who treated women as objects; the lower-class as disposable; and anyone who didn’t look, act, and think like him as the enemy. He was a pathetic, vile figure, worthy of nothing more than contempt and ridicule.

Only, Trump is still all of those things. The Presidency certainly changes a man’s life, but it doesn’t change the man himself.

Trump passing on the NCAA Tournament Bracket opportunity doesn’t mean this story is going away, though. In an email to the Washington Post, White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks noted that, “We look forward to working with ESPN on another opportunity in the near future.”

With any luck, such an opportunity will never materialize. So-called President Trump has far bigger problems on his plate, and assuming ESPN still believes in its stated commitment to diversity and inclusion, it should say thanks, but no thanks to any future POTUS appearance. Would that be a little abnormal? Of course. But then, so is Donald Trump.

And hell, he’s a fair-weather fan, anyway.

A New Kind Of Madness was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An open letter from one reformed New York fan to the remaining Garden faithful who need to be set free.

Dear New York Knicks fans.

I come to you with all the love in the world. Please, don’t shoot the messenger. All I want is the best for you; for all of us.

It’s time to jump ship. (It definitely be sinkin’. Again.)

Look, I think we all know how this is going to shake out in the immediate future. The Knicks are heading to the lottery (yes!) and they’re gonna blow the pick (dammit!). In the offseason, they’re gonna acquire the wrong players (see, e.g., Rose, Derrick and Bargnani, Andrea), and it will be clear to everyone except the front office (see, e.g., Jackson, Phil).

There will be further embarrassing incidents at the World’s Most Famous Arena with even more embarrassing press releases to follow. We’ll pay good money and countless hours watching Carmelo Anthony hold the ball for way too long on one side of the court, and his steadfast refusal to defend on the other.

At some point, the team’s savior — and everybody’s favorite 🦄 — Kristaps Porzingis will be forced to play in bubble wrap because, well … let’s not even go there with bad omens.

Admittedly, it’s not your fault, Knicks fans. None of this is.

And that’s why it’s time to move on. New York owner James Dolan simply doesn’t deserve you. You’ve done enough. Time has been served. (Too much time, if we are being honest.) Dolan isn’t going anywhere, and that means his and his staff’s outward hostility and arrogance isn’t going anywhere, either.

Sure, many, many teams experience down cycles, and prosperity feels SO much better when you’ve been put through the ringer. But for Knicks fans, the dark times have been unrelenting and needlessly humiliating for going on two decades!

Think about the New York’s glorious history. Actually, on second thought, maybe it’s not really so glorious at all. The team’s golden eras have only lasted for six years each. The graceful Clyde Frazier-led Knicks? Six poetic years. The bruising Patrick Ewing-led Knicks? Six gritty years. The incompetent James Dolan-led Knicks? Seventeen painful years, save for one.

And yet, there never seem to be any consequences.

Fandom, like any healthy relationship, needs to be nurtured, and yet, despite the agony, New York fans keep showing up. According to Bleacher Report, Madison Square Garden has sold over 99 percent of Knicks games tickets since the 2000–01 NBA season. That’s nothing short of heroic levels of loyalty — especially when one considers that the Knicks have returned the love with all of 15(!) home playoff games during that stretch.

Let that sink in for a moment. 15 home playoff games in 17 years. Excuse me, 15 fucking home playoff games in 17 fucking years.

Again, despite the (and I’m being generous here) mediocrity, the fans keep showing up. It’s what we do. New York legend, and still-to-this-day-Knicks-fan, Charles Oakley showed up, too. The Oakman, of course, was the guy we all related to during the Garden’s Patrick Ewing-led 1990s hey day. It didn’t matter that Oakley wasn’t a New Yorker by upbringing. For every kid of average talent who was too small to play big, but too tough to play nice, his was the poster that adorned our bedroom walls.

In a way, when Oakley was unceremoniously kicked out of MSG last week, we were all kicked out. Pushed to the ground by a team of security guards, handcuffed, arrested, charged, attacked by the public relations department, and banned from the arena. All within the span of less than 48 hours.

All of us.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Knicks fans, my brothers and sisters, let’s face reality. This not just the final straw. This is the Oak that broke the camel’s back. And despite NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s noble attempt to put the horse back into the barn — he reportedly brokered a meeting between Oakley, Dolan, and … Michael Jordan? — it’s time to move on.

Trust me, I’ve seen the light.

Eighteen years ago, I moved away from New York. I spent two years in Atlanta, followed by the last sixteen in San Francisco. Each year, it gets easier to distance myself from the team of my youth. When I moved out to the Bay Area, I made it a point to latch onto an awful Warriors team with cheap tickets that were just a short BART ride away. I sat through the Cohan years.

I painfully watched the majority of the team’s 26 wins during the 2009–10 season.

I also just watched the majority of the team’s 73 wins in last year. Each moment was beautiful and joyous, and despite the ultimate failure in the Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, I received more than I put into my fandom. I feel lucky to have committed to a franchise that has and executes a clear vision for its future. I’m all-in with a quartet of stars that play both ways with passion and unselfishness. And I’m thankful to follow an organization that embraces its roots, even during the times when there just wasn’t much to plant.

Who knew that the love you give to a basketball team could be reciprocated?

The Knicks will always have a place in my heart, but a better tenant has moved in. I’m now a Warriors fan first, a Knicks fan second. It’s been that way for a long time. My kids are the same way. Call me a bandwagon fan if you want, but I have no qualms about it.

Admittedly, leaving the Knicks was made easier by the fact that I stepped into nirvana with the Warriors rise. But you know what also made it easier? NBA League Pass, where I can watch any team at any time. And Twitter, which keeps me informed, ensuring that I never miss the latest Knicks trade debacle or off-court scandal.

Think I am being overly dramatic?

Well, let me call to your attention the plight of Ewing, arguably the franchise’s greatest player. Despite running through ten coaches since the Big Fella retired, he has been granted all of ZERO interviews with the Knicks for a coaching position with the organization. That’s at least ten chances to show him the respect he’s earned.

And, hey, remember Linsanity? Of course you do. Remember that time Jeremy Lin torched Kobe Bryant at the Garden when he was sleeping on Landry Fields’ couch? Man, what a fun beacon in the fog that was — until it was snuffed out by Dolan and ‘Melo’ for the Knicksiest reasons ever.

Remember Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler? Remember how much fun they were to watch during Amare Stoudemire’s first season in New York?

Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter why you pick a new team. All that matters is that when the Knicks are relegated to the secondary spot in your heart that they deserve, you will be able to laugh without the pain. You will find basketball peace. Life will go on, and Dolan will become less of an embarrassing thorn in your side and more of a clown car driver in your rearview mirror.

Hey, Knicks Fans, James Dolan Doesn’t Deserve You was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The legendary downhill skier has been gone for over a year, but his impact remains lasting.

Bill Johnson is dead. My childhood sports hero has left the ski hill. This isn’t exactly a news flash, although it still feels that way. Depending on when you’re reading this, it’s been a year, maybe more. He died January 21, 2016. He was 55.

That number haunts me because when I think of Bill Johnson now, all I can see are those Freedom 55 commercials that blanketed every Canadian television in the 1980s. You don’t have to have been a latchkey baby raised by a can opener and reruns of The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie and My Three Sons for this reference to make sense. Here’s a quick sketch: Harried 20-something power exec is zapped into the future to meet his 55-year-old self, tanned and fit and jogging along a beach, enjoying early retirement as a result of smart financial planning. For the hell of it, I did a little research, and it turns out the Freedom 55 marketing team came up with the original campaign in 1984, a big year for their brand.

1984 was also a pretty big year for Bill Johnson. That’s when he blasted out of scrappy misfit ski-kid obscurity to win the Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland, the month before the Sarajevo Olympics. It was also his first record, the so-called freak win that made him the first American man to win a World Cup downhill.

And when the ski racing elite of The Greater Alps of Europe were all, “It vas a fluke,” he talked an unholy amount of shit at them for a solid week of blizzard delays until he made good on his shit-talking and creamed the not insubstantial competition to simultaneously become the first racer from outside the Alps to win an Olympic downhill and the first American man to take gold in an Olympic alpine event of any kind.

Ever.

(As the heads of scrappy misfit ski kids exploded in joy across the globe.)

I’ve been writing about Bill Johnson my whole life. Certainly since 1984, back when we all claimed him. I wrote my first piece in grade eight, one of the zillions of baby ski racers in jaw-slung awe of his wild-ass Olympic antics. It was your typical gushy ode, an open fan letter never sent, except to my English teacher, who gave me an A+ and lots of gold stars.

Around the same time, my friend was applying for art school, the kind of place you had to audition to get into, like Fame. She had the singing and dancing and acting down, but writing was not her bag.

So I sold her my Bill Johnson essay, my first writing sale. I charged $5, the rate established by what my older brother had charged a year or two prior for (one-time; non-exclusive) rights to his Remembrance Day poem, which we both got really good grades on. (And gold stars.)

After my friend got into the program, I hounded her for feedback, and she told me they said it was fine “but maybe a little over the top.” And I said, “Over the top? That’s an A+ essay. With gold stars.”

Notwithstanding the gold stars I wasn’t getting, I was also offended on behalf of my hero. Was it even possible to overwrite the magnitude of what he’d accomplished?

Let’s review. Wengen, January 15, 1984. At 2.78 miles, the longest World-Cup downhill in the world, and one of the most treacherous. At that point, Bill Johnson was a nobody, not even a has-been. A never-was at 23. A juvie hothead who’d burned through much of the goodwill earned off his exceptional early promise. As wildly unreliable on the course as he was off it, he rarely performed on par with his outlandish talent. Sure, he was fast as hell, but he couldn’t be counted on to finish his runs upright. Or even show up for practice.

And it didn’t help that he was kind of a jerk. He just pissed people off. Jokes he found funny were often at the expense of someone else. He was so arrogant and angry and monumentally self-absorbed that his equally ferocious charm and generosity got lost in the noise of being “Bad Billy” Johnson. His continued membership in the U.S. Ski Team was iffy, and the smart money was on him being turfed at the end of his yawn of a season.

So him screaming up from hell’s half acre of nowheresville to take the Lauberhorn? Unprecedented. It changed everything. And man, what a run. Already 4/5ths of the way down the hill, Johnson burned ahead of the top time by over a second, astonishing considering his below-20th seed. But then he caught an edge that popped his soon-to-be-famous crimson Atomic Arc “red sled” skis apart, twice. The second time spread-eagled him, tipping him over onto one ski — the other kicked wildly up in the air — and then back on his ass. That should have been that, but Johnson sprang up like a defiant weeble, skied actually off that pigdog of a course for a few nerve-shattering moments, micro-corrected his trajectory and roared back into the gates and his perfect egg of a tuck to win the damn thing.

The entirety of Johnson’s near-wipeout took eight seconds max, which may not seem like a long time, and if you watch the clip of his run it all happens pretty fast. But in downhilling, where races don’t go much over two minutes and are often won by centiseconds — hundredths of a second — eight seconds is the equivalent of a slow-motion disaster scene. This is likely how it felt to Austria’s Erwin Resch, who’d started posing for victory photos while Johnson was still rattling down the mountain like a bag of pissed off cats straight out of hell.

If you listen to tape of veteran ski racer Billy Kidd call the run for CBS, you can hear his excitement: “The time, the fastest so far, but — Johnson is losing it. He’s almost lost it right there. He’s off the course, he’s on the course again. Johnson’s all over this hill!”

And John Tesh — a sportscaster before he was the Entertainment Tonight guy, before he was the New-Age Christian-pop guy — he got so fired up, he sprang to his feet, long arms swinging wildly, and feverishly backhanded Kidd off his chair. Years later, Kidd—who’d won silver 16 years earlier for the slalom at the 1968 Innsbruck Games—called Johnson’s performance one of the most incredible recoveries he’d ever seen.

A month later, Bill Johnson beat them all again at the Olympics.

It vas not a fluke.

And by shit-talking at the Olympics, I mean like fellow Olympian Muhammad Ali in his prime, in everyone’s face to put them off their game and pump up his own. Granted, Johnson’s baiting tactics weren’t anywhere as slick, more on the order of adolescent mouthing off: “There’s no doubt that I am going to win”; “Top three? I’ll finish in the top one”; “I’m just going to kill ’em here, you know?”; “I don’t know why the other guys bothered to show up”; and my personal favorite: “You guys are only racing for second place.” To keep with the schoolyard metaphor, in Johnson’s defense he didn’t actually start it, the Austrians did.

Franz “The Kaiser” aka “The Hammer” aka “The Klammer Express” Klammer, legendary Austrian ski champ — who at the time had an Olympic downhill gold and 25 World Cup firsts under his belt and was the original odds-on favorite to win the race — was credited with calling Johnson a nasenbohrer, German for “nose picker” but which Klammer insisted a) just meant “rookie,” idiomatically, and b) wasn’t even started by him — he pinned that on Resch.

The press corps, bored out of their minds from a week of delays while the Yugoslav[1] army labored daily to excavate Mt. Bjelašnica from a four-day blizzard, were delighted by the entertainment quotient offered up by “Brash Billy” Johnson and ran with it in the papers.

But the ski racing community found Johnson less enchanting because shit-talking wasn’t really part of the skiing experience. That was for the lower classes who played sports that didn’t cost money, where all you needed was a ball and a net, never mind thousands of dollars of ski equipment and a budget to fly you around the world to use it. In those days — and even now because, although the ski scene’s punked up somewhat with the advent of Xtreme sports, it’s still expensive as hell — skiing was very much a gentleman’s sport full of rich kids acting like butter wouldn’t melt, all with faces begging to be smacked.

Not that I was aware of Bill Johnson having smacked anyone. (He had, of course. I just didn’t know about it then.) But he looked like he would. And by that point, I’d had to do some smacking around of my own.

Quick recap of my racing career: terrible skier, decent racer.

It was completely random I’d even ended up in skiing. I was supposed to be in ballet, but the teacher had taken me aside and told me in no uncertain terms that I would never “ever, ever” make it as a ballerina and should just quit. So I did.[2]

Next came free ski-racing lessons at the local hill courtesy of my stepfather du moment, who worked weekends in the repair shop for extra cash. I was eleven. This may seem young to non-skiers, but think of it like playing the violin. Anyone worth their salt starts by three, four latest. By eleven, the little bastards can hot dog down a mogul field like James Bond stunt doubles in a Roger Moore cold open.

And when I say bad skier, picture a chimpanzee on two-by-fours, knuckles dragging as it shrieks its way down the hill in abject terror, stopping only when tackled by coaches into hay bales at the bottom. Now make it less fuzzy and cute. That was me. And by decent racer, I mean fast and stupid, which can take you a fair stretch in ski racing, right up till you catch that edge.

This was around the time Bill Johnson started making a name for himself on the Europa Cup in early winter 1983, laying the groundwork for his glorious 1984 season after the holidays. I can’t remember who told me about him, but it makes sense that it would have been my coach and mentor, Tammy, since this predated the Internet and cable TV in every house.

Before my accident, Tammy said I reminded her of him. There was the obvious wrong-side-of-the-tracks element, both of us scholarship kids clawing for every piece of equipment, bindings and up, win them in races or beg them from sponsors.

And there was the style thing: glider, hardboiled tuck, generalized madness. He was the far better skier, from technique to sheer talent, but every now and then when I was flailing down a course, one leg would figure out what the other one was doing, and I’d instinctively know to shift my weight to the downhill ski and cut the turns early and high for the straight line and fold myself in half and lift the bottoms of my skis almost imperceptibly off the snow to minimize friction and fly across the flats.

That’s when I’d notice the exquisite, perfect silence, when everything went [off], and no one was screaming at anyone to “Shut the fuck up” or calling me by body parts (“Hey, Lips! Hey, Face!”) or slamming doors or cranking Leon Russell downstairs with their hippie leftover friends, yipping and hollering like a pack of teenaged coyotes until three in the morning.

I didn’t know then what I do now about Johnson’s childhood family dynamics — absentee father; freebird mother; rumors of alcoholism, abuse, neglect — but if I had, it would have been a startling revelation. It’s not something I would even have thought to discuss. It was simply the shame I carried.

I only ever fought in defense of my mother’s honor. Three for three on marriage and divorce, the wrongheaded presumption by the misogynistic rednecks in our backwards backwoods little town was that my beautiful, brilliant, bohemian arteeste, single-mother mother was a whore. So the stupid people would say the stupid things. And then I’d have to fight.

The first time was on the T-bar lift with a girl on the team, one of the weekenders that drove up north from the city with their families to vacation cabins plusher than most of our full-time (and only) homes. She’d asked why my sisters and I had different last names, and when I explained that we had different fathers, she said, “Wow, your mother sure gets around.”

I punched her right off the lift, ski pole wrapped in my glove like a roll of quarters in a sock. I think I was as surprised as her. It was the polar opposite of the cold, peaceful silence I felt when I raced, instead this whoosh of heat and fury that overtook me.

The second time was at the local roadhouse, where the age limit was never enforced. Céline was one of the next-door neighbor daughters, both of whom enjoyed snacking on me, taught at the knee by their mother, who, more than a few beers in, got her own kicks snacking on my own mother, her supposed best friend. The entire family, eerily gifted in the dark art of head games, could smell weakness from ten paces. And my family? We smelled. I tended to duck my head and eat my share of shit, but when it came to my mother, it was gloves off. I don’t remember precisely how it started, but it ended with me dragging Céline out by the hair and then someone pulling me off her and tossing me into a snowbank.

It seemed like the sort of thing Bill Johnson would have understood. And when you’re a weirdo teenager with marginal social skills and fewer friends because you spend your free time alone in your room memorizing B-sides of Beatles 45s or sounding out iambic pentameter or teaching yourself to Charleston by hanging onto the side of the bed frame for an entire day or avoiding free-ski afternoons at the hill because you’re an idiot-savant loser who can race but can’t actually ski — when that’s the flavor of freakball you happen to be, it sure is awesome to find a hero who flies his flag loud and proud and doesn’t back down, no matter how scared he gets.

It would have made far more sense to worship someone from my own country — any of the Crazy Canucks, for example (Podborski, Booker, Erwin, Reed), or Laurie Graham, who’d been representing the Canadian sisterhood proudly at the time — but I bounced off their shiny, clean-scrubbed images and was drawn instead like a dysfunctional little magnet to Bill Johnson’s tribe of misfit fans.

And good lord, was he lovely. Tan and blond and aqua-eyed, with a crinkly smile and a flat blade of a nose, his was the sort of golden beauty that belonged behind aviators in a fastback Mustang blazing down an oceanside highway. To an illegitimate half-breed Slavic-Scot Anglican-Jew built to pull a plow but raised in a houseful of rangy Celts in backwoods Canada and weaned on spun-candy Cali surfer fantasies, Bill Johnson represented all that was grand about the Golden State, so much so that it didn’t even matter that he was actually from Oregon.

Bill Johnson never made it past 1984, though it took a few seasons for that to sink in, and I didn’t either. I’d been showing off for a cute ski instructor during night training, not having yet gotten the memo that outperforming one’s object of desire was perhaps the worst way to win a heart. It might have just been a regular crash, but Tammy had tired of the pickup sticks game that was collecting all the snapped bamboo gate poles we’d barrel through, no one having time for anything so pedestrian as turning. So she double-wrapped the gates in duct tape, stabbed them into the snow and poured water on them, effectively icing them into trees. This was pre-breakaway gates that hinged when skied into or over and then sprang back into place. In a display of exquisite cosmic irony, that was also the night I’d had the ski repair shop kids bolt me into my skis, my bindings having gone floppy. So when I hooked a tip, my skis stayed and I kept going, ripping the ACL halfway out of my kneecap.

There’s another kind of silence that’s so quiet it’s almost a roar. Everything goes white and unbearably loud and perfectly silent, and it doesn’t matter how many people are yelling at you, trying to get you to open your eyes, sit up, talk to them — you have to ignore everything and concentrate on the pain so you can compress it down, fold it up small enough until it’s possible to breathe again and brace yourself to swim back up to the surface of consciousness, where you know it’s going to hurt like a sonofabitch. And when I broke through, I knew everything had changed.

It’s possible my knee might have healed if Tammy hadn’t chided me out of going to the doctor, instead urging me to suck it up like a champ, which I’d never be if I didn’t make a good showing for the Olympic scouts the following month. Like baseball, there’s no crying in ski racing. Exception: if you’re so pissed at yourself for blowing the second run, your face explodes in hot, wet anger. But even so, you better keep that helmet and those googles welded in place.

“Take the week,” Tammy relented. “Ice it down, you’ll be fine,” and maybe I would have. I did all right, got on the right lists, but a couple missed turns and solid crashes later, none of that mattered. According to the doc I was finally allowed to see, I hadn’t severed my ligament, but it was hanging by a thread. My career, though. That was cut straight through.

When I quit skiing, I walked away from everything. I left my expensive, hard-won skis and boots in my unlocked locker and Bill Johnson on the pages of my diary.

It was one of those random things, like looking up an old boyfriend, when I popped Johnson’s name into The Google 30+ years later and hit enter. It had never occurred to me that anything bad could have happened to him. My divorce from my own skiing past had been so total that that entire world had ceased to exist for me. And Johnson would have been long-retired. I just wanted to see what else he’d done before hanging up his skis.

The details of his Greek tragedy of a life were painfully easy to find. As Jennifer Woodlief wrote in 2005’s Ski to Die: The Bill Johnson Story, after his “15 minutes of fame ended, his 16th minute got off track.” It was a bleak fast-forward from Sarajevo to the millions in blown business deals, the accidental-drowning death of his 13-month-old son, the friends he drove away, the trainwreck family dynamics, the divorce, the estrangement from his two other sons, the self-sabotaged ski career that could have been among the most brilliant and storied, and the doomed comeback attempt that didn’t kill him but maybe should have.

On March 22, 2001, at Whitefish, Montana, Bill Johnson slammed face first into the side of the mountain. It was the Kandahar Cup, only a few races into his ill-advised comeback bid. Two thirds of the way down the course, after skiing what many called a surprisingly tight run, nailing a jump younger skiers had mangled, he caught an edge — it’s always an edge — and his skis slid apart much the way they had 17 years earlier in Wengen, the day of the stunning recovery and subsequent win that launched his championship ’84 season. For one agonizing moment, it looked like he might get his skis back together. But he didn’t.

The impact smashed Johnson’s teeth all the way into the back of his throat, filleting his tongue almost in half and bludgeoning his head so hard his brain detached from the skull casing and rotated half an inch inside his cranium.

The crash left him permanently brain damaged, physically disabled and utterly dependent on his mother and state aid workers for the most basic of his needs, a fate arguably worse than death for someone who’d inked a flaming skull and the words “Ski to Die” into his right delt shortly before launching his comeback. Not like that was a new credo for him. In an interview with a hometown paper three months after winning the gold back in 1984, a reporter had asked Johnson if he’d been surprised by his win. “Not really,” he said. “I knew at the starting gate I was going to win it. I was going to win it or die.”

Johnson seemed to make a reasonable, if altered and diminished, recovery from his accident, but then he was hit by a series of mini strokes and infections and then some bigger strokes, eventually losing the ability to walk or even care for himself. He moved from his own trailer to his mother’s place to a full-care nursing home, and his days revolved around episodes of Sports Center, reruns of Iron Man, daily visits from his mother, less frequent visits from friends and extended family, and the occasional smoke that someone else would have to set up for him with a straw.

After a major stroke in 2010, and then a massive infection that attacked all his major organs and put him in intensive care for two weeks in 2013, he instituted a DNR order into his health protocol. If he coded again, he wanted to be allowed to die.

I met Zeke Piestrup when trolling around online for a way to watch his film Downhill: The Bill Johnson Story, a bluntly compassionate documentary of Johnson’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall trapped in distribution limbo despite a glowing debut on the 2011 festival circuit. We bonded over a shared hero-worship, and Zeke sent me a copy.

While making the movie, Zeke spent a lot of time with Bill and DB Johnson, Bill’s mother and primary caretaker. “Billy’s brain is totally there,” Zeke said. “Other than the memory loss. Conveniently, the worst 10 years of his life are gone.”

Zeke put me in touch with DB and urged me to go full fangirl, explaining that those types of interactions were the sort of thing keeping “Hard to Kill” Bill alive.

I sent Bill a care package containing a feeble attempt at a glam shot (my expression halfway between saucy and “I’ve got sand in my eye”), some milk chocolate soft enough for him to swallow, a mixtape of eighties classic rock, and a homemade fan letter onto which I’d photoshopped a cocky-looking blond guy with a shit-eating grin under a banner that read, “They say you are what you eat, but I don’t recall eating a fucking legend.”

In reply, DB emailed me a picture of Bill. In the photo, Bill was wedged semi-upright in his motorized wheelchair, my own photo propped against his torso. It looked like his half-stroked out face was twitched into a sneer, which, fair enough. He wasn’t a tourist attraction, even though he of course was.

Thoughts that could go through a person’s head when preparing for a FaceTime date with their crippled childhood sports hero: Wear nice lipstick. Make sure your tits look good in that top. Do your hair, that’ll cheer him up. Talk about his triumphs. Mention the Olympics. All he has left are his memories.

There aren’t any books of etiquette that address this kind of thing. And if there were, what would they advise? I had put off DB’s request as long as I could, wondering why would this man want to have some person he’s never met, to whom he can’t effectively communicate, in his face on his mother’s iPad, when he really just wants to watch TV and tune out.

But then I figured it might be a nice break from re-watching Iron Man, a minor distraction from the indignity of being trapped in a broken body that was once so magnificent and powerful, possibly a small way in which I could be of service. I did my hair, threw on some lipstick, took some deep breaths, assured myself of the importance of what I was doing and dialed in.

DB ruined the date with my childhood crush like only a mother could.

Me: Hi, how’s it going?

DB: We’re watching Iron Man.

Bill: …

Me: I’m so sorry. This is a bad time. I’m interrupting your movie—

DB: How could you be interrupting our movie?

[…]

Me: Right, of course, we have this new technology called “Pause Button” … ha ha …

[…]

Bill: …

[…]

DB: Your photograph doesn’t do you any favors.

Me: …

DB asked what I did for a living. I told her I was a writer and massage therapist. DB explained the shortcomings of the state healthcare program and how it had screwed them over on massage therapist rates. I couldn’t tell if Bill was embarrassed or annoyed or bored or just checked out.

Panicked, I launched into a semi-prepared speech reiterating the main talking points of the card I’d sent (childhood hero, brilliant ski god, ongoing inspiration, thank you so much…). I trailed off.

Bill smile-nodded in my direction and whispered, “Right on.”

Then he turned to his mother and mouthed: “Movie.”

The visit was over.

After that, I sent a few more care packages and letters. Each time, DB dutifully sent back a photo of Bill decorated with my little gifts — chocolates or maple sugar candies or t-shirts. Once, she popped a pair of stuffed reindeer antlers on him, the sort of holiday outfit you’d put on the family dog. I amused myself imagining his inner thoughts: “If I can just focus hard enough, I know I can use my brain power to push the TV off its stand…”

I could see what Zeke meant, about Bill being all there, not that I had anything to compare it to, never having met the man. But the few times he looked straight at the webcam with his one good eye, I could see the hard layer of intelligence I remembered from interviews and photos back in the day. And it gutted me. To be all there but trapped in the prison of a body that wouldn’t cooperate.

I finally met Bill in person on December 17, 2015. It was very last minute. I was in Seattle visiting family and spontaneously decided to rent a car and pop down to Oregon for the day. DB had urged me to visit, but I’d told her I wouldn’t be able to get away: “Next time for sure!”

I dreaded what I feared would be a painfully uncomfortable and possibly unwanted visit, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to do it. I didn’t want to tell anyone it was because I was afraid he’d die before I got another chance to see him, but of course that’s what I was thinking.

The trip was harrowing. It’d been dry as a bone in Seattle until the one day I needed to travel. The straightforward three-hour drive down to Mount Hood became five hours of steering-wheel-gripping terror, teeny compact car hydroplaning like a skip rock on a flat lake, visibility mere feet, RainX be damned. I distracted myself with thoughts of the surreal conversations ahead of me: “Hi, so good to meet you, wow, this sure is awkward, okay, gotta get back on the road so I can get off this godforsaken mountain before dark, byeeee, try not to die before next June!”

When I got to the nursing home, I was shocked by how much Bill’s health had deteriorated since I’d last seen him on FaceTime or in photos. No longer able to sit up in a wheelchair, he was confined to his old-man hospital bed with safety rails and had to be dragged back up and onto the pillows. He’d lost the ability to whisper, and it was hard to know what he needed. Communication was reduced to lip reading. At one point, his mother flipped the sheets off him to readjust him in the bed, try to make him more comfortable. He lay there, pale and half naked on his side, curled like an unbaked seahorse plucked too early from its father’s pouch. His head rolled in my direction, and I leapt from my chair to make a big show of looking at the photographs and cards on his wall, my back to him, not wanting him to see me see him like that. Some things cannot be said properly in English, but the Germans know what I mean here: fremdschämen, the shame you feel on behalf of another.

His one good eye was the same, though, bright and ferocious. He crinkled at me rakishly as I flapped around like a teenager interviewing the captain of the football team. It’s like he hadn’t gotten the memo that he was no longer Bill Johnson, biggest badass in the room. Another word we don’t have in English: saudade, Portuguese for the nostalgia one feels for things that have never existed. I forced myself not to indulge in sadness for that time I never got to slap the arrogant grin off his face in some bar somewhere, but all bets were off once I got back to the car.

I said skiing ceased to exist for me after I quit racing, but that’s not entirely true. I still dream about skiing, and not always in a bad way, and not always when I’m asleep. Sometimes just walking down the street, I’ll catch myself flexing my legs, bringing my hands up, curving my shoulders forward, breathing out in a hard little O as I angle past a telephone pole. I have bruises up and down the sides of my body from cutting the turns too tightly on doorways and tables. I regularly fall off curbs and scrape up my shins, because I never look where I’m going. I’m always two gates ahead like I was taught so many years ago. It’s strange, the things that remain. I can ignore it, but ski racing will always be part of my cellular makeup. I’m like a baby dragon that cracked out of its shell and promptly imprinted on a set of skis someone left lying around. (Red sleds, no doubt.)

Even in the rain, navigating the treacherous drive back to Seattle, I’m looking ahead as far as possible, scanning into the mist for cars and other obstacles, keeping my grip loose but ready, angling my hips into my shoulders in the seat, imperceptibly leaning into the turns along the endless highway.

And then the strangled hiccup of terror as I almost drive up the tail end of a stalled car being strapped onto a tow truck. Outside lane, from seeming nowhere. No flares, not even blinkers. It’s astonishing how quickly everything can change, could have changed. I missed them by so little, flicking myself into the passing lane at the last possible moment. That there wasn’t a car already in that lane, that I’m alive with all my limbs to tell this humdrum story of an almost-accident is just a detail in the gigantic universe that is the bigger picture. That Bill lay in his hospital bed, broken and dying, is another. It could as easily have been me.

Because here’s the truth, the part that doesn’t get included when I drag out my little tale of the almost-was teenage ski-racing star for Show & Tell hour. When they told me my knee was finished and my career over? I was glad. For months leading up to the crash, I’d been plagued by nightmares. It was always the same. Catch a tip. And then pinwheel out of the course, launching off my skis and twisting midair so the center of my back lined up perfectly with the biggest tree on the edge of the run. It was the crack my spine made as it snapped cleanly in half that always woke me, gasping out of bed, sheets drenched. That’s the key point at which Johnson and I diverged, apart from the obvious, that he was an infinitely better skier: He was fearless; I was wracked with it. And maybe that saved my life, if that’s what we’re calling it, this half-life of half doing and half dreaming I’ve been so fucking blessed to half live.

Bill died a little over a month later. Wednesday, January 21, 2016, shortly after 3 p.m., West Coast time. I’d been dodging FaceTime calls from his mother all day the day before, the way you do with an elderly relative always wanting to chat at exactly the wrong time. I was on deadline. I was hung over. I didn’t have time to have a shower, do my hair, fix my lipstick. I put my phone on silent and got back to my life. Just before I turned in, I saw I’d missed a text: “Bill will probably leave us within the next day or so,” DB wrote. “Should you want to see him, we could try to FaceTime tomorrow.”

English had all the perfect words for me: self-absorbed jackhole.

The next day, I visited with Bill for the last time. He was see-through in his dehydration. He’d lost the ability to swallow, but he’d made his wishes clear: no extraordinary measures, which in his case precluded tubes for food or water. Occasionally, a nurse or his mother would swab his mouth with a moist sponge, but that was it. My childhood sports hero was dying of thirst in the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, and I had a front row seat.

I rattled my usual inanities at him — “You’ve always been an inspiration to me, you made me feel less alone” — painfully aware I sounded like I was monologuing his eulogy right at him. Me me me in my self-centered discomfort, which existed so comfortably alongside my ferocious sorrow for him, because feelings don’t care if they make sense or not. They just are.

And then Bill cast his working eye in my direction and winked at me. And I laughed. And he did, too. Silently, just the outside edge of his mouth tipped up.

He died a few hours later.

For weeks, I existed in a fugue state. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t talk. I hadn’t expected to miss him so much. How could you mourn someone you’d never really known? I was undone by the ache I felt throughout my entire body. There was a tangible absence in the world with him no longer in it.

And then it hit me. When Bill died, I died. That baby ski-racer champion-to-be. The girl who maybe might have could. When he left, he took her with him.

Of course it made no sense. Those dreams of winning The Gold were long gone. But deep inside my lizard brain, I’d never gotten the memo. I was still that crazy little racer kid, flying through the gates, where everything made sense, where I always knew what to do, where anything was possible. Where I could finally breathe.

And sometimes I’d sync into a sort of ski-racing disco and the boundaries between my body and the skis and the snow vaporized and I rode the wind down the side of the mountain with an easeful fury that blew all conscious thought out the back of my head like a cannon through tissue paper.

It didn’t happen often, but when it did, my god, it was sublime.

Except now it was gone. And so was he.

And that he was 55. Freedom 55, my ass. If I could think of a word to sum up Billy’s last year, it sure wouldn’t be freedom.

Here’s how I’d rather imagine him finishing out his run. He’s older, sure. Craggy and skin all sun-damaged, but in that sexy way men are allowed to be. In this version, he’s tanned and fit enough, though there’s fuck all jogging on the beach. (He never liked his PT.) No, he’s beer-bellied up to the palapa hut bar, touting his exploits to the hot barmaid, picking dumbass fights and talking an unholy amount of shit. I’m there, too, toasting him from across the bar with the crappy glass of merlot he bought me, merlot being the circa-1980s-Bill-Johnson-approved classy drink for The Ladies.

Maybe later he’ll go for a sail, if it’s warm enough. (He didn’t like the cold either.) Probably, I’ll finally get to slap him. In this dream, he hangs onto the glory. We all do. In this dream, he just keeps winning. We all do. In this dream, there’s nothing left to prove. He’s whole and happy and at peace.

It’s Freedom 55, baby. Rock on.

[1] Now, Bosnia-Herzegovina. (See: Yugoslav Wars, 1991–2001.)

[2] In my memory, I nodded stoically and marched out of the atelier de danse, tossing my soft leather slippers over my shoulder into the garbage can on the way out. In my hyper-revisionist memory, I tossed a lit match after the slippers, and the can exploded in slow motion fireworks behind me as I flicked my side-pony back over my shoulder and strode, glass-faced, toward the camera. (In reality, there were tears.)

Bill Johnson Mixtape: (Belated) Requiem for an American Badass was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tom Brady just led the New England Patriots to the greatest comeback in NFL history — and the #AltRight’s Richard Spencer loved every minute of it.

Super Bowl LI has come and gone. What started so impressively for the Atlanta Falcons became nothing short of a gut-wrenching, Shakespearean tragedy. Tom Brady and his goddamn — some would argue God blessed — New England Patriots became the first team to ever win a Super Bowl in overtime. The franchise became the first to ever come back from more than 10 points down in the championship game. Brady became the first quarterback in NFL history to win five Super Bowls.

In the most ironic of ironies, the Pats winning after being down 25 points in the second half was the perfect cap to the 2016 NFL season. The year was belatedly able to claim one last victim, the tombstone reading: “Here Lies the Atlanta Falcons.”

If I sound biased, it’s because I am. Let’s be honest, nobody actually likes the Patriots except Patriots fans. They’re the team that people are supposed to hate unless you’re from the Boston area and grow up with a wicked hard-on for them.

#PatsNation extends to more than just the fanboys, though. Sounding like horny teenagers that have just received their very first Fleshlights, guys like Joe Buck and Terry Bradshaw barely contain their giddy excitement when describing Brady. Still, I don’t want to paint too glum a picture with too broad a brush. Not every fan rooting for the Patriots are “wicked” spouting, signal stealing-condoning, Deflategate (or is it Ballghazi?) defending, Casey Affleck sexual assault-excusing assholes. I mean, we all like the other Affleck brother, Matt Damon, right?

But I’ve got some news for you, New England fans — you keep some truly awful company.

Self appointed leader of the Alt-Reich — don’t let him fool you with that #AltRight crap — avowed National Socialist, and all around douche-canoe, Richard Spencer, is a Patriots fan, apparently.

And not just for the team’s play on the field.

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

I was born in Boston, Mass. I'm proud of the NFL's Whitest team! #superbowl

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

A Patriots victory is a victory for the #AltRight. #Patriots #SuperBowl

Richard 🐉 Spencer on Twitter

Rooting for the Pats! 1/ Belichick & Brady support Trump 2/ Three White widereceivers 3/ Consistently NFL's whitest team 4/ ATL is dreadful

Think that’s bad? Yeah, not so much.

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

Happy birthday Trayvon Martin! #Patriots #Super Bowl

So congratulations #PatsNation! You now have the distinction of rubbing shoulders with a Nazi. A Nazi that believes Brady and the Patriots’ whiteness carried the franchise to a Super Bowl victory for the ages.

Not skill. Not fortitude. Not coaching. Whiteness. (Let that sink in for a moment.)

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

The Patriots even call their Blacks "White." #SuperBowl2017 #Trump #Brady

No matter what side of the political spectrum you currently reside, there is an overwhelming and undeniable shadow of uncertainty across the country. But make no mistake, Spencer and his ilk are not a fleeting blip. They are real. They are dangerous. They attempt to elicit fear and provoke reaction with their rhetoric of hate under the guise of free speech. The Alt-Reich maintains that they are true patriots; acting and speaking out in the best interest of the “real” America, but the bile that courses through their veins corrupts every orifice it seeps into.

Like Xenomorps in Alien, the Alt-Reich is attempting to burrow its way into the heart of American society, just waiting to explode through the nation’s chest.

New England’s football team is a just a host; a vessel to inhabit.

For the franchise best known for spying, allegedly listening to opponents, tampering with headsets, social media incompetence; and fans that defend a murderer; maybe having a Nazi fan isn’t that surprising. To hear Spencer tell it, a win for the Patriots is a win for white nationalism.

Speaking of “bigly.”

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

Superbowl #NewEnglandPatriots #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Richard 🐸 Spencer on Twitter

Nothing is written. No fate but what we make. #SuperBowl #patriots

Surely, the New England Patriots are not at all responsible for Spencer’s hateful rhetoric. To suggest that the (seemingly) Donald Trump-supporting Brady, his coach, Bill Belichick, or his team’s owner, Robert Kraft, believe as Spencer does would be unfair and untrue. But given the present climate, it sure feels appropriate that New England’s power trio should publicly disavow Spencer and his fandom.

Metaphorically speaking, despite the win for the Patriots, I believe a larger win for humanity was broadcast in the space between the plays. Super Bowl LI ran numerous commercials that spoke beautifully — both subtly & not so subtly — about immigration, humanity, and equality. I was encouraged by message after message championing themes like acceptance and unity.

Coca-Cola on Twitter

Today millions cheer together, because together is beautiful. #AmericaIsBeautiful https://t.co/z65LimssjD

Ultimately, the symbolism of Super Bowl LI was too obvious to miss. Like the Atlanta Falcons, Americans that oppose bigotry, hate and exclusion will pick themselves up, figure out what went wrong, and get to work in making things right. The Patriots aren’t going away anytime soon, and neither are the likes of Richard Spencer.

Game on.

Patriots, You Just Won The Super Bowl! (Now, About Your Little Nazi Problem.) was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Amidst a flurry of concern that politics is infiltrating sports coverage, please realize that’s simply not the case.

On Friday, Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, capped a very busy week in the sports and society domain with this piece at The New York Times, asking for a break from what has, undoubtedly, been a very political run-up to Super Bowl LI, what with the Donald Trump pregame interview, and Tom Brady dodging questions like they were unblocked linebackers, and all of us being forced to contemplate the idea of our lummox-in-chief sharing an intimate moment with Bill Belich- OH GOD MAKE IT STOP.

And so, writes Domenech, wouldn’t it be nice if maybe we could just take a time out from all of that messy, governing the country business, and just enjoy the big game? After all, he argues, there’s something to be said for a brief time-out from our endless political polarization.

When you “stick to sports,” you are doing more than confining yourself to the field and the court. You are providing a way for people who may have diametrically opposed politics to share a beer at a bar discussing quarterbacks instead of executive orders. We should recognize this is valuable, particularly given that one of the factors that led to Mr. Trump’s rise is a market for outrage, on the right and the left, which acts as a consuming fire. There is always another inch to be won, another point to be defended, and this hyper-politicization limits the space free from the culture wars Mr. Trump exploited to great effect.

First of all, as noted by the ever brilliant Spencer Hall, Domenech must have the most genteel sports fan friends in recorded history.

KOBE BUFFALOMEAT on Twitter

I don't think @bdomenech has ever read a sports site comment section or had a bar argument over sports ever

I mean seriously, say the word #DeflateGate around a Patriots fan sometime, and see just how free you are from the “market of outrage.”

Domenech is hardly alone, these days, in his yearning for, dare I say it, a “safe space” from the culture wars and political wrangling that have, undeniably, muscled their way into sports, comedy, celebrity culture, all manners of “escape”, with greater frequency. On Monday, at The Ringer, Bryan Curtis wrote about the growing trend of sportswriters injecting politics into their work, (and their social media), with greater frequency, and wondered if their readers, and their bosses, truly embraced the phenomenon.

The end of “stick to sports” is a pleasure for writers who can flex their muscles in a way their elders never could. The thing is, I see evidence that some readers don’t want their favorite Twitter feeds to become free-fire zones for politics. Over the weekend, when Lowe, Bedard, and Around the Horn’s Kevin Blackistone strayed from their beats, they were all commanded to “stick to sports.”

Similarly, the writers’ corporate parents would rather they point their hot takes toward something other than Trump. Recently, one sports TV executive told me his favorite kind of partisan dispute was one personality rooting for the Patriots to win and another rooting for them to lose — a clash that mimicked the theater of cable news but had none of its baggage. Last January, ESPN sent a memo to employees telling them to “refrain from political editorializing … on platforms such as Twitter or other social media.”

In a similar vein, here’s Ryen Russillo, from his daily radio show, sharing his desire to keep his program primarily about sports, and the frustration he feels over the fact that it seems harder than ever.

Russillo and Kanell on Twitter

Why Tom Brady's relationship with President Trump makes Ryen less qualified to do sports talk in 2017... https://t.co/LroPbH41Bp

“I feel like, there’s so many people that I work with, that every show, every topic, every angle on it, is hoping to be right, destroying the right on every topic that comes up. And I don’t even feel like I’m taking that much of a stance other than I feel like I just — I hear it every single day. I don’t know what the job is anymore.

I got into sports because I want to talk about sports, and now I feel like if I’m not doing a social awareness show three out of five days a week I’m doing it wrong. I can’t possibly think that’s the play, long-term, for what I’m supposed to do as a sports talk show host for the next 10 years.”

For Domenech, Curtis, Russillo, and plenty of others, there’s obviously a certain strange quality to this new status quo. Political conversations are no longer simply entering the sports sphere on occasion, popping by when Tommie Smith raises a fist or Colin Kaepernick takes a knee. Instead, according to this line of thought, a political current now seems to run through the sports conversation as a matter of course, consistently, unceasingly. In Curtis’ own words, “The wall that once encircled sportswriting has been reduced to rubble.”

I, myself, have written plenty about the fact that “stick to sports” is not only folly, but an utterly impossible goal, given that the games we play, by their very nature, reflect our society, our values, our battles over how we operate and what we hold dear.

So here’s something that may sound somewhat surprising.

I get it.

Much as I might disagree with plenty of Domenech’s piece, I also understand, on some level, his desire to, in his own words “consume media without the constant encroachment of political divisiveness and partisan tribalism.” I consider myself as much of a news and politics junkie as I am a fan, and while I enjoy spirited discussion of sports and society as much as anyone, of course there are times when you need a break, if only to preserve some semblance of mental health in these truly dystopian times. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to take a time-out from immigration policy, confirmation votes, and executive orders, in order to discuss other matters. Like, for instance, will Julio Jones see single coverage? Can Dwight Freeney actually rattle Brady? How good is the Patriots defense, really?

The problem that I, and so many like-minded folks, have always had with the “stick to sports” refrain is its tendency to be used as an all-encompassing cudgel, a reflexive response to anyone who would dare to suggest that, yes, perhaps there are political implications to athletic competition that are well worth discussing. But yes, of course, it’s perfectly understandable to want a place to talk about pass-rushes, zone-blocking, and the 4–3 defense.

And to be clear, nobody is coming anywhere close to taking that away.

Here’s Danny Kelly, at The Ringer, breaking down the tactics we can expect to see on Sunday. Here’s David K. Anderson and Joe Ward, at The New York Times, with an illuminating look at how Brady and Matt Ryan handle pressure. Here’s Russillo and Kanell, on ESPN Radio, with a spirited conversation on whether the Patriots are the most despised team in sports.

Here’s the incomparable Stephen White, at SBNation, breaking down all the X’s and O’s, and arriving at a Falcons upset prediction. Here’s Rivers McCown, at Vice Sports, outlining the scenarios that could lead to a Falcons, and Patriots victory, respectively. Here’s Will Leitch, at Sports on Earth, noting that we’re probably underestimating the likelihood that this is Brady and Belichick’s last Super Bowl ride. Here’s Dom Cosentino, at Deadspin, suggesting in the bluntest terms possible that the Falcons’ defense will have quite a challenge on Sunday. Here’s Aaron Schatz, at Football Outsiders, with the deepest dive you could ever possibly desire into the nuts, bolts, and DVOA of the matchup. Here’s Zac Robinson at Pro Football Focus breaking down what he sees on both sides of the ball. Here’s the always thorough Bill Barnwell, at ESPN, turning over every possible nook and cranny of the game, and explaining why he expects a Patriots blowout. Here’s the First Take guys debating whether Brady or Belichick is more indispensable. Here’s Scott Van Pelt’s Super Bowl pick. Here’s Chris Berman’s. Here’s Tim Tebow’s.

You know what’s missing from all of it? Any mention of Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, and the rest of the administration’s misfit scoundrels. The notion that the Trump administration has actually made it impossible to just talk about the game is built on… well, how do we put this nicely… “alternative facts”. Have the first couple weeks of this unprecedented administration intruded into the sports dialog with greater frequency than those that preceded it? Certainly. Does that mean that, as Domenech writes, “politics surrounds and engulfs us, leaving us no space to gather as citizens without giving a thought to it.”? Absolutely not.

Given the saturation in coverage, not just of the Super Bowl, but of sports in general, I feel quite confident in my ability to escape political conversations in the sports realm any time I so desire. Sure, I might argue, alongside many others, that to completely ignore Brady’s sheepish abdication of the Trump question, the very real way in which his election has impacted basketball and football locker rooms, and the all-too-real implications that his executive order had on travel for some NBA players, is to put one’s head in the sand. But make no mistake, the option will always be there, for anyone who needs a brief respite, or a long cleanse, from the sharpest edges of our political dialog.

So yes, indeed, Mr. Domenech, “bonding over sports, television, comedy” is indeed “healthy and valuable.” And I have no intention of letting this President, despite his chaos, his fecklessness, and his utter lack of regard for laws and norms, take that away. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of room to “stick to sports,” whenever I’m so inclined.

Just keep Trump the hell away from the Puppy Bowl, ok?

The Game’s Not Going Anywhere was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The 25 Greatest Super Bowl Ads — and Their Secret Hidden Messages

Believe it or not, Madison Avenue has been pretty good at predicting the future through its Big Game commercials

It’s Super Bowl Week and that can mean but one thing. A nation which finds itself up in arms must gather ‘round bipartisan offerings of chips and salsa, and sit down for the year’s greatest television spectacle: Super Bowl commercials.

Some of the greatest TV spots of all time have first appeared during the Big Game, and you likely remember more of them than you think. But did you know that many of the most memorable ads contained secret hidden messages that predicted exactly what would happen in the year that followed?

Don’t believe us? Take a look at 25 of the greatest examples, and you’ll see what we mean.

1976 — Xerox Monk

What a world it was in 1976. Instead of Presidents using Twitter to incite wars with other nations, we were just trying to find a way to improve upon Gutenberg’s 1440 printing press so we could make a copy of something. Later that year Apple computers launched under Steve Jobs and Mike Wazowski, soon making copying as easy as A-B-Control+C.

1979 — Mean Joe Greene

On the surface, this was a benign and celebrated ad, but something more sinister was definitely going on.

Notice how the little boy had trapped a completely unsuspecting Mean Joe Greene in the tunnel while he was just trying to go about business? Just a portend of the hostage situation that would develop later that year in Iran.

Yes, Greene eventually enjoyed a Coke and a smile — just a classic Stockholm syndrome response.

1984 — Apple Macintosh 1984

Look, if you can’t figure this one out, you have never heard of the Cold War or read any George Orwell. This is considered one of the greatest commercials of all time, which might have been helped by the fact that it was directed by the same dude that did Alien and Gladiator.

(By the way, did Orwell happen to write a instruction manual called 2017? Asking for 325 million friends.)

1984 — Where’s the Beef

The U.S. hosted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles but many of the world’s top athletes were not there to compete and, not coincidentally, America dominated.

Where’s was the beef? Back home in the U.S.S.R., of course.

1989 — Bud Bowl I

In the good ol’ days, we tuned in to watch a bunch of animated beer bottles play ball, and there just happened to be real football in between. Here, Budweiser produced one of the first great stop motion ads, previewing the way Florida would stop all motion later that year for serial killer Ted Bundy.

1991 — You Got the Right One Baby, Uh Huh

In 1991, the U.S. launched Operation Desert Storm and then celebrated a ceasefire when Iraq and Kuwait agreed to peace. We never had problems in the Middle East again. Uh huh…

1992 — Cindy Crawford Pepsi

This commercial was about little boys wanting soda … with an American supermodel conspicuously in the background. Later that year, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was released, and featured a little boy lost in Manhattan running into a conspicuous American hotel tycoon. You can make the connection from there.

1993 — Michael Jordan / Larry Bird H-O-R-S-E

Jordan and Bird played the most epic game of H-O-R-S-E all time for a lunch at McDonalds. Later that year, Ty released Beanie Babies upon the world. Later that decade, McDonalds began a recurring Teenie Beanies campaign in which mothers dragged their children to the restaurant to stock up on plush toys the children were not allowed to play with. One of them was Spurs the Horse. Time is a flat circle.

1995 — Bud-Weis-Errrr Frogs

In March, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science somehow decided Forrest Gump should win Best Picture in a year that featured both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption.

You may remember loving Forrest Gump at first, but things were a bit froggy then, and that’s been toad-ally cleared up now as you got older, Bud-weiser.

1995 — Pepsi Innertube Kid

We spent the rest of that year watching the O.J. Simpson trial and experiencing reality television for the first time and it totally sucked. By the time that whole ordeal was over, most of us probably wished we had been stuffed in a bottle and set adrift in an ocean.

1996 — Clydesdale Football

The majestic Budweiser Clydesdales kicked the extra point here, but they usually go for two. That July 5, scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep creating two of the same animal. Scary stuff.

1996 — Coke Guy Caught on Camera

Cheatin’ Heart?? How in the world did Pepsi know about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair when it was happening in 1996, even though it didn’t come to light until two years later? Greatest presidential subtweet commercial ever. Your move, 2017.

1998 — Tabasco Mosquito

Look, the summer of ‘98 was really hot. These are not all that hard, keep up!

1999 — Wasssaaaaaap

What’s up? Wazzzupppp? Are you kidding me? The Dow Jones Industrial Index was up, that’s what. Over 11,000 for the first time ever!

Sup with you? Nothin … just watchin’ the game… checkin my 401k and stock futures in an appreciating market.

True … true …

2000 — We Just Wasted 2 Million Bucks Monkey

After tens of millions of dollars and months of the campaign trail, hanging chads on a Florida ballot sent the 2000 election to an expensive and timely recount before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Dubya in a split decision. What are you doing with your money?

2003 — E*TRADE Stock Baby

In 2003, babies were buying stock, Jordan retired from basketball to play baseball instead, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected Gubernator of California. 2003 also featured the Budweiser zebra replay commercial, Michael Jordan playing himself one-on-one, and Terry Tate Office Linebacker. What a time to be alive!!

2006 — Magic Fridge

The magic fridge was back, and so was every movie ever made. 2006 saw the release of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, Superman Returns, Big Momma’s House 2, Clerks II, Jackass Number Two, Basic Instinct 2, Garfield’s A Tale of Two Kitties, Final Destination 3, X-Men III: The Last Stand, and Scary Movie 4. No original movie idea was ever created again.

2007 — Kevin Federline Nationwide

In 2007, a young Barack Obama began campaigning for the presidency.

Life comes at you fast.

2008 — Doritos Mouse Trap and Bud Light Sausages

The 2008 writer’s strike cost us a lot of great television, but that didn’t prevent us from getting two of the funniest Super Bowl commercials of all time.

2009 — Doritos Crystal Ball

2009 saw the death of Michael Jackson, a successful nuclear launch test in North Korea, and the release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you saw that coming in your crystal ball, you probably would’ve thrown it through the vending machine too.

2010 — The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I’m on a horse.

In 2010, we got the original Old Spice guy and Justin Bieber. One out of two ain’t too bad!

2011 — Darth Vader Kid

In one of the biggest commercial foreshadows ever, the Darth Vader kid dominated Super Bowl headlines mere months before the world’s Darth Vader was captured and killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan. Let’s just be thankful bin Laden didn’t come with his own John Williams soundtrack.

2014 — Puppy Clydesdale Love

In 2014, a puppy and a Clydesdale found true love, and then Kim and Kanye got married. And Imma let you finish, but that was the greatest love story OF ALL TIME.

2016 — Puppymonkeybaby

WTF??

In hindsight, maybe we should’ve known 2016 would be the worst year ever.

The 25 Greatest Super Bowl Ads — And Their Secret Hidden Messages was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Never as great as Kobe, Duncan, K.G., etc., the immortal Vince Carter nonetheless inspired a generation of young NBA fans.

Vince Carter recently turned 40, making him the oldest player in the NBA. Along with fellow draft picks, Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Pierce, the three are the only active players to play a full season during the 1990s. To put things into perspective, last season’s Rookie of the Year, Karl Anthony-Towns, was two years old when the trio was selected in the 1998 NBA Draft.

With Shaquille O’Neal and Allen Iverson now enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame — and Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Kevin Garnett retired — Carter, Nowitski, and Pierce represent the final links to the initial post-Jordan generation. The latter pair undeniably achieved more than Carter; Dirk will likely go down as a top-five, all-time power forward, and Pierce’s game-winning moments and championship in Boston long-ago cemented his legacy.

Carter, however, whose nightly highlight reel-worthy moments were far too many to count, seems unfairly cast as a once-great-scorer-turned-journeyman-elder-statesman; someone not worthy of being hailed as one of the greatest players in his generation.

And that’s not right.

I was six years old in 1998 when Michael Jordan won his sixth and final NBA Championship in Chicago. I have no direct memories of the GOAT, other than Space Jam. Instead, I was raised on “the dozen,” the best players A.J. (after Jordan): Shaq, Duncan, Kobe, Iverson, Garnett., Dirk, Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Tracy McGrady, and … Carter.

In those first few post-Jordan years, Duncan, Garnett, and Kidd were obviously top-notch players, but their games weren’t yet appreciated by the casual NBA fan. McGrady, Nowitzki, and Nash wouldn’t peak until the latter part of the 2000s, and Pierce and Allen played for basement dwellers.

No, the era belonged to four men: Shaq, Kobe, Iverson, and Vince. And if you were a kid on the playground — unless you were as tall as you were wide — you almost certainly modeled your game after one of the latter three.

O’Neal, Duncan, and Bryant won 14 NBA Championships in total. Nowitzki and Garnett each won MVPs and a league title. Nash and Kidd spent a decade swapping the NBA’s “Best Point-Guard Alive” title; the former winning two MVPs, the latter winning it all in 2011 with Dirk in Dallas. Pierce and Allen were perennial All-Stars before winning a ring in Boston, and Allen went on to win another championship in Miami. A.I. won the 2001 MVP Award and a valiant Finals run.

Which leaves us with McGrady and Carter.

After playing in Carter’s spotlight for three years in Toronto, T-Mac blossomed into the league’s best scorer during stints in Orlando and Houston. And while neither his longevity nor durability ever matched Carter’s, McGracy undoubtedly enjoyed more time basking in the spotlight — mostly because Carter’s career-defining moments were not attached to MVPs or championships.

In the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest, Carter displayed one of the best performances in history of the competition, singlehandedly rivaling the iconic show put on by Jordan and Dominique Wilkins in the 1980s. At just 23 years old, it was widely believed to be his NBA coming-out party.

The following season, Carter took the Toronto Raptors to the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals. Facing off against the Philadelphia Sixers, Carter went toe-to-toe with league MVP Iverson.

• Game 1: Iverson 36 points, Carter 35 points
• Game 2: Iverson 54 points, Carter 28 points
• Game 3: Carter 50 points, Iverson 23 points
• Game 4: Iverson 30 points, Carter 25 points
• Game 5: Iverson 52 points, Carter 16 points
• Game 6: Carter 39 points, Iverson 20 points

In Game 7, with each star having score “just” 20 points, the Sixers held an 88–87 lead with :02 left on the clock. Carter received the Raptors inbound, got his defender on a pump-fake, and put up a great look that rimmed out. While Iverson went on to face the Los Angeles Lakers, everyone assumed that Carter would be back, the series loss just another stepping stone to his eventually ascension to league-elite status.

Instead, the loss was Carter’s peak.

In the following three season, Carter’s scoring dropped from 27.6 points per game in 2001 to 24.7, 20.6, and 22.5. During that period, Toronto failed to make the playoffs, and after discord with the team’s management, Carter was traded to the New Jersey Nets at what should have been the start of his prime (age 28).

Despite being paired with Kidd and Richard Jefferson, though, Carter and the Nets never got beyond the second round of the postseason. Following five unsuccessful years in New Jersey — despite Carter averaging 23.6/5.8/4.7 —he was suddenly 33 years old and on the downside.

The remainder of Carter’s career has seen stops in Orlando, Phoenix, Dallas, and now Memphis, where he’s found success as a veteran role player, averaging 11.2 points on 41.3 percent shooting in just over 24 minutes per game. Not too shabby for an old guy.

It’s hard to define the legacy of someone like Carter. Despite his early reputation as a malcontent, he now sports one of the finest reputations in the game, a consummate professional. It’s also not unfair to wonder whether Carter was something of a victim of circumstance, playing in an era which saw three of the top 12 players ever in Kobe, Duncan, and Shaq; two of the top-30 in Garnett and Nowitzki; and three of the top 50 in Iverson, Kidd, and Nash. It’s no shame not being better than that dozen, but it’s not entirely fair to diminish just how good and, for a short time, anyway, how dominant a player he was.

No, Carter never won a title. He never won an MVP Award, either. He was never chosen as an All-NBA First Teamer. And he never got beyond the second round of the playoffs. But he was the “Most Exciting Player to Watch for a three-year period, at least.

About four or five years ago, when Lob City became a thing and Sportscenter’s nightly top-ten was littered with Blake Griffin’s posterizing jams, I vaguely remember NBA pundits having an on-going discussion about whether or not Griffin was the best in-game dunker of all-time. When they took it one step further, putting Griffin against peak-Carter, though, that felt like a bridge too far. Griffin’s exploits undoubtedly justifies a place near the top of any dunker rankings, but over Carter? Just no. Do we not remember this?

In the end, Carter will probably be remembered as a really good, and sometimes great NBA player whose star burned brightly for too short a time. Not the scorer that Kobe or McGrady were. Certainly not A.I, the likes of whom had never been seen before and never will be again. But with all due respect to McGrady’s offensive prowess, Allen’s shooting, or Pierce’s ability to take over a game, Carter’s jaw-dropping ceiling just might have eclipsed them all.

Forget being like Mike; for a generation of kids born in the early ’90s, we only wanted to be like Vince. And after 21 seasons in the Associations, that’s a legacy no one can take away from him.

Long Live Vinsanity was originally published in The Cauldron on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.