It is the nature of the Olympics to alienate, and it is also the nature of the Olympics to bring you in. There is so much that is strange and stilted about it, and so many structural aspects that are howlingly distasteful, but also there are the athletes and the stories and the basic thrill of watching mastery even in sports you barely know how to watch. Another thing that the 2024 Paris Games have going for them, both in terms of alienation and appeal, is that they have thus far been notably French from the loopy-horny opening ceremony on. As two men who each possess unusual and volatile balances of appeal and its diametric opposite, Drew and I are probably too close to all this to talk about it effectively. Luckily, this week we had Defector's Sacramento Bureau Chief Patrick Redford on to provide a normal person's perspective on this very weird, pretty wonderful sports thing.
Eventually. We began with Drew requesting that both of us just shut the fuck up for a moment so that he could rant about NBC's coverage of the opening ceremony, which we more or less dutifully did before weighing in ourselves on a suitably berserk and, again, toweringly French curtain-raiser. We touched upon our favorite bits, most notably an implied threesome seemingly done in homage to Annie Ernaux and America's community of alpha reactionaries throwing theatrical panic attacks online about a performance from the metal band Gojira at, again, the Olympic opening ceremony. You will no doubt be relieved to know that we also talked about the sports—what we're watching and how effectively we're watching it, the thrill of athletes being too good for a layperson to appreciate and the singular experience of televised water polo, and the delightful low-stakes goofery surrounding the men's basketball team and its rolling DNPs for polarizing NBA stars.
This made for a natural transition to some of the NBA stories that Patrick has been working on, or anyway it did once we got some streaming-related gripes out of our collective system. We talked about the NBA's massive new television rights deal and its implications for both the league's economic future and the already-tenuous Get Woke Go Broke argument built by various dullards around the league's TV ratings. A discussion of the good and bad of Inside The NBA, which stands out as the most notable looming casualty of that new deal, led us to address what keeps a good studio show from being a bad one, and what separates a good commentator—here we had some praise for Dwyane Wade's debut as a color commentator during the Olympics—from, well, Draymond Green.
A question from Drew about NFL economics flowed into a discussion about how and why doing Moneyball-type maneuvers is impossible in the NFL, and then into the notable un-fun aspects of having to know and care about all this stuff—cap hits and tax aprons and so on—as a fan. "It's bad to know this much about the salary cap," Patrick says, and while all of us agreed on this we all had different explanations as to why. This bit is also notable for me saying "not for nothing" for the first time on a podcast, and like the fourth or fifth time in my life. I guess I was into it.
One of the salutary effects of the presidential election seeming like less of a grim slog towards authoritarianism is that Drew is once again eagerly plucking Trump-related questions from the Funbag. While this episode is blessedly free of Trump Voice—we blew our monthly quota last week—the question about whether Trump has ever really done any Classic New York City Things opened onto some interesting thought frontiers. I talk about one of my favorite Trump lies, which involves him stopping a mugging on the way to a Paula Abdul concert, and his documented love of buying Hershey bars from newsstands. Drew asks if Trump ever got a Papaya Dog and I get kind of upset; Patrick brings up Melania's high-flown and delightfully deranged statement after Trump was shot at, and we marveled at her strange language and considered her mention of "Donald's love of music." The image of Antonin Scalia eating an oyster shell-and-all made its way in here somehow. A second question about shower technique, which is another Funbag classic, led Patrick to reveal some truly deranged shower rituals, up to and including watching basketball on his phone in there. Drew and I reacted to this more or less as anyone would, but there was also something fitting about it—at Olympics time, especially, you don't have to really understand what someone is doing or why to appreciate them being good at it.
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