Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about the national anthem, Kevin Costner, desert island actors, action film musicals, and more.
Final reminder: Why Your Team Sucks returns to these fine servers next week, so get your submission in here before I go turning off the spigot. We’ve got a lot of NFL teams to preview and a lot of sucking to cover, so don’t fuck around. Get me that hate and get it to me fast.
Your letters:
Bill:
I was looking at a road atlas the other day and wondered: Which state in this country do you think about the least/forget about all together? For me it’s Wyoming. No news/sports exposure on a national level, nowhere close to me geographically, etc.
Yeah but Wyoming has the Old West allure going for it. As someone who has never lived there, I have a vision of Wyoming in my head that includes buffalo roaming the open valleys of Yellowstone, real-deal cowboys teaching their children how to properly rope a calf, and lots of kickass skiing and hot tubbing in Jackson Hole. Now that idyll of Wyoming is only partially based in reality. Most of that state is either uninhabitable or populated with homicidal militiamen.
But that state still has more mythos to it than, say, North Dakota. Who the fuck ever thinks about North Dakota, especially now that Kristi Noem has moved to DC to enforce the president’s “kill all the nonbelievers” policy? Whenever you hear someone is from North Dakota, it’s like hearing they grew up on the fucking moon. You mean there are people who actually live in that state? How? Why? North Dakota is basically Minnesota’s overflow parking lot. The most famous thing about it is Fargo, and that movie doesn’t even take place there. The second most famous thing about it is either Carson Wentz or Trey Lance. That’s a pretty shallow list of credentials. I never think about that state. And if I ever do, it’s not for a good reason. Fuck North Dakota.
Dylan:
Trash talking should be allowed in chess: Yes/no? I think it would be awesome and would increase both knowledge of and interest in chess.
But they do trash talk in chess … with their eyes. Or they can use thier mouths to do it in street matches. Like at Washington Square Park, as evidenced by one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies:
I’ve been meaning to work “fishcake” into my insult repertoire, but I’m still not certain if that’s strictly a chess-related epithet or not.
But I digress. There’s no amount of trash talk or flashy theatrics that will make tournament chess as big as other sports, because it’s still chess. You can look your opponent dead in the eyes and say, “I can still taste your wife in my mouth from last night.” But they probably don’t speak the same language as you, and they have no opportunity to get revenge by hip checking you into the boards later in the match. The game of chess, especially when played in a formal setting, is so cerebral that yapping doesn’t quite fit with it. That’s true even of today’s chess scene, which already has plenty of heroes and villains to go around, the vaguely Elon-esque Magnus Carlsen foremost among them. This is where I stop answering Dylan’s question, because I’m fucking terrible at chess and know next to nothing about chess culture save for what Patrick Redford or Ben Tippet write about it here.
Jeff:
How good did Oasis sound in Cardiff last weekend? Granted I wasn’t there, but the videos they’ve been posting and the bootlegs that have been circling around sound amazing. Like holy shit I didn’t think they’d sound THIS good, you know? Liam seems to be on his best behavior and Noel seems to really be enjoying himself as well.
One of my friends said she wasn’t gonna go see them live this summer because Liam’s voice is shot, and the above link from Jeff provides decent evidence of it. Liam can’t hit the high notes on “Slide Away,” so he doesn’t bother. But I never expected him to be able to do that because singers’ voices deepen as they grow old, and because Liam Gallagher is lazy. The last Oasis concert I went to was 20 years ago, and Liam was just as negligent back then as he is now. But the concert was still a blast, because it was Oasis and because they play really, really fucking loud. Can’t hear Liam miss those high notes when your ears are gushing blood, amigo. The heart forgives what the brain may not.
Also, this is where I pay reluctant tribute to the use of backing tracks. I used to consider backing tracks to be cheating. I saw Lenny Kravitz play at the Garden long ago and he used backing tracks the whole show. I was like, “Well that’s bullshit. I paid to hear you sing live, Lenny! And to see your dick and balls explode out of your leather pants!” But do I really want to hear one of my favorite artists (yes I loved Lenny Kravitz back then) sound like shit? Don’t I want the songs to sound like the songs, and not like Zeppelin at Live Aid? Well, backing tracks are what make that happen.
I realized this when GQ sent me to cover Motley Crue’s “farewell” tour 10 years ago (they’re still together and still touring). I had to go to two Crue shows for that assignment. Both shows were fantastic, and do you know why? Backing tracks. The sound mixing was so well integrated into the proceedings that I actually believed that Vince Neil could still sing. He can’t, but “Kickstart My Heart” still sounded like “Kickstart My Heart,” and that’s all I ever wanted. And even though Liam’s timbre has inevitably aged, that soundboard recording of “Slide Away” is close enough to the real thing to make me happy.
OK I’m gonna have to put a moratorium on Oasis questions for the time being. Otherwise people are gonna start to revolt.
Alex:
Was at the July 4 fireworks show by the San Fran Symphony and a lot of people stood up for the national anthem. Wasn’t expecting it since it wasn’t a ball game. Anyhow, what’s your national anthem protocol and why? Are you standing or sitting? Hat on or off? Hands at side or on heart?
We’re talking about in person, yeah? Because I do nothing for the anthem when it’s on TV. If you stand up in your TV room when that song comes on, you’re probably an ICE agent.
For any live anthem, I am a fully socialized animal. If everyone else stands, I stand. If they all take off their hats, I probably take mine off. If they all sing, I either sing along or mouth the words in the half-assed manner of a preschooler. Hand on the heart is going a bit far, but in general I just try to blend in for 90 seconds as I wait for the song to end. The anthem before a game is like going to church before Christmas dinner. You endure it, and then you get to the good shit.
And I’m one of the few progressive Americans left who still think it’s good anthem, mind you. I even like singing it when I’ve got the mic in my hands. But I’ve heard it so many times, and in so many needless instances, that it barely registers with me anymore. They even play it before swim meets where I live. Not like Olympic qualifying swim meets, I mean a meet between like the Jimburg Pool Club and the YMCA Dolphinmen. I wish they’d played some Judas Priest instead.
I have never knelt for the anthem, by the way. I’ve thought about it, especially back in the late 2010s. I was like, “I should kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick!” Then I was like, “Boy, that concrete under my seat looks awfully hard, and what if people look at me weird?” That was all the incentive I needed to turn coward and stand there like a fucking pud. This is why I usually use the anthem ceremony to go take a last piss.
Brian:
The wife and I stumbled across Field of Dreams during a recent channel-surfing expedition. I figured we were in for some wholesome Americana. Upon watching, we quickly realized that the most unbelievable part isn’t that Shoeless Joe Jackson emerged from an Iowa corn maze looking like a young Ray Liotta. It’s that Annie Kinsella didn’t immediately have her husband Ray committed to a psychiatric facility. The movie wants us to believe this is about faith and following your dreams, but it’s really about a woman enabling her husband’s complete mental collapse.
Ah well, such plot holes tend to go overlooked when you’re making a fairy tale about a magical baseball field where dead Hall of Famers chill out. If memory serves, I’m pretty sure that Amy Madigan’s Annie told her husband (Kevin Costner), point blank, that he was out of his goddamn mind. But what 1980s movie doesn’t include a supporting character—almost always a woman—telling the main character that his big idea is stupid and wrong? Again, we’re coloring inside the baselines here. This is nothing that would make the average filmgoer from back then scoff.
I know Brian is joking with this question, or at least I hope that he is. But we’re so far removed from the initial Field of Dreams backlash, which I reveled in, that stunting on that movie now feels about as old as the movie itself. It’s more fun to look back more dispassionately, especially since Field of Dreams happened before Kevin Costner rebranded himself into a Serious Filmmaker, blew so much studio money that he got kicked down to the D list, and then went on the exact same ego trip another time after Yellowstone made him superfamous again. It can be hard to remember Costner’s prime after all of that nonsense. Similarly, given how shabbily the current stewards of MLB have cared for the game, it’s hard to remember when this sport actually liked itself. It used to like itself to a fault, but I’d prefer that to whatever Rob Manfred is trying to do with the sport’s image right now.
So I’m OK with some revisionism here. Even though I thought Field of Dreams was sappy (it was of course supposed to be, but I didn’t care), it was well made. It was also part of a brief stretch run where Costner headlined not only one of the most beloved sports movies ever made (Field of Dreams), but also arguably the consensus greatest sports movie ever made (Bull Durham). He also made No Way Out, which was one of the best thrillers of that decade. And I haven’t even mentioned The Untouchables, which has aged horribly but was the most badass thing I’d ever seen when I was 11 years old. In other words, Kevin Costner was cool once. I swear it’s true. I’m one of the six people who still remember Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves fondly, so my credibility is debatable here. But if anyone was gonna convincingly pull off the role of Ray Kinsella in 1989, and cheer for him to bankrupt his family despite his wife’s pleas, it was that Kevin Costner.
As an aside, I watched John Sayles’s Eight Men Out for the first time over the weekend. Now that’s the best baseball movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got the sepia-toned, old timey baseball feel to it. But it uses those atmospherics to tell one of the skuzziest stores in sports history, which is always the best kind of sports story. Sayles eschews all of the standard sports movie clichés to depict a time in history when owners like Charlie Comiskey were so cheap that players almost had no choice but to sell their own team out to the mob. God, I love Prohibition-era crime shit, even The Untouchables. I think I might have to rewatch Boardwalk Empire now.
HALFTIME!
Michael:
Very aware Netflix sports docs are garbage. But old Deadspin is prominently featured in at least two of them: Brett Favre and Manti Te’o. Curious if anyone has inquired about doing a full documentary on old Deadspin.
Given that we’re quickly approaching the five-year anniversary of this site(!!!), and given that we’d like Defector to be known as its own thing and not a child of Defector, I’d like to quickly recap the Deadspin thing for our newer readers. Many of the writers and editors here worked at Deadspin until 2019, when this FOX News anchor-looking piece of shit compelled all of us to quit en masse and start this place. It’s a good story, one that’s more than ripe for a hastily assembled 30 for 30 or whatever.
But no one, to my knowledge, has ever approached us about making one. We got interview requests for those Favre and Te’o docs, but I don’t think any of us granted one. Now, if Apple came to us and was like, “We’d like Martin Scorsese to make a movie about you guys. Here’s $50 million,” that’s another conversation. But for now, I have no interest in contributing, at no charge, to some documentarian who’s probably gonna fuck up the story anyway.
Because I’ve been burned enough times to know better. Back at Deadspin, Ben Strauss of the Washington Post interviewed us all for some big story he was doing on the site. I sat with him for an hour and gave him whatever copy I could. Half the quotes in the resulting piece ended up coming from Clay Travis. I ain’t forgotten that shit, Ben. I’ll sit down with fucking Bari Weiss before I return your next email.
Andy:
I spotted this poster on a recent visit to Pittsburgh: an open casting call for a live musical theater adaptation of the 1994 mega-hit Speed. I was listening to The Distraction when I saw the poster, and so: I naturally thought, “Who from Defector would I cast in a stage musical version of Speed.” Any thoughts? If Patrick can sing, I say let him have the Dennis Hopper role. Also, I don’t know what the songbook is for this thing but if there isn’t a Zager & Evans-inspired number called “On the Bus 2525,” then that’s a badly missed opportunity.
I hate every bus I see, from Route 9A to 40C…
First of all, let’s give a hand to the yinzer Max Fischer who almost certainly talked his drama teacher into staging this production. Given that I am the best singer on the Defector staff by far, as well the handsomest, I’d have to take the Keanu role. Lauren Theisen, a formidable karaoke presence in her own right, would of course play Sandy Bullock’s character. As for Hopper’s disgruntled, psychotic ex-cop, I think you’ll agree with me that our own Ray Ratto has a personality that neatly coincides with it. Can Ray sing? Probably not. In fact, if I asked Ray to sing something, he’d probably respond with some Ray shit like, “My singing voice is uglier than your face, but unlike you I can hide it.” Such a warm and cuddly man.
This reminds me to force my sons to watch Speed. I haven’t even gotten Die Hard in front of them yet, so their action movie knowledge base remains sorely lacking.
Lora:
You have to pick one actor (not actress, that’s a separate question)to be in every movie from now until their death. All genres, all budgets, and they have in a major role in each; maybe not a title character, but a major character. Who are you choosing? Whose face is it you’re willing to see or voice you’re willing to hear in every movie from here on out? My choice was Adam Sandler. I think he has the range.
I don’t agree there, Lora. I just watched Hustle—which is basically a feature length ad designed to get people interested in the NBA scouting combine—over the weekend. Sandler was great in it, but that movie was the first time I’d ever seen him play a character who actually talks and acts like a man Sandler’s age (58). Adam Sandler is as talented a performer as there is, and he definitely deserved a Best Actor trophy for Uncut Gems. But if you’re giving me a desert island actor, I gotta pick an actor actor. Someone whose movies I go out of my way to see, regard of genre or critical notice. Here’s a quick list of candidates:
- Gary Oldman
- Denzel Washington
- Daniel Kaluuya
- Steve Buscemi
- Stephen Graham
- Billy Bob Thornton
- Jake Gyllenhaal
- Riz Ahmed
- Ben Mendelsohn
- Jeremy Strong
- Michael Stuhlbarg
- Tom Hardy
Buscemi gets my vote here. Also, I know that Lora said that were another question, but I’mma go rogue and list some favorite names for that, too. TRY AND STOP ME, LORA!
- Shohreh Aghdashloo
- Rebecca Ferguson
- Viola Davis
- Anya Taylor-Joy
- Margot Robbie
- Kelly Macdonald
- Aubrey Plaza
- Kerry Condon
- Cristin Milioti
- Ayo Edebiri
Going Milioti here, even if my heart wants Rebecca Ferguson to star in everything for the rest of time. Between Palm Springs and The Penguin, Cristin Milioti has proven that she can do basically anything.
Oscar:
As a fellow Vikings fan and Kirk hater, I am getting quite the thrill out of the second season of Quarterback. Specifically, I just finished the third episode. Watching Cousins’ corny ass trying to score brownie points in Atlanta by getting way too into Swag Surfin’ halfway through the season has bated my breath for the coming collapse. Is this the pinnacle of a hate-watch?
I wouldn’t know because the second that Kirk left Minnesota, I never had to care about him again. It’s been the sweetest of times in that regard, so I haven’t watched Season 2 of Quarterback, because I have no skin in the game.
However, I did enjoy seeing this clip of Joe Burrow getting red as shit after leaving the field without scoring. Watch a pathetic Zac Taylor try to calm Burrow down and you quickly understand who’s the real head coach of the Bengals. That’s more interesting to me than seeing Kirk Cousins go dawww gee! when the Falcons draft Michael Penix. Kirk Cousins no longer exists in my world, and I’m a happier man for it.
Brian:
On the last Distraction podcast, you mentioned that you moved out of New York City on “New Years Eve 2003.” I am always confused on this naming convention. Is “New Years Eve 2003” December 31, 2002 or December 31, 2003? I want to remember what I was doing when you were moving out of NYC but without the exact date, my memories could be a year off. Please help!
I meant December 31, 2003. The only time I fudge years in with NFL postseasons, i.e. I consider the Eagles the 2024 Super Bowl champs even though their win against the Chiefs was technically played in 2025. Otherwise, I go by the book. It’s just easier that way, even if I still have a hard time remembering that particular year as our moving year. We also adopted our dog, Carter, on a New Year’s Eve. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember which goddamn year that was. I think it was New Year’s 2016. Lemme check with the dog to make sure I’m right.
(talks to the dog)
OK yeah he says I nailed it. Good on me. Calendars are hard.
Richard:
After a particular incident today, I realized I absolutely do not like the city I live in. I moved here because it was much cheaper than the other option nearby. My home state has awful politics, so no go there. I’m just looking for advice. Do I just up and move (work from home, so I got options) to somewhere else? Do I stick it out and try to better the place I live? I’m at a major crossroads in life and this isn’t helping.
That depends on what kind of roots you’ve put down in that city. I myself would like to retire somewhere quieter than where I presently live, but I can’t just up and go. My wife has to be on board, my kids want to finish out school here with their friends, and I abhor filling out a change of address form. You see how prevailing circumstances are in the way of that move to Cadiz for yours truly. Annoying. That stupid Iran war could have done the job by forcing all of us to flee America for good, but then everyone forgot about what war like three days after Trump started it. Stupid national attention deficit disorder.
But my present, incredibly mild dilemma is of little utility to Richard here, who may have fewer local roots that require tending. Instead, I’ll just offer him this piece of advice: I only moved to the place I live now because of my wife. I’m glad we moved, of course. But I never would have left New York had I not had a distinct, personal incentive to do so. It sounds incredibly nice to just up and move your life somewhere cool, but it’s hard to find motivation to actually do it without some tangible reason to execute the maneuver: a loved one, a job, a school, whatever. Find that reason, Richard. Find out what you’d really like to do with the rest of your life, and who you’d like to share it with, and your new home will soon reveal itself to you. I never expected to become a Marylander, but I’m glad life took me here.
Now to plot my escape.
Email of the week!
Zoe:
I’m a big fan of both of your work and a weekly Distraction listener. Last week (or maybe two weeks ago now), you read a funbag question about dealing with MAGA people on a golf course. I think your answers missed the mark a bit. I agree with you that we (as in the amorphous left) don’t need to be confrontational all the time. We should be able to have normal conversations with people who we disagree with. But I felt like your answer to the specific question (and maybe I misheard/misunderstood you) was basically to ignore it until they say something really bad (the n-word) and then dip out.
As a trans person, hearing this was a little disheartening. I don’t think the question’s author needs to directly confront the MAGA golfer and get into a screaming match with them, but the next time they hear something transphobic, they could say something very basic like, “Oh actually I have trans friends/neighbors/coworkers/family members/etc, they are just normal people, (obviously don’t out anyone),” and then change the subject. The right is attempting to erase trans people from public existence. They have been demonising us to the point where fewer people in the US support trans rights than they did last year or the year before. I’m not asking anyone to engage in a heated debate during their leisure time, but allies can still do a little bit to humanise us to people who likely never knowingly met a trans person before.
I don’t mean to come off as sanctimonious and I don’t expect, or need, any sort of reply from either of you, but I wanted to give you some unsolicited feedback. I don’t really use social media/I didn’t read any of the comments on the Defector post, so sorry if this is something that has already been addressed somewhere else. I really do love all your work and hope you both have some tasty sandwiches soon.
I’ll take this to heart. And also eat the good sandwiches. Thanks, Zoe.