My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

My full-time devotion to college basketball has been dwindling for years, but it bottomed out this season. Due to a confluence of the Winter Olympics taking up my attention for two weeks, the ever-lengthening college football season preventing the formerly neat turning of the calendar from one sport to the other at New Year’s, and life and all that it entails, I hardly watched any college basketball in 2025-26. And yet, there is something to be said for coming into the first weekend of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the best part of America’s best sporting event, with few expectations and little prior knowledge, just ready to be surprised and captivated. And boy, was I. Granted, this first weekend had less upset-laden madness than so many Marches past, a continuation of a new but troubling trend, but to paraphrase noted metaphysicist Stevie Nicks, when it was good, reader, it was very, very good. A few notes by way of a team.

For the fourth time in five NCAA Tournaments, Akron’s Zippy was the best mascot of March.

My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

 

Rob Martin, High Point / Nick Boyd, Wisconsin. I enjoy the three-point revolution in basketball, and High Point is committed to it, what with a player who essentially only shoots three-pointers. But High Point versus Wisconsin was my favorite kind of basketball, nevertheless, where the playground version merges with the one played inside a gym as two teams space the floor and let their respective point guards try and break down the defense by attacking the rim, again and again. Boyd had 27 points and 6 assists in a magnificent losing effort while Martin put up an equally magnificent 23 points and 10 assists before outdoing himself in his own losing effort against Arkansas in the second round with 30 points and 5 assists. Objectively, he was outplayed by his Razorback counterpart, Darius Acuff Jr., who finished with 36 points and 6 assists. But the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is not about future NBA lottery picks like Acuff but comets like Martin who invoke fleeting wonder*. And just as Martin’s lilliputian counterpart Max Abmas once momentarily transformed Oral freaking Roberts into a school worth rooting for, so, too, did Martin give what seems to be a furniture empire-infused finishing school for rich kids a glint of the old Cinderella story. That is the magic of March Madness™.

*Honorable Mention: Francis Folefac of Siena, freshman and Kinesiology Major, whose team damn near became only the third sixteenth seed to topple a one, mighty Duke, and who was absolutely fearless in repeatedly going right at Cameron Boozer, widely expected to be the top pick in the NBA Draft. Vaya con Dios. 

Tyler Tanner, Vanderbilt. As good as Wisconsin v High Point was, the best game of the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament was the second-round tilt between fourth-seeded Nebraska and fifth-seeded Vanderbilt. There was an edge to this one, born, I suspect, of desperation fueled by two teams who rarely find themselves on such a stage. Indeed, Nebraska, having only won its first NCAA Tournament game ever but 48 hours earlier, had literally never been in this position and to win their second game they had to fight off the Commodores’ jitterbugging, pickpocketing, trash-talking point god Tyler Tanner who early in the second half hopscotched past, I think, three defenders in the lane while keeping his dribble to get off a scoop shot that did not go in but still made me think, “Was that that the best missed shot I’ve ever seen?” Little did I know! Trailing 74-72 with 2.2 seconds left, Tanner launched a 60-foot shot that did not just do everything but go in, no, it did go in...and then came back out of the basket, the greatest March Madness™ buzzer beater that was not. If I had not seen it, I might not have believed it, and though I was rooting for Nebraska, and though I was ecstatic that they won, I confess, Tyler Tanner won my heart. You will never convince me that the bad juju incurred from four years of the Scott Frost football era at Nebraska did not cause the hand of fate to intervene in that missed shot. 

Robbie Avila, Saint Louis. Avila was not a surprise, exactly. I have been hearing about this guy for several years now, first at Indiana State and then down the road at Saint Louis University where he transferred when his Indiana State coach took the gig. After all, in his 6'10" height, 240 lbs, and rec specs, he has become folk hero with a multitude of colorful nicknames like Cream Abdul-Jabbar and Milk Chamberlain. It was not, however, until his team’s first round game against Georgia that I finally sat down and watched him play. And though his team was no way, shape, or form just him, he was the spark plug. He knocked down threes and had a soft touch around the rim but as much as anything, it was his passing, out of the high post and all manner of long and short outlet passes to his speedy guards that kept the Billikens’ motors permanently revved en route to a 102-77 eating of Georgia’s lunch. More than that, though he might appear a plodder in his build, he was incredibly nimble on his feet, running up and down in the court all game long in a manner reminiscent of Newman’s unlikely agility in sprinting after Kramer when the latter is hurrying down the street with the Risk board (it’s a long story) in a sixth season episode of “Seinfeld.” Ultimately, Saint Louis could not hang with top-seeded Michigan in the second round but even in losing by almost as many as they beat Georgia by, they put on a rattling good show, and who is the official best team is of no concern to this movie blog writing about basketball anyway. The Saint Louis Billikens win our Rainbow Heart Syrup national championship.  

Saint Louis Center Robbie Avila on the fast break.

Tavion Banks, Iowa. Banks is my preferred college basketball type, an anomaly that makes pedantic NBA scouts cringe, a power forward with a shooting guard/small forward combo’s 6'7" height who might be emblematic of the current nomadic incarnation of college basketball by going from Northwest Florida State College to Drake University to, finally, the University of Iowa but also demonstrates that for many, frankly, the college experience is circuitous, not linear. The whole Hawkeye plane felt like it was made out of Banks-like characters and after cement-mixing Clemson in a first-round game that was fun, really, only if you had a rooting interest in Iowa, they ousted defending champion Florida in a seismic second-round upset by paradoxically pulling the high-flying Gators into the glorious muck of their slow-paced swamp where Banks and his undersized, outgunned mates wrestled them to a one-point defeat and reached the second week of the tournament for the first time since 1999. Former Iowa Hawkeye running back and momentary Heisman Trophy candidate Tavian Banks, still fourth on the school’s all-time rushing list, undoubtedly assumed his place as the foremost Tavian Banks in Hawkeye lore was assured, but as Tavion Banks goes to show, history is always being revised. 

Sixth Man: Dion Brown, Saint Louis. Speaking of 1999... I think the best college basketball regular season game I have watched in the last five years, if not more, was a random mid-February one between two teams with losing records, the Syracuse Orange and the Boston College Eagles, both of whom fired their coach this year, and which I watched only because I sought a college basketball game while My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife did the NYT crossword and she prefers that if I watch a game, it’s one with a good mascot, which Syracuse has in the form of Otto the Orange. He’s an orange! Lo and behold, a triple-overtime spirited rec league-feeling game broke out and reminded me of the January and February Saturdays of my youth when I would get deeply involved in the doubleheaders of old Big 8 and Big 10 games on the central Iowa local affiliates between middle-of-the-pack teams while a syndicated re-run of “The Breakfast Club” on another channel that also seemed to air every weekend underlined these precious reprieves from school. I digress. That Boston College team had this guy who was dead ringer for Prince. And as I watched Saint Louis turn Georgia into gruel, I thought, “Wait, that guy looks a little like Prince.” It was him! Dion Brown, who has trimmed his hair, unfortunately, and does not look quite as much like Prince as he previously did, and who, it turned out, transferred to Saint Louis from Boston College where he had transferred from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lending an appropriate figurative wail to the last 4 days of basketball, “a wonderful trip through time where laughter is all you pay.”

SID (Sports Information Director): Hailee Steinfeld, State Farm Commercial. It’s just a version of captive consumerism, surely, but I saw that “Livin’ on a Prayer” State Farm commercial about 456 times during the last four days and Steinfeld’s double-take reaction shot to the over-aggressive lunacy of Keegan-Michael Key and Danny McBride really started to feel like an impeccable summation of suffering through the global madness unleashed by one deranged lunatic.  

(Big) Best Picture Questions

“Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” – Comrade Josh, One Battle After Another

What, exactly, do we want from the Academy Award for Best Picture? Should it be the movie that most captures the public’s imagination? Should it be the movie that makes the most money? Are those two things interchangeable or are they incompatible or are they somewhere in-between? Should it be a movie that says something? If so, what should it say, and how should it say it? Subtly or with great force? Should it take sides, or should it take no sides at all? Should it be topical, or should it be more universal? Should it be, simply, the best movie of the year? But how on earth do you quantify the best movie of the year? You think it’s “Oppenheimer,” but I think it’s “Barbie,” and it was “Barbie,” you’re wrong, sorry, but where does that get us? Do we really want art to be an ice dancing competition? But then, I’m not voting and you’re not voting; the Academy is voting. What does any of it have to do with us? Maybe they just want to reward the movie that gave the most people jobs.

Maybe what the collective “we” wants more than anything, though, is a Best Picture winner that stands the test of time. That is what so many lists sprouting up this time of year would seem to suggest, anyway, the ones counting all times the Oscars got it wrong, and the people telling you for the millionth time that “Goodfellas” should have won Best Picture over “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 would seem to suggest it too. But expecting 11,000 people to predict by majority what movie will measure up three or four decades from now is asking a lot. “The Last Emperor” swept the Academy Awards in 1987, winning all 9 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet, who remembers it, who talks about it? There was a whole “Frasier” episode about this phenomenon with the eponymous psychiatrist repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to watch and enjoy “How Green Was My Valley”: “It won five Academy Awards!” he bellows to the indifferent teenage clerk at the video rental store. “It’s a classic!” Twenty years later, that is how I feel about “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that the culture at large discarded. Would I have told people in 2005 that “Million Dollar Baby” would last forever? I did tell people that! But whether something is timeless can only be measured with, well, obviously. “They come where they come from,” the esteemed Roger Ebert said in 2003 regarding this very subject. “You never know until they arrive.” To paraphrase Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” I’ve heard people say for years about certain movies that this one will endure, “trust me, when I know, I know, and when it comes to this movie, I know,” and they don’t.

If aging has taught me anything, it’s that for all their pomp and circumstance, the Oscars are as ephemeral as they are everlasting, and that they tend to capture fleeting moments in time more than they portend the future. “The Silence of the Lambs” became an unexpected pop culture juggernaut and lightning rod in 1991; “The English Patient” put an exclamation point on the 90s indie revolution in 1996; like Kevin Costner and “Dances with Wolves” before him, Ben Affleck and “Argo” were carried away on a sudden wave of goodwill in 2012. On a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Michael Schulman noted that generally the Best Picture nominees of any given year indirectly evoke a larger cultural feeling reflective of their respective moment. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution captured one of these moments in full detail, an awards season pitched between the last vespers of the Golden Age and New Hollywood. I will not launch into yet another impassioned defense of “Titanic,” but at the time of its Oscar triumph in 1997, William Goldman, a fervent admirer of it, was also foreseeing a future in which people wondered what the fuss had been all about. In the moment, everybody knows everything, but in the end, as Goldman said, [say it with me] nobody knows anything. 

Ah, and yet, during this very awards season, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has notified us that “Hamnet” will stand the test of time, and Matt Neal of ABC Radio in Australia has advised us that “Sinners” will stand the test of time. All this talk of time is funny because it was a central subject of several Best Picture nominees. “Train Dreams” advances the idea that we can only understand our existence through the rearview mirror; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb “The Secret Agent” demonstrates how history can become buried beneath the sands of time while “Sentimental Value” illustrates that time alone does not necessarily heal all wounds; in one breathtaking sequence, “Sinners” draws past, present, and future all together at once in the same room. “One Battle After Another” draws all those concepts together too. Rather than having a character say, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us,” as he did in his own “Magnolia,” writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson creates a vibe, to use the parlance of our times, that improbably blends the 1960s/70s and the present-day. And in adapting and remodeling Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the story of a burned out revolutionary and his burgeoning revolutionary daughter, PTA embodies the endless tide of the 250-year battle over America’s soul going in and out.

Whether “One Battle After Another” is better than “Sinners,” or whether it deserves Best Picture more, honestly, means less to me than how both movies suggest a way forward in an industry that has been stuck at a crossroads doubling as a cul-de-sac for years now. Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are event films with a pulse, pop moviemaking with a distinct auteurist bent, supreme craft and relentless energy intertwined with a deeper meaning. Of course, both movies were produced by Warner Bros., which is merging with Paramount, run by one our most prominent uncaring idiot sons, and the code that was just cracked might intentionally be lost forever, one more moment in time destined to slip through our fingers.

Harrison Ford: an Appreciation

A few months ago, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I started watching “Shrinking,” the Apple TV show in which Harrison Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the unlikely patriarch of a makeshift family of therapists in his practice and all the people in their lives. It is firmly in the “Ted Lasso” dramedy vein, one where the comedy can sometimes hinder the drama, and vice-versa, allowing difficult ideas to go down a little too easy, though such sentimentality is counterbalanced by Ford’s irascible vulnerability. Everything that Ford is blossoms in the role of Paul, so much so that the character’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s forcing him to confront his mortality feels on some level like it is preparing us all for the eventuality of Ford’s death. I don’t mean to be dark. There is something refreshing about such honesty in our age of longevity-obsessed bros and Ford, after all, is the one who thought Han Solo should be killed off all the way back in “Return of the Jedi,” demonstrating that he already knew in a way that so many do not that not everything is meant to last forever. What’s more, in recently accepting the SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ford nodded at that reality too. “I am in a room of actors,” he began his acceptance speech by saying, “many of whom are here because they have been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.” In that moment, taking a beat after the self-deprecating punchline for a deadpan stare, it was hard not to think: the old guy’s still got it. 

To a person of my generation, Ford is a big deal, having starred in touchstones whose names do not even need mentioning. Roles like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are iconic, but they became iconic later. He made them what they were, and he was virtually inextricable from them, and it’s why I’m almost positive that he was the first actor, nay, movie star whose name I really, truly knew. Now, the line on movie stars is that their persona tends to overwhelm the role, and while Ford’s characters almost always have that same gruff, laconic exterior, he creates interiors, too, as he did in the (more than middling) thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive.” He spends so much of that movie alone, and yet we also not only always know what his character is thinking but who he is. Ford’s pause before his character leaps off the dam turns a stunt set piece into an emotional leap of faith, the nexus of movie star acting. His craft tends to disappear before your eyes, which is why, I suspect, he never won an Oscar and was only nominated once; those fellow Academy actors like to see the acting. 

There was no bigger box office star in the 80s, and there were only a handful of box office stars in the 90s who were bigger, but as the industry changed in the new millennium, turning its attention to superheroes and more youth-oriented franchises, it was hard not to feel Ford’s star dim. He spent a couple decades starring in vanishing middle-class movies that felt like they were transplanted from the 80s and 90s (“Firewall,” “Morning Glory,”) and hawking bottled nostalgia in the new Indiana Jones movie and the new “Star Wars” trilogy. Where once he helped to create something new and invigorating, now he seemed to struggle from lack of a better idea. In 2010, one line in the “Extraordinary Measures” trailer turned him into a meme, and it felt like a demarcation between generations, one that remembered who he had been and one that wasn’t sure what to make of this curmudgeonly old coot. He finally conceded in 2025 and appeared in “Captain America: Brave New World,” the fourth movie in the “Captain America” series. Reviews were mixed.

That movie was an extension of a TV series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” evoking the blurring lines between the big screen and the small screen in our current entertainment landscape, a reality that Ford seemed to acknowledge by returning to scripted television for the first time since his big break. I don’t want to turn this into another movies versus TV debate, but I had always hoped that Hollywood could mount one more movie project worthy of Ford to give him a proper send-off. Yet, appropriately for someone essentially self-taught as an actor, he manifested that send-off for himself in his SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. In briefly remembering his own career while noting the whole purpose of SAG in the first place as protection and fellowship, he gave something that sounded a lot like a Hollywood farewell address. Even more than that, it was how he gave it. We live in an era of attention-seeking bluster and noise and yet, here was Ford with an innate master class in acting on camera, effortlessly drawing and holding the attention of everyone watching without raising his voice or over-exaggerating, epitomizing a movie star’s sense of presence. The pictures have gotten smaller, that’s indisputable, and Ford is living proof, but in that moment, he still felt larger than life. 

From the Couch: the 2026 Winter Olympics in Review

The last Italian Winter Games 20 years ago in Turin were the worst Olympics of my Olympics-obsessed life. This had nothing to do with the Games themselves and everything to do with my physical health having fallen off a cliff at the start of 2006. Something was terribly wrong with me, and at that point, no one knew what, and so even though I watched the Olympics that year, I watched less of them than usual, and almost all my memories of doing so melted in real time. The only one I retain is U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen’s long program. She was in second place after the preceding short program, but had a reputation for struggling under pressure, and I wanted so much for her to excel. That same day I had been scheduled to see a gastroenterologist who would cancel on me at the last minute, foreshadowing how unhelpful and uncaring he would be, and so, I was already glum when I went to a sports bar with friends. I had avoided Cohen’s results all day, because 20 years ago NBC still showed everything on tape delay, but when she took to the ice for the make-or-break moment, a woman a couple tables over, in the air of someone who only finds fun in ruining everyone else’s, loudly declared: “She doesn’t win.” That is my foremost Turin takeaway: sitting there in that moment, feeling like I wanted to cry and not because I was watching a medal ceremony. I still can’t make peace with that joy-taker in my own mind, though in her wretched way, she encapsulated my experience of the Turin Games: they were ruined before they had even begun.

The Olympics are not just about America, never have been, never will be (should be), but considering that we’re the one making a mess of things in the international order, I admired so many American athletes in Milan and in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the 2026 Winter Olympics wrestling with those mixed emotions, like curler Rich Ruohonen and freestyle skier Hunter Hess. The latter stoked the ire of our know nothing President who in his third-grade syntax deemed Hess a real loser and hard to root for, contradicting his own Vice President’s self-congratulatory banalities about rooting for all Americans despite political affiliation. Hess’s teammate Chloe Kim might be right that we should lead with love and compassion, but occasionally it’s refreshing to hear the candor of someone like Greenland biathlete Ukaleq Slettemark who said of the American President: “I hate him.” Thankfully, Hess did not require a humanitarian visa a la Krystsina Tsimanouskaya at the 2021 Summer Olympics after she criticized her native Belarus, though the President would undoubtedly prefer America to be a place that imprisoned people for being mean to him. It’s an extension of his T*ump brand totalitarianism, described by Thomas Friedman as a Me First policy, an inescapable thirst to infect every aspect of everyone’s daily life, as The Onion once put it. He’s a joy-taker, in other words, that woman in the bar recast as the chief executive of the federal government. And you know what, after waiting 20 years for an Italian Winter Olympic do-over, I decided that I would not let him take my joy.

Joy is virtually inseparable from wonder and wonder is what Dana Milbank of The Washington Post argued in December we all need more of in our lives. His search for wonder was framed through the visual arts and, more specifically, through a program at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. titled Finding Awe. I find plenty of awe in the visual arts – this is chiefly a movie blog, after all – but upon experiencing my first Olympics 38 years ago this month, I innately recognized the quadrennial sporting spectacle as a fount for wonder. And though their all-encompassing nature might seem at odds with slowing down, which Milbank wrote was a crucial ingredient in finding awe, well, I have always viewed those two weeks when the Olympic torch is lit as a chance to slow down, to disengage from the larger world and to center myself, like my favorite snowboarder Maddie Mastro taking a few extra breaths before her next descent into the halfpipe.

I have developed true fondness for snowboarding, not least because its competitors seem to seek wonder as much as medals, and though most of the sport’s terminology eludes me, I don’t really need to understand it to know when it fires my neurons. Indeed, it goes so to show how a “lack of knowledge can be helpful, as National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told Milbank. “That moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder.” The Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Klæbo so empathetically broke away from the pack on the last uphill climb in the men’s cross-country sprint in Cortina that the skiers behind him looked like little kids trying to keep up with dad made me say oh my goodness – well, “oh my God.” In his last race, the revered 50k, Klæbo and his two fellow Norwegians Martin Loewstroem Nyenget and Emil Iversen surged to the lead and spent most of the race skiing by themselves. Milbank wrote about visual art opening portals to our past, and in these images, I felt connected to mine through a painting on our living room wall of three cross-country skiers alone amid the trees, which I always imagined as my dad, my grandpa, and my dad’s best friend. I was transported, watching these three Norsemen ski, even if I knew the idyll belied the coming Klæbo storm. I did not feel tension so much as anticipation, waiting for him to make his move, which he finally did on the same hill as in the men’s sprint, just this time after 2 hours of skiing. In earning victory, he won his sixth gold medal, the most of any one person at any single Winter Olympics ever, though more than that, I will always remember three Norwegians in the middle of an Olympic race looking like they were out for a ski through the woods. 

When I was an impatient kid, I preferred the sprints in long track speed skating, but over time, I have come to love the longer distances so much more and how the skaters’ cool, composed faces at the start gradually become unmasked with each lap of the oval. In the women’s 5,000m, though, the mask of Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida did not just come down, no, the burden of the last few laps became so palpable in her face and in her form that American commentator Joey Cheek spent the last few laps insisting she could not possibly hold her lead, until she did. The whole thing reminded me of the reaction of Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton in the wake of becoming the first woman to win gold in the inaugural ski mountaineering competition: she looked into the camera, smiled, and shrugged, wonder rendered as the inexplicable.

As much as the first Summer Olympics were made in the image of Athens, the first Winter Olympics were made in the image of the Alps, and though the view from on the ground rather than from my couch suggests the experience in Cortina was fraught, the pollyannish parts of my heart yearn for the IOC to work out a way for more such places to host without being ridden roughshod over because these Games benefitted from an infusion of alpine wonder missing from so many recent entries. That wonder was exemplified in the women’s giant slalom. I watched it to see if America’s Mikaela Shiffrin would win gold (she did not, though she won later in the slalom), but then, the Olympics always make your memories for you rather than the other way around. For a time, the giant slalom suggested my favorite ski race ever, with Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund and Sweden’s Sara Hector tied for first, their arms around one another in the leader’s box as if they were just trying to hang on. They needn’t have worried, however, because Italy’s Federica Brignone made the host country proud by making like the tiger on her helmet and roaring to victory by six-tenths of a second in a sport where six-tenths of a second is like an epoch. It was so resounding that the silver medalists did their finest Wayne and Garth – “We’re not worthy!” – by literally and amusingly bowing to Brignone before the trio had the time of their lives on the medal stand, emitting enough joy to power Cortina’s snowmaking system.

If wonder is inextricable from joy, well, in a competitive arena like the Olympics, so, too, is it inextricable from agony. When American Lindsey Vonn ruptured her ACL just before Milano Cortina, she chose to compete in the downhill race anyway, and then crashed 13 seconds in, breaking her leg and getting airlifted off the mountain. If some thought it reckless, or vainglorious, I was awestruck. I thought she infused the jejune phrase the glory of sport, the one in the Olympic creed, with more blood, muscle, and bone than just about anyone. Vivre sa vie.

America’s male figure skater Ilia Malinin, the self-dubbed quad god, was thought to be such a foregone victor that when he took to the ice for his long program after several competitors before him struggled, NBC’s Terry Gannon wondered if Malinin should simply skate to win or to make a statement. He did neither. Proved mortal, Malinin came undone, finishing eighth, and while waiting for his scores afterwards, essentially broke the fourth wall, saying for the benefit of the television camera hovering nearby, “It’s not that easy,” as if he were imploring a nation that had already feted him for grace. Malinin would say he could not process what happened, and the unexpected gold medalist, Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan, looked like he could not process it either. Adorned in braces, his coach raised his arm, encouraging him to celebrate, though Shaidorov just sort of stood there with an almost dazed childlike wonder.

For most of the women’s gold medal hockey game, I did not feel joy or agony, just tension, so much so that I kept involuntarily giggling. Canada led most of the way 1-0, trying to hold off theretofore ultra-dominant Team USA until their captain Hilary Knight read the stage direction in the screenplay and tied it with a couple minutes left, setting the stage for teammate Megan Keller to win the game in sudden death on a dipsy do goal that blew even this hockey agnostic’s mind. And though I will remember Team USA singing our national anthem on the podium, I will also remember Team Canada’s Daryl Watts looking at the stuffed mascot she was handed along with her silver medal with incredulous agony, like she wanted to hurl that stoat all the way to Switzerland. Respect. 

The color of your medal is relative though. Curling in Milan Cortina became mired in minor Over the Line-like controversy, but you will have to read about that elsewhere; I just want to talk about America’s all-Duluth, Minnesota mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse (pronounced: Tee-see) and Korey Dropkin, my favorite team since the 2022 Chicago Sky, and only the third American curling team ever to win a medal. (Thiesse became the first American woman to win a medal in curling.) In advancing to the medal round, they found themselves tied with defending champ Italy late in the semi-final with a chance to play conservatively for one point or aim higher and try to score two. The Duluthians opted for a Vegas mentality, played for two, got it, and that proved the difference in a 9-8 win. In the gold medal match, they found themselves in a similar situation, went big, and poetically, went bust. My oh my goodness became an uff-da. Afterwards, Dropkin remarked, “Obviously would have loved to come home with a gold medal, but Sweden earned that.” The power of the negative in that statement was so purely How to Talk Minnesotan that it brought a tear to my eye. And though some knuckleheads in this country think it’s all about winners and losers, that’s what makes the Olympics so wonderful – the silver lining is baked right in there.

What I have come to love so much about biathlon is how its design, cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting that yields a penalty lap for each missed shot, can allow for races to be totally upended right in the middle of themselves. That’s what happened in the women’s 12.5km mass start when at the last shooting target, almost everyone who was anyone started missing shots left and right, and suddenly Czechia’s Tereza Voborníková, who had never finished on the podium on the Biathlon World Cup circuit, never mind at the Olympics, so unheralded the NBC announcers confessed they had not mentioned or thought about her once during the race, found herself in the lead with a couple kilometers to ski. And that is how I found myself in the middle of the truest Olympic experience: fervently rooting for a Czech I had never heard of 17 seconds earlier. Alas, she could not hang on for gold or silver, passed by France’s more expected duo of Oceane Michelon and Julia Simon, earning bronze instead. And though biathletes typically splay exhausted on the ground upon crossing the finish line, Voborníková looked less exhausted than still high on wonderment. “It was incredible to lead the race for a while,” she said afterwards. “This bronze medal means everything to me. It definitely tastes like gold.” I submit to you, no one went home from Cortina happier than Tereza Voborníková. Well, on second thought, there was one person that might have gone home happier. 

20-year-old U.S. Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said that in coming to Milan, she did not need a medal, and though that sounds like off the rack athlete-speak, the thing was, to see her skate in the long program, which she entered in third place, was to believe it. I have been watching figure skaters crack under pressure all my life. I watched Malinin crack one week earlier. (I watched Sasha Cohen crack in 2006.) Liu, however, did not skate like someone overcoming pressure or ignoring it; she skated like someone who was completely at peace; she skated her competitive program the way you typically see people skate their exhibition programs in the Olympic-ending gala. In that way of overbearing youth sports, Liu had essentially already lived a whole life, retiring from the sport at the ripe old age of 16 because she had tired of it only to eventually return after uncovering a true sense of self. Coaches are always yammering about breaking down athletes to build them back up, but in stepping away, Liu broke herself down to build herself back up as the person she wanted to be. And so, she became the first person with a frenulum piercing to win a gold medal (editor: plz fact check) and quite possibly the first gold medalist with a healthy work/life balance. When she left the ice after her triumphant long program, the one that would ultimately lift her from third to first, and looked right into the camera, she effused, if you will permit me to honor the spirit of the f-bomb she dropped on the whole world, nothing less than pure fucking joy.

Olympic greatness in the genuine Faster Higher Stronger sense is not merely measuring up to your own sense of excellence, but reorienting what is possible for your sport. Ever since I first watched a figure skating competition, the fabled Battle of the Carmens in Calgary, I understood on some level that the sport was about toil, tears, surrender coded as sacrifice, and conceding your own identity to your coach and choreographer. Alysia Liu came along and reoriented the sport as one of joyful, mindful self-expression. Imagine if the whole sports world had the courage to follow her lead. 

The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it felt like the biggest moment in the 2025 college football season when it happened, in retrospect, it was even bigger, the one preserving the Indiana Hoosiers’ immaculate season, helping to ensure they would become the first and only other team in the sport to finish 16-0 since Yale in 1894 when the Bulldogs walloped the likes of Tufts, Trinity (CT), and the Volunteer (NY) Athletic Association. Trailing Penn State on the road by four points with 36 seconds left and facing 3rd and goal, Indiana wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. caught quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s game-winning touchdown pass in the back of the end zone, a prosaic description of a catch so remarkable that it truly sounded like Fox play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson had suddenly been confronted with a multitude of the heavenly host. It’s the most natural thing in the world to see such a thing and reactively declare, “That’s the greatest catch I’ve ever seen,” to reach for hyperbole first and let hindsight come later. The thing was, even in hindsight the play demanded hyperbole. He caught that? By managing to get both feet in bounds? While being (legally) pushed out of bounds by the defender? We live in an era of outrageous athleticism and specialized wide receiver gloves that have turned incredible one-handed catches into a dime a dozen, almost. No one, however, has done what Cooper did, in his unbelievable body control, seeming to levitate like Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi atop the trees in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” 

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There has never been a college football season like 2025. I mean that literally. Indiana, the all-time losingest major CFB program entering the season, won its first national championship. In addition, 2025 marked the first one that schools were able to pay their players directly by allowing them to share in the revenue their feats of strength have been helping to generate for decades. It is unquestionable progress even if that progress has blurred the lines between college and professional football to virtually nothing as the ability to compensate players taken in tandem with the so-called transfer portal have in effect created something like unregulated free agency. And if that means modern college football often resembles the worst parts of the NBA, where transactions and front office maneuvering drive discourse more than the games themselves, you can’t be mad at the nominal student athletes. The powers-that-be have been reaping the profits and breaking their contracts for years; now, finally, the players are gettin’ theirs. 

The author, journalist, and all-around college football fanatic Michael Weinreb has frequently noted how the sport tends to reflect America, and so, it only makes sense that given how present-day America feels as if it is spinning off its axis, so, too, does college football. The season has become too long, conferences rarely make historical or geographic sense, and the whole enterprise increasingly feels as if we really are all just rooting for laundry. That axis-spinning sensation was only exacerbated by the second season of the 12-team playoff, one that has all but rendered conference championships moot as these nonsensical confederations are now so overcrowded a true round-robin format is often impossible, necessitating arcane tiebreakers. That is how a 7-5 Duke team played for the ACC title rather than 10-2 Miami, and though Duke subsequently won the conference championship in an upset over Virginia, Miami was, nevertheless, selected for the playoff, and advanced to the national championship game, while the ACC champs went to the Sun Bowl. Did you follow all that? (I did not even mention that Miami just signed Duke’s quarterback Darian Mensah from the transfer portal and that now Duke is suing Mensah for breaking his NIL contract and does Mensah still get to keep his ACC Championship ring?) 

Once, going to a bowl game was cause for celebration, but now these utterly unique postseason exhibitions are mere television inventory, consolation prizes some teams are not even interested in accepting. Both Iowa State and Kansas State said thanks but no thanks and when Notre Dame was not selected for the playoff, they declined a bowl game invitation too, leading so many who had spent the entire season framing it strictly through the prism of the playoff while reducing bowl games to gum on their shoe to hypocritically scold the Fighting Irish for treating bowl games the exact same way. As the idiom goes, pick a lane!

Notre Dame’s decision shone a harsh light on just how much the 12-team playoff has altered not just what is most important within the sport but everyone’s expectations surrounding it. Used to be, success in this sport could be more relative, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it. Even though college football has 136 teams and only 12 slots to go around for its postseason tournament, the new mentality too often is playoff or bust, one intensified by revenue sharing and the transfer portal evening the playing field. Indeed, Indiana is Exhibit A. If the woebegone Hoosiers could flip the script in 2 years, why, so many teams no doubt wonder, can’t we do the same? It spurred a rash of mid-season coach firings, both bluebloods and non-bluebloods alike, and the market’s most desirable candidate, University of Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin, was a social media savvy narcissist who was only too happy to play it up. More than the Heisman Trophy race, really, the Kiffin saga became the season’s ultimate subplot, effectively transforming him into the sport’s main character, right down to the end as his team made the playoff and the decision of whether he would stay or go (he went, taking the LSU job) took center stage. 

Ah, but that’s the thing about college football. Lane Kiffin might have been a black hole, but he could not swallow the sport, and though anyone who watched a Mississippi game during the season knew their success stemmed as much from their quarterback, the jauntily named Ferris State transfer Trinidad Chambliss, in their breathtaking Sugar Bowl quarterfinal clash with Georgia, Chambliss reclaimed the spotlight for his team as absolutely as the Virginia student body swarmed its field in the instantaneous aftermath of their beloved Cavaliers equally breathtaking (then) upset of Florida State in September. Chambliss had big numbers but more than that, he had big plays, reaching the quarterbacking zenith where the burden of what’s at stake surrenders to the joy of performance. The game went late into the January 1st night, awakening echoes of glorious New Years Days of old, and ended with what was tantamount to a Twilight Zone episode.

All the college football sickos who stayed up to watch the end of the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve night, meanwhile, can provide the umpteenth reminder that something ostensibly meaningless can feel like nothing in the world matters more, and the though Indiana and Ohio State 1 versus 2 B1G title tilt was just a prelude to the playoff and not an (un)officially designated Game of the Century, it felt like a Game of the Century, nevertheless. I wouldn’t have thought it could be topped, but the national championship game did, a title fight in which defenses owned the first half, forcing the offenses to up the ante up in a slobberknocker of a second half in which the referees essentially swallowed their whistles whole, living the ideal of Letting Them Play, and Indiana demonstrated true greatness by overcoming extraordinary pressure from a valiant Miami defense to find a way by playing how they had all season long – unafraid.

That fearlessness stemmed from head coach Curt Cignetti’s glowering bravado, but it also stemmed from the confident exuberance of Mendoza, and you saw both in the game’s biggest play when leading 17-14 early in the 4th quarter and facing a 4th down and 4 at Miami’s 12, Indiana eschewed settling for a field goal to have Mendoza run a delayed draw up the middle. Can you have your Heisman Moment after you have already won the Heisman? I guess so, because Mendoza did, as his 12-yard run to the promised land was like Willie Beamen’s run at the end of “Any Given Sunday” but if it had been done by a lanky quarterback from the 30s or 40s, like Sammy Baugh, the kind of gridiron maneuver that typically works best when you’re 9 years old and slaloming through imaginary defenders in your backyard. Instead, the Heisman Trophy winner manifested that imaginary play in real life. As he dove, stretching the ball across the goal line, it felt a lot like Omar Cooper Jr.’s catch back in November. There is so much outside noise in college football these days, but those few seconds when they were in the air, Mendoza and Cooper and the game itself seemed to hover above it, impervious. 

Some Drivel On...the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

If the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics were the best Olympic Games of my lifetime, the viewing experience was still not quite perfect, at least not in America. I enjoyed the opening ceremonies even if the Parade of Nations on the Seine worked less well in practice than in theory, but what I liked least about them didn’t have anything to do with the ceremony itself (any appearance by Gaga is good) and more to do with NBC’s presentation of it. As hosts it chose the peculiar triumvirate of Mike Tirico, Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning. In wake of their less than spectacular job, Clarkson took the most heat. She did have a tendency to speak over moments and performances rather than letting them be, and she did not seem wholly prepared in terms of research, and those are fair critiques. But also, Clarkson was the only one bringing any sense of palpable enthusiasm, hung out to dry by Tirico, who in his bland way is acceptable, if nothing more, as the traditional Olympic anchor but in this scenario failed in the role of interlocutor between his co-hosts. Manning, though, was worst. If Clarkson came across ill-prepared, Manning made a point of bragging about his preparation and then did next to nothing to demonstrate it, essentially saying things like, I talked with the American athletes last night, Mike, and they all told me how excited they are for this moment. For all his media experience, in that environment, he was a nothing burger, seeming to recede from the proceedings entirely for long stretches and leaving Clarkson to pick up the slack. The whole debacle reminded me of Anne Hathaway unfairly shouldering the brunt of the criticism for James Franco’s virtual ghosting of the Oscars in real time. 

The only moment NBC’s broadcast worked, in fact, was when the then-Today Show co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb momentarily took over masters of ceremony duties. That’s because Guthrie and Kotb knew that you treat an opening ceremony like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the Rose Parade, rather than a sporting event. And that is why I am so grateful that NBC saw the error of its ways and has enlisted Guthrie and Terry Gannon to host the opening ceremonies for 2026 in Milano Cortina. In my memory, no one ever got the opening ceremony equation better than Bob Costas and Katie Couric, not just two people who understood the job and how to manifest it but a perfect yin and yang. Gannon isn’t Costas, certainly not in disposition, and so he will not be Guthrie’s yang, exactly. But he’s also worked for a decade now with Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir in calling figure skating events for NBC and understands the line between sports and showbiz and has demonstrated an ability to have fun while conveying pertinent information, just what the opening ceremony role requires. 

I was about to observe that unlike its competitor ABC, which insists on a three-person NBA Finals booth no matter what, NBC was willing to go back to two. But then, it turns out that American Winter Olympics snowboarding legend Shaun White will join Guthrie and Gannon in the booth for the Parade of Nations part. If to me, it seems unnecessary, I also understand the network wanting a little star power, and it’s better to have one person like White than two, and he should be ok because Guthrie and Gannon both have chops for setting other people up. And anyway, Al Roker is always there with Guthrie and Kotb at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, sort of the Ed McMahon, or Andy Richter of the affair and so maybe White can fill that role. He was in that Mila Kunis comedy “Friends with Benefits” after all. At any rate, he’s not another Manning.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 19

November 19, 2005: USC - 50 Fresno State - 42

Why did the Heisman Trophy become the preeminent individual award in college football? Was it merely a matter of timing, created a couple years before the unheralded Maxwell Award was established to honor the same thing? Or was it for no other reason than the name Heisman is more distinct than the name Maxwell? I like to think the Heisman has maintained its unique status for 90 years because of the trophy itself. Modeled after New York University’s Ed Smith, the bronze bust by Frank Eliscu is instantly recognizable. Certainly, it is far more aesthetically rememberable than the Maxwell, never mind the predictably benign NFL MVP Trophy. Though the game has been thoroughly revolutionized, Smith’s pose, the extended right arm to ward off imaginary defenders while safeguarding the ball in his left, remains the premiere gridiron emblem. The image is so potent that 1991 Heisman winner Desmond Howard famously brought it to life, a mimicry that has itself been mimicked by other winners over the years, including last year’s Colorado star Travis Hunter. In this data-driven age where athletic greatness is considered quantifiable and provable, the Heisman can feel anachronistic, even irrelevant. But the trophy’s modern critics have never quite grasped that it was always more about creating an image, something halfway between measured and myth. 

Initially christened the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935 after the men-only New York social club that awarded it, the moniker was altered the next year not for real-life John Heisman’s gridiron accomplishments as player or coach but because he had been DAC president. And so, the inaugural Heisman winner was Yale’s Larry Kelley, who would recall that upon receiving the telegram of his victory, “didn’t even know there was such a thing,” betraying its paltry origins. Indeed, Kelley spurned professional football and even Hollywood’s offer of a movie based on his life, suggesting the sport’s often fanciful amateur ideals. That quickly changed. 1938 winner Davey O’Brien would sign with the Philadelphia Eagles, 1940 winner Tom Harmon starred in the autobiographical “Harmon of Michigan” for Columbia Pictures, and 1946 winner Glenn Davis would briefly date Elizabeth Taylor. The Heisman’s prominence grew with the game itself, assuming the aura of a gridiron Academy Award, as Dan Jenkins noted for Sports Illustrated in 1969, writing of a “war…waged as earnestly by campus publicity men and by the 1,371 writers and broadcasters who are eligible to vote as by the players themselves.” That’s why Notre Dame’s Joe Theisman literally changed the pronunciation of his last name in 1971 to rhyme with the statue, and why in Hunter’s first game at Colorado in 2023 his coach Deion Sanders was already promoting him in an on-field interview. The Heisman is something to be sold as much as won.

Even as the Downtown Athletic Club remained the award’s stewards for years, eventually giving way to The Heisman Trophy Trust in 2003, it farmed voting out, and at present, there are 928 voters comprised of 57 former winners, 870 media members, and a single vote based on the result of a fan poll. There are probably 928 complaints about voting tendencies too. Accusations of regional and positional bias as well as favoritism toward the game’s biggest brands have existed in perpetuity. ESPN, which began broadcasting the ceremony in 1994, has been charged with promoting certain players ahead of others, typically those featured on their network. Dreaded preseason Heisman watchlists set expectations and narratives that can persist despite evidence while the sheer number of voters tends to elicit a groupthink-induced feedback loop. The hype can become numbing, as it was with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson in 2016, the foregone winner for so long that by the end, certain media members were trying to gin up prosaic lightweights as alternatives. Winners, meanwhile, are often unjustly judged a second time in accordance with their success in the NFL, or lack of it, like judging an apple’s taste by eating an orange. What do I think should define a Heisman winner? I couldn’t hope to explain it, honestly, but I know a Heisman winner when I see one, and as much as Doug Flutie and Barry Sanders are, Chris Weinke and Mark Ingram are not. Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California? He is definitely a Heisman Trophy winner.

A running back, Reggie Bush’s stats were not especially eye-popping, at least, not in comparison to other winners through the years. But that’s why he was the ultimate epistemological Heisman winner, and which is why he remains the ultimate Heisman winner too. How did we know he deserved to win, and how did we know that we knew it? You knew he deserved to win simply by seeing him play, not least because when you saw him play, you could not quite believe what you were seeing. Yet, even if he won the award in what was deemed by most outlets as a landslide, when USC lost the subsequent national championship-deciding Rose Bowl to Texas and the Heisman runner-up Vince Young, so many prisoners of the moment swapped sides and suggested that Young should have won all along. These short-sighted about-faces amusingly and inadvertently epitomized the frequent Heisman critique that it only goes to the best player on the best team but even worse, implied the award should be results-based rather than a matter of taste. And though Young was impressive in imposing his physical will, Bush frequently reconfigured what was physically possible. In other words, Young was inevitable, but Bush was inconceivable. Give me the latter.

Bush was never as inconceivable as he was that year against Fresno State, an indelible 50-42 seesaw. You knew it would be a wild night at the L.A. Coliseum from the first touchdown which occurred when the ball bounced off the helmet of one Fresno State Bulldog and into the arms of another in the end zone. The Bulldogs were at the apex of their Anybody Anytime Anywhere era, the mantra instilled by coach Pat Hill to demonstrate his proletariat program’s determination to battle any willing blueblood. They knocked off a few but taking down #1 USC, the two-time defending champs riding a 32-game winning streak would have been the crowning accomplishment. The two teams slugged it out with a bevy of big plays, and Fresno State’s sustained excellence provoked Bush to go higher than ever before, ending with 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 on the ground, and scoring two touchdowns, though he set up two more with long runs that came up just short of the end zone, demonstrating power, speed, and agility in equal measure. Yet, for all he did on the night, nothing else, and nothing else in his whole career, compared to his 50-yard touchdown run with barely a minute left in the third quarter.

 

As a game predominantly played with brute force in close quarters, football coaches have since its inception sought ways to manufacture empty space for their fastest players. For all the formational and strategic inventions, however, no grand designs can compete with a player creating that space on all his own, as Heisman winners have done time immemorial, whether it was LSU’s Billy Cannon bulling his way to it, Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers juking it into existence, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel forging it via his unique gridiron acrobatics. But no Heisman winner ever did what Bush did on November 19, 2005, when he took a handoff, surged up the middle, and followed his blockers to the left where three converging Bulldog defenders essentially guided him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Or at least, appeared to guide him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Instead, Bush came to a dead stop on the boundary’s edge, if only for a split-second, brought the ball around his back from his left hand to his right and then ran the opposite direction, leaving dumbfounded defenders in his wake while gliding in for the touchdown. Unlike those other plays, it was not so much exhilarating as it was mystifying, a football player scoring a touchdown by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reggie Bush did not merely make some space, he reversed the whole damn space time continuum, and in doing so, transmogrified the facts and figures of his stat line into folklore. In other words, it was his Heisman Moment™.  

That no one has ever been more deserving of the Heisman Trophy than Bush made it ironic when he became the first and only winner to vacate his trophy in 2010 after the USC football program was hit with NCAA sanctions directly related to his receiving so-called improper benefits. In lieu of the Heisman Trust retroactively rescinding Bush’s victory, he gave the trophy back of his own quasi-face-saving accord. He broke the NCAA’s Amateurism rules, it was true, and never exactly apologized for doing so, though even a cursory understanding of the NCAA’s formation and invention of the term student-athlete would reveal those rules as one-sided and cynical, and the NCAA never apologized for them either. In fact, they went to the Supreme Court to try and defend them in 2021, getting skunked 9-0. (“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” wrote Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.) The NCAA had sought to make Bush an example, a warning, and it backfired as the argument to return his Heisman marked a tipping point in public perception. Every supposed scandal in the twenty-tens involving a CFB player benefiting from their name, image, and likeness resonated a little less, so that by the time so-called NIL was decreed lawful, it felt preordained. There were other, more influential pioneers in the push for player compensation, like Ed O’Bannon, but in his public pillorying, Bush played an outsized role, nevertheless. He gave up his Heisman so that one day in 2024 he could reclaim it, eating the NCAA’s original sins so they could be cleansed, a fitting emblem of college sports’ great leap forward. 

When you look at it through that light, what Heisman winner’s legacy could possibly compare? 

An Ode to Japanese Breakfast

In a 2023 CNN interview, Michelle Zauner was asked by Chris Wallace to explain the origin of her band name Japanese Breakfast. After all, Zauner was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and American father and subsequently raised in Eugene, Oregon, an upbringing she chronicled in her 2021 memoir “Crying in H Mart.” Maybe by then Zauner had grown tired of the query, not quite giving as full an answer as she has given in other places, just sort of vaguely referencing the pleasing imagery of a Japanese-style morning meal. Indeed, on the A24 podcast a year earlier, Zauner professed regret about her band name and how people reflexively assumed she was Japanese, wishing she could go back and rename it. Just as Patterson Hood has lamented, he never thought his own band Drive-By Truckers would get so big, and once it did, it was too late to change the moniker. And so, in a way Zauner’s own intention got the best of her. In speaking with Sandra Song of Teen Vogue in 2017, Zauner said she liked the name because it combined the familiar with the exotic. “I thought it would make people curious,” she said, “like ‘What is a Japanese breakfast?’”

I missed the first couple Japanese Breakfast albums, catching up with “Jubilee” in 2021 which, as it happened, was the year My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I had originally planned to visit Japan. The global pandemic delayed our visit, and we wound up going for two weeks last fall in 2024. All our vacations, long or short, abroad or in the states, make eating a focal point, but in a city like Tokyo, which has roughly the number of restaurants that Syracuse, New York has people, it became even more paramount. Given My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s diligent planning of lunches and dinners, and snacks in-between, we were content to keep breakfast simple by having it each morning at the hotel. And though one might not ordinarily think of a hotel breakfast buffet in the same sort of breathtaking terms as, say, a multi-course Kaiseki meal, like the one we had in Kyoto, Japanese breakfast, it turned out, took my breath away, nevertheless.

The layout brought Zauner’s description of her band name to life. Because upon entering the dining room, an American such as myself would first see a familiar western style breakfast spread off eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. Take a few steps forward, however, and then turn to the left and there it was, an exotic Japanese style breakfast buffet of rice and miso soup and shumai and all manner of side dishes right beside it. I don’t want to go overboard here and say it was like going from black and white to Technicolor in “The Wizard of Oz.” I had some croissants and pastries, and some jam too, and the truth is, they were far better than you will get at virtually any breakfast buffet in the actual west, evoking that Japanese idea that whatever you are doing should be done to perfection. But it did feel like how the late Anthony Bourdain described Tokyo, as a whole window opening up into a whole new thing. “Mesmerizing. Intimidating. Disorienting.” That first morning I went for it, availing myself of almost everything, from candied sweet potatoes to fish cakes to salted cod roe to natto (i.e. fermented soybeans). You might deem it the Pacific Rim version of an unlimited steakhouse salad bar and, hey, I’m never one to shy away from the green marshmallow fruit salad, so why I wouldn’t try natto? (The natto was the one item that didn’t work for me. They can’t all be winners, can they?)

As I quickly learned, however, the real secret to Japanese breakfast was studying other Japanese people in the dining room and copying their moves. One morning, I noticed the Japanese man at the table next to ours finishing his breakfast with what appeared to be pudding in a jar. I went and got one for myself. This, it turned out, was Purin, a kind of Japanese flan, crème caramel or vanilla, take your pick, and for the rest of our trip, I finished every one of my breakfasts with Purin. I mean, c’mon, seriously, breakfast dessert: that’s advanced. Another morning, I saw a Japanese man at a table near ours stirring a raw egg into rice. This was Tamago kake gohan, which Zauner referenced in that CNN interview, though as a lover of porridge, I thought of it as egg porridge, sort of state-of-the-art oatmeal, often adding a little scallion and seaweed. Once I figured it out, I ate it every morning. It’s not hyperbole to say it changed my life.

Tamago Kake Gohan (e.g. egg porridge)

The sheer abundance of quality food in Japan is hard to imagine until you experience it. Restaurants stacked on top of restaurants stacked on top of restaurants. Noodles that were impossibly toothsome; broth so flavorful and rich I did as the Japanese did and brought the bowl right up to my mouth and slurped up every last drop; egg salad sandwiches from 7-Elevens that have no right to be that good; I had the best sushi experience of my life in Kyoto; I had grape soft serve twice! And yet, five months out, what I think about most, and what I miss the worst, is that egg porridge chased with Purin. All of which is to say, once you’ve had Japanese breakfast, believe me, you will never need to ask Japanese Breakfast why they are called that ever again.

The Sad Ballad of Kris Bryant

In Garrison Keillor’s 2001 novel “Love Me,” a best-selling author takes a job at The New Yorker only to be undermined with a severe case of writer’s block. The magazine, he learns, is a safe haven for the blocked, “a whole stable of writers who drew nice salaries to sit in their office and brood.” That stable includes J.D. Salinger, briefly featured in the book giving the narrator a white silk prayer scarf, claiming it helped. “Helped him do what?” the narrator wonders. In real life, Salinger’s writer’s block was proven to be something of a myth, but it makes for a potent image, nonetheless, someone as skilled as Salinger being waylaid by a psychological inability to do the thing he does so well. In a New Yorker piece, of all places, Steve Martin once noted that “writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” Maybe. But Martin is first and foremost a comedian, and maybe he was just deflecting.

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There’s a way in which the Kris Bryant story has a happy ending. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2015, and he was the National League MVP in 2016, the same year he helped end the most infamous sports curse of all time with the Chicago Cubs, initiating the very out that ended it, in fact, with a big smile on his face. “Most of us thought that would become his staple season,” Joe Posnanski would write of Bryant while looking in the rearview mirror in 2019, “the kind of thing he would do every year for the next decade on his way to the Hall of Fame. And sure enough, in 2017 he had more or less the same season.” “The charmed baseball life of Kris Bryant,” Tom Verducci wrote in 2017, “seems an invention of nostalgia, ripped from the Chip Hilton novels of Clair Bee in the 1950s and ’60s.” Bryant had the story, and the ring, and the trophy, and a slew of statistics I could not hope to explain to back up his preeminent standing in the sport, but mostly, to me, he had that swing. I’m not against the advanced stats revolution in baseball, I’m just personally more compelled by aesthetic. 

“A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” That’s David Foster Wallace in his immortal Roger Federer as Religious Experience essay from two decades ago and he’s right, of course. The beauty in Federer’s backhand slice, or in the way Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone runs are at once self-evident and beyond words. So, how can one hope to describe Kris Bryant’s swing? In his profile, Verducci wrote: “Bryant wants his levers to fire sequentially in perfect timing: front hip, hands, back hip and, lastly, bat head, finished off with tremendous extension through the ball with his long arms.” That, however, is a bit too technical for our taste. Verducci gets closer, or as close as anyone can, a few sentences earlier: “(Bryant’s) is the Swiss timepiece of swings: a carefully timed chronograph of angles, gears and levers.” It suggests not only how all the elements of Bryant’s swing in congress were so visually pleasing, but in an unintentional way, equated him with Federer, as if his swing were a Rolex the Swiss tennis star hawks, classic, stylish, built to last. On the other hand, as Gary Shteyngart noted in his 2017 New Yorker piece about being a watch geek, there is something unexpected melancholy about a time-keeping device permanently affixed to your wrist, keeping track of the unrelenting passage of hours, minutes, seconds, of “our own demise.” Indeed, there is a reason I keep mentioning Bryant’s swing in the past tense. 

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When Kris Bryant was traded in 2021 to the San Francisco Giants, it felt cruel, to the city of Chicago and to him. He lingered in the Wrigley Field dugout in what turned out to be his last game as a Cub, taking one last look, a romanticism that appealed to me almost as much as the swing, a player treating a business like a game. There was an ad for Midwest Express Clinic featuring Bryant at the Chicago Brown Line L stop that stayed up for almost a year after his departure, and though it was probably just CTA laziness, I liked imagining it as them thumbing their nose at the Ricketts Family. 

In truth, Bryant was already in competitive decline, going on the injured list in 2018 for the first time, recovering, playing well, if never at the level of his previous standards. People who track stats could see Bryant was now swinging under a red sky at morning, and when he signed to the Rockies in 2022 on a massive seven-year contract, it all fell apart, an ironic twist given that when he entered the league from the University of San Diego in 2013, he thought the Rockies would draft him, not the Cubs. In the Mile High City, the injuries have piled up, arthritis and bone spurs and a bad back. He hasn’t hit. His batting average last season was .218, the year before .233, which is, like, Al Newman level. The team hasn’t won, and if once Bryant would have been viewed as their deliverer, now he’s just viewed as a financial drain, a $182 million emblem of all that has gone wrong. Local sportswriter Sean Keeler compared him to a car that might as well be sold for parts, perhaps just a glib line in a glib column, or maybe more revealing, suggesting athletes as subhuman, more like a product. No wonder Bryant has received death threats. 

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Bryant’s story is not necessarily new. Famously, Chuck Knoblauch of the Yankees was afflicted with the yips, unable to throw from second base to first, causing his career to fizzle out. Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles mirrored Bryant in the twenty-tens, signing a big contract after considerable success and then going in the hitting tank. “I have no clue what I’m doing at the plate,” he told Stephanie Apstein in 2018 in a line that might as well have described my brief but abominable Little League career. My favorite baseball player Jerome Walton endured a career that was essentially one long, slow fade after a sensational Rookie of the Year season in 1989. But something about Bryant feels different, more sorrowful, and I think it’s the swing. 

In Johnny Tillotson’s 1960 song “Poetry in Motion,” the one that may very well have given birth to the phrase itself, he’s singing about the girl he loves, how she’s poetry in motion, how he loves her every movement, how there is nothing about her that he would change. But once a baseball batter struggles at the plate, it’s natural for him to tweak his swing, and that’s what Bryant did, fundamentally altering his so that what was once poetry in motion became something more like hapless hacking. It was on full, gruesome display in his first at-bat of the 2025 season, gone swinging on three pitches. It was J.D. Salinger who famously wrote that “Certain things…should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” Baseball puts a great many things in big glass cases, if only we could have put Kris Bryant’s swing in one. 

Postscript: Since this post was published, the Colorado Rockies announced they were placing Kris Bryant on the 10-day injured list with lumbar degenerative disc disease. Sigh. Things cannot only get better.