Dear readers—

I’ve read more than 20 sports novels so far on this endless quest that no one asked for. But the great people of America deserve—nay, need—to know which sports book is the greatest.

I mentioned before that this idea came to me after reading a number of “classic” baseball novels growing up that everyone seemed to hold up as the best, but those characterizations never sat right with me. I had to find out for myself.

So like Frodo and Sam’s epic journey to deliver the ring to Mordor, I too must face perilous foes and challenges to reach the finish line and determine a clear victor (if one exists).

Therefore, I thought it was an appropriate time to show you where my search stands. Below are the 23 novels I’ve read so far. I’ve bucketed them into three groups: contenders, good but probably don’t qualify, and cut from the roster.

Great American Sports Novel (GASN) contenders

• The Natural — Bernard Malamud

• The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant — Douglass Wallop

• The Art of Fielding — Chad Harbach

• Shoeless Joe — W. P. Kinsella

• Fat City — Leonard Gardner

The Danny Almonte* disqualified collection

• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace

• The Sport of Kings — C. E. Morgan

• Lord of Misrule — Jaimy Gordon

• Netherland** — Joseph O’Neill

Cut from the team

• Bang the Drum Slowly — Mark Harris

• The Southpaw — Mark Harris

• You Know Me Al — Ring Lardner

• Calico Joe — John Grisham

• Bucky F***ing Dent — David Duchovny

• The End Zone — Don DeLillo

• Bleachers — John Grisham

• The Throwback Special — Chris Bachelder

• Headshot — Rita Bullwinkel

• Carrie Soto Is Back — Taylor Jenkins Reid

• The Hustler — Walter Tevis

• The Art of Racing in the Rain — Garth Stein

• We Ride Upon Sticks — Quan Barry

• Hot Girls with Balls — Benedict Nguyễn

I have about 40 novels to go, and I’m hoping to find few more surprises. However, during this coming stretch I do think I’ll have more DNFs as I get a better sense of what’s actually going to contend for the GASN title belt.

Throughout this search, I’m hoping to add nontraditional reviews, a sport-by-sport perspective, and discuss baseball’s hold specifically. I also think we have to talk about the elephant in the room—movie adaptations!

Thank you for following along! I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments and questions!

Until next time,

—Matt

* Danny Almonte was an elite Little League pitcher from the Bronx, NY who was discovered to be too old during the 2001 LLWS.

** I truly loved this book and thought it wonderfully distilled post-9/11 America. I just don’t think I can call a cricket book the GASN. Sorry!

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Dear Readers—

The first thing I want to do is thank everyone for bearing with me as I work through some semblance of a structure for this Substack. It’s always a WIP, but for now my plan is to focus on three distinct post types:

• Reading Diary: Just haphazard thoughts and updates on my life in books, with a healthy sprinkling of sports, pop culture, and more. FYI, this is what you’re reading right now!

• Good Book Hang!: This is a biweekly post that goes through a bunch of random/fun categories. It’s a way to hang out with our favorite books—i.e., my answer to sluggish book reviews (think Ringer Rewatchables for books). It’ll be a mix of classics, new/popular books, and my personal favorites. See the first one on A Confederacy of Dunces.

• Book Adventures: Wherein I choose a random reading challenge (find the Great American Sports Novel) and write about my journey.

We’ll see how this cadence works.

Deals with the Devil

One of the books I read this week for my Great American Sports Novel search was The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant by Douglass Wallop (later inspiration for Damn Yankees). I had a fun time with it, even though it’s not the sort of all-encompassing book that you’d think has potential to be the GASN.

That said, making deals with the devil for bizarrely positive sports outcomes got me thinking about my beloved 76ers. Between the collapse of last season and the Brown/James moves, it got me wondering who in the city of Philly made a deal with the devil. You’d think it’d be the owner, but I’d guess Josh Harris already had some agreement with Lucifer. It wasn’t me, but I’m happy to be the beneficiary.

Classics Corner

I finally got my annotated Ulysses copy, and to tell you the truth, it hasn’t done much to up my enthusiasm. The writing isn’t speaking to me, and ending Chapter 4 with an outhouse visit didn’t help. Might not be a DNF, but also might not be in a rush.

On the other hand, I’m getting into C&P in a way I didn’t think I would because Brothers K wasn’t my favorite (though I’m thinking maybe I should revisit).

The Good Book Log

• Purchase/find of the week: Squeeze Play by Jane Leavy. The first (and possibly only?) instance where one of the authors tells me to include their book on my list of possible Great American Sports Novels.

• GASN count: 18

• TBR:

  • East of Eden

  • Don Quixote

  • Black House

  • Sense and Sensibility

I didn’t forget about all you beautiful people who voted for DQ and BH! Sorry I failed all those who picked Ulysses. I swear I’ll read these two!

Until next time, thanks for reading!

— Matt

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Dear Readers—

Now that I’ve read more than a dozen or so books as part of my Great American Sports Novel (GASN) search, it’s probably worth thinking about a few parameters for the books to be eligible to claim the crown of the GASN. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop reading.

Before beginning, however, I’d like to give a special shoutout to everyone who has contributed to the list of books I’m tracking. Not every one listed there will be eligible, but it’s nice to maintain a master list.

• SPORTS: It goes without saying that the GASN should be about sports. But to what extent? Some books considered “great”—Infinite Jest1 & Underworld2—involve sports or have incredible sports scenes, but I don’t think anyone would say that they’d be considered “sports” novels. Would anyone really call Infinite Jest a tennis book? The GASN needs to be about a sport, about an athlete, and not just happen to include a sport.

• SAY MORE: But I also think that the GASN can’t feel like just a beat writer recap. It needs to situate the sport within some theme about America. It’s a fine line. I think Infinite Jest & Underworld, for example, use sports as conduits to touch on their bigger themes. The GASN needs to touch on bigger themes through the sports—if that makes sense. It’s a personal judgment call, I know, and I welcome all the disagreement.

• WHICH SPORTS: This next point may result in the most controversy. Are there particular sports that should be the focus? I wanted to say no at the outset, and my list includes 10+ sports so far. However, it’s hard to ignore the pull that baseball has on the literary community. I’ve written before that I think this is because it’s been the most professionalized sport for the longest. Does that mean a diving book can’t be the GASN? No. But I think it needs a compelling reason and may need some bigger themes to carry it along. That said, I think it’ll probably feel less forced if the GASN involves a sport that was significant at the time it was written or when it historically takes place, e.g., Sport of Kings (horse racing) or Fat City (boxing). So if there’s a new book that takes place contemporaneously, it probably needs to be about baseball, basketball, or football.

• SPORT SCENE: I guess this could be a subcategory of one of the earlier ones, but it’s worth separating. To be a sports book, does the book need a critical sports scene? A race? A game? A match? I think there’s a world where the answer is NO, it’s not a requirement, but it’s a nice bonus. And I think that having a pivotal sports scene likely clears up some earlier confusion about whether it’s a “sports book” or a book that happens to have sports.

• AMERICAN AUTHOR: I don’t want to make it an absolute requirement that the author be American in the event that there’s a compelling reason, or a book is clearly about the American experience. I actually thought reading Netherland that there might be a case for its inclusion, since it touches on immigration and the post-9/11 experience in NYC—even though it’s about a group of mostly immigrants playing cricket by an Irish writer. It’s probably just a correlation as opposed to causation issue where, generally speaking, an American author is more likely to write the GASN. Also note that if this were a requirement, W.P. Kinsella (a Canadian), who wrote some of the most beloved baseball books, wouldn’t qualify.3

I’ll continue to refine these criteria as I go. And I’ll still try to read the books on the current list that don’t fit. But I will be more selective about adding anything new outside these guardrails.

As always, if you have any ideas or thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Nothing in this adventure is set in stone. My only goal is to find (if it exists) the best “American” sports novel, and I need your help to do it.

—Matt

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Baseball card stats

• Title: A Confederacy of Dunces

• Author: John Kennedy Toole

• Date: 1980

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (after JKT’s mom sent the manuscript to multiple major publishers and received rejections)

Twitter summary (140 Character Plot)

Slothful Ignatius must pull weight and get job(s) but gets fired. Myrna arrives to save him after his exploits make news across New Orleans.

A Confederacy of Dunces and me

I rarely read for fun in high school and found the cliff notes for just about anything I could. For whatever reason, after my freshman year of college, a group of friends had time to kill and went to a B&N at a local mall. One of the guys mentioned he heard ACOD was good, so I picked it up to read that summer. I loved it immediately and proceeded to read several other books that summer. It holds a special place in my heart as the book that got me reading for fun—hence its honor of being the first Shelf Life! selection.

Reviews from 1980

Here’s a somewhat positive review from The SoHo News:

The end that I’d anticipated was much more quixotic and bleak: Ignatius undergoing shock treatments (which is literally the fate that Myrna saves him from, after his mother, now engaged to Robichaux, is persuaded by a friend to phone the hospital). This would have been decidedly less Yankee-contemporary and more Southern-medieval in flavor, like submitting Quixote to the Spanish Inquisition. But A Confederacy of Dunces was written in more hopeful times than these. And Toole was moved to give Ignatius another improbable chance — a gesture he regrettably failed to make on his own behalf.

And a negative one from the Chicago Tribune:

Unfortunately, “A Confederacy of Dunces” isn’t a very good novel, and it’s not helped by arriving on the scene 15 years late. Like many amateur novels it seems to move in many directions at once. My guess is that much of this material was written originally in play form and then stitched into a novel.

Plus this fun headline from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

1-star Goodreads takes

What do the good people of Goodreads think about ACOD?

What’s better, the opening/closing lines?

The opener, and it’s not close:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste and dress.

It’s unusual because I’m not sure how much I want the opening lines to be pure character description. I think this is generally a literary no no, but most writing rules are meant to be broken. This is a classic.

How could you not be curious to learn more about this goober?

Actor who should play Ignatius J. Reilly in a movie

Josh Gad?

Character I want to have a beer with . . .

Easy, Burma Jones. He’s the only one who could suss out everyone else’s BS. Plus, he works in a bar and could potentially get us drinks for free; though, he had a pretty big hand in getting the bar closed.

Deep-dive Wikipedia research

• Tulane University retains a collection of Toole's papers, and some early drafts have been found, but the location of the original manuscript is unknown.

• Potential movie adaptations have rumored everyone from John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, and John Goodman to play Ignatius.

This is the greatest book EVER about . . .

New Orleans.

Though, I’d say there are moments throughout the book where you kind of forget where you are—then you get hit over the head with an extended NOLA description.

Better if Pynchon or Austen wrote it?

The plot is already absurd, but there is also an element of the story that’d fit with Austen’s comedy of manners. Still, it’d be more fun to see what other crazy details Pynchon would add. Somehow I think Ignatius would wind up as a CIA asset.

Is the book better if Jay Gatsby, Lisbeth Salander, Jo March, Atticus Finch, or Gandalf showed up?

Although most books would be improved by Gandalf, the character from this bunch who’d most fit into the absurdity might be Jay Gatsby. Wildly rich? Could pay for the car. Or maybe Ignatius could work for JG, get into the bootlegging business? Hilarity ensues.

Should it have won the Pulitzer?

ACOD actually won the 1981 Pulitzer. The other finalists were Godric by Frederick Buechner and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Two books I’ve never read, and frankly know almost nothing about. So sure, let ACOD keep its Pulitzer.

Best book to pair

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, if you want a nice Southern Gothic companion.

Fan hard . . .

While I don’t think I can say this is my favorite book the way I used to, it won’t stop some readers’ from loving it . . . like this guy’s tattoo . . .

. . . or NOLA’s statue . . .

. . . or this ode via hot dog cart.

Final Re-readability Takes

I was afraid to re-read this book because I thought I’d ruin my admiration for it. That’s true. But I did find much of it endearing and comical. I disagree with some of its critics that great literature needs to have some deep/broader meaning. Can’t ACOD just be a fun read? I saw/read a recent interview with Colson Whitehead where he talked about how his commitment was to “the novel” and to storytelling, above any obligation he had to history, etc.1 I think similarly ACOD can just stand on its own, even as it retains its special place in my mind as the book that got me into reading.

Until next time, keep on reading!

—Matt

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Dear readers—

You’ve heard me go on and on about the Great American Sports Novel (GASN) search. Here’s the list as it stands, grouped by sports. I’ve read bolded books. If you think I’m missing any, please let me know.

⚾ Baseball

• The Natural — Bernard Malamud

• The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant — Douglass Wallop

• Bang the Drum Slowly — Mark Harris

• The Southpaw — Mark Harris

• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. — Robert Cover

• The Art of Fielding — Chad Harbach

• The Great American Novel — Philip Roth

• Shoeless Joe — W. P. Kinsella

• The Iowa Baseball Confederacy — W. P. Kinsella

• Underworld* — Don DeLillo

• Squeeze Play — Jane Leavy

• Brothers K — David James Duncan

• Summerland — Michael Chabon

• You Know Me Al — Ring Lardner

• Calico Joe — John Grisham

• Bucky F***ing Dent — David Duchovny

• The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings — William Brashler

• The Cactus League — Emily Nemens

• The Celebrant — Eric Rolfe Greenberg

• The Resisters — Gish Jen

• Change-Up: Mystery at the World Series — John Feinstein

🏈 Football

• The End Zone — Don DeLillo

• A Fan’s Notes: A Memoir — Frederick Exley

• North Dallas Forty — Peter Gent

• Bleachers — John Grisham

• Semi-Tough — Dan Jenkins

• The Throwback Special — Chris Bachelder

• Everybody’s All-American — Frank Deford

⚽ Soccer

• The Damned Utd — David Peace

• Red or Dead — David Peace

🏉 Rugby

• This Sporting Life — David Storey

🥊 Boxing

• The Harder They Fall — Budd Schulberg

• The Professional — W. C. Heinz

• Fat City — Leonard Gardner

• Headshot — Rita Bullwinkel

🎾 Tennis

• Infinite Jest* — David Foster Wallace

• The Tennis Handsome — Barry Hannah

• Carrie Soto Is Back — Taylor Jenkins Reid

🏒 Hockey

• Beartown — Fredrik Backman

• Indian Horse — Richard Wagamese

🏇 Horse Racing

• The Sport of Kings* — C. E. Morgan

• Lord of Misrule — Jaimy Gordon

• Horse Heaven — Jane Smiley

🎱 Pool / Billiards

• The Hustler — Walter Tevis

• The Color of Money — Walter Tevis

🏌️ Golf

• The Legend of Bagger Vance — Steven Pressfield

• Golf in the Kingdom — Michael Murphy

• The Golf Omnibus — P. G. Wodehouse

🏃 Running / Track

• Once a Runner — John L. Parker Jr.

• The Fast Men — Tom McNab

• Flanagan’s Run — Tom McNab

🏎️ Auto Racing

• The Art of Racing in the Rain — Garth Stein

🚴 Cycling

• Gold — Chris Cleave

🏀 Basketball

• Under the Frog — Tibor Fischer

🏓 Table Tennis

• The Mighty Walzer — Howard Jacobson

🏄 Surfing

• Tapping the Source — Kem Nunn

🏊 Swimming

• Bliss, Remembered — Frank Deford

• High Dive* — Jonathan Lee

🏏 Cricket

• Netherland* — Joseph O’Neill

🏑 Field Hockey

• We Ride Upon Sticks — Quan Barry

🧗 Climbing / Mountaineering

• Solo Faces — James Salter

🎣 Fishing

• A River Runs Through It* — Norman Maclean

🏐 Volleyball

• Hot Girls with Balls — Benedict Nguyễn

♟️ Chess

• The Queen’s Gambit — Walter Tevis

This list will get updated and shared periodically. My hope is to later write a longform story about the process, about the findings, about some ideas this exercise elicited. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

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PROGRESS STATS

Total Books Read: 15

Total Books Listed: 62

* Most likely won’t meet my eventual criteria to be considered a “sports” novel.

In writing the last few weeks, what’s become clear to me is that (a) I like writing about books and (b) you like reading about them. It’s also become clear that most book discussions on social media are the exact same—i.e., lots of dull reviews and pics of the same book stacks on repeat. So I’m going to try and pivot to fun topics that have already started to click:

• Good Book Hang!: Taking our favorite classics and popular releases. Instead of basic reviews, let’s give crazy categories to get to know them (think Rewatchables pod for books).

• The Search for the Great ___ Novel: Like the Great American Sports Novel (in progress), I want to bring you along as I search for genre/location/era-defining books.

• Reading Diary: In which I ramble on my reading life.

I’ll still touch on sports, pop culture & movies occasionally (especially when they pertain to the reading), but I hope you enjoy the new direction. I’m sure I’ll come up w/ some other ideas as this develops, but until then, I’m happy to welcome you to GBH!

—Matt

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Dear OMFers—

What you’ll soon learn about me from my extensive and highly academic search for the Great American Sports Novel is that I’m a bit distrustful of Shoeless Joe. I’m skeptical of its overwrought nostalgia and the way it’s cited as the GOAT baseball book—not to mention its partner in crime, Field of Dreams, as the best sports movie. I’ve never agreed.1 Though I’m keeping an open mind as I get further into this adventure.

So naturally, this year’s Field of Dreams game—the one where MLB teams go to Iowa to exploit that same nostalgia I question—featured the Phillies on Netflix.2

What caught my eye, however, when the game was announced was the special jerseys for the occasion. [DIGRESSION] I bought a Washington Senators hat when I first moved to D.C. I felt that wearing a Phillies hat to a Mets at Nats was a little too gauche. But I also wouldn’t be caught dead in that hideous Walgreens-style Nats hat. So I bought the navy-blue, sleek Senators hat to blend. [DIGRESSION END] Well, the Phillies’ Field of Dreams hat looked almost exactly the same, but with a “P.” It’s beautiful and I wanted one.

Unfortunately, it was sold out almost everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except this small sports memorabilia shop in Philly—and who knows how legit this hat was. But I ordered it anyway, and when it arrived . . . Perfection!

So what did I do traveling last weekend? I left it in our hotel. After wearing it twice. Gone. I was sure I’d never see it again.

Other great sports items I’ve lost

This got me thinking about all the great sports collectibles and gear I’ve lost over the years—like a St. Andrews Open Championship windbreaker that I absolutely loved.3

More disheartening, I recently saw that someone sold the LeBron James SLAM magazine cover for a couple thousand dollars. I had that one, along with his Sports Illustrated cover from high school. I kept them for years, but my parents (lacking the same long-term investment vision) tossed them when they moved. Sure wish I had those now.

Note: I contacted the hotel to send the hat back. A mystery $10 charge showed up on my card a few days later. Could this be the first time in history a hotel has followed through on this type of request?! I’ll update you as needed.

The search for the Great American Sports Novel update

On the Great American Sports Novel front, I’m up to 14 books, and my TBR list is now well over 60. Just wanted to share a couple of quick observations as my own odyssey progresses.

• The best sports books I’ve read so far have been written by non-American authors. Maybe there’s no great American sports writer, which would be ironic given our obsession with sports.

• I’m wondering if the Great American Sports Novel is limited to only a few sports. Could a ping-pong book really qualify? What about boxing? Or horse racing? Those sports used to be culturally important, but not anymore. Baseball is interesting because it’s been the most professionalized for the longest period. Football is the biggest sport now, but that wasn’t the case 50 years ago. Hence the dearth of classic football novels.

• Relatedly, across my entire list, there’s only one basketball book—and it wasn’t written by an American. Why? I’ll investigate and report back.

Anyway, my search continues. Note: I’ve made more progress on my sports book than I have with Ulysses, for which I’m still waiting for my annotated copy.

So, until next time . . .

—Matt

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Dear OMFers—

I thought we had a good thing going. I thought we had started to build trust. I empowered you to choose my next classic to read, and you selected Joyce’s Ulysses. Certainly not a light read. But I was excited for the challenge, especially with all the Odyssey buzz.

I have to admit on starting it, I’m pretty confused. There are a lot of references swirling around that are above my head. But thus, I persist. In Chapter 2, Stephen has a short conversation after teaching a class about hand, foot & mouth disease. On Tuesday morning, when I read this scene on the train to work, I didn’t think much of it (aside from the fact that it was one of the more straightforward passages I read).

Fast forward to later that day, and guess who calls? Daycare! Yes, daycare, to let me know that my son in fact has HFM and needs to be sent home for (likely) the rest of the week.

So, thank you, readers for this twisted prank you’ve pulled on me. You are to blame for my lack of reading progress this week. Surely, this is a sign from the literary gods that we should’ve chosen another book.

But I will persist. My annotated copy will arrive soon, and I will forge ahead with my now hopefully immune child. I do not know what the remainder of the plot has in store, but I hope it involves fewer rashes.

Critical thoughts on Devil Wears Prada 2 & Monsters University

Most Hollywood sequels have a formula: take the beloved characters from the first iteration, tweak a few plot points, sprinkle in some nostalgia, and let everyone cook again. That’s pretty much how I felt about DWP2 when I watched with my wife this week. Andy has a bit more agency this round, but Miranda is still Miranda—though, maybe with a bit more heart.

But I watched another “sequel”—actually a prequel—this week: Monsters University. My daughter loves Monsters Inc., despite my now needing to check under her bed and closet for monsters every night. We thought we’d try MU, and I must say kudos to the Pixar team. This was not formulaic. Mike & Sully seemed like an unlikely duo in the first, but it gave us no reason to question. I thought it was smart how MU used their personalities and subverted them them to show how they became friends, especially since it ends in failure. Really interesting movie for kids—and apparently also for 30-something dads.

I hope you appreciate my take on a decade-plus-old children’s movie.

My Search for The Great American Sports Novel

I recently read The Art of Fielding and found it bland. Then I realized that’s pretty much how I’ve felt about every sports novel I’ve ever read.

Thus, I am now on a heroic quest to find the Great American Sports Novel, if such a work exists. (P.S. I’m not sure it does.) More to come on this front.

Until next week . . .

—Matt

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Dearest readers—

I rewatch a lot of movies. I won’t tell you how many times I’ve seen A Few Good Men.1 On January 1, or maybe it was January 10 after watching Top Gun: Maverick for the third time in the new year, I decided I needed to make some changes. I vowed to watch 100 new—as in new to me, not new in 2026—movies as a way to fight back against the brain-rot-inducing rewatch.

To hold myself accountable in this endeavor I created a Letterboxd account. This prompted me to attempt to track down every movie I’ve ever seen. So far I’ve logged over 1,500, which TBH seems a bit light. Perhaps all the aforementioned rewatching is to blame? And what’s worse, now I’m not only wasting time rewatching movies, but also wasting time digging through the same filmbro lists over and over again trying to find movies I’ve seen so I can count them. Alas, my 2026 goal stalled a bit, and I’m only sitting 53 movies watched.2

Help me! I’m going to attempt Ulysses (again)!

So that my year wasn’t spent entirely in front of a screen, I also vowed to read 50 books in 2026. This, after I realized last October that I wasn’t sure if I read a single book the entire year. But I’m pleased to report that at 43 books, I’m well on pace. Hence my desire to read a gigantic classic.

As you can see, we have a bit of a conundrum. A tie. A literary pickle between an adventurous Spaniard and the Odysseus-lite Leo Bloom. I actually voted for Ulysses, since that’s what I thought I’d read before putting my fate in the hands of my favorite Substack readers. Had I not voted, Don Quixote would be the victor. But the thing is, I did vote, and ties go to the writer. Sorry!

I guess I’m an Everton fan now?

Why bring this up now? Well, we are in the summer sports doldrums. The World Cup is over, football hasn’t started yet, and we have some time before basketball begins. I posed a serious question about my desire to find a new EPL team. If you recall, I once wrote about my roller coaster ride with Southampton FC and my difficulty following them since relegation.3 I figure, I manufactured fandom once. Why not try again?

Much to my dismay, I only received one response from my dear friend , but the recommendation for Everton is intriguing. And research has confirmed that it’s a good comp for Philly fandom.

LeBron James is still a 76er!

Speaking of which, have I mentioned that LeBron is a 76er? Since this most glorious signing—a feat no doubt greater than anything Philadelphia’s experienced since 1776—I’ve started procuring my fair share of Sixers junk. I bought this amazing (and deeply patriotic) hat, alongside a LeBron Sixers card (I think).4

I also found these adorable LeBron dinosaur shirts for my kids. And I’m still waiting for the real 2000’s jerseys to go on sale, as that’s just a great purchase. I’m sure there’ll be more.

The cheeseburger is the national dish, and no one can tell me otherwise.

Although it was written for the July 4th holiday, my late-to-the-game-Dad brain just came across this piece by Wesley Morris (one of my favorite writers, who sadly doesn’t write much anymore) about potato salad as the national dish. While I like potato salad as much as the next guy, we overthink these questions. It’s the burger, right? Morris argues that the national dish can’t be something we don’t make from scratch. Also, who eats hot dogs outside baseball games and BBQs? And you know what we can make from scratch? And what rocks at fast food joints and gourmet restaurants? Burgers!

I took my daughter to a Five Guys for a quick snack the other day and realized they now serve minis/sliders. She has, up to now, shown little interest in burgers, but she approached this tiny burger with much less apprehension. Maybe she was hungry. Maybe its small size was less intimidating. Maybe it was just time. Regardless, the pride I felt watching her finally enjoy my favorite food made me recognize that this grossly unhealthy amalgam of meat/cheese/bread had to be the American dish.

Dear OMFers—

My most sincere apologies for not getting my Odyssey content published in a timely manner, but as I’ve been reiterating, kind of a big thing happened in Philly sports this weekend. For those living under a rock, LeBron is a Sixer! You read that right, LeBron is a Sixer! I didn’t think anything could overshadow The Odyssey at this point, but leave it to LeBron (more on that later).

How Far I’ll Go . . . to avoid the Sheep Detective

Before he signed with the Sixers, and before I saw The Odyssey, a far more important event occurred: I took my daughter to her first movie at a theater. I’ve been waiting for this for ages, but I am concerned that I may have committed parental malpractice at the same time. You see, I thought seriously about going with her when Sheep Detectives was getting positive buzz, but I was concerned that for the rest of her life she’d be asked “what was your first movie in a theater?” and she’d feel embarrassed answering Sheep Detectives. It just sounds so dumb. So I didn’t do it. And you know what, I watched the movie and thought it was dumb—despite its 95% on RT. What’s more, I don’t think my three-year-old would’ve been able to follow a somewhat complex whodunnit.1

We went to see the live-action Moana instead. Yes, potentially parental purgatory considering it’s sub 40% on RT.2 But here’s the thing: it’s the same story/music/visuals, and she loved it.3 So get off my back!

Now she’ll get to deceptively say Moana was her first movie, and everyone will assume the animated version. Genius!

The greatest Odyssey adaptation is an early aughts stoner comedy

I went to see the new Nolan movie last week and enjoyed it, like most Nolan movies. But it got me thinking about how we adapt stories. The Odyssey is probably the most adapted story of all time. A lot of people are telling it without even knowing.

Sure, there have been some quintessential retellings — Joyce’s Ulysses, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain (the book, at least), etc. But what of the less obvious ones? What about Dope, which is basically the Odyssey in Compton? Some have cited the SpongeBob movie, which is pretty overt.

My personal favorite, in large part because there’s no critical writing about it (obviously), is Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle—yes, the stoner movie about two guys trying to sate their marijuana cravings.4 There are sirens (Princeton girls), monsters (Freakshow), Calypso (Malin Åkerman), Penelope (Maria), among other references.

It’s an underrated classic that should be mentioned alongside other, serious adaptations.5

LeBron James is actually Odysseus reincarnate

In keeping with the theme, LeBron’s 24-year career has become an odyssey in its own right. More than any other athlete, he’s probably the most Odysseus-like than any other celebrity:

• Penelope: Savannah James by his side through his whole career.

• Suitors: All the teams that have been calling for years during each free agency cycle.

• Telemachus: Bronny trying to make it in the NBA, now maybe without his dad.

• Calypso: The Lakers have kept LeBron out of the East for about seven years.

• Cyclops: Dan Gilbert felt jilted after LeBron left and probably cursed the Heat and then the Lakers.

• Scylla: Those pesky Boston teams that irked LeBron early in his career.

• Circe: Klutch Sports has left the remains of many ex-LeBron teams in a pig-sty-like state.

• Giants: Some tall players (Duncan, Durant, Dirk, Giannis) prevented some LeBron titles.

Hopefully now that LeBron is in Philly, it’ll serve as a kind of new and improved Ithaca. It will certainly be a wild ride however it shakes out.

—Matt

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