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Gucci recently announced that Tom Brady will be in a new print ad campaign for creative director Demna’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection, along with model Alex Consani, rapper EsDeeKid (who I’m pretty sure is just Timothée Chalamet with a British accent), and singer Shawn Mendes. People online have had a field day making fun of Brady’s leather pants.

Today, the clothing item himself, Leather Pants, joins The Wilder Things for an exclusive.

Charlotte Wilder: Mr. Pants, first of all, I want to thank you for sitting down with me today. I know a lot of outlets have been reaching out, and I’m grateful you decided to go on the record with The Wilder Things.

Leather Pants: No problem. I hear you’ve been on the Tom Brady beat for a while now, and my team and I really wanted to go with someone who knew the ins and outs of Tom’s history online.

CW: For sure, yeah. I started tracking him twelve years ago when he first joined Facebook and have been following his trajectory online ever since — we also talk about him often on . My favorite era of Tom’s was when he was posting those trippy cartoons, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

LP: You know, some of his gear from the Patriots actually told us about those early days on Instagram.

CW: You talk to his other clothes?

LP: Oh yeah, we’re always chatting. The closet comes alive once he closes the door. You’d think he’d keep most of his football stuff in storage, but he actually has most of it really accessible. It’s like he’s ready to go back into the league at a moment’s notice. A few of his Under Armour Quick Dry shirts from New England live in a drawer near where I hang out most of the time. It’s helpful to hear about his history. It gave me a lot of context for what I’ve gone through the past few months.

CW: That’s what I’m interested in — what has this year been like for you?

LP: I mean, I was thrust into the spotlight. I come from a long line of high fashion Leather Pants. My dad worked with Jared Leto, my mom was in the Aaliyah “Try Again” music video. My grandfather and grandmother met in Mick Jagger’s closet, and my great-grandfather was really close with Elvis. I’ve never talked about this publicly, but my sister tragically died on tour with Harry Styles three years ago. She split right in half when Harry lunged. Everyone thought it was super funny, and I’m like, a life was lost. Please show some respect.

CW: I’m so sorry, how awful for you and your family.

LP: Yeah, thanks. I also think that history of ridicule is why I got freaked out after I walked with Tom in the Gucci show in Times Square in May. I was so young. Demna tailored me for Tom and it was my first runway. I thought we crushed it together, and I was thrilled to be on such a huge stage. My parents always told me I was outstanding, and that day I felt like I really proved it to myself.

CW: That must’ve been really exciting.

LP: But then I saw how many people were making fun of him online for his leather pants and it just felt like a punch right to the fly. They were talking about me.

CW: How did you see the response? Does the Pants community have iPhones?

LP: No, we don’t. Can’t use them because we don’t have thumbs. But one of Tom’s necklaces told me. She was around his neck as he was looking at his phone.

CW: What did you think of the recent response to the Gucci print ad?

LP: Honestly, that’s what put me over the edge and made me decide to talk to the press. I need to own my narrative, and if it means Tom gets rid of me, so be it. I’d rather have my integrity than a place in his closet.

CW: What do you mean?

LP: You saw his answers in that GQ interview. He literally said, “Damn, [they’re] actually really comfortable.” To say actually, like he was shocked. It rubbed me the wrong way. And then he called me “a different look” and said, “there was a rigidity and a structure to it, like my football uniform.” He compared me to athletic wear. It’s unconscionable.

CW: Not to defend Tom, but I think he meant that as a compliment. He really loved his football uniform.

LP: Sure, whatever. I just don’t appreciate being lumped into this greater narrative around Tom’s online crashout. He dated Alix Earle, who is like, a thousand years younger than he is, he’s been posting weird quotes. He’s clearly going through it after his divorce, I get that. But, like, I don’t know why I have had to bear so much of the brunt for him. I’m a clothing item, you know? Leave me out of it.

CW: I totally get how all of this must feel like a real kick in the pants.

LP: That’s actually a really offensive saying in my culture.

CW: Oh, I’m so sorry, I —

Ed note: Leather Pants left the Zoom call abruptly and didn’t respond to further requests for comment.

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The fireworks exploded at the exact moment the game clock struck zero and OG Anunoby threw the ball into the air, high above the hardwood in San Antonio, Texas. We heard loud pops over our apartment in Brooklyn, along with the cheers of millions of people across the city as the Knicks clinched their first title in 53 years.

The ever-stoic Jalen Brunson cried on television. Tyler, my lifelong-Knicks fan husband, had his hands on his face in disbelief. When we first started dating, he said, “I just hope I see the Knicks in a championship before I leave this earth.” He couldn’t even bring himself to say “I just hope I see them win.” And yet, the unthinkable had happened, and I had just watched him watch them win one.

Out on the streets, people seemed to be in a state of ecstasy and shock. Gatherings on every corner of every neighborhood played “New York, New York,” and “Empire State of Mind.” I walked past a burnt-out box of fireworks on Court Street, and as I rounded the corner from Court to Carroll, another batch went off. Big ones, not the dinky kind.

I met and her husband, Cutter, in front of a bodega on Smith Street. Fans had packed themselves into Wing Bar, Union Grounds, Bar Great Harry, and around TVs set up on every corner. The championship celebration beamed from a projector onto a brick wall. It was by now a familiar scene — after the Game 2 win, I watched people gather at a bodega on the corner where the owner was selling booze to anyone who wanted to drink on the sidewalk and watch the game (“I’ve got a few retired cops out there, it’s all good”).

What seemed to be thousands of people gathered in the middle of the road singing “Go New York, go New York, go,” the Knicks anthem from 1993. Adults and children alike were cheering for municipal vehicles as if they were toddlers with a transportation obsession. Whenever a car approached, fans would part like the Red Sea, screaming with joy as the driver laid on the horn. One passenger got out and did the can-can with three random guys as on-lookers fist-pumped. A woman popped out of her sun roof and screamed “Knicks in five” to thunderous applause, and then a bus honked to the beat of that chant as hands reached out to touch it. A police car came through and turned its lights on without sirens, which was the only time I’ve ever seen cops get cheered in New York City.

And then a garbage truck approached, and I watched as adults stationed a block away made the universal “honk your horn if you’re a truck” sign (bent biceps pulling down on an imaginary string). As the massive steel frame rolled into the fray and let out its powerful, fog horn-like bellow, people jumped up and down and let out screams that made it seem like Jalen Brunson himself was waving from the trash compactor.

A few blocks up, we walked by a Ford Taurus (now discontinued) with all of its doors open, blasting “Another One Bites the Dust.” Five older gentlemen danced around it and we joined them, then walked down the street a bit. When we came back up, the music had stopped.

“You gotta play another song,” I said.

“What do you want?” a man named Jerry asked, slowly lowering himself into the front seat.

“Whatever you want.”

“Should I just do ‘New York, New York’ again?”

Before I could answer, the familiar, slow vamp of trumpets poured out of the speakers. A crowd gathered out of nowhere, people of all ages, dancing and singing along. Jerry grew up on Butler, between Bond and Nevins, back in the ’70s and ’80s when he used to hear gunshots everyday. Now, the streets are lined with high-end boutiques and Jerry lives on Sackett with his disabled brother, whom he takes care of.

“I was around the first time the Knicks won,” Jerry said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this. I shed a tear. My friend Tina looked at me and goes, are you crying? And I said, ‘Noooo.’”

He laughed and mimed wiping away tears under his glasses. Nearby, a kid stood on a mailbox surrounded by a crowd of people in orange and blue. Folks smoked cigars and the smell of weed wafted through the air along with a haze of joy five decades in the making.

***

You’ve probably seen videos of scenes like the one on Smith — or maybe even the exact moments I just described — on the internet. New York was a powder keg of elation before the end of Game 5, when it all blew up. This is a kind of sports joy that can only exist after years and years and years of pain.

The Knicks were remarkably bad for generations. They hadn’t won since 1973, and kept finding ways to be worse than they had ever been before. In 2015, the team set the record for the franchise’s worst season when they went 17-65. The Knicks then tied their own record four years later, going 17-65 again in 2018-2019.

A true New York basketball fan can take you through the horrors of failed draft picks like Frederic Weis, Frank Ntilikina, and Kevin Knox. They can tell you about the false prophets in the front office like Isiah Thomas and Phil Jackson. They can tell you about how they came so close in the ’90s, then wandered in The Desert of Irrelevance for thirty years with mirages of hope every now and then.

And then Jalen Brunson showed up in 2022. And his Villanova college buddy, Josh Hart. And OG, and Karl-Anthony Towns, and another Villanova guy, Mikal Bridges. Along the way the team picked up Landry Shamet, Jose Alvarado, Jordan Clarkson, Deuce McBride. The longest tenured player on this roster is Mitch Robinson, who’s been on the team since 2018. All of these players were doubted for one reason or another: too small, too stiff, too soft. But they all had, or learned to embody, the qualities you need to win: Humility and hunger. They seem to genuinely love each other and share a belief in team over the individual.

We talked about the team’s leadership on :

Last year, coach Tom Thibodeau got the team to the Eastern Conference Finals, playing his starters for so many minutes that most of them seemed held together with Ace bandages and pain meds by the end. The team fired him and hired Mike Brown, a talented coach whom the Sacramento Kings axed in 2024, after Brown took them to the playoffs for the first time in sixteen years. Brown found a way to quickly earn the New York players’ trust as an outsider, listening to and directing them in equal measure. A winning formula.

All of these puzzle pieces fit together thanks to team president, Leon Rose, and executive vice president, William Wesley (World Wide Wes), who joined in 2020. Rose must also have some strange hold on team owner James Dolan to get him to stop meddling in the formation of the teams. Dolan is one of the most litigious, contrarian, self-sabotaging owners in sports. He sought out splashy names rather than good fits, sued a rival team, has been accused of sex trafficking, feuded with Knicks legends, barred lawyers from entering his establishments, and, most recently, picked a fight with the city over watch parties. I watched him play a concert with his band on the night of the NBA Draft in 2017 rather than think about his team.

But somehow, Rose built something real in New York City. These players simply never gave up. They trailed in every Finals game, yet they won four out of five. They got over the hump despite Dolan’s best efforts to, once again, fuck up the vibes.

***

I can’t properly describe the depths of the chills that went down my spine when I saw the President of the United States, lit up like a wax statue at Madame Tussauds, in a suite as the national anthem played ahead of Game 3. It was like seeing Hitler at the Munich Olympics, although I don’t think Hitler fell asleep when Jesse Owens won gold. Trump appeared to take a nap after he had inconvenienced every single person who tried to get into the building.

Even with press credentials, we got there four and a half hours early and stood in the hot sun for a long time. A man behind us leaned on crutches and struggled to stand. It was dangerous for people with disabilities and older fans who had to wait in a crush of people for an hour and a half to enter the arena, only to have TSA screen them as though they were boarding a flight.

My blood boiled as I watched one man’s selfish behavior affect what should have been the most joyous moment at the Garden in decades. Finally, a Finals home game! All of it, of course, paled in comparison to the pain Trump has caused by separating families, harming the economy, unleashing a deadly, unlawful police force, peeling back environmental protections, and starting a war (to name a few).

Trump was there because Dolan invited him. Then all of the necessary gates went up. Barriers, stanchions, and secret service members restricted fans’ movements. When I covered the Kentucky Derby in 2017, I marveled at how the whole event was a metaphor for America — access was granted based on money and connections.

The Finals at MSG felt similar: Celebrities have special clubs and entrances where they are whisked in and out of the Garden, separated from the mere mortals in the stands. Mere mortals who, mind you, paid a minimum of $4000 for a nosebleed ticket. And that’s only if they bought it right after the Knicks clinched the Eastern Conference Finals. If they waited until the day before Game 3, it would have cost them $9,000 to get into the building.

The crowd of the Garden during the insane comeback at the end of Game 4 was electric. We were sitting in the rafters called the Hyundai Bridge (god forbid a section of an arena not be monetized), and could feel the whole building shake. But still, the vast, vast majority of Knicks fans couldn’t afford to be in there. Even if they could, they were barred from entering the most vaunted spaces.

But you know where there aren’t gates? Where you can watch for free? The streets of the city.

***

Last year, I wrote about why sports dynasties are actually good. In that piece, I developed a highly scientific formula called The Fandom Romance Index (FRI). Not to quote myself, but I’m going to, because what I wrote applies to this fanbase more than almost any other:

“Being a fan of a losing team is, at its core, romantic. You love this thing that doesn’t really know you exist, will never love you back, is capable of bringing you intense joy and misery, and is usually loaded with nostalgia. The longer your team goes without winning a championship, the more romantic your fandom. Extra romance points if your team has recently gotten close and lost or has just totally sucked for a very long time.”

Here is the graph:

Before Game 5, Knicks fans were at peak Fandom Romance Index, and that’s almost the purest spot to be. There’s a bittersweetness that comes after the thrill of winning subsides, because you might only get this feeling once. It takes a lot of misery and a lot of time for the payoff to be this transcendent. The second the FRI peaks, the timeline resets. It’s like surfing a giant wave that has had to travel around the world in order to break. Once it crests and recedes from the beach, you may never ride it again.

But that doesn’t mean it goes away. I’m a Red Sox fan, and some of my clearest memories from high school are from Boston’s amazing Postseason run in 2004. We didn’t have homework for three weeks, and when the team won the World Series after 86 years, I sobbed with my parents. My friends and I skipped school to go to the parade. No one cared. Those feelings are still within me, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience them again, vicariously, through the people I love and city I’ve loved to live in for almost ten years.

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What sets this championship apart is that it feels like the first major opportunity for the Fandom Romance Index to peak since sports become the only thing everyone watches at the same time, save a live-streamed insurrection (shoutout Jan 6.), election returns, and sometimes awards shows. Everything but sports is declining in viewership, while last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched of all time, with 127.5 million people tuning in. Thanks to the Knicks, these NBA Finals were the most-watched since 1998, when Michael Jordan led the Bulls to their second three-peat in a decade. 23.8 million people watched Game 5.

I’m not going to get into the whole “the monoculture is dead” thing, but it basically is, and sports have become one of the few, if only, remaining common languages. The Knicks’ championship came at a time when watching a game with people you don’t know satisfies the craving for community that so many people feel right now.

People all over the city jumped on the Knicks bandwagon, because, at their highest degree of romance, sports are addicting, alluring, and impossible to resist.

***

“New York feels like a small town at times like this,” the actor John Turturro said on the broadcast before Game 5.

He’s not wrong. But if you immerse yourself in your community in New York City, if you exist beyond the gates and the barriers, it can feel like a small town all the time. The Knicks might have highlighted how people come together, but it happens every day across every borough regardless of the score of a game.

New York is one of the most diverse cities in the world, so it only felt right that Alvarado went straight from the Finals to the Puerto Rican Day Parade with the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani genuinely wants to make the city more affordable, to prevent people like Jerry from being priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in.

This run made it feel like the city was rejecting the very things that Dolan and Trump champion — division, access, cruelty — when all different kinds of people cheered at the same time for the same diverse group of men. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only game this Knicks team lost was the one Trump attended. No matter how much a billionaire owner tries to distort the vibes, the team doesn’t spiritually belong to him.

It belongs to the folks watching at a bar in Greenwood, dancing on buses in the streets of Fort Greene, climbing lamp posts in the West Village, cheering on the subway in the Bronx. It belongs to people who have the capacity for euphoria. Who understand that their sports team connects them to the place and people they love, allows them to feel something for the sheer thrill of it, and, ultimately, reminds them that emotions are the whole point of being alive.

The Knicks are for the people.

The tenacity and dogged determination of this Knicks team has plugged the city in and lit it up. Every building shone blue and orange after wins. Sports won’t fix our country, but they do give people a reason to dance in the streets and cheer for garbage trucks. The moment the Knicks won the championship reminded everyone in this city how beautiful it is to lose your mind in a crowd of strangers.

That collective joy is something that the miserly, greedy, small men who control this country from behind their plate-glass SUV windows and suites will never understand.

And it makes those of us who share in it richer than they’ll ever be.

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In the mid-to-late 2010s, I was a reporter and a blogger. Blogging back then was kind of like being a content turkey vulture. You found something remotely interesting and picked away at it, trying to turn it into a meal, also known as a post.

Tom Brady’s social media was a buffet. I dined out on it for years, and I thought I was satiated. But recently, Tom Brady has set a table I can’t refuse.

Listeners of will know that some of my favorite things to talk about are the strange Instagram posts the former Patriots’ quarterback has been coming up with recently. They began with thirst traps and have turned into with a series of strange, AI-looking images. When I search Tom Brady’s Instagram handle in my photos, 252 screenshots come up. I am a sick woman.

But I find it absolutely fascinating that Brady doesn’t have to be on social media at all, and yet he is. And he’s often quite vulnerable.

It’s not just what Brady’s been posting. It’s when. Notably, right around the same time that news breaks involving his ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen (you can read on the sociology of his social media here, and watch our full episode about it here:

On October 28th, 2024, the public learned that Bündchen was having a baby with her Jiu-Jitsu instructor-turned-boyfriend, and now husband, Joaquim Valente. On October 29th, 2024, Brady posted a photo of a sunset (maybe in the Bay Area, where his parents live?) with The Chick’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s song “Landslide.”

This portion, specifically:

“Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?/Can the child within my heart rise above?/Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?/Can I handle the seasons of my life?”

On August 21st, 2025, Bündchen posted photos of her and Brady’s children hanging out with her and Valente’s new baby, and Valente himself.

On August 24th, Brady posted a selfie of his chest clad in a sweatshirt that says “Forever YOUNG,” with the caption “Yupppppp 💯.”

He then posted this exact same photo — caption, emojis, everything — on December 20th, 2025, the day after it came out that Bündchen had married Valente. Except this time, he added Logic’s song whose title is “1-800-273-8255,” the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s number. It’s about how suicide is never the answer. I’m betting Brady just didn’t know what the song meant, but…a little worrisome!

Gisele recently posted a carousel of photos from 2025, including images of her pregnancy and then her baby.

Around the same time, Brady was seen partying in St. Barth’s with the social media personality Alix Earle, who, at 25, is 23 years younger than he is. They seemed pretty cozy. Given the amount of videos and pictures from this party, they also didn’t seem like they were trying to hide whatever was going on between them.

The day after that story broke, Brady posted another AI-generated-looking illustration on his story. It appears to be of two monks holding hands, with the words:

“PEOPLE ARE NOT BEAUTIFUL FOR HOW THEY LOOK OR SPEAK. THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL FOR HOW THEY LOVE, CARE, AND TREAT OTHERS” (it felt important that I leave that in all-caps, as god intended).

AI Slop and Thirst Traps

Before I get into the analysis of Brady’s recent activity and tell you just how far down the rabbit hole of Brady’s historical social media use I have fallen, let’s talk about a few other wild images he shared this past year.

We’ve said this on the show, but Brady uses Instagram like it’s 2016 and he’s going through a breakup. It sure seems like he wants someone specific (either an ex or a crush, perhaps?) to take the bait and slide into his DMs in response to these earnest stories. Everything Brady has posted over the past year — the selfies, the weird AI stuff, even the many photos he posts with his kids — contains an element of yearning, a desire to be perceived.

This makes sense, given that he lives in an ivory tower. While most of us can go out and wander around the grocery store, Brady is so famous that some of the only spontaneity available to him occurs on the internet.

There’s this image of a mob boss-like Tom The Cat (I think? Of Tom and Jerry fame?) smoking a cigar, with the words, “I’m the CEO of my own life, f*ck your rules.” Brady added, “Well Said !!!”

And this, showing people lined up for various doors, with the most people in line “to criticize” and the fewest in line “to help.”

And this image of a tree and its roots, with the words, “Some days you bloom, some days you grow roots. Both matter.” Brady added the emojis “💯 💪.”

There’s also this image of an old mouse holding a cane and the hand of a younger mouse. The words say, “This image signifies the importance of having a good mentor in life.” I was disturbed when I read the phrase “this image signifies,” and even more so when I realized there are mouse traps clamped to the bigger mouse’s tail.

I reverse-image searched all of these strange illustrations, and each one seems to come from multiple Instagram accounts with about 1,000 followers or so, some of them foreign. I did see that the sprinter Fred Kerley posted the image of Tom The Cat on his Instagram and Twitter. It’s possible that’s where Brady saw it. My best guess is that the other images were served to him on the explore page.

I fear that Tom Brady feels seen by AI slop.

Brady has always been active on his stories. He used to post photos of the Patriots building with the words, “Motivation!” But these days, in addition to the bizarre AI illustrations, Brady has been posting thirst traps.

Like this selfie of his very neatly arranged face and his very hairless chest with the caption “Go time 💯💯💯.”

And this photo of him “seeing how the ol’ arm feels.”

And yet another shirtless selfie of him holding up a pendant with his kids’ names on it.

And this image of his back yard:

There are a lot of other trying-to-look-hot posts I could pick from. Like this, yet another shirtless selfie with his dog (who is a clone of the dog he and Bündchen owned together — more on that in a moment, and you can listen to our episode about it).

Here is Lua, the dog he cloned:

The History of Tom Brady’s Social Media

Brady used to be a lot goofier online and less concerned with looking hot. On March 26, 2020 (the day after my birthday and, perhaps more importantly, shortly after he announced he was leaving Patriots for Tampa Bay) he posted this silly selfie with the words “SUP @gisele.”

This, in 2018, was as close as he used to get to a thirst trap:

I’ve been obsessed with Tom Brady’s social media use since he first joined Facebook in 2014, largely for the same reason I’ve been fascinated by former Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s relationship with Jordon Hudson: as a lifelong Patriots fan, both went against everything I thought I knew about the men.

When Brady joined Facebook in 2014, the Patriots were firmly in their Do Your Job era. Belichick’s father was the head coach at Navy for over three decades, and that military style seemed to serve as a jumping off point for New England’s culture during their twenty-year dynastic run.

When it came to the day-to-day business of practicing and playing football in Foxborough, Massachusetts, “fun” didn’t enter the lexicon. Winning was fun. Everything else was not.

In 2016, however, before the Patriots played the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship, this popped up on Brady’s Facebook. It’s an image of Brady, poorly Photoshopped onto a goofy looking bucking bronco:

For a team where individualism wasn’t celebrated, Brady was showing personality. Was he funny? I had never considered it, but here were signs of life!

And then, during the 2016-2017 season, Brady started getting really funky with his social media. After every Patriots win, he posted the front page of a fake newspaper called the TB Times (not to be confused with the actual newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, though that coincidence did foreshadow the end of his career with the Bucs). Each post featured a cartoon, usually involving a pun about the team the Patriots just defeated.

During the 2017-2018 season, the TB Times started getting even trippier, like it was made by a 24-year-old guy in a basement who dropped acid and fired up Adobe Illustrator. A crocodile named Croc started appearing almost weekly, and I became obsessed with finding out who was behind this, and what (or who) on god’s green earth Croc represented.

In 2018, I asked Tom Brady at a Super Bowl press conference, “Who is Croc?” He said we might find out if the Patriots won. They lost.

Over the next five years, what started out as a silly running joke turned into a hunt for my white whale. I hunted down Brady’s team and broke the story about the creative agency behind Brady’s posts that he had quietly been funding for years (the people making those cartoons had, in fact, been 24-year-old guys).

When I spoke to his team about the TB Times, they said that Brady always wanted to de-center himself in the images and spotlight teammates who made the biggest difference in the game. He cares deeply about being a good teammate. Brady has always leaned into self-deprecation, and he still does.

But these days, Brady seems to be having an online mid-life crisis, one that feels less managed than his channels used to be.

Three Wishes

Brady is once again fighting time itself. He played football until he was 45 years old, working out in specific ways to keep his body as limber as it used to be. He was 41 in 2018 when the Facebook Live documentary called Tom vs. Time came out. In that doc and in other interviews, Bündchen had trouble with the fact that her husband wouldn’t retire (“I moved to Boston”). Brady finally announced he would stop playing in 2022, then un-retired a month later. He and Bündchen were divorced by that October.

Brady’s whole life changed after he stopped playing football; the thing he was better at than anyone else in the world ended, and so did his primary relationship. Posting in a “forever young” sweatshirt, cloning his dog, and hanging out with someone almost half his age sure makes it seem like Brady is, perhaps subconsciously, trying to stop the world from spinning forward.

However, the whole point of life is that time with the people (or animals) you love is ephemeral. The pain that comes with those fleeting highs is unavoidable, but it’s all beautiful and sacred because you can’t recreate it.

What is it that the genie says when he grants three wishes in any tale? He can make you rich, give you power, make you strong — anything but make someone love you or bring someone back from the dead. Brady has money, power, and strength, but maybe he’s hoping that if he posts hard enough online, the genie might bend the rules for him.

It’s rare to see a famous person be this transparent — whether Brady is doing so purposely or not — on the internet. There’s something deeply relatable and human about his yearning, despite his fame. A lot of athletes and people whose jobs or passions are tied to their physical abilities have trouble moving on when they can’t do them anymore. And a lot of men who go through divorces find themselves adrift.

Perhaps the moral of the story is what US Weekly figured out a long time ago: Celebrities, they’re just like us. They just have more followers on Instagram.

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Hey pals, it’s been a minute. I don’t think I’ve written to you all since The Sports Gossip Show launched with The Athletic and The New York Times! Thank you for bearing with me — it’s been a wild three months since our first episode went live with them. It’s still pretty surreal to see the show that and I started with two microphones and a dream pop up in the NYT app along with, you know, Connections.

I’m very proud of what we’re building and very grateful to our team at The Athletic for being so supportive. The fact that the folks at a major sports media outlet even brought us on still blows my mind. I’ve been working in sports for over ten years now. For the majority of that time, I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that someday the Times would pick up a sports show with the word gossip in it. In fact, I didn’t fully believe it until we signed the deal.

While all of that’s been happening, my lovely husband, Tyler, has been in Vancouver making a movie. I’m beyond proud of him, and it’s been truly magical to visit the set out there and see how a film comes to life.

I’m telling you all of this to explain my absence. It’s been an exciting, thrilling, but nevertheless stressful fall, and this newsletter has fallen by the wayside a little bit. I have this really fun tendency of beating myself up for not doing everything all the time at the highest degree of difficulty and excellence. Allowing myself not to write when I haven’t had the bandwidth has felt like personal growth. Or whatever.

But I’ve missed writing, and I’ve missed you all, so here I am. I’m beyond grateful for your patience and support.

***

It was sort of wild to wake up on Wednesday in a city where a majority of people voted for a politician who not only doesn’t make me want to stick my head in a toilet, but actually excites me.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of NYC, and I have to admit that I libbed out — as the kids say — so hard on Tuesday night that I ended up crying on my couch during his soaring acceptance speech.

It was a shock. Are you kidding me? To hear someone tell the truth and say he wants to fix a broken system? Rather than spewing out political word salad and telling us we’re stuck with what we’ve got? Pardon me while I pass out!

Mamdani made me believe that he believes that our future can be different from our present and our past. And he’s obviously willing to fight for it. It takes a special person, a rare kind of person, to persevere first through relative obscurity, win a primary, and then handle death threats, disgusting Islamaphobic attack ads, and tens of millions of dollars worth of opposition campaigns from greedy billionaires who don’t want him to help workers in America’s biggest city.

It also shows the importance of a leader who makes folks feel like they’re on a team together.

I often say that environment determines more about individual behavior than individual character when I’m talking about sports teams. Or any organization, really. My dad told me that when I was ten years old, and it’s stuck with me ever since.

But environments aren’t fixed or static. There are certain people who are game changers, who can shift a general vibe. The Mamdani campaign created an environment where voters rose to the bar Mamdani set — one of compassion and inclusion rather than hate and division.

In other words — and please forgive me if this is corny — he ran his campaign like a championship sports team.

Hear me out. Exactly a year ago, after Trump won the election in 2024, I was texting with my friend Meg. Meg played lacrosse in college, and as we were talking about the despair we both felt, she said this:

“Obviously as an athlete, when you get FUCKED in a game, you don’t blame the other team unless you’re a loser.”

The all-caps use there was all her, and I’m leaving it in.

I’ve often thought about what she said in the past twelve months. For people opposed to the white supremacist garbage that MAGA stands for, it was easy, after the last presidential election, to blame everyone who voted for Trump. To throw your hands up and say that Trump is a cult leader and his spell on people can’t be broken. To make excuses for a Democratic party that really shit the bed.

But when a good team loses a championship, they don’t say, “Welp, the other team was simply unbeatable.” They look inward and figure out what they could have done differently, and then they try to do those things differently. They say, “There’s always next year.” They don’t say, “Guess this was it!”

In November of last year, Mamdani went around New York City talking to people who voted for Trump. He listened to their problems and then built a campaign designed to fix them. He promised to make people’s lives easier, and he had the charisma and authenticity to make voters believe it. He also happens to be a generational talent when it comes to thinking on his feet and giving speeches. That doesn’t hurt.

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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mamdani is a sports fan. Not a sports fan the way Eric Adams (the outgoing scandal-ridden NYC mayor and enjoyer of free flights to Turkey) was a sports fan, when he wore a hat with both the Mets and Yankees insignia on it. No, Mamdani’s two most dearly held fandoms seem to be Arsenal, in the Premiere League, and, more importantly, the New York Knicks.

I like to say that marrying my Knicks-obsessed husband was a no-brainer, because it was obvious that he’s capable of unconditional love. Likewise, voting for a guy who loves the Knicks is maybe the most radically hopeful thing a citizen can do. This is a guy who will clearly never give up. He will never turn his back on his people. He won’t stop believing winning is possible, even though it hasn’t happened in decades.

Before any season kicks off for a major league, sports reporters and personalities give their predictions. They’re often right — the Dodgers, the team with the highest payroll in Major League Baseball, did win the World Series, after all. But every once in a while, something happens that absolutely no one could have guessed.

Like a 34-year-old democratic socialist with zero name recognition who used to rap under the moniker Mr. Cardamom becoming the mayor of New York City. We’ll see what happens from here, but I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in years.

It’s very human to extend the present into the future indefinitely. When it’s cold out, I can’t remember what it feels like to walk down the street in a t-shirt and shorts. But the future isn’t predetermined, and hope pops up when and where you least expect it.

And when it doesn’t, you only blame the other team if you’re a loser. Real players dig deep, get back on the court, and find a way to win.

I never thought I’d say this as a Celtics fan, but this week, I must: Go New York, go New York, go!

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In the first iteration of The Wilder Things — the blogspot blog I started a million years ago when I was in college — I wrote a post every Friday called “Ten Things I Like.” I’ve wanted to bring it back for a while now; I’m not sure if these will be as frequent as every Friday, but I will do my best.

The category of “things” was and will continue to be very broad. Clothes, restaurants, ideas, books, people, snacks, what I’m watching, articles I’m reading, a tattoo I saw on the subway (today, at least).

While I used to do a round-up of ten things, the number will vary in The Wilder Things 2.0. Because sometimes I’m into a lot of things, and sometimes I don’t like many things at all, and I never want to include things that I don’t actually like just to fill a quota. The beauty of working for myself is that I don’t have to hit a certain number on a listicle like I did back when I was in the Blog Mines of the 2010s. Thank god (more on god later) for small victories.

One note: These posts will be for paid subscribers only. I promise that I will try my absolute hardest to make it worth your monthly $5 or yearly $50, because I don’t take it lightly that any of you pay to read anything I write. I’m very moved whenever I think about it! Thank you.

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So, without further ado, Four Things I Like.

Ruby shirts from the 1990s

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They settled in Baltimore and became US citizens in 1926. They were immigrants. They were Americans. Hugo joined US army intelligence and was stationed in London during The Blitz.

Hugo was involved in liberating concentration camps. My mother, Deborah Weisgall, wrote a beautiful memoir called A Joyful Noise; in it, she tells a story about being thirteen years old in Baltimore, and finding a box marked “Secret. Property US Army.” Inside were photographs; piles of dead bodies tossed in trucks and the barely living standing beside them, naked and emaciated, starved beyond recognition.

While in Prague, Hugo returned to Ivancice. Before he got there, he knew that Hitler and his allies had murdered all of Hugo’s mother’s (my great-grandmother’s) remaining family. After he visited, he wrote to my grandmother, “From the Goldmans I got the oft repeated story—everybody was dead. Each died in a different way.”

Here is what Hugo wrote my grandmother Nathalie in that letter from August 11th:

“I believe that I have said this to you before, but from a metaphysical point of view, Hitler won this war. He succeeded in convincing our generation, or at least a sizable portion of it, that human life, human dignity and the human spirit is totally valueless. And that any indignities committed against it for any reason at all, are permitted and alright.

The burning of the books which the civilized world decried in 1933 is going on now again. Only this time German books are being stupidly destroyed — but not only the Nazis, but Heine, Schiller, Goethe and the rest of the anti-Nazis. And so it goes. In spite of the fact that the Czechs have built no Buchenwalds, they have some other installations which would not fare too badly in any comparison.

And on the other side of the picture you have the spectacle of the German Sudenten population, which, according to German anti-Nazi witnesses, are behaving as outrageously now, under the protection of the Americans, as they did before under Hitler. Add to all this the new atomic bomb — and what do we face. I dread to think.”

I’m telling you this because Hugo’s letter reminds me that the kind of cruelty we’re witnessing in the world right now — and, just as importantly, the kind of hypocrisy — has always existed. I’m also telling you this because I think about this letter every day.

This line plays on loop in my head: “From a metaphysical point of view, Hitler won this war.”

I think about it as Israel commits its own genocide in Gaza, murdering at least 50,000 children and destroying 92% of Palestinian homes, not to mention hospitals and schools. I feel deep shame, as a Jew myself, that the very people targeted in a genocide 80 years ago have been, for a long time, committing atrocities against people who are not in their tribe. It’s reprehensible that this American administration has succeeded in equating “Anti-Semitism” with “opposing genocide.” As Hugo wrote, “under the protection of the Americans.”

I think of this line of Hugo’s in particular: “[Hitler] succeeded in convincing our generation, or at least a sizable portion of it, that human life, human dignity and the human spirit is totally valueless. And that any indignities committed against it for any reason at all, are permitted and alright.”

I think about it as ICE abducts immigrants and citizens alike in America.

There’s a reason that so many people are bringing up Germany’s descent into fascism right now. Because history is really just, “What happened?” Knowing what happened means you can recognize patterns when it starts to happen again. It means you can imagine a different outcome and fight for that future.

Trump and his cronies are currently targeting immigrants (and who’s to say who will be next). The state is kidnapping people who came here looking for a better life, who are seeking asylum, who are working to support their families. It’s ripping parents away from their children, even when those parents and children came to the country legally. ICE can legally go into schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. The agency is abducting people at their workplaces and conducting raids near graduations to fill its inhumane quota of 3,000 arrests a day. The Trump administration is completely ignoring due process and kidnapping people off the street and at their immigration hearings. It doesn’t matter what anyone on American soil does or doesn’t do, legally or illegally. This isn’t about policy, it’s about a show of terrorizing force.

There’s a poem by Martin Niemöller that you’ve probably read, but it truly is the most concise way to sum up the role that everyday citizens play in allowing authoritarianism to flourish. It hung on the wall of my high school history classroom. I stared at it so often that I can still remember the font it was printed in.

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Currently, many people are speaking out. Tens of thousands of people aren’t looking the other way when their neighbors are abducted. They are marching in the streets, posting on social media, and making as much noise as they can. The Trump administration is now using the military against US citizens who are exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

Many public individuals are speaking out, too. Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), has directed the school’s police force (bleak phrase in and of itself) to make graduations a safe space where people cannot be snatched from their seats. Who knows if that will work, but he’s trying.

In March, legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and detained because he advocated for Palestinian rights at Columbia University — he wrote powerful letters from the ICE detention center in Louisiana. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, tried to take a boat to Gaza to deliver aid with eight other people.

Thunberg said: “We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying. Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the livestreamed genocide.”

Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, delivered a forceful speech against Trump. Regardless of how you feel about him (maybe men just shouldn’t have podcasts), he is meeting the moment when it matters. Harvard University is fighting back against Trump in the courts instead of rolling over.

People gain power when you give it to them. Fear is one of the most effective ways to get citizens to shut up and hand over their power. The fact that I am even a little bit scared to publish this — that the chill has reached my cozy apartment in Brooklyn — means it is absolutely critical that I do. As Thunberg said, the only thing more dangerous than any kind of physical, emotional, or political risk to the individual is collective silence.

In other letters that my grandfather sent my grandmother in late 1945, Hugo told her about over 57,000 Jews who were stuck at the border between Poland and what was then called the Czechoslovak Republic.

Nov. 16 1945

“The refugees have never ceased coming in, yet I have allowed them to pass by without much concern — usually, I have done the only possible thing, rarely I have kicked them out. Today, however, Berlin finally realized our plight and sent us an officer whose sole task it is to deal with these people. Now I know what efficiency is and how efficiency can cause misery and despair and perhaps even death. I promptly retaliated by signing and predating papers sufficient to take at least 300 people out of this hell — and perhaps send them to another less burning one.”

Hugo didn’t have any real power to deal with this situation, so he broke rules to save lives. Sometimes the only thing we can do is try to help people get from one hell to “another less burning one.”

The only thing we can’t do is become hopeless. It’s easy to feel silly for being hopeful, but being hopeful is the only way anything has ever changed.

I know you’re used to hearing about sports from me, and I know you’re used to jokes. That will continue, but I would be a coward if I didn’t speak up when I want to. It’s not that I think any newsletter I publish will change any of these crises, or that I know how to fix our fractured media landscape contributing to the spread of lies.

But together, if many people do something, maybe any hopefulness won’t be in vain. Hugo was right to “dread to think” what we face. And yet, I’m still praying that someday we’ll see Hitler — and everyone who emulates him — lose, from a metaphysical point of view.

Until then, we have to keep doing whatever we can. To be honest, I don’t really know what that is. Maybe you call your representatives every day. Maybe you go to protests. Maybe you deliver aid to families who’ve been torn apart. Maybe you confront people in your life when you hear them say cruel, bigoted things. Maybe you have enough power that you can break some rules to do what is right. Maybe you write.

Whatever it is, don’t let up. When other people see you being brave, it makes it that much easier for them to have courage, too. If we stop trying, there’s no chance of a better future. And I desperately want to believe in one.

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Alright folks, I’ve never done this before, but I’m sending out an emergency newsletter because my beloved Boston Celtics, the reigning NBA champions, have once again blown a 20-point lead at home in the second round of the Playoffs to the New York Goddamn Knicks!!!!!

And I feel I must come clean. Yesterday, on The Sports Gossip Show, I told that I didn’t care that much if the Celtics lost. That I’m actually pretty soft as a fan. I explained that I sometimes felt the need to put on the face of a tough fan for the decade that I’ve been working in sports media. The kind of fan who, no matter how much her teams win, always wants more. Sports media loves this idea of the neoliberal sports fan, the capitalist sports fan, the robber baron sports fan who can’t get enough and has no reason to stop winning.

I’m a Boston fan — you hate me because my teams have won a lot. I’ve written about this before. The Celtics hoisted the Larry O’Brien trophy last year. Sometimes I feel glutinous to be so rich in championships, which is the most condescending thing I could admit to someone whose teams lose all the time. What a problem to have!

My husband is a Knicks fan, and he has suffered for as long as he’s been on this earth. If New York won, I said, at least I would be happy for him. And, since I live in New York City now, I would be excited to see what happens to this place if the Knicks finally make it past the second round of the playoffs.

If the Celtics lost I would be sad, of course. But I wouldn’t be distraught.

****Spoiler alert****: I WAS WRONG!! The Knicks somehow managed to beat the Celtics again, the exact same way they beat Boston on Monday, by overcoming a 20-point deficit and then stealing the ball at the very end to win by a hair.

And you know what I did? I yelled “fuck” at my television and burst into tears!!! I wasn’t chill about it at all! I wasn’t happier for my husband than I was sad for me!! And then I started laughing, because it was absurd that I, a 36-year-old woman, was crying because her sports team lost two games in a best-of-seven series.

So there I was, laughing and crying on my couch, while my husband fist pumped his way around the room, and then he saw that I was crying and laughing, and he started laughing, and then I started laughing harder, and then I teared up again, and now I’m sitting at my computer writing all of this down.

I was shocked at my emotions, and I’ve came to a depressing realization. Saying I wouldn’t care if the Celtics lost came from a place of such massive sports privilege — a place of such total confidence — that I couldn’t actually imagine a world in which it happened. I had the luxury of imagining a loss without believing it was a real possibility.

You’re all really going to hate me for this one, but I went so far as to worry that I would feel guilty when the Celtics beat the Knicks! That I would feel spoiled in the riches of sports victory compared to my ever-hopeful husband (I saw someone online recently say that the only men truly capable of unconditional love are Knicks fans, which checks out).

The HUBRIS!

I was so wrong. The Celtics’ vibes have been totally off. They look disjointed and mentally out of it. As soon as the fourth quarter started, I had a feeling that recent history would repeat itself.

“The Knicks are going to go up in the last two minutes of the game and the Celtics are going to blow it,” I said to my husband.

And that is exactly what happened.

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And now, here we are. I’m experiencing the same sinking feeling I had for seven years while I watched Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown play basketball together before the Celtics eventually won it all last season. Year after year they would blow huge leads, get completely frazzled, and then totally fall apart. Tatum would take stupid jumpers instead of driving to the basket to get the easy points. I feel like I’m watching the sequel to a horror movie that scared the shit out of me. Awful thoughts creep into my head, like, “What if the Celtics only won last year because so many of the teams they played were injured? What if the haters have been right?”

This is probably the last hurrah for seeing my favorite players together — Brown, Tatum, Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, Derek White, hell, even sixth-man-of-the-year Payton Pritchard. Ownership has to break up this team somehow, because apparently they can’t keep paying everybody a bajillion dollars.

Which is stupid, because if you’re rich enough to own a sports team, you should be rich enough to pay players whatever they want. I’m told that’s not how “economics” really “work,” but I don’t care, because eggs cost thirty-thousand dollars these days and billionaires are going to space.

Look, I will always have last year’s victory. I got to be in the building when the Celtics won a championship. I still have the green and white confetti that I picked up off the floor. And I will be intrigued to see New York City implode on itself if the Knicks advance to the Eastern Conference Finals. And I will be happy for my husband.

Perhaps, somewhere deep in my psyche, I had a feeling this might happen. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to steel myself for a Celtics come-apart. Whatever it was, I flew too close to the sun. I was fooling myself. I’m as greedy as anyone.

Sports are beautiful, sports are cruel. And no amount of mind tricks can save your dumbass sports-fan heart from itself.

Edit: I know they haven’t lost the series yet but I’m really going through it.

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If you subscribe to this newsletter, it’s highly likely that you are aware of Jordon Hudson. She is the 24-year-old girlfriend of former Patriots coach and current coach at the University of North Carolina, Bill Belichick.

“Girlfriend” is perhaps now the wrong term — she appears to be his publicist, business affairs manager, potential fiancée, and the reason that everyone keeps texting me saying, “what on god’s green earth is going on with Bill Belichick.”

My co-host Madeline Hill and I first started following this story for The Sports Gossip Show six months ago (here’s our complete timeline of their relationship). The story started out as a strange fascination, but it’s become something much darker. Something that could actually effect the careers of football players and staff at UNC.

When Belichick joined Instagram, Madeline and I had a hunch that Hudson was behind it. Why else would the gruff, media-hating, attention-diverting, “we’re on to Cincinnati” football coach willingly create an account at the age of 73? When he had, for many years, mocked social media by calling any form of it “Instaface?”

This past weekend, we got something close to proof: During a disastrous interview with CBS New Sunday Morning, the interviewer, Tony Dokoupil, asked Bill how he deals with outside noise about social media.

Bill said, “Yes, so, I’m on some of those social media platforms but I honestly don’t follow.” We took this to mean that this man might not have any idea what Hudson is posting to his hundreds of thousands of followers. He could very well not have the passwords to his own accounts.

Hudson also — famously, now — interrupted the interview to say, “We’re not talking about this,” when Dokoupil asked how the two met.

If you haven’t seen the CBS interview (or don’t have it memorized, like I unfortunately do), go watch it. CBS said in the piece that Hudson was a “constant presence,” and Pro Football Talk reported that Hudson not only interrupted that one time, but was constantly cutting in and even stormed off set at one point, expecting Belichick to follow her.

Page Six reports that Belichick’s inner circle is concerned that Hudson has infiltrated every aspect of his life, and The Athletic published a great piece about how Hudson is the reason a deal fell apart to film the reality show Hard Knocks at UNC. Hudson is cc’ed on all of Belichick’s emails, and she posted some cryptic Instagram yesterday saying that a “statement would be coming later.” Belichick’s literary agency later did put out a statement on Instagram that read very much like something Hudson would have dictated.

Belichick released a statement through UNC about the CBS interview today, saying he made it clear to CBS that his personal life was off limits:

Unfortunately, that expectation was not honored during the interview. I was surprised when unrelated topics were introduced, and I repeatedly expressed to the reporter, Tony Dokoupil, and the producers that I preferred to keep the conversation centered on the book. After this occurred several times, Jordon, with whom I share both a personal and professional relationship, stepped in to reiterate that point to help refocus the discussion. She was not deflecting any specific question or topic but simply doing her job to ensure the interview stayed on track.

CBS denies this. They released a statement after Belichick’s statement was released (I’m exhausted trying to keep up with this story????). Its a statement-off.

A few things:

1. The press release from Belichick seems somewhat professional and came through UNC, so it seems like perhaps a real PR professional got involved.

2. “Do your job” was the Patriots’ catchphrase for years under Belichick — ie: keep your head down and don’t cause any distractions from the football — so I find it rich that he used that language to apply to Hudson, the biggest distraction of all time.

3. As a PR person who is also romantically involved with the subject, you cannot interject as much as Hudson apparently did and expect the interviewer not to ask about you and the relationship in general. Especially because CBS denies that the interview had any established parameters.

4. As I said on our emergency episode of SGS, Hudson doesn’t seem to want to be Belichick’s PR person. She appears to want to be the story. And it’s working. Why else would she launch his social channels, when he previously didn’t have them? He didn’t need them — he was already extremely famous. But she stood to gain followers by using his account as a way to collaborate with hers and amplify her content. She is competing to be Miss Maine in a week and a half — with the ostensible goal of winning and going on to compete for Miss USA. You probably don’t enter a pageant if you aren’t trying to be front and center.

5. If you do believe that Hudson does want to be Belichick’s PR person, however, you could argue that Jordon simply was trying to keep the interview on track and “do her job,” as Belichick said. But her behavior was apparently unprofessional enough that she has, therefore, become the story. Which means she was a very bad PR person.

6. In my experience, when someone wants to be in front of the camera but has a job that requires them to be behind it, they usually fail at the job they’re supposed to be doing.

7. Do you know how derailed something has to be for CBS News Sunday Morning, the chillest news show of all time, to reveal what went on behind the scenes?

8. Hudson’s behavior since the interview has continued to be unprofessional. She retweeted someone who said this — “Bill looks like he wants to reach across and strangle the life out of the interviewer. I kinda wish he did.” Very 2025 to amplify someone saying that Belichick should have killed a member of the media.

9. I think this interview popped off because Belichick and Hudson have rarely been featured on a platform they don’t control since they started dating. CBS owed them nothing, Hudson behaved badly, and they paid the price for it.

   

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This whole situation is one of the biggest PR disasters I’ve ever witnessed. It’s been very strange to follow a story that began as, “haha, Jordon got Bill on Instagram” to “is this person secretly running the UNC football program?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about why these recent developments seem so disturbing to me. It seems like Hudson has created a distorted reality around Belichick, one where she has convinced him she is saving him from the media while she feeds him to it. So, yes, it’s uncomfortable to watch, very publicly and in real time, someone maybe get taken advantage of. Reports recently came out that Hudson went on a real estate spending spree after she started dating Belichick in 2023.

At the same time, that person is Belichick, a notorious curmudgeon who is very rich and doesn’t really need much sympathy. If this were a retired coach who somehow got himself involved with a person who seems to be at best behaving strangely and at worst taking advantage of him, it would be an interesting and kind of sad story about his personal life.

But he isn’t retired. He is the head coach of a massive football program. He has a lot of power, and now Hudson has a lot of power: she’s very involved at UNC, despite not being hired by the university — she’s like the Elon Musk of college football.

A lot of people are relying on Belichick. People at UNC have jobs because of him (including his son), and student athletes and their parents are trusting him to guide their college careers. A lot of these kids hope to play in the NFL. If I were an athlete, or a parent of one, I would be concerned that the man who is supposed to be in charge of my or my child’s future can’t even control his own public image.

Regardless of whatever is going on behind the scenes — regardless of whether you think this is elder abuse, or are on team “go Jordon, take all his money” — the fact remains that Hudson is also causing athletes to lose opportunities, like being featured on a major show like Hard Knocks. In the age of NIL, when your name, image, and likeness are what gets you paid as a college player, the visibility Hard Knocks could have provided is extremely valuable.

Belichick is not in control of his narrative right now, which means he’s not in charge of the narrative of the program he runs. This is all concerning, given that this is a guy who had, for fifty years prior, one of the most well understood personas in all of sports. And, as we saw in the recent NFL draft with the fall of Sheduer Sanders, the only thing that matters is the story. If you don’t have a firm grasp on that, you aren’t in charge of your own reality.

Someone’s gotta get a grip!

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I cried on Sunday when Paige Bueckers subbed out of the National Championship and burst into tears as she hugged her coach, Geno Auriemma. It was the last college game the UConn star ever played. After a college career plagued by years of global pandemics, injuries, and teammates’ injuries, Bueckers was finally a champion.

And I cried again when I watched this video of it so that I could embed it here.

I think a lot of people cried. That hug was Peak Sports. In it, we saw everything the player and coach sacrificed and went through together to reach the top of the mountain. Anybody who’s ever struggled with something and has half a heart could appreciate and identify with the humanity present in that embrace.

But I didn’t just cry when UConn — the team I root for — won. I cried through the whole tournament. The emotion would come over me suddenly. One moment I’d be fine, sipping one of those new Spindrift sodas on my couch, and the next, my lip would quiver. Random moments caught me off guard, like when, in the Final Four game Connecticut played against UCLA, Bueckers had a crazy assist to grad student Katilyn Chen. Chen yelled and grinned after she made the basket and I felt my eyes well up.

There is something about the confidence and prowess of these young women that just really wrecked me this past month, given the barrage of horrible news coming at me from everywhere else. I’ve always been a sucker for a slo-mo hype video, but I was particularly affected by images of South Carolina’s MiLaysia Fulwiley flexing after she was fouled, or when USC won in the sweet sixteen even though they didn’t have star Juju Watkins. I even cried when UConn freshman phenom Sarah Strong did her cute little two-thumbs-up signature move after the game on ESPN.

I would get weepy during the regular season, too. And this whole newsletter might be corny, so for that I apologize, but I’ve been thinking a lot this year about why women’s college basketball made me so emotional. And it might be because the power and joy of these young women exists in such stark contrast to our current cultural moment.

Women’s basketball — and women’s sports in general — is finally getting the shine it deserves. More people watched the women’s NCAA tournament championship last year than the men’s. Four of the five most-followed March Madness stars on Instagram this year are women. Viewership of the WNBA went up by 170% last year.

This is obviously long overdue. Generation after generation of women have played basketball and not been held in the same regard as male athletes. The WNBA was built on the backs of stars — Tamika Catchings, Cynthia Cooper, Lisa Leslie, Maya Moore, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, I could go on — who weren’t paid or celebrated enough. Towards the end of her playing career, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley coached in college and played in the WNBA at the same time. WNBA players still make shamefully low salaries. But players know their worth and opted out of the current collective bargaining agreement to renegotiate this season.

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The timing of this sport’s surge in popularity gives me a little hope when I need it most. Watching women’s basketball flourish when America just elected a president found liable for sexual abuse feels like stumbling across a bird of paradise growing out of a trash-filled sidewalk in the dead of night.

I think that cognitive dissonance, that glimmer of optimism, is what makes me cry. When I watch basketball after reading articles about how our young boys are being brain-rotted by the manosphere, Kaitlyn Chen’s joy on national television feels radical. While I watch Trump ruin the economy, I’m proud of Bueckers and fellow UConn star Azzi Fudd for making (hopefully a lot) of money on a recent Bose ad.

I don’t know where we go from here. I hope the growth of the game continues, and I hope the country snaps back from its rightward bend towards incels and trad wives. I want these young female athletes to live their adult lives in a country that understands their worth. I want us to be able to pull back from the brink. I don’t know if it we can.

But I do know that I’ll keep watching videos of Paige hugging Geno and Sarah Strong giving the thumbs up. And I know that I’ll stay hopeful, because that’s the most radical thing anyone can do.

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I need to tell you a story about lobstering in Maine that is tangled up with the sports world in the most bizarre way possible. It’s a MadLib I couldn’t even have made up five years ago, and things were already pretty messed up then.

Here it is: Jordon Hudson, the 24-year-old girlfriend of the 72-year-old football coach Bill Belichick, is begging president Donald Trump on Instagram to restore federal funding to Maine lobstermen after he retaliated against the Maine governor over the issue of transgender athletes in sports.

Trump took money away from Maine lobstermen after he called out Janet Mills, the Democratic governor of Maine, about whether she’d comply with his recent executive order to ban transgender athletes from girls sports. Mills said, “See you in court.” Here’s a primer from the ACLU on why that ban is harmful for everybody.

A few days later, the Trump administration pulled federal funding for The Maine Sea Grant, which would eliminate $1.5 million in funding this year, $4.5 million through January 2028, and affect 20 Sea Grant workers at the University of Maine in Orono and fishing villages across the state.

Hudson was at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport, Maine, when the news broke. She posted a carousel of photos from the event, as well as illustrations from the Dr. Suess book The Lorax. Her caption starts off like this:

“Dear @potus @whitehouse,

“I am Jordon and I speak for the fishermen. I speak for the fishermen because the fishermen have no voice.”

She goes on:

“The news came like a tsunami to the Forum on Saturday that the federal funding program ‘Maine sea Grant’, was abruptly cut. This program has been a pillar of support for marine research, sustainability, and economic growth for more than 50 years. The forum floors filled with tears and fears as if everyone were drowning, and we were.”

This week, Hudson has also posted several glamour shots of herself with the caption, “But do you love the fishermen?? @potus”

Hudson’s family is from Hancock, which is considered Downeast Maine, and Maine is a big part of her brand. She says she can trace her lobstering roots back nine generations, and she’s clearly passionate about the fishing industry and the state. She carried a lobster-shaped purse to the Super Bowl last month to “draw attention to Maine fishermen.” She’s a former cheerleader and beauty pageant contestant who is a self-described “philosopher.” She often uses big words in Instagram captions that don’t make sense. She says she’s working on a documentary about lobstering.

People in the football world have reported that Hudson is acting as Belichick’s de-facto manager. My co-host of The Sports Gossip Show, Madeline Hill, and I have suspected for a while that this is the case. Hudson has inserted herself into every aspect of Belichick’s life. She seems to have convinced him to get on social media, has posted incessantly about his decision to coach at the University of North Carolina, has appeared in a Dunkin’ Super Bowl ad with him, and has worn outfits in public designed to get her photographed.

Belichick’s famously gruff and distant personality seems to have changed since he’s been with her; he’s showing up in public more, making jokes during media appearances, and using exclamations in his Instagram captions (that we think she is ghostwriting). He dressed up for Halloween, for crying out loud. Ironically, he was a fisherman, and she was a mermaid he’d caught.

Of course I’m locked into this story — a young woman publicly dating the former coach of the Patriots, my favorite NFL team? I’m particularly invested, however, because both sides of my family have lived in mid-coast Maine for over seven decades. Some of us were born there, and those of us who weren’t will technically always be “from away.” But it feels the most like home to me.

I went to college in Maine, and I’ve reported on the state for as long as I’ve been working in journalism. I wrote about Sadie Samuels, one of the few women who fishes in the state, and the lobster boat races in Jonesport. I spent time inland, where many of the lobstermen live (having been priced out of coastal property), to cover the Demolition Derby in Union. I have friends who’ve fished in Maine for generations.

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In 2021, the lobstering industry contributed $725 million to Maine’s economy. It’s one of the oldest industries in the country, and it’s responsible for over 18,000 jobs on land and sea in the state. There are lots of reasons to worry about it — the work force is mostly over the age of 40, and many of the state’s younger residents don’t see fishing as a viable way of life anymore. The cost of gear and fuel is rising. The balance of how the state and federal government protect peoples’ livelihoods, while making sure the correct regulations are in place to prevent overfishing, is constantly in flux. The most existential problem is that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost 99% of all other ocean surfaces on the planet.

Federal funding is essential to help lobstermen weather these storms; it must be restored. Hudson most likely thinks she’s using her platform for good in calling Trump out for this, and maybe she is. But it all seems too little, too late. Last year, Hudson posted a photo of a lawn sign supporting election-denier and Trump-supporter Heather Sprague for the Maine House of Representatives. Sprague’s X account is riddled with conspiracy theories. The Republican party also doesn’t generally support environmental measures that could protect fishermen’s livelihoods.

Hudson also posted pictures from the Fishermen’s Forum with Republican senator Susan Collins, who last year said she was “very impressed with [Elon Musk’s] energy and dedication.” Musk is the billionaire who is the driving force behind budget cuts across the federal government (all while his company, Tesla, paid zero federal income taxes in 2024).

Hudson’s boyfriend also happens to be good friends with Trump. In 2016, Belichick wrote a letter of support to Trump that Trump read at a rally the day before the election in New Hampshire. Last year, Belichick hosted Trump on his podcast a few days before the election. You’d think if Hudson really wanted to get in touch with the president, she could do so. Perhaps she’s tried and realized he doesn’t give a shit.

Maybe it’s never too late to speak up for what’s right. However, given Hudson’s connections to Trump and people who support him, her earnest post begging him to restore funding reads like that one scene from I Think You Should Leave. A guy drives a hot dog car through a building and then gets out wearing a hot dog suit. He stands there and looks at the car and yells, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” Jordon seems to be pretty close with people who were in the car, too.

It takes a lot of hubris to say, “I speak for the fishermen, for the fishermen have no voice.” It’s also easy to answer the question Hudson posed on Instagram a few days ago: No, Donald Trump does not love the fishermen. And he never will.

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The military helicopters thumping overhead took me by surprise. I heard them before I saw them — the low, rhythmic beating that sounds like organized doom or rich people trying to skirt traffic on the way to the Hamptons.

They looked like three Apaches to me, as I stared out of my hotel room window on Tuesday morning in New Orleans. I was getting ready to host a live show for Bleacher Report from Media Row. Media Row used to be called Radio Row; it started in 1991 when a few radio stations needed a place to broadcast from before the Super Bowl, so they set up shop at a Holiday Inn in Tampa.

The event has since grown, as has every other event that this country can squeeze money out of. Media Row is held each year in an endless convention center in the host city. This was the seventh time I’ve covered the Super Bowl in the past decade, and I’ve seen the set-up grow from mostly mic-covered folding tables to massive sets lining the perimeter of the warehouse-like room.

The point of Media Row these days is for brands to trot out either retired NFL players or current stars who aren’t in The Big Game itself. The companies allow members of the press to interview these guys in exchange for letting them plug whatever product they’re repping. I felt like I’d taken acid and entered a football funhouse, where Bounty paper towels had become sentient and were walking around in varsity jackets. The cavernous space, lit garishly with fluorescent lights, made me dizzy, and I promptly got a migraine (I also had a wonderful time hosting the show for B/R, and I got to see many good friends in the business whom I hadn’t seen in years).

Aside from all the normal pomp and circumstance, there was an eeriness to New Orleans this year. The city increased the police and military presence because of the attack here before the National Championship last month, when a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street and killed 15 people. Soldiers walked around the city holding machine guns, and checkpoints were set up to inspect people’s bags.

Trump also recently decided that he is going to attend the game. He’s the first sitting president to do so. I often think about how the NFL wouldn’t let him buy a team, so he ran for president three times and won twice. He now shows up and forces the billionaire owners who rejected him to bow down and kiss the ring. Most of them already have, now, for years — the majority donated to his campaigns.

And now, the NFL is removing the signs that said END RACISM in the end zone. The league put them there after police officers murdered George Floyd in 2020. Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is a playbook that white supremacists have been using for centuries. As Akilah Hughes writes in her newsletter Spite Stack:

It’s Black History Month, and while the Grammys and Super Bowl halftime show no doubt show the beauty of diversity, it’s not lost on me that we are in a major moment of backlash. That the “end racism” emblem in both end zones will be painted over in anticipation of Trump’s attendance speaks volumes. The NFL can’t even symbolically disagree with racism out of fear of backlash.

We are quickly QUICKLY backsliding into the Jim Crow era. And Americans fighting online today have no actual education on what that time was like. Most seem to think MLK peacefully marched and then died for their sins and racism was dead from that day forward. But they don’t know that Jim Crow was so insidious that it had Hitler taking notes.

Last weekend, Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year at the Grammys for Cowboy Carter. On it, she sings about Louisiana, where her mother’s family is from. New Orleans is a city that was built — and rebuilt — by enslaved people. Its economy blossomed because of the slave trade. It now runs on tourism. I’m willing to bet that most people who come here and stay at the Omni Royal Orleans don’t know that it is located on the exact same piece of land where slave traders auctioned off people.

“People don’t know what we do here,” my Uber driver, Nial, told me. He’s a fourth-generation New Orleanian. “They don’t understand that the things they come here for on a surface level, like Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, are things that we celebrate for their deep roots and history.”

We chatted as he drove me back from Media Row. During a lull in conversation, I checked the news and saw that Trump and Elon Musk were rapidly dismantling government agencies.

I covered the Super Bowl in February of 2017, after Trump’s first inauguration. He banned Muslims from entering the country on a Friday. Two days later, I arrived in Houston for the week of events preceding the game. The airport was surrounded by protestors who were against Trump’s racist policy, and there was chaos as families tried to figure out the status of their loved ones. Houston is home to many refugees, many of whom were working jobs related to the Super Bowl that year. When I landed, I started reporting a story about it.

Here’s a passage from the piece that still breaks my heart:

While he’s usually the one helping refugees navigate the complex immigration system, now Mohamed has found himself at the mercy of it. His wife, who’s still in Somalia, was supposed to join him in Houston soon. But because of Trump’s executive order, the two have no idea what will happen.

"The problem is, fear comes from the unknown,” Mohamed said. “And maybe if we just had a little bit more education and awareness, we wouldn’t have that much fear. This is the land of the brave, not the land of the fearful. So hopefully things will work out."

Mohamed (I didn’t use his last name to protect his identity) understood the importance of education when it comes to increasing tolerance. It’s not a coincidence that Trump is, as I write this, actively trying to eliminate the Department of Education.

At the NFL Honors awards ceremony on Thursday night, former Patriots head coach and current UNC head coach Bill Belichick smiled for the cameras, his arm around his stunning 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson (The Sports Gossip Show has covered this relationship extensively). Belichick is 72. Jordon wore a silver dress with a deep slit that bared her midriff. She said she chose the dress because it resembled the Lombardi Trophy, the ultimate prize that will be handed out on Sunday to the winner of the Super Bowl.

I’ve long believed that sports are a mirror for their current moment. And right now, what I’m seeing is that Media Row revolves around brands, the NFL abandons END RACISM, women are trophies, and most of the people who visit for the game have no idea who actually built this city or this country.

In “Amen”, the last song on Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé sings:

This house was built with blood and bone
And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled
The statues they made were beautiful
But, they were lies of stone, they were lies of stone

Despite our nation’s current ugly reflection, I still pray that Mohammed will one day be right for saying, “This is the land of the brave, not the land of the fearful. So hopefully things will work out."

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I get it. When you watch a team win for seven years straight, and you are not a fan of said team, it gets old. You’re angry. It’s unfair. It feels like watching billionaires get richer. If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan — a team that has lost to Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes & Company at least thirty thousand times in the past seven years, most recently last Sunday — you are probably apoplectic.

But hear me out: Sports dynasties are good.

Seeing as I am a fan of Boston sports teams with recent histories of victory, you might be inclined to shove me in a locker when I present my argument, but I hope you’ll hear me out. I even drew a couple graphs and stuff to try to convince you.

On this week’s episode of The Sports Gossip Show (please subscribe!) with Madeline Hill, I said that I believe most people’s experience of sports fandom involves misery.

And, contrary to how it sounds, that is not a bad thing!

The whole point of being a sports fan, in my opinion, is that fandom becomes its own language within its own melodramatic soap opera. If you’re a fan of a team, you can speak the same language as other fans — maybe those people are your family, your friends. Maybe those people live in the place you used to live, and talking to them about your team makes you feel closer to home.

Maybe those people are strangers, and you stumble upon a point of shared connection. One of the reasons I love working in sports is because you can drop me anywhere in the country and I can find something to talk about, sports-wise, with the people there.

[Bear with me — I know this sounds corny, like the whole woefully misbegotten Sports Can Fix Our Divided Country theory. They can’t, but they can make you feel closer to people, and right now, I’ll take it.]

So, back to misery.

At the end of the day, your team probably won’t win a championship. It’s just statistically unlikely. Every league has many teams, and when the season is over, only one of them can win. It’s pretty cruel, actually. I get very excited for big games with high stakes — I love that sports are completely manufactured events that feel hugely consequential. When I report on championships in person, I feel like I’m at the center of the universe, and when I watch them on TV, I feel like I’m a part of a conversation that becomes a whole universe in and of itself.

And then I watch one team lose, and it really bums me out. When it’s my team that loses? The closest feeling I can equate it to is actual heartbreak. Breaking up with someone and watching your team lose elicit the same pangs in your left chest area, bring up the same feelings of “what if?”

But this is where the beauty of fandom comes into play: misery loves company. There are few things that make you feel closer to someone that commiserating over the fact that your team once again turned into a flaming pile of garbage at the end of a game. You say stuff to each other like, “They should fire ____insert coach name here____ and hire me” (they definitely shouldn’t) and you both agree.

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Being a fan of a losing team is, at its core, romantic. You love this thing that doesn’t really know you exist, will never love you back, is capable of bringing you intense joy and misery, and is usually loaded with nostalgia. The longer your team goes without winning a championship, the more romantic your fandom. Extra romance points if your team has recently gotten close and lost (Bills, Lions) or has just totally sucked for a very long time now (Jets).

I actually did some math here to illustrate my concept. I call it the Fandom Romance Index (FRI).

You might be thinking, right about now, “Hey, Charlotte, I thought this post was about dynasties?” We’re getting there. Before we do, however, I have to familiarize you with the Fandom Hatred Index (FHI), which is the inverse of the FRI.

Simply put, the longer a team wins, the more intense other fans’ hatred. Think the Patriots post-Deflategate, when the rest of the country would rather have eaten seventeen bowls of clam chowder in one sitting than watch Tom Brady hoist another trophy.

Which brings me to the Chiefs. While their fans are riding high right now, their fandom is no longer romantic. The romance of fandom matters because, at its apex, it is the most pure form of loving a team, of being a fan. You’re hanging in there without much reason for doing so. You’re allowing yourself to hope despite all the evidence telling you not to — I think it’s beautiful and resilient.

And the higher the romance index, the more gratifying it is when that team finally wins.

Where do you go from there, when the FRI resets to zero? There is no yearning, no wistfulness. There is only pure, capitalistic demand for more wins, higher growth, even better returns. Winning is fun (not to brag), but its effects are hardening. It is not something to write poetry about (something I’m sure all sports fans do in their spare time). I have never felt fandom as gratifying as I did right before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 after 86 years of losing, when my FRI was at its highest. I would get myself shoved into aforementioned locker very quickly by a fan of a bad team if I dared say that I miss having a high FRI, so I won’t (but I do).

I am, however, aware that not everyone gives a rat’s ass about the romance of fandom.

So let me offer you this: If you hate the Chiefs, and you dig deep enough into your soul, you might actually secretly be grateful for their dominance.

Please stick with me here — you know how I said earlier that shared sports fandom is a language you can speak with other fans of your team? Shared sports hatred is something you can share with everybody who isn’t a fan of that team. It widens your potential for connection and allows you to wallow in your disgust with other people all across the country. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, etc.

Dynasties also, as my co-host Madeline rightly pointed out on our show this week, make for better television.

Admit it: it’s more fun to know the characters, even if you hate the show. When the Golden State Warriors beat my Boston Celtics in 2022, I was devastated, but I had to admit that there was something pretty cool about knowing the ins and outs and ups and downs of the Warriors. It made watching the playoffs that much more interesting before the guys on Golden State won their fourth championship together.

So, as you watch the Super Bowl next weekend, your teeth clenched, your fists balled, your mouth yelling things like, “the refs made sure the Chiefs would be in the Super Bowl,” remember that at least you’re feeling something. Something that can bring you closer to other people. Something that creates community. Something that, at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter at all and is all the better for it.

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I had a take on last week’s episode of The Sports Gossip Show that I feel the need to expand on in written form (new episode out now, by the way! Please subscribe on YouTube! Also available wherever you get your podcasts! lol).

And that take is this:

Every NFL team’s third string quarterback should be required to come from that state.

This league bylaw would (of course) be called the Tommy DeVito Rule, because Tommy DeVito is the only reason I thought of it. I’m sort of obsessed with what Tommy DeVito represents, which is, of course, The Hometown Hero.

If you don’t know who Tommy DeVito is, here is a video I made last year that thoroughly explains his whole deal. If you don’t want to watch it, I completely understand, so I will tell you the short version here.

Tommy DeVito is the Giants’ third-string quarterback. Well, he used to be. He may be the starter at this point, because the Giants benched and released the quarterback they drafted 3rd overall in 2018, Daniel Jones. The job now falls either to their original backup QB, Drew Locke, or to our boy Tommy. We do not know who will start the game this week.

But that doesn’t matter. Tommy isn’t special because of football. Tommy is special because he is from New Jersey.

Tommy grew up in Cedar Grove, a town in New Jersey that’s five miles away from MetLife Stadium. His family is loudly and proudly Italian-American — we’re talking “could have been cast in The Sopranos,” which I mean as the highest possible compliment. Tommy went to Don Bosco Prep, a school whose name is already so New Jersey that I can’t even make a joke about it.

Tommy still lives with his family. He said:

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Hello dear subscribers,

For the past month and a half, I’ve had writer’s block. I’ve written seven drafts of essays/newsletters that were simply not good enough to grace your eyeballs.

I could blame it on being busy ( and I launched ! It’s been so much fun! Please check it out and review and like and subscribe!) or on the election, or the fact that the sun goes down almost as soon as it rises these days, but the truth is that I’m not totally sure why I clammed up.

My difficulty writing this newsletter sort of compounded on itself, like when someone texts you and you don’t text them back, and then the longer you wait to text them back the more embarrassed you are that you haven’t texted them back, and then you feel paralyzed by your guilt and physically can’t text them back.

I figured that if I didn’t just sit down and write something, my brain was going to explode. So here we are. I thought I’d tell you all of this because it feels nice to be honest, and maybe some of you are experiencing something similar. I always feel better knowing I’m not alone in what feels like a very specific — but is probably quite universal — neuroticism.

So, in light of this being the week of Thanksgiving, I’d like to tell you about something I’m grateful for. I’m obviously grateful for my family, my friends, their health, and my little career here on the internet. I could get very mushy about all of it, because I am a lucky and sentimental person, but I am going to spare you.

Instead, I’m going to tell you this peg board game I used to play at Friendly’s with my dad.

I don’t know if anyone who didn’t grow up in Massachusetts has ever been to a Friendly’s. But a quick Google search tells me that they a) still exist after going bankrupt in 2010 and b) appear to be have franchises in many states, so the odds are decent.

If you haven’t been to a Friendly’s, it’s a dinette chain originally founded in the 1930s in Springfield, MA. In the 90s, it was basically a fast food place that dressed up like it was in the musical Grease, if the musical also sold ice cream cakes with Disney characters on them. The booths were (are?) covered in red pleather, and they used (use?) dish ware that used to be lame but is now considered cool, and that you will find in many Brooklyn restaurants. You know, the fluted metal ice cream bowls and the silver sundae trays and the plates that are off-white and thick.

When I was little, my dad used to take my friends and me to Friendly’s on Saturdays after soccer games. We’d click-clack in with our dirty cleats, and the whole experience was a thrill. My dad turned it into the most special adventure every time we went; I have the clearest memories of sitting across from him in the booth while he made us and the servers laugh.

The ice cream at Friendly’s used to come with a scoop of ice cream as a face, a cone as a hat, two little poofs of whipped cream as hair, and Reese’s Pieces as the eyes and nose. These decorations were supposed to make your dessert look like a clown, and by golly, they nailed it. I can still taste the fudge that went around the rim of the cone. The chocolate was sort of rubbery and the cone was usually stale. I absolutely loved it.

The tables had those big metal napkin-holders on them, but they also had this. The Friendly’s I.Q. Tester. The peg board game of my dreams:

As you can see above, the peg board game at Friendly’s revolved around the cherry on top of the banana split (honestly though, what doesn’t?). The Supreme Edition featured above describes the rules thusly:

Start with any one hole empty

As you jump the pegs

Remove them from the board

To win — leave last peg in the cherry

Ultimate challenge — leave only the red peg in the cherry.

First of all, that’s a poem. Second of all, I’m going to be very honest with you: I never really understood how to play this game.

I just liked that the pegs came in the little holder, that the little holder was attached to the game, and that the game involved moving little pegs around the board. I must have played by the rules at some point, but they was less interesting to me than the object itself. It was even more exciting than crayons and a paper placemat, which is saying something.

But then the food would come, and the perfectly griddled hot dog would completely consume me as I consumed it.

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A few weeks ago, my husband, Tyler, and I were in this little shop in our neighborhood in Brooklyn called Woods Grove. We call it Woods Hole, because Woods Hole is an oceanographic institute in Massachusetts, and while you can take the girl out of New England, you cannot take the New England out of the girl. They (the shop, not the oceanographic institute) sell candles and housewares, greeting cards and little gifts, as well as odds and ends.

One of those odds and ends was this game:

It is similar to the Friendly’s game, but there’s no little cup, and it’s a triangle instead of a square. The rules are that you jump the pegs over each other, remove the pegs as they get jumped, and “try to leave only one peg.”

I played it in the store for so long that I eventually realized Tyler was laughing and taking photos of me from across the store.

Here is what that looked like, a story in three parts:

I was transported back to being a little kid shopping with my mom — Tyler was like, “Do you want to buy that?” And I was like, “Yes.” So I asked one of the people who worked there if they had any unopened ones, and she said yes. She looked for a while until she realized she did not, in fact, have an unopened one, so I said, “Can I buy the demo?” And she was like, “Uh, sure.”

So I did. And when I tell you that this little game has brightened my life……

I have been trying to be on my phone less, because being on my phone generally makes me feel bad. I’ve been reading a lot (not to brag), but sometimes I want to just completely turn off every thought in my brain while still doing something with my hands. I was doing embroidery for a bit, but for some reason I stopped. And that’s where this little game comes in.

I could sit on the couch playing this game forever. It is the perfect level of difficulty. I have won the game a few times, but right after I solve it, I promptly forget how I did it. So then I can just keep playing until I solve it again and immediately forget what I did again. It’s heaven.

The night of the election, when I realized things were not looking good for Kamala Harris and the future of our country, I got into bed, put headphones on, listened to classical music, and played the game for an hour. I solved it once. It felt great while everything else did….not. I went to bed.

So I guess what I’m saying is that the peg board helps me do something that feels — in the year of our lord, 2024 — radical: it helps me stay exactly in the present.

I’m not thinking about what I did or didn’t do, or what did or didn’t happen, and I’m not thinking about what I will or won’t do, or what will or won’t happen. I’m just thinking about the best strategy for making sure only one peg is left on the board, and how lovely it was to be eight years old eating a hot dog with my dad and my best friends in a travel soccer uniform and shin guards at a Friendly’s in Concord, MA.

Doesn’t get much better than that, folks.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that you find some tiny slice of joy (highly suggest the peg board game) to brighten up these darkening days.

And as my mom likes to remind me — after December 21st, the days are only getting lighter.

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SOME NEWS…

I haven’t been this excited to send an email since I first started this newsletter.

You may have noticed that, over the past couple of weeks, and I have been working together on a few newsletters, live chats, and audio posts. She is, of course, the founder of the great newsletter Impersonal Foul, covering all things sports gossip. 

If you’ve wondered whether we have something up our sleeves, the answer is: yes. 

And that something is The Sports Gossip Show!

is a Substack podcast that will give you a court-side seat to the latest drama and most interesting news about athletes and teams when they aren’t playing. Madeline and I both firmly believe that it’s much more fun to watch athletes on the field if you know they’re doing off of it.

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We both watch sports with one eye on the game and one on the personal life section of athletes’ Wikipedia pages. During Monday Night Football this week, I found myself going down an Instagram rabbit hole, trying to figure out if Joe Burrow is still with his girlfriend and if they are engaged. I just love knowing what famous people are up to.  

Which is why I’ve been giddy since Madeline and I first connected and realized what we could do together. She absolutely struck gold when she started Impersonal Foul and coined the term “sports gossip.” I love what she does. It has been so much fun to develop this show together and realize how perfectly our areas of expertise complement each other. I’m very grateful to be on the ride with her, and it’s been pretty cool to know we’re doing it ourselves. 

We’ve been working on this for six months now, and I’m so jazzed to finally invite you into the extended sports gossip universe.

You can read the first SGS newsletter to listen to the first episode and learn more about the show!

A REQUEST…

Something I’m very proud of is the fact that Madeline and I are funding and producing this ourselves. We want full ownership because we truly believe in the idea, and we didn’t want to risk having to compromise on the vision or execution. This is our own little sports team, and we are the players, GMs, and owners rolled into one.

So (and you can probably guess where I’m going with this) I must enter a shameless plea for support. If you think we’re onto something here — and you want access to every episode, live chat, mailbag, and other fun stuff — please consider becoming a paying subscriber for $8/month or $80/year. I know it’s a huge deal to ask you for money, especially those of you who so generously already pay for The Wilder Things. 

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But the truth is that we are not NBA owners with millions of dollars (obviously). And we want to be sure we can keep up with the production costs that go into making a high-quality show. I promise that it will be worth it. 

ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE…

If you’ve followed my work at all over the past decade that I’ve been working in sports media, you might have an idea as to how exciting this is for me. I have often written and talked about subjects that exist at the fringes of sports. Yes, I’ve covered big events and interviewed athletes and coaches in huge moments. 

But I’ve also interviewed many dogs and made up narratives about cats and squirrels who run across the field at NFL games. I’ve become obsessed with the performers at NBA halftime shows. I’ve interviewed Marcus Jordan and Larsa Pippen about their…bizarre relationship…and done deep-dives into stories like the quarterback who may or may not have been sleeping with his mom’s best friend. And the NBA player who skipped his then-teammates wedding.

This show is the place for all of that.

I’m also passionate about opening up the sports world to more people. So much of the language people use in sports media seems built to keep out new fans, or to exclude people who are curious about sports but who might not know what “triple coverage” is (it’s just when one guy throws to another guy who’s guarded by three guys).

This show will be accessible for everyone, whether you’re a die-hard fan who has the standings of multiple leagues memorized (guilty) or someone who really does think that Taylor Swift put Travis Kelce on the map (also guilty). We’ll never make you feel dumb, and we’ll never dumb anything down. 

So, in summation, thank you in advance for subscribing, I’m so excited, here we go!

And remember: If it’s off the court, it’s on The Sports Gossip Show. 

P.S. If you have a hot tip or want to get in touch about partnership opportunities, contact us here.

Follow The Sports Gossip Show on Instagram here and listen to new weekly episodes on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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This week of sports-adjacent news has been almost too much for me to handle. I’ve tried to sit down and write a newsletter about a thousand times, only to find myself completely stumped as to how to include everything that has been rattling around in my head.

Not only did:

• Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce appear in a box at the US Open with Brittany and Patrick Mahomes after Donal Trump praised Brittany on social media…

• ….but, a few days later, Taylor endorsed Kamala Harris for president….

• …Caitlin Clark and Kyle Kelce liked the post….

• ….and then Taylor called Travis her boyfriend at the MTV Awards.

• Also, Shannon Sharpe went live on Instagram while doing some adult activities…

• …there is a college football quarterback impersonating Patrick Mahomes….

• …and Jayson Tatum accidentally dressed like a communist dictator.

There was only one way to cover these topics, which sound like someone came up with SEO-optimization Mad Libs for sports and pop culture: I needed .

Madeline is the founder, writer, and genius behind the Impersonal Foul newsletter, where you can find all of the sports gossip you could ever desire. We recently held a chat together during the Chiefs first game of the season, and then debriefed in her newsletter afterwards. It was so much fun that we decided to take it off the internet and into real life.

Which is how we found ourselves sitting in a very hot room in Brooklyn with two microphones and a vague idea of how to record audio, despite the fact that doing so is, quite literally, the source of my livelihood. I was manning the recording, so any blips in the sound is my fault, and Madeline did an amazing job cleaning it up in Garage Band.

Look, we’re getting there, folks.

I had such a blast talking about all of this with Madeline, and we hope you have fun listening! Drop any thoughts/questions in the comments.

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I love summer. I am obsessed with summer. And I refuse to believe that the season is over while the US Open is still going on. So I’ve been watching the tournament every night, clinging to the last bits of my favorite time of year. 

At first, things seemed dire for ESPN’s viewership the two most famous players on tour, Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, both lost in the tournament’s early rounds. I could just see the TV executives pacing around, pulling at their hair, and sweating while chugging bottles of Powerade in a beige conference room in Bristol, Connecticut. 

But then, for the first time in over twenty years, two American women and two American men made it to the semi-finals (executives, rejoice!). Emma Navarro, Jessica Pegula, Frances Tiafoe, and Taylor Fritz have given us one more thing to be patriotic about in a summer that seems to have been filled with flag-waving. 

Let’s get this out of the way: all patriotism feels a little weird. Nations are not sports teams. Nations do very bad things, like war. And yet, when the Olympics were on, my name might as well have been Betsy Ross. After the games, the Democratic National Convention took over (because, let’s be honest, the DNC was sports). As embarrassing as this might be to admit, I particularly liked how the Dems are trying to take back chants of “USA, USA” and football in general. 

But the 2024 US Open feels even more “USA, USA” than Tim Walz hugging the former football players he coached to a state championship. 

In fact, if you wanted to explain this country to an alien who just landed at Arthur Ashe stadium, these players’ biographies – Navarro, Pegula, Tiafoe, and Fritz — would be a good place to start. Theirs are stories of billionaires, of immigrants, of family businesses, and of not giving up.

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When I was a kid, few things angered me more than walking into Reny’s department store (if you know, you know) in Camden, Maine, and seeing the Back To School section already set up in July. It wasn’t time yet! We weren’t even halfway through the glorious few months of freedom granted to us each year, and yet the shelves were already taunting me with Trapper Keepers and Lisa Frank folders.

Summer was, and always has been, sacred to me. When I was a kid, both sets of grandparents lived in Mid-Coast Maine, which is, in fact, how my parents met. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this place.

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For the first time in a long time, I had a week off from work. My husband, Tyler, met me in Vegas, where I was finishing up at NBA Summer League. From there we flew to San Jose, rented a car, and drove to Big Sur. I have always wanted to see the Redwood trees and the cliffs that drop right into the ocean.

I knew it was going to be beautiful, but I wasn’t prepared for it to be magical. I know that magical is a vague, overused word, but that’s the best way I can describe it. The air was clean and smelled like lavender and honeysuckle. I’m a pretty skeptical person, but there was something out there in the forest and the ocean that I couldn’t touch or see. 

Perhaps it had something to do with the scale of the place. Even after staring at it for five days, it was still hard to comprehend the drama of the landscape. Where we stayed, the cliffs — green and yellow with fresh growth and dried-out grasses and plants — plunge into the ocean 1,200 feet below. The clouds would roll in over the water but we would stay above them, the sky blue over our heads. I kept closing my eyes, wondering if the scene would compute better when I opened them again. But every time I did, the views from atop the cliffs were almost too grand to understand. 

“It’s looks like a screen-saver,” I said, and then hated that I compared something so ancient and real to a two-dimensional part of a man-made machine.  

The scale of the trees was difficult to fully grasp, too. On our hikes, we’d stare up at the Redwoods that shoot straight up out of the ground. They are (obviously) massive. Each one felt like a specific living being with its own personality. Some grew in stands of five, some stood alone. Some had other trees growing out of their massive branches forty feet in the air. They can live for thousands of years.

There was something…melancholy about the trees. A few had fallen and died and were now covered with moss, turning back into soil. Some of the dead trees had other trees growing out of them. How profound to have your dead lie among your living, I thought. I wondered if it made the other trees sad, or if it was a comfort to watch them decompose back into the earth and give life to others. 

When white people went west, they cut down 95% of these stoic trees, turning them into capital. The thought of cutting down even just one makes me feel nauseous. 

I had a favorite tree. It had burned at some point, but Redwoods have remarkably insect- and flame-resistant bark (which is why they made such coveted material for buildings). This one managed to stay alive and seemed to be healthy.

The trunk was split open at the bottom, its bark splayed apart and hollowed out for about seven feet before growing back together. It formed a little cubby, the inside of which was coated with a layer of charcoal. I’m pretty sure I found god in there. Not capital G God, but that mysterious force that contains the unknowable answer to the central question of existence, which is, simply, why?

I’ve never heard silence as loud as it was in that hollow tree trunk. Standing outside it, I’d hear birds chirping, the wind rustling through the canopy. Then I’d step inside the charred interior of the trunk and hear absolutely nothing. Instead, I felt this light pressure, this electrical current, all over my body, the way some people describe what it feels like right before lightning strikes nearby. 

Big Sur confounded me in other ways. I knew people lived there, I just couldn’t see any houses. A woman named Jolinda, who worked at the restaurant of the inn where we stayed, told us there’s an ordinance mandating that all residences must not be visible from Highway 1. Jolinda lives up in a canyon, three miles off the highway, which is the only road that cuts along that part of the coast. Her road is so bumpy, she said, that it takes thirty minutes to make it to her house. There’s very little cell service up there, and she says she often misses calls from friends and family back home in Kansas. 

“I try to explain to them,” she said, “That out here we live beyond the digital divide.”

On our last day, Tyler and I drove around and took film photos of our favorite places. We stopped by The Big Sur Deli, which is in the same building as The Taphouse, one of two bars that locals go to. I know this because Joseph told us so. Joseph was a local who saw me taking a picture of the community billboard hanging on the outside of the building and asked, “What are you taking a picture of this for?”

I wasn’t totally sure. But I told him I wanted to read all of the fliers, and there were so many that I didn’t have time to stand there and take them all in. 

“That’s fair,” Joseph said, smiling. He had long hair and dirt all over his clothes, because he’d just picked 150 pounds of plums from a rich person’s private orchard. They were being donated to something called The Big Share, a farmers market where residents can come get free, fresh food.

“People don’t realize, it’s a food desert around here,” Joseph said. “To get groceries, you have to go up to Carmel, and that’s at least a three-hour round trip. Families who work don’t have that kind of time.”

Joseph peered at the board. There was a calendar that marked off when certain bridges along Highway 1 would be closed for repair. One of them was actively collapsing, Joseph told us, so road workers were closing it off for three days next week. The bartender inside was worried, because he lived on the other side and wouldn’t be able to get to work. But Joseph said they’re used to dealing with inconveniences and disasters, from landslides to creeks flooding to disruptive maintenance. The community was very close; they all took care of each other. The bartender would sleep on someone’s couch. 

“I don’t even have some of my best friends’ phone numbers,” Joseph said. “I just go find them. There are only so many places they can be — either here or at Fernwood.”

“Are people less lonely here than in the rest of the country?” I asked Joseph. 

“Yes,” Joseph said. “I think they are.”

There’s also no anonymity, he explained. You can’t just sit at a bar and people watch, or blend into a crowd in a city and be nobody. Sergio, another man we became friendly with, put it another way. 

“There’s no crime here,” he said, laughing. “You do something bad, and everyone will immediately know who it was.”

I know that living in Big Sur is much more complicated than I could ever understand from a lovely vacation. I can’t, however, help but admire the accountability we heard about. Because while a close community is an obvious necessity in remote areas, it’s equally as vital in bustling ones, too. Ironically, it’s easier to turn inward in a highly populated place, where most problems can be solved through impersonal apps or digital communication.

There is something profound — sacred, even — about showing up in person, casually dropping by, checking in on people. I wish that sense of community were easier to come by these days in places where survival doesn’t depend on it anymore.

I hope we can go back to Big Sur someday. There’s a tree I have to check on beyond the digital divide.

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I am writing to you from Las Vegas, where I have somehow managed to spend months of my life over the past ten years. I had never been here before I started working in sports, and I was fine with the idea that I would never go. But multiple events have kept calling me back to this alien playground of a place, and I have answered. Probably because I’ve come to love it here in some perverse way.

More specifically, I love that Vegas is one of the most honestly dishonest places that has ever existed. The city doesn’t try to hide what it is. In fact, it lays bare its organs across the desert. It splays neon lights, reflective metal, asphalt, and flashing signs for GIRLS and GUNS and GAMBLING across a tan expanse surrounded by a ring of reddish-purple mountains. My favorite thing to do when I’m out here is drive to the edge of the city and then keep going, into to the open expanse of land that rolls out like a carpet until it hits the foothills.

The landscape is honest, but the dishonesty comes from the promise that pervades The Strip — that you can be somebody else here, if only for a weekend. That you can leave rich. That this place is here for you instead of the other way around; its very existence is a lie. As I write this, it’s 110 degrees outside, and there is no water. Without air conditioning and a man-made reservoir, I would die.

But somehow, I’m alive for NBA Summer League. Summer League is the annual (you guessed it) summer gathering of the NBA world where rookies and guys fighting a roster spot have the opportunity to show teams what they’re capable of (or get a deal overseas). There are games, but the stars mostly don’t appear — it’s a chance for teams to test different players and plays.

It is mostly, however, a chance for people from the NBA world to gather, catch up, and spot very tall people at that circular bar inside the Wynn.

Summer League is also the place where, exactly a year ago, we officially launched Oddball, this strange basketball show of ours that I have come to love. And, for the past year, we have recorded a show almost every day (except Mondays).

It was a real leap of faith to launch the way we did. My co-host Amin Elhassan and I had never worked together, I had never hosted a daily NBA program, and we didn’t really know what the format would be. But Meadowlark saw something here that could work, and we lucked out. Over the past twelve months Amin and I have become good friends (don’t tell him that, though) and built this show into something we’re proud of. Amin has taught me so much about the game of basketball — more importantly, he’s showed me how to really love this league and respect its history.

We couldn’t do it, of course, without everybody at Meadowlark and DraftKings and our very impressive production team. They have shaped the show and helped us make it smarter, funnier, and sharper. It’s rare to find such pros who also happen to be absolutely delightful to be around. Every time I call into our production meeting before we tape, I’m reminded what a privilege it is to work with people who make me better at what I do.

Like Vegas, I’ve gotta be honest — I was nervous to chronicle the ins and outs of the league every day (except Mondays) when we started this thing. I had a solid level of knowledge about the NBA as a general sports reporter/talker, but over the past twelve months I feel like I got my Masters of Basketball. There’s a big difference between following a league and following a league. When I walked onto set today and realized how confidently I now trust my own opinions about the NBA, it really hit home just how much work and time we’ve put into Oddball.

Because a show like ours is basically a Tamagotchi. You have to feed the digital pet every day (except Mondays) or it dies. In order to make something worth watching, everyone has to have an enormous amount of faith in each other, both in front of and behind the camera. It’s like one of those circles where people hold hands and then lean back — if one person loosens their grip, everybody else falls down.

That kind of accountability was daunting at first, but I’ve come to love it. Doing this has been a real lesson in Showing Up. I’ve tried to carry that with me into the rest of my life — I like to think that talking about basketball every day (except Mondays) might have made me a better person. Perhaps that’s a stretch, but what if it’s true?

So I guess I could go on to tell you about Summer League. About how Bronny James hasn’t played well, about how Reed Shepphard has, about how Jaylen Brown was sitting court-side and I missed the chance to interview him.

Or you could just watch our show from today with the great Rachel Nichols! Because at the end of the day, all of the basketball talk is the icing on the cake. The cake is catching up with other people in the NBA world without the crunch of the season; without the hopes and dreams of franchises in the act of coming true or being crushed. Everything is still possible come the fall.

And, as I sit here in my hotel room and stare out at the city below me, it strikes me that Vegas (despite being a millionty-seven degrees in July) is actually the perfect place for Summer League. There’s the logistical ease of having a lot of hotels and restaurants, of course. But on a spiritual level, Summer League doesn’t hide what it is. Like Vegas, it can also sell dreams that might not pan out. Sure, careers can take off here in the desert, but guys also get cut and teams move on.

And you know what? Oddball doesn’t hide, either. I’m proud to say that we never try to be something we aren’t, even when that means becoming doctors to “diagnose” teams’ problems at the trade deadline. Or going to a psychic for pre-season predictions. Or doing an entire show with a really sassy robot named Al who is actually just saying lines our producers feed him. Or putting out a campaign to stop Viral Decontextualization.

Anyway, you get it. Thank you to everyone who has watched, listened, and followed along every day (except Mondays) (and maybe a slightly different schedule in the off-season, but it doesn’t fit with the bit, so pretend I didn’t say that).

We’ll do our best to keep the oddities coming.

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