Mike Sielski & The Changing Sports Media Landscape
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope you'll rate, review, and subscribe to this one and share it with your friends. Today,

Today, we're having a conversation with Mike Sielski, who is a longtime Philly Inquirer reporter who's followed the career of Kobe Bryant since its inception. He has a new book on Kobe called The Rise about the things that went into making Bryant's life so interesting and particularly the unique beginnings for one of the world's most famous basketball stars. Mike Sielski, coming up next.

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Mike Sielski, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today to talk about what I think is a really fascinating book about a study in one of the most incredible sports figures of our lifetime, Kobe Bryant. Thanks so much for taking the time to join me. Ben, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. So, Mike, Kobe Bryant is a fascinating figure for a lot of reasons.

What was the thing that actually drew you to him as a subject that you wanted to devote an enormous amount of time writing about? So after he died in January of 2020, I ended up writing several columns in the aftermath of the tragedy for the Philadelphia Inquirer where I work. And as a month or two went by, the more I thought about it, the more I realized, you know,

There's a story connected to Kobe that I know pretty well and that I can tell, I think. And it's one that is, while is pretty well known in the bubble of the Philadelphia game,

It's probably not as well known outside of that. And that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, his origin story. You know, because he had entered the NBA when he was 17, it felt like he had kind of grown up and changed and matured and went through stuff and had stuff, you know, that he went through that he brought upon himself kind of before everybody's eyes. And I thought that, you know, there was an equally interesting and fascinating story to be told there.

of the 17 years that preceded that. And I thought that if I could tell it the right way, that people would pick the book up a few years from now and say, ah, I understand who this guy is just by reading about him as a young person. You know, I found, I mean, so much of this was new to me in picking up your book. I didn't,

I mean, Mike, you and I have never had a conversation before, but I love the NBA. I think it's fantastic. I think it is when it's, when it's at its best, I think it's, it's just an incredible sport and the personalities in it are like at the top of the world. They are, they are these superheroes, you know, they're incredible, you know? And I mean, I love football. Football is my

In my go-to sport, it's the one that I pay the most attention to. But the NBA, when the NBA is good, is the best. I mean, it's phenomenal. And I mean, I still remember being drawn into those Lakers-Kings series back in the day that just like, I mean, it made me completely passionate about the two teams competing where I had no rooting interest.

You know, which to me is like the mark of a great sport where it can just be like, man, I really care about this. And I don't, I have no devotion to either team, you know? No, I think there's a lot to what you're saying, Ben. And I agree with you in that where the NBA is at its best is that it melds the

The two things that I think draw people to sports, A, the actual individual talent, right? You love a Kobe Bryant. You're drawn to a Michael Jordan or a LeBron James or a Steph Curry or back when I was a kid, a Larry Bird or a Magic Johnson or Julia Serving. And they are...

out there and you can see their faces when the games are on TV and they seem much more human in a way than a football player does just because of the fact that all those guys are wearing helmets in some ways and the game is so technical. And then the flip side of that is that to me when the NBA is great is when there are, you combine that athleticism and the personality of the stars with those kind of

city to city or region to region rivalries. You know, to me, sports is one of the few areas in life where tribalism is a kind of a good thing, right? You want Boston against LA. You want the Knicks against the Bulls. You want, you know, LA against Sacramento. And that adds an additional element of intrigue. And it feels like something is at stake.

I remember seeing the early images of Kobe Bryant. You make reference to him in one of your chapters to being six foot three and 140 pounds. I remember that image of Kobe, and it's always stuck in my mind as like, you know, this is

person who looked like a kid, you know, turned into a basketball god, you know, in a way that was, you know, just so impressive and in a way that I, you know, will never forget. What went into him making that transition from being this skinny kid that, you know, was,

A very different player in terms of, you know, they did not have the kind of track that would necessarily indicate that he would be the kind of greatness that he would become to what he became.

Well, I think a little bit of what you're getting at is the nature and nurture question. And I think in Kobe's situation, it was 50-50. He was born with this incredible drive, this incredible desire at the youngest of ages to want to be great and to be willing to do the things that needed to be done in his case to be great.

And then the other aspect of that is that he was born into a family in an environment that allowed him to cultivate that desire. You know, his father, Joe Bryant was a terrific high school and college player and spent eight years in the NBA. His mother, Pam is really where he got the quote unquote Mamba mentality from. She was a very, she is a very strong woman was raised devoutly Catholic. So at the time that he's six, three and 140 pounds, he,

He knows what he has to do and is willing to do what he has to do to get his body as he's naturally developing to kind of accelerate that process. He's got a trainer the summer before his senior year of high school and not just any trainer.

The guy, Joe Carbone, who's the trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers at the time, and they're working out together. He's got his father as a resource to lean on to to know what needs to be done to get his body ready. You know, at 11 and 12 years old, he's icing his knees after pickup games and recreational gyms because he's seen his father do it.

So you've got this combination of the want to, and you've got the combination of the circumstances and the environment that just create this, as you said, basketball God. On the one hand, he was born to do it. And on the other hand, he was groomed for it.

Talk to me about Duke. They went after him hard. They wanted him, you know, and, and, you know, that to me is one of the more interesting aspects of his early story is that, you know, as I kind of reveal in the book is if he had gone, if he had gone to college, he would have gone to Duke. He and Mike Krzyzewski connected right away and Krzyzewski was recruiting him, you know,

Pretty hard, especially, again, given where that program was at that time. Grant Hill had just graduated. They were coming off of two national championships and an appearance in the national championship game in Hill's senior year. They wanted a player like

Grant Hill and Kobe fit that bill in every regard, you know, not just a great player, but academically strong enough that he could have gone there and thrived. And of course that connection between him and Krzyzewski remained to the point that, you know, Kobe played, you know, in two Olympics under coach K in 2008 and 2012. So, you know, but it's by the time that summer before his senior year begins the summer of 1995, you know,

he's all but kind of put out of his mind the idea of going to college. Yeah, if he were going to go, he would go to Duke. But, you know, by the time he becomes a senior, he's got his eyes set on the NBA and going there straight out of high school. You know, there's...

the prop 48 incident. Yes. You recount in the book. I had, I had not known about that. If you just relate that for our listeners. Sure. So for those of you, for those of the listeners who are familiar with college sports and college basketball proposition 48 back in the eighties and nineties was this edict by the NCAA that said, you know,

you know, a student athlete, a high school student had to have scored at least 700 on his or her college boards out of what was then 1600 to, um, to qualify to play as a freshman. Um, and, um,

Kobe was an excellent student. He scored, you know, 1080 on his college boards out of 1600 could have gone anywhere he wanted to go. But the perception amongst, you know, many members of many fans and, you know, all around the country and including in the Philadelphia area was that, you know,

You know, let's face it, black that certain black athletes were not going to qualify, that they were automatically taken to be proposition 48 cases. And so there's a game where Kobe is dominating another team, another high school in the Philadelphia area. And the crowd starts to chant prop 48 prop 48. And one of his sisters stands up in the crowd. She's there at the game with the rest of his family.

and screams out, my brother's an honors student. How about you? And the crowd quiets down. You know, it's weird to think about these dynamics that were at play, you know, in the 80s and the 90s. I think of the, you know, the different people who were testing the limits of all types of NCAA rules and

You know, certainly we saw that, you know, with, you know, a number of different players within the NFL and it was always an issue within the NBA as well.

What do you think is the lesson about Kobe's decision process and how ready he really was for the NBA when he arrived? I think that's a great question. And I think it's something that I hope people take out of the book. And it was because it was something I was kind of cognizant of when I was writing it. Kobe, to me, was at the vanguard of.

kind of a sea change in the way that young athletes, whether in high school or college, kind of approach their futures. You know, up until that point, the preferred method or path to getting to become a pro athlete, or let's say a pro basketball player was, okay, well, you go play for some famous coach. You go play for Dean Smith at North Carolina or Bobby Knight at Indiana or Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. And you spend however long you have to spend there. And then you enter the NBA draft. And what Kobe figured out

was that those coaches needed him more than he needed them.

And that he had in his hand, he could control his own future, that his future was really in the palm of his hand and not in anybody else's. And that was a kind of a revolutionary way of thinking at that time, because it was just kind of taken for granted up until the year before Kobe came out, that a great basketball player would just go to a college program. Now in 1995, Kevin Garnett,

He was the first player in 20 years to come out and enter the NBA straight from high school. But Garnett was seven feet tall. He was practically a man when he was 18. And he looked like a man. Exactly. It was a complete difference in terms of his...

Exactly. And the other. Yeah, you're right. And the other factor was that Garnett came from what would be called an economically challenged situation. So, of course, he's going to turn pro if he can. Kobe's parents lived on the main line of suburban Philadelphia. He didn't need the money, so to speak, but he did it anyway. And I think that was a factor, too, that kind of got people thinking, OK,

Wow. Why is he doing this? What makes him think that he can pull this off? A, he doesn't need it. B, he's this six foot six kind of wispy kid. He's not a center. He's not a power forward. And he could do anything else. He could go to Duke and become an aerospace engineer if he wanted to. Why would he run this risk? But he knew better than anybody what was in store for him. Yeah.

When you set out to do this, you had to go digging through a lot of history in terms of the Philadelphia area sports scene and the figures who were involved, major figures in terms of determining young men's futures. I'm sure that some of this is work that you'd already done or that you already knew about because of your position at the Enquirer. How much of this was stuff that you had to dig up

just from personal relationships and basically saying, you know, like who was the guy like that you would talk to in the early nineties about how to get something done? Sure. So there were two people who really were at the, um,

at the forefront in helping me do this book. One was Greg Downer, who was Kobe's high school coach, the head coach at Lower Marion High School, who remained in close contact with him until his death. And I had known Greg for a while. I knew Greg and this other person I'm about to mention better than I even knew Kobe.

And the other person was a guy named Jeremy Treatment, who's a major figure in the book. And Jeremy had been a stringer for the Philadelphia Inquirer covering Lower Merion basketball and got close to Kobe and the Bryant family. And then he ended up actually becoming kind of an assistant coach slash media relations representative for Kobe and Lower Merion during his senior year. He kind of handled all of Kobe's interview requests and things like that. So I started with those two guys. And as it turned out, Jeremy...

had tried to do a book with Kobe back in the mid to late 1990s and had interviewed him several times over a two-year span. The project had fallen through, but once I reached out to him again to make a very long story short, he ended up finding the microcassette tapes of his interviews with Kobe from when Kobe was 17, 18, 19 years old and giving me access to them. So I could hear... That's amazing. Yeah, I could hear the contemporaneous thoughts of Kobe's

Kobe Bryant thinking about what it was like to go to the senior prom with. Can I, can I ask you something? Sure. Sure.

Can you put that out? Like, can you release those on YouTube or on, on some kind of audio format? We've created a podcast. It's called I am Kobe. It's everywhere. You get your podcast. It's a 10 part, 12 part narrative series, and it's based around those tapes. Um, so I would encourage, yeah, I would encourage anybody to go to Kobe Bryant podcast.com, um, and check it out. Um, because you can hear Kobe speaking at those times. And, um,

I apologize. I saw that link on the, on the end of your bio in your book, but I did not follow it. That's okay. That's totally fine. I read the book. It's a vicious cycle, Ben. I want you to read the book and then listen to the podcast. It makes you read the book. But see, this is, you know, what's so fascinating about the, you know, what you've done with this book is, is something that I think is very much needed and in needed for,

Particularly, I would say NBA fans of my generation, I'm 40, who kind of grew up with Kobe, but also with like the younger fascination with Michael and Magic and everything that came before that.

but need kind of this perspective that we're not going to get because he doesn't have his last dance. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. And, and I think that that's the thing that we're going to miss here is essentially like, you know, I mean, I, I watched that and I, you know, I mean, I loved it obviously, you know, but it also was like a very Michael biased thing, obviously. And, and it was so funny because my, my wife who is not a sports fan, um,

was nonetheless drawn into it because of the Real Housewives qualities of these NBA stars and all of their personal gripes and vindictiveness and Carmen Electra's over here. Anyway, it was great. But at the same time, I was like, I want this for Kobe.

Because, because Kobe is such a fascinating figure and he's at the epicenter of so many different, you know, elements that came through later than this that I would have loved to hear. And, and I feel like with this book, you know, you've done something that is as real service.

to those of us who aren't going to get that basically. Well, I appreciate that. And, um, I think it's something you're, you're touching on something that I think is, um, important to note, uh, with respect to media culture that we are in now is that, you know, you made the point about Jordan, you know, that being a Jordan production and you're right about that. It was. And, um, one of the reasons I wanted to do this book. And one of the things that I kind of cling to in my profession is that idea of, um,

I'm independent. I was able to write this with, so to speak, the objectivity or the distance that

comes with being what a journalist I think is supposed to be or an author is supposed to be. Um, and I, I believe me, I love the last dance too. And I watched it from beginning to end and was riveted by it. Um, but it was something where I, the one column I wrote about it for the Philadelphia inquire was about how I disliked the way Michael Jordan, uh, treated Jerry Krause throughout the series, you know, not just because, you know, it was

It was deeply unfair.

even though it's really just about the first 17 or 18 years of his life and say, okay, this other stuff happened when Kobe was 29 or 30, but I can see the connection to what I read in the rise. And if I've done the job right, that's what I hope for. Talk about the contest with Stackhouse. Oh, well, so the summer of 1995 is really the turning point in Kobe's life. And the reason that it is

is that he's able to work out with and scrimmage against and play pickup ball against several members of the Sixers, Division I college players in the Philadelphia area. They're meeting every day to play at St. Joe's. And one of those players he's playing against is Jerry Stackhouse, who was a star at North Carolina, helped him get to the Final Four, and had been the Sixers' first pick in the previous year's draft. He's the presumptive savior of the team. And so these two guys are going at it every day.

And there's been a lot of myth-making about the idea that Kobe dominated Jerry Stackhouse every single day of those workouts. And he did dominate him at times.

That's absolutely true. But Stackhouse got it, you know, gave as good as he got. And it's one of those situations where I think that because Kobe was 16 or 17 at the time and because he's holding his own against the Jerry Stackhouse or these other NBA players and because he turned out to be so great that.

He's almost graded on a curve, if that makes sense. Like if the 16 year old can can keep up with the NBA players, then he must be great and it must show his greatness. And it does. It's just not as not quite as one sided as I think it's been made out to be. I just I was fascinated by that because it was it was something that I had always heard.

you know, when I was growing up and, and Stackhouse obviously played for, you know, I'm a, I'm a DC native. He played for the wizards for, for quite a time. And, you know, is someone who I've always respected as a player for his toughness and for, you know, he's, he's got, you know,

He's got some skills and it's, it was just always like Kobe dominated him, you know, as a 17 year old was kind of the story. And it's just interesting, you know, to go back and look at it in hindsight. What's interesting is I reached out to Stackhouse who's now the, the head coach at Vanderbilt and he declined to talk to me. And I think I understand why for the very reason you just cited, he's been hearing these stories and,

And he's had to talk about them before, but he's been hearing these stories ever since. And he's tired of it. You know, he says to himself, you know, I was a pretty good player in my own right. And everybody thinks that Kobe just dunked on me every day for an entire summer. And that didn't happen.

You know, when you were going through this, there had to be different, you know, little incidents like that that were particularly fascinating to you or things that you wanted to dig into. We all have, you know, the myth making the the legends that that come out about various sports heroes. Was there one story in particular or anything in particular that you really wanted to dig down and get the truth about?

Yeah, I kind of wanted to dig into...

identity as a suburban black teenager in the Lower Merion area at that time. Because that was an interesting dynamic to me. Because he had lived in Italy and in Europe for eight years of his youth, he comes over to the United States permanently. The family comes over in the fall of 1991, and he kind of falls out of the sky. And what

When you say Lower Merion in the main line, there are certain stereotypes, at least in the Philadelphia area, that immediately spring to mind. Old money, wasps, you know, those sorts of things. Everybody's named Spencer or Buffy and they all play polo. And it's not really true in that regard. It's a very diverse area economically, racially, etc. But Kobe had not had the experience that any of his black peers had had.

And or any of his white peers had had. So what was it like for him to be this kid who is walking the hallways of his high school? And when he passes his sisters, they're speaking in Italian to each other, you know, not just because it's the language that they know best at that time, but because they can speak to each other and no one else can understand them. It's like their own little clique. You know, he he joined the Black Student Union at the high school, which I had not known before. And, you

you know, was kind of searching for who am I really? He had a very concrete sense of who he was on the basketball court at all times. But he moved in these different worlds in high school. He was exploring, you know, his identity as a black kid. He was in honors English classes so he could hang out with those kids. He was on the basketball team. He loved rap music and he would go record music, you know, at a studio nearby in his community. So there were all these different sides to him. And he was really searching, I think, at that time.

You know, talk to me a little bit about the NBA today and how you view its current track. Obviously,

You know, writers like Ethan Strauss, who I've interviewed before on this podcast, you know, have been very critical of a number of decisions that the league has made that the that you've had, you know, essentially a real break with its popularity in the last couple of years that that it has seen declining ratings and a real boosted politicization by its major stars.

How do you see the health of the NBA today? And do you think that Kobe was kind of

the last huge star within the NBA to not be pulled down by the demands of wokeness or the need to politicize herself. I think there's something to that. I think part of the league's problem is that it has framed itself almost exclusively around its superstar players to the exclusion almost of what we've talked about before, which is the other component of what makes a sport popular is those

tribal city to city rivalries, right? That, you know, the league is kind of banked that if you follow Kevin Durant on Twitter or LeBron James on Twitter, that you'll follow him wherever he goes, where he plays. And,

I think there's really something to be said for the fact that someone like Kobe Bryant stayed with the same team for 20 years or that Michael Jordan stayed with the same team. Those rivalries matter. In terms of the wokeness of it, I think that...

I think that sports fans have reached the point now where, and this, this is not just the NBA. This is the NFL. This is major league baseball, whatever sport you want to pick. I think they are at the point now where they're kind of like, you know what, can we just play the games for, believe me, I write about sports from a very kind of sociological angle as much as the next person. I ended up writing a lot about Colin Kaepernick. I've written about those issues too, as much as anybody, but,

But at the core, sports fans want to watch their teams and their favorite athletes play. And to most of them, it's a respite from everything else that's going on in the world. Politics, the job that they don't like, any of those things. And I think that the farther a sport is,

gets away from that, the more trouble that they're going to have in retaining an audience. And look, there's a lot of things that have gone on in the last couple of years that I felt that have made it harder for me to watch sports. Take the politicization of it out of the equation. I just, I have to admit, I don't enjoy watching sports as much anymore since the pandemic hit. And I'm not sure why that is. I have some theories about it, but- Tell me why that is, because I-

I would say that last year I probably watched the least sports that I've ever watched. Like starting with the cancellation of, of, you know, college basketball effectively. That was, that was from my perspective. Like that was the point where like, Oh my gosh, they're actually doing this. You know, like this is this, this pandemic is real kind of a thing to you know, cut to this year. And I,

I don't think I missed a single Sunday when it came to watching the NFL. I was just so starved for sports and entertainment. But I felt like last year it was just, it was unwatchable or it was just like a bad product all around, you know, everything, you know, and I'm curious what you think is going on there. Like why, why have people like you who clearly love, love sports, you've made it your business.

to doubt. I think there are a couple of things at work. First, I'll speak just for myself as somebody who came up in sports writing kind of the traditional way. Once the pandemic hit the, the access that I would get to athletes, coaches, executives, all of that went away and it really hasn't come back. And for me as a writer,

That was where my bread and butter was. It was going into the locker room, getting an athlete one-on-one away from everybody else and talking to him or her about whatever it was I was going to write about that day. And I tended to write a lot of human interest-y kind of pieces, um,

So I wanted to dive deep on some things. And once that went away, it hasn't really come back. We have not been allowed in the locker rooms. We're still doing everything by Zoom. So just for me and where I am and the way I look at sports right now and how I do my job,

it's not what it used to be. I hope it goes back to it. I'm not optimistic that it will, but there is something to be said for developing relationships with the people you cover. It doesn't necessarily mean that you are a homer for the hometown team or that you've, you're always going to protect an athlete. I, you know, would always try to write honestly about what was going on with them, but that access, the lack of that access hurts from a more spectator standpoint. I think the, I, I,

I was struck by the emptiness of the arenas.

Back when no fans were allowed in and how that changed the dynamic of the experience of watching it on television or on your sling box or wherever you were watching the games, it was just not the same. And I think that played into it for a lot of fans or might feel that way. I also think that, you know, when, when you're going through what the country was going through in 2020 with both the pandemic and the summer, you know, the aftermath of the George, George Floyd murder, you know,

sports were not the respite that people were accustomed to them to being, you know, there are the, the, um,

The NBA players wearing, you know, different names on their backs to raise awareness for social justice and all those things. And it's almost apart from whether you think that's a good thing or a not so good thing. It's just I think for a lot of people, it's just kind of too much. You know, there was just too much going on that was in our faces. And we had this thing, sports, that would give us a break from it. And it wasn't giving us a break from it.

you know, I'm going to get the line wrong, but there's some line from the Lord of the Rings where Gandalf's talking about the Shire and how he loves the fact that they're just, you know, these hobbits who only care about like

and tobacco and all these little homely concerns versus the moving wheels of the world and the wars and the politics that goes on around them. And to me, that's the way that I've always thought about sports. It's like, this is good. This is a respite. It is a way to have people

Democrats and Republicans in the same stand together wearing the same team colors, cheering on the same people, you know, and that that's a good thing.

It's funny you say that. I wrote a column after I got last year, after I got vaccinated, where I made that very point that I was looking forward to. You know, I was vaccinated. I was two weeks out for my second shot and I was looking forward to getting sports. Let's get sports back to normal for that very reason that when you're wearing Eagles green or Yankees pinstripes or Yankees cap.

or, you know, well, let's not go that far. Yeah. That is like rooting for Amazon. But I agree with you, but, but there's, I mean, it's interesting that you bring that up because, you know, we now live in this environment where like, people are like,

you know, Kyrie Irving, we shouldn't praise him. We shouldn't cheer for him, you know, or, or Aaron Rogers, we shouldn't, you know, like he shouldn't get an MVP vote, you know, and, and there's this whole division over all these things. We've seen what's going on with Novak Djokovic, you know, and it's, it clearly these divides still exist. And a lot of people in sports media, you know, are kind of leaning into that division and,

As opposed to saying, well, can't sports be this one area where we just say, you know, look, let's, let's set this stuff aside and, and just, you know, appreciate the game or appreciate the players. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you're, you're right with respect to certain people in sports media. I think there's enough diversity now within the way that people can consume sports that that gets mitigated a little bit, right? Like if you're really into the X's and O's of football,

You can find writers and people on television. That's fair. When I was in college, when I was in college, it was just ESPN and it was only ESPN. So it's not that way anymore. Yeah. And to be honest, Ben, like I have certain strengths as a writer. Like I don't get into the X's and O's as much as somebody else, you know, but my strength might be talking to an athlete to get him or her to open up to me or understanding the history of Philadelphia sports better than somebody else might. So, you know, I feel there is a little bit for everybody, but I take your point.

Page 272 of your book is the meeting between Michael and Kobe. Talk to us about that meeting. So, yeah.

John Lucas, who was a great college player and an NBA player, was the Sixers coach at the time, and he was friends with Kobe's dad, Joe. And so he arranges a meeting for Kobe to meet Michael before a Bulls-Sixers game in March of 1996. So Lucas walks Kobe down to the locker room before the game and

to the bulls locker room and there's a crowd of media around Michael and he peeks up over top of it and sees Kobe and recognizes him and Kobe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Could you just imagine being that, that kid and Michael Jordan recognizes you for a second? Like that's, that's, it's incredible. It's incredible. And B it's,

What's to me even more incredible is Kobe has that reaction that you and I just had for like a half second. And then he shakes Michael's hand and it's kind of like, yeah, he's a human being. I'm a human being. And, um,

One of the things that Jordan does in that moment, I don't get into it in deep detail in the book, but I do in the podcast, is that Jordan kind of lobbies him to go to North Carolina. Right. You got to go to Carolina. Got to go to Carolina. And Kobe says, you know what? I was as much as I admire Michael, I was never going to go to Carolina because I wouldn't have been my own man there. I always would have been following Michael. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's an incredible moment.

for so many reasons. And you don't typically see that kind of generational passage. And you make the point, obviously, that just...

there were just two years that separated Jordan's last NBA championship from Kobe's first, which is, which is kind of insane to think about it because we, we, we demarcate them in our minds as being like from different eras, different approaches to the game, you know, that kind of thing. But there really was this, this kind of continuum there. I got to ask you that the whole genre of NBA,

woke sports reporting and woke commentary within the industry seems to me to be very odd. And the reason that I've always found it to be odd is that, you know, when it comes to sort of, let's compare it to like Hollywood coverage, when Hollywood coverage is happening, they understand that like the audiences are different, but they're writing for an entire industry of people that

who share their woke values, who share their political assumptions.

But when it comes to sports, that's just not true. I mean, it's just not the case. It's a much more, it looks like the country, you know, it's, it's much, it's much more, you know, obviously, you know, college football and the sec are going to be more Republican, you know, and the NBA is going to be more Democrat and hockey is going to be divided. Baseball is going to be divided, but the point, it kind of looks like the country. And it just seems to me like this is very odd that we have such a

A dominant left of center, but, but I wouldn't even say left of center. It's more woke than it is left. Uh, I would argue. And, and that seems to be the real way that sports is approached and the handful of people who are exceptions to that, they get targeted and berated and, um,

made examples of, you know, Clay Travis and Jason Whitlock and, you know, a handful of barstool people. And, you know, it's just that they're treated in a way that is, seems to be very judgmental by their industry. And, and I don't really understand it. It just doesn't make sense to me. I don't, I don't get why this has become such a dominant element within sports coverage. Enlighten me. Why, why has this happened? Yeah.

I'm going to kind of speak for myself here. When I'm, when I've been writing about sports and I've covered sports and to me, the best people who cover sports are like this, the, the, the day-to-day showing up and understanding what's going on with the team or the sport that you cover is paramount. And so I think what you're seeing with respect to

people kind of all over, you know, and you can almost take wokeness out of it to a degree, but it's very easy to comment on sports. We can all do it. I mean, that's kind of why my job as a sports columnist is somebody who's expressed opinion is to write his opinion in some ways is going the way of the dodo bird, because you can express your opinion anywhere, virtually anywhere you want. But let me, let me just, let me just insert something, which is

I also think that some of the best writers in American history have been sports writers. Gary, Gary Smith is one of the greatest like writers that I've ever read, you know, like, I mean, Gary is a LaSalle alum like I am. And we're good friends. Yeah. Yeah. We're good friends. Yeah. So to your point though, I think some of what you're seeing in, in what you're describing is people who are outside of the realm of

day-to-day sports coverage. It's a little different when you got to show up every day and look the people you're writing about in the face. And I'm not suggesting that because you might have to do that as part of your job, that you should go soft on that. In fact, that's something I pride myself on not doing. But I do think that

You know, because sports is so popular, it's the beat versus the trends. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah, it's and look, you know, sports, the thing you're right to a large degree about what people want from their sports coverage and whether some of the places and some of the people who you're referencing are giving people what they really want.

from a sports column or a sports commentary or the debate on a sports show. Speaking just for myself, I tend to cover this stuff. I kind of volley back and forth. I'm trying to always kind of balance what I think people want to read about versus what I actually think and what my reporting is telling me and, you

you know, what I have to say that people might not want to hear. Um, and do my politics sometimes, you know, fall into that? Absolutely. They do. I did a column, um, back during the pandemic about Benjamin Watson, uh, the former new England Patriots, longtime NFL tight end. Um, and this was during, you know, the protests in the, in the summer of 2020. And there was a lot of, um,

discussion about athletes speaking out. And I just used what I had talking, I met Ben and talked to him in person. And I just made the point that, you know, it's, it's wonderful to encourage athletes to speak out, but bear in mind that all the things they say, you are not going to agree with. And here's an example of Benjamin Watson who identifies with the black lives matter movement, but is also an anti-abortion activist. And,

So reckon with him too, because all of these athletes are individuals. They are not, you know, they are not all thinking exactly the same way. You know, I've interviewed Ben and I've had the opportunity to interview a number of people who I think kind of, you know, stick out as being, you know, people who are at odds with, let's say the trend lines and the expectations of woke corporations and the like and

it seems to me to be a sizable portion of the athlete community that there's, that they kind of represent a, a significant, you know, silent portion of them. And so I just find that to be an interesting, interesting phenomenon. Philly sports. Let's just talk about it for a second. What do you feel the most optimistic about and the most pessimistic about when it comes to Philly sports at the moment? Well,

Well, it's a weird time right now. I would say optimistic about Joel Embiid's career track with the Sixers. You know, I was a supporter, as far as I could go, to be a supporter in my job of the process when Sam Hinckley started it. I thought it was the smart thing to do. I would have liked to have seen what had happened had he stayed on board. And the crown jewel of that is Embiid, who's just a marvelous player.

In terms of pessimism, I would say probably the Phillies. They're kind of just stuck in neutral and have been for a while. They do seem to be just stagnating. Yeah. A very top-heavy roster. Haven't rebuilt the farm system yet. So...

In Philadelphia, either things are incredibly great or the sky is falling. There's never any in between the way people around here look at it. The Eagles are amazing where they all suck. They're all just a bunch of bums. That's exactly right. Just looking at their exit, actually, here's a question for you as a sports journalist. I'm just curious about this. Are you allowed to bet on games?

I am not as a policy. I don't think I never have. In fact, I wrote a column years ago about a fellow media member who's still in the Philadelphia area who was running a handicapping website while he was covering the Eagles, quote unquote. And I wrote a column arguing that he should be banned from the Eagles locker room. Yeah.

because you didn't want that element in there. So I've never, I've never bet on sports. Really? You never have. Have you felt the lure? Have you ever recommended something to a friend and said, hey, split it with me if you win? No, I'm honest to God, Ben, I've never done anything like that. In fact, I stopped doing even NCAA March Madness bracket pools when I was in college because I just, it was like,

I felt like I was supposed to know. And then, you know, the quote unquote Diane Chambers of the pool would always win. And I was like, the hell with this. Well, the reason I'm curious about this is obviously sports gambling has become

a huge phenomenon across the country, you know, with the Supreme court decision and everything else it's, it's, it's you know, fueling and dominating everything. Every other ad during a sports game seems to be for a different app. I actually had my fantasy football league died this year after,

I think 18 years of, of running. And the reason that we concluded was that everybody had just moved on to doing daily fantasy and gambling. And it was just like, you know, but you know, don't really care about fancy football anymore. And, and,

I mean, I think that there's both like a good and a bad to that. But I will say it makes me watch more games. Maybe I need to take it up and that'll knock me out of my dole. I would not have stayed up late to watch that Raiders Chargers game, which turned out to be amazing. Yes. If not for the fact that I had the Raiders cover.

It's funny we're talking about this because I have a friend of mine, Dan Barberisi, who used to be a writer at the Wall Street Journal. We worked together. And he did a book called Dueling – I think it was called Dueling Kings where he took up daily fantasy sports for a year and actually bet on hockey. He did daily fantasy hockey and ended up winning more than $100,000 through it.

But the reason he did it, the reason he did it was because he was covering the Yankees and he was in a fantasy league and he thought that he would have an advantage in

because he had access to the players. And so he would ask the Yankees catcher, hey, you know, what is this guy going to throw tonight, et cetera, et cetera. And it gave him no advantage at all because it was all about algorithms and all that kind of stuff. That's great. That's great, though. Yeah, I really recommend the book. Important lesson. Your book is The Rise, Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality. So let's go out on this question. When you look back at Kobe's life, I mean, he's an incredible athlete.

accomplished in every area taken from us too early. He has the same kind of reputation or the same branding, I think, for people a little younger than me of like actors who were rock stars who were taken too quickly from us. Is there a lesson about the way that he approached life that you think that we can take from these early years that you've documented? Something that we can

learn or knowledge we can gain about the way someone who was so accomplished approached the whole challenge of living? Yeah, I think to the good, I think Kobe combined tunnel vision and openness to others in a really positive way. I think that like we talked about before, with respect to basketball, he knew what he wanted to do. He knew who he wanted to be, and he was supremely committed to that.

But when it came to his peers, when it came to things away from basketball, he was a searcher. You would have thought that he would have been one of those guys after he retired who would struggle to find something to fill his time because he was so devoted to gaining an edge as a basketball player and so devoted to that craft. What would fill that gap for him? Well, apparently being a girl dad and storytelling through movies and storytelling through children's books,

and creating the Mamba Academy were ways that he could fill that gap. And I think when it comes to the positive sides of Kobe's personality, that's an interesting balance and I think an instructive and a good one. Mike Silski, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you so much, Ben. I enjoyed it. We'll have more of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.

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You know, obviously, this is coming on the heels of what has been an incredible series of NFL playoff games. I'm often asked why I pay so much attention to the issue of sports and the way that it relates to people's lives based on the fact that so many sports are owned and run by people who have interests that are often at odds with the politics of conservatism or really those who favor human freedom.

We all are familiar with the NBA's role, obviously, in covering for China when it came to their behavior in so many different respects, even banning people from wearing shirts that were talking about freeing Hong Kong and the like after the Daryl Morey incident. And of course, more recently, we have the entire conversation around why China is hosting these Olympic Games and what kind of opportunities they're going to have for propaganda and the like.

We've seen this also within the world of tennis, where Novak Djokovic and where the Peng Shui conversation about the woman who was disappeared after saying some accusatory things about sexual abuse experience on her part.

All of these things are stories that begin within the world of sports and yet come out of them and inform people about the way that they live and speak to the priorities that we have as humans and individuals.

Getting back to the NFL playoffs, I think that what you see there are some incredibly dramatic things that obviously speak to the universal nature of the appeal of the NFL within the American experience and why it's become such a popular game with larger-than-life figures, clashes between coaches and personalities.

who, you know, one instant are, you know, putting down enormous amounts of money on the Green Bay Packers to win the Super Bowl. And then the next are calling for Lambeau Field to be blown up as one fan did and turned into a dome.

I think that the lesson that you can take away from all of this is that sometimes the people who have these platforms now take over the entire political conversation almost unintentionally. I'm not sure that Aaron Rodgers set out to be the face of anti-vax mandate perspective in America, and yet he certainly became that over the course of this season and gained a new controversy in terms of politics.

his own appeal because of it, not just his own personality and perhaps choices that he's made in his personal life that formerly were the stuff of gossip columns and that nature. Instead, he became someone who basically could give voice to opinions that others could not say publicly. Obviously, we're all familiar with the story of Colin Kaepernick and the way that that played out, which I think is really more of a sad story than many people fully know, but

But one of the things that I believe is truly valuable in this moment is that those people who are willing to break with the pack, to not just go with the herd when it comes to their either political or cultural commentary, particularly those who have the willingness to take some slings and arrows from potential people who might buy their gear otherwise or potential corporate partnerships that they might have.

as athletes, they really are standing out in a moment in which so many of the powerful entities in America, whether it's major media entities like CNN, whether it's big tech and the enormous power that is had by Google and YouTube and the like,

They're trying to crush those interesting people within the sports world just as much as they're trying to crush the dominant contention from media people like Joe Rogan who exist outside of their purview or simply too popular to cancel.

It's really interesting to see this dynamic playing out across so many different elements in society at once. And it speaks to the way that so much of the effort on the part of elites has been to stifle debate and stifle disagreement with the things that they hold so dear. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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