Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch

Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch is a nice novel that starts with the main character, Lloyd, an Atlanta police officer with a thirteen-year-old son, Bishop, finding out he has just months to live. 

Lloyd comes from a police family, with his father having been a tough as nails Major, but he's a beat cop focused on trying to help people through his job. As Atlanta citizens would would record with their phones he and other police at work, Lloyd would regularly assume the persona of Happycop, your friendly neighborhood officer.

After finding out about the brain tumor that would soon kill him, Lloyd worries about how to provide for Bishop after he's gone, and comes up with the idea to accomplish this by dying in the line of duty. The book both funny and a lovely story about family, legacy, and what people will do for one another. 

Similar to two other novels from Leitch, How Lucky and The Time Has Come, it's a short book that's also memorable for the heart it has.

The Time Has Come by Will Leitch

The Time Has Come by Will Leitch, who also wrote the novel How Lucky, is a short and interesting novel.

This latest work of fiction from Leitch is also set in Athens, Georgia, and tells a story set around Lindbergh’s Pharmacy, run now by Theo Lindbergh after he took it over following the death of his father, Jack.

The book covers various characters separately and then brings them together at the end, with the principles Theo, Daphne (a nurse), Jason (a contractor) and his son Jace, David (who run a music venue and has a daughter named Allie), Karson (an activist with a law degree), Dorothy (a widower whose husband Dennis passed away from covid), and Tina Lamm (a schoolteacher once known as Mommy Mario and whose family was impacted by Jack Lindbergh).

How Lucky by Will Leitch

How Lucky by Will Leitch feels full of contradictions, with those combining together into a really good novel. 

It's about someone with SMA, or spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that typically has symptoms appear in early childhood and eventually leaves a person confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak. They're mentally sharp, but with a body that didn't sign up for the ride. It's described in the book as akin to Lou Gehrig's Disease, or ALS, but with it coming much earlier in life and having a much longer deterioration period. Also, SMA is a progressive disease, once a body part fails, that function is gone, and that's the way it's going to remain. 

Along with being about someone who has a debilitating disease, the book also is a nice story, one about someone living their life, the people who love them and they love in turn. The best people in the main character's life are those who don't feel sorry for him, but treat him like the real person he is.

Leitch set the book in his town of Athens, Georgia and noted writing it after his friends had a child with SMA. The story is a lot of  things, it's a mystery about an abduction, funny, and heartwarming, with the main character narrating "I have helped people, and I have people who have helped me."

Writers on writing - Hylton on Hillenbrand, Leitch on Boyhood & Tullis on Journalism class wisdom

There's been a few pieces I've come across over the past month that featured writers on writing (a subject I've oft rambled about on this site), including a profile of a great author, review of a brilliantly done movie and Journalism professor on great writers who talked to his class.

The author profile was "The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times and an in-depth look at a fantastic writer (I wrote here about her book Unbroken) with a really remarkable back-story as someone forced to largely remain at home as an adult due to chronic fatigue syndrome. Just fascinating details from Hylton on Hillenbrand's life as well as her writing process.

The movie review was actually written in July 2014, but one I waited to read until actually seeing the film this last weekend. For Deadspin, Will Leitch wrote "High On Life: The Divine Boyhood, Reviewed" on the movie written, directed and produced by Richard Linklater. It was a pretty monumental film in both scope (a fictional work filmed over eleven years) and actual delivery, with how, for lack of a better word, human it was.

The piece on writers and wisdom from them was by Ashland University professor Matt Tullis who did "What 14 Great Writers Taught One Journalism Class" for the website Nieman Storyboard. It was a tremendously cool piece that at the end had a link to another Nieman post, "10 Pieces of Wisdom from Top Writers" with axioms taken from class speakers.

Writing on & by Roger Ebert

Such a shame, the passing of Roger Ebert a few days ago. There's been a number of great remembrances written (and I'm sure still to be written) and below are the ones that touched me the most... along with some of the great Ebert writing I've come across in the past.

It's certainly not an end-all, be-all list, but the remembrance pieces I've found particularly noteworthy (all fairly short and with some including links to longer past writing about Ebert) have been the following: "Will Leitch on Ebert" by Marcus Gilmer (and Leitch) for the Chicago Sun-Times, "I'll Let Roger Do the Talking" by Chris Jones for Esquire, "Million Dollar Movie" by Peter Richmond for Alex Belth's Bronx Banter, "Roger Ebert Hails Human Existence As 'A Triumph'" for The Onion and finally "A statement from Chaz Ebert" on the passing of her husband.

The pieces by Ebert himself that I've been struck by in the past (and linked to and ruminated on in blog posts) included his memoir Life Itself and four different blog posts he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times: "All the Lonely People" on... that, "The Storyteller and the Stallion" on Bill Nack, "Video games 13,823, Huck Finn 8,088" on Huck Finn vs. video games and finally "How do they get to be that way?" on racists and racism.

Just a solid legacy of great writing about and by Ebert.

Writing on Writing (it's Work) - Leitch, Smith & Verducci

There's been a few writer interviews I've come across lately that stood out as interesting and reinforced an idea from a post I did last May, "Writers on Writing (it's Work) - Chris Jones on Robert Caro / Gary Cartwright / Mark Kram Jr." This central idea of work and it's import stood out to me in recent interviews with Will Leitch, Gary Smith and Tom Verducci.

The website TVFury provided the first new interview to note here with "The Fury Files: Will Leitch" and the part of greatest impact to me was at the end with Leitch on the effort he feels compelled to put in...

"I feel like I always just have to be a couple of steps ahead of the coroner. I figure if I type really fast, if I always turn in everything in time, if I keep doing things that I enjoy doing (and therefore make sure this never gets stale for me or the reader) … maybe I've got a chance. But I spent a long, long time writing thousands of words that nobody paid me for, that nobody read."

The Gary Smith interview was actually from 2008, but perhaps it's fitting to link to something a few years old here as Smith has for such a long period been doing great features for Sports Illustrated. On the Poynter Institute website was a post by current ESPN writer Jamele Hill titled "‘Going Deep’ with Sports Illustrated‘s Gary Smith." Background was Hill had written Smith back around 2000 asking about his approach to journalism and while there was a number of interesting responses passed along here, I particularly liked Smith on the subject of reporting and getting a source to open up...

"A lot of times it’s rephrasing a question three, four or five ways. A lot of us have the pat answer or the safe answer or the quick answer, [which is] is the first answer we’ll give. Sometimes it takes that many times of coming back at it in a slightly different way to unlock a little something more."

Finally, Jeff Pearlman on his website last month did the interview "The Quaz Q&A: Tom Verducci" with the Sports Illustrated writer / MLB Network reporter / FOX game analyst. Just as Leitch and Smith provided, there's a ton of solid content from Verducci, but (similar to from the Smith interview) the part I found most interesting was on reporting...

"Patience is a requirement. Anybody with a credential and a pen or a microphone can get “a” quote. You've seen it, Jeff: the scrum around the star of the game and the stock questions that typically feature phrases such as “how surprised were you . . . ,” “the mindset,” and “what pitch.” The worst are the non-questions. They almost always start like this: “Talk about . . . .” It’s sheer laziness. The point is that you ask a stock question you get a stock quote. I don’t want mere quotes. I want information. And I want what’s true. You have to be patient if you’d rather drill closer to bedrock than the surface layer."

GQ September 2011 Issue - Will Leitch on Michael Vick & Other Features

I've not been much of a GQ Magazine reader in the past, but found the most recent issue to have some solid content as well as (at the risk of being a bit hyperbolic) borderline spectacular.



What got me to purchase (and it's the first magazine I've bought from the rack in probably years) was seeing that J.R. Moehringer wrote the cover story. Author of the brilliant memoir The Tender Bar (which I reviewed here) as well as co-writer of the equally brilliant Andre Agassi memoir Open, Moehringer pens for this issue a profile of New York Jets Quarterback Mark Sanchez.

The piece is titled "Broadway Mark" (currently available online just in excerpt form) and while good, didn't necessarily strike me as great. To this point, I kind of like when my favorite writers do stuff that I like, but not as much as other work of theirs. Reminds me that everybody's human and while you strive to do your best work at all times, you're simply not going to have everything you do in life be your best work. When it is, that's great, and when it's not... you know you did what you could and then move on to the next project.

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What I felt was the best piece of writing from this issue was another quarterback profile... this one written by Will Leitch (he off the book God Save the Fan that I reviewed here). His piece "The Impossible, Inevitable Redemption of Michael Vick" is really good writing on an interesting subject... and has the additional cachet of having created news itself. Leitch's reporting of Vick being directed towards the Philadelphia Eagles by the NFL is likely not something the league office would want put out and there and a pretty remarkable detail assuming it's true (and I have no reason to think it's not).

Back to the writing itself, though... Leitch takes the approach of portraying Vick as more than just a caricature of someone who was a bad guy who hated dogs and now is a good guy that loves dogs. Really interesting look at someone who is both an ideal (good or bad) that people assign to him and an actual guy.

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Another piece from this GQ that featured a compelling story was a restaurant review (that's right, a restaurant review as compelling) by Alan Richman. "Diner for Schmucks" details his experiences at and with the proprietors of the New York eatery M. Wells. It's remarkable reading that traffics in the concepts of service, customer expectations and the power of accusation.

Postcription to the M. Wells piece... restaurant lost their lease and now closed. Don't feel bad for the owners in the slightest.

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Finally, this issue contained the Chris Heath piece "Tell: An Intimate History of Gay Men in the Military". It featured accounts from various gay current and former Servicemen and what struck me was an anecdote towards the end of the piece.

From an unnamed member of the military who will soon be able to serve his country without his sexual orientation being grounds for dismissal if publicly known...

"Since I'm a single officer in the Marine barracks and I've got the highest security clearance you can get, I also serve at the White House in close quarters with President Bush and President Obama at social events. Very seldom was the president ever alone, but one time the president had said, 'Go and get the vice president,' and all the straphangers went, and the president went in the Blue Room and was just standing there waiting for Biden. And there was no Secret Service around or anything, and I went, 'Fuck it, I'm going to go and talk to the president about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." ' He was looking out south—there's an incredible view down past the Washington Monument to the Jefferson. And I just stepped in and said, 'Sir?' and he turned around and walks to me and I just started: 'You know, sir, I want to let you know that there are a number of us that work very close to you who appreciate very much what you're doing on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—more than you probably realize.' And he was shaking my hand, he looks up and it's like...he got it. I said, 'I want to thank you for this.' And he goes, 'No, I want to thank you. Thank you for your service, and thank you for your courage.'"

"God Save the Fan" by Will Leitch

Just finished reading "God Save the Fan" by http://www.deadspin.com/ founding editor Will Leitch. Pretty interesting read from a guy who built an enormous website around the types of sports stories not traditionally covered in the mainstream media.



Leitch's website with links to his work and current writing for New York Magazine can be found here and (as his website also features) "God Save the Fan" is just his most recent book, with several others, including the Young Adult book "Catch" coming prior). Back to the book at hand, though... it's an entertaining read that gives the author's view on sports through the prism of it's major entities: the players, the owners, the media and most importantly, the fans.

The fundamental point that Leitch makes throughout the book is that sports are simply games that provide an escape from everyday life for the fans who watch them. The commentators who ascribe huge meaning to events and attempt to generate epic controversy can get in the way of that basic escape and enjoyment.

Maybe it's expanding on this and maybe it's digressing from it a bit, but below are some of the more interesting things I took from the book (yep... in order from start to finish):

Introduction: Features an anecdote about the "pre-everyone finding out about the dogfighting" Michael Vick. At the time he was hugely popular and heavily promoted by ESPN and other major sports entities. Though it was posted on http://www.thesmokinggun.com/, nobody seemed to care that Vick was being accused of giving a girl herpes... and then seeking medical treatment under the most excellent name "Ron Mexico". Good stuff.

Part 1: Players
- Leitch makes the point that the steroid controvery is a touch silly given that it's portrayed as such a crime and yet taking cortisone shots described as athletes simply paying the price.
- NBA star Gilbert Arenas is trumpeted as being the perfect pro athlete for fans to relate to because... he's a bit loony and speaks of sports as being a diversionary entertainment for the fans rather than being something of enormous import that it's not.

Part 2: Owners
- Observation about how fans often side with owners over players in cases of salary disputes. The surmised reason why is that fans can see themselves as being management more than they can imagine being pro athletes. This is tied closely to the fact that people think they could be general managers "if just given the chance".
- Mention of the college football website http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/

Part 3: Media (and why it can be lame)
- Leitch's college experience reporting with Michigan basketball player Robert "Tractor" Traylor. The phrase "because he can" comes to mind... and the story is enough to push anyone away from wanting to be a sports reporter.
- The ESPN empire and it's various foibles... some amusing and relatively harmless (especially for the fellas) and some more disconcerting. Especially how ESPN influences through it's coverage choices.
- The Carl Monday saga. Too nuanced and fantastic to fully describe here so the wikipedia reference will have to do. Having seen it, I highly recommend The Daily Show with Jon Stewart report on Carl Monday.
- The idea of a "sports media expert". C'mon... please. Hence, the blogs...

Part 4: Fans
- Again... it should be about being entertained (or distracted and entertained as the case may be). Everything else... well, to borrow a phrase, it's just noise (or Dick Vitale / Stephen A. Smith / Skip Bayless shouting).

Good book. Entertaining for a sports fan.