Pablo Torre

And what that involves is, A,

an amount of work that goes unseen and unappreciated, and no one wants to hear, especially sports reporters complain about how annoying their job can be, but that's the reality of what it is.

And then the second thing is, it involves debating people about who gets to call themselves this thing, because all you get in return, right?

All you get in return for the higher difficulty and the work that goes unseen is the ability to call yourself a journalist.

And so it is this thing that, of course, blew up, of course, exploded.

And of course, by the way, Lynn Jones, who has such a great, by the way, just like in terms of her vibes, like the only thing that would have been worse for sports media, the press corps writ large, would have been for this person to have been like a kid reporter, like a make-a-wish child.

It's just like the worst possible stand-in for a problem.

But the problem is vocabulary.

Yeah.

Yeah, I want to be very clear about this.

Nothing is quite like sports when it comes to having to deal with fandom as well as real serious issues like...

The billions of dollars coursing through it, like the political favors granted by an administration, like race relations, like protest, like free speech, like what it means even to be a civic institution that benefits from public money.

Right.

So a fascinating thing.

Right.

Like movies are kind of like that.

You got people who are like, you know, man, that guy's a dick because he keeps on criticizing these movies.

He doesn't really love movies.

Right.

But in this case, you also have this larger institution that happens to be the last monoculture left in American life.