Wright Thompson
speaker
994 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 17 Sep
Wright Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When I went and read those stories for the first time, they spoke to each other in a way that I certainly didn't intend for them to. I'm not nearly that smart, but I read them and I was like, oh, shit, this makes sense as a through line.
Well, one of my favorite details is that, you know, people have to be protected from themselves. If you've ever been in the Duke basketball office, uh, All of the coaches in the team meeting rooms were on the fifth floor of that building. And Coach K's office was on the sixth floor.
And if you walk out of his office, like around there, there was a stairway that led down to the fifth floor so he could sort of pop in and pop out. And it's my understanding they bricked up that stairway. So if he wants to go to the fifth floor, he has to take the elevator like everybody else. Right. I think these guys have a hard time letting go. You know, there's a scoreboard.
You know, it's hard for me to know. Like, I'm going to have a story come out next week. And some people might really like it and some people might really hate it. I'm going to have like a definite point of view. And some people might agree. Some people might think I'm an idiot. But there is no binary story. zero some way to be like, this story is a success or a failure.
You guys do a show, you know, shows probably what five days a week and you get metrics. But like, sometimes I bet your sense of how a show went is very different than the audience's sense. And with sports, there's a scoreboard. And I think people get addicted to the simplicity of it. That like, I know whether I won or lost today. I got two kids. I feel like every day I'm taking L's. Yeah.
Four to seven year old. I just got a text message. The seven year old asked about makeup. I just wanted to kill myself. Oh yeah. Yup. I was just like, what? That's starting already?
No, it's funny. I got a book that's out called Pappyland about the history of Pappy Van Winkle. And, you know, my wife jokingly calls it eat, pray, love for dads. I used to think this book is like it's full of parenting advice. And I realize it is, but just not what I meant. The advice is just start drinking in the morning.
You know, yes. And I mean, you have to be careful with that because you don't want to be totally self-indulgent. But, you know, the longer you do this, the more you want it to be something you're interested in. Yeah. Like I've been on this crazy rabbit hole in the last two weeks of I can tell you about a 300 year history of the land beneath what is now Yankee Stadium. Yeah.
I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it used, there was a Creek there called Cromwell's Creek that ran down into the, what's that? The Harlem river, I guess. And, uh, uh, or the Bronx or, I don't know, man, my New York geography, I'm from Mississippi. What do you want? And, uh,
Like I've gotten really interested in the idea that there were worlds and worlds and worlds that are now just in the dust beneath this thing that feels like it's always been there. One of the two of them sort of between like 157th and 164th and River, that whole sort of complex of the old and the new Yankee Stadium. So I'm just really into the fact that.
There is this whole other history of this square of land. I have no idea if anyone else is going to be interested in it. I have no idea how that's going to fit into a story about the Yankees Red Sox, if it will, other than it's the thing I'm most interested in. And so I've been way down a rabbit hole. So it's some of that.
It's like, well, I just hope that there's someone else who thinks this is interesting and not just like totally out of left field.
Well, you know, I mean, the hardest thing in the world, I'm told, is to sell books to men. And that's what I'm trying to do, which is odd. You know, but I mean, it's... These are the... You know, I think about the conversations with my father and the things we bonded over. And it was baseball games and college football games and whiskey and James Bond movies and the Guns of Navarone.
And those things to me, the way I feel about the movie, the Guns of Navarone and the way that I feel about an Atlanta Braves game. I feel like come from very much the same place. And, you know, all of these things we're talking, when you're talking about sports, you're always talking about tribe and community and inheritance.
And, you know, it's that great Jerry Seinfeld thing, you know, you're cheering for laundry and it's sort of like, you know, I don't, My relationship with the, like I have Ole Miss football season tickets. They were my father's season tickets. He and I have the same name. So when he died, I just kept paying for him. And now I've been grandfathered in, I think.
But if they – Ole Miss was talking about tearing down that grandstand and building a new one. And they were going to move the seats. And I wasn't going to renew them. I don't give a shit about going to the games. I want to go to the games and sit in those seats. Right. And if I had to move one row – I'm not interested in writing that check anymore.
And I think a lot of people feel that way about, look, man, go into a game of a team you really care about, that your father cared about, that your older brother cared about, that your grandfather cared about. It's communion. You know, I love that thing in the liturgy, the Catholic or Episcopal liturgy. It's like we do this in remembrance of you. Like that feels very real to me.
I have not talked to him. I really liked him. I thought he was really smart and thoughtful person. You know, that story was written before he got hurt, basically. Right. And so we sort of had to redo huge swaths of it. You know, I... I...
I don't know if you ever met Wick, the owner of the Celtics, but during all those Dead & Company shows last year in Vegas, I started doing these lunches in the Venetian every day at 4.30. And so everybody was in town, come to Smith & Walensky or wherever we were, and we're going to eat a steak and drink a great bottle of wine, and we're going to go on over.
And interface with Jake Plummer, et cetera.
Showing 901–920 of 994 · page 46 of 50
← Previous
Next →