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
And the only people in the church when they walk in are the priest and Pat Riley. And he has gotten on an airplane somewhere out in the American darkness and flown into Kentucky like that. You know, he's the guy who shows up. And so I think when you know that about him, everything starts to line up. I mean, this is a guy for whom basketball was a family. You know, I love this story.
He grew up in a real Italian neighborhood in Schenectady and there was a big upstate New York mob. And so these guys would just feed Pat, you know, like he would eat as a guest in their kitchens and in and out of the back door and played with their sons. And after I think his freshman year at Kentucky, one of these guys who was a big mob boss said, Patrick, you can't come here anymore.
And he was like, what do you mean? And he was sort of like, where you're going, you don't want to be associated with me. We love you very much. You'll be family forever, but you can't come here anymore. And, you know, so he just grew up surrounded by a very strict, I mean, this is, you know, there's a story in the book on Pat, but like a really strict code about how a man behaves in the world.
And you just, I think, see that play out in weird public ways with him over and over and over. Yeah.
I think he'll die in that job. I mean, we had this thing where he was talking so much to me while I was reporting the story about retiring that one day I just called him. I'm like, hey, you're not trying to tell me you're retiring, are you? Because I don't want to have just missed all the signals. And he laughed. And then they got eliminated from the playoffs on the last day of the season.
I was down in Miami and he texted me the next day. And we went to like that Smith and Walensky down on South Beach. He lives in that big tower next to it.
and uh he was like you want to get a drink i was like yes and we sat there had a couple of drinks and he's like you know what you want to know what the greatest lie ever told is and i'm like what he goes that i'm going to retire to malibu and i'm like oh that's it you're never ever going away you know his wife chris is great and the way she describes it she's also a professional therapist i don't think it's an accident that he married a therapist but uh she's like you know
Pat grew up needing to get his, you know, his cookies or praise and he needs it.
I mean, most of the time, you know, it's like that post hoc ergo propter hoc, like, you know, Bill Belichick without Tom Brady is a sub-500 coach. I mean, I just sometimes wonder, like, all a coach is is somebody who either lucks into a star player or gets a star player and doesn't ruin it.
You know, there's that idea of, like, you know, how many Super Bowl titles would the Bears have won if it had been anyone other than Ditko as the head coach? You know what I mean? Like, as opposed to he won a Super Bowl, is there a narrative where, like, actually he lost four of them? Yeah.
That's right. And those things are like it's luck. You know, I mean, I think about, you know, my career is probably very different if Michael Jordan doesn't say yes. Yeah, that has nothing to do with me. You know what I mean? Like it was, I got him on the right day. And so you, you know, and you think about that all the time about how much luck is involved in all of this. So, yeah, I mean, I,
They're teams that have cultures, and then they're teams that just have three really, really great players.
Well, I mean, you know, this is a guy who will be in the Bahamas and send staff down to the gift shop to get four Sudoku books so they can all race. This is a guy very, very, very good at the iPad game Bejeweled. It's almost sad. It's a long fucking way down from game six to bejeweled. I mean, like, so, you know, there is, these guys don't, you don't turn it off.
Nobody who's great at anything is normal. Like just some people hide it. But, you know, I find, you know, he's a very, very serious Marlin fisherman. I mean, I think a really great comp is Michael Jordan and Ted Williams. You know, because Ted Williams was an excellent fisherman. His family let me go down into his files. He has a huge, that is a huge room full of filing cabinets.
And in those are all of his fishing logs. It's his diary, though. I mean, you go through Ted Williams' diary. And, you know, you think about, here's your fun Ted Williams fact. Ted Williams' mother, who was insane, literally, lived through his entire professional baseball career, never went to a single one of his games.
And when she died after he retired, he flew home to San Diego like a dutiful, wealthy son. He paid for a very nice funeral. He then went to her house. He got every single family photograph and he burned them. Wow.
He probably should have married a therapist. Wow. Ted Williams could have used some Chris Riley. I mean the, and so you, you know, the, like there's a story in the cost of these dreams about Ted Williams and his mother and his son and daughter. And the idea is like to try to understand the, You want to create a logical framework where freezing someone's detached head makes sense.
That's the challenge is like, how does this happen? And hurt people hurt people. And Ted Williams grew up in a terrible situation and was an awful father, like truly awful father. And then he got really sick at the end of his life and suddenly he and his kids had this relationship that they had all sort of wanted and didn't know how to have.
And the moment that they got that relationship, he started dying. And now you understand like these desperate kids who had wanted this iconic father their whole lives. And then in the last 18 months of his life, they get it. And now they'll do anything for even the prayer of another day. So things that are totally batshit crazy start to make sense.
Well, I mean, I'm from Mississippi, which is one of, if not the only state in the country that doesn't have a Fortune 500 company. And so at some point... Like, Ole Miss and Mississippi State are going to run out of money.
Showing 941–960 of 994 · page 48 of 50
← Previous
Next →