Back to BasketballandFeelings, everyone, and what a week it’s been, which is really saying something given the fact that there’s absolutely ZERO real NBA basketball out there other than for the die-hard fan — there’s this thing called Summer League, which is something that’s been on my radar for awhile, but I have yet to attend. It’s in in Las Vegas. Maybe because it’s hot as phuck in the desert, I don’t know, or maybe because I’m not yet willing to lean into being an NBA super fan. Victor Wembanyama has been there, Britney Spears has been slapped there, so it would’ve been cool had I gone this year, but I can’t do everything all-the-time @ the-exact-same-time. I’m in Ohio now for my wife’s sister’s wedding, and had to travel through dos airports with a 3 year old, including O’Hare airport in Chicago, which has a ton of escalators. I’m a fan of escalators, objectively, but so is my son, and getting from escalator to escalator to escalator when you’re going from Concourse C to Concourse F at O’Hare International feels like commuting on the L-train from Williamsburg to Union Square or something? Anyway, let’s talk about the NBA. Definitely want to do this.
I got into an argument with New Orleans B. earlier this year when we were talking about Bill Simmons’ Podcast on the the Ringer Network. I love the Ringer Network, in particular Kevin O’ Connor’s podcast, The Mismatch, but there’s some other great “experts” there as well, like Wosny Lambre, and like Michael Pina, whose nice-guy basketball analysis feels incisive and un-cruel at the same time. Of course The Ringer was built by Bill Simmons, and Bill’s got his own podcast too, a highly successful thing that also has its own Reddit community, where from what I can tell dudes mostly my age play inside jokes on each other and will occasionally debate basketball. It’s an interesting corner of the internet for sure.
The other day while listening to Bill’s flagship podcast, The B.S. Pod, partially because New Orleans B. encouraged me to do so, I was reminded of why I never liked it in the first place. One of Bill’s cohosts is this Ryen Russillo guy. Notice the e in Ryen.
Ryen and Bill talk about basketball a lot. Their dynamic if you’ve never heard the podcast before is kinda like Howard Stern’s and Robin Quivers’. Super fun, comfortable, and built in a way that always makes Bill net out on top. It’s not necessarily ass-kissy, it’s just a dynamic that I’ve picked up on. It’s a dynamic that probably existed in their real life friendship and got transferred onto the podcast, in the way that the medium can mimic real life friendships. It’s the reason we listen is what I’m saying, and it works for both of them. Lucratively.
Ryen Russillo said something on this podcast the other day that rubbed me the wrong way though. It was a short offhanded comment, but it’s indicative of why I want to stay away from Bill and Ryen’s banter moving forward. On some level this is probably a generational thing. Bill and Ryen are in their early 50s and late 40s respectively, and they’re the kinds of guys who are probably anti-gun, pro-abortion, and like to call themselves feminists. Yet still practice a form of winner-take-all Americanism that bores me beyond even the defense of A.I. I guess I should probably tell you what happened.
During a banal conversation about Scoot Henderson, a rookie that Bill loves, “he’s so aggressive, a sudden quip pops up about the actor Miles Teller, from Top Gun fame. Apparently Russillo is friends / was friends / knows the actor. Bill says to Ryen something along the lines of hey you should get in touch with him and BBQ, and Ryen then says, basically, that he’s been in touch with Miles but that Miles has not called him back.
That doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. Sometimes my friends don’t call me back either. People get busy. They have lives. Whatever. But what made this so strange was what Ryen said afterward.
Miles Teller wasn’t calling him back, according to Ryen, because after Top Gun, Miles Teller was too big of a star to call him now. Top Gun. And Ryen was cool with it. No big deal at all. He expected it, and here’s what really got me, understood it, it’s what he deemed “the game,” and in no way shape or form would he want to put the burden on Miles Teller to ever call him back again after making a hit movie like that.
WOW
I almost lost an arm when I heard this. First of all, I really felt for Ryen. Like, to be so willing to just be tossed aside, like an olive in a Subway sandwich, now that Miles Teller was at a point in his career trajectory that Ryen could no longer match? So if Miles Teller wasn’t in Top Gun, had he, say, lost the part to someone from my Instagram feed, or something, then Ryen felt he could still be his friend?
Is that “the game” that Ryen was referring to?
Imagine if Giannis Antetokounmpo said that he stopped being friends with all of his high school friends from Greece after he made it into the NBA? If Lebron James had dropped all of his friends instead of the opposite?
But somehow, in the brains of Ryen Russillo, a mega popular sports commentator with an enormous audience of Old Spice body wash men who is often put in the semi-feminized position of publicly kissing his boss’s ass, that was just “the game,” the way it is, aka society, and business — as usual.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of toxic patriarchal social climbing experiment, where someone I was good friends with, good enough that he/she/they slept on my couch numerous times, experienced a, shall we say, global accomplishment, and then, oops, lo’ and behold, they disappeared from my life like vapor, leaving only the stench of their farts all over my couch. That hurt my feelings.
And what I want to tell Ryen Russillo is this: You’re better than that, man. You deserve to get a call back from Miles Teller. You deserve to have friends who aren’t going to drop you as soon as they play a part in Top Gun. Fucking Top Gun. And more than podcasting, you need to invest in a new philosophy of life, something with more something than — winning and losing. Read some bell hooks. Leave the winning and losing to the athletes, and for fuck’s sake, erase Miles Teller’s phone number from your iphone, bro.