Sports and Culture Writing
I love to write. It's my thing. I don't know if I'm any good at it or not, but I've figured out how to get by. Professionally, it's about all I've really ever wanted to do with my life, since about the 7th grade. I feel very lucky to live that dream day in and day out with BroBible.
Almost four decades into this life and I still can't believe I've figured out a way to earn a living playing with words. The headspace that comes with it is grueling at times. It's certainly not brain surgery or rocket science, but it beats having a job where humans scream in your face all day over the wrong kind of oat milk or something like that.
But here's a reality about being in the business of professional Internet writing: Writing becomes such a massive part of your day-to-day life that you forget about the things you wrote that you're enormously proud of. Your ability to spit words out of the blinking cursor in a word processor or content management system becomes muscle memory. In the everyday blog grind, there's a lot of rote learning that goes into framing your thoughts in a way where it's readable and has some utility when presenting your written words to an audience. It's necessary for survival.
This is my trophy case. The choice cuts. The Greatest Hits. Select flavors. Only the good stuff.
These are the features that, in my opinion, stand out from my larger body of work in the BroBible gravitational orbit. They're the ones I sunk my teeth into.
Specifically, with a focus on sports and culture - our two major umbrellas of content emphasis at BroBible.
There are a handful of essays, along with conversations with professional athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs, and other luminaries. People that help shape the world we live in and the things we talk about it.
At the very least, these stories are the ones that feel important or compelling or deserve a longer shelf life than the shifting winds of a digital distribution algorithm.
Whether they are or not, I guess that's on you to decide.
Note: This isn't a comprehensive list. I'll be adding to this page periodically as I think of something from the archive worth sharing.
Select writings
My interview with Jim Irsay - the billionaire owner of the Indianapolis Colts - about his storied guitar collection, friendship with the late Hunter S. Thompson, and the Grateful Dead
On a Friday night before MLB All-Star week in Los Angeles, Miles Teller joined Phillies legend Chase Utley at a private event. The Top Gun Maverick actor drafted five rare rookie baseball cards on eBay, totaling $23,813.95. Teller's picks include a 1952 Topps Willie Mays rookie card, a 1989 Topps Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, and a 2001 Topps Chrome Albert Pujols rookie card. He also discussed his long-time love of basbeball and the Philadelphia Phillies, stemming from his late grandmother.
“It’s just been a part of my life forever. If they said you could take a break from acting for two years and the Phillies will sign you, I would quit acting.”
Two posts came out of the evening: A post about Miles Teller talking about how he became such a big Phillies fan and a Q/A with Chase Utley.
I Watched Chase Utley And Miles Teller Draft $25,000 Of Rare Baseball Cards – Here’s My Report (Interview)
I attended a trailer preview + sneak peek in Los Angele about Elizabeth Banks' new creature feature, Cocaine Bear. The movie, coming to theaters in February 2023, features one of Ray Lioatta's final performances before his passing.
I spent an afternoon on the set of McEnroe vs. McEnroe while it was being filmed for ESPN+. At the end of the day, I scored a sit-down conversation with the tennis legend. Just before my interview, the tennis legend was filmed playing a match against virtual avatars of his younger self, from 1979 - 1992. Michelob Ultra wrote the check to bring the concept to life, including some very sophisticated tech wizardry. Think: A little bit tennis Black Mirror, a little bit sci-fi advertising stunt for a light beer brand.
Rex Ryan details how much the NFL coaching pressure-cooker has changed in recent years since he left the league. And his enthusiasm for the up-and-coming generation of quarterbacks?
Extremely bullish.
"You get to explore somewhere, but it seems close to home. You feel like you should know it well, but then as it turns out, it’s actually hard to know that well,” says Honnald.
“Because the traverse took me 32 hours, I had to go through the night. So then learning it well enough that you can navigate the mountains in the dark is pretty complicated. It’s just fun. I timed it with the full moon. So I was looking at the lunar cycle, trying to plan my fitness with the moon… It’s so cool."
“Normally you do a climb and then you’ve done that climb. This is like 32 hours of experiencing an entire mountain range,” he emphasizes.
I've had the professional privilege of crossing pathes with the Chad Goes Deep guys a couple of times over the years. The LA-based comedians and podcasters are two of the most chill dudes in the world. I really dig their sincerity and surfer bro vibe, along with the energy they've brought to Howard Stern and Fox News in their appearances.
We've covered many of their viral moments at BroBible over the years, going back to when they asked the San Clemente city council to build a 12-foot-tall statue to Paul Walker on the city's pier.
When they landed a show on Netflix after years of hard work, I talked to them about what it was like to make a series for a major platform.
"We’ve always sort of identified as sensitive bros. In pop culture, bros are always sort of portrayed in a negative light as a toxic kind of bro, I think that’s the most standard thing you see nowadays. So I think being able to present this new kind of enlightened bro that embraces what we call positive masculinity."
I asked NBA legend Jason Williams aka White Mamba about getting trashed by Lakers fans. He completely owned it. We also discuss his desire to working in the NBA again with a front-office job.
1987 is an important year in Grateful Dead history. It marked a period of prolific creativity for the iconic psychedelic rock band, along with widespread mainstream success. The band toured aggressively in ’87, playing over 80 shows on both coasts and all points in between. The year also marked the first Grateful Dead shows outside the Bay Area after Jerry Garcia slipped into a diabetic coma on July 10th, 1986. As a result of the five-day coma, Garcia lost some basic motor skills and had to relearn how to play the guitar.
A conversation with Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan from Dispatch, on the heels of an announcement that they'd be hitting the road with the band O.A.R. for the first time.
In August 2016, my friend, mentor, and former employer Anita Thompson called me up with an exclusive story. She had returned a pair of elk antlers that her late husband, American writer Hunter S. Thompson, had stolen from Ernest Hemingway's house in Ketchum, Idaho when he was 27, while working on a story called “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?"
The antlers were at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado for over 50 years. Anita connected with Sean Hemingway, a grandson, to arrange their return, then loaded them up in her Toyota Prius for the 11-hour drive north from Woody Creek to Ketchum.
My story exclusively documents their return and was cited in national media outlets like NPR shortly after going live.
In September 2017, I talked to Miles Teller about his movie, Thank You For Your Service. The interview was conducted in person at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons. As I wrote in the article:
Thank You For Your Service isn’t a war movie fetishizing the drama of battle or rah-rah shock-and-awe patriotism. It’s an after-war movie showing the hell of servicemen and women coming home to grapple with piecing their lives together, from estranged family and friends to unemployment and VA lines. It’s a movie with a purpose, albeit quite uncomfortable, to watch unfold through the story of Adam Schumann, whose infantry battalion suffered eleven causalities in George W. Bush’s 2007 “Surge” in Iraq.
The agenda? Elevate discourse around the mental health resources veterans receives long after their deployments.
Teller: A lot of my buddies are in the military. I know the amount of pride that these guys have when they put that uniform on. And for me, being asked to play a staff sergeant in the Army, a guy who just finished his third deployment, a decorated war hero by all means, and then a guy who’s come back suffering from post-traumatic stress, that was a daunting task. I almost felt like, even just pretending to do– because that’s what acting is, man. It’s like pretending to do it– I felt there was something actually kind of unethical about that, or that’s disrespectful for me to act like I’ve been to war. Because you’ve either been to war or you haven’t, man. You can’t fucking understand it if you haven’t.
My 2016 conversation with NFL legend John Madden.
“I said, no, no. I said, you don’t understand,” Madden tells me on a phone call from his home in California. “I said ‘I was the head coach for the Oakland Raiders for 10 years… I played and coached in regular season games, playoff games, championship games, Super Bowl games, Pro Bowl games — the biggest games in the world. How can more people know me?'”
“He said, ‘just believe me, they will.'”
Madden’s familiar voice pauses before a moment of revelation.
“And they did! I went from John Madden, the coach, to John Madden, the Miller Lite guy who breaks through the wall. It was so big that I didn’t believe them. And then after I got in the commercial, you just became part of the team. It was an amazing experience.”
At the time, Russ was sports royalty in Oklahoma City, a metro area that boasts over 17 Whataburger locations. But back on the west coast for All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, I got a chance to ask Russell Westbrook this crucial question. In-N-Out vs. Whataburger?
John Urschel is passionate about many things: Football, math, playing acoustic guitar, talking about restrictor operators, etc. But also, Connect Four. During senior year at Penn State 2013, the 305-pound guard asked ESPN staff writer Josh Moyer if he’s ever played the game.
When I move first, I am unbeaten. Unbeaten. And I dare someone to beat me. Bring this Connect Four game. I challenge someone to beat me, me moving first.
Now in the NFL on a 4-year, $2,364,560 contract with the Baltimore Ravens, I thought I’d see if Urschel’s challenge was still on the table. So when I showed up to interview him at Persado‘s New York City office in late June, I brought Connect Four. He let out an enthusiastic yelp and a big grin rode across his face.
“I can’t believe we’re going to do this!”
Follow-up: John Urschel on being accepted into the MIT PhD program.
In August 2016, I got a chance to interview director Todd Phillips while he was on a press tour for his movie War Dogs with Jonah Hill and Miles Teller. I met Phillips in a suite at Manhattan’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, where we started talking about some of his documentary projects that predated his scripted career. Just before the movie's release in theaters, I published a lengthy conversation with the director about War Dogs and his career, where the director summed the movie up with a quote that still resonated with me: “I like movies about guys who make bad decisions.”
Buried in my long-form profile, published around the time of War Dogs‘ release, was a discussion about his documentary work with the band Phish on Bittersweet Motel. As a writer and big Phish fan, it was one of those rare, on-the-record moments where I could tell an artist I was a big fan of a lesser-known work, far removed from the pop culture radar. As I recall, Phillips was gracious with his time and seemingly enthused to discuss his documentary work. He shrugged off the studio publicist to keep the conversation going beyond our allotted time. I’m grateful for that because I still consider it a wonderful conversation about his filmmaking career and vision.
In September 2022, I republished a piece on BroBible with just Phillips' quotes about Bittersweet Motel. Read it here.
We've been lucky enough to talk with Jon Taffer many times over the past 10 years at BroBible. The host of Bar Rescue is one of our favorite recurring personalities. In 2015, a couple months after meeting Taffer at a party hosted by Jägermeister in New York, I talked to him on the record about his success rate with rescuing bars featured on his show.
“Can I be cocky for a second? If I hit a home run 80 percent of the times, and you want to talk about the 20 times I miss swinging the bat, I’m okay with that. But, I hit it 80 percent of the time. So I have no embarrassment talking about the other 20 percent.”
On Saturday, while watching the WVU-Oklahoma game at a bar in New York City with a friend, an e-mail from a reader landed in our inbox.
Subject: Navy lost a total bro recently.
Message: Hey, so a couple of weeks ago two F/A-18 Fighter pilots collided and one of them died in the pacific. The Navy lost a total bro and I was wondering if you’d be able to share something out of respect for him?
Travel Channel host Adam Richman is one of our favorite people here at BroBible. A couple years ago, amidst false reports of his veganism in the press, I crashed a test kitchen in Midtown Manhattan with the famed Man Vs. Food host and he taught me how to make the ultimate hangover bacon, egg, and-cheese sandwich.
Richman came by our office to talk about a subject near and dear to our hearts: Pizza.
He ranked his top 5 pizzerias on planet earth, including some off-the-grid classics here in New York City.
Related: Adam Richman shows us how to make the best hangover breakfast sandwich
"He surfs a little stiff because he is just built like a brick. And the guy has the cardio of a tank. His cardio is like a tank, dude."
This is what you know about A$AP Rocky: His real name is Rakim Mayers. He’s 24-years old. He was born in Harlem, but musically, he might seem from Houston. He’s an attitude-driven New York rapper with a steady diet of thick, Southern-fried beats and smoky verses about purple swag. He’s seen his father sent to jail for dealing and his brother murdered. He’s rocketed from street posse mixtape success to a $3 million major label deal in 2011. His interests, outside of music, include high-end designer apparel, wandering the streets of SoHo, weed, video games, and bad bitches. (And “artsy girls.”) He is, in his own words, “mad laid-back.”
This is what you don’t know about A$AP Rocky: He just complimented me on my shoes.
Capt. OLIVER PARSONS: To understand this, you have to know a little about me first. I joined the Air Force in 2013 and served six years before starting Air Force Gaming.
My first day-to-day job in the Air Force was at Minot AFB ND where I did command and control for our Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) in the Nuclear & Missile Operations career field until 2018. This is obviously a pretty stressful and isolating job… but it wasn’t until I was stationed at this northern tier base that I truly felt depressed.
My depression took many forms, but basically, I lost motivation to self-care, I turned to work to distract myself, and my friends had a hard time understanding what I was going through, so when I did get off working 70-90 hour weeks, I used single-player video games to shut myself off from the world and escape.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but not all bachelor parties are made equal.
There are some pretty bland bachelor party ideas out there. If you’ve ever had a year with a string of multiple bachelor parties across a couple different friend groups, you know just how vanilla and repetitive things can get, quick. Day drink by the lake, play a round of golf, maybe hit a ball game or hockey game, grill some meats, maybe hit a casino or a strip club later in the evening, when you’re quite a few deep. Rinse, wash, repeat.
It’s a sacred cadence among a group of Bros, but let’s face it – It gets old after a couple times of the same thing over again.
I’m here to suggest something radically different for your next destination bachelor party or boys weekend hootenanny: A NASCAR race.
“I never felt like I was going to die in the ocean. But it was a moment of total inconvenience when you’re just thinking to yourself ‘how did I get myself into this mess?’ Just thinking about all the things that had to go wrong for me to get absolutely destroyed right now.'”
“But, after it happens, you’re so immensely grateful that it did happen. It just feels so good to have lived through something like that. It’s such a confidence booster, thinking to yourself ‘jeez, I don’t want to do that again. But I can handle it. I can handle whatever I’m confronted with again.’ What feels like an hour of suffering is really just a couple of minutes. It makes time feel a little different.”
Skyline Chili is one of the most renowned places to get Cincinnati chili, with restaurants across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. It was opened in 1949 by Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides, making it a landmark institution in the Cincinnati culinary scene.
If you know anyone from Cincinnati, you know just how important Skyline chili is to them.
In fact, it’s so beloved by Cincinnati sports fans that some actually chugged Skyline’s famous canned chili sauce to celebrate the Bengals punching their ticket to the Super Bowl.
What about NFL legend Carson Palmer? After all, the quarterback laced up Bengals for seven seasons, calling Cincinnati home for about 10 years.
You know NFL Insider Ian Rapoport for breaking news news around the world of the NFL. Important trades, whatever team is exercising whatever out or option, staff changes, etc. Rarely does RapSheet break men’s style news.
But last week, in an exclusive conversation from Super Bowl 53, the NFL Insider became sources himself when he casually broke an important tidbit of fashion news to BroBible. It was based on acute journalistic observation from the hordes of celebrities, influencers, and media types hanging around Radio Row:
Turtlenecks are back.
Before Super Bowl LVII in Los Angeles, I talked to LA Chargers safety Derwin James about Justin Herbert's comments on punting and why he hates doing it.
"I don’t like that counterculture idea. It’s not as though there were a culture to be counter to, you know what I mean?"
I didn’t expect to go to Indiana and get booed.
It’s Sunday. It’s July. It’s 95 degrees in the shade, if you’re lucky enough to find any on the massive grounds of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I’m standing in the back of a truck with the Miller Lite racing team and Brad Keselowski, Team Penske’s driver of the #2 car in the Sprint Cup series. 80,000 people gathered in the grandstands for the Brickyard 400 are booing at us.
Well, him.
IMS can hold close to 400,000, though it’s comparatively empty on a day with a 110-degree heat index. Despite the scattered crowd, the boos are unmistakable. The salty welcome from thousands is a social phobe’s worst nightmare.
It doesn’t phase Keselowski, who made some small talk about never getting a chance to play the famous golf course on IMS’s on monstrous infield despite his many trips here.
“In NASCAR, they love you at beginning of your career and at the end of it,” he leans over and declares while smiling and waving to the crowd like a practiced politician.
There’s always the one that got away. For every trophy lunker or W on a Sunday in football season, there’s an L that stings and stays with you.
For daily fantasy expert Kristi Metzger, that sting is a stat correction by only .4 tenths of a point that cost her a cool $1 million prize.
The time I went to the Super Bowl and hung out outside the stadium to see how much last minute tickets to the game were selling for.
Irwindale is legendary: What Eldora Speedway is to dirt track racing, Irwindale is to drifting. It’s Southern California’s spiritual home to burnt rubber and brightly-painted drift cars. There’s a reason this place is called “The House Of Drift” — It’s the last race on the Formula DRIFT circuit season and a crowd favorite.
It might not be apparent to your old high school driver’s ed teacher, but there’s big difference between reckless driving and squealing around a racetrack at 160 mph with smoldering tires while G-forces scream against your body. The drivers on the Formula DRIFT circuit regularly tightrope walk with the law of physics, flinging themselves through hairpin turns.
All these little pop culture references about our thing make us feel not so weird about that thing we love and treasure and want to share with others.
Like In-N-Out Burger and traffic-clogged freeways, the Chili Peppers are Southern California. Their sound is steeped in California iconography of a certain generation: Palm tree neighborhoods, empty backyard swimming pools primed for skateboarding. A sort of gritty golden hour at the edge of the world and all of Western civilization.
Here’s the thing about Saquon Barkley’s QUADS chain: It’s so shiny, it’s impossible to get a good picture of him wearing it with an iPhone under
the lights of a commercial shoot in Los Angeles. The hardware, famously gifted earlier this summer from Baker Mayfield after Saquon won NFL Offensive Rookie Of The Year, shimmers brilliantly as camera and production crews shuffle around him.
Without a question, John Cena has the best entrance music in WWE history. A few weeks ago I jumped on the phone with Cena to talk about cheat days, his fitness routine, and his new Tapout body spray line. The second he jumped on the conference call, part of me expected to hear his signature “dun dun dun dunnnnnnn” before we jumped in the interview. Instead, I get a polite yet enthusiastic introduction from a WWE PR handler:
“Hello, Brandon. You have WWE superstar John Cena on the line…”
Back in May, just outside the South Rim entrance to the Grand Canyon on Highway 64 en route to Flagstaff, I drove behind a 1989 Toyota Dolphin motorhome advertising their website.
It turned out to be the travelog of Gregg and Anna Davis, a recently-married Mississippi couple on a cross-country journey to some of America’s greatest wilderness destinations, alongside their three dogs. After quitting the 9-to-5 grind in the finance industry, they sold all their belongings and moved out of a big house, choosing life on the road in their RV — affectionately named Nancy.
Extended stays include the beaches of Florida in the winter, Austin, Texas, Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, Moab, Utah, and then a swing through Arizona, California, and up to Oregon, where they’re chillin’ in the beautiful coastal parks on US 101.
Every college has its stories, its word-of-mouth folklore that seems to take a life of its own.
There is a tale perpetuated by the students of Penn State—especially those who attended Main Campus from 2009 to 2011—about the origins of Asher Roth’s 2009 collegiate party anthem, “I Love College.” So the legend goes, Roth, a West Chester University student from the Philly ‘burbs, visited friends at Penn State for a typical college weekend of drinking, toking up, and chasing women. He was so blown away by State College’s party ethos that he headed back to Chester County to pen “I Love College,” an earworm that pioneered the modern frat-rap genre and quickly achieved larger-than-life status on college campuses around the country.
But none of this is true at all.
“That’s a myth that Penn State inspired ‘I Love College,'” Asher Roth tells me. “West Chester University is 100% solely responsible for ‘I Love College.'”
If Adam DeVine, 1/3 of the genius behind Workaholics, were giving a graduation speech, this is what he envisions: “I would probably chant ‘let’s get weird’ a lot and take off my shirt and chug a beer that I had planted under the podium. And when it gets all wild, I would quickly put my shirt back on, and say “stay in school, never grow up, be a kid forever” and run off.”
There have been a lot of great story lines with the next generation of NASCAR talent out there. I was actually at that race at the Watkins Glen race where Chase Elliott finally won a cup race. That was such an amazing moment for NASCAR – Just a jolt of excitement for the entire sport. Being there to see it firsthand was so cool.
Anything like that in particular that you’re rooting for in 2019?
Dale Jr: Man, you talked about that feeling that you had seeing Chase win at Wakins Glenn. We all felt that.