Stu’s Notes: JJ Redick Was Built for Reality TV

The Lakers are “zeroing in” on hiring LeBron James’s podcast cohost to be their head coach, LeBron James’s unofficial spokesperson announced yesterday, making sure to emphasize that LeBron James was not involved in making the decision, and that he doesn’t know why people keep getting that impression. Why “zeroing in?” The implication is that because JJ Redick is calling the NBA Finals for ESPN, it would be uncouth for the Lakers to announce him as their coach before the Finals are over. That old Tom Brady conflict of interest from a few weeks ago, plus some general awkwardness.

I hate the hire, of course, because most things associated with LeBron James annoy me to no end. I also want to think it’s dumb, and that JJ Redick will fail as the coach of the Lakers, but I don’t really think it’s dumb. I think JJ Redick’s pretty smart. I think the Lakers only winning contrived titles since 2010 leaves Redick with a long leash. I think LeBron James is going to retire in two years following a nauseating retirement tour in which he makes Dan Gilbert lick the soles of his shoes, and that after this retirement, the Lakers will be able to stop playing superteam and start trying to win the way NBA teams win these days. I think it’s probably not that hard to win a title as the head coach of the Lakers, and that Redick will accomplish this within seven or eight years, and that the way this experiment ends is with Redick making a Brad Stevens-style transition into front office work with exactly one ring on his finger. Good hire, Lakers. It would have been hard to make a bad hire, but you didn’t make one. Sometimes you do!

The question asked of most men who coach the Lakers and/or LeBron James is whether they can handle the accompanying reality TV environment. It’s often called “pressure,” but reality TV is more accurate. It’s not drama itself. It’s the constant threat of drama. It’s the possibility that at any moment, the tinderbox could ignite and Shams Charania could come swooping in, tapping away on his iPhone to tell the world, “LeBron did NOT like JJ’s look at practice, and he shouldn’t have! Bitch was looking fugly in those Jordans!! LeBron didn’t tell me to tell you all this. But he’s totally right. Also the Lakers are the Finals favorites hunny!!!!!”

The answer JJ Redick provides to this question is “Oh yeah for sure.” For sure he can handle it! That’s the thing that makes JJ Redick a great hire for the LeBron James Lakers. JJ Redick was raised in a reality TV lab.

Let’s examine a few facts. We’ll do this call and response style. When it’s italicized, that’s you yelling this at your computer or telephone. But in a sing-song way.

• Q: What was the golden age of reality TV?
• A: The mid-2000’s!
• Q: Where in the country do people care most about college basketball?
• A: North Carolina!
• Q: When did college basketball’s popularity peak?
• A: The mid-2000’s!
• Q: When did homophobic heckling at college basketball games peak?
• A: Before gay marriage was widely legal but after being gay became normal enough for us to have a lot of mean words for it!
• Q: So?
• A: The mid-2000’s!
• Q: Which players received the most homophobic heckling in their college basketball careers?
• A: White shooters at Duke with good hair!
• Q: Since we became used to reality TV and social media let us participate in it, what’s become the reality TV equivalent in the modern sporting world?
• A: Podcasts!
• Q: When did JJ Redick play college basketball?
• A: The mid-2000’s!
• Q: Where did JJ Redick play college basketball?
• A: Duke!
• Q: What does JJ Redick do now?
• A: Podcasts!

JJ Redick was one of the most famous athletes in the country as a college athlete at Duke, and despite going on to create two children with a woman, he spent those four years of fame routinely being called phrases so vile that our children will never hear them. Once a week, Duke went on the road in ACC play and JJ Redick was told he was a ********** and a ****** and a **********-*********. For four years! From there, he went on to play in the NBA as the NBA’s own reality TV addiction erupted, embracing it himself by pioneering the NBA–player–with–a–podcast space. The man is built for reality television. The man is built to coach LeBron James on the Los Angeles Lakers.

Back-to-back In-Season Tournament champs?

They’re the favorites, hunny.

Etc.

• I am, of course, overjoyed that David Bote is back up with the Cubs. Not because it’s a good thing for the Cubs to be returning to the career .230 hitter they stashed in the minors to save this pivotal season, but because this blog has a lot of fun history with David Bote from our All Things NIT days, when I would write David Bote fan fiction and I exploited a loophole in our voting process to name David Bote the National League Rookie of the Year. (He never told us if he got that trophy.) Those two weeks in 2018 when David Bote was good were two of the best weeks of my life. God, that sentence is sad. I spent six hours yesterday caring for and cleaning up after a dog with IBD. Did you know you’re reading an NIT blog?
• Apologies for missing a week and a half of blog posts. That stomach flu got us bad. The 90’s Bangers Bracket results will be up later today, and I don’t believe we had any other unsettled business. If we did, it may simply be lost to the great toilet bowl of time.
• The format’s different today, and that’s because we’re changing the approach a little bit. Joe’s Notes and my notes will usually be shorter going forward. One topic, some quick hitters, and on with our day. To supplement these, we’ll be separating out some of our coverage into newsletter-style posts. Meaning: The first ever Burnley/Ottawa Senators newsletter, Disco Inferno, should be on the interwebs later this afternoon. Stuart has the full explanation here.
• Among other things that happened while we were gone, Josef Newgarden won the Indy 500. Great race, and the rain delay seemed to actually help TV consumption, at least to my very anecdotal impression. Bummer to see Newgarden win, but I realized that I legitimately don’t like him, and I’m hoping other IndyCar fans feel similarly. Not because I really have anything against the guy, but because he fits the villain archetype so well.
• Among things that happened this past weekend, the Brewers increased their 2024 beef count to five teams: The Mets, Orioles, Rays, Red Sox, and now the White Sox. An odd number of AL East teams, and nobody in the NL Central, in yet another sign that Craig Counsell is a sleeper cell sent to implode the Cubs.
• Last, the most important thing that happened while we were gone: We lost Bill Walton. I never met him, so any words I can share are simply an exercise in my own mourning, not a lesson about him to anybody else. He was the best, though. He was the best. Here’s the writeup we had halfway finished before I started barfing on Tuesday. To add to the joyful, mournful chorus.

There was Bill Walton the public figure, and there was Bill Walton the person. Most of us only knew the latter through glimpses granted by the former. We mourn the public figure, but we know the person behind that figure was even more special, a full human life behind the entertainer and athlete and occasional sage we knew through the basketball world. We know thousands of people mourn the person personally, in a way we do not. We mourn the public figure. But from our distance, we mourn the person too.

Bill Walton was, at the time he played, among the best basketball players of all time. UCLA’s 88-game winning streak gets credited to John Wooden, and rightly so, as Walton himself doubtlessly preferred. But Walton was the best player on that team, and the best player in the country, to the degree that a professional career with two championships, one MVP, and one Finals MVP is defined more by what could have been, had his body not betrayed him.

Walton’s body never stopped betraying him, even through the tragic end. Walton kept overcoming those betrayals, up until the tragic end. He overcame stuttering in his 20’s and horrific back pain in his 50’s. He was evidently battling cancer in his 60’s and 70’s, though he took the trouble to make sure most of us didn’t have to know.

Bill Walton was principled, not performative. This was probably why he and John Wooden got along so well despite seeming to disagree so fundamentally on a wide number of things. The funniest Bill Walton story—and there are so many funny Bill Walton stories—is the one he told about returning to Wooden’s office after Wooden bailed him out of jail. Walton was arrested while protesting the Vietnam War, and after a tense car ride, his coach told him he should express his views on the matter through letters, not rabble-rousing. Walton, the story goes, thought for a moment. Then, he took a piece of Wooden’s stationery from Wooden’s desk and wrote a letter. The letter was addressed to Richard Nixon, and it asked that he resign, citing “crimes against humanity.” Walton asked Wooden to sign it. Wooden didn’t sign. Nixon did eventually resign.

It didn’t start or end with Vietnam. Walton was the San Diegan son of a social worker, and a male social worker at that! He lived his life like it. A frequently vegetarian Deadhead who cared deeply about nature, Walton once missed half a week of preseason preparation with the Celtics because he wanted to participate in a sit in on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Again, this was not performative. There were no selfies to be taken, and we don’t know of the incident because of some media hubbub which surrounded it. This was principled. We know it happened because Danny Ainge said so last week on ESPN.

A lot of people said beautiful things last week about Bill Walton, mostly on ESPN. Bill Walton was, we learned, a very good friend. Or at least one who expressed his care and love for others in a manner which matched his stature. Dave Pasch, Walton’s famous sparring partner and straight man on college basketball broadcasts, shared how Walton, who frequently pretended to not remember who Pasch was while on the air, would take off his headset during timeouts and say, “I love you. But don’t tell anybody.” Rece Davis told a story of how Walton once found himself near Davis’s hometown of Muscle Shoals for a speaking engagement. Walton, Davis shared, asked for his childhood address. Having sent it, Davis received this picture from Walton, a picture of Walton holding a jar of the dirt from Davis’s childhood lawn. Walton told Davis he was going to mix it with the dirt in his own yard, back in San Diego.

The throughline, of course, is that Bill Walton seems to have been in all respects a man who was about what he was about and didn’t need to summarize that for the rest of the world. He simply lived it. He lived his values, and he told people he loved them, and he took the soil from their childhood lawns and added it to his own.

Bill Walton was an icon of silliness. He was a beacon not merely of happiness, but of joy. He refused to risk taking things too seriously.

On that last note: It always annoyed me to see people complain about Bill Walton calling their college basketball team’s game. He was different from the other great analysts of this present era. He wasn’t an encyclopedic knowledge of the players involved, or a brilliant explainer of an offensive chess match, or the kind of guy who’d have a signature call for big moments. But every game with Bill Walton on the broadcast was a special game, and it was a special game to Bill Walton as well. There are a lot of ways to be a good analyst or color commentator or whatever you want to call the person in the second chair. Ultimately, though, it’s hard to ask for more from a regular season college basketball broadcast than someone celebrating the game of basketball. It never stopped being a treat.

Bill Walton was a nonconformist, but not for the sake of nonconformity. He was a nonconformist for the sake of being himself. He was a gift, a tropical bird in a field too often gray. In the words of one of his favorite poets, he was a ripple in still water. We don’t know how he got here. But he showed us one can live life in a fashion beyond the options we know well. He reminded us there’s always more to the world than what’s visible from our field of view. He was hilarious, and he was evidently very kind. He was an inspiration. In a few different ways.