Thank You Ernie and Dan
As a scientist, I’m prone to seeing the phenomena of our world through a mechanistic lens. A breeze was blowing on my morning bike ride because of a difference in atmospheric pressure. The small ponderosa branch that nearly hit me as it fell came off the tree because it bore signs of past disease. The needles drooping and burnt orange. Those bursts of crimson on the Castilleja plants were always surrounded by yellow Arnicas or purple lupines or a host of other wildflowers because the former is a parasite, dependent on robbing resources from its neighbors to pull off its own showy display.
And, I suppose, you could say that at the end of my climb I sat on the top of the mountain amidst those wildflowers and stupid cried because it had been a hell of a year. A hell of a decade really.
But that explanation is incomplete. It doesn’t reveal how I began to lose it when I heard the voice of my late wife in the words of a media personality best known for hosting a show about professional basketball. Or how the conversation between this man and the one interviewing him — another sports show host — reached into my soul and released and rebuilt it all at once.
Ernie Johnson is the host of a show called Inside the NBA, perhaps the longest running and most beloved show of its kind. If you’re a basketball fan — and honestly, even if you’re not — it’s must see TV because it’s funny and human and insightful all at once. Johnson serves as the conductor for the three galactically famous ex-players who surround him on the set, all of whom are great at this gig, but it’s Johnson who makes the whole thing work. And while it’s always dangerous to draw conclusions about someone based solely on their TV personality, Ernie Johnson has a way of jumping off the screen as a deeply good man. Today, I learned that’s unquestionably true.
Dan LeBatard is not as well-known as Johnson, but if you’re into sports at all, good chance you’ve heard of him. He’s been a staple in the Miami scene for years, but what sets him apart is not just a quick wit and the ability to turn a phrase, it’s the fact that LeBatard has a way of using sports as a vehicle for conversations that are far more consequential than who won or lost last night. He’s unafraid to cut into the blood and guts and connective tissue of our collective humanity in all its simultaneous horrors and beauty, and is delightfully uncaring about those who might grouch that he should just stick to sports.
Which brings me to something I can’t explain from this morning. Why, on the heels of an especially hard week during which I just couldn’t seem to drag myself out of a mental pit, I chose to listen to a podcast that features LeBatard hosting Johnson. It wasn’t entirely random — I like pulling up LeBatard’s show now and then for the reasons noted above — but it’s not a typical choice for one of my rides. And yet there I was, stopped on the trail just after the ponderosa branch fell, scrolling through my phone until I saw the episode and thought: why the hell not.
What followed was an hour that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. When I hit play, my chest and gut and mind were as they had been all week — locked in various forms of circulating turmoil, intersecting threads of grief and anger and frustration and occasional hopelessness weaving through each other like one of the circulating eddies in the snowmelt-laden river that runs through my town, places in which you can find pieces of floating debris that never seem to escape. Yet by the time I sat in those flowers and looked down on that town while I listened to the final words from these two men, I felt as though perhaps I could just take a quick sprint through the blossoms before floating into space and gently landing back at my home.
LeBatard is masterful at simply teeing up Johnson’s grace and humanity, in which I heard and felt and embraced Diana once more. In his piercingly beautiful story of unconditional love and loss, I mourned her once more. And in his comfortably egoless and therefore enormously resonant reminder to be content with what we have instead of longing for what we don’t, a peace which has been elusive of late returned to my core. I remembered that for all of the blows life has wrought in the last decade, above all the cancers which struck both my wife and daughter, they still pale in comparison to the good fortunes of my past and present.
A year after Diana died, I sat in the stillness of a predawn dark and watched the first rays of sunrise begin to frame the peak that is our daughter’s namesake. Later that day, I wrote this about her: She reminded me that while our flashes may be brief, some of them are impossibly bright, and everything that matters is contained in the ways your own light sparks the ones that lie in everybody else.
Today, a couple of men I’ve never met and likely never will reignited a light in me. How do you say thank you to people you don’t even know for a gift that important? I guess you just say it. Thank you, Ernie and Dan. Your profoundly human conversation meant the world to me today.
