There's no sense in dancing around it: The sports vibes are pretty damn good at the moment. New Yorkers celebrated a long-awaited championship in the streets with a minimum of property damage and a surfeit of giddiness. The World Cup is already attempting to redeem its shameful and odious origins by delivering some of the most potent sports spectacle on Earth, and communities of all kinds are rallying around the spirited overage of it all. The positive vibrations that emanate from groups of good-natured people getting together to do fun stuff are overwhelming, so much so that Drew and I knew what we needed to do. We needed to get Ray Ratto on the podcast to straighten this shit out, and quickly.
It is not a well-kept secret that Ray, for all his gruffness and singular knack for compound literary burns, is an incredibly kind and pleasant human being, and even he has not been immune to the happy surprises that this World Cup has already delivered in bulk. But we eased into things on the grumpy end of the pool, with a discussion of The Alexis Lalas Experience, which is already threatening to tip over Fox's World Cup studio show under the weight of its smirking villain's thudding trollishness. We would return to soccer later in the show, but beginning with some familiar annoyances helped to level-set nicely.
Then it was on to the happier stuff. Ray correctly assessed the appeal of these Knicks, the most likable iteration in my lifetime of a franchise that really hasn't produced many other likable teams. We celebrated the remarkable accomplishment of (briefly) banishing the James Dolan stink from the broader experience, unpacked NYC's hilarious wish to be the underdog and the way the Knicks both honored and subverted it, and did our best to goof on the folly of reading some political lesson into the team's run and the city's response, while also honoring where it rhymes. Ray also took a moment to credit Mike Brown—he was early on that one as well—and made a comparison between these Knicks and the 2015 Warriors, which fits better than you might expect.
We had no choice but to keep it positive, turning to the World Cup's escalating gamble on how much fuckery and gouging people will tolerate if the sports are good enough to redeem it. Again, we considered a more inclusive and humanistic vision of American life that hosting the World Cup has drawn out of seemingly everyone but the idiot authoritarians in charge, who will go on fighting to make inclusive events as small as they want everything to be. We rejected this in favor of getting really sentimental and happy about watching Curacao celebrate a 7-1 loss.
We followed that with a brief Stanley Cup recap, highlighted by Ray's abiding and sincere love for overtime playoff hockey, a passing consideration of John Tortorella and Carter Hart's effect on this final, and the dreaded possibility that cheapskate Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon will take the worst lessons from his team's Stanley Cup win and apply them to the Portland Trail Blazers.
We also asked Ray whether the USMNT is good, and even cool, and tried to figure out when and how we might learn an answer to that. The first days of the World Cup have been a reminder that goofy positive outcomes are possible, which is how we found ourselves talking about flying direct from Providence to Cape Verde. A Funbag question about a listener's moviegoing gripe about characters leaving unfinished drinks on the bar did nothing to dispel the good vibes. Yes, Ray aired a longstanding beef with Cheers in the form of answering it, but even still, it was a party.
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