There is no dignified way to promote a book. Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated is a longtime friend of the pod and always a welcome guest, but she is also a busy woman—busy on the bargaining committee for the Sports Illustrated Union, busy covering the women's NCAA tournament on the West Coast, busy having deeply held opinions about sodas most people don't know exist. But as the co-author (with Jordan Robinson) of Court Queens, a new coffee table book about the history of women's basketball, she is also compelled to take a break from all that important work to go on a podcast with two hooting dunces to discuss that book, and basketball, and sodas.
Friends: We were those dunces. We're grateful that Emma took the time to join us for what wound up being a wide-ranging chat about history, labor, women's hoops, Opening Day gripes and grouses, and the triumphant-ish return of Mr. Pibb. A classic Emma episode, in short, even though she was recording it from the road and had to dip out after 45 minutes for a negotiation session.
We began with Opening Day and the curmudgeonly confusion that its overstuffed, Bert Kreischer-aided production elicited in us, but turned quickly to Emma's experience with Court Queens. It turns out that writing a coffee table book requires authors to do not just a lot of writing but a lot of wrangling for photos, the payment for which comes out of those writers' advances. We talked about the early days of the women's game, including the defunct six-player, three-zone iteration of women's basketball and its unexpected legacy in the sport today; shouted out Ora Washington, the GOAT of women's basketball's interwar period; and tried to figure out when women's basketball became women's basketball.
From there we talked about the WNBA's new CBA, how close we actually came to a work stoppage, and addressed both the most important economic victory in the (very good) contract that the players won and all the other, long-overdue stuff in the deal, like WNBA teams belatedly getting their own locker rooms and physical therapists and practice spaces. Our conversation about the women's NCAA tournament inevitably became a conversation about UConn, which is as dominant as it has ever been. We talked Emma's fantastic story about what it's like to get absolutely rinsed by UConn, how and why Syracuse has to get rocked by the Huskies every March, and sussed out who's fun (Virginia) and who's not (Duke) in the field. This might have been it for Emma, and it would have been a very good episode if it was.
But an open-ended question about what Soda Thoughts she has been having of late gave her the opportunity to address the resurrection of Mr. Pibb, which apparently had been rebranded Pibb Xtra while George W. Bush was president and de-emphasized by Coke corporate until a lost lawsuit brought back the Mister. There is no one out there doing it quite like Emma when it comes to talking about tasting notes on bottom-of-the-Freestyle-Machine-roster sodas, and we were lucky to get as much of this as we did.
This meant that the Funbag was just for us, and we made the most of it. A question pegged to the Netflix series Death by Lightning began with a consideration of parasociality—elementary human thing, contemporary online derangement, some combination of the two?—and our experiences of it, and then sprawled to include the series Death by Lightning and book Destiny of the Republic, the possible return of The Movies, and why Drew's fans tend to be the same height that he is. It was loose enough that we decided to nail it down with a second, more straightforward question about the most delicious food trimmings/pickings. We answered this one with the seriousness it deserved, although I did sing part of an old Perdue TV ad that has stayed with me for decades. It is good, I think, that Emma was not around to hear this part. She'd endured enough.
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