xactly. It’s fine, that was me in my basement when I was 14. The thing to me is I’m heavily influenced by superheroes. I have every Superman, Batman, Green Lantern T-shirt, everything in my closet. I used to wear that stuff all the time and then my wife was like, “No, you need to stop.”
Heavily influenced by that. I feel like, when you grow up…I was almost like, I could not jump off a building and land safely, that’s just a bad idea. What I found is, I came to bodybuilding and Arnold and stuff like that, and those guys all looked the superhero part.
That’s half the game. The other half of the game is who performs the superhero part. You’re looking at Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, [inaudible 13:32] , these great athletes. Look at Odell Beckham a couple of years ago making that ridiculous one-handed catch against the Cowboys.
I was at that game, it was really cool. To me, it’s like athletes are the guys who…Bodybuilders look super heroic, CrossFitters look super heroic. CrossFitters and powerlifters perform superhero but it’s our athletes, CrossFitters, powerlifters, football players, basketball players who are doing these super heroic feats.
I was like, “OK, I’m going to grow up and be in the NBA.” Unfortunately, you have to be like 6’4” to be in the NBA. I’m 5’9″ so that just wasn’t happening. I spent my college years…I graduated actually, undergrad, with a degree in accounting.
It was mainly because I was trying to play sports in college and it just really wasn’t working. I realized after undergrad, “Oh wow, I’m not going to be a pro athlete.” What’s the closest I can get to a pro athlete? How can I spend time around them, learn from them, figure out ways to get as athletic as them?
Whatever I did in college and high school…I was a late blooming human in terms of growing into my body and feeling it out and stuff like that. Can I touch those people and understand how they do what they do? Because, obviously, I couldn’t figure it out.
Somehow I was always a pretty decent writer. I came to sports journalism. Syracuse had a grad journalism program. It was like one-year intensive. I was a good enough writer to get in there. I took that with the intention of, “I want to get into sports journalism,” because to me, I didn’t understand the whole training thing, or the idea of the guy behind an athlete is his trainer.
My thinking was, if I want to figure out how to dunk a basketball, let me go to the guy who dunks the basketball the best, and ask him. If I’m in a locker room, I can ask, say Kobe Bryant. Obviously, locker rooms don’t work that way. They’re completely different beasts. That was my whole idea.
Long story short, from that, I took that one-year journalism course. I was lucky enough to get an internship to the “New York Daily News” in their sports department. I left there briefly to intern “ESPN Magazine” came back to the Daily News, and didn’t leave there pretty much…
I’m covering sports, I covered a Super Bowl, I think I covered two Super Bowls, did some NBA stuff. Did a little bit of baseball stuff. Baseball stuff is not fun.