All Hat, Some Cattle
A new weekly column for paid subscribers.
ICYMI — I made a big announcement about this newsletter last week.
How can you tell I never went to journalism school? I sent the update out on a Friday at 5PM. I realize that looks like Art Briles or Roger Goodell sweeping something ugly under the rug, but that wasn’t my intention.
A short summation: all of my Texas Longhorn writing will now live on Inside Texas, but please stick around here if you’re a fan of my storytelling and sports-writing.
My first paid article for this newsletter was published over the weekend: Lessons From Pop: What the Spurs coach taught me over the last 26 years.
*Now I have another announcement*
Introducing: All Hat, Some Cattle.
Before I discovered Bill Simmons in 2005, I grew up loving the back page of Sports Illustrated and those old sports columns that felt like they were written under a puff of cigar smoke and stained with scotch.
Those articles opened up a world of sports to me that shaped how I see the game even now. They held the heart, cynicism, whimsy, romanticism, and bitterness that define how we experience sports.
Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Wright Thompson, David Halberstam.
When done wrong, a pontificating sports column feels like pearl clutching or an old man yelling at a cloud. But when they’re executed, they capture something essential — the heart of it all. Sports and fandom. This thing we spend so much of our lives consuming and daydreaming about. The best ones weren’t always romanticized. Sometimes they were raw and broken.
Loving The Best of Deford books and old SI columns led me to discover other legends like Dan Jenkins, but Rick Reilly’s Life of Reilly was the first thing I flipped to every week when my copy of SI arrived. Before I knew what it felt like to swap stories on a barstool, those columns were my introduction to that world.
With this new chapter of Dance With Who Brung Ya, I’m rolling out a new feature for paid subscribers. Every Friday morning, I’ll be sending All Hat, Some Cattle to your inbox. 600, maybe 900 words — always under 1,000.
I can’t promise to match the lyricism or magic of Jenkins, Deford, or pre-ESPN Reilly, but I can promise the topics will matter to me.
Upgrade to a paid subscription for just $6 a month and check out the first one this Friday — it’s about the NBA Draft Lottery.
See you the next time.