I feel very self conscious about this feeling, but I felt like this was the place to air it out.
The funniest, strangest, most vulnerable and interesting part of Michael Jordan’s career, to me, was when he gave it up to go and play baseball. This was an athlete in his prime, a force of skill, talent and fame, and he was ready to (probably because of those same things) walk away for a whim. An old dream, a promise out of heartbreak, but still, a whim. Distilling that down to something possible to make an ask of, plus being recordable, I wondered what a feeling in the lives of some past BASKETBALL FEELINGS guests and contributors that they thought they were done with, only to find themselves coming back to later in life, was.
The end result of that ask is something just as funny, strange, vulnerable and interesting — also pretty sweet.
It includes Josh Gondelman on being overwhelmed, Seerat Sohi (in a cab on the way to the airport) on that lingering, always hard to pin, “is everybody mad at me?” feeling, plus power and interpreting it. Then, William Lou on the feeling of being isolated that takes us from his time away at university to now, when our lives diverge from the people we love, Jordan Ligons believing she was over and done with journalism and writing (which, thankfully, she was not). Then, a very special Roundball Rock crossover where Joey Devine and Sean Keane get stuck in a haunted house and talk about all the times they were the most scared. Finally, Rob Mahoney on his self-admitted “thorny relationship” with pride.
The Basketball Feelings Podcast, Episode 23: "I'm back." (The Michael Jordan Baseball Feeling)