Jack Snow and the Crease

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I found the name the way you find most things worth finding…in a cardboard box. An estate sale on a Sunday afternoon in that particular Southern California light that makes everything seem slightly more meaningful and xanax-induced than it probably is. The other browsers moved through the garage with their paper cups of coffee and their practiced expressions of cultivated indifference, that specific mask serious collectors wear to hide the fever boiling underneath. I was elbow-deep in some dead person’s earthly possessions when I found it.

Jack Snow, Wide Receiver, Los Angeles Rams.

The card had been folded in half and then unfolded, which sounds like the same thing as never having been folded but is absolutely, definitively not. The crease ran straight down the middle of ‘ol Jack’s face like a surveyor’s line, like a property dispute, dividing him into two slightly misaligned halves that had been pressed back together and told to act normal. His gaze was aimed at a parking lot, a large-bosomed blonde, or whatever anonymous pre-suburban infrastructure and spiritual vacancy that happened to occupy the middle distance.

“You find something?” The woman running the sale appeared at my elbow the way estate sale women always appear — suddenly, silently, with the preternatural instinct of someone who has watched a thousand strangers rifle through the accumulated weight of someone else’s life.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Cards are a dollar each or six for five.”

“Sure,” I said, and she dissolved back into the furniture the way she’d come.

Here is what I knew about Jack Snow:

He came out of Notre Dame in 1965, a first-round pick, which is the kind of beginning that carries inside it the implicit promise of an eternal ending which did not come. Instead there were eleven seasons. Eleven years of serious, professional, underappreciated work performed in front of crowds who were mostly watching for something else, waiting for something louder, rooting for someone whose name they’d remember driving home on the freeway with the radio on. His best year was 1967. Fifty-two catches. 1,097 yards. Imagine Roman Gabriel (Roman Gabriel, the name itself like something a screenwriter invented) back there dropping back and flinging bombs to the fleet-footed Golden Domer.

The card is on my desk right now. I keep meaning to put it somewhere — in a sleeve, in a binder, in the flat plastic purgatory where cards wait to become part of a system. I haven’t done it. The man in the photograph is looking at something I cannot see. He has been looking at it since 1976, which means he has been looking at it for damn near as long as I’ve been alive, longer than most of the things I know how to name have existed. Someone pointed a camera at his face and said: this is the moment. Not that moment, not the one before or after, but this one, here, now. Out of all the moments that had ever happened or would ever happen, out of the infinite series of instants that makes up a life, they chose that one and pressed the shutter and it was done.

Insomnia: A Vince Ferragamo Chronicle

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The algorithm finds you at 2 AM the way trouble always finds you—without apology, without warning, and with the specific cruelty of knowing exactly what you need. Insomnia has its own political agenda, and tonight it has decided that what I required is Vince Ferragamo highlights from Super Bowl XIV, when the Los Angeles Rams nearly beat the Steelers in that last cocaine-bright moment before the 1970s finally got around to dying properly, and the world still operated on the premise that beautiful things might actually win.

Ferragamo had that look—dark hair feathered just right, jawline sharp enough to cut through the smog hanging over the Coliseum, the kind of face that belonged in a convertible heading north on PCH with the radio playing something by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac. Not your typical quarterback. This guy looked like he moonlighted in deodorant commercials or maybe starred in forgettable B- movies about Vietnam vets who become badass surfers and kick the shit out of oiled-up sand bullies.

Ferragamo emerged from the University of Nebraska and landed in Southern California like some beautifully wrapped package addressed to the wrong coast, except it turned out to be precisely the right coast. The thing is, he could kind of play. Took the Rams to the Super Bowl, nearly pulled it off against Terry Bradshaw and the Steelers dynasty. Threw piss-missiles that looked effortless, like he was tossing a Frisbee at the beach and moved in the pocket with this casual grace, unhurried, as if he had all day and maybe a dinner reservation in Beverly Hills afterward. Defensive backs would watch the spiral floating overhead and think two things simultaneously: “I’m screwed” and “How does his hair stay like that?”

Then he went to Montreal, because that is what happens.

Careers end the way administrations end—badly, with loose ends, with the uncomfortable suspicion that the promise never quite matched the performance, though in this case the performance was genuinely pretty good, which makes the ending worse somehow. The beautiful ones leave first because beauty is portable and they know it and you knew it too, standing in the Coliseum parking lot in 1980 with a warm beer and a ticket stub, watching the sky go that specific Los Angeles purple that exists nowhere else on earth.

He arrived in California the way everyone arrives in California, which is to say with nothing except the idea of himself, and for three years—maybe less, maybe exactly as long as the story required—Ferragamo threw spirals into a sky that seemed designed by someone who understood what skies were supposed to look like. This is the thing about California. It doesn’t hide what it is. The lie and the truth are the same sentence.

What he represented, if representation is even the right word, was the argument that surfaces are not shallow. That beauty, sustained long enough, earns its own kind of depth. That a man moving with sufficient grace through sufficient light might eventually become indistinguishable from the grace itself. You can dismiss this. Many people do. But dismissing it requires ignoring what it feels like to watch those old clips at two in the morning when sleep won’t come and your mind is doing what minds do in the dark, which is return to things that are gone and ask why they had to go.

The Invention of Matthew Stafford

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After a balls-out year in which he led the NFL in passing yards and passing touchdowns, Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford has been named the Most Valuable Player for the 2025 NFL season. And honestly? It’s about damn time.

This wasn’t some cake walk to glory. Stafford—who turns 38 in a couple days and whose back has more miles on it than a 1987 Buick—conspicuously missed training camp. Missed most of the preseason. There were whispers, the kind that follow aging quarterbacks like flies on roadkill, that maybe he was done. Cooked. Finished.

And then? Then this absolute madman goes out and plays all 20 games.

Every. Single. One.

Stafford for 4,707 yards and, get this, 46 touchdowns against just eight interceptions. Eight! Brett Favre used to throw eight picks before Halloween.

The back thing? The kind of chronic pain that transforms quotidian activities—rising from bed, bending to tie one’s shoes, the acts we perform without thought until our bodies begin their long campaign of rebellion—into deliberate, calculated movements. Stafford, who spent a decade in Detroit getting pummeled behind offensive lines constructed from duct tape and prayer, wasn’t about to let some vertebrae issues stop him from throwing piss-missiles on Sunday.

Now he joins Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk in that exclusive Rams club; guys who won both MVP and a Super Bowl. That’s it. That’s the list. Three guys. And Stafford, the dude who spent a decade in relative obscurity, who we all assumed had missed his window, is now in that pantheon.

What strikes you, thinking about it, is how close it came to never happening at all. How many different versions of this story end with Stafford retiring quietly, remembered as talented but unlucky, good but not quite good enough. How the distance between those endings and this one comes down to what, exactly? A choice. A series of choices. The decision to show up when your back is screaming at you not to.

Sometimes—rarely enough that it felt noteworthy, common enough that we kept believing in it—the universe distributed its rewards with something approaching fairness. And we, watching from our living rooms and sports bars, from our second screens and social media feeds, allowed ourselves to feel that this meant something, that justice was not merely a comforting fiction we told ourselves between commercial breaks.

The Ghosts of ’86

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January 12, 1986.

I remember it….of course I remember it. How could I not? It’s tattooed on my brain, seared into my consciousness like a cattle brand. Rams-Bears. NFC Championship. Soldier Field. The final score was 24-0, which doesn’t begin to capture the brutality, the absolute savagery of what transpired that frozen Sunday afternoon. The Bears didn’t just beat the Rams, they dismembered them. Humiliated them. Left them for dead on the frozen tundra while the “Monsters of the Midway” roared back to life and quarterback Jim McMahon strutted the sideline like Caligula surveying the Colosseum.

But real football fans never forget.

Which is the pledge we lunatics retail to ourselves, isn’t it? The little fascism of fandom, this insistence that our capacity for grudge-holding constitutes depth. As if marinating in resentment for forty years makes you authentic. As if the psychic real estate you’ve ceded to strangers in helmets somehow ennobles the transaction.

So naturally I’m treating this as revenge. Never mind that every sentient organism from that afternoon is either retired, decrepit, or fertilizing the earth. Never mind the Rams themselves have been shuffled like a shell game—Los Angeles to St. Louis to Los Angeles, a franchise as geographically stable as a grifter’s forwarding address. The coaches are different. The plays are different. The cities are different.

But revenge? Revenge doesn’t need logic. Revenge doesn’t care about rosters or geography or the passage of time. Revenge is pure. Primal. It’s the thing that makes grown men scream at television sets and paint their faces in team colors and convince themselves that this time—damn near 40 years later—somehow matters.

Because some scars don’t heal.

Not even the pope himself—a noted Chicago sports fan—dragged from the Vatican and forced to intercede, could save the Chicago Bears.

Fourth-and-4 from the Rams’ 14. Twenty-seven seconds. Caleb Williams—anointed savior, Heisman winner, the latest quarterback drafted to absolve Chicago of its original sins—heaves a prayer off his back foot that somehow, inexplicably, improbably, finds Cole Kmet in the end zone. 17-17. Eighteen seconds remaining. The throw travels 51.2 air yards, per Next Gen Stats, because of course we measure such things now. And Bears fans, that masochistic congregation, allow themselves the dangerous luxury of hope. Of thinking perhaps the cosmos has finally exhausted its cruelty budget.

It hadn’t.

Overtime arrived. The Rams went three-and-out, punted, and handed Chicago the ball at midfield. This was it—the moment destiny had been preparing for. Except Williams, who’d just conjured magic, now conjured disaster. An overthrown pass over the middle. A diving interception by Rams safety Kam Curl with 6:47 left. The kind of throw that makes you wonder if the football gods aren’t just indifferent, but actively cruel.

Los Angeles took over at their own 22 and Matt Stafford led a march downfield like whispered secrets cutting through silence—methodical, ruthless, inevitable. They reached the Chicago 24 before kicker Harrison Mevis— with a physique like Ernest Hemingway and nicknamed the “Thicker Kicker”–trotted onto the field and drilled the game-winner, sending the Rams to the NFC Championship and the Bears back to their familiar corner of despair.

Still cold as shit, but a different ending. Different city. Different decade.

Same exquisite agony.

The Rams, the 49ers, and the Beautiful Stupidity of Conviction

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I’ve always hated the 49ers.

And they—meaning the 49ers, their fans, the entire Bay Area apparatus of smugness and fog and sourdough-based self-satisfaction—have always hated the Rams right back, which creates this beautiful, terrible equilibrium, this mutually assured animosity that’s been humming along for three-quarters of a century now like some vast engine that we all keep stoking because, what else are we going to do? Find meaning in our work? Connect authentically with our inner child? Please.

I once asked my grandfather (a Niners fan to the marrow of his bone) to take me to a Rams game and he told me, “I ain’t going to see no goddamn Rams.” And it’s been this way for 75 years. He was not interested in dialogue, in finding common ground, in the undemanding reconciliation that contemporary culture insists upon. He had chosen his side, and that was that.

The thing about my grandfather’s refusal—and it was a kind of absolute refusal that suggested he would sooner have taken me to witness a public flogging or to tour a horse shit plant—was that it arrived like some ancient decree handed down from Mount Sinai, chiseled not in stone but in that particular California bedrock of sports fanaticism, that stratum of collective identity running deeper than family loyalty, political affiliation, or religious devotion. He simply thought, with the certainty that others reserve for religious conviction, that the Rams were an abomination.

Consider the theology of sports fandom. It demands faith without evidence, loyalty without reciprocation, hope in the face of repeated disappointment. It asks you to invest emotional capital in the performance of millionaires who have no idea you exist, who may leave your city tomorrow if offered a better contract. And yet we comply. We transmit our allegiances generationally. My grandfather could have spared me. He could have said, “You’re right, let’s go see the Rams, they’re just another team.” But that would have been a kind of spiritual fraud.

The beauty—and I mean this sincerely, without irony, though I recognize the absurdity even as I defend it—the beauty of my grandfather’s refusal was its purity. In an age of promiscuous enthusiasm and non-committal dabbling, when people speak casually of “rooting for” five different teams across three different sports, when allegiance has become as fluid and temporary as a Hollywood marriage, my grandfather’s stubbornness stood as a kind of monument to an older, fiercer way of being. He would no sooner have attended a Rams game than he would have voted Republican, eaten sushi, or worn a pair of designer jeans. These were not options available to him within the circumscribed universe of his convictions. He had built a self, and unfortunately the load-bearing walls of that self included an undying devotion to the 49ers.

Those sorry ass 49ers.

Hacksaw Reynolds: The Man Who Once Sawed a Car in Half

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The thing about Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds is that he earned his nickname by sawing a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air in half. Not metaphorically….actually in half. With an actual hacksaw. Thirteen blades’ worth of sawing, after Tennessee got embarrassed 38-0 by Ole Miss in 1969.

“I came back to school and I was very upset,” Reynolds explained. “I had to do something to relieve my frustration.”

So naturally—and here is where Reynolds reveals himself as either a lunatic or a poet, and possibly both—he sought out that beached whale of Detroit iron, rusting in some campus lot, and proceeded to bisect it through the night, presumably by the light of the moon and his own burning rage.

Does this man look like a lunatic to you?

This, it turns out, was entirely characteristic behavior.

Reynolds spent eleven years with the Rams—from 1970 to 1980—where he patrolled the middle linebacker position as if it were a sacred trust requiring both violence and vigilance in equal, unreasonable measure. He made two Pro Bowls, anchored one of the league’s better defenses, and generally went about his business with the sort of single-minded intensity that made teammates simultaneously admire and fear him. The New York Times once observed that “he can be grumpy one moment and charming the next.” Which feels like diplomatic understatement, honestly.

When the Rams released him after the 1980 season (a mistake they would come to understand in that particular way organizations understand their errors: with mounting horror), Bill Walsh snapped him up for the hated 49ers. Walsh would later claim this was the best decision he ever made, which, given Walsh’s curriculum vitae, was saying something. “Jack gave us leadership and maturity and toughness and set an example for everybody,” Walsh explained, then added: “As strange a guy as he was, he really put us on the map.”

Strange doesn’t quite cover it. Reynolds showed up to his first 49ers training camp carrying his own film projector…because of course he did. He materialized at team breakfasts in full pads and eyeblack, as if breakfast were merely another form of combat. He once refused to lend a pencil to rookie Ronnie Lott, informing him he wouldn’t succeed in the NFL until he brought his own pencil to every meeting, a koan of preparedness that was either profound or insane or, most likely, both. Walsh put it plainly: “He is consumed with football, even more than any addicted coach.”

”I roomed with him in training camp,” said Craig Puki, the 49ers’ other starting inside linebacker. ”I was dreaming one night that someone was chasing me with a chain saw. I woke up in a cold sweat, and there was Jack sharpening pencils with an electric sharpener. I asked him why he was doing that at 3 A.M. He said he had to be ready for the team meeting at 9 A.M.”

Reynolds won two Super Bowls with San Francisco before retiring in 1984, then he disappeared to a house he’d built himself on a remote Caribbean island called San Salvador—where Columbus landed, he’d tell anyone who asked. The symbolism here is almost too perfect, too on-the-nose: the man who spent his career discovering new territories of obsession, who’d planted his flag on the unmapped continent of absolute commitment and stood there, wild-eyed and uncompromising, once again reminding everyone else they’d barely left the harbor.

One Sunday in December

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Willie Ellison’s story begins, as most stories do, in obscurity. A man born into a game that rarely remembers its middlemen. Drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1967 out of Texas Southern, he arrived quietly, another hopeful body among many, his future undecided. The league was different then — slower, grittier, less performative. Ellison didn’t enter with a roar. He entered like a shadow slipping across the field at dusk.

For years he waited — patient, disciplined, almost invisible — while others carried the ball, while others were celebrated. It’s easy, looking back, to think of him as a footnote, a supporting actor in someone else’s film. But one Sunday afternoon in December 1971 changed everything. The Saints were the opponent. The Rams, a team of great promise and equal disappointment. And Ellison, finally given the stage, ran for 247 yards, an NFL record at the time. (broken 2 years later by O.J. Simpson) It wasn’t supposed to happen. And yet, it did. As though the universe, for one afternoon, had decided to let him exist fully.

“Everything just seemed to go right today,” Ellison told the Los Angeles Times that evening. “The line was opening holes, and once I got through, I just kept running. It was one of those days.”

The next morning, the New Orleans Times-Picayune called it “one of the finest rushing performances ever seen in the Los Angeles Coliseum,” noting that “Ellison made the Saints’ defense look as if it were standing still.” Rams coach Tommy Prothro, typically sparing in praise, admitted afterward, “Willie earned every yard. He’s waited a long time for a game like this.”

Fame, like light, is fleeting. The following seasons returned him to the margins. Injuries, trades, time — all of it accumulated, layer upon layer, until the name faded again. He left football quietly, the same way he entered. No farewell tour, no parade. Just another man moving forward into the anonymity of ordinary life.

There’s something quietly haunting about that idea. Something tender, almost dreamlike. Every game, every carry, every forgotten yard drifts somewhere beyond the reach of statistics ; not captured on film or preserved in any archive, but floating instead in the invisible memory of the game itself. Like the echo of a song you can’t quite recall, yet still feel somewhere deep inside.

Willie Ellison belonged to that memory. For one strange, luminous afternoon, he seemed to move in perfect rhythm with the hidden pulse of the world — every step in tune with something larger than himself. And then, as dusk arrived and the crowd dispersed, he faded back into silence.

My Football Cards: Jim Everett

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I decided to read Franny and Zooey again after all these years and found a Jim Everett football card tucked inside. I must’ve used it as a bookmark. It had been waiting there through all my mistakes and minor humiliations–wedged neatly between pages 42 and 43, like a slightly bowed time capsule sealed shut by accident. The card was from 1991, Topps, number 532 in the set.

Holding it, I was carried back to a ridiculously pastel living room in the suburbs, me lying belly-down on the plush, shit-brown carpet, watching Everett throw post routes to Henry Ellard and Flipper Anderson. The Rams were in those royal blue and yellow uniforms that looked like something out of mythology. Back then, I didn’t understand the cruelty of the game, or how short the arc of a hero’s flight could be. I thought quarterbacks lasted forever. I thought glory was permanent. I thought the world rewarded the competent, the handsome, and the hopeful. I didn’t know yet that time dissolves everything.

I bought that book, I think, sometime after college, back when I believed J.D. Salinger could explain things to me — about understanding this mysterious thing called life. Everett, meanwhile, was explaining something else on the field: how cruel sports could be. He had the rocket arm, the charisma, the Hollywood setting. And then came that playoff game in January 1989, the one every Rams fan remembers for all the wrong reasons — the one against the 49ers where Joe Montana, calm as a surgeon, turned the Rams into irrelevant background noise. By the next year, the whispers began: soft, inconsistent, maybe not a “winner.”

Years later, I saw that interview with Jim Rome again. Everett’s anger—the sudden table flip, the lunging—became one of television’s favorite jokes. But I didn’t laugh. There was something horrifyingly human about it, the nakedness of being mocked beyond endurance. Rome smirked, the audience laughed, and Everett became a meme before memes existed. Yet what I saw was a man collapsing under the weight of too much visibility.

Holding that card, I thought of Franny Glass praying herself into madness, Zooey drowning in irony and intellect. Both crushed by the awareness of being watched, by the impossibility of authenticity. Maybe Everett experienced the same thing, in another language: the slow psychological rot of performance, the exhaustion of being perceived.

I slipped the card back into its place and started reading again, though I already knew how it would end: in exhaustion, in longing—in the quiet understanding that, like Everett, like Franny, no one is ever really saved. Only remembered for a moment, tucked between the pages.

Detroit Blues, L.A. Heat

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Honestly, if you are a Rams fan, and I mean really a Rams fan, the kind who has watched every single snap for a decade-plus —you find it laughable, bordering on offensive, that the talking heads on television, radio, or whatever medium question whether Matt Stafford is a Hall of Famer. Because we see him week in and week out, dealing with the logistical absurdity of an offensive line that could generously be described as “perpetually transient” and a city that, for years, seemed almost willfully indifferent to his considerable talents.

The eye test says everything.

But here’s the problem: the Hall of Fame isn’t about “week in and week out.” It’s not about the quiet Sunday afternoons when Stafford throws a 14-yard out on third-and-12 to move the chains. It’s about mythology. It’s about how the guy fits into a narrative you can summarize in one sentence to your cousin who doesn’t even like football. Joe Montana was “the cool assassin.” Brett Favre was “the reckless gunslinger.” Tom Brady was “the perfectionist who sold his soul to avocado ice cream.” What is Stafford? “The guy who played in Detroit for twelve years and then won a Super Bowl in L.A.” That’s a little clunky.

The problem with Stafford’s case is that he’s both overrated and underrated at the exact same time. Overrated in the sense that when he won Super Bowl LVI, people immediately started tossing around the Hall of Fame conversation like it was inevitable. Underrated because—if you actually study the numbers—he’s already one of the most statistically prolific quarterbacks in history. He’s top 10 all-time in passing yards and touchdowns, and he’ll keep climbing. The dude was essentially marooned on an island of futility in Detroit for a decade, where his best wideout (Calvin Johnson) literally retired early because he was too good for the situation. That should count for something.

Now, because I can’t resist a music analogy: Stafford is the Black Sabbath of quarterbacks. Stay with me here…in Detroit, he’s cranking out heavy riffs—4,000-yard seasons, jaw-dropping bombs—that only the nerds and masochists (read: Lions fans) truly appreciated. That’s the Paranoid era. Loud, brilliant, buried under bad vibes. Then he gets to Los Angeles, plugs into McVay’s amp, and suddenly it’s his Heaven and Hell moment. A masterpiece that made everyone step back and say, “Wait, this guy’s for real?”

So, will he make the Hall? Yeah, probably. Not on the first try, because voters love a clean myth and Stafford’s arc is more like a messy, psychedelic prog-rock double album. But at some point, they’ll look at the yardage, remember the Super Bowl run, and admit he belongs.

And if you still doubt it, just watch him get obliterated by a pass rusher, pop up grimacing like he just stubbed his toe, and then zing a 25-yard dart on the next play. That’s not just football. That’s Sabbath cranked to 11, live in Birmingham, burning holes in the sky.

One Yard Short

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There are these moments—I swear to God there are—when the whole country, every last bit of it, just sort of shows its hand. Like you can suddenly see through all the gum-chewing and Pepsi ads and halftime shows and it’s right there, the naked truth, if you’re looking. That tackle Mike Jones made on Kevin Dyson in the Super Bowl—Super Bowl XXXIV, if you’re counting—was one of those things. You couldn’t miss it. A guy from Missouri, not flashy, not some big-shot star, just this journeyman linebacker who’d been passed around like a cheap suit, and all of a sudden he’s the hinge everything swings on.

The thing about tackles—and this is something that our sports commentators, with their relentless need to narrate every goddamn thing into oblivion, consistently fail to grasp—is that they are fundamentally about the denial of possibility. Jones didn’t just stop Dyson; he murdered a dream in its infancy, and did so with the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that would make a mid-level insurance adjuster weep with recognition.

Think about the picture of it—no, really picture it, because the replay has been playing for like twenty years now in some eternal ESPN loop and it’s always the same: the Titans—Tennessee Titans, which, if you say it a couple times in a row, starts to sound more like a team from a Nintendo cartridge circa 1991—needing just one yard, one stupid yard, and the guy stretches out like he’s reaching for the promised land. Like he’s Moses or somebody. Horizontal in the air, ball stretched out, the kind of thing you see in a stained-glass window if stained-glass windows had shoulder pads. And the line he’s reaching for might as well be the whole American Dream, that counterfeit horizon everybody’s chasing.

But Jones was there, had always been there, really, representing not heroism but simple physics, the immutable law that two bodies cannot occupy the same space. His tackle was less athletic achievement than cosmic inevitability, the universe’s way of reminding us that for every Disney ending, there must be a corresponding moment of crushing banality.

What I can’t get out of my head, though, isn’t the highlight-reel part. It’s the look of it after. Jones doesn’t even look like a hero. He looks like some guy who just happened to be standing in the right place when history went walking by. That’s the part that keeps me up sometimes. The randomness of it. The whole terrible maybe-ness of existence. And if you still believe in hard work always paying off, or people getting what they deserve, or whatever fairy story they’re peddling this week—you watch that play long enough and I don’t know how you hold on to any of it.