Media

Had a great conversation with the super thoughtful Matt Chittim

Had a wonderful time talking about the NBA’s injury crisis with someone who knows it well, my friend and former colleague Tom Haberstroh, who hosts a great podcast on Yahoo!

It’s great to have friends like Mark. Not only because he knows brilliant things about the capabilities of the human body, and has a big, generous, peace-loving heart. The other reason: he spent his days as an elite leader in special forces. Of course he’s my first call if big stuff ever goes down.

Ballistic tells the story of Marcus Elliott, M.D., who was kind enough to join me in Boston to talk through all the things he has learned about human bodies in motion. It did something weird to the audience: no joke, he was mobbed in the hallway for three straight hours after this ended. Interestingly the crowd was largely people desperate to understand human bodies better: a college athlete on crutches, a Spanish football executive whose program has high injury rates, a researcher into tissue strength, and more.

Welcome back to another edition of Keeping it 100-Proof! I’m honored to have another one of my favorites joining us for a very special Q&A: Henry Abbott, founder of TrueHoop and former NBA editor at ESPN. He firmly believes in serving up hard truths about the NBA, and god knows the world needs a lot more truth these days!

“The role of the media is to police the powerful,” said former ESPN NBA editor Henry Abbott, who launched a new media company, TrueHoop. ​“They have to kiss the a– of the powerful: ​‘Please text me first when you’re making a trade.’ You’re begging for scraps. They confine their insight into the league to these transactions, which are the cotton candy of news. We miss the doping and the money laundering and everything else that’s happening in the NBA.”