705: Time Out

Ira Glass

There's a scene in the film I Am Legend where, OK, civilization is over. The only person left alive in New York is Will Smith, and he is not able to find traces of anyone else alive anywhere on Earth. And every morning, he wakes up and makes himself breakfast, and puts on videos of The Today Show from back before the Earth was destroyed just to make the morning seem normal.

One of the sports fans on our staff, Matt, was saying the other day that that is exactly what it's like today, watching the constant replays of old sports on television. He's watched the 2018 Stanley Cup, the NBA Finals Game 7 from 2013, an old Yankees game from 1978, the Masters last year that Tiger Woods won, all that glory from back when life was normal and sports was part of it. Part of the thrill of the Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance was it wasn't just sports, but a primetime Sunday night sports event that you could look forward to and you could watch, knowing other fans were watching and talk about, and share memes just like the world used to be.

These two guys who write about college football, Jason Kirk and Spencer Hall, wrote this thing that I love about the lack of sports in our world today. These are guys who normally spend over 50 hours a week on a slow week watching games and thinking about sports, who these days, like hungry men raiding an empty kitchen pantry for any scrap of food, have resorted to watching old college games that they've seen before and live Korean baseball in the middle of the night, and the German soccer league, Bundesliga.

Ira Glass

That's Jason. Here's Spencer, explaining what he's come to.

Ira Glass

Spencer's watching way fewer games under lockdown, and sometimes he says he thought this actually might be better for him, in some way, to devote fewer hours to sports, maybe.

Ira Glass

Anyway, the essay these guys wrote about sports during these sportsless months is called "What Were Sports?" And the tone of it is like people who live in tents surrounded by rubble after a war, remembering what it was like to live in houses, looking back on their old lives, which only now they appreciate for what they were. The essay starts this way.

Ira Glass

Other things they miss-- Phillies fans doing things that were not normal for anybody but Phillies fans; spreadsheets of sports statistics for each game, whose results then went into a spreadsheet for the whole season, which then went into a historical archives spreadsheet. "Watching a four-hour game and walking away with one GIF-worthy moment," they write, "felt like a version of sifting for gold, but a version in which the dirt itself was valuable."

Ira Glass

Also fun, watching big people try to stop fast people from running. They write, "Sports were little chemistry labs designed to run for hours, months, and centuries, along the way producing countless things nobody could have predicted from the onset-- a cool, otherworldly space place where people could completely depressurize for several hours and sometimes succumb to space madness along the way when things went haywire."

Ira Glass

There's a whole passage in the essay where Spencer reminisces about the last live game he went to, LSU and Clemson in New Orleans, and got oysters before the game, and met a friend at a restaurant the next day to eat and talk football for hours. He writes, "Do you hear all the beats of an impossible world playing there? I do. I feel every little ping of a world that I've only missed for 45 days at this point, like cactus needles just pressing into the skin of a hovering hand." Jason sums it all up neatly with this.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, for everybody who is yearning for sports right now in our sportsless world, we try to help with radio methadone for your sports addiction. Is that metaphor too negative? We have sports stories from back before the lockdown, back when professional sports were still a vital daily living force. We relive the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Friday Night Floodlights. OK, so let's begin with this story of people yearning for sports to begin again in a moment a few years back, when nothing was normal at all. Businesses were shut down. School was canceled. Kids were stuck home. This story happened right after Hurricane Katrina, in two towns in Mississippi that sit right on the Gulf of Mexico, Waveland and Bay St. Louis.

Waveland was pretty much wiped out in the hurricane. Most homes and businesses there were destroyed or severely damaged. Bay St. Louis only did a little better.

A month after the hurricane, when we broadcast our story about them, most people still didn't have electricity. You couldn't drink water from the faucet. One of the first things they decided to bring back, even before that other stuff-- football, high school football. One of our producers back then, Lisa Pollak, went down there in 2005 during those early weeks after Katrina and put together this story.

Lisa Pollak

The Bay High Tigers played their first game of the season on the Friday before Katrina. They beat Hancock High, 30-14. After the storm, the joke was that they'd gone undefeated. Everyone figured the season was over. Players were homeless. The high school was closed.

But just days after the hurricane, the Bay High coach, Brenan Compretta, started hearing from his players. They wanted to play football. They called his cell and sent text messages. They stopped him on the street. They wanted to play football. They wanted something that reminded them of what life was before.

Lisa Pollak

You wouldn't stage a school play without a school, but football's different-- here, anyway. In Bay St. Louis, game day starts at 6:30 AM with a team breakfast at a church. Newspaper stories about the game are posted on the wall at school. In the afternoon, drummers from the band march through the hallways just before the pep rally. Strangers in town stop players to talk about that week's game.

So even though school won't start again until November, the coach called a meeting to try to restart the team. There were some challenges. Only 19 players showed up of the 70 who are on the team. They couldn't use their practice field since National Guardsmen were camping there. Their field house was destroyed and most of their equipment. And as for their uniforms--

Lisa Pollak

It's game day, the Tigers' very first game since Hurricane Katrina, one month after the storm. And I had flown to Mississippi, where Tyler Brush, the team's quarterback, is showing me around. There's not a lot to see, just huge piles of wreckage, and near the beach, mile after mile of empty spaces where houses and buildings used to be.

After the hurricane, Tyler's family left for a while, moved to Florida, to a town where they used to live. They got a nice house, and Tyler began high school there. He was practicing with their football squad, and he was going to be a starter there too. But then Coach Compretta called. Tyler says coming back here was a hard choice.

Lisa Pollak

As quarterback, he didn't want to let the team down. So now his family's living 15 miles away in Diamond Head, and two of the team's other players whose families didn't return are living with them too. This is a strange place to be a kid right now.

With no school, they spend their days doing cleanup work, hauling out sheet rock, and moving trees and debris. It's bleak and boring. Their favorite hangouts are gone. Football is one of the few things they have left.

Lisa Pollak

Over at the football field, the new uniforms arrive just in time, a gift from a man in North Carolina. And the kids line up while the coaches open the boxes.

Lisa Pollak

The new jerseys are blue and white, not blue and gold, the school colors, but no one seems to care.

Lisa Pollak

This isn't the team it used to be. Over half the Tigers still haven't come back, so the coaches have filled out the roster with some new recruits-- a few seniors who've never played football, some freshmen from the school's ninth grade team, two guys from the Tigers' archrival, St. Stanislaus-- they canceled their season-- and to cap it all off Bad News Bears style, some scared looking seventh and eighth graders from the junior high. In all, it's still just 29 players, a long way from 70.

Some of these kids are all but homeless, sleeping on other families' couches and floors. One linebacker is living in a camper alone, his parents hours away, all so he can play football. With everything these kids have been dealing with and everything they've seen, they seem genuinely relieved and excited to be here today, putting on jerseys and lacing up cleats.

Lisa Pollak

That's Trevor Adam, a senior tight end. And for him, getting things back to normal means pretty much one thing.

Lisa Pollak

Equally excited is Brandt, a tenth grader. I think Brandt might be one of the happiest kids I've ever met. He doesn't stop beaming, even when he's talking about swimming through his flooded kitchen or living for weeks without plumbing or power. He moved to Texas to stay with a relative for a while, but didn't stay long.

Lisa Pollak

It's late afternoon now, about an hour before the game. Everybody gathers around Coach Compretta, and he urges them to think about the past month when they get on the field tonight.

Lisa Pollak

Of course, there's only so much love one football team can take. An hour later, as the team gets ready to run out onto the field, the coach has this to say.

Lisa Pollak

It's kind of hard to believe that out of the ruins of this town just down the street from gutted houses and buildings, this thing has appeared, this movie-set-perfect football game. It's dusk now, with a pinkish sky, and under the stadium lights, everything's kind of glowing. And everyone showed up to play their part-- the cheerleaders, the PA announcer, the marching band or what's left of it, a single kid with a snare drum standing in the bleachers.

Lisa Pollak

The opposing team, the Long Beach Bearcats, line up on the other side of the field. The moment I see them, my heart sinks a little. Not only are there twice as many of them, they just look so determined. Assistant Coach Keith sizes them up this way.

Lisa Pollak

Not even the quarterback's father expects the Tigers to win tonight. They're missing so many guys that they'll have to play their good players twice as much. Their starters will play offense and defense. Guys will wear out.

Lisa Pollak

The Tigers get off to a great start. The first time they get the ball, they go on a drive that lasts half the first quarter and ends with a touchdown on a six-yard run by Robert Labat.

Lisa Pollak

I watch Tyler pass the ball off to Robert, knowing that Tyler pretty much moved back to town for this moment, and that Robert-- who's living with him, separated from his own family-- did too.

Lisa Pollak

On the sidelines, eight Tiger cheerleaders are jumping around. It's more than half the squad. One tells me her uniform was the first thing she packed when her family evacuated. When the girls aren't cheering, they're consulting this big, elaborate chart they've set up in front of bleachers. Celeste, the captain, explains.

Lisa Pollak

The coaches are scurrying up and down the field, improvising to fill in for the key players they don't have, swapping kids in and out. Brandt, the MRE kid, is getting trounced out there, so the coach pulls him aside.

Lisa Pollak

But the rookie players come through with some surprises. For instance, at the very same moment that the coaches are grumbling to themselves about where exactly freshman Allan Vallalta is heading on the field, Vallalta recovers a fumble.

Lisa Pollak

By the end of the first half, it's Tigers 7, Bearcats 6.

Lisa Pollak

The home bleachers are pretty packed by now. And the thing I realized when I start talking to people is that this is the first time this town has gotten together since the hurricane. One of the first people I meet, Gary Yarborough, doesn't even have a kid on the team.

Lisa Pollak

As I walk through the stands, the one thing people keep telling me is what a normal night this is, what a relief it is to do something normal again. You talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes, and what you hear next is just how far from normal everything is. They're worried about flood insurance, and FEMA trailers, and whether they'll have jobs. I ask one man, the booster club president, what the highlight of the game is so far, and he nearly starts to cry.

Lisa Pollak

Down on the field, the Tigers are playing better than anyone had expected. Going into the fourth quarter, the score is 21-6, Tigers comfortably leading. But then in the last five minutes of the game, everything falls apart. The Bearcats' star player, Tramaine Brock, rushes for a touchdown. They miss the extra point, so it's 21-12. Two minutes later, with just three minutes left in the game, Brock sprints 55 yards to the end zone as the Tiger coaches watch helplessly.

Lisa Pollak

It's a two-point game now, 21-19. The Tigers are still leading, but Long Beach has the momentum, and they only need a field goal to win. The Tigers are completely exhausted. Many have been on the field the entire game, the kickers limping. Alan Vallalta, the ninth grader who made that great play, is on the sidelines with an injured knee. The Tigers get the ball back, their last possession, but they can't even manage a first down. They punt it away, and there's still plenty of time for Long Beach to score.

[SHOUTING]

Lisa Pollak

The Bearcats start to drive again. They cross the 50-yard line into Bay High territory. The clock is running down. Coaches are screaming.

Lisa Pollak

The place is going nuts.

[CHANTING]

I can honestly say this is the only football game I've ever been to where it really did seem to matter who won. Earlier, I felt bad taking sides against the Bearcats. Their town was hit by the hurricane too.

But now I don't know what I'll do if the Tigers lose. Their town was hit harder. They're the underdogs. They have to win.

And then they do. They stop the Bearcats. It's over.

[SHOUTING AND CHEERING]

Lisa Pollak

The clock runs out, and the place explodes. 21-19 Tigers. It's every corny sports movie come to life-- people streaming on the field, hugging, players sprawled on the ground, all these people in this wrecked town ecstatic over a football game. Assistant Coach Jeremy Turcotte.

Lisa Pollak

Coach Compretta.

Lisa Pollak

And just like that, the place clears out. A half hour later, the only people left are the coaches, still reliving the game. Luke, one of the assistants, is on the cell phone with his brother in Alabama.

Lisa Pollak

Of all the coaches I met here, Luke seemed the most discouraged about everything. He'd lost his house. He sounded disheartened. In the morning, he told me that when his contract is up in May, he'll probably leave here. But now his mood is different.

Lisa Pollak

Before coming to Bay St. Louis, I felt the way I think a lot of us feel when we see these places on TV. I didn't understand how you go back to a town like that, to all that loss, and live there in the middle of it. What are you going back there for, and how do you even begin to get over it? Watching the Tigers win 21-19, completely outmatched, everyone together cheering them on, I knew the answer.

[CHEERING]

Ira Glass

Lisa Pollak. So we checked in this week with Tigers Coach Brenan Compretta. He is not the coach anymore, but is still very involved with the team. He told us that, in some ways, the pandemic has been harder on the high school kids in town than Katrina was. The kids facing Katrina, he said, could at least still hang out together.

Right now, the school plans to be open in the fall. The team is supposed to start summer workouts in about a week, June 1, with the first game scheduled for August. That's the plan for now anyway.

[MUSIC - "BACKFIELD IN MOTION" BY MEL AND TIM]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Dunk and Go Nuts. So back in 1996, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls were at the height of their power on the way to winning the fourth of the six championships that they won back in the '90s, we did an episode of our show on the Bulls and just about loving basketball. It included the story of a barber named Tommy, who was the one person rooting against the Bulls in a barber shop on the South Side full of Bulls fanatics, as they all watched the playoff game on television, the Bulls against Shaquille O'Neal and the Orlando Magic.

Ira Glass

Even at halftime, the Bulls up by 10, Tommy did not let up. Scissors in hand, a toothpick dangling from his lip, he declared--

Ira Glass

I think it was just funny to him to calmly say no to a room full of hyped-up fans. Later, when the game ended and the Bulls won by 15, Tommy insisted, no biggie. The Bulls would lose the coming series against Seattle. And then-- OK, this is the scene I narrated back then in that show.

Then we all looked up. And through the plate glass window in front of the barber shop, we saw a car pull up. A guy climbs out with a brand new broom in his hand and strides towards the barber shop.

Ira Glass

The guy walks in and stands, broom in hand, near the door.

Ira Glass

The guy's name is Derek, a regular at Coleman's.

Ira Glass

Tommy's unnerved.

Ira Glass

That episode of the show wasn't just about being a basketball fan. It was also about playing basketball and what it can mean to you-- and not incidentally, all the trophies that you collect along the way if you're serious about the game. Further you get, the bigger the trophy. Of course, some trophies do not age very well. Get old enough and, at some point, they can just start to look like dusty, aging clutter. One of our producers, Nancy Updike, talked to a friend of hers who played a lot of basketball all about this.

Nancy Updike

When I met up with my friend Mary to talk about basketball, she was having some trouble with her trophies. She just moved to a new apartment. And her new place was small, so small that a bunch of high school trophies would just dominate any room they were in.

She had the trophies in a box in the living room. And we sat on the floor, pulling out fake silver statuettes of girls in culottes reaching ever upward, hopeful and fit, like in Soviet propaganda posters.

Nancy Updike

Then she found one that was not like the others, sort of hard to understand, actually. Picture this, a thick slice of wood, sanded and shellacked, and mounted with a miniature rim and backboard, and then leaping across the front a stick figure made of roofing nails going in for a slam dunk. Mary identified this as her 1978 girls varsity team trophy from Cardinal Dougherty High School. And the girls, she said, had not been pleased with the trophy at all.

Nancy Updike

Mary handed me the wood slice trophy. And when I reached to touch the stick figure, I realized that one of its feet was on a pivot. So I could actually make it go in for the dunk. Once I discovered this, it was impossible not to do it over, and over, and over. The trophy was completely hypnotizing, a disturbing artifact from an artistic period best forgotten.

Nancy Updike

As a kid, Mary played basketball mostly with her older brother, Daniel. The two of them roamed around the city together, looking for pickup games whenever they could, all summer, every weekend-- even at night, because the court down the street had lights. It was a way to get out of the house, to escape the chaos of 11 kids in a working class Irish family in a too-small house on the edge of Northeast Philadelphia. Basketball was a place of clear rules and gestures that always made sense. And home was a place where you could get hit for no reason or find yourself still hungry at the end of a meal. Mary remembered being hungry a lot growing up, a fact always cheerfully denied by the nuns at school.

Nancy Updike

Another good thing about basketball was that it was cheap. Mary bought the family a rim and a basketball for their backyard when she was only seven or eight, using her first communion money, $65 in $5 increments from everyone in her huge family. The only equipment she really needed and could never afford were good shoes. She always had those supermarket checkout line shoes with the hard plastic soles that were completely embarrassing, of course, but also had no gripability. So she would be running down the court and go sliding, and be called for traveling. So one year, she got up the courage to ask a girl down the block for her old shoes.

Nancy Updike

We talked for two hours about basketball, and we kept returning to the dunk and the cruelty of the dunk on that wood slice trophy, a dunk by a stick figure made of nails, driving home their 18-year-old sense of frustration. They could be the best ball handlers, the best guards, and it didn't matter worth a damn because they couldn't dunk, all of that captured forever in the last trophy most of them would ever receive.

Ira Glass

Mary Conway talking with our own Nancy Updike. Coming up, a kid who's not great at soccer invents a way to be a star. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Time Out." In this kind of unprecedented moment when sports have been put on pause, like when has that ever happened? We had favorite stories from back before the lockdown to fill in the void, the sports void. We have arrived at Act Three of our program-- Act Three, Those Who Can't Play.

OK. So, so far on our show, we've done football and basketball. Let's turn to soccer. This is from Daniel Alarcon, the executive producer and host of Radio Ambulante. And it's about his dad. Growing up in Peru, Daniel's dad, Renato, played soccer around the neighborhood like all the kids did, but he was never anything special.

Ira Glass

But he was thought of, from a young age, as being beyond unusually bright.

Ira Glass

He was incredibly verbal kid, loved poetry and words, great talker. But again, soccer.

Ira Glass

--when he's outside.

Ira Glass

Daniel's dad would also make up games-- like whole professional games, like all the players, both sides, all the action-- starting, Daniel says, when he was 10 or 11. He would do it just kind of for himself as, like, a thing to do, though the whole family knew he could do this.

Ira Glass

They're the local favorite from the province. And in this game that he made up on stage, they played the big, fancy team from the capital, Lima.

Ira Glass

They're like the Yankees.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Daniel Alarcon. He first told this story on his show, Radio Ambulante. He's launched a new weekly podcast with news from Latin America called El Hilo. It's available wherever you get your podcasts.

Ira Glass

Act Four, The Girl With the Golden Gloves. So now we travel back in time to a sweaty gym in 1998. That's when this was first broadcast. It's about somebody with a complicated relationship with the sport she loves from Meema Spadola.

Meema Spadola

Maritza was an accountant, a financial analyst at a huge insurance company. She was living day-to-day like anybody else. Then she heard about this boxing class that was being offered at the company gym. Some guy named Milton was teaching.

Maritza liked sports. She'd even taken an aerobic boxing class before. So she decided to go down and check it out.

Meema Spadola

Every day after work in Manhattan, Maritza would take the subway all the way out to Brooklyn to train for three or four hours at Milton's gym and then go all the way back home to Queens. She spent her weekends at the gym. No one in her old life understood what she was doing. She'd grown up in the projects, put herself through college, gotten an MBA, held a good paying job, and here she was, back so close to the streets.

When she got a broken nose and black eyes in the ring, she lied to her coworkers about it, didn't tell them she was boxing. Her parents didn't approve of women fighting. They were conservative, born in Puerto Rico. Her friends were suspicious of her weight loss. They accused her of being anorexic, infected with HIV, or addicted to drugs. But at the gym, everyone believed in her. Maritza was the only girl at Milton's, his first girl. So she'd spar with the men there.

Meema Spadola

Looking at Maritza, you probably wouldn't think boxer. She's small, just over 5 feet tall, and only 106 pounds. Her features are fine and delicate. But when she talks about her love for boxing, you can see her in the ring. She's radiant. It's like speaking to someone who's had a religious conversion.

Meema Spadola

With Milton's training, Maritza was unbeatable. Within a year, she had taken all the amateur titles in New York. She won the Metros, the Empire States, and in '96 she won the biggest of all, the Golden Gloves in Madison Square Garden, a fight televised around the world, held in a ring where some of the greatest boxers in history have fought.

Meema Spadola

Maritza and I get together to watch the video of her '96 Golden Gloves win. The garden's packed. The crowd's going wild. Maritza's incredibly fast and beautiful in the ring. Watching her, you understand what it means to be a smart fighter. She's calculated.

The woman she's fighting is taller than she is, with longer arms. So Maritza ducks down low and jabs up to the body, choosing where she lands her punches-- to the ribs, then to the chest. And when her opponent can barely catch her breath, Maritza's up, giving her a fierce combination to the face and head.

Meema Spadola

In the last 10 seconds, Manson gets in a good punch, straight to Maritza's face. Maritza stumbles back and then seems to go crazy. She throws nonstop combinations, and the crowd is screaming.

After the fight ends, we're laughing. We keep rewinding to watch Maritza's amazing finale.

Meema Spadola

We're both completely high and hysterical. Maritza's face is transformed. This is pure joy. And in a way it's terrible, because we both know she's quitting boxing.

Maritza wants to go pro, but there doesn't seem to be any way she could make a living at boxing. She's only 106 pounds. They don't even have a name for her weight class. If she went pro, no one knows of any women who are good enough to match her.

As it is, there are only two amateur women at her level. In all her title matches, she's always been put up against these same two opponents over and over. And she's beat them every time. In 10 years, there may be enough women that Maritza would be able to make a career of it, but she's already in her 30s. She says she has to be realistic about the future.

Meema Spadola

It's like she's in love with someone she knows she has to leave. So she circles around boxing, quits, comes back for one-night stands. Last year, Milton signed her up for the Metros tournament without telling her. On the night of the fight, he called her from ringside and told her they were holding up the match for her. Maritza got in her car and drove from Queens to Brooklyn while Milton lied to the judges about Maritza being stuck in traffic. She arrived, beat her opponent in three rounds flat, but was so disgusted with herself for fighting when she was trying to retire that she left without even collecting her trophy.

But being back in the game felt too good. And after that win, she just couldn't bring herself to walk away. Despite her reservations, she went on to fight in the 1997 New York Gloves and, of course, won.

Meema Spadola

In February, just after Maritza misses the deadline for the 1998 Golden Gloves, I go to Milton's gym to see her fight. Even though, these days, Maritza isn't there much anymore, Milton has promised me that Maritza will spar with a new girl he's training. We wait and wait, and no Maritza. An hour passes.

When she finally shows, she looks worn out and tired. She's not dressed to box, and she says she's got the flu. She's not going to fight. Right away, everyone starts pushing her.

Meema Spadola

She says she didn't bring her shoes. She doesn't have any of her gear. Milton points to some shoes lying in the corner, says they're her size. Suddenly, Maritza doesn't look so tired.

Meema Spadola

Then Maritza drops the pretense. We head down in the elevator to her car. Turns out, she's been carrying her gloves, her mouthpiece, her wraps, all of her equipment in her car for the past year, just in case.

Meema Spadola

You've got the biggest smile on your face. You look so happy right now.

Meema Spadola

She grabs her bag, and we race back to the gym. And as Maritza's getting dressed, I notice she wears tiny golden gloves on a chain around her neck. Milton stands ringside, pumped up, ready to see his favorite in action again.

Meema Spadola

Maritza's stiff at first, then she starts to relax. She's ducking down, dancing around the ring. And in the last 10 seconds of the fight, she has a surge of energy. She's punching hard, moving fast, throwing nonstop combinations.

Meema Spadola

And afterwards, she's pumped up with adrenaline, sweating, laughing with Milton and the guys in the gym. She says she'll be back to spar and train every week. And even though she's missed the deadline for this year's Golden Gloves, she swears she'll take the gloves next year. Stay tuned for 1999, she says. Stay tuned.

But Maritza doesn't show at Milton's the next week or the week after. She breaks two appointments with me. She doesn't return my calls. And when I finally reach her, she's angry-- angry she fought again, scared she's getting sucked back in.

Ira Glass

That story from Meema Spadola. Maritza has stopped boxing herself. She's aged out of it. These days, she teaches people to box.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by our production manager Stowe Nelson and our technical director Matt Tierney. Other people who helped put together today's show include Noor Gill, Lina Misitzis, Katherine Rae Mondo, Christopher Swetala, and Julie Whitaker. Our executive editor is David Kestenbaum. Our managing editors are Sarah Abdurrahman and Diane Wu.

Those guys that you heard at the beginning of the show, Jason Kirk and Spencer Hall, their essay about sports was originally published on the website Hazlitt. Their upcoming book is called The Sinful Seven-- Sci-fi Western Legends of the NCAA. Our website, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia. Every Friday at the end of the day, sends out an email to all of us, and it always says the same thing.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.