The Ringer: All Posts by Jacqueline Kantor2022-01-14T11:51:32-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/jacqueline-kantor/rss2022-01-14T11:51:32-05:002022-01-14T11:51:32-05:00What Really Happened Out There?
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<p>Considering the show’s multitude of unanswered questions, it’s no surprise the ‘Yellowjackets’ subreddit has exploded. What’s unique is the way the series’ cast and crew are getting in on the fun too.</p> <p id="gBDYho">If internet communities delineated themselves with yard signs, the <em>Yellowjackets </em>Reddit has chosen theirs. It’s in the style of the “In this house, we believe” black and neon-colored poster, but with a twist, acknowledging some of the subreddit’s most common theories:</p>
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<p id="dVd8S6">Welcome to the <em>Yellowjackets</em> subreddit, the buzziest (sorry) and bloodiest corner of the TV-watching internet. In this house, we (also) believe: Jackie is a time traveler; Lottie is the pit girl <em>and</em> the antler queen; Jackie survived the wilderness and married Travis; Tai killed Travis; the wolf attack never happened; and Shauna eats her baby. Or, on the other hand, maybe we believe: <em>Jackie</em> is the pit girl; Lottie has supernatural powers; Misty killed Travis; and Adam is Shauna’s son. You get the idea. </p>
<p id="q3VWB0"><em>Yellowjackets</em>, which concludes its inaugural season Sunday, serves up horror in both innocuous and brutal forms; rash leg amputations, impalements, and wolf attacks are juxtaposed with extramarital affairs and teen love triangles. The show’s premise, ’90s nostalgia, and impeccable casting present a heady mash of memeability and mystery. It’s a show that sticks with you, and, accordingly, thousands of viewers have been drawn to meet around the digital campfire to share their most unhinged hypotheses and rave about their favorite characters. Plummet into the wilderness of the already 25,000-plus-member forum, spend some time scrolling, and your grasp on reality may begin to feel as tenuous as that of a teenage girl with nothing in her system but homemade wine, psychobilin, and insects. There are posts ranging from “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/s294np/cannibalism_to_vegetarianism_pipeline_lol/">cannibalism to vegetarianism pipeline lol</a>” to “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/s363zm/butterfly_symbolism/">butterfly symbolism</a>” to “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/s2p5la/youve_got_a_little_pit_girl_stuck_in_your_teeth/">you’ve got a little pit girl stuck in your teeth</a>.” There are branded <a href="https://erinharkes.com/product/755169">face masks</a> and <em>Yellowjackets</em>-themed <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/1155763723/yellowjackets-tarot-card-style-hand?ref=shop_home_active_1&frs=1">tarot card artwork</a>. </p>
<p id="j9cVji">On first glance, it would seem that the show poses just one overarching question: How did a tight-knit high school girls’ soccer team go from standard teen rancor to ritualistically hunting, killing, and possibly eating their teammates? (“They got hungry” justifies the consumption, but probably not the ritual.) But between the dual timelines and a possible supernatural bent, in actuality the show presents <em>dozens</em> of unanswered questions. And with that comes an exponential number of possible answers and a fervent following of “<a href="https://twitter.com/96yellowjackets/status/1471353336699834368">citizen detectives</a>” ready to analyze—including those directly involved in the show. </p>
<p id="AfCnLW">“Frankly, I will totally admit in a whisper that I’ve been on there,” cocreator Ashley Lyle says. “Because it’s fun for us. It’s so much fun to see everybody’s theories.”</p>
<p id="rmnw3E">Lyle created the show with her husband, Bart Nickerson; the pair are big true crime fans, Lyle says, and easily identify with the appeal of the “citizen detective” work that so many fans are currently undertaking. The show’s ability to spawn a multitude of hypotheses was “almost a nod to our own inclinations to some extent,” she says. </p>
<p id="nv9Voo">“I think that if I could tell the subredditors anything, it’s like, we are them and they are us to some extent,” she says. “And there’s just so many like-minded people in our writing team and in our cast. I think that’s why everyone’s really engaging with it.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="LfiKvD"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Who Got Eaten First on ‘Yellowjackets’?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/1/12/22880284/yellowjackets-who-got-eaten-first-cannibalism"},{"title":"Lost in the Woods: The Plight of Coach Ben on ‘Yellowjackets’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/1/7/22870985/yellowjackets-coach-ben-fate-theories"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="cq1TIk">Courtney Eaton, who plays Lottie, <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/courtney-eaton-yellowjackets-lottie-doomcoming-interview.html">admitted to trolling the subreddit</a> and pointed out the discussions analyzing her character’s <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/r5d8j1/lottie_is_definitely_a/">antipsychotic medication</a>. Melanie Lynskey, the present-day Shauna, said she’s “<a href="https://twitter.com/melanielynskey/status/1477482065444622338?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">read your Adam theories</a>, and just so you all know, there’s one that basically no one has mentioned yet.” (She also noted that the same questions have infiltrated <a href="https://twitter.com/melanielynskey/status/1479086963793747972">her group texts</a>.) Jane Widdop, who plays Laura Lee, reposted an <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/rqw08f/jane_widdop_laura_lee_just_acknowledged_this/">embroidery of the creepy stick figure girl</a>. The teen Taissa, Jasmin Savoy Brown, <a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/jasmin-savoy-brown-yellowjackets-scream-interview">went as far as to warn that</a> “whatever your theories are about the show and all the storylines, they’re all incorrect.”</p>
<p id="tpHTqi">There was no official conversation about how much the cast would or would not address internet speculation, Lyle says. And different cast members had different preferences for how much they wanted to know about the season. Lynskey, for example, sought out as much information as possible about her character to “create the emotional context for her performance,” Lyle says. The adult Taissa, Tawny Cypress, wanted to know only as much as her character knew—and ended up getting inadvertent spoilers from hair and makeup. Late into production, the crew remained noticeably engaged with the plotline; Lyle recalls the show’s script supervisor hounding her for spoilers and tossing out her own suspicions. In retrospect, those were the first inklings that Lyle and Nickerson were helming the next great small-screen enigma—a potential successor to <em>Lost</em> or <em>The Leftovers</em>.</p>
<p id="7syYB6">“I think we definitely aspired to make a show that was engaging enough to warrant space in the audience’s life, sort of beyond the hour that it’s on.” says Nickerson. “I don’t know that I dared to hope or dream that it’d become this big. ... I mean, just the amazing art that people are making—the meme generation is just so unbelievable and hilarious and brilliant.”</p>
<p id="KaUrjY">Online fan dissection of a drama’s twists and turns is not new; the <em>Westworld</em> and <em>Game of Thrones</em> subreddits have 1 million and 2.9 million members, respectively. But until recently, shows and their Reddit communities have been in conflict. At times, predictions and theories were so off-the-wall (and enjoyable to parse) that the real plotlines ended up <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2021/03/wandavision-director-people-disappointed-finale-1234620764/">paling in comparison</a>. Other times, creators were forced to <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/westworld-season-2-plot-reddit-storyline-jonathan-nolan-details-news-a7651506.html">adjust episodes</a> after Reddit figured out the twists long before the actual reveals. Some shows have outright feuded with their fandoms: “We love to fuck with Reddit as much as possible,” joked <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/10/17105176/hbo-westworld-reddit-fan-theories-shogun-world-samurai-sxsw-2018"><em>Westworld</em> cocreator Jonathan Nolan</a> in 2018. Only in the past year or so have showrunners begun to accept that Reddit sleuthing is inevitable if audiences are given a mystery box. By playing along with their fans, <em>Yellowjackets </em>has taken it a step further. </p>
<p id="VpFwyo">Filming had finished completely by the time of the premiere, Lyle says, which eliminated any chance for “metacommentary” in the show about online theories. The nods to potential theory communities—one episode features a clip of a <em>Yellowjackets</em> Reddit—and the cast embrace of the subreddit also weren’t developed in hopes of sparking an online community. It was very much organic, Lyle says. “We’re all just genuinely fascinated and entertained.”</p>
<p id="8FO6Km">The result is a multifaceted viewing experience and playful engagement that Nickerson compares to a jazz solo. “Hopefully there is something about this show—although it is exploring things that are so sort of like dark and trying to explore trauma—that there is something sort of heightened and playful about it in a way that tends to kind of invite this sort of playful engagement,” he says. The involvement of the cast in theorizing creates a feeling of breaking something beyond the fourth wall, he says. “It’s like breaking the eighth wall in the fifth dimension.”</p>
<p id="x192qe">To keep the community from getting too unwieldy, the site relies on five subreddit moderators to weed out repetitive theses and forestall accidental spoilers. (The show doesn’t officially air until 10 p.m. Eastern on Sundays, but is available to stream on the Showtime Anytime app beginning at midnight ET, which creates a conundrum when it comes to blocking out episode reveals.)</p>
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<p id="co2R24"><br>William Townsend, 28, joined the subreddit after the third episode. He’s familiar with the dangers of online speculation—“I was burned by a lot of theories that came up with watching <em>WandaVision</em> on Disney+ last year. So now I do chill out on some of the more outlandish theories,” he says—and is now one of the moderators. “The community is definitely very passionate about the show,” he says. “You can see that in a lot of the posts that come up, a lot of the theories from the normal ones to some of the more outlandish theories that you come across on a day-to-day basis.”</p>
<p id="2JGC87">His personal favorite theory: Jackie is still alive. His least favorite: Shauna eats her baby in the wilderness. (“The eating the baby just seems too dark, even for Showtime,” he says. “That’s not to say some of the stuff we’ve seen in the show isn’t dark already, but that will just take it to a whole ‘nother level.”) And he’s seen everything you could possibly imagine in regard to Adam, Shauna’s (now-deceased) lover. </p>
<p id="j4TPHy">“That character definitely had the most theories being thrown around about him, almost to the point where I was kind of glad to see the character die off,” he says. “But it is good to see that enthusiasm.”</p>
<p id="XS6oXe">Determining the potential importance of Adam is a compelling task, and an apt example for how subplots in the show can blossom into full-blown speculation. Is he simply a stranger whose random appearance in Shauna’s life sets up an emotional arc about Shauna’s marriage? Or do his connections to the Yellowjackets run deeper? </p>
<p id="QLOv0P">“There was one that was very entertaining to both of us, which was: People really did a deep dive on the bumper sticker on Adam’s truck in a way that I found very unexpected, and it was very creative,” Lyle says. Some conclusions drawn from the posts about the sticker—a multicolored COEXIST with a unique design in the “O”—are that <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/r5zx3o/coexist_sticker/">Jackie transitioned in adulthood and is now Adam</a> … or maybe Adam is a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/ryd0ok/adams_coexist_sticker_on_his_bronco_has_been/">PI working with Lottie’s family</a> to seek vengeance on the living survivors. </p>
<p id="Esy5wF">“There have been a few that I really didn’t anticipate. And in particular there have been a few details that people have assigned a lot of meaning to in ways that were a little bit surprising to us,” Lyle says.</p>
<p id="oHMVNy">Statistically, if there are 10 predictions, at least nine will be wrong, Lyle says. But she does note that a lot of them have proved correct, and there is “at least one person on the Reddit who has come close to the ballpark on almost everything,” she says. “Our hope is that people are having enough fun just with the incredibly creative theory generation that’s going on that even if they don’t ultimately prove right, they’re still having a good time.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="fiMHGh">In the meantime, there are about 48 more hours for the subreddit to continue designing finale bingo cards and posting <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/s2pjjr/jeffs_happy_ending/">book club memes</a>. As long as there’s an episode remaining, there’s still work to be done for citizen detectives. Townsend and the moderators are girding for a tumultuous weekend, and given the <a href="https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/tv-shows/yellowjackets-season-2/">show’s confirmed second season</a>, months of post-finale speculation. “Just wait until after it airs,” assured one Redditor to another lamenting that this is “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/comments/s3ec1g/this_is_the_longest_week_ever/">the longest week ever</a>.” “The wait for Season 2 is going to be as brutal as surviving the wilderness itself!”</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/1/14/22883740/yellowjackets-reddit-theories-subreddit-relationshipJacqueline Kantor2022-01-06T09:49:16-05:002022-01-06T09:49:16-05:00How the Rise of the Celebrity Instructor Transformed Our Relationship With Fitness
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<figcaption>Daniel Hertzberg</figcaption>
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<p>In March 2020, the fitness industry was forced to adapt to the onset of a global pandemic. Nearly two years later, many of the changes are here to stay—for good and for bad.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="HTc0nN">On May 24, 2019, Jessica Menardy fell in love with Jess Sims. Their first run together was a 30-minute “trap fun run” soundtracked by the likes of Rich Homie Quan, Future, and Yo Gotti. Now Menardy sees Sims every day for 20 to 60 minutes, always between 5 and 7 a.m. Sometimes she curses her. Sometimes she adores her. But she always comes back. </p>
<p id="ZpVssp">“Oh my God, that woman,” Menardy says, reflecting on their first meeting. “May 2019 will forever be a special time for me, because finding her ... that was my therapy.”</p>
<p id="3ilQ7L">Menardy is a 34-year-old tax accountant who lives in suburban Los Angeles. Sims is a strength, running, and walking Peloton instructor who has 375,000-plus Instagram followers and a Reebok sponsorship. Sims appears in Menardy’s home via the 32-inch touch screen attached to the latter’s Tread+. Menardy can’t remember going a week without taking a Sims class since that first run. </p>
<p id="q54fsl">“Peloton makes me feel like an athlete, and I needed that,” she says. “I needed to feel so empowered and so incredible during my workouts, especially when I felt so small in life. When I felt small, during postpartum. So, those were the moments. The moments were just simple. When I felt like I was me, I wasn’t just a mom. I wasn’t just here to pump milk. I was an athlete. So it was very, very life-changing and I am forever grateful.”</p>
<p id="OCMAfC">The past two years have significantly altered our relationship with personal fitness. The widespread shuttering of gyms and studios beginning in March 2020 led to an uptick in the usage of apps and streaming workouts, and the threat of a debilitating virus prompted many to take a renewed focus on their physical well-being. Fears of the “quarantine 15” led to <a href="https://www.uwhealth.org/news/uw-study-looks-to-help-with-quarantine-15-weight-management-w">public health studies</a> and <a href="https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/quarantine-15-weight-gain-pandemic">explanations from the Yale School of Medicine</a>; a March 2021 report from the <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2021/sia-pandemic-report.pdf">American Psychological Association</a> found that 61 percent of adults reported undesired weight changes since March 2020, and that 42 percent reported unintended weight gains. As at-home fitness took on outsize importance, so did its instructors. Fitness professionals garnered more fans and followers, and with that exposure came a degree of celebrity ranging from microinfluencing to major brand partnerships. </p>
<p id="Ad1CE0">Cycling instructors and yoga teachers have now <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CQlgNhzLzJc/">hobnobbed with Russell Wilson and Ciara</a>, appeared in <a href="https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7z49l2">Super Bowl commercials</a>, garnered spots on <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22678193/cody-rigsby-dwts-peloton-boo-crew"><em>Dancing With the Stars</em></a>,<em> </em>made ill-fated appearances in the <a href="https://people.com/sports/jess-king-thanks-fans-for-support-after-release-of-magic-peloton-commercial-with-chris-noth/"><em>Sex and the City</em> reboot</a><em>, </em>and proferred up their <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/benji-mishler-smells-all/">dogs for magazine profiles</a><em>. </em>At the same time, they’ve never been more accessible. Trainers’ posts, reels, and TikToks have both fueled their celebrity rise and allowed them to connect with the public in an intimate and immediate way. People are now more likely to see fitness instructors as celebrities, and more likely to feel that they know them on a personal level. These trends have caused the industry to boom, reframed the nature of the fitness influencer, and raised questions about what comes next—and whether the revolution in how trainers and trainees interact is healthy or sustainable in the long term. </p>
<p id="EpxpFq">Menardy breaks down her experience of the past two years simply. “Say Oprah and Tunde were walking down the street,” she says, referencing Tunde Oyeneyin, a Peloton cycling instructor known for sporting bright red lipstick through the gnarliest of workouts. “I would be just as freaked out with both. They’re really that important to me. … I think I would have the same reaction because they mean so much to me, and they’ve impacted my life in different ways.”</p>
<p id="tAV2fK">One major difference between the two: Menardy has been able to tag Tunde after a tough workout and get a direct message response. Oprah likely isn’t in the business of responding to her Instagram DMs. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="D94P9q">Parasocial relationships are connections formed between an individual and a public figure in which the former comes to feel they know the latter as a personal friend. The term <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049?needAccess=true">first appeared in a 1956 study</a> by University of Chicago anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl. The idea is that we create connections with those who entertain, enlighten, and inform us, even if they never know we exist. Over the past couple of years, both the term and concept have become more relevant than ever.</p>
<p id="bxRFSx">In the intro to their study, Horton and Wohl note that “public platforms and theatres” have fostered parasocial relationships with “people of the world of affairs”: fictional characters, television and movie stars, even anthropomorphic puppets. The pair focused on a “special category of ‘personalities’ whose existence is a function of the media itself,” like interviewers or announcers. These <em>personae</em>, as the study calls them, “offers, above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life. His devotees ‘live with him’ and share the small episodes of his public life—and to some extent even of his private life.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="5LdZlB"><q>“Say Oprah and Tunde were walking down the street. I would be just as freaked out with both. They’re really that important to me.” —Jessica Menardy, Peloton user</q></aside></div>
<p id="C7sgAv">Through the years, the public figures on the other side of these bonds have shifted with changing technology: 1800s parasocial interactions (or PSIs) revolved around literary characters; the 1900s brought TV and film stars; this century, it’s expanded to social media stars and influencers. The latter category encompasses everyone from YouTubers to mommy bloggers. And it certainly includes fitness professionals like Sims and her colleagues. </p>
<p id="C0xivf">In early 2020, the members of Black Girl Magic, a Facebook group of more than 27,000 Peloton users, planned a meetup at the Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem. One of the organizers reached out to Sims and Oyeneyin to invite them to the gathering, which they expected to draw about 100 members.</p>
<p id="Z23sZh">“Tunde and I popped up on them and surprised them, and when I tell you, I had my Beyoncé moment,” Sims says. “I thought the building was going to fall over, they screamed bloody murder. I’m telling you, I was really like, ‘Tunde, are we Beyoncé? What’s happening?’”</p>
<p id="nvWoL7">Sims doesn’t think of herself as a celebrity. She grew up in Massachusetts, played basketball at Trinity College in Connecticut, and landed in Houston after graduating through a Teach for America placement. She worked her way up through school leadership positions in the Northeast, became the principal of a charter school in Harlem, and then left education to pursue a full-time fitness career in 2016. Over the past two years, she has <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tv/CH8VLTXj89k/?hl=en">stumbled upon people doing her workouts</a> in a park. Fans come up to her on the street and begin talking to her like an old workout buddy.</p>
<p id="buHrHm">“They’re like, ‘Jess, we’re best friends, we work out every day, six days a week,’” she says. “It’s so funny, cause then I’ll stop and say, ‘I’m Jess,’ and they’re like, ‘I know!’”</p>
<p id="pIB3LW">The pandemic served as a natural flashpoint for these types of connections. According to <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dara-Greenwood/publication/229176481_Television_as_escape_from_self_Psychological_predictors_of_media_involvement/links/5bdd89f74585150b2b9b30cf/Television-as-escape-from-self-Psychological-predictors-of-media-involvement.pdf">multiple</a> <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201905/do-people-use-youtubers-replace-real-relationships">researchers</a>, PSIs can be a response to an internal deficit in which an individual seeks to find a sense of <a href="https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2260&context=etd">belonging</a>, build <a href="https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=luc_diss_6mos">self-esteem</a>, or <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.937.3552&rep=rep1&type=pdf">counter loneliness</a>. Per researcher Carol Laurent Jarzyna, COVID-19 created an “externally produced deficit” in the lives of millions; never before had so many people been limited in day-to-day socialization and physical contact. In a <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42087-020-00156-0">November 2020 article</a>, “Parasocial Interaction, the COVID-19 Quarantine, and Digital Age Media,” Jarzyna wrote that “PSI through digital media allowed us to have a sense of togetherness during the quarantine. … Research has shown that this type of PSI gives us a feeling of belonging, helps us feel closer to our ideal selves, and raises our self-esteem. These are important things in times of fear.” </p>
<p id="qrcnLr">Consumption habits have facilitated these connections, too. In the past few years, people have upped their phone and computer usage—some statistics suggest that in the early weeks of March 2020, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/markbeech/2020/03/25/covid-19-pushes-up-internet-use-70-streaming-more-than-12-first-figures-reveal/?sh=23cde7c23104">internet usage increased by 50 to 70 percent</a>, and that social media went up by half—which only increased people’s exposure to potential parasocial relationships. <a href="https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2260&context=etd">Multiple studies</a> have found that the <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/276236088.pdf">“always on” nature</a> of social platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook “promotes increased parasocial interaction and relationship development.” And influencer-friendly apps have thrived since the onset of the pandemic: According to data from SimilarWeb, TikTok’s average monthly visits increased <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22295131/social-media-use-pandemic-covid-19-instagram-tiktok">576 percent</a> in 2020; the app had 55 million global users in January 2018, and <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/09/27/tiktok-reaches-1-billion-users-worldwide-growth-surges/5886506001/">crossed the 1 billion user mark</a> last September. More than half of the users were between 18 and 34 years old, but the number of users aged 35 to 44 <a href="https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/social-media-117478">more than doubled in the past year</a>.</p>
<p id="hZpadO">“It’s not just Gen Z and younger millennials who follow influencers. People of all ages started following influencers for that entertainment content, right?” says Mariah Wellman, a PhD candidate at the University of Utah who studies social media, influencers, and health communication. “I don’t know if that necessarily changes the definition of celebrity, but it definitely expands on what we consider to be a popular person, worthy of consumption.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="bwgxKr"><q>“They’re like, ‘Jess, we’re best friends, we work out every day, six days a week.’ It’s so funny, cause then I’ll stop and say, ‘I’m Jess,’ and they’re like, ‘I know!’” —Jess Sims, fitness instructor</q></aside></div>
<p id="x2HS6b">This expansion has had a profound impact on the fitness economy. Fitness was already a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fitness-has-exploded-into-a-nearly-100-billion-global-industry-2019-9">nearly $100 billion industry</a> before the pandemic. Between March and October 2020, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2021/01/07/home-fitness-boom/">revenue from health and fitness equipment more than doubled</a>. Between January and November of that year, approximately 2.5 billion health and fitness apps were downloaded, amounting to a 47 percent increase from the prior year. The <a href="https://www.acsm.org/old-pages/news-releases/news-detail/2020/12/29/online-training-is-new-top-fitness-trend-for-2021-according-to-acsm-annual-forecast">ACSM report on fitness trends</a> found that the no. 1 trend for 2021 was online training, in comparison to its being no. 26 in 2020. </p>
<p id="5xF76b">“Those who were able to capitalize on that, really blew up quickly, because people were fearful,” Wellman says. “People were also at this time talking about how immunity is really important, right? And cardiovascular health. It’s not just the physical, the look of your body, but internal health and people were like, if you don’t have a workout program, you should get a workout program.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="eMeNfp"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Atlanta’s Tyler Matzek Conquered the Yips to Become a World Series Champion","url":"https://www.theringer.com/year-in-review/2021/12/30/22855842/tyler-matzek-atlanta-braves-world-series-champion-yips-journey"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="yGSF92">In the months since, there’s been big money to be made in selling wellness: Kayla Itsines <a href="https://www.insider.com/worlds-top-fitness-influencer-kayla-itsines-sells-empire-sweat-400m-2021-7">sold her Sweat app</a>, an offshoot of her original 12-week Bikini Body Guide, for $400 million in July. Jen Selter, who rose to fame with her glute-building exercises and “belfies,” brings in an estimated <a href="https://www.moms.com/how-much-top-10-fitness-influencers-make-per-post-ranked/">$72,200 per sponsored post</a>. Cassey Ho, who first began posting Pilates workout videos to YouTube in 2009 and has amassed 5.5 million followers on the platform, released a Blogilates Home Gym Collection for Target in 2020 and had an <a href="https://www.womenshealth.com.au/these-are-the-10-most-popular-fitfluencers-on-youtube/">estimated income for that year</a> of more than $2 million.</p>
<p id="UnIefz">People have cashed in on fitness trends for years, but never at this scope or scale. That’s a reflection of the increased influence of celebrity instructors, for good and for bad. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="EXwZON">Before Peloton, Mirror, and Tonal, there was the Hula-Hoop. In 1958, the <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hula-hoop-patented">founders of the Wham-O toy company</a> were gifted one of the bamboo rings that were commonly used during gym class at Australian schools. They began to manufacture plastic versions, and an estimated 100 million to 120 million Hula-Hoops were sold in the first six months on the market, ushering in the first at-home workout craze of the second half of the 20th century. The phenomenon went global: According to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/05/15/conceived-in-the-fad-crazed-50s-the-hula-hoop-makes-a-comeback/b0113458-354e-483b-8c32-5c9a6ca56bf1/">story in <em>The Washington Post</em></a>, “three Japanese cities banned hooping in the streets, saying the fad ‘contributed to an increase in traffic accidents.’”</p>
<p id="3E42VI">The 1960s brought “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200504-covid-19-update-quarantine-home-workouts-during-coronavirus">sauna suits</a>” and speed massage machines. The 1970s introduced Jazzercise. By the ’80s, there was the aerobics trend starring Jane Fonda, Denise Austin, and others.<em> Jane Fonda’s Original Workout</em>, released in 1982, is one of the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/style/article/jane-fonda-workout-remember-when/index.html">bestselling VHS tapes of all time</a>. But unlike the fitness stars of today, Fonda achieved fitness fame as an Oscar-winning actress who was able to parlay her big-screen reputation into a lucrative side business. Plus, when the video was stopped and ejected, Fonda’s presence in a user’s life was paused until the next workout session. </p>
<p id="tUIUMZ">“With the access to the instructor’s personal life, we do have an automatic, closer relationship to them than we’ve ever had with any fitness instructor in the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s,” Wellman says. “It’s not just the hours they’re doing that workout video, but they’re engaging with that instructor possibly countless times throughout the day, and that impacts other areas of their life.” </p>
<p id="luo414">Robust communities have sprung up around instructors and their services, such as Mirror’s Facebook group for women who work out or the numerous Peloton groups dedicated to individual trainers. Nicole Gonzalez, a mother of two from Westchester County, New York, is an admin and calendar-creator for HardCORE on the Floor, a Facebook group centered on a monthly strength training calendar. Each month, she sorts through available classes in Peloton’s strength, cardio, and yoga disciplines and builds a schedule that hits every major muscle group. In the spring of 2020, the group had 7,000 members. As of this week, membership is approaching 300,000. There are posts of HardCORE members finding each other at hotel gyms on vacation, and a woman learning her nurse in the delivery room was also a calender devotee. One member found out about the group from the person who administered their COVID vaccine. “I use the term ‘tribe’ because it’s like a family of strangers,” Gonzalez says. “It’s not necessarily everyone’s related, but we are a family. We <em>are</em>.”</p>
<p id="4C5wiO">Many of the HardCORE discussions focus on a given day’s workouts, but there are plenty more about the trainers’ off-topic messaging and what they talked about in that day’s class, whether that’s a non-fitness aside or words of inspiration. Gonzalez sees the instructors as educators first and then influencers, because she says “they practice what they preach.” </p>
<p id="cEFaCe">“It’s not like the ’90s when you grow up and you saw a celebrity and all you got was an article on <em>Bop</em>,” Gonzalez says. “Here, you can literally interact with them, which is super cool. Maybe I’m aging myself, but in the ’90s you loved all these boy bands, and Britney Spears, and everything. It was just so unattainable to know them, and it’s just kind of mind-blowing for ’90s babies to say, ‘Whoa, I can actually have a conversation with someone I am following and really am impressed by.’”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="Z2x8s9"><q>“It’s not just Gen Z and younger millennials who follow influencers. People of all ages started following influencers for that entertainment content, right? I don’t know if that necessarily changes the definition of celebrity, but it definitely expands on what we consider to be a popular person, worthy of consumption.” —Mariah Wellman, PhD candidate at the University of Utah</q></aside></div>
<p id="vBK67W">For all the benefits that come with recent changes to the fitness landscape, however, these types of deepened connections with instructor influencers can have a dark side. Parasocial relationships can sometimes progress to <a href="https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2019/94380/94380.pdf">celebrity worship</a>, and links have been made between PSIs and media addiction and dependency. A <a href="https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/271802/1-s2.0-S0747563219X00072/1-s2.0-S0747563219301827/am.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEMH%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIAXypFbXF8e0EXiEZCspV46ELe9dNAHU3jOI9poYV3fBAiAvfwh65v6xwyG6HodGOf%2FStpVNYmq1PxVlWO5wQBAQ5ir6Awh6EAQaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIMfe9NATQovTgq4zWPKtcDf9dVKnZ3h3jm0Std8JcgxMyvvvvU0EmdzryLWQdXJbMQPBB6DX6IluQcQ5ulh3j0MzFNwIv0DlZ30j1CQxiyVUHNg4nmsHaDbQXlcdyX27HWCS46A9dUR4waNCHLfc5GkhA3AqE4HihhACmGiGZZaLH4s%2F0xiqVkg65WnNTjfmxoOWliWZeokH3RtYxTTMmrpcy4Mt8NWd6o%2BimyST7h3rQb0I3hjTET3w%2F2ewVPe2rCPkRFcqm%2BCIUXnNfVdq5OfEv4jiDCnKVnxCbQwXyTUtqkkAIrmfzcfzqhhDpiCeqGSf8%2FNKTVMljd00LWCHHMW5GiPXLLSj2eWEj4VL0RJirpjHkHtpT30AWokkCrMive%2FtyjJ0a9nqrgM%2Bve82kBq1x288bi%2BuAjwPgQJZVSZr%2BN3We8r9%2B%2FNdHG4eBCqb%2F%2BBBxjc9E1eQiWnubzzUZ6tjDa%2BZIW0ZEMyfEoIw69dHyD3VeCV3WYvt0bXEey1laZM1nZgHxCp152JSVYNMKfnz91C4JgVD0Az2Xhl9f6zZBwiwZbHy7TjRsdCIHWZQE2QDQjytunmtcN%2BXZRtApNR7f5%2BA89ZJ1OVdDzEMg2MIdMm0f%2FtIaX8XREKgWCkR7Vo223w%2BBCMLmSyowGOqYBI6w389Pryz9jUhpqwp771RRCP%2F2HzyfSuuse9Sd536cHn6aGhd3Cd5AB3dXiICsZf2tr9%2FSZ%2BY6qEMTTYHOpKwKj1I6PPiOBi%2F3W6I1QjU%2FSh8vjTXe7u%2BigFKvUroVM7Z8t0Jy5tVGTto0YgIj%2FIwOWecA67JcmQZh74xc8NR68ufvJPAVpkYjZbLHHf4MvKGJrap9tjaDrfEMmuI5KyWaLmEaShg%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20211115T170713Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYR4T62VU3%2F20211115%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=83ebead18f67578d57fb913ee902519538ce946659d3b85ecf83f1af44b31b01&hash=53c4b5917966ccdb657ae5da0b2e88dbc5d5d05a8eb14cacbcd3561451d2c270&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0747563219301827&tid=pdf-d363992e-38bd-464b-a468-16ba65e7b598&sid=8acfe1d56af1044ccc6991188e55742157ecgxrqa&type=client">2019 study</a>, for instance, found that social anxiety and parasocial relationships with YouTubers are predictors of YouTube addiction. The same piece notes that “the intensity of parasocial phenomenon on social networking sites appears to be linked to higher degree of addiction to these websites.”</p>
<p id="nMZOrR">Overwhelming fitness content consumption can also be detrimental to mental health. Constantly scrolling through posts of influencers preening in bikinis and shilling protein powder can negatively affect <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/02/24/social-media-can-increase-risk-of-eating-disorders-and-negative-body-image/?sh=59261784e496">body image issues and disordered eating habits</a>. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-research-shows-company-knew-instagram-harm-teens-senators-say-2021-09-30/">Internal research into Instagram</a>, released by a Facebook whistleblower in early October, showed that the app worsens eating disorders in teenage girls. A <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043377310/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-congress">leaked study</a> showed that 17 percent of teenage girls said that using Instagram worsened their eating disorders, and 32 percent said it made them feel worse about their body. </p>
<p id="vGBIQk">And some fitness influencers have tried to cash in on this new landscape despite <a href="https://elemental.medium.com/your-online-workouts-may-be-hurting-more-than-helping-fdd3ec91b0f0">lacking formal training or certifications</a>. Take Chloe Ting, who gained more than 3 million followers in May 2020 thanks largely to the #ChloeTingChallenge on TikTok, which garnered more than 215 million views by July of that year. She advertised quick fixes and spot reduction, two concepts that counter most accepted fitness knowledge and can set unrealistic expectations for workout results.</p>
<div id="mmQCta"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 152px; position: relative;"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/2p5agCne2dlK3u68uQxflV?utm_source=oembed" style="top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; border: 0;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media;"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="IOo7KD"><br>Casey Johnston says the key to navigating this fitness landscape is by embracing a holistic approach that accounts for diet, stress management, sleep, and more. As the author of the <a href="https://www.shesabeast.co/"><em>She’s a Beast</em></a> newsletter and <a href="https://www.couchtobarbell.com/"><em>Liftoff: Couch to Barbell</em></a>, Johnston provides insights that help her readers become stronger physically, mentally, and emotionally—and she says that people’s experiences with fitness influencers can be a “double-edged sword.” If a program or regimen goes well, users can grow even more enamored of an instructor for guiding them to a healthier life. If one flops, Johnston says, they could “enter a period of dissolution … where it’s like, ‘Now I’m actually mad at them, because they lied to me.’” Johnston says users often “feel guilt or a sense of shame that they couldn’t live up to the bar that this person was setting.”</p>
<p id="3IV0Yf">Fitness influencers aren’t selling a product as much as they’re selling you “a better version of you,” Johnston says. This can make them seem more relatable—and more apt to become the focal point of a relationship that can become unhealthy. Their message is that the difference between your life and theirs may be this yoga practice, or weight-lifting routine, or keto diet. “[It’s] like, ‘You don’t like your life that much,’” Johnston says. “‘I have the tools with which you can at least change a couple aspects of it. And I’m going to make it easy, and look at me. I’m living my best life.’”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="9fRztG">Perhaps the most enduring change in fitness over the past two years is <em>how</em> aspiring weight lifters and at-home yogis find their next trainer. There is a lot more flexibility in how interested consumers connect with professionals, and how the latter are able to market their skills—a trend steeply accelerated by the pandemic, which shows no signs of abating. In Johnston’s view, the enhanced options are a positive.</p>
<p id="nX3jgB">“It’s never been easier to find somebody who aligns with you ideologically, in terms of how to train, or what to eat, or how hardcore you’re supposed to be, or these kinds of things,” she says. “It used to be limited to just whatever trainers were at the gym you signed up at, and now you can go online and find somebody who’s pretty precise.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="ZPHrVG"><q>“It’s never been easier to find somebody who aligns with you ideologically, in terms of how to train, or what to eat, or how hardcore you’re supposed to be.” —Casey Johnston, author of <em>She’s a Beast</em> and <em>Liftoff: Couch to Barbell</em></q></aside></div>
<p id="GkRXGg">Some virtual trainers and coaches are content to keep their online presence limited strictly to fitness information. There’s money to be made even for those who aren’t social media stars inundated by fawning comments about everything from athleisure to wedding planning. “The people who are not quite at that millions-of-followers level of social fervor, they still can maintain a very good living, even though people aren’t necessarily stanning their personality,” Johnston says. “[Success] doesn’t require necessarily selling your entire personality and soul, along with your services, online.”</p>
<p id="hQenWg">On the flip side, there are consumers who crave a window into a fitness coach’s life just as much as their HIIT circuits. These types of instructors face the challenge of maintaining attention and relevance in an extremely saturated market. According to Wellman, people may move around from one trainer to the next until they find one with whom they identify. </p>
<p id="3o0UOH">“Once that happens, oftentimes they’re staying not only for the creativity, but also for this parasocial interaction, this parasocial connection, that they have to other parts of the creator’s life,” Wellman says. “It’s not just that they post at-home workouts, but maybe they also have a toddler, or they also have a 7-year-old who’s back at school. And they talk about those things. Or they’re going through a divorce. It’s all these very personal, intimate things that they can be more transparent with.” </p>
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<p id="WfwSBs">In the best-case scenario, the relationship between trainee and trainer can look a lot like the one between Menardy and Sims. After Menardy kept responding to Sims’s Instagram posts with witty one-liners, she began tagging her in her own workout posts, and Sims would comment on Menardy’s form. At one point, Menardy felt comfortable opening up to Sims about how much her classes had helped her in her postpartum period. </p>
<p id="3rrg0k">“I was like, ‘My gosh, you and I were destined to be in each other’s lives,’ and it’s just easy,” Sims says. “She’s just one of my homegirls. We have so much in common, too: music tastes, and lifting heavy weights, and food. We talk about food all the time.”</p>
<p id="CpTN5O">Now they chat almost every day, Sims says, maybe more than some of her friends she sees in person. Theirs is a parasocial connection that evolved into genuine friendship. As Menardy puts it, she can get a workout with any instructor. But Sims, she says, has a special gift. “Just her energy, her positiveness. It’s something that I need in my life. It’s kind of like therapy.”</p>
<p id="1QYBdQ">Cultivating a real-life relationship with one’s favorite instructor may not be possible in most cases, but for many people that isn’t the goal. As online workouts continue to dominate the fitness world and social media bridges the gap between the public and private spheres, a new standard for how we engage with trainers has been set. A confluence of factors have crystallized to transform the fitness industry, and many of the changes from the past two years are here to stay. For Sims, this new landscape has opened up a world of possibilities—and brought a set of responsibilities with trainees that she doesn’t take lightly.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="BWRncL">“I share a lot of things while I’m teaching and we’re looking right into the members’ eyes,” she says. “They feel this deep connection that they might never feel with any other celebrity. The relationship just gets deeper and deeper.”</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/features/2022/1/6/22866163/fitness-celebrity-instructor-influencer-workout-trends-futureJacqueline Kantor2020-08-19T14:38:17-04:002020-08-19T14:38:17-04:00The Pit Bull Influencers Reclaiming the Dogs’ Image, One IG Post at a Time
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yM0IAgDEW4NH8MQACJXe9R1iVG4=/400x0:2800x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67228220/pitbull_influencers_alyceatinoyan.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Arguably no dogs have been as feared and maligned as the ones classified as pit bulls. But don’t tell that to Instagram stars like Gracie, Rey, and Bronson, just a few of the good boys and girls who are showing just how sweet the breeds can be.</p> <p id="XLK1hM">The Ringer <em>hereby declares this Wednesday, August 19, 2020, to be Dog Day. We have no concrete reason for doing so, other than the fact that dogs are great and ought to be celebrated. We hope you agree.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="jlxmdq">Before <a href="https://www.instagram.com/iheartpgracie/?hl=en">Gracie</a> had 100,000-plus Instagram followers, a burgeoning international fan base, and a deal with the premier talent management agency for animal influencers, she was left tied to a fence in Brooklyn, her russet-colored forehead specked with scattered puncture wounds from dog bites. She sat, silently bleeding, for nine hours, until the owner of the home where she was tied up found her in the daylight. The dog bite on Gracie’s jaw was so infected that it looked like it had been slashed by a knife. At the hospital, Gracie needed surgery for necrotic gum and jowls tissue from her infected bite wounds. The tip of her tail, which had been split open, was amputated. </p>
<p id="dzrMrQ">Tanya Turgeon was still mourning the death of Elsie, her tawny pit mix, when she first saw Gracie in a video shared by a local rescue organization. In the clip, Gracie sat patiently, tail at a high-speed wag, to take treats from the volunteers in the emergency animal hospital. Turgeon saw a glimpse of the resilience and goofiness that had solidified her bond with Elsie, and reached out to bring Gracie home. </p>
<p id="CBgIbh">“I don’t know what most people would think when they see that video, but to me I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that dog is in so much pain but she’s still so friendly. That’s the dog for me,’” Turgeon says. </p>
<p id="iO2E4z">Four years later, Gracie has met fans from 37 states and 20 countries, is certified as an advanced trick dog, and has volunteered as a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDjNWQ2g5nz/">clown dog</a> at a bereavement camp. Her devoted social media fans leave her compliments about her ears (floppy), her eager waddle (muppet-like), her jowls (“<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CC3QuglA_cl/">a-jiggling</a>” as she runs through the grass after a morning poop), and her general demeanor (she is a very good girl). Gracie’s comment section is flooded with hearts and paw prints and cry-laugh emoji at clips of her dunking her heart-shaped nose in an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCn8ClTgkeS/">entire carton of whipped cream</a> or practicing <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zlhOKAzjz/">leg weaves</a>.</p>
<aside id="Bnc5uj"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Fake Dogs, Real Emotions: Why People Need Websites Like “Does the Dog Die?”","url":"https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2020/8/19/21375046/does-the-dog-die-dimdb-can-you-pet-the-dog"},{"title":"Gone in 16 Seconds: Flyball Is the Peak of Dog Sports","url":"https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2020/8/19/21374181/flyball-dog-sport-explained"},{"title":"Which Pop Culture Dog Is Best in Show?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/8/19/21374315/pop-culture-dogs-ranking-best-in-show"},{"title":"How to Train Your Movie Star Dog","url":"https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2020/8/19/21374244/dog-trainers-tv-movies-dog-day"}]}'></div></aside><p id="0LG76h">Dog influencers are the natural next step in social-media marketing. They don’t need filters, aren’t picky about their best angles, and can’t slip up with a career-canceling gaffe. There are <a href="https://www.instagram.com/crusoe_dachshund/?hl=en">celebrity dachshunds</a> with 800,000-plus Instagram followers and <em>New York Times </em>bestselling books, and Shih Tzus posing in a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BoE1KSRHAUW/?utm_source=ig_embed">Fiat</a> and behind platters of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B0UjLbalCxw/">Raising Cane’s</a>. </p>
<p id="XSU8ah">But pups like Gracie, a 70-pound American Staffordshire mix, have a public relations mission to address before they take on outside clients. “Pitfluencer” owners are fueled by the same indulgent conviction that afflicts most dog owners: the belief that everything their pup does is adorable and post-worthy. But pit bull–type dog owners are also chronicling their dogs’ legs-up snoozes, kiddie pool dips, mid-park poses, and morning greetings in hopes of breaking down long-standing stigmas and misconceptions.</p>
<p id="MoS9f8">“You have all of these different accounts, with their names, and you get to see what they like, and what they don’t like, and at the end of the day, they’re just a family dog living in that environment, doing family dog things,” Turgeon says. </p>
<p id="1AvUsp">“I can share what [Gracie] actually is, and no one can take that away from her. It really allows people to fall in love with the animal, and there really is no label involved.”</p>
<p id="eGjpFl">Pit bull–type dogs—for years, reviled, feared, fought, and abandoned—are now the internet’s most lovable underdogs, thanks to Instagram influencers showing the softer, innocuous side of one of America’s most misunderstood pets. </p>
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</div></a> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CB8mX2tguMZ/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">Day 109 of quarantine with the humans #ItsReyDay</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reythepitbull/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> Rey the Pit Bull</a> (@reythepitbull) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-06-27T17:26:57+00:00">Jun 27, 2020 at 10:26am PDT</time></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ismxcb">The first common misconception about pit bulls is the simplest: Most dogs classified as a “pit bull” aren’t actually pit bull terriers. It’s a broad term, in the way that beagles and Rhodesian ridgebacks are both technically “hounds” despite weighing roughly 20 and 90 pounds, respectively. “Pit bull” is a classification used to describe four distinct breeds: American pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, American bully, and Staffordshire terrier. It’s an umbrella term that places <a href="https://www.instagram.com/_bronsonthebully/?hl=en">Bronson</a>, a short and stout 62-pound bully with a champagne tri-color coat and 220,000 Instagram followers, in the same category as <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reythepitbull/?hl=en">Rey</a>, a “pocket pittie” just a hair over 40 pounds with a slate-colored coat, a white underbelly, and 38,500 followers.</p>
<p id="RNBfiM">The second misconception is about demeanor: Pit bull–type dogs are often assumed to be more aggressive and dangerous. It’s reductive to assume every dog of one breed has the same personality, but humans struggle to avoid generalization among their own species, let alone another one. Breed-specific legislation targeting these types of dogs spans from inconvenient (<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/renting-with-pit-bull-type-dogs_b_8044328">extra pet deposits</a> for renters with pit bull–type breeds) to exclusionary (American pit bull terriers are <a href="https://www.petrelocation.com/blog/post/can-pit-bulls-travel-to-australia">banned from importation</a> to Australia).</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="dwgnUK"><q>“It will be someone who I don’t recognize their name who will message and be like, ‘Yeah, we adopted our dog three years ago because of Gracie.’ … I think the dogs I’ve helped are dogs I’ve never heard of.” —Tanya Turgeon</q></aside></div>
<p id="yLKr6C">In “<a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23731/american-dog-0814/">The State of the American Dog</a>,” Tom Junod delves into the ubiquity (and controversy) of pit bull–type dogs. They are a distinctly American dog, he writes, in the way in which we characterize ourselves as “a country of rescues, a country of mutts”; they are also distinctly American in the way in which they reveal the dissonance between the nation’s intentions and its realities:</p>
<blockquote><p id="1rrFAc">There is no other dog that figures as often in the national narrative—no other dog as vilified on the evening news, no other dog as defended on television programs, no other dog as mythologized by both its enemies and its advocates, no other dog as discriminated against, no other dog as wantonly bred, no other dog as frequently abused, no other dog as promiscuously abandoned, no other dog as likely to end up in an animal shelter, no other dog as likely to be rescued, no other dog as likely to be killed. </p></blockquote>
<p id="q8xjJk">It wasn’t always this way. In the first half of the 20th century, the pit bull was a quintessential American dog. Sgt. Stubby, a pit mix, was part of four major offenses during World War I, led American Legion parades, and earned a <a href="https://portal.ct.gov/MIL/MAPO/History/People/Stubbys-Obituary"><em>New York Times </em>obituary</a>. American pit bull terriers were used <a href="http://love-a-bull.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Pit-Bull-war-ads-.jpg">in wartime advertisements</a>. Both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson <a href="https://www.ccspca.com/blog-spca/education/pit-bull-facts/">reportedly had pit mixes</a>. Some claim pit bull terriers were even used as “<a href="https://pethelpful.com/dogs/The-Pit-Bull-Dog-Once-Knows-as-the-Nanny-Dog-What-Happened">nanny dogs</a>” in the early 1900s. </p>
<p id="enGGEm">But the breed took a serious image hit in the ’80s. They became the defense dog of choice for drug dealers around the country. “The dogs are legal to own, more terrorizing than guns and better at delaying police,” reads <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/06/29/Pit-bulls-becoming-drug-dealers-weapon-of-preference/6208551937600/">one wire story from 1987</a>. The same year, <em>Sports Illustrated </em>published a cover story that declared pits a “<a href="https://vault.si.com/vault/1987/07/27/the-pit-bull-friend-and-killer-is-the-pit-bull-a-fine-animal-as-its-admirers-claim-or-is-it-a-vicious-dog-unfit-for-society">friend and killer</a>.” Dog fighting, which was outlawed in all 50 states by 1976, picked up in popularity in the ’90s, and the prevalent breed in American fighting rings is the <a href="https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/dogfighting/closer-look-dogfighting">pit bull terrier</a>. In 2007, nearly 50 dogs, mostly American pit bull terriers, were seized from then–Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick’s property. </p>
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</div></a> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CABN7DkAwZ-/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">Happy Mother’s Day to all mamas out there from this big-headed goober! </a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/_bronsonthebully/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> Bronson the Bully</a> (@_bronsonthebully) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-05-10T19:26:22+00:00">May 10, 2020 at 12:26pm PDT</time></p>
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<p id="0t3GdH">The number of pit bull and pit mixes euthanized in the United States per day is <a href="https://kenneltocouch.org/2019/08/pit-bull-euthanasia-and-how-to-put-an-end-to-it/">between 2,000 and 3,000</a>. Some studies estimate <a href="https://saveabullmn.org/pit-bulls-and-euthanasia-rates/">only one in 600 pit mixes will be adopted</a>, and that about 75 percent of municipal shelters euthanize a pit mix immediately upon intake. <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/07/pit-bull-ban-aggressive-dog-breed-bronwen-dickey/#close">Numerous</a> <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/47434223/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/are-pit-bulls-inherently-dangerous/#.Xzyc6ZNKj9E">animal behaviorists</a> and <a href="https://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/abs/10.2460/javma.243.12.1726">scientists have dispelled</a> assumptions about pit tendencies toward aggression. <a href="https://www.petmd.com/blogs/thedailyvet/ken-tudor/2014/april/dog-bite-fatalities-breed-or-human-problem-31529">Studies instead show</a> that the majority of dog bites come from animals that haven’t experienced positive human interactions (76 percent) or that are chained or isolated (73 percent). Any dog that’s chained is statistically more likely to bite, but someone looking for a guard animal is more likely to choose a hefty pit mix with a baritone bark over a 7-pound Yorkshire terrier. </p>
<p id="F0ils7">When I reached out to Turgeon, I let her know I was coming in with a bit of bias: My four-year-old dog, Scout, is a rescue that was classified as a pit-hound mix, though from certain angles, he looks more like a Chihuahua or Baby Yoda. We chatted about some of the more unexpected factors of pit ownership, like the unsolicited comments from friends, family, and strangers about pit behaviors. If I show someone a picture of Scout curled into my lap, they ask about his breed or try to guess his mix. But if he’s out on the porch, shoulders stiffened with Staffy-like muscularity, yelping at someone who is wearing a hat in a way that offends his sensibilities, passersby will ask whether he’s part pit bull. His good traits bring about speculation on his lineage. His more abrasive tendencies bring up questions about which pit bull–type breed is in his DNA.</p>
<p id="EaMKZ2">Turgeon had a comparable learning curve. She felt neutral about pit bull types before she got Elsie, and she assumed others felt similarly. </p>
<p id="OsjgnQ">“I didn’t really think anything of it,” Turgeon said. “I thought no one else thought anything of it. I was super naive, but everybody was yelling their opinion all day long. That’s when I realized having this kind of dog came with other stuff.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="NdSRGH"><q>“Putting Bronson content out there has helped a lot of people realize that some of the misconceptions about these dogs are crazy and not true.” —Sydnee Gilletti</q></aside></div>
<p id="M4JiSZ">One guy on the street told Turgeon both her and the dog looked mean. Two different men told Turgeon she had no business “having that kind of dog.” Parents would let their children crouch down to pet Elsie, then quickly put the kid away after asking Turgeon about her breed. </p>
<p id="UCw8E5">Turgeon began to use social media to showcase Elsie’s goofier side. She started <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pit-bull-movie-photos-reenactments_n_55d39b3ae4b055a6dab1d2fd?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAF5_AUGbvjmFeglPabd2V0GS-wAkBR7RK60uMIe3FLZvkippbjH4xBlGjpwCdFNXy1P3uwqZmk6ERdTr2FCppXlwmQSyug5cFaxDvfz4MVVrHFgawWpcCbI2UyZ6m4ABopUDu5yXZjuNNe3sATSXjqeCbNb0l1SYF-gGa3jtZOLu">Movie Mondays</a>, which featured the duo imitating classic film shots like the kiss from <em>The Notebook</em> (Elsie played Allie) or the cover of <em>American Beauty</em>. It was an attempt to sweeten two things that the public tended to dislike: Mondays and pit bulls. When Elsie got breast cancer, Turgeon raised money for the Humane Society of New York by selling pink paintings Elsie made using her paws and tail. When Turgeon adopted Gracie, she continued the tradition of showcasing her dog’s daily happenings. Gracie’s page has clips that display her mastery of tricks and commands, but also simple, candid moments that showcase her connection to humans and her everyday dog pursuits.</p>
<p id="aPF6wD">Those prosaic moments, without fanfare or posing, are often the ones that do best with followers, says Jacqueline Keidel Martinez, Rey’s owner. Unlike Turgeon, Martinez had previous experiences with pits before she adopted Rey and her other dog, KJ. Her father gravitated toward more “vilified breeds,” she says, and she grew up with Dobermans and Rottweilers. When she was 16, a few years before the Vick dog-fighting scandal, her father brought home a pit bull terrier, who was a “wonderful family dog.” Martinez adopted KJ and Rey knowing they were likely to be emotive and goofy, like many pit mixes, but she was also prepared to face the interrogations that these dogs sometimes prompt. Martinez works in public relations, and she began Rey’s Instagram account as a testing ground to learn more about the app’s algorithm. Now it’s a chance for her to show a soft, everyday dog side to a pit, and counter the violent, fight-centric imagery that accompanied portrayals when Martinez was a teen. </p>
<p id="vi6Bmq">“Sixteen years ago, when social media wasn’t what it is today, all we had were sensationalized reports about pit bulls mauling children and dog fighting,” Martinez says. “This kind of puts the power back in our hands to change that narrative.”</p>
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</div></a> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDjNWQ2g5nz/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">For the past few years I have had the privilege to work at a bereavement camp in NYC, which has made me all the more sensitive to the staggering numbers of people globally who have lost loved ones these past several months. Bereavement camp seemed more important than ever and I was thrilled to learn it would be happening...but in a virtual setting. What does this have to do with Gracie? Well, when things go virtual she gets to participate!! Above is a couple seconds of top secret footage c/o our awesome producer @mizlizandco (thank you for including us!!) Also thank you to the counselors and kids for making this extraordinary experience happen each year! Grief happens differently for everyone...please reach out to someone if you need help. And know that it is ok to find moments of joy from watching a dog doing what she loves while wearing a tutu and propeller hat. Sending love and peace to everyone and anyone who needs it. </a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/iheartpgracie/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> Princess Grace (P. Gracie)</a> (@iheartpgracie) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-08-06T13:55:04+00:00">Aug 6, 2020 at 6:55am PDT</time></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="uEeSny">The world of pitfluencers covers multiple breeds, countries, personalities, and presentations. Staffies <a href="https://www.instagram.com/the_blueboys/?hl=en">Darren and Phillip</a> from Australia (723,000 followers) model their custom robes and wool-knit sweaters. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/piratepitbull/?hl=en">Pirate</a>, an American Staffy mix in Los Angeles (66,100 followers) has a penchant for <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDCDvSognnh/">headwear</a>. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/noah_and_lincoln/?hl=en">Noah and Lincoln</a> are stout, serious-looking rescued American bullies (177,000 followers) built like hippos. These pitfluencers answer Q&As about foster processes, explain raw food diets, and show off dog toy deliveries. Along the way, many educate the scrolling public about adoption and rescue processes. </p>
<p id="7QeMlz">Turgeon regularly hears from internet strangers who say how Gracie inspired them to seek out a rescue dog, or changed their perception of pit bull–type dogs.</p>
<p id="CZKv9L">“It’s the quietest followers who you don’t realize that you’re touching,” she says. “It will be someone who I don’t recognize their name who will message and be like, ‘Yeah, we adopted our dog three years ago because of Gracie.’ … I think the dogs I’ve helped are dogs I’ve never heard of. Just ’cause someone saw the account and was like, ‘Oh my god, you made me fall in love with this I’m going to go adopt,’ and it’s a dog I didn’t even know about. So even if that happens once, that makes me over the moon.”</p>
<p id="Mr31vV">Sydnee Gilletti and her husband adopted Bronson, a three-year-old American bully, when he was seven months old. His ears had been cropped by his previous owner, and his two ochre eyebrows give him a bit of a perpetual quizzical look. Bronson’s account features clips of him cuddling with Gilletti’s other bully, Kush; trying his first pickle; and bounding up the stairs with a chew toy in his jaws. The feed came in handy when Gilletti and her husband purchased their most recent home. The homeowner’s association had rules against pit bull–type breeds, and Gilletti prepared what she called a “dissertation” to defend Bronson’s and Kush’s character, and brought in the Instagram account as another piece of evidence. </p>
<p id="I2LD48">“Putting Bronson content out there has helped a lot of people realize that some of the misconceptions about these dogs are crazy and not true,” Gilletti says. </p>
<p id="4OR9Bw">Bella Boone adopted <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bully.baloo/?hl=en">Baloo</a>, a three-year-old American Staffordshire terrier and red heeler mix, in her first year of college. The day she met Baloo, she had been sitting next to him in the shelter when a couple walked by and remarked on how beautiful Baloo looked. They asked about his breed, and Boone pointed at his information sheet, which listed “American pit bull terrier.” The couple gasped and the woman said, “Oh never mind.”</p>
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</div></a> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDZlsx_p1cn/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">This isn’t a phase, mom. I’m becoming a hippo. I live here now. _ Follow @bully.baloo for more adorable content! #thebunnyearedbully</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bully.baloo/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> Baloo the Bunny Eared Bully </a> (@bully.baloo) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-08-02T20:10:05+00:00">Aug 2, 2020 at 1:10pm PDT</time></p>
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<p id="J5qkIk">“Just saying the word ‘pit bull’ is enough to turn people away, even if their initial impression was positive,” Boone says. </p>
<p id="h5rlCI">Not a day goes by without a negative interaction because of Baloo’s looks, Boone says. Other dog owners leash up their pups and flee the dog park when they arrive, or ask whether Bella should be bringing “that kind of dog” into the space. The “hate increased tenfold when people are able to hide behind a screen,” Boone says. But Baloo has also garnered a loyal following of 150,000-plus followers on Instagram and more than half a million followers on TikTok.</p>
<p id="CydwlE">“I try to show my followers that a bully breed can be just as well trained as a German shepherd, as friendly as a golden retriever, and as cute as a doodle,” Boone says.</p>
<p id="Fq7VSx">“We get a lot of messages from people saying that they didn’t know pit bulls could be so smart, that they have never seen a pit bull be so sweet around other animals, or that they can’t believe that a pit bull could be so calm. Though the majority of our followers are pit bull lovers, we have gotten numerous messages from people saying they had been previously scared of pit bulls but have since changed their minds because of Baloo.” </p>
<p id="X6v0Y0">Gracie, Baloo, and Bronson are all signed with the <a href="http://www.thedogagency.com/about">Dog Agency</a>, the animal influencer management company started by Loni Edwards in 2015. The Dog Agency represents roughly 160 clients spanning the animal kingdom, from Chihuahuas and malteses to pigs, hedgehogs, and tortoises. Seventy percent of Edwards’s clients are dogs, and roughly 10 percent are pit bull–type dogs; they’re the second-most-common pup among her canines, besides golden retrievers (11 percent). </p>
<p id="RPbCnx">Baloo has had branded partnerships with <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B8jnZSnJWOA/">Sony Music</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CBjH03XJ2vv/">Swiffer</a>. Bronson posted <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CAyH7YigDEv/">a video with an emphatic whine-wag combination</a> that was roughly translated (by Gilletti) into an ad for Netflix’s <em>Space Force.</em> Rey recently posted her first major ad campaign with <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CD1pEHHAguj/">Swiffer</a>. Lily Bug, another of Edwards’s clients, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B1zC9TXgVxB/">promoted Capitol Records</a> with a clip of her intently watching a Katy Perry video. </p>
<p id="KfIXeh">“Dogs are extremely effective marketers,” Edwards says. “They have everything that human influencers have, plus all of these factors that are so incredibly powerful and emotional, and when you’re marketing and you have that emotional element, there’s nothing that beats that.” </p>
<p id="2Tw5o0">Pit bull types garner an exceptional amount of interaction because of their maligned identity, Edwards says. Consumers love an underdog. </p>
<p id="zeWbGp">“Bullies in particular tend to have an incredible engaged fan base, I think because of the stigma. I think because they’re the underdog … people are even more committed and even more engaged and love them that much more,” Edwards says. “There’s just that extra layer with people going above and beyond to break stigmas, to show how lovable they are.”</p>
<p id="Cdyxgu">Most of the human handlers behind pitfluencers didn’t start their social media pages in hopes of brand partnerships or extra cash. That’s just an added bonus. They shared photos because they loved their flat-nosed, perky-eared pit mixes, and hoped others would find joy in glimpses of their pup’s everyday life. Back when Turgeon started Elsie’s accounts, she made it a point to share her without a focus on breed. She wanted to showcase her personality without followers coming in with expectations about her demeanor because of her DNA. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="XrCtZX">“My whole thing was I’m just going to share her without a label, because my whole thought was to let the people just fall in love with her as much as I love her too … and if people love her too, that’s awesome,” she says. “They’re forming their opinion based on her, and not anything else.”</p>
https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2020/8/19/21375963/pit-bull-influencers-gracie-rey-bronsonJacqueline Kantor2020-06-25T08:29:21-04:002020-06-25T08:29:21-04:00Gun Violence Is Devastating New Orleans. Big Freedia Wants to End It.
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<p>‘Freedia Got a Gun,’ the new documentary about the bounce artist’s activism, is a gut-wrenching examination of trauma, the impact of Hurricane Katrina, mass incarceration, and the role they play in Black communities in her hometown</p> <p id="SXR3j8">Early in <em>Freedia Got a Gun</em>, the new documentary about gun violence in New Orleans and bounce star Big Freedia’s activism surrounding the issue, the camera settles on a 14-year-old boy drumming on Bourbon Street. Devin Walker is wearing a polo emblazoned with his yellow charter school logo and tapping drumsticks on an upended gray bucket. In a muggy neon-lit evening, he fades into the background of the French Quarter, just one of many teens drumming on the street, creating beats for boozed-up tourists to add to their Instagram Stories. </p>
<p id="CTxAaI">The clip is a wrenching juxtaposition with Walker’s first appearance in the film. Minutes earlier, he sits in a nondescript classroom at SciTech Academy surrounded by about a dozen other sixth- and seventh-graders. The school’s assistant principal, Ashonta Wyatt, sits at the front of the room, joined by Freedia, and the pair listen as the children relay stories of their intimate experiences with gun violence: one of their mothers shot in the front yard of a home, guns pulled on groups of friends in their neighborhood. Walker describes, with the same even-keeled precision with which he drums, watching his father die of a gunshot wound when he was 7 years old. </p>
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<p id="AVQwLj">In those two shots lies the duality of the city: New Orleans can be magical, a place to sip a lukewarm, cheap beer and dance to a pared-down drum beat under centuries-old wrought-iron balconies. But it is also deeply inequitable, a city where the life expectancy between residents of two ZIP codes less than 5 miles apart <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B8ZoWa6FgYE/?igshid=zfb435r91pkz">can differ by 25 years</a>, even before <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_107fec9c-8408-11ea-9d9b-df1bbbef7d77.html">COVID-19 swept through the Black community</a>.</p>
<p id="rOkHmz">The documentary begins by centering on the youngest generation, including Devin, who throughout the film grapples with both his rising list of charges for possession of a firearm, grand theft auto, and other offenses, and his desire to extract himself from a cycle of gun violence. Big Freedia details her personal experiences, including the shooting death of <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_9a935990-c849-519b-980a-90023f16f860.html">her brother in January 2018</a>. Interviews with journalist and executive producer Charles Blow, as well as community members, the <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_100ee8d9-4440-525f-8ddd-84afdca5841a.html">New Orleans Peacekeepers</a>, Walker and his family, and Wyatt flesh out the rest of the story, which delves into trauma in the community, the impact of Hurricane Katrina, mass incarceration, and the way these factors play into gun violence, an issue now deemed an <a href="https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2018-07/GVPHI-2017-Report_FINAL-WEB-2_0.pdf">epidemic and public-health concern</a>.</p>
<p id="Ion0cn">“They want to say that there’s something broken about Blackness,” Blow says early in the film. “But this is how human beings behave when they’re hurting. … We have allowed the Black community to be abused to such a degree they’re in a constant state of trauma, and they’re human beings—they’re responding to trauma. Society has to take responsibility.”</p>
<p id="HxelxW">In that way, the film is eerily prescient. It was meant to be released in early <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2020/03/tribeca-film-festival-coronavirus-1202217352/">April at the Tribeca Film Festival</a>, but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic and released this past Saturday <a href="https://www.afi.com/news/tag/freedia/">through AFI Docs</a> on the heels of a month of protests that brought thousands to the streets after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. </p>
<p id="7FzyHG">White supremacy, the resultant systemic racism, and its impacts on everything from policing and education to life expectancy and media representation have perhaps never been more topical. But they’ve been determining factors in the lives of Black children like Devin for generations. </p>
<p id="1DFKuQ">“It’s almost like the timing, it helps put attention on the film, but it’s almost an illusion,” says Chris McKim, the director and one of the film’s producers. </p>
<p id="87r88d">“If the film had premiered as planned in April, it wouldn’t have this background, this national story propelling eyes onto the project, but at the same time all these things would have been true. So it kind of feels like it’s really timely, and yet, maybe that’s kind of the problem.”</p>
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<p id="O8KCWa">As an educational consultant and activist, Ashonta Wyatt has dedicated her career to advocating for her community and for children in New Orleans schools, in which <a href="https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/education/70-of-new-orleans-2nd-graders-cant-read-at-grade-level-study-shows/289-88c09b3a-1cde-437c-bc3e-07b64a4ae4f5">an estimated 70 percent of second-graders are not reading at grade level</a>. She grew up in the Fischer Projects, a housing project on the West Bank of New Orleans known for high levels of poverty and crime and, in the ’80s, rampant <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/06/11/in-carefree-mardi-gras-city-many-blacks-are-testisfied-of-police/b68e4f4d-b094-4e5f-9963-5eef87703044/">police brutality</a>. She has seen people murdered, she has known people murdered, and in the documentary, as she does in her everyday life, she fights for the rights of Black students who, she says, are constantly given less and asked for more because of a system built on and sustained by racism. She spends time outside the schools protesting and speaking, sometimes at four or five vigils or funerals a month.</p>
<p id="hR82ZT">“In my 36 years, I can tell you I have done hundreds and hundreds of these things,” she tells the crowd in one scene, where she speaks at a vigil for a 38-year-old man killed in April 2018. “I’m waiting for y’all to raise the white flag,” she continues, as the crowd releases a plume of gold, white, and silver balloons, “so we can stop putting beautiful Black men in the ground.”</p>
<p id="qipr9G">Wyatt commands that crowd with the grace of a natural organizer. When she speaks, people listen. I know this personally, because the day that the scene in SciTech was filmed, I was teaching sixth-grade English in a classroom one floor above; Wyatt was my assistant principal. I remember her walking through the halls to pick up the students who would speak with Freedia; if we actually gathered every child who had been affected by gun violence, most classrooms would be less than half full, if that. Six children speak in that scene, and I taught four of them, including Devin, as well as several other students pictured, and their siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews. </p>
<p id="bpkcDm">I called Wyatt after I finished watching the film to talk about how the documentary could play a role in the current moment: Social media feeds are now swarmed with white people sharing anti-racist resources and suddenly grappling with their role in a system that routinely devalues and disadvantages Black life. Footage of the killing of George Floyd, Wyatt says, forces one to reckon with reality in a way that a written description often cannot; in that sense, the documentary can provide a more palpable way for viewers to understand the trajectory of students like Devin. </p>
<p id="RsBiq6">“Anytime a Black child struggles is personal to me, because I am a Black woman that used to be a Black child that other people cared enough about to fill in the gap that my family couldn’t do. So, as a community, I just think that it’s an awakening,” Wyatt says. </p>
<p id="z1matw">“The world is now catching on for the Black community … 400 years of oppression and suppression and people with their knee on our necks, and we’ve been experiencing it as a people for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Wyatt says. </p>
<p id="WkyfNe">The documentary, which was produced by World of Wonder and is still seeking distribution, runs a little under 90 minutes. It would need to be years long, she points out, to encapsulate the full depth of the Black experience in New Orleans. She and Freedia return, both in the film and in separate interviews for this article, to the importance of community in the city, and the ways in which they were raised—with family, friends, neighbors, and teachers stepping in to parent, nurture, and lead.</p>
<p id="VZQS6K">But the “village” that they speak of is eroded by the demographic and geographic impacts of Katrina, as well as violence and mass incarceration; as of late 2019, Louisiana had the <a href="https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_4dcdfe1c-213a-11ea-8314-933ce786be2c.html">highest incarceration rate in the country</a>. In September, city data showed that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/one-in-7-adults-in-new-orleans-have-a-warrant-out-for-their-arrest-new-data-shows/2019/09/20/db85a5c8-da3d-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html">one out of seven adults in New Orleans</a> had a warrant out for their arrest, many for failure to appear for court dates for minor, nonviolent offenses. The dismantling of the public school system after Katrina led to the <a href="https://neworleans.edweek.org/veteran-black-female-teachers-fired/">loss of veteran Black teachers</a>, and education in the city is currently determined by a web of independent charter networks that have struggled with a <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/new-orleans-charter-network-spent-last-year-making-teaching-special-ed-students-shorted-two-years-ago/">lack of oversight and accountability</a>, and instituted policies that routinely prioritize standardized test scores over other measures of achievement, pushing children through the system often five years or more behind in reading level. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="fvLeVL"><q>“400 years of oppression and suppression and people with their knee on our necks, and we’ve been experiencing it as a people for hundreds and hundreds of years.” —Ashonta Wyatt</q></aside></div>
<p id="102FJE">There are few resources for students like Devin and his classmates to obtain consistent, <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/courts/article_1b162330-c6e2-11e9-84c5-c31beab61904.html">established treatment for PTSD</a>, which some studies estimate affects more than <a href="https://www.wdsu.com/article/opsb-says-60-percent-of-children-in-new-orleans-suffer-from-ptsd/25783377">60 percent of the student population</a>. </p>
<p id="gME1je">“New Orleans is a very special place, there’s no place like it in the world, but it’s also very dangerous, and we have to deal with a lot of danger on an everyday basis,” Freedia says. “We’re a city that fights through, we fight through everything that we have to go through, when we deal with adversity … we’re a strong city, we’re a loving and family community here, and we are striving to get our kids in a better place.” At one moment in the film, she tallies up the people she’s known who have been killed by gun violence, and settles on a number between 60 and 70.</p>
<p id="0VUW6J">“I want [viewers] to also feel the pain that we go through when the phone calls stop and the flowers stop and caskets close, and we have to deal with all the grieving, and the aftermath, and still not knowing who’s the killer … and still not feel safe in your own community and in your own city,” she says. “Most importantly, that we’ve got to stop the violence, and we’ve got to spread the love.”</p>
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<p id="vGQ2Gp">Midway through, the film veers into Hurricane Katrina and its residual impacts beyond the loss of life and property: the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/requiem-bricks/">destruction of low-income housing</a>, the dissolution of social services for youth and other at-risk populations, and the prevalence of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/ptsd-after-hurricane-katrina/403162/">PTSD and mental illness</a>. One study found the latter doubled in the years after the storm. </p>
<p id="QgfYY0">“Who’s worrying about what type of child we’re going to have five or 10 years up the road?” says one man in the Lower Ninth Ward in footage from shortly after the storm. </p>
<p id="KjYA9J">“All that has a psychic cost,” Blow says. “I look at these boys, and I see pain.” </p>
<p id="NthlCn">In 2016, the New Orleans Police Department paid out <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/20/506282657/new-orleans-to-pay-13-3-million-over-police-killings-after-hurricane-katrina">$13.3 million</a> in lawsuits stemming from police killings and injured citizens in the months surrounding Katrina. The <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/courts/article_bc5e70f8-211e-11ea-85da-5b87de21e791.html">NOPD’s consent decree</a> went into effect in 2013, after multiple instances of police brutality and cover-ups following Katrina. One of the men killed by police in the months after the storm was Anthony Hayes, the father of Cardell Hayes, Freedia’s cousin, who is currently serving 25 years in jail for the <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/courts/article_28527d66-84db-11ea-99af-6390f87408eb.html">killing of former Saints defensive end Will Smith</a> in a road-rage incident in 2016. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="qOWJKo"><q>“New Orleans is a very special place, there’s no place like it in the world, but it’s also very dangerous, and we have to deal with a lot of danger on an everyday basis.” —Big Freedia</q></aside></div>
<p id="IeAu9e">The documentary brings up a clip from December 26, 2005, that shows <a href="https://wgno.com/news/crime/video-shows-2005-police-shooting-of-anthony-hayes/">Anthony Hayes in a mental health crisis</a>, surrounded by more than a dozen cops on St. Charles Avenue. He is holding a knife. The incident lasted a little more than three minutes before he was shot nine times. </p>
<p id="N56SoX">Imagine having a counselor or therapist meet the elder Hayes on the street that day, Wyatt asks, or someone who understood how to address a man in the middle of a mental crisis without violence. Without the trauma of losing his father, what happens to Cardell, and his understanding of conflict resolution?</p>
<p id="sJzp78">“We understand that ‘Black-on-Black’ violence exists, but just because intraracial violence happens, are we supposed to just ignore the fact that police are killing Black people or the fact that there is racism in the world?” Wyatt says.</p>
<p id="cGjB9e">In that sense, the documentary wraps in on itself, spooling together cause and effect. It is both extremely of the times and evergreen: There is no discussion of gun violence without acknowledging intergenerational trauma, and talking about intergenerational trauma requires an understanding of systemic racism. And then, in the case of New Orleans, there’s no way to parse through the aftermath of Katrina without recognizing both intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, the latter of which has belatedly taken a national spotlight, and hopefully for the long haul. </p>
<p id="r11i3F">It’s all inextricable. Outside of the classroom where I taught Devin was a plaque that noted the building was originally named for John McDonogh, a slaveholder whose manumission scheme required the people he enslaved to work for 15 years to buy their freedom; his bust was <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_6f01bb22-ae44-11ea-b6c9-7f9ad1019763.html">recently removed from Duncan Plaza in New Orleans</a> and tossed into the Mississippi River by protesters. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="GTS5XZ">“There is oppression in the world,” Wyatt says. “And because a document said that we were free, that we are not actually free because of the systems that are built and continue to be perpetuated to keep us enslaved mentally, physically, economically, spiritually. So until you acknowledge that it’s still happening, present-day 2020, and until you acknowledge your role in it, whether you’re doing it by ignorance or if you’re ignoring it flat out, or because you’re uncomfortable with it, it’s not going to go away. So you have to face it head on. And I think the documentary puts it in your face in such a way that you can choose to turn it off, and that would be your choice. Or you can choose to sit down, and listen, and learn, and try to better understand what these children—who hopefully, by God’s grace, become men—have to deal with in this world.”</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2020/6/25/21302856/big-freedia-got-a-gun-documentary-new-orleans-gun-violenceJacqueline Kantor2020-05-29T06:30:00-04:002020-05-29T06:30:00-04:00How South Korea Brought Baseball Back—and What’s Different in America
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<p>The crowds have been replaced by stuffed animals and cardboard cutouts. The cheerleaders wear facemasks. The foreign-born players haven’t seen their families in months. But the KBO is back. What should MLB take away from the South Korean league’s experience? </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="OTqj99">There was no white noise. That was one of the first things Tyler Wilson noticed when he took the mound April 27 for his first exhibition start of the 2020 Korea Baseball Organization season. He could hear his spikes shuffling in the dirt, the give of the rubber as he pushed off from the mound. The murmur of the batter in the box was sharp, as were the conversations in the dugout. Usually, all of these sounds would be drowned out by the din of the crowd in the 16,000-plus capacity Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, South Korea, where Wilson’s LG Twins were facing the Kiwoom Heroes. </p>
<p id="90gyVb">“When I pitched, I could hear so many new sounds,” he says. “You hear everything so clearly. … In between innings feels strange because it’s so quiet, you’re so aware of everything.” </p>
<p id="6w4jET">Playing to an empty stadium is unsettling in any context. The lulls between action become more pronounced. Every motion is heightened, every noise is amplified. But in the KBO, subtracting the crowd strips the league of its ethos. The 10-team, 38-year-old league is sometimes known to international audiences by its bat flips; the KBO’s real defining characteristic is its fans, who regularly spend all game on their feet, regardless of the score. </p>
<p id="vxVBXQ">Jared Hoying is a chatty outfielder who often calls out words of encouragement to his Hanwha Eagles teammates. His home stadium, in Daejeon, South Korea, is the smallest in the league, with a capacity of 13,000, and when the crowd is at full tilt, “it’s like a soccer crowd thrown into a little baseball stadium,” he says. His usual quips from the outfield are no longer muffled by the noise of the fans, and now <a href="https://twitter.com/DanielKimW/status/1265603803622957056?s=20">socially distanced stuffed animals</a> fill every other seat behind home plate. The cheerleaders are still there, as is a drummer, but it’s no replacement for the usual clamor of game day.</p>
<p id="nLlrU3">“That’s the best part about the whole league … the fans, the interaction,” Hoying says. “And not having that aspect of it [now] ... is whewwww, it’s wild.”</p>
<p id="wGGzpv">Opening the 2020 season on May 5 to empty stadiums was a necessary sacrifice for the KBO. The organization became one of the first major sports leagues in the world to resume competition amid the global coronavirus pandemic, and when it emerged, oasis-like, onto late-night ESPN broadcasts in early May, it sated parched American sports fans—the first game drew in about 173,000 viewers at 1 a.m. ET—and incited a swell of optimism for the return of sports in any shape or form. Ten days later, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2020/5/18/21256724/mlb-labor-fight-players-association-coronavirus">MLB sent its players a proposal aiming to restart spring training as early as mid-June</a> and begin the regular season in early July. (The league and the players union are currently negotiating the economic proposal for a shortened 2020 season, but appear to have <a href="https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29224973/sources-mlb-proposal-includes-pay-cuts-highest-paid-players">hit an impasse</a>.) It’s tempting to envision the cloying symbolism of a first pitch timed for Independence Day weekend, the country reopening with maskless barbecues and crowds clustered in stadium parking lots, sipping Bud Light and marveling at how a novel coronavirus upended modern society in the first half of 2020. But much like one couldn’t compare the talent level of MLB (an international, high-profile league in a country of 328 million) and the KBO (which allows just three foreign players per roster in a nation of 51 million) the status of the pandemic in the United States is not analogous to the current situation in South Korea, according to public health experts. </p>
<p id="fKaExT">Hoying, Wilson, and the other foreign players of the KBO experienced firsthand the rigorous, concentrated national approach that’s necessary to bring baseball back; their spring included tracking apps, strictly enforced quarantine, and months apart from their spouses and children. But they’ve returned to their jobs—a step toward pre–COVID-19 normalcy that’s still unthinkable for millions of Americans. In three months, South Korea went from the second-highest number of cases in the world and a suddenly canceled spring training to restarting a professional sports league played in home stadiums. The country effectively identified, traced, and isolated the virus, and proved that bringing back sports is less about when a league decides to restart, and more about what a country does in the meantime. It doesn’t matter how far down the line a league schedules the first pitch or the first snap. It matters what happens in the months between. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="SK Wyverns v Hanwha Eagles - KBO League Opening Game" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/etLmPkig63ChUiTpA4XNg0Ki5q4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20008408/1222929088.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images</cite>
</figure>
<p id="0aq01I"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="UqBbKF">Wilson joined the LG Twins in 2018 after bouncing between the Norfolk Tides and the Baltimore Orioles in the three seasons prior. Spring training this year took him first to Sydney, Australia, in late January, shortly after the United States and South Korea both reported their first cases of the coronavirus on January 20. On February 21, the team moved to complete the last stretch of training, meant to go until March 19, in Okinawa, Japan. But by <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/south-korea-has-second-most-coronavirus-cases-after-china-president-says-country-faces-grave-1488824">February 24</a>, South Korea trailed just China for the globe’s highest number of cases by country. Concern over the rising case numbers in South Korea prompted Japan to announce mandatory 14-day quarantines for visitors from the country. Seoul <a href="https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/03/557d7e212882-s-korea-voices-strong-regrets-over-japans-travel-restrictions.html">countered with a suspension</a> of a visa-waiver arrangement for Japanese visitors. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="NOiIv6"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"“Is MLB Going to Be Able to Pull This Back?” Health Experts Break Down Baseball’s Plan to Return","url":"https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2020/5/26/21270112/mlb-season-proposal-safety-precautions-public-health-experts"},{"title":"Five Ways Pandemic-Era Sports on TV Could Be Better Than Ever","url":"https://www.theringer.com/sports/2020/5/28/21272876/sports-return-coronavirus-crowd-noise-madden"},{"title":"If an NBA Game Is Played Without Fans, Does It Make a Sound?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/5/28/21266636/nba-game-no-fans-bubble"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="djoDOL">The league canceled <a href="https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200227010800315">all preseason games</a> in the last week of February, and Wilson left for the U.S. on March 7. He flew back to Philadelphia, where his wife, Chelsea, was staying with their 20-month-old twin sons. Across the globe, similar situations played out with KBO teams—South Korean players returned to their country, and foreign-born players traveled to their offseason homes, under the stipulation that they be ready to return immediately when the league deemed it safe to restart. Hoying was training with the Eagles in Arizona, and went to be with his family in Ohio. (Several KBO teams travel to Arizona and Florida for spring training.) His teammate Warwick Saupold, a pitcher in his second year in the KBO, flew home to Australia, where the number of confirmed cases sat at less than 100 in the first week of March.</p>
<p id="BbimYH">“We all went home and kind of hunkered down,” Hoying says. “But then it started getting flip-flopped, worse in the States, and the team was worried we weren’t going to be able to get into the country.”</p>
<p id="EzkODT">By March 21, the weekend when foreign-born players returned to Seoul, South Korea had 8,799 cases and 102 deaths. The United States had 24,418cases and 374 deaths.</p>
<p id="6jDisR">Hoying’s wife and two young daughters stayed behind in Fort Laramie, Ohio, even though they’d usually spend the spring with him; his youngest daughter was born in South Korea. For the past two years, Wilson’s wife and children have lived in Seoul with him during the season as well. Now he was faced with a previously unthinkable logistical quandary: Where was safest for his family during a global pandemic?</p>
<p id="hULpAw">“I had to make a decision—do I take my family? Do I go by myself?” Wilson says. “This is uncharted waters.” </p>
<p id="C2bdsB">There were too many unknowns at the time, he says. It wasn’t clear which country would handle COVID-19 more effectively; it wasn’t clear what life would be like in Seoul when they arrived. Chelsea and the twins stayed back, and when Wilson did land, he—as well as the other returning foreign-born players—underwent immediate testing, followed by a mandatory 14-day quarantine. They went directly from the airport, to the nose swab (a “skull scrape” is how Wilson described it), to two-week isolations—a strict, contactless period that was more austere than any stay-at-home order in the United States.</p>
<p id="f1NCVf">During the self-quarantine, members of the LG Twins organization delivered groceries to Wilson. He cooked breakfast and lunch each day, and for dinner, he ordered from a meal-delivery service similar to UberEats. Hoying’s team and translator picked up meals and groceries for him and left the packages at the door. Soon after landing, each player downloaded an app that required them to consent to allowing it to access their location at all times, effectively ensuring they wouldn’t break the self-quarantine. The app listed four symptoms—fever, dizziness, shortness of breath, and sore throat—and required the returning players to either check yes or no for each symptom once in a 24-hour span. </p>
<p id="pSStcP">When Wilson first returned to the U.S., the plan had been to meet up with his family in Philadelphia then travel to the University of Virginia, where he and Chelsea met as athletes, playing baseball and basketball, respectively. But UVA shut down the sports facilities soon after he returned, and by the date of his flight back to South Korea, he had lost valuable training time and was now attempting to fulfill his usual preseason regimen in a small apartment. </p>
<p id="xUaNLP">“The initial quarantine was incredibly challenging from a preseason training standpoint,” Wilson says. “I had to get creative with new ways to get workouts in and, more importantly, find a way to keep my arm in shape.” He improvised by “playing catch” with a mattress from 2 feet away and using over- and underload balls. There wasn’t much room to focus on details, but it was enough to make sure he didn’t regress in the two weeks indoors.</p>
<p id="CCb5Sm">By the time Wilson and Hoying emerged from quarantine in early April, the shifts in daily life in South Korea—and for their families at home—were seismic. The United States was locked down under piecemeal directives by state, and even county, and South Korea was tentatively returning to normal. There were shoppers at the mall under Wilson’s apartment, and thermal scanners at the entrance to shops and restaurants. By April 21, the first day of exhibition games, the number of active cases in South Korea was down to 2,233, with 237 deaths; in the U.S., there were 693,408 active cases and 45,536 deaths. </p>
<p id="mL8WDm">The United States is still struggling to figure out how to flatten the curve without suffocating the economy. South Korea has not only flattened its curve, it has crushed it, says Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at Oxford College of Emory University. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="o1pbHu"><q>“I had to make a decision—do I take my family? Do I go by myself? This is uncharted waters.” —Tyler Wilson</q></aside></div>
<p id="lOqlv9">“If the U.S. flattens the curves into a mesa, South Korea flattened it into a pancake,” he says. “South Korea can do what they’re doing and bring back the KBO the way that they are because they are reaping the benefits of what they sowed weeks ago, in terms of fast, aggressive actions.”</p>
<p id="a2jnHC">The graph of the United States’ confirmed new cases represents a plateau with jagged edges, with crests showing dates when more than 30,000 new cases were reported in one day. South Korea’s graph peaks shortly after KBO spring training was suspended, but then trails off. After March 21, there were only six days when the country reported more than 100 new cases. </p>
<p id="c5xAIa">On the day of Wilson’s first exhibition pitch, just 10 new cases were reported. South Korea’s population is roughly one-sixth that of the U.S.’s, but on that same day, the U.S. reported about 23,000 cases.</p>
<p id="R6DYJC">The nation’s rigorous, successful handling of COVID-19 comes down to three factors, according to Daniel Kim, a journalist covering the KBO who lives in Seoul. When the outbreak first began in China, Kim says, South Korea’s proximity meant the country immediately attuned to what was unfolding to the west—the flight from Jeju International, the second-largest airport in South Korea, to the Wuhan airport takes less than two hours. While most Americans still viewed the virus as a far-off, transoceanic threat, South Koreans were well aware that an epidemic was outside their door.</p>
<p id="LBcsVL">Once the virus reached the country, it spread quickly, and the government responded in kind, imposing contact tracing and isolation solutions honed during previous coronavirus epidemics—the second major factor in South Korea’s success, Kim says. After the 2015 MERS outbreak, the country revised the <a href="https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_mobile/ganadaDetail.do?hseq=37239&type=abc&key=INFECTIOUS%20DISEASE%20CONTROL%20AND%20PREVENTION%20ACT&param=I">Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act</a>, an extensive list of guidelines that, quite simply, work to prevent what’s happening now in the United States.</p>
<p id="U3A7jO">Under the act, a positive test immediately leads to a review of the individual’s whereabouts, corroborated by CCTV and credit-card information. The government uses cellphone data and travel and medical records to track a citizen’s movements leading up to their diagnosis, then once a “patient route” is determined, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/seouls-radical-experiment-in-digital-contact-tracing">texts the information to every phone within 3.1 miles</a>. Hoying’s phone dings with emergency alerts whenever there’s an outbreak or case nearby, he says. Using government-mined data to broadcast individual travel and enforcing mandatory confinement requires a community commitment, and a sacrifice of privacy, that would be almost unthinkable stateside; hundreds are protesting basic stay-at-home orders across the U.S. </p>
<p id="wXVBRy">“These are all privacy issues—I don’t think such a thing is doable back in the States,” Kim says. “But they basically said public health is more important than personal privacy. … That was the decision that the government made, and were able to change the laws back in 2015. The law was prepared for times like this.”</p>
<p id="aGLOib">Mask-wearing is more normalized, Kim says, because of the MERS outbreak and the air pollution, and walking outside with one has come to be as natural as remembering to put on a pair of socks. Korean culture places a great emphasis on respect for elders—age is the second question one might get in a new interaction, after one’s name. This regard for authority is another reason South Korean has seen a nationwide buy-in, along with a sense of cultural responsibility. </p>
<p id="CkwLvf">“In times like this, that culture helps ... you just follow the orders,” he says. “Koreans don’t want to have a negative impact on others. There’s a sense of responsibility to be within yourself and make sure that you don’t bother people around you.” </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="SK Wyverns v Hanwha Eagles - KBO League Opening Game" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9heN0Y-2S6lgAtm9K2Ee53uwEJs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20008412/1222927893.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images</cite>
</figure>
<p id="WnMtvn"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="G3RKjo">Conversations with Wilson, Hoying, and Saupold about the KBO all led back to one thing: the fans. Their in-game experiences with the league rival any other playing atmosphere the trio has experienced, whether it be MLB or Division I competition. A regular-season, low-stakes MLB contest is often marked by a contended mellowness. There’s a certain joy in enjoying a game without high investment, in watching the action just for the sake of having something to watch, and not being tied to every single move as a major, franchise-defining play. </p>
<p id="RbW0nd">That’s not the mind-set in the KBO. Base hits in a double-digit rout get the level of enthusiasm often reserved for walk-off home runs in the States. A team can be down by 10, but the crowd will still be standing until the final out. </p>
<p id="Tf7nZS">Broadcasting the games on ESPN to a new audience without the packed stadiums is like presenting a sales pitch without your kicker, Wilson says. </p>
<p id="t8qdVB">“I absolutely love it,” he says. “You feed off of it. Those days when you feel a little tired, or worn down, the fans are in it. You get a lot of energy from them.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="Z60Nqc"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="MDbqtG">Saupold remembers a game last year. He was sitting in the dugout with the Eagles down by 10 in the eighth inning, and the crowd energy showed no signs of waning. “It’s never a dull moment,” says Saupold, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers as well as the Perth Heat of the Australian Baseball League. “Every game feels like a playoff game. They all bring so much energy and it does make baseball a lot more fun.”</p>
<p id="MgTW4G">The only rooting interest to rival baseball in South Korea is the national soccer team during the World Cup, Kim says. But there’s nothing that comes close to the KBO. </p>
<p id="OweY9C">“Koreans like to have results right away and move on to the next set of games,” Kim says. A set number of outs breaks one game into “27 mini games, all lined up,” Kim says. “The flow of the game fits in culturally well with Koreans.” </p>
<p id="RQDeoJ">It’s also a release, Kim says. He worked for the New York Mets from 1998 to 2004, including two years as an interpreter, and has been to all of the major league stadiums as well as numerous All-Star Games. The passion among Korean fans is deeper, he says, than anything he’s witnessed in a ballpark in the States. </p>
<p id="LbHons">“In many other aspects of Korean lives, you’re supposed to suppress your feelings,” he says. “ … You’re not supposed to say anything controversial. There’s no right output to get your energy out, you’re supposed to just be one of many, so I think when they come to baseball stadiums, they just let everything out. I think that’s one of the deeper reasons why Korean fans, when they come to the stadium, they’re so loud and they’re so passionate about baseball.”</p>
<p id="8LIq1a">Fans are encouraged to channel the emotions of everyday life—rage, joy, disappointment—to a singular cause, spurred on by cheerleaders. Wilson compares it to college sports fandom. There is less focus on superstar names, and more of a kinship to the larger cause. The buy-in to the local team, in some ways, parallels the buy-in to the country’s COVID-19 containment. </p>
<p id="PDB0li">“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Wilson says. “The engagement is on a different level, the accessibility of players is on a different level.”</p>
<p id="pTetXR">You could hear a pin drop in the early exhibition games, Hoying says. </p>
<p id="hOzDHX">His typical outfield repartees are typical “baseball-type talk”: “hell yeah, nice play,” “oh yeah, you’re toast,” “oh yeah, he’s gone,” and now they’re eerily broadcast to the entire stadium. Hoying says the silence has made players more hesitant to talk in the dugout, fearful that something can be picked up by the opponent or a television crew. Kim noticed how conversations all around the venue became more hushed. </p>
<p id="dZCSRE">After two weeks of exhibitions, most of the players, staff, and usual media had grown accustomed to the eerie stadium silence and the idiosyncrasies of baseball without fans by Opening Day. They’d also adjusted to the new reality of playing sports with the constant threat of a highly transmissible virus: masks, temperature checks, no spitting, and silence. The oddest addition was dozens of media—from other countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—as outlets sent their Seoul correspondents to cover one of the only organized games worldwide. </p>
<p id="sA0X2K">The KBO has made an effort to ease the adjustment for the staff and players. <a href="https://twitter.com/SBNation/status/1259352123369680896">Cardboard cutouts of fans</a> sit in the empty seats, and viewers are projected onto the Jumbotron via video chat. The cheer masters are there to lead the cheerleaders through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3VggKtVSs&feature=youtu.be">each batter’s walk-up song</a>, quick jingles that are set to popular songs and accompanied by choreographed dances usually performed by the full crowd. </p>
<p id="qlYHCU">The first few games were fine in terms of energy, Hoying said. Everyone was excited to be back playing competitive baseball. But that initial surge is slowly burning out. It’s a completely different challenge than anything he’s faced in the past. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="yhDcYt"><q>“South Korea can do what they’re doing and bring back the KBO the way that they are because they are reaping the benefits of what they sowed weeks ago.” —Zachary Binney</q></aside></div>
<p id="gwaz0R">“Baseball is hard enough mentally,” he says. “The game is based around failure. We have all learned to deal with failure in different ways … as a ball player, it’s amazing what a crowd chanting your name can do for you mentally.” </p>
<p id="9IHIAT">The current KBO schedule will have games running until October 18, with six matchups a week, and no All-Star break. There are still stringent restrictions on international travel into the country; Saupold’s fiancée usually comes out multiple times during a season, but he’s realized he may not be able to see her until the fall. Hoying’s and Wilson’s families are still in the States. Hoying’s wife and two young daughters are set to travel to South Korea at the end of May. Wilson’s family is due to fly out the first week of June, but any entrants to the country still have to quarantine for 14 days, and if they’re not a Korean citizen or dependant on a foreigner with a Korean work visa, they are required to stay in government-arranged housing for the two weeks, at costs of up to $100 per person, per day. So a tentative plan includes Chelsea’s father flying to Seoul with her and the twins, then staying in the airport overnight before immediately heading back to the U.S. </p>
<p id="EVfI4L">“Chelsea and the boys will arrive and spend 14 days in an apartment separate from me—I will not be able to see them,” Wilson wrote in an email about his family’s plans. “Then we will be able to finally be reunited and start life together again, almost three months since I last saw them.”</p>
<p id="EDws45">By then, the season will still be relatively young. It’s too soon to know how much the absence of a cheering crowd will affect play or morale, or how the shortened spring training and condensed schedule may affect the quality of play, or the health of players. The KBO is a much thinner league than MLB. There is no deep reserve of minor league talent waiting to step up in the event of injuries, and in less than a month of play, teams are already seeing the impact of a shortened spring training. </p>
<p id="knLbEB">The thick of summer, when the weeks fall into a humid rhythm of back-to-back-to-back games and pitches blur together, will likely test players who are used to standing, singing fans for every batter. </p>
<p id="VtWMOC">“We aren’t yet into the dog days of grinding through when you’re exhausted,” Wilson says. “Those are the games when the fans really are a huge pick-me-up when you’re searching for a little extra something.” </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="SK Wyverns v Hanwha Eagles - KBO League Opening Game" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PD0nHZp1mHC6uj1XdPtV8VfMF7M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20008422/1222926809.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images</cite>
</figure>
<p id="gpRiMf"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="YdenlE">Twenty games in, Wilson’s LG Twins are second in the league at 14-6. Wilson’s first win of the season was a Tuesday game at Hoying and Saupold’s Eagles; he allowed two hits with three strikeouts (including Hoying) in six innings. The league has, thus far, not had a single player or staffer test positive for the coronavirus, which would shut down games for three weeks for the entire KBO. </p>
<p id="9jwcTE">“Life seems normal over here,” Wilson said days before the regular season began. “Outside of talking about it all the time and baseball.”</p>
<p id="eNuT5Z">Saupold realizes how lucky—and bizarre—it is for him to be playing sports while the vast majority of professional athletes have their seasons put on hold. As a sports fan himself, he turned to the Australian Football League as a comfort when he was lonely in his first spring in South Korea. He can commiserate with American fans missing their usual outlets, and has also kept in touch with former teammates in the States who are facing down the potential of losing a year of competition, a devastating blow for minor league players looking to break through to the next level.</p>
<p id="PLlfFG">“They could lose a whole year of baseball,” Saupold says. “You’re pretty much a year on the back burner, a year from trying to get to your dream, get to the major leagues. It’s a very tough spot.”</p>
<p id="Bi1Ome">But there’s a risk in jumping to ease up on social distancing restrictions too quickly, even if it’s only to bring players together for training. Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball continued exhibition games in March until three players on one team tested positive; now, the league is eyeing a tentative June start after pushing back the regular season twice. While no player in MLB has tested positive, there were seven known NBA players with the virus within a week of the season’s suspension. </p>
<p id="f1QSpb">It’s going to be difficult to bring sports back in the U.S. safely at the current level of infection in the country, Binney says. It’s not about how long into the pandemic a country is, but about how it’s meeting criteria in terms of bringing down case numbers, identifying new cases, and isolating those cases. Meeting that criteria means staying tough on the virus—now, and moving forward. </p>
<p id="lwHepk">“If you take your foot off the gas, too soon or too much, you can just roll down the hill and end up right back where you started,” Binney says. “And then even if you did bring sports back, you lost it again, and nobody wants that.” </p>
<p id="vFmval">One could easily watch the South Korean players undergoing quick temperature checks, distancing themselves in the dugout, and playing under the watchful eye of masked umpires, and figure: Why not us, why not now? To the TV spectator at home, a crowd seems like a small thing to give up to get games back. But take out the fans, and add up the rosters, staff, trainers, broadcasters, and necessary stadium personnel, and groups of up to 100 people would still be needed to run just one baseball game. That’s significantly more than the limit of 10 people recommended by everyone from the World Health Organization to <a href="https://templatearchive.com/coronavirus-guidance/">President Trump</a> (at one point). And based on data, America isn’t ready for that yet. </p>
<p id="2dd7tX">“The message people should be taking is not, ‘Look, the KBO is restarting, we should do what they’re doing and restart MLB,’” Binney says. “The message should be—because South Korea got cases down to a very low level, the KBO was able to start, wouldn’t that be cool?” </p>
<p id="X6BwGl">Herd immunity is frequently tossed around as a justification to filling stadiums as soon as the fall without a vaccine. But for this strain of the coronavirus, current hypotheticals about immunity are based more on wishful thinking than actual scientific evidence.</p>
<p id="ziBGuC">“The important thing to remember here is that we just learned about this virus four months ago,” says Jill Weatherhead, an assistant professor in infectious diseases at Baylor University. “The amount of scientific knowledge we’ve gained about it is incredible … but there is so much we don’t know. And so many of those really salient points are going to dictate the safety of having group activities.” </p>
<p id="YO1fzz">It’s impractical to make assumptions about how COVID-19 can affect a team’s schedule given the virus has been around for less than the length of what would have been the major league season so far. </p>
<p id="1i0TWW">It’s easier for South Korea to restart a national league given the country’s unified approach and geographical size—players travel to every away game by bus. The United States’ overarching response to the virus at the moment is fractured, at times split as narrowly as county-by-county policies. But American sports leagues are national organizations, and allowing them to proceed as close to normally as possible, with precautions in place to protect everyone from starters to maintenance staff, requires a unified approach, Binney says. </p>
<p id="HwSgnt">Baseball in South Korea, despite its safe return, is still far from normal. Plans for an early June reconsideration of fan attendance will likely be reevaluated after a spike in infections stirred up fears about a potential second wave. On May 10, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/10/853468647/south-korea-records-spike-in-new-coronavirus-cases-after-nightclub-outbreak">34 new cases were reported in one day</a>, likely tied to one man who tested positive after attending five nightclubs and bars. And on May 28, 79 new cases—the highest reported in almost eight weeks—were announced, mostly tied to an e-commerce company. Hoying is hankering for the fans to return soon; entering Friday, the Hanwha Eagles were nine of 10 teams in the standings at 7-14, with a five-game losing streak, including back-to-back losses at home to Wilson’s LG Twins, and two defeats with double-digit runs this season. When a player’s mental and physical resources are drained, there are no reserves to tap into but their own. </p>
<p id="t2ncmB">“Seeing a crowd yelling in pure joy brings so much happiness and joy for myself … makes you feel almost invincible out there,” he says. “Now, without that element I’ve gotten used to over the years, it’s really hard to find something to get that edge that I have been talking about.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ChCH9X">Hoying’s life is likely closer to routine than the vast majority of his peers or his countrymen. But there are reminders of the lingering effects of COVID-19 in every inning. People pay money to cram into inflexible plastic seats hundreds of yards removed from on-field action to be part of a raucous crowd, to high-five strangers, to take part in the anonymous exaltation of joining a larger, singular cause. Losing that collective experience not only distances fan bases from the team, but removes an intrinsic aspect of the player experience. The impact of the virus is seen most clearly in what it has taken away. </p>
<p id="yoPMux"></p>
https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2020/5/29/21274257/kbo-return-south-korea-baseball-pandemicJacqueline Kantor2020-04-27T07:40:31-04:002020-04-27T07:40:31-04:00Remembering “The Note” on ‘Jersey Shore’
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<p>In the show’s second season, Snooki and JWoww waltzed into an internet cafe and began typing up a letter about lust and infidelity. The world would never be the same. </p> <p id="8WVcsF"><em>Welcome to Reality TV Week at </em>The Ringer! <em>In addition to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/27/21231722/best-reality-tv-character-bracket-round-1"><em>celebrating the best characters in the genre’s history</em></a><em>, we’ll also be remembering some of its most iconic moments, starting, of course, with The Note. </em></p>
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<p id="fa9a6f">In the violent climax of the most tumultuous story arc in <em>Jersey Shore</em> history, there is a sandwich. </p>
<p id="CgwHHf">People are bleeding, acrylic nails are broken, and hair extensions litter the kitchen counter. The fight <em>technically</em> started because Jenni made a comment about Pauly D’s drunkenness on a phone call, but the root of the tension stems directly from The Note: a four-paragraph, 63-word missive slipped into the second drawer of Sammi’s plastic shelves with her name written in blue marker and underlined four times.</p>
<p id="Kfml53">In the corner of the kitchen, Ron is nonchalantly building what appears to be a four-layer sandwich with no less than eight slices of bread, some stacked directly on top of each other, interspersed with unidentified deli meat and cheese. Next to him stands Sammi, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, fresh off an all-out cat fight with Jenni, who sleeps approximately three feet away from her.</p>
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<p id="Oyr0lR">Ron calmly places bread slice on top of bread slice as Snooki, all 56 inches of her pulsing with indignant rage, screams the five words that fracture the female faction of the Shore House irreparably: “SHE WROTE THE NOTE, TOO!!!’ </p>
<p id="TGBvN2">The absurdity of it all. Ron is calmly preparing a 6-inch <em>tall</em> sandwich in the same scene as a life-changing fight; an all-out brawl was spurred in part by a piece of paper that includes the phrase “grinding with multiple fat women”; a two-episode mystery culminates with Snooki hurtling across the kitchen, knocking Ron away from his sandwich. You couldn’t write this shit. Reality TV is great when it enforces the Mark Twain adage: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”</p>
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<p id="ANcKzE">How did we get here? A primer for those who didn’t just binge eight hours of this show <em>in the name of journalism</em>: In Season 2, Sammi and Ron arrive in Miami broken up but still emotionally invested in each other. Two nights at the club end with them screaming drunkenly, and after Sammi leaves in tears, Ron engages in behavior ranging from motorboating to making out with two women at once, then crawls into Sammi’s bed both nights. He offers her sugarcoated explanations of what he did after she left, despite the fact that the men in the house (and Angelina!) witnessed him in action. Snooki and Jenni are clued in about Ron’s mischief and then witness it firsthand. Sammi, meanwhile, is encouraged by Ronnie’s recommitment to their relationship—at one point sitting by his side through a four-hour tattoo session—while also imploring Snooki and Jenni that “If you guys know something, you guys should tell me. I would be very upset if you guys didn’t.” Sam even goes as far as to tell Angelina that if that duo knew anything about Ron and didn’t tell her, she would never consider them a close friend, <em>ever</em>. </p>
<p id="9CqJkD">And so, the bumbling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Miami decide to visit a cybercafe to type up The Note (using vocabulary such as “breasts” to disguise their identity). That’s the SparkNotes version, though I’d also recommend a rewatch. Words can’t fully communicate the nuances of the first morning the note is uncovered. Each cast member becomes an amateur sleuth to determine the writer: Ron, for example, fixates on the use of “wisely”—Snooki doesn’t have that sort of vocabulary, he reasons, so Jenni is involved; Pauly D responds by proclaiming “GYM, TAN, and FIND OUT WHO WROTE THE NOTE.”</p>
<p id="S3Vcha">But of course, because this is not fiction, no one responds like the viewers (or the housemates) expect. These are real people who act on instinct over rationale more often than not, which most of us would do if trapped in a house with seven other people with no internet, reading materials, or outside communication, and a never-ending supply of alcohol. Sammi is more concerned about the identity of the note-writers than the note’s contents, and the entire plan blows up in Snooki and Jenni’s face, culminating in a series-defining physical fight. </p>
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<p id="PvJ8XO">Only one episode in the second season explicitly references the drama by name—Episode 5 is oddly titled “The Letter,” though no one called it that—but the actual text of the message, and the ensuing chaos, is part of <em>Jersey Shore </em>lore. The cast still jokingly brings it up a decade later in episodes of <em>Jersey Shore: Family Vacation</em>, and the early departure of Angelina in Season 2 and her absence from the next four seasons stems in part from her role in the debacle. The episode in which the note is penned premiered almost exactly 10 years ago, but to this day, you can purchase tapestries, mugs, and framed prints with the infamous admission from <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/601541363/the-jersey-shore-note-11oz-mug?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=jersey+shore+note&ref=sr_gallery-1-1&bes=1">Etsy</a>, <a href="https://society6.com/product/anonymous-letter-to-sammi-sweetheart-jersey-shore_tapestry?sku=s6-10035554p42a55v412&c_kid=s6-10035554p42a55v412&utm_source=GOOGLE&utm_medium=cpc&campaign=%5BB%5D_1027_US_%5BPLA%5D_DSK&adgroup=Home+Decor+-+Wall+Tapestries+-+NewPT&utm_term=PRODUCT_GROUP?tracking=search&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_7W59IqH6QIVeezjBx2hmADDEAQYASABEgLY4fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds">Society6</a>, and CafePress, among others. </p>
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<p id="abRXzP">The entire liquor-soaked allegory addresses age-old questions of friendship, loyalty, and honesty. One’s answers to the moral quandaries raised speak volumes about their sense of responsibility. Consider this: Does Sammi have a right to be mad at Ronnie for his transgressions in the first two episodes, even though they weren’t <em>technically </em>together? Do Jenni and Snooki have a moral obligation to tell Sammi they know Ron’s being an asshole, even if Sammi is often an asshole herself? What’s worse: Ron lying to Sam, or Jenni and Snooki lying about writing the note? Why is Angelina HERE and why does she always cause so much DRAMA??? </p>
<p id="cMUvmC">The way the cast behaves, and the real-life stakes that keep this story line afloat for seven-plus episodes, all come down to filming. The drama is created because of the accountability caused by the cameras, and then the cameras are there to capture the drama. </p>
<p id="g0tIDw"><em>She’s going to look like such an idiot</em>, is a refrain Jenni returns to when justifying why they need to tell Sammi the truth. But Jenni is talking about the rest of them as well: They know how it looks for them to have these conversations about Ron and not tell Sammi, and they know it’ll all come out eventually, because this is reality TV, and they were already one season into this grand adventure. Take the penultimate line of the note itself: “Multiple people in the house know, therefore you should know the truth.” </p>
<p id="dNABzE">It’s clear that Sammi’s feelings outside of this house—when this is aired, and the truth is revealed—matter to them. They’re concerned about optics, but they’re also genuinely concerned about their friend. The Note was written so Snooki and Jenni could cover their asses when this all came out; it was also written because of an undeniable sense of loyalty.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="EwGcQc">The Season 2 saga of The Note is great TV because it’s unhinged, messy, indulgent, and drunk—the visual equivalent of a double order of nachos eaten at 3 a.m. But it’s only that way because of the undercurrent of authentic emotions. The stakes are high because there are real relationships involved, and the way in which these allegiances and sense of responsibility shake out ends up being stranger than fiction, of course, because true interpersonal drama has no predesigned plotline. That’s always been the true strength of the <em>Jersey Shore</em> spectacle. The show’s strongest narratives are the ones that hinge on unfeigned friendships. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/27/21237786/the-jersey-shore-the-note-snooki-jwoww-ronnie-sammiJacqueline Kantor2020-01-10T08:12:41-05:002020-01-10T08:12:41-05:00Down the Bayou, Ed Orgeron’s Hometown Roots for an LSU Title
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<p>LSU plays Clemson on Monday in New Orleans for the college football national championship. About 60 miles away, at the southern tip of Louisiana, residents of Larose celebrate their native son.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="SbU2cZ">It’s two weeks after Christmas, but Coco Orgeron’s “wish list” is still up. The vertical sign, propped up in the middle of her lawn in Larose, Louisiana, shows Santa unfurling a scroll with seven items. The first on the list—LSU head coach—was checked off on November 26, 2016, when her son Ed Jr. was officially named the coach of the Tigers’ football team. Health/happiness? Check. Heisman Trophy? Check. Seafood gumbo? Check. Beat BAMA? Check. </p>
<p id="yRzmNW">“P.S. I’ve been good most of the time,” reads the bottom of the sign in red print. The only two uncompleted items on the list: increase oil prices and national championship. </p>
<p id="bIiBer">The former involves geopolitical and economic maneuvers best not addressed here. But the latter is within reach thanks to Coco’s eldest son. On Monday, Ed Orgeron will lead LSU onto the turf at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome to play Clemson in New Orleans, roughly 60 miles northeast of Larose, and try to cap an undefeated season with the program’s fourth national championship in its 127-year history. </p>
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<p id="HKATTI">At Gators Inn on the Bayou, a motel and bar 1 mile from Coco’s house across a drawbridge over the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, domestic beers will be $1 for every (LSU) touchdown, and it will be packed, bartender Donna LeBouef says, or at least as packed as a bar can get in a town of about 7,000. A photo of LSU’s Tiger Stadium in 1913 hangs on the wall behind the bar, and regulars introduce themselves with jokes like, “If you cross an armadillo with a squirrel, you get a <em>betaille</em> that can run across the water like a squirrel” (<em>betaille</em> being Cajun French for a kind of beast). </p>
<p id="3166Lv">The Gators Inn is Jack Ledet’s neighborhood spot. Ledet, 78, lives just over the bridge near the Orgeron home, and has known the family for years; in southern Lafourche Parish, a county that acts as the dangling toe on the boot of Louisiana, dipping into the Gulf of Mexico, it’s not a question of whether you know someone, but how. Ledet pulls up photos on his phone of the ferry that used to shuttle students across the bayou to school, one of Julien Orgeron, Ed Orgeron’s grandfather, in front of his fruit stand, and another of the Joy Theater, where kids used to shoot the rats that ate the leftover popcorn with BB guns. </p>
<p id="Txt8M6">Ledet used to help Julien yank that barge across the bayou. He has known “Bébé,” as Orgeron is known around here, since he was any other boy on the water, shoveling shrimp during the summer and suiting up as defensive lineman and offensive tackle for South Lafourche High School in the fall. To Ledet and many others in the region, Orgeron is a hometown icon who represents, in spirit and drive, exactly what it means to be from “down the bayou.” </p>
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<p id="6VOGtr">“It was his will and determination that did it,” he says. “That was Bébé. And his daddy was the same way. … That’s a different breed of person. He’s not going to give up. Which a lot of the locals, you can say what you want about them, but they will not give up.”</p>
<p id="IzzNTs">With his Cajun rasp and feverish intensity, Orgeron was reportedly deemed to be unsuitable<strong> </strong><a href="https://reignoftroy.com/2019/12/09/usc-didnt-hire-ed-orgeron-sounded-like/">for the USC head coaching job</a>. The announcement of his hire as the Tigers’ head coach was met with raised eyebrows and smirks. Orgeron excelled as a recruiter and a motivator as an assistant, but many didn’t take him seriously as a head coach of a major program, even in his home state. But down the bayou, his unrefined mettle is appreciated and recognized. </p>
<p id="ioGgZB">And he’s always been like this, his former teammates and neighbors say. He exudes grit not just because that’s how he is, but because of where he’s from. </p>
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<p id="40gIGd">Larose is not a town you stumble upon. To get here from the Superdome, you start by heading west and parallel to the Mississippi River. Go past the new airport terminal, where United and American Airlines will offer <a href="https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/2019/12/30/clemson-vs-lsu-gsp-adding-nonstop-flights-new-orleans/2774733001/">direct flights</a> from South Carolina’s Greenville-Spartanburg Airport for three days for visiting Clemson fans. Veer northeast and over the LaBranche Wetlands, a brackish marsh where cypress trees dangle green-gray Spanish moss from their lower branches. On U.S. Route 90 West, Subway and Family Dollar stores give way to billboards for boudin and cracklin, and then handwritten signs for fresh satsumas and “female crabs, full of eggs” from Guidry’s Seafood. As you turn onto LA 308, Bayou Lafourche emerges on the right side, still and muddy, dotted with weathered wooden docks, shrimping boats, and tugboats. It’s nicknamed the “longest main street in the world” for its diagonal slant across the southernmost part of the state, passing through 106 miles from Donaldsonville, Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico, and running parallel to Louisiana Highway 1 and Highway 308. </p>
<p id="nCGOY6">People don’t pass through here accidentally, and people don’t often leave, says Gaye Cheramie, principal and alum of South Lafourche High School, Orgeron’s alma mater. </p>
<p id="dRPoob">“I think it’s one thing that people don’t understand if you’re not from South Louisiana—people from South Louisiana stay in South Louisiana,” she says. The degrees of separation in this parish are small (“it’s more like a ‘family bush,’ not a family tree, and everyone’s related in some way”). </p>
<p id="TzyPWN">Residents are deeply tied to the land, and deeply tied to the state’s flagship university, even before Orgeron landed the top job in Baton Rouge. Louisiana doesn’t have the competing interests of Alabama, which might split allegiances between Tuscaloosa and Auburn, or Mississippi’s dichotomy between Starkville and Oxford. Rooting for LSU is almost as innate as rooting for the Saints. It doesn’t matter if you went to LSU or if you went to college at all, the Tigers are your team.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="zEI333"><q>“It’s not possible to live here and not be an LSU fan.” —Gaye Cheramie, principal and alum of South Lafourche High School</q></aside></div>
<p id="VYVLey">This is Cajun country, where cardinal directions are replaced with references to the bayou: You’re either up it, down it, on one side of it, or on the other. </p>
<p id="CPWAQj">Cajun history can be traced back to the 1600s. French families settled in Acadia, a part of eastern Canada now known as the Maritime Provinces. In 1755, they were exiled from the region after refusing an oath of allegiance to the Protestant King of England. So they scattered along the East Coast, returned to France, or sailed to south Louisiana, where their Catholicism, a shared religion with Spain, the territory’s ruler, was accepted.</p>
<p id="nVmiIB">Self-sufficiency along the bayou was key. This was a group of people expelled by their government and determined to live off the land and the water. They learned how to prepare alligator and planted okra. Every cooked meal started with the holy trinity: onions, celery, and bell pepper. Cypress trees were cut down and used for lumber. Spanish moss became stuffing for mattresses and pillows. </p>
<p id="V0biFk">“A Cajun way of life was living off the land and being with family, which taught you the morals,” says Brenda Trosclair, 66, who is a travel counselor at the Cajun Bayou Visitor Center in Raceland, Louisiana, in the northern part of the parish. “You were taught to do things as a team, as a family and how each one is important to be in that unit … It wasn’t just one family that could provide everything. It took everybody to fulfill the needs for the Cajun way of life.”</p>
<p id="qN0TRZ">“It’s not possible to live here and not be an LSU fan,” Cheramie says. </p>
<p id="qIFuM9">The area was so insular that, centuries later, Cajun French is still spoken, though it’s fading. Trosclair can speak it because it was her only method of communication with her grandparents. At Gators Inn, a regular named Jim shares a story about his teacher rapping on his hand when he spoke French in school instead of English. In the ’70s, when Cajun workers were hired to help with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1978/03/20/archives/louisiana-cajun-oilmen-in-north-sea-long-for-the-bayou-the-best.html">offshore oil operations in the North Sea</a>, deals were negotiated with foreign clients, such as Italians, in French, their only common language. Orgeron’s generation may be the last to have a solid grasp on the nuances of the dialect. French is being taught in schools, but it’s textbook Parisian French, and not the Cajun strain. In the accent though, the past lingers—it sounds flatter than a country twang, but the lilt in vowels, such as in “Coach O” or “brother,” betrays a hint of Nova Scotia. The Canadian raising of vowels elevates a two-dimensional word into something that simmers with centuries of tradition. </p>
<p id="FeVrtY">One Cajun saying best describes how Orgeron connects so well with his players, says Josh Jambon, his former South Lafourche High School teammate. Orgeron’s father, Ed Sr., used to sit out on one of the two green rocking chairs on the family lawn, “one leg cranked out,” and pass the evening chatting with whoever walked by, says Jambon, and “make <em>veiller</em>.” The term, which is pronounced “vay-yay,” means to sit, usually in the evening, and pass the time by talking with friends and neighbors. </p>
<p id="Ai6whm">“Whenever you’d pass, and there were a number of us that would always pass, it didn’t matter what we had to talk about … we’d stop and talk to him,” Jambon says of “making <em>veiller</em>” with Ed Sr. “And he always had that ability, Mr. Bébé, to be able to sit down and talk to us.</p>
<p id="3Qo2Js">“Coach O, that ability that he has to be able to talk to those young players, he got that from his dad.”</p>
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<p id="4rp012">Residents of southern Lafourche Parish describe the tenets of the Cajun way of life with language that sounds like it was lifted from one of Coach Taylor’s motivational speeches from <em>Friday Night Lights</em>: family and community, hard work and ingenuity, grit and determination. </p>
<p id="CyzvBA">“There’s this underdog mentality,” Cheramie says, “that one way or another, it’s gonna get done no matter what. And I think [Orgeron] brings his scrappiness to his coaching.”</p>
<p id="R4m8B9">When Orgeron played for his South Lafourche Tarpons, they had been the assumed underdog in Louisiana high school football for years. But in 1977, Oregon and his teammates, including quarterback Bobby “Cajun Cannon” Hebert, won the school’s second and last state championship with a 21-20 win against Bonnabel High, led by Tommy Wilcox, who went on to win the 1979 national championship with Alabama. Everyone turned out for games—elderly folks with no family members still at the school, trappers who lived out in the marsh and came back into town just for Friday nights. </p>
<p id="L1E0bG">Cheramie was a sophomore when Orgeron was a senior, and she remembers that Coco would stand in the top of the stadium’s bleachers, cheering and screaming the whole night. On the night of the state final, the stadium was so packed they let fans gather on the track and stand beside the field to accommodate a crowd of 10,000-plus. </p>
<p id="Z0cUMt">In December, I drove out to Galliano, Louisiana, to meet Andrew Martin, the president of the “Coach O Day Board of Directors,” the group behind a February 2017 banquet to salute Orgeron and commemorate the 40th anniversary of South Lafourche’s 1977 state championship. Martin, whose son played running back on the championship squad, was joined by three former players, Jambon, Mel Guidroz, and Kevin Gros, and a coach, Roe Pitre. LSU’s rout of Georgia in the SEC championship game and its blowout win over Oklahoma in the national semifinal were still to come, but it had been about a few weeks since the Tigers beat Alabama, their first defeat of the Crimson Tide since 2011, and Orgeron’s former teammates were still buzzing over the win. </p>
<p id="67UdOo">It was “surreal,” says Guidroz.</p>
<p id="07p3cD">“Not a dry eye on the bayou,” Jambon says. </p>
<p id="zfOC9m">“They had a flash flood warning Saturday night. Everybody was crying ... the rivers, the creeks …” Gros adds. </p>
<p id="pT93Zi">Their memories of their high school championship run remain sharp. There was the quarterfinal defeat of Archbishop Shaw and John Fourcade, who would go on to break Archie Manning’s passing record at Ole Miss. Then there was the 26-bus caravan to Ouachita, La., for a frigid semifinal win—the team was stranded when the brakes on the team bus froze. The bayou was empty that night, they said, because so much of the town made the<strong> </strong>six-hour drive to watch the Tarpons play.</p>
<p id="YAOLdV">Orgeron’s former high school teammates have followed his coaching career, which began as a graduate assistant at Northwestern State, where he played with Hebert, and continued on from Miami to Nicholls State, from USC to Ole Miss and back to USC—along every step, he has prioritized his hometown connections. </p>
<p id="gNvsEA">Gros, who played tailback and wingback on that South Lafourche championship team, went to upstate New York for his honeymoon—to see Niagara Falls, and to visit Orgeron during his stint as defensive line coach in Syracuse, where he says Orgeron wore plastic bags over his shoes to deal with the snow until someone convinced him to get boots.</p>
<p id="Bo93Cw">Gros took exception when the public started to make fun of Orgeron’s gravelly accent, but said Orgeron told him not to worry about it. “‘Loook, let it go, let ’em talk, don’t worry about that,” Orgeron told Gros. “And I said, ‘OK, Coach.’”</p>
<p id="h18T0C">Jambon called Orgeron up when he was in Los Angeles and got passes to a USC practice when Orgeron was an assistant. It was after the split 2003 USC-LSU championship, and Jambon’s son, then about 10 years old, couldn’t help but mention that it was rightfully LSU’s title. Orgeron, Jambon says, laughed it off.</p>
<p id="l8EpM9">When Orgeron was at Ole Miss, Pitre, a coach for the ’77 team, called him up about visiting spring practice with his staff. As they entered the facilities, Pitre spotted his old player, called out “Bébé,” and Orgeron immediately took off and tackled him in the hallway. Later, he introduced Pitre to star offensive tackle Michael Oher. </p>
<p id="pYQG3k">All of these men were at the 40th anniversary celebration for the 1977 team, and all of them remember the rising timbre in Orgeron’s voice as he gave his remarks to the crowd of nearly 1,600. The last minute of the speech, focused on how this area, these people, and Orgeron himself had to compete for everything. </p>
<p id="rMdYkR">“Don’t you never, never, <em>never</em> give up,” he said, his voice rising on the last syllable of “never,” shaking the walls of the Larose Civic Center. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="so2dTI">“He’s not polished, but he’s not brass—he’s in between,” Martin says. “People down here, when they decide to do something, they do it. He had a vision, and it came true.”</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2020/1/10/21059784/ed-orgeron-lsu-tigers-college-football-playoff-new-orleansJacqueline Kantor2019-12-04T06:20:00-05:002019-12-04T06:20:00-05:00Gym, Tan, Family: 10 Years With ‘Jersey Shore’
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<p>Through countless ups and downs, fist pumps and grenades, no show has come closer to capturing the complexities and nuances of real-life friendship</p> <p id="8N0xwB">In 2009, after years of cruising through Southern California beach towns, MTV decided to switch coasts, to pivot from wealthy West Coast teens to a relatively foreign group of people, ones who are generally found north of Delaware Bay and bound by a unique set of grooming standards and social habits, and who fondly referred to themselves as “guidos.”</p>
<p id="wMAI1d">Guidos are a regional group; a “bridge-and-tunnel crowd bound together more by attitude than by ancestral homeland,” according to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13708-2003Jul5_2.html">2003 <em>Washington Post</em> article</a>. At the time, they were characterized less by a common Italian heritage and more by distinct spray tans, chiseled abs, heavily managed hairdos that often reached skyward, and a passion for partying. And for all intents and purposes, the home of the guidos—at least as far as MTV was concerned—was a strip of land just south of Asbury Park. For years, guidos (and guidettes) flocked to sections of the Jersey Shore during the summer with the consistency of a migratory pattern, landing along the Atlantic to mate and preen. Centering a reality show in Seaside Heights gave MTV a series that mixed <em>The Real World</em> and anthropological study; it was a perfect inverse of <em>Laguna Beach</em> and would likely be deemed too culturally exploitative to get green-lit today. </p>
<p id="QPHRFY">For Season 1 of <em>Jersey Shore</em>, MTV scoured the tri-state area and emerged with a cast of DJs, bartenders, and aspiring vet techs who met its standards, which were: tan and ripped. The network set them up in a shore house with a hot tub and an endless supply of Miller Lite, gave them jobs at a boardwalk T-shirt shop, and willed them to create chaos. It worked. The cast of the <em>Jersey Shore</em>—Nicole “Snooki,” Jenni “JWoww,” Pauly D, Mike “the Situation,” Vinny, Ronnie, Sammi, Angelina, and, in later seasons, Deena—descended on Seaside Heights like whirling dervishes of hairspray and vodka, fist-pumping their way through bars with names like Karma, Dream, Bamboo, and Aztec, and leaving a hair-gel slick of mayhem in their wake.</p>
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<cite>MTV</cite>
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<em>Jersey Shore </em>Season 1</figcaption>
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<p id="ye38l7">The roommates were reckless and unpredictable (coupling and recoupling among the cast and with Seaside Heights tourists who stripped in the hot tub), hilarious and horrifying (fighting one another, and strangers, in the house, on the dance floor, and on the boardwalk), but even after a first season that created a sensation and ended on a ratings high, their stardom was expected to burn out with the waning days of August. “Maybe we should get a shore house together next summer,” Mike said as the group clustered on the roof of the house in season finale, and yet, the end of the first season felt like just that: an end. Maybe the <em>Shore </em>mates would put in another year or so, but surely after that they’d move on and fade into the same sort of quasi anonymity afforded to former <em>Real World</em> castmates and <em>Bachelor </em>contestants.</p>
<p id="tg15zs">But somehow, unexpectedly, they kept going. The original <em>Jersey Shore</em> housemates have gotten richer and rowdier, partied through Miami, Italy, and New Jersey again, and left bronzer stains on the Seaside Heights boardwalk and the American psyche. This week marks the 10th anniversary of the show’s first episode, and not only are seven of the eight original castmates still filming together, they also appear to be deeply involved in one another’s lives.</p>
<p id="c50e69">If you look past the Ron Ron Juice (ice, cranberry juice, watermelon, and roughly an entire fifth of vodka), the Spiral Squad, the keto obsessions, the hair-pulling, the clothes-tossing, the questionable use of the word “grenade,” the questionable treatment of women at large—the core of the show has always been the housemates’ required Sunday family dinner, and with that, the relationships that have withstood a decade. There’s no other show in the past 10 years to feature such unmitigated rage energy; there’s also nothing else that has been such an honest, consistent description of long-standing friendship and the way in which it evolves.</p>
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<p id="1JGhZb">For viewers of a certain age, the siren call of “Cabs are here” evokes the same sort of sophomoric nostalgia as the taste of vending machine Sprite and peach Burnett’s. The show premiered when I was a freshman in college, and we watched it on Thursday evenings in someone’s dorm. Snooki’s high-pitched cackle served as a pregame background noise and a reassurance that even at our absolute worst, we could never be as reckless as those on the screen. This summer, a friend from college got me into <em>Family Vacation</em>, the newest iteration in the <em>Shore </em>universe, and I was taken aback at how the cast and plot (or lack thereof) captivated me more than prestige TV or other reality shows. “We’ve grown up with them,” my friend reasoned. Which is true: Watching them feels like settling into comfortable dysfunction, like finding your place at a hectic family dinner where you realize the conversation is wildly inappropriate, but you still fit right in. </p>
<p id="Q8VXhu">When the Season 2 premiere came out in 2010, it was the <a href="https://www.tvguide.com/news/jersey-shore-ratings-1021237/">most-watched cable episode of the year</a> among 12- to 34-year-olds. Many of the viewers were close in age to the cast, and have therefore checked off similar life milestones—weddings, babies, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/01/19/jersey-shores-mike-sorrentino-pleads-guilty-to-tax-evasion/#5f7d9c965940">messing up their taxes</a>—around the same time as Snooki, Deena, and Mike. Part of the cast’s staying power comes from their rawness. There are other reality stars with similar longevity, but in most cases, they came into the public consciousness airbrushed, armed with more wealth and sun-dappled self-awareness than the average population. Kristin Cavallari and Lauren Conrad had drama, of course, but it never really included them flashing an entire bar because they forgot underwear. The <em>Kardashians</em> have been around since 2007, but their brand of mess is much more carefully constructed, with Kris Jenner orchestrating controversies and blurring the lines between reality and real life. </p>
<p id="gNZET2">The <em>Jersey Shore</em> cast captivated on the conceit that they are aggressively unfiltered. It’s as if you’d told the drunkest individual at your hometown bar they could make a <em>living</em> off being as loud and as drunk and weird as they could be, then settled in to watch them work for 10 years.</p>
<p id="GKtHYP">Take “Where’s the Beach” in Season 3, perhaps the most artful reality-show depiction of a bender in the past decade (if not ever!). The narrative arc begins with exposition from the night before at the bar, where Snooki and Deena keep toppling over various surfaces like Weebles. The next morning, Snooki reluctantly shows up to work at the T-shirt shop wearing a blanket over an outfit of green fuzzy slippers and a printed tank top that reads “SLUT.” She begins sneaking Bud Lights in a back room and is reprimanded by her boss. Despondent, Snooki leaves work determined to capitalize on the <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shampoo%20effect">shampoo effect</a>, and ends up taking tequila shots with a middle-aged couple. She is tugged toward the ocean, as if by an invisible siren, but cannot figure out how to get from the boardwalk to the water. Snooki screams “Where’s the beach?” at innocent passers-by, and by the time she falls into the sand while being chased by JWoww and Deena, she has drawn a crowd of hundreds and the attention of the cops. In a scene that marked the then-nadir of the show’s drunkenness, she is handcuffed, barefoot and bewildered. </p>
<p id="FaIDDY">Some of the mayhem was less frivolous. Sammi and Ron’s relationship was toxic and often veered into being abusive. The crew openly mocked the size and attractiveness of potential suitors. Mike’s breakdown in Italy culminated in his bashing his own head into a concrete wall, a harbinger of addiction issues that’d take him five seasons to address. If the show were to air for the first time now, as opposed to 2009, there’d likely be much more hand-wringing; it may not have survived for another season. (At the time of the premiere, MTV lost some advertisers after Italian American advocacy groups complained, but for the most part the show continued unheeded.) The early seasons did little to prevent one cast of characters from drunkenly speaking for an entire “guido culture,” therefore dangerously stereotyping a state and its inhabitants.</p>
<p id="ZABe6A">But the cast was hired for their ability to be themselves, and they continue to do so; it is only natural that real-world cracks—addiction, violence, relationship woes—show through. And with the authenticity comes unscripted loyalty.</p>
<p id="AHRIOc"><em>Family Vacation</em>, which premiered in 2018, includes seven of the original cast members. Many things have changed, and some have not; they are still messy, but their messiness tends to carry more gravitas and affects more people, a casualty of age for anyone. JWoww’s romantic conquests used to serve as subplots as she managed a long-distance relationship in Season 1, but recent episodes have seen her balancing a public, contentious divorce; Ronnie’s anger issues, which peaked in his Season 3 destruction of Sammi’s belongings, now directly affect his daughter, and he also entered rehab during the filming of <em>Family Vacation</em>. </p>
<p id="dNZj4k">In the second season of the reunion series, the crew travels out to Las Vegas to see Ronnie. During a tense moment, Ronnie comes clean to the roommates about the increasingly aggressive relationship between him and his on-again, off-again girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Jen. He sobs, sitting in a hotel room chaise longue with a Corona on the table next to him and Mike in a chair on the other side. Vinny, Pauly D, and JWoww sit on the double bed closest to him and Snooki, in a bra and a leopard robe, reclines on the parallel bed.</p>
<p id="aSRsIv">“You tend to forget we’ve lived with you for eight houses,” JWoww says at one point, as she points out how the roommates seem to know Ronnie’s weakness better than he does. “We know who you are.” </p>
<p id="msbgHw">“Today has been the most stressful day I think that any of us have had together,” Vinny observes. “Ronnie is going through a really hard time right now, and we’re going through it with him.” </p>
<p id="CtPfvI">Later in the episode, the group leaves to go to dinner, and Ronnie stays back to sort things out with Jen. The rest of the housemates go to an Italian restaurant and immediately begin pounding red wine” “These last couple days have been hectic, crazy, stressful with the Ron stuff,” Snooki says. </p>
<p id="8UtH6g">“I feel like we are allowed to emotionally eat tonight,” JWoww adds. </p>
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<cite>MTV</cite>
<figcaption><em>Family Vacation</em></figcaption>
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<p id="RjjTDL">In other moments of strife in <em>Family Vacation</em>—Jenni’s divorce, Mike’s arrest and incarceration for tax fraud, multiple pregnancies—the cast rallies around one another through practical and absurd methods. They bring three Funfetti cakes, Doritos, ice cream cake, soda, cookies, and powdered doughnuts to Mike and his fiancée after his sentencing. They also impulsively fly to Washington, D.C., to confront President Trump in person about getting Mike out of jail—but just end up drinking a lot of wine on a private jet.</p>
<p id="Fy7nUp">That, at the end of the day, is what keeps them in the public consciousness. But because of the cast’s unexpected endurance, these moments now carry far more weight than a reality show has any business to. Now when they get drunk, as they often still do, conversations are more likely to be heartfelt confessions of lost love (as in Snooki and Ron’s Miami bender in <em>Family Vacation</em>) than seedy confessions of Smush Room endeavors. Snooki, Jenni, Deena, Pauly, Vinny, Ronnie, and Mike are older now, facing the harsh obstacles that tend to come with getting older—but they’re still going through it in front of a camera. And they’re still going through it together.</p>
<p id="ErhGPL">The reality television boom has offered dramatic scenarios of all types, locations, and characters in the past 20 years. But a decade-long friendship—with all of its nuances, dramas, betrayals, breakups, and reunions—is much harder to find on cable, let alone in the real world.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="NclHF7">“I would love to be in this house 50 years from now,” Snooki said early on in the <em>Jersey Shore</em>’s run. At this rate, she might not be far off.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/12/4/20994222/jersey-shore-10-year-anniversary-family-vacationJacqueline Kantor2019-06-20T06:30:00-04:002019-06-20T06:30:00-04:00Zion Can Make It Anywhere, but Can He Win Over New Orleans?
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<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>The Duke phenom is one of the biggest celebrities in college basketball history, but fitting in with the NBA’s most singular market hasn’t always been as easy as the city’s pace of life. Will New Orleanians put the early departures of their three previous basketball stars behind them and embrace their new large, adult human highlight reel?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="QHibHZ">When Lance Broussard Jr. grew up in New Orleans, Chris Paul was always around. The Hornets of Broussard’s youth were defined by the point guard’s grit and precision. Broussard played pickup basketball on courts refurbished by Paul’s foundation and marked with CP3 logos. But now Paul was gone—traded to Los Angeles at his request—and New Orleans had a 13.7 percent chance of landing Anthony Davis, a Kentucky freshman who had led the Wildcats to an NCAA title at the Superdome in early April. </p>
<p id="tcAj3D">So on May 30, 2012, Broussard, then 19, invited two friends over to his home in Algiers on the West Bank of New Orleans: Kaleb, a childhood friend who had left the city after Hurricane Katrina and recently moved back, and Keith, a former classmate at St. Augustine High School. Kaleb sat on the left. Broussard sat in the middle. Keith sat on the right. </p>
<p id="K743y7">“I remember when we jumped Charlotte,” Broussard says. “I will never forget that moment. That was exciting as hell.” </p>
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<cite>Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports</cite>
<figcaption>NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum and New Orleans Pelicans executive vice president of basketball operations David Griffin at the 2019 NBA Draft Lottery</figcaption>
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<p id="PNQdie">Seven years, five losing seasons, two playoff appearances, and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/1/28/18200988/anthony-davis-trade-request-lakers-celtics-pelicans">one tumultuous breakup</a> with Davis later, Broussard invited the same friends over to his home, now on the East Bank of the city, and implored them to be on time. When they settled in, he insisted everyone take the same spot as 2012: Kaleb on the left, Broussard in the middle, Keith on the right. New Orleans had a 6 percent chance at the top pick this time, but the reward was unprecedented: Zion Williamson, a player so dynamic he had already taken on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba-draft/2019/6/18/18681851/the-zion-williamson-machine-new-orleans-pelicans-duke-spartanburg">one-name status</a>, joining the ranks of LeBron, Kobe, Magic, and Bird, without ever playing in a Final Four. </p>
<p id="Qiw2PE">“It was as if lightning struck twice,” Broussard says, remembering Memphis popping up on the screen in the second slot and leaving Zion all to New Orleans. “But this is way more sweeter, especially given what we went through.” </p>
<p id="ilZ1B2">Broussard identifies as “one of the biggest Pelicans fans out there.” Given that New Orleans is one of the smallest markets in the NBA and a town preternaturally preoccupied by its football team, he may not be far off.</p>
<p id="yZBgzx">He speaks fondly of Paul and wistfully of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the city’s first basketball star. He was less effusive when I brought up Davis. On the evening we spoke, reports had emerged that Davis was angling for a move to New York or Los Angeles. This proved what many had suspected, Broussard says: Davis is less concerned about winning and more intent on a bigger market. A few days later, Davis was dealt to the Lakers.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="97Gavq"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Zion Williamson Became Bigger Than the Basketball Machine That Built Him","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nba-draft/2019/6/18/18681851/the-zion-williamson-machine-new-orleans-pelicans-duke-spartanburg"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="wYZdva">Davis’s public trade request earlier this year damaged his relationship with New Orleans irreparably. But he had never quite clicked anyway, Broussard says. He lacked the hometown appeal of Maravich and the ferocity of Paul, and couldn’t will the team anywhere past a four-game series in the conference semifinals (Paul at least lasted seven games a decade prior). </p>
<p id="qrlz5u">New Orleans’s relationship with its basketball team and its stars has never been exceptionally passionate or conducive to success. Davis, the city’s latest basketball headliner, drew national praise and consideration for the NBA’s best honors. But despite his trademarked eyebrow and six All-Star appearances, he never raised the profile of the team to capture the casual fan, or to remotely compete with the city’s love for the Saints, LSU football, or even local college baseball. </p>
<p id="pzxWWb">New Orleans is insular, at times provincial, exceedingly quirky, and overwhelmingly proud: For outsiders from either coast, it’s a great place to get blotto on fruit juice and rum, but a trying place to play professional basketball. </p>
<p id="s9yCMK">But now comes Zion and his 3 million-plus Instagram followers. He breaks through Nike shoes, brings Barack Obama out to a regular-season college basketball game, earns LeBron comparisons, and is heralded as the best college player in at least a decade. His star power is unprecedented. His talent is unquantifiable. The question, however, is whether he has what it takes to turn around a long-struggling franchise in a city that values personality just as much as performance. </p>
<p id="l7mDWU"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VAOAr9">Bob Remy, 81, was there practically from the start of New Orleans basketball. He watched the ABA expansion team, the New Orleans Buccaneers, play their first of three seasons in 1967. He was the official scorer for the Jazz in their five-year stint in the city, and then for the Hornets for nearly a decade.</p>
<p id="PCp60U">Remy, a New Orleans native, remembers feeling as if he had “died and gone to heaven” when the Jazz traded to snag Maravich, a college superstar at nearby LSU, from Atlanta in 1974. Maravich was a shy, down-to-earth player, Remy remembers, referencing a time the shooting guard invited Remy and his son over to his home. There were no winning seasons with Maravich, but he was immensely popular with the fans and his teammates, both for his dazzling play and his commitment to the city. He left when the franchise did, which allowed Maravich to part on genial terms. </p>
<p id="epfAE1">When the Jazz moved to Utah, Maravich <a href="https://www.nola.com/hornets/2011/06/unhappy_anniversary_the_day_th.html">told <em>Times-Picayune</em> reporter Jimmy Smith</a>: “I’ll say one thing: if in fact this team does anything, if I’m in a situation like Seattle and Washington for the championship, anything I do, I’ll do for the city of New Orleans.</p>
<p id="8np8MJ">”Whether the team’s in Salt Lake or not, I’ll do it personally for the city of New Orleans.”</p>
<p id="56FGoZ">When Maravich died in 1988 from a heart condition, <em>Times-Picayune </em>reporter Marty Mulé credited him for having “<a href="https://www.myneworleans.com/pistol-pete/">turned a state and a region onto basketball</a>.”</p>
<p id="iYAUif">Remy returned to the scorer’s seat in 2002, when Baron Davis and the Hornets relocated to New Orleans. Back-to-back playoff appearances came the first two seasons, as did back-to-back first-round losses. Then came Paul. Drafted no. 4 overall in 2005, he was the first superstar New Orleans ever drafted. Paul didn’t play with the same flair as Maravich, but he was a gamer; Remy says his instinct was immediately palpable from the scorer’s table.</p>
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<cite>NBAE/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Chris Paul during a New Orleans Hornets game against the Cleveland Cavaliers on March 6, 2011</figcaption>
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<p id="hHDUNx">“You could see where he was a true competitor,” Remy says. “He loved to win, he loved to fight. You can’t spot that on a lot of players. ... You could see that he had that fiery attitude about him, and the people took to him.”</p>
<p id="F5hWwu">While many players lived out in suburban Metairie, Paul lived within city limits, a move favored by Saints icons such as Steve Gleason and Drew Brees. He also fixed up local playgrounds and funded after-school programs: At Clay Park, in the city’s Irish Channel neighborhood, the court was painted to mimic Paul’s high school, and at Hardin Park, in the Seventh Ward, the court is painted to look like Wake Forest’s court. Those sorts of decisions matter. New Orleans is not that big of a place, in comparison with other NBA markets, both geographically and in the way in which someone usually knows someone who knows someone. Establishing a presence can turn a player from a celebrity into a New Orleanian. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="XaEo6w"><q>New Orleans is insular, at times provincial, exceedingly quirky, and overwhelmingly proud: For outsiders from either coast, it’s a great place to get blotto on fruit juice and rum, but a trying place to play professional basketball. </q></aside></div>
<p id="loOjOo">Paul’s departure was disappointing but understood, given the volatility of the franchise during his tenure. Because of Katrina, the Hornets split their home games in Paul’s rookie season among Oklahoma City; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Norman, Oklahoma; and New Orleans, finishing with a 38-44 record. The next season brought just one more win and another year displaced. It was later <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2010/12/7/1861380/new-orleans-hornets-george-shinn-david-stern-nba">reported</a> that owner George Shinn wanted to stay in Oklahoma City for good.</p>
<p id="dz9Xqr">The first season back in New Orleans, in 2007-08, was a success—it ended with a second-place finish in the West and a seven-game second-round playoff series against the Spurs. But things unraveled quickly. Injuries struck. Head coach Byron Scott was fired (a decision <a href="https://www.nola.com/hornets/2009/11/chris_paul_taken_aback_by_new.html">Paul said should have been run past him and David West</a>), and the NBA bought the team from Shinn in 2010 to prevent the city from losing its basketball franchise. Paul asked out a year later, but who could blame him?</p>
<p id="zigMIY">Davis’s uncoupling from the city, however, won’t be looked upon as fondly. </p>
<p id="4b8rXm"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="sCNu25">Jeff Duncan, a sports columnist for the <em>Times-Picayune</em> since 1999, references a French term when talking about Davis: <em>esprit de clocher</em>. The literal definition translates to the “spirit of the clocktower.” The saying comes from small towns in France, Duncan explains, and protecting the integrity of one’s home. Anywhere within earshot of the clocktower’s bells is meant to be defended by the townspeople. Or, in simpler terms, you stand for your city until you’re out of it, and you certainly don’t make a public trade request with more than two months left in the regular season and make a fool out of an entire franchise in hopes of booking a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. </p>
<p id="iH0GdF">“Davis did all the right things, and he bought into the city, but I don’t think he had quite the dynamic personality to capture the casual sports fan,” Duncan says. “That’s where he fell short. And once the trade request came out, it was over. Once you turn your back on New Orleans, New Orleans is never going to bring you back into the fold.”</p>
<p id="X7eHbm">Beyond New Orleans natives who root for the home team regardless, there’s also a subsection of Pelicans fans who are post-Katrina transplants who quickly bought in to the city’s sports. Two of my neighbors fit that bill: They were sent to the city via Teach for America in 2014 with no relationship to New Orleans, stayed, and have no plans to leave anytime soon. They are six-year Pelicans season-ticket holders who have missed games only for work and Mardi Gras, and one, Justin Perez, says that had Davis handled the situation differently, he’d still root for his success with the Lakers.</p>
<p id="TV7RLG">“I’m not going to burn my jersey or anything, ’cause that’s expensive, but I’m not going to wear it out to games or anything either,” he says. “If this trade didn’t go down the way it did and he ended up traded to the Lakers without giving up on New Orleans and wasting the second half of our season, I probably would have bought an AD Lakers jersey and still liked him and rooted for him to get a ring.”</p>
<p id="QAFPB8">Davis was appreciated, of course, but perhaps never adored. He was billed as <a href="https://www.espn.com/nba/draft2012/story/_/id/7989513/2012-nba-draft-new-orleans-hornets-win-draft-lottery-secure-no-1-overall-pick">“the first step to us winning it all,</a>” by owner Tom Benson. Then–general manager Dell Demps called the 2012 draft lottery “a great day for the city of New Orleans” and the “start of a new beginning.” </p>
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<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Anthony Davis in his infamous “That’s All Folks” t-shirt before a game against the Golden State Warriors in New Orleans on April 09, 2019</figcaption>
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<p id="1bsz0h">But Davis never emerged as an athlete who could lead a team to the postseason consistently, nor a player who could change the perception of a franchise. He did not have the “charisma” to hook casual fans, Duncan says. Remy used the word “magnetism” to describe Maravich and Paul, and what Davis may have lacked. Personality came up a lot when fans described Davis’s shortcomings. </p>
<p id="MLotnu">Take DeMarcus Cousins as a counter, Broussard says. In 2017, both he and Davis were named grand marshals for Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, the city’s largest predominantly black krewe and the marquee event on Fat Tuesday. But Cousins, then just a week into his New Orleans tenure following a surprise trade, was the one to put a pair of neon-yellow women’s underwear on his head, dangle another pair out for the crowd, and drink Hennessy straight from the bottle. </p>
<p id="qXDd7K">“He has that outgoing personality. He’s galvanizing,” Broussard says. “When he put the panties on his head for Mardi Gras, people fell in love.” </p>
<p id="bWn3e5">When Cousins rejoined the team during the Pelicans’ 2018 first-round series against Portland in Game 3, Broussard remembers the entire arena chanting “Boogie” emphatically. AD is unlikely to ever get such a warm welcome on his return. In his first game after the trade deadline, <a href="https://www.slamonline.com/nba/definitely-awkward-anthony-davis-booed-pelicans-fans/">he was booed during introductions</a>, and again when he got the ball in the first quarter.</p>
<p id="f7C8zx">Another prime example is Saints running back Alvin Kamara, a player who has the city hooked on not only his All-Pro play, but also his tendency to ride his scooter around the Central Business District, his insistence on leaving the float during the Endymion parade to take photos with fans, and his four-word summation of his first Mardi Gras: <a href="https://www.espn.com/blog/new-orleans-saints/post/_/id/29501/alvin-kamara-and-marshon-lattimore-crush-mardi-gras">“I’d fuck with it.”</a> </p>
<p id="lu8UFr">“I think New Orleanians appreciate eccentricity, and he’s an eccentric personality,” Duncan says of Kamara. “He’s his own person. But he did dive in. … He’s very down to earth in a way even Reggie Bush was never embraced like that. Bush came from Hollywood, so to speak. … He was wearing sunglasses in the locker room. That’s not New Orleans. New Orleans is not L.A.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="A12fof"><q>“Once you turn your back on New Orleans, New Orleans is never going to bring you back into the fold.” —Jeff Duncan, <em>Times-Picayune</em> columnist</q></aside></div>
<p id="3GbsQl">A player who wants big-market amenities and branding isn’t likely to jell with the city, which makes sense, given that someone who’s more comfortable living in New York or Los Angeles probably isn’t going to be happy in a city of fewer than 400,000 with shoddy infrastructure and oppressive humidity. But it’s the type of place where Kamara, with his piercings and his willingness to ride a garbage truck for a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QylFPEu8cpU">local commercial</a> (without payment) thrives. There’s an appreciation for a slower pace of life and an openness to the off-kilter. In Davis’s defense, Duncan says, it takes a few years to figure out New Orleans.</p>
<p id="PNaSqY">“This is maybe the most unique city in America because of the history, because of the cultural influences here, that it takes a while to understand all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the city and the population here,” he says. “And you can’t expect a 19- or 20-year-old kid to understand that right away. And by the time they probably figure that all out, they’re ready to move on.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="vQC6Kf">The hope is that Zion is different. Broussard is optimistic that he can succeed where Davis faltered, both in winning seasons and local favor. He’s been preparing for Thursday’s draft by watching several Zion highlight videos a day, he says. </p>
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<img alt="2019 NBA Draft - Media Availability" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QPSmF-rSZPO_M5hoQ44Asc11tB8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16387628/1156977048.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Mike Lawrie/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Zion Williamson speaks to the media ahead of the 2019 NBA Draft </figcaption>
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<p id="l4YuXH">“I think he’s going to be one that resonates with the city,” Broussard says. “I think he’s going to be the one that really changes things around here.”</p>
<p id="dYwCpG">Zion is already more marketable than Davis. Stephanie Kauffman runs Mose Mary and Me, a custom saint candle company whose goods are found in boutiques that stock New Orleans–centric goods like gold fleur-de-lis necklaces and backpacks printed with king cakes. Kauffman also sells candles of the city’s most popular figures—Davis, Drew Brees, Alvin Kamara, Big Freedia. In the two weeks she’s had a Zion candle in stores, she estimates she’s already surpassed the lifetime sales for the AD candle. </p>
<p id="XSguvp">Zion is transcendent, Duncan says, with the potential to change the face of the franchise and the profile of the organization almost immediately. The Pelicans have barely had national television coverage in recent years and have routinely struggled to draw fans to the arena. Williamson could be one of the top-five viewing draws in the league, the type of must-see player who can help lift a leaguewide ratings <a href="https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2019/04/nba-regular-season-viewership-mixed/">slump</a> and fill all of those <a href="http://www.espn.com/nba/attendance">empty seats</a> at the Smoothie King Center; according to <a href="https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/sports/pelicans/article_b54d2b32-777e-11e9-8adc-47c9fd613b30.html"><em>The New Orleans Advocate</em></a>, the Pelicans sold more than 2,000 season tickets on the night of this year’s draft lottery. If Zion can <a href="https://thebiglead.com/2019/03/14/espn-ratings-zion-williamson-duke/">raise ratings</a> for one of the most high-profile programs in college basketball, he can certainly help fill some seats at the Smoothie King Center. Zion has a built-in following, small-town Southern roots, and a commitment to signing every single autograph he’s asked to (in part because of a time he was <a href="https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/05/zion-williamson-anthony-davis-autograph-snub-duke-pelicans-nba-draft-story">snubbed by Davis</a>). </p>
<p id="mw5Djh">Remy and Broussard are New Orleans basketball fans from two very different generations. It’s quite likely they have little in common besides their hometown and their adoration for its teams. But when asked about the keys to winning over the city, their sentiments were eerily similar: This is a town that appreciates a player who embraces the city, despite its flaws and its small-market identity. It’s also a town that will pick up pretty quickly on whether a player is going through the motions or wholeheartedly buying in. </p>
<p id="GzcATs">“Either you get the city or you don’t,” Duncan says. “I have family members [who don’t]. We all have friends like that. I think it takes a lot though, to understand at a young age, to appreciate the history.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="1xnhqQ">“It will be interesting to see how Zion adapts. I think everybody’s different. It doesn’t really matter where you’re from, it’s more about your joie de vivre. It’s about, do you understand how the city ticks? It’s unlike any other place in the country.” </p>
<aside id="Q1DMnL"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/nba-draft/2019/6/20/18692416/zion-williamson-new-orleans-anthony-davis-chris-paulJacqueline Kantor2019-01-22T15:45:50-05:002019-01-22T15:45:50-05:00“This Was Like Someone Had Stabbed You in the Back”: Scenes From New Orleans After the No-Call
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<p>Two years, two straight devastating Saints playoff losses. New Orleans’s reaction to Sunday’s stunner was different than it’d been a year earlier, all while embodying the qualities that set this NFL fan base apart.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="e9lZq8">The silence was the eeriest part. In a city constantly buzzing with sounds—the notes of a brass horn, the beat of a bounce song, the honk of a steamer on the Mississippi, the pour of a beer into a plastic to-go cup—a moment of quiet in New Orleans can feel unusual. This felt especially unusual given that for 48 hours leading up to Sunday’s NFC championship game, the volume had been ramped up considerably. The city was awash with people cheering at random moments and shouting in glee at neighbors, strangers, and friends alike. “Choppa Style” blared from seemingly every nearby radio and was featured in a <a href="https://twitter.com/mayorcantrell/status/1085676454376103936">video posted by the mayor</a> declaring January 18 “Black and Gold Friday.” The citywide din peaked on Sunday afternoon, as for almost four hours the Superdome crowd did its best to blow out the Los Angeles Rams’ ear drums. In bars and living rooms around Orleans Parish, patrons in gold glitter and Alvin Kamara jerseys and fleur de lis earrings screamed as if Saints head coach Sean Payton had personally implored them to. And <a href="https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/sports/saints/article_fd525068-1a9c-11e9-92b3-6f61564ca23a.html">he had</a>.</p>
<p id="rh9RqR">Then, at 5:23 p.m. local time, the noise stopped. The crowd, which had clamored to protest Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein’s 57-yard field goal attempt in overtime, paused. There would be shouts and boos and expletives later. But for now, there was a moment of still, one that was all too familiar to New Orleans fans who had watched Stefon Diggs haul up the Minnesota sideline a year before, and that was all too unsettling in a city that seems to be perpetually making noise about something. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Let's look back at the end of that Rams vs. Saints game one more time. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LARvsNO?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LARvsNO</a> <a href="https://t.co/lx8p00Ll1A">pic.twitter.com/lx8p00Ll1A</a></p>— The Ringer (@ringer) <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1087133904153137152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2019</a>
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<p id="NGAgy8">Two playoff appearances, and two dead-silent, last-minute losses in as many years. <em>Vikings 29, Saints 24 </em>was only 371 days old when <em>Rams 26, Saints 23 </em>brought a fresher, deeper kind of football pain. Few NFL teams have endured multiple last-play devastations in such a short span, and perhaps even fewer have an identity so inextricably linked to their city. “It was as if the air was going out of your body, out of the dome,” says Mel Mitchell, a former Saints safety who was at this weekend’s game. “It was disappointing, and the disappointment started when that pass-interference wasn’t called. But this was like someone had stabbed you in the back.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="RLVRQo"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"A Plea From a Saints Fan: Can Both Teams Lose in the Super Bowl?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/1/24/18195160/new-orleans-saints-super-bowl-anger"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="9IPRT2">At Tracey’s, a sports bar on the edge of the Garden District where intricately decorated second line umbrellas hang from the ceiling and a giant “Brees” banner blankets a wall, the volume temporarily could have matched the booming decibel level inside the Superdome, according to patron Drew Greaves. Until that kick hit the net. “It went from a ears-bleeding volume,” Greaves says. “To … you can have a quiet conversation.”</p>
<p id="mMpLKC">I spoke to fans who told me they cried when they woke up the morning of the game, and to fans who popped out of bed at 7 a.m. because they were far too excited to sleep. The feeling was everywhere: <em>This time would be different. </em>Yet those were the same fans who, after the call that wasn’t and the kick that was, described Frenchmen Street as a scene of “collective mourning.” One man at Tracey’s attempted, somberly, in an accent tinged with both Cajun influence and brown liquor, to explain what this team means to the people here. He settled on something in between “they are a part of us” and “they mean everything,” and then picked up his drink. </p>
<p id="6hmlPL">“It’s strange,” he said. “It’s hard to describe, and I can’t put it into words. I cried today, and it was so many things. We deserved this.”</p>
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<cite>John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports</cite>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Xnhhix">All day, Greaves had watched the people around him answer their phones with a confident “Who dat?” as if that response had fully replaced “Hello” as an appropriate greeting. At the edge of the French Quarter, hours after the final whistle, two tourists from San Francisco debated the meaning of the phrase. “There’s no answer to ‘Who dat,’” one said. “I don’t get it, but I’m fully into it. I don’t think there’s an answer, and there doesn’t have to be.” </p>
<p id="NVU4mV"><em>There doesn’t have to be.</em> Greaves’s girlfriend, Roxanne Legere, a native of the city, wore a Jeremy Shockey jersey to cheer the team on Sunday at Tracey’s. She remembers that after the Saints’ 31-17 win over the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV, one could walk down the street screaming “Who dat” to anyone and get a proper response. “It didn’t matter what you’re wearing, who you are,” she says. “You know they were going to say it back.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="JenoTc"><q>“It was disappointing, and the disappointment started when that pass-interference wasn’t called. But this was like someone had stabbed you in the back.” —Former Saints safety Mel Mitchell</q></aside></div>
<p id="u28Uyp">New Orleans is a city defined by its dichotomy. Turkey and the Wolf, <em>Bon Appetit</em>’s <a href="https://www.bonappetit.com/story/turkey-and-the-wolf">best new restaurant in the country in 2017</a>, sits mere blocks from a historic former housing development. In 2016, the number of visitors to the city <a href="http://www.bizneworleans.com/March-2017/New-Orleans-Breaks-Tourism-Records-For-Visitation-Visitor-Spending-In-2016/">broke the record set in 2004</a> and visitor spending totaled $7.41 billion; meanwhile, the outlook hasn’t been so rosy for locals—recent research shows that <a href="https://www.wdsu.com/article/opsb-says-60-percent-of-children-in-new-orleans-suffer-from-ptsd/25783377">60 percent of students in the public school system</a> suffer from PTSD. A randomly selected square mile of the city is home to disparate culture and socioeconomic standing. One walk down an oak-tree-lined block in the spring can take you past Mardi Gras Indians preparing their suits, lines of tourists waiting in the shade of the bright blue Commander’s Palace, and a mansion owned by Sandra Bullock.</p>
<p id="q1xVLL">In that same selected slice of New Orleans, regardless of who you are or who you encounter, two words can effectively replace a salutation. It’s part ritual, part shared understanding. In some cities, football is important; in New Orleans, football is the tie that binds. </p>
<p id="1ZKKir">As a converted Saints fan, I am aware that my connection to the team is trite in the grand scheme of the franchise’s history. I am a transplant who was never attached to my hometown team and gleefully bought into the consistency of Drew Brees, the eccentricities of Kamara, and the hope that came with every Sunday in the fall. Given that, Monday felt like a sort of dull, emotional hangover: Scrolling past headlines about the no-call was like getting a whiff of whatever did you in the night before. It was unsettling to dwell on, and even worse to ignore. </p>
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<img alt="Divisional Round - New Orleans Saints v Minnesota Vikings" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/v68QhWRGTISknqIJfIvV3tAo9-M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10034721/904970960.jpg.jpg">
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="DM1PQP">The Minneapolis Miracle—a 61-yard catch-and-run for a touchdown as time expired—was a heartstopper. This was a heartbreaker. One ending crushed souls because of how surprising it was. The other will linger because of the build-up, and the outright injustice, and the idea that the disappointment of last year could have been forgotten with this year’s success. </p>
<p id="gCbwxG">“Both of these were bad plays, but this [game] could have been well over before the half,” Mitchell says. “When you lose like that in the playoffs, there is no more film-watching, no more dwelling, no more. … Just cleaning the locker room and going home. The only way to get over that is to put it in the past, and in the present to get the next season kicked off. Other than that, it’s going to be a nasty taste in people’s mouths until next season.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="USKVWI"><q>“It’s not about being the alpha. It’s about love. It’s about giving and having, like the same feeling as Mardi Gras.” —New Orleans native Roxanne Legere</q></aside></div>
<p id="gSznmd">On Monday, the message board near Lake Pontchartrain that once told cars to “drive like a saint to avoid getting ram’d” changed its text to read, “We were robbed.” There are already eight billboards in the Super Bowl host city of Atlanta that say “Saints got robbed,” and multiple billboards around New Orleans offering this refrain: “They Reffed Up. Bless you boys for a great season.” Haydel’s Bakery, a locally renowned shop, has taken to making <a href="https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/01/haydels-debuts-no-ref-cookies-after-heartbreaking-new-orleans-saints-loss.html">No Ref cookies with head official Bill Vinovich’s face crossed out</a>. Tracey’s has announced it’ll boycott the Super Bowl and broadcast a replay of the Saints’ 2010 triumph on February 3. (It will potentially serve crawfish as well.) </p>
<p id="ARx5sA">The 2010 playoff run was framed around the city’s resilience, particularly in light of Hurricane Katrina, says Legere. But nowadays, Saints success is less about returning to full strength and more about expressing pride in what the city has always been, even if the rest of the country isn’t always paying attention. “It’s not about being the alpha,” she says. “It’s about love. It’s about giving and having, like the same feeling as Mardi Gras.”</p>
<p id="6fOTgm">A comic from last year, in which two sad Saints fans question what could possibly cheer them up as they prepare to turn the corner into Mardi Gras, once again feels appropriate. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">This ran last year after the Minnesota loss. Unfortunately, it works today as well. Today we're sad and frustrated. In a few weeks we'll line the streets standing shoulder to shoulder and once again celebrate living in the coolest place in the world.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NewOrleans?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NewOrleans</a> Dats how we roll! <a href="https://t.co/tqqYvhXFb6">pic.twitter.com/tqqYvhXFb6</a></p>— Walt Handelsman (@Walt_Handelsman) <a href="https://twitter.com/Walt_Handelsman/status/1087380747957272587?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2019</a>
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<p id="Uh0W2x">With disappointment, sadness, and anger come creativity, humor, and gratitude. “People don’t live in New Orleans because it is easy,” reads a quote from <em>New Orleans Advocate</em> writer Ian McNulty. “They live here because they are incapable of living anywhere else in the just same way.” </p>
<p id="UsbnGc">It’s the same with the Saints: The city does not love them because they’ve been easy to root for, or because they have a yearslong history of postseason success. They’re loved because in a place defined so much by its culture and spirit, what option is there other than to love the hometown team fervently? New Orleans won’t get over this, but even in death the city celebrates in its own singular way: A <a href="https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/article_8f66e870-1d9e-11e9-b1e9-3b9626333d11.html">parade has already been suggested</a> to take the place of what should have been a Saints appearance in Atlanta. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="QvAXPp">“It’s about hometown pride and what we’ve earned and the way we’ve been overlooked in so many ways and treated,” Legere says. “Nobody really cares what we’re doing, but we’re here and kicking ass. So any time [the Saints] do shine, it does come across as resilience, but it’s more just community pride. We’ve always been this great.” </p>
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2019/1/22/18193353/new-orleans-saints-loss-scenes-from-heartbreakJacqueline Kantor