No. 234: KAMALA HARRIS, GENE WEINGARTEN, KATHY GRIFFIN & AN OCTOGENARIAN NHL ALUMNUS / The courage of this SubStack's convictions. When I fell out of favour with one of my boyhood heroes.

The names listed here could pass for an answer in one of Carnac's hermetically sealed envelopes. This is as close as we get to a viewer-mail edition of ye olde SubStack.

Okay, a bit of a departure from our usual meditations about the perspiring arts. Timely and needed.

The owners of How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) have authorized the SubStack’s editorial directors to make a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris for the U.S. Presidency.

Much has been made of Jeff Bezos’s decision to pre-empt the Washington Post editorial board’s endorsement of the Democratic nominee for the highest office in the land the other side of the bridge out of Gananoque. No one made anything better than did an estimable Post alum and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten, who is also a loyal H2SiS(wRT) subscriber and effusive endorser of this newsletter.

Mr W left this kind though not expansive review in the comment section beneath my account of physically roughing up the Dallas Cowboys coach: Check out No. 142: TOM LANDRY & ME / How my first big assignment went sideways ... to the point where I was lucky not to get arrested.

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Mr Weingarten’s SubStack, the Gene Pool, is a must-read on any day, but the entry I link here, Courage & Cowardice, says what must be said. Drop the mic, maestro!

Sir, we salute you.

Back to in-house matters: We here in the editorial department of How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) did not make our decision to endorse the Vice-President lightly and our proprietors are fully aware that drifting into politics would run the risk of alienating over-sensitive subscribers and adversely affect the financial prospects of the SubStack, a public service to which all of us involved are duty bound.

Ahem.

You’ll note the wording in the paragraph above:

this courting of controversy would run the risk of alienating subscribers et cetera

The crucial word here is “would.” A loaded qualifier to be sure.

You might assume we’re not chilled by the consequences of our endorsement of Ms Harris because, unlike the Post’s owner who made his billions founding Amazon, we reside on the north side of the bridge, where we rely on Amazon to home-deliver our pemican. Fact is, we in Kingston are easily within range of mortar shells from Fort Drum. If Ms Harris’s vendetta-driven opponent prevails next Tuesday despite this SubStack’s expressed opposition, we fully expect a full venting of his spleen and metastasizing of his wrath—to our bunkers beneath the limestone we will go.

No, we say “would run the risk of alienating subscribers” because we believe we’ve already burned them off. Okay, an overstatement—we’ve already burned him off.

To explain this in full, please allow me to dispense with the conceit of the first-person plural and revert to my everyday conceit of the clueless singular.

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In September I wrote an essay about my time with Kathy Griffin and posted the audiophile of our conversation in the wake of the controversy she stirred up in 2017 when she held up what passed for the severed head of Donald Trump.

To me it looks like an exercise in free speech, goofy but in no way threatening like a fatwa or even a chorus of “Hang Mike Pence” outside the Capitol.

Her reviews were, uh, mixed.

Yeah, it was a weak joke that went wrong in ways that she couldn’t have imagine, baiting a sitting president who, like Richard Nixon, has ever kept a long and growing enemies list with names written down in indelible laundry marker. Next thing you know federal agents are banging on her door, auditors are tracking her down and she’s pulled over for full-body inspection every time she boards a flight. Even Interpol got into the act, putting her on its no-fly list. When I tracked her down in Stockholm, she was doing her travel in Europe by train and ferry.

If you missed the SubStack I’ll link it here: No. 226: KATHY GRIFFIN / Her bread and butter was mocking her status as a D-list celebrity. We hung out in the aftermath of Trump's siccing the Department of Justice et al on her.

In response to this piece one of my paid subscribers cancelled his subscription. Like Kathy Griffin, I didn’t see it coming, but probably should have. I thought that my thesis line was pretty innocuous—not that the comedian was right, but rather that there’s something horribly wrong when a president is motivated by nothing more the brazen vengeance.

I should have known one person would been pissed off that I wrote about a comedian and a president almost pathologically lacking a sense of humour. Someone was bound to say, Hey scribe, stay in your lane and write about sports, why dontcha!

Sigh, the price of doing business. What hurt even more is that the subscriber had just three days before renewed his annual subscription, thus I was going to have to extend a refund before the $50 was deposited in my account. (I was on the hook for the SubStack service fees—so the whole thing left me digging into my pocket for loose change.

It stings a little whenever I lose a subscriber—renewals by yearly subscribers have been more solid than I might have suspected, by monthly folks somewhat variable. This one, however, jumped out because the subscriber is a former NHL player, a well-known name, as well as a former general manager in the league who still draws paycheques from the league other than his pension. (I suppose the source of those cheques might be categorized as “a league-approved entity” rather than the league itself, but you get my point.) And, yeah, I will admit that he was one of my favourite players who skated most memorably and served as an executive for one of the six franchise that came into the league in the first round of expansion back in ‘67.

Okay, enough hint-dropping. I’m not going to name him here—I’ll just call him Subscriber X. (I will name him and discuss at length below the paywall, though.)

I doubt my fellow scribes could guess his identity if I gave them 100 guesses though they’d all recognize his name. In fact, going through my history won’t help either—never met the gent, never mind work him into a story. Exactly how he found my SubStack I don’t know.

When folks cancel their subscriptions they’re asked to offer a reason—it’s not a required field, mind you. This Subscriber X did, though, and at some length. Here’s what landed in my mailbox.

If that isn’t entirely legible on your handhelds, here’s the transcription:

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Email: XXXXXXX@comcast.net

Prior status: Paid Subscriber

Reason: Requested by user

User feedback: Did not think it was appropriate to castigate people in the US that are Magavoters even though I’m not Maga. Also I don’t think anyone who does what Griffin did gives a good impression of the overall population in the US. Both sides decry that type of behavior. Unfortunately I enjoyed reading Gare’s writing other than that article.

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First off, I’m glad the departing subscriber enjoyed reading my pieces other than the Kathy Griffin article. From what I can tell in his profile and SubStack history, he read at least 80 percent of the posts over the 12 months, some quite avidly, returning for second and third looks at the entries. I don’t think he’s just pumping my tires with the compliment at the end. And he did renew his subscription before cutting the cord and getting his refund.

This isn’t a personal appeal to Subscriber X, who will likely not see today’s entry. I just don’t buy this line that it wasn’t “appropriate to castigate people in the US that are Magavoters [sic] even though I’m not Maga.” Does anyone care to wager that this avowed “not Maga” man is a registered Democrat? That he voted for Hillary Clinton and plans to vote for Kamala Harris? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

It’s a neat bit of GOP trickeration, what would be “a dangle” in hockey terms: Subscriber X doesn’t defend the executive branch’s harassment of the comedian or drill down on any of Trump’s actions or his inciting hate and violence with his speech; instead, Subscriber X equates any criticism of Trump with criticism of his supporters.

And Subscriber X calls out Kathy Griffin’s words and actions by saying she doesn’t give “a good impression of the overall population of the US.” Well, I wasn’t nominating her for Miss America or Time Person of the Year or anything else—she’s a standup comic and actress and writer. I write a lot about people who don’t represent the overall population of the US—that’s the job, isn’t it.

I’ve gone back and parsed my piece about Kathy Griffin. There really is precious little that “castigates people in the US that are Magavoters.” If twist this you can read that into the second paragraph, which I’ll drop in here in its entirety.

Much has been rightfully made of Donald Trump’s vows to sic the Department of Justice on all but his most ardent fans. In his most eloquent, scripted moment, he eggs on his base supporters by promising to be “your retribution.” They buy this bullshit rationalization though the payback would be his alone.

So, Subscriber X, help me sort this out. Tell me how what I wrote castigates the aforementioned Magavoters. Tell me where I go wrong here or how I’ve done them wrong. Do they not buy wholesale what Trump says and thus presume it will be “retribution” only for his sake and they’re good with that? For what it’s worth, in the time since I wrote the Griffin entry, Trump has only ratcheted up his rhetoric and promises to extend his retributive dragnet to include the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.

Kathy Griffin’s story is one worth visiting, because if Trump is elected, her story will the template for many, including but not limited to his political opponents. Only the slavishly loyal, his lapdogs, will be able to consider themselves safe and only for now.

Kathy Griffin lost a ton of money over the course of several years, not because her fans wouldn’t buy tickets, but rather because they had nowhere to see her. As I noted in the original piece.

… the people bothered by the photo would never have bought a ticket to a Kathy Griffin performance.

Promoters cancelled scheduled shows and venues wouldn’t book her because of those Magavoters … who had no problem castigating her, even to the point when she was the target of death threats.

I don’t think the blowback from the Harris endorsement here will do real harm to How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying). I’ve lost one subscriber with an expressed objection to the Kathy Griffin essay and I might lose more with the Harris endorsement today. But my conscience won’t keep me awake at night and neither will revealing Subscriber X’s name below the paywall.