Feeling Low(e)

On a podcast, a craft, a connection, and having a beer.

The park that I liked to walk through in Hillsboro, OR, my new home at the start of 2015, had pine trees that nearly touched the sky. They surrounded a small brick library, a small concrete stage, a small multicolored metal playground, and a stretch of grass that could fit my training sessions, which meant I also spent time surrounded by these trees. It was a short walk from the house I was living in, but not short enough to walk with silence or my own thoughts as sole companions. I needed another voice to fill my head and to fill my time. I made that walk many, many times, and spent a lot of time in that first year on my own, so this was the first time that I started to build lasting connections to podcasts, and therefore to podcast hosts. The options felt wonderfully uncrowded, and I easily my feed with voices that I am still listening to today. Well, that was true last week, but after the announcement that ESPN laid off senior NBA writer and host of The Lowe Post, Zach Lowe, my feed just got smaller.

Zach Lowe

The loss runs deeper than that. In the two weeks that have passed, I’ve gone about my business, listening to music and news and podcasts about Hollywood, about foreign affairs, about domestic affairs, about music, about pop culture and more, but not about basketball. The season is about to start, but is not currently demanding my attention. I have not worried about Zach Lowe’s future career, because he is talented and amiable, and I know he was making good money. Then, while in the throws of repetitive work yesterday afternoon, my podcast feed ran dry, and I needed to re-fill my “Downloaded” folder. I did not need to hear a fourth voice on scary real world news that day, and I did not need to oversaturate the wonderful music musings I had just listened to. What I wanted to do was check-in on some basketball takes. So I clicked open my podcast player of choice, tapped into my library, and found an unexpected and large pit in my stomach.

For nine years, and in some ways for my entire “real” adult life, I’ve had Zach Lowe in my pocket. I’ve had his analytical and educational writing (thankfully) archived on Grantland.com and published on ESPN, and I’ve had his analytical and educational voice in my podcast player of choice. Most of all I have had his influence and his guidance through my fandom of basketball and in my own sports analysis pursuits. Zach’s work was loudly lauded by several peers when I started helping out with local Ultimate Frisbee coverage in my region. In particular, a Seattle writer handed me a guest pass to the Grantland Fan Club, and I entered hungry. Within a week I had read dozens of stories, and had identified Lowe’s prose as a beautiful example of insightful and legible. I immediately applied the tools I saw him using and applied them to my own sport, and like mana from heaven, I wrote my first piece of analysis for our sport’s biggest coverage outlet, and no piece I’ve ever written has felt so easy and natural and fun.

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The empowerment that Zach’s writing gave me was singular. The way I analyzed and saw sports changed. The way I talked about sports changed. Many other writers have since followed his lead, and his style, and many have created wonderful things. None of them are Zach Lowe. Then, after my reading frenzy, I had his podcast to learn from. I listened to every episode, one a week nearly every week of the year. He was getting the biggest names in the media, and the biggest names in the sport, to talk hoops with him. He was breaking down strategy, trading observations with coaches, trading stories with journalists, asking enlightening questions of players, and providing countless insights into what is still my favorite sport to consume: NBA basketball.

More important than the work itself, to me, is the way in which Lowe goes about doing his work and how he relates to people. It never sounded hollow and never got old when every guest on the show would lay praise at his feet before getting into x’s or o’s. It always felt genuine when Zach would recommend that he and his guest grab dinner or a beer after a game sometime soon. It was surprising that Lowe would never turn hoity-toity when revealing information from trusted and high-ranking NBA persons, an act that others in the spotlight certainly could do and certainly have done. It was always a treat to find his exacting strategic analysis broken up by deeply held opinions on what team has the best mascot or the best looking court, or what team would be the purest version of fun to watch in this upcoming season; high art and low art, together from a single source. For all of this importance and heft in the field, Zach is just a nerdy dad who relaxes with a single beer after a hard days’ work and works hard to be a great writer and a good friend.

In a media world that has changed innumerably in these last nine years, mostly for the worse (old man yells at cloud), Lowe’s stability, reliability, and ultimate-hang-ability has been essential to me, and yesterday afternoon, I realized that my stability has been broken, and my connection to an entire sport has now be shaken, even threatened. While the podcast world continues to boom with output, I have not found a single show that I have stuck with for longer than a few weeks. There are great Twitter posters, fans, media members, former video analysis guys, and celebrities out there sharing their views on the sport out there making fun content, but none of them have the quality, the roster of peers longing to talk hoops with them, the high brow and low brow flexibility, or the earnestness and honesty that Zach has. When every other show and personality wanted to get quoted and aggregated, Zach wanted to discuss ideas with rationalization, and temperance, and grace. Lowe didn’t want to prognosticate, or predict, or dig into personal lives; he wanted to watch ball. He is a voice of reason in a world desperately seeking TikTok interaction. The Lowe Post was enough for me. And let’s not talk about the world of sports writing and publishing; the world is already too sad.

And so I’m feeling low today. I’m feeling a little lost. I’m feeling disconnected from a sport I want to care about that starts very soon. I didn’t know I would feel this way when I lost a sports podcast from my subscription feed. I’m glad I feel so deeply about something so trivial as basketball and its coverage. I’m glad Zach is merely laid off, and will likely be back in my life. I’m glad I have gotten an opportunity to reflect on this strange and specific and very modern para-social relationship, and on my relationship to a sport, and my own past. I’m glad I felt compelled to write, to share enthusiasm about a good dude, and to try something new. I think, now, I’ll try to fill this gap in the world — and Zach’s gap in my world — by texting a peer, and see if they want to grab a beer.