Shout out to David L. Cohen, the previous US ambassador to Ottawa, who invited me in 2023 to host a chat with author Buzz Bissinger. Sure, I said distractedly. As you’ll hear, it went way better than I expected.
Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights, which became a phenomenon in a few different media. He wrote A Prayer for the City, about the odd-couple turnaround team who ushered Philadelphia into a post-industrial renaissance in the ’90s: jock mayor Ed Rendell and the detail-obsessed young lawyer who became his chief of staff, David L. Cohen. He had many other… adventures, which we get into here.
Bissinger was in Ottawa partly to catch up with Cohen, and partly to sell his then-new book, The Mosquito Bowl. An almost perfect American tragedy. As I wrote the first time we ran this episode:
It turns out that in the Second World War, a lot of fantastic college and professional football players figured that if they had to fight, they’d rather be Marines. So on Guadalcanal at the end of 1944, members of the 4th and 29th Marine regiments looked around and said, Holy cow, we could field a couple of great football teams here. So they did. On Christmas Eve, 1944, a single game, on as close to a league-standard field as they could build on an island in the South Pacific, with news of each play broadcast on radio across the Pacific theatre.
And then they all shipped off to Okinawa to push the Japanese Army off another outpost in what became the war’s penultimate slaughterhouse, and by the time the fighting was done a quarter of the boys who had played in the Mosquito Bowl were dead.
The news since Bissinger’s visit is that The Mosquito Bowl will be a Netflix movie, or a movie from Netflix, with an all-star cast. Also there are rumblings of yet another Friday Night Lights reboot. Also Donald Trump returned to office, which as you’ll hear was not Bissinger’s preference. But there’s not much politics in this episode, or at least not served straight up. This is mostly a talk about the reporter’s craft, the constant struggle to find the right relationship to an engrossing story, and the elusive and haunting ideal of America.
I had no idea what to expect from a talk with Buzz Bissinger. Probably you’re like me. Trust me: it’s fascinating.
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In theory you should be able to find a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via a "Transcript” button you should be able to find somewhere near the top of this post, but if you can’t find the damned button I can’t help you. Substack handles the coding and they don’t make this stuff easy to find on some platforms. Life is hard sometimes.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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