How Did Any of This Happen?

On a crazy week and Late Night With Seth Meyers and Emily Blunt and being a fly on the wall

Crazy fun week coming up: Tonight (weather permitting) I’ll play my first USTA tennis match in, like, I don’t know, 10 years? My friend Maddy (who, you might remember, went to the prom with Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer) somehow convinced me to join her for mixed doubles. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it. I think I like PLAYING tennis more than I like COMPETING in tennis. But we’ll find out.

Tomorrow, Margo and I head for New York because Wednesday night, Mike and I will be guests on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Here, for posterity, is the full lineup:

Yes, that’s right — Seth’s guests on Wednesday are Mike, me, and Emily Blunt.

That seems normal, right?

This will be my first-ever appearance on a late-night television talk show, so I’m nervous and excited. But it will not be my first ever time at a late-night show. A few years ago — OK, yikes, I’m looking now and realizing this was SIXTEEN YEARS AGO — I was doing a story on race car legend Jimmie Johnson for Sports Illustrated, and I went with him to the Tonight Show. This was during that all-too-brief time when Conan was the host of the show, and as I recall, the other guests that day were Christian Slater and, I believe, the Backstreet Boys.

Here’s what I remember most about that day: Before Jimmie went on, a couple of the show’s staff came into the room to talk with me. Yeah. Specifically with me.

And what they said, as I recall, was this:

“Hi. We just wanted to come in to tell you we’re huge fans of your work. Really big fans. Everybody here loves what you do. We’re such big fans, really, across the board, we just love your writing, just love your work, um, but hey, listen, we have a really strict policy here that you cannot talk to any of the other guests. It’s just a little policy we have, you know, to let the guests have their privacy, but mainly we just want to know just how big of fans we are of you and what you do and …”

They had come in specifically to tell me to lay off Christian Slater.

But in the nicest and most Hollywood way possible. It was delightful. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they had absolutely no idea who I was, but I enjoyed it all the same.

So my guess is that I won’t meet Emily Blunt. Sigh.

Anyway, we’re doing a bunch of other things in New York. Going to be on Katie Nolan’s podcast, which is amazing because I think she’s the greatest. We’re going to be on CBS Mornings on Saturday. And how about this? Margo and I are going to see the Broadway show Dog Day Afternoon on Friday night, which features a bunch of amazing actors, including my friend John Ortiz. I worked with John on the super-fun documentary The Diamond King about the incredible baseball artist Dick Perez.

Plus, I’ll see a bunch of other New York friends.

I often stop to ask myself: “How did any of this happen?” I don’t have a good answer, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately as amazing feedback about BIG FAN comes back, and I do the final edit on FIFTY SEASONS (coming out February! More news soon!), and I find myself in preposterous discussions with incredible people about future projects.

How did any of this happen?'

When I was in college, I was entirely lost. I’ve talked a lot about failing out of the school of accounting — and never being able to grasp the concept that debits were not inherently good, nor credits inherently bad — and then desperately writing letters to anybody I could think of who might have some advice. One of the people I wrote to was a talk radio host and sports announcer named Gary Sparber — he was such a nice man. He sadly lost his voice and left the business, but he was an excellent announcer, and I idolized him, and when I sent him a note asking for advice, he sent me back a five-or-so-page letter with all sorts of thoughts and guidance and inspiration, and he even told me to record a tape and send it to him, if I liked.

I did just that. He sent me another five-page letter with all sorts of thoughts and kindness and encouragement, but what I remember most were six words he tried very carefully to hide in the note so that they wouldn’t destroy me.

Those six words were “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but …”

And then he hinted that maybe I should focus on writing.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t consider myself a good writer. I had no reason to consider myself a good writer. I’d never had a single teacher or friend or anyone tell me that I was a good writer. But at that point, I figured: What did I have to lose? I switched my major to English (UNC Charlotte did not have a journalism major). I started sending articles out to magazines. But I had little faith that it would lead to anything.

And, yes, I’ve told this story before, but it changed my life, so … I took an English class — I’m going to get all the details wrong on this — and at some point we were reading, I believe, John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” and Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus.” And the assignment was to be a fly on the wall and write an essay about a conversation between the two protagonists.

Well, here’s what happened: I had never heard that expression “fly on the wall.” Or if I heard it, I didn’t remember it. I probably could have figured out the definition from context, but I didn’t. I wrote my essay as if I were a literal fly on the wall. I don’t remember much of what I wrote, but I do remember writing something like this:

“OK, these two guys are talking about something or other, but I see a hot dog there on the other side of the room that has my name on it.”

The two things I do remember vividly are that I did not get an A on the paper because it didn’t have any analysis of value.

And that the professor wrote, “Now I teach you in my class. Someday, I’ll teach you to my class.”

Those words changed everything for me. I’d already (out of desperation) devoted myself to becoming a sportswriter — had already started freelancing as a high school writer for the Charlotte Observer — but those words were the first signal that I could actually be good at anything. I think about what those words unlocked in me.

I think about how much I hope every young person has that thing unlocked in them.

And all these years later, I’ll be on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Mike Schur, and EMILY BLEEPING BLUNT. I definitely won’t bother her to say what a big fan I am. But I’ll always know that our childhood dreams, at least for one night, led to the same place.