Late Night With Seth Meyers!
What is my life?
So last night, Mike and I did Late Night With Seth Meyers. We’ll take a few questions from the audience now:
Q: So, did you get to meet Emily Blunt?
A: No. As mentioned, these late-night shows are very good at protecting their guests, and Emily is on what I imagine to be a Bataan Death March media tour for the new movie “Disclosure Day” — which I can’t wait to see, by the way — and the last thing she needed in her life was some pudgy sportswriter telling her, Chris Farley style, how awesome she is. She was pretty quick in and out, as you would expect.
Q: Were there gifts?
Yes! There was a Late Night tote bag, a Late Night mug, a Late Night T-shirt (so comfy!), and lots of snacks and treats. We each got a bag of cookies from Levain Bakery, which, my plugged-in daughters tell me, is a huge thing.
Q: Were you nervous?
A: Weirdly, no. I don’t seem to get nervous anymore, at least not about speaking in public. It’s probably the strangest evolution of my life; if you told me that in 10 minutes, I needed to do, like a college graduation speech, I’d be like, “OK.” I don’t know when or how that happened — I used to be PETRIFIED to speak in public. Now, I’d be like, heck, the Rulon Gardner story is 20 minutes all by itself (and wouldn’t the college kids love that one!). There don’t seem to be that many advantages to getting old, but one of them seems to be that maybe you stop worrying about the small stuff.
Q: How good is Seth Meyers at this stuff?
A: I know this will sound biased because I know Seth a bit, and he’s a Brilliant Reader, and he just had us on his show … but I think he’s the best interviewer in late-night. Maybe the best ever. I mean, this is a very specific thing. I mean, no one will ever be Carson, and no one will ever be Letterman, and no one will ever be Conan, and no one will ever be Colbert. They all brought their own thing to it. My pal Bob Costas was the best in-depth interviewer ever on late-night, I think. And Dick Cavett was great in a whole other way.
But purely sitting across the table from somebody, anybody, a movie star, an athlete, an author, a politician, anyone, and just talking to them for a few minutes, no notes, off the cuff, being truly curious, and letting the conversation go to interesting places — Seth is the best I’ve ever seen.
Q: Can you believe that the Red Sox’s 1-2-3 hitters each struck out the first three times they came up?
A: No. I can’t believe it. But it happened. For posterity, here’s how it went down:
First inning:
Jarren Duran led off by striking out swinging on a 90-mph cutter at his feet.
Cedanne Rafaela struck out swinging on a fastball at his syes.
Wilyer Abreau struck out by swinging at a fastball that was already in the glove.
Fourth inning:
Duran struck out swinging at a fastball at his eyes.
Rafaela struck out swinging at a cutter in the dirt.
Abreu struck out swinging at a fastball that was not quite at his eyes, more like at neck height.
Seventh inning:
Duran struck out swinging at a fastball up in the zone.
Rafaela struck out looking (variety!) at a fastball on a 3-2 count.
Eighth inning: Abreu struck out swinging when he couldn’t quite check his swing on a curveball.
That’s history — no team has ever had its top three batters all strike out the first three times they came to the plate. I can’t believe how this Red Sox season has disintegrated before our very eyes. I do tend to believe that the Red Sox have had this coming ever since they let Mookie get away, and for the way they treated Raffy Devers, but I mean, this is like a biblical plague.
Q: Come on, seriously, are you really rooting for the Knicks? The NEW YORK KNICKS???
A: I’m as surprised as you are. But I do believe that fandom is a matter of the heart; I have often gone into sporting events that do not involve my teams and thought I would root one way only to find myself rooting the other way.
During last night’s epic Knicks comeback, I found myself pumping my fist and rooting for New York even as they kept showing all the New York celebrities in the crowd — normally, that stuff might turn me off. But I kind of feel like so many of these celebrity fans are true fans, they have died with the Knicks for so long — along with all the Knicks fans that I see all over this city — and I really want this for them.
I do want to ask this, though — even though I realize I’m hardly the first person to ask: Can someone, anyone — I mean ANYONE — explain to me what the heck San Antonio’s De’Aaron Fox was thinking in the final seconds of that game. With the Spurs up 1 and 13 seconds left, New York’s superhero Jalen Brunson tried to shoot over Wemby, which is like trying to shoot over the Chrysler Building, and Brunson missed, and Fox tapped the rebound forward and outraced everybody and seemed to have a clear lane to the basket.
Fox is known for his super-speed, so I get why he saw only the basket in front of him.
BUT … San Antonio led by 1. They had been choking away the game for the entire quarter. It seems unconscionable that he would not pull that ball back out and try to run off as much time as possible and shoot the free throws — not least because even if he DID make the layup, it would only have put the Spurs up by three with 10 or 11 seconds left.
As we know now, he did not make the layup because OG Anunoby blocked the shot, setting up his later final shot heroics.
I think when things are in freefall, the way they were with the Spurs — at some point during the Knicks comeback, I texted Mike saying, “This is just a repeat of what the Knicks did to the Cavs in Game 1 of the Conference Final — I think people stop thinking clearly. They try to do too much. They start getting down on themselves. Wemby missed two free throws. It was all going so wrong.
My guess is that the only thing going on in Fox’s mind in that moment was that he had a clear lane to the basket and he was, by gosh, going to end this absurd comeback once and for all. Fox is a nine-year NBA veteran. He’s a winner of the Clutch Player of the Year award. He’s an All-Star.
But once it starts going bad, no one is immune.
Q: Was Late Night With Seth Meyers all you did in New York on Wednesday?
No! Thank you for asking! Mike and I also went on Katie Nolan’s podcast “Casuals,” and that was an incredible thrill: Huge, huge fan of Katie’s, and we had a blast: