Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

Welcome back to I’m Curious!

Kind of like in our most recent previous edition, we’ll be focusing on one topic today. But this time, we’ll at least be touching on some of the latest in sports.

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the intersection of literature and the arts with sports.

The disciplines have intersected for thousands of years, from the statues of discus throwers of ancient Greece to Shakespeare incorporating references to football to Santiago repeatedly discussing “The Great DiMaggio” in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Today, our focus will be a bit different. Not on athletes being mentioned in books, but instead on athletes reading and even writing as they chase their literary pursuits.

This topic is on a lot of people’s minds lately. Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown made waves when cameras showed him reading a book on the sideline. In the days following the game, the book, “Inner Excellence,” a self-help book by Jim Murphy, rocketed to the top spot on Amazon.

Reading and writing for fun are activities that may feel ingrained for older people and even for young adults. But in a world full of distractions, videos and social media of all sorts, there’s no guarantee kids are reading. USA Today’s Nancy Armour made this point in an excellent piece this week, noting how much of a difference it can make for kids to see Brown model reading as a behavior that even star athletes can do.

Plenty of athletes have been public recently about indulging in the literary world. One city in particular seems to be a hub for them, actually. Portland Trail Blazers guard Scoot Henderson talked about his reading habits in a GQ piece last spring and became a voracious reader after skipping college to play professionally in the G-League, the NBA’s minor league.

And the NWSL’s Portland Thorns are quite the readers, with the recently retired defender Becky Sauerbrunn and her penchant for fantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas and star forward Sophia Smith and her gravitation toward romance novels from the likes of Colleen Hoover and Liz Tomforde. 

As you might expect from me given all the soccer coverage, we land not far away from that for today’s conversation about what athletes do when they’re off the field.

Today’s Profile

I chatted with pro soccer player Emily Menges, who spent a decade with the Thorns before being selected in last year’s expansion draft by the San Jose-based Bay FC.

On the pitch, she has been an anchor for the expansion club, serving as the team’s captain. Despite being an expansion team, Bay FC made the playoffs in their first season, rallying after a slow start. We did cover their demise, a loss in a quarterfinal game against the Washington Spirit, in edition 16.

But off the pitch, Menges spends her time engaging with the arts, editing a literary newspaper called Bel Esprit, which takes submissions of poetry, essays and art. She also is a photographer, with some of her prints available for purchase.

Menges started Bel Esprit in 2020 and said it’s made her realize just how many people have an interest in writing.

“Before that, obviously, you know people like to write but you don’t—you don’t realize how many people,” Menges said. “Once you tell someone you like to write, so many people come out of the woodwork that are like, ‘oh yeah, I write poetry, too. I write short stories.’” 

Bel Esprit has accepted submissions from contributors as far afield as Australia and the UK, Menges told me.

For Menges, she always was interested in books and reading while growing up on Long Island but said she ended up with her English minor “by accident.” Her dean at Georgetown noted that she took enough English classes to nearly qualify for it without trying.

But the jump into the literary world came later, without the stress of class discussions or exams. 

“It wasn’t until after school where I could start just reading books people told me were good where I actually started enjoying a whole literary scene and situation,” she told me.

Some of the ones she gravitated toward included Joan Didion (“I read one thing from her and became slightly obsessed for a while”) and Ernest Hemingway, who, despite his skill as a writer, did not exactly become a topic to chat about with her teammates (“I try not to talk about Hemingway in the locker room.”)

That being said, she noted that there’s been a major evolution in the attitude players have toward reading.

“Even within a team now, you can find people who like your taste, which is crazy. Like I would say, earlier in my career, it was like, you find the one person on the team who also likes to read,” Menges said.

Both timing and time could be a factor. Players nowadays do not usually have to take on second jobs with the recent rise in player salaries and the success of the NWSL Players Association’s “No More Side Hustles” campaign (Menges has been a longtime member of leadership in the union, currently serving as its Treasurer.)

For Menges, she says having extra time helped open the door to jumping into writing and photography.

“I’m 100% self taught, which is good up to a point,” she says about her experience with photography.

Many of the prints on her photography site are of scenes from nature with a handful of city scenes. Birds, she told me, have been a recent addition. 

“I didn’t like birds until recently. It’s like a joke but it does start happening when you get into your 30s. Like, you start noticing birds,” Menges, now 32, said.

For her, photography is a supplement to her love of being out in nature. But it also brings out a desire for as close to perfect a shot as possible.

That, she says, might be the common thread that brings so many professional athletes to hobbies like photography, cooking or baking.

“I think you can think of an athlete as so Type A, as doing everything they have to be doing to be the best that they can,” she said.

“But actually it’s mostly like, competitiveness that makes you like that. And so, you’re competitive with yourself. You’re always going to try to be—I don’t think you can turn that off in other areas of your life.”

In addition to her efforts in the arts, Menges also helps her brothers with I’m Not Done Yet, a charity that helps pediatric and young-adult cancer patients. Her brother Bobby died of cancer in 2017 after years of battles with health issues.

She said that, despite the usual instinct to make a given game for him or a dedication to him, she handles the grief and his memory differently.

“I think there’s a big pressure to, when you lose somebody, to be like, ‘oh, I’m doing this for him. I’m doing this.’ But the reality is, there are so many other areas of my life where I feel him more,” she said.

Menges told me that one of the connections she feels most to her brother comes from the visits she has made to see young patients in cancer wards.

“The kids feel more connected when there’s a professional soccer player there and they love it.”

And for as much loss as she has dealt with, Menges had quite a bit of love in her life recently; she got married over the holidays and went on a quickly-planned honeymoon to Venice.

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One of my favorite questions to ask somebody is how they met their spouse. Usually it brings up a lot of happy memories and gets a person to share their softest side.

For Menges and her new wife Rhian Wilkinson, though, this question can be complicated. The two played together for the Portland Thorns in 2015 but their relationship bloomed in 2022 at one of the most inopportune times.

Wilkinson was the Thorns’ coach. Menges was a player.

And it was not the ideal time to navigate a manager-employee relationship.

The Thorns were one of the central teams in the years-long player abuse scandal being uncovered at the time (for events before Wilkinson became coach.)

In 2021, two Thorns players, Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, came forward accusing former coach Paul Riley of sexually abusing them and saying the abuse was the reason why the team fired Riley in 2015.

In October 2022, a report done for US Soccer by former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates detailed abuse at teams across the league, including romantic relationships between players and coaches at both Sky Blue FC and the Chicago Red Stars that created toxic work environments.

It laid out how the league’s leadership at the time turned a blind eye to allegations of abuse, with players facing retaliation.

In the report, Yates said multiple coaches married former players which “desensitized the system about power imbalances.” 

The report rocked the American women’s soccer community. Players and staff were on edge.

Roughly two weeks after the report came out, Menges and Wilkinson recognized their feelings for each other.

Wilkinson resigned in December 2022 after self-reporting the relationship and a joint investigation by the league and players association cleared her of any misconduct. (Menges was an NWSLPA board member at the time but recused herself.)

“When Rhian and I got together, it was such a tumultuous period in the women’s soccer world that everyone was really nervous I think from every standpoint—in soccer, out of soccer, fans, players, coaches. Like every aspect you looked at, everyone was nervous to know, like, how to feel about anything,” Menges said this week.

Meg Linehan of The Athletic, the reporter behind many of the first news reports detailing player abuse, reported on the details in a thorough story in 2022 (available here but paywalled.)

Wilkinson told Linehan that a player (Menges) expressed feelings for her over text in mid-October and that she reciprocated them. 

“Straightaway, the player and I — because both of us truly believe in the process and what needs to happen in this league — took steps the next day to do things the right way,” Wilkinson said at the time.

Menges spoke with Linehan and identified herself as the player.

“This is way more publicity about my personal life than I would ever want, but I’m not trying to hide from it,” Menges told her.

Wilkinson mentioned losing the trust of the locker room and that prompting her resignation. The Athletic’s story notes that a group of unnamed Thorns players wrote to the league, saying they had concerns about the thoroughness of the investigation that cleared Wilkinson and that they felt unsafe after trying to report the relationship to the club’s CEO. The players also detailed their concern about power imbalances in a player-coach relationship.

Menges said in the 2022 story that she felt there was no imbalance of power in her relationship. 

In the years since, Menges and Wilkinson have stayed together and worked separate jobs.

“The further we get away from it and the more that people can look at a relationship in a vacuum instead of with the context of what was happening with the league at the time, we found a lot of people, a lot of support, a lot of love,” Menges said. 

“It’s still something we’re navigating. But at the end of the day, we’re married, our families love each other, and we’re happy.”

You can watch and listen to my full conversation with Emily here:

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

Get up, get up, get outta here, GONE!: Longtime Milwaukee Brewers play-by-play man and all-around legendary human Bob Uecker died Thursday, aged 90. I can’t let this newsletter wrap without noting how much of a model he was for the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor I love and subconsciously try to emulate.

He was also a joy to listen to, so much so that, despite not really caring all that much about the Brewers, I would actively seek out their games on my MLB TV subscription and put on the radio broadcast as the audio so I could hear him call games. 

His unmistakable voice sounded like a cross between classic baseball announcer and vintage game show host.

A former major league catcher who spent most of his six-year career on the bench, Uecker joked in his speech when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame (as a broadcaster) in 2003 that “I had a great shoe contract and glove contract with a company who paid me a lot of money never to be seen using their stuff.”

He always found a way to make his teammates smile. The World Series-winning 1964 St. Louis Cardinals had to retake their team photo because Uecker and his teammate Bob Gibson, the legendary intimidating pitcher known for his anger on the mound, were laughing, smiling and holding hands while sitting next to each other.

Uecker transitioned into broadcasting and became the voice for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1971, just one year after they moved to his hometown of Milwaukee.

He cut back his workload in his last years but has called games in every season since, even helming the radio broadcast for part of the team’s playoff run this past season.

After calling some games for national TV, Uecker became an actor in commercials, TV shows and movies.

One ad he did for Miller Lite is iconic among baseball fans. Uecker gets booted from the seats where he is pitching the beer, joking that he “must be in the front row.” The commercial cuts to Uecker sitting in the nosebleeds and yelling “he missed the tag!” while watching the game from a spot where the players probably looked like ants.

Uecker had a starring role as the father in the 80s ABC sitcom “Mr. Belvedere,” where a generic sitcom family ends up with an English butler for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me.

He also appeared as a ring announcer and interviewer at a handful of early WrestleManias, including one where Uecker was looking for Wheel of Fortune co-host Vanna White and instead found Andre the Giant, who memorably choked him with one of his gigantic hands.

And before we finish up the run through his 80s acting career, there is, of course, his role as the Cleveland Indians’ fictional alcoholic play-by-play man Harry Doyle in the film “Major League,” starring Charlie Sheen (but if you ask me, Uecker’s the real star.)

“Juuust a bit outside. He tried the corner and missed,” he quipped as the ball sailed several feet away from even thinking about crossing home plate.

Oh, and if you need some good laughs, there’s the 2007 broadcast where he spent a solid 15 minutes calling the game while also talking about, learning about, and expressing an interest in befriending “furries” staying in the same hotel as the Brewers for a convention.

At a few points I was genuinely cracking up and laughing out loud. If I heard this on a regular day in the car I would’ve driven off the road.

Something Good I Ate

We’re gonna weave this into the Uecker obituary here. I don’t have a picture of it but today’s edition is a very good brat that I had at Miller Park (now American Family Field) in Milwaukee back in 2015.

It came as part of a deep discount meant for being a designated driver, wherein your parking stub had an offer for a combo with a brat and a non-alcoholic drink for $5. I remember the brat being really good, beefier than your normal ballpark hot dog and at that price, even a decade ago, tasting better because it was a bargain.

True to the Uecker spirit, I bought tickets in the upper deck behind home plate. During the game, I looked back and saw a strange statue. It kinda looked like Bob Uecker. I trekked up the stairs and saw a statue of Uecker in the last row of the upper deck, with a pole blocking the view. He was sitting in the type of nosebleed seat he made famous in that Miller Lite ad, with his arm around an empty chair where any old fan could take a seat next to him.

For some reason I looked psychotic in the pictures some random fan took on my phone but it’s the picture I got. Given the self-deprecating humor he was known for, it feels kinda fitting that I never met the man himself, but only met a statue of him. So without further ado, here I am with a copy of the late, great Bob Uecker. RIP.