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You don’t need to be a basketball fan, even in the lightest, to become infatuated with the new podcast “Death at the Wing” from Adam McKay.
Most people know your history with film. But I would love to learn a little more about your background in basketball
AM: Yeah, I am 6-foot-5 and I played in high school. I was never much an excellent player or anything. I rode the bench. But I just love it. I’ve played my whole life, like intramural in college and pickup games constantly. It’s just a great game. You can find the game at your level and it’s perfect.
What made you want to tell this story now, as the host and the producer, at this point in your career?
I think it was a story that really didn’t become a story until some years had passed. When we looked through it, you just saw: “Oh, this is tragic. Sports guys die. NBA players die. Rising basketball players die.” But now that there have been a few decades since then, you realize that no, that is actually not the case.
What were some of the things about these stories that you learned that stuck out the most during this process?
The one that really broke my heart with Benji Wilson is that they just let him bleed for three hours. That … just … I didn’t know that. When I heard that, I was like, ‘Oh no, he didn’t need to die.” I didn’t know they sent him to a hospital that didn’t have a trauma center.
What were some of the biggest challenges of dealing with extraordinary tragic deaths on such an intimate basis?
You are spot on. That was the biggest challenge of this podcast series. We’re still in the middle of it but every episode is tragic. Every episode is sad. You see this great potential and this light and these wonderful young people and they died through such tragic means.
How would you describe the elements that linked all of these deaths together?
From @3uncanny4 and @Hyperobject_Ind comes Death at the Wing – how race, drugs and the Reagan Revolution defined a decade of basketball, hosted by Adam McKay ( @GhostPanther ). Listen to the first two episodes here: https://t.co/kG3NEiq5yx pic.twitter.com/3UY8s4gHMu
How different do you think these stories would have looked in the modern era?
That’s a great question and we’re going to actually get into that in the last couple of episodes. But generally, I think the story of The Reagan Revolution in the 1980s is under-told. I even told my kids, in the early 1980s, drinking and driving wasn’t that big of a deal. That sounds horrible but it was true.
