Lowell Cohn (b. 1945) wrote sports columns in the San Francisco Bay Area for close to forty years, first at the San Francisco Chronicle and then at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and he arrived at the work sideways, from literature rather than from the police blotter and the high school box score. He held a doctorate in English from Stanford University. He had read Conrad, James, and Austen before he filed a game story. He came to the press box already formed as a reader and a stylist, and that formation set him apart from the reporters around him, men who had climbed the trade in the orthodox way and who, at the start, resented him for jumping the line. In the introduction to his 2020 memoir Gloves Off, he reports that for years his colleagues called him a name unprintable in a family newspaper, and he grants that the name fit. He had done none of the standard things. He had never studied journalism, never covered high schools, never paid the dues. He walked in and became a columnist, the elite job, and he understood why the men who had served their time wanted to throw him out.
He grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the 1950s, in a middle-class Jewish home where two questions hovered over everyone he met: Is he Jewish, and is he smart? His mother, Eve, taught elementary school. His father practiced law in lower Manhattan and later lost his sight, and the boy read to him and helped prepare his cases, an apprenticeship in language and argument that no school assigned. The family ran on type. As Cohn told me in a 2008 interview, his older brother Robert (1941–2018) occupied the doctor slot, his younger sister the teacher slot, and Lowell the lawyer slot. His father offered more than once, well into Lowell’s thirties, to pay for law school. Lowell declined every time. He wanted to write, and he would admit no impediment to that, though he liked to add that he never committed murder to get where he wanted to go.
The Jewish formation runs through everything he made. He described his cast of mind as argumentative, drawn to fine distinctions, alert to the absurd, and quick to cause verbal trouble, and he named that mind as a Jewish inheritance. His humor he called New York Jewish, ironic and self-deprecating and sarcastic. The writers he carried in his head when he sat down to work were Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), whose Brooklyn Jewish sound he heard in his own sentences, and Philip Roth (1933–2018). His sense of who belonged and who stood outside came from his parents, first-generation Americans who had lived through the years of the Holocaust and who saw Jews as a people apart. Every spring, before he taught a creative writing class at the University of San Francisco, he scanned the roster for Jewish names. He called the habit a stereotype and said he was a stereotype for it.
The road to writing ran first through the academy and then away from it. He attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, an all-men’s school where a sheltered nerd could thrive and where the wealthy WASP students from the Main Line let him understand, without ever saying a word to his face, which fraternities a Jew could and could not enter. He went west to Stanford for graduate study in English and stayed six years, earning a doctorate in 1972 with a dissertation on Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). For a while he looked headed for a professorship. He taught, he read, he steeped himself in narrative and character, and he discovered that the deathly stillness of the seminar room and the library held no action and that he craved action. At the Modern Language Association job market in 1971 no one wanted to hire him, and instead of crushing him the rejection freed him. He decided that if they did not want him, he did not want them, and he would be a writer.
He began as a film critic at the Palo Alto Times, which paid him ten dollars a review and, after a strong first year, raised him to twelve-fifty. He sold a few pieces to Sports Illustrated and, on the advice of the New York Times writer Leonard Koppett (1923–2003), telephoned the magazine cold and asked for a job. The episode became one of his best stories, recounted in Gloves Off. A senior editor, Jeremiah Tax, invited him east, bought a story about Brooklyn street games and Homer for five hundred dollars, and told him he was too green for staff but might prove himself on assignment. Cohn left the building so elated that he vomited on the platform of the DeKalb Avenue station, and he decided his nerves could not tell the difference between extreme upset and extreme joy. Years later he learned why the magazine’s managing editor, Gilbert Rogin (1929–2017), never warmed to him. A mutual acquaintance confessed it: Rogin disliked Joseph Conrad, and so he disliked the young man who had written a doctorate on Conrad. Cohn, who could no more write like Conrad than fly, found the verdict comic and kept it.
The Chronicle hired him in 1979 for the very reason the other writers held against him. The managing editor wanted an outsider with fresh eyes, a man who would see sports without the genre’s pieties. Cohn obliged. His first column asked why teams played the national anthem before games and argued that professional sports had nothing to do with patriotism, a position that drew outraged mail and pleased his bosses, who wanted noise. He wrote that the Oakland Raiders looked soft out of their uniforms, that one of them had a pencil neck, and he asked athletes about their haircuts and what they read and ate. He wrote in scenes, built dramatic tension, gave his subjects dialogue, and treated coaches and players as characters rather than as performers. He took hard stands and criticized local teams when he judged they deserved it, which the Bay Area writers, considered soft beside the blunt New York men among whom he had been raised, rarely did. He needed the splash. He was on a six-month trial, and a background hum got dropped. Readers hated him and read him, and the paper put his face on the sides of city buses.
No relationship marked his career more than the one with Bill Walsh (1931–2007). Walsh coached the 49ers to greatness, demanded excellence, and prized intelligence, all of which drew Cohn to him; Walsh also bruised easily and brooded over criticism, which guaranteed conflict. When Cohn questioned in print whether the coach had lost his edge, Walsh stopped speaking to him for a stretch. The friction sharpened rather than dulled the portrait. Cohn refused to render Walsh as a lone genius and drew instead a brilliant, anxious, perfectionist man driven by insecurity as much as by gift. Out of unlimited access to Walsh’s return to the Stanford program for the 1992 season came Rough Magic (1994), a book that does not topple the genius myth so much as replace it with a working man who labors over detail, struggles to motivate, doubts himself, errs, and recovers. Their bond outlasted a real rupture. When the book appeared, Walsh told a television audience he had not been a party to it, a claim Cohn knew to be false, since the two had signed an agreement and Walsh had taken a share of the proceeds. They did not speak for two years. Cohn stayed angry. They reconciled before Walsh died, and in the fall of 2006, when Walsh was dying of leukemia, Cohn and his old colleague Ira Miller were the only writers who knew, and they sat on the news because Walsh asked them to. As Cohn puts it in Gloves Off, you sometimes judge journalists by the stories they do not write.
That line names his ethic. He held to a small set of moral absolutes, fewer than his religious friends held but firm where he held them. Walsh had told him, on tape, about an affair, and Cohn left it out of the book and said leaving it out cost him the millions a scandal would have earned, because he did not think an honorable man did that to another man. He found outing repugnant and never did it. He believed a married man’s private life was his wife’s business and not a columnist’s, and he extended the courtesy even to people who had given him cause. He drew the line at hatred. When the Oakland A’s manager Billy Martin (1928–1989), angry over something Cohn had written, told two other writers it was a shame Cohn had not been killed with the other six million, Cohn confirmed the slur with both men and answered it not with a frontal column but with a compare-and-contrast piece that set an unnamed Manager One against an unnamed Manager Two, every reader in the Bay Area knowing which was Martin and which was Frank Robinson (1935–2019). He came to think he had handled it as a young man would, and that a mature man would have gone to the team’s Jewish ownership. Decades later, when the 49ers signed a player who had tweeted that the Jews killed Christ, Cohn went to the team’s chief executive, Jed York, gave him the chance to disown the words, and held his own column in reserve. The player deleted the tweets. York never issued a statement and never acknowledged the gravity of the thing, and Cohn judged that for York the affair never rose above a public-relations nuisance.
The toughness was learned young and consciously kept. In Gloves Off he traces it to a Brooklyn playground on Avenue L, where two older boys, Big Sal and Little Sal, routinely put him in a headlock and where he learned to stand his ground and take what came, after which the Sals defended him against outsiders. He calls sports writing a conflict trade built on intimidation and says he learned to face athletes the way he had faced the Sals. He stared down Kevin Mitchell at the batting cage, reminded him that a punch would cost him his house, and won the man’s respect and then his affection. He shouted a question at a contemptuous coach until the coach, startled, answered fully, and the cowed Los Angeles writers thanked him afterward. He understood that you rip a man in print and then show your face, walk up to him, and ask whether he has anything to say, because the ones who hide are marked as punks and can never do business again. He did it with sweaty palms and a churning stomach, hating the confrontation and knowing it had to be done.
His years at the top did not last without cost. After seven or eight strong years he fell out with the Chronicle’s management, in part over money he thought meager and in part over his own political clumsiness, and a long decline followed in which editors second-guessed his columns until his writing turned tentative and, by his own account, deserved the demotion it received. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, owned then by The New York Times Company, called in 1995 and offered him a good salary, autonomy, and a life he could keep intact sixty-five miles from the newsroom. His wife, Dawn, told him to take it. He did, and the writing came back in a day. He had learned, in his forties, that being the man bought nothing he valued. Food tasted no better and his wife kissed him no differently for the clout, and what he wanted was to sleep with a light heart. He married Dawn at thirty-nine; she had a son from a first marriage, and together they raised Grant (b. 1988) Jewish though Dawn is not, in a home with Friday candles and a Christmas tree.
His aesthetic stayed steady across the moves. He prized the basic. Asked why he loved boxing, a sport his educated friends found ungentlemanly, he answered that it was basic, and that basic is the best drama. In Gloves Off he defends the sport against its moralizers by pointing out that swimming and cycling kill far more people than the ring, that football trains men to inflict maximum harm and leaves them with degenerative brain disease, and that boxers, like gladiators, choose their trade as free men whose choices he declines to police. He loved boxing for the same reason he loved a clean sentence: nothing stands between the two men and the act. His models came from fiction and not from newspapers. He admired Red Smith (1905–1982), Jimmy Cannon (1909–1973), and Jim Murray (1919–1998), but he placed Conrad and Greene and Austen and Eliot above any sportswriter, himself included, and he located his meaning in the act of composition, in planning a first sentence, hearing the alliteration in his head, and working toward an ending that lands.
He retired at the end of 2016, after nearly forty years, and described his last season as a slow detachment, the good student turned at last into the bad kid staring out the window. He never said goodbye to the men he had covered for decades, Steve Kerr (b. 1965) and Bruce Bochy and Billy Beane and the rest, because, as he writes, saying goodbye seemed beside the point given that he had never said hello. Retirement did not end the work. He found a second life beside his son, who built a large following covering the 49ers across YouTube, podcasts, and digital platforms, and the two host a regular program together, Lowell the historical voice drawing the line from Montana and Walsh to the present. He keeps a Substack. In June 2026 he and Grant were still arguing on the air about the coming season, the father a measured optimist, the son a half-game more cautious, the old columnist’s voice intact.
The career argues a single proposition, which he made in many forms over four decades: the best sports writing is never only about sports. It is about pride and fear and loneliness and ambition, about men under pressure, and about the writer’s first obligation, which is never to be boring. Steve Young (b. 1961), who as quarterback spent half a decade inside Cohn’s coverage and hated some of it, put the case for the prosecution and the defense in a single line in his foreword to Gloves Off: the medicine did not taste good, but it was good for you. Cohn would take the verdict. He wrote in joy, not in anger, with music playing to seal off the world, and he believed, against the religious certainties of his friends, that men who confront the same world will arrive on their own at the few absolutes worth keeping. He kept his. He did not out the unfaithful. He did not let a dying man be ambushed. He did not let an anti-Semite pass. And he never, not once, backed down from the Sals.
Pure Action: The Hero System of Lowell Cohn
He bought the tie at the Macy’s in the Stanford Shopping Center, a thick dark-blue wool that went with the one blazer he owned, and he wore it to Manhattan to meet a senior editor at Sports Illustrated. The editor bought a story off him before he sat down. Five hundred dollars for a piece about Brooklyn street games and Homer. Lowell Cohn walked out onto the street with a byline coming in the only magazine that counted, and he could not think what a sophisticated man did at such a moment, so he did what he knew, grabbed a sandwich at a grubby luncheonette and got on the subway home. The old D train strained up over the Manhattan Bridge with the dirty East River below, and his lunch rose in his throat. He fought it down. He made the platform at DeKalb Avenue, ran to the far end, leaned over the tracks, and let it go. When he straightened up the new blue wool was streaked orange. He took the tie off and dropped it in the trash and rode the rest of the way to Avenue M and told his father about the sale and never mentioned the tie. He decided, on that platform, that his nerves could not tell the difference between extreme upset and extreme happiness. The alarms ring the same either way.
That platform holds the whole man. Ernest Becker (1924–1974) built an anthropology on the split it shows. We are the animal that knows it will die, the angel housed in a body that defecates and decays, and we cannot live inside the knowledge, so we build hero systems, schemes by which a man might count, might earn a worth the grave cannot cancel. Self-esteem, in this reading, is the feeling that one is a hero in a scheme of things that outlasts the flesh. The immortality project is the labor of a lifetime, the work that says I was here and will remain. On the DeKalb platform the project soared and the creature heaved, and the two could not be told apart. The byline on the shiny paper was the angel. The vomit was the anus. Cohn, who had a doctorate and a stomach, supplied both.
Begin with what he fled. He trained as an academic, took the Ph.D. in English at Stanford, and found at the end of it a world with no pulse. He has described the room he ran from with a precision worth keeping: a deathly still library, dust motes floating in half-light, a polite seminar in Henry James. Becker would recognize that stillness as a small rehearsal of the grave, the quiet a man’s whole being recoils from once he has felt the recoil. Cohn felt it. He turned from the seminar toward what he called, then and for forty years after, action.
The word organizes him. He says he needed action and craved it, that sports writing was pure action and the academy none. The press box gave him the hurricane: the game live in front of him, the deadline closing, the column due four times a week, the rush of seeing the thing in print the next morning and the rush of readers cursing it. He took to the arena the way a man takes to the one place he feels real. He needed the gratification of the artifact in the paper the following day, and he needed the noise it made, and he called both the action and meant by it the opposite of the dust and the half-light.
The arena charges an entry fee, and the fee is toughness. He learned it before he learned anything else, on a Brooklyn playground on Avenue L, where two older boys put him in headlocks until he gave up and then defended him against outsiders. He stood his ground, took the beating, came back. He stood five foot seven and faced men twice his size, and he carried the lesson into the press box, where he told Kevin Mitchell at the batting cage that a punch would cost him his house and won the man’s respect and then his friendship. To flinch in that arena is to die a little, to become a punk, a wimp the players can boss, a writer who does not count. So toughness here is no brute thing. It runs by a code. You rip a man in print and then you show your face, walk up to him, ask whether he has anything to say, because the man who hides has confessed he is nothing. Cohn did it with sweaty palms, hating it, knowing it had to be done. The toughness buys him standing, and standing, in his hero system, is the near cousin of significance.
Watch the word action, though. It looks like a solid thing and it is not. Each hero system fills it with a different content, and each filling makes plain sense from the inside and reads as folly from any other vantage.
A Cistercian rises at three in the morning into the Great Silence and takes his place in an unheated choir stall and chants the Office to a God he will spend his life emptying himself toward. The deathly still room Cohn ran from is, to the monk, the holy place. Action, for him, is the world’s noise, the distraction that pulls the soul off its center, the thing a man kills in himself to make room for grace. His immortality runs through the emptied self and the eternal Word. Cohn’s arena, to the monk, is a bright loud hell.
A proprietary trader sits down at a desk before the open with the screens already lit and puts size on. Action, for him, is the live position, capital exposed, the number moving against him or for him in real time. Flat means no position, and flat is a kind of death, a day with no pulse. Where’s the action, he asks, and he means where can I be at risk. The trader’s monument is the figure at the close and the figure at year end. To him the monk’s silence is a flatline a man chose on purpose.
A kollel scholar in Lakewood takes his seat at the shtender before the same folio his great-grandfather bent over, and learns it the way it was learned a thousand years before him, and will hand it down unchanged. Here action is nothing. Here action is waste, the squandering of hours owed to the page. The sacred is the unmoving text and the unbroken chain of men who carried it, and a man’s immortality runs through the transmission, link by link, into a future he will not see. Cohn’s column, gone with tomorrow’s trash, lining a birdcage by Wednesday, would strike the scholar as vanity dressed as work.
A Marine remembers that he saw action and means a firefight, the test no drill reproduces, the half hour that told him what he was. The action he craved as a younger man came and made some of his friends and unmade others, and the ones it unmade carry it home and cannot put it down. His arena ran the other way from Cohn’s. In Cohn’s arena the violence is mediated through a ball, the worst wound a player suffers becomes a story Cohn files, and the writer drives home intact and pours a glass of wine. The Marine paid in the body for what Cohn collected in the notebook.
These are not one word with four shadings. They are four cosmologies, and Becker drew the hard conclusion from the clash. The monk’s holiness is the trader’s living death. The trader’s vitality is the scholar’s vanity. The scholar’s faithfulness is, to the man on the desk, a flatline chosen on purpose. One man’s road to counting is another man’s evidence of damnation, and evil enters the world at the seam where the hero systems touch, each certain the other has wasted the only life there is.
Take a second word from Cohn’s own creed and the seam shows again. He prizes the stories he did not write. He and Ira Miller knew Bill Walsh (1931–2007) was dying of leukemia and held the news because the dying man asked them to. Walsh told him about an affair, on tape, and Cohn left it out of the book and said the omission cost him the fortune a scandal would have paid, because an honorable man does not do that to another man. He thought outing a low and bottom-feeding act and never did it. His father, a lawyer who lost his sight and whose cases the boy read aloud to him, had given him the law: act so you can live with yourself. In Cohn’s hero system the killed story is the heroism. The thing he refused to write is the proof that he counts as the honorable man his father described. Carry the same act to the tabloid desk and the verdict flips. There the scoop is the heroism and the spiked story the cowardice, the failure of nerve, the betrayal of the reader. Carry it into the beis medrash and the unwritten story becomes the commandment itself, lashon hara, the law against the evil tongue. Carry it to the muckraker and exposure is the law and silence is complicity in the crime. One restraint. Four cosmologies. Each man sure the others have lost their souls.
The collision turns lethal when a man stands inside it. Billy Martin, angry at something Cohn had written, told two writers it was a shame Cohn had not been killed with the other six million. Here two hero systems met at the seam, the Jewish writer who counts by facing up and keeping the code against the manager who reached for the gas chambers to settle a press-box grudge. Cohn took the wound and made it into an artifact. That is the move under all his moves.
Because action, his sacred thing, is the most perishable thing there is. The game ends at the final gun. The player retires. The body fails. Walsh died of his leukemia. Steve Young (b. 1961) took a hit that ended his career. The men Cohn covered carry degenerative disease in their skulls from the collisions he watched and described. A man cannot build an immortality project on the live position, the firefight, the game, because all of it dies the instant it happens. So how does Cohn, who fled the still library straight into the most perishable arena in the culture, get anything to last? His answer is the voice. The byline. The recognizable self pressed onto the world, four times a week, in a tone no other man owns. Becker called the deepest version of the project the causa sui wish, the dream of fathering oneself, of being one’s own author. Cohn began as That Asshole to the writers who had served their time, and he ended, by his own account, as just plain Lowell Cohn. The name became the achievement. He authored the man who carried it.
He tells you he never wanted posterity, only the action, the daily hit, the rush four times a week. Becker might answer that the renewable hit is the immortality project taken in installments, significance drawn down a day at a time so the man never has to sit still long enough to feel the half-light closing. And note what the man who disclaimed the monument did with his hands. He wrote Rough Magic, and a quarter century on he wrote Gloves Off, the book whose first commandment is never to be boring, the volume that gathered the perishable columns and the untold stories and fixed them between covers with a spine and a copyright and a year. The hedge against the trash can. The thing that does not line the birdcage on Wednesday.
Return to the platform. The byline soared and the body heaved, and the orange streaks ruined twenty dollars of blue wool, and he dropped the tie in the trash and rode home and said nothing to his father about it. He had given the right account of himself without knowing it. The made thing on the shiny paper was the part of him the D train and the grave could not reach. His stomach, which knew only that the alarms were ringing, could not tell which kind they were.
The Voice
The signature is collision. High diction and gutter diction in the same breath, and the joint between them doing the work. He took a doctorate on Conrad and he writes “schlubs” and “doinkers” and “pissed off.” He sets Homer beside punchball, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) beside a 215-pound quarterback getting crushed from behind, the Marquess of Queensberry beside a guy getting knocked down while the ref counts to ten. The man who can hear Malamud’s Brooklyn cadence in his own sentences also names a manager’s tantrum a tantrum and a slur a slur. He does not modulate from the literary register down to the vulgar one. He keeps both live at once, and the friction is the joke and the seriousness both.
Under the diction sits a hard, stripped syntax. Short declaratives. Fragments deployed on purpose, never by accident. “Whispering now.” “An admission.” “Schlubs.” “Really?” He told me his Stanford professor once marked a Dickens paper to say the sentences ran too short and too abrupt, and that years later the same man wrote to say he loved the prose. The abruptness the academy faulted became the instrument. Brian Murphy, his colleague at Santa Rosa, says he read Cohn and wondered why his own sentences came out longer and more cluttered. Cohn strips. He cuts to the bone and trusts the bone. When he wants weight he gets it by withholding, not by adding, the way a fighter sets up the knockout by jabbing.
The rhythm is New York, and he says so. He grew up where people were verbally assertive, where you stood your ground or you were a punk, and the page keeps the playground in it. He likes antithesis. The set piece he is proudest of, the Billy Martin column, is built as a compare-and-contrast, Manager One against Manager Two, a form he names as the high-school English exercise it is, and he runs it straight, one clean parallel after another, the bubble-gum crisis, the balanced diet, the food table thrown over, each line a left and a right. He thinks in oppositions. He stages them.
He thinks like his father’s son, which is to say like a lawyer building a case. Watch the boxing chapter. He does not assert that boxing is safer than the genteel sports. He marshals it. Five hundred ring deaths since 1884. Thirty-five hundred drownings a year. Eight hundred dead on bicycles in 2016. The CTE numbers, the suicides, Duerson, Easterling, Seau. He stacks the evidence and then turns to the do-gooder and asks why he picks on boxing. The rhetoric is forensic. He read cases aloud to a blind attorney and learned to win an argument by burying it in fact, then closing with a question the other man cannot answer.
The withholding is structural, not only verbal. He builds suspense and springs it. The Conrad story sits on a ten-minute meeting whose meaning arrives years later in a press box, when a friend confesses that the editor disliked him because the editor disliked Joseph Conrad. The dying-Walsh chapter sits on a phone ringing on a coast highway. He plants the reveal and walks you to it. And the deepest version of the move is the unsaid itself, the stories he refused to write, a whole ethic built on apophasis, on the power of what a man declines to put on the page.
He ends on the kicker. He told me the pleasure of the work is planning the first sentence and then working toward an ending he hopes is a zinger, and he means it as craft, not vanity. The endings land like a closed fist. Iggy, after the whole tender afternoon with Steve Young, says, “I wish Steve was my dad.” Frank Robinson, looming over him in a dead-quiet clubhouse, demands to know whether he is Manager One or Manager Two, then throws back his head and laughs, and Cohn tells you the laugh meant one thing about Billy Martin and lets you supply the word. He trusts the reader to take the last step. The kicker works because the prose before it stayed flat and plain, so the turn has somewhere to turn from.
Repetition is his hammer when he wants no subtlety at all. A reporter must never call the man he covers by a nickname. “Never. Never. Never.” He repeats to foreclose argument, the way a man raises his voice not to persuade but to end the discussion.
Now set the spoken voice next to the written one, because they rhyme. On the phone in 2008 he was fluent, fast, organized, a man who says there is a cause-and-effect machine in his head, ask a question and the answer comes. He performs the persona he describes for radio and television: verbal, colloquial, passionate, funny, informed. But the same instincts run underneath. He makes fine distinctions in conversation the way he makes parallels on the page, the reporter against the columnist, the connected columnist against the stylist, categories drawn with a debater’s care. He frames experience as moral question. He hedges where honesty requires it, “this is a hard one and I’ll do the best I can,” and then he gives the unflattering answer about himself, calls his younger self shmucky, admits his own complicity in his fall. The self-deprecation is the Jewish move he names as his inheritance, the irony turned first on the self so it can be turned on everyone else with a clear conscience.
And the toughness in both registers comes with the tell. He stares down Kevin Mitchell, he shouts the question at the rude coach, he rips a man and shows his face, and then he tells you his palms sweat and his stomach turns and he hates it and does it anyway. That is the whole voice in one gesture. The hard surface, and one honest line admitting the cost underneath. He buys the right to the wallop of feeling, as Murphy puts it, by being so unsentimental everywhere else. The economy is the ethic. He earns the soft moment by refusing it almost every other time.
The Buffered Columnist: Charles Taylor’s Frame and the Disenchantment of Lowell Cohn
He keeps saying it, and the insistence is the data. He tells me he burned off his love of sports by twenty and has not been a fan since his early twenties. He keeps sports out of the house. There is a football game on tonight and he is talking to me instead, not watching, because watching is what he does all day for work. He is passionate about writing, he says, and he would be passionate writing about anything. Not the Niners. Not the Giants. The sentence. He covered the 1985 World Series and felt nothing about who won. The question for him was never which team but whether the assignment gave him room to write.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) gives us the language for what Cohn is announcing. In A Secular Age Taylor draws the contrast between two ways a self can stand in the world. The porous self lives open to forces outside it. Meaning comes at it from without, from spirits, from charged objects, from a cosmos that can enchant or possess or bless. The line between inside and outside runs thin, and the world can get in. The buffered self has sealed that boundary. Meaning lives inside the mind, conferred by the self, and the world out there is disenchanted, neutral, a field of objects the buffered self surveys from behind glass. Taylor’s claim is that the modern West underwent a long migration from the first condition to the second, and that the buffered self is the achievement and the loss of that passage. The buffered man is invulnerable to the old enchantments. He is also cut off from them.
The stadium is the last enchanted ground in secular life. This is the thing to hold onto. When the churches emptied, the charged feeling did not vanish; it went looking for somewhere to live, and it found the arena. The fan is the porous self preserved in amber. He paints his face. He believes the result turns on whether he wears the jersey. He grieves a loss in his body and carries it for a week. The team is the totem, the crowd is the congregation, and the meaning floods in from outside, from the field, from the charged event, exactly as Taylor says meaning once flooded the porous self from a cosmos full of spirits. Mike Singletary stands at his introduction and says God will lead him where he needs to go. That is a porous man speaking, a man who feels the sacred running through the game and into his own fate.
Cohn sits in the press box and feels none of it. He has built the wall. He approves, in print, when Bill Walsh (1931–2007) answers Singletary’s piety by saying God has more important things to attend to than a football team. The remark is buffered to the bone. It re-draws the boundary the fan keeps dissolving, sets the game back out there as a neutral object, and refuses to let the transcendent leak in through the scoreboard. Cohn relishes it because it is his own posture given by another man. The thing on the field is just a thing. Meaning is what the writer brings to it from inside.
Cohn’s buffering is not the default modern condition. It is labor. He achieved it, and he can name the year. The boy in Flatbush was porous. New York held the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Giants, the football Giants, the Knicks, the Rangers, and it appealed to the child and the adolescent the way enchantment appeals, from outside, taking him over. He wanted to be a Brooklyn Dodger and play at Ebbets Field. The world got in. Then the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, and he was not much of a ballplayer, and the love burned off by twenty, and the wall went up. Taylor’s grand civilizational migration runs in miniature through one man’s twenties. Cohn disenchanted himself. He performed on his own sports the thing modernity performed on the cosmos, and the insistence you keep hearing, I am not a fan, I feel nothing, is the buffered self guarding the boundary it paid to build.
He even tells you what the wall is for. He covers sports, he says, because the stakes are simple, so there is nothing he cannot understand, and he can give his whole attention to the writing. Disenchantment is the precondition of the craft. The fan cannot see the game because the meaning pouring in from outside blinds him; he is too possessed to observe. The buffered columnist sees everything because he is sealed against the flood. He watches Walsh not as a genius to be worshipped but as an anxious, perfectionist man under pressure, a character to be rendered. Worship would fog the glass. Cohn keeps it clean. The price of the clear sight is the dead feeling, and he pays it gladly, because for him the feeling was never the point. The artifact was the point.
Taylor’s second move is the one that complicates the man. The buffered self, he argues, secures its invulnerability at a cost, and the cost is a haunting. Sealed against the enchanted world, the modern self feels at times that something has been lost, that the disenchanted field is flat, and it goes looking, often without admitting it, for re-enchantment by other doors. Watch where Cohn’s sealed-off feeling goes. It does not disappear. It migrates. It leaves the team and reattaches to the writing, and there the language turns frankly sacred. He throws up on the DeKalb platform from sheer happiness over a byline. He calls the lobby of the Niners’ headquarters a cathedral and means it. He describes the act of composition in terms a porous man would use for prayer: the first sentence, the alliteration heard in the head, the working toward an ending, the exhilaration at the artifact. The enchantment he evicted from the stadium took up residence at the desk. He is not a fan of the Niners. He is a devotee of the sentence. The porous opening did not close. It moved.
He is buffered against the team and porous toward one tribe. Every spring he scans the class roster for Jewish names. Of every man he meets he asks, is he Jewish. The us-and-them his parents inculcated runs in him still, an identity that comes from outside and takes him in, a belonging he did not author and cannot wall off. He feels nothing when the Royals beat the Cardinals. He felt the Billy Martin slur in his body, phoned the second writer, confirmed it, carried it. The buffering is selective. He sealed the boundary against the enchanted arena and left one gate open to the enchanted people. Taylor would say this is how buffering tends to work in practice. The wall is never total. The modern self chooses where the world may still get in, and Cohn chose his blood and his craft and locked out the rest.
Now run the word across the hero systems, because feeling nothing for the team means one thing in the press box and another everywhere else, and the porous-buffered axis is exactly what separates them.
The supporter on the Kop at Anfield would hear Cohn’s confession as a kind of soullessness. For him porousness is the whole good. You are born to the club, you do not choose it, you cannot leave it, your father stood on the same terrace and your son will, and the meaning floods up from the pitch and binds the crowd into one body. To be buffered against that is to be dead to the only thing the game is for. He would pity Cohn. A man at the match who feels nothing has missed his life.
The professional gambler sits at the other wall entirely. He is more buffered than Cohn, and proud of it. The fan’s porousness is, to him, the mark he preys on. Feeling is leakage, and leakage is how you lose money. He wants no team, no jersey, no totem, only the number and the edge. He would hear Cohn’s “I feel nothing” as the beginning of wisdom and then ask why Cohn stopped halfway, why the man let the sentence enchant him when the disciplined move is to be sealed against that too.
The Carthusian in his cell is porous in the direction Cohn refused. He has buffered himself against the world precisely so that he may be open to the one thing Cohn locked out, the transcendent itself. He has emptied the self of the world’s noise to let God in. He and Cohn perform the same gesture, the sealing of the boundary, toward opposite ends. Cohn seals out the sacred so the work stays clear. The monk seals out the work so the sacred stays clear. Each would find the other’s wall built backward.
The political organizer needs the porousness and engineers it. He knows the buffered citizen, surveying the world from behind glass, will never march. He wants the crowd that feels the cause flood in from outside and take it over, the very condition the fan reaches at the stadium, redirected at power. To him Cohn’s detachment is not a craft virtue but a civic failure, the disease of the man who watches and will not be moved, who files the column and drives home and pours the wine while the world he reported on stays exactly as it was.
So the same flat sentence, I am not a fan, I feel nothing for the teams I cover, fans out into four verdicts. To the supporter it is soullessness. To the gambler it is half-finished wisdom. To the monk it is a wall built toward the wrong eternity. To the organizer it is the citizen who will not rise. Taylor’s point holds under all of them. The buffered and the porous are not two readings of one experience. They are two ways of standing in the world, and a man’s whole estimate of another man’s life turns on which one he has built himself into.
Cohn built the wall young, on purpose, and can date it. He keeps the receipts and shows them to anyone who asks, because the buffering is the thing he is proudest of, the discipline that lets him see what the worshippers cannot. He is not a fan. He severed that line by twenty. But the feeling he cut off the team did not die. It went to the sentence and to the tribe, the two gates he left open in the wall, and through them the enchanted world still gets in. He keeps sports out of the house. He cannot keep the writing out, and he never tried to keep out the question, asked of every stranger, the oldest porous reflex he owns: is he one of us.
Showing Your Face: Erving Goffman and the Performances of Lowell Cohn
He tells you the backstage. That is the first thing to see, because it breaks the frame before the frame can settle. Erving Goffman (1922–1982) built his account of social life on a wall between two regions, and the wall is supposed to hold. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he gives us the front region, where a man stages a performance for an audience and sustains the impression the part requires, and the back region, the place behind the scenes where the performer drops the role, repairs the costume, and prepares the next show. The whole apparatus of social order depends on the audience never getting back there. The waiter who is gracious at the table curses in the kitchen, and the restaurant works because the two rooms stay sealed. Cohn unseals them. He stares down Kevin Mitchell at the batting cage, tells him a punch will cost him his house, wins the man’s respect, and then he turns to the reader and says his palms were sweating, his stomach was churning, he hated it, he did it anyway. He walks you into the kitchen on purpose. The performer narrates his own backstage, which means we are dealing with a man who has read the script Goffman wrote and decided to perform the reading of it.
Start with the front he built, because he can describe it from the outside, and that exteriority is itself the tell. Ask him what he learned from radio and television and he hands you the persona as a finished object: verbal, colloquial, passionate, funny, informed, bright. He says there is a cause-and-effect machine in his head, ask a question and the answer comes. A man does not describe his own spontaneity as a machine unless he has stepped outside it and watched it run. Goffman’s term is dramatic realization, the work a performer does to make the part legible, to project the self the situation calls for so the audience reads it without effort. Cohn is a master of dramatic realization who can name the technique while he uses it. The press-box persona, the tough fair guy looking for no favors, is a front in Goffman’s exact sense, a standardized expressive equipment he puts on to do the job, and he knows it is equipment.
The Sals are where he learned the dramaturgy, though he files it under courage. Reread the playground. Big Sal and Little Sal put him in a headlock, he gave up, and then they went back to stickball, and when outsiders came around the Sals defended him. What did the beating teach? Not how to win. He always lost. It taught him how to perform not-flinching in front of an audience whose regard was the only prize. Standing your ground is a show staged for witnesses. He says so without saying so when he describes the adult version. You rip a man in print, and then, this is the load-bearing part, you make yourself available, you show your face, you walk up to him and ask whether he has anything to say. The ripping is not the performance. The showing of the face is the performance. Anyone can write the hard column from a safe desk. The honor is dramaturgical, enacted in the body, in the press box, in front of the other writers and the player, because a front that is never tested in person reads as a bluff. He tells you the athletes and writers know who does it and who doesn’t. They are the audience grading the performance, and the grade is your standing in the house.
And here Goffman shows us the distinction between the self as performer and the self as character. The character is the tough guy the audience sees, coherent, unafraid, the man who fronts Kevin Mitchell down. The performer is the nervous creature backstage who assembles that character at the cost of sweat and dread. Most men want the audience to believe the character is the whole truth, that there is no performer behind it, no labor, no fear. Cohn does the opposite. He exhibits the performer. He shows the seams. The sweaty palms are not a confession that slipped out; they are the second act of the same performance, and they raise the value of the first. Anyone can be fearless if he feels no fear. To feel the fear, name it, and show your face anyway is a harder and higher role, and Cohn knows the harder role plays better. The backstage disclosure is front-region work. He has turned the dressing room into part of the stage.
The Manager One column is the purest case, a front built to be seen through. Billy Martin said it was a shame Cohn had not been killed with the other six million. Cohn answered not with a frontal column but with a compare-and-contrast piece, an unnamed Manager One against an unnamed Manager Two, the bubble-gum crisis, the balanced diet, the food table thrown over. Goffman would call the anonymity a piece of stagecraft that lets two incompatible definitions of the situation coexist. The surface front, this is a tidy high-school essay about two managers, preserves the decorum of the page. The real performance runs underneath, legible to every reader in the Bay Area, who knew which manager threw the food and which kept his dignity. Cohn maintains the line of the polite front while delivering the unmistakable hit, and the pleasure for the reader is precisely the seeing-through, the shared knowledge that the front is a front. Then he stages the payoff in person. Frank Robinson walks fast across a dead-quiet clubhouse, looms over him, demands to know whether he is Manager One or Manager Two, and Cohn, instead of answering, tells him to work it out for himself. The room is the theater. The team is the audience. And Robinson’s laugh, when it comes, is the audience ratifying the performance, the loudest laugh filling the clubhouse, which Cohn reads for us as one verdict on Billy Martin. The scene works as theater because everyone present is performing for everyone else, and Cohn narrates it as a man who knows he is both in the play and reviewing it.
Now his central professional distinction, reporter versus columnist, which Goffman lets us see as a difference in what self each man is licensed to perform. The reporter, in Cohn’s account, gets the facts, lands the scoop, delivers what goes on behind the scenes. His front is impersonality. The performance the role demands is the suppression of self, the reporter as a clear pane the news passes through, and his standing rises with his sources and his accuracy, not his voice. The columnist performs the opposite self. The whole license of the role is the imposition of a self onto the material, the voice, the tone, the having of one’s say. Cohn says it plainly: he became a columnist rather than a fiction writer because what comes naturally is his voice imposed on life. Two roles, two grants of permission, two definitions of what a working self may show. He locates himself, with a debater’s care, inside the small elite category where personality is not a leak but the product. The reporter who let his self show would be failing his role. The columnist who hid his self would be failing his. Goffman’s point is that there is no neutral self underneath, only the role and its license, and Cohn has chosen the role whose license matches the performer he wants to be.
The frame also catches the thing he is proudest of concealing, the doctorate. He took a Ph.D. on Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and the other writers called him an impostor for it. Goffman wrote about exactly this, the discrediting fact a performer must manage, the stigma backstage that would spoil the front if it got loose. Cohn’s stigma was prestige in the wrong currency, the seminar room in a trade that honored dues paid covering high schools. So he manages it. He does not flaunt the degree. Nobody calls him Doctor, he says, and it almost never comes up. He keeps the Conrad backstage and performs the plain tough guy out front, and the management is so deft that the discrediting fact becomes, in Gloves Off, a charming story rather than a liability, the man who didn’t get the Sports Illustrated job because an editor disliked Conrad. He has taken the spoiled identity and restaged it as an anecdote. That is impression management at the highest level, the performer converting his own backstage stigma into front-region material.
Run the key term across the hero systems, because showing your face means one thing in the press box and something else entirely wherever the stage is set differently, and Goffman insists the meaning lives in the staging.
The geisha performs a self so refined that the performer must vanish without trace. Her whole art is the seamless front, the years of training spent erasing every seam, so that the character holds and the labor never shows. To her, Cohn’s exhibition of the backstage, the sweaty palms, the named dread, would be a botched performance, the artist letting the audience see the work. Where Cohn raises his value by showing the seams, she would lose everything by it. The disclosure that reads as integrity in Brooklyn reads as failure in Gion.
The Method actor goes further than Cohn in one direction and disappears in the other. He wants no line at all between performer and character; he summons real grief to play grief, he lives the part backstage so there is no backstage. To him the press-box tough guy who can describe his own persona as a cause-and-effect machine is a mere technician, a man doing indication rather than living truthfully. Cohn’s exteriority, the very thing that lets him manage his front so well, would strike the Method man as the proof that Cohn never really felt any of it, that the whole performance is calculation. What Cohn calls craft, the actor calls lying.
The trial lawyer, Cohn’s blind father among them, performs for a jury under rules that forbid certain backstage disclosures absolutely. He may never show the jury his doubt about his own client. The front of conviction is mandatory, and a glimpse of the performer behind it can lose the case. He would admire Cohn’s command of the room and recoil from the self-exposure, because in his theater the showing of the backstage is not honor but malpractice. The father who taught the son to act so he could live with himself worked a stage where the second self must stay hidden by law.
The confessional poet stages the reverse of all of them. For her there is no front worth keeping; the backstage is the only material; the performance is the public display of the raw interior the others labor to conceal. She would hear Cohn’s sweaty-palms disclosure as too controlled, too instrumental, a tough guy releasing exactly one calibrated drop of vulnerability to buy credibility for the hard surface, withholding the rest. To her the honest move is to tear the front down entirely. To Cohn that would be dancing naked for no purpose. He shows the seam, not the wound, and shows even the seam on his own terms.
So the same act, showing what is behind the performance, fans into four verdicts. To the geisha it is a botched front. To the Method actor it is proof the feeling was fake. To the lawyer it is malpractice. To the confessional poet it is cowardice dressed as candor. Goffman holds them together by refusing to ask which self is real. There is no self under the performance to be real or fake. There is the role, the license it grants, the audience that grades it, and the region where the man prepares. Each of these performers stands in a different theater, and the same gesture changes meaning entirely when the house lights are arranged differently.
Return to the batting cage. Cohn fronts Kevin Mitchell down, and Jeffrey Leonard, the witness, runs over grinning and says he loves this. Cohn agrees he loves it. Goffman would note that Leonard is the audience and the line is the review, the player certifying that the writer played the scene correctly, after which the two can do business. But hold onto the deeper move, the one that makes Cohn unusual as a subject. He does not give us the scene as a participant who felt it. He gives it as a man who staged it, watched himself stage it, and is now restaging it for us a third time on the page, with the backstage piped in, the sweat and the five-foot-seven and the memory of the Sals folded into the account. He is the performer, the character, and the critic at once. Cohn built the stage, set the wall between the regions, and then opened a door in it and invited the audience to look through, because he understood before any theorist told him that a man who shows you his backstage on his own terms has performed the most convincing front of all.
That Asshole: Pierre Bourdieu and the Field Position of Lowell Cohn
He arrived with the wrong money. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) taught that every social world is a field, a structured space of positions organized around a stake the players agree is worth fighting for, and that a man’s place in the field depends on the capital he holds and whether that capital is the kind the field recognizes as legitimate tender. Capital comes in species. Economic capital is money. Cultural capital is the learning, the credentials, the acquired competence a man carries in his head and his manner. Social capital is the network, the people who will take your call. And each field sets its own exchange rate, decides which species buys position and which counts for nothing. Cohn walked into sports journalism in 1979 holding a Stanford doctorate in English literature, a fortune in one currency and counterfeit in this one. The field had no window where he could change it at par. So the other players named him, and the name was That Asshole.
The name is not an insult. It is a ruling, and Bourdieu lets us read it as one. The journalistic field of that era had a settled law of legitimate accumulation, a recognized path by which a man earned the right to a position. You studied journalism. You covered high schools. You worked the beat, the features, the long apprenticeship, and you rose, and the rising itself certified you. The dues were the entry fee, and paying them was how you acquired the specific capital the field honored, which Bourdieu would call the field’s own consecrated competence, a thing distinct from talent and prior to it. Cohn paid none of it. He converted academic capital straight into the elite slot, the columnist’s chair, the position the lifers spent decades climbing toward. He short-circuited the legitimate path of accumulation. That Asshole is the field defending its conversion rules against a man who found a side door. He grasps this with a clarity that should embarrass the theorist. He says that if he met someone like himself he would think him an asshole too. He concedes the verdict was correct by the field’s own law. He had made a mockery of the system, and the system answered.
The hiring itself shows the field’s structure, because the editor who let him in did it on a logic that only makes sense inside Bourdieu’s account of position-takings. The managing editor hired Cohn for the very deficit the other writers held against him. He wanted an outsider with fresh eyes, a man whose capital came from outside the field, because such a man would write what the consecrated insiders could not. This is the strategy of the heterodox newcomer, the player who cannot win by the field’s established rules and so tries to change the rules, to import an outside standard that revalues his own holdings. The paper was buying disruption. Cohn supplied it, the first column attacking the national anthem, the Raiders called soft and pencil-necked, the questions about haircuts and reading. Each was a position-taking against the field’s orthodoxy, and each made the splash he needed, because he was on a six-month trial and a player with illegitimate capital who fails to disrupt has no other claim to the chair. The face on the city buses is the field rewarding the disruption it hired.
Now the internal map, because Bourdieu insists a field is not one ladder but a space of opposed positions, and Cohn draws the opposition himself with a structuralist’s precision. The good job, the elite category, is the columnist. Below sits the reporter, and Cohn is careful to mark the boundary as one of honor and not merely of function. But within the elite category he splits the position again, and the split is the heart of the field’s economy. There is the columnist who is connected, the man with the sources, who delivers news in his own voice, and Cohn names the holders, Tim Kawakami, Glenn Dickey. That man’s capital is social, the network, the people who leak to him. And there is the columnist who is a stylist, the man whose claim rests on the writing itself, and Cohn names Scott Ostler and locates himself near him. That man’s capital is cultural, the voice, the craft, the literary competence. Two species of capital, two routes to the same elite position, and Cohn knows which one he holds. He says he is not the connected kind. He says he is not good at reporting. He stakes his whole claim on the cultural capital, the style, because it is the capital he actually possesses and the connected man’s social capital is the capital he lacks. The map he draws of his profession is a map of where his own holdings can buy position and where they cannot.
What he does next is the move Bourdieu would call the importation of capital from a dominant field into a dominated one. Sports writing sits low in the larger field of cultural production, a trade looked down on by the literary world Cohn came from. He spends his career hauling the prestige of that higher field down into this lower one. He sets Homer beside punchball. He compares Muhammad Ali to Beowulf and tells you it was not his best. He carries Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) and Philip Roth (1933–2018) into the press box in his head and lets their cadences run through his game stories. He says the models for his writing never came from newspapers, never, and names instead Conrad, Greene, Austen, Eliot. Bourdieu would read this as a strategy of distinction, the dominated player raising the value of his position by annexing the consecrated capital of the dominant field. Cohn is trying to revalue sports writing upward by writing it as literature, and trying to revalue his own position within it by being the man who can. The doctorate that counted as counterfeit at the hiring window becomes, once he is inside, the very thing that lets him claim the stylist’s chair, because the literary capital nobody would exchange at the door turns out to buy the highest position in the house, if only he can get the field to accept the new rate.
But the deepest of Bourdieu’s tools is habitus, and here the frame reaches the part of Cohn the credentials cannot explain. Habitus is the system of dispositions a man acquires from his earliest conditions, laid down in the body before he can name them, a feel for the game that operates below thought. It is how a class, a place, a childhood gets inside a man and becomes his reflexes, his taste, his sense of what is done and not done. Cohn’s habitus is Brooklyn, and he tells you so without the word. New York made him verbally assertive, he says, a whole population short and tall who stood their ground and talked back, and he fell in with them and it became him. The Sals laid down the bodily disposition on the Avenue L playground, the standing of ground, the taking of the beating, the refusal to be a punk, and Cohn says no class at Lafayette or Stanford ever taught him this, that there is no course in it. Exactly. Bourdieu’s point is that the habitus is precisely what is not taught in courses, what is acquired through practical immersion in a way of life and carried in the body as a second nature. The doctorate is cultural capital, learnable, certifiable. The toughness is habitus, the Brooklyn dispositions that no credential contains.
The habitus turned out to fit the field. Bourdieu says a player thrives when his habitus matches the demands of the game, when the dispositions laid down in childhood happen to be the dispositions the field rewards, so that what feels to the man like nature feels to the field like mastery. Cohn says it himself, in his own language, when he realizes that being with big-league ballplayers was just like being on the playground with the Sals, only a different playground. The recognition is the whole thesis in one line. Sports journalism is a conflict trade built on intimidation, he says, where you stand your ground against athletes and other writers. The Brooklyn habitus, useless for the seminar room he fled, was the perfect equipment for the press box he entered. His feel for the game was literally a feel for a game, transposed. The boy who could not change his academic capital at the door brought a second inheritance the field valued more, a body trained to take a headlock and come back, and that inheritance bought him the standing the doctorate could not.
Run the field’s master concept across the hero systems, because legitimate capital means one thing among sportswriters and something incommensurable wherever the stakes are set differently, and Bourdieu’s whole point is that each field consecrates its own.
The tenured medievalist holds the exact capital Cohn fled, and in her field it is the only money that spends. The doctorate, the monograph, the citation, the peer’s regard, these buy position, and a popular voice buys nothing, may even discredit, because legibility to the crowd reads as the absence of rigor. She would see Cohn’s whole career as a man who cashed out his real capital for the counterfeit of fame, abandoned the field where his Conrad was worth something for a field that called it an embarrassment. What he calls importing literature into sports she would call squandering a scholar on the sports page.
The street rapper accumulates a capital Cohn would recognize from the playground and could never hold himself. The currency is authenticity certified by origin, the credibility of having come from somewhere and survived it, a thing that cannot be bought with credentials and is destroyed by them, because the schooling that builds the medievalist’s capital subtracts from the rapper’s. He and Cohn share the structure, the body trained in a hard place becoming the feel for the game, but the rapper’s field punishes the very doctorate Cohn carries. To him, Cohn’s importing of Beowulf would not raise the work; it would expose the writer as a tourist in toughness, a man performing a street habitus he annotated at Stanford.
The career diplomat trades in pure social capital refined to an art, the network, the discretion, the call that gets returned, the position earned by never making the splash. His field consecrates exactly what Cohn’s field, in its disruptive mode, rewards the opposite of. The diplomat rises by smoothing, by the unwritten understanding, by being background. Cohn rose by attacking the anthem and calling the Raiders schlubs. To the diplomat, Cohn’s whole accumulation strategy, the provocation, the hard column, the made splash, is the squandering of relationships, the burning of the only capital that lasts. What Cohn’s field paid him for, the diplomat’s field would have ended him for.
So the same word, capital, the thing a man accumulates to claim his place, fans into incommensurable currencies. The medievalist’s monograph, the rapper’s origin, the diplomat’s network, Cohn’s voice. None converts cleanly into another. Bourdieu’s hardest lesson is that there is no universal capital, no gold standard behind the local currencies, only fields, each printing its own money and each certain its money is the real one. Cohn felt the truth of this at the hiring window, where a fortune in one currency would not buy a sandwich in the other.
Return to the name. That Asshole was a sentence passed by a field on a man who held the wrong capital and took the right chair anyway, and Cohn accepts the sentence as just. But watch what he says happened after. He established his bona fides, he says, and became just plain Lowell Cohn to the other writers and the players, no longer That Asshole, and then he adds, I think. Bourdieu would seize on the addendum. The transformation from illegitimate interloper to consecrated incumbent is the deepest thing a field can confer, the moment the position-holder is accepted as having always belonged, his irregular entry forgotten, his capital retroactively legitimized. Cohn won that, the field revalued his holdings, the doctorate that read as counterfeit at the door became the stylist’s distinction inside. And still he says, I think. The hesitation is the man who knows the consecration is never final, that a field can withdraw what it grants, that he remains, somewhere in the body that took the Sals’ headlocks, the kid who jumped the queue. The honest note, in your register, is that Bourdieu fits Cohn almost too well for the same reason Goffman did. Cohn is a sociologist of his own field. He drew the map of positions, named the species of capital, located himself among the stylists, and traced his own habitus to the playground, all before any theorist arrived. He did the analysis. What the frame adds is the word for the thing he already saw, that the game he was so good at was a game, and that his gift for it was an inheritance he could no more take credit for than the accent he never lost.
Act So You Can Live With Yourself: Philip Rieff and the Last Honor Man in the Press Box
His father gave him the law, and the law was not therapeutic. Act in ways that are honorable, the blind attorney told the boy who read his cases aloud to him, and live with yourself. Philip Rieff (1922–2006) spent his career charting the moment that sentence stopped making sense to the culture that produced it. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic he argued that the West had passed through a great change in the kind of man it trained, from what he called the man of commitment, formed by a moral order he did not invent and could not negotiate, to what he called psychological man, the late modern self organized around well-being, freed from inherited prohibitions, managing his impulses rather than submitting to a code. The older self lived inside a structure of demands, things a man does and does not do because the doing of them is who he is. The newer self lives inside a structure of options, where the demands have softened into preferences and the question shifts from what is required of me to what works for me. Rieff thought the change was the deepest in the moral history of the West, and he did not think it was progress. Cohn is a man of commitment stranded in the therapeutic age, and he knows exactly where he stands, and he pleads guilty.
Begin with the code, because Rieff insists the man of commitment is constituted by interdicts, by the things forbidden, and Cohn’s code is a structure of absolute prohibitions he did not author. You do not flinch. You do not become a punk. You stand your ground and take the beating and come back. You rip a man and then you show your face. These are not strategies he selected for their results. They are the contents of an inherited order, laid down on the Avenue L playground and in his father’s study, and they bind him whether or not they serve him. Watch the tell: he obeys them at a cost he names. He fronts Kevin Mitchell down with his stomach churning. He shows his face to men he has savaged with his palms wet. The therapeutic self would ask why a man submits to a demand that makes him miserable, and would counsel him to release it, to set a boundary, to choose his own well-being over an archaic script. Cohn cannot hear the question. The demand is not his to release. It is what he is.
The reporter-must-never-say-KD passage is the code in its purest, most archaic, most useless form, and that uselessness is the proof. A reporter must never refer to an athlete he covers by a nickname. Never. Never. Never. When a writer asks Steve Kerr (b. 1965) about Kevin Durant, the writer must say Kevin Durant or Durant, never KD, because KD is too familiar, a presumption of intimacy the reporter has not earned. There is no consequence to the breach. No source dries up, no story dies, nothing in the therapeutic ledger of outcomes moves. The prohibition serves nothing but itself, which is precisely what marks it as an interdict in Rieff’s sense rather than a tactic. It draws a line between the man who keeps faith with the proper distance and the man who collapses it for cheap warmth, and the keeping of the line is its own and only reward. Cohn knows it dates him. He says if this proves he is an old fogey, an old-style man, he pleads guilty and does it happily. The plea is the whole frame in a sentence. He has heard the verdict of the therapeutic age, that his prohibition is a rigidity, a relic, a fussiness about nothing, and he accepts the charge and keeps the prohibition anyway, because to a man of commitment the relic is the self.
Now the moral absolutes, which is where Rieff explains the thing the buffered-self essay had to set down. Recall the problem that frame left open. Cohn sealed himself against the enchanted arena, felt nothing for the teams, relativized the worship the fans poured onto the field. Taylor’s wall accounted for the detachment but not for the one place the wall did not hold, the law he would not relativize and the tribe he would not. Rieff names that place. There are things Cohn will not put to a vote, and they cluster exactly where the man of commitment keeps his interdicts. He left Bill Walsh’s affair out of the book and said the omission cost him a fortune, because an honorable man does not do that to another man. He calls outing a bottom-feeder’s act and never did it. He held the news of Walsh’s leukemia because the dying man asked. These are not preferences he weighed for their consequences. He weighed the consequences and obeyed the prohibition against them, left the fortune on the table, because the interdict outranks the outcome. The therapeutic self has no category for leaving the money on the table out of honor. It would call the refusal a hang-up, a failure to optimize, a man held back by an internalized rule he ought to examine. Cohn examined it. It is a moral absolute. He keeps it.
He even stages his own difference from the therapeutic age and does not see that he is staging it. A friend from Stanford wrote a book arguing that the world had gone morally relativist and that there are absolutes men no longer perceive. Cohn has read it, talked it through with him, and he says he has never once been in a press box where men argued moral absolutism against moral relativism. The remark is meant as a comment on the press box. Read it as a comment on Cohn. He lives among men who never raise the question, in a trade and an age that have dissolved it, and he carries inside him a friend’s whole argument that the absolutes are real and merely unseen. He is the man of commitment who knows he is surrounded by psychological men and who keeps, half-privately, the conviction that there is a moral order they have stopped being able to see. Rieff would say this is the condition of the last commitment-men, not that they have arguments against the therapeutic order, but that they retain, like a faith, the sense that something binding is there, even as the culture around them loses the organs to perceive it.
Cohn is a thoroughly secular man. He says he is not sure he believes in God, that the concept has little resonance in his life, that he works on Yom Kippur and puts up a Christmas tree to please his wife. Rieff’s full account ties the man of commitment to a sacred order that grounds the interdicts, a culture of faith from which the prohibitions descend, and that ground Cohn has largely lost. So he is a partial case, and the partiality is the interesting thing. He keeps the interdicts without the theology. He holds the absolutes and locates their source not in God, whom he doubts, but in the experience of men who confront the same world and must formulate certain rules to live in it. This is the man of commitment surviving into an age that has cut away the sacred root, holding the fruit after the tree is gone. Rieff thought this could not last across generations, that interdicts without a sacred order eventually thin into mere taste. Cohn is the generation where it still holds, where the father’s law still binds the son though the son no longer believes the God who might have stood behind it. He inherited the honor and let the faith go and kept the honor anyway.
The therapeutic age dissolves the tribe along with the interdict, teaches the self to belong by choice and to hold its memberships lightly, available for revision. Cohn’s membership is not chosen and not light. It was inculcated, his word, by a mother and father who had lived through the years of the Holocaust and who handed their son an us and a them he did not select and cannot examine his way out of. Rieff would call this the remnant of the communal self inside the individualized one, the inherited belonging that the therapeutic order is supposed to have freed him from and has not. The man who feels nothing when the Royals beat the Cardinals is bound, before thought, to a people. He kept the one tribe for the same reason he kept the one law. Neither was his to release.
Run the central term across the hero systems, because to live with yourself means one thing to a man of commitment and something unrecognizable to the selves the therapeutic age has trained, and the phrase changes its whole content with the order that gives it.
The wellness coach has built a self on the opposite of the interdict. To live with yourself, in her vocabulary, means to accept yourself, to release the inherited shoulds, to set boundaries against the demands others place on you, to honor your own needs. She would hear Cohn’s father’s law as a sentence of bondage, a man chained to an archaic code that makes his stomach churn, and she would counsel him to examine where he learned that he must show his face to men who frighten him, and to consider that he is allowed to choose peace. What Cohn calls honor she calls an unprocessed wound. What he calls a moral absolute she calls a limiting belief. The same phrase, live with yourself, means submit to the code for him and forgive yourself the code for her.
The jihadi martyr is a man of commitment more total than Cohn, and his totality exposes how far Cohn’s secularism has thinned the type. For him the interdicts descend from a sacred order entire and unquestioned, and to live with yourself means to stand right with God and the community of the faithful, to the point of ending the self for the order. He would recognize Cohn’s structure, the binding law, the prohibition that outranks the outcome, the belonging that is not chosen, and he would find Cohn’s version hollowed at the center, a man who keeps the form of submission while doubting the God who alone could justify it. To him Cohn’s absolutes, grounded in nothing more than men confronting the same world, are absolutes resting on sand, honor without the holiness that makes honor make sense.
The startup founder lives by a code that looks like Cohn’s and inverts its content. He too has interdicts, move fast, take the risk, never coast, and he too holds them against comfort. But his order is therapeutic at the root, organized around growth, optimization, the self as a project to be scaled. To live with yourself, for him, means to have maximized, to have not played small, to have left nothing on the table. And there is the exact line. Cohn left the fortune on the table out of honor and called it living with himself. The founder would call that the cardinal sin, the failure to capture the value that was his to capture, a man who had the scoop of a lifetime and spiked it. What Cohn experiences as the proof he is honorable, the founder experiences as the proof Cohn never understood the game.
So the phrase the father pressed into the son, live with yourself, fans into incommensurable laws. For the coach it means release the code. For the martyr it means die for the order. For the founder it means leave nothing uncaptured. For Cohn it means keep faith with the interdict though it costs you the money and turns your stomach. Rieff’s hard claim is that these are not four readings of one moral life but the wreckage of a great transition, the man of commitment and the psychological man and the variants between them, speaking words that no longer translate, each certain the others have either enslaved themselves to a dead code or freed themselves into nothing.
Return to the law and the man who kept it. Cohn doubts God, works on the Day of Atonement, puts up the tree, and holds, against all of it, a structure of prohibitions he obeys at a cost no therapeutic accounting could justify, traceable to a blind father and two older boys on a Brooklyn playground. He calls himself an old fogey and pleads guilty, and the plea is not rueful. It is the last move available to a man of commitment in the therapeutic age, the open acknowledgment that the culture has a name for him, relic, rigid, old-style, and the refusal to be talked out of the code by the name. Cohn chose, knowing the cost, the smaller and harder life, the chair at Santa Rosa over the clout he had lost, the spiked story over the fortune, the proper distance over the cheap KD warmth. Rieff watched the man of commitment vanish from the culture and mourned him. Cohn is one of the ones still standing, in a press box full of men who never argue the question, keeping a father’s law whose God he cannot find, living, by the only definition he was ever given, with himself.
No Ought Under the Honor: Stephen Turner and the Righteousness of Lowell Cohn
The righteousness comes off the page like heat off a sidewalk. Read Gloves Off and you meet a man who knows what is right, who left a fortune on the table because an honorable man does not do that to another man, who held a dying man’s secret because it was the dying man’s to tell, who answers a slur and keeps a code and pleads guilty to being old-fashioned without conceding for one second that the code might be optional. He does not present these as his preferences. He presents them as oughts, as demands that hold whether or not he feels like meeting them, as a moral order he serves. Stephen Turner asks a flat and unwelcome question of every such order. What is there? And his answer, worked out across Explaining the Normative and the essays around it, is that there is nothing there, nothing of the kind the righteous man believes is there, no binding obligation hanging in the social air above the individuals, no genuine ought over and above the ordinary facts about what particular people have been trained to do and have come to expect and believe will happen. The normative dissolves on inspection into the empirical. Turner would take Cohn’s righteousness not as evidence of a moral order but as the thing to be explained away, and the explaining-away is the essay.
When a man says I am bound by an obligation, the social theorist usually grants that something binds him, some shared norm, some collective ought, and then asks where it came from and how it works. Turner declines the grant. He treats the binding as the report of an experience, not the detection of a fact, and he asks what produces the experience. The answer is always at the level of the individual: dispositions laid down by training, habits of response, beliefs about cause and effect, expectations about how others will react. These are facts. They are the only facts. The further thing the righteous man posits, the obligation itself, the ought that stands behind the disposition and justifies it, Turner says is a postulate, an explanatory entity we do not need and cannot find, smuggled in because the language of obligation flatters us and the language of conditioning does not. Strip the postulate and nothing is lost but the dignity. The behavior remains, fully explained, by the habits and the beliefs alone.
Now run it on Cohn, beginning where his certainty is loudest. An honorable man does not expose another man’s private life. Cohn says this as a moral absolute and stakes the fortune on it. Turner asks what is there. He finds, first, a disposition, a trained reluctance acquired in a particular home from a particular father who told a particular boy to act so he could live with himself, a habit of response laid down before the boy could weigh it, now firing automatically when the situation of exposure arises. He finds, second, a set of causal beliefs, beliefs about what happens to a man who betrays a confidence, what it does to his standing, what it does to his sleep, what kind of man it makes him in the eyes of the men whose regard he was raised to need. And he finds, third, the experience of bindingness, the felt sense that this is not a choice but a law. Turner’s claim is that the first two facts produce the third experience, and that the experience is not a perception of any additional thing. There is no obligation that the disposition tracks. There is the disposition, the belief, and the feeling the disposition generates, which the man then narrates as obedience to a law. The law is the story. The conditioning is the fact.
Take the purest case, the one that should embarrass any account that grants the ought, the prohibition on the nickname. A reporter must never say KD. Never, never, never. Here there is no consequence at all, no source lost, no story killed, nothing in the world that changes if the line is crossed. Cohn experiences the prohibition as absolutely binding precisely where it can point to no result. The Rieff essay took this as the signature of a genuine interdict, an ought that serves nothing but itself and is therefore pure. Turner reads the same fact in the opposite direction and the opposite reading is harder to escape. A prohibition with no consequence is the clearest evidence that there is no ought under it, because there is nothing for the ought to attach to. What is there is a man with a strongly trained disposition of proper distance, formed in an era and a place that drilled formality between writer and subject, firing in a situation that no longer carries the stakes that once trained it, and a feeling of violation when the disposition is crossed. The intensity Cohn brings to KD, the triple never, is not the measure of how binding the norm is. It is the measure of how deeply the habit was laid down. Turner would say the man is reporting the strength of his conditioning and mistaking it for the authority of a law.
The righteousness itself, the heat off the page, becomes under Turner a particular kind of mistake, and naming the mistake is the cruel part. The righteous man feels his oughts as objective, as facts about the world that others are also bound by, which is why he can be indignant when others breach them, why Billy Martin’s slur and Jed York’s silence and the writers who say KD all draw Cohn’s judgment. Indignation is the giveaway. It treats a violated obligation as a violated fact, as if the offender had denied that water runs downhill. But Turner’s deflation says there was no shared fact to deny. There were Cohn’s dispositions and Billy Martin’s dispositions, two differently trained men with different habits and different beliefs about what a man may do, and no normative order standing over both to which Cohn’s indignation could appeal. Cohn experiences Martin as having broken a law. Turner says there was no law, only two conditionings in collision, and Cohn’s sense that the universe itself was offended is the projection of his own trained response onto the world. The righteousness is the conditioning misrecognizing itself as cosmology.
Cohn nearly hands Turner the case himself, and the moment he does is worth dwelling on because it shows how close the man came to his own deflation and then flinched. Asked about moral absolutes, Cohn says he is not sure he believes in God and does not know where absolutes would come from, and then he reaches for a ground anyway: men confront the same world, are born and live and die in it, and so they would formulate certain rules to get along, and the Chinese and the Indians and the West would arrive at them independently. This is a man trying to rebuild the authority of the ought after he has knocked out its supernatural footing, and Turner would say the rebuild fails on its own terms. What Cohn has described is not a normative order. It is a convergence of dispositions, an account of why differently situated people might be trained into similar habits because they face similar conditions, which is an empirical story about the production of behavior, not the discovery of a binding law. Cohn thinks he has located the source of the absolutes. He has located the source of the conditioning and called it the source of the absolutes. He doubts God, who might have grounded a real ought, and then grounds the ought in human universals that can only deliver more facts about what people do. The honest reading is that Cohn felt the floor give way under his righteousness and built a second floor out of the same material the first was made of, and did not notice it was the same material.
Hold the deflation against the lived certainty, because this is where the verdict cuts against the dignity, and the essay should not soften the cut. The Rieff essay let Cohn be a man of commitment, a figure with a moral spine, keeping a real law in a faithless age, and granted him the gravity that picture carries. Turner takes the gravity back. Under Turner there is no commitment in the dignified sense, because there is nothing to be committed to, no order whose demands the man is heroically meeting at a cost. There is a man running a deeply ingrained behavioral program, well adapted to the press box, and experiencing the program as honor because honor is the idiom his formation gave him for describing his own dispositions. The fortune left on the table is not a sacrifice to a higher law. It is the output of a disposition strong enough to override the disposition toward money, two trained tendencies, the stronger winning, narrated afterward as nobility. Turner would not call Cohn a hypocrite. The dispositions are real and they fire honestly. He would call Cohn mistaken about what he is, a thoroughly conditioned man who believes he is a principled one, sincere in the belief and wrong in it.
Run the contested term across the hero systems, because the binding ought means one thing to the righteous man and nothing at all to several of his neighbors, and Turner’s point is that the disagreement is not about the content of a shared norm but about whether there is any norm there to share.
The Kantian moral philosopher would defend against Turner from the opposite side of Cohn, insisting the ought is exactly the thing Turner denies, a demand of reason itself, binding on any rational agent, grounded in the structure of the will and not in anyone’s conditioning. To him Cohn’s honor and Billy Martin’s malice are not two equal dispositions; one conforms to the moral law and one violates it, and the law is real, discoverable, universal. He would hear Turner’s deflation as the abandonment of morality as such, the reduction of duty to habit, and he would hear Cohn’s “men confront the same world” as a clumsy gesture at the universality he could give a proper ground. Cohn the doubter and the philosopher the believer are closer to each other than either is to Turner, because both think there is an ought to be found. Turner thinks they are both hunting a postulate.
The behaviorist stands with Turner and goes past him. To him there was never anything but the conditioning, in Cohn or anyone, no inner law, no felt obligation worth taking seriously as evidence of anything but reinforcement history. He would find Cohn’s whole vocabulary of honor a verbal overlay on a schedule of rewards and punishments administered first by two boys on a playground and then by a profession, and he would not even grant the experience of bindingness the dignity of being an interesting mistake. Where Turner explains the ought away and still attends to how the man narrates it, the behaviorist would discard the narration entirely. Cohn would be a set of trained responses with a talking habit attached.
The mafioso holds a code as fierce as Cohn’s and as consequence-bound where Cohn’s is empty, and he shows what the deflation does to the very idea of a shared honor. Omertà is binding, he will tell you, an absolute, a law a man dies for. Turner asks what is there and finds the same answer, dispositions and beliefs about consequences, much harder consequences than a sportswriter’s, but facts all the same, not a normative order. To the mafioso, Cohn’s honor is a soft and self-flattering thing, talk about confidences and nicknames, no blood behind it. To Cohn, the mafioso’s honor is criminal loyalty mistaking itself for virtue. Each treats his own code as the real ought and the other’s as a counterfeit, and Turner stands outside both saying neither is an ought, that they are two conditionings with different reinforcement and different stakes, each man’s certainty a report of how hard his own training took.
So the binding ought, the thing Cohn was sure he served, fans into incompatible readings that are not even readings of the same object. For the Kantian it is a real law of reason. For the behaviorist it is reinforcement with a story on top. For the mafioso it is a rival code certain of itself. For Cohn it is the absolute he doubts the ground of and obeys anyway. Turner’s hard claim is that the righteous man and the philosopher are chasing something that is not there, and that the honest description of all of them runs through individual dispositions and individual beliefs and stops, with no normative residue left over to explain.
Return to the heat off the page. You read the 2020 memoir and you feel a man’s righteousness. What Turner adds, against the dignity the earlier frame extended, is the suggestion that the righteousness is the most explicable thing in the book and the least what it claims to be. It is not the radiance of a man in contact with a moral order. It is the felt intensity of a conditioning laid down early and reinforced for forty years, in a man articulate enough to give that intensity the grandest possible name. Cohn would reject the analysis, and his rejection would itself be a disposition firing, the trained refusal to let his honor be called anything less than honor. The truthful close is that Turner does not prove Cohn wrong, because Turner does not deal in proof of that kind; he offers a redescription under which everything Cohn does remains exactly as it was and means something smaller. The fortune still gets left on the table. The face still gets shown. The secret still gets kept. Only the ought behind them goes missing, and the man who staked his life on its being there never feels it leave, because the disposition to feel it there is the very thing that was trained into him, and it fires, righteous and certain, to the end.
The Guild
The set is sportswriters, and the first thing to see is that they are a guild before they are a profession. Cohn names the members and the ranks with a precision that tells you the hierarchy is real to the men inside it. At the top sits the columnist, the elite slot, the man permitted a voice. Below him the beat reporter, the feature writer, the news man, honorable but lower, valued for the scoop and the source rather than the sentence. And inside the elite slot itself a further split that organizes the whole status order: the connected columnist against the stylist. Cohn places the names. Tim Kawakami and Glenn Dickey are the connected men, the ones who always know the day’s real story, who deliver news in their own voice. Scott Ostler is the stylist, the humorist, the man whose claim rests on how the thing is written. Cohn locates himself near Ostler and tells you flatly he is not the connected kind and not much of a reporter, which is both a confession and a status move, since in his private ranking the stylist holds the higher ground.
What they value is dues. This is the guild’s deepest sacred thing and Cohn violated it, which is why they called him That Asshole when he walked into the San Francisco Chronicle in 1979 with a Stanford doctorate and no time served. The honored path runs through journalism school, high school sports, the slow climb, the apprenticeship, and the climb itself confers the right to the chair. A man who skips it has stolen something. Cohn grants the verdict was just by the guild’s own law. The dues are not training in any practical sense; they are initiation, the thing that marks you as one of us, and the resentment of the man who skipped them is the resentment of any closed order toward the interloper who got in the side door.
Their hero system runs on action and the byline. The action is the live event, the deadline closing, the column due four times a week, the rush of the thing in print the next morning and the noise it makes. The byline is the renewable proof that a man counts, his name on the shiny paper, his face on the side of a city bus. Red Smith (1905–1982) sits at the top of their pantheon as the writer’s writer, the short-story man working in sports columns, and Cohn got to sit beside him at the 1981 World Series and asked him what to do when the column would not come on deadline, and Smith told him the Lord provides. Jim Murray (1919–1998) is the West Coast god, the unique voice everyone copied to their own detriment. Jimmy Cannon (1909–1973) is the New York forebear. These are the saints of the guild, and a man’s standing rises as he is measured against them.
The status games run on toughness and access, and the two are different currencies. Access is the connected man’s coin, the sources, the player who leaks to you, the executive who takes your call, and it buys the kind of standing Kawakami and Dickey hold. Toughness is the other coin, and Cohn’s whole account of the press box is an account of how it is earned and spent. You ask the hard question and persist when the room goes quiet. You rip a man and then show your face, walk up to him, ask whether he has anything to say, because the man who hides is marked a punk and can never do business again. Cohn names Tim Kawakami as the other writer known for asking the toughest questions and persisting, which is how you can read the status order off the page: the men Cohn respects are the men who put themselves out there, and the men he quietly does not are the ones who write the rude coach’s contemptuous answers in their notebooks and accept the humiliation. The athletes and coaches grade this game too. They admire the writer who faces up to them and despise the one who can be bossed, and the bond that forms after a confrontation, the respect Kevin Mitchell gave Cohn after the batting-cage standoff, is the currency changing hands.
There is a smaller, internal status game around money and beat-sweetening that reveals the guild’s moral grammar by its taboos. The beat sweetener, the writer who over-praises the people on his beat so they keep feeding him, is the despised type, the man who has sold his independence for access. Cohn is proud he never had a beat long enough to develop one. The independence is the boast. And there is a real prohibition against certain kinds of access-seeking and a real contempt for the writer who is soft because he is angling for something. The Bay Area guild, Cohn says, was considered soft compared to the blunt New York men, and softness here is the cardinal vice, the writer who protects the local team, cultivates friendships, pulls the punch.
Their normative claims are loud and they sit mostly around the unwritten rule. The reporter must never call the athlete he covers by a nickname, never say KD for Kevin Durant or Mooch for Steve Mariucci, because it presumes an intimacy the writer has not earned and collapses the proper distance. The writer must make himself available after he rips a man. The writer must not write the private affair, must not out a man, must not break the confidence, must judge himself by the stories he does not write. These are presented as obligations binding on any honorable practitioner, and the indignation when they are breached, Cohn’s at the writers who say KD, is the indignation of a man who thinks a law has been broken and not merely a taste offended.
Their essentialist claims cluster around two things, the writer’s nature and the political type. On nature, the guild believes some men are reporters and some are columnists, that these are different kinds of men with different gifts, and that the columnist who tries to report or the reporter who reaches for voice is working against his grain. Cohn says reporting is a wonderful thing he is not particularly good at, as if it were a fixed endowment rather than a skill. On the political type, Cohn states the guild’s self-understanding plainly: sportswriters are left-liberal, almost to a man, because they come out of universities and the middle class and the liberal intellectual formation, and a Republican sportswriter is so rare he cannot name one and would never ask. He treats the liberalism as an essential property of the type, a thing that comes with the background, not a set of positions individually arrived at.
The moral grammar, finally, is an honor grammar wearing secular clothes. The vocabulary is standing, respect, facing up, paying dues, not being a punk, not being soft, showing your face, balancing the scales. It is a grammar of reputation among peers and adversaries, of debts that must be settled in person, of a self that is constituted by how it conducts itself under pressure in front of witnesses. It is conspicuously not a grammar of consequences or outcomes; the prohibition on the nickname serves nothing, the story left unwritten costs a fortune, and the men keep both anyway, because the grammar measures a man by his conduct and his independence rather than by what his conduct produces. The deepest term in it is the one Cohn got from his blind father rather than from the guild, act so you can live with yourself, but it translates cleanly into the guild’s own idiom, because the press box is finally a room full of men watching to see which of them will stand his ground and which will write the contemptuous answer in his notebook and call it a day.
My Interview With Lowell Cohn, Nov. 7, 2008
Luke: “How was writing your book?”
Lowell: “The book on Bill [Walsh]. It was exciting because I got to be inside a football team for a season. He was the head coach and he was great. He and I got to know each other very well. I loved writing it. I’m proud of that book.
“When the book came out, he objected to. He felt I had over-exposed him. He said things about me on TV and to other reporters that got reported which burned me up. We did not speak for two years. He wanted a detente but I’m a New York guy and I was pissed off and I did not want to speak to him. After two years, we gradually made it up and were quite cordial by the time he passed away.”
Luke: “What did he say about you?”
Lowell: “He went on the halftime of a football broadcast and they asked him about the book. He said, ‘That book that had been written, I was not a party to it.’ He washed his hands of it. What burned me up is that we signed a legal agreement. He got part of the proceeds. He was a millionaire. I wasn’t. To say you weren’t a party to it wasn’t true.
“He didn’t like confrontation, but I went down to Stanford and I told him we had to talk and I think I yelled at him. I was really angry. He wrote me a note apologizing and I think he apologized because I think he was afraid I’d sue him because what he said was a lie, but of course I never did that.”
Luke: “Did Walsh’s affair with Kristine Hanson hit the news media when it was going on [mid 1980s]?”
Lowell: “Yes. Everyone knew about it.”
Luke: “Was it written up in newspapers?”
Lowell: “No.”
Luke: “Why not?”
Lowell: “Because it was not relevant. His private affair had nothing to do with him as a coach. I know players and coaches all the time who are having extra-marital sex and I never write about it. If I were having extra-marital sex, I wouldn’t think it would be anybody’s business but my wife’s. I’m not having extra-marital sex but it’s a personal, private thing and it is not my business to write about it.
“When I wrote my book on Bill, he used to talk to me about Kristine Hanson. I didn’t put it in my book. I didn’t think it was appropriate. What burned me up about Bill was that he felt I had over-exposed him because I had him three or four times in the book saying ‘F—‘.’ He didn’t like that. He didn’t like being perceived as someone who said ‘F—‘. He was a football coach. He said it all the time. He criticized certain teams, that was in the book, and he didn’t think that was OK. But my God, he told me all about Kristine Hanson on tape and I never put that in. I protected him because I didn’t think it was what an honorable man would do to do that to another man, even if he was stupid enough to say it. If I had put it in my book, I’d probably be a millionaire today because I would’ve broken that news in 1994.
“I haven’t read [David] Harris’s book but I hear he talked to Kristine and it’s in there. Maybe Bill gave him his blessing to do it? But I never wanted to do it because it was not relevant to his going back to Stanford. I just didn’t think it was morally a proper thing to do. So that was a moral absolute.”
Luke: “Why haven’t you read Harris’s book?”
Lowell: “I feel like I’ve read and dealt with Bill’s life a lot. I don’t want to go over his life again.
“Harris never involved me in the book. He called a lot of my friends and asked them questions about Bill, but he never called me about it. He didn’t reach out to me, which I thought was odd considering I know more about Bill than any other sportswriter. So I guess maybe that turned me off. Not maybe, that did turn me off.”
“I almost never read sports books.”
Luke: “What do you think about outing?”
Lowell: “I never have done it…and I thought it morally repugnant.”
“I have to be able to live with myself and think that I am a good guy. That’s what my father always said, you have to act in ways that are honorable and you have to live with yourself. Even if Bill was stupid enough to tell me about Kristine, I was not going to write about it. Sometimes I think, did he want me to write about it? Was there some sort of weird thing going on whereby he thought he could put it in my book, he could show it to his wife and that would be it. I have no idea. I’m not that complicated. But I wouldn’t touch it. The idea of outing seems like a bottom feeder thing to do.”
“If someone is cheating on a marriage, you don’t know the reasons. Why would I get in the middle of that marriage?”
Luke: “Have you covered any court cases starring athletes?”
Lowell: “I don’t think so. One of the things I like about sports is that if you want, it can be a pretty simplified endeavor.”
Luke: “How come you haven’t written more books?”
Lowell: “My dad died in 1988. I wrote a memoir about boxing, my dad and I, but I couldn’t publish it. Then I wrote the Bill Walsh book and for ten years I’ve been writing a novel. It’s a lot of fun to write a novel but it’s hard for me. In addition, I do a lot of writing. I write four columns a week. That takes up a lot of time. Maybe if I weren’t doing that, I might’ve written that but I’m happy to write the columns. I like that kind of work. I like the action.”
The Model and the Obstacle: René Girard and the Walsh Problem
He would not read the book. David Harris had written a life of Bill Walsh, had called many of Cohn’s friends to ask about the coach, and had never once called Cohn, who knew Walsh better than any sportswriter alive. Cohn noticed the omission and let it turn him off, and then he gave a second reason that is stranger and more revealing than the slight. He did not want to go over Walsh’s life again. He had dealt with that life enough. Hold both halves of that, because together they open the relationship. A man does not refuse to revisit a subject he feels neutral about. The refusal is the residue of something heavy, and the pique at not being consulted is the residue of something proprietary. Cohn behaves, around Harris’s book, like a man guarding a wound and a claim at once, and René Girard (1923–2015) gives us the structure that makes the wound and the claim the same thing.
Girard’s argument, set out across Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, is that desire does not run in a straight line from a subject to an object. It runs through a model. We want what we want because someone we admire wants it or embodies it, and the model teaches us the desire by having it first. Desire is borrowed, mimetic, caught from another. And the structure carries its own poison, because the model who shows me what to want stands between me and the thing by the same act that reveals it. He is guide and obstacle together. Admiration and rivalry are not two feelings that happen to share a room; they are one relation seen from two sides, and the nearer the model, the faster the admiration curdles toward rivalry. The pair can lock into what Girard calls a double bind, each becoming the obstacle the other must surmount, the two growing alike in their antagonism until the difference that once separated them collapses.
Walsh was Cohn’s model in the exact sense, and the word that proves it is the word both men’s worlds reached for: genius. The football world called Walsh a genius. Cohn’s whole work as a writer was to be the one man who saw through the word to the anxious, perfectionist, insecure creature beneath it. But see what that work requires. To penetrate the genius, the writer must stand close enough to claim a knowledge no one else holds, must cast himself as the intelligence equal to the coach’s intelligence, the only writer subtle enough to render the only coach worth rendering subtly. Walsh prized intelligence and demanded excellence, the very qualities Cohn prizes in himself. The coach became the writer’s measure. To write Walsh truly was to prove himself Walsh’s match in penetration, and so the admiration was never separable from the competition. Cohn wanted to be the man who understood the genius, which is a way of wanting to stand level with him, which is a way of wanting the recognized supremacy in a hard craft that the genius already had.
Now the rupture, where the triangle tightens into the double bind. Cohn questioned in print whether Walsh had lost his edge. Walsh stopped speaking to him. Then Rough Magic came out, built from unusual access, and Walsh went on television and said he had not been a party to it, washed his hands of it, a claim Cohn knew to be false, since the two had signed an agreement and Walsh had taken a share of the proceeds. They did not speak for two years. Read the structure under the grievance. Model and disciple have become rivals over a single object, the truth about Walsh, the authority to define him. Cohn’s book claims that authority. Walsh’s denial tries to revoke it, to say this portrait is not me and you do not hold the standing you claimed. Each is now the other’s obstacle. Walsh blocks Cohn’s claim to have rendered him whole; Cohn blocks Walsh’s claim to govern his own image. The symmetry is the Girardian signature, two proud men each insisting on his version, each refusing to give way, coach and columnist grown so alike in stubbornness that the gap in their stations stops mattering. Cohn says he stayed angry because he is a New York guy. The New York is a costume on the deeper thing. He could not let the model revoke the recognition the disciple had spent fifteen years earning the right to confer.
The reconciliation runs through the rivalry’s own terms, which is what Girard would attend to most. They made it up gradually, were cordial by the time Walsh died, but the peace Cohn describes is not a softening of the heart. He went to Stanford, told Walsh they had to talk, and yelled at him, and Walsh wrote a note of apology that Cohn believes was driven by fear of a lawsuit, since the on-air denial was a lie and the agreement was on paper. The double bind resolves not by the dissolving of the rivalry but by its settlement, the model backing down before the disciple, the apology extracted, the scales balanced in the press-box idiom Cohn carries into every room. Even the making of peace is a confrontation won.
And here is the strand that complicates the picture in Cohn’s favor, the place the frame meets a limit and should admit it. The unwritten story. Walsh told Cohn about an affair, on tape, and Cohn left it out of the book and said the omission cost him a fortune. Set aside the standard rivalry reading, the one where a man ruins his rival, and look at what Cohn did. He held the weapon and would not use it. Girard’s account of rivalry tends toward escalation, blow answering larger blow, the mimetic spiral pulling both men toward mutual ruin. Cohn broke the spiral. He had the means to annihilate the model’s image and chose the model’s dignity over the disciple’s triumph. Something in him, the father’s law to act so he could live with himself, interrupted the escalation the relationship otherwise ran on. The frame lights the rivalry and then strikes, in the spiked story, a thing it cannot absorb, a move rivalry does not predict.
Resist the press-box generalization, because this is where Girard flattens into a template the moment you relax. It is true and shallow to say the press box runs on mimetic rivalry, that the elite columnist’s chair is the object every writer’s desire converges on, that men want it because other men want it, that conferred prestige is structurally scarce and so a permanent engine of rivalry. All of that holds and none of it is about Cohn in particular. His rivalry with the other writers was ordinary, and he won it by the strange route of skipping the dues. His rivalry with Walsh was the one that organized his deepest desire, because Walsh, not the other columnists, was the model who taught him what supremacy in a hard craft looked like. The other writers wanted the same chair he wanted. Walsh embodied the thing he wanted to be. Those are different triangles, and only the second produced two years of silence and a refusal, decades on, to read another man’s version.
Run the borrowed object across the hero systems, because the model means one thing to a man who builds himself by rivalry and something incompatible to men formed otherwise, and the mimetic structure that organizes Cohn reads as disease or as nonsense from a different vantage.
The Zen student is trained to dissolve the very triangle Cohn lives inside. The teaching aims at desire without a model, at wanting that has stopped borrowing, at the self that no longer measures against another and so no longer breeds rivalry. The koan exists to exhaust the comparing mind. To him Cohn’s relation to Walsh is the disease itself, a man bound to another man’s excellence, his sense of his own worth hostage to a rival’s regard, unwilling even to read a book because the comparison would start again. What Girard calls the structure of all desire, the Zen student calls the structure of suffering, the thing to be unlearned. Cohn’s lifelong measuring of himself against the genius would look, from the cushion, like a man who never set the burden down.
The medieval guild apprentice wants exactly what Cohn wants and carries no shame about it, because his world is built to aim mimetic desire at the master without letting it curdle. He apprentices himself precisely to catch the master’s desire, to want what the master wants and make what the master makes, and the system disarms the double bind with time, the orderly succession in which the apprentice becomes a master and the rivalry discharges into a new generation. To him Cohn’s trouble with Walsh is the trouble of a man with no guild to absorb it, a disciple with no sanctioned path to surpass his model, so the rivalry went private and personal and hardened into a silence. The structure Girard finds destructive the workshop finds manageable, given the institution to route it through.
The romantic individualist, the figure Cohn half presents himself as, denies the triangle outright. He told you the conviction had to come from within, that he needed no one to tell him he was good, that he would be a writer on no one’s permission. He believes his desire is his own, original, governed by no model, and he would take the Girardian reading as an insult, would call his admiration for Walsh simple appreciation of a great man and his rivalry a separate matter of professional disagreement. Girard’s reply is that this denial is the romantic lie the great novels exist to expose, the subject’s refusal to see that his most personal desire was borrowed from a model he will not name. Cohn the self-made man is the exact figure Girard says is most deceived about the source of his wanting, and the refusal to read Harris is the lie protecting itself, a man declining to meet, in another’s prose, the model whose hold he cannot acknowledge.
So the model, the borrowed thing at the center of desire, fans into incompatible readings. To the Zen student it is the root of suffering, to be dissolved. To the apprentice it is the proper channel of growth, to be institutionalized. To the romantic it is an illusion he indignantly denies. To Cohn it is the unnamed structure of his deepest professional relationship, the coach who taught him what he wanted to be and stood between him and being it. Girard’s claim is that the romantic denial is the most common and the most false, and that the men who admit the triangle at least see the thing the individualist cannot afford to.
The Charged Room: Randall Collins and the Interaction Rituals of Lowell Cohn
He writes with music playing, and the music is the tell. Cohn says he puts it on to seal himself off from the world, Mozart or the Ramones depending on the column, and that he writes in the morning, alone, in joy. Set that beside the other Cohn, the man who needs the action, who craves the hurricane, who lives for the press box and the deadline and the rush of the thing in print the next morning. Two scenes, two sources of energy, and Randall Collins gives us the tools to see that they are the same economy run in two directions. In Interaction Ritual Chains Collins builds a sociology from the ground Goffman left, from the encounter rather than the structure, and he makes a hard wager about what drives human beings. We are not, at bottom, pulled by ideas or values or interests. We are pulled by emotional energy, and we go where we can get it. The whole of a life, on this account, is a chain of encounters, each one charging the man up or draining him down, and a man moves through his days steering, mostly without knowing it, toward the situations that fill his battery and away from the ones that empty it.
Collins specifies the ritual that does the charging. An interaction ritual fires when bodies are physically assembled, when a boundary marks insiders from outsiders, when the assembled attention locks onto a common object so that each person knows the others are focused on it too, and when a shared mood builds and feeds on itself. Get those ingredients running and the encounter produces four things: a current of emotional energy in each participant, a feeling of solidarity in the group, symbols that come to stand for the group and carry the charge afterward, and a standard of moral rightness that makes defending those symbols feel like defending the good. The key term, mutual focus and shared emotion building through the bodies in the room, is the engine. When it runs high the participants leave lit up, confident, full. When it fails they leave flat. And Collins’s deepest claim is that the energy is not metaphorical. It is the real currency of social life, and individuals are, in his phrase, emotional-energy seekers, drawn down the chain toward the encounters that have charged them before.
The press box is an interaction-ritual machine, and Cohn describes its operation without the vocabulary. Bodies assembled, the writers packed in together. A hard boundary, the credential, the working press, the room civilians cannot enter. A common focus locked tight, the game below, every man in the box attending to the same event and knowing all the others attend to it too. And a shared mood that builds through the long afternoon and crests at the finish. Then the ritual extends past the game, to the restaurant on the road, the bottles of wine, the talk that runs ninety percent on what just happened, why the coach did what he did, the story about the tight end in the hotel. Collins would point at that dinner and say there is the ritual completing itself, the assembled insiders recharging on the shared object, the solidarity of the guild getting renewed over the wine. Cohn felt the charge and the solidarity both, and he also felt, with his usual honesty, the moments the ritual failed, the player giving rote bored answers, the day he calls slumming, the wasted article and the wasted day. In Collins’s terms a failed ritual, attention present but mutual focus and shared emotion never igniting, leaves the participant drained, and drained is exactly the word under Cohn’s slumming.
Now the confrontations, which look like the opposite of solidarity and are, in Collins’s scheme, a higher-energy ritual still. The batting-cage standoff with Kevin Mitchell. The shouted question at the contemptuous coach until the coach, startled, gives the full answer. The walk into the clubhouse where Frank Robinson looms over Cohn and demands to know whether he is Manager One or Manager Two. Collins wrote a whole book on conflict as interaction ritual, and the insight is that an antagonistic encounter, bodies focused on each other, attention total, emotion high, generates enormous energy precisely because the focus is so complete. The fight is the most absorbing ritual there is. And watch what it produces in Cohn’s telling: not lasting enmity but a bond. After the standoff Mitchell and Cohn got along great. Jeffrey Leonard runs over grinning, says you love this, and Cohn agrees he loves it. The LA writers thank him after the shouted question. Collins explains the paradox that puzzles the honor-culture reading. The confrontation bonds the men because it is a successful ritual, a moment of total mutual focus and shared high emotion, and what such a moment leaves behind is solidarity and a charge, even between adversaries, even though the content was hostile. Cohn says conflict often leads to a bond, a way of comparing horsepower, a form of communication. He has described an interaction ritual and called it horsepower.
The Sals are where the chain begins, and Collins lets us read the playground as the first link rather than as the source of a code. The standard reading, the honor reading, says the Sals taught Cohn a rule, stand your ground. Collins would say they trained a disposition by charging it. The boy took the headlock, fought back, and the Sals liked him for it and defended him, and the encounter, total focus, high emotion, bodies locked, left the boy with energy and standing and a place inside the boundary. The ritual rewarded the not-flinching with the charge, again and again, until the response was laid down and the situations that triggered it became situations the boy sought, because they were the situations that filled him. By the time Cohn reaches the press box he is, in Collins’s sense, an energy-seeker tuned to a particular ritual, the confrontation, and he finds in big-league sports a lifelong supply of it. He says being with the ballplayers was just like the playground, a different playground. Collins would say it was the same ritual, the same engine, drawing the same man down the chain toward the encounters that had charged him since Avenue L.
Here the frame does its sharpest work, on the thing that organizes the whole man, the word action. The other frames took action as a value or a flight from the academy’s stillness. Collins reads it as emotional energy, named in the only idiom Cohn had for it. The academy drained him, and reread his description of the drain in Collins’s terms: the deathly still library, the dust motes in half-light, the polite seminar in Henry James. That is a portrait of failed ritual, of a place where bodies assemble but mutual focus never ignites and shared emotion never builds, where the encounters leave a man flat. The seminar is low-energy by design, attention dispersed, mood subdued, no crest. Cohn fled it not because he disliked ideas but because the room would not charge him. And he ran to the highest-energy ritual the culture offers, the live event watched by an assembled, bounded, totally focused crowd, where the shared emotion builds for three hours and breaks at the gun. Action is Cohn’s word for the encounter that fills the battery. No action is his word for the encounter that empties it. The whole arc of his vocation, the turn from the library to the press box, is in Collins’s terms a man steering off a dead ritual chain and onto a live one, toward the situations that gave him the energy the seminar withheld.
But the deepest move is the one that complicates the energy-seeker picture, and it sits in the music and the morning. Collins distinguishes the energy of the crowd from the energy a man can carry alone, and he has a particular account of the solitary intellectual, the writer at the desk, who runs interaction rituals in his head with absent partners, with the dead, with imagined readers, with the great voices he has internalized. Cohn writes alone and seals the room with music, and who is in the room with him? Conrad. Malamud (1914–1986). Roth (1933–2018). The voices he says are in his head when he writes. Collins would call this an internalized ritual, the solitary man charging himself by mutual focus with the symbols and the dead masters he carries, the music a device to close the door on the actual world so the internal ritual can run undisturbed. The press box charges Cohn through live bodies. The desk charges him through internalized ones. And the second is the one he says gives him the most, the meaning in the act itself, the first sentence planned, the alliteration heard, the artifact at the end. The energy-seeker found, past the crowd, a private ritual that charged him higher than the crowd could, and built a life that ran on both, the live ritual of the arena feeding the material and the internalized ritual of the desk turning it into the thing that lasts.
Run the central currency across the hero systems, because emotional energy gets harvested from incompatible rituals, and the encounter that fills one man flattens the next.
The festival-circuit raver builds a self on the purest mass ritual Collins describes, ten thousand bodies, total mutual focus on the drop, shared emotion engineered to crest together, the boundary of the gates and the wristband, the charge so high it needs no content at all beyond the collective effervescence itself. To him Cohn’s solitary morning with the music and the dead novelists is not a ritual at all but a man alone in a room, the opposite of energy, isolation mistaken for work. The encounter Cohn calls his deepest charge, the raver would call the absence of the only thing that charges, the crowd.
The cloistered contemplative runs the inverse and would indict both of Cohn’s rituals. Her practice aims at the encounter with God in solitude and silence, and she has renounced the crowd’s effervescence as a lower and distracting energy, the very high Cohn chases in the arena. She might recognize the solitary desk as closer to her own condition, the sealed room, the absent partner, but she would name Cohn’s internal partners, the novelists, the symbols of a literary vocation, as the wrong company, the self charging itself on worldly glory rather than emptying itself toward the only worthy focus. Cohn’s whole battery, crowd-charge and desk-charge alike, runs on energies she has trained herself to refuse.
The trial lawyer harvests the same confrontation energy Cohn harvests and inside an institution that licenses it. The courtroom is Collins’s ritual perfected, bodies assembled, boundary absolute, focus total, the adversary across the room, the jury as the charged audience. He would recognize Cohn’s batting-cage standoff instantly, the energy of total antagonistic focus, the bond that can follow combat, the horsepower compared. But his confrontation produces a verdict, a consequence in the world, where Cohn’s produces a column and a bond and a charge and nothing more. To the lawyer, Cohn is an energy-seeker who found the ritual and skipped the stakes, a man who gets the high of the fight without the weight of the outcome.
So emotional energy, the thing every one of these men is finally seeking, gets pulled from rituals that do not convert into one another. The raver needs the crowd, the contemplative needs the silence, the lawyer needs the adversary and the verdict, Cohn needs the arena and then the desk. Collins’s hard claim, harder than it first sounds, is that beneath the values each of these men professes, the real motor is the same hunt for the charge, and that what looks like a clash of moral worlds is, underneath, men tuned by their histories to different rituals, each drawn down his own chain toward the encounters that have filled him before, each calling the encounter that fills him meaning and the encounter that empties him waste.
Return to the morning and the music and the man writing alone in joy. Collins would resist the honor reading and the commitment reading and the buffered reading and say something flatter and stranger about Cohn. Here is a man whose life can be mapped as a chain of encounters sorted by their charge. The seminar that drained him, abandoned. The playground that lit him, internalized as a lifelong tropism toward confrontation. The press box that charged him through the crowd, sought for forty years. The confrontations that bonded him to the men he fought, repeated by design. And at the center, the sealed room where he ran the highest ritual he had, alone with the dead masters and the music against the door, generating, out of the absent company he carried in his head, the energy he could not get from any room full of living bodies. He told you he writes in joy. Collins would say joy is the name a man gives to the encounter, real or internal, that fills him to the top, and that Cohn spent his life, with more honesty than most, going exactly where the charge was.
