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, a New York man, 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 quietly 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 a son, Grant (b. 1988), brought up Jewish though Dawn is not, a home with Friday candles and a Christmas tree both.
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 (1928–1989), 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 confirmed the slur with both men and answered it. He did not write the frontal column. He wrote a compare-and-contrast piece, an unnamed Manager One set against an unnamed Manager Two, and every reader in the Bay Area knew which was Martin. He 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 in 1994, 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.
And here the frame earns its keep, because 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’s sharpest tool, 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 (1928–1989) 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 (1935–2019) 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, not in the man.
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. The honest thing to say, in your own register of truth over comfort, is that Goffman fits Cohn almost too cleanly, and the reason is not that the frame is powerful but that the subject got there first. 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.
And the argument that makes this more than two parallel observations is that the habitus turned out to fit the field. Bourdieu’s strongest claim is that 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.
But Rieff’s frame is sharp enough to catch where Cohn is not the man of commitment, and the honesty of the essay depends on naming it. Cohn does not hold a sacred order entire. He 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 one tribe is the other thing the buffered essay set down, and Rieff handles it too. Cohn relativized the teams and would not relativize the Jews. He scans the roster for Jewish names every spring. He asks of every stranger whether the man is Jewish. He felt the Billy Martin slur in his body and answered it. 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. The truthful note, in your register, is that Cohn is not a tragic figure here and the essay should not make him one. He is not torn between the orders. He 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.
