I'm Really Looking Forward To My Ntozake Nelson Moment 

We’re less than a month from the arrival of our twins, and now that we’ve gotten all the setup done (cribs, wipes, burp cloths, and all the other stuff you have to get), I’ve drifted into the mode of “uh oh, there’s going to be babies here soon that we have to keep alive”.

It’s daunting, but also exciting. Exciting for the usual reasons, and because I’m already jumping ahead months and years to when I can first show them Star Wars and watch the cartoons that I grew up watching. Going to their first Celtics and Sox game. All the fun moments that you go through when raising kids.

In listening to The Incomparable podcast yesterday, they were talking about Hall of Fame TV shows. At one point, they bring up Sports Night and it occurred to me that I’m really excited to have my own Ntozake Nelson moment. In the show (the pilot, so it’s a little broader than the show settles into), there’s a moment at the end where a 41-year old marathon runner ends up setting a world record, and Casey calls his son to wake him up to watch.

That’s the sort of thing I’m excited about—catching the end of a no-hitter, or a 400 runner setting a world record in the Olympics, and just being there to watch and explain why this is such a momentous thing. Sports gives you so many of those little moments, and I can remember where I was as an 8 year old when the ball went between Bill Buckner’s legs (my parents had let me stay up on their floor to watch the end of the game). I think I was lucky that my parents encouraged my love of the minutiae of sports. I’m hoping to pass that on and share some Ntozake Nelson moments 1

  1. Youtube doesn’t have any good clips of the whole Ntozake Nelson thing, but someone has put up the episode and you can check out the scene starting at 17:35