This time last year

How the Super Bowl prompts some reflection about work, life, and the unknowable future

If your job involves talking to pro fighters, there’s one phrase you’re guaranteed to hear a lot: Everything happens for a reason.

They say this a lot because they need to believe it. And they need to believe it because a lot of stuff that they don’t want to happen to them ends up happening. It’s just the nature of their business. If you’ve got 10 fights on a card, that means you have 20 fighters all showing up absolutely sure they’re going to win. Half of them end up being devastatingly and often super painfully wrong.

Then there’s the other stuff. You break your hand in training. You blow out a knee. Your opponent fucks up his weight cut and the fight gets canceled at the last minute. It’s a goddamn minefield of misfortunes, is what it is. But what are you going to do, mope about it? Curse your awful fate? I mean, maybe for a minute or two. Then you tell yourself that everything happens for a reason even if you don’t know yet what the reason is. God never closes a door without kicking out a window or whatever.

Myself I have never believed this. I think things happen and then, due to our irrepressible humanness, we invent a reason later. We seek order and patterns and meaning. It’s who we are. We are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a random and indifferent universe. We would much rather believe that the universe itself knows about us each individually and can sometimes be prevailed upon to grant our wishes or at least direct our steps toward an eventual happy ending.

That’s pretty absurd when you think about it even just a little. Consider all the awful things that happen to people. Guy I worked at a hotel with in college died after an upstairs neighbor, for reasons unknown, dropped an iron out her second-floor window while he was grilling hamburgers on his first-floor patio. Henry V died shitting his brains out in the mud of France. If this was the universe’s plan for them, wow, what the fuck.

But even an old cynic like me sometimes finds himself believing – or maybe just wanting to believe – in stuff similar to this. Maybe I can’t quite get all the way to ‘everything happens for a reason,’ but I do sometimes find myself believing that – and here I shudder at what a crystal-clutching hippie I sound like even admitting to this – things fall into place for us only when we’re ready for it.

I’ve been reflecting on it this week because the Super Bowl is coming up. This time last year my main job was writing for a website that did sports gambling content. Not even an online sportsbook, mind you, which at least might have felt dignified, like you’re the guy wearing a velvet vest in the casino, snatching money from the rubes with a cigar clenched in your teeth. No, I’m talking about a website that made its money gaming the search engine algorithms and then redirecting traffic to the sites where you can actually place a bet.

This business model was a goddamn house of cards to begin with, and some of the Google algorithm changes last year only hastened the collapse. But early last year at Super Bowl time, we all had our heads in our laptops cranking out lifeless, hollow content on every imaginable Super Bowl betting angle. It was stressful and not much fun and it definitely interfered with my snack consumption during the game itself, which is frankly unforgivable.

(Nachos, bitch.)

As you can probably tell, I was not sorry when that job laid me off along with about 30 other people on a random Tuesday this past fall. (Some real corporate America bullshit, too. One day we were all a team focused on our common goal, and then the literal next day even my boss’ boss’ boss got the ol’ if-you’re-reading-this-you’re-fucked email from HR. Then they had to tell whoever was left, okay back to work! Like you haven’t just given them all a reason to update there resumes and look for an exit.)

But when I first got that job, like a year and a half earlier? I was pumped about it. I needed a job – any job – back then. I was also pretty burned out on MMA, having spent my last year at The Athletic in a situation that felt like falling through a long elevator shaft while banging my head against the wall all the way down.

Shortly after The Athletic got out of the combat sports racket altogether, Yahoo first reached out to me about a possible job. I remember thinking at the time: man, if they offer me that job I guess I’ll have to take it, won’t I? I wasn’t thrilled. I still had that bad taste in my mouth from the way The Athletic job ended, and after such a promising start.

Turns out, Yahoo wasn’t ready to make me an offer yet, so I didn’t need to worry about it. All I needed to worry about was finding some job, preferably with health insurance. When I got offered the sports gambling gig it was basically a life preserver. I got what I wanted, or at least what I needed.

Here was a job that was very much just a job. I hadn’t had one of those in more than 15 years. Ever since I got my first job writing about fight sports, all the way back in 2006, it was basically my life. At times it felt like my identity. When I was doing it well, I felt good and useful and worthwhile. When I wasn’t, I felt bad about myself. I gave up my Saturday nights and Sunday mornings for years and years, boarded more 6 a.m. flights out of Vegas than I can count, wrote down far more MMA fighter platitudes (it is what it is…) than the surgeon general recommends. I even learned how to spell Jedrzejczyk without looking it up. Most of the time I just felt grateful that they let me keep doing it all.

This was maybe not a super healthy approach to work, and it eventually got to me. Well, that and some other stuff that we’ll get to another time.

After years of that, having a job that I didn’t really care about and wasn’t personally invested in felt like a revelation. I churned out mindless bullshit about betting odds and NFL injury news. I updated tables and plugged in codes and wrote 500-word articles on how likely it is that the opening kickoff of the Super Bowl will be a touchback (pretty likely, you guys). To the extent I got any feedback on my writing at all, it was usually something like: you know this stuff doesn’t have to actually be good, right? I closed that laptop at 5 p.m. on Friday (let’s be honest, more like 3 p.m., since my managers were all on the East Coast) and didn’t think about it again until Monday morning. It was great. Until it wasn’t.

Some of that was just the fact that you can only write the same exact article about the BetMGM promo code for Monday Night Football so many times before your soul forcefully ejects itself your body. This was the rare kind of writing that I think AI not only could do, but frankly should do, on account of it is damaging to the human spirit over a long enough period of time.

But also some of it was that Yahoo did eventually get around to offering me what amounted to a part-time job. And by then I was very excited to take it. I was back in the game! Back to doing some writing I actually gave a damn about. At first I was basically a one-man shop, but then some of my best friends and oldest colleagues joined me. It gradually went from part-time to something closer to full-time (though I was still doing the sports gambling job mostly for health insurance).

When we launched The Uncrowned, it felt like finally we were really doing this. We’d sit there together on Zoom meetings and you could feel everyone being lifted by the creative energy coming out of everyone else. It felt like I’d been dead for a thousand years and was finally rising again. It still feels like that.

It also made the sports gambling shit feel intolerably dreary. I did as little as I could for those people just so I could have more time to devote to the Yahoo/Uncrowned gig. They didn’t seem to notice, either. Which, if you already feel like your job doesn’t matter, it’ll really drive the point home when you barely do it and it makes no difference. I still feel weirdly proud of my extremely half-assed effort in those last few months, since they were always going to end up firing us all anyway due to shit way out of any of our control.

Point is, the Yahoo job didn’t come around until I was at a point where I could appreciate it. And it didn’t become more of a full-time thing until I was ready to take that work load on. How many nights before that did I lay awake wrapped in worry about the future? How many times had I looked at the dark path ahead and gone out of my mind with stress because I couldn’t see the next turn in the road?

One of the hardest things for me is to know and believe that, one way or another, I will figure it out. Even though, whenever I get the chance to turn around and look back at the path to get here, I am forced to admit that so far I have always figured it out. Just sometimes later than I would have wished.

But maybe you can’t rush that. I still can’t get myself to believe that there’s any external force or higher power directing all these things. That’s where it drifts too far into self-absorbed hippie territory for me to follow. And really, in the big picture the stakes could almost not get lower than one sports writer finding work and personal fulfillment.

But I do try to remind myself that just because you’re not right where you thought you’d be, or where you told yourself you should be, that doesn’t mean you’re not where you need to be for now. You might have to go through some things to get to others. There might be no other way to get there. Or maybe your neighbor will drop an iron on your head and your worries will be over. Either way.

I guess all I know for sure is that this year I’ll get to sit on the couch with a woman I love and eat snacks far away from the laptop during the Super Bowl. Who knows what the next one will be like. But maybe it’s the not knowing that keeps it interesting.