My next guest is a great friend and one of the leading voices and storytellers of the NBA. Marc Spears is a now a senior writer for The Undefeated, a TV personality on ESPN's NBA coverage, but he's also been covering basketball at all levels for over 25 years. His current role has allowed him to be a journalist the players themselves seek out when they want to have a story told. In fact, Spears has become on of the premier scribes in the players' fight for social justice. The NBA has been outspoken in the fight for social change, and many of their stories have been told by Marc. Of course we talked a little bit of hoops on the court with the season now underway, and stay to hear which current and former NBA players, Marc would want to have dinner with. It was an awesome conversation that I hope you enjoy.
Marc: Early on in my journey, I got a job offer with the LA Daily News covering Angels and Dodgers baseball and Cal State Northridge football and basketball. That brought me back to the west coast to LA. When I was covering Angels games, I remember a guy working there as well. We're in the press box, and he was calling the pitches. He was like 'That's a changeup. That's a slider. That's a curveball.' and I'm like 'How you know these pitches from up here?' He says, 'I played college baseball.' And I was like, 'he's using his expertise from college baseball to cover baseball.' Now I thought about it and I was like, I'm enjoying covering Cal State Northridge basketball more than doing Major League Baseball. I played college basketball and I know the game. I need to use my basketball expertise. I need to get back into that. So I decided to leave to the LA daily news and I went back to covering college sports. I went to Louisville, Kentucky, where I was a general assignment sports reporter and I basically was a backup writer on University of Kentucky football and basketball and University of Louisville football and basketball. So at that time, this is in the late 90s...My thought was I'm just gonna want to be the best college basketball writer there is, you know? Then I got a call from a guy named Neil Scarborough. This is a 1999, Neil was the sports editor at the Denver Post and I had met him previously at the National Association of Black Journalists conventions. Shows that that its really about how much work you put in to "who you know". So Neil called me and he's like, 'How you liking the job out there? I said, 'I'm about to get promoted to the full time writer on University of Louisville. I'm liking it in Kentucky. It's better than I thought.' He just immediately asks, 'Do you want to cover the Denver Nuggets for the Denver Post?' I replied, 'When do I leave?' So, in 1999, I started covering NBA and the Nuggets for the Denver Post. Nick Van Exel and Antonio McDyess were their stars when I got there. Four years later, there was this young kid with braids named Carmelo Anthony that showed up. I covered the first four years of his career. After that I got a job at the Boston Globe, covering the Boston Celtics, when Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett showed up to play with Paul Pierce. I really wanted that job, man. I wanted it because I felt like that was gonna, you know, bring my career to the next level. People knew who I was in Denver and everything, but it was still like a mid market in terms of covering NBA. People weren't paying close attention. But as soon as I started covering the Celtics, even though I was doing the same thing I was doing in Denver, I have more eyes on me. People were paying attention. They won a championship. Got to cover an Olympics after that with the Dream Team. So those were two great years. In 2009, I got a job with Yahoo Sports, working alongside Adrian Wojnarowski, covering the NBA nationally for Yahoo. So that was a great promotion for me. It also brought me back to the Bay (Area). With Adrian being in New York, they needed somebody out west. So I moved to Oakland just so happened that the Warriors had a rookie by the name of Steph Curry that year. So that certainly helped my career as well, being close to him. Being able to cover games in Oakland and Sacramento primarily was great and i was in a good spot. In 2016 I was looking for a different challenge.
Marc: When the job with ESPN's The Undefeated came up and I realized it was right up my alley. I'd get to write a lot about race, sports and culture. Also do a lot of feature pieces on NBA athletes, predominantly African American athletes. Sign me up. And, you know, there was a lot of things going on in this world then. That is escalated now to a high level in terms of racism and social justice, police brutality, and so on. So to me, it's the most amazing job I've could've had, and I was able to get it. And now, with The Undefeated, we're five years in and it's been really gratifying. I feel like I'm doing work that makes people think and opens their eyes. I try to brings light to things that need light. Something that sticks with you more than just a box score, a milestone or a trade or something like that. It's a story that can be really, really meaningful. Be on the bottom of somebody's Wikipedia page as a reference on their life. This job is the best job of my life. I've really enjoyed it, it's been mentally stimulating, and hopefully I got a lot of more great work to go.
Stefano: That was gonna be my next question. If you listeners out there haven't read the publication, if you haven't visited The Undefeated, it's a website that just does absolutely great work surrounding sports, and as they say, at the intersection between race and sports.
Marc: You wrote for us a few times!
Stefano: I did yea. Some of the work I did for The Undefeated was some of the more meaningful stories I've done. To keep this going, do you feel this job was your calling? I mean, you've done work for the NABJ, that's the National Association of Black Journalists. You've been doing this work for The Undefeated, you've been a voice. Do you feel like this was really your calling, to be in this job and telling these kinds of stories?
Marc: Yeah, you know, it's not an easy job. I knew some reporters before that were brought up to them, and maybe they were a little uncomfortable writing about these things. I certainly dealt with a lot of racism and things throughout my life. Things that I've seen with my parents, and my family. When I was a kid, I used to go to town with my mom, and I had to kill time because I wasn't gonna sit there in her work meetings. So I used to go to the San Jose Afro American Museum. I'd go to film room and watch "Eyes on the Prize" when I was like 10 years old. If you've never seen it, it's an amazing documentary about the Civil Rights Movement. It shows everything that happened in the 60s. Like all the police brutality, all the dogs being sent out to attack blacks. The white fountain and black fountains. The different bathrooms. People getting beat up for eating in a restaurant. I'm a boy just sitting here watching this stuff, and it just hit me like, 'Wow, my people really been through a lot. So I've always, I guess you could say, been outspoken and wanted to write about these things. But in an intelligent way, not just yelling and screaming just for the sake of screaming. When I do speak, when I do write, I want people to know that it's factual. It's real. This is something that happened, this is something that, you know, we need to bring light to. Even in my first job, I worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That was the home of the Tulsa race riots in 1921. I didn't know anything about that man. Like, how is it such a hidden story that 100 years ago, hundreds of black people were basically, their whole neighborhood was destroyed. They were bombed on, in America! Killed because of a little silly argument. But it was mostly about jealousy about this, thriving black neighborhood they called "Black Wall Street." Learning more about black history and black struggle, black pain. And not just for blacks, for people of all colors. Races, religions, sexualities, everything. I feel like it's something that I need to talk about, speak out about, I'm passionate about, it just so happens that it intersects with sports a lot. So ever since I got the job, man, I was comfortable. Because I knew I would speak it the right way. And in a factual way, it's very important for me to, you know, have factual, deep stories that could also oftentimes be very educational, and perhaps change the way that somebody is thinking.
Stefano: I feel like, with The Undefeated, as it's continued to grow, the race conversation is being had more and more in the world of sports. Especially in the NBA. So you have relationships with a lot of the players. I mean, you were just mentioning, you know, when you got to Denver, Carmelo, arrived. And when you got to Boston, the big three got together. So in those relationships, have you found that those relationships have gotten even better? Just because they understand that you're on this mission to kind of help them get their voice out when they have something to say about race or about whatever it may be? Have you felt like that's even gotten better because of this work that you're doing rather than some of the work that you did in the past with other publications?
Marc: When I was in the NBA bubble during the pandemic, there was certainly social justice conversation from the players. It was probably at its highest in the league since the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain. I would go into practices, I would go to games and players would be like, 'Hey, Marc!' Those guys would want to talk to me, because they had read my stories, they knew what I was about. They knew the message that I was trying to get across, they knew what I wanted to talk about. So then there's a 20 minute interview with Carmelo Anthony, then there's a 20 minute interview with Jalen Brown. Fred Van Vleet is good with doing a diary. In a lot of ways I think they're they're just as comfortable telling me their stories knowing that I'll frame it in a way that is comfortable, and is a reflection of how they feel. I was often times getting great stuff because the players felt like I was a comfortable person for them to open up to. about who they are, the pain they have, and what they're fighting against. And you know, I took a lot of pride in that. It was humbling. I mentioned Jaylen Brown, who's certainly on the forefront a lot of that stuff. I sat down with him a month ago, for about 20 minutes. We talked about a lot of deep things. He made time to talk to me during a time when he was really on vacation in the Bay Area. Like, he felt it was important to make time for me to keep his voice going. I really appreciate that and felt great about that.
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