Welcome back to another edition of Keeping it 100-Proof! I’m honored to have another one of my favorites joining us for a very special Q&A: Henry Abbott, founder of TrueHoop and former NBA editor at ESPN. He firmly believes in serving up hard truths about the NBA, and god knows the world needs a lot more truth these days!
Henry is deeply respected by NBA fans and media members alike, not only for his beautifully written investigative journalism and his insightful analysis of the league (leading the–also fantastic!–TrueHoop team), but also his consistent support and mentorship of so many colleagues and readers who’ve reached out to him for help over the years. He may be a bit less beloved by NBA ownership groups, the league office, and the growing country club of billionaire oligarchs, thanks to the large portions of truth casserole he regularly serves up to the public.
“And then there’s the reality that when journalists work directly for readers, I think the content gets better. Everyone high-fives the truth. In contrast, when journalists work for companies that rely on advertisers, who themselves are often deep-pocketed with complex webs of relationships, not everyone is happy when the rich and powerful are in the headlines.”
[Interview with Henry on 2.22.2019 from Ben Koo/Awful Announcing.com]
I’ve been a big fan of Henry’s work for years, following him all the way back to his original blog. To witness the expansion and evolution of TrueHoop into a blog network (boosting up the careers of so many great writers!), digital video series, and a podcast during Henry’s decade at ESPN was truly remarkable. And in recent years, the relaunch of the independent TrueHoop on Substack has been as impressive as ever. We like to compliment highly-skilled players by saying they have a “lot in their bag”. Well, Henry has that and then some in the media realm! And lucky for us, he has many years left of his prime. His new book, BALLISTIC, that will be in stores next year! So, without further ado, here’s our Q&A:
In reading and listening to older interviews you’ve done (including a great podcast you did with Nate Duncan when you relaunched TrueHoop in 2019), its amazing to think of the changes in NBA coverage (media/broadcasts/analysis, etc.) that you’ve navigated while successfully progressing in your own career. Looking back at those changes over time, how did you manage to stay ahead of the curve as you created new content? What new technology and innovations do you foresee having an impact on the game in the next few years when it comes to media coverage, social media interaction, and game broadcasts? Will a tool ever be created that allows us to get the “highest density” of the “best stuff from social media” (as you asked in your March 2014 interview with Justin Lewis from Nieman Lab) with the huge amount of content creation these days?
First: I super appreciate this opportunity and your thoughtful questions.
That said, I reject the premise that I’m ahead of the curve! Case in point: right now we are in the business of email, a medium born in 1971 and that, in 2024, young people basically don’t use.
Which puts TrueHoop where we’ve always been: scrambling. It was a blog, a blog network, a wiki (people forget about that one), TrueHoop TV, a number of different podcasts, a Twitter handle, an elite team of award-winning magazine feature writers, and many other things. One of the most popular things I’ve ever touched was animation which killed it across ESPN platforms.
For me, kind of as a quirk of timing was that I got into NBA media full time around 2000, when 90+ percent of the people on press row were doing jobs as they had existed for decades, or even a century. Beat writers filed gamers with a prescribed format by a prescribed time in a prescribed voice and then had a prescribed beer. Columnists, TV folks, the radio people … everyone had routines. I wrote for magazines and did that gig.
But as soon as you made the whole thing digital, no one’s routines were secure anymore, because suddenly we had data about what was and wasn’t popular. Everyone who worked at the paper could see that the game story wasn’t that popular, while Manu Ginobili barehanding a live bat was a hit. It put a little pressure on press row: go to the arena and catch whatever magic might be there. Bring a microphone, bring a camera, good luck!
Much of the industry responded, essentially, fuck that. I’ll do what I do the way I have always done it. It’ll put you straight out of business.
But TrueHoop arrived with no traditions at all, digital since birth in 2005. We just always accepted we had to keep trying stuff.
To your question about the highest density of the best stuff from social media … at that time I was pushing, internally, something called The Ten, which had humans and machines working together to do just that. It kinda met some internal headwinds and just didn’t get to thrive.
I think curation is not well done by algorithms alone. As I’m emailing you I’m on a train, and I can see, in the reflection of the train window, the woman in front of me is scrolling through Instagram. She stops and examines … maybe one in five things but probably more like one in 15? The way the algorithms have presented this to her feels a) miraculous in hacking all of our brains and b) ripe for huge improvement. I mean, it’s the greatest time wasting device in history, in no small part because it takes so long to find anything satisfying.
And ESPN doesn’t pivot on a dime exactly, but in my decade there we tried so much stuff! I can’t even remember all the different logins and products that were integrated through the years. WordPress, Storyful … I liveblogged an entire Finals with Dr. Jack Ramsay using … something or other that I’ve long since forgotten.
Most of those softwares didn’t catch on. In Silicon Valley they like to think that the popular ones have better code, interface, or feature lists, but that’s like thinking people buy cars based on engineering. My view is that the code and the engineering must be good enough, like the food in a restaurant, but mostly people go where the crowds are.
I could write an essay about how evil Elon Musk is. (In fact, I have.) But that doesn’t mean I moved to Blue Sky when he bought Twitter. For all I know, it’s ethically and socially superior, and maybe even technologically so. But nobody goes there. We put a lot of time into Mark Cuban’s audio platform Fireside, but ultimately it just wasn’t a place that we found an audience.
And so to me, it’s about going where your audience is. For a while the hot NBA conversation was in the comments of TrueHoop. Then it was Twitter, now I’m curious to see if it can happen in the Substack app. The only certainty is change.
I’ve been continuously blown away by the your fearlessness in investigative reporting over the years (see William Wesley, Mikhail Prokhorov, Apollo Global, Jeffrey Epstein, etc.) and also in taking on new challenges throughout your career like going from a TrueHoop blogger to being acquired by ESPN and managing the 100-blogger TrueHoop network plus 60 writers as ESPN’s NBA Editor or working on projects that forced you to learn new and complex topics (like in your new book!). Have you always had that hunger to investigate and learn, or did it develop gradually as more opportunities have presented themselves to you throughout your career? Will there ever need to be (gulp) an investigative report on PED’s in the NBA?
I thought that was the job! Speak truth to power! To me the weird part is how many sports journalists don’t do that.
There is no question that Apollo Global’s founder Leon Black was Jeffrey Epstein’s key source of cash for a long time. There is no question that Adam Silver’s college roommate is a top executive there. There is no question that 76ers billionaire Josh Harris was Leon Black’s co-founder, as Apollo became one of the most successful private equity firms on the planet. So we have a deep web of crime resulting in an endless string of trials, convictions, resignations, accusations. We have the most evil man of the modern era dying suspiciously in prison. There was an internal investigation that everyone in the business media assumes was a waste of time.
And Josh Harris is mentioned in sports media all the time–but never with the note that his money comes from the most troubling web on the planet.
Lord knows how many Netflix specials and podcasts there are about Epstein.
But all of the 76ers beat writers, Washington Commanders beat writers, all of those super well-connected insiders who break national NBA news … to them there’s nothing to see here?
Living in such a polarized world with wars, school shootings, political unrest, frequent natural disasters, and all kinds of other serious issues, I am often struck by how much it all contrasts with the enjoyment, connectivity and community I feel on a weekly basis interacting with hoops fans across social media platforms and even at games. Despite occasional exceptions, the NBA (and basketball in general) is truly an oasis of joy and good energy in celebration of such a beautiful game whose talent level and global coverage are at an all-time high. As an investigative reporter that works on serious in-depth stories and also covers the league throughout the season, how do you utilize this flow of good energy to fuel your work while avoiding absorption of the negative energy from the greed and corruption of power-hungry corporations and individuals whose dealings you are exposed to?
Sports are, to me, a source of joy and love. It’s a huge thing in my life, every day. If I’m walking the dog, and there are seven-year-olds playing soccer in the park, I’ll stop a little while to see and hope the ball pings over to the outside and then comes back to the middle and miraculously into the goal. So much yelling and hugging and not being alone, not being in a basement, not scrolling on your phone. I am in favor of being outside, sweating, running around, jumping in water, catching the sun. I’m not really me if I haven’t exercised that day. That’s my drug. (Caffeine is also my drug.)
A while back I ran a half marathon in Brooklyn with a friend. It was this really fun race with live music, big crowds, people on stilts, fire breathers, like the whole shebang. I grew up seeing myself as quiet, an English kid growing up in Oregon … both places had me feeling kind of meek. But thanks to the magical fun of sports, by whatever age I was loud even for Brooklyn! I was yelling, cajoling, laughing, singing, cursing. Fuck yeah, you know!
That love is all over the book I just finished, which is in some ways about where NBA players go in the offseason. The real work of being an elite athlete is full of love, and this book is full of so much running up streams barefoot and jumping off cliffs.
But the league itself puts all that love of the game and wraps it in some very creepy stuff. For years, Clippers fans and their media batted away complaints about Donald Sterling. Dr. Jerry Buss kept a binder full of photographs of his teenaged girlfriends. Mikhail Prokhorov brought large numbers of young women to Nets games with him sometimes. He was once booked, in France, for sex trafficking, and then exonerated. If I know all that’s happening, it makes it hard to get too delirious about an alley-oop.
This is why I wish we had better, more honest media that put pressure on the billionaires and cheaters and money launderers to clean up their acts. There’d be a bigger price for being a terrible person, and we’d have a better, more enjoyable league.
This is especially true of PEDs. I don’t particularly enjoy the topic. It’s not popular with readers, either. Not a moneymaker. Right now, though, we have a code of silence, like cycling’s omerta, which is the worst case scenario for the young clean athlete. The schedule seems to be designed to favor people who use PEDs–it’s a rolling recovery crisis. And when no one talks about it, the dopers are the people who simply go harder for longer, and we tend to celebrate those guys.
I don’t assume there’s an epidemic of doping, but I know I’ve heard from many people who know about some doping. And I know that the game is played at vastly higher speeds, with more incredibly athletic jumpers. Which sets up a real crisis for any clean player. Just keeping up means running faster and jumping higher than any normal player did thirty years ago. And there are all these people who say let ‘em dope, and maybe the NBA will one day allow a little HGH or testosterone or whatever. But for now it’s clearly banned, tested for, and definitely cheating. Cheaters take minutes, jobs, touches, and money from rule-followers. That’s just the truth. If the NBA has these rules, they should enforce them.
In track and field you see loudly clean people, creating an identity and support for those who don’t dope. Can you imagine how proud you would be to play at the highest level against dopers, when you’re clean? It’s incredible to me that basketball players never brag about that. I know there are clean NBA players, but I wonder why their read of the landscape is that it’d be career suicide to brag about it. Who would come for them?
I don’t know if we’ll have a big investigation in the NBA. I’d only undertake it with a lot of support. I can think of precisely zero current full time NBA journalists who have the combination of contacts and ferocity to do it. So I don’t think the NBA’s dopers should be too worried. The tests are easy to beat, the media compliant.
All of which undercuts the joy of sports.
As someone who is very aware of the importance of weaving storytelling into your projects in order to capture the feelings of the reader/viewer, how do you feel LeBron is doing in the current phase of his carefully choreographed media narrative strategy, post-The Decision? Since the Lakers won it all in the bubble it seems as though he’s entered into a new pre-retirement phase where he makes a concerted effort to be consistently positive, supportive to all, and grateful for everyone and everything. It sure appears to be an attempt at molding (or in some cases re-molding) the average fan’s perception of him as not only the top NBA player of all-time, but also one of the world’s most beloved humans. Am I (a) imagining all this or (b) is this true PR brilliance by his Klutch PR team or (c) subtle fan manipulation to ensure he is beloved globally for decades to come as he enters his powerful, billionaire entrepreneurial phase or (d) some combination of these options?
To me the big event of LeBron’s public narrative was the 2010 Decision. Slipping off to Miami turned the best player in the game into one of the most hated athletes on the planet. The feeling was a little like someone who cheated on their spouse. He was the Ohio guy, and he slipped out the back door to Florida.
But in the data, the angry people were white, and mostly in the cities he didn’t pick–Cleveland, New York, Chicago, L.A.
LeBron did a lot to heal white fans’ view of him by returning to Ohio, his first love, and winning a title there.
More recently, in public, he’s all Taco Tuesday. He’s a dad, he started a school, he donates bicycles. His agent Rich Paul is dating Adele–talk about a bridge to white culture! Once upon a time LeBron and his friends managed a brand that seemed shaky, and went years without a single big endorsement. But now they’re a vehicle for giant dollars looking to land in Hollywood or Silicon Valley with a sterling reputation. They’re American royalty.
I’m delighted to see Black skin and basketball culture on those red carpets. LeBron has worked infinitely hard and deserves that as much or more than Tom Hanks, Prince Harry, or whatever. But what makes me a little queasy is putting anyone on such a pedestal. I’m more interested in the real LeBron more than the plastic, gleaming, mythological one.
When you played basketball what position did you play and who would be your NBA comp style-wise? Did your game affect how you live your life and/or cover the league?
Oh please, I played in eighth grade and then on the playground. Played on my wedding day and in so many church basements and rec leagues. But this is an NBA conversation. In that context, I did not play.
Of course it changed everything about my life, though. Too numerous to list.
A silly thing: When we moved to a new town we needed a dentist. My wife found a candidate, but then I found out it was the same guy I played with who never stopped complaining about his own teammates. That is not my dentist; basketball had exposed too much of his character to me.
Also, I can’t let you go without saying CONGRATS on the new book! I’m really looking forward to it! Can you tell everyone a little bit about it and when it will be available?
It’ll be about a year until it’s out, but I am super excited. It’s called BALLISTIC, and it’s about a sea change that’s coming to how we treat all of our knees, hips, ankles, backs. The pain they’re in is the result of movement–which can be changed. The best way to treat a torn ACL is how we treat heart attacks: by sniffing out the warning signs with impeccable evidence a decade ahead of the crisis, and preventing it. Many NBA players are already getting this kind of care, and it’s coming to us all.
Keep a pulse on Henry’s upcoming projects and the TrueHoop team’s NBA coverage at:
Twitter: @truehoop
Instagram: @true.hoop
TrueHoop TV on Youtube
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