Unlike the majority of the more than 1000 people who’ve posted their reviews on IMDB, I wasn’t a fan of Cameron Crowe’s 2009 film Almost Famous. If there are two descriptions that have me headed for the neatest exit, it’s romcom and dramedy. Almost Famous is both.
But Crowe’s 2025 memoir, The Uncool, is the richer
and more rewarding backstory of how a dorky 15-year-old kid somehow talked his
way into interviewing Greg Allman, David Bowie, Kris Kristofferson and getting
published in Rolling Stone.
It’s fair to state that those three performers were given
to mercurial ways and heavy drug use or drinking, all of which may have gone
into their acceptance of young Crowe, but to his credit he possessed the right
combination of balls, conviction and a charming naivete.
I understand because I wanted to be a sportswriter but
lacked the boldness to pull it off.
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| John Austin |
Austin, at six feet, was the first black basketball
player to attend Boston College, where he averaged 27 points a game for three
years, before playing briefly with the Baltimore Bullets and the minor league
Scranton Miners.
I don’t remember what I asked him or how the final story shaped
up; the life of a basketball gypsy in the late sixties would have made for a
fascinating subject, but how would a 13-year-old know that?
What I recall from that day is that I wore a green sweater,
double-breasted and trendy, but left unbuttoned. Middle school could be a
factory of cruelty, full of guys who could barely read but paid close attention
to everyone’s clothes. Pity the poor sucker who wore white socks with shoes or
whose pants cuffs were too high. To my mind, leaving the sweater unbuttoned minimized
the chances of drawing their attention, a personal cloak of invisibility.
But John Austin noticed and advised me to button the
sweater, because it looked “cooler.” His words. I did, but by later that day it was unbuttoned again.
More than a decade later, working for a regional
entertainment newspaper looking to expand its coverage to sports, I found talking
to high school football and basketball coaches a breeze, but entering the New
York Giants’ locker room or batting practice at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia
was like walking into a lion’s den. On my own, I froze up, afraid of being
rejected, ridiculed or called out as a fraud.
It was as if I was wearing the green sweater, left unbuttoned,
all over again.
I did speak with a few players but mostly built my stories around
observation and overheard dialogue. It worked pretty well but sometimes felt a
bit dishonest. I chalked my approach up to New Journalism and
assembled a decent portfolio of published work that helped move me to the next
level, corporate communications, a safe haven where I didn’t feel like an
outsider peering through a clubhouse window.
With that, the green sweater finally went into a closet for good.
