Unbuttoned

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.  

John Austin

I got off to a fast start in 8^th grade, interviewing a substitute teacher named John Austin who also played for the New Jersey Americans (the Americans eventually morphed into today’s Brooklyn Nets) for our school newspaper.

Austin, at six feet, was the first black basketball player to attend Boston College, where he averaged 27 points a game for three years, then played briefly with the Baltimore Bullets and the minor league Scranton Miners.

I don’t remember what I asked him or how the 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 in the 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 by any player.

It was as if I was wearing the green sweater, left unbuttoned, all over again.

I spoke 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.

The green sweater finally went into a closet for good.