Rise and Scribe Podcast: Robert Silverman

Jan 21, 2015; Philadelphia, PA, USA; New York Knicks guard Jose Calderon (3) reacts to an official

Robert Silverman joins me today on the Rise and Scribe podcast to talk about some his favorite stories, his tortured existence as a Knicks fan, and just give general life advice. Robert writes all over place — the Guardian, The Cauldron, The Daily Beast, Knickerblogger and many, many other outlets.

We start off talking about Robert’s favorite piece. Unsurprisingly, he said it was his piece for the Daily Beast about Native American basketball in Wyoming. It’s a fascinating article, and well worth your time if you haven’t read it already. Here’s an excerpt:

Wyoming Indian High is located in Ethete, a tiny town of about 1,500 residents, in central Wyoming. The school itself is composed of approximately 200 students, mainly from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation. Given the hoops mania, though, the gym is the largest in the state, capable of holding 3,000-plus rabid fans. That’s right. A bunch of Native American kids from the rez are the basketball kings of Wyoming.

If you haven’t heard of this dominant team, you might know the area itself—the subject of consistently negative, reductive and often false representation(s) in the media, where life on the reservation is depicted as nothing but a sad, grim blight; and has served to reinforce all of the old prejudices about Native Americans.

When I spoke with Chico Her Many Horses, the father of one of the players, a teacher and coach of the track team, well, I wouldn’t say he was defensive, but there was an implied, unspoken question about why I was here and what I wanted to say about this team and this place. That’s when he uttered the above quote, telling me how this story shouldn’t begin.

He was right, though. The images of sad, broken houses set against the Chiefs’ winning ways, the contrast of such beautiful basketball with the daily struggles of Native Americans, is what brought me here.

Of course, save for the fact that the Chiefs were as great as I’d anticipated, I was wrong about pretty much everything else.

via http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/31/native-american-basketball-team-in-wyoming-have-hoop-dreams-of-their-own.html?src=longreads

After talking about the piece, including the responsibility Robert felt to tel the story right, we then move to talking about the Knicks, and how Robert has become less impassioned than years before. We also discuss what it is about sportswriting that makes it more than celebrity gossip dressed up in machismo. It’s interesting stuff.

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