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Hey, everybody, just a quick note before this special bonus episode.
So I wanted to have Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy on the podcast for a few reasons.
First, weirdly, I feel like he and I have similar jobs sometimes.
Two, he's been a longtime supporter of Love Letters.
And three, we actually have a couple of sports themed episodes coming up early next month.
So it felt appropriate.
Shortly after this interview, Dan had emergency heart surgery.
He's now recovering at home.
I knew he'd be bored, so I sent him some sports-themed romance novels to read as he mends.
I know that many Globe readers are eager to have him back in their lives.
Listeners, I hope you enjoy my conversation with this big personality.
And Dan, if you're listening, get well soon.
Hi, Dan.
Hi, Meredith.
All right, we're going to start with the easiest thing.
Can you introduce yourself and your title?
My name is Dan Shaughnessy, and I'm a sports columnist for the Boston Globe.
And how long have you been doing that job?
I've been a sports columnist since 1989.
I came to the Globe full-time in 1981.
This gets more embarrassing.
My first Globe story was in 1973, so a long time.
How many professional sports games do you think you've seen in person?
Well, it's thousands, so I'd have to know i don't know three four, five thousand.
I'd have to get my calculator out.
Okay, before we get going.
I want to start by explaining why i wanted to have dan on the show today.
Love letters the advice column turns 15 this year.
That means that for 15 years i've been thinking about other people's dating, relationship and single life problems.
If my math is right, i've answered well over 3 000 letters.
Dan is also a longtime columnist, and a controversial one sometimes, who's written about sports issues absolutely more than 3000 times.
He's Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe.
Dan Shaughnessy, our pal, Hall of Famer.
The Boston Globe columnist who riled up the whole city before the game.
There's this Venn diagram, where our work is quite different, but in the middle we can be weirdly similar in what we have to do and how we have to think.
No two games are alike.
No two seasons are alike.
And in your case, with these situations, no two are alike.
Also, we have some sports related episodes this season, so dan seemed like an excellent guest and i should say that you know none of these questions in advance, which i love.
That's the truth.
This is candid yes, as candid as it can get.
Okay, from the very start of my doing this column 15 years ago, the most common type of employee to come up to me at my globe desk and talk to me about love letters or email me about love letters came from the sports department, sometimes in secret, sometimes just in public.
Our former sports editor was constantly asking me about certain letters, certain dating issues in the world.
Is this what modern dating is like?
Why do you think the sports department has been so interested in this content from the beginning?
Well Meredith, I just remember you.
You were like a little kid out of college sitting over near us in your little chair over there.
And I used to come in very early, do a radio show next door.
I'm like, who's that?
Why is she in here at this hour?
And then you turned into this rock star of love letters and multi-platforms.
So who knew?
But so for me, it was just walking by your desk and saying, what's she up to and all that.
And there's sort of a, I don't know, sports and entertainment.
I know you're not strictly entertainment with everything you do, but you do delve into that area.
And there's always been a lot of commonality.
We've had Tom Brady, which brings in Giselle, and now you have Travis Kelsey, which brings in Taylor Swift.
And there's always been kind of a cross-pollination of sports people with your world of love and entertainment.
I totally forgot the seating arrangement, which is that when I first got hired to move downtown at the Globe, they didn't have a desk for me.
So I think I sat next to our hockey writer at the time.
You know listen, I went to Syracuse and I didn't give a shit about sports.
And suddenly I'm in Boston, where I don't give a shit about sports, except for the fact that I care about things that make people emotional, which means you have to care about sports, because I'm watching friends cry about sports and find the greatest joy about sports.
So for me, it was always about, well, how is it like music and the arts?
How is it like the love lives we have in our world?
And overhearing you guys, and it was, I mean, I hate to say it was more often than not men.
And I think it's been a predominantly male, you know, just world, although that that does seem to be changing.
I learned a lot.
I learned a lot about, like the passion that people can have for a team, a fantasy team the loyalty people can have.
You know, I feel that way about about people.
They're just not athletes.
But anyway it was a cool, a cool experience as a young reporter to care about people, the arts and love and relationships and to figure out it was kind of pretty similar.
Absolutely.
I mean, you can't live in this region the last 20 years and not pick up on it a little bit, even if you don't care about sports.
I'm married to someone for 42 years who does not care about sports.
It's fine.
But my wife will say to me, what time are the Patriots playing on Sunday?
And I know the reason she's asking that is that's when she goes to Star Market, because there won't be anybody in the frigging store.
So these things...
These things matter.
Yeah, there is nothing better than the grocery store during the Super Bowl.
It's like I'm like fucking dancing down the aisles.
It's amazing.
Okay, so people always ask me, aren't a lot of these letters the same?
Breakups are breakups.
Everybody's sad in similar ways.
In fact, it's the universal feelings that make these letters so relatable.
So how do you have a new take on all of these experiences?
And what I tell them is like, every breakup, every first date is like slightly ever so different.
And I wonder if you feel the same way when you go into spring training or whatever sport every year and say, is this same shit different day?
It probably feels just slightly different every time.
And I wondered if you could speak to that about, like nothing's ever the same, even if it feels the same.
Well, one thing that sports offers is we don't know the outcome.
So, you know, if you go to see...
King Lear, or you don't, you know how, who's going to die in the end.
Hamlet, these things, the themes, the plots are there.
It's the performance that you're rating.
With us, it's the performance and the outcome.
And the outcome is not known.
It's predictable in many cases, but it's not known.
There's surprise, elements of surprise.
So as long as you do this, no two games are alike, no two seasons are alike, et cetera.
There were times when, like the Patriots got kind of predictably boring in a good way, you know, The games were similar.
They beat these tomato cans, I called them, and it got almost ho-hum.
Here we are back in the AFC Championship.
But quickly, now they suck, and you learn don't take those things for granted.
It's not always going to be like that.
So we have something that those who cover the arts don't necessarily have, which is the unexpected outcome not knowing.
You can see the performance and the drama, but you don't know how it's going to end.
And in your case, with these situations you deal with on a regular basis, no two are alike, as much as it sounds like at many times.
And you don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Yep.
You never know what the outcome is going to be.
And yeah, I guess that's just the excitement of it all.
And, you know, different, obviously, when you're dealing with someone's heartache.
But I can never predict even my own advice.
You know, I get letters back or responses back that are like, yeah, that advice wasn't good.
And I'm sure we're both proven wrong quite a bit.
Well, the people that are asking us a lot of times they want to bet on the games, and then you're really on a slippery slope.
I'm very careful to say, listen, you know more about this than I do, pal.
I'm not going to tell you who to bet on because that's not going to be on me.
I want to talk about the parallel between grief and loss and emotions in sports versus actual romantic relationships.
I don't know anything about the Patriots right now, except that they're not that good.
And that Bill Belichick, our coach is now gone.
And he wrote a letter to fans that was an ad in the globe, I think over the weekend.
Yeah.
All those who said Bill Belichick doesn't have a heart.
He does.
It reads to Patriot fans everywhere nowhere in America are pro sports fans as passionate as in new England.
And for 24 years, I was blessed to feel your passion and power.
And every time I read these stories, or try to understand them and try to care a little bit more, I think oh, this sounds like divorce.
This sounds like the emotions involved in separation.
This sounds like understanding when to let go.
And I wonder what you think we can learn from these emotional ties we have to specific people in our sports lives, what we can learn about relationships from them.
Well, this all came up a couple of weeks ago when they finally split.
I mean, Belichick and Kraft were together for 23 seasons.
That's a long time.
At a press conference, Belichick said he and Patriots owner Robert Kraft mutually agreed on the decision.
I knew it was getting frosty.
I don't think it was ever great, because I know both guys and I know what they think of things in general.
There was a natural tension there, but they worked around it and they worked magically for a long, long time.
But that press conference, it was all, like you say, the language, mutually agreed to part ways.
No, Bill Belichick was fired.
It's okay.
That came under the Gwyneth Paltrow slogan. which is conscious uncoupling, whatever.
I'm like, don't call this something it's not.
The man was fired.
And Bob Kraft just hates to use that kind of harsh language because he wants everybody to like him.
But no, he was fired.
They made it look nice.
But there's hard feelings there.
There's bitterness.
But anytime 23 years together, that's a long, a long professional sports marriage.
Indeed.
Have you ever heard of teams bringing in a therapist type, a counselor type, to help with relationships, whether it's owner, coach or player player?
There's, I would say no, there's more now with psychological visualization for players like think positive things.
I'm not aware of experts in couples therapy being used to keep people getting along.
I'm not aware of that.
Because I feel like, even though I'm not technically at all qualified to be a therapist, I could probably help.
I feel like I'd be good at that.
I feel like I could be sent in.
I can't save the Patriots, though.
After the break, Dan and I will get into some letters and Taylor Swift.
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I hesitate to talk about the thing because the thing is so overexposed, the Taylor Swift of it all.
But wow, like this seems very different in terms of interest than when Gisele Bundchen was, you know, coupling up with Tom Brady in the beginning.
Like it's Taylor Swift.
So it's like kind of like, it's just the biggest thing that can happen.
But I am having people pay attention to football in my life who like, cannot tell you one thing about football.
Have you ever seen anything like this?
Well again, I'm not.
I read a lot and when I was a child I was aware that the former great ballplayer, Joe DiMaggio had been married to Marilyn Monroe.
The romance that thrills the world.
The marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio attracts a record crowd to the San Francisco court where the ceremony is performed.
Congratulations in which all movie lovers and baseball fans join.
That's the only thing comparable in American sports entertainment to what we're seeing here.
He was no longer a player at the time that he was married to Marilyn Monroe.
So she was kind of more, not more famous necessarily, but doing her thing.
And there's the famous story.
When they were married, they were on tour.
And, at the request of the president, went overseas to entertain the troops and came back and said Joe, you've never heard such cheering.
And he said, yes, I have.
And as soon as this thing started with Taylor Swift, I wrote that story.
It's an old, famous, old story.
And, of course, in this case it would be.
You know, Taylor Swift is much more famous than Travis Kelsey.
And with the, with the DiMaggio Monroe thing, it was a little more equal fame at that particular time.
And of course, it was in the 1950s.
So you didn't have the reach of what we have today with global platforms and social media and access to everything the way people do.
So that's the only thing close to what you're talking about.
But there's nothing that equates with with this.
Are you a Taylor Swift fan?
I couldn't pick out one of her songs.
People say, oh, you'd recognize it.
Well, I believe if they say it, but I don't know any of her songs.
And I know I'm seeing all these headlines and they are her songs, but I don't know the song.
I'm glad she was Person of the Year.
I love when they cut to her on TV during the games.
Anyone who has a problem with this has a problem more than this.
I mean, they've got a problem.
So this is great, my view.
Uh...
Okay.
This question actually comes from Jesse, who is holding the microphone by your face so valiantly.
He was talking about how a younger generation of people has a different kind of perception of marriage, as like why, you know, it's just everything feels more temporary and more like let's just all do what we can at any given point.
And similarly, that they engage with sports in that way.
They might not be a forever fan of a team.
They might be interested in a player as opposed to a franchise.
And I'm wondering if you're noticing anything about newer sports fans and how they approach commitment.
Tell me about that.
OK, well, this is I have thoughts about this.
So one is, I mean, you grow up and you are a fan of certain teams.
Sometimes you choose those randomly.
Generally, it's who your parents are fans of. or where you are, what's around you.
You grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
You're an Ohio State fan.
Around New England, you're a Patriot fan, whatever.
Sometimes you choose the Dallas Cowboys randomly.
You like the uniforms, whatever.
Okay.
My opinion on this is that you stay with that for life.
That's what you do.
If you become a student, if you grew up here and you become a student in California, you don't become a Laker fan because you're going to USC out there.
You just don't.
You carry the Celtics with you.
You take them with you.
These are your genes.
You have blue eyes, you're born with them.
You have that the rest of your life.
So I think, in my view, it shows weakness when you switch allegiances because of where you went to school or where you end up living or who you're married to, whatever.
No, you should be loyal to your childhood loyalties.
Hold them for life, cling to that, be small-minded and just stay there.
Now, what you have happening in this generation and this is nobody's fault it goes back to fantasy sports, where you pick teams and you have a fantasy team, a guy from each team, a wide receiver, a quarterback, a running back, and then you end up rooting for individuals.
This is rooting for yourself, but you abandon the team concept of rooting for your team to win.
You just want your numbers to be high because I have this guy my running backs with the Cowboys and my wide receivers with the Vikings and my quarterbacks with the Packers.
I want all them to do well today.
Well, that puts you in conflict in general.
It's not being a sports fan.
It's a betting metric.
I'm not interested in that.
That's just that that's been kind of poisoned the well of sports fandom.
In my view, fantasy sports has not been good for that.
And of course the betting thing just just poisons everything, because then it becomes it's.
It's your livelihood and you want action and you want the tension that comes with that.
So you don't care if the Chiefs or Niners win.
You just care that they score X amount of points or that they win by this much, which is not being a fan.
It's just rooting for yourself, rooting for your pocketbook.
You're blowing my mind a little bit, because I never thought about the idea of being a sports fan.
Teaches you how to just love something, whereas a lot of people now are rooting for themselves.
Like that's such a different idea and sort of the opposite of what.
What being a fan of something really is.
What a bummer.
Sorry.
No, it's OK.
I mean, listen.
Like, maybe it'll all come back around.
Well, and as a professional sports writer, I root for myself every day.
I don't care who wins.
Whatever's good for Dan is the best thing for me, whatever the best story is.
And sometimes that will be the team losing.
If the Red Sox have lost 18 in a row and the record's 19, it's better for me if they lose that 19th game, because it's a better story that they keep this thing going.
Whatever the best story is, we root for.
For me, I root for the Red Sox because helps financially the city the.
I mean like i'm great for them and all that.
But like there are all these reasons, i also root for the orioles because i'm from maryland and like anything that can help baltimore thrive.
I'm like i'm all in right, but i can't tell you.
If you ask me who's on the orioles, i would say cal ripken was, and then end of sentence.
I don't know anything about that.
But um, makes sense.
Okay, totally shifting gears.
Have you seen people make surprise marriage proposals at sporting events?
Oh, yeah.
And that's a bad play.
Now you got to stop doing that because.
OK, I wanted to know what what do you think about it?
What's how do you feel about it?
It's presumptuous and it's risky.
I mean you're putting the in most cases it's a man proposing to a woman and you're putting the poor woman on the spot.
She's on the big board.
So you're presuming she's going to say yes.
What if she doesn't like you?
Now you get all this pressure.
She's going to say no in front of everybody.
I don't I don't like it.
It's been overdone.
It's overplay.
It was good the first couple of couple hundred times, but now it's hackneyed and risky and it's to be discouraged, I would say.
And I wouldn't appreciate it if I were on the receiving end of that.
Do that in private.
Do that in your own time.
We don't need to see that.
Totally agree.
Dan, before we move on to a quick part two of this, do you have any questions for me about Love Letters, the column, the podcast?
I just think everything you do is great, Meredith, so I would never question anything.
I love that.
There was like some fear in your voice there, and that makes me feel really proud of myself.
Okay, so I wanted to do something which is harder, and then we'll be done.
I swear where I'm going to ask you two questions that came into me in the column and I want to know how you would answer them.
Okay. that this is going to be the harder part.
Uh, and feel free to spot, you know, if you were like, wait, I don't want to say that.
Let me start over.
I just want to see because we actually years ago had members of the Bruins.
I mean, so many years ago answer questions and they were like weirdly good at giving love advice.
So I just feel like sports people are good at this.
Okay.
This is a recent letter from a guy who asked me, is it wrong to only want to date younger women?
I'm in my mid-30s and most of my male friends are in long-term relationships.
They all want me to be dating more, but I'm not interested in dating the women they suggest.
And basically this letter writer goes on to say, I've got nothing against older women.
It's just that they tend to want to move way more quickly into marriage and then children.
I've only ever really dated and hung out with younger women and we seem to click better.
Is it wrong for me to want to pass up on older women and peers and people his own age when friends and family try to set me up?
Or do I just need to grow up?
What would you have told this person?
I would say just keep your mind open.
I mean, you don't know when the person who is good for you is.
You know.
What difference does it make how old they are?
I mean, you just can't have that bar like oh, I'm not going to spend any time with you or talk to you because you're over the bar.
You're too old.
I would just be open to everybody.
And I think you're, don't limit yourself.
That's what I would say.
Okay.
All right.
Here's the second one.
I'm a woman in a happy 30 year marriage, but something has happened that is creating turmoil in my heart.
Out of the blue.
I received a card and photo from a man I was madly in love with prior to meeting my spouse.
I met and fell in love with that man over 40 years ago when we were in our twenties.
He cared about me too, but the relationship fell apart because his parents disapproved of me.
Eventually he married someone I presume his parents approved of, but that marriage is no more.
The card I received makes it clear.
I don't know if he's divorced or if his wife died, and I don't want to press him for details.
Receiving his card has destroyed my peace of mind.
I cried more than once.
It made me realize I still care about him.
We live on separate continents.
Am I crazy for fantasizing about seeing him?
Not having an affair, but just seeing him?
Or am I kidding myself?
Is friendship possible in such a situation?
Well, that's a lot there, Meredith.
I'd be fine seeing him, but you can't make that happen when you're in different continents.
And I would just get that out of your head.
I don't think it was very fair of him to reach out if you're still in a marriage situation.
It wasn't very nice of him.
Well, if he's no longer married, she is.
But so you're saying he shouldn't have reached out at all.
Yeah, if he's fetching to reconnect, it's a little disrespectful of her and her marriage that she's going to drop everything and come back to him from 40 years ago.
Well, here's the question.
Like 30 years later?
However many years later, is it okay to approach someone saying Hey, I thought about you and you know, maybe we can have some sort of friendship?
Like, is it like that many years later?
I'm like, no, not if she's married.
It's okay.
It's dopey.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
That's interesting.
I mean, I think we're living in a world, I see, where more exes are friends, but perhaps, if you haven't already established that friendship, it's weird to start now.
I don't know.
It's an interesting thought, but I like that you have definitive quick answers.
Yeah.
You're not messing around.
Well, this is great.
I'm so happy to talk to you because you're just the first person I think of when I think about columnists who've been thinking about the same kind of stuff for a very long time.
And I would argue that we're not stagnant in our interests.
We are dedicated and loyal to our interests.
Well, you've got to keep evolving and you've got to keep paying attention.
With what we do, If you think you haven't figured it out, that's trouble.
I just think you always have to be kind of on the edge that it could all go away and you want to keep getting better at it and keep pursuing it.
And don't think you can fall back on everything you've learned to know.
It's just, it's a new, it's a fresh sheet of ice every day.
All right.
Well, thank you so much, Dan.
This is a treat.
This is different, Meredith.
Enjoyed hanging out here with you for a little bit.
Appreciate it.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design and mastering.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
And remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send a letter about your love problem to lovelettersatboston.com.
Dan will be happy to read it.
We're online at loveletters.show.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
