Feeling Those Good Sports Feelings, With Ray Ratto

There's no sense in dancing around it: The sports vibes are pretty damn good at the moment. New Yorkers celebrated a long-awaited championship in the streets with a minimum of property damage and a surfeit of giddiness . The World Cup is already attempting to redeem its shameful and odious origins by delivering some of the most potent sports spectacle on Earth, and communities of all kinds are rallying around the spirited overage of it all. The positive vibrations that emanate from groups of good-natured people getting together to do fun stuff are overwhelming, so much so that Drew and I knew what we needed to do. We needed to get Ray Ratto on the podcast to straighten this shit out, and quickly. It is not a well-kept secret that Ray, for all his gruffness and singular knack for compound literary burns, is an incredibly kind and pleasant human being, and even he has not been immune to the happy surprises that this World Cup has already delivered in bulk. But we eased into things on the grumpy end of the pool, with a discussion of The Alexis Lalas Experience, which is already threatening to tip over Fox's World Cup studio show under the weight of its smirking villain's thudding trollishness. We would return to soccer later in the show, but beginning with some familiar annoyances helped to level-set nicely.