The Recent Work of Oliver Bateman #23: January/February/March
An overview of what I've been working on
I realize that it’s been a couple weeks since the last update, but I’ve been extremely busy and trying to keep the Substack focused on new (or at least original1) content. Nevertheless, I’ve done loads of stuff since then — more than a few people (though not many) have noted it is hard to follow my output, since it’s spread all over and I’ve never been a destination2 writer. Hence the following recap, which may or may not be comprehensive.3
For The Ringer — by far my most “mainstream” regular outlet at this point — I wrote a pair of long articles with my good friend Ian Douglass. The first was an obituary for the legendary old-school worker Ole Anderson4:
Alan Rogowski, better known to pro wrestling fans as Ole Anderson, died earlier this week at age 81. The first of wrestling’s original Four Horsemen stable to pass away, Ole was something of a throwback even in that group. While kayfabe cousin Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, and kayfabe nephew Arn Anderson styled and profiled in tailored suits, Ole cut interviews in screen-printed t-shirts tucked into plain red wrestling trunks. Alongside kayfabe brother Gene Anderson, Ole’s Minnesota Wrecking Crew tag team had run roughshod over the NWA in the 1970s and early 1980s; alongside promoter Jim Barnett, Anderson turned Georgia Championship Wrestling into a worthy opponent to Vince McMahon’s expanding WWF. But a combination of bad luck, bad timing, and bad relationships with his co-workers ensured that Ole, a divisive figure in the sport’s history, would remain a relic of its past, rather than a shaper of its future.
Rogowski’s childhood and young adult life mirrors the backstory of dozens of wrestlers from the 1950s and 1960s. As related in his 2003 autobiography, Inside Out: How Corporate America Destroyed Professional Wrestling, which he co-authored with Scott Teal, Ole grew up the grandson of Polish immigrants and spent his adolescence in St. Paul, Minnesota, working at his dad’s bar and playing various sports.5
Also, owing to Ian’s professional relationship with Mike Rotunda, we were given the “exclusive” on the WWE’s decision to induct Rotunda6 and brother-in-law Barry Windham into their hall of fame:
The U.S. Express’s journey through the world of professional wrestling is a story of athletic talent, brotherhood, and an indomitable spirit that helped to define one of the most colorful eras in WWE history. Rotunda and Windham’s ascent to the pinnacle of tag team wrestling was marked by memorable rivalries, iconic moments, and a family bond that transcended the boundaries of the ring.
Before their pairing, both men were well positioned for grappling glory. Rotunda was a dominant high school athlete in New York who played football and then wrestled at Syracuse University, winning the heavyweight championship in the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association in 1981. Windham, the tall, athletic son of 6-foot-7, 330-pound WWE Hall of Famer Blackjack Mulligan, had been training with his father since high school and possessed all the tools needed to seize the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship.
Over at the Washington Examiner, I wrote an interesting piece — which got picked up in a few other places, including the relatively insular wrestling press7 itself —about streaming and the fragmentation of sports coverage:
This shift, from a locally adored sport with staggering local ratings in the 1970s and a far larger workforce of locally-based wrestlers to an internationally valuable asset in the streaming wars, reflects a significant change in how we consume media. The local markets that once embraced wrestling as a communal event now encounter it as part of an expansive, often bewildering digital landscape in which they represent tiny nodes on a vast subscriber map. The WWE’s huge rights deal with Netflix is one of several it has recently made. Smackdown, currently airing on Fox, will move in October 2024 to the USA Network, owned by NBCUniversal, which also owns the rights to stream, via its Peacock service, all of the wrestling juggernaut’s historical content and premium live events, such as Wrestlemania and the recent Royal Rumble, formerly “pay-per-view” events back when you bought them separately. NXT, the third WWE wrestling show highlighting younger and emerging talent, is currently airing on USA but will move to the CW in October. And if that isn’t confusing enough, Raw, which airs on USA, will move to Netflix in 2025.
Granted, the WWE’s shows have jumped from network to network throughout their existence, including stints on Spike TV, SyFy, the UPN, NBC, the MSG Network, and more. But 2024, at least in theory, was supposed to be a time of media consolidation. However, the only thing that has been consolidated is the WWE itself, merged into the same umbrella entity, TKO Group Holdings, that also operates the UFC. Unsurprisingly, UFC’s content is hopelessly split, too. Much of it is on its own Fight Pass, but all of its new content, including pay-per-views that can be bought in-app, is on ESPN+. It’s 2024, my mother frequently bemoans, and you can’t even get all the Shrek films and their spinoffs on one streaming service.
And it’s only going to get worse. A company like TKO Group Holdings or a professional sports league like the NBA only needs to deliver value to the people who own it. They would stream their events exclusively in Palau if it paid a few billion more than doing so domestically would (the app-addicted sports gamblers who subsidize this vast live sports enterprise would find ways to watch, don’t worry). The NBA has already stated that it’s looking to double the $24 billion windfall it got from Disney (parent company of ESPN) and Warner Brothers Discovery (TNT Sports) during their last negotiation cycle. This could mean hacking up their countless hours of hooping and balling into ever-tinier increments. Maybe ESPN+ gets some games. Maybe Amazon Prime gets the All-Star Game. Maybe Hulu gets the Slam Dunk Contest. Maybe Paramount gets the Three-Point Contest. Maybe Peacock gets a few summer league showcases. And on down the line until you need to fork over three figures a month just to watch less than your already overpriced cable bill entitled you to a decade ago.
This shift in media consumption patterns has been forced upon us by media conglomerates and the sports grandees with whom they transact business, not by any rational decisions of ours. Given my druthers, I’d prefer to watch all my favorite sports on ad-free YouTube Premium, the way I view sumo wrestling and perhaps the best bargain of any of the streamings I maintain for work. More to the point, the ongoing shift has profound and largely negative implications for how we experience cultural content, including sports like pro wrestling that could once serve as a great unifier in a community like Charlotte or Portland.
The communal aspect, a defining feature of wrestling’s earlier days, is diluted almost to nothing in an age of excessive streaming complexity, where viewing is not so much individualized as completely atomized. Whether we opt out and cease watching or put on our thinking caps and track down as much of this content as we can, the result is the same — we are all alone together, each of us pondering what’s left of the common things we held so dear.
I wrote a lot for UnHerd, mostly shorter articles, but I always try to find ways to adapt these to my broader points. For example, I looked at the class-based ramifications of all-out drug doping in sports:
For much of recorded history, including much of the modern Olympics, most fields of athletic endeavour were dominated by members of the leisure classes. Aristocrats were the ones who had time to learn skills related to horse racing, sword fighting, and other tests of martial ability; they also had the resources needed to maintain this equipment, which separated them from the lower strata of society.
The working class began to participate in sports when aristocratic patrons, desirous of better results on the field of play, discovered that poorer individuals with tremendous natural talent could be enticed via monetary inducements to help give their local and national teams an edge. The century or so since has thus been characterised by the mass participation of lower-class and emerging-world athletes in a host of sports.
Once scientists observing the Enhanced Games have devised the appropriate “secret sauces” for athletic success, all of that could fall by the wayside. A slum child from the favelas of São Paulo, once on an equal footing on the pitch if not the classroom, may find himself unwelcome anywhere.
Meanwhile, the consolidation of material wealth and physical prowess — always strongly correlated — would at last be complete. In that respect, class distinctions could be written into the entire bodies of the rich, programmed to dominate in all aspects of life. A wealthy biohacker like Bryan Johnson could conceivably dial up the appropriate drug and gene-editing regimen to dominate in a given sport. Viewed in that light, for a venture capitalist interested in the further success of those who have risen through merit to the top of the heap, the Enhanced Games seem like a safe bet.
I also critiqued Oprah’s hasty exit from WeightWatchers in light of her Ozempic admission, and received a nice e-mail from WW’s publicist for my efforts:
Oprah Winfrey’s hasty departure from the WeightWatchers board of directors — now rebranded as WWInternational — has thrown a spotlight on the broader issue of how weight loss is marketed and the substances celebrities endorse or use to maintain their physique. Winfrey’s admission of using weight-loss drugs like Ozempic as a maintenance tool, after decades of enriching herself by promoting fitness through hard work and lifestyle changes, is rather hypocritical.
In the realm of fitness and health endorsements, this comes as no surprise — celebrities and influencers use what works best, which isn’t necessarily what they’re selling. Albeit on a far grander scale, it echoes the controversy surrounding Brian “Liver King” Johnson, an influencer who rose to fame through his promotion of an “ancestral fitness” lifestyle, which was later revealed to be bolstered by a substantial steroid regimen.
Johnson was just one of many influencers who, behind the scenes, rely on performance-enhancing drugs while publicly espousing natural methods and hard work as the keys to physical success. The Liver King’s case was particularly egregious, given the stark contrast between the rugged, primitive lifestyle he marketed and the modern, pharmaceutical means he employed to achieve his physique.
Oprah’s case, though different in and scope and context, parallels the Liver King’s in a crucial aspect: the gap between the public persona and the private realities of health management. For years, Oprah has been synonymous with WeightWatchers, sharing her weight loss journey and struggles, becoming a beacon of hope for many seeking to lose weight through diet and exercise.
If even Oprah, with all her billions of dollars and extremely marketable public narratives of struggle and success, resorts to medical intervention for weight management, what message does that send to her followers?
Both Oprah’s and the Liver King’s stories serve as cautionary tales about the complexities of public endorsements and the realities of health management. They highlight a pervasive issue in the wellness industry: the reliance on quick fixes, whether through undisclosed drug use or misleading narratives that oversimplify the journey to health and fitness. Oprah settled on a quick fix after years of extolling the merits of the struggle, which involved considerable weight gain and loss throughout her highly public life: “I use [weight-loss drugs] as I need it,” she recently told People.
Her decision to step down from WeightWatchers and her choice to donate her shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, while commendable, do not fully address the underlying issue of trust and responsibility. As someone who has been an influential figure in the wellness industry, her actions have far-reaching implications for her followers and the broader public perception of weight loss methods. The pivot she made was so abrupt and so definitive, it calls into question all the work she spent a lifetime doing (and selling). If any of that work was worth it — as some, like UnHerd’s Kat Rosenfield and myself, still believe — why abandon the struggle so quickly?
I provided a measured analysis of the State of the Union address:
For the most part, though, this was a garden-variety campaign speech, albeit one delivered directly from the bully pulpit. Between staccato boasts about his achievements (America has, in his speechwriter’s words, gone “from setback to comeback”), Biden would segue into instances of pure campaigning. He branded the January 6 riots a “dagger at the throat of American democracy”, and seized numerous opportunities to criticise the misdeeds and mistakes of his “predecessor”, which included failing to ensure that the government “bought American” on infrastructure products.
Surely eager to remove the stain of special counsel Robert Hur’s characterisation of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”, Biden spoke with extraordinary fervour. Although he sometimes fell into moments of stuttering and stammering, mispronouncing words or placing emphasis on the wrong syllables, his ad-libs — particularly about his advanced age — were engaging and mostly effective, recalling his brighter moments on the campaign trail in 1988 or his Senate interrogation of controversial Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.
All the same, the overall effect of the speech wouldn’t be lost on longtime watchers of The Simpsons — it was akin to that newspaper photo of Grandpa Simpson, angrily shaking his fist beneath a headline that reads “Old Man Yells at Cloud.”
While Biden has now proved he can not only last an hour on the microphone with the assistance of a kindly teleprompter but emote from the diaphragm while doing so, it remains to be seen what impact, if any, this speech will have on an electorate which has significant concerns about both candidates.
I made my first appearance in Cracked,8 of all places, with a long, detailed listicle about motivational speeches in sports movies:
This melding of fact and fiction prompts a curious reflection: How much of our collective memory, our cultural touchstones, are influenced by the stories we see on screen? Gipp’s and Gehrig’s speeches, through their cinematic rebirths out of Reagan’s and Cooper’s mouths, have become a dual artifact of both history and Hollywood, embodying the power of film to preserve and propagate the human experience. It’s a vivid example of how certain moments, whether born on the field or on the set, transcend their origins to become part of our motivational supplement stack.
And therein lies the peculiar magic of these moments, whether real or scripted. Long after the projector stops and the stadium lights dim, their words linger, echoing through our daily lives. These speeches and scenes, from Gehrig’s heartfelt goodbye to Randy the Ram’s or Rocky’s defiant stances, become part of our mental soundtrack — even as the latter two fictional athletes easily become conflated with real ones we’ve watched. Their speeches offer us vicarious resilience, a second-hand courage that’s no less stirring for its source. In moments of doubt or struggle, we draw upon this reserve of celluloid inspiration, finding solace and strength in the familiar cadences of on-screen coaches, underdogs and heroes.
It’s a testament to actors’ storytelling craft, both in documenting reality and in conjuring fiction, that such moments can become so deeply ingrained in our psyche. They might be derided as cliché or hackneyed, but their persistence in our minds speaks to a universal truth about the human condition: Our need for motivation, for larger-than-life examples of perseverance and fortitude. In this way, the lines between the speeches we’ve lived and those we’ve watched blur into irrelevance. What matters is the impact, the way these words, once heard, seem to play on a loop in our heads, fueling us forward.
These speeches, in their unique ways, serve as our collective doping regimen — legal, ethical and highly effective at getting our butts off the couch. They are the performance enhancers of the soul, proof that even in the absence of physical exertion, we can still get a heart-pumping, endorphin-boosting workout for our resolve.
I had many great pieces in Splice Today, too many to recount, but I enjoyed writing this article about the banality of leadership:
This isn’t a tale of triumph, a narrative where machines ascend to the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. This is a story drenched in the jet-black ink of cynicism, where these cushy roles long lauded for their strategic value—CEO, pope, university president, senator, VP of talent, “imagineering” lead, public intellectual, congressman, keynote speaker—are unmasked as hollow vestibules of power, requiring nothing but a stream of thinkable thoughts, clichés, and rare flickers of shopworn insight borrowed from decades-old TED talks.
In the future I’m envisioning, generative AI doesn’t just fulfill these roles; it epitomizes the sheer redundancy and superficiality that these positions have come to represent. I don’t want to extol the virtues of artificial intelligence, but rather to cast a spotlight on the minimal substance these so-called strategic roles demand. These aren’t positions of action, innovation, or meaningful leadership; they’re the shadows where the organization hides its most ineffectual networkers and headshot beauties, akin to Principal Skinner’s desperate attempt to conceal Bart and the other troublesome students from Superintendent (“Super Nintendo,” to young, moronic Ralph Wiggum) Chalmers. In this allegory, the bad boys of Springfield Elementary are the metaphoric stand-ins for workers tucked away in high-profile sinecures where their capacity for damage is mitigated by their lack of real influence or power.
What does it say about our societal pillars, our bastions of leadership and vision, when the essence of their contribution can be distilled and replicated—improved upon!—by lines of code and algorithms? This isn’t some moonshot proposition for the far-off future; it’s a current indictment of the empty spectacle that leadership has become (and likely always has been). Generative AI, with its capacity to churn out endless streams of palatable banalities, is perfectly suited to step into these roles. Not because it aspires to or because it represents an evolution of capability, but because it reflects the shallow depths at which these positions currently operate.
The banality of leadership, the strategic void cloaked under the guise of “vision” and “innovation,” has become painfully evident in this era of technological mimicry. The roles once heralded by journalists and publicists (they’re essentially the same thing, and again, always have been) as the epitome of strategic insight and creative foresight—ranging from the boardrooms of multinational corporations to the halls of academia and beyond—are laid bare by the relentless march of generative AI. This silent usurper, armed with nothing more than algorithms and all the words that are fit to type, has long surpassed the creative output demanded of holders of these esteemed positions. It’s a grim testament to the superficiality that has seeped into the bedrock of our leadership and strategic planning.
I also explored my father’s thoughts on dying and death:
My father’s life, with its tumultuous ebbs and flows, left a repository of wisdom amidst the flotsam and jetsam. Few wrote better on the subjects of aging and the inexorable march toward life’s finale than a man who’d been telling my brother and me that our lives were “half over” since our late-20s.
When I immerse myself in the ocean of memories and the extensive trove of emails he bequeathed, a theme crystallizes—the stark dichotomy of aging. He painted a picture of two prevailing routes one might traverse in their receding years: one path shrouded in despair over dreams unfulfilled, and another fraught with a desperate clamor for busyness, perhaps to obscure satisfaction, or more likely, to elude the gaping maw of emptiness that no accumulation of achievements can satiate. This hard-won wisdom, distilled through his unique blend of direct counsel and the vivid tableau of his own misspent life, illuminated the intricate dance of fulfillment, regret, and the quest for meaning with an uncommon clarity.
Oliver Thomas “Tom” Bateman, my father, was an enigma—a person of contradictions, right down to a preferred first name that changed a half-dozen times during the six decades he spent a step or two ahead of John Law. To the untrained eye, his life might resemble a feverish pursuit of what he liked to call the “god almighty dollar,” marked by athletic prowess gone to wrack and ruin as well as an eclectic assortment of entrepreneurial ventures, their ethicality as dubious as their outcomes. Yet, beneath this relentless quest for worldly acclaim and wealth, lay a soul thirsting for literary expression, a spirit that revered the arts as the ultimate human endeavor but found itself ensnared in the web of a markedly different reality. His reflections on aging, relayed through messages brimming with philosophical musings, humor tinged with cynicism, and at times, visceral expressions of regret, unveil a profound grappling with the notion of life’s final chapter—the inescapable “big sleep” that haunted his waking dreams.
This juxtaposition—the external facade of success versus the internal longing for creative fulfillment—mirrors the dichotomy of aging he elucidated. He portrayed the latter years as laden with potential despair for those who mourn the divergence of their lives from their youthful ambitions. My father’s narrative, embroidered with the richness of diverse experiences yet also marred by incessant, often self-inflicted personal defeats, embodies this perspective. His introspections explored the concept of squandered potential, not in the arenas of commerce or financial success, but in the realms of artistic pursuit and genuine self-expression.
“Every god-damned choice seemed right at the moment, but here I am, looking back at a maze of paths not taken, wonders not pursued, and I know in my heart of hearts that I would do all it over again in one half of a split fucking second,” he wrote in a particularly reflective email. This confession embodies the essence of his inner turmoil—a constant battle between the allure of societal accolades and the pursuit of what he perhaps saw as his true calling.
Before I wrap this up — Substack tells me we’re “near email length limit” — I want to highlight my three favorite pieces of recent Substack writing, “The Work of Gen-X Comedy,” “The Work of a True Poster,” and “The Work of My Father.” I put a fair amount of my limited, all-too-limited time into these, so I urge you to check them out.
Palate Cleanser
i.e., work done solely for this publication or the late, unlamented (unlamented by me, as I regard it as a waste of time aside from all the money I made…but isn’t that life? it is) podcast that preceded it (with the caveat that I only reuse material from the previous podcast that I worked on by myself, which is to say, at least from early 2021 to its swan song in October 2022, most of it).
i.e., I don’t write “viral” content, I don’t engage in online fisticuffs, &c. (which isn’t to say I’m not hated by a number of the take-makers and best kept “out of cite” by others, because I am).
Counting the day job, I produced about 75,000 words of content during this span. Not that anyone cares, because, to quote Langston Hughes, “not enough people care, anywhere.”
It was gratifying to see that some of the research done for this article, which, among other things, confirmed that Anderson had indeed played college football at Colorado, was immediately incorporated into his Wikipedia by whoever obsessively updates that.
Part of the article deals with Anderson’s frequent and well-documented use of racial slurs, which is to be expected from any mainstream publication in 2024. What wasn’t included, due to concerns about space and reader confusion, was the fact that Anderson, a “Polack” or “dumb Polack,” was frequently on the receiving end of epithets: “At the same time, there’s a thread of utilitarianism that runs through all of Anderson’s professional dealings, regardless of the wrestler’s race. As Anderson stated himself in the very same chapter, “I didn’t like very many people anyway. I was never close to a lot of people… If they were talented and worked hard, I liked them.” The man born Alan Rogowski himself comes in for a bit of ethnic mockery in Bill Watts’ autobiography The Cowboy and the Cross, in regard to his supposed “blood oath” with the Native American Brisco brothers to keep Georgia Championship Wrestling together in the face of McMahon’s challenge: “I used to tease Ole: ‘A Polack and two Indians in a blood oath? What a deal!’””
Back in August, we co-authored the obituary for Rotunda’s son Windham (Bray Wyatt) — literally the young man’s last words, thanks to Ian’s prescient on-the-ground reporting months earlier. It should’ve circulated far more widely than it did, but such is life.
Despite my extensive work in both the wrestling and strength/fitness areas, I’m not “internal” to either subject, though especially in the latter case it’s unclear why (I suppose I’m not internal to any beat I cover, instead serving as a sort of ghost who hovers above it all, forever employed and forever “out of cite”).
Not only do they pay, but they pay adequately by 2024 standards. I know!