I caught the first few plays of Saints-Falcons on Monday night on the radio. Kevin Harlan, the 66-year-old legend, was on the call. I thought about Harlan giving the listener directional cues and describing the atmosphere before diving into the play. It was extraordinarily vivid, as only Harlan could do. The art of painting a picture without a picture—both in the ways we try and do here and the ways Harlan does so well on the radio—is seen as a dying art by some, but I fundamentally disagree.
I recently finished the book Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and one of my main takeaways was that the advent of television and other aspects of modern lifestyle took away the romantic, hilarious and haunting mysticism of life. Sports, be it on the radio or written on the page, is one of the few spaces where I find that magic is still very much alive. Credit to Harlan for that.
