Van Valkenburg on the bizarro of Adam Muema

Great story DD. Congratulations!
Did you by any chance check to see if Muema has any
concussion history?

As to reader, to me first person is the only way this story works.

 

You pointed out the baseball bat incident. Add that to the day to day head injuries he suffered in football and it's probably easy to surmise he's got a few issues going on up there.

 

None that I could find.

Btw, before it comes up, I stopped posting here for awhile only because I was sick of my own sanctimony and rep. No one chased me away. I have my issues with SJ, as we all do, but I needed a break from the fights I couldn't resist picking/responding to. I realized i'd been posting here for 10 years. Everyone knew who I was. And on here, I was occasionally an asshole. It was time for others to have the stage. I labored over this story though, cared and worried about it (and Muema) so I decided I'd weigh in here. Thanks to anyone who gave it a chance.

 

Yeah if you look at his yds per carry its one of lowest of top 25 D1 backs which tells you
he took a lot of hits. Combined with the bat injury you have to wonder if there is some
TBI working.

 

I enjoyed this Muema story, but it wasn't quite as good as Les Carpenter's take. JMO.

 

I heart that comment, Pete.

 

I'm curious how you think you would have worked it in to the story if you were going to.

You could have interviewed experts in mental illness, gave them the background and had them weigh in. But without them ever seeing him, whatever they said would have had very little weight to it. It's the kind of thing, in stories, that always sits wrong with me. So, personally, I'm glad you didn't go this route.

You couldn't mention it as the narrator of the story "As I stood there" or "as I read this text" or "as I reflected on his behavior." That would have been even worse than the qualified doctor who never actually saw him as a patient.

You could have worked it in through a quote of those around him, if they were wondering about it. But ultimately, that, I think would have been unsatisfying to me as a reader, because, again, they're just shooting off theories - they aren't experts in the field. They're just spit-balling.

I don't consider myself an expert in the craft, so there might be other options out there I'm not thinking of. But, given what I see in the story, I can't think of a way to address this, that, as a reader, would leave me better served that what you did - tell the story and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

Just my $.02 off the top of my head.

 

Nah, it's one of the best sports stories written this year so far.

I'd appreciated that it <i>didn't</i> dive into the deep end about mental illness or concussions. From afar, it seems to be a mental break, even if I suspect there's somebody on the ground in the CA area running an out-of-home church scam with Rayel. SoCal is primetime ground for that stuff.

 

Good stuff. Enjoyable read for someone who'd never heard of this guy.

 

A guy suggests President Obama is the Antichrist, and Double Down thinks he might be mentally ill.

Typical liberal.

 

I think it was best not to. I worked on way too many stories involving celebrities who go crazy -- your Britneys, Amandas and Mileys -- and even with them it was always something like "who is believed to suffer from bipolar" and that was with Britney, who had actually been in a psychiatric center but her diagnosis had never been released. Otherwise it was talking to doctors who would speculate about it, followed by the "who has not treated the star." Works in celeb tabloid story, wouldn't work here, I don't think.