I recently sat down with author and sportswriter Jon Finkel to talk about his new novel, Bear Brawl, a story about a former fighter who sets out to get revenge on a bear by challenging said bear to hand-to-paw combat.

Yes. An actual bear.

Jon has spent much of his career writing about sports and the people who play them. He's written biographies of Macho Man Randy Savage, Mean Joe Greene, and other legendary athletes. He's interviewed everyone from LeBron James to Brock Lesnar.

He's also a husband, father of two, competitive swimmer, and self-described "sophisticated meathead."

So we had plenty to talk about.

But one of the things that stuck with me had nothing to do with fighting bears, interviewing famous athletes, or even famous athletes fighting bears. 

It was baseball—or the lack of baseball.

Jon grew up a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan. There was a time when he'd watch roughly 150 games a season.

He followed the players. Knew the pitching rotation.

Baseball was simply part of his life.

Today?

He barely watches.

And Jon couldn't really pinpoint when he'd stopped watching. 

There wasn't some defining moment when he decided baseball wasn't worth his time.

Life just kept happening.

And somewhere along the way, something that once occupied a significant part of his life became something he could take or leave.

I started thinking about how often we imagine personal change as a deliberate decision.

We draw lines in the sand. Make declarations. Decide that from this day forward, we're going to be different.

And sometimes that's exactly how it happens.

But a lot of the meaningful changes in our lives don't announce themselves.

We simply look back one day and realize it just kind of… happened.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Almost imperceptibly.

Jon and I also talked about fatherhood.

He has a son and a daughter, and like a lot of dads, he discovered that raising two children doesn't necessarily mean having the same parenting experience twice.

With his son, connecting came naturally.

Sports. Wrestling. Dinosaurs.

You know, the usual dad stuff.

His daughter was different.

She had her own interests. Her own emotional language.

She'll spend twenty minutes telling him about something that happened at school, and he doesn't always know what to make of it.

But he listens.

Before becoming parents, we have ideas about the experiences we'll share with our kids. The things we'll teach them. The interests we'll pass along.

But then our kids turn out to be actual people.

With interests, personalities, and priorities of their own.

And somewhere along the way, we find ourselves paying attention to things we never imagined we'd care about.

Because to love someone is to be interested in them.

Jon has interviewed plenty of professional athletes over the years, and one thing he's discovered is what many of them miss when their playing days are over.

You might expect them to talk about the competition.

The roar of the crowd.

The championships.

But often, what they miss most is the locker room.

The friendships. The jokes. The everyday experience of being around their teammates.

All the ordinary stuff that happened between the extraordinary moments.

I wonder how many of those athletes thought about how much they'd miss the locker room while they were still playing.

They were probably too busy living it.

Stressing about their next game, complaining about the coach, nursing an injury, or wondering why the guy in the next locker couldn't keep his mouth shut for five minutes.

Which sounds a lot like the rest of us going about our everyday lives.

Early in his career, Jon interviewed a 19-year-old Carmelo Anthony about 45 minutes before his first game at the Staples Center, where he'd be facing Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

Carmelo wasn't particularly interested in talking.

He seemed distracted, maybe even a little rude.

And Jon wasn't especially impressed.

About five years later, Jon was listening to someone talk about the pressure of playing against Kobe at Staples Center, and he started thinking about that interview differently.

Here's a 19-year-old kid about to play against Kobe Bryant.

The guy whose posters he'd grown up with on his bedroom wall.

The Black Mamba. NBA champion. Kobe Bean Bryant.

And some sportswriter wants to ask him whether he prefers PB&J or mac and cheese for a kids' book.

Of course his mind was somewhere else.

And Jon realized he'd been looking at the whole encounter from the wrong perspective.

He'd spent years thinking Carmelo was the one who'd been rude. But he'd never really considered what that moment must have been like for Carmelo.

As Jon put it, "I'm the asshole."

What I found interesting was that Jon didn't describe some life-changing revelation.

It wasn't some big epiphany.

He'd just gotten a little older. Lived a little more life.

And somewhere along the way, gained a perspective he didn't have at the time.

Nothing about that interview changed.

But the person remembering it did.

Of course, not everything we leave behind stays behind.

Jon was an exceptional swimmer growing up. An all-state swimmer in high school, in fact.

But when he got to college, he decided not to pursue competitive swimming.

He still swam occasionally over the years, but work, marriage, kids, and all the other things that tend to fill up a life kept competitive swimming on the back burner.

A couple of years ago, with his kids getting older and a pool just a few minutes from home, Jon realized he could probably make time for a couple of practices a week.

So he joined a team again.

And in 2024 and 2025, he ranked among the top ten swimmers in the country in his age group in the 50- and 100-yard butterfly.

Not bad for a guy in his late forties.

His kids, apparently, are less impressed.

They just think it's funny that Dad is one of the fastest old guys in the pool.

I like the contrast with the baseball story.

Something that once occupied so much of Jon's life gradually faded into the background.

Meanwhile, something he'd largely left behind found its way back.

Funny how that works.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the people we want to become.

The habits we want to develop.

The things we want to accomplish.

The changes we want to make.

But I wonder how often we stop to consider the ways we've already changed.

Sometimes without any grand decision or defining moment.

Just because life happened.

We talk a lot about figuring out what matters.

As though it's a question we're supposed to answer once and then spend the rest of our lives honoring.

But maybe it's a question worth asking again every few years.

Not because the answer we gave before was wrong.

Because we're not the same people we were when we gave it.

Until next time—
keep the fires burning.
– Clay

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