Acting on a grudge isn't the answer 😠

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In retrospect, I’m not entirely pleased with how last week’s newsletter came out.

I enjoyed the subject well enough. Baseball pitcher Jose Mesa’s years-long vendetta against Omar Vizquel has always made me chuckle.

I also think it’s a great example of the actual mechanics of a grudge in part because Mesa was so unusually transparent about his desire to keep throwing baseballs at Vizquel.

But in reading it again, it felt like an article I’d written for a publication as opposed to a letter I would send to a friend, and that’s really what I want this newsletter to be. A note from me that arrives in your inbox, expressing my thoughts and experiences in a way that connects with you, maybe even moves you to respond, which you’re welcome and in fact encouraged to do. (The fact I screwed up the link on the “Click Here To Comment” button didn’t help.) 

More than anything, I felt what I wrote last week was an example of how we usually talk about grudges:

• I chronicled a very specific conflict in this case a pitcher furious at a former teammate;

• I then asked if the anger the pitcher felt was appropriate;

• I confessed that while I knew it was immature — not to mention dangerous — for one adult to keep throwing baseballs at another adult, I admitted that I kind of admired it.

All that is true. However, I’m not sure my assessment of the validity of Mesa’s grudge matters all that much. I’m not sure if any of our opinions about another person’s grudge matter all that much.

That’s because what we think doesn’t ultimately have all that much to do with what another person feels. If you have ever tried to tell a truly furious person, “I don’t think you should be this angry,” you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

Additionally, last week I failed to answer what I think might be the most important question about Mesa’s payback: did it make him feel better? I mean, I assume it was satisfying to hit Vizquel with a baseball in June 2002. However, it couldn’t have been that satisfying given the fact that Mesa declared his intention to keep throwing baseballs at Vizquel. 

Did the fact Mesa plunked Vizquel diminish the amount of anger Mesa harbored Vizquel? If it did, it would be possible to argue that Mesa was processing his anger albeit in a particularly harsh and slow manner. Still this would constitute progress in some regard.

My suspicion, however, is that it did not do much to temper Mesa’s feelings. I say this for two reasons:

1. As recently as last year, Mesa said he still didn’t talk to Vizquel

2. When I’ve acted on the anger I’ve felt toward someone I believed to have harmed me, I never achieved the satisfaction I hoped for. In fact, I often wound up feeling guilty.

I’ll get more personal now.

Grudgery Case Study No. 2: The radio row

In 2013, a man who talked about sports on the radio asked if my wife was an imbecile. He did this on Twitter, amending his question by stating he would tone down his criticism if this were the case.

A little background information you need to know: My wife is a journalist. We met when we were both reporters at The Seattle Times. At this time, she was working in the op-ed section and had recently published a column regarding a proposed basketball arena south of downtown Seattle.

Dave Mahler, who’s known as Softy, hosts an afternoon show at 950 KJR AM. He Tweeted this, presumably, in reaction to the column.

From my perspective:

1. This wasn’t a criticism of her work, but a criticism of her. It was personal, not professional.

2. I also suspected his criticism was particularly personal because I had recently become a full-time host at 710 ESPN Seattle. This was the other sports-radio station in town. I felt that Mahler had not been nearly so personal in criticizing other columns the newspaper had published about the arena.

3. I knew the guy. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. My dealings with him had been fairly respectful. We had each other’s cell-phone numbers.

I didn’t respond to the Tweet. Neither did my wife.

The next time I saw Dave was a week or so later at the Seahawks headquarters. The team was holding one of its offseason practices, which was open to the media. He came up to me and offered his hand for me to shake it. This struck me as very direct not just because of what he’d posted, but because even before he Tweeted that, he wasn’t someone I made a habit of greeting with a handshake. A head nod. Maybe.

So when he extended his hand, I felt challenged. Like I was being dared to see if I would react to what he’d posted. 

I can’t recall the exact words I said, but it was something along the lines of, “Don’t come up and try and shake my hand like everything’s cool after what you posted. It’s not cool.”

He suggested we talk outside. I took him up on that, but I don’t think I was talking for very long before I raised my voice. I told him I thought what he’d done was unprofessional. He responded that my wife was a public figure. He said he understood why I was upset. I said I didn’t his permission to feel how I did.

After a few rounds of this, I called him a “low-rent (something)-(something).” I remember that quote very specifically. This occurred as Bob Condotta, who covered the Seahawks for The Seattle Times, was walking by us.

I didn’t feel better after I said this. I felt agitated, slightly light-headed. My hands were shaking. I also felt a need to urinate though my bladder was largely empty. I’d obviously experienced a huge adrenaline dump.

Was I being overly protective? Maybe. My wife was — and is — a journalist, and people tend to have strong feelings about that sort of work. However, I will point out that I wasn’t someone who flipped out every time someone wrote something negative about my wife. Her column about our decision not to have kids evoked some really personal criticism in the comments section (which I see now has been deleted). I didn’t try and track any of those trolls down. Also, there were other hosts at both that station and my own who criticized the column my wife wrote about the arena, and I didn’t confront them because they were talking about the article and not the person who wrote it.

But even as I’m writing this, it feels like I’m trying to justify my feelings, and as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not sure that matters.

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I felt the way I felt for a variety of reasons, some of which Dave had control over (what he’d written) but also some things he had no idea about (my own emotional baggage). I had a strong emotional reaction to his post, and when he came up and stuck his hand out, I acted on that anger whether it was justified or not.

I didn’t hit him, which is good. I did curse at him, which I really wished I hadn’t. It’s not how I want to act in a (somewhat) professional setting. In fact, later that day I went up to him and apologized for cursing at him.

I didn’t apologize for being mad at him, I didn’t indicate that I was OK with what he said because I wasn’t.

Here’s the thing that’s worth noting: Acting on my anger didn’t make me feel any better. At all. In fact, it made me feel worse.

There was no catharsis that I experienced. No relief like, “Ahhh, I’ve vented that anger that was building up inside of me out into the world and now I feel better.”

I stayed mad. I didn’t look at him the next time I saw him at the Seahawks facility. I didn’t acknowledge him in any way for several months.

This was — to borrow a term I coined last week — my begrudging. I had expressed some of the anger I felt to this man, and it had done very little to temper my hostility. I just felt guilty for lashing out at him so I took that feeling and I corked it up and stashed it in the dark little corner of my mind where I stash all the other various resentments and grievances that I’ve accumulated over the course of my life.

If you squint hard enough, I suppose it’s possible to see this as a boundary of sorts. I’d created a no-go zone to keep these feelings from influencing my actions. However, I had no way to process the anger that I’d bottled up. I was just stashing it out of the way, allowing it to ferment and bubble and (eventually) become too potent for the container.

The detente

On Aug. 31, 2013, I went to a college football game between the University of Washington — my alma mater — and Boise State. It was the first game in the remodeled Husky Stadium, played at night and Washington won handily.

That night, as I was leaving the stadium, I got a text from the radio host who’d insulted my wife. We hadn’t spoken since the day I yelled at him.

He was hosting his station’s post-game radio show, their broadcast coming from a set at the east end of the stadium. He said someone had turned my wallet in.

I checked the back pocket of my shorts. Sure enough, no wallet. It must have fallen out when I was throwing around a football with my friend’s kids after the game on a field that was near their broadcast location.

I walked back to where their broadcast was set up, I got my wallet and I thanked him profusely. I even said he was more mature than I would have been. He saw I had a Nalgene bottle of water and said he was thirsty. He asked if he could keep the bottle and give it back to me the next week. I said sure. (He did give me the water bottle back the following week).

That should have been the end of my hard feelings toward him, and maybe it was for a while.

But if that was the case, it didn’t take much for my anger to return.

In July 2014, I was assigned to a new radio show at my station. When a sports columnist from The Seattle Times called my boss for a quote, he (cringingly) referred to me as “a star in the making.” I heard Softy mention that quote mockingly on the air. I thought it was a crummy thing to do.

And then in 2016, Dave was profiled in feature story that was published in The Seattle Times. Now, I had worked at that newspaper previously. Three times in fact. My wife was still employed there. While I pretended I didn’t care, the truth is that it bothered me he was being profiled.

On the day the story first appeared online, someone told me that Mahler had talked about my wife again during his show. Like an absolute sucker, I went and listened.

The newspaper story had stated Dave had made personal attacks on various employees of the paper. During his show, he denied having done so, and when his producer brought up my wife, he stated that I had already left the paper by the time that happened.

I’m still not sure why that made me so mad. Perhaps it was because I felt it confirmed what I’d always suspected: He criticized her in a personal way because she was married to me. Could be I felt he was trying to deny something that he’d actually done. Mostly, I believe it was because I never fully forgave him or moved on from the initial insult, I was not pleased because I thought he was being fawned over in a feature story and this gave me an excuse to be really mad again.

Round 2

The next time I saw Softy was (again) for a Seahawks offseason practice. This time, we were both standing on the grassy hill to the east of the practice fields. The berm, it’s called. As I walked north along the hill, returning to the building to meet with my co-workers, I walked by Dave, looked directly at him and said, “You need to stop talking about my wife on the radio.”

This, unsurprisingly, triggered an increasingly hostile exchange. He asked to know what he’d said, who had alerted me to it. He asserted his right to say what he wanted. I said this was true, but it also didn’t mean I wouldn’t react to it.

Now, I’ve already mentioned that we were standing on a hill. At one point, I realized he had moved to higher ground so he was looking down on me. I moved to get on equal footing. It’s as silly and pathetic as it sounds.

My co-host on the afternoon show — who played linebacker in the NFL for 9 years — was sufficiently entertained by the spectacle that he took a picture with his iPhone.

At some point, I told him that if he continued to talk about my wife, “something was going to happen.”

“That’s a threat,” he said. 

It was. A regrettable and thoroughly pathetic one, which I suppose is a fitting summary of my decision to trigger the incident. I apologized to Dave for the threat a few minutes later, told him I didn’t mean it.

That afternoon, Softy spent a significant part of his four-hour show talking about not just our confrontation earlier that day, but the history of conflict between us. He talked about the wallet, the fact he thought everything was OK after that.

I didn’t hear any of this. I was hosting my own radio show at the time, but over the course of that day, people began sending in text messages to our radio station and mentioning it to me on Twitter. I never brought that incident up during our show at that point or any day in the future.

That evening, I was furious not just at him, but at myself. I had created this opening by engaging with him, and while I considered that a private matter between us, I had given him all the material he needed to turn our conflict into content.

My goal in saying something to him was to have him stop mentioning my wife. The result was that he spent more time than I could have imagined discussing her as well as me.

That night, he posted on Twitter that he apologized for calling my wife an imbecile. He stated she was a public figure but “there are better ways.”

To this day, I’ve never gone back and listened to what he said that day. There’s no need. I decided that I would never engage or acknowledge him in any way going forward. I stuck to that for as long as I worked at 710 AM.

Over the next few years, several of my co-workers told me they had talked to Dave and he’d expressed a desire to apologize. I said I had no interest in talking to him or about him.

In 2019, when I was preparing to move to New York after my wife accepted a job here, Dave came up to me at a Seahawks practice, extended his hand and said he was sorry.

I gave him a handshake, but it was more of a dead fish than a hearty embrace. I said, “OK,” but that was it.

At that point, it had been six years since our first confrontation and I wasn’t any closer to processing my anger. That had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.

In retrospect, the whole thing was utterly silly and fairly harmless. No one was really hurt. He wrote something mean on the Internet. I said some mean things to his face. I lost my cool on two different occasions and feel like a horse’s ass for having done so.

But no one was physically hurt. No one was professionally harmed.

I did, however, spend an awful lot of time and emotional energy on it. Not only that, but every time I acted on the antagonism and resentment I felt, it exacerbated the issue as opposed to bringing any relief.

I’m happy to say that I no longer bear a grudge against Dave Mahler. While I’m not going to say I was wrong to be angry, I absolutely regret the way I lashed out at him in part because it didn’t do anything but make the situation worse. For everyone.

I’ve appeared on Dave’s show twice in the past 12 months. I’ve told him and his audience that I regret how I acted. I said I was sorry for not accepting his apology before I moved.

I wasn’t ready to process my anger then, I was still a couple of years from realizing how desperately I needed to learn how to do that.