dt yhdjty

Introducing

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR 10 Rising Superbrands That Are Taking Over Fashion

JASON SUDEIKIS Is Having One of a Year

CONTENTS

GQ August The Fix

Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

38 Ways to Stunt in the Woods........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 M AC H I N E G U N K E L LY ’ S B E N JA M I N C LY M ER

High School Reunion. . . . 18

Contributor

on Tudor Watches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

The Varied (and Very Fly) Cultural History of Gold Teeth................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 G EO RG E G A N K A S,

TOMMY ORANGE Writer

Golf’s Radical New Guru. . . . . . 36

Features Cover Story: JA S O N S U D E I K I S ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 The New American Sportswear....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

In his first story for GQ, Tommy Orange— whose debut novel, There There, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—profiles legendary Cherokee actor Wes Studi.

“I admire him so much for all he’s done to represent Native people,” Orange says.

“He participated in the American Indian Movement in the ’70s, then went on to have the greatest acting career of any Native person, living or dead. He’s one of our heroes.”

↓ PETER LEE

Brockhampton Says Goodbye........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Creative producer, GQ Sports

WES STUDI’S

Untold Stories........... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

↑

On the Cover Photograph by Hill & Aubrey. Styled

by Michael Darlington. Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode.

Sneakers, his own. Socks, stylist’s own.

Watch, $6,300, by Cartier. Grooming

by Nicky Austin. Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh.

Set design by Hella Keck. Produced

by Ragi Dholakia Productions.

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TO M M Y O R A N G E : R I C H A R D N O U R RY. “ O F F I C E G R A I L S ” : C O U RT E SY O F S U B J E CT S .

The Tragic Case of the Wrong Thomas James.....

CONTENTS

ST YLIST, JON TIET Z.

GQ August

Check out our story on Kevin Abstract and Brockhampton on page 66.

Short-sleeve shirt, $240, long-sleeve shirt, $110, and shorts, $210, by Telfar.

Boots, $170, by Ugg. Socks and bracelet, his own.

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© HDIP, Inc.

Luxury is where you are.

CONTENTS

ST YLIST, JON TIET Z.

GQ August

For Tommy Orange’s profile of Wes Studi, see page 74.

Jacket, $975, by Schott NYC. Hat, his own. Sunglasses, $1,170, by Chrome Hearts.

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S C H M E L L I N G

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The New Fire in American Fashion Calvin Klein both launched their brands in the late ’60s. By the ’90s they were going mega-global alongside Tommy Hilfiger—and I’m gonna throw Nautica in there too. That was the original American sportswear movement, and it put casual American menswear on the fashion map. With this issue, we’re introducing the New American Sportswear.

RALPH LAUREN AND

↑ At GQ, we don’t just write about the New American Sportswear—we wear it. Here I am at a party in monogrammed Bode.

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The 2021 wave consists of 10 young and mostly independent brands that are reinvigorating the American fashion scene, turning heads at the big European luxury houses, and infusing global corporate powerhouses like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance with fresh ideas and energy.

But most of all they’re making clothes we actually wear. And by we, I mean me and the rest of the GQ sta≠, as well as our friends and collaborators.

If you throw a rock in downtown New York City, you’ll likely hit a cool 20or 30-something wearing one (or perhaps several) of these labels.

Which is to say that the New American Sportswear is not one of those cute editorial conceits that’s more about understanding culture than participating in it. Although it’s super fun to argue about (and we did plenty of that while making this issue), this isn’t the kind of fashion that demands to be over-intellectualized. These clothes are for wearing. In this regard, Ralph Lauren is the godhead and GOAT—he created the template and remains the gold standard.

The other radical thing about these designers is that their business models are as innovative and directional as their collections. As GQ fashion critic Rachel Tashjian writes in her feature story (page 50), they all have a deep understanding of their customers and know exactly how to reach them.

While industry experts crow about the death of retail, these

designers are serving up the clothes we want on the platforms we prefer—which sometimes means an IRL store with a line out the door and other times means a timely drop on a dot-com with a sweet UX. What it definitely does not mean is reliance on a bunch of middlemen and gatekeepers.

I have no doubt that loyal readers will recognize all 10 brands on our list. After all, in addition to wearing them, we write about them day after day on GQ.com. But until this issue, we’d never wrapped our arms around all of them at once and acknowledged what they represent as a group—or considered what they’re in the midst of accomplishing together. Make no mistake, they have made American menswear the most exciting and influential fashion movement on the planet.

They have also made the simple act of standing at the closet in the morning and getting dressed more fun than ever. Stu≠ your wardrobe with these brands and you’ll feel it too.

Will Welch GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

TRY IT

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OPENING PHOTOGR APH: SE T DESIGN, BJELL AND-CLOSMORE. OTHER PHOTOGR APHS: PROP ST YLIST, MELODIE DEWIT T AT MARK EDWARD INC.

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WE HAVE REACHED PEAK GORPCORE You no longer have to choose between staying dry and getting a fit off. High-performance outdoor gear has never been more stylish, and fashion garms have never been more influenced by the freedom-loving subcultures of camping, hiking, and climbing.

By SAMU EL HINE

Jacket, $1,640, T-shirt, $375, and hat, $550, by 2 Moncler 1952. Pants, $175, by South2 West8 at Matchesfashion.

Sneakers, $135,

by La Sportiva.

Sunglasses, $490, by Balenciaga.

Hammock, $48,500, by Louis Vuitton.

Cooler, $200,

by Yeti.

Sleeping bag, $290, and duffel bags, $169 each,

by The North Face. Chair, $35,

by Montbell.

Quilt, $249, by Patagonia.

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COZIEST BLANKET Born out of the back of a van—as outdoorsy innovations so often are—Rumpl blankets look, feel, and perform just like your favorite down jacket ($179).

BEEFY FLANNEL SHIRT In his L.A. studio, Greg Lauren uses classic fabrics, like this brushedcotton flannel, to create archetypal American clothing in the tradition of his uncle Ralph ($650).

LUXE PACK Because you need something bigger than a Celine Homme

by Hedi Slimane shoulder purse for backpacking through the South of France ($2,700).

FUNKY HIKER After designing smash-hit sneakers for Yeezy and Versace, Salehe Bembury has taken his talents to Chinese athleticwear brand Anta, where he birthed the SB-02, a hiker silhouette with a bird’s-nest-inspired sole ($189).

CAMPFIRE CUP The beauty of MiiR’s double-walled vacuuminsulated camp cups— besides their lifetime warranty—is that they’re so sleek you’ll want to use them at home too ($28).

PATCHWORK TROU For the gorp-y sub-brand Eye/Loewe/Nature, Jonathan Anderson applies Loewe’s rigorously luxurious craftsmanship to sporty outdoor gear, like these patchwork pants made out of cotton canvas, twill, and herringbone ($850, at Matchesfashion).

SIT-ANYWHERE STOOL This A&F foldable seat, which can support anyone who sits on it, weighs about the same as this magazine ($79, at Jinen).

MID-CALF SOCKS Alessandro Michele is all about high hosiery; these Gucci cottonelastane socks look just as killer with horsebit loafers as they do with trail runners ($200).

HI-VIS OVERSHIRT Most Hermès garments are designed to fly under the radar. This lightweight, waterrepellent top with a nifty drawstring collar is meant to announce your presence from a mile away ($1,575).

THE ULTIMATE LUNCHBOX When Prada decided to introduce a limited line of on-the-go stainless steel containers and utensils, the brand teamed up with the Prada of lunchboxes, London’s Black+Blum (lunchbox, $140; utensils, $85).

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TACTICAL BELT Arc’teryx’s roots as a maker of highperformance climbing harnesses means that you can trust its webbed belts to keep your pants up ($39).

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RUGGED SPEAKER Re-create your homeaudio setup in the woods with the Sonos Roam, which boasts a huge sound and a practically impervious waterproof and drop-resistant design ($169).

ITALIAN-MADE UTILITY VEST There’s a reason highoctane artists like Liam Gallagher and Drake rock Stone Island outerwear. The garment-dyed pieces are beautiful—and built to perform like your favorite outdoor brand ($723).

ADVANCED WATER BOTTLE With a laser-etched palladium-finish stainless steel body and a crossbody holster, this Dior Men bottle is the last reusable water vessel you’ll ever buy ($810).

GRAIL BUCKET With this floppy denim sun hat, Virgil Abloh has introduced a new pattern into the Louis Vuitton Men’s canon: Damier Salt, the house’s classic check remixed using salt and pigment ($760).

CLASSIC CLIMBING SHORTS Developed by a member of the legendary Stonemasters Yosemite climbers in the ’80s, the Gramicci self-belted shorts became a staple of the sport—and developed a cult following in Japan that continues to this day ($88).

INDESTRUCTIBLE TOTE Montbell’s tote has a bevy of handy features (a 10-mm-thick padded bottom, low straps for heavy loads) and, most importantly, a sick retro logo ($79).

’90S SHADES Worn by the likes of Michael Jordan and a generation of teenage techno ravers, the Oakley Eye Jacket—now revived with the latest lens technology—is among the most iconic sunglasses designs of all time (Oakley, $203, and Croakies, $9).

MINIMALIST HEADLAMP If you’ve got your nightrunning outfit dialed in, why settle for a basic headlamp? Melbournebased Knog’s are super lightweight and USB rechargeable and prove that even the most utilitarian accessories can still look cool ($25).

SPACE-AGE SLEEPING BAG NEMO founder Cam Brensinger helped design a NASA space suit. So as you might expect, his sleeping bags have ingenious features like temperature-regulating gills and a shape that accommodates side sleepers ($160).

THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE OF BAGS Everyone goes gaga for Sacai’s Nike sneakers, but don’t sleep on the Japanese label’s Porter bag collab, which now has modules for your phone, AirPods, and trusty bottle of hand sanitizer ($410).

ULTIMATE RECOVERY SLIDE The Chaco-strap foot tan has become a summertime tradition for outdoors enthusiasts, and with this cushy new recovery slide, the tan lines are sure to get even weirder— which, to be clear, is a good thing ($50).

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INGENIOUS JACKET The Kamakura jacket is a legendary Kapital design. In bad weather, it cloaks the wearer; in good weather, it can be worn open like a kimono. And for travel, it folds into a bag with its own handle ($1,450, at Blue in Green).

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NOSTALGIA CLOGS Ugly shoes have been slowly taking over fashion for years, and the Merrell Jungle Slide is the final boss of surprisingly cool, insanely comfortable footwear ($85).

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Music

High School Reunion Machine Gun Kelly’s first-ever review was written by his then classmate Wesley Lowery.

Nearly 15 years later, they talk about how Kelly willed himself into stardom—and the Megan Fox GQ poster that adorned his teenage bedroom.

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S T Y L E D

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A D A M

B A L L H E I M

GROOMING, SONIA LEE FOR EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS USING TOM FORD. MANICURE, BRITTNEY BOYCE, FOUNDER OF NAILS OF LA. PRODUCED BY ZAIR MONTES.

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Jumpsuit and boots (prices upon request)

by Balmain.

Earring, $50,

by Vitaly.

Necklace, $3,500, by Mikimoto x Comme des Garçons.

Nose ring (throughout), his own. His own ring (on left ring finger, throughout) by Cartier. Ring (on right index finger, throughout), $2,120,

by Chrome Hearts.

Music

I had a real conversation with Machine Gun Kelly, we were both middling students at the same high school in suburban Cleveland, fantasizing about the lives we’d later go on to lead. I was a kid with wire-rim glasses who skipped math class to hang out in the high school newspaper o∞ce. Colson Baker, as I knew him, was the lanky white boy roaming the halls in bulky yellow headphones, carrying a CD player and a dream.

“You know what the dream was?

It was exactly what happened to me [this weekend], which was go to an awards show, shut down the carpet, go onstage, accept an award,” he told me over FaceTime a few days after being crowned top rock artist at the Billboard Music Awards. More pertinently, Baker and his girlfriend, the actor Megan Fox, dominated the tabloid coverage: “It has nothing to do with the award. I saw a British GQ HE LAST TIME

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Coat, $4,895, and vest, $775,

by Versace.

Earrings (on left ear), his own. Earrings (on right ear), $50 each,

by Vitaly.

article that came out this morning that basically was like, ‘Despite the fact that BTS was there, The Weeknd was there, Drake was there, the talk of the show was [us].’ That overzealous, overconfident 15-year-old must have known that it was attainable, even though everyone else was like, ‘You’re out of your white-boy-rapping mind.’ No one is sitting in math class thinking that [the next] Drake is sitting next to them.”

Baker was the teenager who got the Decepticons logo from Transformers tattooed on his arm and hung a poster of Megan Fox in his bedroom (at least one classmate recalls him vowing he’d marry her one day). Now he’s bringing her onstage during his performance on Indy 500 weekend.

“It was the GQ poster, right?” he

shouts across the house to Fox for confirmation. “It was from her GQ shoot,” he goes on to tell me. “So that’s some full-circle shit.”

It is indeed some full-circle shit.

Over a dozen years ago, I gave Baker his earliest press coverage: a review of his mixtape in our high school paper. Back then, Fox was starring opposite Michael Bay’s spectacular machinery, being declared the world’s sexiest woman, and reigning over teen walls. Now, Baker is the man who willed himself into that poster.

After a deliberate decade-and-ahalf-long pursuit of fame and success, Baker is living out every millennial teenage boy’s fantasy. In 2007 he was a wannabe rapper, persuading classmates to pay $8 covers to see his

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of a superstar musician: tabloid romances with Instagram models and fellow celebs; more tattoos than skin; rowdy performances and bar fights.

(In 2014, he settled a lawsuit filed by a bouncer in St. Petersburg, Florida, after a brawl broke out during a VIP meet-and-greet.) There was a New York Times profile in which he appears to have consumed more drinks than he answered questions.

“I was always finding what character

Music

I wanted to play,” he told me at one point. “At 29, maybe, is when I finally found out my character.”

That character, now 31, is an inescapable pop culture presence. He and Fox are mainstays of TMZ’s homepage. He pops up in movies like the schlocky Netflix megahit Bird Box. Turn on rock radio and you’ll hear “My Ex’s Best Friend.” Open TikTok and hordes of teens have memed the hook of “I Think I’m OKAY” (the

ABOVE

Jacket and turtleneck (prices upon request) by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

Earring (pink), $195 for pair, by Beepy Bella. Other earrings, his own.

Necklace, $3,500,

by Mikimoto x Comme des Garçons.

Bracelet, $1,210,

by Chrome Hearts.

opening-act sets at the Grog Shop.

Fast-forward a few mixtapes and he was among the city’s most visible mascots: hosting a rowdy flash mob at a suburban mall and selling out campus shows with frat party anthems (“Yeah, bitch, yeah, bitch, call me Steve-O”).

His onstage energy at SXSW in 2011 impressed Diddy enough to sign him to Bad Boy Records, where he’d eventually drop a track with one of his heroes (DMX) and publicly war with another (Eminem). Before long, commercial earworms like “Bad Things” were hitting the Top 40 and Baker was mingling with Cavs owner Dan Gilbert and sitting courtside as his rally song, “Till I Die,” blared from the stadium speakers. And now, as classmates who came up on the punk/emo/ska explosion of the early 2000s are old enough to feel nostalgic, Baker has fully pivoted from rapper to rock star—befriending Blink-182’s Travis Barker and releasing his most successful album to date, a pop-punk a≠air that is more New Found Glory than it is Nas. It’s the latest development in a career that has often looked like that of someone playing the part

O P E N I N G PA G E A N D RIG H T

Jumpsuit, $2,650, and shoes, $1,170,

by Prada. Socks, $5, by H&M. Earrings, his own.

Necklace, $7,200,

by Mikimoto x Comme des Garçons.

His own bracelet

by Vitaly. Rings, $20 each (on left pinkie) and $30 each (on right pinkie),

by Dalmata.

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Jacket, $4,800, T-shirt, $375, and kilt, $1,950,

by Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane.

Underwear and socks, his own. His own boots by Chrome Hearts.

Earrings (on left ear), his own.

Earrings (on right ear), $50 each,

by Vitaly.

Necklace, $625, by Beepy Bella.

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Music

relevant lyric goes: “Watch me take a good thing and fuck it all up in one night”), his single with Barker and British pop-punk rocker Yungblud.

There he is, hanging out with Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson.

Then he’s flying to lift up his buddy after a very public breakup. Next he’s falling o≠ the SNL stage as he wraps Davidson in a bear hug. And

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then there he is again, being interviewed by Howard Stern and Ellen DeGeneres about all of it.

It would be easy to write all of this o≠ as calibrated antics supplementing a musical output that has so far failed to convince industry gatekeepers and tastemakers. But the fact is that after years spent telling anyone who would listen that he was going to

make it big, Baker did just that. More likely than not, the star of your high school football team isn’t in the NFL. That kid voted most likely to be president? Probably not happening. Most of the kids who go to space camp don’t actually become astronauts.

“That’s because they didn’t come to class in an astronaut suit,” Baker chimed in. (continued on page 84)

THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

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BY OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

How Tudor Schooled the Watch World

Watches

Hodinkee founder Benjamin Clymer says two radical new dive watches prove that Rolex’s sister brand is officially on fire.

N THE REALM OF

watchmaking, there can be only one king, and since its founding by Hans Wilsdorf in 1905, Rolex has undeniably worn the crown. But the man who gave us Rolex built another monumental name in horology: Tudor, which was launched as a stand-alone brand in 1946. Wilsdorf’s goal at the time was to introduce a wristwatch that would boast Rolex-level reliability and timekeeping accuracy at a slightly lower price point. In those days, the relationship between the two sister brands was incredibly close. Early models, like the Tudor Oyster Prince, which was marketed to a working-class customer, featured a Tudor rose logo on the dial and a Rolex crown on the clasp.

In 1969, the Tudor rose transformed into a shield and the brand released a generation of Submariner dive watches that have become extremely collectible.

But ironically, in later decades Tudor’s closeness with its sibling appeared to hurt sales—it had simply become the poor

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man’s Rolex, and in the early aughts the brand pulled out of North America entirely.

Then, in 2013, Tudor came roaring back by stepping out of Rolex’s shadow. When it returned to the U.S. market, Tudor brought an entirely new diver collection, dubbed the Black Bay, which, compared with the original Rolex-like Subs, had a design language all its own. (Tudor even offered fabric straps, something the Crown doesn’t yet do.) Tudor had also begun experimenting with case materials you won’t find in the Rolex lineup, like titanium, ceramic, and bronze.

Two new additions to the brand’s wildly successful collection of 39-mm Black Bay Fifty-Eight dive watches embody the creative and commercial risks Tudor has taken to win over collectors and casual horologists alike. When Tudor unveiled the silver-case 925, a Hodinkee colleague described it as an “oddball”—luxury watchmakers don’t often make cases out of silver, as it’s softer than steel and prone to tarnishing. Using it for a functional dive watch (Tudor’s watches are real tools, and the brand has historically had a partnership to outfit the French

navy) is practically unheard of. But the lustrous case with its unique taupe dial is gorgeous—and it’ll set you back only $4,300. The 18K, with its gold case, on the other hand, costs $16,800 and represents a massive new statement from Tudor. It is betting that it has built enough brand equity that customers will pick up a shield-emblazoned diver that’s twice as expensive as a Rolex Sub. I think that bet is sound. I’ve owned a dozen-plus Tudors in my collecting career, and I currently wear a Black Bay Fifty-Eight as regularly as any other watch. I don’t suspect that will change anytime soon.

These two Black Bays hold the key to what I find so charming about Tudor: You get Rolex-level quality and design sensibility, all wrapped up in a package that has an independent personality. The watch you wear says so much about you, and no brand says as much as Rolex. So while most people in the market for a luxury dive watch think the obvious move is to invest in a steel Rolex, that’s exactly the point.

To paraphrase Mr. Wilsdorf himself, the shield protects the crown.

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H A I R , R U B I J O N E S AT J U L I A N WAT S O N A G E N C Y. M A K E U P, S I L B R U I N S M A AT T H E WA L L G R O U P.

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S H O P. G Q . C O M

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St yle

OR S O M E , gold and silver tooth caps are a recent phenomenon.

If you’re like me, your adolescent brain was probably bowled over by the dental opulence on display in the music video for Nelly’s 2005 hit “Grillz.”

The iced-out era of popular rap that it neatly encapsulated has served as a touchstone for the young, style-fluent generation fueling the current uptick in custom tooth jewelry. But blingedout teeth were a thing long before Paul Wall’s mouth was “lookin’ somethin’ like a disco ball,” before, even, Grace Jones’s gilded mug graced the cover of Vogue Hommes in 1975. The history of rocking gold teeth is as varied and divergent as it is flashy, as personal as it is brilliant.

In actuality, the history of adorning one’s teeth with hardware goes way back, well beyond that seemingly ancient Nelly hit. Archaeologists report discovering sets of teeth wound with gold wire in central Italy that are believed to date as far back as the seventh century B.C. They were likely primitive dentures belonging to the wealthy women of ancient Etruria. The Maya were known to drill holes in their teeth for the express purpose of implanting circular pieces of jade in them.

In both of those cases, the teeth-adorning custom was brought to an end by an invading colonial force that deemed it garish. And while neither the Roman Empire nor Spanish conquistadors have much to say about how people dress anymore, this kind of drip policing in the name of decorum and respectability mirrors something many told me they were combating by wearing their fronts.

“Before bling culture, before hiphop culture, there was salsa, and all those salseros were super blinged out,” filmmaker Djali Brown-Cepeda explained to me. She was raised in upper Manhattan and the Bronx’s Soundview neighborhood by a Dominican mother and a Black and Indigenous father, and she’s the mind

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behind Nuevayorkinos and BLK THEN, digital archives dedicated to cataloging New York City’s Latinx and Black cultural heritage. Each of the projects’ Instagrams is filled with family photos and personal narratives that tell the story of a New York that is becoming harder and harder to recognize. There are pictures of Puerto Rican teens hanging in pre-gentrified South Williamsburg, a dapper group of Black partygoers in ’50s Brooklyn, and even BrownCepeda herself visiting the Gra∞ti Hall of Fame in East Harlem with her father in the early aughts. Present in almost all of these images is gold: on fingers, earlobes, necks, and, of course, teeth.

Emmanuel Popoteur, a model, wears an 18-karat-gold cap on his right front incisor as an ode to the one his father used to wear. The elder Popoteur immigrated to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic as a teen in the early ’70s. In the ’80s and ’90s, New York became the epicenter of hip-hop’s golden age, bringing with it new edicts on freshness. “If you didn’t have a gold tooth back then, you weren’t poppin’, ” Emmanuel remembers his father telling him. By that point, gold and silver teeth were most commonly seen in the mouths of West Indian men and women uptown and in Brooklyn who had emigrated from places where the use of precious metals in dental work was common. In typical hip-hop fashion, however, the city’s Black and brown youth took a plebeian banality and flipped it to create something fresh, original, and undeniably fly.

“Our generation is tapping back into something that was culturally smudged due to whiteness,” photographer Quil Lemons, who shot the portraits seen here, explained. “White supremacy has always tried to dull our shine as Black and brown folk,” Brown-Cepeda said. “We’re too loud.

We have too much flavor, right?” For her and her partner, Colombia native Ricardo Castañeda, wearing gold fronts is a way to shrug o≠ a history

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1. OLIVIER DOMOND 22, model and musician Grill: Real Mike Gold Teeth

2. LIAM WAMBA

3. JR HEFFNER

24, model

29, fashion-brand communications coordinator

Grill: Gold Teeth USA

Grill: Gold Teeth USA

4. EMMANUEL POPOTEUR 22, artist and designer

5. J BALVIN

6. DOSHA DENG

36, musician

20, model and journalist

Grill: Ian Delucca

Grill: The Grillest

Grill: Helen With the Gold Teeth

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7. GIANNI LEE artist Grill: Gold Teeth USA

8. SOLANGE VAN DOORN 22, model Grill: Helen With the Gold Teeth

9. RICARDO CASTAÑEDA & DJALI BROWNCEPEDA 32, graphic designer 24, filmmaker and activist Grills: Helen With the Gold Teeth

10. SIM FROM THE HILL 28, musician Grill: Helen With the Gold Teeth

of denigration and embrace selfdetermination. “Black and brown cultural production in New York City has become globalized, but people forget us, and people overlook us, and people kick us out of our own neighborhoods.… [Wearing fronts] is a way for us to express ourselves and to show up every day or whenever we choose to as the dopest, flyest, most unapologetic versions of ourselves.”

Like any good style trend, wearing custom tooth jewelry is also a conduit for self-expression. Colombian megastar J Balvin owns an assortment of fronts from a number of jewelers,

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including New York grills stalwart Gabby Pinhasov of Gabby Elan Jewelry and grill maker to the stars Dolly Cohen. Balvin spoke about his assortment of bespoke fronts as one might discuss a collection of Swiss watches. “I love the art of it,” he told me. “I don’t do it for the flex. I feel cool with it. I feel good, and you express that. But it’s not how many diamonds.

That’s the last thing I talk about. I just want to make cool stu≠ and find new ways to connect with my inner kid.”

Of her custom set of gold-framed blue and white opals, model Solange van Doorn told me, “It’s just really

about trying to figure out how to put a piece of you in your mouth.”

JR He≠ner, who does brand communications for the denim brand R13, divulged that he dons his silver set when he wants “to jump into an alter ego for a night out.” For Lemons, the appeal is both obvious and hard to articulate. “I don’t even really have that language to really contextualize why the fuck I want to have 14 gold teeth in my mouth,” he told me, chuckling. “It’s just stuntastical!”

jordan coley is a writer from Hamden, Connecticut.

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From a scruffy perch at a public driving range, renegade golf coach George Gankas is building a cultish following of celebs and pros by challenging some pretty essential ideas about how the game should be played. B y Z A C H B A R O N

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ONE DAY THIS SPRING , George Gankas was telling me about his brief

and not very illustrious career as a pro golfer. This was in the late ’90s, after Gankas had graduated from college, at Cal State Northridge.

The short version was his driver let him down—he was plenty long, but he had a tendency to block or hook the ball on tight courses—and so did his brain. It was only years later, after he got into teaching, that he got a handle on his own flaws as a player. “A lot of it was ego,” he said in retrospect. “Being afraid to either look stupid or play a bad round.”

But Gankas had always been a little obsessed with the golf swing—how it worked, or didn’t work—and what he found was that more and more people were coming to him for advice about it. So he became an instructor. First at Moorpark, a golf course 50 miles west of Los Angeles, and then—after a client, Janet Jones Gretzky, wife of the hockey player Wayne, asked him if he’d start giving lessons closer to her house—at a place called Westlake. It was there that Gankas began building a wide-ranging roster of clients that came to include the entire Gretzky family, thousands of amateurs of varying ability, and after a time, a promising 14-year-old junior player with a chaotic swing named Matthew Wol≠, who found a spot near Gankas on the Westlake range one day. “I just started hitting balls,” Wol≠ told me, “and he looked over at me and said, ‘Dude, is that your real swing?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, man.’ He said, ‘That is the sickest swing I’ve ever seen.’ ” Wol≠ ’s busy motion was more baseball than golf; he looked like a major leaguer preparing to hit a fastball. But this did not seem like a problem to Gankas, who was beginning to develop a reputation for repudiating much of the modern orthodoxy about what a golf swing should or should not be. The two got along and formed a partnership that endures. Today, Wol≠, at 22—with that same weird action he had at 14—is a PGA Tour winner who has been ranked as high as 12th in the world. Meanwhile, Gankas, who still teaches at Westlake, has become one of the most famous and influential golf instructors on the planet.

There are many elegant and exclusive cathedrals dedicated to golf in Los Angeles: Riviera, Los Angeles

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Country Club, Bel-Air. Westlake is not one of them. It is a flat, unlovely patch of land out in the hinterlands of L.A., where the summers are hot and the grass turns a scorched brown.

Players hit o≠ rubber mats at the driving range. It’s a place where no one will see you, should you happen to look stupid.

For a game played largely in logodense polos made from shiny synthetic fabrics, golf is obsessed with aesthetics—what you wear, how you wear it, what you do while you’re wearing it. It’s a conservative game in that way and in practically every other way too: There are rules about where to stand, when to talk; there are rules about nearly everything.

Appearances and etiquette are all.

Form, in particular—the way you swing a club—is evaluated not just for its e≠ectiveness but for its beauty.

If you turn on a PGA Tour broadcast, it is only a matter of time before the announcers single out someone like Adam Scott, the sweet-swinging Australian pro, as an example for the viewer at home to emulate.

Scott’s swing is what many would call technically perfect: on plane, in rhythm, pretty and unhurried from start to finish.

But, Gankas asked, why is this sort of swing considered perfect? It hadn’t always been. As Gankas’s career as a player petered out, he started watching tape of previous generations of golfers, legends of the game like Sam Snead and Ben Hogan. And what he noticed was that they did all sorts of stu≠ that you’re not supposed to do. They lifted their front foot o≠ the ground. They extended their spine.

“Their arms were flying, which created more speed,” Gankas told me.

“They set up di≠erently, in a way that

allows you to turn more, a way that creates more speed. And we went away from it.”

Gankas thought: What if we went back? “I was like: We got it wrong for 20 years, 30 years, of us going into biomechanics and thinking that we had a better way,” he told me. “And I said, ‘That’s not right.’ And I got a lot of criticism for it at first. And then a lot of people copied [me], whether they want to believe it or not—they did.” Gankas began preaching a doctrine that said: Don’t worry about how you look. “I think that the ball flight says it all,” he told me. “I don’t think that the swing says anything.

I think there’s a lot of guys with pretty swings. They can’t score. And then there’s a lot of ugly swings that score better.”

At Westlake, students now reverently address him as G. His rate has climbed to between $600 and $1,000 per hour; his acolytes include CEOs, gamers, pro skateboarders, and celebrities, who converge on the range to listen to Gankas teach and pontificate and chew tobacco, which he keeps in a tin next to his Goyard wallet. He gives lessons—has been known to play actual rounds—without socks, in Gucci slides and shorts and a flatbrimmed baseball cap. “He dresses like a guy you would never want to take advice from,” Chris Solomon, who cofounded the golf media and podcast company No Laying Up, told me. “It almost seems like it’s too good to be true that this guy can know what he’s talking about, carry himself in this way, and yet not be scamming you. It almost looks like it could be a scam. But it is so absolutely not a scam.” Or as Gankas himself put it: “A lot of people would say I’m a genius when it comes to golf. But if they hung out with me, they’d say, ‘He’s a fucking moron.’ ” Gankas has nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram, putting him at the forefront of a social-media-driven revolution in golf instruction. His posts have a dangerous, slightly feral feel, in that you never know who might show up, what they might say, or how profane any given exercise might get. You might see him harangue an eight-year-old golf prodigy about his rotation or lack thereof (“Ride around and get it—don’t get around and ride

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it!” Gankas says in one clip, in homage to 2 Chainz) or demonstrate something called “the nut sack drill” by having his friend, who goes by The Best Golfer, wear a giant set of plastic novelty testicles in order to show the weight of the body moving along the correct path. Gankas’s posts feature a lot of clouds of unidentified lung smoke and dudes saying “siiiicckk” or “niiiice.” But if you watch over time, you can also see Gankas turn amateur after amateur into speed machines who swing harder and faster than many tour players.

The great golf instructors of yore did not talk about nut sacks. But Gankas does and, in doing so, has revolutionized the sport for the rest of us—the less gifted of us—who play it.

Gankas’s golf is not the high-minded game of business deals and rule fetishization; it is about doing whatever you need to do, however ugly or unseemly, to hit the ball as far as you fucking can. Watch him on YouTube

or listen to him talk—almost inevitably in a fast, confusing monologue— and you realize, eventually, that he is in an ongoing, friendly argument with the entire recent history of his profession. Results-wise, it’s an argument he’s winning. golf swing? What is its purpose? Why do we do this thing that is so dumb? There is no beginner’s luck in golf. Go out there with a club and a ball without preparation or instruction and you will return defeated, angry, and without the ball. They say that people who wait until adulthood to learn foreign languages never quite get the accent right; you either acquire it in the first plastic flush of childhood or not at all. This is the way I feel about my own golf game, which I started on the wrong side of 30: I may pick up the grammar, the vocabulary.

But I’ll never be a native speaker.

And yet I’m obsessed, like most golfers are. There is something WHAT IS A

“There are so many different ways to swing,” says PGA Tour player Mathew Wolff, a Gankas protégé. “And that’s George’s theory: There are so many different ways of doing it.”

irresistible about a game that puts perfection at such a far remove that you have infinite room to chase it.

My text chains come alive whenever the pros on TV top 3-woods into the ground, hook drives, or shank irons into the water: YES. Their ugly mistakes are testaments to the game’s untamable nature, proof of the fact that we all worship the same cruel god. In golf, you’re considered good if you’re a scratch golfer, meaning you shoot around par; the average men’s handicap is somewhere around 14, meaning you shoot 14 strokes above par—not far from one extra per hole.

Into this yawning gap between what we aspire to be and what we are comes a whole host of training aids, One Weird Tricks, and thousands upon thousands of YouTube and Instagram accounts purporting to teach the correct way to do things.

Go to your local basketball court; there are no shooting coaches hanging around, waiting for clients. But go to the public range in your town and you will see grown men with towels tucked under their arms and sticks at their feet and cameras pointed at their bodies, all in the hope of remedying the dizzying number of flaws that can a±ict a golf swing: too steep, too narrow, too inside, too outside, too much sway, not enough sway, too sti≠, too loose,

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too handsy, too armsy, too legsy. It is simply a hard game, even before you look up from the ball and start registering the sand traps and the water hazards, the tricky greens and swirling winds. To play it well is to feel in control of the entire universe; to play it badly is what happens the other 99 percent of the time.

And so the game is rife with instructors of varying philosophies and abilities: resort pros, former athletes tending to the range, Brits doing YouTube videos from gray British courses, and teachers at chains like GolfTEC, where you enter a windowless room and attach sensors to various parts of your body. There are dynastic princes of the game, like Tiger Woods’s former coach Butch

his son that he’d never seen anybody so bad at golf. “I didn’t like sucking,” Gankas told me. “But that was my motivation: to beat my dad.”

Within a year he went from shooting in the 120s—standard beginner stu≠—to shooting in the 70s, which many people never do. Within two years he was a plus handicap— better than scratch. (This is not normal, or really even fathomable.) He did this by becoming a golf monk: 36 holes plus 500 to 1,000 balls on the range, every day. Did he have a life? No. Not at all. He had a spot at a junior college in Ventura, “which was a joke,” and played on the golf team until he transferred to Cal State Northridge, where he played in the early ’90s with Rick Sessinghaus,

“I’m not going to go and tell anybody you suck,” Gankas said to me, when I told him I was apprehensive about learning how he worked firsthand. “I’m like a doctor.”

Harmon, himself the son of a Masters champion, or the now deceased Harvey Penick, whose Little Red Book will be received as a gift, at one time or another, by every golfer alive.

But just as most of the great golf courses in America are exclusive and closed to the public, most of the great teachers are out of reach: They work at private clubs or go on tour with players. George Gankas, however, is still at Westlake, beating up range balls and rubber mats. And you can still book a lesson, to fix what you cannot fix yourself. golf in order to beat his father at it. He was 17, 18 at the time—incredibly late, by the usual standards of pro sports. “I played a bad round with my dad,” Gankas said. “And he told me I was terrible.” The younger Gankas already excelled at wrestling, volleyball, waterskiing, baseball, and football, but his father, Frank, who was a P.E. teacher and a bodybuilder, told GANKAS GOT INTO

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who now teaches the promising young tour player Collin Morikawa.

“I remember him coming up to the first tee with his shirt untucked,” Sessinghaus said about Gankas.

“Just not at all the typical golfer.”

Before long, Tiger Woods would begin his takeover of the sport, and the best players in the world quickly moved from the pudgy, improvisational model of olden times into a more muscle-bound and professionalized mode, enabled in part by technological advances in the equipment. Like the various distinct local accents that are now fading from the world, golfers used to show up to the tour with a whole host of individualized tics and techniques and body mass indexes. But as the ability to put themselves on-camera, in slow motion, became more widespread, the swing began to standardize and calcify. Beauty and aesthetics became all. “It was all ‘prettier,’ ” Gankas told me. “And to me it wasn’t prettier. It was more mechanical-looking. It was

more P.C.-looking, rather than having a flow. There was no flow in it.”

Players in previous generations, Gankas noticed, got busy before the swing even occurred. They didn’t just stand there. “Those old-timers had triggers,” he said—gestures or motions they would do to start their swings. “There’s movement beforehand. Then we got static. I mean, we were just sticking there, and we moved from there, and there was no flow to anything. And so I wanted to see flow again. I want to see rhythm.”

Forget the quiet body at address, the mannered takeaway, the checklist of positions a golfer is supposed to attain throughout the swing. Gankas, as he got into teaching, wanted to see people moving like athletes.

To help students generate more clubhead speed, he taught a violent turn that begins around the hips and knees. “Some of the things I did with my legwork for speed, people were like, ‘Ooh, that’s crazy,’ ” Gankas told me. “Me extending the spine up, my arms flying, not being perfectly on plane like Adam Scott.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t love Adam Scott’s swing, because I do.”

But most of us can’t swing like Adam Scott, and some of us will actually get injured trying to swing like Adam Scott, and Gankas doesn’t want to see that: “I want to see motion back to where it was, where it floated and nobody got hurt.”

The avatar of the Gankas swing on the PGA Tour is Matthew Wol≠, whose swing begins with a tangle of triggers and gets stranger from there—his knees flex, his hands go forward, he lifts the club straight up into the air, pointing the wrong way, across the line, before coming around and down, with an aggressive rotation through the ball. But Wol≠ also hits it really far—his average driving distance is a healthy 314 yards, comfortably inside the top 10 on tour—and has already nearly won a major, coming in second to Bryson DeChambeau at the 2020 U.S. Open. “There’s a lot of things that I do that don’t really make sense in the golf swing, to be honest,” Wol≠ told me. “There are so many di≠erent ways to swing. And that’s George’s theory: There are so many di≠erent ways of doing it. And if you feel more comfortable (continued on page 90)

“

— Divia Thani

The World Made Local

He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit.

Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.

BY Z AC H B A R O N P H OTO G R A P H S BY H I L L & AU B R E Y S T Y L E D BY M I C H A E L DA R L I N GTO N

←←

that he wrapped shooting on the second season of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis sat in his trailer in West London and drank a beer and exhaled a little, and then he went to the pitch they film on for the show—Nelson Road Stadium, the characters call it—for one last game of football with his cast and crew. There’s this thing called the crossbar challenge, which figures briefly in a midseason Ted Lasso episode: You kick a ball and try to hit not the goal but the crossbar above the goal, which is only four or five inches from top to bottom.

And so Sudeikis arrived and, because he can’t help himself, started trying to hit the crossbar.

Confidence is a funny thing. Sudeikis has been ri∞ng on it, in one way or another, for his whole professional life—particularly the comedy of unearned confidence, which he is well suited, physically, to convey. Sudeikis is acutely aware of “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying”—six feet one, good hair, strong jaw. He’s a former college point guard. On Saturday Night Live, where most of us saw him for the first time, he had a specialty in playing jocular blowhards and loud, self-impressed white men, a specialty he took to Hollywood, in films like Horrible Bosses and Sleeping With Other People. He became so adept at playing those types of characters, Sudeikis said, that at some point he realized he’d have to make an e≠ort to do something di≠erent. “It’s up to me to not just play an a-hole in every movie,” he said. In conversation he is digressive, occasionally melancholy, prone to long anecdotes and sometimes even actual parables—closer, in other words, to Ted Lasso, the gentle, philosophical football coach he co-created, than any of the preening jerks he used to be known for. But he can definitely kick a soccer ball pretty good.

So he’s up there trying to hit the crossbar, and he’s got a crowd of actors and crew members gathering around him now, betting on

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whether he can hit it. And he’s getting the ball in the air, mostly, but not quite on the four-to-five-inch strip of metal he needs to hit, and the stakes are escalating (“I bet he can get it in three.” “I bet he can get it in five”), and after he misses the first five tries, Toheeb Jimoh, the actor who plays Sam Obisanya on the show, says, “I think he can get it in 10.” Then Sudeikis proceeds to miss the next four attempts. But, he told me later, “there was no part of me that was like, ‘I’m not gonna hit one of these. I’m not not gonna hit one of these.’ ” confidence is a funny thing.

You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won’t happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It’s a very interesting space to live in, where you’re living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you—are any of us—open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stu≠, professional stu≠, I mean, it’s all…that Venn diagram for me is very”—here he held up two hands to form one circle—“you know?”

Anyway, Sudeikis hit the crossbar on the 10th try. “It’s a tremendous sound,” he said of that moment when the ball connects with the frame of the goal. He’d done what he knew he would do. Everyone on the pitch was cheering like they’d won something. It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a very Ted Lasso moment—a small victory, a crooked poster in a locker room that says Believe. “There’s a great Michael J. Fox quote,” Sudeikis told me later, trying to explain the particular brand of wary optimism that he carries around with him, and that he ended up making a show about: “ ‘Don’t assume the worst thing’s going to happen, because on the o≠ chance it does, you’ll have lived through it twice.’ So…why not do the inverse?”

LIKE I SAID,

T E D L A S S O . M A N — what an unlikely story. The

character was initially dreamed up to serve a very di≠erent purpose. Sudeikis first played him in 2013, in a promo for NBC, which had recently acquired the television rights to the Premier League and was trying to inspire

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American interest in English football. The promo was the length and shape of an SNL sketch and featured a straightforward conceit: A hayseed football (our football) coach is hired as the football (their football) coach of a beloved English club, to teach a game he neither knows nor understands in a place he neither knows nor understands. The joke was simple and boiled down to the central fact that Ted Lasso was an amiable bu≠oon in short shorts.

But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and who confronted hardship, who su≠ered for whatever reason the character stuck heartbreak, who couldn’t go home. And who, around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis somehow, found his way through all that. developed and pitched a series with the Someone not unlike Sudeikis himself. same setup—Ted, in England, far from his Sudeikis likes to say, in homage to his family, a stranger in a strange land learn- background in competitive sports, that ing a strange game—that Apple eventually there’s no defense in the arts. “The only bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he things you’re competing against, I believe, had changed. He wasn’t loud or obnoxious are apathy, cynicism, and ego,” he said. anymore; he was simply…human. He was a This is a philosophy of Sudeikis’s that preman in the midst of a divorce who missed dates Ted Lasso by many years, though you his son in America. The new version of Ted wouldn’t necessarily have known it until Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned recently. He grew up outside Kansas City, kind of way, where the jokes he told and the in Overland Park, Kansas, a “full jock with jokes made at his expense spoke to the qual- thespian tendencies,” as he once described ity of the man. He had become an encour- himself. His uncle is George Wendt, who ager, someone who thrills to the talents and played Norm on Cheers. “He made finding dreams of others. He was still ignorant at a career in the arts, in acting or whatever, seem plausible,” Sudeikis said. But mostly times, but now he was curious too.

In fact, this is close to something Ted says, he was drawn to the camaraderie of athletby way of Walt Whitman, in one of the first ics. When Sudeikis first tried his hand at season’s most memorable episodes: Be curi- professional improv, in the mid-’90s, it was ous, not judgmental. I will confess I get a through something called ComedySportz, little emotional every time I watch the scene a national chain with a fake competition in which he says this, which uses a game of angle, teams in sports uniforms, and a refdarts in a pub as an excuse to both stage a eree. Brendan Hunt, who co-created and philosophical discussion about how to treat costars on Ted Lasso, initially met Sudeikis other people and to re-create the climactic in Chicago, he told me. Sudeikis had traveled moment of every sports movie you’ve ever the eight hours up from Kansas City to do seen. It’s a somewhat strange experience, a show: “Suddenly there’s a beat-up Volvo being moved to tears by a guy with a bushy station wagon, like an ’83, and this is ’97, I cartoon mustache and an arsenal of capital-J think, and these two guys get out, all blearyjokes (“You beating yourself up is like Woody eyed, and wearily change into their baseball Allen playing the clarinet: I don’t want to pants. And one of them was Jason.” hear it”), talking about humanity and how Sudeikis had gone to community college we all might get better at it. But that’s kind on a basketball scholarship but failed to of what the experience of watching the show keep up his grades, and he eventually left is. It’s about something that almost nothing school to pursue comedy. For a while, he said, his sincere aspiration was to become is about, which is: decency.

In the pilot episode, someone asks Ted a member of the Blue Man Group. He got if he believes in ghosts, and he says he close. “They flew me out to New York,” he does, “But more importantly, I think they said. “That was August of 2001, right before need to believe in themselves.”

9/11. And I got to see myself bald That folksy, relentless positivand blue.” (In the end, he wasn’t suit $4,860 ity defines the character and is a good enough drummer.) By Tom Ford perhaps one of the reasons Ted that time, he was living in Las vintage Lasso resonated with so many Vegas with his then partner, Kay t-shirt from people over the past year. It Cannon, doing sketch comedy at The Vintage Showroom was late summer, it was fall, it the newly formed Second City was in the teeth of widespread chapter there. “Ego,” Sudeikis suspenders, stylist’s own quarantine and stay-at-home told me about this time, “that orders. People were inside gets beaten out of you, doing shoes $1,535 watching stu≠. Here was a guy John Lobb eight shows a week.”

“If you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

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Eventually he was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. “I didn’t want to work on SNL,” Sudeikis said—he’d convinced himself that there were purer and less corporate paths to take. “At a certain point in your comedy journey, you have to look at it as like McDonald’s,” he said. “You have to be like: ‘No. Never.’ ” Then he got the call. “It was like having a crush on the prettiest girl at school and being like, ‘She seems like a jerk.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, really? ’Cause she said she liked you.’ ‘She what?!’ ” Sudeikis auditioned, of course, and was hired, in 2003—but as a writer: “It was like winning a gold medal in the thing you’ve never even trained for. You just happen to be good at the triple jump, and you really love the long jump.” He wrote for a couple of seasons, but he was unhappy—Cannon was still in Las Vegas, and Sudeikis missed performing. Finally he went to Lorne Michaels, to ask for a job as a member of the cast. “He had the best line. I go, ‘I had to give up two things I love the most to take this writing job: performing and living with my wife.’ And on a dime, he just goes, ‘Well, if you had to choose one…’ ” At Saturday Night Live, Sudeikis often channeled the same level of cheerful optimism and forthright morality that he’d later bring to Ted Lasso, but audiences didn’t necessarily notice it at the time. One of Sudeikis’s most famous and beloved early sketches on SNL as a performer is 2005’s “Two A-holes Buying a Christmas Tree”—Kristen Wiig and Sudeikis, chewing gum, oblivious to their surroundings, terrorizing Jack Black at a Christmas tree stand. It’s a joke about a very familiar form of contemporary rudeness; it’s also a ri≠ on a certain kind of man who speaks for the woman next to him, whether she wants him to or not. And people laughed and moved on to the next bit, but to this day Sudeikis can tell you about all the ideas that were running through his head when he created the sketch with Wiig. “That scene was all about my belief that we were losing touch with manners,” he told me. “And yet it’s also about love, because he loves her, and that’s why he interprets everything for her—she never talks directly to the person.” But, he said, sighing, “once you start explaining a joke or something like that, it ceases to be funny.”

Sudeikis brought this type of attention and care to the movies he began acting in too, like the workplace comedy Horrible Bosses, even if it was lost on most of those who watched them. “That movie, Horrible Bosses, is riddled with optimism,” he said.

“The rhythms of that movie, of what Jason Bateman and Charlie Day and I are doing, are deeply rooted in Ted Lasso too. But people don’t want those answers. They want to hear the three of us cut up and joke around.”

So that’s what Sudeikis did. He got used to a certain gap between his intention and how it was understood. During his time at SNL, his marriage fell apart. “You’re going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that’s a≠ecting you personally, and then you’re dressed up like George Bush and you’re live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you’re just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.’ ” For a time he became a tabloid fixture. He remembers “navigating my first sort of public relationship, with January Jones, which was like learning by fire. What is the term?

Trial by fire.” In a 2010 GQ article, when confronted with a question about rumors that he was dating Jennifer Aniston, he sarcastically responded that she should be so lucky. “And obviously I’m fucking joking, you know?” Sudeikis said. But back then, he treated interviews like improv—Yes, and— and that could create misunderstandings.

Asked once on a podcast about what people tended to get wrong about him, Sudeikis responded, “That I was in a fraternity—or maybe that I would be.”

To that point, Hunt told me, “He’s much less the assumed fraternity guy than you’d think.” But Hunt said he also understood where the impression came from: “I don’t know where he learned it necessarily, whether it was from his parents, or his basketball coaches, but he exudes an easygoing confidence. And it’s easy to hang with a guy like that. But some people are also like, ‘Fuck that guy,’ intrinsically.”

Shortly after Sudeikis and Wilde got together, near the end of his SNL run (he left the show in 2013), Wilde made a joke during a monologue that she read at a cabaret club

about the two of them having friends, Marcus Mumford, who shirt $188 ties (worn at waist) sex “like Kenyan marathon runcomposed the music for the $125 each show, told me, “He is quite like ners,” and Sudeikis spent years Polo Ralph Lauren answering questions about the Ted in lots of ways. He has a sort pants $255 joke. “The frustrating thing of burning optimism, but also a Aimé Leon Dore about that is that Olivia said vulnerability, about him that I shoes $782 that in a performance setting,” really admire.”

Alden Sudeikis said. “It wasn’t like Hearing people say this, over socks $15 she just was saying it glibly in and over again, Sudeikis said, Smart Turnout an interview.” He described “brought me to a very emowatch $10,200 the experience of growing into tional space where, you know, Cartier a healthy dose of self-love was celebrity, and confronting other allowed to expand through my people’s misperceptions of him, as a disorienting one. “You’re just being being and made me…” He trailed o≠ for a tossed into the situation and then trying to moment. “When they’re like, ‘No, that is you. figure it out,” he said. The picture of him that That is you. That’s not the best version of was circulating wasn’t exactly the one that he you.’ That’s a very lovely thing to hear. I wish had of himself. But he didn’t fight it, either. it on everybody who gets the opportunity “You come to be thoughtful about it,” he said. to be or do anything in life and have some“But also try to stay open to it. I don’t ever one have the chance to say, ‘Hey, that’s you. want to be cynical.”

That’s you.’ ” So he tried to stay open. But it wasn’t until And if he’s being honest, that’s the way he Ted Lasso that people really saw the side feels about it too. “It’s the closest thing I have of him that comported with the way he saw to a tattoo,” Sudeikis said about Ted Lasso. himself. Last year, as it became clear that the “It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever made.” show was a hit, he found himself answering, over and over, some version of the same O N T H E F I R S T Saturday in June, Sudeikis question. The question would vary in its flew with his children, Otis and Daisy, from specifics, but the gist of it was always: How London to New York, where he owns a house much do you and this character actually in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is home,” he told me have in common? Sudeikis told me that over simply. While filming the first season of time, in response to people wondering about Ted Lasso, he’d had the house renovated— his exact relationship to Ted, he developed there was black mold to get rid of and other a few di≠erent evasive explanations. Ted, changes to make. “So Olivia and the kids Sudeikis would say, was a little like Jason had to rent a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Sudeikis, but after two pints on an empty Heights. But it’s not home. It’s someone else’s stomach. He was Sudeikis hanging on the home.” Saturday was the first time Sudeikis side of a buddy’s boat. He was Sudeikis, and his children had set foot in their own but on mushrooms. Sometimes, in more place in two years. “The kids darted in,” he honest moments, he would say that Ted is the said. “Last time Daisy was in that house, she best version of himself. This, after all, is how slept in a crib. So now she has a new big bed. art works: If it was just you, then it wouldn’t It was hilarious. I walked up there after like really need to be art in the first place. And 15 minutes and both rooms were a mess.” so Sudeikis learned to separate himself He and Wilde, he said, no longer share the from Ted, to fudge the distance between art house. They split up, according to Sudeikis, and artist. “in November 2020.” The end of their relaExcept, he said, after a while, every time tionship was chronicled in a painful, public he tried to wave o≠ Ted, fellow castmates or way in the tabloids after photos of Wilde old friends of his would correct him to say: holding hands with Harry Styles surfaced “No.” They’d say: “No, that is you. That is in January, setting o≠ a flurry of conflictyou. That’s not the best version of you.” It’s ing timelines and explanations. Sudeikis not you on mushrooms, it’s not you hanging said that even he didn’t have total clarity o≠ a boat, it’s just…you. One of Sudeikis’s about the end of the relationship just yet.

“I’ll have a better understanding of why in a year,” he said, “and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it’ll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Right now he was just trying to figure out what he was supposed to take away, about himself, from what had happened. “That’s an experience that you either learn from or make excuses about,” he said. “You take some responsibility for it, hold yourself (continued on page 89)

When he won the Golden Globe, Sudeikis gave a dazed speech while wearing a hoodie, sparking glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” he said.

Ciarán “Bearface” McDonald wears BODE.

Merlyn Wood wears RHUDE.

Romil Hemnani wears FEAR OF GOD.

Dom McLennon wears AIMÉ LEON DORE.

Matt Champion wears TODD SNYDER.

Russell “Joba” Boring wears ECKHAUS LATTA.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN STYLED BY JON TIETZ

THESE 10 INDEPENDENT AMERICAN DESIGNERS ARE SETTING THE AGENDA FOR STYLE AROUND THE GLOBE, CREATING AN ENTIRELY NEW LANGUAGE OF MENSWEAR BUILT ON THE CODES OF PREP AND STREETWEAR— AND MAKING THE CLOTHES WE ALL WANT TO WEAR MOST RIGHT NOW.

BY RACHEL TASHJIAN

Jabari Manwa wears ECKHAUS LATTA.

PLUS 18 EAST, JOHN ELLIOTT, AND NOAH

RHUDE → or a T-shirt with a simple graphic on the chest, like a cartoon of a plump guy blissing out in an inner tube. What Santis sells is more expensive than J.Crew—those graphic tees are $85, a pair of striped workwear pants will set you back $255—but most things cost less than $500, like a washed-blue hooded cardigan with frog closures ($450). You can get a beige plaid suit, made by old-school New York tailor Martin Greenfield, for under $2,000.

Something exciting is happening in

cess is defined in the fashion business, driven

April of this year, the J.Crew men’s store in Dumbo, Brooklyn, marked down its slim-fit stretch chinos, printed camp shirts, and patterned swim trunks to 65 percent o≠ before permanently closing its doors. “Don’t worry—we’re not going anywhere,” a sign in the window read, suggesting that shoppers visit Jcrew.com.

It seemed like the latest chapter in a familiar story: Physical stores are dead, e-commerce is king, and J.Crew, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid 2020, had lost its hold on men’s wallets. The customer who was once seduced by the wildly popular Ludlow Suit, which prompted him to ditch generously cut tailoring for something cropped and fitted, had apparently moved on to direct-to-consumer brands like Untuckit and Bonobos—labels that see men’s wardrobes as a series of puzzles. “It’s problemsolving,” Todd Snyder, a J.Crew alum who started his own line in 2011, tells me. “ ‘I found pants that fit me.’ Or ‘I found a shirt that fits me.’ ‘I don’t have to subscribe to the designer way of things.’ ” But over in Manhattan, a store on Mulberry Street tells a much di≠erent story. Almost every afternoon, dozens of people stand in line outside an almost quaint shop with large windows, cream trim, and white awnings. What looks like a mom-and-pop shop with a booming Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack is the flagship of Aimé Leon Dore, the brand started by 35-yearold Queens native Teddy Santis in 2014, named for a combination of the French word for love with his father’s name (Leon) and his own (Theodore). The people who wait for upwards of 30 minutes just to get inside are invariably dressed like a posse of recovering hypebeasts, 20- and 30-somethings who were weaned on Supreme and Yeezy and are now ready to trade up to the chinos, knits, and grown-man sneakers that ALD o≠ers. Nearly every person leaves with a shopping bag, and nearly everyone waiting is already wearing a piece of ALD: a cap with “Mulberry” spelled out in varsity letters, a pair of ALD x New Balance sneakers (Santis was named creative director of the

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sportswear of the 1990s. They are also speaking to a new generation of consumers who see fashion, and these designers, as popular culture, a product similar to music or sports to follow like fanatics. Who view shopping as entertainment—a way of hanging out—and clothes as a way to demonstrate their depth of knowledge in a world of social-mediafueled microtrends. Menswear in America is no longer a churn of mass products, in which designers are expected to translate European ideas into a≠ordable and accessible American ones. Instead, successful designers today are making their own aesthetic. And they are revolutionizing style in the way they speak to, and with, their consumer fan bases, which are made up of young men for whom the past decade’s booming streetwear culture permanently rewired their fluency with fashion.

I spoke to the designers of nine American brands—Antonio Ciongoli of 18 East, Emily Adams Bode of Bode, Jerry Lorenzo of Fear of God, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta, John Elliott, Brendon Babenzien of Noah and now J.Crew, Rhuigi Villaseñor of Rhude, Telfar Clemens and Babak Radboy of Telfar, and Todd Snyder—all of whom, along with Teddy Santis of ALD, are part of a revolutionary generation of designers who are rewriting the rules of fashion and style and reshaping the American wardrobe.

They vary in ambition and aesthetic—Todd Snyder tweaks runway trends for the average American man, while Bode set about changing the very culture around the way men dress. Snyder takes in $50 million a year in revenue. Jerry Lorenzo is doubling his earnings annually. Babenzien does just a few hundred thousand dollars in business a year, but the influence of Noah runs deep in American cities, as his new role at J.Crew proves. Yet all share fundamental characteristics that make them standard-bearers for a new era in menswear.

Since it opened in early 2019, Santis’s flagship has turned its block into an eternal Coachella. Those who aren’t in line to shop are hanging at the Café Leon Dore, an extension

Los Angeles Designer: Rhuigi Villaseñor Founded: 2015 Vibe: Streetwise American luxury with the graphicsheavy attitude of classic ’90s sportswear and ritzed-up prep staples Key Pieces: Penny loafers with custom gold coins in the vamps; bandana-print bomber jacket; bikerinspired graphic sweats → OPPOSITE PAGE ON JOBA

jacket $2,895 t-shirt $400 shorts $1,995 Rhude boots $1,228 Marsèll socks, his own ON JABARI MANWA

coat $5,595 shirt $535 Rhude jeans $290 Eckhaus Latta boots $1,228 Marsèll his own sunglasses Chanel jewelry (throughout), his own ON MERLYN WOOD

jacket $2,150 t-shirt $420 pants $2,575 shoes $595 Rhude

of the store, where a throng of women dressed like Janet Jackson’s backup dancers—tiny top, baggy jeans—and men in jorts and post-ironic graphic tees (Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign; Twilight) seem to have taken up permanent residence. They order Greek mountain tea and indulge in the Instagram pastime of simultaneous high-octane preening and surveillance-state-level observation. These hangers-on are central to understanding Santis’s real aspirations. His clothing, uncomplicated though it may look, is onto something bigger. His genius is that of a stylist and a merchandiser, rather than of a subcultural translator like Shawn Stussy or Supreme founder James Jebbia. Imagine Ralph Lauren’s original mood board if the Slim Aarons photographs were replaced (text continued on page 56)

RHUIGI VILLASEÑOR: PRESLEY ANN/GETTY IMAGES.

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

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THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

blazer $1,950 hoodie $695 t-shirt $450 pants $850 Fear of God his own shoes Birkenstock x Stüssy his own watch Rolex rings, his own → OPPOSITE PAGE ON MERLYN WOOD

jacket $2,350 shorts $680 slippers $550 Bode his own watch (throughout) Rolex jewelry (throughout), his own ON ROMIL HEMNANI

shirt $580 Bode ON KEVIN ABSTRACT

shirt $690 pants $790 slippers $550 hat $230 Bode t-shirt $43 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear socks, his own ON MAT T CHAMPION

shirt $725 pants $820 Bode

hat $25 Poler ON BEARFACE

sweater $590 t-shirt $275 pants $790 Bode ON DOM M C LENNON

sweater $495 shorts $680 Bode boots $129 L.L.Bean socks, his own

FEAR OF GOD ↑

BODE →

Los Angeles Designer: Jerry Lorenzo Founded: 2013 Vibe: A high-tech, luxurious mash-up of sleek athleticwear and soft tailoring Key Pieces: Slim nylon track pants; oversized double-breasted “California” sport coat; sneaker-sole espadrilles in Italian suede

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New York City Designer: Emily Adams Bode Founded: 2017 Vibe: Family heirlooms remade into workwear staples Key Pieces: Quilted barn jackets; high-rise trousers in striped woven-in-India cotton; handcustomized “senior” corduroys

JERRY LORENZO: CHRISTIAN VIERIG. EMILY ADAMS BODE: SE AN Z ANNI. BOTH: GE T T Y IMAGES.

tank top $43 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear

AIMÉ LEON DORE →

with photos of A Tribe Called Quest in jean jackets. Just as Lauren touts his Bronx childhood, Santis likes to play up his Queens bona fides. (As one fashion observer recently told me, “He’s from New York. There’s not much more to it than that.”)

On a Friday afternoon late in the spring, two Gen Z models known for their haircuts sat outside the store on its street-facing bistro chairs, positioned to evoke a Santorini café, passing a joint back and forth. A few moments later, two men in skinny jeans and plaid shirts drinking petite iced co≠ees plunked down on one of the white planter benches and lit up cigars. A cherry red Porsche was parked across the street—not Santis’s, though the auto brand is another one of his collaborators.

Like so many before her, a woman pulled out her phone and began filming the scene. “WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS,” her T-shirt opined. ALD seems to bring Instagram to life.

It’s a wardrobe for the endless pursuit of hanging out—the pursuit of lifestyle as a lifestyle, for an era when having a lifestyle is the millennial answer to having it all.

Next to me, a 25-year-old named Alberto was describing in deep detail an ALD T-shirt from last summer that he proclaimed was “the greatest of all time.” His avid listener was Santis himself. The designer declined repeated requests for an interview—he rarely gives them—but Santis was perched outside the store three of the five times I visited over the spring. His presence gives him the air of both neighborhood shopkeeper and nightclub impresario, pro≠ering honey-slathered wedges of thick white toast instead of bottles of Champagne. “You guys want some bread?” he was constantly asking. Like most people in their 30s, Santis appears to be perpetually busy—he’d release that new Porsche collaboration a week later—yet always hanging out. “Not every owner is going to be in the streets like he is every day talking to people,” Joe Grondin, New Balance’s senior manager of global collaborations and energy, tells me.

But, says Grondin, Santis told him: “I need to be. This is where I learn everything.”

As if on cue, Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Nobody Does It Better” began pumping out of the speakers, which are ingeniously positioned on the store’s exterior to create a siren call: “They can come closer than close / Original they never will be / We bumpin’ from coast to coast, yeah, yeah / We just tryin’ make you see, nobody does it better.…”

Alberto took a swig of his iced tea. “You should bottle this!” he tells Santis. It was unclear whether he was talking about the drink in his hand or the vibe on the street.

NEW ASPIRATIONS You might say that the history of American fashion is the tale of an inferiority complex.

Critics and industry observers like to assert

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that Europe is where all the creativity and support for great fashion exists. In some ways, that’s true. Babak Radboy, the creative director of the Queens-bred, Bushwick-based brand Telfar, likened the European support for fashion to the way Europe protects grapes or cheeses with appellations, with a nationalist undertone. “Defending the old-fashioned system is a bit like…” He trails o≠ and rolls his eyes. “It’s part of colonial white supremacy. Even good fashion that we like. Just the fact that it has to go through Europe and it has to go through this idea called ‘fashion’…”

He shakes his head. “Because Europe didn’t invent looking good, you know?”

Radboy is one of the more radical voices in fashion today, though his skepticism about Europe, and the fashion system more generally, is increasingly common.

Most of the designers I spoke to don’t do traditional fashion shows. “I always talk to the CFDA [Council of Fashion Designers of America]—they actually piss me o≠, to be very honest with you,” Snyder says. “They, I don’t feel, support American designers. I don’t feel like they’re supporting Teddy Santis, who should be considered best new designer. Like, bar none—he should get it. He built an empire under all of our noses, and he’s done it in his own way. And same thing with Noah. Now, of course, everybody knows who Jerry Lorenzo is, but…Fear of God was doing the same thing.

Same thing Virgil [Abloh] was doing.”

Industry thinking goes that if an American designer is lucky, he might get a post at a European luxury house. But none of these stars seem destined for the fashion machine.

Most of them grew up on sneakers, T-shirts, and jeans, listening to rap, going to hardcore concerts. Savoir faire means little to them, as does the European fashion system. “For us, our dream has never been to go to a big luxury fashion house; it’s always been to create our own house,” Lorenzo says. Now the goal beyond that is a creative position at a sneaker brand, like the one Santis has with New Balance, or Kanye West’s with Adidas, or Pyer Moss designer Kerby-Jean Raymond’s with Reebok, or the one Lorenzo formalized with Adidas basketball last winter.

NEW BUSINESS MODELS Snyder, a native Iowan, has a Midwesterner’s pragmatism when it comes to explaining the ethos that makes his brand work. His clothes are conservative, but he is something of the godfather of this movement. He left J.Crew about a decade ago knowing how to dress a tasteful 30-something guy. At the time, he saw brands like Bonobos seizing that customer with their disruptive, direct-to-consumer pitch but felt that while many guys might be “freaked out” by the excesses of runway fashion, there were more than a few who were stylish and moneyed enough that they’d be drawn

New York City Designer: Teddy Santis Founded: 2014 Vibe: The ultimate IYKYK lifestyle brand Key Pieces: Chain-stitched ALD logo Yankees fitted hat; New Balance P550 Basketball Oxfords; twill cotton safari jacket → OPPOSITE PAGE ON JOBA

sweater $360 shirt $205 Aimé Leon Dore ON DOM M C LENNON

sweater $285 shirt $235 Aimé Leon Dore ON MAT T CHAMPION

hoodie $175 Aimé Leon Dore hat $45 Kangol

to something more thoughtfully designed. He isn’t independent—American Eagle acquired his brand in 2015—but that has actually allowed him to do what the old-fashioned system, with its layers of intermediary retailers and big media relationships, did not: eliminate retailers so he can speak directly to his audience. As he learned from a blockbuster partnership he oversaw between J.Crew and Red Wing, collaborations get media attention, so he does a lot of them, with brands such as L.L.Bean and Champion.

Snyder, who invested in e-commerce early on, says, “the wholesale model”—in which brands sell clothes to retailers who then mark them up to sell in stores—“is just not sustainable for small brands at all.” So just as you can only cop Untuckit on its site or in its stores, pretty much the only place to get Snyder’s polos, a Telfar bag, or a Noah suit, with a few exceptions, is on the eponymous brands’ commercial turf.

Radboy describes Telfar’s business model as “an avant-garde Fashion Nova”—referring to the direct-to-consumer fast-fashion brand that created an entire style ecosystem, with its own set of trends, customers, and influencers.

Fashion Nova doesn’t need press, or celebrity brand ambassadors, to build buzz for its products—its customers do that organically by posting on social media. This is a strategy that Telfar (text continued on page 64)

TEDDY SANTIS: JAMIE MCCARTHY/GE T T Y IMAGES.

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

18 EAST New York City Designer: Antonio Ciongoli Founded: 2018 Vibe: Gorpcore for grown-up skaters Key Pieces: Ripstop fabric doubleknee carpenter pants; heavyweight hoodies produced in the USA by Standard Issue; made-in-India cotton oxford rugby shirt

ON JOBA

hoodie $115 18 East x Standard Issue shirt $125 pants $298 18 East vintage boots, his own ON ROMIL HEMNANI

hoodie $175 18 East shorts $195 18 East x Spirits Up! shoes $160 Clarks Originals his own socks Nike ON KEVIN ABSTRACT

overalls $195 18 East t-shirt $105 18 East x Standard Issue boots $175 Teva bracelet, his own ON MAT T CHAMPION

shirt $115 pants $175 18 East

ANTONIO CIONGOLI: CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES.

t-shirt and vintage boots, his own

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coat $998 jacket $228 jeans $158 Todd Snyder tank top $43 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear shoes $120 Dr. Martens ON MAT T CHAMPION

sunglasses $555 Jacques Marie Mage ON JABARI MANWA

sunglasses $320 Gentle Monster → OPPOSITE PAGE ON JOBA

coat $925 shirt $415 pants $495 Eckhaus Latta vintage boots Tony Lama ON MERLYN WOOD

turtleneck $425 jeans $395 Eckhaus Latta

ON ROMIL HEMNANI

vest $510 t-shirt $195 jeans $290 Eckhaus Latta boots $160 Danner hat $250 Albertus Swanepoel ON JABARI MANWA

shirt $475 jeans $290 Eckhaus Latta durag, his own sunglasses $320 Gentle Monster

TODD SNYDER ↑ New York City Designer: Todd Snyder Founded: 2011 Vibe: Elevated, trend-driven menswear for the layman Key Pieces: Classic-cut French terry sweats produced in collaboration with Champion; printed camp shirts made with Japanese linen; tropical wool suits with a little stretch

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ECKHAUS LATTA → Los Angeles and New York City Designers: Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta Founded: 2011 Vibe: Art-school fashion for everyday life Key Pieces: EL wide- and straight-leg jeans; paneled baby tee; fine-gauge Italian linen knits

TODD SNYDER: GONZ ALO MARROQUIN. MIKE ECKHAUS AND ZOE L AT TA: VICTOR VIRGILE. ALL: GE T T Y IMAGES.

shoes $120 Dr. Martens

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

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jacket $1,498 hoodie $348 t-shirt $108 pants $348 boots $598 John Elliott ON DOM M C LENNON

shirt $398 hoodie $348 pants $348 John Elliott his own sneakers Jordan Brand → OPPOSITE PAGE ON MAT T CHAMPION

sweater $198 Noah sunglasses $555 Jacques Marie Mage ON MERLYN WOOD

blazer $1,200 t-shirt $52 shorts $198 Noah ON ROMIL HEMNANI

jacket $748 t-shirt $52 pants $548 Noah his own watch Rolex shirt $188 t-shirt $48 Noah hat $45 Kangol his own sunglasses Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane

JOHN ELLIOTT ↑ Los Angeles Designer: John Elliott Founded: 2012 Vibe: Off-duty Lakers stars and on-duty creative directors Key Pieces: Nylon cargo track pants with waterproof zips; the Villain hoodie with hidden kangaroo pocket; skinny Escobar sweatpants

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NOAH → New York City Designer: Brendon Babenzien Founded: 2015 Vibe: Prep classics through the lens of Babenzien’s Long Island upbringing—surfing, skating, punk music, and long-distance running Key Pieces: Wool-cashmere doublebreasted suit with wide-leg trousers; cotton rugby shirt; double-pleated stonewashed jeans

JOHN ELLIOT T: ROBIN MARCHANT. BRENDON BABENZIEN: ASTRID STAWIARZ. BOTH: GE T T Y IMAGES.

ON KEVIN ABSTRACT

TELFAR →

has replicated, with the aesthetic sensibility of the freaky individualists who made 1990s runways so odd, like Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela.

All of these designers have invented their own unique business models, selling directly through their own stores or e-commerce channels or in highly strategic retail arrangements that have allowed them to thrive outside the traditional fashion system, which so often fails brands like theirs.

“There’s an established path of the way that you’re supposed to do stu≠,” says Antonio Ciongoli, who built the pricey Italian American tailoring brand Eidos (which is owned by the high-end Italian suit maker Isaia) before founding the skate-inflected brand 18 East in 2018. “You’re supposed to show at some sort of fashion week. You’re supposed to wholesale and try to go after Ssense and Mr. Porter and Bergdorf Goodman—all of those things you’re supposed to do. I spent five years [with Eidos] trying to do it that way and just failed miserably. It just never got traction.”

The less expensive, less formal 18 East is somehow more human. Almost everything is less than $300. Ciongoli can drop the clothes when they’re ready, rather than adhering to a traditional retail or fashion calendar’s schedule. “We make really great products,” he says.

“That’s what we do.”

NEW KINDS OF CREATIVITY Simply making great products is the focus for many of these designers, their imperatives being wearability, a≠ordability, and timelessness.

Rhuigi Villaseñor tells me that he grew up thinking obsessively about “what luxury means” and has built his brand, Rhude, by exploring that notion with the kinds of grails a guy raised on Nautica and Tommy (not to mention Dapper Dan) would have prized in the ’90s: Hermès-influenced scarf-print bombers and creamy, distressed hand-knit sweaters. Many of his pieces sell out briskly.

But it’s not because he relies on streetwear’s adrenaline rush of hype and drops. Instead, Villaseñor says, he is meticulous about communicating that his pieces, like a satin racing jacket with Marlboro-inspired graphics, are costly and rare because they’re beautifully made—“the new luxury,” he says.

In this new world of American sportswear, even the freaks are secretly normal. Eckhaus Latta has a reputation as a label for art-school eccentrics that contradicts the transitory naturalism of its clothes. Around 2017, cofounder Mike Eckhaus says, he and his partner, Zoe Latta, started to feel that “we wanted to make the clothes that we were wearing”—especially jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. The two had outgrown being outrageous dressers and had become more sophisticated adults—much as their peers had done, becoming gig economy

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workers and creatives who wanted to wear things that were “easy casual,” as Latta puts it, things “that could be worn to a wedding or to work.” Jersey tees and denim now make up about 70 percent of the label’s business—in other words, Eckhaus Latta is Bushwick and Silver Lake’s answer to Calvin Klein, appealing to a generation that wants weirdness to feel a little more standard.

“I don’t make anything all that weird,” Noah designer Brendon Babenzien says. “It’s more a combination of what we make and how we operate and how we talk about things that I view as being creative.”

Babenzien championed sustainability years before it became a fashion buzzword, but he also takes pains to say Noah should not be categorized as “sustainable,” since very few brands have the resources to improve the planet with their products. Big fashion houses are just now catching up to this kind of thinking, and none execute it with Babenzien’s ethical clarity. Arguably, Noah can be so forthright because its aesthetic requires so little explanation.

About five years ago, though, this formula for simple clothes got a fresh shot of creativity, when Emily Adams Bode began reworking antique textiles into new garments. Later she began making reproductions of vintage trousers and shirts. She launched her line with two pant styles and two shirt styles, “all based on American workwear,” she says. The goal was to speak to a consumer who was particular about their taste in furniture, music, and art by allowing the story behind the textile to take center stage. “The intention was to change the culture of dressing,” she says.

Which she has: Bode was quickly embraced by the same consumers who loved the streetwear brands sold at Union in L.A. as well as the more esoteric menswear at Neighbour in Vancouver, and the label’s success set a new aesthetic standard in American fashion.

It also inspired menswear heads to move beyond a cop-and-flip point of view.

Fear of God emerged as a streetwear brand back in 2013, but it soon became clear that Jerry Lorenzo was up to something far bigger. Now FoG can be seen as a pinnacle of new American luxury. And it’s priced accordingly— more like European menswear brands, with pieces such as a $1,450 iridescent car coat and a $1,950 twill wool double-breasted suit jacket.

(Lorenzo also produces a highly popular and far more a≠ordable brand of lounge and athletic wear called Essentials.) But it looks like nothing any European designer is doing. As Chris Gibbs, who owns Union, puts it, “What Jerry Lorenzo does with Fear of God is his honest take on fashion through his personal experience.” Which includes idolizing Kurt Cobain and Ken Gri≠ey Jr.—and spending his 20s learning to navigate the complex system of celebrity coziness as a club promoter in

New York City Designer: Telfar Clemens Founded: 2005 Vibe: “Avant-garde Fashion Nova”—subverting the American fashion system through its own paradigm of must-have items and everyday wear Key Pieces: The affordable and fast-selling shopper tote; chopped-logo zip sweatshirt; bandana-print durags hoodie $360 bag $257 Telfar ON JABARI MANWA

hoodie $360 t-shirt $88 shorts $210 Telfar slides $110 Ugg socks, his own sunglasses $320 Gentle Monster ON KEVIN ABSTRACT

short-sleeve shirt $240 long-sleeve shirt $110 shorts $210 Telfar boots $170 Ugg socks, his own grooming by hee soo kwon using dior beauty. tailoring by yelena travkina and zoya milentyeva. set design by natalie fält. produced by connect the dots.

L.A. Lorenzo makes it look easy: the drape of Armani’s ’90s viscose-tailoring phase mixed with the serenity of a sweatpants-bound life.

A recent special collaboration with Zegna marked a turning point in Lorenzo’s aesthetic. “We’re just in a position, post our Zegna opportunity, where our resources have caught up to our point of view,” Lorenzo says.

“At Fear of God, we’ve always been trying to say the same thing—elegance, sophistication, e≠ortlessness, and comfortability—and now we have access to communicate that through di≠erent categories, such as tailoring, suiting, and knitwear. With the expansion, our story still stays the same.” (continued on page 90)

TELFAR CLEMENS: VIT TORIO ZUNINO CELOT TO/GET T Y IMAGES.

THE NEW AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR

BY GERRICK KENNEDY PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN

FEW COLLECTIVES HAVE TEETERED ON THE BLEEDING EDGE OF CULTURE QUITE LIKE BROCKHAMPTON. FEWER STILL HAVE HAD THE COURAGE TO CALL IT QUITS WHILE STILL AT THE TOP OF THEIR GAME. HERE ITS MEMBERS TALK ABOUT GOING OUT ON A HIGH NOTE—AND WHAT COMES NEXT.

March, Kevin Abstract, the young leader of Brockhampton, dropped a tweet ahead of the band’s latest album that left fans shook: “2 Brockhampton albums in 2021—these will be our last.”

It’s rare for a band to go out just as their popularity is surging. It’s rarer still that a band would be so at peace with the end.

It was only a decade ago that Brockhampton was born out of a simple vision.

Abstract wanted to redefine what it meant to be an “all-American boy band,” to make something ambitious and bizarre and new.

So he did what any kid growing up in the digital age would do and hit the Internet, posting a query on a popular Kanye West fan forum he frequented daily. About 20 guys responded, and in 2010, a band that called itself AliveSinceForever formed in Abstract’s hometown of The Woodlands, Texas.

The members would rebrand as Brockhampton (the name of a street that Abstract grew up on), and together they would go on to capture a generation of young fans with cross-disciplinary work in music and art that harnessed their collective ambition, business acumen, and DIY spirit.

Brockhampton’s underground success, which culminated in a multimillion-dollar record deal with RCA in 2018, upended the way we saw rap groups and boy bands, with music that centered a crew of thoughtful, multiracial, and multinational young guys, both queer and straight, who were figuring out life in real time, together.

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It’s the middle of May, a little after dawn in West Hollywood, and I’m huddled at a table in a soundstage parking lot with a few of Brockhampton’s members, including Dom McLennon and Jabari Manwa. Romil Hemnani and Merlyn Wood are playing with Wood’s schnauzer-poodle mix, Energy, while Abstract and Russell “Joba” Boring are inside getting styled for this photo shoot. Bearface, the group’s elusive, cherub-faced vocalist, put the dissolution of Brockhampton to me matter-of-factly: “We didn’t have that many more albums in us.”

The men of Brockhampton—now in their mid to late 20s—are understandably ready to move on from the whole boy-band thing.

And they’re especially eager to tackle projects without having to compromise for their brothers in the band. “My goal for us was to be a rap group who called themselves a boy band,” Abstract says, “but now a lot of rap fans look at us like a boy band—or like soft music—so they write us o≠. We’re always overlooked in that way. And I want to be respected in the rap world more, ’cause that’s the shit I listen to. It’s made me feel like, ‘Damn, people still don’t really view us as true MCs. True rappers.’ ” That Abstract feels the group hasn’t been given a certain level of respect within the hip-hop community is surprising, especially considering that rap is the foundation of their music. Even when they flirt with pop hooks or make soulful R&B joints, Brockhampton albums have always been, at their core, rap.

In that way, they capture so much of what today’s pop landscape looks and sounds like, as identity-fluid as they are genre-fluid.

One of the criticisms often levied at Brockhampton is that their voracious appetite for new ideas has made their work feel structureless, as if they’re trying a million di≠erent things in a million di≠erent directions. The guys were already living together when COVID hit, which allowed them ample time to experiment and dial in their sound.

During jam sessions, they would often try on new roles within the band. Producers would try singing and vice versa, which led to Manwa stepping into the spotlight as a

vocalist for the first time. “I wasn’t feeling 100 percent happy with what I was doing as a creator,” he says, when I ask what prompted him to be more visible. “I knew there was another level, other stu≠ that I had to do.

COVID, more than anything, forced you to be like, ‘Okay, you said you want to do this thing.

What’s stopping you?’ ” That focus is partly why the group’s penultimate album, Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, received critical acclaim upon its release in April. The record had been in the works ever since the completion of 2019’s Ginger, the album that pushed the band beyond cult status and into the mainstream, mostly thanks to the sun-kissed R&B groove “Sugar.” The track exploded on TikTok and landed on the Billboard Hot 100, earning the band its first platinum hit and a performance on Ellen. That momentum made it easy for Roadrunner to come together, as albums usually do for the band: fast and furious, with ideas in abundance. And then the pandemic hit, and Brockhampton was forced to change course.

“A lot of the stu≠ we tried to do earlier in the writing process was poppier,” rapper Matt Champion says. “It was bigger hooks and trying to make just feel-good music.” Instead, the members decided to tone it down and focus on introspection, using the turmoil of the past year as raw material. “People are just going to be in their room taking in the music,” Champion reasons. “They’re not going to be out at the bar.”

Even though the album has far more guest artists—including A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, and legendar y R&B crooner Charlie Wilson—than any of Brockhampton’s previous releases, it is also the band’s most personal o≠ering yet. “This is the first album where I’m 150 percent in love with it,” says Hemnani.

“I don’t really care what anyone says or thinks. For the rest of my life, I’m going to be able to look back on this album and be like, ‘I did everything I could have on that album.’

Like literally exhausted myself.”

In particular, the death of Joba’s father by suicide last year provided an emotional through line for Roadrunner. As a member of a group that tra∞cs in raw honesty, Joba has always made himself especially vulnerable, often inserting candid dispatches about his struggles with mental illness into his verses. Working through his grief created the album’s searing centerpiece, “The Light,” as well as its closing track, “The Light Pt. II.” But the process was an understandably di∞cult one. For Joba, the heaviness of grieving for his late father on the record and talking about it in interviews was weighing on him to the point where he had to pretend that the album wasn’t actually out in the world. In some ways it was an act of self-preservation. “The day the

Brockhampton performs at the 2019 Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City.

NAOMI GALAI/GETTY IMAGES.

album came out, I just got consumed by guilt and it lasted for like two weeks,” he says. “So I tried to drink the guilt away.… I put unrealistic expectations on this album, and those tracks specifically, in hopes that they would kind of expedite the healing process.”

Joba’s eyes well up as he reveals that he needed to be hospitalized last year to treat his depression. He’s even seriously contemplating leaving music after Brockhampton disbands. “I’ve just been kind of stuck in this, like, existential loop since the album came out—and a lot of fear,” he says. “But everyone tells me that the reception’s been good.”

Abstract says that with one more album left, the band will be in the studio for the rest of the year. (A world tour was pushed to 2022.) But he’s not feeling pressured by

Brockhampton’s final bow. “I’m just inspired, really, to keep singing stu≠ and doing it while we have the time to,” he tells me. His mind seems to exist in a liminal state of calm—an attitude that appears to have permeated the rest of the group. “Everybody’s given their life for the last 10 years,” Hemnani says. “And at a certain point, people deserve to give their lives to themselves. So it feels like it’s time to let everyone just spread their wings and do the things that they want to do. Being in a group, I love it so much, but there’s also compromise.

And I think everyone kind of deserves the shot to do what they want—no compromises.”

Abstract adds, “I feel like we’ve achieved everything. I feel like we’ve done more than we said we would do in a lot of ways. There are still goals that I feel like we have as a

“WE’RE ALWAYS OVERLOOKED. I WANT TO BE RESPECTED IN THE RAP WORLD MORE, ’CAUSE THAT’S THE SHIT I LISTEN TO. IT’S MADE ME FEEL LIKE, ‘DAMN, PEOPLE STILL DON’T REALLY VIEW US AS TRUE MC’S. TRUE RAPPERS.’ ”— KEVIN ABSTRACT

group that we haven’t hit yet. Certain awards or number one songs. Shit like that.…”

Hemnani interjects: “But it’s also like a goalpost that constantly moves because you have one level, and then you get a taste of what’s to come and it makes you hungrier.” However, he isn’t sad or frustrated by the things left undone. Quite the contrary, actually. “I met all these guys when I was like 14,” he says proudly. “So to be 26 here, like where I’m at now? Fuck, I feel great.”

The impermanence of life can be frightening or freeing, depending on how you see it.

And the same can be said about the moment they’ve arrived at—almost, but not quite, at the end. They’re still in the thick of processing their emotions and eager to discover what’s on the other side of this.

Each of them is managing in his own way.

McLennon, for instance, is choosing to take the long view. “There is this group of monks that will make sand mandalas,” he explains, referring to the Tibetan Buddhist artistic tradition of careful, intricate pattern work made from colored sand that can take days to complete. “And when the mandalas are finished, they will dump them into the river.”

That’s how McLennon’s been thinking about the Brockhampton project—as a work of art coming to its natural conclusion. “Like, this is beautiful, this is incredible,” he says.

“But this was never meant to exist forever.”

gerrick kennedy is a Los Angeles–based journalist. His next book, ‘Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston,’ will be published in 2022.

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Two men with the same name. A murder, a manhunt, and a chilling question: Did a Florida court hand down a life sentence because of a mistaken identity?

BY TRISTR AM KORTEN PHOTO GR APH

BY O CTAVIO JONES

Thomas Raynard James at Florida’s Okeechobee Correctional Institution, where he’s currently serving a life sentence for murder.

Long enough for him to consider just how far o≠ track his life, at 23, had drifted. He had a notion of what was coming at the hearing. The cops had found marijuana and an illegal gun in his car—he knew he was facing something more serious than the petty drug-possession charges he had dealt with before. But he was hopeful. He had already come to think of this ordeal as a wake-up call.

It was August 1990, and Thomas James had resolved to get his shit together.

James was a hustler, a pot dealer in the projects around Brownsville, north of Miami in central Dade County. He managed a crew and a couple of corners. But in his mind, this was just temporary, a means to an end. He was saving up; he had bigger plans. His goal was to own his own business. Start with a car wash, like his father had, then buy real estate, some of the low-slung concrete bungalows in the neighborhood or a small apartment building. That way, he thought, people are paying you every month. He had saved up about $36,000 so far, which he initially thought wasn’t enough to get started. But recently he’d found a company that worked to help finance small-business plans like his.

He let himself imagine big things.

Then the cops opened the trunk of his car.

James was already on probation for accidentally knocking down a cop while fleeing a raid on a housing project. Now his aspirations, which had just begun to feel attainable, were on hold, maybe even in jeopardy. The situation underscored just how ready he was to quit the scene. He liked the money he made on the streets but hated the trouble that came with it. He was always checking his rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. Not just by the cops but also by rivals interested in his turf and by the stickup boys who prey on the dealers. He was indi≠erent to guns; they were tools of the trade. Lately he’d started feeling like he needed one for protection.

That’s why he had picked up the Tec-9 the cops discovered.

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The van slowed to a stop at the courthouse and James shu±ed outside, where his hands were cu≠ed and clipped to a belt; his legs were shackled, and he was chained to about a dozen other inmates. The group was crab-marched into a wood-paneled courtroom and told to sit in the jury box. Before long, a judge called out their names one by one. James was nervous; this was the first hearing he’d had since his arrest. He didn’t know how much jail time he was looking at, but he was also eager to get on with it—one step closer to putting this chapter behind him and starting the life he wanted.

“Thomas James,” the judge read aloud.

James stood. But before the judge could detail the charges, the court clerk sitting below the bench reached into a large accordion folder and pulled out a document.

“Your honor,” he recalled the clerk saying, “there’s a warrant out for him for first-degree murder.” James raised his eyebrows. This was a mistake; he hadn’t murdered anybody. He assumed his file had gotten mixed up with that of one of the other guys on the docket.

The warrant spelled out the particulars: Seven months earlier, near Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, a robbery had gone bad and a man was killed. Hearing all this, James was stunned but not yet scared. They can’t be talking about me, he thought. He lived 15 miles from Coconut Grove and had been there only once or twice in his life, and that was years ago. None of this made sense to him.

But a mistake this egregious would surely get straightened out quickly.

And yet the defendants’ files hadn’t been mixed up. James’s name really was on the warrant, which said that witnesses had identified him at the scene of the crime. A public defender James had never met entered a not-guilty plea, and o∞cers whisked James downstairs, where they collected his fingerprints again, snapped a mug shot, and booked him for murder.

These were busy days in Dade County’s courtrooms. Although the era of Miami’s

cocaine cowboys—those flamboyantly homicidal drug tra∞ckers—was waning as the big bosses went on the run or landed in prison, a new market had emerged. Crack cocaine was fueling the next age of street violence. Dade County, later renamed Miami-Dade County, had one of the nation’s highest murder rates.

Carjackings and home invasions were rampant. Guns were easy to find—in fact, the Tec-9 that had landed James in jail had been manufactured right in town. Police departments were harried, and the streets were frenetic. In the neighborhoods that James worked, a new breed of stickup boys had begun employing increasingly brazen techniques, sometimes dressing as women, complete with wigs and purses, to rob dealers like James. The judicial system was overloaded, and a frightened public was clamoring for harsh punishments.

After he was processed, James recalled, he met the public defender he’d seen in the courtroom, Owen Chin. The lawyer explained that he didn’t know much about the case yet.

James said he knew even less. “I never been in Coconut Grove,” he told Chin.

In the van on his ride back to the jail, James tried to guess at what might happen now. He was caught in the system’s kaleidoscope. The idea of small-business loans and real estate investments must have felt more remote than the moon. He grew angry. And at some point, the frustration began to cover another feeling: fear.

M U R D E R T H A T James was accused of committing occurred six months earlier, on January 17, 1990. That evening, as dusk was settling over a three-story apartment building at 135 South Dixie Highway, two men approached unit 110, the home of Francis and Ethra McKinnon, an older couple living on disability. One of the men wore a mask; the other didn’t bother.

With the McKinnons that night were Ethra’s daughter, Dorothy Walton, who was a THE

When his murder trial began, Thomas James was still certain that the mix-up would get sorted out. Perhaps naively, he figured that anybody who testified would take one look at him and realize— finally—he wasn’t at the scene that night.

PHOTOGRAPHS: FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS.

nurse, and her husband, Johnny. Prosecutors and witnesses would later say that these were the only four people in the apartment.

Shortly after 7 p.m., Johnny sat in the living room, chatting with Ethra as she watched television. Dorothy was in the kitchen, while Francis rested in the bedroom.

Suddenly, the unlocked apartment door burst wide and a man with a silver handgun rushed in, his face clearly visible. Behind him, a man with what might have been a stocking covering his face followed. Both shouted for everyone in sight to hit the floor: “Get down!

Goddamnit! Get down!”

Dorothy, Johnny, and Ethra did as they were told. Dorothy pleaded, “Please don’t hurt my mother!” The gunman grabbed the younger woman’s purse o≠ the kitchen table and rifled through it. Francis, hearing the commotion, stepped from the bedroom and into the hallway with a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver in one hand. He paused to take in the living room’s chaos. That gave the unmasked intruder just enough time to raise his silver gun and fire. One bullet. It entered Francis’s right cheek, traveled into his neck, and hit the carotid artery. Francis fell where he stood.

The intruders weren’t done. The gunman grabbed a cookie tin o≠ a table and removed wads of cash totaling between $300 and $400. One of them said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Then they bolted out the door. The whole episode took minutes—a confusing flash of fire, noise, and panic.

Outside, Cheryl Holcomb was in the parking lot near her mother’s apartment when she heard the bang of the pistol. She dropped to the ground and screamed. Two men ran past her. Regina Ortiz heard the shot and the scream and stepped out of her second-floor apartment, 205, directly across from unit 110.

She saw the two men sprinting west toward the highway. She recognized the one in front and later identified him in a deposition. “We call him Dog,” she said. “I grew up with him in school.”

In a small yard adjacent to the complex, a resident named Joy Thompson was hanging laundry on a clothesline when she saw a man with a silver gun in his left hand race by and dart across South Dixie Highway.

The apartment complex sat on the border of Coral Gables, home to the University of Miami. Coral Gables o∞cers were the first on the scene, but without a homicide bureau, they relinquished control of the investigation to detectives from the county’s Metro-Dade Police Department, who arrived quickly.

The cops canvased the area and began interviewing neighbors. Almost instantly the name Dog surfaced. Coral Gables o∞cer Lester Moore wrote in a report that several unknown tenants yelled out to him that “a dude by the name of Dog did it.”

Regina Ortiz, the neighbor who said she went to school with Dog, o≠ered information about the other man too. “Ms. Ortiz stated that the second person she saw running down the alleyway is known by the name Tommy James,” Metro-Dade detective Arthur Nanni wrote in the report he filed that night.

O∞cers also spoke with Larry Miller, who lived in the complex. Miller had su≠ered a head injury that impaired his speech; he made money by collecting cans. He told police he had been outside the building before the murder, when the two suspects approached and asked him for a cigarette. Then he watched

man named Thomas James. He found one: a mug shot of a Thomas Raynard James, who had a record of nonviolent drug arrests and a gun charge. Conley printed the photo and created a lineup that included the photographs of five other Black men with no connection to the incident. In his later testimony, Conley said that he did not recall if, when he searched the database for the name Thomas James, any other individuals came up.

Conley also located a mug shot for Vincent Cephus Williams and made a similar photo lineup. The next day he returned to the apartment complex with the photos. Regina

Thomas Raynard James, left, and Thomas “Tommy” James.

them head toward the McKinnons’ unit. He said he got a good look at them.

Starting around 10 that night, people began calling the Coral Gables Police Department with tips. “You’re looking for Vincent Cephus—listen to me, listen— Vincent Cephus and Thomas James. That’s all I know, bye-bye,” a man with a deep voice told an o∞cer. Later, a female caller rang the station. “I had got some information that I had heard on the street, so maybe you all want to check it out,” she said. “I heard one of the boys is named Thomas James. Then you have one that go by the name Dog, okay?

His first name is Vincent.” The o∞cer on the line then asked the caller: “Okay, and Tommy James and Vincent, they from the Grove?”

“Uh-huh, they’re from the Grove,” the woman a∞rmed.

Conley had been with Metro-Dade for 16 years and overseen more than 100 murder investigations when his supervisor assigned him to the McKinnon case that night. After arriving on the scene, he debriefed the o∞cers who’d been combing the area, and he read the reports that referenced the names Dog and Thomas James. Then, according to testimony he later provided about his work that evening, Conley drove to police headquarters and visited the department’s records section, looking for a photo of a HOMICIDE DETECTIVE KEVIN

Ortiz quickly recognized Williams, the man she knew as Dog. But she didn’t recognize anyone in the lineup containing Thomas James. “She was unable to identify Mr. James,” Conley explained in a deposition.

In fact, Ortiz subsequently had to correct how police characterized what she said the night of the shooting. In a later deposition she clarified that she never told o∞cers that she witnessed James running from the apartment—just that she had heard from others, including her sister, that a Tommy James had been the man with Dog. “I never said [I saw] Tommy James,” she explained.

Nevertheless, the rumor was recorded by detectives as an eyewitness account.

Conley showed Dorothy Walton the photos as well. She picked James out of the lineup as the man who shot her stepfather. But Conley didn’t ask her anything further—how the picture had triggered her memory or how confident she was in her recollection—which is part of suggested procedure. When Conley showed the lineup to Dorothy’s husband, Johnny, he selected someone else as the killer.

Next the detective showed his lineup to Larry Miller, the cognitively disadvantaged can collector, who identified James as the man he saw that night. In all, Conley showed the lineup to eight witnesses. Only two—Miller and Dorothy Walton—said they recognized Thomas James. (continued on page 86)

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When Wes Studi broke through in Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, he was cast as a terrifying villain. But for many in the Native community, he was a hero channeling decades of righteous anger. Tommy Orange tells the story of an overlooked icon who forever changed the way Indigenous people are depicted onscreen.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL SCHMELLING

STYLED BY JON TIETZ

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me over Zoom one recent afternoon. “As far as they’re concerned, they’re not villains. They’re W E W E N T T O S E E Dances With Wolves in the doing what they have to do in order to either theater as a family. I don’t know how many maintain their life or further their own intermovies all of us went to together. That was ests. I think it’s only human.” And this was maybe the only one. Native people playing the point. Wes Studi gave us a human in each Native people in a movie being shown in a of his roles, moved us beyond caricature, and movie theater? It was an event. This was 1990. broke through to play characters who weren’t I was eight. There’d been nothing close to specifically cast as Native Americans. He that moment in my lifetime. We were used to delivered what Native people hunger to see Italian Americans playing crying Indians in and want other people to witness: how we are anti-litter PSAs. Otherwise, I’d seen no Native here and how we are human. people onscreen. After the movie, in the car, In the process, he’s become the biggest star my dad, a Cheyenne man from Oklahoma we’ve ever had in the Native acting world, but who’d majored in Native American studies he’s never attained actual stardom. To most at Cal Berkeley, summed it up as “glamorized audiences, he’s just a fearsome face. “That’s Indian history with white man hero.” But at one thing that we haven’t had,” Wes says. “A the time I was hungry to see any Native actors sustainable part of the fabric of showbiz.” For at all. You can’t know what it’s like years he’s been dreaming of an unless you know what it’s like, to all-Native film—a Native director, ←← want to see yourself in the world producer, writer, and cast. But first, OPENING PAGES as badly as Native people do— he stresses, “we need some stars. jacket $975 we who, on top of being almost To do a full Native-cast feature or Schott NYC completely unrepresented, are series, it’s going to need men and tank top, his own women, and recognizable people misrepresented when we are repvintage pants and who put people in theater seats.” resented. So what if Dances With vintage suspenders Wes has been working in the Wolves made us the backdrop for from the dominant culture’s bearded- Front General Store industry long enough to know the nice-guy-white-hero mythology? struggles we’ve faced in our fight hat, his own for representation. But to hear At least we were there, living and sunglasses $1,170 his story is to know where we’ve breathing onscreen, even laughChrome Hearts come from, despite the setbacks ing, even making jokes at Kevin watch $6,500 Native people encounter when Costner’s expense, showing how Cartier even dreaming of making it onto we tease like we do. Make us vil→ the screen. And that’s a narrative lains, fine, but make us the toughOPPOSITE PAGE est Pawnee anyone had ever seen. that fills me with hope. jacket $1,190 Enter Wes Studi. vest $490 The first Native person to T H E F I R S T T H I N G to mention is shirt $245 pants $490 appear in the film—some 30 minhis face. “He has one of the most Double RL—Ralph utes into what seems until then arresting faces in cinema,” says Lauren a sleepy Civil War story—Wes is director Scott Cooper, who cast belt, vintage shown debating with his fellow Wes in his 2017 film, Hostiles. hat, his own “It’s a road map of a man who’s Pawnee about whether to attack lived, who’s seen things. That a white man who’s built a distant sunglasses $450 Balenciaga campfire. “I would rather die than penetrating gaze of his holds the argue about a single line of smoke lens unlike anyone else outside watch $11,700 Rolex in my own country,” he proclaims. of Denzel.”

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It’s true: His face is very arresting. The Indians.’ The thing that sets Wes apart is relearn Cherokee. “There I am in my grandpiercing gaze, the ragged cheekbones, the that he’s an exceptional actor. So he can do mother’s house,” he recalls, “and my granddeep-set laugh lines that spread out from those roles, but he can also be a detective in a mother looked at me after I said something his eyes and drop down from the corners of Michael Mann film.” in English and said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t speak But Wes hasn’t always been serious. Even that. Not in my house.’ ” his mouth. Then he actually smiles, opening his whole face up, and for a moment I’m when he’s playing a comedic role, it’s dry— After Wes’s first year of school, the family reminded of my father. How they both have he’s a kind of Indian straight man, being moved to the outskirts of Avant, Oklahoma, this real stern expression, which isn’t really funny about being so serious, like in 1999’s where they worked on a remote ranch and all that stern, just sort of waiting for when Mystery Men, where he plays a cloaked mys- largely existed in isolation, there being few the next joke might land. tical teacher and superhero-team unifier Native Americans in the area. “That’s where Wes is talking with me from his home who speaks with Yoda-like syntax, or in A I got used to the idea of being the only brown outside Santa Fe, in an area called Arroyo Million Ways to Die in the West, when he guy in town anywhere,” he says. His dreams Hondo. He’s a little frustrated with the video- tells Seth MacFarlane after drinking the in those days were limited: “nothing beyond chat technology, but once his wife, Maura, helps get the feed working, he settles into an expression of quiet curiosity. Wearing a blue Nike windbreaker, he’s sitting in a very New Mexico interior, with a guitar hanging on the adobe wall and viga-style exposed “I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A WORKING logs stretching across the ceiling. There’s a ACTOR. I’M NOT HERE TO BE A PERSONALITY. Fender amp at his side—he plays bass guitar I’M HERE FOR THE WORK.” in a band called Firecat of Discord, named for an Oneida figure who appears in times of chaos to restore a sense of calm.

For the past 25 years, he and his wife have led a mellow life here. Most mornings he wakes up and lets his dog out, a blue heeler who “blasts his way out of the house.” Then whole bowl of Indian medicine, “You’re getting a good meal and having a horse to he puts water on for co≠ee and goes out to totally gonna freak out, and probably die.” ride.” That changed in high school, when Wes feed his horse, Chloe. Wes has spent most It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but delivered attended a Native boarding school. “I was just of his life around horses, and he often rides deadpan, with no trace of a smile. freaking amazed at the number of di≠erent Sterlin Harjo, a director who recently cast kinds of Indians that I saw,” he recalls. “It was the trails bordering his property, sometimes venturing for several hours to the distant Wes as an eccentric uncle in Reservation a big cultural awakening.” outpost of Eldorado.

Dogs, a forthcoming FX comedy series about When he was 17 he joined the National Horseback riding is how he stays in shape Native teenagers committing crimes on a Guard, and in 1968 he was activated to for the “leathers and feathers,” as he play- reservation in Oklahoma, says that Studi’s serve in Vietnam. He saw plenty of action. fully calls Westerns. And those roles are most intense roles belie his range. “To most “Ambushes happen,” he recalls, “and the primarily how he’s kept working all these of the world, he’ll always be Magua,” he says. firefights start and then all hell breaks loose.” years, in over 100 projects, to the point “But Wes is a really funny guy. His physical Once, a platoon mate on his riverboat was that he’s quietly become an acting legend. humor is something that I don’t think that incinerated by a rocket. (“All that was left “I always wanted to be a working actor,” he people expect.” Cooper likewise stresses of him was a boot,” he says.) Sometimes the says. His voice is deep, with a warm rasp. Studi’s versatility: “He can play contempt and friendly fire was the worst; he still remem“I’m not here to be a personality. I’m here impatience and reluctance and dignity, often bers artillery from a U.S. airship “coming for the work.” all at once. There’s this deep humanity that down like raindrops.” Occasionally he draws Wes has mostly played stoic, historic radiates from him, and that’s because of his on those memories for his performances, but Native Americans—the title character in life experiences outside of cinema.” mostly he tries to forget. “It’s an awful thing Geronimo: An American Legend, a skeptical to see dead bodies lying around, floating Powhatan chief in Terrence Malick’s The New A S A C H I L D in the 1950s, Wes never even con- down rivers,” he says. “The inhumanity of World, a dying Cheyenne leader in Hostiles. sidered being an actor. He grew up outside warfare is something that I’m glad I’ve seen, But he’s also transcended the classification the town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in an area but I don’t ever want to see it again.” of Native actor: He’s the arms dealer Viktor at the foothills of the Ozarks called Nofire By the time he came home, the war had Sagat in Street Fighter, a police Hollow. TV and electricity were become pretty unpopular. “People didn’t detective in Heat, a Na’vi chiefwondrous and foreign concepts. want to hear anything about what hap→ tain in Avatar. “He’s kind of this “We just marveled at all that,” he pened over there,” he says. After returning OPPOSITE PAGE unicorn, as far as Native actors suit $1,695 says. His mother, a housekeeper, to Oklahoma, he became a peace activist and Giorgio Armani go, in that he’s a working Native was 17 when he was born; his began demonstrating for Native rights. He actor,” says Sydney Freeland, a shirt $210 stepfather, a ranch hand, was joined the American Indian Movement, a Budd Shirtmakers Native filmmaker. “You have all soon shipped o≠ to Germany grassroots organization formed in response these talented people, but they during the Korean War. When to the poverty and police brutality many tie $250 Charvet get typecast,” she continues.

Wes was five, he was sent away Native people faced, and in 1973 he joined hat, his own “They only work when they have to school in Muskogee, 30 miles hundreds of other activists, led by future the Western movie that shows southwest of Tahlequah, where Last of the Mohicans costars Russell Means sunglasses $1,095 Chrome Hearts he learned to speak English so and Dennis Banks, at the Pine Ridge reserup. ‘Oh, we’re going to tell a story fluently that when he returned vation in South Dakota. There, for 71 tense about the railroad going across watch $9,500 Cartier the United States—bring in the home for the summer, he had to days, they occupied the town of Wounded

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Knee, the site of an infamous 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota by the U.S. Army.

Recruited to drive a truck loaded with supplies along back roads into the encampment, Wes was intercepted by federal agents and thrown in jail, but it turned out he was only a decoy: Meanwhile another truck actually delivered the supplies.

Even now, nearly half a century later, Wes grows animated as he recounts that period of activism. “It’s like the only time we are noticed is after we make a raid of some kind, right?” he says. “I guess it really goes back to the old days. You have to ask yourself,

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do we as Indians always have to be demonstrating or fighting something? You know, causing a big uproar about something in order to be noticed?”

In the years following the occupation of Wounded Knee, he wandered. He moved to Tulsa, where he trained horses and helped revive a Cherokee-language newspaper. In the early 1980s, an old family friend from his father’s sweat lodge circle invited him to a performance at an American Indian community theater, where he discovered a latent desire to act. His first paid gig was in a stage adaptation of the book Black Elk

Speaks, about the life of an Oglala Lakota medicine man, with the lead played by none other than David Carradine, a white actor who, in addition to playing a half-Chinese character on Kung Fu, could apparently also pass as Native. As Wes puts it, “They wanted a star, and they got him.”

Wes was soon eager for bigger roles and quickly came to a realization. “I wasn’t gonna be able to do it in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” he says.

“Otherwise you’re doing community theater the rest of your life.” He was working in a bingo hall when he made his decision: One evening he announced to the crowd that he was going out to L.A. to see if he could make it as an actor. He was in his 40s, with little money and no car; he rode the bus to auditions and crashed on a friend’s couch. But his timing was good. A few years earlier, two of Hollywood’s preeminent Native actors—Will Sampson, of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame, and Jay Silverheels, of the original Lone Ranger—had started an organization called the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts to help Native actors find agents. Soon, Wes landed representation and a role in Powwow Highway, a road comedy about life on a Cheyenne reservation. A year later he became the Toughest Pawnee in Dances With Wolves.

The film would go on to win seven Academy Awards, gross over $400 million, and transform the Western genre through its sympathetic portrait of Native Americans.

But at the time of its theatrical premiere, Wes was struggling financially. “By that point I had spent all my money from the movie,” he says, “so I was working at an Indian store, selling turquoise and silver.” This was in the L.A. neighborhood of Reseda, at a shop called the Red Tipi, right across the street from a movie theater. “At first there weren’t that many people going to see that movie,” he says. “It got some rugged press.”

But within a couple of weeks a line began to form, and Wes soon found himself comforting dazed theatergoers who’d been awakened for the first time to the U.S. government’s crimes against Native people.

“We dealt with mainly guilt,” he says, “and all kinds of emotions people would have. If nothing else, they wanted to come over and just say sorry.”

There was something so perfect about this scene, this moment in his life. I mean, it was funny, with that neon tipi sign and those possibly tearful white people coming into the store to buy something from a real Indian at an Indian store. But it also felt so true to the life of any Native American artist or actor, there being some suspicion that the people interested in making our careers possible by buying our art might be doing so for reasons other than genuine reverence for our work—perhaps out of pity, or guilt,

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suit $6,750 shirt $775 Brioni tie $225 Turnbull & Asser hat, his own THIS PAGE

coat $3,250 shirt $570 Louis Vuitton Men's bolo tie, vintage vintage hat from Santa Fe Vintage sunglasses $290 Versace

or after learning something that changes the way they think about Native people.

Say it’s the Standing Rock protests in 2016, and you find yourself selling a novel about Native Americans the spring after that awful fall when Trump’s ascent to power began to jack up half the country’s anxiety about what being American even means. Or say it’s Dances With Wolves dominating the Oscars and you’re Wes Studi, selling Indian souvenirs to guilt-ridden patrons. “We made some good sales while that movie was playing there,” he says, flashing a smile. “And it stayed there a long time.”

to form the backbone of his career. “We Natives have kind of a love-hate relationship with Westerns,” he says, at the same time acknowledging that “they’re a way for Native-looking people to get into the business. It was the only way I got in.”

The genre still needs to undergo more changes, but Westerns are slowly moving toward a more human depiction of Native people. That shift is evident in Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s 2017 film, in which Wes plays Yellow Hawk, the dying Cheyenne chief being escorted back to his reservation by a soonto-retire U.S. Army captain portrayed by Christian Bale. He was acting opposite one of the great Method actors, but for this role, and many others, Wes underwent his own dramatic transformation. To play Yellow Hawk, he learned basic Cheyenne, just as he’s gained

chance to meet Wes Studi previously, in October 2019. He had admired my novel, There There, and his agent reached out, inviting me on Wes’s behalf to the Governors Awards, where he’d be receiving an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. I’ll always regret that I didn’t go. I was overwhelmed at the time. I was promoting my book and I’d said yes to too many things. It didn’t sound as desperate then as it does now as I write it here. Regardless, I should have gone. The moment was historic. Later, I watched the ceremony on YouTube. U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo introduces Wes magnanimously, and Christian Bale presents the award. When Wes T H E S U C C E S S O F Dances With Wolves cregets onstage, Oscar in hand, he thanks Bale ated new possibilities for Native actors, and and then simply says, “It’s about time.” Which in the years that followed Wes got the parts of gets a big laugh, followed by big applause.

Magua, the Indian villain in Michael Mann’s And he’s right.

Native Americans were some of the first people to be filmed—three dancing Sioux were the subject of an 1894 short film shot at one of Thomas Edison’s studios—and we’ve been a part of the industry for more than a “WE NATIVES HAVE KIND OF A LOVE-HATE hundred years. It is about time. But we’ve also been stuck in a certain time period.

RELATIONSHIP WITH WESTERNS.…

Relegated to the past. America hit the Pause THEY’RE A WAY FOR NATIVE-LOOKING PEOPLE button on what Native people meant to it TO GET INTO THE BUSINESS. after James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans. The country preferred its IT WAS THE ONLY WAY I GOT IN.” Natives gone. The only good Indians were the dead ones. Our noble, vanishing race.

This is much trod territory—that we’ve been wronged, that our story hasn’t been told.

But the truth is that Native people actually The Last of the Mohicans, and the starring proficiency in over a dozen other Native lan- have been allowed to be part of America’s role in Geronimo: An American Legend. In guages for his roles. He admits that he’s some- story, only in a way that’s convenient for the some ways, playing the Apache leader turned times groping in the dark. “It has more to do mythology the country has fashioned for prisoner of war came naturally to him. “You with using the language as best you can when itself. We were here at the nation’s beginand I are Indians,” Wes says to me. “We know you really don’t know absolutely anything nings, then became a dying enemy, and from what it feels like to be outsiders, to not be a about it,” he says. “All you can do is depend that point forward it only made sense for part of this particular society. I’m playing a on whoever is teaching you. Which syllable us to live on in Westerns, as villains, or as guy who was thought of as a terrorist back do I use to make this word sound like I know dreamy medicine people preternaturally in the day. He has a lifestyle he’s trying to what I’m doing?” connected to the land. defend, and he has a culture that he is a part When I first saw Hostiles, I was so proud Wes starring in films that have nothing to of that he’s not willing to give up.” to find out Wes spoke solely in Cheyenne for do with Native American heritage is someAfter Wes shot The Last of the Mohicans, he the part. I didn’t grow up speaking the lan- thing we acutely desire: to be allowed to married Maura Dhu, a jazz singer he’d met in guage, though my dad is one of the last living play parts without having to authenticate L.A., and they moved to Santa Fe to raise their speakers of a particular Southern Cheyenne our realness as Indians. We want to break soon-to-be-born son. Around this time, Wes dialect. Talking with Wes, I realized he was through as U.S. citizens, without anyone questioning whether we’re true heard that Michael Mann was directing an trained by a guy from Lame upcoming film starring Robert De Niro and Deer, Montana, where some Indians just because we’re capa→ Al Pacino, and one day he called the director. Natives speak a Cheyenne close ble of seeming like everyone else.

OPPOSITE PAGE When Mann answered, Wes said, “So I heard to what my dad speaks. During Of course, there are some coat $3,300 cultural di≠erences that will you’re making a film with Pacino and De Niro the pandemic, I started learning shirt $1,050 always persist. Wes says that in and Wes Studi.” Mann laughed. But Wes got a the language with my family, pants $2,300 call some weeks later and was o≠ered a part and when I recently rewatched Salvatore Ferragamo the ’80s, a white reporter once asked him, “What makes you so in Heat as a police detective—not a Native Hostiles, I listened for any familboots $1,600 Bed J.W. Ford di≠erent from us?” At the time, role, just that of a cop going after bank rob- iar words or phrases. There he said that he didn’t know, but bers who eventually gets to shoot Val Kilmer. wasn’t much. I’m not a good stuhat, his own “It was a recognition that I was not just an dent of Cheyenne. But between since then he’s come to a conclusunglasses $320 Indian actor,” Wes says, “that I was an actor what I’ve learned recently and sion, he says. “What really makes Gentle Monster above and beyond my race.” what I heard from my dad growthe di≠erence between us and scarf $225 Still, he says, it was Native-specific roles, ing up, Wes’s lines seemed familAmerican society is that we hold Double RL—Ralph Lauren particularly in Westerns, that continued iar, and that was a good feeling. on to our (continued on page 84)

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grooming by lauren chemin. tailoring by amelia fugee. produced by kyra kennedy. location: el rancho de las golondrinas, santa fe, nm.

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ancestors,” he says. “We have nothing to feel ashamed of about what they did for us. We wouldn’t be here if they didn’t do what they did for us. We wouldn’t exist had they not made the treaties.” It strikes me that what Wes is saying pertains not just to Native culture but to Native filmmaking more specifically.

When he accepted that Oscar, it seemed to be with the knowledge that he was part of a lineage that went back to Jay Silverheels and Will Sampson and stretched forward to some unknown project, not yet greenlighted, that would one day win the Native community another statue.

Wes went to Oklahoma to shoot his part in Reservation Dogs and to spend Mother’s Day with his mom. Now in her 90s, “she’s still pretty darn perky,” he says. When he was a child, he helped her with English, but these days they mostly speak in Cherokee.

She’s had this big poster of him as Geronimo up on her living room wall for years. “When you gonna take that thing down?” he’ll ask her whenever he visits. As he recounts the story, it strikes me that there are layers here. “The most famous Indian playing the most famous Indian,” I say to him. He laughs.

I N E A R LY M AY,

He was going back to see his mom again Memorial Day weekend, and to Pawhuska, the seat of Osage County, to see the Indian relay races—an old Native sport where riders race bareback horses, three di≠erent laps on three di≠erent horses. Just a few miles away is where Martin Scorsese recently filmed Killers of the Flower Moon, his adaptation of David Grann’s book about the murders of Oklahoma’s Osage Indians during the 1920s, when oil discovered beneath their reservation made them rich. I ask Wes if he was tapped for the film. “For the longest time they were checking my availability as they redid the script,” he says, “but when they finally started casting, the calls stopped.”

Wes points out that the cast does include Tatanka Means, the son of his old Last of the Mohicans costar Russell Means, and he’s encouraged by that sense of continuity. As for the industry as a whole, he stresses that there are so many more Native Americans involved in filmmaking than there were when he started out. “And now,” he says, “they’re able to write from their Native mindset.”

Sydney Freeland, who worked on Reservation Dogs with Sterlin Harjo and directed multiple episodes of Peacock’s Rutherford Falls, a comedy about an upstate New York town with a large Native community, credits Wes with part of that shift. “He laid the groundwork for a lot of the stu≠ that people are doing now,” she says. “There’s a lot of roles coming up, but they’re contemporary roles. They’re not period pieces. It’s not ‘We’re going to make a Hollywood Western with cowboys and Indians.’ That’s due in large part to the foundation that he’s put out there for everybody.” Freeland described a moment on the set of Reservation Dogs when she looked back and saw all these familiar Native faces.

“These are people whose couches I’ve slept on,” she says. “A Native showrunner, cast, and

crew.” It was what Wes had been dreaming of ever since he first wandered into Los Angeles, more than 30 years ago.

I’ve been thinking about the state of Native acting a lot this year. The TV rights for the adaptation of my novel were dropped

by HBO, and I had a feeling that it was because there were no stars to cast, too few known faces to sell the show. This was wrong, of course, because then along came Rutherford Falls, the first proper Native TV show in this country, with a largely Native cast and Native writers room, and Reservation Dogs is on the way.

But most of all, it was wrong because we still have Wes Studi, our lodestar, blazing the trail ahead with his brilliance. I was recently asked to write a short film for a production company out of Oakland. I’d never written a screenplay before, but I did start dreaming up a script, written for Wes Studi specifically. Something that would showcase all of his talents, as a charmer, a humorist, a speaker of several languages. He’ll be an older Native man traveling across the American landscape, visiting A.A. meetings along the way. He’ll be a poet who published his first book in his 70s, after a lifetime of addiction.

He’ll rob banks with handwritten notes. His twin brother will have died recently, and the book will be coming out at the end of his trip. Something like that. I’m probably not the one to do it. But someone else should.

Write it with Wes in mind. With all that he can do, and with all that it could mean to have him star in a film everyone sees.

Well, obviously not everyone. Just enough of an audience, which is all we’ve ever asked for.

Baker never actually came to school dressed like an astronaut, but when he moved to Cleveland midway through high school, he was definitely a kid in a costume. I was particularly attuned to new arrivals, having relocated to the city during middle school myself.

But even if I hadn’t been, Colson Baker would have been hard to miss.

new Birkenstocks stomp the same halls as fading Air Force 1s.

Already close to six feet tall, he was as lanky as he was pale, sporting a buzz cut and what had to have been XXXXXXL white T-shirts that draped down past his knees. He was the kid who got so obsessed with The Fast and the Furious that he saved the paychecks from his after-school job at Dave’s Supermarket to install neon lights on the underside of his dad’s PT Cruiser. As Baker himself explains it, he felt he “had to be a complete juxtaposition to our scenery.”

“You’ve got to understand, those things came from me being by myself and having no guidance,” he told me. “My guidance came from who was talking to me in my headphones and who I was watching on TV. The neighborhoods I was hanging in, the people I was around, those were my influences, those were my parents, those were my guidances.”

Baker’s home life was chaotic. His mother left the family when he was young. His father, who died last July, struggled with alcohol abuse and depression. Father and son clashed constantly as Baker was dragged around the

tommy orange is the author of the novel ‘There There,’ a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

This is his first article for gq.

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“You have to be crazy enough to be the editor of the fucking school newspaper to end up growing up and editing in fucking real newspapers, you know what I’m saying?

“I was like the kid wearing an astronaut suit and everybody was like, ‘Why the fuck would you do that?’ But the universe saw me wearing an astronaut suit and was like, ‘We can give it to all the people who aren’t wearing it, or we can just give it to the fucking kid who’s wearing an astronaut suit and make him a spaceship.’ ”

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S H A K E R H E I G H T S , O H I O , can be di∞cult to pin down: It’s a relatively white, moneyed suburb just southeast of Cleveland, known for its liberal values and early embrace of school integration. Writers who’ve profiled Baker over the years have painted our public high school as a somewhat rough, majority Black school just outside the city limits, while those who’ve read or watched Little Fires Everywhere imagine a town full of condescending Reese Witherspoons. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It’s the kind of city where a kid from government housing gets dropped o≠ at a friend’s mansion to work on their group project—and both of them are expected to go to college. It’s a land where

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world under a strict set of expectations. And prior to their reconciliation later in life, Baker looked to pop culture for cues.

“I had to be whatever I was seeing on TV. I will never forget when I saw American Gangster in theaters, with Denzel Washington. I immediately went to my boss.… I borrowed his fur coat and I borrowed his suit…and swore to God that I was Frank Lucas. A week later I would see Travis Barker in a music video and I would be in a T-shirt with a purple tie over it and some baggy JNCO jeans.”

When we all went o≠ to college, Baker stayed behind, getting a job at the Chipotle in the next town over and playing shows downtown. He was relentless—the first rapper to win amateur night at the Apollo, releasing mixtapes and uploading behind-the-scenes videos directly to YouTube. His lyrics painted him as the underdog and the outcast, which played well with the fans, who bought tickets to his shows in legions and got “Lace Up” and “EST,” two of his early calling cards, tattooed on their bodies. When I asked why his fan base is so loyal, he said, “There’s a lot of kids whose yearbooks weren’t signed, if that makes any sense. There’s are a lot of kids who are like, ‘Dude, I’m not cool. I don’t know what to grab on to. Who’s representing for me?’ ” I mentioned that, at the time, I hadn’t imagined Baker as much of a teenage outcast. His home life certainly seemed a mess, but from what I could gather from Facebook, he was going to parties I wasn’t invited to and hanging out with girls I was scared to talk to. When you’re blowing out the bass in your mom’s minivan, a tricked-out PT Cruiser seems damn cool. But then again, Baker was always someone I knew of but never really knew. I’m pretty sure the first time we spoke was sometime during our senior year, when Baker stopped me in the hallway near the planetarium and asked me to buy his high school mixtape, Stamp of Approval.

“I still have that article,” Baker told me, breaking into a laugh and turning to Fox, who at the moment was standing just across the room. “He [wrote] the first review ever of any music I’d ever done in the school newspaper,” he said. “It was ballsy that I even had the nerve to go and sell that mixtape in the first place,” he added to me. “Clearly I was overvaluing myself. There was already a point of delusion.”

He’s got a point. I’d probably be a little less generous with my review today—I gave him four stars out of five, suggested he get to his hooks more quickly, and accurately predicted he’d likely “ascend to the role of a major player in the Cleveland rap scene.”

When I listen to it now, the mixtape contains hints of things to come: enough youthful defiance and nearly unhinged bravado to persuade Chip tha Ripper, then one of the city’s hottest rappers, to feature on one of the standout tracks.

“Essentially what I would tell people back then was, ‘I’m going to be the biggest rapper in the world’ or ‘I’m going to be the biggest rock star in the world,’ ” Baker explained. “I didn’t ever settle for ‘I’m just going to get a record deal.’ I did always put the bar super high.”

During my sophomore year of college, Baker reached out to see if I could help connect him with the organizers of an annual music festival held near campus. By the next year, he was the show’s headlining act. When we ran into each other on the night of his performance, he recognized me but was momentarily shocked when I called him Colson. By then he had completely transformed into Machine Gun Kelly.

a couple more transformations since then—from rapper to rock star, from underdog musician to Hollywood guy dating a generational sex symbol, with a seemingly bottomless well of famous friends. The changes, he explained to me, came after he really began to find himself: “This was partly to do with the costumes.

I still was trying to be somebody else, and now I’m kind of like, ‘I’ve found who I am.’ It took me having a partner to realize that who I am on the red carpet is also who I am in the house now.”

Stuck inside during the early days of the pandemic, Baker picked up his guitar and began releasing “Lockdown Sessions”— covers of everything from Paramore’s “Misery Business” to Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova”—on YouTube, where they were viewed tens of millions of times.

Then, in September, he released Tickets to My Downfall, a stark departure from his hip-hop past: a 15-track pop-punk album that sounds like a Blink-182–Linkin Park hybrid.

Critics wondered if it was a stunt—and it was certainly savvy, soaring not just to the top of the rock charts but to the top of the Billboard 200. “There is a shitload of teenagers that are going through things and are needing somebody to preach to the choir,” explained Cole Chase Hudson, the TikTok star who goes by Lil Huddy and appeared in Downfalls High, a 49-minute musical short film Baker released earlier this year.

“Pop-punk is emotional…angsty and rebellious and younger and feels more fun,” Travis Barker, who produced and plays drums on the album, told me during a late-night phone interview. “I don’t know that there is another style of music that is like that.”

Barker, who said he now considers Baker his “best friend,” met the singer years ago after a Blink-182 concert; hangouts ensued whenever Barker was in Cleveland. In 2019, Baker confided that he had an acoustic ri≠ and hook he was struggling to build into a full song.

Barker got to work and within days, “I Think I’m OKAY,” Baker’s first true rock track, was finished. Later the two went to the studio to work on what eventually became Tickets to My Downfall.

“It helps him a lot, coming from being a rapper and being more of a lyricist,” Barker explained. “Typically in rap music, they pay more attention to cadence and pay more attention to words and ways of saying things that rock musicians don’t really think of. He was successful at a completely other genre of music. Not many people can do that.”

Even in the depths of his party-rap years, Baker was bragging that he’d “got these crazy white boys yelling ‘Cobain’s back!,’ ” tattooing BAKER HAS UNDERGONE

the anarchy symbol above his belly button, and dropping a mixtape titled Black Flag.

At its core an album about addiction, loneliness, and attention-seeking antics, Tickets to My Downfall delivered Baker’s tried-and-true ballads of the screwup in a di≠erent genre.

“It was just like reverting back to me selling the mixtapes in the hallway and putting a price on it,” he said. “All those years of me covering rock songs in concerts. All those years of me being on Warped Tour. All those years…I was just way too ‘I’m going to be the biggest rock star.’ How can you be the biggest rock star if you’re not making rock music?”

Baker has always alternated between party boy and misunderstood outcast. But on this album there is a new self-awareness— that although he’s successful, it’s clear he’s unhappy, and that the partying and bar fights and tabloid romances look like a train wreck from the outside. “I’m not holding back at all with the lyrics,” he told me. “It’s all the realities of what pressure does to you.

I’m not talking about pressure like surfacelevel pressure. I’m talking about pressure that will put somebody on their ass or create a diamond.”

While completing Tickets, Baker found what he believes is happiness. Last spring, he met Fox on the set of the upcoming thriller Midnight in the Switchgrass. Before long he was wearing a necklace from which dangles a vial containing a drop of Fox’s blood—shades of Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton.

The whirlwind romance with Fox, Baker says, is his first true love. During a podcast appearance last year, Fox described herself and Baker as “twin flames,” meaning “we’re actually two halves of the same soul.”

In the weeks after I spoke with Baker alone, the couple made headlines on TMZ and in the Daily Mail for their surprise Indy 500 party appearance; kissing on the side of the street after getting pulled over by the cops; appearing to park a Range Rover in a disabled-driver spot; cuddling at a graduation ceremony; and showing up at Logan Paul and Floyd Mayweather’s fight in Miami.

You might be cynical about all of that, but Baker doesn’t care. “It seems like right when someone gets happy all the—I call them the miserables—all of the miserables come out and they want you to join their club because they don’t like happy,” he told me.

The younger Baker would have been bothered by this. For years he was driven by the haters, the people who said he’d never be what he has become. But now, he says, he’s got more security. He’s the dog who caught the car. The kid who lived his dream, and who knows it. After decades of fighting for your respect and attention, he’s done asking. This all made me wonder if the most famous kid from my high school class was finally growing up. But Baker said he hasn’t thought that far ahead.

“I guess if I had a word to describe where I’m at right now, it would just be running,” Baker told me toward the end of our call. “I don’t allow myself to really acknowledge anything right now. I’m just running.”

wesley lowery is a Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist.

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In fact, Dorothy Walton and her mother later told police that they even knew Thomas James’s mother; they said they were related to her.

Conley was convinced he’d identified the killer, but it took him six months to locate the man in his photo lineup. He finally found Thomas Raynard James in jail on a gun arrest, lodged under an alias he’d given police when he was picked up. Conley already had the warrant ready when he located him. On the form, when asked to describe the relationship between the victim and the defendant, Conley wrote “very distant relative.”

recall that in the weeks that followed, as he prepared for his trial, he met with his lawyer on only three occasions, for less than an hour each time. He knew Chin wanted to present an alibi, but James honestly couldn’t provide one.“Where were you on January 17?” Chin asked at one point.

“January? It’s August! I don’t know where I was!” James fumed.

Chin ran through the evidence, telling James that prosecutors had a witness who placed him at the scene and even knew his mother. James was perplexed. “My mother?

Don’t nobody in Coconut Grove know my mother,” he said. It was like he was in a parallel universe, one where people were talking about some other Thomas James.

While he waited in jail, James befriended and confided in an older inmate named Sammy Wilson, who was facing drug-tra∞cking charges. To Wilson, James’s case didn’t seem right. A botched robbery? Wilson didn’t think so. In those days family members could drop o≠ clothes for inmates to wear while incarcerated, and as Wilson remembers it, James “always dressed fresh.” To Wilson’s eye, the figure that James cut was of a hustler or a dealer, not a thief. “His pants, his shirt, his shoes— everything he had matched. He kept his hair trimmed. He was GQ,” Wilson told me. “That right there let me know he wasn’t no robber.” It wasn’t much, but it inclined Wilson to believe James when he claimed there had been some kind of mistake. And Wilson made a point to remember the kid’s story.

J A M E S W O U L D L AT E R

trial began in January 1991, he was still certain that the mix-up would get sorted out. Perhaps naively, he figured that anybody who testified would take one look at him and realize—finally—he wasn’t at the scene that night. The prosecutor called 11 witnesses; hardly any of them WHEN THOMAS JAMES’S

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were in a position to recognize James from the crime scene. Most were police o∞cers, crime scene investigators; one was the medical examiner who performed Francis McKinnon’s autopsy. There were only three eyewitnesses: Ethra McKinnon, Dorothy Walton, and Larry Miller, the can collector who said the men asked him for a cigarette before the robbery. But Miller was not an ideal witness. When he took the stand, the prosecutor asked, “Do you see that person, the man who came up and asked you for a cigarette that night? Do you see him in the courtroom?” Miller replied, “No.” Just as James had predicted.

Ethra McKinnon, frail and elderly, told the court what happened in the apartment but said she had been too scared to get a good look at the robbers. Dorothy Walton, however, was more certain. She was a registered nurse and trained in making detailed observations. She picked out James as the man who entered the apartment, told everyone to get on the ground, and then shot her stepfather in the face. The only other testimony directly related to James’s involvement came from the lead investigator, Detective Conley, who explained how he showed the photo lineup to Walton and Miller and got a positive ID for the killer.

That was the extent of the evidence against Thomas Raynard James. Nine fingerprints were lifted from the crime scene, but none matched his. No gun was recovered, no DNA was collected, no footprints were photographed. Chin didn’t call any witnesses for the defense. He simply cross-examined the individuals the prosecution presented. (Chin, now retired, declined to answer questions for this article, citing client confidentiality.

But his strategy was likely guided by a now defunct Florida trial rule stipulating that when a defendant chose to call witnesses, but declined to testify themselves, their lawyers lost the right to rebut the prosecution’s closing argument.)

The trial lasted two and a half days, during which the jury considered four charges: first-degree murder, armed robbery, armed burglary, and aggravated assault. On the third day, when they returned from deliberating, Judge Fredericka G. Smith asked, “Did you reach a verdict?” With his mother, Doris, watching from the spectators’ bench, James saw the judge take a sheet of paper from the jury foreman. “We the jury find as follows,” Judge Smith read aloud. “The defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree.”

James went numb. The word guilty followed each of the other charges. He felt unmoored from reality.

A week later, he was given a life sentence.

As cold shock spread over him, James realized he had seriously misread the threat to his existence. He would be eligible for parole in 25 years, but that didn’t register. I’m going to die in prison, he thought.

In fact, prosecutors pondered the possibility of the death penalty for James. However, one of them, RoseMarie Antonacci-Pollock, who helped prepare the case, wrote in a memo that she recommended not seeking capital punishment because, as she wrote, “I am extremely concerned about the very weak nature of the state’s evidence in this case.”

justice system is not expected to be perfect. It was designed with levers and pulleys to counterbalance errors.

But the levers and pulleys don’t always work.

In fact, it is increasingly apparent that they fail at an alarming rate. Around this, a consensus has grown, and reform movements, backed by conservative and liberal groups alike, have taken on issues ranging from decriminalizing minor matters like motor vehicle infractions to reducing jail populations. Prosecutors are being elected in cities across the country, pledging to make systems fairer for the poor and for people of color. Police have begun to refine their procedures around the number of witnesses they use to build cases. But none of that was happening in 1991. Not in Miami.

When Thomas Raynard James shipped o≠ to state prison, he concluded that the only person he could rely on for help was himself. He resolved that if the truth of what happened that night in Coconut Grove was ever going to emerge, he would have to uncover it.

One day, about a year into his sentence, James was walking in the yard at Hendry Correctional Institution, in Immokalee, when another inmate approached him. “You in for that murder in the Grove?” the man asked.

“Yeah, but I didn’t do it.”

The inmate looked James dead in the eye.

“I know,” he said. “You and the dude who did it have the same name.”

James was stunned and elated. Perhaps there really was another Thomas James, he thought. He realized something else too: Prison might provide more answers for him than the courts. James didn’t know anybody in Coconut Grove, but behind bars he would meet outlaws from all over Florida; he could investigate his own case.

It was slow going. He’d requested the files from his case but couldn’t get his hands on any until 1996. When they arrived, he read them with a hardened new perspective. He was no longer the kid who assumed matters would eventually work themselves out. He was amazed by what he learned.

One of the first things that struck him was that, according to the documents, there were seven people in the apartment when the robbers burst in, not four, as the prosecutor and witnesses claimed at trial. Three children were also present that night: Lance JeanJacques, age nine; Josmine Byrd, age eight; and Robert Tamsie Smith, age six. They were not related to one another or anyone else in the apartment, although their families lived in the complex. What were they doing there?

And why was their presence not mentioned in court?

More glaring to James were the statements from witnesses who seemed to refer to a di≠erent Thomas James altogether. For example, he noticed that Ethra McKinnon made several references to Thomas James’s mother in her pretrial deposition, referring to the woman as “Mary.” That shocked James; his mother’s name is Doris.

“I knew his mother,” McKinnon said at one point in the deposition. “That’s Mary’s son, Thomas James, and the other one she call Dog. His right name is Vincent.”

He discovered that McKinnon even suggested that she was related to James and his THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL

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family. “Well, his grandmother mother was my sister-in-law,” she said.

James had an idea. He was friendly with a prison sta≠er who had been helpful with work assignments. He needed a favor. Could she search the prison records system and see if there was another Thomas James? She agreed and quickly found an incarcerated Thomas James serving a life sentence for a series of armed robberies. The prison o∞cer read closer. This man’s last known address was in South Miami, about three miles from the Coconut Grove apartment complex.

Then James asked if she could look up the name of the inmate’s mother. She did. It came back as Mary.

a breakthrough and gave James real hope for the first time in years. He had been fighting his conviction ever since the prison doors shut behind him, looking for evidence to contest his conviction. He filed his first appeal in 1992, claiming the photographic lineup was suggestive and that he had had ine≠ective counsel. He filed another in 1994. Both had been rejected.

Undeterred, he slogged on, studying the law, the process, his dwindling options. He wouldn’t let himself fall into despair and lethargy. Investigating the case gave him a purpose.

Now, with the information he’d found about the young witnesses and the comments about “Mary’s son,” James filed another appeal, asserting he had new evidence. But this was also rejected. The problem was that the information had been made available to his lawyer, so this wasn’t considered new. Chin had, apparently, simply never told his client about it. The denial was a crushing blow, but James remained resolved. He kept digging.

James became a sleuth, an investigator.

Whenever he was transferred to a di≠erent prison, or whenever new inmates arrived, he was ready with a question: Anyone from Coconut Grove? Over the next few years, James collected more and more information. He heard rumors that the McKinnons’ apartment was a numbers house. The bolita, or Cuban numbers, was a gambling enterprise popular in Miami, and Francis McKinnon was rumored to be a so-called numbers man who collected money for the bets. This could explain why children might have been in the apartment— perhaps sent to pick up their parents’ winnings.

It also provided a possible explanation for why that apartment was robbed in the first place.

(At trial, prosecutors never bothered to present an explanation for why an unemployed couple in a poor part of town were targeted for an armed heist.)

At Everglades Correctional Institution, in 2005, James met an inmate named Andre Slaton. As they got to know each other and James explained his situation, Slaton revealed that about a decade earlier he had met a guy, in another prison, who opened up to him about a robbery. According to Slaton, the man said that he and his partner once hit a numbers house and were confronted inside.

He told Slaton they had to “bust a hero” and that afterward police arrested somebody else.

Slaton said the man who told him all this was Vincent Cephus Williams. Also known as Dog. T H E D I S C O V E RY WA S

James asked Slaton if he’d share this in a signed statement, which he did. A story from an inmate wasn’t going to win an appeal, James knew, but the information helped him understand what had happened. In 2012, he received another written statement from a second inmate, who claimed that Dog had bragged that he and a partner “hit a number-house on the Dixie.” The inmate recalled Dog saying, “I had to bust pop for being a hero.”

James’s goal was to keep compiling witnesses and evidence until his case was overwhelming. His family helped. His cousin Charles Brister and his mother knocked on doors at the apartment complex and passed out flyers, looking for information. They got a break in 2014, when a friend posted a picture of James on Facebook along with a request for tips about the crime. Josmine Byrd, one of the children in the apartment, saw the post. She was now 33 and claimed that she had never been interviewed by the police. (O∞cers did talk to her after the murder and made notes but never took a formal statement. Conley showed her the photo lineup containing James’s picture and she didn’t recognize anyone in it.) Now she was volunteering to testify about what she witnessed. She signed a notarized statement declaring that Thomas James “is not the man I saw shoot Mr. McKinnon.

I had a clear view of the man’s face ‘which I won’t forget’ and Thomas James is not him.”

Using Byrd’s statement, James filed another appeal. Like the others, it was denied. He reached out to newspaper and TV reporters, to no avail. A producer for a major TV network asked to review the documents, James recalled, so he sent them. He never heard back—and said he never got his case file back, either. These were dark years. No one was listening; the facts seemed not to matter. Finally, he sought help from the last person he could think of. He wrote a letter to the other Thomas James.

about James’s case from Sammy Wilson, James’s former jail mate. I had met Wilson years ago, when I was a reporter for the Miami New Times covering “outlaw Miami” (my editor’s label), and we had stayed in touch. Wilson and I went to a Popeyes for lunch in March 2020 to talk about the state’s stop-and-go e≠orts to restore voting rights to felons. I had just attended a seminar on justice reform presented by John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and I suppose that’s why, as we finished our fried-chicken sandwiches, I said, “Hey, Sammy. If you think you know anyone who is wrongfully convicted, let me know.”

“Hell, I know a guy saying he’s innocent since the day I met him,” Wilson shot back.

I began poring over James’s case and meeting with his family, learning about the kid who grew up playing Pop Warner and idolizing the Dolphins, who loved the Commodores and the Bar-Kays and the fried conch at Jumbo’s. I heard, as well, about the hardheaded teen who wouldn’t listen to his parents.

When I finally met Thomas James, at South Bay Correctional Facility, a privately run prison on the edge of the Everglades in Palm Beach County, he was no longer the young man who dreamed of owning buildings. He was middle-aged now.

I FIRST HEARD

He had wide eyes and a round, friendly face.

Years of careful investigation have made him an e∞cient thinker and communicator. He answered, without hesitation, all of my questions about his growing up, his venturing into the drug trade, and his finding trouble with the law. He explained how his parents tried to steer him right. “I chose my own path. They warned me,” he said, adding that his mother would never take any of the money he o≠ered her. He seemed grateful to be heard. “I’ve been trying for a very long time,” he said.

But James didn’t have all the answers to his case. There were limits to what he could uncover. So I spent much of the past year filing public-records requests and searching for documents. I also attempted to track down the people who were at the apartment complex that night, 30 years ago.

Josmine Byrd, the little girl who witnessed the murder, was di∞cult to locate because she had been in, then out of, then back in jail on drug charges. But through a lawyer she a∞rmed the statement she had signed. “I just talked to Josmine, and she said yes, she did sign that a∞davit, and that it is accurate, that the individual she saw kill Mr. McKinnon was not Thomas James,” the attorney, André Rouviere, told me. “That is confirmed. She recalled it vividly.”

As if to underscore how tough life was in and around 135 South Dixie, one of the other child witnesses, Lance Jean-Jacques, was in jail awaiting trial on attempted-murder charges. I wrote him a letter and received a note acknowledging that he received it, but then silence. A private investigator friend tried to help me get a bead on Dog—Vincent Cephus Williams—but no luck.

I visited Dorothy Walton’s home. She met me at the door, but then a young man stepped in front of her and said we would have to talk later. “You’re dropping a bomb on us,” he told me. I followed up by mail and phone but couldn’t persuade her to speak with me.

Detective Conley told me through an intermediary that he wasn’t interested in talking, either. He wanted to enjoy his retirement.

But I was able to interview one of the people present in the apartment complex when McKinnon was killed.

Cheryl Holcomb, whose mother lived in a neighboring apartment, was at the complex that night. She confirmed for me that Mr. McKinnon was a numbers man in the bolita racket. “They wrote numbers downstairs, like Cuban numbers,” she said about the McKinnons. She recalled for me standing in the parking lot outside her mother’s apartment when she heard the gunshot. She ducked down and screamed. She didn’t remember seeing anyone run by her, but later she did hear people say it was Thomas James and Dog. She knew both men from the neighborhood.

Thomas James lived about three miles away.

“It was the Thomas James who stayed in South Miami,” she said about the man everyone was referring to. “The Thomas James I knew of, he was popular, everybody knew him,” she told me. He was handsome and tough, and all the girls liked him. “They say that Thomas James, he don’t play.”

She had seen a picture of Thomas Raynard James on the Florida Department of

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Corrections website. “See now, the guy they got there, I don’t know him. That’s not the Thomas James I know.”

James—who has no middle name and goes by Tommy—is housed these days at the Tomoka Correctional Institution, among the scrub pines of central Florida, just west of downtown Daytona Beach. When I met him there, he had on a faded blue prison uniform. He was tall, with wide shoulders, and when he sipped from a cup of water, his gold teeth flashed in the light. I could see why he’d been popular with the ladies.

Tommy James has been in jail almost as long as Thomas Raynard James. He was convicted as a habitual o≠ender in 1996, at the age of 23, and given a life sentence, another young man for whom we’d collectively agreed there could be no redemption. We put him behind bars and lost the key. Maybe that’s why he was talking with me now. He sympathized with the man who shared his name, both buried by society and forgotten.

He wasted no time getting to the point.

“I know the other Thomas James was arrested by accident, by mistake” he told me.

“The o∞cers were looking for me.”

What the cops didn’t know at the time was that he couldn’t have been the killer. He had been arrested the day before on unrelated charges and, according to a jail booking card I obtained, was locked up when the murder took place. This Thomas James had a pretty good alibi. Still, he thought he could help clear some things up, so he told me his story.

Tommy James grew up poor in a tough part of Miami. To complicate things, he said, he was small for his age. “Coming up in school, I was a runt—I had runt complex,” he said. To compensate, he acted out. He ran through tra∞c, jumped over cars, climbed the tallest tree. He’d fight bigger kids “just to prove I was the toughest.” Soon he was carrying knives, then guns.

“Like they say, I didn’t play,” he o≠ered, echoing what I had heard from Cheryl Holcomb. “I had a reputation for being fearless.”

His childhood outlook was formed by a survival imperative. “It was a bad environment to grow up in. There was no one to nurture you other than other criminals,” he said.

And that’s how he fell in with Vincent Cephus Williams. “Dog was like the leader of a crew,” Tommy said. “We hit drug dealers, numbers houses.” They robbed outlaws, victims who wouldn’t call the cops. “The house targeted was a numbers house,” he said about the McKinnons’ apartment. “Months earlier it was scoped out. I had been there before. It was on the list. It was discussed.”

Tommy said he had been familiar with the apartment since he was a boy. “I been there.

My mama’s been there. We were related in some way. We been in that house!” he said.

Just as Ethra McKinnon had told prosecutors.

Tommy’s recollection that he and Dog were casing the apartment, and talking about robbing it, means that others could have heard or seen what they were up to. And that could be the reason witnesses thought he was involved.

Of course, he wasn’t. “I was in jail,” he told me. “I woke up in the morning—I had been there maybe two days—and this guy from the T H E OT H E R T H O M AS

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neighborhood comes in. He assumes I’m there for the murder.”

Tommy said he was confused. Who got killed? he asked. According to Tommy, the man replied, “You know, the man in the Grove who ran the numbers house.”

Tommy James got out of prison in 1993. He recalled meeting up with Dog. “ ‘You know, they think I did that thing with you in the Grove,’ ” Tommy remembered telling him, as they sat in Dog’s car. “He said, ‘Yeah, keep your mouth shut. We outta here.’ He said no one was after me for it.” By then, Thomas Raynard James had been charged and convicted.

Talk in the neighborhood was a confused mess. Thomas Raynard James had been sent to prison, but on the streets Tommy James, a free man, was rumored to be the murderer.

He never thought to set the record straight.

According to Tommy, he kept his mouth shut as Dog instructed.

Tommy told me he doesn’t know who was with Dog during the robbery, except to say it wasn’t Thomas Raynard James. “We would never involve a person who was not on the team,” he said. “Never would have happened.”

He also told me he didn’t know where Dog was these days. Amazingly, Vincent Cephus Williams was never tracked down by police— even though he’d been positively identified by numerous witnesses who saw him at the scene and again in the photo lineup. That’s more evidence than the police used to arrest Thomas Raynard James. A bulletin to detain him was issued to police departments. Yet Detective Conley couldn’t find Williams? It defies belief.

Especially because he was, for many years, right under their noses. In 1991, he was convicted in a Miami courtroom of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and sentenced to 11 years. He spent a decade in the custody of the state—all the while wanted by police in connection to a murder. How much could go wrong in one investigation?

Years ago, when Thomas Raynard James discovered Tommy James was in prison, he wrote to him. “He went about it the wrong way,” Tommy said about the letters he received. “He was saying, ‘Just admit it. My mom’s old. I need to take care of her.’ ” Tommy got angry. “I mean, man, you crazy,” he said. “He was trying to get me charged for murder.” So Tommy acted out. He wrote a letter saying he would confess if Thomas Raynard James paid him $50,000. Thomas Raynard James stopped writing.

But years have passed, and Tommy feels di≠erently now: “This is new. Now I’m saying it. I’m willing to talk.” He told me that he’ll speak with anybody he needs to—defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges—in order to help. “I was the one they were looking for initially.”

Tommy was adamant: A grave mistake had been made. “It’s a fact it was me they was looking for, not him,” he said. “I know it’s not him, and I feel bad for him.” Then, as our interview wound down, he said in a quiet voice, “Let the other Thomas James know I feel for him. I’m sorry this happened.”

too often. The singularity of this tragedy is that he found a way to discover an improbable truth and it wasn’t enough to get anybody’s attention. The criminal justice system, that vast assemblage of state agencies and bureaucracies, is not designed to look backward. It is a juggernaut that rolls unceasingly forward.

The slim hope that’s often left to convicts like James is that they might get lucky with an ad hoc array of long-shot advocates—law school clinics, grassroots campaigns, or the media. In fact, I wondered where the media had been for James. He told me he had reached out to everyone in South Florida— The Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel, local TV news stations CBS 4, NBC 6, FOX 7, and ABC 10. Then, during our conversation, James told me the most devastating thing I could hear: “You know I wrote to you, back when you were at New Times,” he told me. “Sammy gave me your name.” He didn’t sound angry; he was just answering my question regarding whom he reached out to. When I checked with Wilson, it turns out the letter was sent after I had left New Times. But that fact brings me no relief. Instead the “what ifs” haunt me.

Still, we do what we can. In March, I reported what I had found to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s O∞ce for review by its Justice Project, which examines potential wrongful convictions. A spokesperson for the agency, Ed Gri∞th, updated me in June: “The state attorney’s o∞ce Justice Project is actively investigating, and we are waiting for additional materials to be supplied to us from Mr. James.”

James has had to be stoic. He doesn’t allow himself to get too excited by any one advance nor let himself fall into despair at any one setback. A Coral Springs lawyer named Natlie Figgers recently took over James’s case and is preparing an appeal based on new evidence: the potential testimony of Tommy James. But she knows that the sheer number of appeals James has filed over the years may complicate things. She told me that she’s also hoping that the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s O∞ce, or even the governor, will look at the case.

So what happens now? Here’s what: Tomorrow, Thomas Raynard James will get up at 5 a.m. and head to breakfast, as he has done for 30 years. He’ll eat, then walk the yard.

Then lunch, then another walk in the yard.

After dinner, maybe he’ll watch some TV in the common area before lights out at 10 p.m.

That’s what will happen. As he walks and eats and sits, maybe he’ll ponder a future that could have been, the businessman he wanted to be. Or maybe such fantasies are dangerous to a man locked up for life. Of course, what he hopes will happen is that the courts will hear his appeal and that the State Attorney’s O∞ce will see the chain of mistakes that led to his conviction. And that someday, before he dies, he will walk out of prison an exonerated man. Until then, in the moments when he can—whether he’s wandering in the yard, eating in the mess hall, or watching TV in the common area—he’ll keep asking if anyone is from Coconut Grove.

of this case is not just that Thomas Raynard James was wrongfully convicted. That, unfortunately, happens all

tristram korten is the author of ‘Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival,’ which was based on his November 2016 gq article.

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accountable for what you do, but then also endeavor to learn something beyond the obvious from it.”

In the first season of Ted Lasso, the comic premise of the show is revealed to be a tragic one: Ted is in England, far from home, doing something he doesn’t know how to do and probably shouldn’t be doing at all, in order to give his failing marriage space to survive.

When the character’s wife and son visit, in the show’s fifth episode, his wife tells him, “Every day I wake up hoping that I’ll feel the way I felt in the beginning. But maybe that’s just what marriage is, right?” It’s a wrenching moment that also gives new meaning to the show: Ted Lasso’s heart is big, but it can also be broken as violently and as easily as anyone else’s. By the end of the season, Lasso is divorced and renegotiating his relationships with his now ex-wife and son.

The first season of Ted Lasso had already been written—had already aired—by the time Sudeikis found himself living some aspects of it in real life. “And yet one has nothing to do with the other,” Sudeikis told me. “That’s the crazy thing. Everything that happened in season one was based on everything that happened prior to season one. Like, a lot of it three years prior. You know what I mean? The story’s bigger than that, I hope. And anything I’ve gone through, other people have gone through. That’s one of the nice things, right?

So it’s humbling in that way.”

And in fact, the seeds of Ted’s heartbreak, Sudeikis said, went all the way back to a dinner he had with Wilde around 2015, during which she first encouraged him to explore whether Ted Lasso could be more than just a bit on NBC. “It was there, the night at dinner, when Olivia was like, ‘You should do it as a show,’ ” he said.

They got to talking about it. Sudeikis asked why Ted Lasso would move in the first place, to coach a team he had no real reason to coach: “ ‘Okay, but why would he take this job? Why would a guy at this age take this job to leave?

Maybe he’s having marital strife. Maybe things aren’t good back home, so he needs space.’ And I just ri≠ed it at dinner in 2015 or whenever, late 2014. But it had to be that way. That’s what the show is about.”

I said to Sudeikis that I thought that while it was common for artists to put a lot of their lives into their art, it was less common that they end up living aspects of the art in their lives, after the fact.

“I wonder if that’s true,” he replied. “I mean, isn’t that just a little bit of what Oprah was telling us for years and years? You know, manifestation? Power of thought? That’s The Secret in reverse, you know?”

But…if we’re being honest, is that a thing you want to manifest?

“No. No. But, again, it isn’t that. It wasn’t that. And again, that’s just me knowing the details of it. Like, that’s just me knowing where it comes from, where any of it comes from.”

But he acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not necessarily a bad one, but a hard one.

“I think it was really neat,” he said. “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Is that easier said than done? To land like an Avenger?

“I don’t know. It’s just how I landed. It doesn’t mean when you blast back up you’re not going to run into a bunch of shit and have to, you know, fight things to get back to the heights that you were at, but I’d take that over 412 bones anytime.”

He paused, then continued: “But there is power in creating 412 bones! Because we all know that a bone, up to a certain age, when it heals, it heals stronger. So, I mean, it’s not to knock anybody that doesn’t land like an Avenger. Because there’s strength in that too.”

attended the Golden Globes, which were being held remotely on Zoom. He had his misgivings about the event—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the awards, had been in the news for a series of unflattering revelations about its organization, and also the show was taking place in the middle of the night in London. Tom Ford had sent over a suit for Sudeikis to wear, and he tried it on, in his flat in Notting Hill, but he felt ridiculous, there in the middle of the night, and so changed out of it and into a tie-dyed I N F E B R U A R Y, S U D E I K I S

“With kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. ‘I’m bad with names.’

‘I’m always late.’… All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it!” hoodie made by his sister’s clothing company.

“I wore that hoodie because I didn’t wanna fucking wear the fucking top half of a Tom Ford suit,” he said. “I love Tom Ford suits. But it felt weird as shit.”

The rest of this story you know: Sudeikis ended up winning best actor for Ted Lasso and gave a dazed acceptance speech while wearing the hoodie, and this in turn sparked glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. For the record, “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” Sudeikis said. It was just late at night and he didn’t want to wear a suit. “So yeah, o≠ it came and it was like, ‘This is how I feel. I believe in moving forward.’ ” Lately, Sudeikis told me, he had been trying to pay more attention to how he actually felt about any given thing, to all the various

signs and omens that present themselves to a person during the course of living their life. Even in his past, he said, there were moments that were obvious in retrospect, in terms of what the universe was trying to tell him, messages he missed entirely at the time.

In Vegas, where he was living with Cannon before Saturday Night Live, he developed alopecia and his hair stopped growing, and he didn’t know why. And then, at the end of his 30s, “during the nine months before Otis was born and the nine months after he was born,” Sudeikis developed extremely painful sciatica. “I went and got an MRI and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, the jelly doughnut in my L4, L5, is squirting out and touching a nerve.’ ” But why? When he had his second child, this didn’t happen at all. So: why?

“I mean, since last November,” Sudeikis said, “the joke that feels more like a parable to me is a guy is sitting at home watching TV and the news breaks in to say flash flood warning. About an hour later he goes outside on his porch and he sees that the whole street is flooded.” You’ve probably heard the rest of this joke before: While the guy is praying to God for some kind of help, a truck, a boat, and a chopper come by, o≠ering aid, which the guy turns down. God’ll provide, he says. Sudeikis finished the joke: “Two hours after that, he’s in heaven. He’s dead. He says, ‘God, what’s up, man? You didn’t help me.’

God goes, ‘What do you mean, man? I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a speedboat, I sent you a helicopter.’ ” So, Sudeikis said, “you can’t tell me that hair falling out of my head wasn’t—I don’t know if it was the speedboat or the pickup truck or the helicopter, but yeah, man, it all comes home to roost. What you resist persists.”

He went on. “That’s why I had sciatica,” he said. “That’s the speedboat. That was like: ‘Hey, you gotta take a look at your stu≠.’ ” And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious— to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered. “I don’t know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don’t put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. That’s the other half. ‘I’m bad with names.’ ‘I’m always late.’

Oh! Well, knowing is half the battle. All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it! Get better at names. Show up five minutes early, make it a point to do it.

So, I’m still learning these things. But hopefully I’ve got plenty of time to do something about it.”

Sudeikis smiled a little wearily: “I mean, at the end of that joke, the guy still got to go to heaven, you know?”

zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.

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T H E NEW AMER I CA N S P O RTSW E A R

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Intriguingly, the more far-out an American brand is, the more it appeals to an audience apart from the typical fashion consumer. With Telfar, Radboy tells me, the goal is to tap into the fashion avant-garde of the ’90s, when “you just did not know how you felt about something when you saw it. It just looked weird.” And yet Telfar Clemens is the American designer most in touch with the consumer outside of fashion’s traditional target audience of white mall-goers and Instagram algorithm chasers. “American fashion to me means millions of people are wearing a thing,” Clemens says. “What I love is how that looks on the street—not how that looks as a business structure or design process.” He says he and his team discovered you can have “a whole business that doesn’t address itself to Europeans at all.”

“We don’t even have the same customer as the fashion industry,” Radboy says. “I mean, it’s majority Black. When we do the presale, we have a little live view, and especially when we do bag security, you see the DMV [D.C., Maryland, and Virginia] lighting up, Detroit, Tuscaloosa, Oakland—all these cities that are just not part of any kind of fashion map.”

Clemens, whose brand was largely ignored by the fashion press for a decade and then, upon the growing success of his bag, received an onslaught of industry accolades and prizes— including GQ’s 2020 Designer of the Year award—put it even more bluntly: “We used the fashion system to get out of the fashion system.”

NEW CREATIVE DIRECTORS Ultimately, what powers all of these brands is the individuals behind them. They have the minds of icons—not unlike Ralph or Tommy.

And they have the sort of moxie that is capable of remaking an industry. Their brands, as Gibbs put it, are about the designer’s personal history and experience with fashion, making the clothing honest—and consumers can feel that in the garments.

John Elliott, who launched his brand in 2012, grew up working in men’s stores that specialized in premium denim and American sportswear, and so he thinks like a merchant and a shopper. His Escobar sweatpants, with their super-skinny leg and distinct long white drawstring, became a menswear staple seemingly overnight, like a Levi’s 501 for the globe-trotting Calabasas elite.

I asked Elliott how he found success so quickly. “This brand says my name,” he tells me.

“And the last thing you want is to tarnish your own name and do something corny.” It’s a good point: Nearly every fashion brand is designed by someone who doesn’t share its name but is

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tasked with carrying out the founder’s vision.

But designers like Elliott—and Santis and Babenzien and Lorenzo—are building a reputation from scratch, which has driven many of their lesser peers to rely on Instagram marketing and dressing celebrities. For the few designers who really have it, the celebrities come to them. “The beauty of the time we live in [is that] for the past 10 years, global icons have been obsessed with emerging designers,” Elliott says. “And you’re in a situation where you’ll have Kanye West come check out our collection in, like, season five, because he was curious.” Fashion, he says, is “a cultural thing” for musicians and athletes, “and they’re always interested in what young emerging designers are doing and new ways of dressing.”

Brands big and small are obsessed, above all else, with the idea of authenticity. What this buzzword means, it seems to me, is success outside the bounds of the terms that fashion’s old power structure uses—not industry accolades, not a well-placed story by a savvy publicist, but some show of organic adoration for the brand. So much of fashion’s hype is just marketing—Instagram ads, paid celebrity placements, or a good stylist tipping o≠ an otherwise clueless star. It can be hard, with the noise of the publicity machine and social media, to know what people actually like.

What’s authentic? The lines of enthusiastic shoppers waiting to get inside the ALD store, John Mayer geeking out over Fear of God on Instagram, customers who can’t yet a≠ord Bode flocking to the brand’s new co≠ee shop, everyone in the world carrying a Telfar bag— these things are the proof of success that you cannot achieve by faking it.

In May of this year, J.Crew was back in the news—this time with an announcement that might actually impact the throngs of young men who live and breathe this current culture of style. Brendon Babenzien, the designer of Noah, would be the mall brand’s next men’s creative director. “We need to disrupt the business,” CEO Libby Wadle said at the time.

It served as evidence that these designers’ subcultural values are about to go mainstream.

In this new moment, a mass brand like J.Crew has its work cut out for it. You can’t simply buy style—you have to engage people authentically, to co-opt the buzzword of the moment. The consumers that a designer like Babenzien has cultivated don’t seek out a single trendy silhouette or “problem-solving” garments; they don’t want to dress like celebrities, either; they want to feel that same sense of discovery that celebrities have made so attractive. In a sense, they’re like Kanye West, checking in on niche designers in their early seasons. And these designers know that this could happen only in America, because of how America shapes trends and sensibilities. “I feel like America has always been the center of culture,” as Lorenzo puts it. “You can take fashion out of it and can still look to music, you can still look to sports, you can look to the arts, and I feel that the fashion world has finally taken on this understanding and embraced this understanding where the center of influence is coming from. I’m just kind of blessed that it’s happening during our time.” rachel tashjian is a gq sta≠ writer.

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doing it one way, you’re going to be able to repeat it more. Whereas if you’re trying to get in certain positions and make your swing look perfect and do something you’re not comfortable with, it’s going to be much harder under pressure.”

At the Masters this year, both Wol≠ and Gankas ran into trouble on the premises— Wol≠ for signing an incorrect scorecard after his second round, and Gankas for dropping his cell phone on the hallowed eighth hole of Augusta National. (He was briefly removed and then reinstated; coaches are supposed to be able to carry phones.) But Gankas told me he didn’t care: “Probably one of the worst weeks we’ve ever had,” he said with a laugh.

“But shit happens.” He’s arrived so thoroughly he doesn’t mind when he is occasionally asked to depart.

O N E D AY I N F E B R U A R Y, I watched Gankas instruct a guy named Nelson, a lineman for ConEd who traveled up to Westlake from Long Beach on his day o≠. Nelson was a repeat customer; he told me he’d been grandfathered in, a bit, on his rate. Gankas began the lesson by working on Nelson’s transition: the move from backswing to downswing. “Imagine your left nut sack moving into your left hip,” Gankas commanded.

“Load that nut.” He’d drawn a line in chalk on the mat: the path Nelson’s nut sack was supposed to follow.

By Gankas standards, this was relatively tame, and none of the many other golfers scattered around the range blinked as he bellowed about loading balls. At the end of the lesson, he showed Nelson video of his new, improved swing. “That looks like a fucking pro,” Gankas told him. “That’s a whole new player right there.”

His next student was a guy named Tim, with a Rolex and a Los Angeles Country Club hat and golf bag, who introduced himself as a real estate developer and race car driver.

“I just got back from 24 Hours in Dubai,” Tim said. “And I got COVID there. I was super fucked up.” Vaccines were not widely available at the time; neither man was wearing a mask.

Gankas asked him uneasily if he still had it.

Tim said no: He’d recovered. And the two of them went to work.

Gankas is a hands-on instructor, and on most days he enlists a number of the guys who sit around watching to help move his players into the positions he wants to see them in—jerking on hips and knees, rotating shoulders, and holding training aids out at the ready. As Tim swung away, Gankas admitted

G EORGE G A N K A S C O NTINUED

that these days power-company linemen are generally the exception, not the rule, in terms of his clientele—that my romance about his widespread availability was somewhat misplaced. “I’m too expensive right now for a lot of people,” he said, “and that does suck, but they’ve had their opportunity to come over the last 20 years.” One of Gankas’s regulars, Ben Kohn, the CEO of Playboy, told me he first found Gankas through “other people talking about him at Bel-Air Country Club, where I play, as well as on social media”—a typical client these days. (Kohn said he was undeterred by the boisterous scene at Westlake. “One, you’re in California,” he said. “Two, you’re in Southern California.”) Another time, Gankas called me mid-test-drive of a Bentley: “It’s a little stupid,” he admitted. “I can a≠ord it. But it’s stupid.”

But in an era when many people are trying to figure out how to make golf a more open and inclusive game—from clothing brands like Malbon and Whim and Eastside, which are trying to shake the country club out of the sport, to companies like No Laying Up, which produces podcasts and videos about the

To be an amateur golfer is to be full of unhelpful tips and clips of half-watched YouTube videos. Gankas basically took my brain and shook out all the detritus, the loose change.

He got me out of my head. sport from the perspective of smart fans who actually play it—Gankas has arguably done more than most in terms of making the game accessible to the widest spectrum of interested people. He teaches on a public range at a public course, and he makes parts of those lessons available to anyone who wants to watch them on Instagram. His business now includes a massive online membership site, where for a subscription you can get videos of Gankas teaching pretty much every aspect of the golf game and where Gankas employs a few guys to field and respond to questions more or less instantly. He also sells a couple of training aids—the GBox and The Shallower— that have made over a million dollars in their first year of availability, according to one of his business partners.

Gankas estimates that between his in-person list and his membership site he has more than 8,000 students at any given time. That would make him among the most prolific golf instructors in the country, and that’s before you take into account those nearly 300,000 Instagram followers—more than most players on the actual PGA Tour have. At Gankas’s level of success, he could go on tour as a swing coach with Matthew Wol≠ or any number of other professionals he occasionally works with—Danny Lee, Sung Kang, Padraig Harrington, Akshay Bhatia, and a host of players he can’t name publicly—or he could fly around the world, giving private lessons, which he occasionally does.

“The guy has the knowledge and pedigree to

teach wherever he wants,” No Laying Up’s Chris Solomon said. “I have heard this: He will charge you on your lesson based on what kind of car you pull up in.” (Gankas denied this. “That’s ridiculous. That would make me a dick.”) Wol≠ said that he is often out at dinner with Gankas when people recognize the instructor and come over to ask about the golf swing: “He’ll get up and start showing them how to swing in the middle of a nice restaurant.”

Recently, Gankas told me that he was considering moving to Arizona, to pay less taxes. But his wife likes California, and he’s from there too. And what Gankas really likes is teaching the golf swing. He told me, “Why do I stay here on the mats? Because people don’t mind it. I can fix a player in an hour and they’re stoked and they go back and talk. And I think, for me, it doesn’t matter where I teach.

As long as I’m helping people. As long as I’m fixing people.”

arose, then: Did I need fixing? There is some blissful minority of players who simply like playing, who do it for, I don’t know—the trees? Fresh air? They like driving the cart? But most people I know who play golf are in a constant, masochistic dialogue with themselves about just how badly they suck. I am a person whose brain is mostly indi≠erent to success but absolutely obsessed with failure. This makes golf a perfect game for me, because I spend the vast majority of my playing time failing at it.

So yes, I needed fixing. I was nervous about it, though. Gankas is used to this. It doesn’t make sense to him, but he’s used to it.

“Your ego is so on right now,” he said, when I told him I was apprehensive about the prospect of learning how he worked firsthand. “I’m not going to go and tell anybody you suck. I’m like a doctor. So you’re judging yourself, but I’m not judging you.”

Gankas’s great flaw as a player, in retrospect, was fear. Now he teaches his students to overwhelm fear with acceptance. Stay present, he says. When you’re out on the golf course, don’t get too sunk into yourself; look up from the ball, at the beauty of the natural world, and get outside your own traitorous body, your own monstrous ego.

“For me, to always look up and out is huge because I can see detail in the trees,” Gankas told me. “It gets me present. It gets me out of my head.” He said that lately his eyesight, which had been excellent, had begun to fail him. “I need to get my eyes fixed so I can get back to that. Because if I’m in my head, I’m miserable. I’m running through thoughts. And a lot of times, that’s not where I want to be.

So I teach my players to stay present. And if I’m not doing it myself, I’m not going to teach them to do it.”

He told me even the great Wayne Gretzky had been like me when he first met Gankas.

“I asked Wayne Gretzky, ‘How come you get so nervous when you play golf?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s not my sport.’ I said, ‘You played in front of millions of people. What were you thinking then?’ He said, ‘I just was following the puck. I knew where the puck was at. I was at the puck first. That’s all I thought about.’ ” Gankas would like us all to just follow the puck.

T H E Q U E S T I O N I N E V I TA B LY

He led me to the range, had me hit a few shots. And then he was o≠. A lesson with George Gankas is a blur of motion: You rub up against trash cans, to learn the feel of a proper pivot; you watch yourself in the mirror he’s got set up there, to see what the proper setup looks like; you hit o≠ the mat, o≠ the grass, o≠ the concrete, even. He moves you around a bunch with his hands. When he’s got something particularly poignant to say, he tells you to press Record on your cell phone camera first so you can capture it for posterity. He is kind—You’ve got a good turn, bro—but also blunt, honest, when you repeatedly do something wrong, like line the ball up with the hosel of the club for some reason: What the fuck are you doing?

All you are really wondering, though, is: Did it work? I will not bore you with the details. I will simply say I’ve had other lessons; I learned more from Gankas in five minutes than I have in any of those other lessons. It was pouring rain during our session, and he stood out in the middle of it, undaunted, identifying flaw after flaw. It was clearly easy for him. Without getting too technical about what we were doing, my overwhelming takeaway is that it was simple: Turn back, to this position. And then turn through. Now do it again, but faster. To be an amateur golfer is to be full of unhelpful tips and clips of half-watched YouTube videos. Gankas basically took my brain, turned it upside down, and shook out all the detritus, the loose change.

He got me out of my head.

I have watched the videos he has left me with many times—more times than is helpful, probably. I have relived the lesson in my mind, probing it for information I have yet to absorb. I have gone from bad to slightly less bad. Slightly less bad feels amazing.

zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.

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FINAL SHOT

For our cover story on Jason Sudeikis, see page 42.

ST YLIST, MICHAEL DARLINGTON.

Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480,

by Bode. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

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