Local Limelight with WUNC's Jeff Tiberi
For NPR fans in the Triangle, journalist Jeff Tiberi's voice may sound familiar. A longtime North Carolina journalist turned host of WUNC's "Due South," Tiberi is a fixture of our region's media landscape. He's also a college basketball fanatic.
Driving the news: Just in time for March Madness, Tiberi and fellow journalist Mark Meher are out with a new book, "The Magnificent Seven: College Basketball's Blue Bloods," on how the teams have established themselves as "American basketball royalty."
Order it here for a signed copy ($26.95), and get the details on an event featuring the authors coming up on April 6.
We talked with Tiberi for our latest Local Limelight conversation. The Q&A has been edited for Smart Brevity.
🍽️ Favorite place to eat in the Triangle? Sassool (Strickland Rd location).
✈️ What do you think the Triangle is missing? A direct flight to Italy.
📱 What's your first read in the morning? Usually tapping on some alert or news update that has broken/developed overnight.
📖 Last great book you read?"The Anxious Generation," by Jonathan Haidt.
🎧 Go-to podcast? "All The Smoke."
🏀 Would you consider yourself a college basketball fanatic? If that's a serious question and I suspect it is marginally so, I would respond by telling you that one of my favorite teams was the 1996 UMass Minutemen.
A team that, of course, has not been assembled for near 30 years. And I'd tell you their starting five consisted of Marcus Camby, Donta Bright, Dana Dingle, Carmelo Travieso, and Edgar Padilla. What's neat about Padilla and Travieso is that they were the starting back court, and happened to be born in Puerto Rico on the same day in the same Hospital. Why do I remember that? Well I guess that's the answer to your question.
⛰️ Favorite place to go for a long weekend? Our cabin in Blowing Rock.
❤️🩹 Do you have any pets? What kind? What are their names? Our cat, Kiki, aka, Professor Kiki Foster died on Valentine's Day. She had been with us for 13 years. We miss her.
🚙 How did you end up in the Triangle? In early 2015 I was reassigned to cover the NCGA. So, after eight-and-a-half years in Winston-Salem I headed east.
📆 If you could pass any law, what would it be? I'd create a state holiday for the opening Thursday and Friday of the NCAA Men's Tournament (Round of 64).
All government buildings and schools would close at noon. (Tobacco Road Days?)
🧳 What's something you're looking forward to, unrelated to politics/your work? We're going to Memphis later this spring. I've never been.
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In 1978, a quarter century after Hillary and Norgay's historic ascent, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. One view of innovation in sports, advanced by the bioethicist Thomas Murray, is that people's perceptions are shaped by how new ideas and techniques are introduced. The status quo always seems reasonable: Of course we play tennis with graphite rackets rather than wooden ones, use the head-first Fosbury flop to clear high-jump bars, and climb mountains with the slightly stretchable kernmantle ropes developed in the 1950s. But many of these same innovations seem more troublesome during the transition periods, especially if only some people have access to them. When Bannister finally broke the four-minute barrier, he was once again paced by his training partners, but only for about the first three-quarters of the race. This form of pacing remained highly controversial, but because none of the pacemakers had deliberately allowed himself to be lapped, the record was allowed to stand. These days, such pacing is so routine that there are runners who make a living doing nothing but pacing races for others, always dropping out before the finish. The full-race pacing that Kipyegon will likely use in Breaking4 remains verboten; the slightly different pacing that leads runners almost all the way through the race but forces them to run the last lap alone is simply business as usual. Oxygen in a can is good; xenon in a can is bad. These are subtle distinctions. Sports are, in at least some respects, a zero-sum game: When one person wins a race or sets a record, it unavoidably means that someone else doesn't. Even at the recreational level, if everyone decides to run marathons in carbon-plated shoes that make them five minutes faster, the standards needed to qualify for the Boston Marathon get five minutes faster. 'Once an effective technology gets adopted in a sport, it becomes tyrannical,' Murray told me several years ago, when I was writing about athletes experimenting with electric brain stimulation. 'You have to use it.' In the '50s, a version of that rationale seemed to help the British expedition that included Hillary and Norgay overcome the long-standing objections of British climbers to using oxygen—the French had an Everest expedition planned for 1954 and the Swiss for 1955, and both were expected to use oxygen. Less clear, though, is why this rationale should apply to the modern world of recreational mountaineering in which Furtenbach operates. What does anyone—other than perhaps the climbers themselves, if you think journeys trump destinations—lose when people huff xenon in order to check Everest off their list with maximal efficiency? Maybe they're making the mountain more crowded, but you could also argue that they're making it less crowded by getting up and down more quickly. And it's hard to imagine that Furtenbach's critics are truly lying awake at night worrying about the long-term health of his clients. Something else is going on here, and I'd venture that it has to do with human psychology. A Dutch economist named Adriaan Kalwij has a theory that much of modern life is shaped by people's somewhat pathological tendency to view everything as a competition. 'Both by nature and through institutional design, competitions are an integral part of human lives,' Kalwij writes, 'from college entrance exams and scholarship applications to jobs, promotions, contracts, and awards.' The same ethos seems to color the way we see dating, leisure travel, hobbies, and so on: There's no escape from the zero-sum dichotomy of winners and losers. Kalwij's smoking gun is a phenomenon that sociologists call the 'SES-health gradient,' which refers to the disparities in health between people of high and low socioeconomic status. Despite the rise of welfare supports such as pensions and health care, the SES-health gradient has been widening around the world—even, Kalwij has found, among Olympic athletes. There used to be no difference in longevity among Dutch Olympians based on their occupation. But among the most recent cohort, born between 1920 and 1947, athletes in high-SES jobs, such as lawyers, tend to outlive athletes in low-SES jobs by an average of 11 years. As Kalwij interprets it, making an Olympic team is a life-defining win, but getting stuck in a poorly paying dead-end job is a loss that begets an endless series of other losses: driving a beater, living in a lousy apartment, flying economy. These losses have cumulative psychological and physiological consequences. Some things in life really are competitions, of course. Track and field is one of them, and so we should police attempts to bend its rules with vigilance. Other things, such as being guided up Everest, are not—or at least they shouldn't be. The people who seem most upset about the idea of rich bros crushing Everest in a week are those who have climbed it in six or eight or 12 weeks, whose place in the cosmic pecking order has been downgraded by an infinitesimal notch. But I, too, was annoyed when I read about it, despite the fact that I've never strapped on a crampon. Their win, in some convoluted way, felt like my loss. Another detail in Kalwij's research sticks in my mind. Among American Olympians, silver medalists tend to die a few years earlier than either gold or bronze medalists. Kalwij theorizes that these results, too, are related to people's outlook. Gold medalists are thrilled to win, and bronze medalists are thrilled to make the podium; silver medalists see themselves as 'the No. 1 loser,' as Jerry Seinfeld once put it. With that in mind, I've tried to reframe my attitude about the xenon controversy. Let the annual Everest frenzy continue, with or without xenon, and let its allure continue to draw the most hard-edged and deep-pocketed summit baggers. Meanwhile, leave the other, lesser-known mountains for the rest of us to enjoy in tranquility. I'd call that a win.
