My Selfish Reason for Why the Ricky Needs to Stay Good Forever

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.

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The Ricky has, of course, meant a tremendous amount to me over the last 10 years. 

It meant a lot to me in the early years, as a means to finding purpose and community through a team where the day to day results could not have mattered much less, then it mattered to me as a gathering place for celebrating triumphs and mourning losses when the games actually started being of consequence. It meant a ton to me when it when I was invited to join the staff -- for a position, as a writer for a sports podcast, whose description made zero sense when said aloud -- after my gig writing for The 700 Level ran aground, and I feared I was gonna be firing off takes on Amir Johnson and Marco Belinelli into the void for the rest of my life. It's meant the world to me when readers have told me that things I've written have helped capture the thoughts about this team they had but could not articulate, which as a writer is a pretty solid validation of the basic point of my existence. Certain months, the regular paycheck has also helped a whole bunch -- love you, Ben from Kinetic. Undoubtedly, the last decade of my life has been significantly richer for the Ricky's presence in it. 

But none of these ties are the thing that most specifically binds me to the Ricky for life -- the thing that guarantees I can never totally leave it behind, and that I can never let it become bad. And that is an RTRS connection very likely only held by me and members of my immediate family, even those who wouldn't recognize Mike and Spike if they were caught in the crossfire of them arguing about Isaiah Canaan: Five years ago, we buried my father, Glenn Unterberger, in The Shirt. 

A handful of people reading may recall that I talked about this once on the podcast, the week of my dad's funeral. Frankly, I wouldn't even expect that anyone would remember, except that a handful of listeners have mentioned it to me over the years as something's that stuck with them -- one even cited it in the Reddit thread Spike started about favorite RTRS moments, which I was pretty bowled over by -- despite it being stuck smack in the middle of an early-season podcast mostly focused on whether or not Markelle Fultz was ever gonna be A Thing, and my last half-minute or so of audio getting cut off (probably my fault). To this day, I'm pretty sure it's the only time outside of the funeral that I talked publicly about my dad's death, and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do it anywhere else. 

But for the great majority of folks who missed those 10 or so minutes of October 2018 audio, or those who need a fresher after all these years: My father, who was the Joel Embiid of fathers (regular season not playoffs), died very unexpectedly on a Sunday right before the start of the 2018-'19 season, kicking off the most miserable and exhausting (though in many ways still quite cathartic and beautiful) week of my whole family's lives. A million decisions none of us had ever considered having to make before suddenly needed to be made, one of which was what to bury him in. My mother Alyse was pretty resolute that he shouldn't be buried in a suit -- as a lawyer and generally upstanding member of the Lower Merion community, he wore them regularly, but was never at home in them -- and figured he'd be more comfortable spending eternity in something a little more him. Ultimately -- to my stunned amazement, and to her immeasurable credit -- she decided the best thing for him to wear would be The Shirt. 

Most Ricky readers will not need further context or elaboration about The Shirt, by now an absolutely iconic piece of Process ephemera. But in case you do: The Shirt was a limited-edition RTRS release which featured the Ricky basketball-mic logo (and a compulsory "Say the Name" command) on the front, and on the back listed all 99 players who were rostered on the Sixers at some point during Sam Hinkie's tenure -- along with, of course, Hinkie himself. Memorably, during Live Ricky II, Ringer fixture and FOTB Chris Ryan competed with a Ricky listener in a game attempting to name as many folks from the shirt as possible; it lasted approximately seven and a half hours and nobody recalls who if anyone actually won. Generally speaking, if you wanted to sum up the Ricky's whole deal in one piece of clothing, The Shirt would be the garment. 

The fact that we literally laid my father to eternal rest in such a shirt might lead you to assume that he was a really, really, really big fan of the pod. That wasn't actually the case. He appreciated it in theory, and he greatly enjoyed going to the live pods with me and my mom -- and he read and email-fw'd the hell out of most of the stuff that I wrote for If Not Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders. But I'm not sure he totally understood how or where to listen to podcasts, and I doubt there would have been an obvious time or place for him to listen to them if he did. He appreciated the pod the same way he appreciated The Simpsons; he would dutifully chuckle when I tried to explain one of my many unthinking references to it, and then he would have no curiosity to investigate further. 

But The Shirt still kinda made sense for his final outfit. It was his shirt, first of all, a favorite of his when it came to around-the-house wear. And while he wasn't necessarily a huge Ricky guy, he was a huge Sixers guy -- as well as huge Phillies guy, a huge Big Five guy, and I bet he'd be a huge Union guy by now too -- and a real Process-Truster, having sorta inherently grasped what the team was doing under Hinkie and pretty quickly falling for Embiid, RoCo, T.J. and the whole crew. Plus, the Sixers had been such a big part of his relationship with my mother -- they met at Penn when he was editing the sports section -- and with me for the prior decade, after I got majorly back into the Sixers in the late '00s, that it sort of felt like we were burying a part of us and our love together with him. (My brother Sam, a metalhead who also had a wonderful relationship with my father but could not tell Ben Simmons from Ben Detrick, was a very good sport about the whole thing.) 

And it also just felt like him. My dad might not have listened to the Ricky much, but he was definitely a kindred spirit, dating back to him and his friends buying cheap seats at the Spectrum to watch the 9-73 Sixers proto-tanking for Doug Collins back in '73. He had the same sense of humor: the same love of inside jokes, running bits, observing tradition for tradition's sake. He adored basketball minutiae and random trivia. He was, like our proud hosts, unmistakably Jewish. He wasn't much for trolling, but he did know how to grab onto a random cause and hold firm in it for years no matter how pointless it seemed -- he spent at least a decade bemoaning the band Traffic's absence from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; I was flabbergasted when they were actually inducted in 2004. If he came around a generation later, he might've been a Ricky listener. He might've even been a Ricky writer. He was a great writer. 

Inspired by the Reddit thread and the RTRS anniversary in general, I re-listened to the podcast a couple days ago for the first time since it aired five years ago. I was, as you can probably imagine, overcome by a lot of it. By the memory of just weird a crazy, fucked-up week that was for me and my family. By the fact (which I'd totally forgotten) that my parents and I were actually supposed to go to the season opener that week before my dad died. By how amazing and heartbreaking it was that my mother -- by no means a frivolous person -- was able to make the call to bury my dad in such a ridiculous shirt and never second-guess the decision, because she just knew him that well and loved him that much.

And I was overwhelmed with the memory of what a stabilizing force in my life the Ricky was that week. How much solace it gave me to be able to share those stories of my dad with Spike and Mike and everyone listening, how randomly wonderful it was when a listener somehow recognized me at a Wawa a day or two later and offered his sympathies and support, how touched and grateful I was that Spike came to the funeral even though I’d only been working for the Ricky a few months at that point. Hell, I remembered how comforting it was listening to the pod before and having it open with Mike ranting about how much he hates the goddamn Celtics. I needed the Ricky that week like I'd never needed it before, and it was there for me in every way. 

And I'll always need it. Not for those same reasons, necessarily -- but at the risk of getting a little morbid or weird, the fact that my father's remains will forever be wrapped in a shirt with the Rights to Ricky Sanchez's logo facing heavenward means that I don't exactly have the luxury of letting the pod go south. I'm not Indiana Jones; I can't just go digging up graves whenever the narrative of my life calls on me to do so. If Spike and Mike want to hang it up one day, I suppose that's their decision to make — but if they ever start to turn the Ricky into something awful and weird and embarrassing to associate with my father's memory, I'm gonna have no choice but to throw my body in front of that shit. Luckily, after 10 years of consistent and still-expanding greatness for the Ricky, I'm not too worried. I doubt my dad would be either.