Who

Robert Friddell – guy from Richmond, Virginia, majored in English and Religious Studies at Virginia, former teacher, current wrestling coach, formerly sold custom suits, currently writes and edits, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Laura, and his dog, Coach.

What

A company that wrestles with words.

When

The LLC was established in June 2021, but intangible was largely a quarantine project. The idea for it came in April 2019, and while the next year brought 5 interviews and stacks of research, this book remained a pipe dream I’d never get to finish. I lost my job in April 2020, and of all the quotes that ran through my mind in the next few weeks, the oft-quoted line from Virginia’s 2019 National Championship run stuck out: “If you use adversity the right way, it can buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone without it.”

Their journey inspired my making of their story.

By the end of July 2020, I had all 26 interviews, so I spent August transcribing the 23 hours of recordings. In September and October, I split them up and put them back together into a narrative resulting in a rough as rocks first draft.

I put it away for a few months and got to spend the holidays with my family after working in retail the previous three years. January and February was honing season, and I sent a draft to the players and managers in late February, with the elders receiving a draft after their season ended in March.

Other things happened, the editing continued, and I found folks to help me get this thing into paperback and ebook form. Thanks in large part to their expertise, here we have a book set to release on 10.4.21.

Where

My backyard, where I edit.

Why

I’ve tutored, taught, edited graduate school essays for friends, ghost-edited a year-long travel blog, briefly had a blog with quotes I admired and blurbs I wrote, got (correctly) rejected from four Master's programs for poetry, daily read articles on the Orioles, Braves, Seahawks, and Virginia Basketball, write a lot, and found myself watching every postgame interview with Coach Bennett out of sheer curiosity.

I met him once. In February 2020, I got a text from my coworker in Charlottesville that the Virginia Basketball coaching staff was coming in the next night for their annual group appointment to pick out some new custom clothes for game days (though they switched to more casual attire this past season).

I drove up from Atlanta through the night, slept till noon, and went to help set up. Coaches filtered in, we got started, then the guy whose program I’m writing a book about is standing next to me and telling me it was good to see me again. The guy meets a lot of people, so we’ll forgive him, but no doubt that threw me for a loop.

I knew he liked to make this event all about the rest of the coaches, but I asked him if he wanted to look at anything, he said, “No, thanks,” and backed away to the corner of the room presumably to get as far away from me as possible.

We didn’t interact for the next few hours, I worked with some of the other coaches on measurements and such, then – I swear the man is a ninja – he’s in front of me, big smile on his face, asking me if I can help validate his parking.

I had never worked in Charlottesville, had zero knowledge of how one might go about getting parking validated, panicked, mumbled, and pointed in the direction of my coworker, who pulled out a little card – the goddamn parking validation – and Coach walked out. I almost stopped him in some effort to redeem myself, but I hesitated and stood my ground.

The whole experience went off without a hitch.

What I wanted to say was to thank him for using a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s If poem in his last press conference: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.”

I talked with one coach I’d already interviewed, but other than that, I didn’t mention the book or ask for an interview throughout the whole event. It was their thing, I wanted to serve that crew in some sort of thank you for the experience of being their fan, and it was my job.

They all left, we cracked beers and ate the leftover pizza, then one of them called to say he left his clipboard and was coming back. We talked for a minute, I told him about the book idea, and I asked if I could interview him. He handed me his card and said, “Anytime.” That was big.

Apologies, back to the why.

The night of the National Championship is a little blurry, but the next day, I read dozens of articles documenting the two-year turnaround after their loss to UMBC in 2018, and nothing really did it for me. This thing didn’t happen in two years – it took ten.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I knew my lifelong career wasn’t in the world of custom suits, but I hadn’t put a finger on what it was. Ideally, it’d involve words in some capacity, but that was as far as I’d gotten.

Pacing around with our dog, the idea hit that someone needed to write the ten-year story, and while being that someone was leagues out of my league, I’d met a couple former players, I knew my way around words, and something in me clicked. Throughout the whole process, I couldn’t shake the feeling of that click, and after every setback, it kept pulling me back into this project.

I’ll go with a line from Bob Frost’s Education by Poetry speech here: “Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known.”

I guess my why started and always came back to that feeling or belief, but each passing interview built confidence – not because of quantity but because of quality. As a fan, you sometimes don’t realize how smart these guys are – in basketball, for sure, but there’s more to it than that. They’re eloquent and efficient communicators with humble hearts who aren’t afraid to call it like it is both in basketball and in life.

They told their story, and I helped out with the words.