Chris Spatola, and the Things I Can’t Make Sense Of

On losing a friend, questioning everything, and wishing I could hear him say “CHILDERS, my man!” one more time.

Chris Childers, Chris Spatola, and Steve Lappas hosting together at the Final Four.

I’m writing this for me. Maybe it’s a form of therapy. I’m going to post it on my website as a moment of true honesty, because I don’t know what else to do with what I’m feeling.

I’m trying to make sense of Chris Spatola’s passing. I already know I won’t. But maybe putting the thoughts down on paper will help me live with them for a minute.

To put it mildly, I’m devastated. All of us at SiriusXM College Sports Radio are. Chris was a coworker and part of our family, but he was also a different breed. I’ve always felt very different myself, and maybe that’s one reason I connected with him.

Chris wasn’t your prototypical ex-jock. He was a basketball genius with a military background and a real set of beliefs. He wasn’t interested in being some polished, surface-level sports personality who looked the part and played Mr. Cool. He was a person. Imperfect and awesome all at once.

That’s why I loved working with him. Doing radio with Chris wasn’t a matter of teeing up the former player and waiting for his take. It was a real back-and-forth with someone intelligent, thoughtful, and full of grit. He had an edge. He had emotions. He had things going on beneath the surface, like the rest of us.

I know the people I work with see my flaws, too. I don’t hide them very well. I’m emotional. I put my heart and soul into my relationships and into every bit of work I do. Sometimes that makes life harder than it needs to be. But it also meant I recognized something real in Chris.

When we traveled together, we’d eat together and hang out in each other’s hotel rooms and chat. I can hear his voice right now: “CHILDERS, my man!” It’s so clear in my head that I almost expect him to say it again.

And then I remember that he won’t.

That is another what-the-fuck moment in a life that seems to have too many of them. What is this life? Seriously. Why does shit like this happen? Why is there so much sadness and sickness? Why so much tragedy? I know people have answers they’ve held onto their whole lives. I used to have some of those answers myself. Maybe, I still do. I don’t even know, to be honest. Today, none of them feel like enough.

Someone might tell me that suffering has something to do with free will. I have a hard time accepting that. Honestly, I’m not even sure I believe in free will.

I know that sounds like a strange turn to take in a piece about Chris, but this is where my mind goes when I grieve. I start asking questions I can’t put back in the box.

I think about how much our bodies and brains influence what we do. When I feel calm and balanced, I can be the person I want to be. But I can also feel something shift inside me and suddenly react to a small problem as though it’s enormous. My mind may know I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I still feel myself doing it. In those moments, I feel completely out of balance—chemically, emotionally, all of it. I can see the reaction happening, but I can’t always stop it. If being calm and rational were simply a choice, I’d choose it every time. So how much control do we really have?

And what about the circumstances we’re born into? A kid raised by caring parents in an affluent home might have every resource available to help build a stable life. Maybe that kid grows into a well-adjusted adult. Maybe that kid still struggles terribly with the meaning of life. Having every advantage doesn’t make someone immune to pain.

But what about the kid born into poverty, or a broken home, with parents who can’t or won’t put that child first? When that person struggles later, how much of what we call a “choice” was shaped by circumstances they never chose? I know there are success stories. I know people can surprise us. I’m not pretending there’s a perfect formula here. I’m saying it’s hard for me to look at the way people are made, and the worlds they’re born into, and then speak with total certainty about what any of us deserves.

And somehow my mind brings all of that back to Chris.

Our friend is gone. What the fuck?

I want to tell you about a moment on the show today, because it probably explains where my head is better than any philosophical question can. I brought up Chris on the air without planning to. We have a segment called “Get Yourself Together,” and I started talking about the tragedy. It just came out of me.

Rick was about to talk football. I put him in a difficult position, and he told me so during the break. In my head, my first reaction was: Dude, go fuck off. Sorry my grief made the show uncomfortable while we’re all grieving.

That wasn’t the whole truth of what had happened. I knew I’d surprised him. But that first reaction was real, and I’m trying to be honest here.

The more I sat with it, the more I thought about how Rick and I can experience the exact same moment in completely different ways. Sometimes we may as well be two different species. Rick can compartmentalize. He can hold a feeling, do the show, and come back to it later. In that moment, it felt to me like grief had been assigned a time slot: Pony, you can be sad at the top of the hour. Right now we’re talking football.

I can’t always work that way. I wasn’t trying to make the show about me. I was hurting, and I said something because Chris was on my mind. He’s still on my mind.

For some reason, I’ve become less able to set these questions aside as I’ve gotten older. Now a loss like this sends me straight into questions about how any of us are supposed to live.

Weirdly, the change seemed to line up with getting my master’s degree. Something about going back to school changed the way I thought. Maybe it gave me room to ask questions I’d spent years avoiding.

Life used to make more sense to me. I believed Christianity was the authority on it all. Follow it, do right, and my soul would be okay. Then I started thinking harder about the whys and hows. The deeper I went, the more I hoped my faith was true, and the less certain I felt that it was.

Think about how hard that is. For more than 40 years, you believe there is an answer to the biggest question you will ever face. Then you begin to wonder whether you believe it because it’s true or because it’s what you were taught where you happened to be born. You look at the different faiths people inherit around the world and wonder whether they might be human attempts to explain something none of us fully understands.

I’m not telling you Christianity isn’t true. I don’t know that. I sincerely hope it is true and authentic. After all, I have spent a lifetime learning the lessons of the faith. I’m telling you I don’t know.

That uncertainty gives me anxiety. I had anxiety before, too, but it often showed up as religious guilt: Am I worthy of heaven? Am I destined for hell? Did I act right? Did I believe right? “Act right or else” is a powerful thing to carry inside you. Maybe the beliefs I grew up with are completely true. I cannot honestly say I’m certain anymore, and losing that certainty has been painful and depressing.

I’m starting to become okay with saying “I don’t know.” At least, I think I am. But it’s hard to live that way in a world full of bold assertions and absolute truths. Everybody seems ready to tell everybody else what to think, what to say, which side they’re on, and what that says about them. Whether it’s a movement someone believes in deeply, a political fight, or the vitriol that has filled our lives for years, I sometimes want to stop the whole conversation and ask: What are we doing? What is all this for?

As a kid, I thought my career was the goal. I wanted so badly to be on radio or TV and become a professional sportscaster. And I did it. I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years. Part of me is proud of that. Part of me looks at it today and thinks: Who cares?

I don’t mean that the work has meant nothing. It’s given me people I love. Its the reason I get sit here and ponder about Spatola’s loss because he meant something to me.

Some days it feels as though we get up and play work. We do what’s expected, make somebody else money, try to earn enough to provide for our families, and hope we don’t step too far out of line. Work hard. Act right. Keep the boss happy. Play the game or risk losing the security you’ve built. Meanwhile, so many of us are wading around in our own shit, trying to make sense of being alive.

I wonder whether we were built for the way we live now. The constant pressure. The technology. The noise. The expectation that we should always be available, productive, and keeping up. AI may change things even faster, and I don’t know what that will do to us. I look at social media and worry about what it has already done to people’s mental health, especially young people’s. We surround them with invented standards and trends, then ask them to measure their worth against those things. God forbid they’re a little weird.

I’m weird. I’ve never been the most normal person in the room. That can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that I can sit here and write this, knowing some of you may judge me, and write it anyway. I’m not offering it as a set of answers. This one is for me.

Because I suspect more of us are frightened and uncertain than we admit. We get up and play work. Sometimes it feels like we play family, too—not because the love isn’t real, but because we’re trying so hard to be the parent, spouse, or grown-up who knows what they’re doing. Deep down, a lot of us have no clue. We’re insecure. We’re trying. We’re making mistakes and getting through another day.

Then we go on the radio and talk about Tom Brady’s Super Bowl rings or where LeBron might play next. Those things can be fun. Sports have been my life. But the rings and the headlines are things we made important. Sitting here thinking about Chris, I wish we put as much energy into helping each other get through this fucking life.

It’s hard. It’s weird. We need each other.

I need quality people like Chris in my life, and I’m glad he was in it. I’m glad I got the conversations, the meals, the hotel-room hangs, and that voice calling out, “CHILDERS, my man!” I’m angry that there won’t be more of them. I don’t have a lesson to draw from that anger. I don’t have an explanation that makes his absence okay.

So Chris, if you’re up there, know that we love you. We’re down here fighting really hard to make sense of why you won’t be breaking down hoops with us on the radio come November.

I wish you were here to help us talk it through.