I wanted to highlight David Hale’s piece on Davin Vann and the mental health battle Vann has been going through since losing his sister in an accident when they were kids. It’s a difficult story but an excellent read, and also kinda shocking.
“I was just tired of being tired,” he said.
Vann wasn’t planning to die, exactly. That would imply some agency in his life, a feeling he’d long abandoned. Instead, he figured he’d just ease his car onto I-40, inch the accelerator to the floor, then let go.
“Just f— the brakes, see how fast I can go,” Vann said. “I was thinking that if somebody hit me, I wouldn’t care.”
I never would have guessed that he was struggling in this way. You watch a mainstay like Davin for years and can’t help but start to feel like you know him, when of course the reality is you’re seeing only a small slice of that person. It can be easy to lose sight of that.
And that sports just aren’t very important.