Kings of Staten Island

Photo of Hobbs Kessler by Adrian Umpierrez

Kings of Staten Island

Words Jeff Merrill

‘The Forgotten Borough’ sits at the mouth of The Narrows, making up its lower jaw like an underbite, with crooked teeth, appearing to belong more to New Jersey than the glistening Empire State. It clings to the other famed boroughs via a braces-linking rubber band called the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and through the dreams of the beautiful people who grew up gazing at the bright lights across the Upper New York Bay. People who dreamed of one day taking that final ferry ride past Ellis Island, giving the Statue of Liberty a Wu Tang salute and stepping off at the battery in lower Manhattan to put their name in lights above the Applebee’s in Times Square or above their bed in a cast iron warehouse turned loft in SoHo. Beautiful people like Colin Jost, Pete Davidson, Alyssa Milano, Rich Eisen, The Wu Tang Clan and the USATF Indoor Championships.

Having just read a fantastic conversation attempting to answer the question of ‘When Did Running Get Cool?’ between Ryan Sterner and Paul Snyder in the Rabbitwolf Creative Newsletter, it dawned on me that Staten Island is a fine place for a USATF Championship meet. The conversation between two great minds centered more on the culture of running, and its transformation from when “Shoes were bulky and ugly in a way that is different to how shoes today are also bulky and ugly.” I remember the first time I walked into a collegiate cross country conference championship banquet and saw guys wearing torn jeans and Vans slip-ons with retro racing shirts instead of the standard team-issued ripstop nylon I had come to know. It was as if the rebelliousness and freedom I had always felt as a runner tearing across the muddied landscape had come splattering out in wardrobe fashion, ready to karate kick an amp as they rounded a bend and headed up the hill. It was expressive, not chasing.

Nowadays, it's hard to parse through what is done authentically and who posts what to ‘chase clout’ as the kids say, and most of the time, there’s a mix. Even footwear companies try to create catch-all products blanketing multiple consumer groups in order to expand their chances of success. The pull to tip the mixture toward doing things for broad appeal is strong because we want what we love or are good at to be cool and widely admired. We want to be accepted, and it’s generally more comfortable to try to be accepted using a front than it is to risk being rejected for who you really are. In business, it means stock bumps baby, and in professional track, an athlete’s livelihood depends on it. The difference in what an athlete earns depends on whether 5,000 or 5,000,000 people tune in regularly to watch them compete, or follow them on Instagram, or make a peanut butter and banana sandwich on Youtube. But the percentage of trends that hit that come from strategic plans titled ‘Get Money’ is in my experience, quite low. More often, success comes from a specific insight that leads to a functional product, serving the needs of a consumer and then someone else in a completely unrelated field (or generation) sees that product and says: “dang, that silhouette is wild, I’m going to rock that over here”, and then the success spiral starts. Which isn’t inauthentic if it’s also born from a real love of it!

It feels like we’re in the middle of something, in the spiral, the worm is turning. The culture surrounding running has become a thing to attach oneself to, to be accepted and to be cool in the broader cultural zeitgeist- a weird thing to experience for people who loved it when it existed as an escape hatch to run out the nervous energy, angst and frustration of being an outcast, instead to feel like a superhero, or at least capable, ‘before it got cool’. But it’s also something that those of us who have loved it always believed would happen, because how could it not? Once it’s expressed in the right way, of course people would understand… which is also bound to happen for elite-level racing. It has happened before and it will happen again.

The fear for those who aren’t shouting for a total gutting and reformation of the sport is that in the pursuit of cool, the soul of it will be lost, and the fear of those who want to it to hit mainstream is that not enough is being done to emulate what other popular enterprises are doing. I hope it soothes the worries a touch to say that as long as racing at its core is cool to some, it will retain the potential to be cool to many- to be expressed in ways that are beloved by a broader audience. This seed of truth is what pushes the people who love it to try to share that feeling with others. When it belongs to many, there are many forms of expression. The feeling will outlast all iterations of expression- one race, many races, many seasons. The expression of it will keep evolving and popping up in different ways as long as people love to race. The people who love the act of racing are the ones who will unlock that feeling in others because it blasts through them, and their quirks, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies are cool because they are part of the definition of someone who is great at what they do, loves it and doesn’t give a rip who knows it. Their haircuts might be the result of a buzz cut growing out (Ryan and Paul, and many more of us) and their ugly, bulky shoes will become cool ugly, bulky shoes- the ones nowadays and even the ones from back in the day.

Pete Davidson is alluring, and I can’t explain it in a couple sentences, but I get it. I read something a while back where someone who’d had a pulse on the industry for a while compared him to a young Frank Sinatra, gangly and rough around the edges. And you know who has an underbite? A guy who grew up a little south of Staten Island who still packs stadiums at 75. How many kids in the 70’s and 80’s tried to push their lower jaws out a little bit further so that their silhouette’s above their denim jackets emulated The Boss?

Lots of athletes rolled The Rock last weekend in front of a pretty good crowd at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex, but 2 performances in particular deserve some extra attention, because the athletes didn’t really need to be there to improve their standing in the sport. Sure, Hobbs Kessler hadn’t won a national title, but he’d run the third fastest indoor mile of all time this season after placing 5th in the Olympics and earning a bronze medal at Word Indoors at 21 years old. Nikki Hiltz has not lost a national championship they’ve contested since 2022. Nevertheless, the two stars made the voyage to The Forgotten Borough and racked up 2 titles apiece- one in their main event, the 1500m, and one, as 800m/1500m specialists, testing themselves in the 3,000m. They just love to race… and collect a little national title bonus if it’s there.

Photo of Nikki Hiltz by Adrian Umpierrez

A lot of people try to be cool by seeming like they don’t care what other people think. The real ones care about what they’re doing too much to let what others think affect their game, and they’re the ones who will make a difference.

You’ve got to let go of the outcome.

Off to my Orthodontist’s appointment.

If Hobbs and Nikki got braces, you’d at least consider a retainer.