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The Bayless Brothers are deeply flawed ambassadors for two of Americas biggest obsessions: food and football. Their story is a story of self-aggrandizement and alienation, obsession and ostracism, pride and performance. It’s a reminder that even problematic people in the public eye are full of nuance if you’re open to finding it.

Prologue: Festive Food

My first blog was a food blog.

At the tender age of twenty I was living in South Tucson and engaged in the hard-to-explain liminal space of “studying-off-campus-but-sorta-abroad” that was Earlham Colleges border studies program.

As I criss-crossed the US Mexico border a half a dozen times that year, I ate so much Mexican Food, American Food, and Mexican American food that I became filled with a youthful naiveté that told me one day I would open a restaurant that commemorated these travels. It would be filled with dishes that embodied my own love of Mexican food, showing off my intellectual and culinary prowess through a playful, edible deconstruction of the relationship between Mexico and the US.

There would be high end takes on low-brow snacks like oxtail taquitos, a nostalgic re-imagining of my moms go-to Chicken California casserole, and this messy sandwich I was obsessed with that I’d dubbed the “sexy avocado torta,” inspired by an episode of “No Reservations” I’d seen.

I even already had a name I picked out for this hypothetical restaurant: Frontera, Spanish for border.

Hours deep on a blogging bender at a Tucson coffee shop, filled with iced coffee and the naïveté of being 20, I googled “Frontera restaurant” to confirm that my idea was indeed pure genius. There was just one problem. Frontera was already the name of a wildly popular restaurant run by a white guy with aspirations to evangelize Mexican food.

Part 1- Rick Bayless: Su cultura es mi cultura

Rick Bayless and I have at least this much in common: we both fell in love with Mexican food when we were supposed to be studying something else. After getting his BA in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma, Bayless started a PhD program at Michigan in anthropological linguistics. He’d worked at his parents barbecue restaurant growing up but but had fallen head-over-heels in love with Mexico and Mexican food after traveling there. So he pursued a graduate degree that would allow him to travel and learn more about the culture and the food only to realize that his heart was in cooking, not academia. Executing a career pivot with springy confidence that would make Allen Iverson’s Achilles tendons cry out with envy, Bayless chose cooking over academia and never looked back.

He opened a small unassuming restaurant called Frontera Grill with his wife in Chicago in 1987. Allegedly the first customers sat down, looked at the shockingly fajita-less menu, got up to leave and said “This is not Mexican food. You’ll be out of business in six months.” Those first customers and their salty first take turned out to be deliciously wrong.

A cinematic montage’s worth of restaurants and accolades followed. After Frontera, he opened now Michelin-starred Topolobampo next door in 1989. Since opening those two, he opened a dozen more, nine of which are still open, plus another outpost in the O’hare airport slinging out verifiably passable tortas as I can attest. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his TV show “Mexico: One plate at a time.” Along the way he won multiple James Beard wards. He’s been a judge on Top Chef and competed on Iron Chef, losing by one point to Bobby Flay in Battle Bison. He cooked for the Obamas at the White House. Obama even asked him to be the Whitehouse chef, an invitation Rick turned down to focus on his restaurants. The Frontera name is also now proudly stamped on Bayless’s own line of canned salsas and tortilla chips. He entered the “Snoop Dog has won the game and is just doing side quests now” phase of his career when he created and starred in a live theater show called Cascabel.

His culinary career is the stuff of legends. You have to respect Rick for doing more to popularize Mexican food in America than almost any other chef. There’s just one thing wrong with the shining picture: why is self-appointed poster child of Mexican food a white dude from Oklahoma?

Bayless embodies the same cultural appropriation problem posed by the popularity of Diana Kennedy. It’s wonderful that she has helped spread love and appreciation for Mexican food, but there is an unavoidable neo-colonial dynamic to a white lady from England being the ambassador of a Mestizo Meso-American cuisine that is not her own. When someone in my border studies program pointed out to this out to me, it made me arrive at the awkward realization that one of my other favorite Mexican cookbooks: Amor y Tacos was authored by a white lady from Orange county. Why are there so many white evangelists for Mexican food?

Sean Brock, a chef who I have met twice (we’re not related) and admire deeply runs into this same conundrum. His claim to fame is getting people to finally understand the depth and historic significance of Southern food through his Charleston restaurants Husk and McCrady’s. Yet, by his own admission, the history of Southern Food is inseparable from the West African slave trade, and enslaved Black Africans brought essential ingredients and techniques that we now consider “Southern.” So why is a white dude the go-to ambassador for Southern Food? American food, like our music, dance, and sports, were built on the work, perseverance, and resilience of Black and Brown people, yet to this day, so often the ones getting the credit are white guys. The popularity of Andy Ricker’s Thai food and Ivan Orkin’s Japanese Food brings up similarly thorny questions.

When he’s been publicly accused of cultural appropriation, Bayless has pushed back vehemently, repeatedly framing himself as an appreciator of Mexican culture not a thief of it, and arguing that his restaurants have given many cooks & chefs of Mexican descent a chance to pursue their own dreams over the years. He’s even claimed the infamous “reverse racism” defense, arguing that people saying he can’t cook Mexican food just because he’s white is itself racist. Bayless’s outspokenness even landed him in a brief, bizarre feud with the late LA food critic Jonathan Gold. Gold took issue with Bayless saying he was going to bring the flavors of Mexico to LA with his latest restaurant, a city we should note, with a long and proud history of Mexican immigration and delicious food.

So when NPR ran a think piece about white chefs appropriating other culture’s foods, Bayless predictably showed up in the comments to defend the frontera of his honor.

His response ranged from missing the racial colonial dynamic entirely:

Search as I might, I haven’t unearthed any examples of French, Italian or Japanese (three of the most respected cuisines in the world) alleging inappropriate appropriation toward any non-natives who’ve joined the ranks of those who call themselves French or Italian or Japanese chefs.

To academic man-splaining:

Basically, to work deeply in the culinary aspects of intangible cultural heritage, you need to have serious training in anthropology, which I do

To finally bringing up race but not quite getting how the power dynamics of privilege work:

Many of those who denounce my work focus on the simple fact that I’m white. All I’d have to do is claim that I had a Mexican great-grandmother, and I could be part of the club.

To an impassioned conclusion that makes you feel some sympathy for the man and makes you wonder if tearing him down is in fact burning down a straw man:

Criticize my work if you think it’s not well researched enough, or if you think all the years I’ve lived and traveled in Mexico isn’t enough to absorb the cuisine. But don’t criticize me for being white, for falling head over heels for Mexico and it’s incomparable cuisine, and for wanting to share it with the world.

As much as I find his persistent notion that he isn’t the beneficiary of white privilege cringey and lacking self-awareness, I also understand his frustration at being attacked for his earnest desire to share his love of something.

While I understand them as deeply flawed messengers, I can’t outright dismiss the impact that chefs like Rick Bayless and Sean Brock have had on me and others. On a personal level, their work and cookbooks have encouraged me to re-think what I know about food and approach food and people with more respect, curiosity, and reverence than I would otherwise. I see this as a net positive, even though it clearly hasn’t done enough to build true equity.

Food, it’s long been reflected, is the easiest and most comfortable pathway to something resembling multiculturalism. The danger is that in embracing the quick wins and pseudo empathy of more white people appreciating tacos and gumbo, we’ll forget about all of the other types of reparations and healing that are still needed.

It’s hard to argue that Bayless hasn’t helped spread respect for potentially overlooked or under-appreciated culinary traditions, but the end goal of a modern food culture shouldn’t be just having more white ambassadors for “under-represented” cuisines of the global South.

As Jessie Nicely of Compound Butter magazine once reflected to me during a podcast discussion of Anthony Bourdain’s legacy:

“I hope we get to a point where we don’t need a white guy to go to a Chinese restaurant for other people to say, ‘oh yeah Sichuan food is good.’”

Nicely said, Jessie.

Bayless’s culinary legacy remains a complicated one. Today he can be understood as a champion of Mexican culinary heritage or a thief of it. So is he a culture vulture or a champion chef? Porque no los dos?

Halftime

I got into football around the same time I got into cooking, my junior year of high school. Like any high schooler, I was trying on new hobbies and interests to see which ones stuck. Football was a new frontier for me. I started watching games as a sort of solo experiment, approaching the sport the way you might an independent study class, but the NFL quickly struck me as quite fascinating and engaging. I found myself caught up in the Manning-Brady rivalry, Brett Favre’s stubborn refusal to retire, and the surreal drama of the 2007 Patriots Season, from Spygate to the Helmet Catch.

As I’ve gotten older, my relationship to the game has grown more complicated. For every positive thing I’ve come to enjoy about it, I seem to find three more negative things, any one of which should make me stop watching entirely. In my positive pile I have the athletic splendor of toe-tapping sideline catches, the joy of watching with friends, my love of cooking large batches of nachos, trying multiple varieties of quaffable beers in one sitting, and the transcendence of a truly exciting playoff games. In my negative pile I have an abridged list of: the league gaslighting the concussion crisis for decades, multiple known rapists and abusers playing in the league (the league rarely disciplining these violent men with more than a light slap on the wrist), a “problematic to put it nicely” record on race, a sport that destroys the human body, a recruiting complex that preys on poverty and and may be subverting higher education entirely in the name of profit, and a very poorly-concealed boner for the US military industrial complex.

Still, I’m slightly embarrassed to say I can’t quit it just yet. The content is too good. As a producer of and fan of content, there is almost no content playground greater than the football world. Since the football season is only a few months long, for the rest of the year you have to look elsewhere to get your fix. Thankfully, this larder is well-stocked. That’s how I’ve become a connoisseur of Football Youtube.

Football Youtube reminds me of New York City. It’s densely populated, full of fascinating and opinionated people, and is put together in such a stimulating way you just have to tip your hat to in gratitude. There’s truly something here for everyone!

For the curious students of the game there’s the authoritative baritone of KTO and his historical deep-dives into players and the best and worst draft classes and halftime shows. If you crave youthful enthusiasm, Set the Edge’s content is so infectious it’s hard not to get swept up in what he’s curious about. If you want equal parts substance and silliness, there’s the joyful Brandon Perna of That’s Good Sports and his unapologetic bias towards the Broncos. If you like saltier football takes there is Barry McCockiner’s ascerbic sarcasm and unabashed loathing for Tom Brady or the cynical summaries of the iconically named Urinating Tree.

Secret Base is close to the pinnacle of sports Youtube content in my opinion, regularly publishing incredibly entertaining and researched data journalism, and I’d highly recommend their Collapse, Rewinder, and Chart Party series. Their mouth-watering deep dive into the Atlanta Falcons is must watch Football Youtube in my opinion. Yet one of my personal favorite channels is Flemlo Raps, whose warm, curious, empathetic humanism is a refreshing contrast to some of the more hyperbolic channels out there. Where others only see the highlights, Flemlo sees the complicated people playing the game.

I’ve carefully chosen these channels to populate my Youtube feed and they are all now curated parts of my football diet. However, there’s one iron-clad truth of football Youtube, which is that if you stay online long enough, the algorithm will end up serving you clips of “Undisputed.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s a sports talk show with an aggressive debate format made famous by an ornery sports journalist with a penchant for trenchant discussions and interviews. His name is Skip Bayless.

Part 2- Skip Bayless: I scream, you scream, we all scream for sports teams

A sports lover from a young age, Skip Bayless’s skill with words was his ticket out of Oklahoma. This talent earned a full scholarship to Vanderbilt University, his way to escape a bleak home life in Oklahoma City. Like an Oklahoman Alexander Hamilton, he wrote his way out.

He was hired by Miami herald as a sports writer right out of Vanderbilt. His rise continued from there, ending up as a head columnist at the Dallas Morning Herald at 25 As a successful if polarizing sports writer in Dallas, Bayless inevitably ended up on the Cowboys beat. To make the most of this phase of his career, he wrote 3 attention grabbing tell-all books about them: God’s Coach, Hell Bent, and The Boys.

This books got a lot of attention (positive and negative) and also started beef with their star quarterback, Troy Aikman. The cause of the beef was Bayless spending 6 pages in Hell Bent exploring the rumor that Aikman was gay. I should clarify that there is no evidence that Aikman is gay, and less still that it matters. Still, this caused such steamy beef between the two men that, according to The Ringer, after winning the Super Bowl, Aikman didn’t head to Disney World, but instead called Skip Bayless to say:

“I am not gay. How can I fight this? Am I supposed to keep a girl around even if I don’t care anything about her, just so I can keep everybody off my back?”

Bayless’s books on the Cowboys were filled with this sort of stuff: floating rumors and speculation about things that a half-hearted fact checker could dispel easily or dismiss as irrelevant. While it’s easy to call this out as bad journalism in hindsight, I’d argue this is the exact same sort of shameless and intellectually bankrupt “just letting the theory out for exercise” logic used by the History and Discovery channels today to waste hours of television on if Stalin was creating an Ape Army (he wasn’t) and if the supershark Megaladon is still swimming around out there looking for trouble (it isn’t). Posing a dumb question in bad faith is the lowest and ultimate shitty but engaging form of content.

Saying his writing isn’t factually accurate is like saying a fireworks show isn’t factually accurate. Facts aren’t the point. Bayless’s journalism, like a fireworks show, is all about entertaining incendiaries.

People speculating if something’s real isn’t evidence that it is of course, but in this way Bayless was ahead of his time in reading the tea leaves for where media was going. In the eyes of the public, a salacious allegation matters a lot more than the factual correction it entails and has much more staying power. It’s better business to endlessly speculate and argue about stuff than to report on what’s actually going on. This is even easier with famous athletes and sports teams, since the personalities are known, the storylines, heroes and villains are easy to drum up, and many people already have strong opinions about the teams and players. By understanding these principles intuitively Bayless quickly solidified himself as a provocateur and antagonist in his writing career. In his television career, he’d perfect this persona and take it to bizarre new levels.

On his debate show “Undisputed,” Skip Bayless teams up with Hall of Fame tight end Shannon Sharpe for what can only be described as lightly structured professional yelling. They are framed as “discussions” about something trivial and ultimately hard to prove that rapidly devolve into a shouting match. For this show Skip perfected the same “discussion as combat” spectacle that’s taken over political discussions on cable news.

He was a professional troll before we had a term for that. His tone and personality is so abrasive that he quickly became a meme:

Let’s just come out and say it: sports debates are a fun but silly endeavor. Any man who dismisses women discussing the Kardashians or the British Royal Family should look long and hard in the mirror and think back on how many hours and gallons of ink have been spilled by men looking to optimize their fantasy football lineups.

On one level, these arguments have more stats to fall back on than almost any type of argument. Proving whether Jordan is better than Kobe or LeBron could be based entirely on their career point, assist, and championship totals. Yet such statistical comparisons aren’t as interesting as the arguments they could entail, and raw stat comparison makes for mediocre TV at best. What’s more compelling than a stat based sports argument is an opinion based sports take. Whereas a sports argument works inductively, gathering evidence to build a theory, a sports take works deductively, starting first with the theory (Kirk Cousins is an overrated and overpaid QB) and then finding evidence that supports that theory (lack of wins in big games). Sports takes also make for better verbal spectacle, since neither side can really prove the other wrong. In fact, on sports talk television, usually the camps are pre-determined before the segment starts, one arguing for Kirk Cousins greatness, the other for his flaccid mediocrity. The point is not for either side to convince anyone or for anything productive to come of it. On TV, the only point is for the men to yell and create a scene that’s hopefully fun to watch. Bighorn sheep fighting have more substance than sports debates on TV. At least when Bighorn sheep fight someone gets laid at the end.

As a professional disher of sports takes, Skip Bayless has been on record making outlandish claims for decades now. Unsurprisingly, in this timespan he’s dished out some verifiably terrible takes that have aged like milk in the sun. He will likely never live down claiming that the now infamous NFL bust Johnny Manziel would one day be bigger than Lebron James in Cleveland. If you’re unfamiliar with football or Manziel, he was a flashy and selfish quarterback from Texas Tech drafted by the Browns in the first round (why is it always the Browns?!), who has since come to embody the “collegiate star imploding in on itself under the pressure of the NFL in a supernova of suck” with such force that Steven Hawking might have something to say about it.

What else might you include on Skips “anti-resume” of bad takes? Well, he called 2 time Superbowl champion and MVP of Superbowl 50 Von Miller a bust before his career had gotten started. He called Cowboy’s quarterback Dak Prescott’s openness about his depression following his brothers suicide a sign of weakness. He invited Richard Sherman onto his show only to have Sherman humiliate him in front of the whole country worse than what he did to Michael Crabtree. This led Sherman to proclaim “I’m better at life than you” on live TV and the fallout led ESPN to consider cancelling Bayless’s show.

His terrible takes aren’t limited to football, or even sports for that matter. He went public that he thinks Nelly is a better rapper than Jay Z and decided to make light of Rihanna’s assault at the hands of Chris Brown. What strange hills this man insists on dying on.

Skip’s style is so hyperbolic, his brand of provocative contrarianism so honed that he’s basically escaped the gravity of grounded sports discussions, floating about like a ballon that generates its own hot air to stay aloft. He’s the Fran Lebowitz of football, paid to be cranky and misanthropic, famous for being against things more than for anything. Moreover, the medium he’s in demands that he defend such absurd takes that at this point in his career he’s basically a parody of the character he’s created, as epitomized in this phenomenal edit of Skip Bayless debating himself:

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the man is how much money he’s paid simply to be opinionated. To put his most recent 4 year contract with Fox Sports of 32 million dollars into perspective, that’s more money than 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garroppolo will make in four years under his recently restructured contract. Skip is paid more to shit talk professional athletes than many of the actual athletes he shit talks.

Like him or loathe him, you just can’t get away from Skip Bayless. If you spend any time in the sports media eco-system and hive mind, you’ll find his takes, their responses, and their knock offs just about everywhere. Fox also spends a lot of time and money reminding you that Skip Bayless is in their network, with the same combative tone of a “Beware of Dog” sign posted outside of a home.

In one of these abrasive ad campaigns for “Undisputed” Skip claims that Shannon was “like a brother” to him, but quickly clarified that “brothers argue!” This wasn’t the first time he’d described his cohost as a brother. Before he had Undisputed with Shannon Sharpe on Fox, Skip had “First Take” on ESPN with Steven Smith. After publicly stating that Steven Smith was more like a brother to him than his real brother, Skip then shared a uncharacteristically personal monolog on his podcast about his real brother, Rick.

I came across this out of character monolog one fateful evening when the algorithm shoved yet another video featuring Skip Bayless in front of my football-weary eyes. Alexis slumbered softly next to me as I read:

“Skip on his relationship with his brother, Michelin star chef, Rick Bayless | The Skip Bayless Show.”

The thumbnail image of this new nugget of football content gave me unusual pause before I tapped into consuming it. I thought: “Wait, these two recurring famous white dudes in my Youtube feed are related?”

Epilogue- Food for thought

Skip Bayless’s real name isn’t Skip, it’s John. His father, John Bayless Sr, nicknamed him Skip as in the “Skipper” or captain of a ship. Skip’s father owned a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City called Hickory House. He’d regularly wake up at 4am to drive across town and start smoking the ribs for the day. Both Skip and his younger brother Rick, then called Ricky, worked there for a time growing up. Everyone in the Bayless family loved cooking and working at the family restaurant, except for Skip. While he loathed the work at Hickory House, Skip maintains it taught him a good work ethic and to follow his dad’s example of never taking a sick day, something he claims he’s never done until this day. While Rick took naturally to cooking, Skip resented it, preferring sports. How much of this hatred of cooking was actually loathing of his father will never be known, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the elder Bayless wanted nothing to do with cooking. The end result though was isolation between the two brothers. Since Rick showed no interest in sports, in the midst of an already emotionally barren home life, the Bayless boys had no hobbies in common to bring them together.

The finances in the Bayless family were fragile. Restaurant margins are thin and crowds at Hickory House were fickle and fleeting. Skips father dealt with the pressure by drinking. Skips father was an alcoholic who would come after the boys physically after he’d been drinking, which was often. Until Skip was big enough to fight back, he was on the losing end of his fathers fists. John Bayless Sr made a point of keeping his wedding ring on before striking Skip, hard. Skips fathers alcoholism in turn drove his mother into a drinking problem of his own. By high school Skip was barely sleeping at home on weekends because the environment had gotten that toxic and violent.

Both boys needed to get out of that home to survive, so away they went. As Skip pursued a career as a sports writer, Rick became obsessed with Mexico and Mexican cooking after a visit there. Both of them moved away from Oklahoma and never looked back. As their stars rose into the stratosphere, their father was lost in his own darkness. He separated from their mother, moved to Tulsa, and drank until liver cirrhosis took him at age 49. Skip doesn’t drink to this day.

What’s remarkable to me about Skip and Rick Bayless is that while they’re each individually quite famous, they are not siblings in the public eye in the same way as the Wilson brothers or the Olsen sisters, for example. For such famous individuals, it’s remarkable more people don’t know they’re related. This is not an accident. They’ve long been remarkably private about their relationship and don’t talk openly about being brothers very often. There are few photos of them together. I could find almost no instances of Rick talking about Skip and just a handful of Skip discussing Rick. By Skips account, today they are estranged and do not have a relationship. According to Skip, they most recently saw each other their mothers funeral, caught up for ten minutes, and that was that. Through hard work and relentless self promotion, the Bayless brothers escaped poverty, alcoholism and destitution, but the collateral damage may have been their bond as siblings.

When I started writing this, I had a pessimistic pet theory that the Bayless brothers embody particular types of public white privilege. Rick’s is getting to be a respected spokesperson for someone else’s cultural heritage and Skip’s is getting to be an abrasive and obnoxious about someone else’s industry. As I neared finishing it, my views got a lot more complicated.

There’s another interpretation, in which the Bayless brothers are a testament to hard work and perseverance and the ability of the human spirit to rise out of poverty and abuse and make great things of yourself. This duality matters a lot, I think. It’s a reminder that often we’re all engaged in the same sort of take warfare that Skip is, desperately looking for evidence that proves us right and in so doing missing examples that might paint a more complicated and harder-to-digest picture.

The Bayless Brothers are deeply flawed ambassadors for two of Americas biggest obsessions: food and football. Their story is a story of self-aggrandizement and alienation, obsession and ostracism, pride and performance. It’s a reminder that even problematic people in the public eye are full of nuance if you’re open to finding it.

When I first realized they were related my heart filled with the sort of dramatic stirring normally reserved for Pixar montages and the end of Christopher Nolan movies. Peering into the shady undergrowth of Youtube looking for cynic certainty, I was instead ambushed by empathy. I could hardly believe that such a spectacularly sad and Shakespearean sibling drama was hiding in plain sight this whole time. Learning about the complicated contours of their relationship made me rethink most of what I thought I knew about these men separately. My skeptic dismissal of their flaws was replaced with an almost mournful form of pathos.

If the ballad of the Bayless Brothers is this bittersweet, what other flavors and textures are missing from the par-baked storylines cooked up by the Youtube algorithm?

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