What’s Beard Reading? (3.07: “The Strings That Bind Us”)
Season 3, Episode 7 of Ted Lasso was originally to be titled “Boxes,” the name initially attached to the teaser screenshot on AppleTV+. “Boxes” would have served well enough to highlight Richmond’s new Total Football approach, which challenges the very notion of positions and rigid technique on the pitch. Ted and the team are now thinking outside the box and all that. “Boxes” also would have underscored the show’s consistent encouragement to look beyond the categories that we often put ourselves and others in: “Be curious, not judgmental,” as the apocryphal Walt Whitman quote from “The Diamond Dogs” goes.
But only a few days before episode 7 released, the title was changed to “The Strings That Bind Us” — an altogether more provocative and apropos name, both for the episode and the series. “Strings” here literally refers to the risky drill Roy schemes up to force the team’s awareness of each others’ movements. But it also gestures towards what has been (and presumably will continue to be) most fundamental to Richmond’s success — the shared history and experiences of the teammates, the bonds they are forming in the ebbs and flows of life on and off the pitch that form them as people and players and help to multiply their gifts.
This teamwork (or cooperation or interdependence or another term in that vicinity) is my best bet for the fourth element of Total Football that Ted has yet to name (the other three being conditioning, versatility, and awareness). Such a term would dovetail with Trent Crimm’s epiphany after Richmond’s loss to Arsenal, as he becomes convinced and even giddy that Total Football “is going to work.” It will work, Crimm says, because this new approach is actually not so new. It’s what Ted has been aiming at all along: “By slowly but surely building a club-wide culture of trust and support through thousands of imperceptible moments, all leading to their inevitable conclusion.”
Jamie understands the importance of teamwork, too, and in his halftime pep talk encourages that vision in the other players as well: “If we want this to work, you gotta stop going to me and start playing through me. You get me?” Even as the Greyhounds have ostensibly shifted to a Total Football strategy, the team and coaches continued to treat Jamie as an ace and the striker to rely on to pull out the win (a mistake they made with Zava and seem intent on repeating here). This fixed mindset ironically shows up most clearly in the versatility drill when Jamie receives his own name as the alternate position he’s supposed to inhabit. But Jamie’s transformation over the last two seasons poised him to immediately see this mistake, even if the coaches can’t quite see it yet.[1] But with the team’s turnaround in the second half of the Arsenal match, the light perhaps now dawns. Their strength lies in genuine teamwork, teamwork that goes beyond being in name only and makes room for communal participation, excellence, and creativity.
That, too, is the secret of Ted Lasso the show itself, and Beard’s book choice in episode 7 gestures in that direction. Most of Beard’s books through the years have been nonfiction,[2] but in “The Strings That Bind Us,” he’s reading a novel, one that is especially on-brand for the idiosyncratic coach. James Kirkland’s Friend of the Devil is the first in his planned Bill Walton Mysteries trilogy (Fire on the Mountain was released in 2020, with a third volume to come). Put out by Meathouse Publishers in 2019, Friend of the Devil imagines the champion Portland Trail Blazer turned inimitable basketball sportscaster (and notorious Deadhead) as an amateur detective. In this installment, Walton (along with his fellow commentator, Dave Pasch — the Watson to Bill Walton’s Holmes) is searching for the kidnapped daughter of a former teammate, all the while calling games for a Pac-12 tournament each night.
Kirkland credits Walton’s goodhearted nature as the catalyst for the story: “Walton seems like the kind of guy who, if a friend came to him in need, he would do anything to help,” Kirkland has told interviewers. “So I just took that to the most extreme and fictional place possible, of him fighting crime.” It’s a wacky premise to be sure, but its quirkiness is also its genius, per the Amazon reviews.
This plot brilliantly taps into the buddy comedy formula that undergirds Ted and Beard’s relationship. And the book’s onscreen appearance at this juncture of the series reminds viewers of the larger creative team and their entrenched histories behind the Ted Lasso franchise. As it turns out Meathouse Publishing is spearheaded by the often silent partner behind the Lasso phenomenon — comedy writer Joe Kelly. An alum of the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, Kelly is most known for How I Met Your Mother and Detroiters.
The web of connections across the Ted Lasso creative team comes into clearer focus through the lens of this novel. The story was conceived, for example, over beers between Kirkland and Kelly as they discussed other writing projects. Kirkland wrote the novel, but Kelly edited and published it. And the book frequently invokes Detroit (and by extension Detroiters) as well, most notably through the rental Chrysler 300 that Pasch drives in the story. Significantly, Sudeikis played a Chrysler executive for Detroiters, and Sam Richardson — co-creator and lead of the show — is featured in Ted Lasso as Ghanaian billionaire Edwin Akufo (“Midnight Train to Royston” and “Inverting the Pyramid of Success”). There’s a small shoutout to the other Detroiters lead actor, Tim Robinson, in the first team meeting of “The Strings that Bind Us.” I’m mentioning here only the smallest sliver of interconnections I’ve seen across the creative team of Lasso, and there must be so many more that I’m missing.
It is fitting to the spirit of the show that it includes Easter eggs such as Kirkland’s novel, especially in an episode entitled “The Strings that Bind Us.” As Sudeikis expressed in a Today show interview on the eve of Season 2’s release: “So much of [the story] is rooted in people that we’ve had as mentors or coaches, directors, partners, so leadership was a big part of the ethos of the show.” That same interview also features a heartwarming moment with the high school basketball coach that Sudeikis has credited as an inspiration for the Lasso character. And the sentiment is reminiscent of Mister Rogers (another influence for Ted that Sudeikis has noted) who in speeches would call on his audience to reflect for a minute on who brought them to this point in their lives, such as in his commencement address for Dartmouth in 2002:
I’d like to give you all an invisible gift. A gift of a silent minute to think about those who have helped you become who you are today. Some of them may be here right now. Some may be far away. Some, like my astronomy professor, may even be in heaven. But wherever they are, if they’ve loved you, and encouraged you, and wanted what was best in life for you, they’re right inside your self. And I feel that you deserve quiet time, on this special occasion, to devote some thought to them. So, let’s just take a minute, in honor of those that have cared about us all along the way. One silent minute…
Through Ted Lasso’s arc, the writers have been intentional to spotlight many of those loves and influences, such as Ted’s unabashed enthusiasm for Arthur Bryant’s BBQ. In so doing, they encourage us to also recognize and pay homage to our own “thousands of imperceptible moments” — the people, places, and experiences that have shaped us; the larger projects we contribute to; and the bigger pictures of which we are a part.
[1] One quibble: this unawareness strains credulity just a bit, given Ted’s commitment to the Lasso Way and visionary leadership in the first two seasons, but perhaps it fits with the fact that he has fallen off his game a bit this season and is only now regaining his bearings. Or maybe he’s playing dumb so the team can draw their own conclusions? I’m withholding judgment for now.
[2] The only other fiction we see Beard reading (as far as I can tell) is Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (“Headspace,” Season 2, Episode 7), even if he often makes allusions to many others (including several to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club).
Other Installments of “What’s Beard Reading?” (for Season 3):
Episode 1, “Smells Like Mean Spirit”
Episode 2, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea”
Episode 8, “We’ll Never Have Paris”
Episode 9, “La Locker Room Aux Folles”
