The Two Max Muncys (1997)

...and the two Allen DeGraffenreids, and the weird randomness of sports (and life).

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I.

Here is one of those stories that is either A.) Too weird to mean anything or B.) So weird that it must mean something:

On the first day of May in 1970, a child was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Eighteen years later, that child, now a young man, turned down a track scholarship at the University of Tennessee and decided to walk-on to the football team at Ohio State, where he became a placekicker and a seldom-used wide receiver. He was not drafted, but he wound up signing as a free agent with the Cincinnati Bengals, and he bounced around between several NFL teams, a World League of American Football Team in Scotland, and a CFL team in Winnipeg, before his career ended in the summer of 1997.

Four years after the first child was born, a second child was born in Kansas City, Missouri. That child, as a young man, played only a single season of high-school football in Georgia, but became a top-20 prospect in the state as an offensive lineman. He played his college football at Vanderbilt University, and went undrafted in 1997 before signing with the Arizona Cardinals, where he played sporadically until 2000.

And I recognize that none of this feels particularly out of the ordinary, until I tell you that both of these men are named Allen DeGraffenreid. Which means that for a brief period in the summer of 1997, there were two entirely unrelated men with the name of Allen DeGraffenreid playing professional football, one of the rarest professions in America. And maybe you view this as a bizarre coincidence that does not hold any deeper meaning; but at the very least, it is a reminder that randomness plays a bigger role in our lives, and in our games, than people are willing to admit.

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II.

Here are two reasons why this newsletter has chosen to make a sudden left turn into existentialism:

A.) The Oklahoma City Thunder, on the verge of winning the NBA Championship, have two players on their roster with the same name (Jalen Williams and Jaylin Williams) who were both chosen in the same draft. (Jalen Williams scored 40 points in the Thunder’s Game 5 win, while Jaylin Williams didn’t play, which really got lead broadcaster Mike Breen off the hook.)

B.) There are now two entirely unrelated Major League Baseball players in West Coast cities (Oakland Sacramento and Los Angeles, respectively) who share the idiosyncratic name of Max Muncy, and they were born on the same day, 12 years apart.

These convergences, of course, are not without precedent; perhaps you have your own personal favorite tale of athletes with the same name showing up in the same places. It happens quite often with more common names—for a time, there were roughly four dozen wide receivers in the NFL named Mike Williams, which seemed entirely engineered to confuse casual fantasy football players. In 2021, the New York Jets drafted a running back named Michael Carter in the fourth round, then drafted a defensive back named Michael Carter in the fifth round (despite the Jets’ powerfully inept draft track record, they did not actually draft the same person twice). Back in 2010, a Raiders-Jaguars game featured tight ends on both teams named Zach Miller.

“Really, if you think about it, it's kind of weird,” one of the Zach Millers said. “I've never met anyone with the same name. It's really rare to have two guys with the same name, spelled the same way, in the same profession, playing the same position. It just gets weirder as you go.”

That quote came from one of the few stories I could find about this odd coincidence, because for the most part, the media makes note of these things, but has no idea what to say about them beyond the fact that it is incredibly weird. (Other times, in this era of disinformation, we are so desperate to make these coincidences seem profound that we conspiratorially twist the facts to impose meaning where there is none.) And yet I have to admit I have been drawn to these quirks of fate since childhood, when a pair of entirely unrelated Los Angeles Rams linebackers named Jack and Jim Youngblood played alongside each other and required the adddendums to their jerseys you will note in the picture at the top of this post, and here:

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III.

I cannot tell you how obsessed I was with the Youngblood Convergence as a small child. I spent roughly 30 percent of my spare time drawing pictures of football players, and in nearly every picture, I included a rendering of the Youngblood jerseys. I still always presume they are brothers, and every time I look them up and remember they were not related at all, my synapses explode anew. And yet here were these two men on the same team playing the same position with the same surname that was such a prototypical linebacker name that it recently sent me down the rabbit hole of something called nominative determinism, which is the idea that people gravitate to professions or interests that suit their names. When I mentioned this theory to my friend, he told his wife about it, and she suggested that I needed to suffuse more meaning into my life. And honestly, she’s not entirely wrong.

The central role of the writer is to attempt to impose meaning and plot on things that often appear random or disparate, which is probably why the Youngbloods and the power of coincidence so captured my imagination as a child. This is true in sports, where plays and games and championships are often decided by inexplicable bounces and strokes of both good and bad luck that have led every broadcaster in America to utter the words, You can’t possibly script this. (What is sports-talk radio but an attempt to impose meaning on sports where there often is none?) But it is also true in the larger universe, where we are currently suffering through an era where things are so strange and dystopian and conspiratorial that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine we aren’t living in some sort of engineered simulation.

And I suppose that’s why the Max Muncy thing and the Jalen/Jaylin Williams thing felt almost comforting to me this week: Because the world is full of random coincidences that are not conspiracies, but merely prove reality is always more peculiar and more random than we think. Someday when this era ends, America will feel somewhat normal again, and life will still be strange, and the challenge is to be able to sit with these opposing ideas, and to recognize that it is up to us to impose our own meaning on the strangeness while accepting that we cannot impose meaning on all of it. Sometimes, winning and losing is as random as encountering two NFL players named Allen DeGraffenreid. Life is weird, and it only gets weirder as you go.

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