At least Sam Darnold didn’t have to play board games. Not that we know about, anyway. Across the next two weeks Darnold’s rise and fall and rise will be detailed to death, so who knows? Maybe somewhere along his remarkable journey from New York to Charlotte to San Francisco to Minneapolis to Seattle, we’ll discover a few crazy anecdotes.
John Travolta, he needed to play board games. Travolta’s career in movies was flat-lining in the early 1990s. He was unhirable. Once one of the youngest bankable stars in Hollywood history, he’d become so toxic that people thought Quentin Tarantino was kidding when he talked about casting Travolta as Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction.”
Tarantino needed to know the fight would be worth the effort. So he invited Travolta over to his house for dinner. But the supper was just a prelude.
“Then,” Travolta remembered in 2004, “he wanted to play games.”