Part 1

I’ve spent two decades in tunnels and locker rooms, watching NFL linebackers tape up their fingers and NBA point guards stare into their phones to block out the noise. The pressure in those places is suffocating, but it’s artificial. The stadium lights are designed to make you think it’s life or death. It never is.

Then I found myself in Angola, thousands of miles away from the draft combine or the Super Bowl, watching a different kind of machine at work. I was tagging along with Alex Honnold and Stacy Bare. The mission was noble on paper—”adventure not war,” solar energy, bridging cultures. But when you strip away the press release, you’re left with the raw, uncomfortable mechanics of the American sports industry dropped into a post-conflict zone.

We were there to climb. But first, we had to watch a demonstration of unexploded ordnance being blown up in a ditch.

It’s a jarring shift. Usually, the “danger” I write about is a torn ACL or a contract holdout. Here, the danger was buried in the dirt. Millions of landmines left over from a twenty-seven-year civil war. We were looking up at these beautiful, virgin granite walls, thinking about routes and handholds, while the locals were thinking about where they could walk without losing a leg.

There’s a specific kind of guilt that hits you when you realize your “adventure” is someone else’s trauma.

We rolled up to a hotel in the city—a high-rise with this weird, decorative stonework. It wasn’t a mountain. It was a building. But the content machine needs to be fed. Alex, being the brand, the face, the “asset,” starts climbing the facade. He’s squeezing between balconies, testing the stone.

“I’m going to be like those Russian dudes,” he said, half-joking. “Press out a handstand… take a bunch of selfies… be a viral internet sensation.”

He said it with a laugh, but I felt the weight of it. That’s the job. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the serenity of Yosemite or the chaos of Angola; you have to “earn your keep.” You have to make the sponsors happy. You have to create the image that sells the shoes and the energy drinks.

I watched him scale that building, scuffing his shoes on the facade, while security guards and locals watched from below. It felt like a performance. A circus act. We were the wealthy Americans playing Spiderman on their architecture because we could. Because we had the safety net of return tickets and health insurance.

There’s a moment where Alex says, “It feels hollow.” He was talking about the stone on the building, but looking through my lens, I wondered if he was talking about something else.

Part 2

The dynamic on the road is the same as it is in the NFL, just with more dirt. You have the franchise player, and you have the guys who clear the lane.

Stacy Bare is a veteran. He’d been to Angola before, cleaning up landmines. He carried the weight of the place in his eyes. He wasn’t there for the selfies; he was there to rewrite his own memory of war. But on the rock, he fell into the role that every rookie lineman knows: the support staff.

They called it “fluffing.” It’s a crude joke, but accurate. Stacy would go up, clean the route, scrub the moss, check the loose rocks, and make it ready. He did the dirty work so the Star—Alex—could come in and flash the route for the cameras.

“I’m the fluffer of the trip,” Stacy laughed, but there was a sharp edge to it. “I prepare things… and then Alex sends them. Got to know your role.”

In American sports, we worship the guy who scores the touchdown, not the fullback who cracked his helmet open to make the hole. It was happening here, too, on a remote cliffside in Africa. The hierarchy traveled with us in our luggage.

But biology is the great equalizer. You can be the greatest climber in the world, the “asset” worth millions in sponsorship, but you can’t outclimb bad bacteria.

Alex went down hard. Not from a fall, but from the food. Watching a superhero curled up in the dirt, shivering, unable to stand, stripping down to his underwear because he’s soiled himself—it breaks the myth immediately. The cameras usually cut away here. The narrative prefers the summit. But this was the reality: a young man, far from home, mortal and miserable.

We had to treat him like a delicate piece of cargo. “We need to take him to get a blood test,” someone said. The fear of malaria was real. Suddenly, the viral stunts and the handstands on the hotel edge didn’t matter. The system stopped because the asset was broken.

Part 3 We wrapped the trip. The solar panels were installed—a genuinely good thing. The routes were climbed. The photos were secured.

Alex recovered. He talked about how the trip was “pretty much everything I hoped for.” He was back in professional mode, framing the narrative for the exit interview.

But as we packed the gear, I couldn’t shake the image of us walking past the villagers to get to the rock. We had the resources to fly across the ocean, drive into the interior, and choose the “hardest way up” a rock face just for fun.

Alex called it a “privileged perspective.” He was right.

We left scuff marks on their buildings and bolt holes in their mountains. We captured our content. We got our “adventure.” And then we got on a plane and flew back to the comfort of the United States, leaving the landmines exactly where they were.

The sports world loves a story about conquering adversity. But usually, the adversity is a game clock or a rival team. It’s a game. In Angola, we played our game on top of their reality. And like every visiting team, once the whistle blew, we showered, packed up, and went home, leaving the silence behind us.