Teasing Tatanka and Other Travel Plans

Tatanka – Lakota Sioux word for American Bison (buffalo)

If a bear charges you after a surprise encounter, stay still and stand your ground.  National Park Service Advisory

The plans are pretty much in place.  The accommodations are all booked, the basic itinerary is set and in less than two weeks it’ll be time for us to over pack, throw fishing and camera gear and mountains of other stuff and junk into the car that we won’t need and will never touch and head out on vacation.  I’ll leave the boilerplate “out of office” email message that says I’ll have no cell phone or internet service while I’m gone.  You see this is all part of the new American work protocol in which your employer expects you drop everything, leisure, kids's birthdays, sex and death (a family member's or yours), if and when duty calls.  By saying that you don't have any service you're trying to sound like you're saying, "Gosh I'd really like to but I'm in the wilderness."  But what you're really saying is "Fuck off:" Everyone leaves the same basic message, “Hi, I’m sorry I missed your email but I’m at Silicon Valley and there’s no internet or phone service here.”  I mean really how many places are left where you have no phone or internet service?  Actually I know of one.  That will be the cabin in Montana we’re renting for 5 nights out of the two weeks we'll be gone.  It’s about 20 miles from the nearest town and there really is no phone or internet. 

Participating in the American Demise

There's been a buzz in the news cycle during the last couple of weeks about yet another national plague; one that’s rotting the culture and moral fiber of America.  It has nothing to do with sexual preference or email-gate: not about Muslims or right wing Christians; and it isn't over a warming earth or smarmy, sanctimonious political windbags.  Nope, none of those.  The new national scourge is, hold onto your butts sports fans – participation trophies.

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For those who’ve been on a cruise or just naturally choose to avoid stupidity, participation trophies became part of the national debate when professional football player James Harrison announced that the trophies that were given to his children would be returned.  Said Harrison; “I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While I am very proud of my boys for everything they do and will encourage them till the day I die, these trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy. I'm sorry I'm not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I'm not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best...cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better...not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut u up and keep you happy.”

And so, for the time being at least, our new national Yoda on America’s moral fiber is a professional football player; appropriate for a sports crazed nation that is absolutely, insanely and unabashedly goggle eyed gaga over football. Of course it was Harrison’s right to strip his kids of the trophies. It’s not like he beat them or sucker punched a woman.  That he had to announce it to the world would be puzzling if not for the fact that Harrison has a penchant for stirring the pot.  And stir it he did as the battle lines were drawn and the pros and cons of participation trophies were debated in every medium and I suppose damn near every sports bar in the nation.  The anti-trophy crowd’s argument was outlined by Nancy Armour of USA today; “Yet somewhere along the way, someone had the misguided notion that kids should live in a la-la land where everything is perfect, there are no hardships or heartbreaks, and you get a shiny trophy or a pretty blue ribbon just for being you…No wonder study after study has shown that millennials, the first of the trophy generations, are stressed out and depressed. They were sold a bill of goods when they were kids, and discovering that the harsh realities of life apply to them, too, had to have been like a punch to the gut.”  Pardon me, I feel a sneeze coming on –“BULLSHIT.”  Ah that feels better.

So there we have it.  The collapse of America is imminent because of participation trophies.  Okay, that’s hyperbole but I’ve exaggerated for a reason, because folks have gone off the deep end over cheap hardware.  Consider NBC Washington anchor Jim Vance who opined, “It’s child abuse to give a kid a trophy that he has not earned.” We’re talking about children here folks; children playing games.  But as too often happens with youth sports the adults are butting in and fucking up the works; because that’s what adults do.

Having two kids who participated in youth sports and having coached youth sports I guess I have a little experience in the area.  My kids got participation trophies.  They’re packed away in a plastic bin somewhere.  My kids; one 32 and one 29 seem to be doing just fine thank you and I don't even think that they remember the trophies.  They work, they’re raising kids and they’ve gone through some hard times; particularly my daughter who I often consider one of the grittiest, most tenacious people I know.  I have a nephew who got a participation trophy for tee ball.  A few years later his dad died and the boy became the man of the house and remained so all the way through his college graduation. 

As a coach I gave out more than a few of these trophies.  The kids were happy, for a moment; and then the trophies were more or less forgotten in favor of the pizza party and handed to the parents who I imagine put them up on a mantle to collect dust and take up space until they were finally put away in storage.  These are mementos, nothing more, nothing less.

Give a kid a trophy and the leap is made that he won't be prepared for real life.  Okay, wanna get the little blighters ready for the real world?  Let's talk behind their backs; spread rumors about them; throw them under the bus; flip them a bird and drop an "F" bomb on them if they reach in front of you for the bowl of potatoes at the dinner table and by all means decrease their allowance as you load more chores on them. 

Over the decades I’ve become weary of that time worn notion that somehow athletics prepare kids for life, build character and toughen the spirit.  I’ve adopted John Wooden’s idea that “Sports don’t build character, they reveal it.” It isn’t up to the coach, the team or an activity to do the parent’s job of preparing a child for life, molding character and building a foundation that will stand up to life’s storms.  As for Ms. Armour and her notion that millennials are depressed; well maybe she needs to take a little stroll out of the sports department and take a visit to the news department.  Everyone’s depressed lady.  Americans are working brutal hours, are afraid to take vacation time and are bringing home less of the bacon (which by the way costs more per pound and has less lean and more fat); our government is a bureaucratic, bickering snag to progress; we’ve been at war for more than a decade; personal privacy is extinct and the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination is nuts-a-rama.  And Nancy Armour is worried about trophies?

What is truly disappointing is that the national debate about youth sports has centered on hokum; a non-issue.  Whatever happened to the other issues?  You know the ones that are apparently too trivial to catch the ire of Washington news anchors.  It would be refreshing to see Google get blown up with stories and debates about:

                Kids burning out at a young age because they’re pushed by parents and coaches to travel hither and yon playing a sport year round in that often futile hunt for the D-1 scholarship.

                Coaches falsifying records to pack their teams with ringers.

                Coaches teaching kids the "benefits" of flaunting league rules.

                Coaches and parents acting out at games, all the way from abusing umpires, officials and the other team to coming to outright fisticuffs.

                Kids undergoing major orthopedic surgeries because they’re pushed to do too much too soon.

                The use of steroids by kids as early as 8^th grade.

                Coddled kids?  What about those uber-talented youngsters who get to skate from youth through college not being able to read at grade level?  What about the star athletes who, during their youth, aren't held accountable for any aspect of real life, be it basic responsibility or differentiating between wrong and right.  As long as they produce runs and wins, hey, it's all good - just try not to get caught next time. 

If we’re going to have a national tirade about participation awards why are we picking on kids?  What about the tens of thousands of adults who jog a 10K at 15 minutes a mile?  They get medals. And while kids usually forget about their awards the adults literally slaver over their medals; they paper their walls with them  At the risk of sounding like a geezer, back in my day you didn’t get a medal unless you finished in the top three. Everyone else got a cheapie little ribbon.  I’ve got less of a problem with an 8 year old getting a trophy than an adult getting a fancy medal for taking pictures along the course with a cell phone. 

Sports is America's graven image.  Professional sports are a business for both owners and players where character, fair play and sportsmanship are for the most part relegated to the worn, dusty shelves of nostalgia.  College sports are a morass of hypocrisy, greed, corruption and oceans of money misapplied.  But youth sports are for the most part and for the vast majority of kids supposed to be a fun activity.  Yes there are opportunities for life lessons; to learn about teamwork, appreciate camaraderie, develop healthy habits, hone skills and coordination, learn perseverance and maybe develop a lifelong activity. Youth sports have become the last bastion of sport as a game; where fun is supposed to trump yes - real life.  

                

Father's Day

"My dad taught me everything I know.  Unfortunately he didn't teach me everything he knows."  ~ Al Unser.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”  ~ Unknown but often attributed to Mark Twain

He pulled on the oars on a chilly (well, frigid) early morning and the little rowboat, not so much glided as  moved in fits and starts to a little spot tucked into some reeds at the lake’s edge.  I would stare sleepily, trancelike at the water that swirled around the paddles.  Once at our spot he would tie the boat off on a half-submerged tree and then he’d make sure I’d baited my hood correctly and then would guide me through the cast.  The reel zinged and then the little split shot plopped into the water and then we waited.  That was Lake Merced, in the southwest corner of San Francisco.  The lake is just inland from the ocean and is often blanketed by fog that’s pushed in by a chill ocean breeze.  In the middle of that lake on a little rowboat it seemed like you were in the coldest damn place on Earth. 

Classic Dad; book, pipe, easy chair and a little Cognac

Baseball Takes the (A) Rod

At the instant of the crack he would glide along the deep green carpet looking up in the high blue sky picking out the orb that at its apex must have looked like a dancing white pea in the chill swirling winds above San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.  He moved surely as if guided by some mystic inner sense directing him right to the spot where the little orb would land.  And then he would position the glove just right, oftentimes just in front of his belt, opened and waiting like a leather basket. Plop the orb would drop into the glove and he’d step forward and throw a seed back to the infield.  I had the pleasure and yes, the honor of seeing Willie Mays, arguably baseball’s greatest player do that in person in many a game at the frigid and usually unfriendly confines of Candlestick Park.  I also watched Mays belt a fair amount of his 660 career home runs.  I didn't see the 660^th, which he hit in the uniform of the New York Mets in the twilight of his career.  It was 1973, the Vietnam War was still raging, Nixon was living his Watergate nightmare and I was just about to turn 20. 

Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

Two Stories; Giving and Taking

This is a story about two stories.  Both are typically American.  Both reflect values.  One story is about values cherished.  The other is about values gone awry.  The stories tell a story; about what is good in America and what is wrong with America.  Each story is about responsibility; accepted and denied. Both stories were on the recent nightly news and were broadcast within minutes of each other.  One story can warm the heart and bring a tear.  The other story is a groin kick that makes you wonder about the double dealing we often think pervades our society.    

Sniping Over the Sniper

There’s been an awful lot of sniping going on surrounding the movie American Sniper, the story of Chris Kyle based on Kyle’s memoir of the same title.  It’s an argument that like damn near every argument in America these days, has no gray area, got nasty from the start and spares neither the movie, its director Clint Eastwood, the Iraq War, the book, nor Chris Kyle himself.  And like arguments in America it managed to go off the rails into wild irrelevance.  A prime example was Michael Moore hauling Jesus into the donnybrook.   I saw the movie the weekend it debuted and shortly afterwards I noticed all the hoo-haw that was hitting the media.  And so I decided to read the book and a fair amount of articles in order to make up my own mind.