Everything is Political

Sassafras House is a land where the sports calendar matters, both in terms of playing and viewing.  These days, JT is a runner and a wrestler, and I am there to watch and cheer him on.  When it comes to watching sports, our first love is baseball, both the MLB and college baseball and softball.  But we regularly make time for college basketball, both women and men, and for years we’ve watched college football and the NFL.

I believe in the power of sport to unite people, to provide enjoyment and excitement, to teach us all lessons about human achievement.  I think that there are times when sports can transcend our individual identities to teach us universal human truths.  For my son, sports and being part of a team has taught him lifelong lessons about the power of perseverance; it’s showed him that a work ethic matters.  I encourage my middle school students to participate on teams and I go to their games.  I’m enough of a fan that this Fall I taught a Middle School course on sports statistics and when the students in the course wanted to talk all NFL, all the time, I was a good sport about it.  

My appetite for football has faded in recent years, largely as a result of the growing evidence that the sport is damaging to the brains of its players.  The more I understand brain science, the more I find football uncomfortable.  I’m glad that JT doesn’t play and in recent years I’ve watched less and less.  I did pay attention to the NFL on the weekends after President Trump decided to attack Colin Kaepernick, because I respect Kaepernick and his actions.  The spector of NFL players standing up to the president was appealing.

My respect for Kaepernick extended to the hope that he would once-again find employment in the NFL.  I may not enjoy football as much as I once did, but Kaepernick wants to play and I respect him.  The outcome of that story is well-known: no team in the NFL sought the services of Kaepernick and, as this article by Dave Zirin makes perfectly clear, the reason is obvious.

Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.  For me, the conclusion is that NFL owners are a privileged, racist lot of men, the sort who want their fans to pay extra taxes for their stadiums, and otherwise spend our hard-earned money to line the owners’ pockets.   They aren't looking to field winning teams as much as they seek a football universe on their terms, not ours.  I am done with the NFL.  I'm still a sports fan; I'm teaching sports statistics once again this Spring.  This time, the course has a new title: "Baseball Statistics".

Season Opener

One of the nicest things about our school is that many of JT’s friends began there when they were little boys.  JT and his fellow wrestler E became friends when they were four years old.  They’ve grown up together and their friendship is something they both value.  There’s something sweet about watching boys who once played in the sandbox together as they are now captains of their wrestling team.  It’s a sport that they both love. Their final wrestling season began on Monday and, as I often do, I sat in the bleachers with E’s mom, TS, who, like me, sometimes wonders how it was she became the mama of a wrestler.  

She and I are both moms of singletons, both women who waited to have children and now are thinking about all the changes that are coming to our world as we launch these boys into the world.  We talked before the match began and discovered that we are both treating this Senior year a year to live in the moment; to enjoy every minute of time these boys of ours are still living at home.

Then the wrestling began and we watched one another’s boys wrest out a victory after 6 long minutes on the mat.  They were hard-fought wins and we cheered the whole of the time.  It was exhausting to watch; it seemed like the seconds were ticking by extra slowly.  When it was over, TS looked at me and said, “maybe living in the moment is overrated.”

I laughed and in that second agreed. But I will be at every wrestling match that will have me, cheering like a lunatic and shouting things like, “hold him down” and “stuff the head!” as if I am bloodthirsty.  Because it’s wrestling and that’s what we do.

The Next Season

JT started wrestling in 8th grade and I have since then come to realize that it’s as much a sport as it is a cult.  Our coaching staff is not of the old-school starve-yourself and sport-a-cauliflower ear variety, for which I’m enormously grateful.    In a state with a commitment to the sport, our team has a tradition of tough practices and an admirable team ethos.  Outside of practice, the team is closely-knit and there is a lot of laughter among the wrestlers.  It’s detracts from mat-burned faces, so I think that’s all to the good.

I’m told that there’s nothing like 6 minutes of grappling on the mat to show you what you’re made of.  As a mama who has watched her son battle through those 6 minutes, I’ve decided that I’ll let his example teach me the lesson.  Where cross country fans are a civilized cheer-everyone-on variety, wrestling has a more bloodthirsty fan base.  I’m gearing up to yell things like, “stuff the head” and looking forward to the inevitable moment of the season when T gives me a sidelong look as she sniffs the funky gym air and points out, “If you’d had a girl, we’d be watching basketball right now.”

Alas, we are wrestling moms instead.  Stuff the head!

Race Day

JT ran his final race of his Senior year Cross Country season on Saturday.  A week before, at the second to the last race of the year, I felt emotional.  I expected that his final race in our school’s uniform would be even more emotional.  He’s been at this school for 15 years and Cross Country was the first school uniform he ever wore.  At the time, as a 7th grader, he was proud to wear the school colors.  If anything, he’s even more proud today.  T and I headed out on a cool day to cheer him on.  The course is one of the hardest in the state and he ran all out.

He’s not the kind of kid to hold back as he approaches the finish line.

I knew the kid in red was getting passed.

At the finish line, JT was all in.

I was cheering like a lunatic but I didn’t cry.  It’s not that I’m not proud or emotional; I’m very proud and I think a lot about the next part of parenting, the part that features me sending my boy out into the world.  My boy is a committed runner and a good one.  Running has been an epiphany for him; he loves every element of the sport.  Running has fed his soul as well as his muscles; it’s taught him to value hard work and train for more than tomorrow’s event.  I love the fans and the crowds at a race and I expect that I will be cheering on this runner for a while to come.  For starters, he’s registered for a race in each of the next two weekends.  His college choices are all schools where he will be able to run competitively.  Next fall, I expect to be watching my boy run in a new school’s uniform.  I expect that I’ll be excited.  I know that I’ll be proud.  But mostly I'll be glad that he's found something he loves so very much.  That's happy!

Real Life Conversations with T: In the Stinky Gym edition

The backstory:  Since the new year began, T and I have spent a portion of nearly every weekend in a large gym filled with wrestlers.  The man stink can take its toll, as it did last weekend.

T:  If you had a girl, we’d be watching basketball right now.

Me:  I can’t argue with that.  Enjoy the grapplers, honey!

The boy we’ve got loves him some wrestling.  And so we watch wrestling.

Boxing Day

While I don’t have a “wrestling mom” sticker on my car, be assured that many a New Jersey wrestling mom does roll up to meets proclaiming that she is the mother of a wrestler.  T declares that it’s just a reminder to bring your insurance co-pay to the match and often I fear that she is correct.

The wrestling season of matches is blissfully short —— it lasts from late December to mid-February —— but what it lacks in length in makes up for in a crazy practice schedule.  After school practice started just after Thanksgiving and most days, JT doesn’t get to my office until 5:45 pm, a sweaty, stinky mess of a boy with a scratched and mat-burned face.  I long ago learned not to greet him after practice by proclaiming, “what happened to your face?!” but the temptation remains.

Where the wrestling season really exacts its toll is during Winter Break, when daily practice happens at 9 am and skipping or being late is not an option.  We had Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off but there is practice for the rest of the week, through the 29th.  I’m happy about 3 days off for the New Year celebration, though I won’t live it up that much.

Guess who is running a 5k on the first of January?

The blessing of wrestling season is that JT loves and respects the coaches and his teammates.  The work ethic he’s learned from the sport has carried over into his school work and his other sports.  The ability to work hard, be a good teammate, and then stand on your own in the spotlight are life skills that will stand him well in life.  So I get up early and drive to practice with nary a peep, glad for a happy and hard-working boy.

Personal Best

One of the best parts of being a parent of a teenager is the pleasure of watching my child come into his own being.  JT loves physical activity, a trait that was apparent in him pretty much the moment he learned to walk.  For his whole life, he’s brought both confidence in his physical ability and an innate caution that is rather an unusual combination.  I remember when he was two years old and liked the slide at our local park.  He’d scramble up the ladder and then pause to situate himself before he slid down, hands up and ready to fly.  This combination of confidence and caution was empowering to us both.  I knew he wouldn’t climb to the top of the jungle gym if he didn’t feel confident he could come down safely.  He knew that I would let him take risks.  In sports, he’s found a place to express that combination of confidence and caution and be a team member who pulls his teammates forward.
I am proud of what he’s learned about himself.

This fall, he’s running in his fifth season on the Cross Country team.  He’s always liked running and for the last two years he’s treated the season as a chance to train with a team and enjoy himself.  But he’s grown up a lot in the last year and over the summer he made an effort to run and push himself so that he entered the cross country season in much better condition.  This year, he was ready to ratchet up the personal challenge.  He brought some friends to the team and at practice, he pushed them and himself.  His coaches were pleased; he was proud of his effort.  In early races, he ran well enough to score times that were his personal best.  He did this three races in a row and earned the last of seven Varsity running positions.  He began to speak with the coaches about how much faster he could finish a race.

JT has always been a good finisher; turning on the gas in the final 300 yards and regularly passing the runners in his path.  The trick for JT was to start stronger, holding the pace in the second mile and still having enough energy to finish strong.  For all his teenager boy traits, JT is cautious.  Running faster early in the race felt risky to him.  During a race, runners can’t use a watch so he needed to develop an internal sense of pacing.  So he tried it at practice where the task at hand was pacing and timing.  The varsity team ran up and down a stretch of road, checking their timing with each mile, and getting a sense of where they should be and how they could get there.

Last Wednesday, the team returned to a course they’d run earlier in the year.  JT was determined to see what he was made of.  He ran faster from the start and in the first half-mile, he was toward the front of the pack, a place I’ve not seen him run that early in the race.  He looked good.  As the race progressed, I could see him from across the field, holding the quicker pace he’d set from the start.  At the mid-point of the race, he was in the top 15.  He held that pace at the end and finished strong.  Two hundred yards out, the runner in front of him knew he was going to be passed.  JT finished the race with a personal best time that was 2 minutes faster then he had ever run before, 19:34 in a 5k race.  

My boy spent the next two days walking two feet off the ground, proud of his effort and enjoying the congratulations of his coaches and team members.  He’s not the best runner on the team, but he’s a good runner working steadily to get better.  His spot on the Varsity team is looking more secure each day. Meeting that challenge is a life lesson that will linger long after the season is complete.  

The Runner

Since the 7th grade, JT has run for the cross country team in the fall.  He started running under the direction of the amazing Coach L, a man who is as gentle as he is strong and whose patience with kids is extraordinary.  Those Middle School cross country years started slow, though JT ran well and liked it immediately.  When he started high school two years ago, he joined the cross country team in the fall.  This coach, a different Coach L, is funny and strong, and a fan of a work ethic.  JT respects her and looks to meet her ambitious expectations.  For two years running, he’s earned the Iron Man award, a distinction given to team members who never miss practice.  JT is a never-miss-practice kind of kid, so this challenge was right up his alley.

JT is a moderately good runner, with the tenacity to go long distances and enough energy to finish strong.  He’s an even better teammate, who has steadily brought his friends into the sport.  Last winter, when the cross country season had ended and wrestling was just under way, he and a group of wrestlers headed out on the cold mornings for some extra runs to maintain conditioning.  Something truly clicked on those mornings and a runner was born.

Throughout the spring and into the summer, he ran nearly every day.  He made easy 5 and 6 mile distance runs; he ran sprints; he ran tempo drills.  He was excited for the start of practice; the arrival of weekends finds him consulting Coach L’s instructions and going out for a run.  

On the weekends, Lucy the cat takes over coaching duties.  She's gone from supervising a little boy who played with Playmobil and ran around in the back yard to supervising homework and athletic practice.  She watches from the window when JT steps out the front door.

She stays in the front window while he stretches outside, a watchful eye on her boy.

She looks on as he consults his watch and sets his timer.

And then he is off.  

Lucy retreats for a nap, but stays downstairs because her boy will be back soon.  She must be ready to supervise the post-run shower and snack.

One Tough Lady Vol

The news is filled with stories about the life (and basketball victories) of Coach Pat Summitt, who died this morning.  I’ve been a fan of Tennessee basketball since I moved to the state in 1989.  Pat Summitt could do that.  For me, the reason was quite simple: she demanded that women and their athletic prowess be recognized and respected.

The second year that I lived in Nashville, some friends and I went to a high school girl’s basketball game in Sparta, Tennessee.  The trip to Sparta was driven by the desire to eat at a renowned meat and three restaurant on the town square.  We needed something else to do on that Friday night, so we went to see the local high school girl’s basketball team.

In those days in California, girl’s high school sports happened at times convenient for the boys.  But not in Tennessee, where the Lady Spartans of White County High School played in a sold-out gym at 7 pm on cold Friday night.  I had never before paid to attend a girl’s high school sporting event.  But in Tennessee in 1992, girls’s basketball was something to behold and fans paid for the privilege.

That achievement was the result of Coach Pat Summitt, then running the show at the state’s flagship university, the University of Tennessee of Knoxville, and showing off some impressively skilled basketball teams.  Her teams earned the respect of the state and the result built a girls basketball empire in Tennessee.  Her contributions to women’s sports are legendary and will remain so.  As for me, I’ll remember a rocking gym on a Friday night in rural Tennessee where the girls knew for sure that they were something else.

Real Life Conversations with the Wrestling Coach: Life Skills edition

The backstory:  I’ve written before about how much I like and respect JT’s wrestling coach.  One of the things I enjoy about him is his sense of humor, which is right up my alley.  The other day we had a conversation about Ultimate Fighting which, much to my dismay, JT has been known to enjoy watching.  

Me:  I don’t get it.  And I worry that JT will want to try it.  

Coach L:  Don’t worry. Wrestling is not a gateway sport.

He went on to assure me that getting hit in the face just once would cure a normal person of interest in Ultimate Fighting.  Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Unexpected Lessons

When JT took up the sport of wrestling in the 8th grade, I had some misgivings.  My associations with the sport were largely stereotypical, and, like most stereotypes, these weren’t positive.  I thought of wrestlers as grunting beasts.   I wasn’t interested in that path for my son.

But I indulged JT’s 8th grade choice to try the sport because our school’s wrestling coach is one of the finest human beings I know, a strong man with a kind heart, incredible patience for kids, and a terrific sense of humor.  JT could do worse than learn some lessons from Coach L, and so I supported his choice to wrestle.  

Two years later, he’s begun his third season of wrestling under the care of Coach L.  I’ve had to acknowledge that my stereotypical view of the sport was wrong.  There is still some grunting, of course, but the sport is far more than that for my son and his teammates.  It’s a lesson in strength, perseverance, and preparation.  Despite the fact that an individual wrestler is alone on the mat for the contest, the team element of preparation for those matches is incredibly powerful.  The boys work hard together and are proud of one another for facing the challenges of the sport.  Last season, JT’s proudest moment wasn’t a victory of his own, it was the victory of a teammate who started the season barely able to complete 10 push ups.  That’s not a bad way for a 15 year old to see the world.  

Wrestling has taught JT many things.  He’s learned the power of a team to support an individual venture.  He’s learned that preparation and resolve are skills that pay off in a myriad of ways when it comes time to persevere.  He’s become both physically stronger and more emotionally durable, thanks to a sense of self that he’s learned as he prepares to face a match on the mat.  When I watch him wrestle, I can see from his face that he’s up to the challenge.  So I haven’t yet screamed, “get off my son,” while he’s engaged in a match, a victory of my own.

We’ll have to hope that I can continue to demonstrate this self-restraint as the 2015-2016 season unfolds.   As for the boy, well, he’s learned some important lessons about strength and endurance, about being a teammate.  I’m looking forward to the rest of this season’s lessons.  

Season 2

The cross country season has officially ended and JT’s next sport, wrestling (!), doesn’t officially begin practice until November 30.  However, the team (which seems to be as much a cult as a sport) has decided to have some early morning runs to get in the spirit of things.

To be honest, I cheerfully agreed to twice-a-week  7:15 am runs with the view that they would never last.  But it’s week 2 of morning runs and there are a lot of boys out there stretching and otherwise getting ready to make a 2 mile jog down the towpath along the canal that is next to campus.

Last night I told T that 7:15 runs were a damn sight better than midnight trips to the police station, which I suppose nicely sums up my current parenting philosophy.  It would also seem to explain why we arrived at school at 7:10 this morning.

Real Life Conversations with JT: Poor Decision-Making edition

The backstory: The arrival of baseball season invariably finds baseball items left all over the house.  Among those items are protective cups that I keep finding in places I would prefer they would not be, as was the case on Monday.

Me:  Dare I ask if the cup here on my kitchen counter has been used?

JT:  I didn’t know where to put it.

Me:  Really?  Really?

I took the offending item upstairs and placed it in the closet that T and I renovated specifically for the storage of sporting goods.  If it is any consolation to those of you who eat meals made in my home, it was a fresh-out-of-the package item.  Of course, that may not be the case the next time I find it on the counter.

Sigh.

Season 3

JT started the 9th grade by joining the cross-country team.  He’d run on the Middle School team for the previous two years but when practice began in mid-August, it rather kicked his backside.  Still, he kept running and made every practice and every meet, earning himself an Ironman Award from the coach for his efforts.  I drove him to pre-season practice, stayed at school for late practices, and attended cross country meets all around central New Jersey.  I started the season in flip-flops and ended it in sneakers and a sweatshirt, there as he crossed every finish line.  His coach was a terrific combination of enthusiasm and rigor.  Thanks to her, the boy gave up soda and took up the eating of fruits and vegetables with the spirit of a convert.  The season ended at the start of November and we had three weeks off before he joined the wrestling team.

Wrestling has not been a sport I historically enjoyed, largely because of the macho culture I associate with it.  I’ve changed my mind this season, a tribute to the tone set by the head coach of our school’s team, one of the most gentle and kind men I know.  Within a week of the start of the practice season, JT was sold on the sport.  I’ve joked that wrestling is part team and part cult and I still think that’s true.  There seems to be a different kind of intensity when you prepare to grapple with a stranger in a cavernous gym.  Practices were long and demanding and we drove home in the dark most nights this Winter.  But JT loved it and ended his season wrestling Varsity as a freshman, an honor that meant he got pinned in most of his matches.  He takes solace in the fact that one of this year’s team captains lost every one of his frosh matches.  The boy has drunk the wrestling koolaid and he’s already planning for next year’s season of sweating intensity.

The third season of our year is the nation’s pastime and our family’s favorite obsession: baseball.  Practice officially started last week, barely a week since wrestling practice ended.  Yesterday, he flew to Florida with his team to spend a week at a high school spring training camp.  The game is his first true sporting love, an affection inherited from his grandfather.  The coach of this team was JT’s first PE teacher. Back then, at the age of 3, PE was the best part of his day.  That’s still the case, which perhaps explains his eagerness to play on a team for every athletic season available to him.  JT ginned up for the baseball season by fitting in pre-season weight-lifting and heading off to 7 am Sunday practices with nary a peep of complaint.  His love of the game is palpable, an intensity that I found endearing.   That’s a good thing, because this is the most equipment-intensive sport in our repertoire, with bags for gloves, bats, cleats, and the range of catcher’s equipment he uses.  Soon enough protective cups will be left all over the house with an abandon that will cause me to shout unkind comments.  

All of these teams have in common coaches who go more than the extra mile every day, serving as good-humored mentors and role models to my boy.  They demonstrate a combination of work ethic, intensity tempered with kindness, and competitive spirit that serves JT and his teammates well during the season.  But it is the way these coaches and teams teach lessons about life beyond sport that makes the teams an experience that will last long beyond the season at hand.  My son’s life has been richly blessed by these experiences and I am very grateful for that.

Our Sporting Life

Among his strongest passions, sports tops out at number one for JT.  He watches ESPN daily and his iPad is filled with assorted apps to generate scores and stats for his brain to chew upon.  He watches games as well and this point in the year, with March Madness in full-blown effect and opening day of baseball just around the corner, is among his favorites.  He has loyalties to certain teams and schools and the t-shirt collection to prove it.  He’s still enough of a kid to plan his wardrobe around the day’s games (yesterday featured a Wisconsin t-shirt in the morning and a switch to Syracuse for the afternoon).  His Tennessee and UCLA t-shirts are washed and ready for today’s slate of games.

I introduced this obsession and do my best to keep up with it, but JT’s knowledge of sports outpaces my own these days.  When I needed to fill-out my Buffett bracket, it was JT’s help that I sought.  As he grows up and seeks more and more independence, the games we watch together maintain a powerful bond between the two of us.   Not too many years from now, he’ll head off to college and a life of his own.  Until then, we watch games and cheer on our teams and find common cause in these games that are about fun, hard work, and perseverance; all lessons that benefit my sometimes impatient boy.  These days it is one of my greatest pleasures as a Mama.

Rocky Top

On Monday night, JT and I watched the NCAA Women's Basketball tournament and cheered on the Lady Vols, our favorite team.  I've been a Vols fan since I lived in Tennessee in the early 90s and I passed the condition on to my son.  He knows all the facts about the Lady Vols and their coach, Pat Summitt.  He knows that she's the winningest coach in NCAA Basketball.  He knows that she was once offered a job coaching the men's team at the University of Tennessee (she refused, arguing that it wasn't a step up).  He knows that the basketball court at the University of Tennessee is named for her. 

JT has a bracket in a betting pool for women's basketball and he picked Baylor to win the game and advance to the Final Four.  Even so, that didn't matter as he cheered on Tennessee.  Ultimately, the Vols fell to Baylor, just missing the Final Four.  We were disappointed when the team lost. 

At the end of the game, as the Tennessee players and their coaches left the gym and Baylor celebrated their victory, my boy started to cry.  "I want to see Coach Summitt again," he told me.  Like many fans of Summit and her team, we're worried that she might not be back to coach next year (Summitt has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's).    So I explained to him that while we don't know what Summit will do next year, we do know that women's basketball has a national audience thanks to her tireless advocacy of the game.  That 12 year old boys in New Jersey are eagerly watching the women's game is a pretty terrific legacy.  Thanks, Coach.

PS: For more on Coach Summitt, check out Mechelle Voeppel's story over at ESPN. com.

Behind the Curve

I have at least one t-shirt that reads 'Bruin Nation'.  I've recently been trolling shops to get JT a t-shirt that reads 'Cardinals Nation'   But at the gym today I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt that read 'Yankee Universe'.  Clearly, the rest of us are behind the curve.

Wherever he is, Mr. Steinbrenner would be proud.

In Which JT Deals Patriarchy a Blow

I was raised in a sports-viewing home and JT is suffering the same fate.  It started four years ago, when he was just 6 and became obsessed with the winter Olympics.  That year, he put on his sneakers and slid up and down the icy front side walk, pretending that Apollo Ono couldn't keep up with him.

Since then, we've marked the passage of time by the sports calendar.   January features football bowl games and playoffs and as those games wind down, the  basketball season cranks up.  March brings the madness and is followed by baseball's long summer season.  That yields to fall and football weekends.  And soon enough, it all starts again.

As it happens, I've long been a fan of women's basketball.  Though I got cut from the team in the 5th grade (true story), I still like to watch and when living in Nashville I taught myself how to shoot pretty reliably.  I've shared my enthusiasm for playing and watching with JT.  I've taken him to women's games at Rutgers University; we watch games on the television.  I'm a University of Tennessee fan and so is JT.  He remembers player names and stats with the relentless enthusiasm of a true fan.  He watches men's and women's basketball with equal enthusiasm, with no sense that the games or the players should be distinguished by gender.  I suppose this the is the result of growing up in the home of a feminist mama; to be honest, I've not given it much thought.  But last week I had cause to reflect.

Last Thursday evening, the UT Lady Vols were scheduled to play the University of Georgia.  Both teams were highly ranked and JT tuned in to watch the game.  But ESPN was showing men's games on both of their channels.  And as a simmering young man settled in to watch Indiana University play Seton Hall, he got worked up about the injustice of it all.

"UT is ranked #3," he exclaimed.  "And Georgia is #5.  Indiana and Seton Hall?  Whatever.  I have to watch this game instead of Pat Summit?  Ridiculous."  I expected that the ranting would wind down and I could return to grading exams while we watched the game that was available.

But I was wrong and the boy's indignation only grew.  Finally, I realized that it was time to explain the economics of sport and gender to JT.  So I broached a discussion about said issues.  I explained that the women's game isn't as popular as the men's game; that women's professional opportunities in sports aren't nearly the same as men's.  I even explained that some people think girls aren't as good as boys.  He greeted this news with fierce defense of the women's game and the smarts of girls.  "That's ridiculous, Mama," he announced.  "Girls can do anything boys can do."  And then he named a litany of the women he admired: Hillary Clinton, Candace Parker, Pat Summit, Vivian Stringer, the principal of his school and particularly feisty Junior basketball player also at our school.

They say that men become feminists when they become the father of a daughter.  I suppose that's often true.  But there's much to be said of little boys who are feminists from the outset, raised by hard-working, tough mamas who go out and do what needs to be done, in the process teaching their boys to respect the accomplishments of girls and women everywhere. 

Olympics

As a child, I always loved to watch the Olympics. I have succeeded in passing on that pleasure to JT. Two years ago, during the 2006 Winter Olympics, he'd stay up late tucked in my bed to watch the events. Afterward, in the snow and ice on the sidewalk outside, he pretended to be Apollo Ono.

We're getting ready for Beijing by watching lots of Olympic Trials in the past week. From gymnastics to track and field to swimming, he's excited about it all. I'm reminded of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, where Rumanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci stole the show. I was 9 that year, just one year older than JT, and when ABC showed a story of the training of gymnasts in Communist Rumania, I was impressed by the lock-step dedication and devotion. I remember asking my Dad why Americans didn't train that way. He bravely tried to explain the limits of a communist system of governance but all I could see was that they turned out a great gymnastics team. In later years, when I was in college enrolled in a class called "Problems in Communism," I would remember those 1976 Olympics with some amusement.

JT's not thinking of moving to any other country, foreign training regimens not withstanding. But the swimming trials have convinced him that maybe some swimming lessons are worth his time. Tomorrow morning he'll start those lessons and, I'm guessing, that in his imagination JT will be Michael Phelps gliding across the Middlesex pool and turning in record times.

The Barry Bonds Phenomenon

The prompt over at Sunday Scribblings is phenomenon, specifically what sort of things make other people excited that just don't get you all worked up. Mine is rather a guilty secret: I don't hate or revile Barry Bonds. If he breaks Hank Aaron's hitting record, I'll watch it on television. I'll probably think about what it takes to hit so many pitches in the major league. I'll listen to commentators indignantly announce that Bond's accomplishment is sullied by allegations that he used steroids. And then I'll change the channel.

I won't wring my hands and note the shame of Bonds using steroids to enhance his already phenomenal hitting power. I'm pretty sure that Bonds has used perfromance enhancement drugs. I think it's a shame, especially because he was a talented athlete without the enhancement. But I won't rant that the record must have an asterisk to note that he's a steroid user.

And it's not because I don't care. I don't think that athletes should use performance enhancement drugs. But I'm not surprised when people do so and I can hardly blame them. The fame and the money and the power generated by physical prowess; by a talent randomly handed to you by god, must sometimes be overwhelming. The combination of physical and mental strength required to be a good athlete is a rare one; hard to sustain over the years. How can we be surprised that some people look for a quicker road to athletic success?

In the end, whether he used drugs or not, Barry Bonds is an impressive athlete. One day, long after he's hit his last major league ball, he'll look in the mirror and have to answer his conscience. That's good enough for me.