Loving the Cup

When I made the decision to take a year off of watching sports, I did not think to look ahead. Doing so, I could easily have changed my mind simply based on the fact that it was an Olympic year. Now, just a few weeks later, I'm forced to miss another global sport spectacle, and the secret truth is, this one hurts even more. If missing the Olympics was like losing JFK, then missing the World Cup is like losing Bobby.

At this point in the experiment, I have ignored a Super Bowl, a Stanley Cup Finals, an NBA Finals, a near Triple Crown, March Madness, MLB Opening Day, and countless big match-ups, grudge matches, and highlights. It's a surprise to me that the hardest things to ignore have been the two international events. Even more of a surprise is that the one thing I have found myself the most tempted to cheat over has been the World Cup.

As it was getting started, I had a great conversation with my wife about which event was "better". She made some bulletproof points that have convinced me that the Cup has it all over the Olympics, despite all the lofty claims I made about it in my previous post. Disagree? If you look at them as sporting events, and if you are honest with yourself, the Cup is where it's at, sorry. Let me explain.

CEREMONY

The opening ceremony of the World Cup has certainly been growing over the years, but it remains a fairly tame production, at least insofar as length. A quick YouTube search shows that while the most recent show came in at about 22 minutes, earlier editions were a fraction of that time. After that, it's on with the games, and isn't that what we all came for? Meanwhile, the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies are starting to feel like spoken vows at a wedding. The true goal is less an authentic expression of love than an attempt to outdo all those who have come before. Eventually, you each a point of diminishing returns, and I think if we crane our necks around to Mohammed Ali in 1996, or perhaps the archer who lit the flame on the first arrow, we may see that point quite clearly.

COMPETITION

The Olympics offer a dizzying array of battlegrounds and tests of skill. Tuning in, one is never quite sure what one will see on the screen. For years, even after the advent of cable, networks have struggled with how to show everything that is happening to television audiences. Some events are cut away from, some are shown entirely on replay. Spoilers are always an issue, though that can certainly be the case for the Cup as well. In my lifetime, many sports have been excluded, included, and even excluded again, like Baseball. This can make it hard to even know what you are looking for. At the same time, there are several sports, like Curling, whose actual rules seem to escape us Olympiad after Olympiad. No such confusion with the Cup. We're all here to play or watch one thing. The only issue we have is what to call it!

SOCIAL IMPACT

I'm sure nothing beats the feeling of winning a medal for one's country. To stand on the podium and especially to hear your anthem played if you won gold must be an absolute honor and, perhaps, the pinnacle of human athletic achievement. For those of us watching, it's easy to shed a tear as we watch our young representatives stand, hand over heart, at the top of the athletic world. We are filled with pride, patriotism, and validation for where we were born (or where we chose to move to). Too often, though, as soon as the medal ceremony is over, the converge cuts to another sport where, likely as not, we are getting our asses handed to us. That's a downshift that can really strain the gears. It's just not advisable! In no time, you are forced to start paying attention to medal counts. You might find yourself muttering, "Well, we don't have as many golds as OTHERCOUNTRY, but we have twice as many silvers!" In this way, the Olympics start to feel like the youth soccer leagues where they don't keep score. Didn't medal in the 800 meters? Well, try the 400! Or the 200! Go get 'em!

Contrast that with the Cup, where we start out all playing soccer, and we keep playing soccer until only one team hasn't lost. You want to win? Keep winning! There are no second chances, and only one team will raise the trophy.

INTANGIBLES

This was the biggest point my wife made. The World Cup is a single tournament of a team sport. As such, it's inherently more inclusive and approachable as a casual fan. Few of us can imagine the pressure it takes to win gold in downhill skiing, or swimming, or the decathlon. And though it may be hard to imagine scoring the winning goal, we can all identify with the idea of going out there with some friends, or coworkers, or family members, and accomplishing something together. I know there are team sports in the Olympics, and I know that perhaps the most talented team of all time in any sport ever was the US Men's Basketball team in 1996, but overall, the number of individual events dilutes the pool.

A group of people will always have an advantage when representing something as vast and diverse as a nation. We can each find our favorite player, while still rooting on the whole team. Few individuals have managed to become a solo national hero and avoid the fall from grace. Thoughts turn to Ali again, and few others in the athletic realm.

INJURY TIME

I've often heard it said that there is nothing quite so exciting as overtime hockey in the playoffs. I couldn't agree more, but what if I told you that there was a sport where every single game goes into a short overtime style period before the game is over? Every. Game. Can I interest you in that?

FINAL WORD

I know there is much more to the story. I saw John Oliver's amazing piece on the corruption of FIFA, and that has to be taken in to consideration. Still, it's hard to imagine that the IOC is much better as a governing body. Any group of businessmen who make money off the the accomplishments of others and the enjoyment of those accomplishments by still others while basically fronting some cash are not to be trusted any further than they can be thrown (now that would be a great Olympic event!).

The Olympics are like JFK. They are the pinnacle of idealism. They are youth, and promise, and opportunity. They are our best and brightest on display, and it's not a great idea to miss them. But The World Cup is Bobby. More focused, more cutthroat. Bobby got things done, and Bobby was always a team player. For me, missing the Olympic Games was awful, but missing the Cup has just made it worse. From where I'm sitting, it seems like it'll be forever before I get the chance to watch again.

Business Trip

I'm in Provincetown for a week for work. That is a sentence that I sincerely hope each and every one of you, along with everyone you know, has the chance to say at least once in your lives. It's a week of sun-splashed quaintness that is virtually unrivaled in my experience. This former fishing village has been transformed over the years and is now, in my opinion, the headquarters of love.

Like Australia, or Galapagos, things just seem to have developed differently here. For a long time, the very end of Cape Cod, where Provincetown sits, was cut off from the mainland. Not quite an island, and not quite not, Ptown was the perfect combination of remote and sheltered. Here, the Cape curls in on itself creating an absolutely perfect breakwater and harbor. The water is so calm that at one point, when it became clear that some houses built out on the very end of the Cape weren't safe there, people were able to float the houses across the bay to the main village. Many of them still stand there today.

Provincetown has long been a community known for acceptance and inclusion, especially for the gay community. Walking up and down the streets (or street, really) you are quickly reminded of how many different kinds of people it takes to make the world. Good moods abound, and people are generally as pleasant as you could hope for them to be. Anyone can talk with anyone, or anyone can keep to themselves. Anything goes in this town, and everywhere you look, there's proof.

I feel very lucky and thankful that I have been able to visit the Cape fairly regularly throughout my life. In recent years, it's been a priority for my wife and I to get out here at least once a year. We've come to know that there is something special about waking up on Cape Cod. The sea is in the air, and everything just feels different. This year I started what I hope will become a new tradition. I took a boat ride out to the very end of the Cape at Long Point. No one was around, and I just sat, reflecting on the year behind me and the year ahead. Call it the end, or call it the beginning, doesn't really make a difference. Spots like that are to be embraced.

On The Brilliance Of Character Names In Mad Men

When I first had the idea to stop watching sports for a year, I thought a lot about how much of my attention was focused on the games. Each game takes several hours, and I wasn't just watching to see the score. I was keeping track of all kinds of little battles within each evening's war. No matter how many things went right, something, somewhere, was bound to put a damper on the evening. Maybe the Sox and Celtics won, but the Bruins blew one at home. Or maybe the Yankees beat the best team in the league while the Sox barely squeaked by a lesser opponent. Scoring titles, batting championships, MVP races, coach of the year, a staggering amount of things to keep track of and stress out about. And this was amid one of the very most successful runs any city has ever had across multiple sports. It doesn't get any "better" than this.

As I thought all this through, I likened it to watching two films every night, all year long. Like, really getting in to them, film studies style. Looking at what the cinematographer was doing to support the directors choices. Digging in to the motivations each actor was employing to flavor their character just so. Seeing what worked and what didn't, and wondering what was planned and what was discovered. I took a film studies course once and, as it tends to for many of us, it had a profound effect on the way I take in media. That was how I was watching sports. Like a class.

Now that I'm off the Boston team treadmill, I have time to fix my attention elsewhere, and a lot of those film studies tendencies are emerging again. My wife and I have been trying to keep our TV watching to a minimum, so I have much more time to reflect on the things I see, and I'd like to dedicate this week's post to something I have been thinking about a lot. The brilliance of the character names on AMC's great show, Mad Men.

I have long held the belief that if a work of fiction aspires to be truly great, the character names have to reveal something about the personalities you are working with. It can be blatant, like Jack (of all trades) Shepard (herding the flock) on LOST, or more ethereal and whimsy, like Cosmo Kramer. But the name has to work for the character. I don't mean it has to make sense, I mean it literally has to work for, to be employed by, the character, to tell us things that aren't said straight out. The more time I spend with this theory (and, it's been a while now) the more these messages jump out at me. Perhaps they do to you, too. In fact, I'm a bit worried that I'm just patting myself on the back here for something that everyone sees as matter of fact. But when it's as good as it is for Mad Men, I don't want to take it for granted. So fix yourself an Old Fashioned and bear with me, or click away now and come back next week.

Starting at the top, we have a legendary character name in Don Draper. I work pretty freely with homonyms in this game, so at first I thought the trick here was that this was a man who was the origin of the species. Aggressive advertising has so deeply infiltrated our daily lives, and I used to think this was a show about the flawed and devious characters that were around when that dangerous trend started. So following this logic, Don would be a Dawn of man, an origin of a species. More recently, I've fallen even harder for this name. Don has been so many men, so many people in fact, that he wears their personalities like suits. That's how he can so effectively take their points of view and cut to the core of what they want in his famous soliloquies. It's how he can cheat on all the women he has loved without remorse (for the most part). Hell, it's how he can live half his life as a dead man. He takes these people in his mind and "dons" them like a hat. And when he is done with them, he hangs them on the rack.

His last name is no less brilliant, but a bit more blunt. Drapes obscure the ability to see clearly into, or out of, a window, and that is what Don has built his life, and his fortune on. He is a master Draper, blocking our vision of the product, or his true self. Framing it and dressing it up so you don't notice how bad the view actually is. Don Draper. A perfect character name. The whole series is tied up in that single name!

Let's take a look at his buddy, Roger Sterling. He's my favorite character to watch, and in many ways, he's got my favorite name on the show. If you remember, he hasn't arrived at his position by hard work, like just about every other character whose lives we are acquainted with has. He took over for his father, who started the agency with Bert. Roger grew up in this world, and his biggest talent seems to be his ability to schmooze with the elite, when he wants to anyway. It's easy to see from the way he dresses, even in his LSD hippie phase, that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Sterling silver, that is.

He can't escape this reputation, thought at times he does wake up and struggle against it. Often though, he is happy to slide by on his reputation. As the series opens, he is quite content with his place in life and sees little reason to rock the boat. He's a classic yes man, who only becomes uncomfortable with his chosen role when a better, faster, younger yes man enters the picture, in Pete Campbell. The yes man status is what informs his first name, Roger.

Let's not forget the women, who for once are given better, more far reaching arcs than the men on this show. I have to start with Peggy, who is constantly fighting against just that, being pegged as anything anyone wants to hang on her. Joan thinks Peggy is timid as the show opens, but she manages to defeat that stereotype, getting an actual job writing copy. From there, she just keeps on forcing square pegs into round holes all series long. I've not really arrived at anything specific for her last name yet. She abandoned her son, so Olson could refer to that, but I think it's a bit more subtle. I feel like the name was arrived at by smelting "old" and "son" to imply that she is struggling against being marginalized in an old boys club kind of world. She's no less a pioneer than Don is in that way.

And finally we come to Betty. She's the biggest gambler on the show, and she's been that way forever. She bet on her good looks when she left home and moved to New York. She bet on Don, and rode their couple hood to riches and an ideal life. Then when it fell apart, she bet on a politician. As with all gamblers, as the show rounds in to the home stretch, it seems the house is winning, but maybe she'll turn it around. Remember back in the first season, Don even had an odd little nickname for her. He called her "Bets". Don gave her the life she wanted, and he didn't fight her for anything when they split. It should have come as no surprise when essentially the same thing happened with his second wife. They practically telegraphed it when they named her Megan, which sounds an awful lot like "again" to me.

There's plenty more, like how Pete seems like such an empty suit, until he shows he actually has some art to him, like a Warhol Campbell. Or how Bert Cooper's last name is a nod to an actual profession, long since obsolete, but still somehow romantic. Or even how Lane was corralled into a hopeless situation where he payed the ultimate "price". But this is already too long. I don't want to end up spending several hours on it, after all.

Active Listening

For 8 years now, I have worked at a small, liberal arts college in the northeast part of the United States. If this is the first post of mine you are reading, you probably can make more than a few assumptions about me based entirely on that single sentence. It's even likely that at least a few of those assumptions would be more or less on the mark. Hopefully none of that cheapens what my next few paragraphs hold, but if it does, so be it. We all have our perspective, and we all have to make a choice as to whether we let that hold us back or not. Sometimes I choose the former, but not tonight. 

Paying less attention to sports has given me the time and space to process some of the heavier conversations that are taking place in the world. One such conversation popped up about 10 days ago and really jolted me. After a sad, sick person acted upon his darkest motivations, robbing us of our friends and family members, the news media and the internet initiated their standard operating procedures. Interviews with survivors and commentary on gun control and mental health care filled the cable news channels. Meanwhile, the social media titans and message boards of every kind debated the appropriate allocation of sorrow and blame as if there was a correct answer to arrive at. This debate intensified as links to videos and manifestos began to circulate, but the national conversation remained flat, basic, normal.

Slowly, organically, something remarkable then began to happen. It started with straightforward statements, connected around a common theme. Women telling stories of their own day to day struggles with objectification and marginalization. Some were intense, others not, but they were all tied together through the now familiar hashtag; #yesallwomen. Seeing these simple, short, devastating stories from strangers across the country all joined together in a stream of brutal honesty was staggering to me. 

Many people think that this wave of expression was disrespectful to the victims of the shooting. That the national focus should remain on them for some appropriate amount of time until the news tells us what to worry about next. To me, this kind of conversation is a utopian ideal and I am still not over the fact that it even happened. Imagine the clarity, compassion, and courage it takes to speak about vulnerability in the face of such hatred. To ignore the easy, empty reactions of blame and rage, and to offer up in their stead your own, personal fears to the nation, and the world. Healing is what comes from gestures like that. Healing for everyone.

Facebook and Twitter are not often breeding grounds for healthy, vibrant conversations, but this was a different moment. I've read story after story and post after post of people who spoke up after seeing that others had, and of people who had their entire perspective on gender relations changed for good as a result of this conversation. I'm certainly one of those people. I used to consider myself a pretty good guy for thinking about how women I was out with were getting home in the city, or for understanding when a female friend didn't want to walk to their car alone. It's easy now to see that simply acknowledging those situations isn't just not enough, it's nothing. It's certainly not going to lead to change, and in many ways, it's only going to further cement the status quo. 

In some ways, I feel I have really arrived in the social media world.  After I said on Twitter that the more men bristled at the #yesallwomen conversation, the more they should shut up and read, someone I didn't know called me an idiot. I'm looking forward to getting my badge. Later in the exchange, that same person threatened to rape someone who had tweeted in my defense if they didn't shut up. I suppose it was inevitable that a national conversation on social media would deteriorate, but I am truly sad to see it go. There are a lot of conversations that need to be had and Facebook and Twitter are such great opportunities, if only we could remain curious about other opinions, and stop being defensive about our own. 

I have no earthly idea what will finally fix the gender relation problems in this country, but I'm willing to say that I know how the journey to that solution starts: with a conversation. If we can simply take a moment to quiet down, focus up, and listen to one another, progress will come. It may feel slow, and the goal may seem impossible to reach, but the conversation is what will get us there, so let's not let it die. Let's keep this conversation going until every guy understands that #yesallwomen is not an accusation or an attack. It's a perspective, and you can use it to help make the world better by making yourself better. Besides, not attacking people, or not objectifying people, or not marginalizing people is nothing to be proud of. That's just paying the rent.

The college I work for has a motto that I have been inspired by and that I have believed in since I first saw it in print. That motto is, "Expression Necessary to Evolution", and it's what this whole thing is about. It's an idealistic notion and an optimistic belief. And any assumptions that you manage to get right about me based on all that, I'm more than happy to claim.