The Agony of Defeat

I am and always have been an unabashed sports guy.

This assertion will come as exactly zero surprise to anyone who has ever had even a cursory interaction with me. I’ve played sports since I was a little kid — and I still play hockey on a regular basis. I’ve coached kids’ teams. I’ve been a rabid sports fan — especially for my beloved Boston teams — my entire life and I watch high-quality soccer pretty much weekly. I’ve enjoyed exploring and learning about new sports when I’ve had the chance: while living in northern Germany in the late ‘80s I watched cricket on British TV in an attempt to understand the game. I still maintain that seeing Bobby Orr rush up ice or Michael Jordan gliding through the air or Mikaela Shiffrin laying down a blistering giant-slalom run is to witness the fleeting moments of physical perfection the human species can achieve. And I still get choked up and cry when an Olympic gold medal or the Stanley Cup is awarded, or when Megan Rapinoe stands astride the world having just scored a goal that will propel her team (and gender) to new heights.

Quite simply: I believe sport is magical. And though I’ve always preferred doing to watching others do, I believe there’s something to be gained by watching the best of the best ply their trade and demonstrate those instances of human wonder.

That’s why it might surprise those who know me that I am THIS close to turning off the TV and giving up top-level sports forever.

The sign-stealing scandal rocking Major League Baseball is the latest — and potentially fatal — blow to my love of sports. I’m not going to get into the details of what the Houston Astros did, just watch this two-minute video.

It’s cheating. Out and out cheating. In blatant defiance of rules that expressly prohibit what the Astros did. And despite the declarations of those involved, it tarnishes the championship the Astros won.

And it’s only the latest example of organized, high-level cheating in highest levels of sport worldwide. The Russian government orchestrated a vast effort to facilitate doping across several Olympic sports — and yet still they’re appealing their punishment. Everyone knows what Lance Armstrong did during the year he dominated cycling — and yet countless other riders have been busted for doping since then. We’ve lost count at how many NCAA football and basketball programs have been penalized for paying players, bribing agents and other rule-breaking acts.

And then there are the infamous scandals plaguing the most successful (in recent years) of my Boston teams: the New England Patriots and their Spygate and Deflategate controversies. And despite having been caught and punished for such acts, the Patriots JUST THIS YEAR were busted for having a video crew filming the coaching staff of next week’s opposition. Jeez Louise! Have they no shame?

Even my beloved Red Sox, THE religion here in the northeastern corner of the country, is caught up in the sign-stealing scandal. Manager Alex Cora, who was part of the Astros’ scheme in 2017, and the Sox “mutually agreed to part ways.” It remains to be seen if the World Series the Red Sox won in 2018 will be tarnished along similar lines as Houston’s 2017 championship.

Does it even matter? There’s doubt now, and such doubt can never be fully erased. I have my doubts about the whole Deflategate scandal — but Tom Brady’s greatest-of-all-time career will always carry a stain, as well as persistent questions about what else he/the Patriots might have done during the unusually successful run the team had over the past two decades.

Cheating in sports is nothing new. It’s been going on since sports has existed. I’m not THAT naïve. But it seems different now: with all the money involved — even in putatively “amateur” sports — it’s just par for the course when doing business. And business is what sport was supposed to enable us to escape.

Maybe I’m being naïve when I ask this, but what’s the point of playing if you can’t play without cheating? Any victory you might gain would be hollow. Regardless of the dollars you might put into your bank account as a result, you’d still know deep down inside that you hadn’t earned it. You weren’t better than your opposition on that given day. You didn’t push yourself to a higher level than you’d ever gone before. In short: you achieved nothing BUT making money. More power to you but now you’re no different than anyone else trying to make a buck each and every day. But beforehand, before your cheating was exposed, you were akin to a god or some other ideal to which the rest of us might aspire. Now, you’re just one of us — and lesser than the rest of us who live and work honestly.

I’ll still tune in to this week’s Premier League games, and I’m thrilled my Celtics smoked the hated Lakers last night, but I’m slowly getting over it all. And I’ll stay focused on books and art and nature when looking for the poetry in this world.

A Voice from the Past

It was last week, on the three-and-a-half-year anniversary of my father’s passing, that I learned a whole lot more about the guy than I’d known before.

During the summer after he died, in 2016, I’d gone through the house that he and my mother had retired to back at the turn of the century. They’d brought with them all of the stuff they’d accumulated in forty-plus years together: multiple households’ worth of furniture, books, kitchen items, clothes and just plain riprap that their borderline-hoarder natures led them to keep. That they’d grown up poor during and just after the Great Depression meant they rarely jettisoned anything that might, just might, be useful at some point. Dad, for instance, kept countless empty, clean peanut butter jars in a cabinet because who knows when you might need a screw-top container? Several china sets that I’d never cast eyes upon let alone seen used on a table, clothes that hadn’t been worn in decades and bookshelves full of VHS tapes — Mom and Dad held on to everything.

And it was a lot. Mom died suddenly in October 2012 and Dad’s travails began three weeks later when he broke his hip while walking from the kitchen to the dining room. Because of his untimely injury and resulting frailty, my father had never been able to go through Mom’s stuff properly. And, of course, there were his own accumulations as well. So I did a big purge that summer of 2016; I even rented a dumpster that sat in the driveway while I filled it for a couple of weeks.

But there was also a lot of wheat among all the chaff. My mother and father led full, fascinating lives and their personal belongings reflected their struggles of war, poverty and loss, as well as their good times of successful careers, vibrant families and deep friendship.

Of special interest to me among their items I discovered in the summer of 2016 was a 62-page paper — a thesis, really — my father wrote while in his final year at Dartmouth in the first half of 1949. That he and I shared an alma mater, as well as a career based on the written word, was icing on the cake that was the subject matter: his take on our country’s perceptions of World War II — before, during and after — from the perspective of an infantry veteran.

The revelations about my father start right away. The paper had no title (which Professor Dargan called out in his on-the-page corrections; his other edits throughout the paper are interesting to this writer/editor as well) but it had an illustration on the cover sheet of a sundial and a soldier’s helmet. I have no idea if my father drew that illustration. I never saw anything resembling art or drawing that he might have made at any point during my life, but my older brother was a good artist when he was younger and my late younger brother was an art student who loved and excelled at drawing and cartooning. Those predilections had to come from somewhere and genetically, those two had only my father in common. There’s no attribution in the paper to another artist yet there are three pages of detailed footnotes in the work, so I am inclined to believe my father drew the illustration.

The narrator of the paper is introduced in a foreword as “American Youth.” The note acknowledges the author is using this generic third-person reference as a tool and that it is actually the author himself speaking. And that narrator reveals some things about himself that his son never knew.

The details include references to what life was like in the pre- and early-war days of gas rationing and blackouts of coastal Massachusetts towns, as well as happier-time images of hockey and visits to the beach (sound like anyone we know?). There are references to appeasing and isolationist American politicians during the 1930s that are in stark contrast to what the 15-year-old son of a World War I veteran knew about “the Krauts” and “the Japs.”

There are portraits of being away at school in Maine and hearing news of Pearl Harbor, and then listening with the rest of the student body and all the faculty to FDR’s speech to Congress a day later — and then retreating to the ice rink to distance himself from the new state of the world. There is the draft and the passing of a physical followed by induction and basic training.

And then there are accounts, though nothing too detailed, of what was encountered from further training in England to landing in France to bypassing Paris and heading to Belgium, where the Battle of the Bulge and especially the Battle of the Huertgen Forest waited. The Rhine is crossed at Remagen and Russians are greeted farther east in Germany. And ultimately, there is a return home to a new United States and a new world.

Nothing is too detailed in the accounts because much of the paper is, rather, an assessment of the various interpretations of the war by various publications, books and movies. And not surprisingly given he was a grunt 20-year-old grunt in the infantry, my father’s assessment is particularly harsh on rear-echelon cheerleaders, “sensationalists” and propagandists who outright lied (in some cases about places where my father was actually fighting) and paper generals who fought the war from behind a desk. On the other hand, my father is effusive in his praise of those who were on the front lines and portrayed things there as they really were, especially artist Bill Mauldin.

I had heard many of the wartime tales directly from my father, so what was really interesting to me were the specifics of life before the war and his perspective after it. My father’s slices of pre-war life in Medford, Massachusetts, and his take on war and combat, told from the fresh perspective of a 25-year-old were fascinating, and different from those the 50-something-year-old had told me over the course of my life.

And his take on the post-war reactions at home was just plain shocking. For the 50-plus years I’ve been alive our national storyline has been about how returning World War II veterans were greeted joyously, in stark contrast to how veterans returning home from Korea and Vietnam were treated. But my father’s paper, written less than four years after the close of World War II, puts paid to that falsehood by lamenting the lousy treatment of vets. Earning particular scorn in my father’s words, a feeling he and Mauldin shared, were phonies at the American Legion, desk jockeys who got Combat Infantryman’s Badges while medics who were out “going through the same dirt as did the doggies” didn’t, war profiteers for big business, Army PR officers, political blunders, and “housing and rent troubles” that vets faced. It’s clear why my father was so pleased at the high regard in which the military is held here in the United States in modern times.

Finally, what was eye-opening to me was reading my father’s indictment of what American troops did to the local populace in some of the places. His indictment of immoral behavior on the part of fellow GIs even at such a young age makes it clear how, many years later, when his son was considering applying to the military academies, he could say, “The army made me a man” and in the same breath add, “If you even think about West Point or the Air Force Academy I’ll break both your legs and you won’t play hockey anywhere.”

My father fought in some of the most vile, disgusting, inhuman combat the world has ever seen — and he was proud of what he’d done and what he’d become as a result. But even as a 20-something — an age when all I cared about was surfing, girls, partying and other frivolous, short-term pursuits — he exhibited a moral compass and a steadfastness that I sometimes think I’m still searching for, even in my 50s. He cited a post-war quote from Mauldin: “The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.”

I set my father’s paper aside after finding it that summer of 2016 for whatever reason. Apparently I wasn’t ready to read it then; perhaps our turbulent final few years together were still too fresh. My father was no saint, make no mistake, but as a result of reading his college work written in 1949 I have a newfound respect for the man. I don’t know if I could have had that respect while he was still alive; our relationship was fraught with all sorts of challenges that stemmed from our individual natures. We were, to cite an oft-quoted (by me, anyway) Springsteen line, “too much of the same kind.” Oh, I respected what he’d done and what he’d been through; I’ve been clear about that for forty years. But now I have a better take on the person and not just his life. It’s a voice from the past that I am grateful to have heard.

Oh, and Professor Dargan gave my father’s paper an A.

Travel Post-Mortem

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
— Mark Twain
(And unlike a lot of famous quotes attributed to Mark Twain, this one he actually said.)

As has often been the case in my life, travel prompts big and broad thoughts in my noggin. Sure, I contemplate short-term and in-your-face notions on what I’m seeing and doing, the people I’m meeting, and how much fun I’m having. But travel also forces me to ponder larger notions, typically related to life — mine, in particular, and in general. I don’t believe I’m unusual in that regard, and I think that’s what Twain was getting at in his quote. It’s hard to remain narrow-minded when you see all the world and its people have to show you. And that might be the main reason I love travel so much.

I’m just back after spending a week in Spain. In all my time in Europe, I had never made it to Spain before, so when my Dutch friends, Boogie and Marlies, announced they were having a party for Marlies’ 50th birthday, I knew I had to make the effort. I found a pretty cheap round-trip ticket and I could stay with them, so I knew I could do the trip relatively affordably. A factor, given my current finances.

Boogie and Marlies live in Mallorca where they have a wonderful, cozy little home in Palma. There, they run a 130-foot mega sailing yacht for an American owner. I’ve sailed with my friends all over the Atlantic, from the Grenadines to Greenland, including having spent the summer of 2011 crewing for them on a 72-foot charter boat — accounts of which you can find in the annals of this blog. They are dear friends and when I realized I hadn’t seen them since the summer of 2013 (when I helped them move a big sailboat from New York City to Rhode Island) I knew it was time. That it had also been December 2011 since I’d last been on a continent other than North America and it was DAMN SURE time to go.

And I’m so glad I did. For starters, it was great to see such good friends again after too long apart. Palma was wonderful and the party was great fun, and I also spent a day-and-change in Barcelona on the way home. Some quick-hit thoughts about my trip to Palma and Barcelona (in no particular order):
• I usually try to fly European airlines because the service is so much better than what I’ve experienced on U.S airlines. The service on Swiss was as I’d expected but they seem to be following their American counterparts in cramming passengers into smaller and tighter spaces
• Topographically, Palma and Barcelona reminded me a lot of the Los Angeles basin (without the urban sprawl): brown desert with mountains surrounding a populated bowl, palm trees and other desert plants transitioning as one gets higher in elevation
• All the old, falling-apart windmills on Mallorca made me think I was on the set of “Man of La Mancha”
• The Arab Baths in Palma are small but worth seeing. It’s cool to think the stones had been placed more than a thousand years earlier. And the peaceful garden outside reminded me of the meditation gardens in Encinitas, outside of San Diego
• Barcelona is a wonderfully scaled city. It’s big and it’s modern, but the buildings — with the winding alleys and narrow streets — make it a comfortable city. It’s not overwhelming like a New York or a London, but it’s still big enough to have everything you could want

• I walked past the famous Sagrada Familia and found it a little Las Vegas-y for my taste. But there were churches scattered all over the city that were gorgeous and inspiring without being so, well, tacky. One, in particular, recommended by a friend featured a stunning view from the top of the tower
• As much as I enjoyed Spain, I don’t know if I’m wired for the hours the Spanish keep. I found the quiet afternoons when stores are closed, followed by everything being open during the evening hours, followed by everyone going to dinner at 9 and 10 o’clock (or later) to be disconcerting. Hey, it works for them and I’m game to try, but I may be too much of a morning person for the whole “sleep late, siesta, late dinner” thing

It was also a unique time to be in that part of the world. In addition to seeing amazing sights and experiencing a different culture (or two; more on that later), I also found myself seeing first-hand the convulsions of a political/cultural upheaval in a tumultuous region.

I can’t do justice to the situation in Catalonia/Spain so I won’t even try. But the sentencing of several leaders of the Catalonian independence movement led hundreds of thousands of protesters to take to the streets in Barcelona and other Catalonian cities. By the time I arrived only scattered small demonstrations remained, but the anger simmered throughout Barcelona. From balconies all over the city I saw the Catalonian flag and yellow ribbons, posters crying out for justice, and as I had dinner one evening a protest popped up in the small square in front of the restaurant. I stood in the doorway watching a hundred or so people sing the Catalonian anthem while under the watchful gaze of a couple of police officers. An older gentleman walked along the perimeter of the demonstration with his right arm and middle finger extended toward the singers, illustrating that things aren’t so cut-and-dried. But what was especially moving to me was that the bartender who’d been serving me and with whom I’d been chatting put everything down and stood in the doorway, fist raised overhead, singing along with the crowd.

It was powerful, inspiring even, to see such passion for a cause, and a love for rights and freedom, especially as I see people (myself included, if I’m being honest) stand by meekly as rights and freedom suffer assault in the United States, the place where the modern notion of freedom got started. (And a couple of days after I returned to the U.S., more than 300,000 people gathered for a massive protest in Barcelona. In fairness, the next day,  80,000 people gathered in support of Spanish unity.)

On top of that, the day after I left the remains of the late dictator, Franco, were exhumed from the memorial to those who died in the Spanish Civil War and moved to a family plot in Madrid. It might seem incredible to us, but there are plenty of Francoists in Spain, so such an event (years in the making after court challenges and appeals) was as profound as the unrest in Catalonia. Spain, it seems, is a very much a dynamic nation. That’s both appealing and unnerving. To be honest: I don’t know how I feel about such back-and-forth dynamism. I mean: freedom and independence is a good thing, isn’t? Fascism is bad, right? Well, there are Spaniards on both sides of both of those questions. And since my trip I’ve been reading up on the events in Spain in hopes of understanding things a little better.

And it’s that notion — the desire to understand things a little better — that travel prompts in me. In the case of this trip, external things were more front-and-center than most travel I’ve done. But there have been plenty of internal things running through my brain and heart since I got on the plane to Spain.

On a personal level, there’s the sheer joy I get in being among foreign cultures. And that joy comes not only because of the different ways other people eat, talk, play and relate to one another, but because it comforts me (the ol’ curmudgeon himself) to see just how different people can be but actually how alike we are, deep down. We all want happiness, we all want love, we all want to savor life…we just seek those things in different ways. And one way is not better than another it’s just…different. It’s in those differences I find communion, I find my humanity. No culture has a corner on the best way to do things, so it behooves us to embrace our similarities and explore our differences, and take what works best to keep evolving as a species.

I don’t get those people who freak out on non-English-speakers here in the U.S. Are you SO insular that realizing there are billions (with a B) who don’t speak English? Are you SO arrogant as to think your language is the only one worth learning? One of the things I love most about Europe is the range of languages — and the fact that multilingualism is everywhere — but more, the acceptance people have for others who speak differently. That variety speaks (bad pun sort-of intended) to the multiplicity of the human experience — and how close by it is — and hints at how much more there is for ALL of us to learn and grow.

And that’s not to diminish my/our own language and culture. English is an amazing language, and America has created so many amazing, wonderful things that are rightly celebrated. I celebrate them. But I can also celebrate others at the same time I take pride in my own tribe.

Throw on top of language our differences in food, dress, customs, sport and so on, and the incredible vastness that is homo sapiens is nothing short of mind-blowing. And it’s all out there for any of us to learn, should we so choose. And I, for one, want to keep learning until I die, and travel enables me to learn AND feel better about the magic of my species in one fell swoop. Mark Twain, as he was on so many topics, was wise indeed.

Oh, and one other observation from this trip: electric scooters are taking over the world.