Glory, Grief and Real Life

Sometimes, like the Iowa Hawkeyes' C. Vivian Stringer, right, and Laurie Aaron in 1993, you celebrate those moments that life gives you to celebrate.

For athletes and sports fans, the seasons of glory tend to stay in your mind forever. Championships clinched, big games won and the chance to breathe some rarified air are what anyone who loves sports wants to experience.

In Iowa, 1993 was a year with plenty of that rarified air, and I've been thinking about that year -- specifically the 1992-93 basketball season -- a lot lately. Yet in my mind, I don't remember it as a season of glory. It was a season of grief.

Twenty years ago, the Iowa women's basketball team earned its first and only trip to the Final Four and had a team good enough to contend for a national championship. I was The Des Moines Register's beat writer for the Hawkeye women's team, and it was gearing up to be everything a sports writer dreams of covering, only to end up a different story altogether.

On the night before Thanksgiving, the 47-year-old husband of then-coach C. Vivian Stringer died of a heart attack. Her life and the life of her family changed forever. Somehow, in ways I still can't get my head around today, she joined her team six weeks later and continued the season.

In that same two-month period, was the death of Hawkeye men's basketball player Chris Street in a car accident and the deaths of the women's team's former ballgirl and its team physician.

People think sports writers have the easy job, that we cover fun and games. But people forget that those involved in sports -- as players, as coaches, as writers -- experience the same gamut of life as everyone else.

And it was all there in that season in Iowa City.

The national media figured it out, of course. Week by week, they came into Iowa City to tell the story of the team that was rising up from all this adversity to play beautiful basketball. National media were generally kind, but their presence made it all less about the individual games and more about the greater narrative.

And every time, there would be the questions. I would think to myself, "Please don't ask, please don't ask, please don't ask ... " and of course they always would. You could just see the energy drain out of the coaches and players as their moment of joy was interrupted by a reminder of the sadness around them.

These players and coaches were people I had known for years and had come to care about. I got to the point where I felt protective of them and would even just make up questions on the fly at press conferences to change the subject or mood. After months of this, I had begun to hurt for them, too. I'm certain my co-workers who covered the Iowa men's team that season felt much the same way.

Journalists are members of our communities, and what happens to our communities happens to us. We get to know the people on our beats, and life can creep into any beat there is, sometimes when we least expect it.

I recently learned the story of a former colleague, a longtime courts reporter. In 1988, he was at an administrative building looking for a story on a slow news day, and the coroner asked him if he wanted to have lunch with him in his office. My colleague declined and walked away.

Minutes later, a gunman came into the coroner's office and shot him to death. My colleague set aside his horror and grief, called the office of his afternoon paper and asked them to hold the presses. A half-hour later, he had the story written.

Last month, that former colleague died. I got the call on a Sunday evening, assigned a reporter to write his obituary, suggested some people he could call, looked through some photos to choose just the right one and edited the story.

As I closed the story, I closed my eyes. There were tears building, but I sighed, went back to work and kept them from falling.

To paraphrase a movie about baseball, there is no crying in journalism. It's not that we don't feel the need; it's just that if we ever started, we might never stop.

(This post first appeared as an essay in the Wisconsin State Journal and the Des Moines Register.)

Fans for the Ages Made a Difference

When the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series in 1957, it certainly wasn't just men who found it worth celebrating. (Francis Miller, Life magazine)

(A version of this post first appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal)

March Madness brings out all kinds of things.

It’s the time of the year when the malls in cities that host state tournaments are full of kids in letter jackets. It’s the time of the year you turn on the TV and hear all sorts of screaming teenagers. It’s the time of painted faces and oh, so many tears.

And for me, it’s the time of the year when I miss getting yelled at by my mom.

My mom, who died 2 1/2 years ago, always had one big rule you dare not break: You did not call her during the state basketball tournaments.

Problem was, I lived out of state for most of my adult life and in the pre-Internet days didn’t always know exactly when the tournaments were on. So I’d call her to say hello on a Saturday afternoon and the "hello" would be followed with "Don’t you know not to call me when the tournament is on?"

Yes, I knew that. I knew that because my mom was a huge sports fan. She didn’t play sports, she didn’t advocate for them per se but she was part of an important force that is often forgotten when there are discussions of women’s sports equality:

She loved sports, plain and simple.

My mom, who graduated from high school in the 1950s, was not alone in that regard. I have a friend whose mom yells at her if she calls when the Iowa Hawkeyes are playing. I had a college classmate whose mother sent valentines to her favorite college basketball players. One of my favorite work assignments in recent years was spending an afternoon with a fanatic 83-year-old woman who loved her Packers. I have an aunt who broke her wrist a couple years ago when she fell changing a light bulb so she could see the computer better to cast an All-Star vote for the Brewers’ Corey Hart (and as she lay injured, she asked her daughter to please cast the vote for her).

Beyond battles about girls getting to play, women like this made a difference just by loving sports. For every advocate who battled for opportunity on the playing field, there were also women who just loved their sports and made it perfectly fine for their daughters to love them, too. It’s an important part of the women’s sports equation that is often overlooked.

And if you look for them, these women are everywhere. Go to a baseball game sometime – minor-league or major-league – and you’ll see them. Look in a back row somewhere and you’ll see an older woman, scorebook on her lap, keeping track of the Ks and noting a 6-4-3 double play. I chatted with one of these women once at a Milwaukee Brewers game, expressing admiration for her vest that was loaded with buttons of current and former players and she told me all kinds of stories about who was her favorite and why.

My dad loved sports, but my passion for them came from my mom. It was my mom who stood out on the deck one day in 1969 and yelled, "Al Sindor is on TV." I was 8 and didn’t know who this rookie Al Sindor guy was, but if my mom thought it was important to watch, then I’d come inside and check it out. It was the start of my lifelong love of basketball, which included clipping out pictures and articles of Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for a scrapbook.

The passion to watch sports held by my mother’s generation and the generations before them isn't what people normally equate with helping to tear down the walls of sports equality. But it was their love for this stuff that made it OK for little girls of the past to put on a baseball cap and go outside to play with the boys; my first ballcap was a birthday present from my aunt who hurt herself trying to vote for the All-Star. That love of sports is what made them eagerly sign up their daughters when the opportunities to play finally started to come. It’s so routine now; 40 or more years ago it would not have been.

It was this passion that made it OK with these women if their daughters grew up wanting to be sports writers (as I was) or TV sports producers (as my sister is), even if girls seemingly didn’t grow up to do such things. Their fierce love of sports, of just being a passionate, knowledgeable and unashamed spectator, is part of what laid the foundation for what came to pass in later generations in terms of opportunities on and off the field.

I just wish I could call my mom to tell her that. She probably wouldn’t even yell at me.

Fans of all ages show up for the Green Bay Packers' annual women's-only event and enjoy their chance to work out with players, including Jermichael Finley.

Man, This Week Has Been a Joke

Quvenzhané Wallis went from being on the red carpet to being the target of a blue joke. (AFP/Getty Images)

This has been a busy week for outrage.

The Seth MacFarlane-hosted Oscars got some people’s knickers in a twist, a crass Onion comment on Twitter actually resulted in an apology, which is something those offended by a Joan Rivers Holocaust comment are never going to get.

Throw in Swedish meatballs made of horsemeat and, as the week ends, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker being compared to Jeffrey Dahmer, and you've got something to outrage everybody.

Whew, I’m exhausted just typing it. But to me, it’s sort of the confluence of a lot of things in our culture right now – that line of humor that always seems to move a bit, a reactionary culture and people’s sense that they have to express everything they think the moment they think it.

Welcome to 2013.

Let’s start with the Oscars. I wasn’t a big fan of the MacFarlane hosting job, but then again I can’t remember one I’ve actually liked. Few can, so that’s why the outrage about MacFarlane seemed rather odd. It was coupled with some notion that the broadcast was terribly sexist, yet how many people at home were deciding which actresses looked hot and which ones didn’t?

One who looked cute, because she’s too young to be anything else, was 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, a Best Actress nominee. With a puppy purse in hand, she was the epitome of sweetness in the midst of the often-tacky red carpet sideshow. So of course that was the perfect setup for the satirical website/newspaper The Onion to jokingly call her a word that is generally never uttered at a woman unless you want to get slapped or shot.

That was the joke, of course, that she is the opposite of that. But the use of that word aimed at a 9-year-old was something that many (including myself) thought crossed a line. Even so, I was more stunned by the Onion apology than I was the joke. Everything seems fair game these days, even children.

In Rivers’ case, there were those who felt she should apologize because, as a Jew, she should know better than to joke about such matters. Rivers has no plans to back down, and good for her even if I don’t quite agree that jokes about the Holocaust are a way of continuing a conversation about it. But I also don’t agree that there is one group of people who get to designate how others should feel about something that is part of their own history, too. 

Part of the reason much of this is exhausting to me is the humor involved is so lame. We seem to be caught up in a cycle of creating a punch line that involves shock and little else. There’s little nuance, there’s often little thought except the arrogance of “Well, you just are offended too easily.” Rude and funny are not the same thing to everyone. If so, every high school freshman boy in the world would have his own cable special.

I’m no saint. I work in a newsroom, and newsrooms are veritable petri dishes for the formation of the darkest of humor. I’ve often wondered what the outside world would think if they heard the things we say. Let’s just say the Onion isn’t that far removed from the things we wish we could put in the paper sometime. But it all generally involves some thought, commentary or wordplay and doesn't just rely on an obscene word or notion.

I’m old enough to have watched “Saturday Night Live” in its first seasons, when it really broke some ground on the comedy front. But in a world where just about any crude, rude phrase passes as humor, I wonder how many of those sketches would even make it on the air today?

Not everything was brilliant on “SNL” back then, it would take a very selective memory to make that statement. Yet an infamous sketch in which Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor throw every racial epithet at each other works as a commentary on society and not just because of the shock of hearing those words on TV. (The setup was that it was a job interview, and in our clueless world there probably used to be job interviews like this and probably still are.)

People are so dug in now, would they even get the joke? It’s amazing to me that the Onion – which I love – continues to thrive since satire seems all but dead. Two movies that say more about our culture than any I can remember in recent years “Citizen Ruth” and “American Dreamz” utterly tanked at the box office and few people I know have even heard of them. But poking fun at both sides of the abortion debate or lampooning our obsession with talent-reality shows is not a way to earn a lot of love from the people.

To me, all this is just exacerbated by social media, text messaging and call-in radio shows. There is such an abundance of ways to immediately express your thoughts that so many people feel compelled to do this every waking moment. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone; I get twitchy and want to click ‘like’ on someone’s Twitter comment even though that isn’t even possible. But everyone’s inner “edit” button seems to get worn down as the years pass and the results aren’t pretty.

In some ways, it’s a nice problem to have. Complaining about too much freedom is like complaining about too much sunshine. Either way, however, you have to be careful not to get burned.

The words Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor threw at each  other in a comedy sketch shocked, but also offered food for thought. (NBC)

Oscar Stage Not the Only Home of the Brave

The word "brave" is often tossed around to describe Kathryn Bigelow, director of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Hurt Locker."

On Sunday, the parade of speeches at the Oscars will offer up a celebration of courage not unlike a Medal of Honor ceremony.

There will be stories of brave performances and courageous choices, and actors or directors clutching their chests to illustrate how their breath was taken away by the fearlessness and tenacity of someone with whom they worked.

And around the country, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, foster parents and people about to board a plane for their Doctors Without Borders assignment will roll their eyes in unison.

Yet, let’s face it. Bravery is in the eyes of the beholder. By its very definition, bravery is doing something  others would not do. Often those doing something “brave” are people who find something easy that others find so, so difficult.

There are plenty of people who would run into a burning building before they’d get up on a stage or behind a lectern in front of other people. There are some who can’t imagine a world past high school where they are required to write anything that other people might read.

Still, I get a little weary of those who equate creative activity such as writing, acting or performing with the Great Struggles of Our Time.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert recently weighed in on this topic, taking to task one of the literary legends of our time, Philip Roth. Now, I couldn’t get through Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” but on this score she was dead-on. She was reacting to a story that Roth had tried to dissuade a just-published author from continuing on in the business because writing is torture, just awful. Gilbert feels just the opposite.

“I'm going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it's f*cking great,” she wrote on the Bookishwebsite. “You don't have to wear a nametag, and -- unless you are exceptionally clumsy -- you rarely run the risk of cutting off your hand in the machinery. Writing, I tell you, has everything to recommend it over real work.”

Writers aren’t the only ones susceptible to this. I was at an Ani DiFranco concert years ago, not because I’m a big fan but because my friends were and it seemed a fine way to pass the evening. We were down in front and the crowd behind us screamed and screamed for Ani.

“I never wanted this,” she said coyly, over and over again. “Really, I never wanted this."

I wanted to shout, “Well, give me my 20 bucks back and go play in a coffeehouse.”

Courtney Love surmised that Kurt Cobain was a victim of the pressure around him. On the one hand, you think, “Well, why do you become a musician?” but in Cobain’s case he was sort of catapulted into a stratosphere that most wanna-be rock gods would never see coming.

There are elements to what Philip Roth said that aren’t full of hubris and ridiculousness. As an artist, you are driven by a need to create something but at some point you have to let it go. That’s where everyone else’s opinion can come in and that can be the hard part.

Just this week, Dame Maggie Smith said on “60 Minutes” that she’d never watched a minute of “Downton Abbey.” For some people that came off as a pretentious load of crap. But as a journalist who looks at a clock and has to let a story go, I understand. You don’t want to look back, you might not like what you see because all you'll see is what you could have done better. Heck, I edited a local history book that came out two years ago and I have yet to read it because I would weep at something as minor as a misused semicolon. Conversely, something like a blog can be tended to and fixed, weeks after the fact, making this a very emotionally easy way to create.

For most  people, all of life is a one-shot deal. You go through, trying to do what you can and if you mess up you try as hard as you can to do it right the next time.

It isn’t coal mining, it isn’t MedFlight piloting, it isn’t pediatric oncology. But maybe real life is the bravest thing of all.

The fire department in Mount Horeb, Wis., is doubly brave: Members will run into a burning building AND stand in front of 42,000 people to sing the national anthem.

Fantasy, Glory and Everything In Between

Oscar Pistorius, where people know him best - on the track. (AFP/Getty Images photo)

I think it’s time for a new Fantasy League.

Just take any famous sports figure, preferably one who is held up as a pantheon of virtue, and give them 100 points. Then come up with a point system that little by little chips at that century mark and see who gets to zero first.

Maybe just 10 points off for driving drunk. Screaming obscenities at an official … meh, just a few points here or there. Peformance-enhancing drugs? That’s worth some points, too. Sex offenses pile up the points even faster, beating up a spouse or significant other would certainly be a high-ticket offense. Perhaps a commissioner would have to set the bar as to what a murder would rate.

Because, really, how we look at athletes and celebrities is nothing more than a fantasy. If the last year or so hasn’t proved that to people, nothing ever will.

This week’s arrest of sprinter Oscar Pistorius on charges that he murdered his girlfriend is just one more smack across the head to remind people that watching someone do something glorious on TV doesn’t automatically turn them into a perfect person.

We like the fantasy. We like it when Pistorius and his blades challenge the notion of speed and what someone minus two legs can do. We really like it when a guy like Lance Armstrong can overcome cancer, get back on a bike and climb a mountain. We love the idea of a Joe Paterno, a kindly father figure who we can look to for old-school guidance in our new-fangled world.

But if people we know and love can shock and disappoint us on a regular basis, why shouldn’t a total stranger? Because, when it comes down to it, they are strangers. Only in the fantasy are they people we know.

There’s often been a disconnect among the things athletic heroes do, that somehow they don’t add up. The problem is, just like for you and me, they do add up. They add up to someone being wholly human.

There’s also been a disconnect in people’s perceptions, particularly about athletes. They are the gladiators of our day and we ascribe to them so much of what we want to be while forgetting they are also made out of the things we all are. To think Pistorius wouldn’t shoot his girlfriend because he rose up against so much adversity, or that Armstrong wouldn’t cheat because he overcame cancer is as logical as saying someone is more likely to shoplift because they have blue eyes.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, for the same reasons as anybody else. Silly reasons, actually, that point out that we just don’t know a dang thing.

In 1994, I was covering the NCAA women’s basketball championship game that North Carolina won on a buzzer-beater. There was pandemonium in the locker room after; these women were, deservedly, over the moon with happiness. They screamed, they danced. They jumped on a bench and danced some more. The bench broke, sending players flying and a few sports writers, too.

I don’t remember exactly how I ended up on the locker room floor, with my leg a little cut up by the splinters from the busted bench. The players got up and continued to celebrate, but one turned around, offered a hand to help me get up and asked me if I was OK.

It was the Tar Heels’ speedy little freshman point guard who had opted for a basketball scholarship even though the track world was waiting with baited breath for what she could accomplish there. She was cute as a bug and had the Tar Heel logo painted on her face like she was a kid at a carnival. Her name: Marion Jones.

Stripped gold medals and a prison sentence later, that’s how I still remember Marion Jones. It’s why when her name first surfaced in connection with performance-enhancing drugs, I was genuinely upset. Surely, it was the fault of her good-for-nothing husbands, I originally believed. She was so sweet to help me up off the floor, was the thought, she wouldn’t cheat.

Of course, that’s as logical as your mother telling you when you were a kid that if you continued to make that face, your face would stay that way.

My face of disappointment didn’t stay that way. Sad to say it’s been replaced by a face of skepticism, that even a jaw-dropping charge like the one against Oscar Pistorius inspires not much more than a shrug from me. It's too bad. There are a lot of good people out there and some of them are athletes.

I want to believe, I really do.  I also wish there was a Santa Claus and that I owned an Invisibility Cloak.  But the hero worship for me, these days, is a fantasy that is out of my league.

Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones' illustrious track career ended with tears outside a federal courthouse and a prison sentence. (AP photo)

Screw Up, Repent, Cash In, Repeat

For Lance Armstrong, redemption starts with talking to Oprah. (OWN photo)

I am so tired of the redemption story.

I’m tired of it because it is a cliché. I’m tired of it because it turns suckers into an awful lot of people. I’m tired of it because it lets way too many people off the hook.

Before you think I’m terribly hard-hearted and cynical, understand that I don’t think redemption is bad. It’s necessary and it’s inspiring, particularly when it truly galvanizes someone’s humanity instead of, say, landing them endorsement deals and a fat contract.

The redemption story, though, is another … well … story. You know how it goes: Athlete/actor/public figure/business person pretty much destroys their life and maybe someone else’s. Then they clean up their life and the world embraces them. Big pay day ensues. Happy ever after. The end.

That’s why I’m so uncomfortable with the Lance Armstrong story these days. Quite frankly, I would have held him in higher regard if he had just kept up with the denials and accusations. But to go on “Oprah” and admit you’re a flawed human being? What a cliché.

This ennui with the redemption story isn’t just about Lance Armstrong, though. For me, it’s the way it’s become just too easy with a fawning public and a culpable media to tell that same old story. Those with a comeback story are placed upon a pantheon that seems hard to reach for those who never screwed up to begin with. Solid, dependable, trustworthy success is just too boring for our culture, and that is truly sad.

In a long journalism career, I’ve done one comeback story that I can recall. And it’s why I’ll never do another one. A former star athlete blew away (literally) his career; this was the 1980s and cocaine was everywhere. Now he was cleaned up and working at a local business and talking to kids about how he’d screwed up his life.

It was only later, when I was older and more cynical, that I realized how perfect that PR was for the business he had now chosen and felt a little squeamish about that. I also got an anonymous call from a very angry woman who had been the victim of some bad stuff this guy had done. She didn’t think it had to be in the story, she just wanted me to know who it was we were trying to make look so good.

I felt bad for her, but it was only later when I actually became the victim of a crime that I realized what these redemption stories must be like to people on the other side of the story. I vowed never to do one again, and so far, I haven’t. Not one like this.

Yet they’re there, everywhere. As the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis is celebrated in these, his final days as a pro, few mention a situation he was involved in years ago in which a two young men were murdered. The men's families remember, though.

The redemption story is but one of many clichés the willing media and the naive public lap up. The problem is, people recognize they need an angle and try to sell themselves in such a way.

I recently got a story pitch from a new business owner wanting me to do a story on his business. I said we’d print some information that the new business opened, but wouldn’t do a full story. “What about a story about a black man opening a business?” was the response. “Did you really have to go there?” I wanted to say.

I also got a story pitch from a PR person wanting me to write article about her CEO client, a woman. The story pitch? About the challenges of a woman working in a man’s world. I wanted to tell the PR person that as a former sports writer, I could probably teach her client a thing or two about working in a man’s world.  I also wanted to ask her who set the time machine back to 1973.

It all reminds me of the great line from “Muriel’s Wedding,” when Muriel follows the cluster of young women on their vacation until they get fed up with her.

“You’ve got no dignity, Muriel,” one of them cruelly says as she walks away.

Dignity. It’s a lost art. Maybe finding a little bit of it is all the redemption we need.

Townie Time

A big clue you might be a townie: Birthday greetings wished to you on the bowling alley's sign.

When you belong in a community, the big things to you are not the things that make the big news. Oh sure, there’s a new strip mall going up and the mayor is running for re-election, but for a lot of people in my town the big deal this month is that a woman named Joan is retiring from the post office.

The friendly faces you see every day are part of what makes a community, no matter what the size of a place. But being bummed the woman at the post office is retiring just drove home one more time the truth that is impossible to ignore: I am a townie.

In many ways, this is no surprise, it’s just been tough to admit. As one who lived in cities my whole adult life until moving back to my hometown 29 years after I left here for college, as one who can wander the streets of London and New York and not get lost, admitting the townie thing can make me a bit sheepish.

Yet it’s been there, since almost the beginning. Like everything else, the first step is acknowledging it. And there have been so many steps along the way, it really should have been obvious. Because you know you are a townie when:

● You still call people “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” usually former teachers and parents of people you went to school with once upon a time.

● You spend way more time than you ever thought you would at the funeral home.

● Someone calls the local coffee shop looking for you.

● You ask an acquaintance if you can come over sometime and look at her house because she lives in a house you spent a lot of time in as a kid and are curious what it looks like now.

● You ask the young cashier at the grocery store what she’s majoring in, and when she says elementary education,  your first thought is, “Oh good, she's such a nice girl.”

● You splurge for a landline and keep a listing in the local phone book because you’re involved in so many things that people of all ages, some who might not be tech-savvy, really do need to be able to find you.

● While out for a walk and wondering what time it is, you look up to see what the bank clock says even though the clock has been gone for 20 years.

● You are introduced to someone and you say, “Oh, I used to babysit you.”

● You are introduced to someone and they say, “Oh, you used to babysit me.”

● You recognize, from a block away, that the woman walking down the street was your third-grade teacher because she is wearing the same style cardigan and scarf as she did when she was your teacher in 1969.

● You have practically memorized the phone number of the strictest teacher you had in grade school because you call her up so often for various community events you are both part of.

● You still miss the A&W.

● You tell a real estate agent, “If the street wasn’t there when I was in high school, I don’t want to live on it.”

● You tell someone “OK” when they suggest a lunch spot that hasn’t had that particular name for about 40 years.

● As soon as the weather turns cold, you start asking the folks at the local meat market when their winter sale is happening.

● You are quite accustomed to people jumping out of their cars and taking pictures of that meat market, because it is called Dick’s Quality Meats.

This list wouldn’t be exclusive to a small town; no doubt people have strong connections in their neighborhoods in cities, too. Indeed, when the grocery store my friends shop at in Des Moines rebuilt elsewhere on its site and rearranged its parking lot, you would have thought their world was turned upside down. Because it kind of was.

As a small-town townie, sure, there are things people you barely know end up knowing about you. It’s weird and it’s wonderful and it’s not for everyone. But the prize is a sense of belonging, the feeling that you’re all kind of in this together.

Well, that and a big meat sale.

This grocery store sold T-shirts last year. They sold out.