Tour de France Intro

Posted: July 8, 2013 in Cycling
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At first it seemed strange to write my thoughts on Week One of the Tour de France, because how many readers will care? But then again…how many readers do I really have? And of that group…Katie, Chad, Markus, Aunt Mary Anne…you guys care.  And Mom will forward it to Dad who cares but he probably won’t read.  So there you go.  This month’s feature: TdF commentary.  You’re welcome, both-or-all of you who read this!

So before I even start with my thoughts on Week One, let me do an intro.  Why should you care about the Tour?  Why now, even after 8 years of American back-to-backishness has been erased, Armstrong-to-Landis, for doping?  Why now, when the GC (general classification, the individual championship) is either a foregone conclusion for Chris Froome or a battle among lesser-knowns?  Why when the only two “name” Americans have all but been eliminated – Christian Vandevelde on a flight back to the States after a crash; Tejay Vangarderen following up a white jersey (“best young rider”) championship last year with some big-time struggles on the first Pyrenean stage?

Well, how about the word Pyrenean, for starters?  Here’s why the Tour matters, now more than ever and, in this humble blogger’s opinion, right up there with March Madness and college football and the NFL.

It’s a tour of France

And that’s more than just a first-semester translation…it really is an epic tour.  This year’s installment – the 100th – started on Corsica, progressed along the Riviera, headed into the Pyrenees, will head through Brittany past some amazing landmarks that include Mont Ste. Michel (which incidentally I know nothing about but I’ve seen photos and I’m thrilled to see it on TV), through the Loire Valley into Provence, into the Alps, and back through Paris.  Forget the Travel Channel, the History Channel, the Food Network, or any combination thereof…the Tour de France combines all of it along with sporting drama and adventure inspiration.  It’s amazing the things you learn – about the history of Corsica as a possession of multiple empires, the Roman ruins that extend well into Central France, the areas that the Allies managed to secure during WWII, the cuisine in Basque country vs. that of the Alps vs. that of the famous wine regions.

Not impressed?  I wouldn’t have been, but even a dude living here in the shadow of the Hollywood sign has to be amazed by the cinematography. This is a global event, covered by NBC in the States, Sky in Britain, Eurosport in much of Europe, etc.  They spare no expense with aerial footage of mountains, Rick Steeves quality travelogues of the small towns the Tour rolls through, adventure camera work down daring descents of steep, dramatic Alps.  The Tour is a triumph of photojournalism, and it gives you incredible access to one of the most beautiful and historic regions of the world.  For that alone it’s probably worth having on the in background while you Tweet or Instagram on your phone.  But wait, there’s more…

It’s an International Delight for the Senses

I’m biased; I’ve been there.  But you should love the Tour for the same reasons you love the Olympics or the World Cup.  People from around the world gather, waving colorful flags from their countries and states, and even cooler they do it from nationalities and districts you didn’t even know existed.  Catalonian Spain, the city of Luxembourg, the island of Corsica, the Island of Man…there are flags and chants and customs that show up all over the place to match the pageantry of the classics – your French flags, your Union Jacks, your Stars and Stripes, your off-kilter-lower-case-Ts from Scandinavia…  The Tour is one of the few free events of its level – to watch the Tour you just have to show up…although for the best stages you should show up days in advance to stake out a spot for your camper (or in my case, your rented Opal furnished with four boxes of granola bars and two cases of Vittel).  At every mountain stage there’s an unofficial area called “Dutch Corner” which typically sets up a week before the stage and which serves until the day after the race as the party zone – just show up, look friendly, and someone with consecutive matching vowels somewhere in their name (Koenraad von Oosterbaan, perhaps) will hand you a Heineken, raise his along while his mates do the same, and warn you that you’d better drink it fast.

For the TV viewer it’s a look at what’s great about humanity – people from around the world (yeah, mostly Europe but don’t forget your Aussies, your Kazakhs, the fact that a Columbian guy almost won yesterday, and the presence of quite a few North Americans) gathering in support somewhat of their home country but mostly of dedication, achievement, and camaraderie.  When cyclists get within 2-3 kilometers (mile, mile and a half) of the summit of a climb, the wall of humanity they pass through is incredible – costumes, flags, shirtlessness (and these are mainly Euros…it’s attractive shirtlessness, not NASCAR shirtlessness!).  The Tour is the Olympics without the overpriced corporate sponsor seats; it’s open to the public for anyone who cares enough to go and packs enough to drink.  And for those of us who don’t pack enough to drink, there’s Dutch Corner and some friendly British neighbors.

But why do the sports matter?  Why watch someone ride a bike when your kid can  ride a bike?  Well, there’s…

Many Events Among One

Here’s what ESPN-based America doesn’t get, what I didn’t get until fairly recently.  The Tour de France is about much more than the winner – or what we call “the winner”, the winner of GC.  Yes, it’s a three-week race in which the winner sometimes wins by only a minute.  And many days the standings don’t change at all.  And much of the time it doesn’t look like the potential winner isn’t really trying to win.  But there are reasons. So many wonderful reasons.  Here’s how it goes:

  • Riders are exponentially more efficient when they’re riding behind – “in the slipstream of” – another rider.  It’s physics – when the guy in front of you clears the static air in front of you, you’re riding in essentially a vacuum, using significantly less energy.  It’s been said that it’s 30% less, 40% less energy.  Whatever it is, it’s noticeable.  I ride – when I’m behind someone after I’ve been pushing air for miles, there are times when I’m going 2-3 miles an hour faster and it doesn’t feel like I’m pedaling at all.  Aerodynamics are huge, which leads to:
  • It’s a team game.  Because of the above, if you have a guy who’s one of the 5-6 guys who really *should* contend for the TdF title, you save his energy.  Someone has to cut through the wind – the aerodynamics only work when someone is doing that up front physics work.  And so every team has most its riders designated as “domestiques”, riders whose job it is to take the wind for the team leaders.  Which may seem like you’re letting the leaders coast, but it makes the strategy fascinating. Because domestiques get tired too, and they’re by nature not the best riders so their usefulness is limited.  and these races are always 100+ miles each day with wind, hills, and elements to contend with.  And what gets really interesting with this strategy is:
  • GC (General Classification) riders tend to only attack when there’s a chance to get away from other GC contenders.  On flat stages with no major change in difficulty – either from a turn into devastating headwind or from an uphill tick that makes the ride that much tougher – there’s not much chance to get away, so the GC contenders and their domestiques are content to roll the status quo.  But…guys who won’t necessarily win the *race* might want to win the *stage*, and they have a lot to go for.  So they attack.  And when they take off, sprinting from the front of the group, someone has to chase.  But no team wants to waste its domestiques’ energy on a fool’s errand while the other teams rest for a big mountain day.  So the breakaways tend to get away until the main contenders calculate that they need to get serious.  It’s economics – I don’t care if Jibronie X is 3 minutes ahead…but I care if he’s 10 minutes away…that’s my breaking point and as soon as he hits that I have to take the lead to chase him down.  Which makes *every* stage interesting because *every* team is doing that calculus.  Including…
  • The points competitions.  We all know the GC championship, the famous one won by Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong (but maybe not Lance Armstrong if you’re reading a recently-published World Almanac if they still sell those) (but, seriously, Lance Armstrong…we all saw it and everyone else in contention in those races has already been excommunicated for doping, too, but whatever).  But the Tour is more the Olympics, entire, than the Olympic 100 meters.  There are several champions, it’s just that one championship tends to reign a little more supreme.  But there are several other winners, including:
  • The Green Jersey, given to the winner in “sprint points”.  Every flat stage has at least one “intermediate” sprint along the route, at which point the first 10*  riders to cross a certain line win points, and has about twice as many points given to the first 10* riders (in descending order – 1st gets 30, 2nd gets 27, etc.) to finish. (*and let’s just say 10…it could be something different but for the sake of explanation…let’s say 10).  Sprinters tend not to be great GC riders – their legs are too bulky, their bodies too heavy to get over the mountains as quickly.  But they’re amazing at diving away from the pack in the last 200-400 meters.  So their teams often take up chase in flat stages to get them to the front to have a great chance at winning the stage.
  • The Poka-Dot Jersey, given to the “King of the Mountains”.  Like the sprint competition, on mountain stages there are points awarded to the first 10* riders to summit each “categorized” climb.  Mountains are put in the categories based on how steep/important they are, and points are awarded proportionally.  So while the GC contenders need to climb well, particularly on climbs before the end of a stage, KOM riders have more incentive to attack and burn energy – they can rack up points early in a 3-4 climb stage and not care about finish time whereas finish time is *all* the GC guys care about.
  • The White Jersey, given to the “best young rider” (riders under 24) on GC time, which gives other riders a vested interest in attacking or defending.
  • Cash prizes, for things like “first rider to the highest point on this year’s tour” give riders an interest in attacking.
  • Stage wins – the winner of each day’s stage is honored, wins money, etc., meaning that even if eking out a 1-second victory is meaningless in the final results, it’s meaningful for many.
  • The “incumbent’ Yellow Jersey.  The leader of the GC at the end of each day gets to wear yellow at the beginning of the next, a huge honor and a big prize, meaning that each day he and his team have a responsibility to “defend” the yellow jersey by trying to stay in first.

 

  • All of this gives each stage flavor.  The GC riders have a wholly different goal from the other competition riders, and each contender – for green, yellow, polka-dot, white, stage – has a team trying to work for him.  Attacks are the name of the game – when a KOM contender attacks the field to get a head start on a mountain, the GC teams have to determine whether it’s worth chasing him to stay on his wheel.  Remember, if they stay on his wheel he works 50% harder and they get a free ride, so to speak, at his pace…but the minute he gets a 3-4 bike length lead (which isn’t that hard given the element of surprise over that long a day) they have to extend themselves trying to catch up, which is energy they may need later.  Particularly if…another GC contender “sends” his teammate on an attack, knowing that if his teammate gets away, that’s good news for the team; and if the opponent wastes energy chasing him down, that’s also good news.

 

Which just all goes to show –  every stage has something.  On flat stages, the sprint teams want to get their riders toward the finish line at the front of the field to sprint it out for the day’s title and the Green points, but they can’t chase down every attack immediately.  So there’s almost always a mad dash to the finish – the handful of “breakaway” riders, exhausted from not getting nearly the wind-shield ride that the big group got all day, trying like crazy to summon the energy to stay seconds ahead of the hard-charging sprint teams who hope they calculated right when they decided it was “go time” to chase and make up lost time on the field (remember – no team wants to lead the way and waste that energy, so they almost always wait until their “economic” breaking point to decide they have to do it).  And in the mountains, GC guys try to attack KOM guys try to attack, and virtually everyone is gambling that they have enough to stay away or that the other guy they’re letting get away doesn’t have it.  Plus, for every uphill that isn’t a “summit finish”, there’s a daredevil downhill at 60+ mph.

 

So why should you care about the Tour de France?  Because it’s an event unlike any other, but one that includes all that makes sports great.  Teamwork, international pageantry, multiple events in one, a beautiful and historic tour of an exotic land.  And it’s inspirational – yeah, there were once drugs and there are probably still drugs, but only because these guys are constantly pushing the limits of what’s humanly possible.  Recreational cyclists gear up for “century rides”, 100-mile Saturdays that take around 6 hours, multiple refill-the-water-bottle stops, etc.  These guys go over 100 EVERY DAY for three weeks, and they throw in the biggest mountains in France to spice things up.  The event is a triumph of international brotherhood, an Olympian meeting of the world for a greater cause.  But the race itself is a triumph of humanity, overcoming our limits and pushing them higher and higher.  There’s nothing like the Tour de France, and regardless of who’s winning or who’s competing, it’s worth watching.

Vive le Tour.

 

Santa Monica Shooting

Posted: June 10, 2013 in Political Rantings
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Today, I am an American.

Sure, I was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Michigan, and now live in California.  Okay, I’ve been to over 40 states and about ten national parks, I’ve gone to the polls for five presidential elections and I’ve worn the red, white, and blue at two different Olympics.  But on Friday I truly became an American:

There was a school shooting / gun massacre 15 blocks from my apartment.

Can’t get any more American than that.

This post isn’t about me, it’s about us.  Yeah, this particular shooting happened in my neighborhood but if you live in America long enough it’ll happen to you, too.  And the saddest thing?  It’ll actually feel pretty normal.

There was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from my apartment on Friday, in Santa Monica, California.  I was at work, twelve miles away sitting near a few fellow Santa Monicans when the news broke.  And I’m embarrassed by my reaction.  If I’m repeating this phrase too many times it’s because it’s still echoing in my mind: there was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from where I live.  And when I got the news, my reaction was:

(at the time) Only 5-6 people known to be injured? That’s not too bad.

And it gets worse.  Let me take you through the collective reaction I observed in a room of people located exactly twelve miles from the shooting and among whom several live within a mile of it.

1) Did you hear there was a shooting at Santa Monica College?  Wow, that’s crazy… (everyone heads to Huffington Post or the LA Times for more info)

2) Well, only 5-6 people known to be injured…that’s not too bad.  Glad it wasn’t worse.

3) Hey, wait – I heard on NPR this morning that President Obama is in town…do we know for sure he’s okay?  (Quickly we confirmed that he was miles away from the incident)

4) Wow – that’s right.  Obama’s in town. Traffic was going to be horrible anyway, but with this shooting it’s going to be awful.  How are you going to get home?

Yep, that’s the reaction we have to gun massacres these days.  A little concern, a little relief that less than 10 people were killed, and then the real panic begins, at least here in greater Los Angeles – how is this going to affect traffic?!  (We’re eerily like that SNL skit “The Californians” and all those spoof news breaks they did on Arrested Development.  “Mass murder in Santa Monica – what that means for your commute coming up at six!”)

And can you blame us?  In just the last twelve months we’ve had the Aurora theater, Newtown, unprecedented gang violence throughout Chicago, the Boston Marathon and its shootout aftermath, and now this. I don’t bring up the above “stages of hearing your neighborhood got shot up” because I’m proud of it or to make fun of it.  I bring it up because two days later I’m still in shock about how little shock I was in when I got the news.  I swim at Santa Monica College; I have my own parking permit there as a Santa Monica  resident who uses the pool.  On the radio they interviewed people who work at the oil change place I go to; on the news I saw the tire shop where I got a new set on the Dodge last year.  I drove right past the crime scene today going from a haircut to Trader Joe’s.  There was a mass murder in my neighborhood and my reaction was essentially “wake me up if the death count rises to double digits.”  Several innocent victims lost their lives along a stretch of road that I travel regularly, and within minutes I had entered into a discussion of how that would affect traffic for the rest of the day.

But what can you do?  We’re numb.  When Columbine happened I was a junior in college and sat in disbelief watching CNN, so much so that I showed up late and disoriented for a final exam that day.  I read all the stories, watched the interviews and vigils on TV, mourned with the rest of the country and stamped that day in my memory forever.  In my lifetime that was the second tragedy that I’ll never forget.  There was the Challenger explosion.  There was Columbine.  Then we had 9/11.  And then?  Shoot, I can’t name them all.  Was there a Jonesboro?  Or maybe Jonestown?  There was Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown…  And there have been a bunch of others.  Santa Monica will probably be forgotten soon like some of the other “small” massacres of the past 15 years.  How could it not be?  It’s been six months since dozens of elementary school kids were killed in cold blood and we haven’t done anything to fix it.  Congress can’t get enough votes together to even hold a vote.  Wayne LaPierre will make a statement tomorrow about how “if everyone on that Big Blue Bus that the gunman scattered bullets upon had had their own gun, maybe this wouldn’t have happened” or “if community colleges spent less money on laptops and more money on arming their teachers with guns we’d be smarter and safer” or whatever garbage the Koch Brothers stick in Little Wayne’s teleprompter.

And we’ll forget all about Santa Monica College.  Shoot, as I’m writing this two days after the shooting, this incident isn’t even the top headline at latimes.com.  We’ll forget about this like we forgot about the others – do yourself a favor and read this article about Newtown six months later…the world has forgotten but these families are living hell day by day – having felt emboldened and united to change America’s ludicrous ways too many times and having been stymied by LaPierres, Hestons, Cantors and Boehners.

Leading up to the Newtown shooting – and picking up just as soon as we’ve mostly forgotten, I’m sure –  there was a bill passing through the legislature in Michigan, where I grew up,  that would have allowed concealed weapons in places like sports arenas and, yes, movie theaters.  Like Aurora.  Because, you know, the second amendment is more important than the sixth commandment.  And even stranger, the second amendment is evidently more important than the first – every elementary school student knows that the first amendment right to free speech doesn’t cover “yelling fire in a crowded theater,” yet if 20 elementary school kids hadn’t died at Sandy Hook Elementary, Rick Snyder would have made it exponentially more likely for someone to open fire in a crowded theater.

That’s America.

We’re the only developed country on the planet that does this.  And while we use taxpayer-funded guns to spread democracy across the world we don’t listen to our own tenets of majority rule.  Most of America – and, screw it, all of intelligent America…my apologies to the members of Bachman/Palin Overdrive – favors stricter regulation on high-capacity magazines, bans on automatic weapons, background checks and the elimination of the gun show caveat.  Yet the NRA’s influence and the Tea Party’s reluctance to do anything cooperative with a black man have filibustered our outcry and our grief to the point where there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood and I shrugged my shoulders because the death toll wasn’t big enough to get worked up about.

I’m an American.  You can tell because there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood.  And if you live in America long enough you’ll be able to say the same thing. Unless we continue to fight to do something about it.

Wayne LaPierre and Charlton Heston like to say that we can take their guns “when we pry them from their cold dead hands.” I’m in, fellas. And this week you know exactly where to find me – just head for the chalk-body outlines and walk a dozen blocks toward the beach.

Boston

Posted: April 29, 2013 in Uncategorized
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What I’m about to write shouldn’t matter.  Terrorist attacks are terrorist attacks and, actually, tragedies are tragedies.  Whether it’s a mall or a bus or the World Trade Center or the finish line of the Boston Marathon; whether it’s a bomb or an electrical problem or a heart attack…tragedies are tragedies.  But…Boston.  Boston sticks with me two weeks later and it will for years.

Boston was an attack on Boston, of course.  And David Ortiz and Paul Pierce and even Neil Diamond stood up.  And Boston was an attack on America, and Barack Obama attended the funerals and we sat riveted as a country as the bombers were apprehended.  Boston hit me for both reasons – I love the city, I obviously love America – but it hits another of my communities deeply.  The Boston bombings hit the Boston Marathon, my favorite race, my most prized accomplishment, and somewhat ironically the Mecca of running.  And since I’ve relived Boston dozens of times in the last two weeks, here are a few stories about what Boston means.

Boston

Boston is the oldest and most prestigious marathon in the U.S.  It’s the oldest continually-run marathon in the world (Athens took about a 2,450-year break).  And you need to either qualify or raise a bunch of money for charity.  It’s the gold standard for amateur runners – if you’re wearing a Boston Marathon jacket in the running community you’re big-time.  You wear Boston on your sleeve; if you’re trying to qualify, everyone knows because you’re going nuts trying to do it.  If you’re qualified, you’re bona fide (rhyme intentional) – every local running store or track club has a “Boston Bound” group, a sendoff meeting or team photo or t-shirt.  I’ve run a lot of big-city marathons – Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles – and none compares to Boston.  Boston is…it’s Boston.

Dad

When I was a kid, my dad really got into running.  He ran the New York City Marathon, the Chicago Marathon, the Detroit Marathon… I’d ride my bike next to him while he ran on Saturdays in the summer; in the winter, my brother and I would jump around on the high jump mats at the Track & Tennis Building at U of M while he ran laps, and then we’d hold his feet down while he did situps.  And every April we watched the Boston Marathon on tape – he’d record it while he worked on Patriots Day (only a New England holiday) and we’d watch it that weekend.  That course was magic…I knew the Hopkinton start, the Wellelsey Scream Tunnel, the Newton Hills, the Boylston finish.

And so when I was a senior in high school and my dad finally qualified for Boston I understood – I thought I was a legit athlete, captain of the swim  team and such – and it was a huge accomplishment for Dad.  But I didn’t really know.

He qualified in November, and around New Year’s we took a family ski trip.  On the last day, on the last run, Dad took a spill.  We made it to the lift in time for one more but he  called it quits – a huge sign in retrospect – and we took one more run while he settled in.  He drove home with ice on his leg and got back to Boston training.  The race was in April, after all.  And so he ran into February – Tuesday night speedwork, weekend long runs into the 14-15 mile range  – for a full six weeks before he finally figured the enduring pain in his leg was something worth talking to a doctor about.

So he went to the doctor, got an x-ray and…it was broken.

Yep, broken.

That’s the power of Boston.  My father ran – and ran hard: speedwork, distance runs – for six weeks on a broken leg, all because nothing was keeping him from Boston.  That’s Boston.

Dad didn’t run Boston that year; he wrote a letter to the Boston Athletic Association and they gave him a deferral.  When he did run it I was in college and tracked him online while the race was broadcast on ESPN.  When he returned home, his friends had toilet-papered the house and planted a sign in the yard with his name and finishing time.   Grownups.  That’s Boston.

Me

I hit the 20-mile mark of the Toledo (Ohio) Glass City Marathon about ten seconds ahead of my Boston Qualifier pace.  The only problem – a mile earlier I was closer to 25 seconds ahead of pace.  It was all falling down.  This was my sixth marathon, the first time I had ever seriously thought I’d qualify for Boston.  I had been putting in epic work – the South Beach Diet had gotten me down to 140 pounds, I had been getting 11-12 mile track workouts in every Tuesday night to add to my 15-20s on weekends, I was all over crosstraining with situps and pushups and biking and whatever else.  Boston was an obsession – once I got within 9 minutes of the qualifying time that was all I thought about.

I had Sam Adams and Boston Creme doughnuts in a cooler; my dad was there and so was the girl I thought was the greatest in the world at the time, all supporting me and there to share in the glory of a BQ (which every runner knows as the initials for Boston Qualifier).

And it didn’t happen.  I led the race at one point, which should have told me I was being dumb.  I needed a 3:10 – 7:15 miles – and I was on that pace for almost the whole thing, but I ran under pace too long…I left too much out there and when I lost about a minute per mile for the last six I still set my personal best time and placed in my age group.  But it was devastating.  I pouted through the awards ceremony and the next couple weeks.  In my mind you only got one shot every few months…the recovery from going all out on a marathon took a while.  But I had already planned to pace said world’s-most-wonderful-girl to her BQ a few weeks later, so when she bailed out of that race and I had one more shot at Boston I wouldn’t tell anyone and I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but by the time I toed the start line the dream of Boston consumed me.  I was ready to suffer.

My mom cried when I told her I had qualified.  My dad didn’t answer the call – when he called back ten minutes later he said something like “either things went horribly wrong or incredibly right, but this is too early for you to be calling me after this race”.  I ran 25.2 great miles and one excruciating one – not that it hurt (it didn’t) but that I knew I had it unless I cramped, pulled a muscle, fell down…  And, shoot, I’m a regular guy so the grandiosity isn’t really there, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier than crossing that finish line with a qualifying time.  Boston, man. Boston.

Boston

The cruel punishment of qualifying for Boston is that you, you know, have to run Boston.  It’s an epically tough course that only real runners understand. The net elevation is negative – how hard could it be?  But Boston ruins your legs.  It’s an amazing course – a slight downhill out of Hopkinton through Ashland and Natick into Wellesley.  The “Scream Tunnel” in Wellesley where the all-women’s college makes you feel like McCartney or Timberlake for a full mile and you have no choice but to lift your knees and push the pace.  But then you hit Newton, Hell’s Alley, and Heartbreak  Hill.  The downhills and the pace you tried to push just trash your legs; the crowd support is amazing but it makes you think you’re invincible when reality is you’re not…you pay for it in Newton and Brookline.  But you enjoy it too.

Before you get to that point you take the bus from Boston Common to Hopkinton – a 45-minute trek that reminds you just how long the race really is.  You bond with fellow runners, you hang out at Athlete’s Village, you hear war stories from everyone’s qualifier, you realize you’re running – to quote Big Papi – foocking Boston!!!!!.

So when you hit Boylston, that finish line that America now knows as synonymous with Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, World Trade – you’ve run 26 miles hoping to get to that point and you’re running .2 miles that you hope will never end.  That turn from Hereford Street to Boylston Street is a dream come true – you see the finish line, the Boston badging, the crowds…it’s everything you worked for.  After Boston I listen to that NCAA Tournament closing song “One Shining Moment” and, yeah, I tear up a little…”and all those years, no one knows, just how hard you worked, but now it shoooows….”.

The finish line at Boston isn’t the finish line of a marathon.  It’s the finish line of several marathons.  You have to have an epic marathon to even get to the start line of Boston.  The finish line of Boston is the finish line of your dreams if you’re a runner. And that’s why the Boston attacks hurt even more, that’s why the running community just keeps running to cope.  The Boston Marathon finish line , yes, is a mass collection of people and I guess a good target for terrorists.  But it’s more than that – it’s the culmination of dreams, a place you suffer over and over to get to.  And that’s why it’s that-much-more devastating to me that it’s a nightmare for so many, a place of real suffering and not self-inflicted “suffering”.

I don’t know how to close this.  I’m still shell-shocked from Boston.  The last time I was in Boston, a business trip last December, I had about four hours to kill before I had to get to Logan to catch my flight.  I walked a little Freedom Trail, got some chowdah at Fanieul Hall, strolled around Fenway, and made sure I walked the finish line.  That’s Boston to me.  That attack hit America, it hit Boston, and it hit athletes everywhere.  For runners, that’s not just one finish line, it’s the finish line.  It crushes me that it’s the not just the greatest finish line of my life, it’s the actual finish line of three people’s lives.

CW Chronicles: Lady We’re Effed

Posted: April 14, 2013 in CW Chronicles
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February, 1998.  Early in the days that the crew was even together, we embarked on a roadtrip that still makes me laugh.  I don’t know that too many of us remember too much about our actual Spring Break in Fr. Lauderdale, but the drive may well be my favorite experience from college.  To set the scene, first know the cast of characters:

Dudes Car: Brent, Curt, Me, Padley. Vehicle: Ford Explorer.

Girls Car: Katie, Stephanie, Leanne, Jill. Vehicle: some compact rental…think Ford Escort.  Note: Alexa flew down to meet us.

(and, yeah, we had dudes and girls cars…weird, I know)

Now, to get a full idea of how this would go down, you have to know the people.  Katie was the social director – the whole trip was her idea, she organized beautifully for the girls, and we dudes just glommed on to it and tagged along.  Stephanie, Leanne, and Jill were just cool to hang out with – easygoing, beer drinkers, great conversationalists on most  topics.  Just a great carload of humanity there.  In our car, Padley was just a tall, happy-go-lucky fellow – such a good dude, never a bad word to say about anyone, and always happy to be around people and hanging  out.  You’ve read about Curt – he’s the hard luck star of “Curt Loses His Coat” and “The Chicken Boots”.  Bad things happen to Curt for some reason.  He’s nice to a fault, generous like nobody’s business…you couldn’t script a better roommate.  And then there was Brent, the wild card.  Looked exactly like Napoleon Dynamite at the time (his words, actually), had a little bit of a temper on him, could play all roles – the great guy to hang out and watch sports with or the loose cannon you knew was going to get himself in trouble.  Brent’s antics include:  punching out every window we passed on our way to a party the last day we were in the dorms; getting lost in Toledo trying to buy weed even though he doesn’t smoke; sitting silently, rocking back and forth, having torn apart a wooden massage toy/tool thing, inconsolable for hours…because a frat party wouldn’t let his buddy in.  Tremendous guy to have in the mix for a situation like this and a great guy in general, but his antics would play a major role here.

We left Michigan on a Saturday morning to caravan down from Ann Arbor, and things started smoothly. Brent was driving his Ford Explorer, the girls were in their car, we were holding up signs when we wanted to communicate back and forth (between the two cars we had one “car phone” – this was before cell phones got big), the music was going well.  We stopped around Cincinnati to get gas – the girls’ smaller car had a smaller tank – and either Curt or Padley took the wheel in our car.  Brent didn’t like giving up control of his ride and even protested a little, so the next time one of the girls had to use the bathroom Brent took the car over again.  He would not give it up the rest of the 24-ish hour drive down.

We cruised through Tennessee into Atlanta, ate something at a Waffle House somewhere in that stretch, and it was dark out from Georgia on down.  Brent entertained all of us by setting the cruise control at 69 for a good stretch, baffling the girls who wanted to make good time in the other car and thought he was being overly careful while we cackled laughing in the back.  And soon we crossed into the Florida panhandle, stopped for gas and felt the southern warmth on our skin even thought it was close to midnight  Life was good.

About an hour from Orlando, we hit a freaking monsoon.  Brent had been driving for a healthy dozen hours straight or so at this point and we were all eyes up to the front windshield trying to help him see.  We lost contact with the girls, we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car, and the storm stayed ugly for a good 40 minutes or so…until we broke through the other side and things started to get clear again.  It was well after midnight now, but we figured we’d be all the way down to our hotel by early morning to sleep it off on the beach and get Spring Break off to a good start.  We slowed up a little, reconnected with the girls, and it was smooth sailing…until traffic stopped dead.

(Note – the story is about to get good)

As it turned out, the road was shut so they could clear an accident.  We sat for maybe a half-hour waiting, and during that time Katie came up alongside the driver’s window to say hello.  She knocked, Brent rolled down the window, and after saying hello she mentioned “Hey, your back left tire looks a little low; you may want to check it out next time we get gas”.   Brent, ever the charmer, replied “Stick to your dolls and let the men do the driving,” rolling up his window.  Katie stared at us, we all shrugged, and soon enough the road started moving again and we figured we’d patch things up at the next stop.  Which would come sooner than we thought…

About 45 minutes later, the girls started flashing their brights and honking, so we pulled over and they told us the news: evidently when Katie got out of the car she had knocked her wallet off the seat and lost it outside.  In her wallet she had about $500 in cash for the trip – a fortune for college students – and without it she was broke for the week, plus as kids we didn’t know what happened if you lost a credit or debit card or anything like that.  We’d have to turn back, but we were on the Florida Turnpike where exits only come up every 35-40 miles.  So we had to drive on another 15 miles or so, get off and get back on in the opposite direction, pass the accident area by several miles, get off and get on again, and try to figure out where Katie left her wallet.

That’s right: we had to return to a general area of the highway.  To find a black wallet.  On a blacktop road.  In the middle of the night.

When we got to the area, there was still one police car there filing accident paperwork, so we knew we were in the right zone.  He told us that he’d leave his police lights on so that people would be cautious while we drove up and down the shoulder with our brights on trying to illuminate the road.  And we did, for well over a half hour, watching the ditches for alligators, swatting insects, and hoping against hope.  And miraculously – Curt found it!  (Of course he did – his bad luck is personal…he’s actually good luck for everyone else)  We celebrated, took pictures, and got  back in the cars triumphantly, happy to have such a good Spring Break story only on day one.  And so when the girls needed gas a couple exits later we took in the sunrise, felt the warm air, and felt pretty good about ourselves.  Well, all but one of us did.

Brent refused to even pull up to the pump.  By his estimation we were maybe 100 miles out and he had enough gas to get there, and why should he bother pumping gas when “it was the girls’ fault that they wasted all that gas chasing wallets”.  So we got back to his car in a parking spot, waited for the girls to finish fueling up, and followed them out of the gas station and back onto the highway…

In the wrong direction.  They got on the turnpike North instead of South.

And with the exits so far apart we might not have noticed it until one of the girls remarked “hey, wasn’t the sun on the other side of the freeway before we got gas?”.  We pulled over, determined that – again – we’d need to get off 10-15 miles down the road, get back on again, and recover the same ground.  Brent, mind you, was still driving – his hair having gotten at least an inch or two poofier since the wallet situation…it got about a half inch poofier per hour by my calculation at the time.

We got back on after the backtrack/looparound, and finally headed south again.  We passed another exit and as we were moving past Curt asked Brent how he was doing on gas.  Brent said he was fine and we cruised past, but then we clicked his overhead info station a few times to see that we had something like 26 miles until empty.  Within a minute, we saw a sign “next exit/services: 38 miles” or something absurdly farther than what we had left.  So Brent kicked into gear:

Fearing that any touching of the brakes would require him to re-accelerate and burn more precious fuel, he refused to brake.  He passed on shoulders, leaned on the horn as we approached slower cars, and drove maniacally as we looked out the rear window at the girls’ surprise.  What was this madman doing?

This continued for 30+ miles, a no-sleep-or-rest-in-24-hours Brent flying down the highway as terrified to use his brakes as we were of his driving.  And soon enough we could see the Shell logo beckoning a mile down the road at the next exit.  We were going to make it!  But Brent wasn’t so sure.  Ignoring the fact that even if we coasted to a halt on the exit ramp it would be a 10-minute transaction to walk there, get a gas can, and get back (or just push the car there), he took that exit ramp at easily 50 miles an hour.  It felt like we were on two wheels, all of us were pressed up against the driver’s side from the G-force, and as we straightened out to get to the toll booth we were still pushing at least 25-30 mph.  As the toll booth woman’s eyes widened at the barreling-down Explorer, we wondered how this would end.  Would she lift the gate?  Would we plow through it?  Would it stop us or shatter the front end?  She must have hit the gate lift button because the gate opened as we cruised through, but not before Brent threw a wad of bills from his pocket out his window at hers, yelling as an explanation of his lunacy:

“Lady, we’re fucked!”

Postscript: We did make it down to Ft. Lauderdale and we had a good week as far as I remember. Beaches, basketball games, dinners, lots of drinks, lots of late night drinks and singalongs on the beach.  Just a good trip.  And it mellowed old Brent out some, so much that as we crossed the state line from Florida into Georgia on the return trip, he offered to abdicate the driver’s seat and let Padley take a turn at the helm.  And within 20 minutes, Padley controlled a blowout and coasted us to the shoulder for safety.

The very rear left tire that Katie had warned us about a week earlier had blown out.

Why Sports Matters

Posted: April 13, 2013 in Uncategorized
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A few months ago I was at a bar in Manhattan Beach in an interesting situation.  I was there with my buddy Tyler, with whom I was facing off in fantasy football that week; our friend Dave, who played wide receiver in the NFL for six seasons; Dave’s girlfriend Annaliese, whose brother also plays in the NFL; and their friend Steve, a SportsCenter anchor on ESPN.  Tyler and I were talking all kinds of fantasy football trash, which was funny because we were sitting with people who are around the actual NFL all the time and we had to explain to them what we meant.  So then the NFLers turned it on us, asking “why do you care about sports?”.  They had the easy answer – it made them and people around them rich (which wasn’t their only answer, but a nice trump card they had).  For Tyler, Steve, and me?  They weren’t going to be easily impressed.  So I’ve been thinking about it and I’m more convinced than ever that sports do matter.  Here’s why:

Sports Unites

We’re a nation divided, a people divided.  Politics, religion, money, aspiration – in many ways, the more people around you the more you’re alone, as in New York and LA it’s not at all uncommon to not know your neighbors or say hello when you pass them on the street.  We’re segmented in entertainment with hundreds of channels designed to segment us into small slices of marketing goodness, and we walk around as (i)Pods the way Steve Jobs intended, earbuds in so that we walk to the beat of our own personal soundtrack out of tune with others’.

But sports?  Sports makes us all wear the same color shirts and fight traffic to be together.  Sports gets us up at the crack of dawn to park our cars on a grassy field and share beers and barbecues.  Sports packs us into a bar and forces us to high five and hug strangers.  Sports lets us say “Roll Tide” or “Go Blue” to people we see on the street and really mean it, genuinely smiling and taking pride in our collective happiness.  Sports unites.

When I was six, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series.  I was old enough to watch games on TV, follow along when I got to go to a game or two a year with my dad, read the box score in the paper.  I knew it was special, but when we won?  Neighbors came to the door hooting and hollering and spraying beer.  We hopped in someone’s car and drove the mile or so to downtown Plymouth and the town square, and the whole town was out, hugging, chanting, smiling…  That’s when I started to see the power of sports – the whole town was out, everyone was happy, sports had united.

This past couple weeks, Michigan’s basketball team made a deep run in the NCAA Tournament, and I was reminded again of that unifying power of sports.  As we got deeper and deeper into the tournament, I got more and more calls, texts, emails from friends from long ago – people I hadn’t talked to in months and people I hadn’t talked to in years.  And maybe it’s a sad commentary that we *needed* sports to bring us back together, but then again that’s the world.  We become divided whether by geography or new priorities or schedules.  Sports unites us.

And what’s most fascinating to me is that sports unites people regardless of their rooting interest.  So many of the calls and texts I got this week were from fans of other teams – they didn’t necessarily care that Michigan was in the finals, but they knew that I did and they understood.  My friend Hallie is a huge Alabama fan; we don’t work together anymore, we have totally different schedules and live in different parts of LA, but when Alabama has big games she always invites me over because she knows I understand – I’m not really rooting for Alabama (who roots for the house in blackjack or the killer in horror movies?) but I’m rooting for her to be happy because I know what it’s like to have a team on the verge like that.  Sports fans get sports fans.

Sports is the ultimate conversation starter – if you see someone in their team gear it’s a natural opener, either “congratulations” or “bummer about that game” or “good luck tonight”.  It’s something we all have in common – if LeBron James scores 50 points over the weekend, it’s noteworthy enough that we can all talk about it on Monday; if the Lakers sneak into the playoffs, it’s a conversation whether you love them or hate them.  A guy who works for us in Boston wrote to me the other day – as part of our half-business, half-basketball email chain – that “I can’t count how many people I know that I wouldn’t know if we didn’t have sports in common”, and I agree.  Sports isn’t just a conversation starter, it’s a natural reason to invite people over or out to the bar for a game.  In a way it’s lowest common denominator – it’s tough to get people excited about an activity you researched or dreamed up, but if you invite people to watch a game at the bar?  You’ll get enough turnout and probably know some other people there, anyway, that you’re bound to have a good time.

Living in Los Angeles, I’ve noticed that certain cities have that extra level of civic pride and brotherhood, and sports is invariably the reason – Boston people are thrilled to see other Boston people; I wear my Detroit Tigers hat walking down the beach and call it “the friendmaker” since someone from back home is bound to say say something and strike up a conversation.  Sports unites us.  Sports matter.

Sports Matter Because They Don’t Matter

You know why sports are such a good conversation starter?  In large part because they’re more or less trivial – they’re something we care about while all the while we know it’s not real life.  You can’t casually ask someone “how’s your marriage?” or “how’s your retirement portfolio?” the same way you can ask “how about those Lions?”.  Sports matter because we care about them even though they don’t matter – they’re perfect for conversation, perfect for feeling those artificial highs and lows to help balance out the real nerves, fears, and pains of whatever may ail you.  Sports are just trivial enough to matter.

Think of it like this – we’re animals.  We thrive on adrenaline, we’ve evolved to be active, raise our heart rates, let emotion take over and feel highs, lows, and everything in between. But we’ve created a world where that doesn’t happen regularly – most of us aren’t worried at all about our next meal the way our ancestors were.  The day to day of your job or relationship doesn’t really change – there are milestones but they’re far apart.  So look at humanity – we look to drugs, alcohol, manufactured drama, anything to feel highs and lows the way nature intended.  And then there are sports – sports allow us to feel that adrenaline, gearing up for a big game as though we’re narrowing in on a survival hunt; narrowly escaping defeat and being able to feel the stress pour off of us. All exhaling “oohhh” in unison when a big shot just misses the net.  Sports is just trivial enough to let us do all of that – to really feel – without much consequence.  As we’ve created a world in which we sit at desks and answer phones and type on keyboards, sports lets us get that moment to moment surge of anxiety and adrenaline.

Sports Inspires

The caveat to “sports doesn’t matter” is “well, neither do the Kardashians or  anything on HBO”.  But the difference is that sports *is* real – it’s people pushing past their limits, it’s the human body achieving new heights.  The adrenaline we get from sports can be channeled – into a better workout, into going after a goal, into putting everything you have into whatever confronts you.  After Trey Burke’s jumper against Kansas two weeks ago, I ended up on the Venice Beach basketball courts shooting threes – our crew was inspired by the game and wanted to play.  Lance Armstrong inspired me to buy a road bike, which led to Ironman triathlons.  And athletes everywhere inspire kids to dream big and patients to fight hard.  Sports has the capacity to not just unite us, but involve us – it’s people like us (but then again not that much like us) doing amazing things, a reminder that we all have something amazing inside us.  Sports does that in a way that scripted entertainment just can’t.

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So sports does matter (and sidenote – I’m using “sports” as singular here…not entirely sure why but it felt right when I started writing.  Sorry, grammar nerds!).  When I was a kid I was known among the family for writing great thank-you notes after Christmas and birthdays, but my formula was pretty easy – know where my relatives lived and then find something that mattered to them to comment on or ask about.  And it was usually sports.  When my aunt and uncle lived in Dallas, it was the Cowboys. My grandparents were in Chicago – I’d ask about the Bulls.  Sports was an easy way to relate to the world; even now, it’s hard to truly know someone, as we all have the public “me” we show to the world and the internal dialogue of what really matters to us but that we may not want everyone (or anyone) to know.  Sports is that direct route to show someone you care about something that’s important to them – when a friend says “Go Blue”, shoot, it’s not that far off from “I love you” or at least “I care about you and want you to experience happiness today”.  And, readers, same to you.  Go Blue.

Fab Four-Eight-Thirteen

Posted: April 9, 2013 in Uncategorized
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April 4, 2013.  The day of the return.

On this day, 1993, I watched from a hospital bed, gauze coating my ears and nose.  Fabs vs. Tar Heels, and it wasn’t Chris’s TO that did us in.  It was Donald Williams going straight up insane from three, it was Carolina grabbing rebounds, it was us rimming out jumpers…but it was C-Webb’s TO when my dad patted me on the shoulder and said “I have to work tomorrow”.  And then it was SportsCenter for the next 10 hours.  My nurses thought they were doing me – a huge sports fan at age 13 – a favor by leaving it on.  But my breathing tube crimped when I rolled, so I didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time that night.  So while I saw Webber’s timeout 100+ times that night, I also saw Williams dropping threes, Montross grabbing boards, George Lynch with putbacks all night.

And my saving grace?  The Fab Five were sophomores.  I was a kid.  We’d be back.  But we haven’t been…until tonight.

Now?  I’m a grown-ass-man.  The team I loved…it took some hard times.  I got to college and we had some talent, but it didn’t click.  We won the NIT, but… I mean.  We won the inaugural Big Ten Tournament, but then dropped out in the second round to Baron Davis and UCLA.  And that was it…  It was almost ten years before we got back in the tournament.  And a goddamn lifetime until tonight, back in the finals.   And we were soclose.

This isn’t a game recap.  This isn’t sour grapes.  This isn’t a plea for some tiny place in history.  This is just my story as a Michigan basketball fan who loved the hell out of the last season and wants to put it in perspective for posterity.  This is for Jalen, Juwan, Chris, Jimmy and Ray.  The same it’s for Glen, Loy, Terry, Mike, and Rumeal.  And it’s for Trey, Nik, Spike, Glenn, Tim, Mitch, Jordan, Caris, Jon and the gang.  And it’s for Jason McMann, Ryan Stayton, Adam Lilling, Heather Discher, Joe Johnson, Jeff Yuille, Jeff Williams…the people who never gave up on this team and who hurt tonight in the aftermath of being right there.

My story as a Michigan fan:

I remember losing to Villanova in 1985.  Not that vividly, but I knew Michigan was a one seed, and that was the state I lived in in a sport I cared about.  I was six.  We lost, it was a huge deal, I got over it.

I remember Gary Grant, Antoine Joubert, Roy Tarpley…   On certain Saturdays my dad would take me and my brother to Ann Arbor and he’d get a haircut and let us play on the high jump mats at the Track & Tennis Building while he ran laps – he’s my marathon/triathlon inspiration – and we’d get a sip of Gatorade at the end.  And on those Saturdays when Michigan was playing a tomato can opponent his barber – Bill from State Street Barbershop at State & Packard – would have free upper level tickets to those games.  I loved those games.

I remember picking Michigan in my first bracket and keeping up that tradition.  I loved that team  – the giant M to start the word “Michigan” on their jerseys, the big games with Indiana and Michigan State, the fact that the name on the jersey was the same as the state I lived in… So I picked them against seeding, against reason, against logic.

But then the coach quit.  Days before the 1989 tournament.  Bill Frieder got more money somewhere else, and the football coach who was now the Athletic Director said those famous words that spoke like crazy to a ten year old: “A Michigan Man will coach Michigan”.  And Michigan went on a run, but not before a standoff at the Galvin household.  My father had grown up in Jersey and gotten a masters degree at Seton Hall – he’s now going balance 30 years later with a masters at Michigan – and so he and I butted heads over the ’89 final, but Michigan won its only title to date, 80-79 on some Rumeal Robinson free throws.  As it turns out…the foul was questionable and Rumeal’s character was more than that (he’s in prison for stealing from his own grandmother).  But I was hooked.

And then…

After a couple tough years getting knocked out by JR Reid’s Carolina teams and the team-of-destiny from Loyola Marymount after Hank Gathers’ death, the Fab Five arrived.

Jalen, Juwan, Jimmy, Chris Ray.

The team that I thought only defined my small generation of kids from Michigan but who defined so much more.  The baggy shorts, the black shoes and socks, the bald heads.  MIA might get credit for “no one on the corner got swagger like us” but she’s ripping off the Fab Five.  No one in history had swagger like them.  And I lived a half-hour away as a middle-schooler.  My dad had season tickets – I went to a couple games a year…he split them with a neighbor and the two of them went to all the big games together – and every kid I knew had the gear.  That team was transcendent.  I watched the coming out party against Duke over a TV dinner and a babysitter.  I watched the “Shock the World” Final Four game as a babysitter down the street, and if those kids had set the house on fire I wouldn’t have known or cared.  I was hooked.

A few years later I lived out my dream of going to Michigan and immediately bought season basketball tickets.  I had tickets with several friends – at least 7-10 of us – and we had to sit up in the upper bowl.  During the fall of our freshman year, Robert  Traylor broke a backboard with a dunk. The next day I flew to Florida to meet my family for Thanksgiving at Disney World.  They knew all about the dunk…it had been national news.  That team underachieved and went to the NIT…but then won it.  We were still relevant and building.  But then…

Trouble was brewing.  A car accident the year before had brought out some legal eyes: the car was too expensive for the driver, Maurice Taylor (my least favorite human being of my lifetime…good player, awful human) and the recruit inside, Mateen Cleaves, would come to haunt us.  The coach was fired, the team went to the NCAA tournament the next year…but that was the last time for a decade.

Now…we may well have deserved some punishment, but to date I’ve seen a lot of NCAA probation for less.  Ohio State football, USC football, Auburn and Cam Newton – it’s been wild.  But Michigan…I was naive but it was over for ten years as it turns out.  The coach was fired, the program went on a “fact finding” self-imposed probation, and the uncertainty and lack of coaching decimated the program.  My junior year was awful but my senior year we got a taste of glory.  With now LA-Clipper Jamal Crawford leading a new freshman class we went 13-1 and took #1 Duke to the limit…before Jamal was suspended for “suspicion of benefits” (which turned out to be a pretty common violation) for the rest of the season, right before the Michigan State game.  State blew us out and went on to win the championship.

During that time, I saw the temporarily-declining program and the ascending program up the road in Lansing and decided to do something.  I started writing a newsletter at basketball games, called “The Full Court Press” (a step up from the Half Court Press , the newsletter from the Izzone at Michigan State).  I kept it up two seasons and people caught on – I was the “voice” of the newly-founded student section, nomenclatured by the t-shirts distributed among us that said “Maize Rage”.  By that point, my crew of several friends in the student section had eroded to a few people in my graduating class – many times it was me and a handful of new friends, among them Jason McMann, Ryan Stayton, Heather Dichter, and maybe 2-3 others – representing the senior class.  It was certainly less than a dozen of us.

But we persevered.  The Athletic Department was reading my newsletter and I got hired along with the new coach, Tommy Amaker.  I was in charge of generating student spirit; for that, a few years later with the advent of the movie “Old School”, students started referring to me as “The Godfather”.  Someday here I’ll post my alternate lyrics to the Jay Z track “H to the Izzo” – “L (loss” to the Izzo (MSU’s coach)”.  We created a legit student organization, one that exists year-round outside of basketball tickets and games.  I’ve gotten teary-eyed when I’ve seen folks like Denard Robinson throw on a  Maize Rage shirt.  But for several years…that organization chased some terrible teams.

It’s late, it’s postgame (our national championship loss to Louisville) and I’m rambling, but what it comes down to is this: that was more than ten years ago.  Since then I’ve made good friends in grad school and started a local business with a guy, Joe, who around the same time I was an alum helping out the Maize Rage created a petition to get Rick Pitino, the coach who beat us tonight, to coach Michigan (Rick accepted, then reneged, but Joey got to talk to him on his cell phone which is pretty sweet).  I’ve sen Michigan finally beat Michigan State again, and do it a few times in a row…all  coming long after that day that Jason McMann and I painted our faces to watch us lose by 51 points at MSU.  I’ve lived a lifetime with this team.

I lived a full lifetime with this team this past week, from Trey Burke’s jumper to tie Kansas after we were down 10 with under 2 to go, to the dominance of Florida, to the win over Syracuse, to the first half dominance of Louisville to tonight’s loss.  I’ve lived multiple lifetimes with this team, many in the past couple weeks and many more over the last 25 years.

What does it all mean?  I’m trying to sort it out, but Michigan basketball has been a fixture in my life and it’s taught me that things may seem easy but they’re never easy; it’s taught me that the true believers – all the real MFers – are few and far between but worth holding onto and staying in touch with. And it’s given me a hell of a ride the last three weeks.

When the Fab Five went down by 19 to UCLA in 1993, my brother, sister, and I tried to rally the team by doing somersaults off the couch in my parents’ basement. Michigan came back to win that game and get to the national final, the aforementioned Webber TO game.  All tournament long, 20 years later, my siblings and I responded to dire situations by texting each other the word “somersaults”. And tonight I did somersaults on the corner of Wilshire and 11th in Santa Monica, CA, trying to rally the team.  Didn’t work this time, but it proves that Michigan basketball runs deep, and I appreciate the ride.

Thank you to Trey, Mitch, Tim, Spike, Nick, Glenn, Jordan, Caris and the  gang for giving us hope.  Thank you to those who have believed the last 20 years when believing was rough.  And thank you to sports fans everywhere for giving this stuff meaning.

We On.  We weren’t for a long time but we so on right now and one setback won’t change that.  Last time we got thisclose  I suffered the rest of the night in a hospital bed.  This time I suffer as an adult, blogging to avoid the nightmares that will come from closing my eyes and reliving.  But it’s been a heck of a ride.  Go Blue.  We On.

A Letter to Pope Francis

Posted: March 14, 2013 in Uncategorized
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Dear Pope Francis,

Congratulations on the new job!  I tried Tweeting you at @Pontifficator but you may not yet be as hip as the ol’ Benedictator when it comes to social media.  Soon enough, though…hope you get this email.

A little about me:  I’m Irish-Catholic by upbringing and tradition (psyched for St. Patrick’s Day this weekend), was an altar boy from about 3rd grade through middle school, was baptized, confirmed, and became a godfather at another baptism, have visited Jerusalem and Vatican City on some soul searching…but honestly my church attendance has been pretty lax the last six years or so.  My policy:  In any calendar year I need to go to church more often than I go to Vegas (instituted in 2008, when Vegas won 5 to 4).  For 2013 Vegas is up one-zip, but I’ll be at Mass on Easter to even the score.

And I guess that’s where you come in.  I had a pretty good track record under John Paul II and I’m not really blaming Benedict for my recent slew of absences.  There are a ton of factors – most modern countries are getting less religious, I live in an ironically sinful and nonreligious area where every city is named after a saint and/or a Spanish Catholic mission, I have I think everyone’s doubts about whether there’s really a God and how accurate and literal the Bible really is.  But, shoot, man – your institution hasn’t helped matters much recently and I’m hoping you can at least give us some more reasons to believe.

Have you ever seen the movie Dogma?  You should – Jay and Silent Bob, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Salma Hayak as a stripper and Chris Rock as a prophet and George Carlin being George Carlin.  It’s actually a pretty good litmus test for American religious realness, I’d say.  If you can laugh at it even while it’s being pretty sacreligious at times, I think you kind of get the modern world in way that just having a Twitter account doesn’t really suffice.  It’s supposed to be satirical but some of the most religious, pious, just truly great people I know really like it because they get the real message – that there is and absolutely needs to be a break between the tenets of spirituality and religious tradition and what has become the institutional religious dogma that quite frankly turns a lot of us Good Samaritans and would-be-disciples off.

If you’ve read this blog before you can probably tell that I’m a man who’s worn a Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelet.  But maybe the most meaningful bracelet out there is the good old WWJD bracelet.  And I’m hoping you’ll direct the institution you now control – the church I grew up in, the institution that means so much to my grandparents and less but still something to my parents and my generation – back toward that message and away from politics and dogma.  A little less Roman, a little more Catholic.  A little less Old Testament fire and brimstone and a little more New Testament “what you do the least among you you do unto me”.  Crank up a little of Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter” in the Popemobile and you may hear a little Christ in there…”I think it’s about forgiveness”.

Because, shoot, I’m several paragraphs in now and I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room – at least a ventricle of the heart of the matter here.  Your institution – Jesus’s institution that he passed down to pope after pope and that now rests in your hands – molested kids and covered it up.  I say my Hail Marys to two entities – Our Mother (but not Notre Dame) and the University of Michigan on fall Saturdays. But had my parents not moved from Wilkes-Barre to Ypsilanti, had I grown up in Pennsylvania and attended the football-loving main state school where I grew up, I think I’d say the same thing:  Penn State football should be finished.  One sicko molests a kid and you deal with him; you follow WWJD and you forgive him but you don’t do so cavalierly.  You work like crazy to make it up to the kid and you make sure it never happens again.  Penn State football screwed up royally and institutionally and sickeningly and I hate seeing their highlights on SportsCenter and the articles about the poor players and poor fans who have to live with the aftermath and especially the poor Paterno family and how they have to somehow soldier on on the backs of millions of dollars while the legacy of their patriarch has been (rightfully) tarnished forever.  Penn State football should be excommunicated from the public consciousness, unless it’s brought up again in remembrance of the victims and the cause.  But, shoot – to err is human and to forgive is divine…and Penn State is human and secular and slavish to the almighty dollar.  But you’re supposed to be divine.

So how is a Doubting Thomas like me supposed to adhere to the teachings of the church when the church is worse than Penn State?  And how can the church hold so rigidly to its almost 2,000 year old dogma – women can’t be priests, priests can’t marry, birth control and homosexuality are sins – when it can’t honor the Golden Rule and the most central of principles that God sent Jesus to preach and exemplify?

So please, please be progressive.  My requests:

1) Make the child molestation thing right.  No harboring, no aiding and abetting.  Forgiveness, sure but eventually.  Clean it up (more on how in a second) and make amends to the victims.  I’ve visited your fancy new digs – you’re selling advertising on the side of the Vatican while all the while you have thousands of Michaelangelos and DaVincis in storage because you can’t possibly display it all.  Money’s not an issue.  Become a leader in child abuse awareness education, set up scholarship funds for affected kids, whatever you need to do.  WWJD, and the answer isn’t “hope it goes away or goes unnoticed”.

2) Let priests marry.  You know how you clean up the child abuse situation? Don’t create an atmosphere where it’s bound to happen.  As a former altar boy – who had no involvement or knowledge of anything like that at my church, but spent some time with priests is why I’m saying this – I won’t say I wasn’t initially shocked by the scandal, but then again after a few minutes of thinking about it I wasn’t really *that* surprised.  As a ten year old I could tell priests were different from the other grown men I knew, and I didn’t blame them.  They were lonely, they were isolated.  Comparing Father Joe or Father Perfetto to my dad…my dad had a job during the day but his real life was at home with us, with my mom. Coaching soccer, pitching wiffle ball in the neighborhood, going out for beers with his running buddies.  Priests were priests all the time.  They lived with the other priests in a house next to the church.  Most adults work at least a few miles away from where they live, and many live a few towns away.  They’re not always their work selves.  Priests had this weird singularity to their lives – everything they did centered on being a priest and everyone they knew was part of the parish and saw them as the priest.

Think about Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Exceptional men, good leaders…mistresses of convenience.  Lewinsky, the maid.  As Chris Rock says “a man is only as faithful as his options”.  Those guys were good-looking, powerful, etc. and even *they* stooped to a weird level when that itch needed scratching.  Now look at a priest – no real experience dealing with women, all the women they know are parishoners who see them in this celibate light…what are their options?  Have you ever seen the HBO show “Taxicab Confessions”?  It’s a bunch of tawdry admissions that people make to cabbies and it’s risque enough that it’s a whole series on a popular cable network.  These priests hear those kinds of confessions for a living – they’re facing some kind of sexual temptation regularly but through the constraints of their chosen profession they don’t have any real outlets.  What do you expect?

So that’s half of it, but here’s the other half – who goes into the priesthood if it means giving up any chance of having a family or a “normal” life?  Which teenage/twentysomething boys, having recently discovered and been discovered by girls, is willing to make that lifetime sacrifice?  It cuts down your pool of potential priests considerably.  You’re losing out on great candidates *and* by the same token you’re increasing the likelihood that the men you employ will be…let’s just say strange.  If you’re a ladies man – does Don Juan have the same connotation in Argentina? – or feel you might blossom into one any day now, you’re that much less likely to make that permanent celibacy decision.  But if you don’t fit in in that world, there has to be an increased probability that that’s not what you’d value as highly so you’re probably more willing to make that decision, right?  It’s a sample size of one, but I know one guy from high school who became a priest and he’s top ten strangest humans I’ve ever met.  Watched a lot of those Faces of Death movies and would tell you all about them if you were stuck on a work shift together; would walk around the pool club we worked at in a Speedo like it was no big thing.  Weird dude.  Priest.  Me, my brother, our dozens of other buddies who grew up in the same church?  Never really considered it.

WWJD?  Lot of evidence out there in the Gnostic gospels that Jesus said things like “My wife” a few times.  The Bible goes way out of its way to include Mary Magdalene – a prostitute…sex can’t be that bad, right? – as a central figure and a favorite friend of Jesus’s.  Jesus was brought into human form to humanize God, to be one of us.  Why shouldn’t priests have that opportunity to live like their congregation, to celebrate and interact with women?

3) Let women be priests.  There’s the fairness thing, equal opportunity and all that.  But more than that there’s the pragmatic thing.  Women are over half the population.  They’re dynamic speakers, they’re innovators, they’re great at organization and fundraising and leadership.  They have all the qualities you would want in a priest in at least as high of amounts as men do, and so by leaving them out of the mix you cut your labor pool in half.  So, again, you end up with a lot of B-teamers leading your masses.

Then there’s WWJD again.  Again, JC adored Mary Magdalene.  And depending on whether dogma classifies Jesus as a human or not, Mary (mother Mary) is either the greatest or second greatest human being of all-time in the church’s eyes.  Why not women?

4) Lay off the birth control thing.  I’ve only read a little about you but it sounds like you’re going to make poverty a big focus in your papacy. I applaud and admire you for that.  So let’s get real…middle class Catholics – us buffet Catholics who pick and choose the pieces of doctrine we like (and even if we screw that up a little, we all embrace the heck out of that forgiveness clause so I think we’re okay in the end) – don’t listen to the Vatican on birth control.  But poor Catholics – and, disproportionately, poor Catholics from your neck of the woods south of the border – do.  And it’s killing their chances of getting out of poverty.  You know that saying “The Lord helps those who help themselves”?  (Of course you do…is the Pope Catholic?)  He’s giving poor Catholics a chance.  Condoms, pills, Elaine Benes’s sponge…man, I can respect your take on abortion coming from the church itself, but these other methods?  Any time you can prevent a curious teenager from dooming both herself and her child from a life of poverty, I have to think Jesus wants you to do that.  The New Testament is all about forgiveness and inclusion; Jesus understood that people were sinners and he embraced us for it.  Leviticus may disagree but Jesus gets the final say, right?  Leviticus didn’t even make the Trinity…podium finishers only, man.  Jesus forgives, Jesus understands.  Jesus would understand the stats and the temptations and the modern world we live in where “be fertile and multiply” should probably take a backseat to “how are we going to feed all 8 billion of us” and the sympathy for young single mothers.

5) Maybe most importantly, be inclusive.  Do you know why Christianity spread like wildfire?  In large part because it wasn’t exclusive.  You didn’t have to be born into it.  You didn’t have to be circumsized.  The Jesus message is ridiculously universal and welcoming.  God loves you.  God knows you’re not perfect but he loves you anyway.  God loves you so much and wants you to know that so deeply that he sent Jesus in human form to become one of you, to understand your lives better, to fraternize with the sick, the lame, the poor, the elderly, the prostitutes.  God doesn’t hate anyone, but if he did he’d hate the “God Hates Fags” sign carriers a lot more than he’d hate the fags themselves.  Half the New Testament is about Jesus befriending the undesirables.  The Beatitudes are all about “blessed are the poor, the sick, the meek”.

So let’s get inclusive. Let’s go back to the way St. Paul spread this thing like he was Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all rolled up in one.  #jesuslovesjesusforgives #lethewhoiswithoutsincastthefirststone #allarewelcome  The church’s greatest asset is its core message, that only God can judge us and that he’s willing to forgive. Let’s not lose sight of that.

I don’t think I’m all that different from a lot of arm’s-length Catholics. We’re going to question the heck of out of religion because that’s the world we live in, one of science and reason, one of pragmatism and skepticism, one in which we’ve been disappointed too many times by leaders and promises and in which we’ve been distracted by false idols and American Idols.  But I think a lot of us still want to believe in Jesus’s message and in the church’s mission.   They teach in philosophy that Jesus was either “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” but I’m willing to give him a dimension in between – a great man whose vision and message is important whether he’s the son of God and the son of a virgin or whether he’s just the incredibly admirable son of an incredibly admirable mortal named Mary.  Forgiveness, tolerance, do unto others as you would like done unto you – like many prodigal Catholic sons I’m going to continue to have my doubts about divinity but either way that’s a message I can get behind.  I hope the church can focus on it, too and I’m particularly hopeful that you’re the man for the job.

Amen,

Brian

A Case for Midwestern Weather

Posted: January 28, 2013 in Uncategorized
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It’s late January in Detroit.  And Chicago, and Minneapolis, and, well everywhere, but throughout the Midwest and Northeast.  And there many are wishing they lived somewhere warmer – down South or in the Southwest.  And in those places, they can’t imagine living north.

Demographic trends show this.  Southern and southwestern states are gaining population while those in the “Rust Belt” are losing it, and while some of this is due to immigration patterns and jobs, there’s still that stigma that “who would want to live where it’s cold when you could instead live where it’s warm?”.

So as I sit here in Southern California, having closed a window on January 27th because the ocean wind is picking up tonight, I have this to say:

There’s a case to be made for Midwestern weather, namely:

1) The “unbearable” days in the Midwest are the shortest; in the south and desert southwest, they’re the longest.

Yeah, in the Midwest there are some awful days. Heavy snow making commutes horrible; temperatures below zero; a lack of sun for more than a week at a time.  But think about when those days come – December, January, and February.  Those are the shortest days of the year.  I live in Los Angeles. It was 70 degrees at the  beach today…but it was dark by 6:30.  And in Phoenix or Orlando or Houston, those warm-weather hotbeds, it was probably a gorgeous day, too.  But it was dark long before 7pm, as it was in Detroit and Chicago.

The difference – in those eternally warm places,these are among the best days of the year.  By May it will be over 100 degrees much of the time, and you can certainly argue that those days are every bit as unbearable as the below-zero days in the Midwest (more on this in a second).  But these are the *best* days in the South; the best days in the north are in the summer, when it’s light out until 9 or later.  In the Midwest, the best days for being outside are the longest days of the year.

So if you accept that in most places – and I’ll fully admit that here in Santa Monica we really don’t have to choose, but then again a small fraction of the world has this coastal Mediterranean climate – have at least a couple months of lousy weather, the Midwest  makes out really well on the deal.  The best days are the longest and the worst are the shortest.  And…

2) It’s easier to warm up outside than it is to cool off

I’m a distance runner.  I grew up in Detroit.  And there weren’t more than 2-3 days in any given year that I couldn’t run outside.  If you dress for it, winter weather is pretty manageable, especially nowadays with lightweight, insulated clothing for active sports.  With a thermal layer, you can ski or run or walk in pretty much any weather.  And even without – as kids we had a habit of playing basketball on New Year’s Eve every year, since our parents would typically all gather at one family’s house and leave the kids playing in the basement or outside.  And the only thing that truly hurt was your hands once you ran them under water after coming inside (it’s awful…worst pain I’ve experienced but it lasts maybe twenty seconds) to get the feeling back.

The point?  Cold weather doesn’t prohibit you from outdoor activities.  And some are actually fantastic – skiing, sledding, snowball-fighting, pond hockey.  You just have to dress for it.  But in the heat of summer in Phoenix or New Orleans?  Forget about it – you can’t work out outdoors past mid-morning for fear of heat stroke; you sweat through your clothes within minutes of walking outdoors.  When it comes to extremes, warm weather is more of a deterrent than cold-weather when it comes to most recreational activities.

So is scraping windshields and shoveling driveways a bummer? Sure.  But as much of a nuisance as cold weather can be, I’d argue it beats the alternative when it comes to livability.

3) A common opponent

It’s easy to scoff at those who say they “love the seasons” or that “cold weather builds character”, but I truly believe this to be true: a winter’s worth of snow, ice, and cold benefits the community all year round, and it’s because winter weather provides everyone in the community with a common opponent.

Think about it – as a society we don’t have all that much in common.  It used to be that there were three channels on TV and a community gathering place in the center of town and people had things in common because there just weren’t many things overall.  But now – there are hundreds of channels on cable, plus people watch a lot of TV on their own schedule with DVR or Hulu or entire TV series on Netflix.  We don’t listen to communal radio, as everyone has an iPod or a 12-disc changer in their (old) car.  Newspapers are nearly dead – most news nowadays is national and partisan.  There’s not much you have to talk or care about with someone who just happens to live nearby.  Except the weather.

And the common opponent of cold weather is a great one for bringing people together.  When it snows heavily, you drive more carefully and let people go in front of you.  You see neighbors shoveling driveways or digging their car out from a drift, and you help them because they’d do the same for you.  You mention the weather to the people in line at Starbucks, you tell people to “stay warm out there” as you hold the door for them.  You’re all in it together.

And then spring comes, and you rejoice together because you suffered together.  On the first really nice day of spring, you can’t help but say “great day, huh?” as you pass someone on the street.  You wave to people on bikes or out jogging because you know how much the great weather means to them.  There’s something about suffering and achieving together – that’s what made the Greatest Generation so great, through the Depression and WWII.  And with winter weather, communities have that.

Here in Los Angeles, our common opponent is traffic, which is a terrible common opponent to have in that its very nature is “too many people”.  So it’s not really a common opponent – because you’re one of those people to me, I’m against you, and vice versa.  Your very presence on the road exacerbates my greatest daily challenge.  And we don’t have that same kind of community.

Now, certainly I’m romanticizing the common-opponent function of weather.  Not every day in Buffalo or Minneapolis is “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street”.  But I have noticed it time and again, and the every-few-years’ storm here in California where it pours rain for days a time is actually one of my favorite LA traditions. People are just nicer to each other, friendlier to each other, because for that stretch we’re all in it together.  We should all have a common opponent, and winter weather is a great one.

 

So what’s my point?  This time of year, many in the Midwest see the grass as greener down south or out in the desert.  Some take a trip to Florida or the Caribbean; others think about moving to Phoenix or Vegas.  My point – don’t move to Phoenix or Vegas.  Or inland SoCal, for that matter.  It’s a bad trade, giving up the great days / long days combination, the common opponent, and the ability to acclimate yourself to lousy weather with nothing more than $50 and an REI membership.  There’s something to be said for Midwestern weather, even if you’re only looking at the warm/cold “when can I go outside” factor and even if you’re not taking into account green grass, fall leaves, snow days and that first day in spring where girls bare their shoulders again and teachers hold classes outside and everyone acts like a lottery winner because there’s something about that freshness of spring.  Midwestern weather – winter weather – is its own reward in many ways, and I’d argue that it beats nearly every other climate out there when it comes to livability.

So enjoy it, Midwesterners, for you’re the lucky ones.  And if you need me, I’ll be at the beach.  Nobody has anything on coastal southern California.

What I Wish Lance Armstrong Would Have Said

Posted: January 20, 2013 in Cycling
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Author’s note: I’m a Lance Armstrong supporter.  Have been since I first read his book, “It’s Not About the Bike”.  It inspired me while training for my first marathon; the next summer, while watching the Tour de France, I bought a racing bike.  I’ve since done something like fifteen marathons and become a fairly legit triathlete.  Lance wasn’t the only reason and maybe I would have ended up here anyway, but he – or, rather, the world he turned me on to – was a big inspiration.   I watched the Oprah interviews this week as a fan, someone looking not for an admission (you had to know…) or even really an apology, but for the story.  And what we got seemed a little too scripted by a PR firm (“I’m not here to talk about anyone else” seven or eight times) and a little too “for the masses” for my tastes (I *get* the Tour de France and the cycling culture; I want to know more about why/how he did what he did than just what he did).

Most importantly, I know that the guy I rooted for and used as inspiration as an endurance athlete was more myth than man, and I’m okay with that.  But I did want to connect the two – I wanted the man to live a little closer to the myth, to give us more of a reason to still believe.  And I think the story is there, but got lost in the PR posturing and all that.  Here’s what I wish he would have said, and what I believe is pretty close to the truth:

LANCE:  Oprah, thanks for having me and giving me an opportunity to get some important things off my chest to the public.  As many have probably predicted – some for years, I’m here to do a few things.  I’m here to confess to using performance-enhancing drugs.  I’m here to confess to lying about for years and in some pretty awful ways.  I’m here to apologize to the many I’ve hurt – those who accused me, those who supported me, and those who believed in me.  And I’m here not to make any excuses or to try to spin the story, but to give an explanation.  I know that many will judge me for my actions and probably even more for the actions I didn’t take over those years, and I’ll fully admit that that judgment shouldn’t be altogether kind.  But as people judge the story and especially as those who supported and believed in me try to rationalize it, I want to at least explain what I did and why I did it.

I used performance enhancing drugs – EPO, testosterone, and blood transfusions.  I used them in every Tour de France I won, all seven of them.  And I lied about it.  I lied about almost every day for more than ten years now.  In doing so, I initiated lawsuits against those who accused me of what I actually did.  I went on the attack and said some nasty  things about those people and because of the pulpit I had acquired over time those nasty things hurt some people profoundly.  

So I confess to quite a big of what I’ve been accused of.  And although it’s hopelessly late and can’t begin to make it up to some of the people I’ve hurt, I apologize.  Deeply.  But, Oprah, I want to be specific about what I apologize for.  My PR folks have coached me on this interview and they’ve been adamant that my role here tonight is to be contrite and apologetic, to not point fingers or act defensive, and to look as sympathetic as I can.  And maybe this is the same kind of defiance that got me in all this trouble, but I’ve thought about it and I want to do it my way.  I want to apologize, but I don’t want to just look in a camera and say I’m sorry.  I want to truly be sorry, and there are some definite things that I’m truly, deeply sorry for:

I’m sorry for lying.  I’m sorry for what I did to the Andreus, to Floyd  Landis, to Tyler Hamilton, to Emma O’Reilly, responding to their true accusations with venomous falsehoods of my own.  I’m sorry for letting down the millions who believed in me – my fans, my teammates, and particularly the cancer survivors who have held me up as an inspiration.  They deserved a better hero, someone worthy of that adulation, and I’m certainly not him.

But if I’m being honest – and that’s one of the reasons I want to do this interview, Oprah, to finally be completely honest – I can’t completely say that I’m sorry for doping.  And I guess that’s where I want to start my story, an explanation that may be better for clearing my conscience than for clearing my name.  But to those who I apologies, I also owe the truth.

I did use performance enhancing drugs.  In 1999, as a recent cancer survivor given a new lease on life and a chance to return to elite professional cycling, I got together with my coaches and doctors and we determined that with my new body type – cancer and chemo had destroyed a lot of my muscle mass that had made me a pretty good sprinter in the early 90s – ironically was that much better suited to compete as a leading rider on a Tour team.  We decided that I should train to be a Tour champion – my measurables were in line with what the greats of the sport, the Miguel Indurains and Jan Ullrichs and eventually the Alberto Contadors, could post, so I had a chance to join them.

And here’s where being honest might hurt me a little, Oprah – I’m not here to talk about anyone else or point any fingers, but the culture of cycling at the time was such that…if I wanted to compete for championships, doping was going to have to be part of it.  If you look at the record book, the couple Tour champions before me and several immediately after me, well, they’ve all been convicted of doping.  If you look at the guys who finished second, third, and beyond behind me, if you wanted to take my championships and pass them down to them – you can’t.  They’ve been convicted of doping, too. And my mother taught me well – “everyone’s doing it” isn’t a valid excuse and I made my decisions alone and need to face the consequences.  But when I decided to use PEDs, I did so because I firmly believed I had to in order to compete, let alone win.

Now, let me explain myself a little.  Remember, I was less than two years from literally being left for dead by the cycling community.  My team – Cofidis – it used a “fitness” clause in my contract to drop me, to void the contract, while I was lying in a hospital bed not knowing whether I’d ever leave it.  I was an angry young man – angry that I had lost a few years of the prime of my career, angry that teams didn’t believe I had what it took to make it back as a professional.  So I had a lot to prove and a lot of motivation.  So, with a chance to prove everyone wrong and get back immediately not to just where I had left off but to a higher spot, I doped.

And here’s where it gets strange, Oprah – I doped to win a bike race.  I doped to win a three-week, two thousand mile bike race that received 30 minutes of TV coverage here in the States.  And when I won – even before that, when I started to watch my body get to that zone where it could win, and then when I won – I doped again so I could do it again.  I doped for myself and my teammates, maybe my sponsors.  

And then a funny thing happened, and I can’t claim in any way that I’m an innocent victim.  But one Tour win led to two, and during that the media picked up on my story, a cancer survivor who crawled off his deathbed and hopped on a bike and became the second American to ever win the world’s most famous bike race.  And I went from being a bike geek who nobody knew and now I’m doing shows like yours and they ask me to write a book and it becomes a bestseller.  And all the while, Oprah, I’m doping for me and I’m doping because that’s what I firmly believe – what I believe, what my trainers and coaches believe and what a lot of the cycling community might not have admitted publicly but what we all believed – a champion cyclist had to do.

But here’s the difference – now I have to make a decision.  In cycling all I ever had to do was pass the drug tests, and that was easy to do.  That’s why we all did it – it was easy to beat the test and so you knew that the winners of the races were going to be dirty and if you wanted to be among them you had to be dirty and beat the tests too.  But now I’m on your show and I’m doing interviews with Bob Costas and Dan Patrick and even Barbara Walters and Katie Couric.  And the President of the United States not only knows my name but wants me to participate in cancer research efforts in Washington.  And now when someone floats the idea that “maybe Lance is using drugs”, now I have reporters asking me that question directly.  And so now I’m not just beating drug tests, I’m lying, directly.

And this is the part that I don’t expect everyone – or maybe anyone – to understand.  But it’s a part of my story.  Once you start lying to claim that you’re innocent, you have to make a pretty conscious decision.  If you’re going to adamantly claim that you’re innocent you have to act like an innocent man would act.  So I can’t duck the question anymore by telling a French reporter that I don’t understand the language enough to answer it, and as one of the faces of the cancer survivor movement and someone on the front lines raising money for research and helping survivors believe in themselves to beat the disease, I  can’t turn down invitations to do your show or Larry King or Katie Couric even when I know they’re going to ask me directly about drugs.  An innocent man would do the show, raise the money and the profile of the cancer cause, and deny the allegations.

And in acting like an innocent man would act – when people came out and wrote articles or did interviews claiming, or I guess just stating the fact, that they knew I was a doper and lying about it, I had to deny it and when it kept coming I had to think like an innocent man.  An innocent man would lash back at them, might sue them for defamation or at least send out the message that these accusations wouldn’t be tolerated.

And, Oprah, I can’t claim that I did everything I did for cancer or for the survivors who believed in me.  I lived the high life and won the championships.  I enjoyed the heck out of winning and everything that came with it.  But did I ever want it to stop?  Did I regret that it had grown so big?  Yeah, at times.  All I really wanted to do when I got out of that hospital was to be a great cyclist again, to win major races and prove to myself that I could.  But then five, six years later I look up and every day I’m getting a hundred letters from cancer survivors thanking me for helping them beat the disease.  I’m in charge of one of the largest cancer fundraising organizations in the world and presidents and Oscar winners and athletes all over the world are wearing the Livestrong bracelets and I’m the guy who knows this dirty little secret that a good part of that empire is built on a lie.

So what can I do?  I’ve beaten the tests and no one has successfully pinned doping on me.  If I stay the course – and honestly I felt pretty committed to it whether I wanted to stop it or not – I might be able to avoid letting everyone down.  And I can certainly avoid having to pull the rug out from under the foundation and the cancer community and, yeah, this incredible life of wealth and success that I enjoyed.  

So here I am.  I’ve been caught and I guess if I can liken it to my cycling career, we always said that the hardest thing in the world was defending the yellow jersey.  You wanted that jersey on the last day of the Tour but you really didn’t want it at the beginning because honor and pride requires you to defend it and it’s just too taxing to take on that responsibility.  I’ve been defending my own yellow jersey for years now – this myth about me that I’m complicit in creating but that I never imagined would take on the life that it did. And in a way it feels pretty good to give it up, because like the yellow jersey it feels great at times to wear the badge of “hero” and “icon” and all of those things, but particularly when you achieve it how I did, it’s a heavy burden to have to defend every day.

I apologize to all I’ve hurt and to everyone I’ve lied to.  I know in the hearts of most I’ll be remembered more as a cheater than as a champion and more as a liar than as an inspiration.  And that’s fair.  But I hope I’m also remembered for the good I tried to do with the opportunity I was given, and that cancer survivors keep that spirit that survival and beyond, anything is possible.  Maybe its narcissistic or arrogant but I’m still proud of what I accomplished – what we accomplished, with my teammates and coaches – in cycling and I know that the overall perception will be that this admission changes everything, but for those stricken with cancer who want to believe I hope they can believe in achieving greatness because it is possible and maybe they can just be better people than me and do it totally clean, too.  I know that I have a lot of apologies to give and that they’ll probably never all be accepted, but I hope that many can accept me for what I am – a human being who made mistakes but who hopes to still make the best of opportunities.  I accept that I’ll be judged and that the judgment won’t be flattering, but I’m going to keep fighting the good fight against cancer and I hope to make it up to everyone I let down.

CW Chronicles: The Chicken Boots

Posted: December 29, 2012 in CW Chronicles
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In a recent dinner with some (most?  There were two…) of my loyal readers, the central theme of this CW Chronicles series came up:  some of our  best stories need never be forgotten, but some were never fully known in the first place.  So for posterity and entertainment, I vow for 2013 to be the year for all of these to be recorded for posterity.  Curt’s broken wrist ix next up, but for today one of my all-time favorites and one of the lesser-known Curt stories:  The Chicken Boots.

If I had a few adjectives to describe Curt, most would be synonyms for “wonderful”, at least a few would be sophomorically homoerotic because that was just the kind of humor we all used at the time, but the other big two would be:

-Hardworking

-Unlucky

And The Chicken Boots summarizes them both fantastically. During the 1999-2000 school year (Tom Brady’s senior year…) Curt worked at least a few nights a week at the butcher/deli counter at Plymouth Marketplace, about 15 miles from Ann Arbor back in our hometown. He had finally declared a major (something ecological…in the School of Natural Resources and Environment) and was working pretty hard to fit in a ton of credits.  So he’s work late to close up Marketplace, get home even later because it was a 20-30 minute drive, study until he passed out, and get up before most of us housemates to get to classes early.

One night, he was hoping to get out of Marketplace pretty early because of a big next day, so he volunteered to help the other staffers take out the garbage to close things up.  The only thing – that night the guy on garbage duty hadn’t double-bagged the bag of meat scraps, and so as Curt walked to the dumpster the bag broke, dripping day-old chicken guts and refuse-meat sludge all over his Timberlands.  Not a huge deal, so he scooped up what he could, dropped it all in the Dumpster, helped clean up the mess, and jumped in his car to get back to campus for a little studying for a quiz the next day before turning in.

Except…once he had been in his car for a few minutes he realized – his boots now stunk to high hell, mostly of what he described as “chicken juice”.  He cracked a window, drove fast, and when he got home he left his boots outside on the porch to air/dry out while he studied for his quiz, passed out in bed with a coursepack next to him, and woke up the next morning for two consecutive classes.  The first was a quiz in one of his major requirements; the second was the day they were being fitted for wading boots for some river labs they’d complete later in the semester.

Waking up a little late and a little groggy, he got dressed, looked for his boots, remembered he had left them outside, and walked to the door with a full backpack and a mind full of crammed quiz knowledge.  He threw on his boots on his way out the door, trudged up to campus, sat down in his class a minute or two before it started, and then realized…

It stinks in here.

It stinks in here, and it’s my boots.

It stinks in here, it’s my boots, and everyone’s starting to figure out where it’s coming from.

It stinks in here, it’s me, everyone knows, but I can’t leave because I have to take this quiz.  Do I sacrifice my own grades for the sake of common courtesy?  Or do I go on the rest of the semester with a B+ average as “the stinky kid”.

Now, quick aside here – Curt had a history of leaving the room during exams and sacrificing his education as a result.  During freshman orientation and the foreign language placement test, Curt – who had straight A’s through five years of Spanish – left the room to use the restroom, got lost and couldn’t find his way back to the right classroom, failed the test and subsequently had to take four semesters of Spanish beginning with level one.  I’m not sure if this was on his mind when he made his boot-stink decision, but he decided to stick it out and take the quiz.

Naturally, the professor waits until  toward the end of class to give the quiz, and so a half hour into class Curt has offended anyone within sniffing distance.  The quiz comes, Curt takes it quickly, and as soon as he’s done he excuses himself and gets out of there.  He wants to run home, or just become another Shakey Jake and go barefoot to his next class…but he can’t.  That’s the day they’re fitting him – OVER his boots – for waders for the river project.   His boots stink yet he’s REQUIRED to wear hiking boots to his next class, which starts in about a half-hour.

Now, if I get one more adjective for Curt it’s some kind of hyphenated “way-too-nice-and-considerate-for-his-own-good” word.  He can’t fathom having anyone on a knee measuring his feet with his boots smelling like that, so he has to buy a new pair.  But the only place nearby that he can even imagine would have hiking boots is the over-priced Bivouac store on State Street.  He resigns himself to his fate, runs into Bivouac – still smelling like holy hell – and finds the cheapest pair of boots they have (something in the $125 range or so in 1999 dollars).  But…they don’t have those in his size.  So he goes to the next cheapest, and repeats a few times until they find one that fits…and he ends up spending something like $200 for a pair of boots he doesn’t even like.  Just so he doesn’t offend everyone in his class with The Chicken Boots.

My favorite part of the story: seeing these kind-of-ugly boots on him later in the day and asking “hey, new boots?”, and having him grimace and tell the whole story.  The written version can’t capture that and I apologize…but the defeated, “I should have expected this” look in his eyes…that’s Classic Curt.

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