How to Succeed

Watching the world’s top athletes compete in events like the Olympics can be very inspiring.

It can also be demoralizing. 

There are only a few spots for any American Olympic team when it comes to individual competition. Usually, its 3 and sometimes just 2. 

So think about the astronomical odds against someone who wants one of those spots. Then imagine the amount of work that has to go into it, and also some of the luck involved.

When I say luck, I mean that at any time anyone can have a strange accident, an odd step that causes a twisted ankle or catching a cold at the wrong time. Those everyday life occurrences can kill a dream.

Then, after all of that, an athlete might be in a race in which less than a half of a second can separate the winner from the person who finishes 4^th and off of the medal podium.

Skiing is one of those sports and Mikaela Shiffrin, the defending gold medalist in the Women’s Slalom finished in 4^th place this year. 

Fortunately she won gold in the Super G, the day before, an event in which she wasn’t necessarily favored to win. 

Here is someone who has been training her entire life for these moments. She went to Burke Mountain Academy in Vail essentially to be on the skiing team there. Watching her bio and her training methods and her work ethic could make someone frustrated in their own efforts at what they do in life to succeed. 

Then, to just come up short and in 4^th place. 3^rd would have been good since at least a medal comes home in that event. That could crush someone who is mentally unprepared for it although few who reach that level lack the emotional strength to contend with that potential misfortune.

I am someone who is awestruck at this. It helps inspire me, even at my advanced age. It does so because I see where I have succeeded at certain things and failed at others. An honest appraisal of my failures reveals that I didn’t work hard enough to reach a particular goal. I rested when others were working harder than, I made excuses when others didn’t. 

When I did succeed at certain things, I was engaged, focused, and entrenched. There are no short cuts. When I created a company from scratch I not only worked beyond full time, I had to work a full-time job at the same time. It was balls to the wall. 

I heard a couple of interviews with members of the bands Led Zeppelin and Lynard Skynard. Both interviews had parts which mentioned how much time was spent practicing, writing, and doing that over and over and over again to create what would become legendary rock music. We hear about a culture in which people live who do these things. It is a completely different way of life that can only be experienced to be fully understood.

That is what it takes to reach very lofty goals. 

After all of that, then they have to hope not to stub a toe before a race or break a finger in a closed door to keep one from playing the guitar, or just get the flu at the wrong time.

Bachelor fans take note that again I have successfully selected the final four in this season. If only that was a skill that could pay off! I am now not as confident with my selection for winner (Bekah K) but have to stick with it.

I am a bit behind in Celebrity Big Brother but did get to witness Kesha Knight-Pulliam get the boot she wanted from the show. Good. She was on my nerves. Not as much as Omarosa though, but that eviction night was a win-win for this fan of the show.

To close it should be clear that any shortcomings I have in reaching any of my current goals is because of my Bachelor and Big Brother viewing habit. 

Done.

Pitchers, Skaters, Bachelorettes, and Shannon Elizabeth!

Pitchers and catchers report today, the Olympics are in full swing, Celebrity Big Brother is on, and the Bachelor too. 

That’s a lot of excitement for me, as someone who stays inside and keeps entertained by television.

Baseball is still my favorite sport and as a Mets fan I am cautiously optimistic. As was the case last year, the success or failure of my particular favorite team is based on its pitching staff and if it stays healthy, as it didn’t last year.

The team which will be the most fun to watch, though, will be the Yankees. They signed Giancarlo Stanton, who hit 59 homeruns last year to line up with Aaron Judge who hit over 50. Then there is still Gary Sanchez, who broke a Yankee single-season record for homeruns by a catcher. Also throw in Greg Bird at firstbase who packs a lot of pop and will be a forgotten force when the season starts.

The Brewers, Cubs, Nationals, and Giants made the biggest strides in the off season in the NL with the Angels doing the same in the AL.

The Olympics have been a favorite experience of mine since I was a kid. I remember when I was about 10 watching some guy run past my house often. Since there was hardly any traffic where I lived he stood out. I tried to run with him a few times and he told me he was training for the Olympics. I watched the 72 Games from Munich that particular year and never saw him, but I was hooked on the whole thing. 

I was hooked on the Olympics so much throughout my life that I even created a sports festival for Delaware called the Diamond State Games which operated for 9 years before crashing in the Great Recession.

Still, NBC gambles that Figure Skating and now Curling are the 2 sports which everyone NEEDS to watch and there seems to be wall-to-wall coverage of those sports. Fortunately there are other channel options within the NBC network so we do get to see plenty of the other events. On Demand features highlights of pretty much all of the events so nothing really gets missed.

Two new favorite events of mine are snowboard racing and gang speed skating. Snowboard racing features 4 people at a time racing on a course down a side of a mountain. Certainly, to me, beats a timed event. The timed ski events, for example, always seemed to be a bit unfair since the course has to change on pretty much every run downhill.

Gang speedskating doesn’t include street gangs, of course, but rather a whole group of skaters on the main oval at the same time. I saw prequalifying competitions so I don’t know much more than that, but what I did see was great. 

The X-Games definitely helped spice up the Olympics with many of these newly contested events. Lots of additional ways to earn medals for those Winterly inclined athletes.

For the past 6 seasons of The Bachelor I have picked final four finishers after watching the first show of the season. I have successfully picked 23 of 24 finalists, 5 of 6 winners and the one person I picked to win but didn’t, came in second. This year, if you are following along, the winner will be Bekah K with Kendall, Lauren B and Tya the remaining final four. 

Celebrity Big Brother helped to bridge the gap between seasons of Survivor, which will start again on 2-28. Eleven “celebrities” entered the BB house for a truncated season. MMA fighter Chuck Liddell was the first to get evicted. I was sort of hoping he choked a couple of the other out on his way of the house, but was left a little disappointed there. I am rooting for Shannon Elizabeth to take the crown. She, like me, is a big fan of the show.

That’s it. Just wanted to get a post in before heading out to try to sell a house…one of the 6 jobs I have now trying to keep my dog happily fed and housed.

Done

Congratulations Philadelphia!

Shame on me for not writing a single thing in this blog in 2017. This year that will not happen.

I didn’t want to start up again on January 1^st. That is just too cliché. This is, however, part of an overall restructure of the way I take on life based on as honest of an assessment of it as possible and how it ended up at the end of 2017.

Ah, where to restart? Let’s just stick with sports and the fact that the Philadelphia Eagles finally won their Super Bowl ring. We’ve heard pretty much every year for 52 years that THIS will be the year they win and, by God, their fans were right, just like they predicted.

I root for New York sports teams, except now for the NY Jets, whom the Eagles finally tied with Super Bowl rings with one. I don’t root for the Jets anymore since they signed Michael Vick a few years ago and will never forgive them for that. So I’ve been able to experience the feeling of rooting for a winning team 4 times with the NY Giants.

I can’t stand any Philadelphia sports team and its because of what happened when I moved here to Delaware for good in 1986 and the NY Mets were in the World Series. Everywhere I went to watch the World Series against the Red Sox, Philadelphia fans were booing the Mets. I couldn’t understand it because we didn’t feel the same way about the Phillies back then. We hated the Pirates and the Cardinals. 

So I vowed those 31 years ago to always root against all Philadelphia sports teams and that extends all the way down to middle school level.

However, I don’t root against my friends. I want my friends to experience the positive things in life because…they are my friends. While my distaste for Philly sports teams and my reveling in any loss they might take is basically good-natured, as a compassionate human being I have to rejoice for my friends when they get a chance to celebrate, especially when its so very, very, very, very infrequently that they get to do so.

For those who don’t fully understand why emotions run so high with people who are fans of sports, consider what follows. First, in the US, I think that Football and Baseball are the 2 sports to which this pertains the most. But let’s take football.

For 16-20 Sundays of the year (and now some Saturdays, Thursdays and Monday nights) during the Fall and Winter months, football fans sit in front of a TV and watch a game. It’s a social occasion where fans relax, get entertained, eat food, have some drinks, and watch a game that many of them tried to play when they were kids.

Playing the game helps relate people more to the game since they understand how it is played and how hard it is to reach the professional level. People admire the skills and hard work it takes.

They become attached to the teams that they are able to see locally on TV and even see in person over the course of time. If an organization does things right, the players stick around for a while and fans become attached to the players and admire what they are able to achieve. 

The associated social activities, the changing seasons and the feelings associated with great Fall weather and Holiday festivities are all positive feelings that further endear fans to sports teams. For instance, when I think of Football season I think of changing leaves, crisp cool air, maybe apple cider, turkey on Thanksgiving, playing in the snow when I was a kid, beer….lots of it when I drank, pizza, and wings.

Fans become parents and their kids end up watching games and their parents and watching football is a bonding experience where kids begin to pile up some of the same memories I had, perhaps.

Then at the end of the season one team wins a championship. With football 31 of 32 teams and millions of people then get to watch the fans of the team that wins it all celebrate victory. Moms and Dads are hugging, kids and parents are hugging, dogs are barking excitedly while wearing their teams colors even though they have no clue why. 

And we want to experience that same feeling with our own families and kids. Everyone wants to be happy. We want positive closure to a season full of ups and down. Everyone wants to end on a high note like that.

Year after year after year we wait to have that happen for us. There are plenty of those ups and down throughout the year so we do get to have plenty of good times along the way and things to talk about…we sign a great new player, we win big games against rivals, we taunt each other’s teams fans, we strategize, hope, eat pizza, drink beer, gather with friends, cheer, and have fun. 

Then, most of the time, we end up saying, “wait til next year!” We recover from losses quickly because of the way our minds work and we recall all of the positive things, as listed above, that happened throughout the year. Mainly, we remember the great times we had with friends and family.

In probably every single family, or group of friends, the following has probably been heard, “I just want to see my team win ONE time before I die.” 

There are people that never have that wish come true. It’s very sad that there are friends you have right now who wanted to celebrate a big win with their father or mother or uncle or aunt or grandparent or friend and never had that chance to do so. 

How much does that really mean to some of those people who are on the living side of that equation? Go through your social media feed and take a look at some of the pictures of your friends who are sports fans. I saw two in particular which I will mention. One, was of a man kissing his father’s urn of ashes and saying that “we finally did it, Dad. I wish you were here to see it.” Another was of a friend who had gone to his father’s grave, decorated it with Eagles merchandise, and saying basically the same thing. Those are very moving and powerful statements about life there.

For all of my friends I wish that you get the opportunity to experience the feeling of winning like that. I hope that you get to experience that with your kids also and your grand kids too. That’s just winning in life though; its not so much about a sports team particularly. They are just a piece of the puzzle…a conduit to what is incredible about life. Its why sports galvanizes families and, indeed, entire communities. 

Have fun at your parade in Philadelphia on Thursday, my friends.