Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Twig. “You can bend a twig, but not a tree.” Theo of Golden

A small force early in life can alter the course of growth. Same thing with a career. I hope some of the “foresters” of my med school years are still around to see how straight and tall the twigs they pruned have grown when we return 40 years later.

2) Trickle. “It was hard on all of us to watch her trickle away.” Theo of Golden

My siblings and I and our spouses watched my parents slowly trickle away. Their bodies still in the room; their essence slowly departed and eventually gone. Blessedly, they remembered each of us until the very end. Many are not so fortunate. We’d spent much time together over the years. Time during which we learned much about what made us all who we were.

It hurt so much more to know just who it was we were about to lose.

3) Dolly. Boy, has anyone over the last, oh, 30 or 40 years been as universally loved as Dolly Parton? Nope. Not from where I sit. Old and young and everything in between. Didn’t really matter what kind of music you typically listened to, you listened to at least some of Dolly’s stuff because so many musicians you DID listen to covered so many of her songs.

What an impressive human, Dolly Parton. Raised in the holler in abject poverty that was so severe it was even more spartan than how my Dad grew up. No electricity. No running water. 1 of 12 kids (like my Dad). Like so many poor kids of that era she literally couldn’t wait to get away, and yet everything we saw her do she could trace back to that backwoods building in Tennessee. She constantly and consistently gave homage to her family and her upbringing. Raised by a father who couldn’t read, one of her charities has given away 330 million books and counting to pre-school children.

Not a typo. 330 MILLION.

Dolly’s sense of high style famously came from a chance encounter with “working girl” in the town next over. She owned it. Used it to turn any critical conversation away from how she dressed to what she thought. She parried every criticism and every “dumb blond” joke with sensitivity and wit. She got the best of everyone from Carson and Letterman to Barbara Walters. To Newsweek in 1977: “Some folks see my artificial look and think I have no depth. But my inner sadness and joy are as real as my hair and nails are fake.” To Letterman: “Honestly, it makes me mad. All these people staring at my chest, but I’ve got a great ass, too.”

She sang “this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool” on her debut album, and truer words have rarely been sung. Dolly Parton, one of one. She will also be one of the few folks everyone knew who everyone will miss.

4) Entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which two or more particles are so intrinsically linked that the state of one particle instantly determines the state of one or several of the other linked particles regardless of distance. The theory of superposition, that all particles consist of an infinite number of possible positions until you measure them, is the theory that underlies the famous Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment.

It is also the theory underlying the possible existence of the multiverse, the infinite number or versions of our universe that exist unseen because they are, well, unseen.

It’s the key component that forms the plot line of my favorite Sci-fi book, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. A brilliant physicist and his equally brilliant artist girlfriend discover that they are pregnant before they have become truly committed to one another. Their tiny little life lies in a very real kind of superposition. Stay together and become a family means dramatically downsizing their professional aspirations. All-in pursuit of their careers means leaving family behind. Like the cat in Schroedinger’s box, their fate becomes fixed once they have opened the door.

Entanglement is something else. An added something. Once “measured” is there an effect on another version or versions of themselves in rest of the multiverse? Does entanglement only exist at the smallest of scales? An electron alternating between spins or a molecule somewhere between its cis and trans form, each all of the above until observed? Once observed, measured, how is it that their entanglement effects itself on the particle entangled?

Does this work at a macro level? At any given point in time are two people in a macro version quantum entanglement linked in such a way that the measurement of one instantly determines the state of the other?

5) Estrangement (n). The deliberate physical and emotional distancing from family members and other loved ones resulting in near or complete loss of communication. Estrange (v): to sever contact with a family member or other loved one. Estranged (adj): to have communication with a family or other loved one severed.

Over the course of the last 6 or 7 weeks there have been no fewer than 3 articles in the WSJ about the phenomenon of estrangement and the peculiarities of its modern day iteration. Each article was followed by a series of letters to the editor with opinions on all sides of the issue. In today’s Sunday Times Magazine “The Ethicist” is asked to weigh in on the subject. Where once this was territory with cleanly marked borders, a child cuts all communication with a physically or emotionally abusive parent or a family ceases to communicate with a child who has a mental illness or recalcitrant substance abuse, the theme in all of the above mentioned articles has been the relative downgrading of what constitutes grounds for estrangement.

Beth and I know several people our age who chose to cut communications with a family member. We also know several couples who have had a child sever those lines with them. Our lived experience with these people echoes what I have been reading these last several weeks, and what I read this morning. It is as if there are two, distinct scenarios in play, each with a generational dynamic, and each seemingly with a starkly different therapeutic engagement. This latter aspect, the actions of therapists, is particularly different today in contrast to that seen in eras past.

I find this latter part to be interesting. When we were a very young couple with very young kids we had friends who had rather unhappy relationships with parts, or even all, of one family or another. Many turned to a therapist for help in making their way through these gauntlets. To a person, though, the effort was an attempt to find some way to tolerate whatever it was that was making them unhappy in the extended family. I can’t recall a single instance in which they either sought advice on how to, or were ever counseled to cease all communications and contact with their family.

Nobody should be expected to remain a participant in a family in which extreme examples of abuse such as physical or sexual abuse, severe addiction, or severe untreated mental illness that puts other family members at risk exists. Our one friend endured beatings and constant emotional abuse from a parent who went untreated after a psychotic break when our friend was in jr. high school. Yet another suffered extreme emotional distress when they were abandoned by a parent who had a hidden second family and an entire life they chose over our friend and their siblings when they were in high school. Neither of those friends has had any contact with those parents since. Sometimes, in the case of real abuse, the shoe must be on the foot of the parent. We know yet another couple who have a child with a severe substance abuse problem who tends toward violence when they have lapsed. For their own safety and emotional well-being they have been forced to cease all communication with their child.

And yet, it’s quite hard to rectify the situations of couples we know as adults who have been proactively estranged by their adult children. In several cases we were spectators to the lives of their young families. We interacted with them as families and as couples, and spent lots of time with their children when the parents weren’t around. There weren’t and aren’t any mental health issues. The possibility of any type of physical or emotional abuse was so distant as to be unimaginable. And yet there they are, suffering what can most accurately be described as a life sentence of silence, apart, without parole.

It’s inexplicably sad. The addition of a new generation, the appearance of grandchildren often makes these stories sadder, still. At dinner one night with one of these couples one said that the beginning of the school year was particularly difficult as they watched neighbors head off to games and plays, concerts and recitals. “I guess I just thought that I would get to be a part of that just like my Mother and Father did.” They spoke of birthdays and holidays where their gifts and their cards were returned, sometimes just showing up on the front porch, unopened. “What do they tell the children? How do they explain why they haven’t seen us? What do they say when the children ask why Grandma and Grandpa didn’t send them anything for their birthdays or for Hanukkah?”

Something very fundamental seems to have changed in at least some parts of our communities. Where once adult children sought assistance in managing the challenges of family ties they deeply desired to keep, there is now an active community led by a vocal group of very high profile therapists that encourage such estrangement. The Ethicist: “But, to paint with a broad brush, therapeutic culture has tended to expand, sometimes recklessly, what qualifies as abuse or harm. In an earlier era, the complete severing of family ties seemed to be justified only by extreme circumstances…Today the adult child going no-contact may speak of not feeling ‘seen’ or of parents who weren’t ’emotionally present’, failed to ‘respect boundaries’, or were ‘controlling.’ Sometimes the grounds–‘narcissistic abuse,’ some generalized ‘toxicity’–sound alarming but are so amorphous that they can be neither refuted nor verified.”

He continues: “All these complaints can arise from genuinely damaging relationships. They can also describe ordinary parental shortcomings. But we should pause at the premise that total, you’re-dead-to-me estrangement is justified simply because continued contact makes someone less happy.”

Is that it? Is the reason for the apparent decline in what constitutes grounds for a life-time ban due to a shift in the therapy community zeitgeist? As young parents we sought the counsel of trusted elders, and we did speak with therapists in an effort to work through some of the stickier, harder parts of raising our family. Always with the desire to maintain a workable, and hopefully happy and loving relationship with not only our children, but also our parents.

Indeed, one of the estranged couples told a story one night over dinner of what would now be a classic example of “failure to respect boundaries” and “controlling behavior” likely to result in estrangement. A clear, red-line boundary around guns and gunplay had been made clear to both sets of grandparents, and yet one summer a set of grandparents arrived for a visit with gifts of very realistic-looking squirt gun pistols and rifles. The in-law in the couple thanked their in-laws for the gift, removed the squirt guns and announced a water balloon fight commencing in 15 minutes. When the grandparents expressed their displeasure at the removal of the guns the young parent-in-law simply reiterated their long-held rule against toys of such type in the house, and asked what their mother-in-law would like them to bring with them when they arrived at the annual family Labor Day party.

No argument. No histrionics. Certainly no cessation of communications or threats to the relationship. Simply a firm restating of the boundary and an equally clear indication that they planned on family business as usual.

These couples who were not creators of a seriously abusive or dangerous relationship, but who have nonetheless been estranged by their adult children tell of “parting words” like “I need to choose myself”, or “I need to protect my peace”. And yet, these sentiments can coexist with an intact family. One that continues to communicate. One in which a next generation gets to receive, and the generation of grandparents gets to extend caring and yes, love. From my seat at those dinner tables everything about estrangement in the absence of truly abusive and harmful behavior on the part of either generation is not normal. It’s actually quite abnormal and strange.

Says so right in the word.

I’ll see you next week…

How much information is too much? Is there an element of timing in that question? For instance, is the amount of information that is ultimately enough (and not too much) subject to a schedule? I’m prompted to think about this by a couple of very current events, or types of events: two instances of death resulting from police/citizen interactions and more than several instances of government officials enmeshed in scandal, or the appearance of scandal. You’ll not find commentary here about the particulars of any of these current events; I have no standing. My thesis, though, is that the twin virtues of transparency and disclosure have been tarnished by the evil twins impatience and entitlement.

Think about it for a moment. Events that are large and important fairly cry out for patience and a deeper, more thoughtful discussion. One that begins after facts have been extricated from the web of innuendo born in the bosom of opinion. The stampede of analysis now comes even as a story unfolds, before it even ends. It matters not whether we are observers of an event that touches on a certifiable “big theme” (e.g. racism), or one that is tiny, local, or personal (e.g. infidelity). The commonality rests not with the protagonists but rather within the observers, especially those who comment: it’s all about them.

Are you old enough to remember when it was considered unseemly to be a self-promoter? Even if you are, it’s tough to recall those days before the ever-connected world when blatant “look at me” or “listen to me” behavior was met with the collective cluck of a society bred for humility. This “cult of self-promotion” not only imposes itself on big events and grand issues (comments that begin with “I think…”), it also means that no one is to be allowed a privacy if the entitled self-promoters decide that they simply must know, well, whatever. “A universal, wrathful demand of the public for complete disclosure” about everything and anything. (Gideon Lewis-Kraus)

The need to know trumps all; one who asks the question in some way is granted all manner of primacy over one who might have the answer. It’s uncomfortable to watch at times.

The phenomena is not without irony. Witness articles critical of self-promotion that tell the story of someone who is almost famous for talking about not promoting him/herself. Nice, huh? It’s like a hall of mirrors, a kind of “Inception”. Trust that it doesn’t escape my attention that there are more than several folks out there who consider “musings” a form of self-promotion. An irony within a discussion of irony.

There’s a certain power in thoughtfulness, a seriousness that induces thoughtfulness, in turn, in the listener. If we always know what you think or what you did precisely when you thought or acted, how are we to ascertain what, if anything, is important? If one demands full and immediate disclosure of any and all information, regardless of how significant or trivial it might be, or how public or private the consequences, how are we to order anything at all along the great/small continuum? At some point the primacy of the inquisitor must find its limit, if only for a moment.

A moment of peace for the rest of us, should we care to think about something deeper than the event in question. A moment of peace for an individual who might harken back to an earlier day, one when it was possible to graciously decline to offer anything at all, lest it encourage someone to be interested.

Yesterday I flew out and back to Boston. Half of my day spent in an airport or in the air, the other half as the stranger in the church, standing apart at the cemetery as I said goodbye to one of my closest childhood friends. Everyone dies too soon. Every child, of course, but Grandparents and parents are also gone too soon, even when they depart at the “usual” time. But there’s something about a friend dying, especially a friend from long, long ago.

It’s like a part of you dies, too.

My friend John was part of a nearly inseparable foursome. T, Dolph, and John became my tribe. I met Tom and Dolph right away during pre-season football practice. John sat next to me in Trigonometry; we discovered that we lived about 4 holes apart on the local golf course, a very convenient little factoid after we bonded as teammates on a very mediocre high school golf team. That summer was the first of 7 or 8 summers during which we played golf together at least 5 times each week. We got better. Maybe not good, at least not for a few years, but better than mediocre. But spend 3+ hours with someone 5+ times each week and what you really get better at is friendship.

John, Tom and Dolph were all a year ahead of me in school so they got a head start on college. Still, every school break found us right back where we’d been for our high school years. Pool and pingpong in our cellar. Tuna fish sandwiches in John’s kitchen. Earth, Wind, and Fire in Tom’s basement and Genesis in the living room at Dolph’s. I was the only one without a car (my parents didn’t let any of us have our own car) so every adventure happened in one of the cars they had. You know, I can’t ever remember catching any heat about that, even though we pretty much never found anything too trivial to NOT bust one another’s chops. Nope. Instead they taught me how to drive a stick so that I could take my turn as chauffeur.

We were all from about the middlest of middle-class families. Our parents had all come from rather modest economic backgrounds with the exception of my Dad who grew up about as poor as a city kid could grow up in the ’30’s and 40’s. But during our collective years in Rhode Island it sure seemed like we were on a level playing field. Our parents didn’t fund our fun. We all had summer jobs and what we made each summer had to carry us through the summer and the year to come. I don’t ever remember owing any of them any money, and I surely never thought about them ever owing me. Whoever had money in their pocket bought the pizza or the beer.

They were just the most comfortable friendships imaginable. I’ve had other, subsequent friendships that were just as comfortable. Just as special. Chris in high school. Rob in college and beyond. Rash and Bill in grad school. But T, Dolph, and Johnny were the friends who showed me what a real friendship was supposed to be like.

As those young years went by we all stayed close, but John and I stayed closer. John asked me to be his Best Man, and John was an Usher at our wedding (as you know if you’ve been here at all, I have a brother who is one year younger than me; all talk of best friends comes with an astaericxs: best friend after my brother). John and Deb, Beth and I spent time together as couples and as young parents. We drifted apart, as young couples will under the pressures of time and distance. And yet each “reunion” really did feel like just the most recent time among all the times we gathered.

Are you on Facebook? Do you look at your “Memories” there? 2 weeks ago would have, should have been Cape Week for the extended White Family. Talk about “sooner than too soon”, the decline and ultimately the death of our matriarch was the final straw for that extraordinary 32 year run. Mom was a bit of a tyrant. OK, not “a bit”…Mom was a tyrant when it came to what constituted a family week on the Cape. Family meant Mom and Dad, their 4 kids and their spouses, and 10 grandchildren. You know that thing where you alert all your friends within 100 miles of your beach that you’ll be there and invite them to drop in? Yeah…no. Mom barricaded her families in the Cape House and invited pretty much no one to visit.

Seriously. Her younger sister had to lobby for an invitation.

The only exception? John! John and Deb not only had an open invitation to come with or without their sons, Mom called them up each spring and tried to convince them to come for a visit. My Mom adored John, and he returned the sentiment. Pretty sure after we all turned 45 or so my Mom saw John 3 times as often as I did. At the cemetery yesterday both young John and his brother Matt had no memory of who I was and what I was to their Mom and Dad, but they remembered the year they visited the Cape House and the fuss my Mom made over the lot of them.

The last time I saw Johnny was at my Mom’s funeral. John and Deb drove to Rhode Island despite the terrible illness that would eventually take his life. John lost his Mom in high school. No one can replace your mother, but in some small way my Mom filled a tiny bit of that hole. John and Deb were there, and they stayed for the duration. The news of John’s death found me last Wednesday I think. Out and back to Boston on Saturday was never in doubt. Deb gave me the precious gift of time despite all of the friends with whom she and John had spent the recent decades.

Deb treated me as if we’d just said see you later on the morning after her wedding day.

I know what you’re thinking. Come on Darrell…get to the message already. Get to the teachable moment or just bring this story home. But you already know it, don’t you? You can never have enough friends. The friends you grew up with just might still be your best friends, even if you haven’t recently had the joy of actively sharing time and space with them. Friends like that stay friends. And friends like that don’t remember how long it’s been since you had pizza and a beer together, they just know how happy they are to be with you. Johnny and Deb, Beth and I could have done a better job of that, for sure. But still, the friendship was still very much alive. Deb let me be the last person she saw before she said goodbye to John. I cried all the way to the airport.

Teachable moment? Pick up your phone. Call the best friend you ever had as a kid. The friend who talked you off the ledge after your first breakup. The one you called when you got into the school or got the job of your dreams. That person you think of first when some amateur hack writer puts up a post about the friends we shoulda, coulda stayed in touch with. They were the first one to see the best parts of you, maybe even before you knew you had them. Distance and time often defeat even the most sincere efforts to keep warm the fires on our oldest friendships, but no one I know has ever regretted making that call. Whaddaya got to lose? If they don’t pick up the phone at least you took the shot.

I’ve got a date with T and Dolph to have a beer and toast our friend, my friend John, gone much, much too soon, taking with him a piece of who we were, and who we became.

John F. Brennan II 1959-2026. RIP Johnny. I’ve missed you. Missed you and Deb. I will miss you forever.

I’ll see you next week…

“They may say I can’t sing, but they can never say I didn’t sing.” –Florence Foster Jenkins.

Mrs. Jenkins was a socialite in NYC, I believe, who was quite passionate about singing opera. She had the financial wherewithal to produce her own performances in a rather major way. A pivotal scene in the movie takes place at Carnegie Hall, for example. There was only one problem with that, at least as far as it went for the spectators: Mrs. Jenkins was a terrible opera singer. Actually, she was epically, brutally bad at singing opera. Yet again and again she went to the well and sang her heart (and her lungs) out in front of an audience.

My instant, deep emotional response to this story is jealousy. Jealousy followed by mad respect. Jealousy because Mrs. Jenkins has a passion, something about which she cares so deeply that she is willing to pursue it to whatever limit her abilities might impose. Respect because she is willing to devote time and resources to this pursuit in spite of the fact that she will never come anywhere near anything that even approaches proficiency, let alone excellence. More than that, she insists on sharing the fruit of her labor publicly, even though she is told time and time again that her particular fruit is inedible.

No matter. Florence Foster Jenkins will sing.

Everyone should have a passion like this. We should add a tiny disclaimer or two, of course. There are a few things that shouldn’t be done by amateurs or hobbyists, no matter how passionate they may be about them. Neurosurgery quickly comes to mind. Or operating heavy equipment, even if you didn’t take any of those medicines that are advertized on TV where you have to choose between your health or, you know, driving a backhoe. If your passion is harmful to you or those around you it’s probably more psychopathic than passion. Short of that, though, the kind of passion shown by Mrs. Jenkins is to be envied, something to aspire to.

For many years now my own life has been missing this. Outside of my marriage and my family there isn’t really anything I burn for like Mrs. Jenkins burns to sing. I do get to watch this magical phenomenon on a daily basis though. Beth had long yearned to ride horses. When our kids had gone off to college she finally had her chance. The barn is her happy place. A funny thing happened for her that makes our collective experience very different from Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins. Somewhere along the way to “time-filling hobby of 50-ish homemaker”, Beth actually started to get good. I mean good enough that even a knuckle-dragging ex-football player spouse could see the difference. Good enough that she outgrew the ability of her horse. Doing the work has never felt like work for her—that might define passion, eh?–and there has been a payoff: she is still getting better at riding.

As for me, I will go on in search of that thing that makes me want to put everything aside and just do. That thing—singing for Foster Jenkins, riding for Beth—you think about when you are doing almost everything else. For those like me I wish you good fortune in your search, and remind you that the search is worth the effort. If you are one of the lucky ones who’ve already found yours I extend to you the same jealousy and mad respect I have for Mrs. Jenkins and my wife.

Never, ever, ever let anyone tell you that you cannot sing.

1) Fears. “I’ve started harassing the guards at the borders surrounding my fears.” How one of my patients has described her late-in-life efforts to get outside her comfort zone.

A sound strategy at any phase of life.

2) Volunteerism. Says here it’s a goner. At least for anything and everything that cannot truly be called a charity and can prove it.

Man the sidelines for your kids’ travel soccer team? The one you pay >$1,000/month/kid for? Are you nuts? Hand out water bottles in that adventure race your spouse ponied up $150 for the privilege of suffering? Bollocks. Stand over the fryer and pull out basketful after basketful of fried fish for the PTA? Your property tax is going up regardless.

My epiphany, a reminder of which came via FB this morning, was the ER coverage and associated willingness to provide in-hospital consultations for local hospitals without compensation in the first 25 years of my private practice career. The “D” in MD must have stood for “dupe”. As soon as my younger colleagues pointed out that their peers in outer settings were paid to perform those services the hospitals magically found employed staff to pick up the service.

Unless it’s a real, live, honest to goodness all revenue directed toward the charitable function, it has no right to even ask.

3) Reunion. Man, where did the time go? My 40th medical school reunion is this October. I mean, I know I’m getting older–I’ve been calling myself “advanced middle-age”–but 40? That’s just crazy talk! It just showed up all at once.

My medical school was, if not unique, then certainly not one of the typical model of the times in the 1980’s. These were days when prestige for doctors and the schools that trained them began to shift from the reputations of graduates as practicing physicians to a more research and academic measurement ethos. But not at my Alma Mater the University of Vermont. Nope. UVM was unabashedly committed to training clinicians who spent the majority of their careers in the active care of patients as both primary care docs and specialists. For sure there were exceptions; one of my classmates Steve will receive an award for academic excellence and another was a state medical director.

But from the very outset we were trained as if we would all spend our time in reference, if not reverence, to the “Marcus Welby” ideal of a physician. We even contracted the time given to basic science education in favor of entering the clinics a full half year earlier than almost every other school in the U.S.

There were a couple of other idiosyncrasies as well. To begin with we were tiny. 93 students filled the seats in Hall A, the classroom that formed the center of our first year as med students. If memory serves we had the first med school class with more women (47) than men (46). We were also much older than the typical class with an average age of 29. In a time when most students went straight from college to medical school we had a number of classmates who had a whole career before joining the medical field. Heck, at least 4 of us turned 40 in school, and more people entered school as parents then became a parent over our four years together.

I have no memory of our 5 year reunion but I vividly remember wanting to maximize our attendance for year 10. We had a couple of separate class events, a pattern that has continued over the years. In a completely selfish move I have become what schools call the “Class Agent” even though no such position really exists for UVM’s med school. Well, at least as far as doing anything to help other than send along a class list with only 40 or so active, accurate contacts. Still my desire to touch base with the people who shared such an important stage in my life that I have grabbed hold of this excuse to call, text, and email anyone and everyone!

Why selfish? Well, colleges want to use reunions to drum up donations. I’m ok with that, but that’s not why I spent two weekends doing the above calling, texting, and emailing. Nope. I just want to hear everybody’s stories. I want to hear about their successes. About the dreams that came true and about the one’s missed by THAT much. Every single reunion I’ve gone to has been surprisingly enjoyable in that it was even better than I’d been hoping.

Man, all of a sudden, 40 years.

4) Snap. Or sometimes Slap. Either way, the demise of a rotator cup is the “all at once” conclusion to a process which sometimes has been going on for decades. Oh sure, you can do it all at once and out of the blue; that’s how I trashed my right shoulder in 2008 or 9. T’was the siren “Linda”, one of the CrossFit “Girls” benchmark workouts what did me in then. In the round of 6 I felt a sickening wet “slap” in my right shoulder followed by excruciating pain, simultaneously marking the end of the ascendancy of my physical fitness and my status as a good golfer.

I found enough ways to work around the shoulder that I actually maintained quite a bit of my fitness, at least as we defined it in those halcyon early days of CrossFit, but my golf game was so ugly and unsatisfying that I didn’t pick up a club for almost 14 years.

But slowly, ever so slowly, my right shoulder recovered. In truth, from the start I was not encumbered when doing anything that I really HAD to do. You know, like, work. I could do all of my office related tasks and after a week or so I returned to the operating room and went right back to doing all of the surgeries I’d done for almost 20 years. Same outcomes with no increase in complications. Working out took a bit of time but I found accommodations that allowed me to exercise without pain. Golf, on the other hand, continued to hurt both physically and emotionally.

I didn’t just stink at golf, my version of stinking was really an ugly version of the game.

This, too, changed slowly. Some 3 or so years ago by local friendship crew finally convinced me that the joys of camaraderie on the first tee outweighed the emotional trauma of poorly played golf. I decided to re-learn some version of the game so that I could partake of both the tomfoolery on the first tee and the outlandish lies told about our round while splitting the “G” at the 19th hole. For the first time since freshman* year in college I took lessons. Indeed, over the last 3 years I have taken more lessons and spent more time practicing than I have in the prior 50 years combined.

Did I get any better? Mind you, there was nowhere to go but up. Or so, as it turns out, I thought. From a 24 handicap further marred by pain in right shoulder with every swing I managed to work my way down to a 15 or so hcp with lingering pain in that right shoulder to go along with progressively more annoying pain and decreased range of motion in my LEFT shoulder. Yup, slowly, over the decades following a football injury in my left shoulder, my OTHER rotator cuff has been fraying from the mundane insults of daily life. As funny as it sounds, the rate limiting factor for my return to golf had become my left, or so-called “better” shoulder.

Still, with a little level-setting for expectations, I kinda made my way back to what might be called age-appropriate levels of fitness and activity. Slowly, but still, better. I’d come to a point where I didn’t really think about anything but proper mechanics whether I was in the office, doing chores, or working out. Last weekend Beth and I did some cleaning outside. Not very challenging physically but somewhat atypical movement patterns involved. Cleaning up afterwards whatever remained of my left rotator cuff gave up the ghost.

All at once.

Gotta tell ya, it sure felt like the whole damn thing went all at once. Man, that was really painful. Thankfully, with some unbelievable tender basic care at home from Beth and a couple of ortho buddies rallying and coming to the rescue a couple of days later, I find myself back in familiar territory, albeit 17 or 18 years older: able to do everything I need to do while at least temporarily unable to do a bunch of stuff I want to do. I can work. I can operate. I can type, and hence I can continue to offer my drivel for your reading…ahem…pleasure.

There’s a punchline to this story. This one has a teachable moment. The X-rays of my shoulder showed an amount of arthritis that surprised both my shoulder guy and me. The “slowly’, it seems, was directly responsible for the “all at once”. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Whether on the ascent or the descent, doesn’t it seem as if movement in either direction is so often made up of steps so tiny you barely notice you’ve moved? Working through a gnarly management issue, a complex contract negotiation, or maybe your snatch or pull-up technique. It barely seems as if progress is happening, until you get all the way there all at once.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. That left shoulder was slowly failing, moving just under the threshold of awareness. It sure felt like a cataclysmic, all to itself event when that rotator cuff was finished failing, but like so much, both good and bad, the process was actually moving along slowly all this time. Like getting older, eh? You don’t really notice it until that one day you walk by a mirror and your Dad is looking back at you.

The lesson here, however painful it is and however trite the reality of always remembering the lessons that hurt might be, can actually be a positive one. When we are stuck in the middle of a journey we may move so slowly that it appears we are not really moving at all. Until we get there. I may sound a bit like Polyana on this, but as I sat around icing my shoulder last week, especially after we learned about all of the slow-moving pathology it had been hiding, I thought about some of the wonderful endings I’ve experienced in journeys I barely felt moving at all.

At least that’s what I’m gonna be telling myself as I slowly build the bridges, physical and otherwise, to wherever it is that’s next. Hoping that whatever happens all at once is one of the good things.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Theo. “Purple Marlins fly in cursive”. Why yes, yes they do.

2) Lila. “What does it sound like when you read in cursive?”

It sounds like music my darling girl. Like music!

3) Cape Week. This past week would have been Cape Week. That magical week each year when my siblings, our spouses, most years my parents and all of their grandchildren gathered on the beach as one, big, mostly happy family. Family meals together. Lots of wine and Sundae School ice cream.

Boy, what a special thing that was!

Each year it would rain on only one day. We would take advantage of the respite from the sun and the sand and go as a family to see a movie. Typically an animated Disney movie. If the movie came out earlier we were all supposed to wait to see it at the Cape. Beth and I were thinking about this yesterday as we spent the day relaxing and watching the movie “Sheep Detectives.”

Beth: “That would have been the perfect Cape movie!” Indeed, it would have been perfect. We spent a goodly amount of time in the cocoon of memories of tiny, and then not so tiny children, almost all smiling almost all the time. My Mom and Dad at some of their happiest.

What a special time that was.

4) Grit. I found this piece as I was thinking more deeply about my last two posts on opportunity. Let’s take another look at the singular ingredient necessary to seize and take advantage of opportunity when it arises: grit.

What is it that produces vastly different work products, outcomes, from similarly situated and talented individuals? Why do two equally gifted athletes similar in every way achieve at different levels? How best to explain widely disparate test scores in math, for example, from the “best and brightest” students? There is something within those who succeed at the higher level that is somehow missing in the others, or at least missing the same degree of expression. It’s likely that there are a number of words or expressions that capture this quality, but I kinda like “grit”.

Grit begins with a belief in self, a sense of self-worth, of being worthy of success. Without this first step it’s rather easy to see how anyone might just give up before ever starting. Here, as my cousin Rick has pointed out, might be a true variable when discussing opportunity: those of us who grow up in a demanding family characterized by firm boundaries, unfailing support, and high expectations may actually have an unfair advantage. People with this type of upbringing truly do believe that the iron is always hot and that they are worthy and capable of striking. Without this foundation of belief in self it’s easy to see how one might look at the same iron and think only of how not to get burned.

To have grit one takes this core belief and puts it into action. Angela Duckworth, professor at Penn, calls passion and perseverance the two actionable components of grit. You have to want it, whatever it might be, and you have to work at making it happen. Ya ya…I know all about the lucky sperm club and all, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people looked upon as lucky actually worked their asses off to get that way. Perseverance might very well be defined as ongoing maximal effort. One who has grit might not necessarily get the best outcome, but it’s not likely to be due to being out-worked at that thing called “it”.

An important sub-category of perseverance is resilience, and this is the final core attribute to grit. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from defeat with faith intact to resume the quest for “it”. Think about what comes to your mind when you hear someone described as “gritty”. It’s someone who has a passion, a commitment and a willingness to work toward an achievement. More than that, someone you think of as gritty has faced adversity or moved on after defeat. No one has a straight line to success; the gritty move on, secure in the knowledge that they are willing and able to do the work needed to succeed.

Grit is passion and perseverance bookended by a sense of worthiness on the front side, and the resilience to overcome setbacks on the back. Opportunity is wasted without it.

I’ll see you next week…

I’ve been engaged in conversations in many venues of late on the topic of opportunity. Specifically whether there is equality of opportunity in America, and whether there is somehow a fundamental difference in that opportunity today versus any yesterday. As the father of 3, employer of many, and mentor to countless more, it’s a topic of some significance and importance.

We should start by admitting that there is really no possibility that true equality has ever, or will ever exist (tip of the hat to my cousin Rick for his eloquence on this). There really isn’t a level playing field, nor has there ever been one. In order to have a realistic discussion about opportunity we must acknowledge that people have vastly different talents and capabilities, a fact that inherently creates inequality. Some folks are simply smarter or stronger or wiser than others. We should also agree that in order for a free society to prosper it is necessary that we acknowledge and reward different levels of achievement and effort differently.

Equality of opportunity is, or should be, about what you are able to do with your potential.

At this point there appear to me to be two variables that exist when we examine opportunity by starting from outcomes and then looking backward. It is impossible to escape the reality that education is the springboard to opportunity, and that the educational opportunities available prior to college are not equal across the board. If a child is not identified as having the potential to excel early in the school years it’s much more difficult to fully express potential when they are not placed in a setting where they will be challenged intellectually. Every public school system has a place for advanced learning; the key is for those with potential to have access.

From here it’s all about effort. Desire, determination, and perseverance. No one reaches the fullest expression of their potential without these three key ingredients. This is why it’s a fool’s errand to evaluate opportunity by looking backwards from any given endpoint. With a particular quiver of similar “tools” it is impossible to comment on opportunity from a societal standpoint because you simply cannot measure the individual expression of these three variables, desire, determination, and perseverance.

Right about now someone is just itching to talk about the unfairness of wealth when it comes to opportunity. This argument presumes that wealth inherently, in and of itself, provides greater opportunity. I don’t think this is true. A life with everything one needs or wants provided to you is not really an example of seeking, finding, and taking advantage of an opportunity to succeed. What wealth provides, and those born into families of greater means benefit from, is the assumption that one will succeed. Indeed, it’s almost a demand that the next generation will succeed. Once upon a time those not of wealth were truly and harmfully excluded from places that would open opportunities. Now those same institutions are not only open to those of fewer means, they actively look for and support those who seek them out. The “better” the school the less significant money becomes as a barrier to entry, a barrier to opportunity.

What remains as a real barrier is a lack of imagination and a lack of belief when it comes to opportunity. I found myself sitting on a plane next to a young man from a family of very limited means living in a town with a very low mean income. A rising high school junior, he had tested into a STEM magnet school where he was getting all A’s. He was earning pocket money by programming mobile Apps for a cousin’s business. I asked him about the next step, about college, and his answer illustrates the last frontier in equality of opportunity. You see, he has already demonstrated determination and desire, and he shows no signs of slacking or giving up, but the highest aspiration he perceives is to go to the local state college. No one before me had ever given him any indication that there was more. That he was capable of more. More often than not it seems that kids from similar backgrounds are told just the opposite, that they cannot rise. That’s a big problem, but as my cousin noted that’s also a topic worthy of a separate discussion.

The last barrier to equal opportunity for all Americans is one of awareness and imagination. Parents, teachers, and other older mentors should collectively advance the notion that their young ones can rise. Once aware, any individual’s outcome is then determined by his or her desire, determination, and perseverance, and limited only by their own imagination.

The Interwebs are chocablock filled with the musings and bleating of people who feel they have been denied an opportunity. Some of these expressions are thoughtful, but really, most of them are simply expressions of envy and its cousin resentment. Reading just a bit deeper and one finds evidence of the challenges one creates when one insists on being an experiential learner.

You know, if it’s never happened to you it’s inconceivable that it has ever happened in the history of mankind.

A great example of this is the silly concoction making the rounds known as “Total Boomer Communism”, a construct that essentially lays the blame for pretty much everything wrong in the world at the feet of the successes of the Baby Boomer generation. Can’t find a house to by that fits every single one of your buying criteria? Price, mortgage rate, commute, schools and the like. Gotta be because all of the Boomers in your area insist on staying in the town where they raised their family and went to work. Taxes too high and interest rates on your loans eating up your salary? Surely something never before experienced by any prior generation and gotta be caused by the Boomers getting massive tax benefits because they vote their pocketbooks. Or something like that.

To be fair, we really aren’t building enough housing to meet population growth. Certainly not like we did when the Greatest Generation, the parent generation for the Boomers, was returning from war and entering the workforce. But with the exception of housing built it turns out that pretty much every generation post WW2 has run this same gauntlet at one time or another. Mortgage interest up to ~7% this week? Whatever. My first mortgage in 1990 was 11.5%. Taxes bleeding away purchasing power? Pre-Reagan tax rates peaked at 75%. Every newspaper and media outlet runs a story every day of the week telling us that today’s younger generations are wallowing in dismay that they will surely never have what their parents and grandparents once had.

Funny thing: someone unearthed a WSJ article from the ’80’s about the Baby Boomer generation’s identical concern that they would never achieve what their parents and grandparents did.

We spent the weekend with our close friends, a couple we’ve known for more than 40 years and with whom we have shared innumerable life experiences and milestones. We met in medical school, further charting our similar life paths. Both couples left graduate school with significant school debt, and both left residency training with additional debt tacked on from the cost of living during our residencies. We watched as many of our college classmates began their careers and began earning real wages at age 22, some well into 6 figures by their mid-20’s; our “real jobs” would not start until we were 30+ years old. It was the opportunity cost inherent in our career choice.

Everyone we knew was paying some sort of opportunity cost. Wanna be an investment banker in NYC? Trust me, rent was silly back in the ’80s just like it’s silly now. Most of the folks we were young with left the city for tiny houses and public schools for the kids that were at the end of long train rides to and from work. The market crash and subsequent increase in inflation that came after the Pandemic lockdowns was a real bummer that truly knocked a lot of young folks off their economic pins. Many folks of all ages continue to feel the repercussions of that time, especially those who aren’t close to retirement and haven’t had a chance to get going on investments and savings.

But the same thing happened not once, not twice, but three times to Baby Boomers. In October of 1988 the stock market plummeted on what has become known as Black Friday. Jobs were lost. Fortunes disappeared. It took years for folks to catch back up, just in time for the dot-com crash of 2002 or so when the same thing happened. And then, of course, the Great Recession of August 2008, the one that really hurt my part of the Baby Boom, the younger cohort. The difference for my slice of Boomers was that we’d been through the prior two disruptions; rather than despair like our older generational compatriots did in that WSJ article, we just went to work.

We simply took advantage of the opportunity before us, swallowed hard on the cost of that opportunity whatever form it may have taken, and went to work. We didn’t look to either our parents generation or older members of our generation for relief or redress. We didn’t seek some sort of financial or social reparations, we simply went back to work. Those of us who have comfortably weathered these societal-level financial upheavals did so not through resentment and envy but by acknowledging that we still had the opportunity to succeed.

Why should it be any different now? You arrive at an opportunity and you always find challenge. Always. What happens next depends on you and what you bring to the opportunity: Desire, determination, and perseverance. No one reaches the fullest expression of their potential to take advantage of an opportunity without these three key ingredients. This is why it’s a fool’s errand to evaluate opportunity by looking backwards from any given endpoint. With a particular quiver of similar “tools” it is impossible to comment on opportunity from a societal standpoint because you simply cannot measure the individual expression of these three variables, desire, determination, and perseverance.

What then remains as a real barrier is a lack of imagination and a lack of belief when it comes to that opportunity. However, well meaning pundits who insist on pursuing courses of action built upon envy and resentment of prior generations do a disservice to their own generations and those that will follow. Why should we believe that this will be the time in our history that generational progress will stall, or even reverse? What is the evidence that desire, determination and perseverance will fail for every generation younger than the youngest Baby Boomers when belief in their power has led to continued success and prosperity for generations?

Why now?

There are serious structural issues in every economy that present challenges to any generation’s success, however one might define or describe success. These times may, indeed, bring an opportunity for an economic re-set at the national level. Regardless, parents, teachers, and mentors of all kinds should be telling their young ones that success lies largely in their own hands. It lies ahead if they recognize the opportunities before them and seek to take advantage of them with the belief that they will succeed through desire, determination, and perseverance. Commentators on the landscape who base their conclusions and the advice that arises therein on intergenerational resentment alone fail their audience by complete lack of that faith.

Everyone of these older Americans faced their own version of the challenges younger generations face today. Why must we lose faith in those younger generations? Why should they listen to voices who tell them that they are the first generations who won’t rise through belief, desire, determination, and perseverance? Every opportunity comes with a cost and success has come to those who were willing to meet the challenge of that investment.

Why is now different?

I’ll see you, from my tiny two bedroom cottage on the farthest reaches of the daily commute, next week…

In an airport, once again, traveling between friends and family, family and friends. Sadly, I’m on my own for these couple of legs. This “sandwich generation” stuff is getting harder by the day. MCO to BOS this morning as I travel from the funeral of my best friend’s Dad to what looks like an abridged version of the annual White Family Cape Cod adventure. We are down one parent, too, and the next generation is in the early stages of careers and families of their own which makes it difficult to get away for a week on the beach. My journey is solo as Mrs. bingo awaits the arrival of the Man Cub’s little sister who begins her own journey any day now.

In the middle of the sandwich, where we welcome babies into the family as we say goodbye to parents who leave, we hopefully share this stage with at least one good friend, and hopefully for our longevity three or more (turns out that’s a magic number). In addition to a brother with whom I cannot be closer and my darling bride with whom I could not be more in love, my journey has been blessed with a best friend who has ridden shotgun or been my driver for 40 years now. We have taken turns carrying each other whenever one of us needed the lift. Mostly we’ve just walked side by side, as friends do..

Friendship is on my mind quite often. I ponder it as I think about friends old and new. My 35th college reunion was a month or so ago, and I am pleasantly surprised at the number of old friends and friendly acquaintances who are emerging from the mists of my past. Misplaced, lost, or cast aside, the skeletons of friendships past walk with me, still.

We are blessed, fortunate beyond measure, if we can count among the masses a single friend. One to whom we can always turn, from whom we withhold nothing, who will give to us everything. To have more than one friend such as this is to have a kind of wealth that beggars description. My parents gave one in 1961; Rob, the friend who just lost his Dad, showed up in 1978.

If we are lucky enough to have such friends they are joined in the garden of our lives by that next best thing, friendly acquaintances, and these in turn are surrounded by acquaintances. The entire garden is encircled by farmland that lies, for the moment at least, unexplored. The enterprising gardener is always on alert for new seedlings out there to plant in that garden of friendship.

The garden analogy is an apt one for friendship. A garden requires tending and so, too, does a friendship. Left untended, left to chance, it is certainly possible for a garden to flourish. All too often both gardens and friendships ignored too long have a beauty that is but a cherished memory, seen only with the mind’s eye.

Friendship, like a garden, grows best when exposed to both sun AND rain, albeit for different reasons. A friendship that has known only sunny days may weather that first storm; a friendship that has known both sun and rain is steeled against any and all weather, especially if we gardeners were active in the tending despite the elements. So it has been for my friends and me.

Who is your friend? Who is there for you in both sunshine and rain? From whom do you wish only friendship, and who asks only the same from you? Have you done your part? Have you tended your garden in both sunshine AND rain?

I am in an airport, leaving my friend and headed toward my brother. It’s raining; we are all missing our Dad. But we have tended these gardens for decades. The sun will come out soon enough.

1) Susurrus. A soft rustling, murmuring, or whispering sound. At the moment emanating from my inland ocean and surrounding me in a cocoon of calm.

2) Verbivore. One who consumes literature. Found in “Theo of Golden”, a self-published novel eventually picked up by a traditional publisher after wracking up some 250,000 or so sales while being publicized by the author’s niece. If memory serves, wordsmithing that produced the term “verbivore” has led to 2.5 million books sold and counting. Gives hacks like me some hope.

Anyway, should be a word.

3) Dessert. Fortified wines like Port, and other sweet wines such as the French gem Sauternes need to talk to the author’s niece above. I mean, I’m all for a nip of something brown and smoky following a worthy meal, but why not tickle your sweet tooth and your sense of special by having something that less than 1% of post-dinner tipplers would choose.

You’ll thank me for this.

4) Goals. What do you do when you have reached a major goal, maybe your ultimate goal, and you discover that you underestimated your “top line”? You know, maybe you were being modest about your ceiling, or perhaps you got started so late in life that you just reasonably figured that you would run out of room to improve, or maybe bump up against the limits of your skill or strength or fortitude before the game clock ran out.

But what if you find yourself in a place doing a thing that you have become really good at doing, and you keep getting better at it? Maybe keep getting better when your peers are getting out?

It doesn’t really matter what that thing is. Beth and I were chatting about a major life change we underwent in our mid-40’s and we casually wondered whether we would have taken on some of the things that have brought us some success and quite a bit of happiness over the last 20 or so years if we hadn’t made that big change. Now, I know, I’m the no regrets guy, and no, this is not a “would we be happier if?” line of thought. I’m/we’re still all of that and more. The topic came up mostly as a wondering if I would have done “Y” and Beth “Z” at all. What came next was the conversation about goals, and how do you push on once even your most ambitious goals might have been met.

What do you think? Ride the peak, or peek around the corner and see if there’s more there to climb?

5) Youth Sports. This year’s World Cup introduced North America to the Norwegian soccer star Erling Haaland. We learned his backstory, including the altogether delightful education about how youth sports are conducted in his hometown of Byrne, and presumably all of Norway. Like the rest of Europe, Norway is a soccer-crazed country. The emergence of a credible national side capable of going deep in the World Cup draw was the source of great national joy.

What struck me the most, other than the Norwegian “ROW!” cheer of course, was the amazingly healthy way Haaland grew up to become a world-class Futboller. If memory serves his local soccer club did not begin tryouts for higher level teams until the kids were 13 years old. Not only that, there was (is) no alternate universe of clubs geared toward cultivating the skills of the more talented kids prior to the age of 13. No weekend tournaments hours away; almost all competition occurs between teams made up from the population of kids in Byrne, or whatever town or city you look at. Out of town games are with the surrounding towns only, if they occur at all. Sports as a healthy outlet for energy and as a complementary avenue for learning the kinds of stuff you need to grow up well but might not get enough of in school.

Honestly, once the USMNT was bounced I was all in for the Norwegians just for this.

Contrast this with the toxic, irrational money-grab that is youth sports in the U.S. American kids and their families being convinced that single-sport specialization should begin as early as 10, or 8, or even 6 years old. For almost everything. Soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf, figure skating, you name it. Perhaps the only sports that don’t stoop this low are sports that just don’t have these early avenues available. Think field hockey, for example, which really doesn’t have much of an outlet until girls reach high school, and which doesn’t really have a professional league to which they might aspire.

Grown men and women make a living coaching youth sports, in some cases for teams filled with grade schoolers. Parents buy in, literally. Have you stumbled onto a Little League age baseball tournament? Little boys segregated on teams by birth year wearing tailored uniforms and carrying bat bags filled with 2 or 3 bats that cost a couple hundred bucks. Each. Like it’s gonna matter to their batting average, which their parents have memorized to the 8th decimal point. Reminds me of the 8 year old golf progeny with custom made clubs and a fitted putter.

Gotta support that kid’s dream. How else is he/she gonna get a scholarship and an NIL deal?

That’s what makes the Byrne, Norway model so lovely and makes it so hard to stomach the willful hypocrisy of Any Town, U.S. These kids aren’t gonna go pro. Almost none of them will get a single penny to play college sports. Heck, the numbers are pretty stark on the prospect of a kid playing a sport at any level of college whatsoever. This week I re-posted a Random Thoughts “classic” with the numbers from 2016 or so. Just for fun I gave the numbers another look, this time 2024 which is the latest year for which participation numbers are available.

Let’s start with some top line, all sports data. The percentage of high school athletes who go on to play a sport in college overall, all sports/all levels is 6-7%. Of this cohort slightly less than 2% receives a scholarship to play a sport. For boys the participation rate ranges from a wrestling and volleyball low (3.0 and 3.6%, respectively) to the high of ice hockey and lacrosse (14.1 and 14.7% respectively). Every other sport is significantly below 10%. For girls ice hockey leads the way at 32.1%, followed by lacrosse (14%) and field hockey (13%). Boys (1.06%) and girls (2.02%) hockey lead the way when it comes to making it to the pros. You’ve got a 10X better chance of getting your son to the big leagues as getting either your son or daughter into the NBA or WNBA: boys will play pro baseball (0.43%), boys or girls will play pro basketball (0.037%).

And what do you lose? Never mind the money involved; your parental ROI from a financial standpoint is microscopic unless the goal was simply to play in college at some level somewhere. But there’s a far bigger loss when you think about what these kids don’t get to experience. For every kid like the pitcher recently featured in Sports Illustrated who is throwing 100+ MPH for his local high school and not some national travel program, there are 500 kids displaced from their hometown and their childhood buddies in pursuit of a nearly unreachable goal. For every Jaylon Brunson whose Dad put him in seasonally appropriate sports until he was 12 or 13 so that he could learn what it meant to NOT be the best kid on the team, there are 500 kids shipped off to some elite academy for a Lord of the Flies experience to prove that they ARE the best kid on the team.

That, and in Brunson’s case, the opportunity to feel what it’s like to lose. A meaningful lesson for any kid on any team.

Even at the local level where kids grow up together and play on their hometown teams there is way too much emphasis on winning. Knowing I was going to write this today I was thinking about my experience as a Dad and as a coach when my kids were younger. Both of my boys saw a majority of their more athletically talented peers forsake their hometown school/team for regional sports powerhouses. The local “big time” if you will. Unfortunately, almost none of them ever saw the field or the court at the private schools; they gave up the chance to stay home and play on teams with the kids they grew up with. Precisely one kid played in college, and he transferred back to the hometown public school to play both his top sport and his second favorite as a senior, and had a ball!

Which brings me to one last point, the absence of the multi-sport high school athlete. Early sport specialization robs kids of the joy found in playing more than one sport. Robs them of the opportunity to expand their circle of athletic friends. To experience the very different things one sees and feels as both the best athlete on a team and perhaps the kid right in the middle of the Bell Curve. There’s a safety thing here, too. Repetitive use injuries are 2 or 3 orders of magnitude higher in single sport youth athletes. Tommy John surgeries for high school juniors. Epidemic rates of non-contact ACL tears in female soccer players. Even more damning than the sheer numbers is the fact that modern training programs and recovery protocols exist that would decrease these traumatic occurrences if they were implemented regardless of their effects on the won/lost column.

A two minute Google search for Jeff and Mikki Martin and the BrandX Method’s results with risk mitigation and injury prevention in girls’ soccer published more than 15 years ago will make you seethe every time you read about some poor girl in a program that does not have a similar program ends up under the knife.

The best job I ever had was being a junior high school football coach. I was the assistant to the assistant backfield coach; my job was to catch the kids doing something right. Great job! A close second was my time as a 5th and 6th grade basketball coach in a league with no tryouts and no cuts and a firm “equal minutes” rule. Man, did those kids have fun! Funny thing: all of those teams I coached were free. No fees for the kids or their families. Fun divided by $0 is infinity. Infinite fun.

Just let the kids play. Like Haaland and his schoolmates. The ROI is infinite.

I’ll see you next week…