Little Fish, Big River, Bigger City

A Good Walk Not Ruined

Someone once said that "golf is a good walk, ruined." When I was younger, I loved golf. I played two or three times a week. One summer I took a few classes at Stanford University and was given the privelege of the student discount which equated to 18 holes for $8. I played nearly every day. The thing is, I took a lot of "mulligans" so I never really knew what my score was.

By and by, I lost interest in golf when it became more expensive and when my lifestyle changed to the degree that I didn't have four hours to burn on being a bad player. I eventually got to the point of playing on a real course every two to five years with some driving range sessions tossed into the middle. I felt the driving range was all the golf I needed: you show up, whack a few, they never really count and you're outta there in thirty to forty-five minutes. It was turbo golf without that awful feeling that your scored sucked eggs.

However, after a couple of years at the driving range now and then with my friend, Tom...the thought of actually playing on a real course enticed me. On my most recent trip to Seattle, we set a date to play and I embarassingly showed up a few minutes behind our tee time since the major on ramp to the freeway I needed to take was closed. Tom treated me to a real course, not one of those dumpy public things where you have to tee off from rubber doormats like we had in the '60's. No, this was golf in all its glory, complete with fountains, a posh clubhouse and a cute little pony-tailed beer girl who frequently stopped by to check in on us.

So, considering that my real score from those old 1988 every day golf days was a mystery...I decided to count every shot, no matter how bad, no matter how much of a mistake it was. I pretended that I was playing in a real tournament, by the rules with full spectators and coverage by ESPN III. I'm horrible. I have my moments of brilliance and my stellar shots, but overall my game is a travesty. I shot a 156 and lost more balls than I can count. Between Tom and I, we luckily found enough balls while searching for mine to keep me in business.

Now, none of this would be a big deal except I finally saw the light. I didn't ever quite understand how someone could spend so much time, effort and money just wasting it away on something so frustrating. What is the light? The light is that golf is not about the game, nor the ball, nor your score. Golf is really about just getting out with a friend and shooting the breeze. It's an activity that can be enjoyed your entire life and there really is nothing quite like just walking along a perfectly beautiful course with perfectly beautiful fairways to find your perfectly awful shot. There's something about hitting one good shot now and then that just keeps you coming back for more because the next one might be good, too.

Which leaves me in my current dilemma, or...as my girlfriend likes to say, "dilemna" because it just sounds better. My golf clubs sit in the closet by the front door where we keep our shoes, jackets and doggie poop bags. Everytime I open that closet, those clubs are just silently begging me to take them out again. My 156 eats away at the back of my mind and I envision myself sneaking out for a few hours on a perfect day and attempting to do better. I picture focusing on every shot, relaxing a bit more, taking what I learned from Tom and applying it...I dream of shooting a 154 or maybe even a 153. More than that, I would just enjoy an afternoon with a good friend taking a nice walk, not ruined. Thanks Tom, for showing me the beauty of the game and for not laughing more than was necesary. We shall play again.

Drop And Give Me Twenty

Recently I had the opportunity to attend my 20th High School Reunion. Ouch. I was wanting to go, but not looking forward to facing the fact that my Peter Pan attitude and lifestyle had to face up to the fact that time is flying by no matter how hard I try to keep old age at bay.

A few years ago, I had attended my 10th college reunion which was actually quite a blast. However, a 20 year reunion seemed so much bigger, so much older. In the end, I sucked in my sagging gut, tightened up the belt a notch to feel thinner and I bought the flight to Seattle. Luckily, the weekend was a tri-fecta because it was also a chance to attend the Amazon.com company picnic aka "play broomball" in addition to a good friend's wedding. The reunion was neatly sandwiched in between those two events like peanut and jelly rests between bread.

Despite my fears of feeling inadequate in the eyes of my peers after 20 years to make something of myself, I boldly walked down the street to the venue on a perfect Seattle evening. I had just come from winning the Broomball Championship at the Amazon picnic which is enough to make anyone at any age float six inches off the ground. It's the B+ athlete's equivalent of winning an Olympic Gold. My spirits were buoyed as I met the first person at the door on her cell phone having some sort of crisis...I said hello and asked how she was and she reaffirmed her situation with a "you have no idea what I've been through..." type of response. Well, so far, so good...

I felt very alone for one of the few times in my life as I had desperately wanted to bring my girlfriend, LoLo along but she was already committed to a wedding which I believe was a polite way of getting out of facing the fact that she's dating an old man. Regardless, as I approached the door and quickly found my nametag, I was greeted by good friends I've known since 1977. Everyone was all smiles, everyone was so nice. I was prepared for the competitive aspect that I faced at my college reunion - how much do you make? How much have you achieved? What country are you running? How many kids do you have? Instead, people seemed to be entirely and utterly varied from what I expected. People seemed "real" instead of like characters from an over-achievers documentary.

Sure, some of us had aged and changed to the degree that without name tags, we'd be unrecognizable. Having been rather shy for most of my school life, not a lot of people recognized me either. Then again, I'm about four inches taller and a good seventy pounds heavier than those days. Not to mention I'd lost the "part it down the middle and feather it back on the sides" '80's haircut. I think the nicest thing about seeing everyone again was learning how many different paths everyone had taken. In college, it seemed that everyone went down very similar paths - analyst, politician, lawyer, company president... Not so for my High School cohorts...there were real estate agents, moms, writers, small business owners, architects and my favorite - a bus driver. It made me realize that from high school, people take almost any path whereas after college, your classmates tend to take a path directly related to where you went to school and what you studied. Duh, Scott...it makes sense.

After a beer and numerous conversations which were two minute recaps of life from 1983 to 2003, the slide show started. Because I spent nearly every waking moment training in skating, I guess I missed the part of high school that was high school. There were so many photos of the little cliques that people had formed...house parties, ski outings, marching band trips, etc. etc. I was never a part of those except for one, the senior "camp out" on our football field during the week of graduation. Somehow, I was included in a few of the pics since I had been a dash of a class clown my senior year and put together a couple of skits for school assemblies.

The evening wore on, people started dancing badly to old '80's tunes and it was time for this dog to exit. As I was leaving, I met a few more folks in the hallway, one of which was a hockey player I had always been jealous of because he played hockey and I was stuck on figure skates. It turns out, he thought I was always so lucky because the girls at the rink always had talked about me. It's nice to learn that kind of thing after growing up feeling like a total outcast, even if it is 20 years later. As I headed for the stairs, I ran into a documentary filmmaker who was always the most interesting person in our class. He was still himself...happy, kind, positive and more than interesting. He was also full of humility in that his achievements are enormous but you don't know until you "google" him on the internet.

Since it was a school reunion, it's extremely apt that I searched for the lesson in the evening, the take away. What I learned is that there are so many paths in life and you can take what you want and just be happy. People aren't going to judge you and hold you to some measuring stick of success. Success is in following the path that only you know while keeping a smile on your face. As I grow older and hopefully wiser, I'm almost wondering if failure exists. It seems that even when things don't go the way you planned, it's not necessarily failure. It's learning and growing...and that's what really counts. Which means that without trepidation, it's time to drop back into my little Peter Pan world and give another 20 years.

Monday Night Football

I'm not your basic "T.A.M." (Typical American Male). Sure, in many respects I am however in other respects, I'm embarassingly not...like football. I'm a total football dunce, in fact I'm a definite ignoramous regarding most multi-million dollar team sports leagues. I don't know the rules, I don't know players names, stats or where they went to college. The worst example I can think of regarding this was when I caught part of a game a couple of years ago while eating at Red Robin in Seattle. I looked up and was rooting for the L.A. Rams. I spouted off about how I'd been a big fan of the L.A. Rams since 1971. The person I was with looked at me blankly and said, "Scott, the Rams are in St. Louis..." I replied with utter shock and asked how long that had been the case. It had been the case for the last five years or so. Yea. Now you see how in touch I am with sports.

So of course, I need to defend myself a tad before I launch into why I'm delving into an experiment on becoming a sports fan. I grew up as a figure skater (of all things) which was not a very cool thing to be as a straight male, especially in the early '80's. I was ridiculed and teased all through school to the point of trying to never admit what I did in my spare time. I spent around 40 hours a week on the ice in addition to jr. high and high school because I was a pretty good competitor and eventually was ranked 7th in the U.S. However, I was still a "fag-gayboy-flaming-homo" to everyone who played football or soccer, not to mention I was considered completely off the market for dating by any girl I was interested in. Being human, I decided to make my problem go away by simply ignoring it. So I grew up without really knowing the first thing about American sports since I was such an outcast. To further highlight this point, I had lunch with an old high school friend sometime last spring and mentioned my girlfriend. The girl I was having lunch with was utterly floored, "WHAT??? I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE GAY!!!" Now don't get me wrong. I have tons of gay friends who are very dear to me. However, when you're labelled gay as a kid, it can be quite painful to try and set the record straight, so to speak.

Now that skating is a good ten years behind me I'm trying to put it all behind me and come out of the sports closet to see the light. I need to figure out what it is that I've been missing out on all these years. I still don't quite get why people go to the degrees that they go to for their teams, but someday, I hope to understand. Alas, the best I can do is try and get a grip on the current season and drive my line of scrimmage forward. Thank God for the internet for helping me can learn what the heck the rules and penalties are in addition to keeping me abreast of who's winning and losing.

Now, you might ask...why am I going through all of this trouble? Well, to be honest, it's for the same reason any man usually goes through any sort of massive metamorphic change in life - it's for a woman.

I happen to be dating one such incredible woman who also happens to be from a die hard family of sports fans. A visit to her family home usually entails at least one (if not five) sporting events watched by everyone around the TV. Stats and player histories are tossed about and I feel like a foreign exchange student trying to get a grip on Mandarin Chinese without a translator to run interference. I decided that I can continue to be an outcast or I can jump onto the bandwagon. After picturing her family pulling her aside during the next half-time at the family home and talking to her about her obviously wrong choice in men, I decided I'd better jump on the bandwagon or I could be benched for the season...even worse, I could get traded for a superior free-agent sports fan who can quote all pro sports stats back to 1957 despite 7 Budweisers and five Niner-dogs in his system.

Easy choice, huh? Not so...you can't just jump onto a bandwagon if you're clueless. I got a lecture about that on Sunday when I mistakenly rooted for "my Niners," the Dallas Cowboys AND the Seahawks during a spattering of highlights. It turns out, you gotta pick a team and stick with it. It also turns out that you either have to spend ten years in San Francisco to root for their teams or lie about how long you've lived here. If you lie about living here, you've then got to decide between the Raiders and the Niners because you'll get burned at the stake if you try changing your team loyalty at any point in the season. Since the Seahawks suck and always have, I'm going to go for improving my lie.

Now that the opening weekend of football season is behind me, the dust seems to be settling a tad. I was allowed to go and watch the Eagles game with said girlfriend/Eagles fanatic and fellow Eagles fanatics...but I had to behave. This was after catching the first game of the season on Thursday night and spending a good piece of Sunday watching the (St. Louis) Rams get pummeled by the Giants. There was an untimely interruption due to a wedding in Sacramento but I was able to get some good recaps by watching ESPN Sportscenter from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. once we got home.

I'm not sure how the girlfriend does it, but she seems to be able to know everything without putting in the added "homework" that I'm enduring to stay on top of just one game played by all the teams in the league. Additionally, she seems to magically know all about baseball and basketball, too. I don't yet have the capacity to add those into my curriculum but eventually I may get some extra bandwidth once I'm get the hang of all this. Sometimes I wish I could audit because I feel like I'll never graduate as a real sports fan at this rate.

At the end of the day, I still feel like a "football fairy." Here I am, 38 years old, born and raised in America the Beautiful and I'm struggling to grasp one of our great traditions so that I can spend more time and have a more meaningful relationship with the woman of my dreams. I chuckle at the irony. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? I feel like it's "3rd and 25 on my own one-yard line and I need a Hail Mary completion to win," but the fact is...I'm here and I'm giving it my best shot, so without further ado....HUT, HUT HIKE!!! GO NINERS! I mean Hawks! No, wait...ug....will someone just pass me another Budweiser, please? Because I totally get the part about beer.