Month: January 2015

SCOREBOARD

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scoreboard

Every pickup basketball game has “That Guy.” Never the best player (who can’t bothered to be bothered) nor the worst (who is too busy working his ass off to notice or at the very least admit it out loud), “that guy” is the guy who has decided long before he took the court that he’s going to keep score.

After every basket or possession, he’s calling it out. Quick to correct those who have it wrong. Repeating it ad nauseum _ particularly especially when his team is winning _ to serve as a reminder that there must be a sense of place in the universe and (with god’s grace and a couple of 3-pointers) his team’s place is on top, not yours.

I am that guy. I have always been that guy from the day my dad paved part of our backyard and turned it into a 20 x 20 court with one of those upper-end glass backboards in hopes that I would use it to become the kind of player that made him a pretty good junior college forward (before life got in the way) and my uncle an even better one at Penn State (before being 20 got in the way).

While I loved to play, genetics and a decided lack of ability relegated the idea of me making a last-second shot for the Washington Bullets to the goings-on inside my head. I topped out at 5-11, a good seven inches shorter than my dad (and if we’re being honest here, a deck of cards shorter than my little sister). I made up for my lack of height by having no talent whatsoever other than the confidence to jack up any shot from anywhere no matter the circumstances.

We’ll pause here to give anyone who has ever played with me a chance to avoid vertigo while they finish vigorously nodding their head.

But dammit, I could add and subtract. Maybe it was simply a byproduct of all those imaginary games I would hold when noone was around, the ones where Jeff Malone or John Stockton or whoever I wanted to be on a given day was always open from 15-feet as the buzzer sounded. And yep, you can bet I was “fouled” if for some ungodly reason that shot had the temerity to clang off the rim.

It was my court. I figured it was my job to keep order. I can’t tell you I did it on purpose, but hey, nobody stopped me. Looking back, it’s hard to not laugh. During those countless afternoons spent honing a shooting stroke that still stops by every now then at 40 (and hopefully sticks around until 80) I was a walking/talking/jump-shot heaving abacus.

Not much has changed. While I technically don’t get paid to keep score (though I do anyway most nights) I am paid to tell you who won, who lost _ and perhaps most importantly _ what it all means. Some days, I’m pretty good at it. Some days I stare at the screen waiting for inspiration to strike and _ when it doesn’t _ pluck my right eyebrow furiously and hope I can “fool’em again” as the great Jim Murray used to say.

If only the scoreboard fixating was limited to my work. And that’s the problem. I have too often turned every part of my life into some kind of endless track meet. I can tell you my weight without getting on a scale within a pound or two (and no matter how high or low the number, it’s never low enough). I haven’t balanced a checkbook in years but I know what the balance in my account is within a buck or two (and no matter how high or low the number, it’s never high enough). I can tell you who has done the last five loads of laundry, who called who last in (insert relationship here), and who sent me a note on Facebook on my last birthday and who skipped.

The funny thing about this is, I’m losing. I’ve been losing for as long as I can remember. The blessings bestowed upon me are so countless it would make most people puke. Every problem I have is a #firstworldproblem. And I’d include my cancer on that list. This week the FDA approved the use of a drug that could turn something I worried would eventually kill me a year ago into something that requires one silly pill a day. (Downside: this means playing the “but I have cancer” card to win any argument I’m losing may be coming to an end).

I have treated every single aspect of my life like a game. I read the wire to see which of my colleagues is writing what, who is traveling where and wondering why I’m not. I read both newspapers in my town and send texts/twitter shoutouts when I see something I like while at the same time wondering how I could (or have) done it better even if in many cases that’s probably not true.

It’s even worse in my house. For too long I viewed my marriage like a competition. I kept mental tabs on who was doing what/when. If I cleaned the litter box a half-dozen times before my wife got to it, I made damn sure to passive-aggressively let her know. (“Oh, you know where the litter box is? I thought you’d forgotten” stupid stuff like that).

I am the player who – with his team down 30 points in the last minute – drills a 3 and hoists his arms in the air. You know, kind of like this:

The irony _ even on the days I want to admit it or not _ is that I am down. Big time. And yet I create scenarios that allow me to find a category in which I somehow have an advantage. I have known my wife for nearly 14 years and she has devoted herself to me selflessly and relentlessly, sometimes against her better judgement. She does not need to keep score _ hell, it probably has never even occurred to her to try _ because this isn’t some contest. This is life. There is no scoreboard. There is only the day to day. How we live and who and what we devote our lives to is what matters.

It’s a lesson that I have spent the last four years trying to beat into my head, with mixed results. Parenting has taught me a lot (actually, it’s taught me just about everything) by forcing me (at long last) to grow the *%# up. I see my two kids every morning and wonder how some schlub like me has managed not to screw them up yet.

This is usually the point where I would throw in a “but there’s time” in order to get a laugh. But there are still moments when that obsessive competitiveness seeps out and finds its way into my son through some strange osmosis. He’s 5 1/2 and he absolutely hates to lose. It doesn’t matter if it’s a video game or a race around the house or brushing his teeth, he absolutely cannot come in second (and heaven help you if he comes in third). I have used that drive as a motivator when he doesn’t want to do a chore or get dressed, often pitting himself against his sister in a sprint to see who can finish what task first.

This morning it led to tears, my 3 yo crying because her brother tugged on her arm in the scramble to reach the top of the steps so they can finish a mad dash to get dressed. The moment soon passed, but they are becoming a bit more frequent than I would like.

I have no idea how to change it and I’ll admit I’m probably not quite ready. I played pickup hoops on Wednesday night. The first game I happened to be guarding a friend of mine. He got the ball. A small skirmish that may have resembled defense ensued. He called a foul and I immediately became a fourth-grader, making a joke about his height and disrespecting the call. What an idiot. While the call was debatable, my immediate reaction was not. It was dumb. And I’m getting too old to do the same dumb stuff I’ve done for the last 40 years.

I imagine I could start by trying to set a better example, to take some TNT to the ever-counting scoreboard in my head _ the one that reads “Will 2, Life 1” with “Dude, when are you gonna stop doing that and realize you’re one lucky bastard and just get on with it” scrawled beneath it like some sort of advertising sign _ blow the thing up.

Pass me the detonator. it’s time, don’t ya think? At least, after this one last game …

Hey, Rome (and the eventual deconstruction of my ego) wasn’t built in a day.

A little new school for this space, but hey, times change:

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Roots

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The Burgh2

This was not supposed to be the place. Too many hills. Too many unironic moustaches. Too many roads to nowhere. Oh, and too much black and gold. Way, way too much for a kid who grew up in the D.C suburbs and spent each spring of his childhood watching Mario Lemieux and his buddies crush the dreams of the guys wearing red, white and blue (you know, the colors of America, not some industrialized wasteland).

I never wanted planned to live in Pittsburgh. Let’s just get that out there. My college buddies and I would drive up a couple times a semester when we were at WVU 20 years ago, going to games and charging beers to a Discover card I ended up not paying off until I was nearly 30. (Note to kids: I don’t care how cool that free T-shirt those credit card dudes are offering in front of the student union looks, pass on it until your annual W-2 hits at least five digits).

Back then Pittsburgh was the big city. Then my world got bigger. Larger. More complicated. I graduated and my horizons expanded. I needed a job. The location didn’t matter, just the opportunity to see my name in print and tell everybody how good I am live the dream.

One problem: by wanting to be from anywhere, I ended up being from nowhere.

When I tell people where I went to school, they assume I’m from West Virginia. I immediately correct them and tell them I’m from Maryland, as if being from West Virginia is something to be ashamed of when the fact is most of the truly great people I’ve met in my life are from the place where montani semper liberi. When people hear I’m from Maryland, they assume I identify with Baltimore. I make sure to correct them and tell them I grew up 30 minutes from the White House regardless of my stance on the NFL’s team’s nickname.

The truth is I’m from a town without a center. There is no main street in Waldorf, MD. The most unique things about it _ slot machines and tobacco barns _ are long gone. There’s a liquor store, a bank and a fast-foot place on every corner, but there no there there. That doesn’t make it the seventh circle of hell, but the truth is my memories and fondness of it are tied to the people, not the place.

My adult life has been little more than a series of itinerant phases: 4 1/2 years in Morgantown (sorry about that extra semester mom and dad, I was just too damn lazy), 2-plus at my first job in Easton, MD (where I didn’t have nearly as much fun as I should have), a half-dozen more in southwest Florida (where I became ridiculously tan, incredibly fit and professionally challenged but also terribly broke) and another six in Louisville, KY.

It’s telling _ and not in a good way _ that I hardly keep in touch with anybody from those stops. I adore Motown but I’ve only been there a handful of times in the generation since I left. My first boss remains an inspiration but we’ve spoken maybe four times since I hooked up the small UHaul trailer to my Jeep Cherokee and sprinted for the Gulf of Mexico in July, 1999. I met my wife in Florida. We were married in paradise in June, 2005 then bolted for the Bluegrass (sight unseen, I might add) five months after we made it legal.

Louisville is tricky. We bought a home there (still sort of for sale, if you’re looking!), had our children there and where I might have been happy if I’d allowed myself to be. I couldn’t. It wasn’t enough. The job. The house. The life. I spent so much time fixating on what came next I didn’t bother to make a real investment personally or professionally. I became claustrophobic and did everything in my power to sabotage any chance at developing a meaningful, lasting relationship with an area that had warmly accepted me even as I daydreamed about where I’d end up next.

When the opportunity in Pittsburgh popped up, it took me five seconds to apply and three months sweating out the decision even though the truth is I wasn’t running to something as much as I was running away from the notion of truly settling down. It was only when I accepted the job that I bothered to look down. I’d grown roots in Louisville. Real ones. Mortgage. Kids. Did I mention mortgage? Yet I pressed on anyway, determined Pittsburgh would offer salvation and a needed fresh start. The truth is, the fact it was Pittsburgh was merely incidental. It could have been Sydney or Sheboygan. It was a step up, a step away, another notch on a bedpost becoming ever more crowded and ever more meaningless.

The carousel needed to stop. Any maybe it has, as hard as it was to imagine 3 1/2 years ago when my wife pulled up to the house I’d chosen to rent with a 2-year-old on one arm and an infant slung under the other. She stared at the 32 steps up from the driveway to the front door and shouted “do you (bad word) hate me?”

She wasn’t kidding. Neither am I when I say it wasn’t her that I hated. It was me. Pittsburgh initially was my purgatory, a place I needed to atone. And for the first two-plus years I treated it just like I treated every other mailing address I’d used during my adult life: as a waystation between this stop and the next, wherever it might be.

Juggling a demanding new job while replacing someone who had been an institution for three decades with a family life that included two young children and a wife who wondered how in the world she’d gotten here was a hell of my own creation. I couldn’t stand the town for a good two years, projecting all the anger I felt about my own mistakes onto a city that didn’t give a damn either way.

And maybe that’s why here  _ as odd as it seemed during those first miserable months _ became the perfect place to rebuild. Pittsburgh is welcoming but not charitable. It makes you earn its respect. Maybe that’s because its spent the last 20 years remaking itself after the collapse of the steel industry.

The Pittsburgh in your mind (alright, the Pittsburgh in my mind too) is not the Pittsburgh you imagine. The mills are all but gone. There is a thriving college scene. A dynamic health care industry. A booming energy economy. Hipster neighborhoods. family-friendly cul de sacs and perhaps the prettiest baseball park in the country. There’s an arena where two of the best hockey players in the world go to work 40-plus nights a year, hardly complaining even as their everyday brilliance is taken for granted. There’s a model NFL franchise that rarely makes me check the police blotter. There are parks and bike lanes and dive bars and five-star restaurants.

We ended up buying a house in a suburb east of the city that _ to be honest _ looks an awful lot like a hilly version of my hometown. Chain restaurants and Target. Giant Eagles and a gym. It’s comforting even as we warily planted true roots. We spent the first year basically renting the house from ourselves, unpacking what we could and throwing everything else in the basement. We survived a cancer scare, back surgery (her’s, not mine) and potty-training the world’s most dramatic 3-year-old girl. Over the Christmas break we decided it was time to unpack. We recycled an avalanche of boxes. We tossed a bunch of crap that we’d forgotten we even had. We came upon a trove of pictures from when we were younger, thinner and tanner. We laughed. Then we put them back.

Slowly we are making the house our own. The art on the wall doesn’t favor the past but the promise of the future. Our 5-year-old’s kindergarten’s pic. Our daughter’s beautiful smile. Our fridge is dotted with pics of people — check that, of FRIENDS — we’ve made here. I am trying to emerge from my own self-imposed bubble (the one that’s kept me from investing in anything other than what I see in the mirror) and become a part of the community. Hanging out at my daughter’s daycare. Wrapping presents at my son’s school. Maybe (MAYBE) running a 5k. Maybe (MAYBE) volunteering with the Red Cross. Learning my neighbor’s first AND last names.

I don’t know if we’ll be here forever. But I do know that I’m OK with the idea of that being OK. My son has a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey. He asks me about “the Crosby.” One day during the fall he wondered where his Steelers shirt was (he doesn’t have one yet, but I have a feeling I’m fighting a losing battle). My daughter will attend her first birthday party for a friend early next month. They will grow up Pittsburghers, certified “yinzers.”

And while I can still get lost here at the drop of a hat, while I’m still mystified at why everybody feels the need to slow down entering a tunnel and while I still feel like I have a ways to go before I will no longer be considered an outsider by my peers (a concept that might be in my head at this point than anybody else’s) I have developed an affinity for this place. It has earned my respect. I’m trying to earn its.

As long as it doesn’t require a moustache, I think it’ll work out just fine.

Usually we close with a rap song, but not today. The quality is poor, but this video the Pirates showed the home crowd before Game 3 of the 2013 NLDS gave me chills, and I’m not one to get chills. It’s a tribute to those who had faith in a franchise that for years was lost but found itself after two decades at sea.

Sounds familiar. Sounds awfully damn familiar.

The Kid on the Back of the Bus (aka Tweet Decked)

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twitter yin yang

I can still see that kid in the back of the bus. Toughskins. Not quite brand name tennis shoes. Hair straight as the hands of Big Ben at 6 o’clock. Small. Smart. Insecure as hell.

Oh, and loud. Really flipping loud. He didn’t have an inside voice. Or an outside one for that matter. It’s as if God stuffed a megaphone down his throat then shredded the internal filter that was supposed to protect him from blurting out every thought before it neared completion.

That mouth tended to lead to trouble. The constant need to be heard, to be taken seriously, to be deemed “cool” led to problems, specifically “fist in the vicinity of the face” problems. He had no trouble telling people when they were wrong, where they screwed up, how they could do better. By third grade that mouth could curse a streak so blue if it had to be edited for TV it would have sounded like a garbage truck backing up (which in some way, it was). Beep. Beep. Beep.

That kid got his ass kicked on more than a handful of occasions. There was some bullying involved _ it tends to happen when you are a nerdish 57 pounds in fifth grade _ but just as often it was that mouth, that damn mouth, piping up, unable to resist the temptation to get the last word in. The mouth made up for in bravado what the kid lacked in strength and _ sadly, especially when it was time to get off the bus in the afternoons _ speed.

God, was I a piece of work when I was 8.

I taught my sister (who was three grades behind me) the seven words you can’t say on TV (and then a few dozen more) when she was in kindergarten. I remember this because she would use them (some of them even in correct context, impressive considering she was 5) to whoever happened to be chasing her too cocky for his own good older brother on a given day.

I can laugh about it now, three decades later, because I survived. And if it sounds like I’m blaming the victim a bit here, I don’t consider myself the victim of bullying, not really. Sure I had to deal with kids who wore cooler clothes, who were stronger and more popular and didn’t have a problem letting everyone know it. I was never in that group (not really) and it pissed me off. So I attacked with that mouth, the one that all too often would start moving even though it had no idea where it was going. I’m not saying the kids I would fight with (and before we get too far into this, let me stress it was typically the same handful, including a kid who lived down the street and was the size of your typical motorhome). We antagonized each other. My words rattled him. His arms occasionally tried to rattle me. It ended mercifully when I was in 5th or 6th grade. We were fighting. He told me to look down. Because I’m nothing if not accommodating, I obliged. One knee to the nostrils later, my Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt was covered in blood, my parents were called we were both told that if my insults wouldn’t reach his ears then his knuckles wouldn’t reach my face.

I’d love to tell you has a ton has changed. It has not. Not really. While it’s been probably 20 years since I last got in a fight _ and it was during a hockey game, so it probably really doesn’t even count _ that mouth still gets me in trouble. It just does it in an entirely different way: by using my fingers as an accomplice.

I get paid _ amazingly _ to write about sports for a living, just like I planned when I was 15. I am incredibly fortunate, particularly when there are thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs, victims of an ever-changing media climate that can’t seem to strike a balance between profits and public service.

It should be enough. It should be more than enough. And yet, it’s not. In many ways, I’m still the kid in the back of the bus, surveying everything in front of me, trying to find a way to fit in, trying to find a way to be cool, trying to bridge the gap between my shortcomings _ both personally and professionally _ and the incessant voice in my head that never stops reminding me that I can be better, that I can do better and that I’m not nearly close to reaching whatever murky goal lies out there in the distance even as the realist in me knows I’ve got it better than just about anybody.

Which leads me to twitter (FOLLOW ME! … or don’t). Finally, a medium where my brilliance could be doled out in 140 characters or less. A chance for those unfiltered thoughts to run wild. A place I can say what I think (and just as importantly, what YOU should think) and be funny and snarky and obnoxious without the fear of getting off the bus and facing whatever target I honed in on in a given day.

Over the last five years and 33,000 tweets (and counting) I have inadvertently painted myself into a corner. What began as a legitimately earnest attempt to be the sarcastic voice of reason has morphed into me becoming the kind of shrill, “get off my lawn and by the way, you stink” troll that I have for so long despised. Take any subject and I’ll find a way to find the cloud inside the silver lining. Whatever your take is, I’m only too happy to take the opposite point of view. My ability to find the one thing that’s going to tick someone off remains fully functional. Do I believe it? Not always, but hey, anything to get one more retweet, one more favorite, one more follower even if it’s just a spambot or Taye Diggs.

I am trying to have it both ways. My employer is one of the most trusted names in the news industry, and part of the deal is they ask us to color inside the lines, a standard I am growing more and more thankful of as accuracy and fairness takes a backseat in the increasingly heated competition for more clicks, Facebook likes and hashtags.

The small (note to bosses: VERY small) tradeoff can be relative anonymity compared to my peers. Sometimes you’ll see a byline. Most times you’ll just see “PITTSBURGH (AP).” It can appear nowhere or it can pop up in millions (no, I’m serious here) of newspapers and hundreds of web sites depending on how big the story is on a given day. More people stumble across my stories than I ever dreamed, and yet the kid in the back of the bus remains unimpressed.

That kid has opinions. Dammit, they must be heard. That’s what the mouth tells the fingers all too often when I hit “send” for the latest bit of snark and analysis to unwitting souls who mashed “follow” (whether they meant to or not) next to @WillGravesAP. And while I think I’m hysterical (just ask me, and I’ll tell you) at times it’s also gotten too much. The back of the bus is crowded. And I don’t want to sit here anymore. Not all the time anyway.

There are people who have made themselves professional provocateurs and who have the chops and conviction to back it up. And there are folks who hide behind easter eggs to take shots at those further up the food chain. I’m not in the former group and have no interest in joining the latter.

At my best I consider my feed a mix of news and benign antagonism. Too often lately it’s become me shouting just to shout, to chime in on whatever the topic of the day is because Important People are doing it (the trolls too) and dammit, I’m important, right? RIGHT?

I have a 5-year-old son who is bright and thoughtful and as competitive as hell. He wants you to do well so long as he does better. He’s cornered the market on patronizing, amazing considering my wife would tell you I perfected the art long ago. He beat me in “Sorry” the other day, did a victory lap and patted my head saying ‘You did good daddy.” The flashback was so vivid I wondered if my wife had laced that night’s spaghetti with LSD.

He’s starting to pay attention to sports now. Flipped on a game the other day and one of the teams I cover was losing on the road by a hefty margin. He told me “Pittsburgh isn’t very good.” It’s as if a seedling sprouted its first shoot. I’ll be honest, I’d love it if one day he wanted to do this for a living. In my wildest dreams I can see him sitting next to me in a press box putting together a game story or writing a feature or talking to a player. I have little doubt sports will provide the same bond that was the only real connection between my father and I.

Yet I wonder what he would make of the old man on twitter. He might say “daddy, why are you so mad?” The other day I went on an unasked for rant on the baseball Hall of Fame vote, chiding more senior members of the Baseball Writers Association of America for failing to elect two stars whose careers were pockmarked with evidence they used performance-enhancing drugs. Why did I do it? I have no idea. Was it personal? Not really, but 140 characters doesn’t allow for nuance, not in the chase for eyeballs. My rant might have been well founded but it was also unnecessary. Even worse, it was borderline unprofessional.

When I was done, I was kinda disgusted. I thought, “dude, get over yourself.” It’s a battle I’ve been fighting since those days in back of Bus 98. The war is nearing an end. It has to. The noise is becoming too deafening. The constant need to prove myself by being the funniest, smartest, whatevereset guy out there is exhausting.

I love Twitter. And I’m not quitting. But I’m going to try _ TRY _ to be more of a grownup. The truth is the only thing that will quiet that voice in my head, the one that won’t shut up, is by becoming a better man, a better reporter, a better role model for my son and hell, for me.

As much as that kid on the back of the bus is exasperating, he’s still a part of me. He just doesn’t need to talk so much. Maybe more thoughtful writing and more aggressive reporting will calm him down. Maybe a little less worrying about what everybody else is saying and a little more worrying about the example I’m setting will help. Or maybe he just needs to listen more and check his twitter feed less.

Like Common says on “Driving Me Wild” — “It’s a shame what they do for fame and to be respected/ Joe, you coulda got it if you never woulda stressed it.”

It’s time to get off the bus. Or at least move up a few rows. Save me a seat, will ya?

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