The Good Old Days

Are you raising an unbearable child? Probably.

When I was a kid I split time between my Mom's house in the woods and my Dad's farm just down the road. From relatively early on we had pretty much full independence. On a nice day we'd be sent out in the morning to find our own fun. I cannot tell you the number of hours I spent up in the hayloft (which was literally suspended from the second-floor barn ceiling some 20 feet above the floor) or amidst the shards of metal and glass all over the place. Barbed wire was just another impediment -- or better yet an addition -- to the forts and tunnels we created. We'd climb the machinery and dangle from beams. We'd run around like we owned the place and I don't remember my grandmother helicoptering even though she was always in the house and occasionally would pop out and give us a shout offering a popsicle. We'd run down the hill behind the barn (the one that was perfect for sledding in the winter) at full speed to see who could get the furthest before wiping out.

In the woods we'd climb trees and jump from the branches. Or in the nearby fields we'd play tackle football, or baseball complete with hit pitches and in one-on-one or two-on-two games it counted as an out if you threw the ball and nailed a runner between bases. We had boxing matches with winter mittens as gloves. No one chased us around to make sure we drank enough water (we ran into the house when we were thirsty) or had enough to eat ("your arms ain't broke" is something I heard on more than one occasion when I whined about wanting a snack.) We'd chuck iceballs at one another in the winter and attach little sour apples to sticks and whip them at one another in the fall. We'd fight when angry.

And mine wasn't some sort of antiquated, mythological childhood. Everybody I knew did this stuff. And I'd bet anyone in my age range has similar stories, catered to the suburbs or the city or what have you. I probably sound like an old man romanticizing the good old days, and I never want to be that guy, so I suppose that there are things I missed that I didn't even realize. When you grow up poor or working class there are all sorts of disadvantages that you internalize, and my kids (touch wood) will have all sorts of advantages including me probably helping them to schedule them beyond free time while I hover and coach and beam. It's a different world now just as it was a different world then from what my parents knew, a world they always put up as being somehow tougher and more authentic just as their parents surely did for them.

Nonetheless, I know that my kids (again, assuming it happens) will never run on the farm or get to enjoy seemingly endless expanses of woods to explore. And so I'll tell them stories, about the time I tried to jump from a tree onto the back of a friend's speeding minibike, or about taking an iceball square in the nose (my first broken bone!), or about jumping from the neighbor's roof into a pile of leaves that proved insufficient to cushion the fall, or about that time we . . .

1989

So the Baby Boomers had 1968. Holy shit, have they told us, and told us, and told us of the wonders of 1968. Because in 1968 they changed the world, you see.

But of course they didn't. As a general rule of thumb, the baby boomers who tell you all about how they changed the world are not the ones who actually changed the world. So some ex hippie will prattle on about peace and love and someone like John Lewis, who really did change a particularly noxious corner of the world, doesn't feel the need constantly to reinforce that point. And John Lewis is a politician, for whom plugging his role in changing the world ought to be front-and-center. (It's actually remarkable how few of the Civil Rights Movement's activists act like your apodictic baby boomers, when the irony is that they are the ones who are most in a position to act like self-important, self-righteous, and self-indulgent twits. Ahhh, baby boomers, the dubious gift that keeps on giving, even when we make it clear we really don't like the gift.)

Don't get me wrong -- 1968 was a remarkable year, made all the more so because its currents were truly international. It's a year I love to teach. And it's a year that has come to symbolize both the best and worst of that strange decade. But for my generation, 1989 was every bit as important, with the added benefit of 1989 having been a time when the world really did re-order itself significantly.

Twenty years ago (gulp) I graduated from high school and headed off to Williams. Little did I know when I made the two-plus hour ride into an entirely different world that within a few months much of the world that I knew would transform itself. The Berlin Wall, the prevailing symbol and metaphor of the Cold War, would fall, and that collapse would itself provide a metaphor for the crumbling of the Eastern Bloc and the dawn of a new era. As 1989 gave way to 1990 FW de Klerk, who had risen from the ranks of Afrikaner Nationalism with a seemingly impeccable apartheid pedigree, released Nelson Mandela from prison and unbanned the ANC and PAC, setting the stage for epochal transformations in South Africa. The Simpsons made its debut in December 1989. And of course Milli Vanilli's first album, destined to win a Grammy in 1990, was released in the United States. Tectonic shifts all.

Much like 1968, the legacy of 1989 is "Still Up For Debate." Any series of events that causes The Boston Globe to heap praise upon a Bush (albeit the competent one) is clearly monumental.

Thurman Munson, In Memoriam

I was eight years old when real life intruded on my theretofore hermetically sealed sports fan life for the first time. I had already had my heart broken by the 1978 Red Sox, of course, but August 2, 1979 was different.

I remember the moment clearly, though I think I have conflated the context. I was riding in my Dad's silver Chevy Blazer, a big-assed SUV in an era where Big-assed was good and no one knew what an SUV was. We were listening to the radio, and they interrupted the broadcast with breaking news. Now keep in mind that this was an age before ESPN, before sports talk radio, before the internet. If you were a sports fan you had the games themselves when they were broadcast, you had the daily newspaper, and you had a few precious minutes on the news in the evening and snippets on the radio. Sports and news were simply not ubiquitous. Breaking news was a big deal, unlike today when the Sportscenter after Pardon the Interruption opens with breaking news virtually every day. ("This just in: Brett Favre could not choose between waffles or pancakes at breakfast this morning.")

Thurmon Munson, the Yankees fireplug of a catcher and the New York version of local hero Carlton Fisk, had gone down in a plane crash in Canton, Ohio in which he was the pilot. He was dead. And I was legitimately crushed. By that time I truly, absolutely, unquestionably loathed the Yankees. I hated Thurman Munson because he embodied the evil doppelganger of Pudge, and because he was the heart and soul of that mighty but detestable Yankees team. But even then I knew that the hate existed within a context and that some things -- life and death -- were more important.

In my memory I have always remembered hearing that broadcast, and its grim updates confirming the fatal climax, in New York with my Dad and his then-girlfriend. That memory is plausible -- she was from New York, Dad enjoyed a good two-or-three year span in which he spent much of his time in New York, even living on Long Island for a spell. My uncle had just moved to Long Island (where he raised my cousins as Red Sox fans, God bless him) and so we went down somewhat regularly in elementary school and junior high. But my guess is that when I heard that terrible news we were simply driving around Newport -- running to a farm supply store or an auto parts place for one of my Dad's projects on the farm. The memory provides a nice symmetry -- young Red Sox fan from a farm in rural New Hampshire driving with his Dad on the outskirts of the big city that represented so much promise and hope and excitement and most of all the damned Yankees, hearing news that for at least a little while changed his worldview. It may not have quite happened where I thought it happened, but the slight transformation, and the intrusion of the real world on what was still at that point the sparkly fantasy world of sports, was very real then, and still strikes me as one of the most real experiences I have had as a sports fan even thirty years hence.

Hamstrung (Big Time Self Indulgence Edition)

I know from hamstring injuries. Although my track career also saw its share of knee problems -- I stopped high jumping after my sophomore year because of my left knee -- my hamstrings were my bete noir. At the NESCAC track championships at Tufts my junior year, when I was seeded first in the triple jump, I tore my right hamstring during the long jump. Almost upon takeoff I simultaneously felt and heard a brutal popping sound, and that was it.

I spent the summer rehabbing, mostly in Michigan, where I spent an unlikely summer working as a bartender at a dude ranch. In July of that summer Michigan held a giant sports festival, the Great Lake State Games (for those of you from the east it was very much akin to the Bay State Games -- I competed in those twice -- or the Empire State Games). My goal was to be well enough to long jump in the track meet in East Lansing. I did so, placed second, and ther than having my car engine blow up on me, recovered pretty well.

Paranoid my senior year about that hamstring I was extra careful. My only real injury problem my senior year came with a minor but excruciating partial tear of my left patella tendon, which eventually sidelined me during one event at NESCACs outdoors, but otherwise I was able to work through. We returned to Tufts for the All New England Championships where we got to face off against the big boys in New England track and dield (and where we always did very well). I had qualified in the long jump as well as the triple, and on the Friday evening long jump finals I knew something was awry. I had a knot in the area where the hamstring and glute meets on my left leg. My steps were awry and my speed was off, and so I did not qualify for finals, which was a bummer, but the real prize for me was the triple jump. I was in good health, I felt good, and I believed that if I pulled it all together I would qualify for nationals. Qualify for nationals, have a good day, maybe a litle luck, and All American is not an impossibility.

It did not take long the next day for those plans to go to hell. During warmups I felt the tightness again, and should have gone to the trainer for a massage, but I was in the first flight and was among the early jumpers in the random draw. I took off down the runway, exploded a huge hop phase, and drove my left leg up for the crucial step phase. That's when I felt the familiar tug and heard the familiar sound, this time in my left leg. Somehow I finished off the jump, though pretty much by collapsing into the pit. In a way I wish I had not -- the jump was decent as it was, and would have been exceptional had I not torn the hamstring before finishing the final two phases of the jump. That was the one. Athletes at a peak of performance are the ones most vulnerable to tearing the hamstrings. I was so close.

And torn it was, pretty much a full rupture. My college track career ended with me face down on the infield at Tufts University for the second year in a row. It was, suffice it to say, devastating.

Gretchen Reynolds' piece Hamstrung Results from a recent issue of the New York Times' sports magazine Play thus spoke to me. I I excerpt the article in its entirety since I received it via their email newsletter and cannot seem to track down an independent link to it:

It’s been quite an Olympics for the hamstrings. They’ve determined the outcome of more events than Michael Phelps’s freakishly long arms. Sanya Richards blamed a “grabbing” hamstring for her loss in the 400 meters; sprinter Tyson Gay’s hamstring pull at the U.S. Olympic Trials reduced him to a non-factor in Beijing; and Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang’s heartbreaking exit from the Games, while directly caused by a sore Achilles tendon, “almost certainly was related” to a severe hamstring injury he suffered a few months back, says Dr. Bryan Heiderscheit, an assistant professor of physical therapy at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and an expert on hamstring injuries.

Injured hamstrings, Heiderscheit says, are especially common in sports that involve fast, hard spurts of running, such as the track and field sprints, but also football and soccer. “The million dollar question is why,” he says. Despite reams of research, there’s no answer.

What is known, though, is that a hamstring injury is self-perpetuating. An athlete who’s suffered one is at an enormously increased risk of another. Again, researchers don’t know why that is, although a new study by Heiderscheit and his colleagues is suggestive. In the work, 11 athletes hobbled by hamstrings underwent a M.R.I. examination. In all but two of them, the hamstrings showed “substantial changes in the tissue,” even a year and a half after the injury, Heiderscheit says. Some sections of tissue were enlarged and scarred; others atrophied. The whole was, in effect, remodeled. How that metamorphosis contributes to later injury and, more important, how to use the M.R.I. findings to avoid re-injury “will require a lot more study,” Heiderscheit says.

In the meantime, the hamstrings will have plenty more chances to affect the medal counts in Beijing. “I hope no one else goes down,” Heiderscheit says. “But I won’t be surprised if they do.”

That's not quite where my tale ends. I rehabbed again, though with nowhere near the same enthusiasm. I tried to compete a bit later that summer, with very mixed results, and I jumped the next year for the Greater Boston Track Club while I coached in Concord, Massachusetts, again with fairly mixed outcomes. I was never the same, but then again divorced from the context of track at Williams, it never would have felt the same anyhow.

Three years later I had my last bit of sporting glory, playing rugby for Rhodes University in South Africa. I had lost a lot of speed but could still get around well enough to start at wing. Every so often that haphazardly rehabiltated left hamstring would catch on me, but it was not until the last game of the season, a humiliating defeat to a club based at a police base (university boys in the Eastern Cape taking on Afrikaner policemen is a recipe for an asskicking, and we got flambeed). Towrd the end of the game I had the ball around midfield and felt the familiar sensation once again. this time the hamstring was as much scar tissue as muscle, and predictably I went down, though for reasons that still baffle me (we were shorthanded, I do know that) I stayed in the game and hobbled around utterly uselessly for the remainder of the game. I got caught at the bottom of a maul and some big bastard "mountain climbed" me, stomping directly on the hamstring.

For a month my leg was night-black from ass to calf, my last real sporting scar. Today I can run around, if I warm up right I'm still faster than most guys even though I was never really fast per se, but before long I'll feel a little hitch and will know that either my day or at least my ability to go all out are done.

I regret nothing, despite the creaky knees and worthless hamstrings and cranky back that sports left me with. I'll be one of those guys who gets his knee replaced at 50, both by 55, working on hip replacement before retirement. It was all worth it. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, working harder, smarter, better. But I'm always sympathetic to the guy with the hamstring injury. Their pain takes me back to moments of pain, but also to days of joy.

Hubris Alert (Memory Lane Edition)

When I was a kid my Little League had a fundraiser. Some huckster brought in these plastic cups that we were to sell to family and neighbors and one of his main talking points, apropos for a group of boys, was that the cups were unbreakable. You could slam them against the floor, step on them, and generally abuse them and they would not break. To prove the point he distributed cups to all of us and allowed us to have our way. Cups were bouncing everywhere. I slammed mine against the floor like a wide receiver spiking a football after a touchdown. The unbreakable cup (white, with an imprint of a strawberry on it) cracked in two. I brought it triumphantly to the salesman. His only response, I kid you not, was "Oh, a wise guy, eh?"

The lesson: Avoid the hubris of proclaiming indestructibility. Do not claim that your ship is unsinkable. Do not claim that your plane (or helium-filled deathtrap) cannot crash. And do not claim that your new electronic passport with a microchip embedded in it is "foolproof against identity theft." Inevitably, some wise guy will clone it within minutes.

Postscript: Despite my revelation of the fallibility of the cups, my grandmother bought about a dozen, some of which were still extant upon her passing in 2003 and may be somewhere now for all I know. I made the All-Star team at first base that year playing for the Dodgers.

Mt. Washington

There are certainly taller mountains than New Hampshire's Mt. Washington. But there are not a lot of places that are more rugged. The Washington Post travel section featured Mt. Washington and its worst-in-the-world weather

this weekend. Twenty years ago this summer a group of friends and I spent a weekend hiking and camping high in Mt. Washington on a break from a summer program at St. Paul's School in Concord. The weekend still lives within me, and in my mind's eye I'll probably always be 17, surrounded by friends and the Presidential Range.

Political Memories

I just received the following in an email from the prodigal RoJo who has been deeply immersed in his study of Ronald Reagan:

I've "tagged" you in a "blog meme." This means you have to write a post about your earliest political memory - I'm not sure what the penalty for ignoring this is, but it's bound to be something terrible.

[Here's his.] Well, far be it from me to risk something terrible happening to me. Especially when the threat comes in a British accent, which, when not foppish and fey, can be quite sinister!

My earliest political memories come in montage version. I cannot claim to remember anything from Nixon's America, and I am not certain anyone remembers anything of the Ford experience. But I do recall bits and pieces from the Carter years. And I certainly remember seeing episodes of All in the Family, which probably introduced me to political culture as much as anything else in those days. I remember Mrs. Carter coming to my home town when she was First Lady and my little brother being excited to meet "Mrs. Washington" (he was about four as I recall). I remember the hostage crisis vividly, most notably my Mom owning a t-shirt depicting Mickey Mouse flipping the bird with the caption: "Hey, Iran!", which naturally was the greatest thing I had ever seen.

Even cooler is that I just found the image online.

By the 1980 I was nine and can clearly remember wanting Carter to lose and supporting Reagan, to the point where I was a budding political cartoonist and could do a pretty mean Reagan, usually involving him threatening to bomb someone and asking for jellybeans, both proclivities I supported at the time. Within a year of his election, however, I came to my senses. I was a liberal Democrat by 1982. I was eleven.

So my earliest memories come from the Carter years, but my political awareness emerged with the Hostage Crisis. I was eight when this played out on my little tv screen in our house on a cable-free dirt road in Newport, New Hampshire, so by my own recollection I was not especially politically precocious. I do have clear memories of sports, and especially baseball and the Red Sox that antedate my political memories or concerns, so I guess that particular path was already cleared even when I was young.

Appetite For Destruction at Twenty

Can it really be that Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction is twenty years old? The realization first hit me a couple of months ago when I pulled that seminal album out of my collection for the first time in a couple of years. It sounded as groundbreaking, as brilliant, as age-defining as ever, and then I realized that it was released in the summer of 1987, and for a brief, meteoric period they were the biggest, most exciting, most unpredictable, most rock and roll band in rock and roll.



It collapsed so quickly, and we've spent well more than a decade waiting for Axl Rose to release Chinese Democracy under the GNR name. Rolling Stone has a great cover piece on Appetite, which they excerpt here. It's almost impossible to believe that album could be twenty years old. It seems like just yesterday. And when the first vertiginous sounds of "Welcome to the Jungle" come directly at me from my speakers, it's the late 1980s, Axl & Slash rule the world, and the world is still ahead of me.