The Three Stages of Cinnabon

Stage 1: "I have to have one! It smells irresistable!"

Stage 2: "Oh man. This is so good."

Stage 3: "I should not have eaten that."

Pro? Am?

I'm pretty sure everyone who watches sports, at some point, has wanted to be a professional athlete. And 99% of those people had delusions of becoming a pro athlete. I'll share when the dream died for me.

We had a weekly tennis club in middle school. We would play on the parking lot behind school with these crappy nets. There were four or five courts, I think, and the courts were arranged in a hierarchy. The worst players were on the far left, the best players on the far right. By the time eighth grade was over, I was the best player on the best court. To me, it stood to reason that I was going to move on to high school, be the best player on the high school team, go to college, become the best player there, then move into the pros. I never said it had any ground in reality.

So my freshman year, I had my first match of my career against Chagrin Falls. I was playing second doubles. One of the opposing players showed up wearing jeans that were a little tight and a little short, and there was a pack of Camel Lights sticking out of one of the pockets. He and his partner proceeded to clean our clocks. My pro aspirations ended that day.

I watch a lot of pro tennis and follow it pretty closely, and on more than one occasion, I wish I was there on tour. Lately, though, I've been thinking: Is that really the best scenario?

To get to the professional ranks, you have to have a singular focus. How many pro athletes are well-rounded people? It doesn't seem to be a high number. Baseball players, for some reason, seem to be particularly stupid. Pro athletes essentially live on another planet. They have money beyond the dreams of most and do not interact with the common man, usually. They exist separate from the rest of humanity. It's extremely difficult for them to stay grounded. How many athletes go broke soon after retiring because they couldn't manage their money? How many get busted for drugs because they need the rush?

It might not be worth it. A sports career doesn't really contribute much to the human race, all things considered. There might be an Arthur Ashe or Muhammed Ali that comes along every once in a while, but they're rare. I feel like I'm more connected to humanity, better well-rounded, more intelligent than the average professional sportsman. I feel like I have the opportunity to do things to really make the world better, and that I don't have contempt for the common man that rich athletes do.

I'm not saying I wouldn't join the ATP if I was offered the opportunity. I'm also not saying I'm better off the way I am. But perhaps the life of the pro athlete is not as awesome as we'd like to think, and maybe our "common" lives are better than we realize.

This Might Not Make Sense

The average IQ is 100. This provides an objective benchmark for comparing people, but most of us use ourselves as the standard. We consider people smarter than us to be smart and those not as smart to be, well, not smart. This is OK when you're average intelligence, but what if you're not? Are dumb people considering slightly less dumb people smart? Are smart people considering slightly less smart people dumb? Does that truly matter?

The older I get, the more I think the "ignorance is bliss" axiom is true. I think this is because I look around and I see a lot of people wrapped up in their consumerism and/or their own worlds, and they all seem pretty happy. Meanwhile, the people who like to take a deeper look and change things don't seem to be quite as thrilled with the world¹. Change never came from those who were satisfied.

It's well documented that many great artists and thinkers had problems with depression and other disorders. This is not likely a coincidence; it seems harder, for some reason, to produce great things when you're happy.

It's like some sort of devil's bargain. Most people who are smart and/or gifted probably wouldn't trade it for the sort of carefree demeanor the less worldly seem to enjoy, but it seems to come with some sort of torture mentally or emotionally. There is a price to be paid. Faulkner probably doesn't write The Sound and the Fury if he loved everything, right? It seems to be harder to be happy, the smarter and/or more gifted you are. It's like you see things, and you see how it's all wrong, and it's all you can focus on. And nobody else is able or willing to see it that way. How can you possibly be happy?

Maybe The Matrix was on to something. If you saw the truth, how could you deal with it? Those people never seemed happy, but they didn't want to trade their knowledge for happiness. Except Cypher, of course.

What it comes down to is I think the mentally and artistically exceptional have a sort of burden, something trying to drag them down. Some hide it, some don't acknowledge it, but it's there. Some overcome it, some embrace it, some merely fight it to a standstill. But it exists. There's a reason Alanis Morisette stopped making good music after she wasn't angry anymore. How many people still listen to "Thank U"?

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1 I realize this sounds really bitter and kind of elitist. This is not intentional.

Just Down the Road From King's Island...

I'm excited! This week is the ATP tournament in Cincinnati. For the second straight year, I'll be attending. I went for the first time in 2003¹, then again last year.

The first time, it was the excitement of seeing pro tennis in person for the first time. Everything was a new experience, and it was pretty overwhelming in a great way. Last year was fun and newish because five years had passed, so many of the players at the tournament I hadn't seen before. I was seeing almost all of them for the first time.

That won't be the case this year. In fact, this won't even be the first tournament I attend this year; I spent a day at the Sony Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne. I actually was within five feet of Roger Federer. This was when things were looking like they were falling apart for him and everyone thought he was kind of done, but I was still in awe to be near him. I've been in close proximity to all of the world's top players except Juan Martin Del Potro. Nobody had me as awestruck as Federer². Being near Nadal was kind of like being near a rock star. Djokovic was kind of like a guy you know from the bar. Andy Murray seemed like he was amused by it all.

So I think I'm going to be entering this with a bit more poise. I won't have the sense of discovery. I like that feeling, but it will be nice to know what I'm doing and maximize my time there. If you've never been to a pro tennis event, there's a lot of things to do there. It can be overwhelming. You never see it on TV, but there are multiple courts, a huge food court³, and shopping. Lots of shopping.

I'm planning on bringing my camera this time. I'm not much of a photographer, but hopefully I'll come out with some good shots. It's gonna be a blast.

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1 You can see some unexciting pictures from that trip on my Facebook page.

2 A couple months ago, I planned on writing a short entry. Roger said he still believed he could beat Nadal on clay, and I was going to poo-poo him and basically say that window had closed. Of course, he goes out and beats Nadal at Madrid, then wins the French Open and Wimbledon. I'm thankful for my laziness.

3 And the food is pretty good and not unreasonably priced. At Key Biscayne, I had a delicious mahi mahi sandwich for less than $15. It's a better deal than it might sound.

Candy Sweet

I realize my window of opportunity for dating a girl with pink hair is quickly closing. I find this depressing. I feel like this is something I should get to do.

Snort of a Problem

One of the nice things about pro tennis is that it has so far avoided the steroid scandal that other sports have become embroiled in. I'm not sure why this is¹. However, a drug of an entirely different sort has reared its ugly head: Cocaine.

Perhaps tennis is just 30 years behind baseball. What makes this all noteworthy are the circumstances behind the cases and the rules regarding cocaine. Firstly and most shockingly, cocaine is considered a performance enhancing substance. No, really. If there is a way to describe coke, "performance enhancing" is not one of them².

The penalty for a first-time cocaine offense? Two year ban. No, really. That seems perfectly reasonable and just for a recreational drug. Not counseling, a fine, or even a one month ban. Two years.

Two top players have been busted in the last two years: Martina Hingis in 2007 and Richard Gasquet this year. In both cases, the player denied using steroids and fought the ban. Hingis' attempts were rebuffed; Gasquet was cleared.

There are so many levels of stupidity behind these things, it's hard to sort them out. Hingis' defense centered around inconsistencies in the testing and handling of samples. This is generally a bad idea; organizations do not like the accusation they did something wrong. It's not much of a surprise, then, that her appeal failed. What was Gasquet's accepted defense? That he kissed some girl at a nightclub, and she probably did some coke, and that resulted in his failing the test. No, really.

Read the finding by the tribunal in his appeal. Try not to marvel at the how dumb Gasquet's story is and how idiotic the panel had to be in order to buy it.

Gasquet's positive test was 151 ng/ml. This is the equivalent of the size of a grain of salt. Hingis? 42 ng/ml. That's right, a trace of cocaine one-third the size a grain of salt triggered a two-year ban that effectively ended her career. I can't completely fault the tennis governing bodies for this; they follow the World Anti-Doping Agency and this is their rule. However, it's a stupid rule and doesn't do any good.

Oh, and just for fun: The amount you need to fail a test in the American military is 150 ng/ml³. So it's actually easier to fail a cocaine test if you're an athlete than if you're in the armed forces. Now which are you more concerned about being on coke?

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1 And frankly, I don't really care. If steroids made Rafael Nadal the fist-pumping, testosterone-exuding champion he is, great! I want to see tennis played as well as it possibly can be.

2 I realize it could theoretically help. But seriously, do you really think people are snorting coke and benefiting from it?

3 I can't find the list of WADA cutoff amounts. If anyone can, send it my way, please.

You Really Like Me

In addition to posting my entries on Blogger, Facebook also imports all my pieces to my Facebook account. Sometimes people will use the "like" function on those posts. I don't know what exactly that means, and it really bothers me.

Kids and Their Rock'N'Roll

I write this at the risk that I sound old and curmudgeon-y at the tender age of 25.

I've come to the determination that either the current crop of kids suck, or the music that defines them does. Possibly both. Music is the medium that really defines a generation. Movies try, but they don't. How many times have you really watched a movie and thought, "Yeah, I really feel like this is my life"? More importantly, how many times do you look back at a movie and think that? Now how many times do you look back at the music you listened to when you were in middle/high school and feel like that music reflected your world view or mindset?

I realize I'm not exactly breaking new ground here. But if you look at the 90s, you can see how the young generation looked at life. They were angry. They were confused. They didn't know what to do, but they knew who they were blaming. Nirvana still resonates to this day, even though it was a corporate production¹. Pearl Jam is still doing its thing, and they're still beloved. People still identify with them. You know the mentality of the alt-rock crowd. You know the mentality of the ska crowd². What's the zeitgeist of pop and rock music today? Kind of ugly.

If I'm missing something, please correct me. But I just see it today and it's just... nothing. Maybe it's just a logical extension of the increasing jadedness of Americans. Maybe it's the logical extension of the consumerism and lack of meaning we find with aspects of society. Maybe they're distracted. I just think it's pretty sad, the prospect of Fall Out Boy being the voice of a generation.

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1 I think that's a real tribute to the talent of the people involved.

2 If you listen to ska, which doesn't have wide appeal.

Marilyn Monroe

It's a bit mystifying to me that Marilyn Monroe is held up as this sort of paragon of feminism by my generation. Have these people actually spent the time to learn about who she was an what she did? She slept with anyone and everyone. She was an alcoholic and a druggie.

So, yeah, aspire to that.

Two Face

Some words of wisdom from my roommate, Steven C. Porter:

"You have two modes: Really exciting... and everything else."

The Man Across the Net

The human existence is driven by rivalries. We thrive on competition, even if that rivalry is with ourselves. Think about it: The Cold War was really just a rivalry with the US and Soviet Union. Politics thrives on rivalries, especially in this country. You have a rivalry with at least one of your friends in something. The instinct to one-up is hardwired inside us.

This is doubly true in sports. They don't just thrive on rivalries, we need them. If we don't have them, we create them. They are the most important part of the season. The effects of a rivalry are astounding. Winning that game means more than any other win, except a championship. It inspires players to raise their games higher than they had before or knew they could. A rivalry brings more attention and interest to a game than it otherwise would. It's art (sports) imitating life.

I had a rivalry of sorts in my high school career. I say "of sorts" because it was one-sided, and as the old saying goes, it's not a rivalry if one side wins all the time. It was with one of my teammates, Andy Keller.

Andy was/is a friend of mine. We had a lot in common, we were teammates, we had some gym classes together. We saw each other a lot back in the day. He's a good guy.

While I had started playing tennis in middle school, he didn't pick up the sport until his sophomore year of high school (my freshman year). When he joined the team and he wasn't very good, of course, because he didn't yet know how to play. So we played a couple times and I beat him. He started the year on the JV team.

He proved a quick study, moving up to second doubles by the time the season ended. When the next season rolled around, he was a lot better. All of a sudden, I couldn't beat him. His friend Jason also joined the team, and while he wasn't a very good tennis player, he was such a good athlete it was extremely difficult to get a ball by him, and he won matches that way. I wasn't good enough at that time to beat somebody like him, so I went from thinking I was going to be one of the best three best players on the team to not being able to beat a guy I could before and this other guy that had just picked up a racquet.

It was frustrating. I thought I was getting better, but Andy clearly was, too. I never beat him in those last two years he was on the team, and I haven't beaten him since¹. Andy, in fact, was the #1 singles player on the team his senior year². Is he better than me? Yes, but not so much so that he should beat me 100% of the time. He's a little bit faster than me, a little bit stronger, a little bit tougher mentally. Having a lot of little advantages really adds up, more than you might think. I had better volleys and a better second serve, but he made it tough for me to get up to the net.

It came down to my mentality. I didn't think I could beat him, so I never did. One time we were playing and we had to quit tied 5-5. We picked it up the next day, and all I could think was, "Just don't lose the next eight points in a row." What did I do? Exactly that. Why did I do that? Stupid. What made it worse was it would almost always be by close scores; I would just fold at the critical moments.

For his part, I doubt Andy ever saw it this way. Like I said, we were friends, and he was always nice and encouraging. I pulled out an old yearbook not long ago and read what we wrote. Not only did it make me laugh out loud, but I also noticed how he went out of his way to try and pump me up. So maybe I didn't have the requisite anger to really want to beat him for any reason other than my own ego.

One irony about all of this is that I haven't played since I realized all this. I really think I can beat him now. It's partially because I think I'm stronger mentally, but mostly because he doesn't really play anymore. We just don't live near each other these days. It's sad, because we still get along well.

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1 I could beat Jason, who was almost as good.

2 I suspect Joe Ziska intentionally allowed Andy to beat him before positions were set so that Joe could play easier opponents. All three of our singles players that year were pretty close in skill, which was good for the team.

Summertime, Summertime

This article by Steve Tignor¹ had me feeling nostalgic. It's a little weird to feel nostalgic about summer during summer, but think about it. It's not quite the same, is it?

I suppose that's one of the consequences of aging: Summer just doesn't quite have that magic. On the face of it, it makes sense; school is out, you have no responsibilities other than making sure you come home alive when the sun sets, and there was just a sense that you could do anything. The days were wide open. Sometimes you had a thing planned that you knew you were going to do, but more often than not you would get together with your friends and ask, "What are we going to do today?" If you were anything like my group of friends, you'd spend half the day trying to figure that out, but when you did, it was on.

I spent more than one summer this way: Get up, call Josh Crawford, go outside, play basketball in the driveway for 10 hours², sit on the porch when it was finally too dark to play. Throw in an Indians game once or twice a week³ and it was summer well spent. I remember that semi-humid haze of a summer dusk, when it was not quite cool but not really hot and the sky was sort of a ruddy color. Sitting there on the porch, it was just really nice. In high school, it would be going to the tennis courts at end, turning on the lights, and just playing in that warm summer air and imagining it was the US Open with the lights on. We would play well past midnight sometimes, just because we could.

Like all youth, I was foolish enough to think it would always be like that. Now, summer doesn't hold that promise of possibilities Why? There's a variety of reasons. For one, I think I have friends now that prefer to be inside than outside⁴. I also have a lot of friends that are married or in committed relationships now, so they're hanging out with their significant others and not me. Probably more importantly, we have jobs and commitments and other things. We can't just go outside and run around for no reason. We almost have to have a reason to go outside and have fun; it has lost its intrinsic value.

As I got older, I spent less time outside. Why? I'm not sure. It seemed like movies, videogames, etc. just held our interest more. The thing is that I don't think I've ever regretted spending a day outside; there have been many an occasion I regretted not doing so.

Summer hasn't changed, of course, we have. I would still take summer 100 times out of 100 instead of winter or fall. Perhaps I need to learn to appreciate summer in a different way. I've come to appreciate waking up to a brilliant azure sky instead of the gray dinge with which winter greets us. Maybe I need to take the bull by the horns and just get out there more⁵. It's a lot easier to just go to work, go home, eat, and do other things. And by the time I realize it, the day is gone and it's already night. Carpe summer⁶?

(Side note: Hey, hey! Blog post #100! Here's to the second century mark.)

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1 He's become one of my favorite writers. He also uses the technique I think is necessary to be a successful tennis writer: He writes about the things surrounding the game, the spirit of it. He combines this with unparalleled insight and good humor.

2 You would think playing that much would have made me good at it. It did not.

3 My parents were partial season ticket holders.

4 I'm starting to think this is a consequence of getting older. Kids want to be outside all the time. Adults do not. Why? Maybe we feel the temperature more, maybe we get used to the comfort of being inside.

5 I underestimated how much easier it is to be outside all day when there someone else making your meals for you.

6 Something that I've found is that it's so much more enjoyable to do nothing outside than it is inside. Even if it's just reading or updating your blog, it's a lot better to do so outside. That's what I'm doing right now.