“I looooove the cover!” a considering reader says as she picks up and thumbs through my latest book. 

“Me, too,” I tell her. “The story that birthed it is every bit as good.”

Then with eyes that hold the door agape, she invites me to go on. 

Every gameday, prior to tip-off, my assistant coach would print off a bare-bones paper we called “Post Game Thoughts.” We passed these out to our players in the locker room immediately following their sprint up the tunnel after games. 

The house I grew up in was always stocked with red rags. We had them in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, the corner of the laundry room, the bathroom floor next to the plunger (just in case). But we didn’t only keep them there. The ever-absorbent automotive staples were also stacked knee high in tenuous towers on the floor of my dad’s painting shed. A sack stuffed full of them rode around with us behind the bench seat of his Ford Ranger, a few bumped along in the trough of his golf cart, and one was often hanging halfway out of the back pocket of his jeans. Before the days of disposable everything, these industrial towels were our clean-up go-tos. We never knew when we would need one, but a red rag was within reach in case we did.

And like the Energizer Bunny, they lived on and on and on.

Values drive decisions. Big ones in hairy times. Small ones when no one’s looking. Gnarly ones deeply embedded beneath shrouds of bells and whistles and tangled tresses. What we really believe in the core of our gut serves as our navigational rudder. It keeps our heads clear, allowing us to move quickly. Act consistently. Find our way through the mud and the muck. Our principles function as both a lighthouse and a compass to help us make our way. 

When we keep them top of mind, that is.

The official tossed the ball, supposedly straight but slightly sloping toward the visitors’ side of the half-court line. Our center, perched in the supreme ready position, her dominant arm crooked like a statue’s ready to unfurl and reach, took full advantage of the gift in an alien gym. Rising to meet the ball at the top of its flight, she tipped the leather prize toward our wide-eyed teammate who was posted-up on the edge of the circle, hand extended like a catcher’s mitt.  The tip-off  was soft and right on target. Our eager teammate pulled it in, then spun on her opposite foot, simultaneously pushing the ball off the floor in front of her as she raced toward the open goal. It only took two bounces to get to the rim where she cleanly kissed it off the glass for the first two points of the game.

The jam-packed gym went wild.

Start with the socks.  That’s what Coach Wooden said to do. Put them on attentively. Get the stitches on the toe-line straight then pull them tight, smoothing the cotton insulation to and around the heel before securing the ribbing snuggly above the ankle. “You want to make sure they stay in place,” said the Wizard of Westwood. 

Wrinkles pass their problems up. 

A few words from my favorite author, Anna Quindlen…

At first a dribble thuds. In virgin care, the basketball is a foreign object that seems more square than it is round. But fingertips learn fast. A symbiotic relationship forms in the crouched rat-a-tat-tat of repetition where handlers recognize early, the give of supple leather separated by predictable seams. The ball teaches you how to bounce it, if you hang out with it enough.

Just a few days after the glittery New Year’s Eve ball dropped as everybody was lacing-up their tennis shoes and heading to work out, I overheard a stranger say that she’d made it all the way through 2024 without buying any clothes. Three-hundred-sixty-five days without an apparel purchase. Impressive. Not a pair of socks. Not a sports bra. Not a trendy jacket or a pair of jeans. 

All the plexiglass goals in the gym had been swung up by their mechanical arms toward the rafters, their nets hanging sideways, still, closed for business for the day.

Happy New Year!!! The blog will return next Tuesday, January 7, 2025.

Thank you for reading in 2024!

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dear Santa,

The countdown is on. Only a week left until you kiss the wife and board the sleigh. Do you feel harried, like we do?

My guess is no. 

All my teams got the iceberg talk.  We had a paper handout -- clearly before digitization – that we passed out for our players to put in their notebooks on Day One. An enormous floating glacier shelf provided palpable fodder for an important conversation with our team about what the outside world sees and what it doesn’t. The players the media doesn’t feature, the traits that must support the skill sets, the stuff most would call mundane—we had to understand how much it mattered, regardless of the attention it did or did not garner. Though we marvel at the shiny, frozen chunks that proudly poke out above the water, ninety percent of an iceberg’s mass lies below the surface.

“Once-shattered confidence re-breaks easily in familiar places.”  I just entered that in my phone. I said it to a friend this morning while discussing his team’s painful plight in a contest that reflected the worst of them. The sentence, sitting on the shards of a lopsided loss, has a story I can touch. It illuminates and helps us both to find a why-now-how that grounds us. Roots stretch out in all directions around the words. Maybe they still will in a month. Maybe they still will in a year. But then again, maybe they won’t. Most likely when I return to find this sentence under a random “Thoughts” heading on my iPhone, I won’t see the thinking that came before and after. The sentence will float as an alien object disconnected from the shaky ground that bore it. The tenderness will be gone.

A friend of mine once drove from Los Angeles to Yonkers in a flight of panic. Straight through. No pause to see a landmark. No stop to collect two hundred dollars.  No foray to a diner he’d heard about in the news. He just jumped in his car and drove.

We had a robust Japanese Maple just out and to the left of our back door. The breathtaking cultivar started out small but grew crazy over the years, eventually peeking above the roofline and reaching all the way across the flagstone sidewalk it lived beside. I could never bring myself to cut it back. Its branches stretched up and out in haphazard fashion but its foliage, even on the low branches that hovered inches above the ground, turned so brilliant in autumn my heart wouldn’t let me give it a trim. Its leaves would morph from their everyday green (a color you can grow numb to if not careful) to arresting glow-in-the-dark orange when the temperatures started to drop. In the days when dark begins to descend early, the specimen stood like a lantern marking the spot where the pathway turned.

Reposting a thought line that seems fitting for such a time as this . . .

My dad once ran for school board in the small rural town where I grew up. There was some fuss about our superintendent-- best I remember-- though specific fuss about what I’m no longer sure. (If indeed I ever was.) I just remember people being wound up. Almost everyone in the 14 square miles of our oil-field community had pledged allegiance to an opinion and thus had chosen a side. Our tiny town was as fractured as an oil-and-gas pay zone after the drilling is done.

And my dad--of all people--was vying for a chance to enter the fray.

I’m a trier. If you peeled away the flesh and dug inside my bones, you’d find a never-resting, fluttering chaotic mess of WANT-TOs, HAVE-TOs, and NEED-TOs balled up around themselves. For all the things I’m not (and there are many), and all the things I am (though there are several that I wish I weren’t), this one thing they could carve upon my tombstone: “A striver is resting here.” It would be, at once, both gloriously and painfully true.

“Get off the stage, Cash, get off the stage,” Johnny used to say. The country-music legend, known for his growly delivery of born-from-real-life lyrics, found the line between “fairly average” and “truly one-of-a-kind” a razor thin tripwire. In the early 1990s, music producer Rick Rubin began recording Cash singing and strumming in Rubin’s living room. As he asked the musical storyteller to play the songs of his life, Rubin found himself mesmerized by the intimate connectivity of the lyrics pulsing through the man. After a while, the two decided that the informal sessions of self-expression would make an enduring album, so they set up to record. As soon as the light turned red, however, Rubin noticed a change in Cash. The iconic balladeer began performing instead of musically telling his truth.

Part of his heart was missing.