Why Teenagers Should Not Get Jobs

I was chatting with my friend Beth the other day about the difficulties I have traveling. My son’s Spring Break is coming up and I will be on four flights between Phoenix and Indianapolis the next two weekends.

The people at both airports, even the never-smiling TSA security agents, do what they can to make my trips as painless as possible. People working at hotels are a different story.

Me at the Grand Canyon on Oct.4, 2008

Amy and I attend a local charity’s annual dinner and auction. It’s our one time a year to dress up and “hob-nob” with the financially well-off. In 2008, Amy was the high-bidder for an overnight stay in a suite at the El Tovar, the 100-year-old hotel on the rim at the Grand Canyon.

While finalizing the reservations, we told the representative over the phone that we would exchange the suite for a handicap accessible room on the first floor. The only time we would be in the suite was while we were sleeping. All the rest of the time, we would be outside staring at the Grand Canyon.

Working the registration desk the day we got there was this teeny-bopper girl no more than age 22.

“Okay, you’re all set. You’ll be in Suite 263 just up those stairs and down the hall,” she said bubbly. Note that I am sitting on my handicap scooter at the time.

“We reserved a handicap accessible room on the first floor,” Amy responded.

“We don’t have any suites on the first floor,” was the answer.

In my attempt to make things easier, I told the reservation desk girl that we’ll take the suite on the second floor if she would direct us to the elevator. I got this “Lost in Space” blank stare.

In each episode of the late 1960’s television show, the robot would frantically wave its arms and say, “Does not compute. Does not compute.” That is what this chicky’s face was “saying” to me.

The owners of the El Tovar used the historic structure loophole in the Americans with Disabilities Act to get out of installing an elevator. After checking with the desk manager, she looked at me (remember I’m sitting on my scooter) and said “I’m sorry. We don’t have an elevator.”

“Then how does my scooter get ‘up the stairs and down the hall’?” I asked.

“Oh we have bell boys for that,” was the bubbly reply.

“You have a bell boy who can carry my scooter – WITH ME SITTING ON IT – up those stairs and down the hall?” I asked.

Once again, all I saw was “Does not compute. Does not compute.”

“That is why we need to have a room on the first floor,” Amy said.

And “Einstein” here replied, “But we don’t have suites on the first floor.”

March is Here! Time to Get to Work.

For the past 15 years, my father, my uncle and I have gone to Laughlin, Nevada for the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. This annual event is much more than just three guys getting away from their spouses and/or significant others for a what-happens-in-Laughlin-stays-in-Laughlin type of vacation.

From Left: Uncle Art, me and Dad.

Throughout the winter, we’re watching various teams on television, reading all kinds of articles in the newspaper and sport magazines, and checking to see if we saw the team that neither one of us thought even existed. When the conference tournaments start, we take control of our televisions and remote controls to watch every game. And I really mean every game.

Eventually “Selection Sunday” comes around. Dad, uncle and I have already decided who is going to be 1, 2, 3, 4 … 14, 15, 16 seeds, so the only question is: Did the selection committee get it right? That leads to two straight days of visiting school websites and the blogs of various college basketball pundits, and filling out more than one bracket. And then it’s time to go to work.

My uncle lives in Denver, my dad in Phoenix and I in northern Arizona. My uncle flies to Phoenix, he and my dad pick me up on the way, and for the next three hours we share our thoughts, reread the scouting reports and review our home-made statistic comparison charts.

Obviously, the purpose is to make money. Once in Laughlin, we get all of our “guaranteed”, “sure-to-win”, “no doubt about it” bets in and then we start looking over the other games for additional profits. When the first game starts, the three of us are with the thousands of other basketball junkies watching the games and screaming like school girls when the last second half-court heave goes in and makes us losers. We know enough about basketball to make us dangerous second guessers. “Why is the coach playing that guy? He’s going to foul in the next two minutes.” “Why is this guy still on the bench? He’s their best three-point shooter.” “Play zone defense.” “Play man-to-man defense.” “Get the ball to the center.” “He traveled!” “That wasn’t a foul!!!”

We do other guys-on-the-town things too – as wild as three men between the ages of 48 and 73 can do. We’re usually awake past 9 p.m., we might have two beers a day instead of one or none, and a comment stronger than “Great Googley Moogley” might come out of our mouths.

And though we may leave Laughlin with less money than we had when we drove into town, we’ll have memories to last the rest of our lives. We’ll meet some wonderful people, like the elderly couple from Vermont who taught us Pai gow Poker, or the guy from Chicago who made a large bet on a team the three of us were too afraid to bet on and walked away with a ton of money. And possibly, my uncle will inadvertently say something that will make an entire craps table stop because everyone, including the stone-faced pit boss, is laughing so hard.

But the memory that will forever be in my mind is that I spent this weekend with my Dad.

How to Get Yourself Killed

Hypothetical questions intrigue me. They’re the ones that start with “What if …”, like “What if there was no such thing as a hypothetical question?”

The hypothetical question rolling around in my brain today concerns the Pittsburgh at Louisville basketball game on February 27. Watch the video and then I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G5Y16pUgow&feature=related

 

By rule, when a non-player steps onto the court and flings the ball in the air, the referee can call a technical foul. Pittsburgh’s Aston Gibbs made the resulting two free throws and the game ended in a 62-59 Louisville victory in overtime.

I checked the Las Vegas betting odds (for entertainment purposes only!) and Pitt was getting 1.5 points. Here’s the “What if.”

If the score was 60-59 (instead of 60-57) when the Pitt player missed that easy shot and the Louisville player made the dunk shot, then the score would have been 62-59 – a three-point spread – and the pro-Louisville bettors would be winning with only three-tenths of a second to play. BUT, when the cheerleader flings the ball in the air and Gibbs makes his two free throws, then the final score would have been 62-61, and those pro-Louisville bettors would have gone from sudden winners to sudden losers.

A person who enjoys living should not do certain things, like wear a suit made of meat in a lion’s cage, sleep on railroad tracks, or make Vegas bettors sudden losers.

The moral of this story is: If you do nothing for three-tenths of a second, that nothing could save your life.

That Was an Idea

In 2009, Amy bought the empty house next door on short sale with the plan of renovating it to be a handicap-accessible rental. While some people would classify my position as “On-Site Supervisor”, in reality I was just some guy hanging around taking photographs.

The person who did 97.5 percent of the work was our good friend, Ed. Ed has an amazing construction talent, including finishing projects the way he knows is best, despite our occasionally “unique” suggestions.

“Now there’s an idea,” Ed would say.

It took Amy and me a while to catch on to Ed's subtlety. If the project hadn’t lasted four months, we would have missed it.

“How about turning one of the bedrooms into a basketball court?”

“Now there’s an idea.”

“It’s windy in northern Arizona. Let’s put a windmill on the chimney.”

“Now there’s an idea.”

Today, this two-bedroom, one-bath house does not have a windmill nor a basketball court.

 “Now there’s an idea” has become our catch-phrase for those suggestions we blurt out or actions we take without thinking of all the ramifications.

This year, I am my church’s little school’s Chairman of the Board. It’s okay if you don’t call me “Sinatra”. It’s only a pre-school and kindergarten, but the issues and rumors are tremendous.

Some want us to start higher grades. Some want us to stay the way we are. Some want us to stop everything and rebuild into something better. Some think our two teachers and two aides will be fired. Some think all the parents will remove their children. “The children are doing great.” “The children are failing.”

There seems to be something new every couple of days, and since I am Chairman of the Board, it eventually gets around to me, though often second and third hand.

I’m busier now than when I was working every day. This is an itty-bitty, two classroom pre-school and kindergarten in a church building, but the way people are talking, you’d think we’re discussing the future of Harvard.

I wasn’t smart enough to think of Ed when people suggested two years ago that I join the school board .

“You’ll be great on the board. It’s fun!”

“Yeah. Right. Now there’s an idea.”

Sometimes mothers need to shut up

I really enjoy college basketball. It’s an obsession.

I was born and raised in Indiana, a state infatuated with the game of basketball. Basketball to a Hoosier is like meth to a junkie. I got hooked on college basketball in the mid-1970s when Indiana University went 63-1 between 1974 and ’76 and won the 1976 NCAA National Championship. The 1975-76 Hoosiers were the last team to not lose a game the entire season and post-season tournament. I was then a student at IU when the basketball team won the National Championship in 1981 and watched the 1987 championship game with my former college buddies on the IU campus.

My addiction intensified about 10 years ago when I started joining my dad and uncle in Laughlin, Nevada for the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. I’ll describe those weekends in a future post.

While looking over game and team stories and blogs from college basketball writers I respect, I read some of the details about the Larry Drew III case. Drew III, son of a star basketball player and professional head coach, was a junior guard for the North Carolina Tar Heels until he suddenly left the team and the university on February 4, 2011. From Seth Davis’ blog (Davis is the college basketball writer for Sports Illustrated and is the “expert in residence” on the set for CBS Sports), I learned:

  Much has been made about the role that Larry Sr. might have had in his son's decision, but Drew's mother, Sharon, is a far greater problem. Sharon is the one who would call the coaches to complain about how many minutes her son was playing or how many shots he was getting. The news site Inside Carolina reported that in 2009 Sharon called the basketball office irate after she heard (head coach Roy) Williams spoke with John Wall, who was then a high school senior, about coming to play in Chapel Hill. (Wall played for one year at the University of Kentucky and is now a professional.) Sharon was the one who would protest how many tickets she was getting to games, and where her seats were. She is the one whose meddlesome tactics led the coach at Drew's former high school to dismiss his younger brother, Landon, from the team in the spring of 2010. The coach, Derrick Taylor, told the L.A. Times, "I informed [Landon] and his mother he could no longer be on the team. He's a great kid, but the circumstances are too unbearable." The school's principal later instructed Taylor to reinstate the player, saying "Landon can't be punished for adult behavior."

Sharon Drew reminds me of the mother who over-promoted her son to his coaches, athletic directors and the media in the late 1990’s. The boy we’ll call “David” was a forward at one of the high schools my paper covered in central Indiana. David was 6-foot-3 or 6-4 tall, weighed between 180 and 190 pounds and an okay basketball player – not good enough to be a starter, but better than the team’s manager.

David’s mother regularly complained to the coach, athletic director, and school principal about her son’s playing time. She then started impersonating other people wanting to see David play more. When that didn’t work, she would pretend to be the secretary of a famous and successful college coach and tell the athletic director over the phone this famous and successful coach would be personally scouting David at a particular game and the coach would really appreciate see David do more playing than watching. Shortly after laughing at the absurdity of a famous coach personally coming to see David play, someone looked at the college team’s schedule, and that team had a game at the same time David was playing his high school game.

David transferred to a private school before his senior year. Because the talent pool was much smaller at the private school, David became a starter.

The fall after David graduated from high school, David’s mother came to me saying her son will be playing college basketball – as a walk-on – at Utah State University. Based on what I knew of David’s skills and his mother’s bombastity, I knew it wasn’t true, but I had to check it out. I called the coach at David’s private high school and said “I hear David’s going to play ball at Utah State.” His reply was “Where did you hear that (poop)?” The coach said he could have gotten a couple of smaller colleges to offer David a scholarship, but David’s mother insisted he play at a major university.

I attempted to talk to Stew Morrill, who has been the head coach at Utah State for many years. I never actually talked to Morrill, but his secretary said “I know all the boys on our team, but I’m not familiar with that (David’s) name. I’ll talk to Coach and have him get back to you.” Two days later, I got a fax from Morrill’s office with a supposed quote from Morrill saying, “I love the guys on this team. We’re really excited about the upcoming season and NCAA tournament. Thank you for your inquiry into Utah State basketball.”

I eventually found David’s picture with the Utah State practice squad – the group of guys the real team beats up on when the real team is not playing for real.

I hate to admit it, but David’s mother left an indelible impression on me. I can’t help but laugh when I see the Utah State men’s basketball team on television.

My mom has made – and continues to make – an indelible impression on me. Fortunately, it’s an impression I will never hate to admit.