Behind the Scenes at the World Cup

Anybody who has read this blog will know: I don’t get the whole thing about sports. As proof of this, I report my initial reaction to one of the first games of the FIFA World Cup, which I saw on Father’s Day at my in-law’s house:

“The problem could easily be solved—and it surprises me that no one has thought of it—if the two teams would just cooperate. Whoever happened to have the ball at the moment would be perfectly free to put it wherever they want, included in that little netted area. That done, they would give the ball quite courteously to the other team. That way, everybody would be happy, and the scores would be phenomenal—can you imagine it? You’d have games with scores of 333,633 versus 975,813—and the crowd would be delighted, because apparently the big deal is to shout “GOALLLLLLLLL!” So the entire country would get laryngitis and could stay home in bed sipping hot tea, and resting their vocal cords—a nice bit of secondary gain. So who wins? Well, we total up both scores, and if it’s larger than a set amount, both teams win!”

Guess what?

Liany, Raf’s sister and a Montessori teacher, absolutely loved it. But the rest of the family?

Well, they were acting a bit more like the crowd that—inexplicably—had gathered in the lobby of the Fine Arts Cinema, which has a little café and, more importantly, a large screen television. And it was standing room only—every chair was taken. By chance, just when we arrived there, the Argentinians scored a goal, and the crowd erupted. Given that we were there to watch an opera, it wasn’t necessarily a god sign.

“Marc,” says María, a 20-year old who works at the café, “do you ever get the feeling that it’s just too much, the world? The corporations and the news media control everything, and the little people of the world are forced to pay more and more and are being manipulated by the media into being silent and thinking they’re happy….”

Was it time to sneak in the backdoor of adulthood and tell her that every generation has felt that way, has wanted to change the world, has been idealistic, and when she was older….

No.

I had spent twenty minutes, you see, watching the goings on in the slum, or favela, of Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, which in fact is getting a little ethnic cleaning done to it while the rest of us are enjoying the World Cup. Consider this quote:

In a bid to try and make the country appear much more socially acceptable to the influx of oblivious visitors and dignitaries who will be flying to the country to watch the games, the Brazilian authorities have forcibly evicted thousands of people from their shanty towns and gunned down others on the streets indiscriminately.

It is estimated that at least 40,000 poor people have been gone (sic) missing from the militarized favelas; while kids were killed with impunity in the ghettos which were then occupied by the police, who, according to insiders, later bragged about the amount of people they murdered.  

Or consider this:

Some in the stands vented their frustration by cursing President Dilma Rousseff, whose government footed a good chunk of the tournament’s $11 billion cost. Rousseff, who’s seeking a second term in October, can at least boast that the event came off without a hitch, contrary to what many expected. “People will be in a bad mood for a few days, but the Cup won’t decide the elections,” says João Augusto de Castro Neves, an analyst with Eurasia Group, a political consulting firm that gives Rousseff a 70 percent chance of winning.

I consider María, sitting in front of me: she’s not sleeping well, she’s not eating well, she’s depressed and anxious and worrying about what will happen in Puerto Rico. The effect of the economic crisis is beginning to be felt: the electric company has until the end of the month to figure out a scheme to restructure its debt, and if it doesn’t? Will they start selected blackouts, as rumored? Cut payroll, as feared? Who doesn’t have a relative working for the government? She talks about her fears, and soon is in tears; I get up to get a napkin. Later, in gratitude, she’ll bring me coffee.

I consider the people of Maré, who are getting used to the police bursting into houses and shooting anybody who might be a drug dealer. The people who have been displaced in order to have the stadia for these games built. Oh, and was there a report that stray dogs had been killed because it would be unsightly for the tourists? Think I remember seeing that….

Being an adult gives you experience, so I can trot out the speech that my mother once gave, about seeing so much progress in her life. Especially in civil rights, and rights for LGBT people, we’ve made real progress, if looked at over the decades. So I tell María that, and she looks unconvinced.

I’m not convinced, either. Both of the young women who spoke with me today had the same desire: to change the world. That’s good—I felt that way too, and most days still do. Everybody should want to change the world, especially at age twenty. I did.

The difference?

I believed I could do it…. 

Royalty on Several Levels

OK—two guys. One grows up in a very poor town in Venezuela, gets introduced to the violin as a child, and goes into an amazing program, El sistema. He goes on to do well, becoming the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which recently extended his contract. But he doesn’t forget his roots: he’s also the director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.

If you know classical music, you know Gustavo Dudamel; if you don’t, you won’t. But the other guy in the clips below you will know: Prince Henry of Wales. Now, as you can see below, given a baseball jersey / t-shirt and crowned Prince Harry of Harlem.

Well, the world needs heroes, and it may be that we need them more than ever. So Harry, along with his brother and sister-in-law, decided to create something called Coach Core, just before the Olympics in London last year. The three turned to an organization called Greenhouse, which works in London’s poorest communities, and which runs programs…well, wait. It’s easier just to copy / paste what they say about themselves…..

Greenhouse puts inspirational coaches into schools and community clubs to work with 8 to 18 year-olds across 10 areas; Football, basketball, table tennis, volleyball, judo, swimming, drama, multi-sports for young people with special educational needs, tennis and athletics.

Great idea, hunh? So now, the Coach Core program has its first  group of coaches: 23 college age kids who are working with Greenhouse Master Coaches to learn the arts and skills of coaching, as well as the fundamentals of child development and how to instill core values. Oh, and also something else—fundraising.

Well, that’s a tremendous story. But watching the clip below, I noticed the banner behind the speakers’ rostrum—Harlem RBI, it said. Right—time to check that out.

And what a find! It all started in 1991, when some volunteers got together and created two baseball diamonds in an abandoned lot. The next year, there was a year-round youth mentoring program for kids at risk, a newsletter, and a summer literacy program.

Important, because kids of middle class or upper class families do all right during the long summer vacations. They either progress academically or at least maintain what they’ve got. But kids in Harlem have nothing to do, and when they hit the classroom in September, they’re one or two reading levels behind. So here’s the deal: the 700 kids in the program read during the morning, and play baseball during the afternoon, for 6 weeks during the summer. It’s first come, first served—and importantly, it’s free.

But it’s not just about the summer program—the organization established a charter public school in 2008, and its kids are doing great. Here are the results:

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in Math by 91%

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) by 154%

•   Our fourth graders made the second biggest jump (out of 90 NYC charter schools) in improvement in ELA, and sixth biggest jump in improvement in Math. That's big progress!

•   Our third graders made an incredible showing in their first year of testing, outperforming last year's third grade cohort by double digits.

In both English and Math, DREAM fourth graders outperformed the school district average and the New York City average.

Because the summer program is old enough, the first graduates are coming back and telling the kids: “I was where you were. I buckled down and studied and graduated from high school and now I’m in college and nobody has ever done that before. Not in my family, at least….”

Oh, and how are they doing? Well, as you can hear in the clip below, 100% of the kids in the program graduate from high school, and 97% go on to college. That’s in a community where 50% of kids drop out of high school.

It makes a difference, you know, to see a guy from the ‘hood come back and tell his story. And yes, it’s cool when a British prince comes through the neighborhood, but it might be totally cool when Mark Teixeira comes onto the field. Look, the guy signed a $180 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees, and he’s got a World Series ring (don’t know what that is, but I assume it’s important).

Well, for a lot of kids, it’s baseball that teaches you team building, discipline, getting back up to the plate after you’ve struck out. For me, it was the cello, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra, and several inspiring men and women—all important.

Something similar happened to Gustavo Dudamel. Here’s his story, taken directly from his website:

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009, Gustavo Dudamel hails from humble beginnings in the small town of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Born in 1981, he began violin lessons as a child with José Luis Jiménez at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory. He continued his violin studies with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin American Academy of Violin. His conducting studies began in 1996 with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and, the same year, he was given his first conducting position, Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.  In 1999, he was appointed Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and began conducting studies with the orchestra’s founder, Dr. Abreu; a few years later in 2004, Dudamel was brought to international attention by winning the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Competition. These early musical and mentoring experiences molded his commitment to music as an engine for social change – a lifelong passion.

You know, guys like Dudamel and Teixeira are my heroes, much more than a prince. Oh, but sorry—I’ve forgotten the real heroes, those two teachers in the clip below, who walk into a classroom every day, take attendance, call Billy out for screwing around, give permission for Ginny to go to the bathroom, and then start teaching.

Nobody else in our society is more important.

Performance Through Panic?

If true, it’s amazing.

The problem?

I don’t think it’s true.

But what do I know? I don’t play golf. So I have no way of knowing whether Charlie Beljan—28-years old, recently married, recently childed (his son was born in September), and needing a top ten finish to stay in the PGA—played his way through a panic attack to win the Children’s Miracle Network Classic.

OK, so I don’t know anything about golf. But I do know something about panic attacks, having had two or three at the beginning of this year. That said, could I have done a routine activity, an activity I had spent thousands of hours to perfect?

Teaching. I have taught for twenty years, and the average person works 2000 hours per year. So, I have an estimated 40,000 hours of teaching notched on my belt. Could I have taught a class—that day the decision to hurl myself into the stream of cars or fish out my cell phone and call for help was made by convention only?

No.

Well, the clip below lets you see for yourself. Something is clearly happening. I don’t think it’s a stunt. I’m convinced that what was happening was exactly what we see—a guy struggling with anxiety, a man battling demons.

And Beljan was fighting some heavy odds. There are three things, scientists say, that completely remap your brain: getting married, having a child, moving to a foreign country. Beljan was married early in the year, and his first son was born two months ago.

Never had the experience, but I’ve heard about it. Yes, initially it’s exhilaration. But it quickly turns to exhaustion.

So he’s already under stress. And then, last Friday, on the second round of the first day of the golf tournament, he goes into a panic attack. And emerges with a 64—his second best performance.

Gets into an ambulance, goes to the hospital, gets a battery of tests. Comes out the next day, and decides to do the last two rounds. “I was crying on the range because I was so afraid these feeling would come back,” the New York Times quotes him as saying.

Two other quotes:

1.     Beljan also picked up a paycheck of $846,000

2.     “I never tried to make golf something more than it is.”

Well, my question would be ‘what is it?’ Is it a game or a high-risk, high-exposure job under conditions that you mostly cannot control? The Times quotes an expert as saying that golf is the most mental of games (though what about chess?).

And certainly sports is about pressure, and how we react to it. My current theory is that guys, for most of our evolution, were hunters. The chase, the hunt, the kill are bred into us. The corporate world isn’t quite the forest or savannah we crave. A football stadium with 250-pound muscled beasts facing us is more to the taste.  

And there’s a term in sports—the choke. A talented player, someone who has worked ceaselessly to perfect his game, loses it completely, enters into a panic, gets worse, gets tight, starts to analyze when he should relax. It’s a horrifying spectacle to see. (Even worse to go through, as I have….)

My take? Beljan did a reverse choke. He was operating under extreme stress, but somehow never lost his automaticity. Look at the clip—yes, he’s gasping for air and crouching on the sidelines (or whatever golfers have). But when he’s playing? He seems as loose as a jellyfish.

My question? What would have happened if he had lost, just for a second, that automaticity, that ease? For most of the time, that’s what happens. A missed note, a missed shot—the shoulders go up, the forearms tense, sweat forms and runs down the fingerboard. The next high note will now be harder, you think, and then….

…you’re spiraling down.

Did Beljan trust his body so much that he never lost flow?

Think so.

Panic attack?

No.