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| This is warm compared to this morning |
It was six degrees this morning outside my window.
Yikes.
I'm at work now, but have a few minutes to gather my thoughts and try to present them in a way that will be enlightening, charming, and oh whatever.
I see the world is handling things juuuusst fiiiinnne this week. No, I can not type those words with a straight face. The behavior of this country is sad. Obsessed. And so on.
For someone like me, there is nowhere to run to (Martha and the Vandellas, 1965). I can't afford to hide on an island or bury my head in the sand. So I turn my collar to the cold and damp (I'd like to think no explanation is necessary on that one, but it's Simon and Garfunkel, originally in 1964) and keep pushing forward.
I mean, I simply don't have the bandwidth to do battle. As such, I mostly ignore it all. And I try to go into my "I don't care" bubble.
Or I pick my fights.
But, for the record, stop. Please. We're all guilty of the divide.
*****
While I'm on that rant, no rule says one must engage on a topic. Any topic. You can simply keep scrolling. I do it all the time. It's not that difficult.
There is this desperation to be the smartest person in the room (even virtually). There's also an obsession with fighting and arguing. There's just no need.
And the macho "tough guy" stuff online. It's nuts, such as the witch hunt for who didn't vote for Ichiro to be in the Hall of Fame. One person -- one -- didn't vote for him, keeping Mariano Rivera as the lone unanimous inductee.
It also happened with Derek Jeter and, well, OK. So be it. I'm not going to rescind that person's voting right nor do "I want to meet the one person that didn’t think Ichiro was a Hall of Famer," as one nitwit said.
For the record, that one voter is a fool but it's still their right.
*****
It's been a month of working. But not enough working. We're surviving. Barely.
But, still, there are games to call and I'm doing what I do.
I posted a tweet/X/whatever this morning calling for all young broadcasters to be mentored. I stand by that belief.
I've seen it. Entitlement, lack of preparation, bias, etc. Overall, forgetting how lucky they -- we -- are to be there.
I'm extremely fortunate to be moving towards 2,000 game broadcasts. I've been welcomed at so many different places to call a game and am overall grateful for every stop -- from stools on a sideline in a small gym to a heated booth at Cardinal Stadium to a two-level suite at Fenway Park.
I'm additionally grateful when schools work with me to make it all work but, at the end of the day, it's up to me. So when Harrison High School put us in an auditorium to call a football game and I had to look through a window over ten feet away with no view of the end zone to my left, we made it work. In that case, I sent Chris Erway to the field with a wireless microphone. We survived. We laughed about it.
An athletic director has enough to do without dealing with us. So we minimize any grief.
For the record, I called basketball last night at Greenwich High School. Times have changed and I no longer sit at center court to call a game like I did in 1999. Instead, athletic director Peter Georgiou and site manager Joe Urbano set me up with a folding table in the corner of the gym, near the Greenwich bench.
Perfect. No complaints.
But consider this. You're a young broadcaster. You're calling sports. You're following your classmates around, explaining their athletic exploits to a waiting audience. These are calls and moments that will live forever. Don't you want to do it the right way? Don't you want to do it where your call and behavior are both things to be proud of?
More than anything, don't you want to simply do your "job" and stay mostly out of the way?
That's my approach, I suppose, but to each their own.
Regardless, it's often the "Wild West" with young announcers. They need guidance to improve and to decide if they want to stay in the business at all. And, frankly, they need criticism -- sometimes blunt and honest. Even those who wanted to only be mentored by top-level broadcasters got treated like that by me. Not naming names.
They know. Maybe.
I'd just like to see us elevate the business, especially given how the media is viewed.
*****
One last note: last night's game broadcast was only on Robcasting. It was sadly last-minute but exists now in archival form. What it was supposed to be was the beginning of a span of winter games on WGCH (and Robcasting).
I'm confident that WGCH will join us soon. I'm planning to call another Greenwich game very soon (possibly tomorrow or Friday).
Being back in the GHS gym brought back a flood of memories of great games and great people.
But in the end, it produced a 57-52 upset win for Greenwich over undefeated Staples. A lot of people were smiling as they walked out.
Including me.
Turning my collar to the freezing Greenwich night.
