That Championship Season

When I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago, I feel sad.

The coach and four members of his state champion basketball team are five such men in the Pulitzer Prize play in 1973. The team gets together every year on the anniversary of their win, and That Championship Season takes place at their twentieth reunion.

Though they are still under forty, these former stars of the court spend most of their time looking back. Life is behind them. Everything else pales in comparison with that championship season. But by their Big Two-Oh anniversary, the Big Win from  Long Ago is proving to be a thin thread for holding together the loyalty of the starting five who once swore “all for one and one for all for always.”  This could be The Last Reunion.

I saw the play in a small theatre in lower Manhattan and afterward wound up on the same uptown subway car with one of the actors in the original cast.  We talked about the show, and he said the author, Jason Miller, based the play on middle-aged men he knew in Pennsylvania. As preparation for doing the play, Miller took the cast to his basketball-loving home state where they visited bars frequented by men much like the characters in the play. These true-life former jocks were still cursing each other for mistakes they made on the court decades earlier.

Even with this testimonial from the actor, I tended to think Miller’s play as greatly exaggerated. People don’t get that worked up over a ball game and stay worked up for twenty years. But then, I think of where I live.  Less than twenty miles up the road, the football stadium at Clemson University seats eighty thousand fans.

More than thirty years ago, the Clemson team was declared national champions after a post-season win at the Orange Bowl. Ever since, that championship season has been a benchmark for football patrons.  On the twentieth anniversary of the Big Win, a newspaper quoted someone as telling the winning coach, the 1981 Orange Bowl win was the greatest moment of his life. This not from a former player but simply an ardent fan. 

Our local newspaper publishes a sports magazine dedicated to Clemson teams. The Orange and White is named after the team colors. Many papers sell metal containers readers can mount on posts at the street near their mail boxes so the carrier can put the daily paper in a safe, dry place. For several years, those containers in our town were orange and white. The containers carried no mention of the teams, but the colors conveyed a silent message for many athletic boosters. 

Win, lose, or draw, clothiers cash in on team loyalty, selling orange wearing apparel: pants, shirts, sweat suits, T-shirts, caps, and, for all I know, underwear. On home game days, many fans are seen around town  before and after the game wearing some or all of the above. 

My thought after the Orange Bowl and twenty years later was, “Let us pause briefly while everybody says, ‘Who cares?’” I am probably in the minority with this attitude, but that doesn’t bother me. I voted for George McGovern in 1972. 

I guess I’m missing something. A dear friend who played high school football tried to explain the intense sense of belonging and unity among the eleven males out there on the field, especially in the huddle and as the ball is snapped into motion. Fine, I wanted to say, To what purpose? 

Granting the unity among those eleven males in the huddle, how does that spill over and bring capacity crowds to an eighty-thousand-seat stadium? No doubt, a fair percentage of the males in the crowd are alumni of some team. But a bunch of them aren’t. And then there are women. And little children. Many of them in the same orange outfits. Again, To what purpose?

It starts in high school or junior high if not in elementary school. Coaches promote and principals support the idea of making the athletic mascot the symbol for the whole school, not simply the sports teams. Marquees in front of schools typically carry logos depicting the Raiders or the Bumble Bees.  I frequently pass an elementary school whose electronic marquee proudly calling attention to the Panthers. These and other hostile critters are intent on boogering up their enemies. This is probably are an accurate depiction of the purpose of the athletic teams but not of academics or the choir or band.

Many boys are initiated into this All-American Obsession at the peewee stage. Some midget teams play in a little park in our neighborhood. I can see and hear them at times as I sit at my computer.  I heard a coach, trying to get one little guy to come up to team expectations, tell the boy, “I know you want to have fun, but this is serious.” 

I well remember the last time I was in a football stadium. It was a year or so before the team up the road was declared national champs. My wife and our sons and I were living in Waco, Texas, and my older brother-in-law, a Baylor football fan, had an extra ticket for one of their home games. I accepted Jeff’s invitation to the game for two reasons: I loved him like a brother, instead of just a brother-in-law, and I didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to spend some time at his side in an activity that meant something to him. 

I guess I inherited a defective sports gene. I’m the only son or son-in-law in my generation who doesn’t connect with football, Sports fever took with the rest of the guys, but not with me. Actually, I couldn’t have played football in school if I had wanted to.  Our whole family spent most of the fall months in cotton patches of West Texas while most other school kids were in the class room. On the other hand, if my older brother and younger brother had been in school, I’m sure they would go “gone out” for sports.

I transmitted that defective gene to at least one of my two sons. Number One Son never got into athletics. Number Two Son played basketball and soccer on church teams in grade school and junior high and still keeps up with college and pro stuff, especially the Georgia Bulldogs in the state of his birth the Bulls and Bears in his adopted city of Chicago.

Because I am not mucho macho, I wish jock types had something more significant in their store of  memories than perfect or flawed hand-offs or lay-ups in a football or basketball game twenty years ago.  Yes, I feel sad when I see men place so much stock in rough-and-tumble physical activities of the long-ago. If an able-minded, able-bodied person clings to past achievements, even those which ennoble and enrich the greater society, this suggests a lack of meaning in life in the present. I treasure many aspects of my past, but I try to build on the past as I seek meaning in the present. 

If those who must look back to find meaning for life got involved in a civic club, church, mentoring, or local politics, these activities might help them find meaning in the present.

The Bible contains athletic references, typically likening life to a race.  The challenge always is for the Christian to discipline himself or herself as a follower of Jesus:

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14). 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,  looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted (Hebrews 12:1-3). 

In one final passage, notice St. Paul uses the double image of running a race and a boxing match: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air;  but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).

There's a World Outside of Yonkers

By the time I finished high school, our family had called at least eighteen different places home: houses and apartments and even one garage. We moved often but not far, all within a fifty-five mile radius of Sweetwater, Texas. 

We were hours away from any neighboring state, so the first time I spent a night outside of Texas was just after I graduated from high school. 

My vision of the world expanded as almost every one of the fourteen members of our senior class boarded a school bus and traveled for a week in Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico!

The song, “There’s a World Outside of Yonkers, Barnaby,” from Hello, Dolly! comes to mind as I think of my need to look beyond the world I knew.

Cornelius Hackl is a thirty-three-year-old clerk at Horace Vandergelder’s Feed Store in Yonkers, New York, just north of New York City. It’s 1890, and Cornelius wants his co-worker, seventeen-year-old Barnaby Tucker, to go with him to see the sights of the Big City.

Mr. Vandergelder, a widower, leaves these two employees in charge of the store as he goes to Manhattan to meet the matchmaker, Dolly Levi, in hopes she will match him up with a second wife.

After their boss leaves, Cornelius sings to Barnaby, calling Yonkers with some thirty-two thousand people a “hick town” and New York with its million and a half a “slick town” that is “full of shine and full of sparkle.”  They should go there and find adventure.

They can ride elevated trains and see the lights of Broadway; visit expensive restaurants: see shows at Delmonico’s or join the wealthy Astor family at Tony Pastor’s. Barnaby hesitates. Then Cornelius says they might even see the stuffed whale at P. T. Barnum’s Museum.  The whale clinches the deal for Barnaby.  But Cornelius sees something more romantic than Barnum’s whale: He’s determined not to come back until both he and Barnaby kiss a girl.

Once they get to New York, they find more excitement than they bargained for in the world outside of Yonkers:  
• Barely escaping early detection by Vandergelder, they duck into a ladies’ hat shop.
• In the shop, they meet the proprietor, Irene Molloy, and her young helper, Minnie Fay.  
• With less than a dollar between them, the guys claim to be men of means and convince Irene and Minnie Fay to go around town with them.
• Along the way, Barnaby asks whether they are having an adventure.  Cornelius  assures him, he will know it if he’s in an adventure!
• Dolly teaches them to dance and gets them to enter a dance contest at the expensive Harmonia Gardens Restaurant. 
• At the restaurant, they find a wallet and use the money to pay for the meal.
• The wallet turns out to be Vandergelder’s. 
• Vandergelder discovers they are away from Yonkers and raises a ruckus.
• The whole crowd is hauled off to the police station.
• At the station, Dolly gets everything straightened out and everybody off the hook.
• Cornelius sings to Irene: “It Only Takes a Moment to Be Loved a Whole Life Long.”
• Dolly convinces Vandergelder to marry her.
• She also makes him take Cornelius as a partner in the Feed Store.

Most Broadway musical comedies, including Hello, Dolly!, make no claim of profound lessons in life. Yet, we can draw philosophical and theological inferences from Cornelius and Barnaby’s efforts to see the world outside of Yonkers.

Whether we’re from “hick towns” or “slick towns,” most of us need to discover a larger world, and the fellows discovered quite a bit of the world outside of Yonkers.   With their mutual lack of experience and Barnaby’s youth, they stumbled through romantic encounters, risked their jobs, and faced potential legal trouble. 

They acted unwisely, going off with very little money and no specific plans beyond seeing New York.  They acted irresponsibly in walking away from their jobs after Vandergelder left them in charge of the store.

Even so, they made a start toward seeing the larger world by simply getting away from home base. Everyone who is physically able needs to get out of the of the house or apartment from time to time.  Otherwise, those “four walls” can seem to close in.  We need to associate with other humans rather than having only the TV or Internet for companionship.  Structured activity with other people can keep us from closing in on ourselves, whether it’s a bridge club, bowling league, Lions or Kiwaniis service club, writers group, church, credit or non-credit courses of study, or sports teams.  If schedule and money permit, there’s nothing like visiting other parts of the country or even leaving the country.  As the saying goes, “Travel broadens the mind.”

At age thirty-three with little or no previous experience in romance, Cornelius’s stated desire to kiss a girl is fulfilled as he experiences love at first sight.  And things come together for him.  He gets engaged to Irene, and Vandergelder makes him a partner at the Feed Store.  However, neither of these things would have happened without help from Mrs. Levi. 

In her first words in the show, Dolly declares herself to be “a woman who arranges things” for pleasure and profit.  She admits the “things” she arranges include other people’s lives. Many times, we are assisted along the road of life by wiser, shrewder, more experienced, perhaps older, friends and guides who save us from ourselves.  We count our blessings for such people as we leave our comfort zones and venture into our particular worlds outside of Yonkers.

On a higher, yet deeper, level, the parable-poem, “Footprints in the Sand,” has been circulated in various forms and attributed to various authors.  The narrator dreams of walking in the sand on the beach and having scenes from her life appear before her.  Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, at other times, only one set.  She noticed the single set of footprints usually were those from times of stress and difficulty.  Thinking of God’s promise to be near at all times, she asked why He had not been there at those trying times.  He answered, “When there was only one set, the steps were mine.  I was carrying you.”

If we are people of faith, we believe we have a source beyond our own knowledge who can guide us through the sometimes tortuous paths when we leave the familiar environment of our Yonkers and go into new ventures or adventures, in situations of our own making or circumstances over which we have little control.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones” (Proverbs 3:5-8).

"Before the Parade Passes By" from "Hello, Dolly!"

Dolly Gallagher Levi, the central character in the musical comedy, "Hello, Dolly!," is determined to leave her widowhood behind.

Early in the show, as Dolly first takes the stage, she hands out business cards, each listing a different service she provides.  They include financial consultation, instruction in the guitar and mandolin, varicose veins reduced.  Also short distance hauling, fresh eggs, ears pierced, pierced ears replugged, and restoration of national monuments.

But she focuses mostly on being a matchmaker and sets out to help several young couples overcome assorted obstacles between themselves and the altar.  But these efforts mask her main goal of matching herself with Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy merchant who is also bereft of his spouse.

To accomplish her goals, she lures  Vandergelder and the various lovers from their small town of Yonkers, New York, to the big city to the south.  All this takes place in the 1890s, when New York City’s entertainment hub is Fourteenth Street.  This happens to be the day for the annual Fourteen Street Association Parade.

Eventually, everyone will converge on the upscale Harmonia Gardens restaurant, the site of assorted high jinks, mishaps, and close calls, before all the couples — including Dolly and Horace — are matched up at the final curtain.  But it takes two acts and fifteen songs to get there.

Dolly Gallagher was a showgirl at the Harmonia Gardens before she met and married Ephraim Levi.  So she looks forward to a triumphal return to her old stomping, er, dancing grounds.  In that setting, she will dance and sing the title song with the waiters, who tell her, “It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.”

The show is a comedy, both in our contemporary sense of being comical and the historic sense of things turning out well for the main characters.  So we aren’t too worried about whether the couples will eventually get to “tie the knot,” and we don’t leave the theater overcome by sad or serious thoughts.  

This calls to mind Lorenzo Jones, a soap opera in the “Golden Age of Radio” in the 1940s and 1950s.  The daily introduction described Lorenzo as lovable and impractical but still loved by his wife Belle.  His impractical nature showed up in his strange inventions, including tri-spouted tea pots: one each for strong, medium and weak.  Despite such experiments, the narrator told us, life with Lorenzo, “has more smiles than tears” (Old Time Radio Catalog http://www.otrcat.com/lorenzo-jones-p-1539.html).

In the case of Dolly Levi, she may shed a tear or two in a moment of reflection as she recalls her former life.  She talks to her late husband from time to time in the show, and as she thinks about the parade on Fourteenth Street, she asks Ephraim’s permission to re-marry.

As a middle-aged widow, Dolly feels she has been sidelined.  Life’s parade moves on, and she doesn’t want to be left behind.  She’s a survivor.  She is determined to become the wife of Horace Vandergelder, “the well-known half-a-millionaire.”

The one serious song, “Before the Parade Passes By,” closes the first act, so by the time the intermission ends, as with Lorenzo, so with Dolly, there will be “more smiles than tears.”

To Dolly, the literal parade becomes a symbol of the excitement and enjoyment of life she longs to return to.  So she is determined to “taste Saturday's high life” and get some life back into her life.  She doesn’t want to watch life go by her in the passing parade.

Amid the noise of horns and cymbals and the lights of sparklers, she wants to raise the roof and carry on as she holds her head up high. She’s ready to move out in front and lead the parade herself.

So, the fluff and nonsense of the story line notwithstanding, Dolly’s song offers encouragement to women and men who are widowed, divorced, or those who have never been married but would like to be:  You don’t have to be sidelined as the parade of life passes by.

Dolly’s call back to life has many implications beyond romance and marital status.  Norman Vincent Peale, longtime pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, convinced thousands and thousands of people around the world of “the power of positive thinking.”  For Dr. Peale, this was not simply “operation bootstraps.”  Rather, as a Christian minister, his call to positive thinking was an affirmation of the power of God through Jesus Christ as the resource for combatting life’s problems.  

My wife Pansy and I encountered a walking, talking testimony to the miraculous positive power of God a few years ago: a man named Robert Vandergrift in Bountiful, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City.  As lifelong Baptists visiting the world capital of Mormonism, we hunted for a Baptist church as we spent Saturday night in a motel in Bountiful.  We found our way to Bountiful First Baptist Church for Sunday morning service.  That’s where we found Bob and learned of his outliving medical predictions of an early death from colon cancer that had metastasized to both lobes of the liver.

About ten years earlier, in 1996, Bob was sixty-eight when a surgeon found the mass in his colon the size of a baseball.  Bob was told, statistically, he had “six months to two years to live.”  He got a second opinion and was told, “Get your affairs in order because you have about four months to live.”

Bob was a Christian and active churchman, but he said, “I didn’t want to die. Our faith is tested when we face our own mortality. There was a lot of panic and prayer by the time I was told to get my affairs in order.”

In his book, My Home is in the House of Cancer, Bob tells of another doctor who told him, “You don’t have to be a statistic. Some of that is up to you.” In a book by Dr. Peale, Bob learned about a process of “visualization” that included developing a strategy.  He had encouragement from many sides.  He described his “team”who worked with him: “The Creator, the surgeon, the oncologist, the clinical trial, the medical social worker, a coordinator, and an angel who has been gone from this earth for nearly a century, family and friends as they held me in the light.”

As he thought of what he could do, Bob drew on his faith.  He found a challenge in Deuteronomy 30:19: “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”   He accepted that challenge and chose life.

Bob said, to bolster his determination to choose life, he went to a bank and asked for a loan of twenty-five thousand dollars.  “Of course, I didn’t tell the banker my medical prognosis,” he said.  With part of that money and as part of his vision, he bought a new car.  He said, in effect, “I didn’t have a Volkswagen vision.  I had a Cadillac vision.  So I bought a new Cadillac.”

He has shared his story with thousands of people, face to face, in correspondence, in public speeches:

"I wrote about some of my thoughts along the way and that was important.  I sometimes called others when I learned they had cancer. People I had never met. Sometimes, they lived far away.   I sent my story to them hoping there would be something in it for them, but somewhat anxious because I didn’t want to mislead them.  I included some words of encouragement.

"I had shared my thoughts about cancer with others because I was being asked what I was doing because I was improving so much. I finally put it together as a little book and took it to Kinko’s and printed it.  I looked at my future in 1999 and I wondered … Why have I survived while others have not? 

"I didn’t know what the tomorrows would bring. I set my sights far ahead but I knew I must walk them one day at a time.

I was invited to give a talk at the Intermountain Health Care Cancer Conference in Sandy, Utah on September 29, 2005. The audience consisted of oncologists, nurses, medical social workers, cancer patients and survivors.  There were other talks, some with many in attendance — some with few. Eventually, there would be about 10,000 visits on my web page in a year and I developed some relationship with many cancer patients."

As I was writing this blog a few days ago, I reconnected with Bob by email.  His wife died about six weeks ago, but now in his mid-eighties, he is still a survivor.  He wrote this: 

"As far as my cancer is concerned, my cancer marker is up a bit but I have not been on treatment of any kind since the original,  which was, I think, about 13 years ago.”

So this courageous man long ago followed the instruction from Deuteronomy.  He chose life.

Bob has not let the parade pass him by.