Looking For Sports Heroes

Five months ago Lance Armstrong gave up his effort to conceal his use of performance-enhancing drugs and confessed on Oprah.

I am still coming to terms with my disappointment.  Not that it was a surprise.  Lance should never have “consulted” with, or had anything to do with, Michele Ferrari, the infamous “Doctor Dope.”  When accused of doping his response was always  that he was the most tested athlete in the world.  Never the simple statement, “I have never used performance-enhancing drugs.”  I, like many others, hoped and feared in equal measure.

But still.  How excited were we cycling enthusiasts during those Tours.  We added cable to our TV package for the month of July so we could get up at five AM and listen to the incomparable Phil Liggett describe the drama of the stages.  Lance was a great story.  And we took a kind of pride in seeing our sport, cycle racing, minor league at best in the US, rise to prominence in the American sports world.

So I’m left wondering about my lifelong desire to find heroes to admire, models to aspire to be like.  Sports may or may not be a good place to look for them. 

When I was seventeen my hero was the Marquis de Portago, race car driver, bobsled racer, and dashing figure in the European social world.  When I was eighteen it was Jack Kerouac.  (I’ve never gone back to my tattered paperback copy of “On The Road,” not wanting to experience the likely disenchantment.)  Then it was a handful of professors in the Berkeley English department.  I gradually learned that their admirable specialty knowledge was imbedded in lives of petty grousing, envy and frustration, struggles with areas of life where they weren’t that competent.  Like all the rest of us, in other words.

What I admire today is a blend of three things:  a talent, the development of that talent through persistent hard work, and freedom from self-importance. 

The reason we look to the sports world for models is that it does present a series of individuals to the public in a way that lets us evaluate them over time in all three of these ways.

My current hero is Roger Federer, though I’m not much of a tennis fan.  He was plonked at the French Open yesterday, but gracious as usual to the winner of his match.

I hope he keeps winning.  I hope he doesn’t dope or have a string of mistresses.  I’m hoping, but I know we live in a world of clay feet.

Two Obituaries in This Morning's NY Times

It was a striking coincidence for me that the two leading obituaries in this morning’s NY Times were for  two people who played very different roles in my young life.

The first was Dean Jeffries.  In the ‘50’s and ‘60’s he and Von Dutch were the premier hot rod pinstripers. 

Pinstriping goes back to the early years of the automobile.  A fine straight line in a contrasting color follows a major fender contour and finishes with a design flourish.  In the fifties, the Golden Age of the hot rod, pin striping became the finishing detail of choice, and Von Dutch and Jeffries were the California gods.

I tried a little pin striping myself.  I did my buddy Skip’s 1951 Pontiac dashboard.  Not bad, but no Jeffries-level work.  The challenge of pin striping was the center point in the middle of the rear deck or the nose of the hood where the striping on the two sides of the car came together.  Those center flourishes had to be symmetrical.  No stencils, this was all done freehand.  It’s really tough to get the swoops and teardrops to exactly mirror each other.

I find myself still doodling pinstripes during meetings, trying to get the arcs and curves on each side of a centerline to match.

The second was Herbert Blau.  He was the director at ACT in San Francisco when I attended SF State College in, let’s see, must have been 1962.  He also taught at the college, and filled in one day for Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) in the creative writing class I was taking.  He commented on a story I had submitted.  I can’t recall exactly what he said, but it mattered that he took what I wrote seriously enough to think about it.

Blau was the driving intellect behind the appearance of Waiting for Godot and the works of Beckett and other avant garde playwrights on major American stages.  I was surprised to find that he passed away in Seattle, and had last taught at the UW.  If I’d known I might have looked him up and said thanks for a word of encouragement fifty years ago.

Does anyone not as old as I am find any of this interesting?

A Farewell to Bakeries

I didn’t realize how much I loved bakeries until I stopped going to them.

My wife has been gluten-free for a couple of years.  I decided to give it a try and see if there were benefits.  I don’t have a wheat allergy, as she does, but after two months I’m finding a benefit.  When I’ve gone for training runs or swims in the past, I’ve needed to know exactly where the potties were.  You don’t need to hear the details, but let’s just say that a smoothed-out GI process is a good thing for me.

But I suffer from fantasies about cinnamon rolls, currant scones, and the real-deal old-fashioned maple bars.  I imagine standing at the display case at Macrina’s on McGraw gazing at morningglory rolls and bread pudding.  Or biking back from Edmonds and stopping at Larsen’s to pick up an almond twist as a reward for a hard ride.

Gluten-free baked goods are getting better.  I’ve had some pretty decent brownies—maybe the best wheat substitute is chocolate.  But I’m toying with the idea of a gluten-free vacation day once every couple of months.  I could spend a week deciding whether to have a cinnamon roll, scone or maple bar for breakfast.  Abstinence makes the stomach grow fonder.

An Improv Game: Arms

I spent Sunday with seven other people in an improv class with Matt Smith.

Improv was the part of my first acting class I liked the least.  I knew it was necessary if we were going to turn Mr. Stick-Up-The-Ass into Mr. Mellow Quick-Wits.  But I didn’t like it.

But this class was much fun as Jesse, the director of my play, had promised.  And at the end of the day I felt the stick, if not fully extracted, had at least been loosened a little.  Let me share one of the activities we did.

Call it Arms.  You stand in front of your group with your hands clasped behind your back.  Your partner stands behind you and sticks his arm through yours, so at a glance it looks like his arms are yours.

Ready?  Someone throws out a topic.  For me it was bees.  So you start riffing on your topic.  But you have to build on whatever gesture the arms are making.  Normally you speak a thought and reinforce your thought with your gestures.  Now the gesture leads, and you have to follow with a line of thinking.

So the arms made an expansive open-handed gesture—I described the search over hill and dale for colorful flowers.  A finger pointed—the bees zero in on a target.  The hands go into my pockets (slightly risky gesture)—hey, we weren’t really that interested in bees anyway.

One thing to keep in mind: the gesturer has to hold a gesture long enough for the speaker to work out something to do with it. 

This stuff can be fun.  You just have to find the right people to do it with.  Do people still play parlor games, the way they did fifty, sixty years ago?  Some of my friends would get a kick out of these improv games.  Others might say, “Roger, I can see those acting classes you’re taking must get kinda weird.”

Meeting My First Reader

A few friends have read LIFTERS and told me how much they liked it.  But they’re friends, and strongly biased in my favor.  Today I talked with a woman who is a student at the Lifetime Learning Center, where I’m the director.  I don’t know her beyond the casual chatting I do with the three hundred or so students who take classes with us.  But she had overheard me telling someone about the novel, and asked where to find it.

She came to me bubbling with enthusiasm.  What a sweetheart!  She’d recently had the experience of reading an e-novel published by a local author someone had recommended to her, and had been disappointed.  “Probably never would have found a publisher,” was her judgment.  But my book was great, she said.  She loved the writing.  I hear that praise with caution; it’s possible to write fluently but not have much of a story to tell.  She asked me about the research.  “You can tell you did your homework,” she said.

That led to a conversation I’ve had before in book discussion groups.  Is a novelist who brings historical events into his story required to be accurate?  Those discussions sometimes become a debate between what I call the historians and the storytellers.  The historians argue that you can create dialogues that no one could have recorded, but you shouldn’t alter what is known as historical fact.  The storytellers say the novelist can do what she wants as long as she holds the reader’s interest and faith in the world she is creating.

I could go either way on that.  I find myself intrigued by the motives of certain historical figures, and enjoy speculating about them in what I write.  An example is the wrestler Dr. Roller in my story.  There is no documentation that will get to the root of his ambivalent behavior.  You can read the newspaper accounts, and you’ll be left, as I was, free to speculate.

But newspaper accounts of life in Seattle during the first decade of the twentieth century were the starting point for my story, and I came down on the side of the historians.  Nothing that I knew had actually happened was altered in my slice of early Seattle life.