Month: May 2020

From Serenity Now!! to The Serenity Prayer – How To Survive a Pandemic

May 20, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

The actor Ben Stiller’s father Jerry died on May 11, a month shy of his 93rd birthday. Jerry Stiller was a comedian and actor whose career spanned more than half a century. Like the spring-loaded plunger that sends a pinball into the field of play, Stiller’s death (which was not attributed to Covid-19) sent my thoughts bouncing around the bumpers and flippers in my brain, unexpectedly leading me to the answer to a most vexing question: How should I live my life as the Covid-19 pandemic plays out?

“SERENITY NOW!!”

Fans of Seinfeld know Stiller as George Costanza’s father, Frank. George is famously “neurotic, self-loathing” and “prone to occasional periods of overconfidence that invariably arise at the worst possible time.” Frank was perhaps best known as the prickly champion of an alternative to the Christmas holiday known as Festivus – a product of his “disgust with the commercialism of Christmas and his dislike of tinsel decorations.” Frank did not conceive of Festivus himself, or declare that feats of strength and the airing of grievances would be among its core traditions, but to me Frank is Festivus, and Festivus is Frank.

Festivus aside, I remember Frank Costanza best for “SERENITY NOW!!” – the phrase he bellowed when his frequent fits of anger reached a zenith.

Frank’s outbursts were often prompted by exchanges with his shrill, nagging wife, Estelle. As Frank explains: “The doctor gave me a relaxation cassette. When my blood pressure gets too high, the man on the tape tells me to say ‘serenity now.’” When pushed to his breaking point, Frank looks skyward, holds up both hands with fists clenched, and shouts that phrase at the top of his lungs – there is nothing relaxing about it.

Frank first used the phrase on the show when Estelle refused to move her front seat forward to give him more leg room in the back seat of George’s car. Frustrated by Estelle’s resistance and ignoring George’s reminder that they were only five blocks from home, Frank loses it: “Like an animal! Because of her, I have to sit here like an animal! SERENITY NOW! SERENITY NOW!”

George asks about, and Frank explains, the inspiration for the phrase. Then George asks: “Are you supposed to yell it?” To which Frank responds, “the man on the tape wasn’t specific.”

What does this have to do with a pandemic? Well, at times over the last couple of months, I’ve absolutely felt the urge to channel Frank, to look skyward and shout, “SERENITY NOW!”

In my first blog post, I described my feelings about the Covid-19 pandemic as follows: “Unsettled. Anxious. Uncertain. A little bit scared. Disoriented.” Two-plus months in, I might choose a slightly different set of words. For sure, I would add frustrated and restless to that list.

Frustrated

My consumption of news regarding Covid-19 has trailed off. I became frustrated that this pandemic – a public health crisis prompted by a virus that literally does not care where you come from, what you look like, or which political party you support – has achieved the impossible: it has further divided a country that was fast becoming a nation of Hatfields and McCoys. If a public health emergency cannot bring us together, exactly what can? Would it take war between nations? A meteor strike? An invasion by extraterrestrials?

The debate du jour, of course, is about the pace of “opening up.” Judging from a non-scientific survey of my social media accounts, there are three camps: (1) Full Throttle; (2) Proceed With Caution; and (3) Slow Down.

Those in the Full Throttle camp want to open up the economy NOW!, and some consider being asked to wear a mask to be a threat to personal liberty on the level of being forced to donate a kidney. Some – not all – in this camp are willing to tote guns and storm state capitols to prove … something. These are many of the same folks, of course, who originally thought (because they were told to think so) that the whole coronavirus thing was a hoax. As the bodies have piled up (we could nearly fill the Rose Bowl with the dead, at this point), they have now pivoted to alternately blaming bats, the Chinese, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, and Obama. Some have taken to acts of defiance of rules and guidelines promulgated in the name of public health. They ridicule the snowflakes who wear masks and practice social distancing. The Full Throttle folks are convinced this crisis is being manipulated by “the media” to control the masses and help tank the economy for political ends.

Those in the Proceed With Caution camp (spoiler, my camp) are typically sane and rational and conflicted. People in this camp understand that this pandemic poses a once-in-a-century quandary, and that difficult decisions are being made based on a delicate balance of legitimate, competing interests. They tend to want public and private decisions guided by data, science, and compassion, but are also resigned to the fact that cold, hard economic analysis needs to be considered as well. They know that being 100% confident in the wisdom of any decision is a pipedream. These folks want to save as many lives as possible while minimizing the economic and other collateral damage inflicted by any set of policies that shackles commercial activity.

I think the vast majority of Americans are in this centrist camp, and that they hold many different opinions and points of view because there are really difficult, vexing problems to be solved, and reasonable minds can differ on how to solve them. Doctors, public health experts, economists, experts in the transmission of respiratory illnesses, economists, actuaries, supply chain experts. I say bring all of them to the table to help forge a path forward. You’ll note I omitted politicians; in a perfect world, all of the politicians would be quarantined – together – on Madagascar (with apologies to Madagascar).

Doubling up on the protection, for good measure

Then, there are those in the Slow Down camp. A few on the fringe in this camp are convinced politicians urging open economies want to kill the most vulnerable in some twisted Darwinian experiment. They are by nature nervous and cautious, and wonderfully stubborn about saving lives. They will advocate taking any and all steps to ensure that the inevitable second wave can be controlled. Whatever the economic impact, they want all of us to wait patiently for the virus to be brought to its knees – by a vaccine or otherwise – before getting all the way back to “normal.” As much heat as they take, they are the most compassionate among us, and their voices need to be heard even if the ultimate course we take strays from their ideal course.

I’m not frustrated that there are differences of opinion – that’s to be expected in a society where information (and disinformation, sadly) flows like beer at a frat party. What’s frustrating is the moving targets, the demoralization of institutions that should be leading our national response, the inconsistent approaches taken by states that share borders simply because different political parties control their governments. It’s all so silly and on-brand for America, circa 2020, that the imperative that we vanquish a common, non-discriminating foe has driven us to hate, berate, and distrust one another even more.

Restless

While my frustration is largely borne of what I know and see today, my restlessness relates to the future and its unknowns. I am restless because I realize that I need to figure out – for myself – how to forge a path forward. I don’t fully trust elected officials to call the plays, and therefore I need to figure out exactly where I stand on the “open up” versus “go slow” spectrum and be prepared to improvise. None of us is an innocent bystander; we are all participants. Going forward, the outcome here – that is, how much worse things get before we can say this pandemic is over – will depend on the choices we make, individually. Day by day. Hour by hour.

We all take risks, every single day. We drive, sometimes too fast. We eat delicious Italian beef sandwiches dipped in gravy, and ice cream, and sushi. We ski and skateboard. We jaywalk. By and large, we respect formal and informal rules – that’s part of the social contract under which we live. But to different degrees, we are willing to push the edges of those rules.

And now, mundane things we never associated with risk are – even if to some tiny degree – risky. Riding a commuter train. Using a public restroom. Going to a grocery store. Singing in a choir. Pumping our own gas. Judged against staying home, every single one of these actions increases the risk of contracting the coronavirus and suffering from Covid-19.

How each of us navigates this pandemic will be a study in risk tolerance. Every day.

I desperately want to get back to normal. I want a haircut. I want to eat in a restaurant. But I also want my 89-year-old diabetic mother to see her 90th birthday in October, and to join our family in my home on Christmas Eve.

The restlessness. The frustration. At times it leads to those “SERENITY NOW!!” moments. I don’t get there daily, or even weekly. But every once in a while – usually when I read a story about some defiant, selfish jackass – I get to that peak and feel like letting go, like Frank.

So how did Jerry Stiller’s death help me develop a framework to use going forward? My musings about Frank Costanza and SERENITY NOW!! and individual responsibility and negotiating risk led me to think about The Serenity Prayer. You may not know it by that name, but I suspect you’ve seen it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian

This prayer was composed in the early 1930s, during the Depression, and gained widespread secular use. It was later adopted and popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous, and the famous atheist author and philosopher Ayn Rand said of the prayer:

… that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity.
Ayn Rand, The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made, as published in Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

I fancy myself a rational man, and if The Serenity Prayer offers up “the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve,” I’m all in – so much so that I have decided to use it as a North Star for finding the way back to “normal.”

Accepting Things I Cannot Change

Going forward, I know I will encounter things I cannot control or change, and must accept. Among them:

+ I cannot change that some people will insist on viewing the “open up” versus “hunker down” debate as a political debate. It’s nonsensical and counterproductive and I wish people would stop. But they won’t – I’ll have to accept that and move on.

+ I cannot change that some people will view minor inconveniences (wearing masks, staying physically distant from others, not getting to play blackjack at casinos) as major assaults on their liberty. There have been oceans of ink spilled onto pages by people who have actually suffered a deprivation of liberty – none of those pages describe the horror of being asked to wear a cloth mask at Costco.

+ I cannot change the hearts, minds, and souls of the truly asinine – the kind of people who respond to polite requests by becoming violent and menacing and confrontational.

+ I cannot change that some will spend an inordinate amount of time looking to assign blame, rather than looking for solutions.

+ I cannot change that not everyone will assess the risks that are presented ahead through the same lens as I do. I have no choice but to accept that I will encounter some who do things I find unacceptably risky, and some who will believe I am the one being reckless.

+ I cannot change that my state, village, or employer will impose rules on the road back to normal that I think go too far. I’ll accept the rules, and do my level best to comply with those rules. But I might – unwittingly or intentionally – violate a rule here or there. I won’t do so intentionally, though, if I think I am putting anyone else in harm’s way.

+ I cannot change that things won’t snap back to normal overnight, that we have miles and miles yet to go before we get to normal.

+ I cannot change that when I watch baseball or football or hockey again, I’m likely going to be watching athletes in empty stadiums and arenas. Sad, but true.

Having The Courage To Change Things I Can

But there are many things I can control and change, going forward:

+ First and foremost, I can change my mindset to a pandemic mindset when I am out and about. Early on, I read or heard great, simple advice: whether you believe you are infected or not, behave as if you are a contagious carrier of the virus determined not to infect anyone else. This is the Covid-19 Golden Rule, as far as I am concerned. If everyone followed this rule consistently, we would all be OK. I am going to do my best to do so. (And, by the way, having tiptoed back into society over the last few weeks, I will be frank – lots of people are not living by this rule.)

+ I can control my level of education about the virus, how it spreads, and which precautions are most effective. Statistics about how many have died, how many have been tested, how many ventilators are in use, and how many ICU beds are open are important – but they don’t really do me any good, individually, as I forge ahead. I will read seemingly credible sources that provide practical advice, like the one I’ve linked here. Facts about the disease, and how it spreads, are critical to understanding how I can follow the Golden Rule. When I’m outside, 150 yards from a playing partner hitting a golf shot (using a club no one else has touched), I’m not a danger to anyone. When I am in line at the deli at Sunset Foods with 20 of my closest friends on a Saturday morning, I am a threat. So I will wear a mask, keep my distance, avoid coughing or sneezing, and keep to myself. And in the unlikely event someone invites me to join a choir, I will politely decline.

+ I can hunker down when sick – this is the most important application of the Golden Rule. In the past, I’m sure I’ve gone to work or to a restaurant or party when I’ve felt just a wee bit under the weather. No more. If I am even the least bit feverish or “off” in any way, I’m staying home. Period. Sure, I might have to overcome FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) from time to time. But until we are truly back to normal – and maybe even after we are back to normal, I’m not going to apologize for sidelining myself if I am feeling ill. Those among us for whom never missing a day of work is a badge of honor? Please get over it; it’s not so honorable to get others sick.

+ I can control and change my tolerance of other points of view and degrees of sensitivity to social interaction. Look, some people are going to be very anxious in public for the foreseeable future. They will wear masks even in situations where they are not obviously needed (alone in their cars, for example). They will feel more comfortable around me if I wear a mask, or keep my distance. I’m sure there will come a time – likely a long, long time from now – where I think to myself, “wow – didn’t he hear the news that we are past this thing?” Shame on me when (if) I have that thought. Why should I care if you choose to wear a mask in public in 2025? Why should I care if you choose to cross the street to avoid me when I am walking toward you? Let’s try something new, as a society, and be universally respectful and tolerant.

Was the bearded guy’s gun really necessary?

+ I can control how I react to the defiant, rude, selfish oaf who refuses to live by the Golden Rule. My hope is that my reaction to that person will be the same as my typical reaction to any troublemaker I encounter in life. First, respectful re-routing. Second, cautious and measured engagement (if necessary). Third, extraction and flight. Growing up in the city helped train me for this moment. As someone who walked city streets every day and encountered the normal collection of drunks, menacing kids, creepy adults, etc., I learned that the best way to avoid trouble was to simply avoid it. Cross the street. Choose another seat on the bus. Move to another table. Get off a stop early. Simple survival tools. If I encounter someone who decides to make a spectacle of himself by defying rules or ridiculing those who impose or follow them, I will likely adopt that same strategy – avoidance. If forced to engage, I’ll try to do so calmly and with reason, aiming to avoid a SERENITY NOW! moment for everyone. And if all else fails, I’ll get the hell out of Dodge and, if I’ve witnessed something really, really bad, I’ll do what I can to ensure that a person charged with keeping the peace is aware that a troublemaker is on the loose.

+ And finally, I can control and change the choices I make as a consumer. When businesses re-open, those who understand and respect differing levels of comfort among their clientele will thrive. Those who celebrate being allowed to open by raising a figurative middle finger to best practices will suffer. If you are a business owner, compassion and common sense will breed comfort and loyalty. Simple gestures will matter. Case in point: the local Waterway car wash/gas station has earned my business by taking the simple step of placing boxes of disposable plastic gloves next to its pumps. Small measure, small cost. But it tells me its management knows that some people will appreciate not having to contact a touch screen or gas pump that many others have touched that day. If I owned a business that interfaced with the public, I would not want to alienate a significant percentage of my potential customer base by seeming not to care all that much about Covid-19.

The Wisdom To Know The Difference

The final ask of The Serenity Prayer is for the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and cannot change. As the Honorable Richard M. Daley once said (I think), “it ain’t a rocket scientist thing.” We generally know what we can and cannot change. And I’m not sure the changes I have listed above necessarily require a great deal of courage to be executed. It seems that simply being considerate, tolerant, and exercising common sense will go a long way here. But that’s usually the case, right?

So that’s my plan going forward – accept the things about living through a pandemic that I cannot change, and change my mindset in small ways to be a better pandemic citizen.

Of course, I reserve the right to become frustrated. If it becomes too much, I will close my eyes, raise my clenched fists, and in memory of Frank Costanza I will wail “SERENITY NOW!!!” (But I won’t do so in an elevator or other confined space.)

-30-

My Rushmore: Games I Played As a Kid*

May 11, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

“My Rushmore” posts feature my musings about the four greatest [fill in the blank]. Of course, the actual Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is a monument to four historically significant American presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. This isn’t about them. Today, I write in memory of the four greatest games I played (inside my house) as a kid.
THE AUTHOR

I was a city kid. I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in a brick bungalow – a crowded brick bungalow. I was the youngest of nine, and by the time I came along my parents had pretty much had enough of the whole parenting thing. If I made it home for dinner and was in my bedroom about the time my parents were settling in with their late-night snack to watch Johnny Carson, all was good. I pretty much did what I wanted to do. Because I wasn’t all that interested in getting into serious trouble, that arrangement worked out well for everyone.

My days outside the house were filled with the normal city kid stuff – school, playing sports, throwing snowballs at cars, riding bikes, playing sports, climbing roofs, collecting beer cans, playing sports, raiding back porches of apartment buildings for bottles to turn in for nickels, and … playing more sports.

But like most kids, when weather or darkness forced me and my friends inside, we played games – either together, with siblings, or alone. Sure, I played Monopoly, Clue, the Game of Life, and Risk – but all four games on My Rushmore are, not surprisingly, games involving sports, and games that could be played alone, if need be.

Let’s get to it.

No. 4: Strat-o-Matic Baseball

Strat-O-Matic Baseball – or just Strat-O – is a table-top board game. A math student at Bucknell University named Hal Richman started Strat-O in 1961. He went on to release football, basketball, and hockey games, too. But Strat-O Baseball was my thing when I had time to kill from maybe sixth through ninth grades. My interest waned in playing Strat-O, I suppose, at about the time I got a driver’s license. I was the only Strat-O devotee among my circle of friends, but I take comfort in knowing there were enough of us that Strat-O has survived to this day, has its own Wikipedia page, and that its founder was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Strat-O is a dice and card based simulation game. I’ve never played the game Dungeons and Dragons, but I feel like Strat-O might have been something like D&D for baseball nerds. Basically, every major league baseball player’s statistical performance is represented on a game card. Rolling two dice and referencing a pitcher and hitter’s card yields a result for every at-bat. The makers of the game were “intent [on] replicating athletes’ abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions.”

I spent hundreds of hours playing Strat-O at my desk, hand-scoring every game, and compiling neatly organized composite statistical summaries. Weird, I know. My mother must have wondered why I was constantly clamoring for more college-lined loose leaf paper and pencils. When I played Strat-O, I managed both teams, and the dice and cards yielded the results of each at-bat and, ultimately, the games. I would set up All-Star teams from each league, made up of my favorite players. But there was no way of rigging the game so that your favorite player always hit the clutch homer – it was all about statistical probabilities and rolls of the dice. I suppose by managing one team less aggressively or less wisely than the other, I could tilt the probabilities of one team winning – but I was most interested in letting things play out, and then compiling the statistics.

Today’s video-game addled youth would find Strat-O to be boring, I’m sure. But video game systems that allowed you to simulate major league baseball games just weren’t a thing in the late 1970s, for better or worse. Playing Strat-O honed my math skills, sharpened my knowledge of baseball strategy, and kept me off the streets. It is well-deserving of its place on My Rushmore.

No. 3: Coleco Electronic Quarterback

Coleco Electronic Quarterback was a handheld electronic football game, released about a year after the first generation of the groundbreaking Mattel Classic Football. The games were very similar, using “simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects.” The “players” were represented by glowing, reddish LED blips on a dark screen, brought to life by the magic of a 9-volt battery. The object of the game was to press buttons to move a ball carrier (a brighter blip) down a field, avoiding “tacklers” (represented by less bright blip). The screen had three lanes running the length of the field, and each press of the button advanced the ball carrier a yard. This was high-tech stuff, let me tell you.

Unless you are 50-something or older, if you got your hands on one of these games and played for a few minutes you’d probably say, “you spent hours playing this?” Without a hint of shame, the answer is, “Yes. Yes we did.” In defense of my generation, remember this: we did not grow up in an age of seemingly endless in-home entertainment options. There was no YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or TikTok. Heck, ESPN – the first 24-hour sports network – did not debut until 1979. Even in a metropolis like Chicago, our televisions received about eight English-language channels – if you had the best antenna available. There was no cable TV, no Netflix, no HBO – nothing. We were starved for diversion, and mostly we got outside and figured out ways to entertain ourselves. But for those long car rides, rainy days, and late nights as we drifted off to sleep, Electronic Quarterback and handheld games of its generation filled the void and cracked the door open for what was to come.

Mattel Football 2 – proud owner, Sandy Veith

I have no idea why I scored the Coleco version of this game rather than the Mattel version, above, but it was a source of some pride because the Coleco version was the first to have a feature that allowed the offense to pass. In retrospect, this game (and its Mattel cousin) was pretty mindless and boring. But it deserves its place on this list because it occupied lots of my time, and it was a sort of gateway device – a precursor to the mind-blowing, realistic video games of today. For those of you who love Madden, MLB The Show, EA Sports’ NHL and NBA games, and even Call of Duty and Fortnite, remember to honor your elders and go easy on us when we clumsily try to master the modern video game and the seemingly endless array of buttons, triggers, and joysticks on its controller. We grew up when dodging little LED blips on a dark screen was cool – and all we needed to operate the game was a 9-volt battery and our thumbs.

No. 2: Tecmo Bowl

Those of you who are super observant may have noticed that the title of this article ended with an asterisk – intended to be a qualifier on the word “kid.” The reason for that qualifier: Tecmo Bowl.

Here comes a confession. Around 1989, during my last year in law school, I visited a mall outside of Boston with my then-girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancée, and future wife. I have a very vague recollection that we casually looked at engagement rings, but I have an absolutely clear recollection that we came home with a Nintendo Entertainment System like the one pictured below. (Recollection confirmed with said wife, by the way.)

I must have had a few bucks saved up from nice summer gigs, and decided to splurge. We set up the NES at her apartment because she had a 19- or 21-inch color Panasonic TV (far superior to my 10-year-old, 12-inch, black-and-white Sanyo). We were both in grad school and did not have a ton of spare time for mindless endeavors, but we had enough to spend some of it playing Super Mario Brothers in her roach-infested, rent-controlled apartment.

Super Mario Bros. was the cartridge that came with the system, and probably the only one I owned for quite some time. After graduating in 1990, I moved back to Chicago and the NES came with me. At some point, I had purchased Tecmo Bowl, a football game for the NES. As described on its Wikipedia page:

[Tecmo Bowl] is an American football video game developed and released by Tecmo. Originally released as an arcade game in 1987, … a [cartridge] for the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1989 and was the first console game to include real NFL players, via a license from the NFLPA … The NES version of the game was extremely popular, spawning various sequels, starting with 1991’s Tecmo Super Bowl. The NES game has also been cited by various media outlets as one of the best sports video games ever made.
Wikipedia

One of my friends from college who was a couple years older than me had worked and saved enough that he bought a townhouse in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It became something of a home for wayward members of my college crew, and a hangout for many of us – wayward or not. Among other things, we played Tecmo Bowl. Lots and lots of Tecmo Bowl. The original Tecmo Bowl featured 12 NFL teams, and whether you beat your opponent had something to do with your skill, and something to do with the team you drew.

Hence, the asterisk. I’m not sure I was a “kid” anymore at 25 years old; but during those sessions in that dark, cramped townhouse in Lincoln Park we acted a lot more like kids than grown-ups. I suppose I could have been spending time doing things that were more enriching, socially productive, or both. But as it turned out, there would be plenty of time for that later in life. We hung out, drank beer, played cards, and played Tecmo Bowl. Don’t judge.

In researching this piece, I was blown away by the treasure trove of information available on the internet about Tecmo Bowl. In addition to the Wikipedia page, I found not one, but many detailed rankings of the NFL teams included in Tecmo Bowl, and of the NFL players who were the highest-rated, best players within that game.

Bring me any ranking of Tecmo Bowl players from now until the end of time, and I’ll tell you which player had better be at the top of the list – Bo Jackson of the Oakland Raiders. In 1989, when the NES version of Tecmo Bowl was first released, Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson was at the height of his powers. The 1985 Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn, Jackson was clearly the greatest two-sport professional athlete of my lifetime. His career in football ended and his career in baseball was derailed by a serious hip injury he suffered during a football game in 1991.

Bo: The Greatest Video Game Athlete Ever

Jackson’s greatness had three primary components. He was big. He was powerful. And he was fast. Very, very fast. Jackson had been selected in the second round of the MLB draft out of high school by the Yankees, but made good on a promise to his mother to attend college and accepted a football scholarship at Auburn. He played running back for the Tigers in the Fall, and baseball in the Spring. After winning the Heisman Trophy and (reportedly) running the 40-yard dash in 4.13 for NFL scouts (at 227 pounds!), he was the first overall pick in the 1986 NFL draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But Jackson would never play for the Buccaneers, and he told them as much before they drafted him. As the presumptive first pick, the Bucs had flown Jackson on a private jet to Tampa to tour their facilities. That turned out to be against some idiotic NCAA rule, and in all its draconian glory the organization stripped Jackson of his eligibility to play baseball at Auburn during his senior year. Jackson thought the Bucs had intentionally compromised his baseball eligibility to force him to play football, and told the Bucs that selecting him would be a wasted draft pick. On April 29, the Bucs ignored Bo’s warning and drafted Jackson with the first overall pick.

About six weeks later – on June 2 – the defending World Series champion Kansas City Royals took a gamble and drafted Jackson in the 4th Round of the MLB amateur draft (the Yankees’ right to sign Jackson had expired). Again, Jackson kept his word and did not sign with the Bucs. He signed with the Royals, played 53 games at AA Memphis, and was called up to the Show in September. He played five seasons with the Royals, three with the White Sox, and one with the Angels – resuming his baseball career with a new hip after his football career ended.

Even though his baseball career was by then in full flight, the Raiders selected Jackson in the 7th Round of the 1987 NFL draft – the Bucs’ right to sign him having expired. Bo signed with the Raiders, who agreed to allow him to play both baseball and football. They figured having part-time Bo was better than no Bo. Given baseball commitments and injury, Jackson never played more than 11 games in an NFL season.

In 1989 – the season Tecmo Bowl was released for the NES – Jackson rushed for 950 yards and a 5.5 yards per carry average in 11 games. And he hit 32 homers, drove in 105 runs, and stole 26 bases for the Royals. For good measure, he was the MVP of the 1989 MLB All-Star game.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of dominant NFL players coded into Tecmo Bowl – Lawrence Taylor, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, and Barry Sanders, to name a few. But anyone who cares to argue the case against Bo Jackson is simply going to lose that case. If you dare to try, first consider this YouTube video (yes – someone made a YouTube video!!) titled “Why Bo Jackson is So Unstoppable in Tecmo Super Bowl” or this article, “Remembering Bo Jackson’s ‘Tecmo Bowl’ Dominance.”

Bo Jackson was the greatest two-sport talent of my lifetime, and his injury was tragic. Folks can argue my “greatest two-sport talent” declaration – there have been other athletes who have played professionally with some success in two sports. But what cannot be argued is this declaration: as represented in Tecmo Bowl, Bo Jackson was the greatest video game athlete of all time.

1. Super Toe

The top spot on My Rushmore of Games I Played As A Kid* goes to the glorious, plastic oaf pictured above: Super Toe, or – as I affectionately called him – “Toe.”

Super Toe was an elegantly simple toy sold by Schaper Toys in the mid-1970s. The game came with just a few components: Super Toe himself, two plastic footballs that were squared off on either end so that they could stand without a kicking tee, and a set of plastic goal posts that were constructed in sections. The idea behind Super Toe was simple – you used him to kick plastic football field goals through the plastic goal posts.

“The score is tied and time is running out …” was the pitch on the commercials. Once you set up the goal posts, you picked a spot for your field goal try, lined up Super Toe, placed the ball in front of his plastic leg, and – this was the fantastic part – whacked Super Toe on the top of his helmet, sending his kicking leg forward to strike the ball, which sent it hurtling through the air toward the goal posts. The harder you banged on Toe’s helmet, the further the ball would go.

Super Toe’s range was maybe 12 feet (give or take), and obviously kicking the ball through a set of plastic goal posts became more difficult as you got further away. At first, successfully kicking relatively short field goals was a challenge – you had to get the hang of just how hard you could slam down on Super Toe’s head. But as you got better, finding space to try longer and longer field goals was the challenge.

Toe and I spent a lot of time together, and I got reasonably proficient sending those odd plastic footballs through the uprights. But my time with Toe nearly ended disastrously.

To understand why, you have to understand the layout of my childhood home on Sacramento Avenue in Chicago, pictured below.

Chicago bungalows are relatively narrow, maybe 20 feet wide on a standard 25-foot city lot. Our house was situated in the middle of a double lot, so it was a little wider than most – say 25 feet. Our house, like all bungalows, was much longer than it was wide. In the front of the house, you had the aptly named front room. As you proceeded toward the backyard and alley, along the left side of the house you had a dining room, bathroom, and kitchen. On the right side, you had my parents’ bedroom, a second bedroom, and a third bedroom. In our house, a narrow hallway connected the dining room and kitchen, with the second bedroom (mine, at the time) and the one bathroom on either side of that hallway.

At our dining room table, my father sat at the end nearest the front room, facing the back of the house. We ate at 5:30 p.m. every day, like clockwork. One night, I was called to dinner at exactly the same time I was about to attempt Toe’s longest field goal ever. I had figured out that I could squeeze a few extra feet of “field” out of my bedroom by placing the goal posts near the closet door, which was furthest from the door to the room. But my room wasn’t going to be enough to contain Toe’s booming leg, so I lined him up in the hallway to attempt an epic kick that would have to travel into and across the bedroom to reach the uprights.

There was one problem. Unless you whacked Toe on top of the helmet just right, he tended to kick the ball wildly. As luck would have it, on this occasion I whacked Toe on the head a few moments after my Dad had sat down at the dinner table. Toe kicked the ball a long way – but sideways. The ball rocketed out of the hallway, flew the length of our dining room table, and landed in my Dad’s mashed potatoes.

To my surprise, he did not yell. He got up calmly carrying a plastic football covered in mashed potatoes, walked down the hallway, picked up Super Toe, and then walked both to the back of the house, down the back stairs, and to the alley. There, he dropped Super Toe and the ball in one of our two steel garbage cans. He never said a word to me as he returned to his seat at the table and finished dinner. I just sat and ate silently, not knowing if I’d ever see Toe again.

Later that night, I snuck out to the alley and retrieved Toe and the ball. I hid both in my closet for a time, and made sure never to attempt a field goal from the hallway during dinner (or any time my Dad was home) again. At some point, I moved my bedroom to the attic upstairs. A long, window-less carpeted room served as my new quarters, and Toe and I had a gloriously long, safe space in which to split the uprights.

I rescued him, just as he had rescued me from hours of boredom.

-30-

PHOTOS

Honorable Mention: Mattel’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots

Honorable Mention: Aurora’s Monday Night Football

Honorable Mention: Slot Hockey

The Last Dance’s Missed Step

May 1, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

Predictably, I’m hooked. Four episodes into its 10-episode run, The Last Dance on ESPN is proving to be must-watch television. Great memories. Unforgettable characters. Horace Grant’s succinct, profane summary of the Detroit Pistons’ petulant walk-off after being swept by the Bulls in the 1991 conference finals. Dennis Rodman getting the green light from Phil Jackson, mid-season, to go on a 48-hour bender in Vegas. Countless electrifying highlights of Michael Jordan in his prime. For any basketball fan – and especially a Bulls fan – this is watching sports pornography. What’s not to like?

Actually, I do have one small beef with The Last Dance, and I think those of you who are from Chicago, grew up in Chicago, or lived in Chicago at any point before or during the Jordan years will understand. So far, at least, The Last Dance has failed to capture Michael Jordan’s enormous impact on the City of Chicago’s image and its citizenry’s collective self-esteem. MJ turned out to be a six-time NBA champion, zillion-time All-Star, Olympic champion, and the greatest-of-all-time at his sport. But before he was any of those things – and while he was building his legacy – he was our superstar.

I’ve seen some quibbling, critical reviews of the series – typically from those who acknowledge Michael Jordan’s status as Basketball Jesus, cultural icon, marketing phenomenon and all that, but clearly aren’t enamored of Michael Jordan the Person. One described Jordan as a 57-year-old with a paunch who – sadly – cannot let go of decades-long grudges. (On that charge, I find him guilty, though I’m not sure it’s so sad – the paunch or the grudges.) Another remarked that the series is too wed to telling the story from Jordan’s point of view. To that, I say “What? You want to hear more from Scott Burrell and Jud Buechler?” Call me crazy, but I am far more interested in Jordan’s perspective than Luc Longley’s.

Yet another scribe suggested Jordan only agreed to allow extensive access because he saw LeBron James as a threat to his status as the GOAT. Frankly, I don’t much care why Jordan agreed to sit down for hours and hours of interviews – I’m glad he did it. If you’ve seen the excellent 30-for-30 feature on the 1985 Bears, you saw an incredibly poignant story angle focused on Buddy Ryan, the team’s defensive coordinator. By the time the cameras rolled, Ryan was a dying man who had lost the ability to communicate much at all, let alone tell stories. The love his former players had for Ryan, and the love he had for them, came screaming out of the television. But man, what I would give to hear Buddy Ryan tell stories about Hampton and Singletary and McMichael and Dent and the Fridge. So yeah – I’m fine with lots of MJ in this series, and relegating his supporting cast to supporting roles.

My Guys – Norm Van Lier, Jerry Sloan, and Bob Love

Chicago Basketball B.M. (Before Michael)

Pre-Jordan, professional basketball in Chicago was more or less a wasteland. The Chicago Bulls were actually the third NBA franchise to call Chicago home. The Stags (1946-50), Packers and Zephyrs (1961-63) had failed to stick, but the NBA awarded the city an expansion franchise in 1966. The Bulls, coached by Chicago prep and University of Illinois great Johnny “Red” Kerr, actually made the playoffs – the first time an expansion franchise had done so in its first season. The Bulls first draft pick was the legendary Dave Schellhase of Purdue, a 6-3 guard who played in 73 games for the team and scored fewer points per game (2.8) than he had functioning limbs (presumably, 4). The initial success did not last. By 1968, the city was sufficiently disinterested in the Bulls that one of their home games was contested before 891 fans, and some “home” games were played in a far western suburb – Kansas City, Missouri.

In the mid-1970s, the Bulls put together a pretty decent team, and they were the first team to break my heart and make my nine-year-old self cry. Featuring Jerry Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Chet “The Jet” Walker, and Bob “Butterbean” Love, the 1974-75 Bulls took the eventual NBA champion Golden State Warriors to seven games in the conference finals, but lost. To this day, I hate Rick Barry and his silly underhanded free throw style – the one he used to make better than 90 percent that year. I recall the sting of that loss if it happened yesterday. After the game, I retired to my room, pulled the covers over my head, and cried myself to sleep. I had been initiated into the fraternity of disappointed Chicago sports fans.

That Bulls squad, coached by Dick Motta, dribbled off a cliff the next season. They went 24-58. Motta was out, and the forgettable Ed Badger replaced him. This began a dark, dark time in Bulls history. Playing mostly to empty seats at the Chicago Stadium, the Bulls teams in the eight years leading up to Jordan’s arrival in 1984 were most remembered for bad basketball and consuming copious amounts of cocaine (if The Last Dance has it right). This was my team, though. As I staggered through adolescence, I rode with the A-Train, Artis Gilmore – he of the creaky knees and gigantic Afro. The A-Train was 7-2, a bruising lefty with a blacksmith’s touch, and the best center in team history. Incredibly – given the weight of having been a Bull – he ended up in the Hall of Fame. The only reason he was a Bull at all was that the team drafted him #1 overall when the American Basketball Association folded and the NBA held a dispersal draft to claim players from the teams that were not being merged into the league. The Kentucky Colonels’ loss turned out to be the Bulls’ gain. Probably my favorite Bull of the Dark Ages was Reggie Theus, a flashy gunner from UNLV who was basically a thoroughbred running around with donkeys.

Trivia Question 1: In the 1977 NBA draft, the Bulls selected two players from the Atlantic Coast Conference who had played for the US Olympic basketball team in 1976. Who were they and what schools did they attend?
Trivia question brought to you by the one true team

The NBA draft in 1979 proved to be something of a bottom. The Bulls’ ineptitude had earned them the right to flip a coin with the Los Angeles Lakers for the first overall pick. The Bulls lost the flip, and the consolation prize was David Greenwood of UCLA. The Lakers took a guy named Earvin Johnson out of Michigan State. Went by the name Magic. That worked out okay for the Lakers. As the Greenwood Tree took root, in 1982 the Bulls drafted Quintin Dailey out of the University of San Francisco in Round 1. Dailey, a reasonably good player, was most memorable for his nickname, “San Quintin.” Apparently, a few months before the Bulls drafted him, Dailey had been accused of sexually assaulting a resident assistant at USF. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation, dodging any time in the penitentiary that inspired the nickname he could not shake. Decent folk – and even some local sportswriters – pilloried the Bulls’ selection of Dailey.

Eventually, the A-Train was shipped to San Antonio and the Bulls hit “re-set” for what seemed like the 15th time in my 17 years on Earth. In the six seasons pre-Jordan, the Bulls won an average of 30 games a year – or precisely 36.7 percent of the time. On the good news front, tickets to their games could be fetched for a song. That would change.

The Little School By The El Tracks

While Chicago professional basketball was in a dismal state pre-Jordan, Chicago was home to a powerhouse college program. Coach Ray Meyer’s DePaul squad, playing initially in 5,000-seat Alumni Hall at Belden and Sheffield, proved that the public would pay attention to winning basketball. DePaul built its program largely by recruiting the suburbs. In 1974, the Demons added Proviso East’s Joe “The Godfather” Ponsetto, Thornton’s Randy Ramsey, and Hersey’s Dave Corzine to an already decent squad. The next year, the Demons added Thornton’s Curtis Watkins and a rangy guard from East Orange, N.J. named Gary Garland. The table had been set. (Later in life, Garland, whose nickname was “The Music Man,” toured as a backup singer for his half-sister, a modestly talented gal named Whitney Houston.)

In 1979, Chicago’s own version of Michael Jordan arrived in Lincoln Park in the person of Westinghouse High’s Mark Aguirre. A 6-6 forward with hands Coach Ray once described as being as large as toilet seats, Aguirre was the best pure scorer I ever saw play college basketball. As a teenager whose dad wisely bought DePaul season tickets when Aguirre was a freshman, I worshiped Mark Aguirre. (So much so that I forgave him for being a Piston later in life.) As a freshman, Aguirre joined a veteran Demons squad and led it to the Final Four, losing to Larry Bird’s Indiana State team by two points. Between that year and 1983-84 – the six-year run-up to Jordan’s arrival – the Demons were 153-27 (an .850 winning percentage). It’s no wonder that DePaul regularly drew crowds of more than 15,000 after moving to the Rosemont Horizon – the House that Mark Built. Meanwhile, the Bulls struggled to fill half of the lower level at the old Chicago Stadium.

After building the program largely with suburban kids, Meyer turned to the Chicago Public League to take his program to the next level. In addition to Aguirre, he recruited Carver’s Terry Cummings, King’s Teddy Grubbs, and Skip Dillard and Bernard Randolph from Westinghouse. I still can hear PA announcer Jim Riebandt’s spirited introduction of DePaul’s Chicago Public League-dominated starting five … “from Chicago King …,” “from Chicago Carver …,” and of course, “from Chicago Westinghouse. Number 24. Mark. Aguirre.” Still gets me pumped.

Naturally, because it was a Chicago team of my youth/adolescence, the Demons underachieved. I absorbed another memorable gut punch in March 1981. My Dad let me skip school, and he and I climbed into his baby blue Lincoln Continental and road-tripped to watch top-ranked DePaul in (we assumed) the first two rounds of the NCAA tourney in Dayton, Ohio. Alas, in one of the biggest upsets in tournament history, DePaul lost to St. Joseph’s at the buzzer, 47-46. A completely forgettable guy named John Smith made an uncontested layup at the buzzer. Aguirre put on headphones and left the arena in tears, walking all the way back to the hotel in his uniform. His supernova college career was over just like that – he was the first overall pick in NBA draft a couple months later. My Dad and I stayed for the second game (eventual national champion Indiana dismantled Maryland), and made the 1,000-mile drive back to Chicago the next morning. Crushed.

Air Jordan Arrives

There was a bridge of sorts between that DePaul program and Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the person of Dave Corzine. Corzine turns out to have been at DePaul just prior to Aguirre’s arrival, and also on the scene when Jordan arrived. After a stellar career at DePaul, Corzine was drafted in the first round by the Washington Bullets, made his way to San Antonio, and in the summer of 1982 was traded to the Bulls along with the great Mark Olberding for the A-Train. Corzine was listed at 6-11, but in college he’d played at about 7-3 thanks to a glorious ‘fro of his own. Like a lot of the big men of his era, he was simply an outsized version of a normal human being – he wasn’t the chiseled, super-hero that we see today. Consummate pro, played his 25 minutes and scored his 10 points. Set solid screens, leaned on opposing centers. Nice little mid-range jump shot. In the two years before Jordan arrived in 1984, Corzine scored 14 and 12.2 points per game – his best marks as a pro. He was part of the core of the train wreck of a squad Jordan joined.

That Jordan arrived in Chicago at all is a story often told, and already told in The Last Dance. Corzine and Co. were bad enough that the Bulls earned the third overall pick. The Rockets and Trail Blazers, in need of big men, selected Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon and Kentucky’s Sam Bowie. Jordan fell into the Bulls’ lap, and the rest is history.

There’s no point to me walking through Jordan’s career, but there were two seminal moments for me. As The Last Dance detailed, Jordan scored 63 points in a playoff loss to the Boston Celtics in 1986 after missing most of the season with a broken foot. I remember the game vividly, because it marked my return to being a sports fan, after a long period during which it seemed like every game I watched was a game I covered as a college journalist. I remember sitting on a couch and enjoying a ridiculous display by Jordan. He relentlessly loped around the court like a colt, contorted himself to score over, under, and around the great Celtics front line. That was the day I thought to myself, this guy is really something special. And I pinched myself – he actually plays for my team.

Trivia Question 2 – Which Bulls’ player threw the inbounds pass to Michael Jordan that led to The Shot, and where did he play in college?
trivia question brought to you by the one true team

The second MJ moment, for me, was The Shot – the dagger of a buzzer-beating jumper in the deciding Game 5 of the first round in 1989 playoffs. Of course, Jordan hit that shot over Craig Ehlo to give the Bulls a 101-100 win, leaped about 14 feet into the air, and pumped his fist wildly as his teammates mobbed him and the Cleveland fans stood in silence. That was the first inkling that Jordan could not only shine spectacularly as an individual, but that he could will a team to win.

Move Over, Al Capone

By the time the 1990s rolled around, and certainly by the time of the 1997-98 season on which The Last Dance is focused, any Chicagoan traveling just about anywhere on Earth was almost certain to get something like this, in one accent or another: “You’re from Chicago? Ahhhh – Michael Jordan!!” By anywhere on Earth, I mean Europe, Asia, even Alabama or New Mexico. Jordan had become an international icon. If you were from Chicago, Jordanphiles from everywhere – and obviously, there were lots – envied you merely because you happened to live where Jordan played. “Chicago” no longer conjured up images of Prohibition era gangsters and the rat-tat-tat of their machine guns, but of the most dynamic, graceful, dominant athlete in the world.

Arriving on the heels of the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, Jordan elevated the franchise to heights no one could have imagined. Wildest dreams? Nope – way, way beyond our wildest dreams. Remember, this was the franchise of Coby Dietrick and Ricky Sobers and Tom Boerwinkle. Of Granville Waiters and Leon Benbow and Sedale Threatt. Fine fellows and excellent ballers, for sure – but players who played on teams for whom the playoffs were an inconvenient and unwelcome delay from the start of the summer.

Not only did he lift the franchise, but Jordan lifted an entire population’s self-esteem. That he came, in a short time, to symbolize and represent all that was good about Chicago is a little bit ironic. After all, Jordan was from Wilmington, North Carolina. Though Jordan played in Chicago, became famous in Chicago, opened restaurants in Chicago, and raised his first family in Chicago, Jordan was not from Chicago. Jordan was not Aguirre, or Cummings, or Isiah Thomas, or Doc Rivers. They were from Chicago (or, in Rivers’ case, Maywood). MJ just played here because Portland had to have Sam Bowie and his brittle legs. As it turned out, MJ was better at basketball than all of them. And he put their town on his back and took all of us for an unforgettable ride.

Chicago’s reaction when Jordan left was interesting – a collective shrug. We didn’t really care that he found it necessary to come out of retirement and putter around with the Wizards for a couple of years. I could not have cared less. Jordan was mine when he was at his greatest. His career ended, as far as I am concerned, with the pose in Utah after nudging Bryon Russell – ever so slightly – to free himself for a jumper that sealed a sixth title. (I have a feeling we’ll see that shot at some point in The Last Dance.) I was not the least bit bitter when Jordan decided to play for a team other than the Bulls. He’d earned the right to do whatever he wanted. I hardly watched, not because it bothered me, but because our time together had ended. I don’t even recall being very upset that the dynasty was (maybe) ushered to an early end by Bulls’ management, personified in the series as GM/Punching Bag Jerry Krause. Let’s face it, Pippen needed to get paid. Phil’s Zen act was wearing a little thin. MJ was not getting younger. And the two ends of Dennis Rodman’s candle were converging. Did the team have the right to lose its title on the court? That can be argued. But I, for one, felt satisfied with the double three-peat.

I have never met Michael Jordan in person, or been anywhere closer to him than in the same arena on the few occasions I was able to see him perform. I share very little in common with him – apart from a love of basketball, golf, and (to a lesser extent I think) casinos. But somehow, for some odd reason, I felt entitled to take more than a small measure of pride in the simple fact that he and I – and millions of others – shared a city.

A Missed Step, Or A Lost Cause?

Thankfully, The Last Dance – and not the Tiger King – will be the Covid-19 series I’ll remember best. Like any documentary that covers a lot of ground, viewers will quibble with things left out. My point is this: the producers have missed (so far, at least) capturing Jordan’s impact on my hometown, Chicago. And they’ve missed deeply exploring the impact he had on civic pride and a city’s self-esteem. When Jordan arrived in 1984, the last championship any Chicago team had won was in 1963, when the Bears won the NFL title. The Bears would win a Super Bowl before MJ would get the Bulls to the promised land, but Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to Chicago sports, with apologies to many who were great – but not as great.

There are bits and pieces of The Last Dance that convey the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, and even the footage of Jordan’s rookie season shows an ocean of empty seats at the Stadium. We heard Michael dish about the cocaine, booze, and women his teammates soaked up on road trips when he was a rookie. We’ve seen plenty of footage of parades and celebrations and adoring crowds – and we’ll see more as the series unfolds.

But what the producers missed is something that is not easily captured and communicated: the story of how a singular athlete lifted up not just a teammate, or a team, or an entire franchise – but changed the perception and self-image of an entire city.

He is the greatest player of all time. He is maybe the most ruthless competitor to ever wear sneakers. He is a marketing force. He is a cultural icon. He’s all of the things that
The Last Dance highlights. But during the years that really mattered – during that glorious span of 14 years – he was all ours.

-30-

Answers to Trivia Questions:
Q1: In 1977, the Bulls selected Duke’s Tate Armstrong in the first round, and Maryland’s Steve Sheppard in the second. Both played on the gold-medal winning 1976 U.S. Olympic team. Seven of the 12 players on that team were from the ACC.
Q2: Brad Sellers of Ohio State inbounded the ball. The highlight of his career.
answers provided by the one true team

Month: May 2020

From Serenity Now!! to The Serenity Prayer – How To Survive a Pandemic

My Rushmore: Games I Played As a Kid*

The Last Dance’s Missed Step

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