A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I was having a bit of a personal dilemma. While attending a wedding of a good friend, I met up with several mutual friends of varying degrees of familiarity. Some were guys that I knew years ago and hadn't really spoken to since. Some were guys that I knew a while ago and still speak to occasionally. Some were guys up with whom we try to meet regularly and as often as possible, and still others were guys I'm sure I was supposed to know but couldn't recall why. My wife and I have an understanding in these situations: if I don't introduce her in the first three sentences after meeting someone, it means I don't remember their name and she need to introduce herself in hopes that they will do the same. I'd rather concede being slightly rude in not introducing my wife, then admit to not having a freakin scooby who I'm talking to. She's sometimes jumped in after two sentences, so I think she secretly will suffer the insult because she gets to introduce herself and roll her eyes dramatically...
So, over the course of the first few hours of this wedding, we went through the gauntlet of countless (re)introductions. Some were cordial, some were a bit more formal and some were enthusiastically familiar. But, as I saw and said hello to someone I know quite well, I was overtaken by formality. As this woman approached, looking radiant in her best wedding attire and smiling widely, I panicked and stuck out my hand for a handshake. This was a woman I have spent multiple holidays with. After what I did to her and her husband's toilet following a Czechoslovakian stag do, there can never be any pretense of refinement between us. Knowing this, she was forced to make the mid-air adjustment from hug to handshake and we both looked awkwardly at each other, commenting stiffly on how nice it was to see each other again. To make things worse, her husband followed immediately after and we embraced in a loud, macho, back-slapping, caveman-esque Man Hug.
And so it happened all night. Someone would approach. My mind would start racing... do I know you? How do I know you? Are you a handshake or a hug? Have you ever seen my testicles (that doesn't eliminate as many people as you might think)? Now, it is entirely possible that I was over-thinking this a bit, and I knew it. But I couldn't help it, and it was exhausting. I was relieved and thirsty by the time the celebrations began in earnest.
So, on another social occasion this past weekend, I decided to eliminate the issue: everyone would just get a hug. Maybe it was the GBK Taxi Driver, maybe it was ice-cold San Miguel(s). But everyone was going to get hugged whether they liked it or not. Guy friends got them, girl friends got them, even gay friends of guy friends' girlfriends got them. Hug, hug hug. If they stuck out a paw for a stoic shake, I swatted it aside and went in for some huggage. If they looked scared as I approached, my arms held wide and wild eyes locked on theirs, I swooped in for some soul-affirming squeezosity. Many - if not all - of the men slapped my back, as if to beat the homoerotic connotations right out of the situation. But, if they did that, I pulled them closer, and hugged them harder. I hugged the shit out of people that day. No literally, that would be gross.
The fact is that I felt better for it. No more obsessing about whether I delivered the appropriate amount of familiarity, no more trying to tailor my greeting with a rather muddled recollection of levels of acquaintance. Everyone got the same: they got me. None of them gave me a Coke, but I'm sure they'll thank me later.
We established some time ago that I know nothing about sports. That's not changed. But I do know people, and there is something about people involved with American football in the UK that I find really interesting.
Let me start this off by saying that I consider myself as included in my argument. I know that I don't do anything close to the amount of work that is required to achieve anything more than serendipitous excellence in coaching. Please do not assume when reading this that as I point my finger at 'you', I am unaware of the four pointing back at me. I am aware that I am included.
As for interesting things - actually, there are at least two things, possibly more. The first is that, by and large, people in this country don't seem to want to do the things necessary to become seriously competitive at this sport. Most people (I can hear the cry of a thousand string-vested muscle shirts being torn in a Hogan-esque outrage) - don't want to get up crazy early every day, lift weights, watch film, or even practice at least five days a week. And the thing is, because it's the majority that seem to this pathological aversion the discipline of Becoming Great (and yes, I do include myself in the Mediocre Majority), they actually get away with it.
They don't have to work hard to compete because their competition is just as institutionally lazy, inept or both. By genetic disposition and an endemic geographical disparity of resources, most people languish in the misty twilight between (very) local notoriety and national obscurity. Those who DO excel, do so often in spite of the support systems they have at their disposal, and their achievements are often difficult to evaluate objectively due to the overall paucity of real competition in the British amateur game. That unfortunate situation creates a real challenge for those players and coaches who have true and quantifiable talent: they tend to congregate around well-established successful programs, and they tend to have to leave the UK to develop their talents to a truly elite standard. There have been previous few who have actually been able to make the transition between 'great UK player' to 'great player', and most of them are only British by birthright - often they have spent more of their developmental years in the US than at home.
The other thing I find interesting is that many of those same people who do not recognize or choose to ignore what it takes to become truly great at this sport are the same people who are the most self-congratulatory when their efforts, however minor, result in some success, however small. I have never known - in the US or in the UK - a group of participants of a minority sport that was quicker or more vocal to celebrate transitory or coincidental success than the British American football community as a whole. Facebook is swarming about this club or that, claiming to be champions of this or that. Twitter chirps constantly with boastful proclamations about a team's dominance. If Social Media is to be believed, there seems to be no limit to the pain and suffering that every team could inflict on every other. Which I find odd, and unique (in my experience) to the UK gridiron. You don't see it in British basketball, baseball, lacrosse, ultimate freaking frisbee or mother-fucking quidditch (there is an International Quidditch League, I shit you not. 300 teams, 1500 registered players and a truly international World Cup).
The reality is that coaches and players involved with the consistently best programs, the ones that truly understand what it takes to be objectively competitive; they are the ones you never hear from. Leaders and athletes - not simply participants - working at the most elite levels that the sport can offer in the UK are too busy doing the hard work to spend any real time tweeting about it. John Wooden reminds us that “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.”
I wish more American football coaches and players in the UK were humble, grateful and careful. Until we reconsider what it truly means to excel, we cannot truly appreciate the magnitude of our achievements (or lack thereof). It simply should not enough to be 'good for the UK'; we need to seriously think about growing the fish AND the pond. And, in the meantime, mostly keeping our mouths shut while we get to work.
