Burgers, Beer and Bear-Hugs (oh my)!

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.

Still No Bo

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.

A funny thing happened on the way back from the toilet...

It was 4:23 in the morning. Unusually, my wife had asked me to feed our youngest because or eldest (also unusually) had woken up crying. I had done the zombie feed, burped her (the baby, not my wife), put her back in bed and made my way sleepily to the toilet. I got up to return to our bedroom. My foot was asleep... not uncommon after a stint on the khazi. I shook it out and continued walking. But it didn't wake up. In fact, by the time I got to our door about 10 feet away, my right arm felt funny, too. My wife, slightly annoyed that I was making such a commotion, turned the light on and asked I was OK. I looked at her, and I was suddenly very aware that I was not OK. I slid down the wall as she repeated my name and asked whether she should call an ambulance. My eyes must have said 'yes' because my mouth no longer wa0 doing as it was told. I wanted to scream out 'Yes, call the ambulance quickly!' I knew every second counted. I I knew it was serious.I knew I was having a stroke.

I wanted do be able do something other than lay there in a crumpled heap, moaning and drooling. I think I managed to mumble 'I'm scared,' and flop myself onto my back before the paramedics arrived. The looks they gave me and the serious, professional tones of their voices confirmed my fears. A muffled tear - the first of many that I would shed over the next week - worked its way down my lazy right cheek as she said those words. 'Listen,' she said. 'You've had a stroke. We need to get you to hospital'. In the background, I could hear her partner calling it in. '43-year-old male, FAST positive... no sign of head trauma...' I felt myself trying to correct her, 'Forty-TWO! I'm 42!' Even I understood the absurdity of trying to correct that tiny, insignificant thing. But it felt immensely important. My wife knew; she giggled a little as she translated my slurs.

With the help of all three of them, I got into the evac chair and they put a blanket over me to cover my modesty. 'I'm a drooling vegetable,' I thought. 'What dignity could I possibly have left?' As I got upright and strapped in, a neighbour arrived to help move me down the stairs. The way he looked at me reminded me again that this was real.

As I got to the top of the stairs, the oddest thing happened. Everything went... normal. My hand relaxed, my leg pulled itself in and my tongue shrunk. I looked up at my wife, showed he my fully functional hand and exclaimed in relief, 'Thank fuck for that!' A temporary glitch; a mini-stroke. I'd gotten away with it. I didn't have too much time to celebrate; by the time we'd cleared the last step, I was all strokey again. I sighed in despair.

Outside, a Welsh monsoon had blown into Devil's Bridge. The edges of my hospital blanket were dragging through the run-off river that was racing down our road. I remember think that the 'loading' was much clumsier than on TV; it was bumpy and rattly and noisy. My father-in-law's head peered around the door. Another set of eyes making a mockery of my wife's assurances that 'it was't that bad.'

They adjusted the oxygen mask on my face, strapped me down and with two unceremonious thuds as the doors closed we started the 12 mile trip to the ER. I was trembling from a mixture of cold, fear and spasm. The gas was making me nauseous and the unforgiving Welsh roads tossed me around like the lifeless ragdoll I thought I'd become. We stopped once to shut the door. My wife held my hand and kept me awake as we made our way agonisingly slowly to the hospital. I was literally putting my life and into the hands of a hospital I'd never trusted. The last time I was gettting treatment here (in 1996), the nurse showed me how to take a really deep drag on the nitrus oxide before he took out a pair of pliars, put his foot on my shoulder and yanked a wire from my previously broken finger. To say I was worried about the standard of care I'd receive is putting it mildly.

There is a certain degree of calm that comes with resignation. As far as I knew, strokes always won and they always kicked your ass. As they wheeled to have a CT scan, I was simply waiting to be told that my life was over as I knew it. My family, my job, maybe even my residency in the UK had been taken from me in an instant.  The tears came again - this time mourning the loss of identity and independence. As my wife tried to reassure me that everything would be alright, I tried to reassure her that I wasn't scared shitless. I don't think either of us would have won an Oscar for our efforts.

We sat. Well, she sat; I lay. But we both waited for the results of the scan that tell us how much we would allow ourselves to hope.