I thought out this blog post while in the shower this morning. So, we’re not even going to pretend that it is well-researched. It’s stream of consciousness. I apologize in advance.
Josh Beckett (image from Over The Monster and Getty Images)
There are Boston Red Sox fans who I follow on Twitter who are upset that the media has pointed out that Josh Beckett went golfing, despite having a muscle issue and missing a scheduled start on the mound. They feel as if the media has ganged up on the pitcher, and he has every right to play golf on an off-day. Beckett himself even defended his actions by saying that he “only gets 18 off-days a year” and that he had every right to use one to hit the links.
Let’s put the supposed media “witch hunt” aside. Let’s look at the actuality of an athlete playing another sport as leisure while in season.
Professional and college athletes are often forbidden from playing any other sport – even one as innocuous as golf – while in season. For example, a very good friend of mine played Division I hockey, but she also loved to ski. But when she was home for the brief time she had for the holidays because she was in-season, she had to watch everyone else in her family ski while she sat there. She couldn’t downhill or cross country ski. She had an understanding with her teammates and her coaching staff that because she was an athlete in season, she couldn’t jeopardize being injured participating in another sport at leisure.
Sometimes this expectation is physically written into a contract with a professional athlete, and sometimes it is just implied. If you make a living from your body being at its peak, you don’t put it at risk of any type of injury.
There is a vast difference in athletic output between golf and skiing, but you still can be injured playing golf (ask my father, who actually broke ribs playing golf a few years back.) While those injuries are usually relatively mild, the risk is still there. And given that baseball is a sport where players often miss starts due to things as minor as ingrown nails and broken toes*, the minor injuries that golf can cause are significant enough to meddle in the everyday life of a baseball player. For a pitcher, the repetitive shoulder isolating actions of golf increase that risk more. If you’re a pitcher with over ten years of major league wear and tear on your arms and shoulders, and you have a sore latissimus muscle (which Beckett has) the motion of hitting a golf club may not be advisable in season. (In layman’s terms, the latissimus muscle is the muscle found from under your armpit around the side of your back. It’s a muscle used in both pitching and swinging a golf club.)
Also, there is that old adage that if you’re not well or performing well enough to do your job, go to school or attend an event, than you shouldn’t be stepping out and doing something enjoyable in its stead. When you were a kid, and you had to stay home from school with either an legitimate illness or a trumped up cold because of an exam you wanted to avoid, your mother wouldn’t just let you go to the mall or playground or what have you later in the day. No, even if you were feeling better, you stayed home. You needed to keep up appearances – or at least my mom wanted us to. Even to this day, if I am stuck home sick, I’m not jumping in The Kat Mobile and putting around. That’s playing hooky. I don’t want to appear to be playing hooky.
If you are being paid handsomely to show commitment to your job, you never want to appear to be playing hooky.
Josh Beckett knew he was not making his next scheduled start. He then decided to go play golf with another pitcher. He’s an adult and is allowed to make his own decisions, but I just don’t know if that was his best one. Is the media out to get Beckett? Frankly, the media is out to get anyone and everyone involved with the Red Sox because no one within the organization is showing accountability. It’s like a consumer report – you pay $50 to attend a game, you spend $140 a month to get a cable package with NESN so you can watch it, but you’re getting nothing but failure from that money. I think it’s fine for the media to ask these questions. The product is faulty, and they are just trying to figure out why.
*And before anyone comments, “Have you ever had one of those injuries? They hurt,” yes, I have had both. And danced on pointe, ran cross-country and did beam with both. I’ll get off my high horse now.
Hi, my name is Kat. I joined a 31 day blog-post-a-day challenge (the WordCount Blogathon Challenge) and…missed the very first day.
Oops.
And now that I’ve negated my eligibility for actually saying I completed said challenge, I’ll try to go 30 days in a row writing a post.
Sure, posting once a day on all three of my personal sites in the month of May when I still work full-time in higher education is rather self-punishing. If I get through it, I’ll be a better writer for the experience. In addition, it’ll help me write substantive material every day, something I feel empty not doing. But it is something I go without doing too often.
Writing something once a day means I may have to branch out beyond sports, which I hope my more sports minded followers will not mind. One topic I will be writing about in May will be that this month is National Stroke Awareness Month, a topic very near and dear to my heart. My grandfather (who taught me a lot of my sports knowledge, including an extremely useful base level knowledge of NASCAR) suffered numerous strokes between 1991 and 2002. Just about two weeks ago, my own mother (who is only in her early fifties) suffered her own stroke. My mom is well on her way to recovery – luckily, her stroke was mild, and she’s already back on her feet after a few days in the hospital.
The general public doesn’t talk enough about stroke – in fact, it seems like it’s only mentioned when we talk about the late Dick Clark, and then, it’s shrugged off. We forget that it can strike the very young and very fit (like former New England Patriot Tedy Bruschi), and that if you are vigilant, you can treat a stroke before it causes significant damage. We also overlook that research has provided us with immensely better ways to treat stroke in the past twenty or so years – the advances in treatment from my grandfather’s first stroke and his later ones were noticeable, and is has improved more since the early 2000s.
So in between the sports and social media related posts I will write in May, I am going to talk about stroke – how you can prevent it, how we can work together to further the research and how many stroke victims have successful recoveries. I promise not to get preachy – I just hope that I can use the small platform I have to help others.
If I ever had a day with the Stanley Cup, I am not sure exactly what I would do with it. You’re talking to a girl who once had to carry the Beanpot down a Madison Square Garden hallway and did so totally on her tiptoes because she was too frightened of somehow harming the famous trophy. I feel like if given the Stanley Cup for a day, I’d find a padded room, place it there, borrow some stanchions from my full-time job, and only let people get within four feet of it. I wouldn’t want to be THE person that somehow breaks the Stanley Cup, thus ensuring its future as being imprisoned behind thick plexi-glass.
Given that anxiety, I did not enter Discover’s Day With The Cup contest. But many hockey fans did, and the contest has been whittled down to three worthy finalists. You can see each finalist on the contest’s Facebook page.
While all three finalists have equally motivating tales, I have to say that the entry of Heather and Noah was the most heart tugging. Noah shared his love of hockey with his father, a member of the military who was recently deployed overseas. As the entry reads, “Hockey was something that me and my dad did together, every weekend, my mom don’t like the cold.”
Noah and Heather (who I am guessing is his non-cold liking mom) credit Noah’s hockey team, the Fulton Red Raiders, for helping them through the emotional ups and downs of having a loved one deployed. They want to win a day with the cup to salute Noah’s dad and his fellow soldiers.
The other two finalists are equally as deserving, but Noah’s especially touched my heart. I know I’ll be voting for him to earn a day with the Stanley Cup.
Which one of the Day With The Cup entries do you like best? Would you be as nervous as I would if you got a day with the Stanley Cup? Tell me in the comments!
Thank you to Discover for providing the information for this Day With The Cup post. It is a sponsored post, meaning I may receive compensation from the company for posting it.
When I was a little girl, I adored the 1980s cartoon Jem.
Jem was a popular animated cartoon and series of dolls about a woman named Jerrica. Jerrica spent her days running a music related company and running a home of foster children. But at night (or whenever she touched her magical holographic earrings and called upon a Great Oz style machine named Synergy), Jerrica became Jem, mid 1980s pop rocker with bubble gum pink hair and the very thickest of eyeliner. Only those closest to Jem – her all-female band with equally bright hair and horrid 80s fashion taste – knew she led this double life.
Five year old me loved the idea that you could be great at two careers and just seamlessly glide from one to the other without too much conflict. Sure, the Jem/Jerrica charade did get tricky at times, but in the interest of good TV, it was always figured out without anyone who didn’t need to know finding out.
Fast forward 25 years, and living a life like Jerrica’s is not too far fetched. During the day, I am a higher education administrator, caring for 16,000 undergrads and another couple thousand grad students. When they succeed, my office rewards them, and when they fall hard, my office punishes them. Increasingly over the years, my job has included handling external interests when students fall hard and trying to promote the much good the unnoticed majority are doing.
At night, I am a sports writer – or at least I try to be. Writing and communicating was the one thing I knew I wanted to do since I was twelve years old, but the foundation was laid long before: I had been writing stories, making handmade books and creating newsletters since I was four.
For a while, I was able to seamlessly glide between working in Student Affairs during the day and being a writer at night. It was fulfilling and felt even glamorous in a way to get out of one job and frantically run to the other. “I just expelled someone and ran a town hall meeting for students, but wait! – a half hour later, I am covering a lacrosse game!”
Just like the cartoon I loved as a child, I was doing two meaningful careers – one that I loved, and another that helped others. And the two lines didn’t cross. The rare times conflict arose, I was able to deflect or solve it before anyone who didn’t need to know knew.
Until lately. read more…
Veteran sports broadcaster Verne Lundquist is calling NCAA Tournament basketball games for CBS this weekend. I don’t know about you, but even fourteen years after CBS broadcast its last Winter Olympics, Lundquist’s voice will still always be associated with Olympic coverage for me.
If you grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was high probability that one of your childhood dreams was to be a well-trained, calm and composed figure skater representing the United States at the Olympics. Part of that dream included Lundquist narrating your life story – or at least pertinent biographical information – to the masses. And then when Scott Hamilton, his color analyst, would flip out and talk nonsensical about your performance, Lundquist would bring him back from spaz-ville.
“She landed a triple loop,” Hamilton would comment, then start shrieking like someone turned his personal energy throttle up to Micro Machine Man. “OH MY GOODNESS, THIS IS THE BEST MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA. NO MANKIND. NO, ALL OF THE UNIVERSE.”
Lundquist would cut through the energy and translate Hamilton’s insanity to the masses. “I think what you’re trying to say, Scott, is that she’s doing quite well.”
Childhood Olympics junkies, like myself, would take to the nearest tiled floor in my house during Olympic coverage commercials and “skate” around in our footy pajamas. When I did so, I always could hear Lundquist’s voice right before I manically started jumping around in my tiny kitchen. “The first to skate, the ten year old from Rochester, New York, Katie Hasenauer.”
You wanted Lundquist to tell America your own personal story of adversity, you wanted Hamilton to over-caffeinatedly swoon over your jumps and artistry, and you wanted to skate like Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi. That was life as a ten year old girl in 1992, back when the Olympics were the national equivalent of the Super Bowl, March Madness, a Mad Men season premiere and a Harry Potter film opening all in one. (Or at least, that is what it felt like.)
When I had Syracuse-Wisconsin and Ohio State-Cincinnati basketball on my television Thursday night and heard the now 71 year old Lundquist calling the game, I was instantly taken back to those days where I spent my entire February school vacation glued to the television watching Olympics coverage and hanging on to his every word. For me, there are few childhood memories clearer or fonder than that.
Here’s Lundquist calling one of 1992 Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi’s programs.
