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.

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.

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.

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.

I work for a university very much in the public eye, exposed by some of the very publications I freelance for. Two of the incidents involve one of the sports I write about.

I took myself out of the college hockey writing game for most of this season because of the turmoil, which was hard given that I had finally gotten a gig at one of the sports’ biggest sites, one I had aspired to write for since I started following the game.

But it still felt tricky. Many times this year, the news department of the newspaper I freelance for came calling our office. Since news and sports exist in silos in many traditional newspaper operations, they don’t know me and I only know of them from exchanging pleasantries at the coffee maker. But I still feel uneasy when they come calling my office.

Those instances and others are blurring the lines between my two lives.

It’s also becoming more difficult to physically lead two lives. Every recent step I take to strengthen my writing career has been failing like my attempt in high school to take AP Physics without taking Physics first (where my teacher would look at my homework and say, “I can’t even give you partial credit for this.”) Every step I take to strengthen my higher ed career frustrates my writing career, and vise versa.

When I take on a new writing opportunity or increased responsibility on a publication, knowing I need to do so to further that part of my career, my education job intervenes, and I’m unable to fulfill those duties. My massive failure of attempting to be the associate editor of SBNation Boston for a month is the biggest example of this – that was a role I had wanted for a long time, but I couldn’t manage all of the responsibilities on top of my other work. Stepping down from that role was a giant sucker punch to my gut, and probably the biggest feeling of failure I’ve felt since the AP Physics debacle of 1998.

When try to go above and beyond in my education job, I have to decline a lot of writing assignments. I get home every day around 8pm from my education job, and I’m so overwhelmed by the amount on my plate for both jobs that I can’t focus on much of anything, and find myself asleep with my netbook on my lap.

It’s easy for others to recommend that I pick and focus on one career. Balancing both was so fun and fulfilling for so long that I don’t want to admit that I’m now failing at the balancing act.

I also don’t have a mentor in either career, nor do I have the support from those close to me to help me make a decision. I have a husband who thinks I’m crazy, and doesn’t understand my need to stay up late to get work done. My own family is seven hours away. I am on my own, like I always have been for so many important decisions in my life.

I can’t keep unhappily struggling to balance my two lives. I’ve gotten to the point where the stress from the balancing act is making me ill. I am failing at it, and not making progress in either career. So do I drop my life as a sportswriter, or do I drop my life as a higher education administrator? And how do I deal with the loss of the career I drop?

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.

And while that is fine and good for Little Miss Polite me, it’s also limiting. Do you realize how much more blogging material I would have if I just hung onto that writing, stripped out the nonsense and posted it?

So today, when I saw several Boston based football writers seriously suggest, upon the Tim Tebow trade to the New York Jets, that “Brian Hoyer is the second best AFC East quarterback,” I threw my pen across my office in disbelief. I then recovered the pen and started scribbling.

But wait – why scribble and throw? I’ve got a blog that needs material, and this is a pretty legit rant. So here you go: my unedited “Scribble and Throw” response regarding Brian Hoyer, New England Patriots backup quarterback. I’m not claiming that I’m right, that this is grammatically correct, or that this is by any means my best work. This is just what exactly I thought and wrote in fifteen minutes time.

—————–

Okay fine. My beef with the “Brian Hoyer is the 2nd best AFC East QB” comments.

I don’t understand the “the New England Patriots think he is starter material” reasoning behind the comment. Bill Belichick recognizes the value in return he can get in players. If he recognizes Hoyer’s a starter, wouldn’t he negotiate with one of his trusted trade partners and get something for him?

Hoyer’s game experience – which I understand isn’t as valuable of a statistic as some make it out to be – is minimal. He’s played 13 games in three seasons – five each in 2009 and 2010 and 3 in 2011.

If he’s starter material, why do the Patriots make Brady play through injury and meaningless games? I understand Brady’s competitive, but he’s also smart. He knows he’s at an advanced age for an NFL quarterback, and has the mental capacity and football understanding to realize what he needs to do to prolong his career. If Hoyer was starter material, Brady and the Patriots would play Hoyer more often to give Brady the rest he so badly needs after the plethora of injuries he’s been plagued with.

And don’t even try the “Brady isn’t injury plagued” bit with me. The man’s ACL/MCL tear may have been caused by Bernard Pollard, but it also was a cascade injury, caused by overcompensation from a previous injury. Brady has had surgeries in several off seasons. Goodness, he’s been a starting NFL quarterback for over a decade. You’re going to be injured, and you’re going to be in pain, and a Sunday off every once and a while would be useful.

And the Patriots don’t think Hoyer is good enough to provide Brady with that break.

This opens up an even deeper question – who is Brady’s successor? Is Hoyer that successor, and if so, how do you prepare him with experience beyond practice? Belichick likes to win now, not win next year when your QB has more seasoning. And true, Brady came off the bench and was high caliber pretty quickly, but that’s a rarity. Even “perfect QB specimen” Andrew Luck needs seasoning. Starting quarterbacks need to get used to being pummeled like a nail on a worksite and  need to command the leadership of all of those around you, regardless of how many more years in the league they have than you. That’s difficult. That doesn’t happen overnight. And that doesn’t happen by throwing a mere 22 yards a year.

Ryan Fitzpatrick may not be the world’s best quarterback, but he (somehow, Stevie Johnson and all) has the leadership thing down. Mark Sanchez is a hot mess, so let’s not go there. Heck, even Chad Henne, Matt Moore and David Gerrard have a more varied and useful set of game experiences than Hoyer. I’m not saying their skill sets are better, but they all have a little bit more panache and a few less butterflies in the stomach every time they jogs out to the huddle. That counts for something.

Is Hoyer better than Tebow? Tebow has measurable results – a bigger sample size, if you will – that we have not been able to measure with Hoyer. Tebow can command an offense down the field in a do-or-die situation. We have no tangible recent pro football evidence that Hoyer can do that.

So the flippant comment that Hoyer is better than Sanchez, Fitzpatrick, Tebow, and the Dolphins-starting-quarterback-de-jour is completely ungrounded in anything besides “well, the Patriots organization says to a few people that he might be ready.” And that and a dollar won’t even get you over the Tobin Bridge.

If the email is too lengthy, students read two lines in, realize it resembles a novella, and immediately strike the delete option. If the email sounds to harsh or overbearing, students reading it hear the Peanuts teacher voice in their head and tune out. If the email is too brief, then you risk not getting all of the points you need to across.

On top of all of that, universities are asked to include certain messages by the Boston Police and Mayor’s Office. The two entities produced a PDF called, ”Play It Safe,” with tips they wanted to provide to Super Bowl revelers. The PDF was available for forwarding via email or posting to school websites. In giant institutional email systems with limited mailbox sizes, it is far easier to post the PDF online and incorporate the tips into university-wide emails.

Here’s a quick look at Massachusetts area colleges and how they tried to get the “please behave on Super Bowl Sunday” message out to their students:

• I’m biased, but my boss at Boston University wrote a great one this year – one that struck the perfect balance between length and importance. You can see it here. He also wrote a blog post.

• Our neighbor on the other side of the Fenway, Northeastern University, struck a different tone, with several different messages going out to students from various entities (individual resident directors as well as an all-University one.) One of those messages was subsequently called out by Boston Police for misrepresenting their policies. BostInnovation’s Laura Landry was on top of the story during the week. (If you don’t read her education writing on a regular basis, you’re missing out.)

• The UMass Amherst campus has had problems with sports-related rioting on their Western Massachusetts campus in years past. To get out the “behave or else” message this year, they chose to make videos with alums Victor Cruz of the New York Giants and James Ihedigbo of the New England Patriots addressing the student body. You can see Cruz’s video over at Gahden Gremlins.

• Suffolk University also sent out an email to their student body on Friday. According to the Suffolk Voice, the email focused on the precautions the BPD will be taking around the city during the Super Bowl.

Is there any perfect way to give students the “Please Don’t Riot” message, or will a select few always misbehave when the opportunity presents itself? Do you have examples of what your school sent out that you’d like to share?

Nextag.com rounded up some figures and shared them with members of the media throughout the web. Here are some of the facts and figures I found interesting:

• In terms of Patriots’ gear, “Tom Brady continues to be the most sought-after jersey with 8 of the top 10 selling items, followed by Wes Welker.”

• Women’s merchandise account for seven of the top ten most popular Patriots’ items sold online. The most popular item is the “Reebok New England Patriots Tom Brady Premier Team Color Jersey,” with a women’s pink jersey, the “Reebok New England Patriots Tom Brady Women’s Pink Fem Fan Jersey” coming in a close second.

• Despite the usual outcry towards pink and sparkly sports wear for women, two of the top ten Patriots items on Nextag.com are pink female jerseys. Another two have rhinestone embellishment and are in fabric and prints exclusive to women’s styles.

Big thanks to Nextag.com for sharing this data with sportswear geek me. What will I be wearing to the Super Bowl Party I’m working Sunday? Not anything Brady, but not anything Manning either. I’ll be wearing a very special outfit that will represent the two teams that would have made the Big Game…if the AFC and NFC determined their representatives based solely on the first four weeks of the season. I promise to post a photo sometime Sunday on my Twitter feed.

We’ve seen tons of stories throughout the years of athletes persevering through injury or illness to play in the most important game, meet or match of their lives, and many of them have been in the Super Bowl. In a well-done marketing move, the marketing team behind Vicks created the following info-graphic about not letting anything derail you from playing in, attending or watching the game, as well as the best NFL stories that have the healing quality of a good bowl of chicken soup.

It even gives a shout-out for one of the only New England Patriots I can root for, fellow Western New Yorker Rob Gronkowski. A recent fan survey pointed to him as the best example of the Vicks slogan, “In the NFL, there are no sick days.”

(I’m a sucker for info-graphics, what can I say?

I eventually grew up, traveled much more, even lived in a hotel for a year and a half (overflow housing at Binghamton), and realized that beloved Walden Galleria hotel was just a chain. A clean chain, a safe chain, a very nice hotel for a 14 year old on a Girl Scout trip to a large regional mall, but still…a chain.

So part of me was taken aback when Tom Brady may have taken a swipe at Buffalo hotels in a Super Bowl press conference on Wednesday. You don’t like Buffalo hotels? You specifically felt the need to call out Buffalo hotels? I’m sorry that the Rust Belt-but-still-surviving city of Buffalo doesn’t suit the taste of you, your Brazilian supermodel wife and your two small children who honestly just get excited to go swim in a hotel pool regardless of its Triple A star status.

Then the more rational, less defensive, and Boston conditioned side of me took over. He may have a point. Brady only sees Buffalo and the surrounding area during its coldest and grayest months. He’s not spending long periods of time there (unless he gets snowbound in the Hyatt in Rochester after the World Junior Hockey Championships prevent him and his teammates from lodging in Buffalo.) And the hotels around Orchard Park, much like the hotels around Brady’s home stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, are like the ones near the Walden Galleria: generic chains or sketchy motor inns best suited for home hair dyed hookers. (Nothing against home hair dye.)

Maybe it was not the best statement to make in public. Maybe he should have picked on Green Bay. (They’re small market too. They just…market their quaintness and sausages better?) But in the grand scheme of awful remarks to make, Brady’s jab ranks pretty low.

(I wrote this post Wednesday evening, before Tim Graham of the Buffalo News summed up Brady’s remarks and Buffalo’s knee jerk reaction perfectly Thursday morning. Read his column here. Brady isn’t the first athlete to bash Buffalo’s tourism, and most likely will not be the last.)

Another note: if any Western New Yorker uses this as an excuse to root for the Giants, I will…shake my head disappointingly (I’m not good with threats.) The Giants are not New York’s horse in this race; they are New Jersey’s. They are just as inherently unlikable as the Patriots. Remember the poorly officiated and entirely devastating Super Bowl XXV? Why would you even consider rooting for the team that caused Bills fans so much heartache twenty-one years ago?