Volume 2, Entry 14: Forever at Twenty
In July of 2006, one week after seeing Fuzzy play for the first time from the announcers’ box at the now-bulldozed McAuliffe Fields that became new dorms for Sac State, I coached a 15U all-star game in Galt. We were playing Woodland, the nominal district juggernaut, with a berth in the third-place game on the line.
The team I had was a group I had coached in multiple tournaments already that year and included numerous players I knew well: my neighbor Mikey, who closed out our Hurricanes’ championship in 2005; my brother’s good friend Brian; Sterling, who played on multiple teams of mine and whose father coached with us; even Nick, who had been on the C-Cardinals team six years earlier that inspired me to first make baseball cards.
But our dugout wasn’t the one that interests me now.
In the opposite dugout was Peewee Medina, a thin, slightly hunched man who looked even smaller in the mandated baseball pants and jersey. I didn’t know Medina personally, but I’d seen him many times before at league meetings and pre-tournament events. He had been running and working in the league that annually demolished us for decades.
But he hadn’t been coaching. For this tournament, though, he was in the dugout; he was retiring from his role and chose to go out on the field. I was twenty years old that day; Medina had been coaching and running Woodland’s league for not just decades but decades longer than I had been alive. He was nearly four times my age, and yet we were both on the same field filling the same role, writing out lineup cards and discussing ground rules behind home plate.
We won that game going away; the final score was a mercy rule-shortened 11-1, if memory serves. After the game as we lined up to shake hands, I was Medina’s final handshake. Of course I congratulated him on his retirement and legacy, and, among the pleasantries, I said one final thing to him.
“I hope to be like you,” I said. “I want to do this forever.”
Medina smiled and laughed and then we both went back to our teams. While we would play again the next day, losing a late lead and falling to a future San Francisco Giants draft pick, his career was over.
A few days ago, I received an email asking me to facilitate the Babe Ruth draft this weekend. Even with Troy in sixth period, Dylan and Greg graduating, and Matt dominating for Laguna’s Mathletes team, I hadn’t thought about Babe Ruth in quite some time. I figured their season had either started some time ago without an extended draft or just flat joined the list of sacrificial offerings at the COVIDland altar, but they had been delaying their start as guidelines for youth sports were implemented. But this was the first spring I can remember without giving its season even a second though. I’ve spent far more time reloading box scores on MaxPreps to check if Dylan pitched, removed enough from the reason I even know him, never even connecting the two things.
That disconnect, though, casts a strange light on what I said to Medina that evening in Galt. I said I wanted to do that, to coach baseball and work with Babe Ruth, forever. And it was the truth: I did at that moment. I saw Medina’s culminating moment as a road map for the future, assuming that the things I loved at twenty would remain the things I loved forever.
Fifteen years after making that statement, I received the “run our draft” email and gave serious consideration to declining. Stress is mounting, particularly with a busy weekend in preparation for an exam, a new unit, and the championship Mathletes events (including Tuesday’s time-displaced round). My revisions have not progressed in a week, pushing potential announcements and release dates and submissions to copy editors further back, and I’m sleeping less and less each night. Was it worth five or six hours of total work?
My words to Medina have never seemed so naïve. In fifteen years, I’ve gone from my life revolving around coaching and Babe Ruth to not even missing it. In between, there were highlights of course—the Hurricanes’ championship, the fall 51s with Maia and Zach, the JV championship, the year with Fuzzy, coaching with Larry and McKinnis and Carey and Mark and Tod and Frei and my dad on multiple occasions—but my life shifted behind dramatic changes. That’s what happens between twenty and thirty-five.
But I didn’t understand that then. There was no way for me to understand that in 2006. Everything moving forward would always be the same and then, 55 years later, I too would be coaching my last game, rather than eleven years later and not even batting an eye over it.
In 2006, I could not conceive of myself as ever being a person who could be without baseball. It was the only way I connected with people. It was a way to do good and push myself and leverage technical and organizational skills and carve out a niche in the world. My career plans were the same as what they became, but the trajectory I saw for myself was limited. I didn’t project growth or change, I didn’t project the mental health issues, I had never heard of Challenge Day, I had no interest in Calculus, and I only that year joined my brother at school to pass along all of my Mathletes stuff to help start the program I would eventually coach. I assumed I would be married in fifteen years, that I would want to be, that everything would always be the same except one day it might be my kid in the dugout with me because, in 2006, I wasn’t close to wrapping my head around the fact that nothing does, not the world and not who we are at twenty.
What I said to Medina was true but ceased to be true later for so many reasons including the inevitable gap between who I was that day in Galt versus who I am today. I have friends now, I have a career I’m very good at, I own a home, and coaching baseball is a relic of two million iterations of that person ago. I can’t swing a bat or throw a ball now; but, even if I could, I might not. Not without Zach and Maia. Or maybe Dylan. Not without a reason, that is.
I don’t want to do it forever anymore. I honestly think I’m a better person away from it. Even if I admit that I don’t know if there’s anything I want to do forever (or that it’s possible to know anymore at 35 than twenty) doesn’t mean I’m not aware of in particular not wanting to do any one thing anymore. I don’t think I want to coach right now. Maybe I will again some day; I don’t right now.
But.
Coaching and Babe Ruth are in my DNA. I’m not the person I am today without those experiences. I needed to be naïve and immature and hot-headed then to reach this point now. I needed something to teach me about having purpose and connecting with young people and interacting with adults and just plain mattering. I thought I was starting a life in that world but, alas, I was just growing up in it, enough to learn that I didn’t need it.
But.
This spring, I can still honor where I began the same way I have every single spring since 2003: at their draft, and running it as I have annually since 2006. Contributing in my one small way to an organization that shaped me, even if it didn’t always treat me well. Most years I’m excited to pull out my Draft Suite and orchestrate the event; this year I’m not. But I’m going to be there, if not for myself, then to see Larry and Chris and Doug whom I used to fist bump and then race to the coaching boxes with and Joe and Scott. But, more than anything, I’ll do it as tribute to the single most-formative experience of my young life, the thing that helped guide me to a point at which I no longer needed it.
And I’ll also do it for Medina, who died in 2019. I didn’t lie to him in 2006; I just didn’t know better.
I amend my statement:
I will run their draft forev...
Ahem.
I’m will run their draft this year, since Alyiah can walk on Saturday instead of Sunday. I’ll sacrifice some time to make it happen.
And probably next year too. But we’ll see.
Question of the Week
If you had to count all the regrets in your life, would you say you had more or less than the average person?
I’ve been trying to figure out how to answer this since I received it, and I keep returning to the idea that I would answer this question very differently based on my age. It is counterintuitive, but, when I was young, I obsessed over missteps and poor decisions. I had this firm idea of what I wanted at any moment and, whenever I found myself moving in a direction counter to that or some combination of fear and poor judgment resulted in a missed opportunity, I convinced myself that I accumulated regrets like no one my age. That I was always failing to seize the moments presented to me and dooming myself, one regretful blunder at a time, to a disappointing life.
I still believed this a decade ago. My life looked so different than the one that I projected in my head. I was in the same tight quarters, not feeling particularly successful and not moving forward in any meaningful way. My life was better than I saw and progressing faster than I perceived within my own inertial reference frame but it wasn’t this other thing. Impatient for the real part to begin, I felt stagnant, regretful for every missed chance to exit the cycle that was not spiraling somewhere and increasing or decreasing its magnitude but just circling with uniform radius. I was in motion but going nowhere because I wasn’t where I believed I should be and where the world and society and my own naïve but powerful and loud mind told me I needed to be. My existence was regretful.
But, bit by bit, I’ve started to shed that mindset. I’ve ridden two waves, once with my AVID class that culminated in 2014, and once with your class of 2017, to find other avenues that shook me from that mindset. I looked down a lot and failed to notice that there was motion in my own life; those two groups not only forced me to look up and notice the blur moving around me but to start to realize that those things I regretted not reaching maybe weren’t the only things that could make me feel the way I dreamed of feeling. This is a bigger idea than what I intended to write here, but there was a moment of discovery over this past year where I truly understood that had the love in my life I wanted. That I didn’t need the things I believed I needed. I had found the people whose paths I wanted to ride along parallel to for as long as I can. That happiness is fleeting, that nothing inherently matters, that no one knows what the purpose of life is and that knowing it wouldn’t solve anything. And, more important than anything else, that my gravest, most crippling errors led me to that love and that purpose and that understanding. All the pain shaped me so that I could understand myself and others. I needed all of it—hell, I need all of it—to find the people and activities and mindset that push away the old feelings more of the time.
I can regret decisions and low moments, but I can’t really regret them because they led me to here, to this, to you. So, at this moment, I would say I have far less regrets than most people. It’s more of a mindset thing, probably, but that’s the truth right now and I’m glad for it.
Content Consumption
FILM
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
I confess before anything else that I slept through large chunks of Godzilla: King of Monsters and Kong: Skull Island. This wasn’t for lack of interest in either; I just wasn’t invested in or riveted by the human stories sputtering alongside the titans’. I didn’t care about Monarch or the families or the implications—I just wanted to see brilliantly-rendered updates of the beasts that entertained me as a kid on USA Network marathons. Sign me up for Gojira versus Ghidorah; wake me when they enter the ring. With that in mind, I found there was still an awful lot of human fluff I couldn’t have cared less about in Godzilla vs. Kong, but the battles and were enough to ride through the lulls and thin story this time around.
As this film opens, Godzilla is stirring up trouble at a research facility and along is growing weary of his containment. Lots of humans do lots of things for lots of reasons—many want to weaponize the titans, others to protect them as our guardians—but the Titans clash multiple times until a diabolical plot threatens both monsters and our world.
Godzilla vs. Kong takes its cues from the summer blockbusters of old. It feels most like Independence Day to me, which a huge overarching conflict with unfathomable forces running alongside the many interwoven human ones, but the stakes and story struggle to carry that weight. Independence Day possessed a cohesion lacking here; Godzilla vs. Kong expands our world in disorienting ways and runs on thin blockbuster logic that just barely threads the needle between set pieces. I would have happily cared about some character’s journey—Rebecca Hall’s ape-whisperer and the young girl she adopted came closest—but I never got attached in the previous installments. I only cared about getting throw titular foes into conflict and how those battles would both play out and affect the world they took place in.
And the good news is: the battles were good. Both creatures were more than just gargantuan monsters—King especially—and the script includes wrinkles that make later battles unique. There’s lots of destruction and roaring and the film is clearly at its best during these intervals, casting Godzilla and Kong in the forefront so that the humans become the excursions they ought to be. The monsters look fantastic—Godzilla in particular won me over, true to the old suits but very realistic—and their battles are unique with a sense of construction in the final scene adding an element. I don’t know what it all meant, but I enjoyed the stuff that gave this film its name.
Is this a great movie though? It’s not bad at all, and that’s speaking as someone with limited affinity for this universe. Come for the fights, stay for the anticipation that builds between fights. But, given the choice between watching this again and watching Pacific Rim for the 40th time, I would choose the latter every single time.
Friends with Benefits (2011)
As a big fan of Mila Kunis, I felt it was high time that I should watch Friends with Benefits, the soft-serve romantic comedy from a decade ago. I’d never felt compelled to watch it before, but it appeared on Netflix today so I threw it on, hoping to find a benign film with a lot of Kunis and enough story to sustain a 100+ minute runtime in the background. What I found was a relic of 2011 that feels at once generic and horribly dated, with too much going on and elements that have aged like rotting meat.
Jamie and Dylan (Kunis and Justin Timberlake) meet in New York after both get out of unfulfilling relationships. Dylan is new to the city so Jamie takes him under her wing and they become friends, but they decide to add a physical dimension temporarily to their relationship as well. The pair navigate in and out of that but eventually develop more complicated feelings that force them to confront the nature of their relationship amid swirling life changes for them both.
For such a broad-strokes romantic comedy, Friends with Benefits had an impressive cast. Kunis brings her trademark with and sass to give Jamie far more depth than Dylan; Timberlake is eminently likable but, even when given a fleshed-out back story, his character feels like an anthropomorphic skinny tie than a real person. Wordy Harrelson is here, playing the sports editor working alongside Dylan, but his playful sexual harassment and predatory leers cut into the amusement of his crass but sage advice; likewise, Richard Jenkins has to play Dylan’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father in a role that swings from grossly played for laughs to over serious. Jenna Elfman, Patricia Clarkson, and star athlete Shaun White all her roles as well and, while each has their moments, none can elevate the film above its lame premise and script.
That’s the thing: Friends with Benefits proceeds like it’s being meta and self-aware when it calls out romcom tropes or grafts real-world issues onto its relationship-movie, but that belief is laughably misguided. This is a film burped out of an edgy title content to play romcom mad libs while pontificating about cliches. This is every generic romantic comedy except the characters sleep together a lot (in scenes, I might add, that actually did make me laugh a la Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and that never really bothers to make It’s characters memorable. This is a snapshot of superficial 2011 culture that hopes Kunis and Timberlake can give an empty vessel enough spark to reach the credits. And the result is a film that surely won over distracted audiences members on dates far more than me tonight ten years later.
The Father (2020)
Being the last watch of the eight Best Picture nominees for me should have added some gravitas for me this morning. I love watching the Oscar contenders and connecting with the stories, craft, and themes that bring them acclaim. Watching The Father, though, left no room for comparoson or outside thoughts: this was a singular experience for me, a film that was challenging, heart-wrenching, and thought-provoking with brilliant performances and a tight script that sucked me in and held me captive in the brutal, fractured, dangerously-real world of its characters.
Anne (Olivia Colman) has assumed care of her ill father Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), trying to balance his failing mental faculties with his intense desire to remain at home and in control of his own life. When Anne screens a potential nurse (Imogen Poots) for him, the encounter transforms into a fulcrum for the conflict between Anne, Anthony, and both of their futures.
The two leading performances in The Father make this film riveting and potent. Colman must convey Anne’s deep internal conflict while masking it, and she utterly nails it, offering broad smiles with tears and pain. Their relationship was not perfect and, in moments, we see those wounds surface, her eyes conveying the gut punch of a dismissive statement or a cruel comparison to her sister—but only for the briefest second, as she knows that Anthony’s decaying mind cannot be judged for even his most-hurtful words. Likewise, Hopkins is phenomenal, at times charismatic and dancing, at others loud and passionate, and at others shrunken and confused, stuttering and fearful. For such a recognizable star performer, I lost track of Hopkins and saw only the man who wanted only impossible things while struggling to grasp the specifics of his situation.
And, with Anthony’s perception plagued by disjointed lurches, so too does the film let us feel that through his eyes. The script jumbles scenes and faces and settings, often with Anthony the only constant thread; we are being told a fractured story by an unreliable narrator who clings to what he says but knows his vision and recollection are impaired. The filmmakers make this experience fluid and disorienting but without fanfare, letting it develop organically and capture his state far better than anything I’ve seen before in film. And, if there is ever any doubt about the trauma or tragedy Anthony feels, Hopkins’ expressive and raw performance convey it for us.
Someone described this as a horror film and I would agree; it’s a worse horror than many, in fact, because of how urgent and real this horror is. The Father induced tears on numerous occasions, but not always for Anthony. Yes, his painful struggle navigating a fading world shredded my heart, but often I found myself watching the other around him and hurting for them instead. Whether for Anne or the nurse trying in vain to console him or even the brutish husband unwilling to hide his contempt, there was harsh inevitable truth facing everyone here.
This a difficult subject matter for sure but the cast and filmmakers of The Father could not have done it greater justice than they did.
This is going to be a busy week, what with the draft, the Mathletes meet (and its time-displaced excursion) and first-ever awards ceremony, my first exam of the year at school, a dinner, and the still-not-furthered revisions looming in the background. But: I will feel like I have earned my weekend in six days, that’s for sure.
And I will begin tomorrow with waffles and, hopefully, finishing my first non-feedback-oriented read of Faeblood Unbroken.
