Monday, May 23, 2011

Is it a slur or a bundle of sticks?

Twice this spring an NBA player has been caught calling someone a faggot on television.

Frustrated with a call on the court Kobe Bryant called a referee a bundle of sticks, the day after a Phoenix Suns executive told NBA commissioner David Stern he was a homosexual. Sunday night, Chicago Bulls forward Joakim Noah was caught by a TNT camera calling a fan the same.

While various websites are racking in the page views today exploiting Noah’s temporary loss of his cool, one can only wonder why all the commotion? Sports leagues and other entities are disciplining people for being caught using the coarse language, not for the act of using the language.

It would be a stretch to say every person has used the words faggot or fag to define something other than a bundle of sticks or a cigarette. So many people have that it’s not even considered that abnormal of a word to use to describe everything but its dictionary definition.

Words do hurt, all of us know this first-hand; however, our unseen actions should at least stand to rebuke or confirm the words that all of us slip up and use out of frustration.

If someone wants to call a homosexual a faggot, go ahead. Once that word is eliminated from public discourse others will surely take its place, which is why the emphasis should be on the act of discrimination or belittlement, not the word itself.

Where someone stands on the whole gay marriage issue is not the point. People should take umbrage at their fellow man being mistreated. Who people sleep with is their own business — as long as it’s not the woman I am dating.

Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

Friday, May 20, 2011

Since it apparently cannot be defined, what is “loyalty”?

My friends have a lot of time on their hands at work so sometimes we all exchange e-mails about various sports subjects and topics. Usually, a few tangents are taken and this was the case when many of us spoke about baseball this week.

Eventually the focus turned to a column published by Yahoo Sports where the writer asked whether the New York Yankees were making the right decision to stick with their aging veterans. These are players and people who have played for the team for more than 15 years and reached the highest levels of the game on multiple occasions.

Instantly, after reading Les Carpenter’s column, I thought of loyalty and what it is in a sports and business sense. The search for an answer was an unfulfilling one, so I am asking my family and friends for their interpretation in the hope it will catch on.

We are so quick to vilify an athlete for spending their formative years in a city then bolting for more money in another city. It does not matter whether the person might be reunited with family and friends, or they may prefer their new city, or more money is offered fans feel wronged that their “hometown hero” left for supposedly greener pastures.

The same fans who spend their discretionary dollars going to games fail to realize that if another employer offered them a 30 percent increase with some additional perks they would nearly forget to submit a two-week notice to their former employer.

It is not a crime to switch jobs, or to do so with little to no notice to your employer. Yet it may not be the most loyal thing for someone to do that. The refrain is usually “I had to look out for myself and my family.”

In the same notion, employers have long shown a similar zest over the past four decades to terminate an employee or eliminate a position nearly regardless of that person’s performance, evaluations or other metrics. They say “it’s not personal, just business.”

Even the dictionary cannot define “loyal” or “loyalty” without mentioning the word loyal. This week I was telling my girlfriend that what one person may consider loyal could be the exact opposite to someone else.

So what is loyalty, especially in a business and sporting sense? In search of an answer I sought out a friend who like me is looking for work.

Someone who is not loyal has “been burned in the past and they see what other people have done to get ahead. Maybe in their head they think it’s wrong, but they think this is the way it is and they have become complacent with that. No one wants to stand up, because if you do you are the scapegoat and you are made an example of.”

Essentially, her sentiments were aligned with mine. However, the answer sat with me like an appetizer, it was great, but not completely fulfilling.

In all the business books I have read have covertly mentioned that someone must look out for themselves at all times, regardless of how it might impact the team. Hopefully Tavis Smiley’s “Fail Up: 20 Lessons on Building Success from Failure”, which I recently purchased for obvious reasons, will break the uninspiring trend. One, which chances my luck in the business world, could certainly be better.

Laughs and liveliness
-Wb

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Do you succumb to visceral pleasures?

The most popular are smoking, drinking and fornicating. Other people succumb to cursing, or anger and other intangible toxins. For me, my vice is driving intoxicatingly fast. Fast enough to feel my left hand jackknife in the wind as it’s extended from the door of my bright red car.

There is something about being behind the wheel of a machine that is totally within your control. One that can reach seemingly unreachable and unsafe heights of speed and a machine that can—for the most part—come to a stop when you demand.

All the mechanical aspects of cars are of no interest to me. However, there is a certain rush of blood that rises from my fingertips, up my forearms, through the biceps and then diffused to the rest of my body when taking a corner obscenely fast, or flirting with the speedometer in my car. As much as the Florida Highway Patrol has tried to reign in this habit, there is still something exhilarating about releasing so many emotions onto a pedal that is no more than 10 square inches.

In my younger years, I would have judged someone whose vices involved drugs and or sex. To this day, I still have a blue joke about women and cigarettes that I tell friends. But as the points on my driver’s license started to pile up my penchant for considering the speed limit a suggestion rather than a demand fit the definition of vice: an evil or wicked action, habit or characteristic.

We all have our vices, many of which we are not proud about—some of which we hardly admit to ourselves. It would be easy to traipse through life pretending they do not exist in our lives; however, when lies are the foundation of our existence, life is eventually going to descend into rubble.

Once we are buried beneath the veneer of perfection, our vices become all the more human. Of course, to err is human; to forgive is divine.

Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Is Morning Joy and orchid or a state of being?

I used to believe in the absolute truth, a truth that will does not allow people with sullied intentions to sling mud on it. But this is 2011 and we are in the era where “my interests will always trump yours.”

The reason I have always looked up to Nelson Mandela is not because he was mistreated for more than three decades. It’s that once he was set free, he still spoke of the collective rather than the individual. It’s an attitude I have tried to emulate since returning from Mandela’s land.


The past two weeks have been the ultimate test of that ideology.


Every day I try to put my time at the Tallahassee Democrat behind me. In the past 10 days I have also realized I need to put some people behind me as well, because like the Democrat their priority is their interests — regardless of the collateral damage to others.

My joy is to truly realize who is for me and who is just telling me that because it’s convenient. My joy is to play soccer on occasion and provide that one-touch pass that completely surprises and splits the defense. My joy is knowing that in the darkness, dawn— whenever it may come— is on the horizon.



It took separation from a job I loved, and a conversation with Whit’s dad, to realize that I am Will Brown, not “Will Brown with the Tallahassee Democrat.” In the late nights chasing stories I lost track of who I am and focused more on what I am, as though it was validation for the type of man I had become.


That probably happens with most of us, we are too preoccupied with what others perceive us to be or what we are and not who we are. It takes a special, or mature, person to intimately recognize who we are at our essence.

My challenge to you is to figure that out if you have not already. Because newfound free time and the ability to play soccer more freely are tolerable in small doses, but the absolute truth is I would much prefer to be working.

Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb