Are you a maverick

If someone mentioned the word Maverick and Dirk Nowitzki or John McCain were the first things that came to mind few would blame you.

Ah, but some South Africans would beg to differ. Late last year a gentlemen’s club in Cape Town, Mavericks Revue Bar started a unique line of fragrances for men. Titled “Alibis” these colognes were designed to give men, just that, after visiting this establishment.

Cape Town is a gorgeous city with a lot to offer tourists and residents alike.

A friend of mine lives there and the stories she has shared about her adopted city that are an amazing combination of colorful, vivid and strange. She warned me even the most exotic Americans would find some of the lifestyles and people in the city by the sea unique.

When I told her about Mavericks making news on the other side of the Atlantic, she responded with an email recalling an even zanier about her city. She surmised "so yes darling, we are a hell of a lot more sexually liberated then Americas Especially Cape Townians."

As for the fragrances, which are being sold for $40 to $50 depending on the exchange rate, well they are creative to say the least.

My Car Broke Down: with the scent of fuel, burnt rubber, grease and steel.
We Were Out Sailing: with the scent of fresh ocean spray, sea salt, aqua and cotton rope.
I Was Working Late: with the scent of coffee, wool suits, cigarettes and ink.

As a journalist that routinely works until midnight, the latter selection would be the most appealing to me. Of course I don't wear cologne, or drink coffee and abhor cigarettes, so obviously this is not a product for me.

(Just imagine how much someone would make if they created a cologne that masked the sky high HIV/AIDS rate down there. But, I digress.)

The most humorous part of the entire tale for me, however, was the location of this “gentlemen’s club.” It’s on Barrack Street, which is less than three blocks from the museum I tried to visit two years ago when I was in Cape Town.

No, the museum I wanted to visit did not feature naked women. It was collection of artifacts and memorabilia from District 6, a neighborhood inhabited by black and colored people in the 60s that was demolished because the government wanted to redevelop the land for whites.

From all I heard the District 6 museum is a treasure trove of local history. At least that is what the tour bus told me. What the tour operators did not mention was the museum was within walking distance a still-standing structure that is yet another excuse for South Africa to make the news.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

What is your calling in the happy valley of life?

Paul William Bryant died the year before I was born. But he apparently was a legend in his occupation, one who was so revered that those who didn’t call him “Sir” simply called him “Bear.”

He was not a perfect man, but one who was an excellent molder and motivator of young men.

Joseph Vincent Paterno was like Bryant in that respect. Neither man was perfect, but there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people that were inspired by the lessons both men taught.

Paterno died Sunday after complications from lung cancer at 85. Until November 9, 2011 Paterno coached at Pennsylvania State University since 1950. For context, the man who coldly told him of his termination over the telephone was born in 1954.

Paterno spent 31,442 days on this Earth. For all but a quarter of one percent of those days he was known as an honorable man who tried to do things the right way.

There will be some who say he died because of a guilty conscience in a child sex abuse scandal that has rocked his former employer. Others will claim he died of a broken heart because of how his career ended.

I would argue he died because his time on Earth was complete because Paterno, like Bryant, was put here to use athletics to mold boys into men. Both were humble men, yet idealistic about their legacies because of their unprecedented success. Sadly, both died within 90 days of coaching their final game.

Everyone has a coach or a teacher in their life that has genuinely touched them. If you do not, all I can do is pity you for missing your blessing. The lessons may not be evident immediately, but with reflection they will become apparent. While you are at it, thank those teachers, professors and coaches that have helped you along the way. Many of them are monetarily underpaid, so reimburse them with compliments.

Mike Shannon was the parent of a teammate. But to me, he was my first coach, back when I was a 4 year-old playing in a soccer league in Sarasota where the home field has been converted to a Par-3 golf course. I will never forget Larry Laskowski and Charles Stockton telling me to not wallow in self-pity, but celebrate with my teammates, after missing three extra points in a football game we won 47-6

But the most important coach in my life was a man named Bob Rowe. He is a small man in stature, but his lessons in kicking a football 50 yards and using football as a means to an education cast a larger shadow.

When I had a mental block that was preventing me from reaching my on-field potential, Coach Rowe told me “If you have done it once, you can do it a thousand times.”  To this day, I remind myself of that comment when an obstacle appears too conspicuous to overcome.

No one would deny Jim Tressel, Barry Switzer. Bobby Bowden and Jimmy Johnson are great football coaches. What separates those national championship winners from people like Jake Gaither, Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Paterno and Bryant is that the latter group were highly successful AND used education to mold men.

"If you're not a man when you get there, you'll be a man before you leave," former NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington said of his Penn State experience. "Joe has his system so that you're prepared for life. Joe trains you more mentally than physically so that nothing will rattle you."

Ten days before Paterno’s career unceremoniously ended, I wrote a blog congratulating the champion and for taking some of the sheen off of himself to recognize others. Few people read it, which doesn’t bother me, but while people in my business were eviscerating the coach for all that he could and should have done a week later they were ignoring his humility in the limelight.

A family spokesperson told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post one of Paterno’s final lucid thoughts to anyone outside his immediate family were used to think about others, a constant characteristic throughout his life.

“I’m happy in one sense that we called attention, throughout this state, and throughout the country probably, that this is going on,” Paterno said of the scandal that indirectly cost him his job. “It’s kind of been like a hidden thing. So maybe that’s good.”

Paterno’s life, legacy and death is another reminder that we must all find out why we were placed here on this earth. Through prayer, thinking, actions and occasionally failure our calling will come to us. There is as much honor as being a maid as there is in being the president if that is our calling.

Put more bluntly, without sanitation workers our lives would stink.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

Could you run for public office?

The incessant wall-to-wall coverage of quest to find a challenger for Barack Hussein Obama II annoys me.

Every action apart from how the Republican candidates kiss their spouse has been scrutinized by the mainstream, bloggers, pundits and voters alike. Sometimes these nuggets of information reveal something about the elephants that they would rather have us not know. In other instances, it’s just drivel that is used to drive ratings and web hits.

This came to mind when I heard about a comment surging candidate Rick Santorum made not too long ago about social assistance. “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money. I want to give them an opportunity to go out and earn money.”

Yes, that is a direct quote.

Yes, other candidates might have said more inflammatory things. However, I also reminded a friend that since Ron Paul is my congressman it is an occupational and personal hazard to speak about him electronically.

And that is my point. How many of us could win an election if many of our behind doors comments are disseminated in public?

A college classmate is a journalist who admits she doesn’t really like white people. There are people in my family who call gay people “confused.” I have heard colleagues speak about the perks and perils of “Obamacare. I have joked with friends about the shortcomings of others in a far from politically correct matter.

One person’s humor is offensive to another person.

Had the former Pennsylvania senator not used the word black, it would have been a completely fair assessment, and one that millions of people would accept needs to change about this country.

A candidate can refer to “the blacks” and people are ready to call in Ben Jealous and the rest of the NAACP. In this new age of endless political coverage just the suggestion someone is a Mormon or Muslim can righteously offend people. Surely, there is a gay person, or two, out there who doesn’t like Newt Gingrich’s position on marriage — especially since the former Georgia congressman’s two divorces are the epitome of irreconcilable differences.

The ease in disseminating information, and in this case sound bites, provides a wealth of information about candidates, whether they are running for local, state or federal office.   There are, however, pitfalls to this approach, as Clay Johnson writes in The Atlantic.

“The problem stems from choice and selection. The democratization of media has made it so we can all be Howard Dean campaign staffers, or followers of Harold Camping. Anything we want to be true we can find online -- and who would choose to be informed when they can choose to be affirmed? You can see it start with our cable media, as Fox and MSNBC are scrambling to find new ways to affirm the beliefs of the right and left respectively, all the way down to the corners of the web, where you can find out why September 11th was a conspiracy, how vaccinations are responsible for autism, why our first black president must not be an American, and how the rapture is still coming soon. No matter the crazy thought in your head, there's a minor media outlet starting up just to serve you: the long-tail of affirmation.”

Johnson’s take is why I love reaction to my commentaries, comments on my published stories and sharing opinions with people — even if I don’t trust them, nor care for them that much. Constant reaffirmation of zany positions, in politics, or other arenas, can lead to lunacy.

At the end of the day politicians are people. The only difference between many of them, and the people Santorum highlights, is they enrich themselves off the government and call it work. People and politicos can and will make mistakes. It was probably a mistake to write an electronic essay picking primarily on Republicans while living in Texas.

Then again, Iowa offered a glimpse that misstatements are not instantly someone’s death knell. Even ones like Santorum’s that many would lead some to applaud and leave other apoplectic.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb