How tempting is a shortcut to success?

Photo taken from ESPN.com

Taking the road less traveled is easier in theory than practice. 

Baseball is considering its biggest mass punishment in 93 years after a Miami area entrepreneur agreed to share his knowledge about providing performance-enhancing drugs to a litany of players. Whether the players will be suspended, and for how long, remains to be seen.

The story is another case of a professional trying to seek an edge by any means necessary.

A Sports Illustrated columnist argued Wednesday that he wouldn’t take performance enhancing drugs if he were an athlete. The column was in response to outfielder Ryan Braun being caught in the crosshairs of another investigation that he used performance-enhancing drugs. There are more than a dozen other players linked to the Miami-area clinic, but Braun’s backstory may be the most intriguing.

In truth, most of us would have to look long and hard at the person in the mirror if a shortcut to professional success and financial security was thrown in front of us like a thong in front of a throng at a bachelor party.

In some ways, one can empathize with Braun. Baseball is a sport where the difference between very good and elite can be as much as $50 million.

Then again, Braun’s road to riches was much shorter than many of his baseball brethren. He was a first round draft pick in 2005, breezed through minor league baseball and reached Major League Baseball before his 24th birthday.

He, allegedly, chose to take performance-enhancing drugs in search of additional success.

After driving in his rookie season, Braun signed a $45 million dollar contract with the Brewers. Four years later, the player and the team were once again at the bargaining table. In April 2011 Braun signed a $105 million extension.

Few complained when Braun went out and won the NL MVP award in 2011 and helped the Brewers win a division title for the first time in 29 years.

The bottom fell out that winter when a doping test revealed Braun had elevated levels of testosterone. In his case, the house of cards was too fragile to conceal the deceit in perpetuity.

Those who are seduced by the shortcut to success may not have such a public shaming.

What Braun is accused of doing, taking a banned substance to get ahead of his peers, is no different than offering a young judge a seat at the federal level if they ensure a certain verdict. Perhaps it’s the aide to a politician who is promised support for a future run for office if they help the politician deceive the people they serve. Maybe, it’s the journalist who works in Middle-of-Nowhere, America who is tempted with a cushy position in New York City and a six-figure salary, but only if they report a story from a specific angle.

An athlete who chooses to take performance-enhancing drugs has a choice, just as those other professionals. Athletes are just in the limelight more than your wayward judge, politician or journalist.

Of course it’s the latter whose misfeasance has the broader impact on society — albeit with fewer press clippings.

Braun made $4.27 million in his MVP season. He’s scheduled to make $8.5 million this season. And who can forget the $113 million in guaranteed money the Milwaukee Brewers owe him through the end of the 2020 season.

Many of us joke our principles have a price. It’s likely that price falls below the nearly $130 million in compensation Braun will earn by combining his talent with temptation.

Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be on traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as far that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken

Are you someone who “Cannot Understand Normal Thinking?”

We find out who our truest friends are when we are caught with our pants down in a compromising position. That may not be an adage, at least not yet, but it sure sounded nice.

By all accounts Tampa socialite Jill Kelley has kept her pants on since her role emerged in the resignation of David Petraeus earlier this month.

Petraues is the West Point graduate, former leader of American forces in Afghanistan, and CIA director who resigned because he was caught opening up to his biographer. Based on his previously glowing media coverage one would think he is our generation’s version of Washington, Grant, Eisenhower, Westmoreland, and Schwarzkopf rolled up into one brassy uniform — but I digress.

Kelley was originally a minor player in this story. But the more information that pops up, like Petraeus in missionary, the more people are speaking on the record to the media about the authenticity of the 37-year-old wife of a Tampa cancer surgeon.

While the story arouses one’s curiosity about many things, it should lead us to consider how frivolously we confer status on someone or something.

Money cannot buy one class. Just as a high-profile position does not afford integrity, possessing a few degrees does not make one intelligent and cooking Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t make one a chef, money purchases many things, but not everything.

Kelley probably learned that the hard way this month as countless people have essentially called her a poser in the Tampa Bay Times and other publications because she wanted to enter South Tampa’s high society.

In high school I used yearn “to be popular.” Looking back, it was such a silly thing to strive for. Then, and now, I didn’t have the most money, world-class looks, the fanciest car, or a personality that is particularly flashy.

I would like to think I am funny. However, that may be stretching the truth, and may turn me into one of the “C.U.N.T.’s” that believe all that is superficial is all that matters.

In truth, I am a sports writer in a sleepy South Texas town that prefers to be told selective truths as opposed to the slightly snarky honest prose that has become a trademark of my writing. There is more to me than the byline people see in the newspaper most mornings.

There is more to most of us than what we post on social media, cram into a 160-character text message, or slip into a phone conversation.  The Times story illustrates the Kelley’s didn’t have too many true friends in snooty South Tampa.

While it’s easy to saturate ourselves in the silly, at the end of the day little of it matters. People preen and pretend to care for others all the time. They are the people who cannot stand normal thinking, because everything is about them.

Those who are really in it for the long haul are usually the people who not only — figuratively— know when you pants were down, but tell you where to buy a new pair because your current pair are stained.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

Police reports are public records, right?

I don’t hide my annoyance well.

When someone or something has irked me my mannerisms and body language completely changes. Apparently, expletives explode from me more frequently. Few things bother me more than having to suspend the writing process when I am in the middle of a groove.

Yet, that is what happened Tuesday night when a random Austin number called me. I figured it was a source trying to get in contact with me about something.

Nope. It was a friend of a friend of a friend of the man who burglarized my home 15 months ago. Apparently, this gentleman is facing a few decades in prison because he is a habitual offender.

 Among other charges he’s faced in his life: aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, cocaine possession, possession of meth with intent to sell and a few more. There were others, but I couldn’t write them down nearly as fast as the prosecutor reeled them off to me.

Upon receiving the call, I felt a bit bad for the guy who burglarized me. His friend of a friend of a friend told me he was facing “25 to life.” As a 27 year old man, serving 25 years in a cell just seemed so excessive to me. (Of course that was before I found out this man’s rap sheet was longer than Warren Buffett’s resume.)

I even contemplated calling someone in Florida to ensure the alleged party only served 10 years. But colleagues, friends and others all reminded me that if someone was dumb enough to break into my home, they deserve whatever comes their way. (Of course that was before I found out this man’s rap sheet was deeper than Kim Kardashian’s To-Do list.)

Throughout Tuesday night, I wondered whether I am too nice a person. The supposed bribe of “money or whatever you need” from the friend of a friend of a friend didn’t sway me as much as the prospect of someone being a permanent resident of Raiford, Florida. (Of course that was before I found out this man’s rap sheet was bigger than Osama bin Laden’s porn collection.)

My fiancé likes to tell people I have a strong moral compass, which only serves to convict me when I’m not doing the right thing. But, I could just imagine what she would say as I waffled on calling district attorney asking them to find a way to stop the annoying phone calls in mid-sentence.

I was tempted to take the easy way out. Of course that was before I found out this man’s rap sheet was so extensive he knows how to find victim’s telephone number in the police report.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

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