Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Joe Mauer stayed home. Not only did he re-sign with the Minnesota Twins, he LITERALLY stayed home. Born and raised in St. Pau,l Minnesota Mauer can’t even get himself to go across the bridge into Minneapolis. Arguably the best catcher in major league baseball, with “told” riches laid out before him for the taking, he turned it all down in order to walk the same streets, shop the same shops, and see the same sights he has seen his entire life. Yup, old Joe doesn’t even have to find himself a new barber–the same guy  who cut his hair in high school still has the job!

Now, I live in Cleveland, and you might have heard about our own native son, kid named Lebron, who has a very similar opportunity before him. (I wrote a little about this in “It’s Not About the Money. No, Really!”). Lebron James appears to be the biggest, most important free agent in the history of the NBA. 25 years old and no worse than entering his peak years, Lebron is an unrestricted free agent.  Indeed, unlike Mauer, Lebron is actually unencumbered by any of the economic realities of his game or his league–his off the court income dwarfs what he has or might make in salary. As such he has the liberty to make his decision based on the non-contractual issues like the aforementioned off court income, or the adventure of exploring a new city, or mining the value of staying home.

It’s really hard to determine which of these two young men is more important to the economic success of this team, and the related economic success of his city. Knowing that Mauer would re-sign allowed Minneapolis to give the go-ahead to a new baseball stadium. Knowing they had Mauer in the fold, ownership has begun to sign other pieces to a championship puzzle. On the other hand the most conservative estimate of Lebron’s economic impact is that he has single-handedly increased the value of the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise by $100 million. This is probably ridiculously low; Dan Gilbert the mortgage king will have surely made the largest “underwater” major purchase in the history of sports should Lebron James leave now.

Lebron just completed his seventh year as a Cleveland Cavalier and despite yeoman efforts by general manager Danny Ferry and owner Dan Gilbert, Lebron and company have not been able to bring a championship to Cleveland. This has been his mantra, oft stated, that winning is his only priority. Only slightly behind that, though, is the goal of winning “at-home.” Lebron actually has more in common with Joe Mauer then it seems at first blush, for Lebron is not really a Cleveland kid at all, but kid from Akron. Indeed, Lebron built his castle in Richfield, equidistant as the crow flies from both Akron and Cleveland, but spiritually more a suburb of the former.

So what is Lebron to do? What does Lebron want to do? What SHOULD Lebron do? Our local paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been awash in stories, commentary, conjecture, and innuendo. A friendly acquaintance who writes for the Plain Dealer has been tasked with the onerous job of recording and reporting “Lebron rumors”, with absolutely no requirement to confirm anything she writes. It’s the Lebron-A-thon, all Lebron all the time! The hometown is actually getting smaller and smaller every single day.

What do I think? I think Lebron is a really smart kid, much, much smarter than the majority of sports fans give him credit for. He’s actually quite different from the majority of the kids who went straight to the NBA from high school, and pretty much all of the “one and done” kids who spent a year in college before beginning their careers. My bet is that Lebron would have been much more than the keeper of a “gentleman’s C” average in college. No, Lebron would have been a solid B student taking a real college curriculum.

He’s also aware that he will eventually screw up somewhere, somehow, sometime. He’s a pretty shrewd character to be sure, but he is also a 25-year-old who has openly admitted that he is still in the process of growing up. Cleveland is a pretty small place, more small-town than major city actually, and it’s pretty hard to hide 6′8″, 265 pounds of handsome wealthy young man. I’d love to be wrong on this, really I would, but my guess is that he senses the inherent safety of a truly big city.

Knowing this I still think Lebron is too smart to not see that he has placed himself in a no-win situation should he decide to leave Cleveland now. There’s been too much talk over the last several years about winning at home, and too little talk too late about what home actually is. I think Lebron realizes this, and I think he is using his unique position to maximize his chances of winning one for the “hometown.” I’m predicting some fancy footwork, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, and a couple of major surprise announcements at the end of this week, all of which give Lebron a chance to make good.

Then what’s the true value of staying home? Here’s my bid. The value of staying home is exactly one championship. My prediction is that Lebron signs a two-year contract with a player option for a third. If he wins a championship in either year one or year two he’s outta here. He made good, kept his promise, it’s time to move on. If he fails to win a championship in year one or year two he invokes his player’s option to great fanfare, with all kinds of emphasis on the sacrifices that he is making to stay in Cleveland. If the Cavs shouuld win championships in BOTH years one and two he certainly stays for year three, unable to resist being linked with Phil Jackson as the only architects of “three-peats” in the history of the NBA.

After that, come hell or high water, it’s Cleveland in the rearview mirror. Three years, over and out. At age 28 Lebron will be off to other pastures, new challenges, fresh horizons. World as oyster, and all that sorta thing.

Why? At the end of the day it pretty much comes down to the difference between Joe Mauer and Lebron James much more than it comes down their similarities or to the differences in their hometowns. Mauer has never sought the limelight. Indeed, he has actively sought the cocoon of small-town, hometown. James, on the other hand, has ALWAYS sought more. Even in high school he had one eye on the game at hand and one eye on the tomorrow to come. Nothing wrong with that, really. They are what they are, and it is what it is.

S0 what’s the value of staying home? One championship and three years to get it. You heard it here first.

 This whole Tiger bashing thing has never seemed quite on the mark for me, but until recently I really haven’t been able to put my finger on just why. Leave it to two of my touchstones, Crossfit and Sports Illustrated, to bring it into focus.

Selena Roberts opined this week that in some way Tiger is not worthy to take the crown from the great Jack Nicklaus, that his personal failures, his lack of “goodness” somehow disqualifies his results on his particular field of play. She goes even further, conflating l’affaire Tigre with the whole Barry Bonds/Mark McGuire debacle in MLB. Somehow Ms. Roberts is channeling Tiger’s aggrieved mistresses on our collective behalf, coming to the inevitable conclusion of the offensitive that Tiger’s behavior off the course nullifies his accomplishments on it.

Rubbish.

Unlike Mssrs. Bonds and McGuire there is no credible evidence that Tiger has altered the balance of the playing field through anything other than talent and effort. Not unlike our growing Crossfit competitions, it is nothing but the result that matters on the competitive pitch. Tiger has 14 majors, 70-something wins. Count ‘em.

Ms. Roberts commits the amateur’s error of amnesia, a particularly disappointing error given her experience and position as a national sportswriter. You see, most of the extraordinary athletic feats we extoll were performed by jerks, at least at the time of their performance. Raving egomaniacs, barely tolerated by their competitors, if tolerated at all. Think about it. Think about the signature athletic accomplishments in your lifetime and the lifetime just prior. Does anyone qualify as a genuinely nice guy? Happily married, kind to children and small animals alike? I’m sure there are others, but I come up with a very short list of Lou Gherig  and…Lou Gherig.

Jack Nicklaus? Ridiculed behind his back as “Fat Jack” by the jealous, and “Carnac” for his self-righteous know-it-allness. Possessed of an outsized ego and not really at all concerned with how he was perceived by anyone in his heyday, it was only at the end of his PGA career that the “Golden Bear” became teddy. Jack possessed that certain arrogance and dismissiveness of any and all not strictly necessary to achieve his lofty goals, similar in scope and kind to the various corporate chieftains of his generation (Se Welch, Jack, et al).

Babe Ruth? Come on. A veritable bull in the china shop of life, he mauled his way through the 30’s indulging appetites as outsized as Tiger’s. Openly jealous of the afore mentioned Lou Gherig, our collective memory of The Babe is air-brushed in the azure of ages past, just like Ms. Robers. Mickey Mantle? Spend a little time reading about his treatment of Roger Maris, or re-read Bouton’s “Ball Four”. The guy was a ton of fun, but virtuous is nowhere to be found in any true-to-life memoirs of The Mick.

Philanders, drunks and gluttons, or arrogant chieftains lording their superiority over their minions, the owners of most of our cherished athletic records are nearly uniformly men besotted with themselves, consumed in and by their pursuits, convinced only that they deserve whatever it is that they desire. At the very least they are possessed of overriding ego and an ability to channel their every effort in the pursuit of records, leaving in their wake a sea of collateral human damage.

Well, that…that…that just seems so WRONG. They don’t deserve our support, our worship. They should PAY for their misdeeds. Ah…here Ms. Roberts gets it just a little more right. They do, indeed, pay for being miscreants off the field, at least nowadays they do. Kobe loses millions in endorsements for taking liberties with one who was unwilling. Barry Bonds makes nary a cent off the field, and hasn’t since long before his hat size grew.  Mark McGuire is driven underground for YEARS after his retirement, cut off from both the succor of adoration that might come to the clean holder of a cherished record, and just as completely shut out of the riches that such adulation would bring. Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe Louis and others in that era largely escaped this fate because of a fawning media who protected them. Ms. Roberts is quite right to decline that role, and quite right to unravel the tightly woven tale of Tiger that allowed him to accrue his nearly obscene off-the-course riches.

But “goodness” as a pre-req for greatness as regards epic athletic feats and achievement? Nonsense. It’s still exactly 100M, and it will remain so whether or not Usain Bolt becomes a bonehead. A home run is still over the wall, whether it’s hit by The Mick or Junior. We shouldn’t care where Joe Willie spent the night before as long as he beats the Colts the day after. We are indifferent that Lance Armstrong leaves everyone he touches with his bike in a flaming heap by the roadside, we simply yearn for Tour de Lance v 8.0.

Tiger will pay a price, has paid a price, for his behavior. He is down…what?…somewhere between $25 and $100 Million A YEAR in lost endorsemant money right now. You know, $25 Million here, $25 Million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money, eh?

Me? I hope Tiger laps the field at both the British Open and the PGA. He plays golf by the same rules as Jack, Arnie, and Old Tom Morris; no gimmes, they still putt ‘em all out. Like Crossfit, every second counts, eh? Records are made to be broken and I want to experience the thrill of witnessing athletic feats of grandeur. I’ll decide whether or not to like Tiger based on his People Magazine profile, sure, and I’ll think about whether or not I buy something on his say-so a little more closely now, but I wanna see greatness on the golf course.

That’ll be good enough.

From Sunday musings on Crossfit.com:

Sunday musings…

Really just one thing on my mind today, Father’s Day. It’s a funny little day, really, in just the opposite way that Mother’s Day is a funny little day. On Mother’s Day we are prompted to remember to thank Mom for all of the thankless stuff she does for us, putting our needs first, before hers, on a daily basis. Mother’s day is our one day to expunge any guilt we might have for not noticing all that stuff as well as a day to tell her how much we love her.

On Father’s day we remember Dad’s in the house.

That is, of course, if Dad is actually IN the house on Father’s Day. Have you taken a moment to think about our time honored Father’s Day activities? You know…Dad goes off with his buddies to play golf, or he’s on a boat or in a stream somewhere fishing. It’s kind of a throwback I think to the days when Dads were the sole breadwinner in a one-income family and worked 6 days a week so that they could do a week’s worth of fix-it duty on Sunday. Father’s Day was that one “get-out-of-work” pass.

I always thought this was kinda weird, actually. I mean, Dad was gone all week at work, and he was sorta at work even when he was home during the week, engaging only when forced to by our transgressions or if we as kids asked him to help with some very major issue. It wasn’t malicious or unkind, just…distant.

If you’re a wonky egghead like yours truly you read stuff about the effect that Fathers have on their kids and the kids’ development. Turns out that just having a Dad in the house (as long as he’s not hurting folks), even one who mostly occupies a rocking chair with life swirling around him rather than through him, is actually really beneficial for healthy growth for both boys AND girls. Makes it all the more strange that we traditionally give the old guy the “day off” on Father’s Day.

I think I’ve always felt this way, even way back when I was too young to either know it or articulate it. When my Dad would play golf on Father’s Day I would make sure that I was a caddy assigned to his group. After my brother and I did the lawn I would plop myself down next to that rocking chair for whatever ball game or golf tournament was on the tube, ready to catch any stray words that might fall my way. Those could be some quiet afternoons, for sure, but those were also the rare days that ended in a hug.

Mrs. Bingo asked me what I wanted to do today for MY Father’s Day. She knew the answer, of course, because I’ve given the same one for 21 years now. I said I wanted to be included in all of the kids’ stuff, whatever they might have going on. I wanted to be THERE, even if there is not typically some place I might choose to be (garden, barn, etc). I thought I’d do some of the Dad stuff that they know me for, too, if they’d have me. I’ll be off to make buttermilk pancakes in just a minute.

So Happy Father’s Day to all of you Crossfit Dad’s. Remember to give your own Old Man a call; most likely he really DID love you and really DID like being your Dad, he just didn’t know how to say it. Then, if you can, jump right into whatever the kids have going today. Fully engage in the act of “Dadship”. Your kids will think that it’s you who is giving them the gift, but really it’s still your day and it’s still all about you today.

Giving yourself a day to be nothing but Dad. 3-2-1…GO!

The genius gene. I didn’t get one. To be fair, I was born in the deep end of the gene pool for all kinds of really cool stuff. I did get a very healthy dose of the “smart” gene; my mother is still convinced that I’m brilliant. But a genius? Capable of creating something totally new? Something that is earth–shaking, a game-changer? Nope. Don’t have it. I didn’t get that gene.

I got the “Salieri” gene.

You remember Salieri, don’t you? Salieri was the miserable soul who was not only capable of recognizing the genius of Mozart, but he was instantly aware that he would never possess that particular kind of genius. What  made him miserable, of course, was the fact that he was insanely jealous and bitter that his particular gift was the ability to identify someone else’s genius. This is one thing, though, that Salieri and I do NOT have in common. Rather than being bitter and jealous when I identify someone else’s genius, I am instead delighted, simply ecstatic to have made the discovery. Even more so, I am happy to trumpet my discovery, to tell everyone I know about a new genius or a new genius idea. And then I STEAL it!

Any genius ideas that I have ever been given credit for have essentially been derivative. I do have the gift of taking someone’s really good idea, maybe even a genius idea, and making it a little bit better. I have learned to take someone’s genius in one area and apply it somewhere entirely different, in a slightly different way, making something that appears to be totally new in that new place. Now, I always give credit for the original idea. It just wouldn’t be right to either take the credit for the “aha moment” or to fail to give attribution for the origin of my derivative. That would be a little bit TOO much like Salieri, wouldn’t it? It’s just really interesting how powerful the work of a true genius really is, for a true genius creation is applicable in areas that can range far and wide of its original intent.  It’s fascinating how few people do this, take a really good, original idea out of its universe and apply it somewhere else.

Take for instance Skyvision Centers.  From the outside sSkyvision looks like any other high–end specialty medical practice. But if you look just a little bit deeper you notice that Skyvision is actually a consumer service business; our product just happens to be eyecare. When I talk to other physicians about how we run Skyvision I get all kinds of feedback that includes the word “genius.” Looking not too terribly far below the surface, though, and you see lots of really good ideas from other parts of the business world that are simply being applied in a different setting. Our patient–flow principles are lifted directly from Toyota whose manufacturing principles, moving something through space and applying different processes to that something along the way, are widely viewed as a true genius breakthrough in manufacturing.

Skyvision is the first truly patient–centered eyecare practice in America. We built the entire business around one single patient, and every single member of the Skyvision team is borderline obsessed with maximizing the pleasure of a patient’s experience in our office. The office itself is designed to evoke other settings where patients have had a good consumer service experience. Our lobby looks much more like the front of a high end spa. High ceilings and wide hallways give the constant impression of space… elbow room… uncrowded. Even our carpet pattern was chosen to maximize comfort and minimize stress; it turns out that certain patterns make older patients unsteady on their feet and we gave our designers the task of avoiding anything that would cause subtle discomfort.

Not a single one of these ideas is new. I do not own the creation of any single element at Skyvision. What we have simply done is acknowledge good ideas elsewhere and put them together in a slightly different way in a slightly different place. Kind of like what would’ve happened if Salieri had been free of jealousy, free to simply revel in Mozart’s genius.  That’s me, a kinder, gentler, huggable Salieri, content to discover other people’s genius and then maybe  apply that genius in a little different way in a little different place. It doesn’t always work of course. Imagine if Salieri tried to adapt Mozart to the harmonica!  I’ve certainly done the equivalent of that, too.

Have you ever met a genius? A true genius? I think I’ve met a couple over the years. There’s a guy in New York, a neurologist, who may be the smartest person with whom I’ve ever actually spoken. He had about a dozen patents by the time I finished my residency. Of course, there’s also my brother-in-law Pete, the electrophysiology idiot savant. Pete’s actually probably a real, live, across the board genius, but he IS my brother-in-law and, come on now, there’s only so much credit you can give a guy like that who’s in the family! Pete can see stuff in an electrical tracing and relate it all the way down to the electrons changing spin, and then figure out how to fix what he sees with some new, off the wall solution. While he’s doing this, of course, what he’s really interested in is how he’s going to ambush me just before bedtime with something like “so, what do you think about God?” Genius.

There’s a genius in every walk of life. It doesn’t have to be something phantasmagorical like the gates to calcium channels along the heart’s electrical highway. No, it can be something as mundane as trash disposal. Baking bread. Or fitness. My most recent brush with genius has been in the world of physical fitness. That’s right… fitness. The most recent genius I’ve met is a fitness trainer from Southern California who came up with something no one else had ever been able to figure out. Something that no one has been able to dispute, argue, or contest. Greg Glassman defined physical fitness.

Herein lies another one of the characteristics of genius. You’re thinking to yourself, physical fitness, everyone knows what physical fitness is. Sure you do. Give me a definition. Define fitness…I’ll wait…ahem… still waiting… thought so. That genius thing always seems to make us go “of course!  why didn’t I think of that?” So it is with Greg Glassman and fitness. Work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Work, something you can measure. How much did you move how far how fast. Simple. Everything is now measurable. Every program designed to increase fitness can now be observed, measured, and compared.

Like most geniuses Coach Glassman didn’t stop there, though. The next little bit of genius was figuring out HOW to improve fitness in the most efficient and effective way. By utilizing “intensity”, by maximizing power  output while exercising Coach Glassman  as postulated a more direct, efficient, and effective route to producing physical fitness. Unlike most geniuses he didn’t require the help of any “derivative genius” like me to apply his two great discoveries. The creation of Crossfit, the broadly applied commercial version of his two genius breakthroughs, has done quite nicely without any help from me, thank you very much!

Nope, the place where I might be of some little help is in applying Greg Glassman’s fitness genius in the area of health. Not too very different from what I’ve done with the best practices that I found in manufacturing and consumer service in building sky vision. Coach Glassman has recently offered that fitness is a proxy for health; he has actually stated that measuring fitness is tantamount to measuring health. I think there’s a little more to it, just like I think there was a little bit more to applying best practice consumer service principles to medicine than just putting Nordstrom’s shoe salespeople in a doctor’s office. Sometimes the genius idea is just the starting line when it’s applied in a new way in a new place. Not too surprisingly, Coach Glassman and I don’t agree entirely on this at the moment, but that’s okay! Like Salieri I can find genius and geniuses frustrating at times. Unlike Salieri, though, I’m a patient man, comfortable with my role  when in the company of geniuses.

After all, they’re the ones with the genius gene.

Bob Ryan, the great Boston Globe sportswriter, is famous for a writing style in which he simply jots down short little “thoughlets”. He basically just throws out whatever’s on his mind, expanding on some thoughts, and just letting others dangle, tiny little flags sent up the flagpole. If you’ve ever read him, and if you pay attention, you notice that he occasionally revisits these “thoughtlets” with a much deeper examination.  This technique or style has been ripped off by countless other sportswriters, usually without attribution.

Over the course of my day-to-day life I find myself interested in countless little ideas, tiny thoughts, or random observations. Not all of them are worthy of the full attention of the “Restless Mind”, but I think a lot of them really  ARE interesting, and I really hate to lose  them. So I thought on occasion I, too, would steal this technique from Mr. Ryan, only I am going to openly acknowledge that it’s his, and openly thank him for giving me the idea. So, without further ado, here are some  random thoughts banging around between my ears…

1.)  Lacrosse.  I am absolutely up to my eyeballs in lacrosse this weekend, and loving every minute of it. My son Randy had a  game yesterday, and looking back I realized that I spent at least six hours in front of ESPNU watching NCAA lacrosse as well. It’s really a fantastic sport. I’m a little guy, and lacrosse would’ve been a great sport for me when I was younger. Unfortunately, I didn’t come upon lacroses until I was a high school junior, and I didn’t get a chance to actually play lacrosse until I was in college. I was a pretty typical football player turned lacrosse player — great wheels, no stick. I was a defensive midfielder before the position actually  existed. “Hey, Darrell, see that kid over there? Yeah, that one. The one who knows how to play lacrosse. Go beat the crap out of him and don’t let him score!” Yup, I was THAT guy.

When my oldest son, Danny, started playing in junior high school I rekindled my love for the game. I’ve been telling people for years that lacrosse is the perfect game for boys. You get to do everything your mother ever told you NOT to do: you get to run with a stick, and you get to HIT people with! Seriously, how good is THAT?! It’s funny, though, because it’s exactly this part of the sport that is putting this wonderful, lovely game at risk in our local public high school.

You see, our athletic director is concerned that lacrosse is inherently a dangerous sport. He’s concerned that the injury rate is, or will be, much higher than all other sports simply because it’s lacrosse. I don’t think that’s the case. As a matter of fact, after watching very high level lacrosse on television this weekend, I’m convinced it’s not the case. I say this after having watched my youngest son, Randy, get the snot beaten out of him in his last three games (Randy is an attackman who plays the “X.” position; he has the ball an awful lot making him an inviting target).

What the athletic director is actually seeing it is a rather unskilled version of the game. As such it’s really not any different from unskilled versions of any other contact sport. Who among us hasn’t seen an unskilled basketball team rough up the team made of five extremely skilled but rather slight hoopsters? Or the soccer team that consists of brutes, muscling their opponents off the ball? Or the classic example, the hockey team whose tactics consist largely of muggings on skates? No, it’s not the game. Lacrosse is no more or nor no less injury-prone than any other contact sport.

It’s really quite beautiful, and I have to make sure our athletic director realizes this.

2.)  Women’s lacrosse. If you love men’s lacrosse you’ve probably watched a game or two of women’s lacrosse. While I write this I’m watching the Virginia women beat Towson State in a playoff game. They have lacrosse sticks, they shoot at 6′ x 6′ goals, and the ball spends an awful lot of time in the air being passed from player to player. The similarities seem to end there, though. It’s a totally different game!

I’m I’m reminded of watching my sister play field hockey in high school. Man, talk about a game with lots and lots of rules, totally impenetrable to all but the chosen few who have been initiated in some secret athletic rite. I could never figure out why any whistle was blown in field hockey, and I have to confess that I’m just as bewildered watching women’s lacrosse. The women are very fast, clearly elite athletes, and they’re certainly holding lacrosse sticks and shooting at lacrosse goals.

I hope I figure out women’s lacrosse in less time than it took me to figure out field hockey!

3.) There was a  very insightful article, an interview of the great economist Gary Becker in the Wall Street Journal couple of weeks ago. Becker touched on all kinds of topics, and spent a little bit of time on one that’s very close to my world, namely healthcare economics. He’s a little frustrated, heck were ALL a little frustrated by the willful obfuscation foisted upon the great unwashed mass of humanity that doesn’t work inside the Washington DC beltway when it comes to health care economics.

A case in point is the effect of out-of-pocket expenses on the overall amount of money that is spent on healthcare in any given country. In the United States we presently spend about 17% of our GDP on healthcare. Out-of-pocket expenses make up only about 12% of total health-care spending. In Switzerland, however, a country widely acclaimed for a very effective health care system, and equally acclaimed for spending only 11% of GDP on healthcare, the Swiss have out-of-pocket expenses equal to about 31% of total spending.

Swiss consumers of medical care are assumed to  have the ability to make complex medical decisions on their own behalf. Do you think maybe, just MAYBE there is a correlation here? Do you think that perhaps the fact that Swiss patients individually own 31% of the skin in the game has anything to do with driving overall healthcare costs lower? That perhaps the fact that every healthcare transaction is roughly 1/3 the responsibility of a patient, thereby involving every single patient in the financial aspects of every single health care decision, might be in part responsible for a lower percentage of the GDP being spent on healthcare?

Nah. Couldn’t be that.

4.)  Aches and pains. My partner Greg Kaye turned 41 years old this week. Greg actually handled the “turning 41″ part much better than I did 50, only finding it difficult over the last month or so. Greg is also a former athlete, just a little less  “former” then yours truly. But Greg has struggled over the last month or so because of a couple of nagging injuries which have limited his athletic exploits, and consequently reminded him that he is no longer 21.

I’ve got pretty much the same chronic infirmities that I’ve had for several years. I’ve made my peace with them, at least I think I have. The difference for me now is that every time something new crops up I’m having a hard time putting aside the thought that it’s not just a little niggling effect of being 50 years old, but that it might actually be something serious. I’m starting to see friends, and friends of friends die. Some of them are dying from common things, and some of them are dying from relatively uncommon, weird things. I have a little bruise on my trachea right now. In all likelihood that’s all it is. The good news: I probably won’t put a tie on for a week or so. The bad news: until I put a tie back on I’m going to be wondering.

We used to call this “medical students disease”, the phenomenon where every medical student came down with whatever disease we happen to be studying at the time. I apparently was never cured of “medical students disease”!

Who do you see when you look in the mirror? When it’s just you and the mirror, and no one else, whose gaze do you meet coming from the mirror? Each one of us travels the highway of life cloaked in various masks and disguises, ever more complex shields between  what others see of us, and what we see when we stand alone, bared, in front of the mirror. Do you ever do this? Stand in front of the mirror stripped bare of all artifice, neither masked nor cloaked? What do you see? Who looks back?

It’s funny; whenever it’s me doing the looking the guy who looks back always has a soul patch!

So much of our lives are spent creating the image seen by others. What does Mommy want me to do? What would Daddy think of this? It starts very early, you know. We don’t even know we’re doing it. We get better and better at it once we leave the house, perhaps to a friend’s house to play, but certainly when we first enter school. We learned that a certain pose, a certain way of speaking, indeed the very way we stand elicits a response from the person standing opposite us. In a way, that person is another kind of mirror, except that this mirror shows us the effect of our “makeup”, our masks, our armor.

Who among us hasn’t experienced the intense, deep, boring pain that comes from sharing some deep confidence with a friend only to have that friend break our trust and share whatever that confidence was with someone else. We see a part of our true selves reflected in that circulating confidence; it’s always a painful experience, isn’t it? The lesson here is that baring the reflection of our true self can be painful. And so, we don’t.

Moving on we project for a purpose. Meeting our college roommate for the first time, that first job interview, lunch with the boss’s boss. What’s in the “mirror” is really more of a projection of someone sitting next to you or standing in front of you, and less a projection of you, who you really are. There’s nothing wrong or bad here — we simply do what we need to do. But in doing so we often drive that pure reflection of who we really are deeper and deeper, further and further from whom we appear to be.

Many of us sneak a little bit of self into the public projection, almost like an inside joke which is hidden from almost everyone. Maybe it’s a tiny tattoo on the inside of your ankle or that third hole in your year which you only fill for “outside consumption” in the most comforting and welcome circumstances. Nobody can see your tattoo, and nobody knows what type of the earring fills that hole, but YOU do. For me it’s a soul patch.

Now my wife, the single most important person in my life bar none, HATES my soul patch. Hates every version that I might dream up. Hates it long and dark; hates it short, neat, and trimmed. I had a mustache and a goatee around the time of my 40th birthday (no issues turning 40, mind you) and frankly I thought I looked pretty darn cool! It worked for little while, until that is it started to get gray. My lovely daughter, Megan, asked me to shave it as a Sweet 16th birthday gift to her and POOF, away it went. But every now and then the soul patch reappeared, tolerated for progressively shorter periods of time and always wiped clean at the behest of my beautiful bride. Except when I looked in the mirror, when it was just me and who I really think “me” is. I always see the soul patch.

If you do spend some time in front of a mirror and if you do open your eyes enough to take in that true image of who you really are the next thing you realize is how very rare are the occasions when the person who shows up is that reflection in the mirror. They are almost “never” events. When they happen, and when you all of a sudden realize that THIS event is one of those times, it can be almost magical. Think about it. You’re in a place and you’re with people and it’s so comfortable that the person YOU see in the mirror, the person you think you really are, is the exact person who shows up. And that version of you stays! You’re in a place it with people who know you, the exact version of you that looks back from the mere when you allow yourself to see who you really are.

It almost never happens, and the few times that it does create memories that are like monuments. Your own “Mount Rushmore” event. You return to those memories, you return to those events as  if they were touchstones, little shortcuts to who you really are. I had one in my 40s that is so meaningful that I can remember all of the details as if I just came home. My friends Bruce and Kathy invited Beth and me and three other couples to be their guests for an “adults only” ski trip. We spent five days in Telluride; Beth was injured and she didn’t even ski. Every minute that I was there I was exactly the man who stares back at me from the mirror. It doesn’t always turn out this way, but for me it was an extremely positive experience. I really liked the guy walking around in my clothes, and everyone else seemed pretty good with him, too. For five days the guy who looks back at me from the mirror when I’m looking at the guy I really think I am and I were one and the same.

It hasn’t really happened like that since then. Oh sure, there are little snippets here and there. A date with Beth, an hour in the office, a morning session at a Crossfit certification was my son Randy. But nothing like five days. Yet, when I’m there in front of the mirror, just me and the Darrell I think I am, it’s still the guy who spent five days in Telluride with friends new and old, all of whom saw the same person I see in the mirror.

So who are YOU when you look in the mirror and the person you really think you are is standing right there in front of you? Do you do this? Shorn of all disguises, all masks, all forms of armor and defense, who looks back at you when you are looking… for you? What do you look like? Who do you see?

I always see a soul patch…

I was in Providence again last weekend. I really need to stop visiting because every time I go it reminds me of how little has been done to save Cleveland since I wrote my article last year ( “Saving Cleveland” ). I mean, for crying out loud, just look at the headlines in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday: “Medical Mart budget hidden from County cCommissioners”. Seriously? A $500 million project and the guys running the show can’t see the bill? Really?

I guess it’s time I admit it. I missed the boat. I assumed that we had folks in Cleveland running the show who might have something in common with the people who ran Providence during its resurrection. BZZZZZT. Sorry! Johnny, tell Dr. White about our lovely parting gifts.  We unfortunately have elected politicians and other leaders with mis-matched talents. They are either men and women   with enormous hearts and limited abilities (think city government), or politicians blessed  with enormous talents and limitless intellect who are saddled with hearts the size of a pre-Cindy Lou Who Grinch. For crying out loud our politicians can’t even get corruption right! The guys in Providence were “effectively corrupt,” lining their pockets while getting the job done. Ours? Well, you read the same newspapers I do.

Nope, I was wrong. Saving Cleveland is not going to come from our entrenched leaders, be they politicians, businesspeople, or community  organizers. Saving Cleveland is not going to be a “top-down” process; saving Cleveland is going to come from the bottom up. Judging by the stunning lack of success our “leaders” have had with their “swing for the fences” strategies, I was at least a little bit right in “Saving Cleveland”– Little Ball is still the game that needs to be played to save our city. One year on, though, and the strategy becomes a little more clear. We need lots of little people playing little ball. Thousands of bunt singles will still score runs. What we need is a bit of an insurrection.

Alright Smart Guy. Lots of fancy words in there. Just what you mean by “bunt singles”  and how exactly do you propose we do this? I think it’s a back-to-the-future kind of thing. When I was looking for a place to live all of my college classmates who had grown up in Cleveland were dying to get back to the City. Mind you, this was when the Cuyahoga River was on fire. And yet all of my friends were “pants on fire”  hauling back to Cleveland. I think that’s the key; I think that’s the group, those are the same people who need to embrace the Save Cleveland movement. We need another generation of young people, high school and college aged kids who decide to “love” Cleveland and bring everyone else along with them.

The saying is way easier than doing, of course. It always is, eh? In this case the say is easier still because we don’t even have to create the blueprint — it’s already been done several times in several places. We, someone, preferably the kids need to do three simple things: PROTECT Cleveland (demand that our officials make our cities safe), BUY Cleveland (always choose products made by, or services provided by local companies), and CELEBRATE Cleveland (that “love bomb” thing I talked about before).

A couple things have become clear to me over the course of the last year. I already mentioned my profound disappointment in our “leaders”, but I’ve been equally disappointed in other civic and business organizations. Our main newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, continues to take potshots at Cleveland. No fruit hangs too high if the picking will produce a story knocking the city. For the most part our television stations and radio stations are equally guilty of this type of behavior. This is not the information infrastructure that will be necessary or useful in saving Cleveland.

What we need is a new way now, the stuff that our young people use as a matter of course in their daily lives. I’m talking, of course, about social media. Facebook, twitter, Linked In, even that old standby MySpace… the way our young people talk to one another. New music is shared on Facebook. An ad, a video, or a movie goes viral on YouTube or Hulu. The “game” of saving Cleveland, all the little examples of Little Ball will take place in the stores and shops in the streets of Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs, but the talking about it will take place in the “blogosphere.”

PROTECT Cleveland. Our young need to take back the streets. They need to take back the malls and the stores and the schools. They need to be encouraged and supported when they “call out” bad stuff. They need to be encouraged and supported when they demand that our elected officials make every nook and cranny of Cleveland safe. This is the table-stake; we simply can’t throw them under the bus on this one. We can’t lose the next Flats.

BUY Cleveland. This one should be easy, right? I mean, we’ve got pretty much everything we need here in Cleveland. That’s what makes it so utterly amazing and infuriating when we learn about how difficult it is for great businesses in Cleveland to get Cleveland business. Did you know that the city of Cleveland’s website was designed by and is hosted by a company in Denver? Seriously. Denver! How wrong is that? It’ll apparently have to start from the bottom here, too. Every kid, every young executive, every young professional will need to seek out others just like them who live and work in Cleveland and do business with THEM.

CELEBRATE Cleveland. If our established institutions insist on accentuating the negative we’re just going to have to find another way to drop that big old “love bomb” on Cleveland. How about a campaign where the kids tell the story of every Cleveland experience they have, every Cleveland business they use, every Cleveland  place they visit where something about it was good? Do it on Twitter. Do it on Facebook. Post video on YouTube. Tell your buddies, and tell them to tell theirs. A fight for Cleveland, a fight for the hearts and minds of Clevelanders, each one of them a reporter with a sideline pass!

There you have it. Saving Cleveland, from the bottom up. Thousands of Cleveland people, Cleveland’s young people, coming to bat and bunting for singles. Little ball. Opening Day is today. Why not?

Batter up!

She was 89 years old, my last patient, sitting demurely in my exam chair. I think I’ve known her for about 10 years. If I’m remembering correctly we’ve been through two cataract surgeries together, and I’ve done a little bit of laser work for her left eye. In fact, she’s in the office for us to consider some laser for her right eye, but she doesn’t really have any problem with the right eye today. It’s her left eye that’s giving her a little bit of trouble.

“It’s hard to describe. It’s like I have a headache or toothache around my left eye. I don’t have any problem at all with my right eye. I’ve had some sinus problems on this left side. That headachy feeling goes away with a Tylenol and a little bit of warm water. What do you think I should do?”

I look at her chart. I’m starting to remember more about who this extraordinary  woman is. There’s no mention of a family doctor in the chart. “Oh no, all of my doctors have died! All of the department heads and bigwigs I used to see are long dead,” she chuckled. More of her personal history is starting to come to me. 89 years old and she still does the books for her family business. Does all the payroll — files all of the taxes. With the exception of the pain around her left eye the only problem she will admit to is running out of steam in the office earlier in the afternoon then she did a couple years ago.

I start to slip into “Dr. mode” because, well, that’s what I do! That’s what all doctors do. We are presented with a problem, a symptom or disease, and we seek a solution. One of the wonderful things about being ophthalmologist is that I can almost always identify the problem, and once identified I can almost always find a solution. Indeed, I’m kind of intrigued, a little amused even, because this is the very rare time when a sinus problem is actually the cause of eye pain! Just like the majority of my patients with headaches think that the problem is coming from their eyes, so too do most of my patients with pain in the front of their face believe that it always comes from their sinuses. In fact, neither is very true very often. But in this case my patient is actually correct; her pain is referred pain to her eye and her eye socket from sinus problems. We can probably “fix” this, and I start to run through my mental Rolodex of good doctors near her home.

A little bit of unease is setting in, however. My patient is 89 years old, doesn’t have a single medical problem on her problem list, and isn’t taking a single medication. She hasn’t seen a medical doctor since 1978. Her only problem is an ache  around her left eye which she is successfully treating with Tylenol and warm water.

“May I take off my Dr. White hat?  Would it be okay if I talk to you as just Darrell for a few minutes?” A little smile comes at the corners of her mouth and she nods.  Here’s what I said:

“My friend lost his dad last week. By all accounts his dad was a great guy. He led a very active life pretty much through the last day he was alive. Went for a walk. Watched a wrestling practice for one of his grandchildren. Had a big dinner and went to bed with a smile in his face. He never woke up. Your mother  lived to be, what did you say, 104 years old? I think the best chance for you and I to have you leave this world at age 103 like my friend’s dad did last week is if I DON’T give you the name of a doctor to take care of your sinus.

Here’s what will happen if I send you to a medical doctor. Any medical doctor. They will hear you, hear about your pain, and they will do what doctors do. You will get an x-ray and you will get a CAT scan. You will almost certainly get some kind of medicine for your discomfort, medicine that may or may not be any better than Tylenol and a cup of warm water. You’re 89 years old — the doctor will probably find something else “wrong” that needs to be  “fixed”. More medicine… more tests… more time. No one has enough spare time to hang out with doctors! Think of all the wonderful things you have done for more than 30 years in all the time you HAVEN’T spent in doctor’s offices. Do you think you can continue to treat the discomfort in your left eye with Tylenol and warm water? Would that be OK?

Remember, I have my “Darrell”  hat on,  not my “Dr. White” hat. as I’m sitting here talking to you I’m thinking of my grandmother, my beloved Gama. I lost my Gama when she was 86. She broke her hip, went into the hospital, and never made it out. She was really pretty good, not terribly healthy but pretty good, right up until she broke her hip.  She thumbed her nose at all of the well-meaning doctors my Mom tried to bring her to, doing pretty much whatever she pleased right up until the end. Smoked her cigarettes while reading trashy novels…a few beers after supper every night. I’m convinced she wouldn’t have lived a day longer if every little medical problem was identified and “treated”, but I’m sure that her life would have been much less enjoyable if she had received all that care.

Do you think you can handle this discomfort? Would it be okay to continue treating it with an occasional Tylenol and some warm water? (I gently placed a hand on her knee) I really think this is the best thing to do here. I’ll give you the name of MY doctor in case you ever get really sick.”

At the end of the day, whether you are a generalist or a specialist, each of us needs to remember that we care for patients. Entire human beings. Not organs or organ systems, not symptoms or diseases or complexes. We take care of people. Even someone like me, someone who takes care of an organ not much bigger than a large grape. The eye, or the heart, or the left third toe are all connected  to a whole person.

I put my “Dr. White hat” back on. I told her I was available anytime she had a problem, and I looked forward to seeing her again next year. We walked to the front desk together arm in arm.

“Thank you, Darrell.”

It’s Easter and all of my friends have been asking if my kids are home for the holiday. It’s funny. I find myself saying that half of them are here and half of them are away. How can that be, you might ask, that I can have half of my kids home for Easter when I only have three children? How do you have half a kid at home and have a kid away? Well, I guess I should tell you about my “Sometime Son”, Alex.

Some years ago, I think it’s five  now, my kids came home and announced that Alex would be joining us for dinner. This in itself was not really all that extraordinary as Alex had been joining us two or three times a week for dinner for many months. My response was  “great, I’m sure we have enough to eat .” What they said next was really quite extraordinary, however. “Alex is going to be here for dinner and he’s not going to be leaving.” THIS was different.

Alex is one of two boys from what is, by any definition or description, a rather troubled family. It seems that at the time Alex had been bouncing around between multiple homes as his father was working through some legal problems. His father was about to be unavailable to him for many months, and Alex was clearly having a difficult time with not having a single, secure place to call home. Alex was and is one of my son Dan’s closest friends and was also very close with my two younger children, Megan and Randy. My kids essentially decided that Alex would be living with us.

So there you have it. Beth and I had gained a fourth child, a second son. Alex moved into Dan’s room and joined Megan’s sophomore class at the local public high school. Alex lived with us full-time for the better part of his sophomore year until his father once again had a place for the two of them to live. Although we offered Alex the opportunity to stay with us, and although leaving the White house meant changing schools, Alex’s father insisted that he leave us and live with him. Although Alex no longer lived under our roof, he was no less a part of the white family. We saw him for years most days of the week, and we continued to enjoy his company at the dinner table with great frequency. One of the two most poignant pictures that Megan keeps from her high school graduation is one of her and Alex celebrating their shared milestone.

Unfortunately the troubles in Alex’s family had simply been better hidden over the final two years of high school, and once he graduated it became too difficult for him to remain under the same roof with his father. Alex found himself working three deadend jobs in order  to stay in an apartment that he couldn’t afford. He economized on food — the rockhard bundle of muscles that graduated from high school with Megan had turned into something that looked more like the body of an elite miler. We simply couldn’t believe how skinny Alex had become.

Once again the white kids reached out. All three of them took Alex’s aside separately and told him, in slightly more colorful language, that he was being silly and ridiculous. “You need to quit one or two of those jobs and come home!” And so it came to pass that our “Sometime Son” came home to the White house during the summer of 2009.

When I tell this story I end up receiving all kinds of accolades, comments and congratulations on being such a wonderful person and doing such a wonderful thing. I must confess that this is quite a little bit embarrassing since it was actually my children who were responsible for this; my only contribution was that I didn’t get in the way. Frankly I’m not really sure how extraordinary this really is. If you take even a cursory glance at your family tree you’re likely to find a “cousin” or “uncle” whose lineage just doesn’t seem to have any genetic connection with yours. It turns out that in days of yore this practice of taking in folks who might be a little less fortunate than you was actually quite common. That “cousin” was in all likelihood a 1950s or 1960s version of Alex, a kid who just needed a place to call home, a place to be loved. That  “uncle” or “aunt” was probably his mother or father. I think this probably happened a lot in days gone by, and if I think  if you look just a little bit you’ll probably find that it happens quite a lot even now.

So what’s become of Alex? All of the  “other” White children are either in college or about to enter. Well, toward the end of last summer Alex was still working two of the dead-end jobs. We found ourselves alone chez White one afternoon watching a lacrosse game together. I told Alex that he had much more to offer, that he was much better than what he was doing at the time. You see, Alex is actually very, very bright. He’s at least as book smart as he is “street smart.” If he felt that treading water by doing low -end restaurant work was what he wanted to do at the time why not do it in a new place? Rather than staying in Cleveland, a city that he clearly had mastered, why not do the same thing in Albuquerque or Anaheim? Miami, or even Madrid? How about college? Beth has assisted about  a dozen kids in their college process. What did Alex think about college?

I asked him about the Marine Corps. For several years Alex  had talked about his desire to be a Marine. It turns out that his grandfather was a Marine, and Alex is very fond of this particular grandfather. Alex had a couple of minor legal issues that would need to be cleaned up prior to enlistment, and I offered our assistance in helping him overcome these if the Marine Corps was still his ultimate goal. After a couple of days of reflection and thought Alex returned with his decision: he’d like to be a Marine. And so on September 11, 2009 (the date still gives me chills every time I mention it) Alex was sworn in as a US Marine, and on February 22, 2010 Alex reported to Parris Island for boot camp.

So there you have it! I am home here for Easter with exactly half of my children. My daughter Megan is home from college and my son Randy still lives with us full-time as he completes his senior in high school. My son Dan, “The Heir”, is finishing up his junior year at the University of Denver, and we anxiously await his first summer here at home since he left for school. And my “Sometimes Son”, Alex, is halfway through boot camp in the swamps of South Carolina. The collective concern that we all feel for him and the collective sense that we will have not one, but two empty seats at our Easter dinner table makes the term “Sometime” seem to be not quite right anymore. We all think about him much too much for him to be only a “Sometime Son”.

It’s Easter, and I miss both of my sons who are away.

No good deed goes unpunished. Everyone’s heard this. Do you think it’s true? Does fear of the unforeseen consequence give you pause, make you think twice and maybe choose NOT to do that good deed?

There’s a young man who bags groceries at my local supermarket. He’s a special needs kid who went to school with my guys.  Let’s call him Billy, obviously not his real name, but he’s still a little kid in a young man’s body and he goes by a kid’s name like Billy. I always try to check out in a lane where Billy is bagging because he’s just a nice kid. Always smiling. Happy to be there. I’ve never seen him having a bad day. Sometimes if the line is long in back of me I’ll bag alongside him and we’ll race to see who can bag he most groceries the fastest. He kicks my ass every time.

Billy is a huge Cleveland Cavaliers fan and an even bigger LeBron fan. In season we always deconstruct the last game and make predictions about the next. I’m tellin’ ya, if Mike Brown and Danny Ferry spent just a couple of sessions with us the Cavs would be hoisting their third championship by now! Billy always tells me about his viewing plans for tonight’s game, and we talk about any game he might be attending for weeks in advance. The kid just loves his Cavs.

I’m a pretty lucky guy. Check that, I’m a VERY lucky guy. I live in Cleveland, not Boston or New York or LA. Even though I’m just a guy, not a big hitter or classic gobbersnopper, I know some pretty cool folks here in town. Several of my friends have seats that would make Jack Nicholson or Spike Lee jealous. How cool would it be to take Billy to a Cavs game and sit courtside? Give him a chance to see how big LeBron is in real life. So I asked him if he’d like to take in a game with his sneakers on the court, sitting across from the home bench and chatting up the refs from, oh, 3 or 4 feet. He said he’d ask his Dad, which I agreed was a really good idea, and he seemed pretty psyched.

Flash forward a couple of weeks. I’m on my way into the store and I stop by Billy’s aisle and apologize that I haven’t been around, tell him I’m still working on those tickets. Billy’s face kinda drops and he sheepishly says that his Dad doesn’t think it’s such a good idea, seeing as how his Dad doesn’t know me and all. I agree with Billy’s Dad and tell him so, and I promise that I’ll give his Dad a call if the tickets materialize. And then I start the second guessing.

Was I wrong to offer those special tickets to Billy? Was it a little bold to offer to bring him to a game? I can definitely see his Dad’s point of view; I can almost hear the conversation at the dinner table between Mom and Dad, can’t you? Who is this guy? Why Billy? What does he want? All reasonable questions, so I thought I’d ask them of myself and maybe have a little virtual conversation with Billy’s Dad in the process.

Why are you bringing this kid to a Cavs game, using courtside seats with a kid you barely know? The first and most obvious answer is because I CAN. I can get the tickets. I can drive the car. I can make a little something special happen in the life of a nice kid  whose universe is happy but a little small. I imagine him asking “But why? What are YOU getting out of it?” There’s the rub, eh? What would I be getting out of it?

Have you ever been presented with that rare opportunity, a chance to do an unpunished good deed? A freebie. Almost no one knows about it but you and maybe the recipient of the good deed. The internet corollary of “no good deed goes unpunished” seems to be “no good deed goes UNPUBLISHED”, but that’s not the case here. You’re gonna do the deed, you’re gonna feel good, and you’re gonna move on. That’s what I’d ask Billy’s Dad. That’s what this one feels like. It’s just a kid who loves basketball and LeBron and his Cavs. An open shot…the ball feels good…the basket looks as big as a hula hoop…a freebie…a free throw.

Listen, nobody does any good deeds without some kind of payback. Some need more payback than others, but if it didn’t feel good you wouldn’t do it. Maybe that’s where I went a little wrong here. I didn’t really look too much beyond the universe of me and Billy at the end of the aisle in a grocery bagging frenzy. He’s a special needs kid; his family doesn’t know me. Duh. Bad execution built on insufficient forethought, albeit based on good strategy. My heart was, and is, in the right place. It’s still that rarest of good deeds, one that might very well go unpunished. The execution just needs a little polish. Maybe it’s Billy and his Dad who need to take in that game, four feet from one family on the floor.

That’s not the point, though. How you pull it off is really not the point. The take home message is that there are good deeds out there to be done. Little deeds and large. Equally good whether the stage is grocery store or global. The essence of these good deeds that may go unpunished lies in both intent and outcome. The net benefit must land with the recipient, no predictable or probable harm should befall the recipient (it’s your responsibility to perform that particular due diligence), and for Heaven’s sake it should be unpublished, a private deed for the sake of nothing other than the deed itself. (This still qualifies; you have no idea who Billy is, and you won’t have any idea whether or not I’ll be able to pull this off.)

Have you ever been here? It’s a freebie. No one will know. You’ll probably get away with it, that most rare of things, the unpunished good deed. You’re right there at the free throw line. The ball feels good in your hands. Really good. The basket looks as big as a hula hoop.

Take it. Take the shot.