by Dave Barry
“Yes,” I assented eagerly. Pete would be regaining consciousness soon.
Phil picked me up in his gorgeous sculpted arms and began running with impossible swiftness through the trees toward Creepstone, followed by Stewart and Sven, and, much farther behind, by the Jonas Brothers, who lack supernatural speed but are very cute. Reflecting in my mind on how much I had made all of these males suffer, I vowed mentally to stop, once and for all, being such an indecisive, self-centered ninny.
Until the next book.
A Festival of Grimness
I’m standing next to a soccer field at the Wide World of Sports complex in Walt Disney World, the Happiest Place on Earth. There are two men standing about twenty feet from me. They are not happy. Their faces are the color of wild cherry cough drops, and they are shouting.
“GET IT OUT OF THERE!” one of them shouts.
“GET IT OUT!” the other one affirms, adding, by way of explanation, “GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!!”
The men are shouting at nine-year-old girls, presumably their daughters, playing in a big soccer tournament. The girls are trying to kick a ball away from their goal. The men are not satisfied with their efforts.
“GET IT OUT OF THERE!!!” shouts the first one, so violently that I half-expect him to expel a chunk of trachea onto the perfect Disney grass. But the man doesn’t attract any attention, because there are hundreds of other adults around, watching dozens of games, most of them shouting just as loud, and sounding just as unhappy. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think all these people were furious at their children.
But of course they’re not: They’re modern American parents raising modern American children, and God forbid that a modern American child should engage in an athletic activity without being shouted at by adults.
“GET! IT! OUT! OF! THERE!” shouts one of the sideline dads, who is now so worked up that his words are coming out in bold-faced type.
The other dad, sensing a teachable moment, shouts, “KIM-BERLY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”
When I was a child, things were different. For one thing, North America was covered by glaciers. For another thing, when it came to sports, we kids were pretty much on our own. Where I lived, in Armonk, N.Y., the only organized sport was Little League, and aside from the dads who coached the teams, there were few grown-ups around. When the games were going on, my dad was on the train home from another long day in New York City, wearing a hat, smoking, and reading the newspaper in a car full of other smoking, hat-wearing, paper-reading dads. My mom had four kids to manage, so the last thing she had time for was to sit in the bleachers at the Wampus33 School ball field and watch me scurry around right field like a disoriented gerbil in a desperate and almost always futile effort to position myself where the ball was going to come down.
So Little League was really just for us kids. We rode our bikes to the field, played the game, and rode our bikes home. At dinner our parents might ask us how the game went, but they might not. It was not a big deal either way. We didn’t expect the grown-ups to think it was all that important. We didn’t think it was all that important. It was Little League. If an adult had appeared at the Wampus ball field and spent an entire game yelling at the players, everybody would have thought that person was a lunatic.
The other sports we played had no adult involvement whatsoever—no coaches, no referees, no league officials, no score-keepers, no uniforms. We played anywhere we could, including living rooms, with whoever was around—three on a side, nineteen on a side, one on a side, whatever. We picked our own teams and made our own rules and argued a lot and played until it was so dark that while trying to catch a football that you could not see you might (this happened to me) run face-first into a tree that you also could not see.
Nobody watched us play these sports. Nobody encouraged us from the sideline. But we managed to have fun anyway. And we went on to become a strong and proud generation that survived the Great Depression and won World War II.
No, wait, that was my parents’ generation. My generation’s big achievements ran more along the lines of spending junior year abroad. But we did learn some important life lessons from sports. I learned, for example, that even though I was not as big, or fast, or strong, or coordinated as the other kids, if I worked really hard—if I gave 100 percent and never quit—I would still be smaller, slower, weaker, and less coordinated than the other kids. In other words, I learned that even though I enjoyed playing sports, I sucked at them. And understanding that you suck at some things is useful information in life. The world would be a better place if people were fully cognizant of their areas of suckage.
For example: I have, over the years, received in the mail approximately 17 million manuscripts from people whose goal is to become professional writers. They want me to discover them, encourage them, mentor them, find them an agent, etc. Some of these people have talent; some have actually become professional writers. But a great many of them will never become professional writers, because—follow me closely here—they are not good at writing. Of course I don’t tell them that. Probably nobody will ever tell them that. They will continue to try and fail, and in the end they’ll be bitter, like the early-round contestants on American Idol who think they got booted because Simon Cowell is mean, rather than because their singing sounds like a bull being castrated with a hockey stick.
These contestants humiliated themselves on national TV because when they were growing up, loving to sing, always singing around the house, no thoughtful family member or caring friend ever had the kindness to put a hand on their shoulder and say, in a gentle and loving voice, “You suck.” They needed Simon Cowells, but instead they were surrounded by Randy Jacksons and Paula Abduls, trying to be nice, not wanting to hurt their feelings, and thus setting them up for failure. Because the cruel fact is that the world does not reward suckage, outside of Washington, D.C.
Take nature. If you are a wildebeest that happens to be bad at running fast, you will fail. You might have a sincere desire to run fast, and you might believe you can run fast, because when you’re hanging out at the water hole, other wildebeests—the Randy and Paula wildebeests—are telling you what you want to hear: Sure, dog! You run pretty fast! But when the cheetah shows up and the herd takes off, you will be a wildeburger. You would have been much better off if you had accepted your limitations and gone into some other line of endeavor more suited to your talents, such as sloth, or professional writer.
Speaking of which:
Beep! Beep! Beep!
That’s the sound of what we writing professionals call the Segue Warning Horn, telling our readers to hold on tight on as we make a sharp turn and attempt to get back to our original topic, which you may recall is youth sports.
Here’s the problem: A lot of parents are insane. You may be one of these parents without even knowing it, because the craziness takes you over gradually.
It’s not a problem when your child is really little. My daughter started playing soccer when she was four; at that stage, the parents have no choice but to be mellow. You can’t take the games seriously, because four-year-olds are unaware of many key elements of soccer. The ball, for example. The players may notice it on occasion, but they don’t feel the need to become personally involved with it. They have other things on their minds. They’ll see one of their friends, and they’ll think, “Hey! There’s Stella! I’ll give her a hug!” Also at any random moment they might feel the need to lie down, or skip off the field, or do a cartwheel, or get some nose-picking done. What with one thing and another, they don’t have a lot of time to devote to the ball.
So at this stage your role, as a parent, is to watch for those rare moments when your child and the ball are in the same general vicinity, and then shout: “Kick the ball!” And then, on the off chance that your child does kick the ball, you shout: “No! The other way!” That’s it. You do that for maybe forty minutes, during which time either (a) nobody scores, or (b) both teams score eighty-seven times, and th
en it’s time for cupcakes.
So in the beginning the soccer parents are fairly relaxed. But pretty soon the kids start to get the hang of the sport. The games become more competitive; score is kept; league standings are published. There are no more cartwheels.
This is when some parents start to change. They shout more, and their shouting takes on an urgent, even angry, tone. They shout at the officials, and sometimes at the coaches, but above all they shout at the kids. These parents will tell you that sports are about having fun, but they clearly are not having fun, especially when they—excuse me, I mean when their kids—lose. Again, not all parents act like this. But a lot of them do, and they’re the ones who tend to dominate the sideline mood, which becomes more and more serious.
The parents of my daughter’s team have, so far, managed to resist this trend. We’ve been together for five years, and we’re still fairly mellow on the sideline, unless you count my wife, who is both Cuban and Jewish and therefore genetically programmed to produce more words in any given hour, awake or asleep, than the entire state of Wyoming. But hers are generally words of encouragement, such as “Good try!” and “You can do it!” and (to our daughter) “Stop fiddling with your hair!”
The rest of us parents watch the game and cheer as needed, but we’re also chatting, reading, texting, and occasionally, during evening games, sneaking snorts of adult beverages that some thoughtful parent has snuck in along with the snacks. We view games at least partly as pleasant social events. Our daughters do, too.
We were not prepared for the Disney World tournament. We began to realize what we’d gotten into when, in our first game, the opposing team showed up with a large, professionally made team banner on a pole at least ten feet long, which two of the fathers planted in the turf. That’s right: a banner. It would not surprise me if, for home games, they also had a blimp.
Another intimidating factor was that the opposing girls were larger than our girls. I’m pretty sure some of them were wearing brassieres. They went through an elaborate warm-up routine, and at various points did these coordinated military-sounding cheers, like small brassiere-wearing Navy SEALS. When the game started, the opposing parents—most of whom were wearing team colors—shouted intensely the entire time.
They killed us. And the thing was, the more goals they scored, the more intensely the parents shouted. It was as if they wanted their girls to destroy our girls. I will admit that I developed a strong dislike toward those parents. I wanted to go over and tell them to shut up. But I didn’t, for fear they would impale me with their banner pole.
We played two more games in the tournament before we were, mercifully, eliminated. We got creamed in both of them, scoring a total of zero goals. In one of the games, when our girls had fallen far behind and clearly were going to lose badly, the opposing parents, who were wearing matching team T-shirts, started an organized chant calling for more goals.
And these were parents of nine-year-olds. The parents of the older teams were even more intense. Everywhere you went at the tournament you saw people staring unhappily at the field and barking instructions at their kids. Occasionally, when a team scored, there would be a brief outburst of joy from the parents of that team, and reactions of disgust from the opposing parents. Then everybody would resume staring and barking. The air was thick with parental pressure. It was a festival of grimness.
You might be thinking: “You’re just being critical because your team got its butt kicked.” There may be some truth to that. Maybe if our girls had won, I’d have loved the tournament. Maybe I’d have bought a professional banner.
But I don’t think so. I think that no matter what happened, I’d have found the tournament to be kind of depressing. I think that parents—not all of them, but a lot of them—are sucking the fun out of kids’ sports. They’re making it clear to their kids that they think sports is about winning, and only winning. This is a reasonable value to instill if you honestly believe your child is going to become a professional athlete. But you need to remember two things: 1. Your child is not, in fact, going to become a professional athlete.
2. There are more important things in life than winning.
Such as not being a jerk.
Your kids don’t need you shouting at them on the playing field, any more than they need you shouting at them in the classroom. Let them play the game and figure out for themselves how they feel about it, without having to worry about your feelings, too. Make it clear that your happiness doesn’t depend on the score. Cheer for your kid, sure, but do it cheerfully. If you can’t manage that, take a walk; the game will go on fine without you, because it’s not about you.
And if, while you’re taking your walk, you happen to pass a girls’ soccer game, and you notice a group of parents who are sitting and chatting in a relaxed manner except for one Cuban-Jewish woman who is so animated that calming her down would require tranquilizer darts, stop and say hi. Maybe we can offer you a refreshing snuck-in adult beverage. Because you are, after all, an adult.
Right?
Father of the Groom
On my son’s wedding day, when I saw him standing up there in front of everybody, waiting for his bride, I had this sudden, intense awareness of the passage of time. To me, it seemed as if only a few days had passed since Rob was playing happily in my living room, flying his remote-control helicopter.
Then I realized that in fact only a few days had passed. I got him the remote-control helicopter as his wedding gift. He may be a grown man, but he’s still a guy.
Anyway, it was an amazing feeling, watching my son get married. The whole weekend was very emotional for me; I cried like a baby. And that was just when I saw the bill for the rehearsal dinner.34
But seriously, before I say anything that might be construed as a criticism of the vast and constantly expanding wedding-industrial complex, which currently accounts for 38 percent of the U.S. economy, let me state for the record that I loved my son’s wedding. He found a wonderful bride in Laura—a smart, beautiful, warm, talented, and funny woman who is absolutely perfect for him. They had the best wedding in human history, and I am not saying this solely because I had many glasses of champagne and danced with approximately twenty-seven women simultaneously to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy.”
So I have no complaints about the wedding. I must say, however, that the planning of the wedding was a tad stressful, in the same sense that the universe is a tad spacious. And for good reason: Planning a modern wedding is comparable in scope to constructing a nuclear power plant, although the wedding is more complex because—to pick just one of many examples—a nuclear power plant does not require floral installations. These used to be called “flowers,” but that was before the florists—excuse me, I mean the floral-installation artists—realized that “floral installations” is more professional, as measured by how much you can charge for installing them.
Which brings us to budgeting. Here’s my advice for parents who are going to be planning a wedding: At the very beginning, decide exactly how much money is the absolute maximum you are willing to spend. Write this number down on a piece of paper and keep it with you at all times. That way, when the wedding is over, you can pull it out, look at the number, and laugh until a streamer of drool reaches all the way down to your feet, which will be bare inasmuch as you can no longer afford shoes.
Here’s the problem. The bridal magazines, which depend for their existence on advertisements for the wedding-industrial complex, have for decades been hammering home the three core principles of the modern American wedding:FIRST PRINCIPLE: Your wedding is the most important day of your life, so you want it to be perfect.
SECOND PRINCIPLE: However, it does not have to cost a lot of money.
THIRD PRINCIPLE: However, if it doesn’t, it will suck.
These principles resonate powerfully with your modern bride-to-be, because ever since she was a little girl she has been fantasizing about her wedding day. This is not true of your modern groom-to-be. When
he was a little boy, he was—I state this with authority—conducting experiments to see what happens when you set fire to He-Man action figures.35
But the bride has been dreaming for years about having a fairy-tale wedding, patterned after the wedding scene in the Walt Disney animated film Cinderella, wherein Cinderella and Prince Charming ride off into the sunset in a horse-drawn carriage while the cute little mice wave goodbye. What they don’t show you in this film is parents in bare feet paying the bills for the carriage rental, the horse supplier, the mouse wrangler, the sunset-installation professional, etc. Because all of these things cost money. And if you hold the wedding in New York City, as we did, all of these things will cost extra money, because you will be paying for unionized mouse wranglers.
True Story: My wife inquired, at the hotel where we held the rehearsal dinner, about the cost of renting a projector and screen so we could show pictures of Rob and Laura as guests arrived. The hotel said that, counting the fee for the two workers36 required, by union contract, to set the equipment up, it would cost us—I am not making this up—eighteen hundred dollars. Which of course is more than it would cost, outside of Planet Manhattan, to buy a projector and screen, as well as a used car to drive them home in.
My point is that putting on a modern wedding is an expensive and complicated undertaking, which is why many people these days hire a professional wedding planner, whose function is to make it even more expensive and complicated. The planner works closely with the bride, as well as the only other really essential person in the wedding, by which I of course mean the bride’s mother.
At this point the groom is pretty much out of the picture. If the wedding were a solar system, the bride would be the sun; her mom would be another, slightly smaller nearby sun; the wedding planner would be a third sun; the caterer, floral installation professional, photographer, videographer, cake design engineer, etc., would be planets orbiting these suns; and the groom would be an asteroid the size of a regulation softball 73 trillion light-years away. Sometimes the groom gets so far out of the wedding-planning loop that the planners forget to invite him to the actual wedding and the bride, at the last minute, has to marry a member of the catering staff. (This happened to Madonna twice.)
