Confessions of a Jeter Cheater

Derek Jeter cheats.

Yes, the 37 year old, future hall-of-fame baseball player, the Yankees shortstop who just signed a 51 million dollar contract to stay with the team another three years, was called out for cheating in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. I’m not talking about his tax dispute with New York State from 2008. I’m talking about the way he plays.

Cheating, in baseball, is what older players do when they make slight adjustments to their playing style to cope with their diminishing skills. It’s perfectly legal. They swing a little earlier at bat, since their eyesight might not be as good as it once was, or perhaps they try to hit without a stride to add precious seconds to their time at the plate. Since baseball is a game of statistics, people notice. (This year Jeter came dead last amongst shortstops in a couple of defensive statistics.) And aging as an athlete in front of millions of fans cannot be an easy experience.

Even though I’m a soccer player and not a professional ball player, I cheat too. Now Jeter and I make marginally different salaries (I don’t own a 30,000 square foot home nicknamed ‘St. Jetersburg’), I may have slightly less fans, and I have not been romantically linked with anyone with a title that includes the words ‘sexiest’ or ‘universe’, but otherwise, we’re identical. My soccer game, since my ACL repair, is more passing and less shooting. When it’s time for my team to take a corner kick, I often find it’s time for me to concentrate on tying something on my shoelace so that someone else will take it. It makes me glad no one is keeping track of my statistics, or writing national magazine articles about my cheating.



Can you spot the difference?








(Large aside: The more you think about it of course, the more you realize that almost everything we do in life as adults is a form of cheating-- sometimes to make up for our diminished capabilites, and sometimes because we run out of time. For example:
- Recently I bought one of those supermarket roast chickens and served it to my family as though I had prepared it myself. Cheating? Sort of. Although it is a bit of work to cut the meat off of there.
- When I put on makeup, I’ve noticed in the last year or so I don’t bother looking in the normal side of the round mirror- I always flip over to the magnified side. Cheating? Yup. Sometimes I even start out of the magnified side and don’t realize it, and then try to flip the mirror over to the magnified side only to find that everything has miraculously shrunk. What’s going on?
- I wear black almost all the time. This is double cheating, really. We all know black is slimming, so that’s a cheat for sure, but another reason I wear black is that I am filthy (and not in a good way.) Black hides almost all dirt. The other day as I was just about to leave the house, I dropped half a cup of coffee and splashed it all over myself. I swore, grabbed a towel and dabbed at the coffee on my black clothes, then said ‘meh’, and left the house without changing. Total cheat.)

Overall, the New York Times Magazine article about Jeter was totally depressing. Do I need to be reminded that aging sucks and that we all adjust to cope with it? But there were a couple of sweet spots in the article, and I will share them with you: the first is that the Dallas Mavericks, an aging basketball team, beat the much younger and much more hyped Miami Heat in the NBA finals recently. How? According to the article, “Crafty older players find ways to compensate for their loss of quickness. Cleverness matters.” I love it that sometimes, experience trumps youth.

Secondly, I love this: “...(the modern thinking is that) today’s players, who condition themselves year-round – often with the help of private trainers, the most up-to-date scientific methods, nutritionists and massage therapists- play longer and have more years of peak performance. It makes sense. It’s also not true.” Wait, WHAT?! Yup. Babe Ruth, who they lovingly call ‘rotund’ and ‘hard-living’, played longer professionally than many current ball players and is largely considered to be the greatest baseball player of all time. Do you think he had a nutritionist? Pfft.

To celebrate these small victories for us middle aged folks, I am going to have a milkshake. Don’t worry, I will wear black, in case I spill anything. Then maybe I'll play some soccer. Care to join me?

The Internet is Scary, or, Cristiano Ronaldo calls Soccer Mom ‘Douchebag’ after Sideboob Incident

I want to talk about my blog. I realize that technologically, I’ve always been a late adapter and that blogs are considered passé. It’s all about ‘the Twitter’ now. But blogs might not be dead yet: in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, in a review of a book that grew out of a popular mom blog, columnist Leah McLaren said she felt ‘wistful for the (blog’s) cyber verbiage of yesteryear’ when writers posted entries of more than 200 words. Then Sunday’s New York Times Magazine mentioned that the most prominent sportswriter in America is Bill Simmons, a blogger who sometimes posts up to 6000 words on some topics, and that his blogs are downloaded an average of 600,000 times each. Of course, these are actual writers writing about relevant things, not just navel gazing in soccer cleats, as I have been known to do— but reading about these popular bloggers made me curious about my stats. Who reads me? And then I discovered a button on my blog that can tell me just that.

Don’t worry. I can’t see individual people and I don’t know if you are ignoring me. But I do have a button called Stats that tells me which countries people are viewing my blog from. It’s totally addictive. Why? The other day I checked it to see who was reading me and it turns out my blog had already been looked at 19 times in the Ukraine since that morning . That’s more than the 12 Canadian readers I had in the same time period. The Ukraine? (Oh dear. Given my dodgy grasp of geography, I’m ashamed to admit that if I was handed a blank map of the world and forced to pinpoint the location of the Ukraine, I would kinda wave my hand over one general area, hesitantly, and I might be wrongish.) I’m also inexplicably read by a fair number of readers in the BRIC countries (other than China, who doesn’t give a damn about me.) I even have 1 reader in Zimbabwe.

Naturally, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Luckily it can be easily explained by another kind of statistics my blog gathers for me: the keywords people google which help them find my blog. Of course, there are the expected ones—people who know me and google me by name. But yesterday someone found my blog by googling ‘garbage cans that go up stairs’, because of a piece I wrote about my physiotherapist that mentioned both stairs and garbage cans.

A surprising number of people also google Cristiano Ronaldo and end up on my page. Why? Because a year ago I posted a fake interview I pretended that I had done with Ronaldo. Also, people that googled the word ‘sideboob’ found my blog because of a piece I wrote back in March. ‘Soccer Mom’, and another popular key word, ‘douchebag’, have also landed people on my page in reference to posts I wrote or a friend guest wrote, in the past. Does the title of this post make sense to you now? Cristiano Ronaldo is probably perfectly nice and did not do anything wrong; but, rather, my title might just be the tiniest shameless attempt to increase traffic to my blog. (It’s pathetic, I know. The New York Times Magazine article I referenced earlier has Simmons quoted on others sports blogs as saying “The worst thing that’s happening now is that people are writing things just to drive traffic and get attention.” Oh yeah? Suck it, Simmons, with your 600,000 readers and your ESPN masthead.)

Now I almost wish I didn’t know these statistics at all because it makes me wonder what to write about. In a ridiculous attempt to appeal to my newfound Ukranian readers I actually googled ‘soccer pierogies’ to look for a picture I could use- because pierogies are one of the only Ukranian things I can think of- but sadly, Google Images came up with nothing. (I did find a race where men dress up like pierogi mascots and run on a field {see above}, but there was no soccer ball, so that’s out. I also found a Jesus pierogy that a woman discovered one Easter in her frying pan and sold for $1775 to Golden Palace, the same people that bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese a few years ago for a much higher price.)

The last stat I discovered is the hardest one to face: my most popular blog ever, by a wide margin, is the only one I did not have a hand in writing. Yup, my friend Frank’s An Open Letter to Soccer Douchebags is my (his) most popular blog ever, having been looked at hundreds of times. Dang.

To console myself I’m going to try to scrape the pentagram shapes of a soccer ball into an uncooked perogy so I can hopefully sell it and make millions. I clearly won’t be making any dough (pun intended) from my writing. Except, perhaps, in the Ukraine. (Wherever that is.)

Keepie Uppie

Recently in the New York Times Magazine’s Youth Issue, we were treated to articles about a 21 year old fellow who is a highly successful online poker player with a net worth of about $5 Million, and a 16 year old female freestyle soccer player who is wowing people with her talent at keeping the ball in the air while doing tricks with her feet.

Dan Cates, the poker guy, is photographed in what appears to be a windowless grey room devoid of any decoration, with grey carpet and a grey couch. He is slouched on his office chair in front of two computers, with his feet up on the armrest of the couch, underneath a blanket. His face is pasty and he looks unwell. Perhaps it’s partially the blanket thing.

Indi Cowie, the soccer girl, is rendered in a series of colourful pictures, doing what she does best- moving the ball around in the air with her feet and head, jumping and flicking it all over the place. Looking at a video of her is much more instructive than looking at a photo. Here’s a short one:



What do these two have in common? Everything.

Each has become an expert in his or her field because of practice. An insane amount of it. Both have followed the idea Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book Outliers- that 10,000 hours of practice at something makes you quite good. That’s about 3 hours a day for 10 years-- or a lot quicker if you do more than 3 hours every day. Pick anything: learning another language, playing tiddlywinks, stitching needlepoint cats on throw pillows, masturbating—if you do it that much, you’re going to do it well.

It brings to mind Amy Chua’s controversial recent book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the one in which her teenage daughter has performed a piano recital at Carnegie Hall by the age of 14 but has never in her life been allowed to play with another child or have a sleepover. But of course in that situation, the mother was the driving force behind the success- she forced them to practice their instruments 3 hours a day. Indi Cowie just wants to do it. The magazine article says she sometimes accidently wakes her mom up at 5am when she’s practicing in the garage. What kind of teenager gets up at 5am voluntarily?

When she performed at her school’s talent show, Indi won handily, although in addition to the comments of “Isn’t she amazing?”, the other comments were “Who is she?” She has no friends except her 12 year old sister. And even though she’s performed at halftime at a Chelsea-Manchester United match in England and has had her talents featured in a PS3 soccer commercial, she’s a nobody at home, and her name is misspelled in the high school event program. Cates, the poker player, realizes he might have a problem and repeatedly mentions trying to achieve a “balance of life” with his magazine interviewer, even going so far as to fly to Texas to meet with a specialist who would help him understand social situations. (Personally, all I think he really needs is a bit of fresh air, vitamin D and some green vegetables, but what do I know?)

All of this mocking is just jealousy on my part, of course. No one is clearly ever going to feature me in the youth issue of anything, but it’s not just that: I want to be good at something too. (Not freestyle like Indi though – my knees could never take 3 hours of practice a day and besides, I refuse on principle to take on a hobby which is sometimes ridiculously dubbed “Keepie Uppie”.) I’m jealous of how society always rewards the experts , whether it’s with money, or prizes, or some degree of fame. Apparently being goodish at a number of different things without any kind of focus doesn’t get you anywhere.

I was lamenting this to my husband, who is, in fact, an expert himself. He’s got a PhD, won the dean’s medal in grad school, has been nominated for both teaching and writing prizes, and has been awarded a number of grants and a prestigious fellowship for his research. (Strange, since he has trouble finding the coffee filters every single time he opens the kitchen cupboard.) He said, “Look, honey, it doesn’t have to be a youth thing, you could start now. In ten years, by the time you’re 51, you could be really good at something.”

“I’m 42, not 41.”

“Oh,” he said.

Sometimes I think there’s a chance that he doesn’t even know how to spell PhD.