Well, now they know about Chuck Moser in Sydney, Australia.
A couple of months ago, an order for “Warbirds” came in from Stephen Dunne, who identified himself as a football (American football, not soccer) coach in Sydney.
In case you don’t know, I published “Warbirds” two years ago as an historical documentary of the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles football team, which at the end of the century was named “Team of the Century” in Texas high school football. The Eagles, under Coach Chuck Moser, won 49 straight games and three straight state championships from 1954-57.
I conceived the book simply as a reconstruction of the details of the streak, most of which were long since forgotten. But I wasn’t very far into the work when I saw that the details may have been about the streak, but the heart of the book was how the Eagles played the game. The book was more about the coach than it was the team.
The book was shipped to Stephen Dunne, and last week I heard from him again.
“Coach Moser is shown in such a wonderful light,” he said. “His attitude and strength comes through in the book. I'm head coach of Sydney University Lions down here in Sydney, Australia. We've made six straight State Championship games, winning the last three. The last two seasons have been undefeated and we are on a 31 game winning streak. When reading I looked for some keys to Coach Moser's success as well as what motivates the players to succeed.”
Sports in Australia are organized not so much along high school or university lines as along “club” lines. I’m not sure what that means. I visited the Sydney University Website and had a hard time figuring out who might be eligible to play for Coach Dunne’s team. Their season is also reversed from ours. In March, it’s fall in Australia, and teams this weekend are playing their fourth games of the season. The Sydney University Cubs (colors: maroon and gold) are playing the Northwestern Pumas at 7 tonight (Sydney time) at the UNSW Hockey Complex in Little Bay. Last week, the Cubs beat the UTS Gridiron Gators, 30-14.
“I had read another book about Coach Moser (before I found out about yours) and it was very disappointing,” Coach Dunne said. “No details on the football, not even what offense they ran (I'm also a collector and student of 50s football, Spilt T offenses and such.) The other book also gave no clear picture of what Coach was like. I was so glad to read a version that did justice to the subject. My congratulations.”
Well, shucks. Music to my ears.
“It's a book I will be returning to,” he said, “and - I hope you'll be happy to know - I will slip in some references to Coach Moser when talking to the team.”
The team could do worse. Chuck Moser didn’t start with X’s and O’s, but with values and principles. There were rules of football, and also of living. From these he developed a program that was designed simply to give his team its best chance to win. Now that word is reaching a football team in Sydney, Australia. Am I happy to know? Yes, I think so. I press the book to my chest and thank God I had something to do with making that happen.
March 31, 2006
March 23, 2006
How kids complete us
Mark me down in favor of chasing ducks.
I am sure that my two kids chased a duck or two in their time, and I am sure that I let them. I know I didn’t coach them to do this, as fellow San Diego columnist David Moye has done, and has caught some flack for. I know I would have been surprised if my kids didn’t take out after any duck, or gull, or goose or eagle, that came closer than 20 yards to them.
I was also confident that if a kid managed to get too close to a duck, the duck would know what to do. Then it would have been me, chasing out to shoo the duck off the kid and coo over her that it was just a duck and there was no need to be traumatized for life. Of course I would be preaching to the choir, because there would be no chance of the kid ever again chasing a duck. Likewise, I would assume that a traumatized duck would never again come within chasing distance of a kid. So many of them do, though, that I wonder if they think about it at all.
I am glad other publications have someone who writes about kids. He reminds me of writing about, and fathering, mine. I am reminded deliciously of the kind of secret love that exists only at an objective distance, such as is felt by a father in a dark bedroom, standing with a hand on a crib in which his child is soundly sleeping. The father must make a contract with himself, not to share the moment with anyone, so personal is its power.
Kids complete us, you know. When my daughter was born in 1974, I became a parent. Obvious as that statement seems, it is also worthy of the greatest respect. Parents are everywhere, but the only way to become one is to have a child. It is like joining the oldest and most revered guild.
A human being can’t know anything distinct about being a parent until he becomes one. Before 1974, I walked among fields of parents, socialized with them, befriended them, visited them in their homes, without the slightest clue about who they were. In total ignorance, I made judgments about them.
When I became one of them, that started to change. It took a child. Watching this child, and later her brother, cute, fat, little babies with their raging appetites for love and knowledge and independence, I started to see someone else, another child. Me. Parents can almost see through their kids’ eyes, because they have been there. Hanging out with these kids provided me the opportunity to revisit my own childhood, but with the experience of all my accumulated years.
It was enlightening. Through my kids, I came to a totally new and original understanding of a childhood that I had already lived. It was like a circle closing. A parent’s children complete his childhood.
When that happened, of course, I had to reconsider my parents. Who were they? I thought I knew. They were loving, autocratic, opinionated, inconsistent, nosy. But those were only my judgments of them. I lived with parents, bonded to them and shaped by them, from the day I was born until the days they died, and there were such vital things I never knew about them.
Until I became one. Then, watching my children, I saw myself as a child. Through those eyes, I saw my parents in a completely new way. A second circle was being closed. For the first time, I thought I could understand my parents. To understand did not mean to accept. I am not the parent that my parents were. Many of their ways, I have rejected, and modified others. What I came to understand was how those decisions were made. Many times, my parents were flying by the seat of their pants.
Then, looking at my parents, through this new childhood perspective that my children had provided me, I saw someone else. Me, again. This time as a parent. A third circle was closing. Having kids let me see my own childhood more clearly, my parents more clearly, and myself more clearly as a parent. Dr. Spock himself could not have taught me that.
Here was some new understanding that I could use. Growing up, my kids were living with a father they didn’t really know. They had judgments of me, but they were their judgments. There were vital things they didn’t know about me, and couldn’t until one day they walked in my shoes.
The best I could do was provide them clues about me, let them know me as best I could. Much of that I did by writing about them, and about me. Now another publication has a father doing that very thing, and I am glad.
I am sure that my two kids chased a duck or two in their time, and I am sure that I let them. I know I didn’t coach them to do this, as fellow San Diego columnist David Moye has done, and has caught some flack for. I know I would have been surprised if my kids didn’t take out after any duck, or gull, or goose or eagle, that came closer than 20 yards to them.
I was also confident that if a kid managed to get too close to a duck, the duck would know what to do. Then it would have been me, chasing out to shoo the duck off the kid and coo over her that it was just a duck and there was no need to be traumatized for life. Of course I would be preaching to the choir, because there would be no chance of the kid ever again chasing a duck. Likewise, I would assume that a traumatized duck would never again come within chasing distance of a kid. So many of them do, though, that I wonder if they think about it at all.
I am glad other publications have someone who writes about kids. He reminds me of writing about, and fathering, mine. I am reminded deliciously of the kind of secret love that exists only at an objective distance, such as is felt by a father in a dark bedroom, standing with a hand on a crib in which his child is soundly sleeping. The father must make a contract with himself, not to share the moment with anyone, so personal is its power.
Kids complete us, you know. When my daughter was born in 1974, I became a parent. Obvious as that statement seems, it is also worthy of the greatest respect. Parents are everywhere, but the only way to become one is to have a child. It is like joining the oldest and most revered guild.
A human being can’t know anything distinct about being a parent until he becomes one. Before 1974, I walked among fields of parents, socialized with them, befriended them, visited them in their homes, without the slightest clue about who they were. In total ignorance, I made judgments about them.
When I became one of them, that started to change. It took a child. Watching this child, and later her brother, cute, fat, little babies with their raging appetites for love and knowledge and independence, I started to see someone else, another child. Me. Parents can almost see through their kids’ eyes, because they have been there. Hanging out with these kids provided me the opportunity to revisit my own childhood, but with the experience of all my accumulated years.
It was enlightening. Through my kids, I came to a totally new and original understanding of a childhood that I had already lived. It was like a circle closing. A parent’s children complete his childhood.
When that happened, of course, I had to reconsider my parents. Who were they? I thought I knew. They were loving, autocratic, opinionated, inconsistent, nosy. But those were only my judgments of them. I lived with parents, bonded to them and shaped by them, from the day I was born until the days they died, and there were such vital things I never knew about them.
Until I became one. Then, watching my children, I saw myself as a child. Through those eyes, I saw my parents in a completely new way. A second circle was being closed. For the first time, I thought I could understand my parents. To understand did not mean to accept. I am not the parent that my parents were. Many of their ways, I have rejected, and modified others. What I came to understand was how those decisions were made. Many times, my parents were flying by the seat of their pants.
Then, looking at my parents, through this new childhood perspective that my children had provided me, I saw someone else. Me, again. This time as a parent. A third circle was closing. Having kids let me see my own childhood more clearly, my parents more clearly, and myself more clearly as a parent. Dr. Spock himself could not have taught me that.
Here was some new understanding that I could use. Growing up, my kids were living with a father they didn’t really know. They had judgments of me, but they were their judgments. There were vital things they didn’t know about me, and couldn’t until one day they walked in my shoes.
The best I could do was provide them clues about me, let them know me as best I could. Much of that I did by writing about them, and about me. Now another publication has a father doing that very thing, and I am glad.
March 20, 2006
Some anniversary
Wow, the third anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. There’s something to drink to. I wish it would hurry up and be over, so the country could spend that money on the war on terrorism.
Imagine, having $200 billion, the cost of the Iraqi action so far, available to fight the war on terrorism. The main network, the Osama network, might have been totally smoked out by now.
It is aggravating to know bin Laden is still at large and plotting various forms of doom for the Westerners. He must feel either very lucky, that the U.S. has burned the $200 billion in Iraq, or very smug. Could he have known that one of the consequences of 9/11 would have been the Bush administration’s decision to attack the wrong enemy?
It is interesting to wonder how much bin Laden did understand, about how deeply the 9/11 hit would wound this country. Destruction of icons, yes, and installation of fear, and he no doubt knew about the financial records that would be destroyed in the attack, and the immediate blow to U.S. financial institutions.
But did he foresee airline bankruptcies? Insurance industry crises? Security paranoia, and accompanying political polarization? Administration attacks on the Constitution? Polls showing 60-plus percent disapproval ratings of the President of the United States? The U.S. Treasury being bled dry, through all these holes blasted into it by 9/11?
Saddam Hussein was no Mr. Rogers, but if in 2003 you stood him side-by-side with Osama bin Laden, and handed the average American a rifle, it’s not hard to predict who would have gotten shot first. By calling it a “war on terror,” Mr. Bush must have meant he was at least aiming at bin Laden. How did he miss him, and hit Saddam?
That question was not meant to be funny. It’s still hard to suppress a chuckle, though, when you remember Mr. Bush aiming at a Supreme Court nominee and hitting Harriet Miers instead, or aiming at disaster leadership and saying, “Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job,” or watching his own political army duck and beg him please to put the gun down before the fall elections.
Strange to suppose, that the strongest voice for Iraq withdrawal would turn out to be the Bush political base. A strange way to get out, but totally appropriate, given the way we got in. Let’s just do it, stop the drain, give bin Laden some disappointment for a change.
Imagine, having $200 billion, the cost of the Iraqi action so far, available to fight the war on terrorism. The main network, the Osama network, might have been totally smoked out by now.
It is aggravating to know bin Laden is still at large and plotting various forms of doom for the Westerners. He must feel either very lucky, that the U.S. has burned the $200 billion in Iraq, or very smug. Could he have known that one of the consequences of 9/11 would have been the Bush administration’s decision to attack the wrong enemy?
It is interesting to wonder how much bin Laden did understand, about how deeply the 9/11 hit would wound this country. Destruction of icons, yes, and installation of fear, and he no doubt knew about the financial records that would be destroyed in the attack, and the immediate blow to U.S. financial institutions.
But did he foresee airline bankruptcies? Insurance industry crises? Security paranoia, and accompanying political polarization? Administration attacks on the Constitution? Polls showing 60-plus percent disapproval ratings of the President of the United States? The U.S. Treasury being bled dry, through all these holes blasted into it by 9/11?
Saddam Hussein was no Mr. Rogers, but if in 2003 you stood him side-by-side with Osama bin Laden, and handed the average American a rifle, it’s not hard to predict who would have gotten shot first. By calling it a “war on terror,” Mr. Bush must have meant he was at least aiming at bin Laden. How did he miss him, and hit Saddam?
That question was not meant to be funny. It’s still hard to suppress a chuckle, though, when you remember Mr. Bush aiming at a Supreme Court nominee and hitting Harriet Miers instead, or aiming at disaster leadership and saying, “Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job,” or watching his own political army duck and beg him please to put the gun down before the fall elections.
Strange to suppose, that the strongest voice for Iraq withdrawal would turn out to be the Bush political base. A strange way to get out, but totally appropriate, given the way we got in. Let’s just do it, stop the drain, give bin Laden some disappointment for a change.
March 18, 2006
Directions to a new blog
Today I inaugurated a new blog at http://www.michaelgrant.com/newsblog/. The blog below, “Conjugating the News,” is the introductory blog at the new site and is offered here as your reference to this new work. This blog will continue in its general essay form, and the new blog has a specific focus, explained below. I hope to see you there, as well as here. MG
Conjugating the News
Most Americans have a strange, but innocent, belief about how the news media decides what is and isn’t news.
Growing criticism of the media at the beginning of the new century has encouraged many of them to give voice to that belief, and the voice is instructive. One critic, in a recent letter to the editor n San Diego, CA, found the heart of the issue in a single sentence.
“It’s strange to me,” said the reader, Stuart Jewell, “that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism is no mystery; it is as black-and-white as mathematics. Journalism uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs. If first-year journalism students can’t define what news is by the end of the semester, and its relative levels of urgency, then they flunk the class.
This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they never studied “News” in school. Not their fault; it isn’t taught. But it should be, right alongside English, civics and computer literacy. In this age, of all ages, the study of “News” should not be confined to journalism studies; it should be a core social sciences class in every American high school. In the Introduction to its 2001 book, “The Element of Journalism,” the Committee of Concerned Journalists states: “In the new century, one of the most profound questions for democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means, and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.” The answer from citizens, according to Stuart Jewell, is that citizens have no idea what to care about. They have never been taught what their role is.
That is the purpose of this course of instruction. Welcome to one journalist’s attempt to articulate what an independent press means. It is time for the public to learn its responsibility in the media-public relationship, as a step in accepting that responsibility. If a course in civics equips students with the information and means to participate in a democratic society, “Conjugating the News” will provide students the knowledge and background to become discerning consumers of information, in which they are immersed every single day. Their subject of study will be the same subject that media professionals have been studying for years.
Actually, my first-year journalism students never flunk my class because they don’t know what news is. They may flunk because they can’t spell, can’t punctuate, and slide around grammar as if it were a greased flagpole. But they don’t flunk the news part, because of a wonderfully elegant wrinkle: they know what the news is before they ever get to my class.
I didn’t understand that until about five years ago. I had been teaching, for some years, the survey “Mass Media and Society” course. Doing that work, it became clear to me that the definition of “news,” and the values and categories of news, were not created by the media. They were created by early humans, tens of thousands of years before the media existed. Taken together, they constituted a “reaction package,” that humans from the earliest days to the present, carry around with them all the time. The media simply took that reaction package, starting about 3,500 years ago, and turned it into a business.
It made me curious. I wanted to test it. Back in my “Introduction to News Writing” classes, on the first day of the next semester, I said, “Before I teach you a single thing in this class, you already know what the news is.” I gave them a page of notes, several lines of details, arranged randomly, as if they were notes in a reporter’s notebook, about an event that had “happened” that day.
“Imagine you are reporters for the morning paper. I want you to look at this information, then write the first sentence of the story – what this information is about – and bring it with you to our next class. I will ask you to read your sentence, and we will see if you know what the news is.”
Their rate of success was about 90 percent, and after five years – 10 semesters – of testing, it remains steady at about that level. They were carrying the reaction package around all along. It must mean that most – practically all – of the American population knows what the news is. It must mean that Stuart Jewell knows what the news is. So what is it, about what columnists and reporters do, that seems strange to him?
It brings us back to the beginning: education. A free press is vital to the survival of a democracy, so vital that it predates the Constitution. Very interesting to realize that the Constitution did not create press freedom. The First Amendment states, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.” The key word is “abridging,” which means to reduce in scope, or diminish. That means the framers understood, in the infant democracy after the Revolution, that freedom of the press already existed.
The First Amendment guarantees the press almost absolute power to do its job. Now we have evidence, more than 200 years later, of citizens to whom this work, of columnists and reporters, seems “strange.” I remember that strangeness very well, leafing through an algebra book that had just been issued to me and thinking, “I’ll never learn this stuff.” But I did, and I was allowed to move on toward graduation.
What is strange to me is that if algebra is required for high school graduation in the United States of America, then news – this conscious-unconscious reaction package that we all carry, that the media turned into a business – sure as hell should be, too. Public knowledge of where news comes from is vital to a basic understanding, and a basic acceptance, of how this enormously powerful, beyond abridging, press, the mainstream media, does its job. That acceptance is at the heart of the “profound question” posed by the Committee of Concerned Journalists for democratic society in the 21st century.
There is something else the public needs to understand. The media originally turned the human “reaction package” into a business to keep people informed. But a second media function, totally separate and distinct from information and news, has evolved. The reaction package makes people vulnerable to manipulation. Over time, the media, and groups (entertainment, marketing, political) who are expert in using media, learned and developed extremely sophisticated ways to use the package to manipulate public reactions. That second, enormously powerful, function of the media, is a powerful second reason for public education in the conjugation of the human responses that started it all.
Conjugating the News
Most Americans have a strange, but innocent, belief about how the news media decides what is and isn’t news.
Growing criticism of the media at the beginning of the new century has encouraged many of them to give voice to that belief, and the voice is instructive. One critic, in a recent letter to the editor n San Diego, CA, found the heart of the issue in a single sentence.
“It’s strange to me,” said the reader, Stuart Jewell, “that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism is no mystery; it is as black-and-white as mathematics. Journalism uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs. If first-year journalism students can’t define what news is by the end of the semester, and its relative levels of urgency, then they flunk the class.
This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they never studied “News” in school. Not their fault; it isn’t taught. But it should be, right alongside English, civics and computer literacy. In this age, of all ages, the study of “News” should not be confined to journalism studies; it should be a core social sciences class in every American high school. In the Introduction to its 2001 book, “The Element of Journalism,” the Committee of Concerned Journalists states: “In the new century, one of the most profound questions for democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means, and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.” The answer from citizens, according to Stuart Jewell, is that citizens have no idea what to care about. They have never been taught what their role is.
That is the purpose of this course of instruction. Welcome to one journalist’s attempt to articulate what an independent press means. It is time for the public to learn its responsibility in the media-public relationship, as a step in accepting that responsibility. If a course in civics equips students with the information and means to participate in a democratic society, “Conjugating the News” will provide students the knowledge and background to become discerning consumers of information, in which they are immersed every single day. Their subject of study will be the same subject that media professionals have been studying for years.
Actually, my first-year journalism students never flunk my class because they don’t know what news is. They may flunk because they can’t spell, can’t punctuate, and slide around grammar as if it were a greased flagpole. But they don’t flunk the news part, because of a wonderfully elegant wrinkle: they know what the news is before they ever get to my class.
I didn’t understand that until about five years ago. I had been teaching, for some years, the survey “Mass Media and Society” course. Doing that work, it became clear to me that the definition of “news,” and the values and categories of news, were not created by the media. They were created by early humans, tens of thousands of years before the media existed. Taken together, they constituted a “reaction package,” that humans from the earliest days to the present, carry around with them all the time. The media simply took that reaction package, starting about 3,500 years ago, and turned it into a business.
It made me curious. I wanted to test it. Back in my “Introduction to News Writing” classes, on the first day of the next semester, I said, “Before I teach you a single thing in this class, you already know what the news is.” I gave them a page of notes, several lines of details, arranged randomly, as if they were notes in a reporter’s notebook, about an event that had “happened” that day.
“Imagine you are reporters for the morning paper. I want you to look at this information, then write the first sentence of the story – what this information is about – and bring it with you to our next class. I will ask you to read your sentence, and we will see if you know what the news is.”
Their rate of success was about 90 percent, and after five years – 10 semesters – of testing, it remains steady at about that level. They were carrying the reaction package around all along. It must mean that most – practically all – of the American population knows what the news is. It must mean that Stuart Jewell knows what the news is. So what is it, about what columnists and reporters do, that seems strange to him?
It brings us back to the beginning: education. A free press is vital to the survival of a democracy, so vital that it predates the Constitution. Very interesting to realize that the Constitution did not create press freedom. The First Amendment states, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.” The key word is “abridging,” which means to reduce in scope, or diminish. That means the framers understood, in the infant democracy after the Revolution, that freedom of the press already existed.
The First Amendment guarantees the press almost absolute power to do its job. Now we have evidence, more than 200 years later, of citizens to whom this work, of columnists and reporters, seems “strange.” I remember that strangeness very well, leafing through an algebra book that had just been issued to me and thinking, “I’ll never learn this stuff.” But I did, and I was allowed to move on toward graduation.
What is strange to me is that if algebra is required for high school graduation in the United States of America, then news – this conscious-unconscious reaction package that we all carry, that the media turned into a business – sure as hell should be, too. Public knowledge of where news comes from is vital to a basic understanding, and a basic acceptance, of how this enormously powerful, beyond abridging, press, the mainstream media, does its job. That acceptance is at the heart of the “profound question” posed by the Committee of Concerned Journalists for democratic society in the 21st century.
There is something else the public needs to understand. The media originally turned the human “reaction package” into a business to keep people informed. But a second media function, totally separate and distinct from information and news, has evolved. The reaction package makes people vulnerable to manipulation. Over time, the media, and groups (entertainment, marketing, political) who are expert in using media, learned and developed extremely sophisticated ways to use the package to manipulate public reactions. That second, enormously powerful, function of the media, is a powerful second reason for public education in the conjugation of the human responses that started it all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)