The NFL We Deserve

In normal times, I would be the last guy to defend Roger Goodell.  The man is a walking due process violation, $44-million-per-year proof that, in America, no level of incompetence is too great to be rewarded.

In normal times, I would be the last guy to defend Jerry Jones.  The man is the McMansion come to life, a billionaire oil baron whose idea of architecture is the Disney World of football stadiums and whose idea of a friend is Chris Christie.

In normal times, I would be the last guy to defend the NFL.  The league spent 20 years trying to convince us that the concussion crisis was fake, then spent the last five trying to convince us that it could be solved by having their officials throw a flag every sixth or seventh time a receiver gets hit in the head going across the middle.

But these are not normal times.  On Friday, Deadspin released a slew of photos showing the aftermath of Cowboys defensive lineman Greg Hardy’s vicious abuse of his former girlfriend in 2014.  Hardy, then with the Panthers, sat out much of last season while the legal process played out.  He then signed with Jones’s Cowboys, was suspended for 10 games, saw his suspension reduced as part of a settlement with the NFL and returned to the field—reminding us, within his first week back, that he is both a great football player and an absolute disgrace of a human being.

The reaction to the photos has been sad but predictable.  Most people want Jones or the NFL to get Hardy off of our TV screens.  A few contrarians are arguing he deserves a second chance, though it seems like maybe we should wait for him to go at least 10 days without making an ass of himself on national TV before we start giving him redemption points.

But both of these reactions start from the premise that we’re a society that cares deeply about violence against women, that we won’t cheer or pay to see domestic abusers play, at least not until they demonstrate that they understand the gravity of their transgressions.  The fact that, as with Ray Rice, we needed to see visual proof of the horror of domestic violence before we applied any serious pressure to the NFL to respond suggests otherwise.

It’s absurd for the league to suspend pot users for longer than wife beaters, but it’s no more absurd than a law that allows us to sentence someone to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for drug dealing.  It’s absurd to treat dog fighting as more socially reprehensible than intimate-partner violence, but it’s no more absurd than the fact that Michael Vick did 18 months in Leavenworth, while Greg Hardy got his record expunged.

I won’t cry for Greg Hardy if he gets cut or suspended.  But let’s get real for a second: Greg Hardy isn’t a football problem.  He’s an America problem.  Roger Goodell, Jerry Jones and the NFL can take him off of TV, but they can’t take him out of our culture.  

That’s on us.  

Meet the New Boss...

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Megan Rowley has an interesting—if sobering and somewhat depressing—look at the (lack of) diversity in baseball hiring.  As Rowley explains, the Moneyball revolution has opened the door to a bunch of mostly white, mostly male, mostly Ivy League-educated sabermetric types…who have promptly turned around and closed the door behind them, creating a workforce almost as monolithic as the one described in Michael Lewis’s 2003 classic.  She notes that this 

is pretty dispiriting coming from a crowd that itself fought so long for relevance in front offices across the league. This isn’t to suggest that there aren't women and people of color who are statheads, any more than it would be reasonable to suggest that all former players are white. But after a decade of painful progress to advance women and minorities to positions of authority, a generation of Ivy Leaguers are falling into the exact same traps: showing a predilection for “Clubability,” as Michael Lewis called it, over something new, something innovative, or even something marginally uncomfortable. They hire people like them. Instead of the Platonic ideal of a baseball organization, one predicated on the ability to stare unflinchingly at our heroes and value underutilized skills, what we get is a whole bunch of history repeating from the very people who were supposed to remind us that clubability is not necessarily indicative of future performance.

Rowley is right, and when we’re at the point where hiring Dusty Baker as a manager is necessary to achieve some sort of social good beyond keeping orthopedic surgeons employed, you know something has to change.

But this is not a baseball-only problem, and it behooves all of us who consider ourselves “reformers” in any area of life to think long and hard about whether we are really creating more-inclusive institutions better able to address modern realities—or simply replicating ourselves and creating openings for the ideas and people we like to flourish.

Take education.  One of the most startling realizations for me when I interned for the D.C. Public Schools during Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship in 2009 was just how homogeneous the organization had become.  This wasn’t an accident: our orientation was held in a room with inspirational Rhee quotes plastered on the wall.  Almost every intern hailed from an elite (usually private) college or graduate school.  When the fourth or fifth representative of the Kennedy School got up to introduce himself, he joked that we had hit a “Harvard patch” in the introductions. 

Rhee succeeded in bringing a lot of smart, committed people to DCPS, an organization that probably wasn’t doing a whole lot of recruiting at Kennedy before she arrived.  And, contrary to what many believe, this wasn’t part of some sort of sinister plot to privatize education in Washington.  Rhee genuinely believed that if she surrounded herself with smart, driven, educated people with little to no experience within the system—people, in other words, like her—that she could change things for the better.

The problem is that no one knows everything.  Everyone has blind spots.  And when you hire a bunch of people who have similar life experiences and similar worldviews, they are likely to have a lot of the same blind spots as well.

So Rhee bungled school closings.  And she said dumb stuff about teachers.  And she did a bunch of puff pieces for national news outlets, while ignoring and freezing out local reporters.  And, in the end, like all true believers, she found herself excusing and justifying behavior that could not be excused or justified.  Because if you’re right—and if everyone around you is always telling you you’re right—you probably don’t spend much time thinking about whether you might be wrong. 

Diversity isn’t about doing things differently than the status quo, and it isn’t about making sure the firm holiday card looks right.  It’s about making sure that your organization makes the best decisions it can by taking account of the widest range of perspectives possible. 

Or, to put it differently: If you still think that putting a bunch of smart guys in a room and asking them to solve a problem is a good idea, there’s a credit default swap in Brooklyn I’d like to talk to you about.

Nov. 3

If my cousin Jeremy were still around—if he hadn’t died suddenly 10 years ago today at age 20—my guess is that he’d be a lot like a lot of the young entrepreneurs I meet all the time in Philly, the ones who own the new bars that become neighborhood staples or the water ice stands that morph into local chains or the home-improvement businesses that go from one employee to a dozen in a matter of months.  Jeremy could sell you the ink for a pen; he actually did it once in grade school, after he sold the ink-less pen to a less-enterprising student.

Of course, he’s not here, and he’s never going to get to open a bar or start a water ice stand or run a home-improvement business—or meet the nephew who will have to settle for a middle name in place of a lifetime of memories.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade trying to make sense of Jeremy’s death, which has gone about as well as you might expect.  I’m not an everything-happens-for-a-reason person or a we’re-all-going-to-a-better-place-after-we-die person, either, which pretty much leaves drinking and crying and listening to Bruce Springsteen and drawing inspiration from how his parents and sister have kept living and fighting and honoring his memory.  Because frankly, if it happened to my kid or my sister, I don’t think there’d be enough alcohol or tears or Bruce to keep me functional. 

But sometimes, when I can stand to think about it a little more, my mind turns to Jeremy’s life and not just his death and the what-ifs.  J was a “cool” kid, both in the sense that he was fun to be around, and in the sense that he made lots of friends.  And as a kid who wasn’t so cool (in any sense), I was both awed and jealous of him.  Particularly as I entered my teen years, I assumed his life was better than mine, that he must be happy because he was so good with people. 

That sounds so absurd now that I can barely write it, but having a limited sense of how the world works is pretty much the definition of adolescence.   What makes it so painful all these years later, though, is that, as someone who loved J, I didn’t get how he suffered.

For as good as J was with people, he struggled in school.  A lot.  He had a learning disability, which made it hard for him to read and slowed his academic progress. 

To be sure, J was smart, but that only made it worse.  For one thing, it made it easier for him to mask his struggles.  I didn’t realize for a long time how hard it was for him to read because he could repeat books from memory.  But on a deeper level, it must have been hard for him to understand so well exactly what he couldn’t do and why it mattered—but to have so much difficulty doing anything about it.

I didn’t get this when I was 16 because I didn’t get much when I was 16.  But I can’t imagine how much J’s struggles must have weighed on him.  I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for him just to graduate from high school—which he did—or get into college—which he did—knowing all the while that, no matter how hard he worked, every step along the way was going to be so much harder for him than for others.

I wish I could go back in time and tell him that it’s OK, that we all struggle at some things, that I love him and admire him for who he is—a loving son, a protective brother, the only person I know who committed all of “Shawshank Redemption” to memory—and not to worry about all the rest of it because, by the time he’s 25, he’s going to be the wealthiest and most successful of all his cousins.  I wish I could tell him that who you are when you’re 15 or 20 is not who you are when you’re 30, and thank God for that.  I wish I could give him a hug.

But I don’t have a time machine, and I don’t have any way to make any of it less senseless or painful or heartbreaking.  All I’m left with is pictures and memories and alcohol and tears and Bruce.

And that horrible phone call I got at work when my dad told me that J’s mom had just called him and said, “Jeremy’s not alive anymore.”

Requiem for Ahmed

Back in May 2001, my family flew out to my aunt’s wedding in Southern California.  We decided to bring her and her new husband a wall clock as a wedding present.  When my dad put the clock through the X-ray machine in security, a buzzer went off.  The guard carried the clock, still in its wrapping paper and audibly ticking, over to a table on the side.

The following conversation ensued:

Security Guard: What’s that?

Dad: A clock.

Security Guard: Oh, OK. Have a nice trip

Dad: Thanks. (Retrieves clock).

These were different times, of course, and I wouldn’t blame a security guard today for actually checking to make sure that the loud ticking device about to get on a plane was just a clock.  (I wouldn’t have blamed them then, either. Of course, this was back when airport security was the stuff of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and the guy who waved us through was probably tired from having to work security at The Vet the night before just to pay his rent.)

That said, there’s a big difference between making someone unwrap a present and treating anyone with an electronic device you don’t recognize as a criminal.  It’s bad enough when the people who can’t tell the difference work airport security; when they staff our schools, it’s a recipe for disaster.

The arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Texas student who brought a clock mistaken for a bomb to school, reveals so many of our nation’s pathologies that it’s hard to know where to start.  Racism.  Xenophobia.  Our immediate impulse to involve the police in the lives of juveniles.  (Particularly black and brown juveniles—see the first two items on this list).  Throw in clueless, blundering bureaucrats who refuse to apologize because THEPOLICYMUSTBEFOLLOWED, our poor science education system—really, no one could tell the difference between a bomb and a clock?—and the State of Texas while we’re at it.

But if this incident is going to lead to a National Conversation or Teachable Moment or somesuch, I hope that we at least consider the damage that more than a decade of post-9/11 paranoia has visited on all aspects of our lives. 

Yes, this problem is intertwined with the others: our paranoia has a peculiar way of oozing out just a little bit more when brown people are involved.  But this goes beyond just racism and xenophobia.  Over the last 14 years, we have allowed our public institutions to become more closed off, more secretive, and more distrustful of us, the very people for whom they exist, all for the illusory promise of safety.

And to what end?  Are we really safer?  In the air, probably a bit, though I’ll leave that judgment to the experts.  In other aspects of our lives?  I sort of doubt it.  The level of security required to achieve appreciable gains in safety on public buses or trains or in schools or stadiums is more than the vast majority of us would accept.

And so we end up with low-level bureaucrats at a school in Texas, who know their job is to keep kids “safe” (whatever that means) and notice something “suspicious” (whatever that means) and decide to write with the freedom of a 14-year-old kid on the blank check we’ve handed them.

I don’t know what’s sadder: the fact that someone thought locking up Ahmed Mohamed would make America safer or the fact that, given the world Ahmed’s grown up in, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised. 

On Obergefell and Omi

Watching the celebrations play out on Friday in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, I was reminded of my Omi (grandmother), Lottie Morley.

No, she wasn’t gay, and in a lot of senses, she wasn’t particularly progressive either. She once told me that while she enjoyed coming to my jazz-band concerts, she looked forward to the day when I would start playing real music. (I eventually figured out that anything post-1870 didn’t qualify).

But she had a strong sense of justice and, even more importantly, a keen understanding of the importance of freedom. Omi came of age in Nazi Germany. Her first date with my Opi was on Hitler’s birthday in 1935. They had the day off from school.

Eventually, they both fled to England and then to the United States, where they settled, moved to the New York suburbs, had two children who grew to be successful professionals and pretty much embodied the American Dream in every relevant sense.

A few years back, Omi was invited to a friend’s house for a Seder to celebrate Passover, which commemorates the Jewish exodus from Egypt. The host asked everyone to write some thoughts on the meaning of “freedom” to share with the group.

In addition to her thoughts, Omi brought two “identity” cards that the Nazis had issued to her husband (my Opi) and her brother. Like all Jewish men, their cards were inscribed with a “J” for “Jew”, and their middle names were listed as “Israel”. Jewish women were assigned the middle name “Sarah”.

“What was the first time I was conscious of freedom?” Omi asked. “Walking through Hyde Park in London in September 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, listening to the speakers at Hyde Park Corner. They stood on soapboxes and held forth about their diverse religious and political beliefs. They aired critical opinions about people in power without fear of persecution of any kind.

“I guess most of you have witnessed it without giving it a second thought.”

On the left, we sometimes pooh-pooh the importance of freedom from state-sanctioned oppression. How can we be truly free, some ask, amidst the tyranny of brand loyalty and trigger-warning-less speeches and micro-aggressions?

Of course, equal rights under law is not the only measure of freedom. But it’s a pretty damn important one. As I saw pictures of Jack Evans and George Harris kiss after becoming the first gay couple married in Dallas County on Friday, I tried to imagine what it must feel like—at ages 85 and 82, after 54 years together—to have the state declare their relationship equal to that of any straight couple.

I tried, but I can’t. Because while we’ve all faced challenges in our lives, fewer and fewer of us know what it feels like to endure the legal status of a second-class citizen.

Six days after Omi died in 2013, my wife and I welcomed our second daughter into the world. We named her Sarah.

A few days later, my dad told me he thought it was a nice way to reclaim the name that the Nazis had affixed to Omi and millions of other Jewish women during the Holocaust.

I smiled. We had settled on the name because we liked how it sounded. We hadn’t even considered the historical implications.

We never gave them a second thought.