BROKEN WILL? HOW TO BREAK IT

Kristen Faulkner left a broken will on her way to Olympic gold.

More than one.

It was a race that seemed settled with two leaders breaking away from the first chase group.

All Vos and Vas had to do was pour it on to the finish line.

Faulkner was out of the picture. Then she wasn’t.

The TV camera followed her from behind as she rode down the leaders.

In a normal world she would have been cooked, going out too early with her energy fading down the stretch and getting passed.

She was going to cruise in at fourth place, just off the podium, and move on to next event.

Like Steve Prefontaine in Munich ’72, she’d fade to fourth, get atta-girls, and thanks for coming.

That’s Steve on the left.

Except somehow in the wide world of sports, she kicked and never let up; and there was no chase.

Instead of burning out too early, she  left a broken will in everyone who’d planned to catch her.

It reminded me of Joan Benoit running into the LA Coliseum alone for the gold the 1984 marathon.

Unless it’s your will, a broken will is part of the beauty of sports.

Train as hard as anyone and still come up short?

Then what?

 

Keep Going, That’s What

This is Jimmy Carter and a guitar.

There’s something sweet about an old guy and a guitar, especially an old guy with endurance, usefulness, and a strong will.

I like thinking he could pick out a nice rendition of Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

What I do know about Jimmy, and it’s worth reminding, is he ran for President in the first election after Watergate.

Back then it looked like Democrat rule for the next twenty years after Tricky Dickie screwed the pooch, and it would start with the Carter Administration.

Go, Jimmy, go.

But he lost his re-election bid. By a lot.

 

After he left office, Carter returned to Georgia to his peanut farm, which he had placed into a blind trust during his presidency to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

He found that the trustees had mismanaged the trust, leaving him more than one million dollars in debt. In 1982, he established the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

He traveled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, monitor elections and further the eradication of infectious diseases. He and his wife Rosalynn are key figures in Habitat for Humanity.

Carter wrote numerous books and continued to comment on global affairs, including two books on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in which he criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He and Rosalynn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

 

Like an Olympian in fourth place, all that was left for Jimmy Carter was to do the sort of work that satisfied his will to serve.

He kept training and stayed in shape.

Be like Jimmy.

 

You Know What I Hear?

If something is beautiful it drifts away like the waters?

Is that it? Wet beauty, damp beauty, moist beauty?

Are old, old, men afraid of water? Good, they ought to be.

Especially the water on the bathroom floor where old, old, men slip and fall.

Don’t do that.

But the water reference is strong.

Norman Maclean is haunted by waters. Yeats is haunted by waters.

Maybe it’s a writers’ thing for guys who don’t know how to swim?

I, too, am haunted by waters, past waters, like the Ice Age floods that formed the landscape of Eastern Washington and the Columbia Gorge.

I’m haunted by the sneaker wave no one sees.

What I’m not haunted by is Jimmy Carter who knew what do to after losing a presidential election.

I’m not haunted by Steve Prefontaine, Joan Benoit, Kristen Faulkner, or any Olympic stars.

Win or lose, they keep training for their next race.

What would you call someone who couldn’t accept a loss, who whined and complained for years about how they were treated.

A man should not harp, and hector, and badger a vulnerable population until they are nearly comatose from the effort needed to keep up with their latest load of baloney.

That’s a man with a broken will working to break others, a loser explaining how he’s a winner.

With Kristen Faulkner we know what a winner does.

They make their move, stand on it, and take it home.

We know what the chase group does, too.

They watch the winner pull away, not pull over and complain.