The Gap

Divorce is never an easy "out", regardless of the alternatives. Whether it's in our personal life or a divorce of less intimate proportions, a departure will always create a gap.

Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies fame decided 18 months ago, together with the rest of the band members I presume, that it was time to depart from a 20 year relationship. Steven's life had taken many turns over the previous years; he had left his family, moved to upstate NY, found a new partner, lost a substantial amount of weight and finally gotten caught by the local law enforcers with banned substances.

One would suspect that the turmoil that was Steven's life led him to the conclusion that a clean break would be the best solution.

Sadly that's only in the movies. No option is an easy one when it comes to a big life decision.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing BNL perform at the Hammersmith Apollo. This was the 4th or 5th time I'd seen the band live, but the first time without co-founder Page.

Whilst the show was very enjoyable, funny and nostalgic (If I had $1m automatically takes me back to freshman year at University), you could both see and feel that the band was trying to find out how to fill the void left by Page.

Initially you can't, but with time it gets easier and easier.

Perspective

I could be writing about the horrible sweep by the Yankees or that the Red Sox for a moment even lost the lead in the wild card standings.

I could write about the torn feelings of admiring Smoltz pitching a gem in a Cardinals outfit while I reminisce about his 8+ ERA for the Red Sox.

I could follow up on my short and impulsive posts about the recent beaning frenzy, especially after the Porcello-Youkilis fracas.

Or I could write about the complete disbelief that follows watching Usain Bolt run any sprint distance. (Please God, make him be clean. I would stop watching athletics forever if it turns out he's juiced too.).

Ultimately though, money aside, those are all....well, games. Whilst in many cases it feels like life or death, it's not.

For Greg Montalbano(above, picture by Boston Globe) baseball went from being the more or less sole focus of his life and the dream to one day pitch in the Majors for his beloved Red Sox to something much less important. As a freshman at Northeastern University, where Montalbano had enrolled after pitching for St John's High in Shrewsbury, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1996, but battled through his illness, and in his last two years at NU was voted on to the All-American team. With the Red Sox A affiliate in Sarasota, he proved the Red Sox right for picking him in the 5th round of the '99 draft by tearing through the minor league levels.

Unfortunately, tumors were constantly tearing through his body too. He in the end lost count on how many times he'd had surgery to remove benign and malign tumors, at least 16 or 17 times in ten years.

After shoulder problems prevented him from taking the step up to Triple A in 2002, a combination of arm problems and yet another bout of tumor removal made him lose almost 2 years of baseball, although he did team up with another well known left handed cancer survivor

in the Red Sox Gulf Coast team in 2004; Jon Lester.

When he finally got a reprieve and became healthy in 2005, the Red Sox released him after spring training. As horrible as that is to write (and read), we all know, as did Greg, that baseball is a business, and after 5 years the Red Sox had to go down another route.

Greg took another path too. Now back to full strength, he dominated, nay crushed, the opposition in the Can Am Independent League, at one point going 35 1/2 innings without giving up a run in July 2006, posting an 0.86 ERA that had the major league scouts calling once again.

Sadly, this is not a Hollywood movie where a Tom Berenger on his last knees gets a final chance in the show and makes the most of it. On his way to the stadium for his scheduled start, Greg got the call he feared the most; the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute telling him his cancer had returned....again.

"I am a tumor machine," he says. "I make tumors. I have no idea why."

An great article by Stan Grossfield in the Boston Globe in October 2008 highlighted Greg's personal fight for me, and I've been following him on the net since.

Greg left baseball to focus on the next step of his life, using his engineering degree from NU and working incessantly for the Jimmy Fund, raising awareness and money for cancer research and treatment.

Even a sterile medium as the internet was able to portray Greg to me, and no doubt to other readers, as a truly great person. The kind that we see too rarely in life, but when we do they leave a permanent mark.

Often death "sanitises" the picture of a person, making him seem better, nicer and friendlier than he or she might actually have been in real life. However, in Greg's case, without ever having the privilige of meeting him, I don't doubt for a second that he truly was as good a person as the testimonials portray him to be.

The cancer took its final toll on Greg on August 23rd 2009, 13 years after his first diagnosis, but I suspect Greg still managed to leave this world a winner.

Greg lived every single moment and accomplished more in his 32 years than most do in their entire life.

His sister Kristen described Greg as a person who never allowed his incredibly persistent illness to get the better of him emotionally.

Hopefully our donations to the Jimmy Fund can some day allow another person beat cancer and take the field at Fenway.

Greg Montalbano was laid to rest the day after what would have been his 32nd birthday, accompanied by more than 1400 people at his wake and a standing room only 400 at the ceremony. I'll leave the final words of this post to his sister Kristen.

"Happy birthday, Greg. Your life was far too short, but you pitched a perfect game."

Aural memories....

I'm a music nut.

There's no other way to describe it.

After getting my first radio and cassette player (remember those?!?) at an early age, my life has been surrounded by music. More or less every significant event or time period in my life can be connected to certain songs, albums or artists.

Junior High? My metal phase, mainly Iron Maiden (The Power Slave and Somewhere in Time albums) and Van Halen. Albums on heavy rotation were 1984, 5150 and the aforementioned IM records.

High School? My guitar was my life in junior high and early high school and I listened more to guitarists than bands, so Eddie Van Halen, Clapton and Steve Lukather featured frequently. I moved after my first year in high school and making new friends expanded my musical genres, and I was introduce to The Cure and Depeche Mode, and later the first ventures into dance music - which also coincided with the beginning of regular concert going. Albums included Staring at the Sea, Violator, Fahrenheit and Lettin' Off Steam.

In college? More of The Cure, and got introduced to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Barenaked Ladies, D:A:D and Manic Street Preachers. This was also the period when I started DJing, both at clubs and on the radio, so my music taste became even more eclectic; discovering more house music, R'n'B, hiphop and soul. A Tribe Called Quest, De-La-Soul, Guru, KLF, NWA/Ice Cube and Snoop/Dr.Dre did many turns on the turntables. Most of my income was spent on records, and I had now amassed a substantial collection. Influential albums; Gold Against The Soul, Gordon, Blood Sugar Sex Magic and The White Room.

Emigrating? Moving from Sweden to the UK ironically made me embrace Swedish music to a greater extent as well as some new British discoveries. Eric Gadd and Blacknuss represented Sweden, whilst Fat Boy Slim and to an extent Oasis represented Britain. I also reacquainted myself with Aerosmith and Beastie Boys, and a certain Marshall Mathers came on the scene. Albums included Allstars, 2001, What's the Story?, You've Come A Long Way Baby, Nine Lives and Floating.

Often I'd go through more bands than clothes. Whenever I'd discover a new band, I HAD to get all the records the artist had ever released, and I'd listen exclusively for a few weeks or months until I found the next one. Some artists stuck, others were laid by the wayside.

Somewhat bizarrely, on a trip to India I spotted a video on an Indian music channel by John Mayer, and his music has played a big part in my recent life. His Continuum album came out days after discovering the events that lead to my divorce, but luckily I can now listen to the album without my first thoughts going back to that time period.

In the last eight to ten years my taste has returned a little bit to the more guitar oriented genres, and artists frequently played on my iPod(s) include Linkin Park, Lostprophets and probably my all time favourite - the Foo Fighters.

I've over the years been to more concerts in my life than I can remember, but I sadly never got to see Van Halen with their original line-up. Despite that I did manage to many of the bands I listened to more frequently, including this (at least in Europe) somewhat unknown band that my Canadian dorm-mate introduced me to in 1992 - Barenaked Ladies. All good things must come to an end, but it's still sad to find out that one of the lead singers, Steven Page, went down a path in his life that ultimately ended with him leaving the band. At least I managed to see the original line-up several times, including a very memorable New Years Eve in Phoenix, AZ.

Ah well, time to go to work, so it's Paramore and Prodigy on the iPod...

And over to Todd...

I recently joined a sportsbloggers group on LinkedIn and found this gem today. This is the kind of writing I aspire to produce.....still working on it. As many things in the post ring true for me in several levels, I wanted to share this...

Todd Civin writes:

It was the night of my first race. The Derry five miler. The most I'd ever run at work is 45 phone poles, or about three miles. "What's an extra two?" I thought. That was until I passed the three-mile mark.

Read his full post here.

Materialistic madness

What you sow you shall reap. What goes in must come out. Etc. Etc.

So how come I'm so bloody surprised about the amount of stuff I have? How can I be shocked that my belongings (sans furniture) required almost 30 moving boxes? Which I now have to try to fit into a 100 sq ft room....

Not. Going. To. Happen.

I'm sitting here, trying to see the actual floor in between the masses of just....well....stuff.

So the next weeks will be spent weeding and sorting and filtering. Not used in the last year? Gone.

Things to do:

1. Hang up pictures. (Might seem like a strange priority, but you'd be surprised how much space pictures take on the floor. )
2. Sort and put away clothes. (Note: Try to avoid having a non-functioning washing machine for 2 weeks before moving house. Result is all your clothes in big blue IKEA bags.)
3. Pack up one more box of books and put into storage. (Surprising stat no. 47: Books take up space. And when you've had 10+ years in a large house, with plenty of bookshelves, restricting your large collection to 1 bookcabinet is not an easy task. )
4. Sort out parking permit.
   
5. Try to fit everything into the kitchen cabinets. (Clearly some weeding out needed here too.)
6. Go for a run. (This will actually be item no.1. October might seem far away, but so is 13 miles through London on foot. In 2 hours hopefully. Running programme starts in earnest today.)

Thank god I've got nothing to do then. At least I've got just about 3 weeks until the season starts in glorious HD.

Fan...wait for it...aticism

So, most of my posts have been about one love - sports.

As we twiddle our thumbs waiting for the first pitch thrown in anger, I thought I'd orate a smidgen about another passion, both personally and professionally - television.

See, I get paid to watch TV...to simplify things a little bit. Yes, I know "we" (as in society) should not watch too much TV, and when given the choice of a nice day outside and or vegetating on the couch, I'm often the first one out the door. I play sports, I love to hike and enjoy fresh air walking around.

Still, I will not deny that I watch a fair bit of television, both professionally and personally. However, I'm quite selective about what I watch. I refuse to watch anything "reality" based - in my opinion it peaked with The Real World: San Francisco. Since then, a bunch of has-beens or never-will-be's trying to be the most outrageous person on tv just to get famous enough to be invited to turn on the Christmas lights in Oldham. Super.

Give me a properly scripted, well cast drama or comedy show any day. Over the years I've watched glimpses of more shows than I can remember, and followed a (not) suprisingly vast amount of shows.

Sooner or later though most show "jump the shark". Rarely does a series maintain the writing and energy produced in earlier seasons. Every now and then comes along the exception that drags you in. Now even the shows that fail to jump the shark have their ups and downs, but in today's TV market the leash is much, much shorter and many shows are cancelled long before they fulfil their promise.

Other shows seem to spend a weekly waiting game to see if they get renewed for another half season. Gone are the days of Cheers and Mash, both series that performed below average at launch before going on to run very succesfully for more than a decade.

Currently worth spending 45 mins on:

• Life - Damian Lewis of 'Band of Brothers' fame stars as a falsely imprisoned LAPD officer who is exonerated and returns to LAPD with a goldbadge, untold million$ and an urge to find out who framed him. All while in a Zen like frame of mind.
  
• How I Met Your Mother - A story told in flashbacks of how a group of 20-somethings live in NYC. It would be too much of a cop out to call it Friends for the next generation - plus this show is funnier.
• Entourage - Sex and the City for men. The city is LA. The sex is with a star actor, his hanger-ons and friends with countless number of starlets and wannabes. An HBO production, so not a PC dialogue in sight.

Now I'm off to see OC Ska...and then pack for my move this weekend. Joy and pain all rolled into one.

New Year, New Hope

A new year always brings a sense of a clean slate and a brighter and more focused, albeit sometimes short-lived, outlook on life and its possibilities. Many of us enter each new year with new personal goals and/or milestones ahead of us:

This is the year I will take charge of my fitness/finances/career/personal life (fill in your own noun), etc.

It’s no coincidence that January is the month with by far the most new membership applications to UK fitness clubs, as people look to the New Year as a year with limitless possibilities. Once past the Winter Solstice, every day is just that fraction little bit brighter and longer, and we take charge of our lives to avoid yet another Van Wilder year (although without the glorious parties), stuck in Punxatawney in an eternal winter.

We exercise more, we tighten our purse strings, we search for that next wonderful career opportunity, and if we don’t have someone, that special person to have in our lives. Whilst January is often a cold and dark month, it also allows us to look at the year as a fresh new canvas to paint the next chapter in our lives…of course hopefully a better one than Isaac did…


A new year also brings new hope to many sports fans.

This is the year that my team will finally win the championship.

Glorious are the days of the ignorance and hope. As Thomas Grey wrote many years ago:

Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.

Most fans (possibly excluding Royals fans) can spend the early winter months (and longer if you’re an NFL fan) dreaming that this is the year. The MLB and the NFL , with its salary cap (NFL) and revenue sharing (both), means that even small market teams are able to go on extended chases for the title if everything falls into place.

Since the introduction of the Free Agency in the NFL in 1992, the Super Bowl has seen 11 different champions, with only Dallas, Denver and New England winning more than once during the 16 Super Bowls of that era. The MLB is a little bit more skewed due to the salary luxury tax and not a fixed cap, but even the World Series has seen 9 different winners since the 1994 strike year, with only the Yankees, Marlins and the Red Sox winning more than once during that period.

Still, despite the Yankees fielding an infield earning more ($80.5m) per year than half of teams paid their entire roster in 2008 (1B: Teixera, $22m/year, 2B: Cano, $9m, SS: Jeter, $22m, 3B: Rodriguez, $27.5m), baseball is one of the sports where money isn’t the sole determining factor. Witness Tampa Bay’s total payroll of $43m in 2008 not preventing them from winning the AL East, beating the Yankees $201m and the Red Sox $138m rosters.

So, despite the unusually cold start to 2009 here in the UK, and the Yankees single-handedly trying to solve the credit crunch by purchasing every single player, winter will eventually lead to spring, and with that we all have hope for a better year than the last one, regardless of the challenges we face. We face the new year looking forward to a long overdue reform in world leadership, and a better future. 2009 can be the year we achieve that next great career jump, it can be the year we greet our svelte mirror-image in the morning, and 2009 can be the year.

To steal the catch phrase of 2008:

This is the year.

Geography

As I have no real affiliation to any particular region in the US, but instead picked my NFL team based on the first game I ever saw and my MLB team on a multitude of factors, including feelings for that particular city and events from moments there, I sometimes end up in strange emotional places.

Also, subsequent directly and indirectly related events and other people's affection for certain teams have elevated a general feeling of indifference to a true sense of dislike of the coach and certain supporters.

With this in mind, I still found it a bit odd that I found myself on Sunday night rooting fiercely first for my beloved San Francisco 49ers against the increasingly loathsome Patriots, and a few moments later passionately for my Red Sox against the Los Angeles/Anaheim Angels of California/Anaheim/Pasadena/Los Angeles. Now, I am the first one to admit that Tom Brady reminds me in many many ways of my first football idol; Joe Montana. Brady's poise in the pocket, with small adjustments to get away from pass rushers before launching another beautiful pass and his cool head in the face of extreme pressure is very reminiscent of the Bay Area favourite. Still, whilst Belichick has proven that he is a superb coach, he's also proven that he has can bend and break rules without compunction, both in his professional life and his personal life, thus at least for me not a deserving target of my respect. Also, my feelings towards the Patriots are compounded by the presence of Randy Moss and some fans.

Simply put - I don't like the Patriots.

Of course this causes raised eyebrows considering my immense devition to the Red Sox, as "normal" people follow the teams from the same city. If you're a Boston devotee, then it should be the Celtics, the Red Sox, the Patriots and if you're a glutton for punishment - the Bruins.

However, when I decided to follow the MLB, I could not bring myself to follow a team with Barry Bonds, and the A's are almost as close to Candlestick as the Mariners, so that was not really an option.

So here I am, cursing the Patriots one second and rooting for the Red Sox the next. I suspect something only a non-US person can relate to.

And those years when I was knee deep into Fantasy Football it got even worse...I once found myself wanting the Cowboys to score because I had Cowboy WR on my FFL team.

That's probably a step too far.

Love/hate relationship

Being a relative newcomer to baseball (7 years) and as a Red Sox fan (almost 6 years), plus not being a Boston native, I have yet to develop the “standard” love/hate relationship to the Red Sox that many long time fans seem to have. At least those who became fans prior to 2004.

When I started following the Sox in 2002/2003, the general atmosphere was one of extreme loyalty, but also combined with the somewhat fatalistic view honed by decades of nearly-rans.

Sure, the Sox are great in June-July, but come September they’ll slump.

As I was not following baseball during most of the horrible 86 years between 1918 and 2004, (apart from witnessing my own obvious horror show hosted by Aaron Boone at 5am one October morning in 2003) I have had to understand history by reading many a book on baseball and the Red Sox. It is painfully obvious that being a Red Sox fan prior to 2004 was like being a sucker for punishment. Every opening day was filled with new belief, but also a little bit of trepidation of the inevitable letdown that will come at some point. You would love the Sox, but they would also break your heart every year.

Personally, the City of Boston nowadays holds a similar emotion in my psyche. Boston is without a doubt one of my favourite cities in the world. One snowy February night 5 ½ years ago I proposed to my then girlfriend there, and for years that amplified my attraction and love for Boston. Finding out years later that some horrible things affecting me personally had happened in the very same city shattered my love for Boston. I struggled very much just watching my beloved Sox on television, knowing what Boston now represented for me, looking in the crowd on the TV feed for people I loathed, and loathing even more that people I hated with a passion were also supposedly Red Sox fans.

How could I reconcile these conflicting feelings in my head? How could I love the Sox while having such a love/hate relationship with the concept of Boston itself. Only then did I realise a little what the long time Sox fans had been going through. Falling in love with the Sox, only to have your heart shattered. I truly felt like a “proper” Red Sox fan….

Today the atmosphere is very different. I returned to Boston, found love again, not only for the city, but also for people there. Like my love returned and healed my heart, Bostonians now encounter different emotions for the Sox than before.

8 games behind the AL East top? Doesn’t matter, we can catch them!

As strange as it might seem, there are young Red Sox fans who think that the team always wins in the end. There are new “fans” that came to the Nation after the 2004 glorious (yet for me personally with hindsight very difficult) win, certain people without any baseball interest paying fortunes for World Series tickets so that they can say “I was there”. Whilst I’m of course happy that people flock to the gorgeous temple that is Fenway, like with any other successful team there will be bandwagon jumpers (see: Manchester United). Although I do not feel that the pink B caps are an abomination like Kristen does in her great Basegirl blog, (in fact I got my girlfriend a pink cap – sorry…), I feel more annoyance towards the bandwagon fans who think the Sox will do no wrong.

Similar to my personal life where I am now a little bit guarded, I follow the Red Sox with a smidgen of concern, knowing how fragile a team ultimately is. A season ending injury (god forbid) to Lester or Beckett would have serious effects on any post season chances.

However, I still find myself opening up and allowing old battle scars to fade, knowing that life will go on even if the Sox lose, but life will be just that little bit better if they do win.