If Life Were Like Facebook

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Facebook, lee greenwood, president, social media, trump, twitter

My wife woke me Friday morning with her usual greeting.

“You won’t believe what he did now,” she muttered.

Not bothering to answer, I lifted my phone from the bedside table, scrolled through my newsfeed, and found the article that was the source of this morning’s agitation: “Trump Moves Press Corps to White House Basement.”

I re-posted the article on my feed with a one-word introduction: “Ugh.” Then I hit the shower.

The drive to work was predictably slow, as traffic threaded past several rear-end accidents that were likely due to people posting updates and checking their “likes.” Self-driving cars can’t get here soon enough, I thought.

“Trump’s an idiot,” my coworker, Josh, declared as I settled into my office cubicle. “He is a horrible, horrible human being.”

“Yeah, I heard about the press corps,” I replied.

“No,” said Josh, dabbing his nose with a well-worn Kleenex. “I’m talking about the executive order declaring ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ as the new national anthem.”

“Ridiculous,” agreed Kathryn, popping her head above the cubical wall, wide-eyed as a frightened prairie dog. “This has got to stop. Who voted for this guy?”

“I voted for him,” Adam said, swiveling his chair toward us. “And it’s time for a new anthem. Lee Greenwood has done a hell of a lot more for this country than Francis Scott Key ever did.”

“Great news!” Jenny said as she breezed past our row. “My daughter just got accepted to Stanford!”

“Good for her,” Josh said with a snort. “A college degree will mean a lot when we’re all working the salt mines for the Chinese.”

We went to lunch a little earlier than usual, it being a Friday and all. After posting pics of our entrees on our respective newsfeeds, we returned to lamenting Trump’s latest tweet about election fraud.

“I know, right?” the waitress chirped as she handed us a fresh basket of microwaved cheese bread. “He’s such a psychopath. Shaking my head!”

The afternoon dragged on at work, as it usually does, but I was proud of the 240-word post I wrote about freedom of the press and the looming national tragedy. By the time I left the office, it had garnered 24 “likes,” and seven “loves.”

Glancing down at my phone as I merged onto the highway, I never saw the Peterbilt truck that sideswiped my Prius, sending it rolling over a ditch and into the trees that lined the road.

I woke up hours—maybe days—later, in a hospital room bathed in sunlight.

“You hear what Trump did today?” a nurse asked as she checked my chart.

“I know,” my wife muttered, peering at her phone. “What did we ever do to deserve this crap?”

Stephen Roth is the author of the comic novel A Plot for Pridemore, which won the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.

Reconsidering Coach K

Tags

acc, basketball, dean smith, feinstein, krzyzewski, the legends club, valvano

When former N.C. State basketball coach Jim Valvano—the legendary and lovable “Jimmy V”—was undergoing cancer treatments at Duke University Hospital in early 1993, he formed an unexpected friendship.

Nearly every day, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski would walk from his team’s practices at Cameron Indoor Stadium to the hospital, where he would spend an hour or so with his one-time rival. The two coaches talked some basketball, but they mostly talked about life. They laughed and cried. Every day, when Krzyzewski walked into the hospital room, Valvano’s eyes would light up.

“What are we, chopped liver?” one of Valvano’s daughters joked outside the room as the two coaches rambled on about some Atlantic Coast Conference basketball game from years past.

Krzyzewski was at Valvano’s bedside shortly before he died. He would later describe those hospital visits with Jimmy V as a life-changing experience. “You and I became brothers during the last four or five months of your life,” Krzyzewski wrote in a postmortem letter to the man he had battled against in several crucial basketball games.

Coach K’s friendship with a dying Valvano is the heart and soul of The Legends Club, a new book by John Feinstein about the three most iconic basketball coaches in ACC history—Krzyzewski, Valvano and North Carolina coach Dean Smith. From 1980 through 1989, the three coaches squared off against each other two and often three times a season. The games between Krzyzewski and Smith continued until 1997, solidifying Duke-North Carolina as the most intense—and publicized—rivalry in college basketball. Many would argue that the 17-year period covered by The Legends Club represents not only the heyday of ACC basketball, but all of college hoops.

When I was growing up in Georgia in the 1980s, ACC basketball was the biggest thing going from January into March every year. I was a North Carolina Tar Heels fan because most of my mother’s family members were Carolina fans. I also liked Georgia Tech due to its proximity and exciting players like Mark Price, Bruce Dalrymple and John Salley. I liked N.C. State and Valvano, who could have easily been a stand-up comedian if he wasn’t such a damn good basketball coach.

I despised Duke. I didn’t like the Cameron Crazies—the smart-ass Duke student section that reveled in its creative ways of rattling opposing players. I detested Coach K with his angry scowl and his tendency to jaw at the refs throughout a 40-minute basketball game. Storming the sidelines in a dark, Richard Nixon-style suit, he seemed petty and mean. As many have pointed out before, Krzyzewski really does look a lot like the team’s pointy-eared Blue Devil mascot, except that at least the mascot is smiling.

The only time I can recall rooting for Duke was during its epic 1991 Final Four upset of UNLV, a team that somehow managed to act more obnoxious and entitled than even the smug brats who always played for Duke.

After reading The Legends Club, I am still not a fan of Duke, but I did come away with a greater appreciation of Krzyzewski. Despite his fiery nature and defensiveness even in the wake of winning five national titles, Coach K has many admirable qualities. The son of Polish immigrants, he rose from working class Chicago to attend West Point and serve in the Army. Three years into his tenure at Duke, he was nearly fired after back-to-back losing seasons. Krzyzewski probably would have been fired if that took place in today’s big-money, win-now sports culture. Instead, he is simply the winningest coach in college basketball history.

What fuels The Legends Club are several entertaining anecdotes about Smith, Valvano and Krzyzewski, their games and their personal interactions. Feinstein, a Duke graduate who covered ACC hoops in the 1980s, knows the territory well. He does a fine job of pushing aside the public images of all three coaches to reveal their humanity. Krzyzewski and Smith, for example, despised each other and had several clashes during heated Carolina-Duke tilts. In the end, however, they developed a mutual respect, if not a friendship.

Ultimately, The Legends Club is a Coach K book—perhaps because he has coached the longest and remains at the top of his profession. If you just can’t separate Krzyzewski from Christian Laettner stomping on a Kentucky player, or Grayson Allen’s many tripping incidents, this might not be the book for you. Or maybe it is? You may be surprised by the old coach’s many layers, beyond the dark-suited Blue Devil you see all the time on TV.

Six Reasons Why 2016 Was Not the Worst Year Ever

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2016, louis c.k., media, medicine, technology, worst year ever

Are you feeling sad about 2016? Are you dreading what 2017 might bring with an inexperienced, unpredictable president and several impending crises at home and around the world?

Well, cheer up! Unlike what you might have read in several media end-of-the-year roundups, 2016 was NOT the Worst Year Ever. Not even close. Here are six reasons why you should feel pretty good about 2016, as opposed to almost any other point in history. I have statistics to back me up:

1. Worldwide Poverty. Despite what you might have read, the poverty rate has been in steep decline for decades. According to the World Bank, 42% of the world’s population lived on $1.90 a day (adjusted for inflation) in 1981. As of 2013, that percentage had plummeted to just 10.6%.
2. Violent Crime. The amount of violence in the U.S. is unacceptable and has been on the rise over the past two years. Historically, however, the crime rate is much lower than it was a few decades ago. The FBI reports that the U.S. homicide rate in 2014 was 4.5 per 100,000 people, less than half of what it was in 1980, or even as recently as 1992.
3. Road Fatalities. Seat belts, airbags and other safety measures have dramatically decreased the number of people who die each year in automobiles, even though there are more cars and trucks on the road today than ever before. In 2015 there were 35,092 motor vehicle deaths, 35% less than the number of traffic fatalities in 1972.
4. Life Expectancy. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 78.8 years. That’s something worth celebrating when you consider that the average American was expected to live less than 70 years as recently as 1960.
5. Medical Advances. Want a specific year that was definitely worse than 2016? Try 1918. Not only was World War I winding down, but American doughboys brought disease home after the Armistice. Somewhere between 20 and 40 million people died of a worldwide influenza pandemic in 1918, including 675,000 Americans. In 2016, by contrast, roughly 36,000 Americans died of flu-related illnesses. That’s just one example of how much medicine and our quality of life have improved in the past century.
6. Technology. From smartphones to automated cars to drones that may soon deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep, this is a time of rapid innovation and technological change. As Louis C.K. hilariously points out in this routine, there are numerous advances we currently take for granted today that were not even available a few years ago. Sure, the growing presence of artificial intelligence is somewhat terrifying, but technology helped make 2016 an exciting time to be alive.

So there are your six reasons. Do you feel better? Probably not. We could be—and should be—doing a much better job of treating each other with kindness and addressing the world’s problems in practical ways. Still, barring an environmental or human-made worldwide disaster, 2017 will almost certainly not be the Worst Year Ever. Just like 2016 was not the Worst Year Ever—though it often seemed that way.