12 Years A Clipper

I won’t waste any ink providing background details on what’s going on with the Los Angeles Clippers or the NBA right now. If you’re not up to speed, then click here to get caught up. Instead, I’ll start this story on Day 2, minutes before tipoff in Game 4 of the playoffs between the Clippers and the Golden State Warriors. Full disclosure: I’m from Oakland. Amidst mountains of speculation and anticipation surrounding what kind of statement the Clippers players would or would not do, I sat on my couch waiting for another 1968 Olympics moment. Good Lord was I disappointed.

As the Clippers took the floor for their warm up, they all met at half court in a high-profile huddle. With a big flourish, they tore off their warm-up jackets and tossed them on the floor, revealing red shirts turned inside out. That would be the Clippers refusing to rep the logo of a franchise owned by a recently-outed, but long-suspected bigot. Not a bad start for a protest. Unfortunately, minutes later, they were on the court, playing Game 4 in full Clippers regalia—logos and all.

My problem with this mini-protest is that it failed to do the one thing that a protest must do—create urgency to provoke action. Instead, this show seemed to be an attempt to do as little as required before moving onto to the real business of playing basketball.

With all due respect, I completely understand the coaches’ and players’ desire to stay focused on the task at hand. Still, I was unimpressed. So, while I admit that I’ve never been a professional athlete, I find myself needing to sound off on the late night before heading to bed. Plus, one of my favorite sayings is still “Take my advice—it’s free, and I’m not using it.” With that in mind, I present to you another Live From Tomorrow list...

10 Things That the Los Angeles Clippers Should Have Done

1. Refuse to play. They could have just stayed home. Or, they could have showed up, but refuse to take the court. Honestly, this is my least favorite option. I can still remember watching the World Cup in 2010 as several French players refused to play because of a disagreement with their coach. I was, and still am, disgusted with their actions. I subscribe to  the idea that in some respects, you play for yourself, not the coach or the owner. But, at least refusing to play would have created urgency.

2. Request an off-season trade. What if every player on the Clippers spoke with their agent, then filed a formal trade request with the franchise? This would have raised the stakes without jeopardizing the team's playoff run. After all, NBA players have been known to request trades for much smaller offenses than what the Clippers have been subjected to. And please, spare me that played out “they have kids to feed” B.S. The minimum salary in the NBA is around a half a million dollars per year. That means every player on the Clippers is doing just fine, even the ones with splinters in their asses from riding the bench every night. If there is an NBA player that cannot financially afford to sit out a season, then he is an idiot, and needs to learn how to manage his money better. Find another team... go play in Italy... find a ghost writer to do a screenplay about your story and call it 12 Years a Clipper*. If grape-pickers, miners and garment-workers can do it, so can you.

3. Bring the message onto the court. This action is very common in professional sports around the world. Almost every week, teams in the English Premier League sport a ribbon, patch, or arm band of some sort to commemorate something important. NFL players even wear pink socks! While a little insignia would not have been groundbreaking, it would have been a way to channel and highlight the team solidarity.

4. Rock the mic. If I can listen to the 2nd runner up from American Idol butcher the Star-Spangled Banner, then I know there’s room Chris Paul** to say a few words on the mic—and to the world—at halftime or before the game. It’s better than watching a crew of backup dancers shoot cheap t-shirts into the second row with an air gun.

5. Drop the logos. Completely. The Clippers could have kept going with their idea, which was a good start, except fort the fact you could still see the logo on their pants. What if they all took the court in plain uniforms with no logos? The great thing about this action is that it would have forced the hand of the NBA. I'm sure Adidas would've had something to say about it. Plus, my guess is that somewhere in the rule book, it says that NBA players can’t just wear whatever they want. After all, didn’t they fine players for wearing their shorts too low? Can you imagine if the league had to make a decision about what to do? Do they make the Clippers forfeit the game? Do they let them play in plain uniforms? I doubt Mark Jackson’s Warriors would have been filing any complaints in the latter case. My sense is that what the players want most is for the league to get off the fence and have their back. I can’t think of a better way to do this than to put the ball in the commissioner’s court—are you with us, or against us?

6. A work slowdown. This is a classic protest move of industrial laborers—they don’t exactly strike, but they don’t exactly work. The Clippers could have taken the court as if everything was normal... but then refuse to play offense! Imagine how awesome that would be to watch Chris Paul walk the ball across half court then just stop. How beautiful would it have been to watch them rack up back-to-back-to-back 24 second shot clock violations. The message would have been clear. The irony is that the Warriors put up 39 points in the first quarter, leaving the Clippers down by 15 after only twelve minutes of play. Maybe if the Clippers had just “slowed down” the game and focused on playing some defense they would have been better off.

7. Black Player Salute. This one might be my favorite. The Clippers could have taken the court with custom jerseys sporting the names of some of the greatest black basketball players on whose backs the league was built. Some giants that come to mind immediately are Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Julius Erving, Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, Moses Malone, Bill Russell, Lenny Wilkins, and Bill Russell, just to name a few.*** If they wanted to get real creative, they could have included great black athletes who broke down barriers in other sports: Muhammed Ali, Arthur Ashe, John Carlos, Althea Gibson, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Jack Johnson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Carl Lewis, Joe Louis, Willie Mays, Jesse Owens, Leroy "Satchel" Paige, Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Tommie Smith, Marshall "Major" Taylor, Venus Williams, Tiger Woods****, and the list goes on. Can you imagine J. J. Redick stepping on the court with a red and blue Jim Brown jersey? And don’t try to tell me that they didn’t have enough time to get the jerseys made. I got a dude in East Oakland that can get you customized knockoff soccer jerseys from any club in the world by tomorrow, so holler at ya boy.

8. Win the game. If the Clippers hadn’t gotten spanked, then we’d all be talking about how they rallied together and used this adversity as motivation. But they did get spanked. In all fairness, I know they wanted to win. But they didn’t. I’m just saying. Maybe it sounds harsh, but as I write this, I feel bad for the players, but I do NOT feel motivated to rally behind them. If they had actually taken a stand, then I would be writing a very different article write now. But they didn’t, so I’m just another Warriors fan hoping that they lose, and hoping that they all find a better team to play for next season.

9. Play 2 on 2. The Clippers could have let J. J. Reddick and Hëdo Turkoglu take on the Warriors by themselves. Or, better yet, the two teams could have coordinated to arrange a 2 on 2 matchup: Reddick and Turkoglu vs. David Lee and Steve Blake. In other words: imagine an NBA without the black people.

10. Do nothing. Part of me feels like doing absolutely nothing would have been better than staging the mini-protest that they did. Wouldn’t that have been more true to their stated mission of staying focused on the game and playing basketball? I guess I feel like they did something just because they had to—but what they did was useless. 

Ultimately, they missed an opportunity to make history—not to make a scene, or to make history for themselves, but to create a moment that would live on in history forever. Like Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winners podium. Like Ali refusing conscription into the army and forfeiting his heavyweight belt.. Instead, it may become another footnote in the history of American racism and so-called "40 million dollar slaves."

DON'T FORGET TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE OPTION IN THE POLL AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS PAGE... "WHAT SHOULD THE CLIPPERS HAVE DONE?"

* The title of this blog post is taken from a hilarious meme that started circulating on the internet on Sunday, April 27, 2014.

** Ironically, Chris Paul is President of the NBA Players Association.

*** I was tempted to include Michael Jordan, but the cat always seemed to have his tongue when it was time to say something important.

**** Don't even start with me

UPDATE: At the time of writing this article, I did not know that the Clippers did in fact do #3. Apparently they wore black socks or something like that. So, my apologies for the inaccuracy. But, I will point out that I watched the entire game without noticing, so that says something about how meager the statement was.

Spring Broke

     

If you were to google "spring break," a short video of me eating mojarra frita in my chancletas would come up... actually, that's probably not the first video you'd find, but it should be. Apparently, March 20th was the first day of Spring. Apparently, Spring did not get the message. Either that, or it’s broken... temporarily out of service... under construction. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that I just landed back in Boston last night and it’s colder than a witch’s tit. So far, this readjustment has been harder than any re-entry to the U.S. I’ve ever made before, and I’ve made a few. I can’t lie, it’s not just the weather—the last ten days were pretty special. Barranquilla is just as off the hook as it was when left it last June. The Lopez/Deal/Matheson family is still the tightest crew on the Colombian Coast—especially now that they’ve welcomed a new batch of kittens and puppies. 

My girlfriend, the lovely miss Allison Bak-Dashian, is still awesome and beautiful, especially on her birthday. 

Speaking of which, La Troja is still the epicenter of all Salsa-flavored desorden.

I’ve made it through my morning class, “Management of Financial Resources in Non-Profit Organizations.” In truth, my body was there, but my spirit was still a few thousand miles to the south. Now I’m sitting in the library, trying to give myself a fierce metaphorical kick in the ass. The next two months are the home stretch of this Master's program, and I can’t afford to be moping around campus wishing Spring Break was a two-week affair. If there was ever a crunch time, it is now. The good news is that I’ll have some help staying focused now that I’m back. For starters, we’re getting buckets of snow dumped on us tomorrow, so they’re won’t be much to do other than stay inside and study. On top of that, my Spring Break adventures left me spring broke, so my social life will be necessarily constrained for a bit. Hopefully, putting these thoughts to paper will help me get my mind right and get to work. Hopefully by the time you read this post, I will have gotten my academic mojo back. 

Pura Vida,

Drew

Gradschoolisms

Last Friday I deejayed a party for a bunch of my friends. And by “deejay” I mean sit at my laptop and put songs in order. In response to Harvard’s pricey “Masquerade Ball,” two of my friends decided to throw the first annual “Financialade Ball,” targeting those of us who have accepted our status as broke, unemployed graduate students. I must have missed the part of the email invitation that said that the dress code for the Financialade Ball was still fancy. I showed up dressed as regular old me.

At one point during the night, a friend said that she liked how I looked in “DJ Mode.” I’m pretty sure was referring to how I was dressed. Jeans, polo shirt and cap. I said “thank you,” but I couldn’t help scratching my head a little bit. Then it occurred to me that, from her perspective, I was dressed up in my Hip Hop costume. From my perspective, I had been wearing a suit all day and was happy to finally be wearing “normal” clothes.

So, what’s the point? The point is that, even though I’ve developed a lot of deep, great relationships, there is still a large portion of this community that has an extremely limited perspective of who I am, based on the fact that we only interact in the context of Harvard Graduate School of Education. Between meetings, job interviews, and other miscellaneous first impressions, I end up dressing like a full-fledged grown-up a lot these days. So it got me thinking, “Who is the real me?” And maybe the more interesting question is, “Has the real me changed since I’ve been here?”

Now, you might be tempted to cry out, “DON’T CHANGE! Don’t let the system get you down, Drew! Don’t sell out!” My first response to you is, “stop yelling.” Then I would ask,  “What’s the point of doing all of this if it isn’t going to change me at all?”

Thankfully for you, that’s as deep as this post is going to get. Instead of wallowing in introspection, I’ve decided to present a lighthearted list of some of the habits that I actually don’t want to pick up along the way. The first edition of this list will focus on a few "gradschoolisms" that I often hear thrown about in various class discussions and meetings. While they are designed to make you sound like an intelligent card-carrying member of Academia, I believe that they are over-used, annoying, and downright silly.

1. Meta-

In all fairness, one of my professors warned me about this word way back in August. At HGSE, everything is “meta.” As if nothing is worth doing if you don’t dedicate half of your brain power to being conscious of doing it while you do it. But really, it’s gone to far.  In other words, this word is getting meta-annoying, because it bothers me, and I’ve thought about it a lot, and I know why it bothers me.

2. Unpack

Many professors and colleagues here will push you to “unpack” what you just said. In other words, that simple comment you made is actually reeeallly complex, and we’d all really like to know what you meant when you said, “I thought the reading was boring.” 

3. Push Back

This is a really polite way to go about pointing out that what somebody just said is actually bogus. As in, “I just want to push back a little bit on what you just said about all Asian kids being excellent at math and science.” I’m all for keeping things civil, but sometimes I just want to bust out like Rep. Joe Wilson during Obama’s 2009 State of the Union address.

4. Piggyback

This one often gets used in combination with “revisiting” or “building on.” It’s really popular with people who are looking to squeeze the juice out of those five points for participation. It wouldn’t be so bad if “piggybacking” actually took the conversation somewhere new. But most of the time, when someone starts a comment off with “I just want to piggyback” or “revisit and build on what Sarah just said,” they are either going to repeat exactly what Sarah just said, or say something that has absolutely nothing to do with what Sarah just said.

5. Myself

To be honest, this one’s been getting on my nerves since way before I got to grad school. In fact, my freshman year English teacher was the first person I heard articulate just how annoying this abuse of grammar is (shout out to Nancy!). Yes, I can be a little anal about grammar, but the fact that this word get used incorrectly is not really what bothers me. What irks me is that when people misuse the word “myself,” they often think that it’s making them sound more intelligent. So, for the record: “myself” is a reflexive pronoun. That means “myself” cannot do anything. You cannot contact “myself” to touch base, or do anything else that sounds professional and important. I am the only person that can ever do anything with myself. Just like you can do whatever you’d like with yourself. So, next time you’re about to use the word “myself” in a professional environment, please reconsider and double-check to make sure that you don’t really just mean “me” or “I.” There. Now I feel better.

When making this list, I was really tempted to include the word "scaffold." Before coming to grad school, I had probably used this word a grand total of eleven times in my entire life. Now I find the word "scaffold" coming out of my mouth every other day. But here's the thing. It's a great word, and I haven't found a good substitute to describe a lot what we are trying to do as educators. Our work is necessary, but if we do it correctly, we should be able to remove ourselves from the equation at the end of the day, leaving a structurally sound student standing tall. When teachers embrace their work as scaffolding, it helps remind us that it's not about the teaching, it's about the learning.

Pura Vida,

Drew

PS: I recently uploaded my 2013 Reading List as a new page on this site, so if you're interested in what I was getting into on the book front last year, click here to check it out.

Special thanks to Bart at Drivellian Photography for documenting the shenanigans at the Financialade Ball.

Bonus Learning

It’s been a while since my last post, and I’ve been making the most of my monthlong break in between semesters. Many of my friends and colleagues on campus chose to take a different approach. Like most universities, Harvard offers its graduate students the opportunity to take classes during January, a mini-semester known as “J-Term.” Since we’re already paying an arm and a leg to be here, it does make sense to get your money’s worth, I guess. 

Personally, this option just wasn’t for me. When I started to lose feeling in my right pinky toe sometime in mid-December, I knew that I needed a change of scenery and a few weeks to thaw out. In fact, I was on a plane to New Orleans before my last two final papers were even due.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not knocking the idea of a little bonus learning during the break. In fact, I picked up a few nuggets of wisdom here and there myself. So, without any further ado, I present the latest in a long lineage of Live From Tomorrow Lists!

1. You're never too young to lose your first tooth.

2. You're never too old to get an awesome Christmas present from the Notorious D.A.D.

3. Mexico City is as big and crowded as everyone says it is.

4. My Salsa is smooth, but my Tango needs a lot of work.

5. Mezcal tastes better when you're drinking it with family in Mexico.

6. San Miguel de Allende is a great place to spend New Year's Eve.

7. The Sinaloa taco truck at 22nd and International in Oakland is still better than anything I could find south of the border.

8. You don't need a cool accent to be a great soccer coach (but it doesn't hurt). 

9. Natick F.C., my East Coast squad, has what it takes to win the championship at Teamworks in Acton.

10. New Orleans Jazz is just not as enjoyable when its 7 degrees outside.

So, as you can tell by that last video, I've landed back in the Arctic Circle, and I'm settling back in. I've narrowed my schedule down to six courses, but I'll be cutting that down to five this week after I see what some of these professors are working with. One thing is for sure—this semester is about to be no joke. I'm just glad I made the most of my break because it's about to get ugly. Wish me luck.

Pura Vida,

Drew