Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  Ronald Reagan’s snapshot? Vision. Strength. Freedom. These are his enduring legacies. In time, no one will remember the Iran-contra scandal, but they’ll remember the man and what he stood for. They’ll remember JFK’s youthful vigor and idealism; Jimmy Carter and the momentary peace in the Middle East, and his humanitarian works since he left office; George W. Bush standing tall and firm amidst the hallowed ashes at Ground Zero. And this is at the big-time level. Most politicians don’t get to that big-time level. Most of us have our footprints washed away by the next wave of politicians, and we return to our lives and our families and worry only of the legacy we have left for our children.

  C. S. Lewis wrote at length about what he called “the inner ring,” and man’s constant struggle to be accepted within it, but I’m here to tell you that you can’t fight the status quo and still be accepted by an inner circle. And the dirty little secret is that there is no inner circle. It’s a mutually exclusive thing, and it gets back to that snapshot. Nobody’s going to remember you anyway, so you might as well walk that lonely road and fight that good fight and stand for something and do the right thing.

  When I got into politics, it reminded me of all those baseball games I used to go to as a kid. Have you ever noticed how kids go to ballgames wearing the full uniform of their favorite team? Well, that was me. I used to wear my Pirates uniform to Forbes Field. I wore number 21—Roberto Clemente’s number—I guess on the thinking that if they ever needed anybody to fill in I’d be ready, and from this perspective being elected to Congress was a lot like getting called onto the field of play at Forbes Field. I made a promise to myself that if I ever got to the plate at Forbes Field I wouldn’t bunt. I wouldn’t sacrifice. I’d swing for the fences. Every day was an opportunity to do something significant, because I couldn’t know how many days I’d have and I didn’t want to waste any of them, and I realize that this mind-set runs counter to all those politicians who look at one day merely as a bridge to the next day. It’s all about prolonging their time in office, and not at all about making the most of their time in office. It’s a fundamental difference. It’s about bunting, instead of swinging for the fences. And the folks who play it safe, they’re not bad people. After all, it’s human nature to want to keep your job and get reelected and be liked and admired by your friends and neighbors back home. Let us never forget that there’s a constant pressure to cave in to the status quo. Teachers, lobbyists, senior citizens, NRA-types . . . they’re all banging away at you at home. But when the majority is fixed on a noble goal, these pressures can be overcome and good things can happen.

  I’ll end with a footnote to the story with which I opened this chapter, the one about the well-read woman who cornered me over dinner one night just a few days before the 2004 presidential election, alarmed that the country might not survive its outcome. Remember how she had been all distraught and whipped into uncertainty by political pundits who maintained that the fate of the free world hung in the balance? And, in turn, how I tried to calm her fears by asserting that America would survive, no matter what the outcome of the election? Well, she called me on the Monday night just before the election to thank me for setting her mind at ease.

  “I had my first good night’s sleep in months,” she told me happily, and in her peace of mind I heard the reassurance we’d all do well to take for ourselves.

  See, I choose to celebrate the good in people—and, therefore, the good in our systems as well. Our democratic system of government is as good as it gets; its potential lies in great leaders and people back home who demand better; we’re blessed to stand on its foundation. Sure, some of us stand a bit taller than others, and quite a few of us get caught stooping to some unimaginable levels, but the abiding strength of our government is that it can reinvent itself. From one generation to the next, or from one election to the next, our system can bend to accommodate the national mood. Today’s leaders can be voted out of office at the next opportunity, and they often are when their constituents no longer share their views, or their style. Just because you hold important office today doesn’t mean you’ll hold that same important office tomorrow. It’s what you do with your time in that office that counts—and if it doesn’t amount to all that much . . . well, then who’s really the poorer for it, after all?

  4

  TAKING A STAND ON SPORTS

  “Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see—not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.”

  Lewis Lapham

  Ozzie Guillen, the Venezuelan-born manager of the 2005 World Series champion Chicago White Sox, keeps a sign on his clubhouse wall, admonishing his players to stand for the national anthem at the start of each game. It’s one of the few hard-and-fast rules in Guillen’s relatively loose clubhouse.

  The penalty for missing the anthem? A $500 fine—and the unending loss of regard of one of baseball’s most outspoken personalities. “If you’re not from this country, you should respect the anthem even more than Americans because you should feel pleased you’re here,” Guillen told Sports Illustrated about a month into the 2005 season, explaining his position. “And if you’re from this country, you should have respect for people who are dying for it. This is a great country. It has the right of free speech. That’s why a lot of countries have problems, because people can’t speak for themselves.”

  Well said.

  In the world of sports, Ozzie Guillen stands apart because he stands for something, and he means for his players to stand for something as well—a perspective that contrasts mightily with one of the most disturbing developments from the 2004 baseball season, wherein then-Toronto Blue Jays first baseman and perennial Most Valuable Player candidate Carlos Delgado famously refused to stand for “God Bless America.” Delgado, who was born in Puerto Rico and who played for a Canadian team, managed to duck the issue by claiming he had no direct ties to the United States and was therefore not showing any disrespect when he remained in the clubhouse as the song was played during the seventh-inning stretch—and yet Americans were right to feel dissed.

  At the time, Delgado claimed his refusal was a protest of the war in Iraq, which he called “the stupidest war ever.” Regrettably, Delgado’s position ran somewhat counter to his other claim, that he had no real stake in American affairs, and I think people responded to the hypocrisy. Delgado himself must have sensed that public sentiment was against him, because when he became a free agent following the 2004 season and peddled his services to the highest bidder, he made a special point of promising to stand for the anthem out of respect for his new employers and his new hometown fans. Unofficially, it marked the first time a baseball player’s pledge of allegiance to the United States was used as a negotiating ploy, and for my money it also marked a new low in the declining standards to which we hold our professional athletes. And Delgado promptly lived down to our low expectations; he quickly signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the Florida Marlins, after which he let slip that now that he had gotten what he wanted he wasn’t sure he would stand for the anthem after all.

  Like millions of American baseball fans, I was so disgusted by Delgado’s tactics that I can no longer root for him, but I can’t honestly say I was surprised. We’ve come to demand so little of our professional athletes off the field of play it’s a wonder we continue to cast them as role models for our children, and lately their churlish behavior has found its way onto the field as well, to where I find myself thinking that Ozzie Guillen is someone I want on my team while Carlos Delgado emerges as someone I want to run out of town.

  Consider these recent lowlights from the
world of sports and you’ll get what I mean:

  • Latrell Sprewell, the onetime National Basketball Association all-star guard, alienated fans and foes alike when he criticized Minnesota Timberwolves management for not extending his contract before the start of the 2004-2005 season, for which he would be paid $14.6 million. “Why would I want to help them win a title?” he told reporters, with the arrogance folks had come to expect from a player who once choked his coach. “They’re not doing anything for me. I’m at risk. I have a lot of risk here. I got my family to feed.” And the most galling piece to Sprewell’s insensitive cry of poverty was that he wasn’t the first wildly overpaid NBA superstar to suggest he’d completely lost touch with the average fan who somehow manages to come up with close to $100 per ticket for the privilege of watching these louts play. Once, during a 1999 work stoppage, New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing begged public sympathy by suggesting that folks need to understand the unique financial circumstance of professional athletes. “We make a lot of money,” he said. “But we spend a lot of money, too.”

  • Notre Dame head football coach George O’Leary was fired after only five days on the job, after it was discovered that he had lied on his résumé. The scandal rocked the college football powerhouse, and prompted some die-hard Fighting Irish fans to whine that lying on résumés was a fact of American life, and that O’Leary’s subsequent accomplishments as head football coach at Georgia Tech should have superseded his relatively inconsequential résumé padding. O’Leary himself protested the decision by pointing to his considerable credentials, and suggested that the lies on his résumé were no big deal. Clearly, his record of achievement didn’t need any embellishment, but what O’Leary and his supporters didn’t understand was that college football coaches ought to be held to a higher standard than their players or boosters.

  • Randy Moss, the talented wide receiver now toiling for the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League, justified his increasingly vulgar (and hardly spontaneous) “touchdown dances” to celebrate his end zone catches by claiming that the only consequence to his actions was a fine levied by the league. “Ain’t nothing but ten grand,” he said, after pretending to drop his pants and moon the Green Bay crowd in a January 2005 playoff game while he was a member of the Minnesota Vikings. “What’s ten grand to me?” Moss’s agent, Dante DiTrapano, however, argued that the fine was extravagant and unnecessary and planned to appeal. “If you can’t have freedom of expression on the football field, come on,” the agent said. Moss’s coach, Mike Tice, maintained that he didn’t see Moss’s boorish behavior and could therefore not comment on it, which I guess amounts to looking the other way. (And it seems to ignore the obvious fact of videotape, and that he could have screened his receiver’s antics from every conceivable angle following the game.) For his part, Moss demonstrated a remarkable inability to gauge public opinion and promised that his next end zone celebrations would be even more offensive.

  • University of Miami officials poked additional holes in the confused notion that student athletes can do no wrong by admitting highly recruited high school linebacker Willie Williams, after it was revealed that he had been arrested eleven times in the previous five years. The revelations came to light after a recruiting visit to the Miami campus the previous spring. “Just to decline a recommendation to admit a player because of what somebody might think nationally, I just don’t think that is the right way to handle it,” said Hurricanes coach Larry Coker in defending the university’s decision. School officials contended that they were not aware of Williams’s criminal history when he accepted Miami’s scholarship offer.

  And so I’ll ask what sometimes strikes me as the defining question of our times: What the heck is going on here? And, more to the point, when did we get so accustomed on a societal level to the bad behavior, bad judgment, and bad examples of our big-time athletes or our big-time athletic programs that it started to roll off us like nothing much at all? When did the bar of expectations fall so low that an ant could clear it without too much effort? And why does it all seem to matter—more so now than at any other time in our recent history?

  Well, from the beginning of recorded civilization, athletic competition has been a kind of societal proving ground. What are the Olympic games, after all, but an extension of an ancient ritual to honor our best athletes, and to bestow upon them the riches and virtues and accolades we might otherwise seek for ourselves? The struggle to succeed in sports mirrors our struggle to succeed in our workaday world, and each reinforces the notion that if you work hard, dream big, and play as a team good things will come your way.

  WHY SPORTS MATTERS

  World-class athletes, by their grace and dedication and prowess, are the physical manifestation of our shared quest for excellence. They have incredible gifts, and their success brings them money, fame, and glory. The twenty-four-hour media attention that comes their way as a result also gives them a tremendous responsibility to model behavior that is consistent with their work ethic on the field of play, and yet in recent years athletes have been dropping the ball in this one area at an alarming rate. Think back to the inspiring examples of Jesse Owens, who used his powerful body to combat Nazi propaganda during World War Two; Sandy Koufax, who followed his faith and refused to participate in a baseball game that might have decided a championship because it fell on one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar; Arnold Palmer, whose tremendous humility has won him an army of fans, even as his dominance set him a couple fairways apart from his competitors; Jim Abbott, the left-handed pitcher who overcame enormous physical disabilities to enjoy a remarkable major league career that included a no-hitter for the New York Yankees. Think back to the superstar athletes of yesteryear and wonder when it was we started expecting less of our heroes—and, as a result, receiving less in return.

  To be sure, we spend so much time worshipping celebrities in this society that when we cast these athletes in the same role we start to think they can do no wrong. (And—even worse—they move about thinking the same!) Deserving or not, athletes are role models to our children, and we need to get wise to the learned truths that they can do wrong, that they very often do, and that the nature of these wrongs can have profound implications. Still, even our best athletes can fade quickly from memory; their time at the top is short; with each succeeding generation there will always be someone faster, stronger, and more talented ready to take the helm. And yet because we invest our star athletes with such formative influence, and allow them to stand as role models for our children, their legacies can live on long after they leave their games behind.

  Consider: John McEnroe starts throwing his tennis racket and ranting and raving at fans and officials, and soon enough there are thousands of John McEnroe wannabes, throwing their tennis rackets on their neighborhood courts and kicking up the kind of fuss that in my day would have earned a licking.

  Baseball players juice themselves with steroids so they can hit more home runs, and before long high school players are roaming the nutritional supplement aisles at the drugstore looking for the same edge.

  Football players taunt their opponents after a sack and the next thing you know you’ve got kids in Pop Warner and Pee Wee leagues all around the country trash talking and piling on.

  U.S. figure skater Tonya Harding notoriously engages a hit man to take a blunt object to the knee of her American teammate Nancy Kerrigan, the reigning national champion and Harding’s chief rival for a gold medal at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway—sending a powerful message to young athletes all over the world that if you can’t beat ’em in head-to-head competition it’s sometimes okay to beat ’em with a blunt object instead and avoid the athletic confrontation entirely.

  Of course, there are wonderful exceptions to the general decline in sportsmanship and leadership. There’s cyclist Lance Armstrong, setting new standards in one of the world’s most grueling competitions and at the same time calling important attention to the struggle with cancer that he shar
es with millions worldwide. There’s legally blind musher Rachel Scdoris, who thrillingly completed the 1,200-mile Iditarod dog sled race and sent a powerful message to disabled individuals that anything was possible. There’s tennis great Andre Agassi, who donated millions to establish a charter school in an impoverished section of his hometown, returning something in a bricks-and-mortar way to the community that helped shape him.

  But these are the exceptions in a generally self-centered field of superstars. Our most gifted athletes are coddled at such a young age they get to thinking they’re held to a different standard than the rest of us—which too often means no standard at all. There’s no discipline, no consequences, and so they slip through the system believing that the rules of polite society don’t apply to them. At the same time, they look on at their own so-called heroes, and start modeling their behavior on the back of these bad examples. It all feeds on itself, and the further along they get in their athletic development, the more deeply ingrained these negative traits become. They don’t know any other way.

  That’s the nut of it, really, that we invest these superstar athletes with far too much influence. It’s a huge responsibility, to set a positive example every time you leave the house, every time you step to the plate, every time you’re out on the town following a game, and too many of these young stars are just not up to it. Even the veterans find it tough to be under such a constant spotlight, and most coaches don’t have the first idea how to rein these guys in. Coaches have a hard enough time getting athletes to demonstrate leadership on the field and in the clubhouse, and when it comes to demonstrating leadership off the field they’ll take the position that it’s not in their contract.