by Adam Carolla
This appealing to kids at all times has now stepped out of the world entertainment and into politics. Every senator and congressman is on Twitter and has an Instagram account, which is supposed to help them stay in touch with their youth constituency but really just ends up being their downfall when they get caught sending dick pics to an intern. Even President Obama went on Zach Galifianakis’s Web series, Between Two Ferns, to talk about Obamacare. Nothing against Zach or his show, but I certainly hope the president would prioritize his time better than doing a comedy bit with the guy from The Hangover. But Barack had to do that gig. He couldn’t expect young people to educate themselves on an issue or to seek out information; he had to show up where they already were to spoon-feed it to them.
So aiming everything at people under eighteen has already ruined movies, music and now politics, but what’s killing me is that it’s now creeping into the sacred realm of sports. I’m not going to even get into the head-injury issue and how it is going to be the end of Pop Warner football. I think the “protect the kids” mentality has crept in in an even more insidious way.
A few years ago while everyone in the media was talking about the Richie Incognito bullying story, I thought the bigger and more egregious example of pussifying sports was the Red Sox World Series celebration. When they all went into the locker room to party, David Ortiz, Big Papi, a two-hundred-fifty-pound home-run hitter and the biggest guy on the team, wore a snow-boarding helmet and ski goggles because there was Champagne flying. Can you believe what’s going on? We can’t even have a Champagne-spray victory celebration without protective gear because someone might get a detached retina.
The novelty of shaking up Champagne and spraying it on a guy goes away if he’s wearing a slicker, goggles and a hat. It’s no fun spraying your teammate with Champagne if he’s dressed like a deckhand on an Alaskan crab boat.
And the entire locker room was covered in plastic, too. It looked like the front row of a Gallagher concert. You just won the World Series, Red Sox. I’m sure you can hire some folk to clean up the mess the next day. Again, it ruins the fun. This is the equivalent of egging your principal’s house while it’s tented for fumigation.
And was there an incident to provoke this? Did Carl Yastrzemski die from an errant Champagne cork? Did some Veuve Clicquot in the eye end Steve Garvey’s career? Where’s the bravery in sports? These guys are supposed to be larger than life heroes we look up to. Bottom line: I want to watch a guy being interviewed while his teammates do a Champagne golden shower on his hair, not his helmet.
It’s not just the wussiness in sports that’s killing our kids, they’re getting softened up everywhere because our whole culture is overshadowed by the threat of liability and lawsuits. I was in New York not too long ago doing some gigs and decided to hit the gym in the hotel. There was that big sign on the wall with the usual list of things not to do. Among the “No Smoking” and “No Eating” (as if someone chugging away on an elliptical machine is going to bust out a fondue pot) was “No Horseplay.”
Seriously, Marriott, “No Horseplay”? Are you that afraid someone might sue you? I don’t think this would hold up in court. I ask you, reader, how many times have you heard a study on the news about this or heard the surgeon general talk about the epidemic of horseplay-related deaths? None. And furthermore, I’d argue that anyone young enough to engage in horseplay wouldn’t even know what horseplay is. (For those of you who don’t know, horseplay is a disgusting porn genre. The man gets on all fours . . . perhaps I’ve revealed too much.)
This kind of overly cautious mentality is everywhere today, and it’s destroying our kids. Sonny and Natalia came home from school one day in 2012 and I asked them about their day and more specifically what they did at recess. Sonny told me that they had a “walking recess.” I had no idea what that was. We certainly didn’t have them when I was a kid. He clued me in that a walking recess is one in which there is no running, no balls to kick around and designated “cool zones.” It was September, so it was pretty hot, but not scorching. It was in the low eighties. When I was in school, I would have been doing two-a-days and being denied water the entire time. But my kids are sitting in cool zones probably talking about their various nut and legume allergies. Dear schools: Your pussifying my kid with your cool zones is not cool.
We’ve gone nuts with the sunscreen. When the kids had just turned five there was one night they wanted to go take a dip in the pool. They came up to me at around five forty-five in the evening asking to go swimming. I said sure, and told them to go put on their bathing suits. They quickly came down in their swimming gear and as we started to head outside Sonny doubled back, panic stricken. “Daddy, what about sunscreen?” I told him that the sun had gone behind the house and there was no need. There was literally a shadow cast across the pool from the house. Sonny could not deal with this. He insisted he was going to need some sunscreen. I said no, and that it was a waste of time and he should head out to the pool before the sun really went down and it got too cold. They headed outside with Olga while I went upstairs and put my trunks on to do a few cannonballs with them. As I walked out, I heard Sonny ratting me out to the nanny for not slathering his sunblock on. Of course, word of my crime eventually got to Lynette adding to the constantly growing list of grievances and reasons for her to give me the cold shoulder. And thus I got cock-blocked over sunblock.
Then there was the Sunday, correction, the football Sunday, I had to spend at the park with the kids in Sonny and Natalia’s class, their parents and their teachers for a getting-to-know-you event. When I got there, I walked up behind two dudes of suspect sexuality in yoga pants and shirts with no sleeves and a bunch of five-year-olds in front of them. Yep, yoga in the park for kids. For what? Stress relief? You’re five, what’s causing you stress? Tough session of Fruit Ninja on the iPad? Zipper broke on your Doc McStuffins backpack? You need to get yourself grounded before that make-or-break finger-painting session? This is what people in Arkansas and Nebraska are thinking of when they make fun of California. When Woody Allen did all those gags about Los Angeles in Annie Hall, even he wasn’t clever enough to come up with yoga in the park for five-year-olds.
So on top of the cool zones and yoga, our kids are fed a steady diet of unearned praise and self-esteem.
You just need to look at their T-shirts to see how much our kids love themselves. I saw a kid wearing a Nike shirt the other day that read “My Way, All Day.” I wanted to take him aside, sit him down and say, “Listen, you little shit. It will be your way all day in 2050 if you don’t fuck this part up. Your job right now is to be a kid and listen to adults.” It’s not even so much what ideas like this are doing to our kids, it’s what will happen when these kids become adults. I was driving through Hollywood and saw a guy who looked like a rapper you’d never heard of wearing a hat that read “Fuck Humble.” Well, it was a nice society while it lasted.
These snarky T-shirts are all the rage these days, and not just on kids. At one point, Kimmel’s brother-in-law decided to start an online T-shirt company. He was one of those guys you’d see constantly rocking that “No Fear” gear, so of course he decided he needed to get into the douchewear game. He very proudly pulled me aside one day to show me his latest T-shirt. It said “Scars Heal, Losing Doesn’t.” I smiled politely but then had to inform him, “But scars don’t heal. Wounds heal and leave scars. Scars are the permanent thing that is left behind. Scars never heal. I still have a scar from a vaccination in 1964.” There was a prolonged pause of stunned silence before he said, “Shit. I just ordered five thousand of these.”
When I was on Loveline, a listener once sent me a T-shirt that read “Masturbation Is Not a Crime.” I brought it home and did what I do with all the shit people send me (sorry, fans). I put it in a pile to give to the housekeeper. The problem was that my non-English-speaking maid’s non-English-speaking husband wore it to work one day and got fired.
This attitude pandemic has really affected Sonny. I was watching
basketball with him one night and he told me that even though he’s a pretty big Clippers fan, he would settle for playing for the Miami Heat. He actually said settle. That was his fallback, his safety NBA franchise. There was no doubt he’d be in the league, it was just a matter of going to his favorite or slumming it with the Heat.
This kind of behavior started early with Sonny. Back in his tee-ball days there was one game when he refused to wear his hat. I’m not sure why, but he just didn’t want to. I told him to put it on three times before he did it. Lynette then said I had to tell him why he needed to put on his hat. What has happened to our society? What happened to the years when you as dad or coach could just yell at a kid to put their hat on and they would? Nowadays, we have to convene a tribunal and bring in a family therapist to make sure it’s stated in a supportive, nurturing and positive way. He was on a team that was wearing uniforms. He’s supposed to be part of that team and should be doing what they’re all doing. But in our current society everybody has to be such an individual there is no such thing as a uniform. And therefore I become a monster for telling him to put one on.
I’m also considered a monster for not hoisting him on my shoulders and celebrating his “home run.” It was not a home run. Yes, Sonny scored, but he didn’t hit the ball more than forty-two inches from the plate. It was somewhere in between a grounder and a bunt. But the kid who threw to first overshot and the right fielder was picking dandelions, so Sonny was able to round the bases and score. And he even got the game ball with the date written on it. It’s on his shelf right now, ironically higher in the air than it ever traveled that day.
I don’t think any of this helped Sonny’s attitude on the field. When he wasn’t able to connect with the ball, did this push him to practice more and try to improve his swing? Nope. He blamed the ball. That’s the problem with the artificial self-esteem inflation we’re doing. It removes kids’ ability to look at their weak spots and fix them. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Sonny still believes, and this is a direct quote, that he could “hit the ball to the moon.”
Kids hit the field today, in whatever sport, thinking they know everything there is to know. They don’t even want to hear any direction or coaching. Another time, when Sonny was at bat whiffing I was behind the backstop trying to coach him. I shouted to him “Sonny, swing level” at least three times. I wanted him to keep his elbow up. But I realized as I saw him not doing it that he was five and maybe the word “level” wasn’t in his vocabulary yet. So I said, “Sonny, do you know what level means?” He looked over his shoulder and very condescendingly shot back, “Yes! We have levels on Angry Birds.”
Things really went into overdrive when Sonny was doing track while the 2012 Olympics were all over television. After watching about ten minutes of the Summer Games, he declared that he was going to be a gold-medal sprinter. This is despite the fact that he also declared that his friend Jensen was the fastest second grader on the planet. I guess he thinks he can make up the deficit with pure grit and determination. I had fun sarcastically noting the odds that the two fastest people on the planet sit next to each other in the same school. At least Sonny was realistic enough to know that it wouldn’t last forever, and that he would have to fall back on teaching kids how to run.
One day, I spent eight hours broiling at L.A. Valley College for one of Sonny’s seemingly never-ending track meets. As soon as he finished his last race, I said to Lynette, “I’ll go get the car.” I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there and into my cool house with a cold beer. She told me, “No, he has to get his medal.” I was confused. He hadn’t won the race. He hadn’t even placed. He came in eighth. It got extra confusing when I looked and saw that the podium had six spots. Sixth-place level on the podium was as high as a serving tray. The sixth-place runner could have roller-skated up to receive his medal, no problem. Again, Sonny came in eighth, so I wasn’t sure how that was considered a podium finish. And he wasn’t on the podium; he was in what I would call the drip tray. He stood next to another kid who stood next to the person in sixth place. They might as well have dug a hole to put him in. For his three races, he came in eighth, ninth and another eighth, but he still came home with a Mr. T’s neck worth of medallions.
The whole thing got even more insane when they called his name and he snapped into a Usain Bolt victory posture. If Usain Bolt had come in eighth at the Olympics he would have just kept running until he found a cliff to sprint off.
Here’s an actual picture of Sonny celebrating another track “victory” a la the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
This isn’t just an L.A. thing either. One of my listeners tweeted to me that at his kids’ school they had a track meet and third place was gold, second was platinum and first was double platinum. There literally was no bronze. The ranking system they’ve had since the inception of the modern Olympics is not good enough for today’s princes and princesses, and will certainly destroy their fragile self-esteem.
Don’t take all of this the wrong way. I love to see my kids succeed, I just think that as a society we continue to lower the threshold of what is deemed a success in order to not hurt any feelings.
Let me end with this quick note to Sonny for when he reads this later in life.
Son,
I bust balls about the ninth-place finish being a podium finish because I don’t want you to settle for that. That game ball on your shelf for your home run is a living reminder of settling for okay instead of great. I used to get participation trophies for my years of playing football. But I have no idea where those are now, because I got rid of them. They meant nothing to me. Those trophies were given to me for simply showing up. They may as well have been handed out on the first day of practice. Instead of that, I want you to feel the pride that comes with doing your best and kicking some ass. Like you did on this day:
This is a picture of you winning the 400-meter. That’s what I want for you, in all things. And what I want for me. Not in a reflected glory, my-kid-is-great-therefore-I-am-too kind of way. My old man never got his ass off the sofa to go to any of my football games. I could show up and simply settle for attendance, and call that a parenting success compared to him. But I want to cheer you on when you’re winning, and push you when you’re not pushing yourself. If I’ve ever gone too far, I’m sorry. It’s just that I believe, as a wise man once said, “Scars Heal, Losing Doesn’t.”
Conclusion: To Sonny and Natalia, on the Definition of Success
AS YOU KNOW by now, I was raised in an environment where success wasn’t an option. Yet somehow, I broke the pattern of merely getting by and have a life I enjoy and am proud of. I think this is due, in large part, to surrounding myself with successful people. The ingrained mind-set I had to fight against came into sharp focus when I was with Jimmy Kimmel doing some media. Around season two of The Man Show, we sat down for a behind-the-scenes interview for 20/20. The woman who was interviewing us asked me, “Did you ever have any idea that you’d have this kind of success?” I said, “No. I’m a guy from the Valley who swung hammers and dug ditches. I would’ve been happy just writing jokes for someone else. I never imagined being in front of the camera, having writers and a staff or a big set.” It was true. I would have been happy just being the guy who built the set. She then asked Jimmy the same question about our success. And he said, “I’m surprised it took this long.” The interviewer laughed like it was a joke, but Jimmy was dead serious. He was twenty-seven at the time, but he thought he should have been on television at twenty-two. It’s a good way to think. When you have that kind of vision, you’ll be much more likely to make it happen.
So, Sonny and Natalia, in this final chapter I want to talk to you about success. It was a conversation I never had with my folks, because they never experienced it. I have. And let me tell you something. Success sucks. Never become successful. I’m serious. Avoid being successful at all costs, because once you are, everyone is going to want a piece of you. If you have money, your ne’er-do-well brother-i
n-law is going to owe you fifty grand, want another sixty and when you tell him, “Not until you pay me back the first fifty” he’s going to call you a douchebag and cause a scene at Christmas dinner. Many of the jag-offs that I went to high school or worked construction with back in the day are still hanging around, sucking off my teat. They’re decent guys who can’t get their shit together and I have too much of a heart to cut them off. Trust me on this. While you may be Planet Success, you’re going to be orbited by a bunch of loser moons.
People will come out of the woodwork that you don’t even have a connection with. Really. I got a call one day from a guy named Tony Bruno. He’s vaguely related to me in some way—he’s the brother or son of my dad’s cousin. I’m not even sure if it’s cousin by blood or “cousin” because he and my dad grew up on the same block in South Philly. Either way, I’ve never met the guy. He knew I was a showbiz success, and wanted a little help getting his own career started. He was a musician. Long story short, he had a demo he wanted me to get into the right hands. This was in 2010. The reason I’m specific about the year is because the date makes it extra funny, and pathetic, when I tell you that his demo was on cassette.
Be prepared. Once you’re successful, chances are that you’re going to be called a one-percenter, someone who hangs out on a yacht with Mitt Romney, doesn’t pay their fair share of taxes and kills seals. People will assume you had everything handed to you because of white privilege. All of this will make you a target for bullshit lawsuits from people who want to take you down to bring themselves up. As I’m writing this book I’m out six hundred fifty thousand in legal fees, having just fought off patent trolls who sued me and other podcasters for no reason other than to make money off work they did not do. I was a target simply for being successful.