Baby Athletes

Dez Bryant is being coddled by the Dallas Cowboys.  Apparently, a grown professional cannot take care of himself.  He needs a team of three people to keep track of him.  Listed below are the six rules he agreed to in order to continue to play football. 

• A midnight curfew. If he's going to miss curfew, team officials must know in advance.
• No drinking alcohol.
•  He can't attend any strip clubs and can only attend nightclubs if they are approved by the team and he has a security team with him.
• He must attend counseling sessions twice a week.
• A rotating three-man security team will leave one man with Bryant at all times.
• Members of the security team will drive Bryant to practices, games and team functions.

This is a professional athlete people!  Now granted, he's young and has more money than he ever dreamed of when he was growing up, but you shouldn't have to do that.  All that should have to be done is have these written into his contract when he signed it.  Everyone knew that he had some personal issues coming out of college.  Just put some verbage in the contract that states that if you don't tow the line, you'll get cut.  You don't have a job if you can't follow the rules.

The stipulations about the curfew and attending counseling make sense, I like them.  Midnight is reasonable, and besides nothing good happens after one o'clock in the morning.  And knowing that he has had some personal issues in the past, having counseling sessions a couple of times a week gives him the opportunity to work through the issues.  You know, instead of going out and self destructing.  I don't know how I feel about the no alcohol thing.  Drinking never really leads to good decisions, especially in heavy amounts, but do you mean to tell me that the guy can't have a beer or two after a game?

The big issues deal with this, for me, is the security team.  Professional baby sitters.  Three guys are getting paid to babysit another adult.  At what point did it become necessary for this to happen?  One able bodied adult needing another to drive them to their job.  I might start lifting weights and start talking to some teams to see if they need any of their players need a babysitter.  I could stand to make some serious bank to make sure someone else doesn't screw up their life. 

The simple solution to this problem is not to pay them as much money as they are making.  If you don't make hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, guess what, you aren't going to strip clubs.  You aren't making horrible financial decisions like buying ninety thousand dollar cars that you don't drive.  You won't have people coming around looking for handouts.  People who are looking for handouts because they live a life that might be a little less than savory. 

A year later

We have been in Minnesota for a year today.  We packed up our stuff and made the move from Kansas in the hopes that the job market would be better.  There are other factors that were taken into consideration when we moved, but that was the big one.  As my wife is finding out, even though there are more jobs around here, it pays to know someone on the inside. 

While the job search continues we have found that living in such a larger city there is just so much more to do.  I'm not just talking about going to malls, games, or museums.  There are places to just go and walk around.  There are lots of streets in St. Paul and Minneapolis that are developed to be a place to just go around and walk and see.  Sure there are stores and restaurants, but sometimes it is fun to just walk around the area and people watch.  On top of the run of the mill stuff you will find in any larger city, there are tons of parks.  Free parks, which is great.  A place to get out and walk around and because it's not always one hundred degrees in the middle of summer, you can enjoy them while the weather is nice.

One of the greatest things about living up here is how close we are to home.  Since moving here last fall, we have made it home four times.  Living down in Wichita, we would make it home about two times a year.  So we have doubled the times we have been home.  It's just been so nice to get home, but we have put on quite the amount of mileage on the cars in the process.  On the other hand, we don't fly any more, so that is a great bonus.  Speaking of home, living in Minnesota is almost home.  We missed having trees and water and even green grass.

In the end, I don't really regret moving from Wichita to the Twin Cities.  The toughest part was leaving all of our friends and a place we were comfortable.  Part of the adventure of life is the unknown, and we are living that right now. 

Chuck Being Chuck

I'm past the home stretch.  I have but one book left in my little quest to feel like I have accomplished something in a year.  After I finish up with these six books, I think I might just place every book I haven't read on my night stand.  A bigger challenge to see how many I can get through before next January, which sadly is five months away.   

When I was first introduced to Chuck Palahniuk's books I was a little skeptical.  I read 'Fight Club' after seeing the movie so the twist in the book wasn't much of a twist to me.  I picked up a few more of his books here and there and started to read them.  'Survivor' got me hooked on Palahniuk.  Yes, his writing style is weird.  Yes, his plots are twisted from time to time.  Yes, I question whether or not I am ever going to read another one of his books.  He has hits and misses, but doesn't every writer?  The thing about his writing is he doesn't stick to one style.  He changes his approach in each book and that is one thing I like about him.  You never know how much different the next book is going to be.  Is he ever going to win a Pulitzer Prize?  Probably not.  Would I read any of his books over, say, a James Patterson book?  Absolutely. 

'Damned' was a little more normal that I had anticipated, but still bordered on weird.  After some of his other books that went way far out, it feels like he has dialed it back a little bit on the two books of his that I read this year.  Just like 'Tell All' it took a while to get into the story because the main character didn't develop until a third of the way through the book. 

I know that this book focused just mainly on the narrator, but what makes a book a good book or even a great book, is secondary characters.  It's one thing to have a book mainly about one person, in the style of 'Old Man and the Sea', and have only a few minor characters that are around for just a few pages and it's another thing to introduce supporting characters, keep them around for the entire book, and not develop them.  It's infuriating!  But, it's what Chuck Palahniuk does.  He writes whatever he wants to and probably tells his editor to get bent. 

• Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies
• Tell All
• Damned
• A Little Matter of Genocide:  Holocaust and Denial in the Americas from 1492 to Present
• Suttree
• Founding Brothers:  The Revolutionary Generation