By Adam Kaplan
I am a sports fan. I appreciate that the rhythm of the sports seasons gives me great sports options during the times of year that I am most free. Most sports fans would tell you that the summer is sort of the doldrums in the sporting world with little going on besides the dog days of the baseball season, and the midseason of the extraordinarily long PGA tour. Luckily, I have a fairly full plate during the summers and do not have to suffer through this sporting downtime.
What I love about sports is that it is an arena in which we can see true drama play out in a very real way with very benign consequences. Through sports, we get a chance to watch how someone deals with adversity. We get to see how people handle gigantic triumphs, and how they manage colossal disappointments and abject failures. Yet, the result of the games is not life or death….they just win or lose. It is great fun to watch and very instructive about people.
Through watching sports, we not only get a chance to watch athletes deal with these situations, but we also come to feel like we know the players that we watch, and so we cheer for or against them. Through watching them succeed and fail, as well as through “up close and personal” interviews from the media, we truly come to believe that we know and understand these folks. We know what makes them tick….
This is, of course, nonsense. The truth is, most of us sports fans don’t know the athletes at all. Some of the most revered and respected athletes are not remotely who we have been meant to believe they are. The most stark example of this in the last decade is probably Lance Armstrong. Here was an absolutely incredible athlete who had overcome great hurdles to emerge as the top athlete his sport had ever seen…the GOAT. And the image that had been presented to us, his fans, was that in a sport rampant with cheaters, Armstrong was a guy who had succeeded cleanly. He had beaten all of the cheaters. As the world eventually learned, he had been cheating all along, and bullying his competitors in the process. Similarly, not too many years ago, Tiger Woods was at the top of the sports world. With a squeaky clean image, and unbelievable talent, Tiger had positioned himself as an ideal role model. We all felt like we knew and understood Tiger which only deepened our respect for him. In reality, Tiger was not the person that was fed to us by his handlers, and his carefully cultivated image was just that. He was a flawed man battling addiction and making poor choices. There are so many of these disappointments…Michael Vick, Michael Jordan, Ray Lewis, Marion Jones, Kyrie Irving….sadly, the list goes on and on.
This problem is not isolated to the sports world. We see it in virtually all forms of celebrity. Whether it be the once revered OJ Simpson, or the once admired Tom Cruise, or the previously idolized Mel Gibson, or the unassailable Ellen Degeneres, they all turned out not to be quite the people that we had believed they were. The status of CELEBRITY creates, with so much of the public, a false sense that we actually know these people. We do not know them, and we spend WAY too much time trying to know them.
I want to be clear here. While there is a certain amount of culpability that is appropriately leveled at these famous folks for carefully cultivating and presenting a false image to all of us, (and certainly, the criminals among them are deserving of scorn) the truth is, that they are all just human beings. They are flawed and unable to rise to the level of perfection that we want them to. That’s the challenge of being human.
But, what we should never forget is that none of these folks really matter in our own personal worlds. Yes, they can entertain us, yes they are incredible at their chosen professions, but they are ultimately irrelevant in our lives. What really matters is the people in our lives, the people that we interact with on a personal level. What really matters is the people that share their strengths, weaknesses, nuances, and complexities with us; these are the folks that we should really be focused on.
There is no better place to discover these people, and to connect with them, than in our camp setting. (I know…you saw this segue coming for several paragraphs now!) It is in cabins and projects, at meals and evening activities, when we are interacting with real people and working through real challenges, that we find the folks that we truly want to admire.
I have been associated with Camp Nebagamon for a very long time now, thirty-six years to be exact. Without a doubt, the most incredible and truly admirable people I have ever met have been people that I know from my association with Nebagamon. And the reality is that none are perfect and all of them work through their own struggles. But what makes them truly admirable is that they continuously work on doing their best to be as good as they can be. I remain forever grateful that I get the opportunity to connect with the real people I admire on a regular basis through camp.
