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Can You Hack It? Living As If Spirit Was, Y’Know, A THING

[NINE-DAY READ. Okay, not really, but you *could* take each of the 9 spiritual life hacks below and make it your daily focus. Or take the 15 minutes or so now!]

“You can’t hack it!”

This was as derisive as we could get. This was contempt, as close as a small-town kid in the 1970s could come to putting a rival — and sometimes, painfully, even himself — in his place. You don’t have what it takes. You’re not tough! You just quit when things don’t go your way. (Later on, “You suck! took over, with more vulgarity and less nuance.) You get the idea. “Hacking it” was the idea of fighting one’s way through heavy undergrowth with a machete; for me, though, a more apt metaphor was less exotic — hoeing and hilling the backyard potatoes, maybe, or raking all the humps and stones out of the Edinburgh Square infield so the ground balls wouldn’t bad-hop us in the head. “Hacking it” meant taking your figurative least-blunt instrument and swinging, cutting, hacking our way through obstacles.

This isn’t about unscrewing jars or getting free stuff, but it might be useful anyway.

I suppose it later had the same connotation for the computer geeks looking to break code or bypass cybersecurity, hence “hackers”, which led inevitably to the concept of LIFE HACKS. Reddit forums, podcasts and twitter feeds offer all kinds of hacks and short cuts to living well. Video gamers exchange cheat codes that allow a player to jump past problems. Rami Malek won an Emmy for portraying a disturbed Hacker-As-Hero in Mr. Robot; we all want to hack the system, at least the unjust ones. (Okay, or watch movies where somebody prettier than us does.) But life hacks? Cheat codes to goodness? Can a few simple tricks pave the way to a life of nobility and genuine accomplishment?

Well, mostly no. “Life is suffering,” the Buddha persists in reminding us. (All the Buddhas have, in one language or another.) Looking for shortcuts and easy ways out doesn’t make for great leaders, inspiring artists, brilliant chemists or superb athletes, let alone someone on the “straight and narrow” path of spiritual enlightenment and wisdom. But while a life of goodness, higher awareness and peace of mind isn’t EASY to build, it also doesn’t have to be super-complicated. There are actions we can take, habits we can develop over time, that really do lead to contentment, to Soul Success.

Or, at least, this is what I’ve READ.

Still, my wife and I were inspired by an off-hand comment that Rainn Wilson made on a podcast. He mentioned that he has sometimes given “fireside chats” in which he shares his own “Spiritual Life Hacks”, though he didn’t mention what they were. We were intrigued, and we brainstormed nine of them to share during a laughter-filled, fire-crackling winter evening in our cozy living room. As are we, the Nine Hacks were inspired by the Baha’i teachings, but they are confirmed both by age-old practice and by cutting-edge thought…

So, are you ready? (Me neither, but I can certainly explain what we talked about!) In no special order, here’s what EnviroBride and I came up with as keys to living the Truly Good Life:

  1. CHOOSE PAIN & DIFFICULTY.

Wait: we should go looking for trouble? Not exactly. I’m not recommending that we all go out and pick up some fancy addictions or purposely make Bad Life Decisions. But I am saying, Don’t shy away from the tough stuff. LIFE will challenge us anyway, so why not toughen ourselves up by our own choices? It ’s not really so strange: artists, athletes, and scientists willingly, eagerly, take on tough challenges in order to grow in their work. It builds character! Tests help us to grow! (No, really!) Famously, basketball coaching icon John Wooden put “competitive greatness” at the top of his Pyramid of Success; he argued that “real love of a hard battle” made basketball players and teams, or anybody striving to do anything worthwhile, better and stronger. The finest steel goes through the hottest forges. The Baha’i Master ‘Abdu’l-Baha put it this way:

“The more difficulties one sees in the world the more perfect one becomes. The more you plough and dig the ground the more fertile it becomes….The more you sharpen the steel by grinding the better it cuts…”

He even said we should “bring [children] up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship.” Baha’i kids love to hear that one! But it’s true.

  1. SPEAK TO THE UNIVERSE. YELL HELP! BEFORE YOU NEED IT. (Yup, it’s PRAYER.)

Pray every day whether you think you need it or not. I am still a novice at this after decades, but things somehow go better when I put some energy and thought into stating my requests to the universe and my condition within it. Praying. Whether we are basically saying Thanks!  or Help! or Wow! there is real value to voicing our innermost thoughts to our best selves, to the Universe, to our ancestors, to the Creator. We get out of our own heads. We consult powers higher than our own. We ASK. We put ourselves humbly in our place before The World has to do it, or seek understanding after life has smacked us down. It’s all good! And try not to think, I gotta get God to change His mind! Or make sure She knows what’s up!  It’s mainly our own minds we’re trying to change. Or at least, that’s the attitude that works best for me: try to feel connected with, and be mindful of, and maybe even ask for help from, a Higher Power. It’s one good way to get things off your chest.

  1. SPREAD COMPOST ON YOUR MIND. LEAVEN THY BRAIN.

As is manure to a field, or as yeast is to bread (it’s the leaven, the thing that makes it rise), so is the input of Words of Power to our hearts and minds. Reading It lifts us, nourishes us. Like most people, I have too many days where I feed my Best Self nothing but the spiritual equivalent of junk food — trivia and rumours and rehashed gossip, stuff that doesn’t nourish me at ALL. So I try to give myself at least a couple of high-fibre, vitamin-enriched mental inputs per day. I allow myself to think and rehearse the greatest thoughts of the greatest Minds. Apply. Rinse. Repeat. It doesn’t need to take long. The Prophet/Founder of the global Baha’i community offered this challenge:

“Immerse yourselves in the ocean of My words, that ye may unravel its secrets, and discover all the pearls of wisdom that lie hid in its depths…. Say: Through it the poor have been enriched, the learned enlightened, and the seekers enabled to ascend…” Baha’u’llah

And right now, for another instance, I’m reading — just a little bit, most days — the gorgeous, nature-adoring poetry of Mary Oliver. At the end of “The Summer Day”, she grabs me by the shoulder and looks me in the eye and says, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Now, that is a healthy snack for my head.

  1. “BE STILL AND KNOW”. MEDITATE.

Sometimes our hyperactive minds, our pinball attention, need to be stilled. Regularly, in fact.) There are many forms of meditation: from the active pondering of a problem, asking ourselves questions, to the emptying or quieting of the mind. Sometimes it’s a long look back, or imagining our way into a future. (Sometimes, even now, it’s an empty gym, a hoop, and a ball.) Religious traditions have always, in various forms, advocated this quietness. (The snippet above comes from Psalm 46, verse 10, in the Old Testament.) We recently heard Daniel Levitin speaking on and around his new book, Successful Aging. The neuroscientist points to the science of meditation and its demonstrated benefits to brain health and psychological well-being. Strong advice, given in a church sanctuary to a nodding host of mainly non-church-going white-haired well-to-dos. My wife commented, “Well, it’s great that he’s advocating it, but religions have been telling us this forever!”

“The spirit of man is itself informed and strengthened during meditation; through it affairs of which man knew nothing are unfolded before his view….Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries…” ‘Abdu’l-Baha

  1. STUDY ACCOUNTING! (KEEP SCORE, but BE KIND.)

We can learn. We believe. We plan. We are doers. We are HUMANS being. But if we don’t examine all these things for ourselves, we’re barely half alive. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. We need to pause for reflection a whole lot more than most of us do. We need to know the score, not of the most recent Raptors game but of our own lives. The great sportswriter Grantland Rice (in a long poem, about football, of all things!) concluded as follows: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks–not that you won or lost– / But how you played the Game.” And that score is not measured, it goes almost without saying, by comparing ourselves and our material well-being to others and their treasures; as the Indigenous prayer says, we ask assistance and take stock of our lives “not to be superior to my brothers, but to be able to fight my greatest enemy, myself”. Yes: know thine enemy. So we should find some way to get to better know ourselves, in some semi-organized way. We can reflect according to whatever schedule works, but the foundation is some brief DAILY accounting.

Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.” Baha’u’llah

Well, that was blunt!

  1. THANKSGIVING IS EVERY DAY.

Maintaining an “attitude of gratitude” breeds humility, respect, openness, and love. We might ask, What am I grateful for today? The mirror image of thankfulness is generosity. So we Thank. And we Give. Thanksgiving. It works. It’s one of the principal reasons to pray, has been forever, but it’s also a great way to train ourselves to habitually think and behave. Christian pastor Charles Swindoll said it well: “The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.” Thanksgiving is a CHOICE. Many life coaches preach the importance of the “attitude of gratitude”, and there are all kinds of scientific studies that prove it: people who are grateful are just happier, more contented, more likely to see their circumstances in a positive light. (They’re also NICER.) Thanksgiving is a renewable resource, and we should mine it daily.  

  1. DIVORCE YOUR STUFF.

At LEAST get a firm pre-nuptial agreement, so you don’t get to the point where your stuff owns YOU. (‘Cuz you can’t take it with you…!!)

MATERIALISM IS A BEAST, and it doesn’t take days off. We need to tame it. Face facts (it won’t hurt, honest!). We are tempted (constantly! everywhere we walk or scroll, by the entire machinery of our so-called civilization!!) to worship things: from big bank accounts, private jets and exotic vacations to sports franchises, sneaker collections or the obese menu of our favourite foods and drinks. It’s the human condition, after all. We do live a material existence, and I’m not suggesting AT ALL that we lead some weirdo, shadow existence that denies the basic facts of bodies. But we all know that at our best, we don’t become slaves to our possessions, our selfish desires, or our pleasures, for that matter. We should try to do better than merely “amusing ourselves to death”, as the late great Neil Postman wrote. Meanwhile, the Baha’i Teachings refer to “materialism: rampant, crass and brutal” (!!) as one of the modern “false gods” that we unconsciously substitute for real spiritual longing, for a genuine reverence. The globally elected international council of the Baha’i community — it’s amazing — warned in 2017:

“The forces of materialism [say to us]…: that happiness comes from constant acquisition, that the more one has the better, that worry for the environment is for another day. These seductive messages fuel an increasingly entrenched sense of personal entitlement….Indifference to the hardship experienced by others becomes commonplace, while entertainment and distracting amusements are voraciously consumed. The enervating influence of materialism seeps into every culture…” 

It’s hard not to let it swamp us. If we can’t exactly divorce our stuff, maybe we could try to just be friends?Baby steps: a little detachment goes a long way.

  1. HUNT GOODNESS! BE A HOPE DETECTIVE.

My best buddy and his wife have long worked hard at a thing they call valuing. It’s their antidote to the relationship-killing tendency to find fault with and backbite about everybody, but especially about the ones we should most care about. Does “seeing the good” make us wilfully blind? Not really; it actually clarifies our vision. Chronically seeing the negative is NOT “reality”, but just a bad mental habit. Instead, work to find what is best about spouses, or colleagues, or situations. Apply ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s simple foundation of psychological health: the 10 and the 1. (Simple, but not easy!!)

“If a man has ten good qualities and one bad one, to look at the ten and forget the one, and if a man has ten bad qualities and one good one, to look at the one and forget the ten.” ‘Abdu’l-Baha

Naive and “super nice”? Hopelessly optimistic? Pretending that everything is just fine even when it clearly isn’t?

This is NOT what I mean, or what “look at the ten…look at the one” means. More like this, as sadly departed writer David Foster Wallace urged in his only commencement address: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed…” Being positive is good hygiene! Filling our thoughts with what is NOT — negative situations or characteristics that lack the goodness we hope for — is not nearly as nourishing as seeing what IS. Seeing the positive this way (think: our kids, our students, the girls on the basketball team) helps others to be the best of themselves, even as it makes it easier for us to gather a little joy and discover more fuel for the warming campfire of gratitude. Everybody wins!

  1. TURN HUMAN NATURE ON ITS HEAD.

The ancient theological doctrine of original sin, compounded by any number of modern arguments for cynicism and chronic disappointment, has been profoundly confusing and destructive. Have you noticed? When people shrug and say, “It’s only human nature”? it’s always after someone gives in to temptation, or steals, or cheats on a friend, or erupts in violence. But if human nature is essentially negative and destructive, how come most of us have family and friends that we love and trust? When we look at the people we know best and care about, we might see the flaws (see no. 8) but we’re more likely to notice that most people are mainly good most of the time. We’ve ALL seen it: people help one another, at need; they’re friendly, if given half a chance; they build, they make art, they love children, and they aspire to goodness even when they’re far from it. This is also human nature! We need to learn a new reflex, so here’s my challenge: whenever you notice a small kindness, or witness people helping each other after tragedy, or consider that young person who dies in tackling the creep who’s killing kids in a school, announce it to everyone who can hear you: WELL, THAT’S JUST HUMAN NATURE RIGHT THERE!

It’s one of the ways that the Baha’i Teachings keep turning my head around, and have so much healing wisdom and energy. They say: humans are essentially good, but we can go horribly wrong if we’re poorly trained or left to our own selfish tendencies. In other words, the human spirit is a noble thing, but we can turn towards lowdown thoughts and things and, yes, we can use our superpowers for some pretty crappy purposes: 

“O SON OF SPIRIT! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.” Baha’u’llah

 “Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess….Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” Baha’u’llah

This last one is the touchstone of my life. “The root cause of wrongdoing is ignorance.” We need to KNOW BETTER, and help everyone — but especially the young, and those who raise them — to recognize these “hidden gems” that are inside us, and help them to be discovered, polished, and displayed. EDUCATION IS EVERYTHING.

 

Early this morning I walked long as snow built up on the trees, and it occurred to me that my bride (a dancer, a skier, a lover of movement and stretching and fitness and did I mention MOVEMENT? — came up with NINE WAYS TO LIVE LIFE BETTER and not one of them was EXERCISE. (Or even avocadoes.) Our spirits tend to get lifted by the gym workout, the brisk walk, the game of footie or even hacky-sack at lunchtime. So that was a miss, and no doubt you can come up with other “spiritual hacks” that have worked (or could) for YOU.

These things WORK! Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking any of this will be easy, but it’s not string theory! Every guru reminds us: “Step by step. Little by little. Day by day…” Thanks for paying attention!

Coach Obsesses About Basketball “Requirements”, Has Words

[9-minute read]

Just down there, in the He Said/She Said section of this here site, is the latest quotation that got me to thinkin‘…

Bonus points if you know this guy. Hints: HoF player and coach; *not* J. Naismith!

The citation is from James Naismith, in 1892, weeks or months after he scribbled down the 13 Rules of the game he had just invented. He was far too humble to call it “The Naismith Game” or anything like it, so he called it “Basket-Ball” “because there’s a [peach] basket and a ball, so…” I saw a reference in something I’d read to what might have been the second thing he wrote about his new baby, this sport he’d been asked to design in order to give young Christian men — it was invented at the YMCA’s International Training Centre, after all — a way to keep in shape during a Massachusetts winter. (And this, from a Canadian! Perhaps there was no ice rink at the Springfield YMCA? Maybe he held an anti-hockey grudge? Or — horrors! — he didn’t know how to skate?) Anyway, this was the reference, a copy of which hangs in the Naismith Museum:

 

“THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL REQUIREMENTS OF BASKET-BALL”

“Agility, accuracy, alertness, cooperation, initiative, skill, reflex judgment, speed, self-sacrifice,

self-confidence, self-control and sportsmanship.”

There are 12 qualities that he wanted the game’s disciples to know and strive for. And I couldn’t help noticing how close they come to alphabetical order! (So yes, I’ve given Coach Naismith a little editorial help in what follows.) In the interests of obsession and whimsy, let’s think of them not only in this (improved) order but also with my (mainly) approving comments on Dr. Naismith’s “requirements” after each one:

ACCURACY. When modern hoopswise guys talk about “athletic ability” and the physical prowess of prospects and pros, they routinely ignore this one. They favour sprinters, long-armed discus-throwing types, jumpers and other track’n’field demonstrations of “athleticism”. Even 128 years later, we need to be reminded that hand-eye coordination, the ability to make that leather globe go through an elevated fruit bucket (or between flailing limbs to an open teammate) is fairly important, too. Cooz. Earl the Pearl. Nash. Steph. KD. Luka. Accuracy.

Continue Reading >>

Ignoring Excellence: Sport At Its Best, Barely Noticed

[8-minute read]

They were coming down the escalator, the whole team and its coaches and support staff, and there must have been a few dozen friends and family members along for the ride, too. I was virtually there thanks to the randomness of the Twitterverse, watching video shot by somebody at the Ottawa airport (#YOW!) as the Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team returned home, victorious again, from the Canadian university championships. I kept waiting for the punchline, the birthday shout of “SURPRISE!!” Confetti, maybe? A brass band? Something.

Ravens at the Ottawa Airport. That’s Marcus with his back turned, Big Eddie left of the banner with a suitcase, gritty Mitch on the other side. (photo by YOW staff)

I was waiting for the welcome, but I wasn’t actually expecting one. I’ve seen this show before. I retweeted the video, added a snide comment – they must have edited out the adoring fans and their roars of appreciation! – but it would have been surprising (and delightful) if there had been a crowd there. After so many championships, such unremitting quality, most Ravens home games are nowhere near sold-out, even though it’s a modest size and every seat is close to the action. Those lunatic student sections we see on American TV? At most Ravens home games, there are fewer students in the crowd than there are cheerleaders. Large swathes of Ottawa residents get right giddy if the local pro hockey millionaires so much as sniff the playoffs; the Senators are routinely mediocre and often appear to be poorly run. But the Ravens? Ottawa is just not that into them.

This is surely a place I go and a thing I write to feel special, in a why doesn’t anybody else GET how GOOD this is? sort of way. I’m not completely alone. There are plenty of others who understand how astounding are the accomplishments of this under-appreciated athletic powerhouse. Even cable giant Sportsnet’s Tim Micallef – once a year, mind you – brings real enthusiasm and knowledge to his praise of U SPORTS¹ basketball in general, and the mighty Ravens in particular. The final games in the tournament had high production values to go along with the fine play. What’s more, back in 2014, the American sportswriter Jordan Ritter Conn obviously *got* it; Conn wrote a comprehensive feature for the lamented Grantland site, subtitled “If a team wins nine out of 11 national championships in Canada, does it make any noise? Meet the Carleton University Ravens.

¹ U SPORTS is the third different moniker for the national university sports body. When I tried out for varsity basketball (cut at *two* different schools, beat that!), it was the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union. The CIAU gave way to CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sports), but that acronym wasn’t bilingual, either, so U SPORTS is now the brand. I still stumble over what to even call this association I pay so much attention to.

At the time, the Ravens under coach Dave Smart were on the verge of matching one of those “unbeatable” sporting legacies: the immortal John Wooden and his string of ten national championships in twelve years at UCLA. They’ve left that hallowed mark far behind now. Last Sunday’s 34-point blitz of the Calgary Dinosaurs in the U SPORTS national final in Halifax marked a FOURTEENTH TITLE IN SEVENTEEN YEARS. The Ravens are always at Nationals, where only the top 8 teams in Canada qualify. In the three years where, major upset alert, Carleton did NOT win the title, they were edged out by good teams playing superb games. But get this: in those 17 years, when the Ravens get to the championship game, they are 14-0. Fourteen times they’ve reached the highest rung along with one other team, and never lost. This can’t be true, but it is.

No, THIS way! Coach Smart. (Getty Images)

More preposterous? The 34-point smackdown of the Dinos this year doesn’t actually stand out that much. The Dave Smart Domination of the Canadian university basketball scene started in 2003, but of the first six championship games, five were decided by six points or fewer. Nearly all Carleton’s players were from Eastern Ontario, many of them developed as kids by Smart himself in his club teams. (Fun fact: four of his nephews played, starred, during his first decade as a coach. “He’ll run out of nephews eventually,” the cynics said. He did, but that didn’t matter.) They did not have overwhelming talent. Since then, though, as the Ravens began to attract players from across Canada, there have been some shocking feats of season-ending domination. 20-point wins in ’11 and ’12 were followed by a 50-point shellacking of Lakehead in 2013 and 2015’s crushing of UOttawa, again more than doubling the score on their crosstown rivals. A 22-point victory over Calgary the following year foreshadowed last Sunday’s extinction of the Dinos.

How does this happen?

He wouldn’t like this answer, but it’s obvious: it’s all Smart. (He credits players who buy in, sustain the expectations from year to year, and allow him to coach them feverishly.) For his career, he’s won well over NINETY PERCENT of league and playoff games. He is a basketball savant, and sees the game with a detail and precision that yours truly (a pretty confident hoops coach) can barely conceive of. He has incredible energy and focus, relentlessly challenging his players to be perfect and then to be better. (I don’t know how he sleeps. Maybe he doesn’t, at least at Nationals.) He is a master motivator. He was an effective recruiter who promised nothing but year-round effort and a coach’s chronic dissatisfaction – well, that plus improvement, success and brotherhood – until his reputation as a teacher of the game and his litany of WINNING did a lot of his recruiting for him. He is notably hard to play for. (I’ll never forget him berating fifth-year star Phil Scrubb for an error with under 2 minutes left, up by, oh, *48* or so, in the 2015 UOttawa massacre. He relentlessly chases perfection. I also remember Scrubb looking right at him, nodding understanding, as his players uniformly do. They all accept, even welcome, his urgent, desperate entreaties to do it right.) His teams practise with a furious intensity that somehow never ends in fisticuffs, and endure an internal level of competition that: A) makes game pressure pretty familiar, and B) somehow produces not antagonism but an amazing level of team cohesion, mutual respect and collective accountability. The Ravens rank with the greatest examples of TEAM play, the strongest rebuttal to the me first mentality, that I’ve ever seen or even heard of. They are the ultimate in unselfishness.

Which brings me to Marcus Anderson.

Anderson is a defensive menace. He’s in his fourth year with Smart, an internationally respected defensive guru. (Ever heard the trope “Defence Wins Championships”? The Ravens have. And they do.) Marcus doesn’t score much, though he can get hot from three-point distance, but he has been guarding the Ravens’ best offensive opponent for three seasons now. For the last two, he’s been selected as U SPORTS Defensive Player of the Year. Naturally, last Sunday, he drew the assignment of guarding Calgary’s do-everything star, Mambi Diawara. (What a great name!) He lured Diawara into an early offensive charge, but also got caught for two 1st-quarter fouls himself, and headed for the bench. His main replacement, a talented transfer named Isaiah Osborne, was clicking offensively and did a more-than-adequate job on Diawara. The team was humming, and unless I’m mistaken, Anderson never got back in the game. He played only six minutes, far below his usual contribution. And yet: there he was, standing at the bench, hollering instruction and encouragement to his mates on the floor. There he wasn’t, pouting or feeling sorry for himself over not contributing more in the Big Game. In the post-game huddle, after the bouncing and yelling and water-pouring exuberance of the Ravens’ celebration, there was Marcus, addressing the team. I don’t know what he said, but I know what his face communicated: I love you guys, we did it, all of us, and every bit of trial and sweat we’ve gone through is worth the world to me. Let’s keep going!

How long can this sort of unprecedented athletic dominance continue? Can the Ravens keep this up?

Short answer: YES. Marcus is back. So are tournament all-stars Munis Tutu and first-team All-Canadian Eddie Ekiyor. So are Yasiin Joseph and TJ Lall, the other starters. The Ravens lose the Mighty Mitches, hard-grinding forwards Wood and Jackson, and role-playing guard Troy Reid-Knight.

(A quick word on Mitch Wood. His whole season was a little like Marcus Anderson’s game. A far-undersized power forward at 6’4”, Wood is one of the toughest men you’ll ever see on a basketball court, and had been a sometime-starter in his previous four years. But with the ascent of Ekiyor as a dominant inside player, and with Smart having gone to a more guard-oriented lineup because of the logjam of talent there, Wood’s role was reduced this year, at least when it came to playing time. Didn’t matter: he was never anything other than a high-effort lynchpin for this team, and a quietly rugged role model. I loved a stretch during the second half of his last university game, when if the Calgary men had any glimpses of hope, Wood snuffed them out with a series of hustle plays in which he nabbed at least four of his game-high 5 offensive rebounds. These are relentless-effort, unyielding-determination plays that sap an opponent’s will, and which had Wood’s teammates standing and roaring their appreciation. They were thrilled by his career-ending contributions, the essence of what makes for a brilliant team culture. These Ravens have that by the truckload.)

Everybody but Troy and the Mitches is back. There is star power in the freshman and sophomore classes that most haven’t really seen yet, since it’s very tough to defend and rebound with the precision and fury that Smart demands.² There were five talented young men who sat out every game this season as redshirts, learning to practise like a Raven does, and aiming to score a game uniform next year. (One of them was on Canada’s U-18 team last summer, for crying out loud.) It’s awful news for the rest of the men’s basketball programs in Canada, and for the NCAA teams that come north to get spanked by the Ravens next summer (as, famously, the Duke Blue Devils refused to schedule Carleton on their Canadian hype-fest last summer; can’t let a defeat gum up the works of an ESPN DukeFest!). Next year’s Carleton Ravens could be A LOT BETTER than this year’s 37-1 championship squad.

² My favourite Raven is Yasiin Joseph, a local Ottawa high school star that I coached a little bit. He played barely at all in his first two seasons as a Raven, and politely cut me off one time when he knew I was about to give him the “hang in there, buddy” speech. “Hey, don’t worry about me. This is awesome. I’m learning so much.” He earned a starting job in his third year after a brilliant performance in leading a comeback win against Alabama and Collin Sexton in the summer of ’17, and was the leading scorer in Sunday’s final. Great hands, great heart.

And still Ottawa yawns. And most Canadian sports fans barely notice, let alone understand the incredible talent, effort and culture-creation that the Carleton Ravens basketball program³ represents. The good news is that I can still easily get last-minute tickets for games, and can take my high school players at great prices – if only I could convince them that it’s worth their time.

Short trip, I know, but it drives me NUTS. March Madness, indeed!

³ AND THERE’S MORE: I’ve written about the Ravens frequently over the years, most recently HERE and HERE and HERE. You KNOW you want to deeper…

 

2014: A Howdy-Do Year in Review

Last January, I didn’t get my 2013 lookback, The Great Eighteen, up until the 20th, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to call this prompt. Efficient. Timely — at least for me! Reflection on accomplishments never comes at a bad time. (Does it? Of course, you ninny! Okay, but — Which doesn’t mean it’s always foolish to look backwards, either. Alright then, so maybe — Just get to it!)

I posted to JH.com 93 times last year, which is as productive as I’ve ever been, and that with December nearly ringing up a doughnut. (That’s jock-talk for nada. Zero. Hole in the JZone layer. Nuttin’, honey. I missed that bizarro perfection by one lonely post, so the rest of the year must’ve been excellent.) Starting with my self-conscious blurts in the middle of 2005, JH.com now has an archive of 637 posts. That seems like quite a few.

So, I consulted a panel of experts. What were the most meaningful, artistically satisfying and world-changing posts of 2014 on JamesHowden.com? No. I didn’t. I trawled through 2014 and asked myself, “Okay, self, what do you still like and think others might, too?” Oh, I did take my readers into account, based on what got read most, or what found life elsewhere on the ‘Net, but mainly this is me Me ME. So here is a quick skate through some of the things I wrote here last year. It gives a reasonable portrait of what gave my head a shake in 2014. It’s a quick read, and you can click on anything that appeals. Here, then, are the

Fabulous Fifteen!

1. Sequel: The (Not Quite) Christmas (Late) Show* Must Go On (Jan. 2)                 (with Chinese Characteristics)

For the last three years in China, my wife and I taught in the School of International Business, a small college within our university in Dalian. Every December, there was a spangly student SHOW. Here, I reviewed this incredible, excessive, odd, passionate, obligatory celebration of something-or-other. Warning: this is only the second half of the extravaganza, and you may not be able to resist dipping back into December 2013 for the full jaw-dropping effect. It was amazing. (And only occasionally depressing.)

2. Lost in Cambodia  (February 5)

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Bruins and Ravens and Wins: Hey, WHY?

It’s all so blasé, a profoundly bland kind of humdrum yeah, so what? Even for those who actually pay attention, it gets taken for granted, but for the majority of people here in the capital of Canada an incredible sporting success story is little known and cared about less. Folks might have heard that one of those cute university sports teams, the one at Carleton – yeah, and it’s not even the hockey team, I think it’s basketball – well, it wins. A lot. A few national championships there, some will know; they’ll even sometimes play a game at the home of the NHL Senators. (Most recent commercial nomenclature: Canadian Tire Place. What it’s not called, but is: House of Hockey Worship; Puck Pagoda; Temple of Higher Shinny.) The Sens are fairly supportive, doing their good corporate-citizen best, but this remarkable basketball story, even with maxed-out local interest, gets the Place less than half full.

So listen up, Ottawa. Be warned, Canada! And pay attention down there, Excited States of Basketball – the Carleton University Ravens are poised to do something long thought to be undo-able, for any sports team, anywhere.

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Ten for Twelve. Ravens Win! (Well, *I* Felt Something.)

I’ll regret this later in the day, but only with a bleary, weary grin and a bemused shake of the skull. I get a little hoops-deprived here in China, but not in these wee hours. It’s ten to five in the morning, and my adopted hometown team has just done the ridiculous.

To update last week’s Jordan Conn article on Grantland: “If a team wins TEN out of 12 national championships in Canada, does it make any noise? Meet the Carleton University Ravens.” Well, the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees (just Google it) did, and fought madly and well, but the dynasty stands as the Ravens rolled on, 79-67. Did it make any noise? Well, just north of 7000 fans in the home of the NHL’s Ottawa Senators – yup, for all you Murricans reading, our national college hoops classic drew over 10,000 empty seats with the two local unis in it – made a fine effort. Sometimes the play-by-play guys were synchronized with the three cameras operating, and for a second-tier pro and a one-weekend-a-year ex-coach colour guy, the SportsNet 360 team did a fine job.

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Of Grantland and Conn and Backwoods Basketball

It’s an early Friday evening, down-home time. If I was in Ottawa, I’d have spent hours by now in a cavernous puck pagoda – named for reasons corporate after Canada’s iconic purveyor of duct tape, snow shovels, lawn mowers and power saws – and I and a few thousand echoing others would know two of the four teams in the only-slightly-mad northern university basketball version of the Final Four. It’s the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball tournament, and you can’t get there from here in Dalian, China.

The expected collision in the Canadian final: Carleton Ravens collide, in the big house, with their crosstown rivals from OttawaU.

The March Madness of the American tournament – featuring 64 teams (once the play-in games are out of the way) to our eight finalists – is yet to come, and I’m only slightly crazed by the distance I feel. Detachment doesn’t come easy, but it comes, friends, it comes, often whether we want it or not. When I’m in Canada, I’m an Ottawa man, have been since 2002. I’m a long-time nutter of a basketball coach, and I knew Carleton University’s Amazing Dave before he was the least-known ruler of Canadian sport, the guy whose teams at a previously mediocre Ottawa school have won nine national championships in the last eleven years. It’s a dynasty such as we don’t see in sports anymore, and even most maple leafs don’t know about him or the furiously good teams he produces, year after decade. The most shocking upset, possibly, of this year’s CIS Final 8 happened before the tourney began, when the neighbouring University of Ottawa Gee-Gees were given the number one seed after a late comeback storm and a buzzer-beater in the (almost meaningless) Ontario final gave them a one-point win over Carleton’s Ravens, their first domestic loss in nearly two years.

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John Wooden (on failure)

“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

John Wooden (191o-2010) was not only the greatest basketball coach of all time, but a wise teacher for 20th and 21st century America. I quoted his wisdom in a recent article here. He was my hero, perhaps even Number 2 among the greatest men I can imagine, and I can’t believe he’s been gone three years already. He was a writer and an educator, though, and his words live on, as does his example. His advice runs through my mind nearly as often as that of ‘Abdu’l-Baha. In the immediate calm-down after an incredible NBA finals, where I loved the Spurs and admired the heck out of LeBron and the Heatles, I miss basketball and coaching. I miss John Wooden.

A Hall of Fame player, tough and fiery, with a degree in English literature and teaching as a day job.

Humble victor, though he won again and again and again and again. A great man with feet of granite.

Learning Danny Green

Although my teaching schedule has blissfully allowed me to watch every minute of the NBA Finals — the games are on at 9 am here in Dalian, and my classes are mainly in the afternoons — it’s also June: time to make up for past marking sins, time for administrivia and visas and social obligations, time to prepare for a Canadian summer. I haven’t written a thing about the Spurs versus the Heat, and Game 6 is already upon us. Xiaoqiang is here, and the TV is warming up. I’m thinking about Danny Green.

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Happy November

It’s a great day for Catholics to remember and revere their preferred holy souls. It’s great for everybody, I say. All Saints Day (once called “All Hallows” day), was the original churchly stimulus for the dark and tricksy slant to the “All Hallows E(v)en(ing)” preceding it, which has grown into the tooth-rotting cuteness of the North American Hallowe’en. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except when high schoolers exulting in their sexuality and maturity also want to swipe the free candy that should go to small children. And to me.)

Coincidentally, it also was a day for me to repair a rather ragged piece that I had (prematurely) posted to the right in the It’s All About Sports! section. I had never suitably commemorated a passing that I’d been anticipating for years: the death of John Wooden last June. Coach Wooden was the closest thing to a saint that we’re likely to see in the world of sports, a coaching genius and an old-fashioned Christian gentleman and a great and enduring hero of mine since I was 16.

And did you know that National Novel Writing Month started today? It began as a lark by a few friends in San Francisco, California, and now a few hundred thousand people worldwide are going to try to write a 50,000-word novel this month. Tens of thousands will use the month as a carefree, quantity-not-quality way to be able to say: “I wrote a novel!”