The snow cat had turned back up the slope, its lights pointing in our direction. Trent and I dropped flat into a small depression, our bodies hopefully obscured by the shadows. The snow was cold and hard, but I was wearing plenty of padding. We were at the top of Vail Mountain at night, and it was pitch black save for the snow cats grooming the ski slopes for the next day. We looked around for our third, but Matt’s tall, skinny shape was nowhere to be found.

The lights passed us over. “Go!” Trent cried. In the crunching snow at a full sprint, we covered the last open expanse, then slid baseball style down to the catwalk, fully out of view. Matt reappeared a moment later, clutching a square of folded black plastic to his chest. “I dropped my trash bag,” he explained.

The sledding we were about to do was not smart, legal, or safe. In fact, we were probably the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night. But that’s what made it great.

We started out with a blue square, an intermediate run down the middle of the mountain. Trent handed me a trashbag with two leg holes cut out of it, and I climbed in, feeling like an overdressed hobo. Trent gave me a quick primer: wear goggles, tap with your arms to steer, and get up as fast as you can so as not to be bowled over by the next sledder. Then he and Matt, veteran trashbag sledders, took off down the run.

I could not decide which was scarier: standing atop a ski slope on a moonless night, waiting to get arrested by a snowmobile patrol, or sliding into the impenetrable darkness in a waste receptacle liner. I thought I heard voices, so I chose the latter.

I had forgotten the goggles. I became a moving cloud of snow crystals, an arctic Taz zooming my way to the bottom (and hopefully not into a tree). I couldn’t see a thing, and I barely missed taking Matt out as he stood up from his run.

We kept going like that, running, sliding, jumping up and running again, till we came to the end of the blue. Thrilling, I thought, but more for the James Bond antics than the actual sledding. The trashbag was easy enough to slow down by sitting up instead of lying flat on one’s back.

And we kept hearing voices. Our codeword was “Red,” as in the color that ski patrollers wear, and we whispered it to each other at least several times on the running, stopping dead in our tracks. We couldn’t decide if it was ski patrol or other trashbag sledders on a parallel run.

Then we came to the top of International, a steep, mogul-y black diamond. Trent looked over the top of it. “I’m not saying we should try it,” he explained. “I just want to see.”

Matt seemed hesitant, too. I didn’t see the big deal. “Dude, go for it,” I said.

Trent shrugged. A Vail native, he didn’t need to be told twice. From a sitting start, he slid down the face. We lost sight of him in a cloud of snow after twenty feet, but his cries did give us a roadmap for the run.

“Whoa…”
“Whoop!”
“HOLY SHIT!”
Giggles.

Matt and I went next. Sitting start, hands digging into the snow to slow down, but it made no difference. After the first mogul launched you airborne, the speed was too much to control, and the second and third one knocked us so high it made you wonder if you would have a functioning ass the next morning. My goggles had completely stopped fogged up, so I was flying blind at uncontrollable speeds down a mogul run. If my senses weren’t so overloaded by rushing wind, ice, and the sensation of weightlessness, I probably would have feared for my life. When I stood up, my beard was so encrusted with ice crystals that I looked like Santa Claus.

I called my girlfriend Jen from the bottom of International and told her what we were doing. “I’m imagining you guys as cartoon characters because I can’t imagine real people surviving that!” she exclaimed.

We had one last slope to consider: Pepe’s Face, the steep strip at the bottom of Vail Village that après-skiers sipping margaritas love to watch beginners fall down. We weren’t idiots; we took the catwalk around. But we did notice boot prints leading up to Pepe’s, getting deeper and deeper as if someone was running headlong, and then a single butt-sized trail heading off the cliff into the darkness.

I guess were weren’t the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night after all.

Could it be that a 16 year-old, only 4′9″ tall, is as wise as she is flexible? In her quest for the perfect full backflip with a twist, she somehow also discovered that achievement grows from steadfast, daily determination– and maybe even from enjoying this first great success as the world watches on.

Super-human feats are often preceded by big dreams. These long-term goals convinced a single mom to continue paying for her son, Michael, to take swim lessons and persuaded the Johnsons to double mortgage their house to keep their daughter in the gym. They believed that what was next could be astounding.

Behind the question, “What’s coming up next or you?” is an acknowledgment of a certain amount of pressure. There’s an expectation that the answer must be great and that the outcome must be even greater. And then, there’s the assurance that after that, the question will arise again and again. It may not come from a journalist, but from one’s own mind.

In the face of all that pressure, focusing on the present moment one day at a time may actually be a necessity. If an athlete’s mind escapes to a quandary over how their career will play out, they are certain to miss the play of their lifetime: the optimum stride, the ideal breath, the most balanced alignment. Champions are present with both mind and body. They perform to the best of their ability in each moment, which ultimately prepares them for the next moment.

We can all benefit from this model, whether we’re trying to write a book or to run a company. Piece by piece, day by day. This is how everything happens, from how cities are built to how personal (golden) triumphs are won.

This was the 100m butterfly, one of Phelps’ toughest tests. His qualifying time had actually put him 2nd to a swimmer named Cavic, not the 1st that he was used to. 100m means you only go up and back, and after the first 50m he was trailing pretty significantly. I had thought no one else in the bar cared, but as Phelps made the turn the sound started to rise. A pretty significant roar saw Phelps home in the last 50m, where he outtouched Cavic by the pencil width of .01 seconds.

But that was nothing compared to the next night.

We were dressed to the nines–it was an Indian wedding, and many women wore colorful silk saris as they danced to Britney (the bride’s favorite) on the dance floor. I had set up an ESPN.com alert for my phone to tell me when the race was going to start, but I didn’t need it. The race that could break Mark Spitz’s record for 7 golds in a game was going to be at 10:58, and by 10:30 I was checking my clock every 3 or 4 minutes.

At 10:45, I wandered across the hotel lobby from the ballroom where the reception was to the same hotel bar from the last night. Jen was supposed to meet me there in a few minutes. I noticed that several other people were doing the same, with the stealthy glances that could only be people leaving a social gathering to see a sporting event. By 10:55 the hotel bar was jammed with suits and saris, but still no Jen. I jogged back across the lobby to look for her on the dance floor to no avail. Then I saw one of her friends who told me where she was, in a corner of the dance floor I had missed.

I grabbed her by the arm with a stern glance–didn’t she understand that she was about to miss history? Her friends looked somewhat alarmed as I dragged her back to the bar. We got back just as the race began. I felt my intensity grow with the crowd, my shouts reflecting the general mood. The race was a 4×100 medley, which meant each American swam a different stroke. First up was Peirsol in the backstroke. I let out a few curt “C’mon, Peirsol!”s, but he didn’t need much encouragement, giving the US a good half body-length lead.

The second leg was Hansen, and along with the bar I grew quiet and tense as Peirsol’s lead slowly evaporated in the breaststroke leg. Then Phelps jumped into the pool for the fly. Like the night before, his first 50m was pedestrian, actually falling behind the Australians. But then the touch, and the turn, and he came on like a galloping, double-jointed horse. “C’MON PHELPS!” I started to scream, every five seconds or so, still constrained by propriety and the dignity of the tie around my neck.

Jason Lezak was swimming the freestyle leg, the anchor. The same Jason Lezak whose once-in-a-lifetime performance had caught the 100m freestyle gold medalist from behind and kept Phelps on track to eight golds. He jumped in the water with a slight lead from Phelps’ effort, with Australia right on his heels. At the turn he was still ahead, but not by much. Phelps’ 8 golds, one of the greatest feats in sports history, was hanging on these 50 meters.

At this point, all propriety went to hell. “GO LEZAK!!” I started screaming, so loud and so constantly that I felt my vocal chords ripple and fray from the effort. I clutched Jen in my right arm, who covered the ear I was screaming into with one hand and pumped the other in the air, cheering with abandon herself. Australia gained, but they wouldn’t catch Lezak, and when he touched and the NBC graphic of 1 – UNITED STATES went up on Lezak’s lane the bar exploded in laughter and cheers and wet eyes and hugs.

Jen looked in my eyes and said “Thank you,” a look of understanding passing between us. She went off to explain to her friends how I was not a terrible abusive boyfriend, and I went off looking for someone to share the enormity of the moment with. I wound up sitting at an empty table with an insurance salesman from New Jersey who at least knew his sports. We talked about Joe DiMaggio’s 56 games as possibly the next nationally cherished record that no one thinks will ever fall until it’s suddenly happening.

The thing is, where but sports is human achievement so simple, pure, and quantifiable? Generally in sports we like to cheer for two types: the underdogs and the dominant ones. But when a dominant athlete goes up against a seemingly insurmountable record like 7 gold medals in a single Olympics, he becomes the underdog as well. 7 gold medals. 8 gold medals. It’s simple, easy. One more is better. One more is the next level of greatness. Where does that happen in everyday life? There is clear victory in war, but then there are of course the lives that are lost. There is clear victory in elections, but then the guy you elected turns out to be just another politician. There is victory in life, love, and business, yet it’s never as clean, as uncomplicatedly glorious as that morning in Beijing, that night in the Hyatt in New Brunswick.

So I ask you, where where you when Phelps did it?

The right question is, what is the pool on. From Outside Online:

To promote the breaking of swimming world records, the Chinese have optimized their Water Cube pool for speed by: (1) Keeping the water at 80.6 degrees, the temperature considered optimal for swimmers; (2) pumping “microbubbles” into the pool to break the water’s surface tension; (3) building the pool to a depth of 42.7 feet, which prevents water-temperature interference; and (4) introducing a ventilation system that whisks chlorine fumes off the surface of the water, allowing the athletes to breathe clean air.

Doesn’t anyone find that disheartening? It’s like throwing a slugger grapefruits so he can break a home run record–sort of takes the fun out of the idea. But I guess “…the world record, set in Beijing in 2008…” will be a common phrase going forward, which is exactly what the Chinese intended. Kind of upsetting, don’t you think?

Now lets look at who George J Mitchell is—former Senator from Maine and current member of Boston Red Sox front office management. Yes—I was stunned to hear it as well, a very interesting and underreported fact. This so-called impartial Mitchell Report was conducted by a man on the Red Sox payroll.

The problem with his report is its selectivity. Mitchell went after certain people and exposed them, leaving baseball’s complicity to hang on the necks of a select few. The targeting of Clemens may not be so much against the Yankees, as it’s clear the accusations begin with the Blue Jays, right after Clemens left the Red Sox on bad terms.

The Red Sox rationale for turning on their star pitcher was that he was done, gassed out. So Clemens turned around and won three Cy Young awards. Steroid aided Cy Young awards—well, maybe not the first one from 1997. But the others were steroid aided. Take that, everyone but the Red Sox.

In fact, the report seems to out someone significant on virtually every team but the Sox, especially players from the Yankees championship run, mostly accusing blatantly good men like Any Petite of using HGH before 2003, when it was both legal in MLB and under the law.

Anyone with eyes knows Barry Bond’s steroid abuse went way too far. Those same people know many in baseball look a bit too built, muscles a little too swollen, tempers a little too short (Jason Veritek). But feigning impartiality on this report is a joke. Mitchell had his targets and he went for them, hard. For the sake of baseball fans, we’ve got to get past the steroid era, through serious testing and intolerance. Not by commissioning a career politician to do a partisan hit.

Let me put this in context. Baseball has always been a peculiar sport, in that its records are far more revered than other sports. Part of it may just be because the numbers are so small and elegant: 56, 755, 511, 61*. But also because many of them were set in a time when baseball had the attention and cachet of NASCAR, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and MLB all in one. The personalities are larger than life–Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Ruth, Mantle, Williams. So it only makes sense that when so modern ball-masher starts chasing our bygone heroes we get upset about it. Hank Aaron, a great man, was vilified by many for his pursuit of Ruth’s record. But Aaron’s class won over even the small-minded folks in time, and he became a modern, living Ruth.

So when Barry Bonds started chasing Aaron, we were against him from the start. Bonds tried to make it about race, but it wasn’t. He would have been a villain no matter what he did. But here’s today’s revelation: Bonds really is a villain! The grand jury says so!

It’s hard to find a parallel for this. When has the nation illogically been against someone, only to have that illogical hatred justified? Seems like history always gives us the opposite examples with oppression of women, blacks, gays, etc. Sure you could say we knew about Barry. We saw his head and arms and home run totals expand and didn’t need a positive test to tell us. Nobody knew for sure, but we sure acted like we knew. Anybody think of a parallel for this?

And another question: what do people in San Francisco think about all this? While we were vilifying Bonds without proof, they were glorifying him in the face of the same knowledge everyone else had. Whaddya say now, Northern California?

I’m getting away from the point. At home in North Carolina several years ago, I noticed a guy with a blue devil tattoo on his arm. It was small—tasteful if you will. I liked it and it never even occurred to me that it was a little extreme to get a sports tattoo. Until the other day when I saw a photo online of a guy with the biggest Boston Red Sox tattoo ever.

I instantly thought, “I hope you were drunk when you got that thing.” So now I don’t know what to think. Here are some photos for you to look at and ponder the question, “Getting a tattoo of your favorite team: Really cool or as stupid as getting Daffy Duck?”

—————
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up is a column by Kate Torgovnick. Formerly appearing on Tuesdays, now look for it every Friday. The perfect way to ring in your weekend, right?

• wearing a Red Sox hat and a Rockies jersey because you “really like them both”
• purchasing baseball paraphernalia after October 1st, 2007
• rooting for the Colorado Rockies

As bandwagonitis is a seasonal affliction, its virulence in any given year is subject to environmental factors. The current strain is something of a “perfect storm” of treatment-resistant forms of the disease. In 2004 we first saw the rise of the “Reverse the Curse” strain of bandwagonitis which ripped through the country like wildfire, leaving a trail of pink Red Sox cap-wearing Midwestern girls and tearful parents in its wake. This year, that strain, though somewhat weakened since 2004, is meeting up with another form of the disease that seems to recur every four or five years: the Cinderella Story.

We must help her and others
like her before it is too late.

It should be emphasized that this is not a Cinderella Story strain to take lightly. Medical professionals will think back to the 1997 Florida Marlin Cinderella Story bandwagonitis and scoff. Yes, it is true that everyone expected a virulent form of the disease that year, and that fear proved to be unfounded, but remember the critical oversight: the citizens of Florida were too busy golfing and waiting to die to know that a World Series was being played. We should not expect a similar reprieve from Colorado this year, as the early winter has driven innocent Coloradans into their living rooms and bars until ski season begins, putting them in grave danger of becoming victims.

The only real cure for bandwagonitis (a steady diet of baseball games on television, radio, or in person, at least 50 in a calendar year) is rarely undertaken and is seen by many victims as worse than the disease itself. Left untreated, the disease will fade into remission over time. As such, the CDC* has released the following set of guidelines for those afflicted with bandwagonitis to follow in order to reduce its harmful effects on Real Fans, who are always the hardest hit during these times:

• Do not try to call balls and strikes. You do not know what a strike is.
• If you are watching a game with a Real Fan, be courteous. Offer to get them a beer whenever you get up, or to kneel on all fours and act as their footrest.
• Do not under any circumstances taunt a Real Fan of the six teams no longer in the playoffs** unless you know more about your “own” team than they do. Except Diamondbacks fans, of course, as no Real Fan has ever been confirmed among them.

If we all work together, I’m confident we can make it safely through October.

Signed,
Dr. Bitter Yankees Fan, M.D.

The Rules is a (mostly) weekly column by Ethan Todras-Whitehill setting forth the definitive truth on just about everything. It appears on Mondays.

Like many of these places whose history reaches back a hundred or more years, Cooperstown is built on a myth. In 1907 the Mills Commission, formed of ex-US Senators and baseball executives, declared that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown. They declared this despite the only evidence being a single man’s uncorroborated account of the event. But really, they declared it because like all things great and lasting and faith-inspiring, baseball needed a creation myth and a home.

In reality, the origins of baseball are much less romantic. It evolved from old games from Britain like stool ball and cricket and rounders that came over with the colonists and subsequent immigrants. The rules changed slowly over time, until they were finally first codified by the Knickerbocker Club of Manhattan, from which they developed into our modern rules.

Cooperstown. You read it, it means something. It means the Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball Mecca, the Home of Baseball. You read Canton, Ohio. Some of you think, where? Others go, of course, the Football Hall of Fame. I say Springfield. You think “The Simpsons,” not the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame. The point is, consciously or not, the Mills Commission knew what they were doing when they gave baseball a birthplace.

Cooperstown today is adorable. I took my girlfriend Jen there last week, and after we parked and were about to turn onto the main street, I warned her, “Be ready for an overdose of cuteness.” We turned and were confronted with a street lined with brick houses, impeccably kept trees, old movie theatres–and of course, shop after shop hawking baseball souvenirs. Halfway down to the Hall, Doubleday Stadium looms off to the side, a modernized Field of Dreams with a 19th century feel.

Then the Hall itself. At once grandiose and intimate, it opens with a show that invokes your childhood catches with your father at dark (“Tommy, come in!”) then leads you through the museum where you see Babe Ruth’s bats, Willie May’s glove, Ty Cobb’s spikes. You walk past the Negro Leagues exhibition, the homages to Jackie Robinson, and the slapdash “Women in Baseball Exhibit” (which really wasn’t done that well). Then you come to the hall, the bronze plaques inscribed with each member’s achievements. You come to Babe Ruth, his 70-year-old plaque uniquely shiny from all the visitors rubbing his face for good luck.

Cooperstown is where those who worship baseball can go to feel good about their religion. If you haven’t been there, it’s worth a trip.

Trouble was, that was all they wanted to do.

Have you ever seen a potato cannon (or gun)? It’s made of PVC pipe with a long barrel and an ingniting chamber. The potato is shoved down to the base of the barrel, and then some kind of ignitable material like aerosol is put into the chamber, and the fuse and igniter are lit. It takes a couple hours to make, plus some time to figure out the correct fuel/air mix, plus enough potatoes to feed a small Russian village.

The upshot, of course, is that you get to shoot a potato far. Really, really far.

What is it about guys that they want to make inanimate objects travel great distances?

What do we do at the beach? Throw a football as far as we can, inevitably bothering some grandmother. What do we do at the lake? Skip stones across it, with as much sidearm force as we can muster. I don’t play golf, but I do like to go to the driving range and just bomb balls down the field. I won’t ever hand a set of keys to someone if I can possibly justify throwing it to them. And then there was a time when a highly-educated friend and myself could discuss nothing more than a plan to throw fruit off his deck in hopes of hitting the water, and not the passersby in between.

It’s not inherently competitive, though as part of organized sports it can be. In my experience it’s mostly cooperative: you cheer for a buddy’s fifteen-skipper, just like you do if his tangerine clears the walkway. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve never seen women drawn to any of these pastimes. So what is it about guys?

And don’t give me any of those zoological or Freudian explanations. Last I checked, it wasn’t a sign of male virility how far you can ejaculate. And my territory is not symbolically marked by the range of my throwing arm. I think it’s simpler than that. I think it’s about the outward way that guys like to express their power–and not the Dick Cheney kind.

It is the power to propel an object to great heights, then watch the Earth’s gravity claim it again. It’s the rush that runs up your arm when you release a flat stone perfectly level to the water and for a few moments it walks on water like a sillimanite Savior. And maybe there’s a small part of you that doesn’t mind the looks of fear on the faces of the blanket-bound biddies when you and your buddies pick up the pigskin.

And in that power, there is joy. My twin charges finally got their father on the phone and had him authorize me as an official potato cannon overseer. I yelled at them constantly to make sure they didn’t mis-aim the cannon and hit a neighbor’s house or each other, but I had to admit that it was pretty darn cool that they could fire a spud the length of a football field. Budding scientists, artillerymen, or rocketeers, maybe, at that moment it didn’t really matter. It was just good, clean–powerful–fun.