I just got off the phone with my buddy Larry. He’s around 50 years
old. He said that he was unhappy about a show that he enjoyed not
being renewed, and he told his 13 year old daughter, Haley, that he
was going to write the network a letter. Haley said, “You mean that
you are going to the trouble of getting a piece of paper and a pen,
writing it all down, putting it in an envelope, licking the envelope,
putting a stamp on it, and walking to the mailbox to send it?”
“Yes,” he said. She
couldn’t understand it.
You may be saying, “Who
cares about knowing how to write and mail a letter, just write an
email.” I’m thinking that maybe that’s a skill that we don’t use
much any more, but something inside me says that it is a skill worth
having. These types of fundamental skills, I feel, are vital to life,
and having to actually go through a little trouble seems more
worthwhile to me than just sending an email.
Lots of stuff has
changed over the years and especially from when I was a kid and a
teenager in the 1970s and 80s. Some stuff has gotten better, no
question. Surgeries and medical stuff have advanced, among other
things. But over the years I think that we have lost some of the
ability to do things for ourselves, and to have to work hard to learn
about something.
I think that we have an
instinct to seek things out, but I also think that if it’s right in
front of us we will always take the easy way.
Do kids still love
lifting weights like we did when I was young? From the 8th grade on,
I was obsessed with lifting weights and getting bigger and stronger.
I needed to earn everything about it, all of it. Sometimes, I think
that with the overwhelming distractions of video games, social media,
and phones, maybe kids today don’t have the head space to love
gaining all the knowledge that they can about lifting weights.
Don’t get me wrong, I
use all that stuff, too. Except video games. Never played one. (I
lied, I played a hunting game ten years ago, twice.) But I had none
of those things when I was first learning about training with
weights. I had to learn about it the hard way, just like everyone did
back then.
I loved it from the
beginning, and have loved it ever since, over 40 years of it. Maybe
one of the reasons that I liked it so much was because we had to use
our imaginations a little. Pictures were a big deal. I would read the
Dallas Cowboys Weekly and if I saw one picture of the Cowboys –
especially Randy White – lifting weights, I would take note of
everything in the picture. I remember that one particular issue in
the 1980s that had Randy alone lifting weights with his Rottweiler
next to him. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Another
picture had him doing curls outside in Texas with a dip of Skoal in
his lower lip.
I studied those
pictures. Just the coolness of him being alone with his dog, getting
his lifts in, sent me to the weight room right away. I’d imagine
that I was cool like that when I lifted. It meant something to buy a
magazine and for it to have some great pictures of guys lifting heavy
weights. The pictures captured the strain, the exertion, the spotters
at the ready, the people in the gym gathered around with incredulous
looks on their faces.
I still remember a
picture in a magazine of Mr. America, Casey Viator, in the 1980s
incline benching 315 for reps with veins like snakes sticking out of
his forearms. Or powerlifter Jim Cash deadlifting with insane muscle
and vascularity. That was some magical stuff, and so inspiring. Hell,
even reading about great lifting fired me up. You would play the
movie in your head as the author described the lifter crushing some
prodigious poundage, or a hard set. There was something to all of
that. There was a certain mystery about everything.
Hell, it takes away
from the specialness of it all when you know all the facts about the
person that you used to only be able to read about in magazines or
pay to see in seminars if by chance they came to your town. Now, you
follow them throughout their whole day from when they wake up in the
morning, all their meals, their training, all of it. It leaves
nothing for the reader to wonder about. And you see their faults, you
see that they are all human. People like that stuff, but I don’t. I
don’t want them to be normal like all the people I know. Those guys
were like gods to me, and that made it way more cool when you
actually saw or talked to one of them in person.
I used to think that
kids today have it made with all of the information out there and the
videos and all. But I don’t think like that anymore. It’s just more
confusion and so damn easy. What do they have to learn on their own?
Who do they have to seek out for information? I can remember, in high
school, my friend and I would go to gyms just to watch people lift
weights. I can remember going to the Washington Redskins training
camp in the ’80s, sucking in a deep breath and forcing myself to
walk into the weight room and ask the assistant strength coach if I
could ask him a few questions. He did make a little sighing sound
like he was busy, but I persisted and he opened up and answered my
questions. Once you got people going, they would talk to you.
Everyone likes to talk
about their craft. I can’t imagine my sons doing that. And they both
love lifting weights, but not that much – not to have an insatiable
thirst for knowledge about it, to go out of their way to ask
questions like I did. I can’t even picture them doing that.
Everything is right there on their phones, or on YouTube, right now.
And because they don’t have to do the hard searching, they
don’t.
You see, when one
doesn’t have to search for knowledge, and then experiment on their
own and make mistakes on their own and then go find people with the
knowledge to teach them, or go to the bookstore and buy a magazine
about lifting weights or find a book about it and then, on their own,
figure out what works and what does not work, their life is missing
something. It is missing experiences, of course, but it’s the
difficulty of the seeking and the finding that makes it all worth it.
Without that, it can’t possibly mean as much.