Boxes of crap always pose unseen dangers for me. I keep mementos. I have a spirit ribbon from a Douglas MacArthur Junior High football game in 1972. I’m sure it meant something at one time, but I seem to have killed the brain cells that held that memory. I can’t throw it away because I know it means something to me; I just don’t know what.
I was going through a box the other day. I found the front page of the Wednesday, October 29, 2003, Sports section of the New Jersey Star Ledger. The Star Ledger was the primary newspaper of northern Jersey. It was a pretty big deal. I kept that paper because of the headline: “Garner Sisters Trigger Wardlaw-Hartridge, 1-0.”
On my 40th birthday in October of 1997, two friends took Landi and me to dinner at Windows On The World. They were wining and dining us so that they could talk about merging our businesses. Windows On The World was the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center.
I owned a small IT consultancy that specialized in solving problems in distributed systems, HPUX Unix in particular. I’m not bragging when I say that we were one of the best in the world at what we did. My friends, Scott and Frank, owned a similar, small, but very successful consultancy that was network focused. Their idea was to combine our companies and get big. They were both twenty-five years old, and their goal, they said, was to be worth forty million dollars by the time they were forty years old. They wanted me and my company to be a part of it, to “hitch my wagon to a star.” I asked for some time to think about it.
I knew Scott and Frank very well. Both are good guys. I knew that they would build a business plan to achieve that goal. They would absolutely execute on that plan. They were smart technically and both were very good businessmen. They were about to begin a journey toward vast wealth and wanted me and my company to go with them.
In October of 1997, my son, Catfish, was nine months old. My daughters, ages 10 and 11, were living with their mother in Arkansas. I had seen my oldest, Jen, play a single softball game. I had never seen Jordan play. I remember watching Jen run the bases after getting a hit. She was running full speed, but she wasn’t lifting her knees. I remember thinking “I could help her with her running form. She’d be a lot faster…. if I had more time here.” But I had to fly back to Jersey.
One of the things that always sticks out in my mind about my parents was that they were at every swim meet I ever swam in and at every football game I ever played in. No matter if I played every play or never got in the game, Mom and Dad were there, always. Sometimes I wished they hadn’t been there, especially if I had done something dumb, but they were there watching me give my best efforts.
I remember a football game one night on a dusty field in Olive Branch, Mississippi, in 1970. I played for an 7th/8th grade team from Oakshire Elementry in Whitehaven, Tn. We were down by a couple of touchdowns against Olive Branch. In the fourth quarter, Coach Daniels put me and told me to “go out there and throw the ball.” Jimmy Stegall and Billy Holland were my primary receivers and we walked the ball down the field getting 5 to 6 yards a play. We ran the little down and out patterns we had run a million times in practice. Finally, the defensive backs started trying to jump the route to get an interception or break up the pass. Stegall turned his route into a down-out-and-up, I threw it over the top and Jimmy ran about fifty yards for the score.
We were only down by one and we got the ball back. We started down the field again with the same short passes. In my mind, I was Archie marching the Rebels down the field. We were going to win. There was no doubt about it. Time was getting short when Mike Pittman, our wingback in the old, single-wing formation, came into the huddle and said he was beating the corner back on every play. He wanted to run a post pattern. We were on Olive Branch’s thirty-five yard line or so. A post pattern could be a quick score.
Just like he said, Mike blew past the corner back and was wide open. No one was between him and the end zone. I threw the ball. For a moment, it looked perfect. I watched it in the night sky. The throw, illuminated by the lights of the field, was a tight spiral. For just that second, it looked almost like a perfect pass. Then someone creamed me from my blindside, but I had seen enough to know. Laying on the ground, I knew I had overthrown Mike by a fuzz. Mike, running down the field, realized it too. He gave it his all, but it wasn’t enough. At the last second, he dove. He was stretched out flat, but it wasn’t quite enough. The ball passed his outstretched fingertips by a fraction of an inch. Empty handed, he skidded on his belly to stop just short of the end zone. The game was over. We lost.
Dad saw that. Mom saw that. They and just a few other parents were there to see a great few series of plays by a 7th/8th grade football team living out their dreams, trying to pull off a comeback win in the closing seconds of a football game.
I thought about that a lot. Scott and Frank were young. They were in their mid-twenties and had no kids. Merging with them would mean working in NYC all of the time. It would mean doing eighty-hour weeks to build capital to fund growth. It would mean travel to build a network of clients. Their plan was to quickly open offices in LA and London. Though the New York Yankees were their “flagship client,” they had their eyes on Wall Street and were already making inroads there.
There are times in your life when you get the opportunity to make a decision that will affect you for the rest of your life. Sometimes, you realize this when you are doing it and sometimes you don’t. I thought about it. It comes down to what is really important to you.
By October 2003, Jen and Jordan had moved to New Jersey. Jen, Jordan, and Catfish, all went to school at the Wardlaw-Hartridge School. (We used to call it “Hogwarts.”) Jen, the keeper on the soccer team, was a senior and Jordan, a forward, was a junior. Wardlaw wasn’t known for its sports teams at that time. The girls’ soccer team wasn’t very good at all. Jen routinely had fifteen or twenty saves in goal. Jordan frequently found herself alone taking the ball toward the goal. On Tuesday, October 28, they played Bound Brook. The game was at our field and was hard fought. It was a rainy afternoon. At one point, Jordan got loose with the ball and looked to have a breakaway run with the ball until it found a puddle and stopped. Finally, late in the first half, with an assist from Amanda, Jordan scored. The score was 1-0.
In the second half Jen was pummeled from all sides as Bound Brook tried, time-and-again, to score. Though battered, Jen held tough. Darkness was creeping in as the game drew to a close. Time was short. Only seconds were left. Bound Brook fought to get the ball into the box for a close shot, but Wardlaw flooded the box and fought back. Finally, in a final moment of desperation, Bound Brook fired a shot off. It was a rocket shot and it ricocheted off a Wardlaw hand. It was a handball in the box. There was going to be a penalty kick from the top of the box. Ten yards between the kicker and Jen, the keeper. One shot to tie the game. One shot.
I couldn’t breath. The tiny crowd watching the game was so quiet you could hear a fish fart.
Jen got ready. It was getting darker by the second. The Bound Brook girls approached the ball quickly and launched a bullet toward the lower left corner of the goal. Jen reacted like a cat, diving and stretching and reaching enough to barely tip the ball outside the goal.
The whistle sounded. The game was over. Wardlaw won 1-0.
I saw this with my own eyes.
About a year ago, an old friend in New Jersey died. Scott called me to let me know. We took the opportunity to visit some. It’s been twenty-six years since we had dinner at Windows On the World. I’m retired, living in Florida and enjoying the adventures of my kids, my dogs and my grandkids. Scott now lives in Colorado. Every Monday morning, he takes a private jet (NetJets) to Newark and then a helicopter into Manhattan where has a condo. His wife grew up in Colorado, and they are raising their kids there. The kids are teenagers now. Every Friday afternoon he flies home to his family. He tries to get there in time for supper. Frank is divorced and splits his time between NYC and London.
When I found that old newspaper, I smiled and remembered that hard fought match so many years ago. I thought back on every soccer and softball game my kids ever played. I smiled at their victories and remembered their losses.
I thought about my friends, Scott and Frank. When we are young and working like dogs, we all say that we are making sacrifices for our families. The long hours are all for our families, we tell ourselves. I didn’t believe that then and I don’t believe it now. I think that when we work those nights and weekends, we are sacrificing our families for work.
That old newspaper reminded me just how good life has been to me. I saw it all.
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