In 1988, Nike introduced the “Just Do It” slogan. The tagline ushered in the era of Air Jordan shoes and on its one swoosh the goddess company soared. Almost forty years later, the sentiment still sells gear while rolling off our tongues.

Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden + Kennedy, the independent advertising agency whose first client was the Oregon-based sportswear brand that boasts the swoosh-known-‘round- the-world was the creator of the “Just Do It” campaign. He stole the idea for the motto from a death-row inmate he read about who said, on the precipice of execution, “You know, let’s just do it.”

Despite the grisly origin, the slogan continues to thrive.

The shiny black hearse is the tip of the serpentine spear. Behind it, car after car after truck, truck, truck after car after car after car follows, each with headlights bright in the fullness of day, some with hazards blinking as if to clear their eyes or signify importance. Connected by heavy invisible hoses, coupled vehicles slink along, sometimes with no end in sight, managing the stress of pulling and turning. Yeoman’s work of carrying on. The train helps to dispense the weight.

In Oklahoma, oncoming traffic pulls to the side of the road to pay respect. 

It’s not the law, but everybody does it here.

The old oak tree at the very edge of the property is the last to let go of its leaves in the fall and the last to push buds in the spring. Every year I worry as I walk past it. Is it gone? Is it finally too tired to do it all again? I walk, watch and worry. Walk, watch and worry. Walk, watch and worry. Then one night while I’m sleeping, the grand, wily tree erupts. As day breaks, I pass by its sprawling branches full of rich green buds. “Welcome back!” I think and say out loud. Within a couple of days, it has the biggest, brightest, fullest, thickest canopy of any tree on the place. I hear it mock me as I make my rounds.

“Gotcha. Again.”

At the end of the opening scene of Apollo 13, astronaut Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) is standing in his backyard looking up at the sky. With an outstretched fist, Lovell moves his thumb back-and-forth and back-and-forth in a now-I-see-you-now-I-don’t maneuver over the bright white orb in the midnight sky. He squishes his left eye as he stares, “They’re back inside now, looking up at us. Isn’t that somethin’?” he says to his wife Marilyn (played by Kathleen Quinlan.) She drops the trash bag she is carrying and stops her cleaning up. 

“I bet Jenny Armstrong doesn’t get a wink of sleep tonight.” 

Neil Armstrong has just completed a bouncy stroll across the moon.

In the twinkle of a town where I grew up, we had one stoplight but two grocery stores.  Bi-weekly, my mom would make a list—in her impeccably petite, heavily right-slanted handwriting—of essentials needed for feeding my brother and me and taking care of the home we shared. She would pull the circulars from the Healdton Herald for Stones IGA and David’s Foods, dividing the list into what-to-get-from-where, based on the purchase price. She squeezed the juice out of every quarter, nickel and dime… didn’t then, and doesn’t now, have faith in or partake in waste.

Under the canopy of a giant Shumard Oak grows a burgeoning tiny acorn forest. Baby sprouts have rooted in and are growing in the bed where all my flowers go. If the ground were left alone without any human attention, nature would probably take over and there would be a grove. Or, maybe the great oak’s canopy would shade out the sun’s rich sustenance, and all the saplings would return to dust. Maybe the baby seedlings would get greedy and nudge one another out. Most likely, per natural selection, some would die and some would thrive. 

A lot could happen over time. 

The NBA playoffs have begun. Round one is underway and Oklahoma City is already doing what Oklahoma City does. They’re unnerving their opponents by guarding the guy with the ball, as well as all the guys without the ball... and the hoop... and the deadly deep corners of the court... all at the same time. They’re making each other-- teammates who happen to each be other-worldly in their own right-- even more other-worldly than they already are. They’re continuing to play pinch-and-poke like middle-school boys at their post-game courtside interviews. They are who they are no matter who the opponent is or what might be on the line. 

Ambassadors of clarity, bullet-proof identity, buy-in that runs thick and rich like blood, they are the standard. The team to beat. The defending world champions. 

But do not use that word.

“Defending.”  

“Defending” is not a concept the Oklahoma City Thunder acknowledges or accepts.

Years and years and years ago, I was invited to visit my son’s kindergarten class as a “guest presenter” during career week. Parents were asked to come in and talk about what they do. I followed a Fireman.  He brought the truck.

I was doomed before I began.

Below is a revised, updated version of a previously published piece about perhaps the most iconic of all professional sporting events--the Magical Masters...

I wonder if when they built it, they knew what it would become. Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts were iron-willed men on a crusade to create a thing they could see and taste but on Earth were unable to find.  So maybe.  Maybe they had an idea. But it would be impossible to have known then what an icon it would become. When the two men first laid eyes on the abandoned 400-acre Fruitland’s Nursery running parallel to the Savannah River, Jones said it seemed as though “the land had been lying here for years waiting for somebody to lay a golf course on it.” So they grabbed it, and with the help of Alister MacKenzie, that’s exactly what they did. They built Augusta National’s sweeping fairways between the trees, and layered dogwoods and azaleas in the straw underneath the pines. They used the bends and hills as guideposts; they built water and sand to act as foils.  And for the last ninety-one Aprils, it’s been hard to tell what the “and 1” is at the Master’s— the landscape or the golf.

They say the drive into Augusta National down the centuries-old Magnolia Lane transforms people.  It’s been known to re-set the sputtering and heal the wounded. To re-invent the fading and to birth the next in line. The magic is almost palpable though you never get a warning about where or when it might descend. 

It’s called a lie. The way the ball sits on the surface when it stops rolling, whether on the edge of a green where the tight stubble gives way to loopy blades, or in the center of a sand trap with barely a dimpled shell poking out above the grains. The lie informs what happens next. Which club to use, what stance to take, how hard to swing. So much depends.

On and off a golf course, it almost always does.

I heard about a woman who decided, on a whim, to host a New Year’s Eve party. On the invitation in the space beside “attire” she wrote: “Wear the one thing in your closet that you never get to wear because you have no reason to.” 

People showed up in things like a yellow fur hat, a prom tux from the 80s, a wetsuit, a kilt.  She said it was the best party she had ever been to --not because she threw it, but because the people in attendance left their familiar fabrication back at home.  

Her off-the-cuff invitation had given people permission to not have to try to fit in. 

Figure skater Sarah Hughes was sixteen years old when she glided to a gold medal in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Our team was participating in the Big 12 Basketball Tournament when she shot up from fourth to first on the wings of a technically demanding free-skate routine. The phenom from Long Island, who’d been skating since she was three, jumped and twirled and spun and whirled in a sequined lavender costume with a grin as big as Dallas fixed across her face. She attacked the ice.  Swirling and floating as if untethered, she flew around the rink and into America’s heart. My team and I didn’t know an axel from a lutz from a toe loop, but we sat spellbound watching her let herself skate free. 

As the music rose to its crescendo, her competitive routine coming to its close, Sarah spun like a tiny tightly wound-up ballerina inside a jewelry box. Then BAM!  Driving her blades into the ice, sending a cloud of frozen mist rising up around her, she threw both arms down and out, palms open in a physical “ta dah!” 

Our entire team exploded in a raucous standing ovation from our fifth-floor Marriott suite. 

In a happenstance conversation on an airplane with a seasoned elementary school teacher who had decided to call it quits, I asked, “What was the biggest change you witnessed over your three decades of growing kids?”  

“Parents,” she paused in thoughtful survey, “parents used to want their children to be successful.” I noticed a hint of nostalgic wistfulness in her eye, as she continued, “Now all they want is for them to be happy.” 

I wondered how and why the two had become such disparate things.

Sadie bounced through the back door, ecstatic. She had a new math teacher, Mrs. Washington, a twenty-year vet (not of the armed forces but of the profession, though the line between the two seems sort of dotted if you turn your head just right.)  Mrs. Washington had recently relocated and was new to Sadie’s school. 

“She’s sooooo cool,” Sadie said, kind of bobbing her head, while grinning like she had a Super-Secret, as she no doubt held an image of her teacher in her mind. “Her room is bright and colorful, and we sit in stations to do our work . . .” Then, while dumping out the contents of her backpack on the kitchen island, “She puts a thought for the day up on the board and we read it out loud together at the start of class.”

“Oh! I love her already,” Sadie’s mom, Brenda, gushed. 

Michael W. Smith composed the iconic song, “Friends,” in roughly thirty minutes. The year was 1983 and Bill Jackson, Michael’s close friend from his Bible study group, was moving away.  Michael’s wife, Debbie, decided he should write their spiritual brother a tribute and perform it at his farewell dinner that evening, but Michael wasn’t too keen on the thought. They had less than an afternoon. 

Debbie insisted. 

Jon’s precognitive mind didn’t know he had eggs. He ate eggs, preferring them sunny-side up to scrambled and scrambled always over poached or boiled.  He colored eggs, dipping them carefully into bowls of dye at Easter for his younger brother and sister to hide and find. But he didn’t know he had any. 

Until people started telling him what to do with his, that is.

Since being old enough to understand and to remember, coaches and teachers, parents and grandparents, podcasters and TED talkers –voices of authority, people “in the know”-- have inundated him with unsolicited assistance. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” they say.

Jon takes umbrage with the notion.

My dad would have turned 89 yesterday had dementia not rooted in and crowded out his days. On his birthday, I ache for all the life that’s happened here without him.

Consistently, but with haphazard timing, his essence blankets me. 

This story—my way, I suppose, of folding up and tucking away the raw edges of jagged grief—was the first blog I posted when I began “A Weigh of Life” almost five years ago. I’m re-posting it today with a little spit-shine, including a fresh title. Dad was big on buffing. I think he’d be glad to see I’ve moved forward from the arm of his chair.

We pushed the lead to seventeen midway through the second half. But the savvy and experienced Australians refused to go away. On defense, they bluffed us into taking shots we didn’t love and usually didn’t take. On offense, they probed until they could isolate the match-up that they liked, then they put us one by one on skates. They scored. We fouled. We missed. They rebounded. With seasoned play that fueled conviction, they built inside our red, white and blue jerseys a tower of existential dread.

When USA is emblazoned across your chest, the expectation is “we win.” It doesn’t matter if your roster was just decided ten days before you flew across the world while most of your competition has been playing together for years. No one cares if the average age of your team is nineteen while most opponents are twenty-five. It’s immaterial. So what if you’re jet lagged and it’s only dark at night from twelve to four and the beds are hard and the rooms are hot? Nobody wants to hear it. Your job when you wear the gear is to win.

Our crystal-clear objective was teetering on the brink.

PaPa hung the hoop on the streetside face of the carport above the concrete that sloped at an angle toward the asphalt street. The “driveway” pad was mostly smooth. Its only demarcation, a seam where the cement met the pebbly tar, naturally, at right about fifteen feet. 

In most respects the outdoor half-court was perfect. A boundary line of gravel flanked it to the left.  To the right, it was walled off by yard-- grass sometimes mingled with stickers, sometimes mud. The court didn’t sit atop a hill where the Oklahoma wind was known to sweep. The airspace above it wasn’t threatened by stretching branches of nearby trees. The street it met at its inborn free-throw line was almost always quiet. The slant of the surface, however, was the cause of much chagrin.

Following a lengthy debate, “Let’s just do it right,” PaPa finally announced with end-of-story resolution, “with as little wrong as it will be.” 

We sang the song, it seemed like, almost weekly. “Trust and Obey/ for there’s no other way/ to be happy in Jesus/ but to Trust and Obey . . . .” A go-to for small-town worshipers on Wednesday nights at the Church of Christ.   A song regulars could sing without the assistance of a hymnal, though there was always a reminder. “Turn next to #915.” We sang it so often we forgot to hear the words. 

Trust and Obey. The directives come hitched like a trailer to a truck, though it’s hard to say which is doing the pulling and which is being pulled. They’re not the same and yet one rarely makes a showing without the other in tow.