Reel or Real?
My inbox bulged with unsolicited videos of players desperately seeking a college basketball scholarship. Most of the reels were professionally produced complete with a soundtrack, statistical overlays, and technological enhancements that made the productions feel more like mini movies than athletic proofs of concept. Sometimes a deft steal would be staccato repeated for effect, or a passer would be encircled on the screen to draw attention to the needle she was about to thread with the ball. Or a Houdini dribble move would be replayed in slow motion to show how the dribbler intentionally tied up the defender’s feet. But the highlight of the highlight reel was the ball going through the hoop.
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Swish, swish, swish, swish… swish, swish, swish. The scholarship seekers never missed.
In video voodoo land, not only does the good stuff get strung together, but the bad stuff gets left out. And that’s what keeps the reel from being useful. It isn’t ever real.
Players don’t exist on the edges of a spectrum that runs from “suck” to “wow.” Nor do people. Pros don’t. Celebrities don’t. Addicts don’t. Our parents and our spouses and our kids don’t. The player that appears to be a miniature Diana Taurasi-in-the-making, probably isn’t. But she probably isn’t horrible either. Most likely, she’s somewhere in between. That’s where we all land. We are –each of us—a complicated concoction of grand intentions and disappointing actions. Of shameful thoughts and unspoken compassion…of selfish moments and generous grace. We are, at once, messy convolutions of our most wonderful and lousy selves.
A walking, talking dichotomy. The opposite of a highlight reel.
I had a Sunday school teacher who once told us that when someone was driving really slow and she found herself getting irritated, she would just imagine they had a giant wedding cake in the back of their vehicle that they didn’t want to tip over. We junior high eye-rollers sort of snickered as she told the story. Who drives around with a wedding cake? No one we knew, that’s for sure. But the picture she painted for us stuck with me. Her point was about grace, but the metaphorical scenario still serves as a prescient reminder of all we cannot know.
Real lives are checkered with sometimes good and sometimes not so much. Out of focus intentions and warped behaviors are par for the course of a life. The truth is all of us vacillate somewhere between the extremes.
We call that “being human”, a pass we often give to those we’re close to, but fail to apply liberally to the masses that we don’t. Especially the high profile, or those we “feel like” we know, We have no clue about how Roger Federer treats his children or Jennifer Anniston responds to people when she’s tired. But we laud them as if they have no imperfections, placing them on pedestals they didn’t ask for and don’t want.
Perhaps the same could be said for those that we condemn. We don’t know why the person working at the drive-through is snippy or why the flight attendant seemed so forgetful or what the receptionist had to deal with before she answered the phone. If we were living their respective stories, we might have been the same or worse. And yet, we’re quick to put them in a box with a fancy stick-on label and a lid. We see the highlight/lowlight reel and think it’s who they are.
Years ago I was getting ready to host a university fundraiser at my home. Due to a series of events beyond my control, I returned home from recruiting much later than anticipated only to find that the truck delivering the tables and chairs for set-up had driven past a “Do Not Enter” sign on our neighborhood street. The truck had traveled down fresh tar making ruts on the road and leaving black tracks up our driveway. When I made it to the back yard, I discovered that the tables were not arranged as we’d requested, nor were the linens the ones we ordered. I could see the hapless driver still in the driveway waiting for his tip at the spot where the tread marks stopped.
I made my way toward him (without passing “Go” or collecting $200) and lost my ever-loving mind.
As I unloaded on the guy, ripping him upside down and backward, then sideways for good measure, he grew belligerent and defensive. Our exchange was heated and embarrassing. When he left, I sat down on the grass and cried.
As he drove away, it hit me that he’d seen the worst of me.
Sometimes we meet the world disheveled and nasty. We have moments we’re ashamed of, mulligans we’d like to be granted, exchanges we’d like to have back. And some days we show up with the best of our best in full display. The reality is that our truest selves meander between the endlines. Human beings are impossibly complex, and the circumstances swimming around us are always impacting how we feel and what we think and do. To pull only the finest or the most pathetic is to distort what is real.
Good play after good play after good play interrupted by great play, makes an average high school player look like she belongs in the WNBA. But it’s never as simple as that. Coaches need the context of the game—we need her misses and her makes—to know what kind of a player she is, and even more importantly, what kind of player she can be. Somewhere in the mix of it all is where her real value lies.