Since I was 4 years old, I have been broadcasting games.
Many of those games were played in the backyard or in my parents’ bedroom at the house I grew up in Argos. No one but the birds, butterflies and my faithful dog Spunky ever heard the tens of thousands of calls of wiffle ball home runs launched over the grape vine, touchdown runs past the edge of mom’s flower garden and game winning field goals that just cleared the crossbar of our swing set.
The goal then was to become the Chicago Cubs radio announcer. Most things I did, I did with the intention of helping me get there.
I finished my Butler University degree by doing my internship at WRSW in June 1991, and I joke a lot that they have been trying to figure out why they ever let me in the door every day since.
Through the first 10 years here I continued to lift my foot up for the next rung of the proverbial ladder, but I never found it. I applied to all kinds of places for all kinds of play-by-play announcing job openings and got a lot of “you are really good, but we are looking for … an older guy, a more experienced guy, a guy with a deeper voice, a guy who is more forceful in sharing his opinion.”
I heard it all.
I quit trying to “move up” for a while. The proliferation of the internet and digital technology made it seem like if I was good enough to advance to a higher level of sports broadcasting, someone would find me.
Now I am 17 years into broadcasting Warsaw Tiger Sports, and I see things much differently.
There is a comfort in being here and doing what I am doing. My college broadcasting friends call it “being a big fish in a small pond” and that used to offend me. But now I realize that they are right, but I ask “what’s wrong with that?”
I bring that up because Chuck Pagano addressed the media in Chicago for the first time as the Bears’ new defensive coordinator last week, and he was refreshingly candid.
Pagano was asked “Do you see this job as a chance to work your way back into being a head coach?”
His answer: “I’m not … I’ve done it already.”
Pagano went on to explain that he has been a head coach and he is comfortable just being a coordinator.
Some people smirked at his comments. They positioned them as weak.
I totally got where he’s coming from.
There is happiness and then there is joy.
Happiness is short-term. A song, a food, a movie or a TV show – any one or combination of them could brighten up someone’s day and make them happy. No one can be happy all the time, and some people are happy more than others. Joy is long-term. It’s the cornerstone of a person’s spirit. It’s an underlying factor in how they live, who they spend their time with and how they look at everything.
Pagano says that his joy has a sweet spot, and it’s in building defensive game plans and working with people more closely than a head coach ever can. He doesn’t need the limelight of being a head coach to drive him anymore.
He figured out his role, and he’s comfortable in it.
Some people are born leaders. Some people have that “thing” that makes them easy to follow. I can’t explain what that “thing” is, but we all know it when we see it. You can’t buy it. You can’t obtain it if you don’t already have it, but you can learn how to use it if you do.
One of the problems we have today is that we have too many people trying to be leaders when they aren’t equipped for that. I’ll admit it … I am not a leader. I want to be one so much, but I am a follower. Now, I think my track record shows I am a really good follower. But I know who I am, and I am very OK with that.
Too many of us, in our quest for money, power, prestige and position can’t admit that we are not really leaders. It shows a sign of weakness to admit it, they say. It makes you less of a man to not be the biggest and the baddest, they say.
They are wrong.
We ask our young people to accept their roles on the teams we follow, but we don’t do it as adults, so why should they?
And let me be perfectly clear on two points: first, you should follow through on your dreams to their conclusion. Never settle! But second, understand that it may not have been meant to be that you reach your goal. What happens then? Anyone who feeds you some line like “anything less than reaching your goal is failure” is a person who has no joy and is only made happy by others being miserable. To them it’s all a game with only a winner and losers. Shed yourself of those people. They suck the life out of you.
