boys

The past two weeks have found me in Baltimore conducting a leadership course on mentoring and coaching for their police department, and in the Bronx as an assistant football coach for the last game of the season.

With both groups, I have taken some chances and talked to these teenagers and men engaged in hard activities about the importance of love. I’ve gotten some interesting reactions. A couple of my football colleagues openly made fun of my assertion that love was a quality that could elevate these tough,gritty endeavors to something that was transcendent. They don’t get that you can talk about kicking all kinds of ass but it doesn’t buy you what you really need.

It seems to me that love, trust, and respect are great foundations on which to build any warrior culture. The ability to discuss these openly in the company of men would also mean that courage would also have to be a part of the group’s DNA.

I may be hallucinating but I thought I saw glimmers of interest from the sergeants and my players in further discussion on the the topic. Even if this is my hallucination, I’m going to keep trying. I’ll ignore the smirks and jokes born out of fear and insecurity.

A new definition of masculinity can embrace both notions of love and the fierceness of the warrior. Too many men live in a purgatory where neither quality is present. We all suffer because of that.

I’ve been gone and I apologize! I have a good reason. I’ve spent two weeks with JFK High School at their football camp. I’ve previously mentioned that I am the volunteer strength/conditioning coach as well as the running backs coach. It’s been quite an education. My high school football experience at Collegiate (about 35 years ago) was not adequate preparation for this experience.

The first week was 10 hour days in the rain with young men who are coming back from a 1 and 8 season record. There is a completely new new coaching staff. The second week consisted of 14 hour days in the heat at Monticello, New York. I was reminded why I was there when one of the boys told me he didn’t know Monticello was part of New York since New York consisted of “the three boroughs.”

We’ve got players who dream of stardom in the NFL and players like MK who joined the team in this, his senior year, because he wanted “to do something fun, stay out of trouble, and not be like my gangster brothers.” They don’t have a list of colleges they want to attend, they haven’t taken the SAT, most of them would be the first in their families to attend college, and they don’t have a lot of role models for success – inside or or out of school.

The nights for the coaches consisted of film study, chewing tobacco, a LOT of profanity and sausage sandwiches at 2am. I did the film study and sausage sandwiches ( and I still lost two pounds! – perhaps I can write “The Football Coaches Diet?”). My 9 year-old son was a trooper and witness to this “man thing.”  Times like this make me even more happy that I left the professional lie that I was living.  During the day, I got to practice what I had learned from books, DVD’s, “Remember the Titans,” “Friday Night Lights” and YouTube about what it means to be a football coach. My preparation didn’t prepare me to talk the boys through their tears of pain and frustration, the need for my Reiki skills, the need for mediation and bouncer skills, and the fact that the Emotional Freedom Technique would be accepted and welcomed by tough teens from the Bronx.

I have a new respect for the game and its potential to develop and reveal character.
To play at a high level requires incredible amounts of self-discipline and focus. There is a need to surrender your ego to accomplish a greater good. If you want to succeed, you must be persistent and learn to deal with adversity. At its best (and please don’t tell my fellow coaches that I said this) it’s learning how to trust and to love.

The boys at Kennedy work so hard to improve at the game. Their cynicism would melt from their game faces and an audience would gather when I or any of the other coaches talked about our lives and our journey to manhood. They were so kind to my son – teaching him the “proper” way to do a “soul handshake;” correcting his form when he threw the football; listening to his plans to breed mice; thanking him for his help with drills and providing water; and in one case, a player sharing that, like my son, he was also named for a character from Norse mythology. In his case, his mother expecting a girl, named him after Thor’s daughter! This revelation was overheard and he was the source of teasing but he felt the cost of the disclosure was worth the benefit of gaining common ground. So many of these young men are incredible and deserve much more than life has planned for them. I hope I’m able to tilt at this windmill for at least this season.

I should be doing more of the work on my bill-paying coaching business but right now, this volunteer coach thing is working for me. So on my way to being a rich and famous leadership and life coach, I’ve found something else to keep me in the ranks of the army that continues to fight “The Long Defeat.”

My adventure now includes a role as a volunteer high school football coach.  In fact, my posts haven’t been as regular as I’d like because of the “two-a-days” being conducted at the high school’s field in the Bronx.  This post is not going to be profound.  In writing it I get to be a little wistful, a little amazed, and a lot frustrated by the experience.

Each time I show up to the school, I enter into an unapologetic man’s world.  It’s one of sweat, profanity, chewing tobacco, childish humor, and talk of the glory days long past.  My own football glory days were limited as my high school had only enough personnel to field a team for two of my high school years.  With the recent revelations about the brain injuries that football can cause, I now believe that my truncated career was a blessing.  But I now get to engage in mature reflections about the game and at the same time improve my cognitive function by learning its intricacies.

I’m working as the strength coach and assistant running back coach at one of the largest high schools in New York City.  Their four-year graduation rate is under 30%.  Despite the challenges, a group of 45 young men show up in the summer for ten hours of daily character-building.  In between sprints, pushups, and blocking schemes they are directed to pull up their pants, eliminate the use of the “N word,” to support each other, and to “finish strong.”  These tough teenagers look you in the eyes, thank brand new coaches for their advice, and begin to figure out that they should have a cause bigger than themselves.

They don’t know, that despite this work ethic they are developing, that their life choices are being unfairly limited by people they have never met and by circumstances that they had no hand in creating.

This coming weekend is football camp in upstate New York.  I’m taking my 9 year-old son with with me but it still means time away from family, close living conditions with the other coaches who are not in touch with their feminine side in the same way that I am (and who also happen to be strong, engaging male figures for these boys), and time away from the marketing that is critical for my fledgling leadership coaching business.  However, there are men to build – 45 African-American, Dominican, West Indian, Puerto Rican, and Russian teens who deserve to get a little traction on the path to the people they deserve to become and who are fighting against incredible odds.  Stay tuned.

The denigration of females? Tasteless language wrapped up in bad grammar? Just some more misogynist rap? Not exactly. This was part of a “game” played by teen boys at the elite, all-male Landon private school in Maryland. They played a game mimicking a fantasy sports draft that involved the ranking of local girls in terms of sexual desirability. The goal was to have sex parties with points given for sexual conquests. Landon’s group of “young gentlemen” have had a problematic recent history that can be glimpsed in the story link above.

These were no knights of honor. These boys were raised in a school culture that begins in 3rd grade. Who are their fathers? What did their non-participating classmates have to say? Their intent was to prey on local girls. I read one news story that took the view that “boys will be boys” and that they were just a little immature and foolish to publish this stuff in an age of omnipresent Internet scrutiny.

It seems to me that this was more likely a story of familial narcissism and entitlement. It was a perversion of the daring, competitiveness, and energy that are a part of healthy male energy. How does this happen? Sports performance coaches talk about “sensitive periods” in athletic development for young people. This has to do with the pace of development of a young person’s particular motor abilities (e.g. balance, endurance, speed, strength).

These sensitive periods are also present in the emotional development of adolescent males. Fathers and other responsible adult males are supposed to help induct these young men into the masculine fraternity. In my perfect world, young men would be a combination of William Wallace (you know, Braveheart) and Gandhi. If boys this age aren’t guided through the minefield of puberty, they will end up locked into a cage of greed, materialism, selfishness, sexism, and aggression. Money and status often provide more of an impetus towards these things than an inoculation against them.

My wife and I have our own set of instructions and parenting process for our daughters should they come across young piglets from whatever race or class. That may be the topic of another post.

I was watching “City of Joy” with my 9 year-old son the day after I read about these Landon boys. This a movie about a victimized Dalit community in India and an American doctor (played by Patrick Swayze) trying to find himself. I explained to my son his role and path to becoming a modern day knight. I explained that it would require mental, spiritual, and physical skills and toughness. I told him that I expect him to ALWAYS be the first to stand up to bullies. Some may find my view of man as protector and knight as sexist in its own way but I do not apologize for this. I have also made it clear to my girls that they should rely on themselves for their personal safety.

Bottom line, there are shepherds, sheepdogs, and wolves. Maybe boys will be boys but we shouldn’t ignore the bad fruit that will be harvested if we don’t pay more attention.

I saw this story today and it caused me to reminisce. You see, once upon a time, I was a Scout leader. I had never been a Boy Scout myself but I was desperate to attack the “Nature Deficit Disorder” of the students in my East Harlem school. My kids were the most unlikely of Scouts but we won awards and were chosen to go to the Mecca of Scouting, Philmont, for two weeks.

I was never comfortable wearing the Boy Scout uniform and my visible enthusiasm was, I’m sure, just a shadow of that shown by almost every other Scout master I met. There were some people who were not the most enlightened and cosmopolitan but we were privileged to work with some incredible individuals in the New York Council like Diego Aviles. Yeah, the Boy Scouts have some problems but my students, boys AND girls, had experiences that I could never have provided them. The Scouts have some problems that need to be fixed but if they’re becoming irrelevant, it’s more a reflection of a flawed society than it is a reflection of what BSA brings to the game.

Today, February 8th, marks the centennial of Boy Scouts in America. Over the past century, more than 110 million boys, young men, moms and dads have been members of the BSA. However, with such a momentous celebration at-hand, the Boy Scouts, in many ways, are a struggling organization. At a time when shows like “Man Vs Wild” and “Survivorman” are experiencing immense popularity and global awareness of the environment is at a high, wouldn’t it make sense that an organization like the Boy Scouts would see a surge in enrollment? After all, the scouting program specializes in promoting survival skills and enjoyment of the outdoors as its biggest recruiting tools for boys and young men.wired.com, After 100 Years, Are The Boy Scouts Still Relevant?, Feb 2010

You should read the whole article.