First of all, I am very proud of the Arizona Cardinals. Nobody would have ever guessed that the lowly Cardinals would ever make it into the playoffs this year, much less earn a trip to the Super Bowl. Plus, they played like they deserved to be in the Super Bowl. Had one call gone our way, the championship could’ve been ours.
My driver from Providence to Cape Cod told me about the time twenty years ago when picked up Franklin Delano Roosevelt III, the grandson of the U.S. president Franklin Dealano Roosevelt, at the port where the ferry arrives on the Massachusetts shore from island of Martha’s Vineyard. There wasn’t much to his story besides the fact that FDR the Third thought he was too good to speak to him on the two hour drive to the airport. My driver explained: “He was an asshole.”
Although I felt like I had to stick up for the grandson of a US President, I couldn’t argue on his behalf because I honestly didn’t know there was an FDR3. Instead, I changed the subject to talk about cars. That lasted for another hour until we arrived in Cape Cod.
Since I’ve been back, I did a little research and learned that FDR3 is a respected economics professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York state–an honorable position within our society. You can see his faculty page on the university’s website. When I reconsider my driver’s experience with the man, I imagine that both of the guys in that taxi on that random day in the 1980s were unsatisfied with where they were in life. What boy wants to grow up to be a cab driver? And how can even the most accomplished economist not feel like an underachiever when he was expected to grow up to be nothing less than the President of the United States?
I imagine this scene plays out every day in each corner of our society. The characters and circumstances are different, but the consistent theme is reconciling the dreams and aspirations from youth with the tough realities of life.
Several years ago I heard a great story on This American Life a man who played in a 1970s British punk rock band called The Automatics. They had little commercial success, so he moved on to other things in life, eventually became a successful mortgage broker in Beverly Hills. One afternoon while at his office, he went on eBay to find if any of his band’s old records were being sold online.
That moment of curiosity began a story that ended with the discovery that his band’s old records had garnered much attention in Japan, enough fans to warrant a reunion tour through Japan, although he would be the only original member of the band on the tour. So he took a break from his high-dollar job in Beverly Hills and traveled to Japan with his wife to play the songs he wrote in high school. Except this time, he was in his late 40s, and he would play in front of hordes of fans. One venue was so packed with fans that his only way out of the building after the show was to be passed over the crowd.
Host Ira Glass asked what it was like to experience a postponed fame: “We don’t get what we deserve. We get what we get, and you have to be okay with that.”
Did the Arizona Cardinals deserve to win the Super Bowl? Yes. Did the Pittsburgh Steelers deserve to win the Super Bowl? Yes. You had two great teams loaded with men who played like champions. Had one call gone our way, the Arizona Cardinals would be Super Bowl champions. But in the end, only one team can win, and it was the Steelers. Maybe next year will be the Cardinals.
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