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It keeps going, life.
Things end.
I was watching the last episode of the “Around the Horn” TV show yesterday. For 23 years, this daily staple has been piped into my TV room. Now it’s off – poof.
Watching this show had become a part of my life. Not every day, but a lot of days.
Yesterday, there were emotional goodbyes offered by many of the guests. They were signing off forever from the show kind of like the feeling when we watched the last episode of “MASH,” “Cheers,” and “Seinfeld. Woody Paige, 78 years young, said some nice things about the audience. Israel Guttierez cried. He seemed sad the gig – a pretty sweet one if you’re a sportswriter – was ending.
When things end, we are often melancholy, especially if they were like this show, which was pretty much fun and frivolous daily banter about whatever was going on in sports that day. The scoring system was stupid and intractable and whimsical – all by design – so there was never any drama about who would win. This made the show less compelling yet creatively daring.
Sensitive aspects about the lives of the people on the show were revealed. The show’s very likable and upbeat host, Tony Reali, one day told us how he felt about losing one of his babies. Real-life tragic stuff on a sports talk show – that we felt and it was atypical. Israel Gutierrez came out to the world that he is gay. Tim Cowlishaw talked about his alcoholic battle and overcoming it. Woody Paige revealed his struggles with depression.
Guests came and went: Pablo Torre, Kevin Blackistone, Courtney Cronin, and so many others. They kept spewing sports opinions, Tony kept muting them for uttering words he didn’t want to hear, usually cliches. The horn sound would blare several times a show, kind of annoyingly and meaninglessly. The show seemed like it would go on forever, and yet it is no longer. What just happened? What are we to make of it? What does it mean?
“I don’t know” is the answer to all three questions, just like it is the answer to many of life’s questions. We don’t know. Will we ever? I don’t know.
I didn’t love the show, although I admired Reali for being a truly nice guy in a media profession packed with quite a few less-than-warm people hellbent on their own intellectual ambitions and desire for more power, money, and influence.
I usually watched the show as a warm-up for the show that followed, “Pardon the Interruption,” hosted by Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. As a kid, I laughed at Tony’s sports columns in the Washington Post. One time, he went to the luge event at the Olympics and compared the small contraption the athletes were sliding down at 80 miles per hour to a “pie plate.” I still think that’s funny. The fun he seemed to have writing was one of the first inklings I had that becoming a sportswriter could be a joy-filled living. Tony turned me on to writing about sports.
I wish in many ways I had been one of the guests on Around the Horn or Pardon the Interruption, which would have been more likely had I been a sportswriter for a major daily newspaper. But I didn’t qualify. Wasn’t known like these people were. Needed major newspaper chops. I’m a sports blogger, so not the kind who would have been invited to be on that show.
Had I lived another life, it probably would have been as a newspaper columnist. These are not regrets, just reflections. I wish we could all be allowed to attend five different colleges for four years and have five professional lives, so our choices wouldn’t have to be so narrow. The colleges for me would be Stanford, UCLA, Williams, The U, and Arizona, and maybe Rollins College because I’ve heard the parties there are great.
The five professions would be a sportswriter and guest on Around the Horn, a surfer living in Laguna Beach, a surfer living in Key West, a sports blogger, and Sammy Sportface.
What I really believe is that the ending of Around the Horn is another reminder that things start and end, that nothing is forever, that I’m getting older along with everyone else, and that life continues. All shows eventually end as do all jobs and careers, and blogs.
Speaking of endings, I have been watching a bunch of college commencement speeches to find one worthy of bringing to your attention because it reached me in some sort of hard-to-pinpoint, potent, visceral way. I was struck by how many of them this year didn’t move me at all and were so predictable: follow your passion, you will fail, rejection is going to be a big part of your life. Who doesn’t know these things?
I swear somebody needs to invite me to be their commencement speaker because I have a whole lot to say about my college experiences, what led up to that, what the working world is like, and what being a human being is really like, triumphs and lows and all kinds of other whatnot.
I am not the most confident guy, but I have supreme confidence I would give a much more powerful speech than so many I have been watching these last few days. Call me. Email me. Instachat me. FaceSnap me. I’ll come and give your graduates a speech they’ll think about every day the rest of their lives.
As I clicked on and listened to these graduation speeches – some all the way while others only got only a minute of my time – I kept reminding myself that if you stick with research long enough, you’ll find in some unexpected random place a gem.
I wouldn’t call it a gem exactly, but I will say I was moved by the words and insights about what it’s really like to be a neurosurgeon from Dr. Betsy Grunch. She spoke to the 2025 graduates of Augusta University’s Georgia College of Medicine. She told the story of being on call for 36 hours straight when a mother brought her three-year-old child, who was vomiting, to the hospital. She studied the MRI results and then had to tell the mother her baby had brain cancer.
“I still remember the mother wailing on the floor as I told her the news. And that stuff sticks with you forever.”
This speech was well written, easy to take in, emotional, genuine, and had a touch of hope. These are some of her words I want to share with you, mostly because I believe you may enjoy reading them.
“I want to remind you how powerful this profession is. Medicine asks for your mind, your heart, and most of your weekends. It will ask everything of you and give back in ways you can never imagine.”
I had a recent experience with a health professional who told me some disconcerting news about my health. I was more bothered by the way he said it than the news itself. I didn’t sense he cared about me or what happened to me once I left his office. I was just a box to be checked. I wasn’t really a person to him, just some old guy with health problems, a to-do list prognosis he had to make. He came across as self-assured, cocky actually, kind of a punk. This exact behavior is what the doctor spoke about in her speech.
“Medicine at its core isn’t about knowledge; it’s about connection. You can memorize every textbook and ace every exam, but if you can’t look a patient in the eye and make them feel seen, heard, and safe, you’ve missed the point. Hearing doesn’t begin with a prescription. It begins with a conversation. Patients don’t want to know how much you know. They want to know how much you care. In the end, it’s the human connection that makes medicine a calling and not just a career. I celebrate you for daring to care in a world that desperately needs healing. Prioritize the human connection as the heart of medicine. I urge you to hope to be the doctor your younger self always dreamed of, and your future self’s patients will never forget.”
I started by writing about endings. At the end of this blog, this doctor’s words feel like a hopeful beginning.
Life is both: starts and stops.
Enjoy her speech:
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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