Be grateful for the ability and opportunity to do the things you love

It was a Friday evening about a month ago and I was dragging.

It was the end of a busy week and I was getting ready to head out for what would be my eighth sports PA announcing gig in as many nights.

I love announcing, just love it. But I was struggling to find the energy and enthusiasm I like to bring to the mic.

For one thing, my beloved Wickliffe Blue Devils boys basketball team was playing a powerful opponent in Crestwood that evening. Wickliffe had lost the first match-up of the two teams a few weeks earlier by 27 points, and there was no reason to think that night's result was going to be any different.

I try to be lively and professional in my announcing whether my teams are winning or losing, but going in knowing a loss was likely made it that much more difficult to get up for the game.

There are also the simple logistics of announcing. It's not hard work by any definition, but it does inevitably involve a certain level of time and effort if you're going to do it right.

Even when the gig is just down the hill at the Campus of Wickliffe, as it was that evening, I have to pack everything up, drive to the school, unload and bring it all into the building, set up, test everything, get my hands on rosters and officials' names, confirm pronunciations of all visiting players' names as well as the referees, and confer with the athletic director about any special events or announcements.

Then I sit at my assigned table near courtside practicing introductions and announcements to minimize flubs and, more importantly, make sure I'm adding to (and not detracting from) the experience for everyone in attendance.

Like I said, it's not ditch digging or roofing or anything, but it takes work, both physical and mental. And I had been doing it over and over again every night for more than a week. I was ready for a break.

It wasn't until I walked into the gym in the middle of the junior varsity game, with my announcing backpack over my shoulder and my rolling equipment case in tow behind me, that my attitude changed.

You couldn't help but notice people clapping and cheering. Kids were sitting with their friends in the stands having a good time. The cheerleaders and pep band were eagerly getting ready to perform. It was exactly the type of positive, wholesome atmosphere that has always attracted me to PA announcing in the first place.

It was at that moment I remembered this is something I get to do and not something I have to do.

I always say announcing – particularly at my alma mater – is a true privilege, but sometimes I don't treat it that way.

The instant I started seeing this assignment through eyes of gratitude, everything became that much more enjoyable, and I found myself with more energy than I knew what to do with.

All of which is to say that even in the midst of busy and stressful times, if you're blessed to do things you love doing, whatever they may be, never forget to be thankful.

Be thankful you're given the opportunity to do them and that you have the ability to do them.

Often when I'm out walking and running in the morning, I will say a prayer of thanks for the most basic elements of that 30-minute exercise period: the breaths I draw, the steps I take, and the moments I experience.

None of those things is guaranteed, and I'm entitled to exactly zero of them. Yet God gives them to me anyway.

Even when I'm tired, bored, or for whatever reason generally disengaged while doing something, that realization alone is enough to refocus my attention and heighten the experience.

By the way, Wickliffe lost the game that night by 36 points, but I still loved every minute of the gig. It was another chance to do what I enjoy doing and to realize there's no absolutely no guarantee I'll ever get to do it again.

By the end, it didn't feel like the eighth night of announcing in a row at all. I was actually kind of sad there wasn't another announcing date on the calendar the next evening.

As hobbies go, sports PA announcing is a strange but fun one

The high school sports season has kicked off here in Northeast Ohio, though I generally refer to it as "announcing season."

I have picked up a variety of public address announcing gigs these last few years, mostly through Wickliffe High School. It all started with the Wickliffe Swing Band, whose announcer I became back in 2014 (making this the start of my eighth season on the mic for this great institution). In subsequent years I've taken on Blue Devil boys and girls soccer, volleyball, and boys and girls basketball.

All of that, in turn, has led to separate engagements announcing for the Mentor Ice Breakers hockey team; Lake Erie College; University School; Perry, Mayfield, and Riverside high schools; and even a Division I men's college basketball game for Cleveland State University.

I've often said that PA announcers are much like football linemen: In ideal circumstances, you don't even realize they're there. Our job as announcers is to enhance the experience for both fans and players, all while staying out of the way and melting into the background.

The kids are and always will be the show. Just as no one comes to the ballpark to watch an umpire call balls and strikes, no one buys a ticket to hear the guy talking over the public address system.

That doesn't mean we don't do our jobs without enthusiasm. These kids who work so hard on their chosen sports deserve robust introductions and verbal recognition of their achievements. The trick is to balance energy with restraint.

The best I've ever seen and heard doing that was the late Ray Milavec, who taught, coached, and announced at Wickliffe for decades before passing away in 2016. He was a master at the craft, if you want to call it that.

Between now and mid-October, if all goes as planned, I will have announced something on the order of 40 total volleyball matches and soccer games, not to mention halftime band performances and miscellaneous band festivals. I also run the scoreboard for girls soccer.

And I can't tell you what a privilege it is to do all of it. I get a little sad when fall sports end, but six or so weeks later I'm back at it doing basketball, which makes for a very fun winter.

Some people collect stamps. I strive to pronounce kids' names correctly into a microphone. To each his own.

An after-school basketball program in the early 80s expanded my worldview a little

Big bad Lincoln Elementary (now Wickliffe Elementary)

When I was in fifth and sixth grade at Mapledale Elementary School, we had an after-school basketball program for boys during the winter. Or at least I assume it was specifically for boys, because no girls ever participated, nor do I expect they were ever invited.

A few times a week, we would gather in the gym and Mr. Oravecz would teach us the fundamentals of the sport: dribbling, passing, shooting, etc. We tried to run a few very basic plays, though our early-adolescent brains often had trouble absorbing even those.

One day in the spring, we would travel across town to Lincoln Elementary School to play end-of-season games against boys from Lincoln and from Worden Elementary.

Both years we did this, the outcomes of the games were never in doubt. We would beat Worden and get beaten by Lincoln, and Lincoln would beat Worden.

Lincoln was, you see, by far the biggest of the three elementary schools in Wickliffe at the time. It had two floors. Two floors! Mapledale and Worden were single-story buildings with only a few wings each.

Lincoln also had a gym with bleachers. Bleachers! We had no such thing at Mapledale. It was intimidating, at 11 years old, to walk into a strange gym with bleachers overlooking the basketball floor and seeing those bleachers filled with kids rooting heartily against you.

Lincoln also had something else we didn't.

Lincoln had Black kids.

If that sounds pathetically sheltered and Caucasian, it's because it was.

We didn't have African-American kids at Mapledale, and I think Worden was in the same boat. (Actually I do remember one Black kid at Mapledale, Ricardo Davis, but he may have been the only one there during my time.)

African-Americans were actually a minority at Lincoln, too, but there were definitely far more of them there than at our two small schools.

So, in addition to coming to this seemingly large school with a gym twice the size of ours, we also had to find a way to play against Ralph Topps. Ralph was an African-American kid who, if he wasn't already 6 feet tall in fifth grade, was darn close to it. I was one of the taller Mapledale players, and I don't know if I was even 5-7 at the time.

I later played summer baseball with Ralph, and while he was a decent athlete, he was really just a regular kid like the rest of us.

Looking back on it now, that sort of "revelation" seems pretty funny, maybe even sad. A year or two later, we would all be brought together at the same middle school, and it turned out we had a lot more in common as Wickliffe kids than we were ever separated by race.

Or at least that's how it seemed to me at the time. It was only later I learned of some of the things the African-American kids had had to deal with because of the color of their skin. Things I never would have dreamed of, things that never in a million years would have happened to me, and things that made me sad.

In the end, that basketball program was the start of an education for this kid from Harding Drive that continues to this day.

The one athletic skill I wish I had? Being a good ice skater.

In that brief time of my life during which I competed in scholastic sports (7th through 12th grades), I quickly became aware of my own limitations as an athlete.

I had speed. I was fast, which is useful in a variety of sports.

Until my freshman year of high school or thereabouts, I also had height. I reached my final adult height in 7th grade, then I just stopped growing. If you know me now, you will laugh at the fact that I played center on our middle school basketball teams.

I also had some small degree of power, as evidenced mainly in how far I could hit a baseball or softball, or run over a smaller defensive back in football.

And that was about it.

The list of the things I lacked athletically was far longer. I have never been particularly coordinated, I wasn't born with natural upper-body strength (and never had much desire to put in the work to develop it), and I wasn't blessed with the type of body positioning and spatial awareness that most sports stars have in abundance.

My 8th-grade football and basketball coach, the legendary Mr. Lowell Grimm, once said to me, "Tennant, you're an enigma."

And he was right. I am not only left-handed, I am very left-handed. To the point that I was far more comfortable as a running back carrying the ball on plays that ran to the left than those that ran to the right. In basketball, I could grab rebounds and occasionally block shots, but I was lucky to sink one out of every 10 free throws.

So when I stepped into a pair of ice skates for the first time in my life at the age of 22, I was kind of hoping it was something that would play to my strengths and cover up my weaknesses.

It was not.

Ice skating (and doing it well) is an amazingly impressive feat to me. I can get moving on skates and keep moving, and I can kind of do the snowplow stop if I'm not moving too fast and have sufficient distance in front of me.

But I cannot skate backwards, I cannot do crossovers, and I cannot do the sideways hockey stop. I have tried all of these things over and over and over, and I simply do not have the ability to pull them off.

I think that's why I like watching hockey so much. Even after 30 years of intently following the game, I can't get over how well those guys skate. They make it look effortless.

I make it look painful.

On the plus side, however, I'll bet none of them were ever as proud as I was to be called an "enigma."

Are you, like me, a formerly tall person?

 

This is my sixth-grade class picture. That's me in the top row, right side. I circled myself, but I probably didn't need to.

I could have just told you to look for the tall kid.

You see, for a time in early 1980s, I was a Tall Kid. I was one of those who shot up early. I went on to play center on my middle school basketball teams.

If you know me now, you will find that funny. 

In this photo I was something like 5 feet, 9 inches tall. Now, nearly 40 years later, I am 5-9 1/2. I was listed at 5-10 on our high school football roster, but I'm not sure I ever quite got there.

Yes, I just about peaked height-wise by middle school.

I reached my adult height in my very early teens, then that was it. I was done growing. Or at least I was done growing vertically. It just wasn't in the biological cards for me to ever hit 6 feet.

I passed this "get tall early and then stop" gene on to my children, all of whom have been tall for their ages. My sons are both about 6-1, which confuses me. If they didn't look like me, I would start to be suspicious as to their true lineage.

There are worse things in life, I suppose, but it took me a long time to stop thinking of myself as "tall."

Maybe I'll hit another growth spurt when I turn 52.

It could happen.

Don't give the controller to Daddy!

There was a time when I was pretty good at video games. This was approximately 1982 to 1984. Then I started a long, slow decline that continues to this day.

The result is that my kids make fun of my gaming skills, or lack thereof. This actually happened: Jack was playing "Super Mario Bros." on the Wii the other day, and when I asked if I could join him, he hesitated for a second and then said, "OK, but don't be sad when your guy dies."

Slightly offended, I asked what he meant. And he said, "Well, it's just that you're not very good."

Please note that I had never actually played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii before. Jack was just assuming my incompetence.

It turned out he was right, of course. Back in The Day (I find myself increasingly referring to The Day in conversation), I was pretty good at Super Mario Bros. on the old Nintendo NES system. But this new version of Super Mario Bros. is much more complex. Whenever I play, my character must look out of the screen, see that it's me controlling him, and decide it would be just as easy to commit some form of electronic suicide.

Now if we were playing the old Atari 2600, it would be a different story. I could play me some Atari 2600. Didn't matter what the game, I was probably pretty good at it. Combat? Pac-Man? Air-Sea Battle? Basketball? I was The Man at virtually every Atari cartridge.

The main reason for this was that I actually had time to play and practice. You can get good at just about anything if you have time to work at it. When I was 12 years old, I had time for everything. Teachers hadn't yet started doing that thing where they give two hours of homework to elementary school children every night, so time is the one thing we had in abundance (of course, my generation is also functionally retarded when compared with a lot of kids today, so maybe that homework thing would have been a good idea).

Do you remember that scene in the movie "Groundhog Hog" where Bill Murray is teaching Andie MacDowell to flip playing cards into a hat? He tells her, "Six months, four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert." That's how it was with my friends and I when it came to video games.

It helped that my dad was a Gadget Guy. And by that I mean we had most of the cool new electronic gadgets of the 70s and 80s before anyone else had them. I was playing pong on my TV in 1977, thanks to the Radio Shack console Dad brought home one night. We also had the Atari 2600 long before most of the families in my neighborhood. So I was able to get pretty good at almost everything.

Then came the arcade craze. I spent a lot of paper route money pumping tokens into everything from Space Invaders and Centipede to Donkey Kong and Galaga. My friend Mel and I would ride our motocross bikes up to the game room and blow $3 to $5 (that's usually as much money as either of us had at any given time) in an hour or two. We would be wearing our 80s-style painters caps decked out with metal pins of our favorite New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. We thought we looked cool. In reality, we must have looked like The Incredible Dork Twins.

My favorite game was one called Track & Field. You would participate in a variety of track events by repeatedly mashing a pair of buttons in rapid fashion to make your onscreen athlete run faster or jump farther. I was good at this game. Good to the point that I once played a game of Track & Field for a full hour on a single quarter.

Once I started high school in the fall of 1984, the time I had available for gaming dropped dramatically. There were sports practices, extracurriculars, actual homework assignments, etc. And the video game world quickly passed me by. I lost track of what was new and hot, and sadly the arcades started going out of business. By the mid-90s, video games cost upwards of a dollar to play and could only be found in the lobbies of movie theaters.

Now I'm reduced to the role of Inept Daddy. We'll be playing Super Mario Bros., and when I inevitably fall off a ledge or run into something I thought was friendly and die, one of the kids will give me the ultimate insult: a condescending head shake, a small laugh, and the words "Oh, Daddy." The message being: "We only let you play so we can laugh at you. You're more entertaining than the game itself."

Whatever, you little brats. Once they invent time travel and we go back to the 80s, I'm dragging all five of them to the arcade and I will school them. And I'll make them wear painters caps, too. Then my revenge will be complete.