I miss the feeling of flying around the track

High school track and field season is underway here in Ohio. My dad always said he didn't mind watching my cold October football games nearly as much as he minded watching my cold (and usually windy) early-April track meets.

Having had a few of my own kids run track, I understand where he was coming from. And while I don't miss freezing in the stands, I do miss being a sprinter and long jumper like I was in the mid- to late 1980s.

I was the only guy I knew who played football to stay in shape for track season and not the other way around.

Like any sport, track had its good days and bad days. But looking back, the good days were so good that I've blotted the bad ones from my mind. My track memories consist mostly of sunny dual meets and long Saturday invitationals that offered up far more wins than losses for my teammates and me.

What I miss most is the feeling. The feeling of being at the peak of your athletic ability. The feeling of hitting the long jump board just right and flying 20-plus feet into the sand pit. The feeling of attacking the curve in the 200 meters and blowing by the competition.

There's really nothing else like it.

I stayed in touch with the track world after high school first as a newspaper sports writer then later as a track parent and now as a public address announcer for track meets. I watch these young kids speeding up and down the straightaway and I want them to know how fleeting these moments are. I want them to appreciate every race, win or lose.

I want them to understand it all goes away much more quickly than you think it will.

It's not that I abandoned running the minute they handed me my diploma. But for many years starting in my mid-20s, running no longer meant sprinting, but rather long, slow distance races. I can't remember the last time I full out sprinted, though I'm guessing it was sometime in the early 90s.

Nowadays if I tried going all out in a sprint, my hamstrings would probably explode in a gooey mess all over the track.

But there was a time when I and the kids with whom I competed could move. Like, really move.

If they could figure out a way to bottle that feeling, I would buy several cases. As it is, though, I have only my old guy memories of races long completed and medals fairly won.

And maybe, given the ways things work in this life, that's enough.

My top five 1980s arcade games

I spent quite a bit of time (and money) in arcades in the early and mid-80s. The games were so much better than the systems we had available on our TVs at home that it was worth dropping a few bucks in quarters for an hour or two of fun.

For me and my friends, the primary destinations were Galaxy Gardens (the nearest game room), Up to Par (the biggest game room), and Fun and Games ($3 all-you-can play Tuesday nights!)

I don't have any photos from the time, but I distinctly recall wearing a series of very 80s painter's caps on these arcade excursions. Often I would decorate these caps with small metallic pins of my favorite musical acts of the time...most notably Men at Work, the Police and Duran Duran.

I did not, for the record, wear any neon, though.

As I've mentioned here before, video games kind of passed me by once the 90s rolled around, but I still have very fond memories of the golden era of arcade gaming.

Here, then, is one man's (and only one man's) ranking of the five best games from that period. Many of my fellow Gen Xers will be outraged to find Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Dig Dug, Centipede, Missile Command, Berserk, Joust and a host of others left off my list. Those were all worthy choices, they just didn't make my personal top five.

(5) Vanguard

This is a dark horse entry, to the point that many won't even be familiar with it. I was a frequent player for a few reasons, including the variety of settings through which you could fly your ship, the fact you had four directional fire buttons, and maybe most importantly, the very cool, Flash Gordon-inspired music that would play when you passed through one of the glowing energy fields. I pumped a lot of tokens/quarters into this one. (Speaking of great 80s video game music, while I never liked the game itself, you can't beat the driving distorted guitar riff of Reactor, which you could hear cutting through the arcade noise no matter how crowded it was.)

(4) Gorf

Gorf was among the first games to incorporate voice synthesis. It would semi-mock you with cries of "My Gorfian robots are unbeatable" and "Prepare yourself for annihilation!" Like Vanguard, I liked the variety in this one, even though it kind of ripped off Space Invaders and Galaxian. If you could get through the five different challenges, you would rise in rank from Space Cadet to Space Captain. If you could survive five full cycles of missions, you would reach the ultimate rank of Space Avenger. You could also get yourself more ships if you were willing to spend TWO quarters instead of one. This was a big investment but often worth it.

(3) Donkey Kong

I have grown to love the original Donkey Kong more in the 2000s than I ever did in the 80s. I play it on my laptop thanks to the amazing MAME emulator, and I've gotten to the point that a game isn't successful if I don't make it past the first "pie" board, as pictured here. (I call them "pies," but I think they were supposed to be tubs of cement or something similar. Mario was, after all, a career tradesman.) I love the barrels and rivets levels, and the pies are great, but I can do without the frustrating elevators. All in all, though, a very fun experience every time you press that one-player start button.

(2) Galaga

Lots of people loved (and continue to love) Galaga. It took the concepts of Galaxian and Space Invaders to another level of enjoyment, rather than just recreating them à la Gorf. The wrinkle whereby you could allow your fighter to be captured and then earn it back to be a double-firing, dual-ship juggernaut at the bottom of the screen was genius. And as valuable as they are to the environment, I never minded wasting hundreds of those darn bees every game. They deserved it. We have a replica cocktail arcade game in our basement that includes the original Galaga, and I play it often.

(1) Track and Field

My early-80s gaming friends could have told you even before they clicked on this post that Track and Field would be #1 on my list (and it isn't even close). If you were around back then, you will remember this as the game in which players had to repeatedly hit two buttons quickly to propel their little track athlete through the 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, hurdles, hammer throw and high jump. The faster you alternated button hits, the better you did. Which led some to cheat through the use of combs or pencils held in such a way as to create a faster cadence of button mashing. I always played it straight, though, and I was pretty good at it, which is probably a big reason why I liked the game so much. Depending on the whim of the arcade owner, this game could be set to end after the high jump no matter how well you did, or it could simply start over through the cycle of events, though with tougher qualifying times and distances. Either way, this is one I wish I also had in my basement. But I just checked on eBay, and these machines are going for anywhere between $1,800 and $4,000. I didn't love it that much.

You should know who this man is and what he accomplished

 

In an Olympic year such as this, we're almost inundated with amazing athletic performances. The world's best amateur athletes (probably the best athletes, period) get together and do things that, unless you're very familiar with their particular sports, are difficult to fully appreciate.

Take gymnast Simone Biles, for instance. It is next to impossible to hear too much about her, because she is a generational – probably once-in-a-lifetime – talent. She does seemingly superhuman things so often that casual fans of gymnastics like me quickly lose perspective on just how uniquely gifted she is.

The same is true of track and field, long one of the marquee sports of the Summer Olympics. What track athletes accomplish in terms of speed, skill, and hardcore competitive spirit is breathtaking. I could watch Olympic track events all day.

Which is why I feel like you and I should know the name JuVaughn Harrison. That's him flying through the air in the photo at the top of this post.

Over the weekend, this 22-year-old from Huntsville, Alabama, qualified for the Olympics in both the long jump and high jump at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in baking-hot Eugene, Oregon.

We could stop right there and his achievement would be historic. No one has competed in both of those events in the same Olympics in more than 100 years, since the great Jim Thorpe did it. Technically speaking, they are very different events and require very different talent, skill, and execution.

But get this: Harrison not only qualified for the Olympics in both events, he won both events. If you're a non-track person, I'm not sure I can describe for you just how mind-boggling this is. He beat out a long list of highly trained specialists to take first place in both jumps.

That's...unheard of.

For the record, Harrison long jumped 27 feet, 9 1/2 inches (8.47 meters) and high jumped 7 feet, 7 3/4 inches (2.33 meters). Try measuring out those distances sometime and marvel at the fact that a single human being could leap horizontally and vertically that far/high.

I won't get into it here, but it's interesting to note how the quality of long jumping has diminished since the 1980s and 90s, when we as fans were absolutely spoiled by the likes of Carl Lewis, Mike Powell, Dwight Phillips, Ivan Pedroso, etc.

There are a lot of theories as to why the top long jumpers don't go as far as they used to, but that doesn't take away from what JuVaughn Harrison accomplished in Eugene, and what he could accomplish a month from now in Tokyo.

Remember his name.

The Keurig vs. the iPod - Which is the greatest invention of the last 30 years?

As the son of a Gadget Guy, I gravitate naturally toward technology. I can rarely afford to buy it, you understand, but I do gravitate toward it.

Growing up, we were among the first people in our neighborhood to have cable TV, a VCR, and a home video game system.

Actually, I should have put "home video game system" in quotes, because what it was was a cheap, black-and-white Pong-based game from Radio Shack that my dad brought home one night in 1978. He hooked it up to our living room TV, and suddenly I was playing video games. At home. In my living room.

A stunning innovation at the time.

Two years later, he bought us an Atari 2600, and thus began a long love affair with video games and computers that peaked in the mid-1980s when I got really good at the arcade game "Track and Field." This was a game where you had to mash two buttons really, really fast in order to make your little pixellated video game athlete run and jump through a variety of events.

A lot of guys (and it was really only guys who played it) would cheat by putting a comb between their fingers, which allowed them to develop a lightning-fast rhythm that would propel their video runners to sub-8-second 100-meter dash times.

But I played it straight. In large part because I couldn't figure out the comb thing. The point is, I was really good.

Well no, actually, the point is I like technology and gadgets and stuff like that. And for my money, the two best gadgets of the past 30 years are the Keurig coffee maker and Apple's wonderful iPod.

My kids bought me a Keurig for Father's Day a few years ago. I was just getting into coffee then, and getting the Keurig pushed me over the top into full-on addiction. I'm proud to say I remain physically and mentally dependent on the hot brown liquid until this day!

OK, not something to be proud of, but also not something to be denied. Coffee snobs will tell you the Keurig makes a low-quality drink, but I ignore them. What it does is make coffee as fast and convenient as it can be. It's ingenious, really, and it spawned an entire industry of companies that do nothing but make those little K-Cups.

All of which is cool. But the iPod? Well...the iPod is mythical. When I was a teenager, I was really into music. And the accepted medium for popular music in the 80s was the cassette. I had lots of cassettes. Like hundreds of them, all stored in cheap plastic holders that my dad undoubtedly bought at a discount store and screwed into my bedroom wall.

Cassettes were an extremely portable form of music, if by "portable" you mean "assuming you're willing to lug around a 13-pound boom box on your shoulder." But then came the Walkman, which allowed you to listen to your favorite cassettes in a little metal box that weighed less than a pound.

I figured that was the pinnacle of technological achievement. You had to carry multiple cassettes if you wanted musical variety, but that seemed a small price to pay.

But then – I don't even know how to describe how stunning and revolutionary this was – Apple came out with the iPod in the early 2000s. There were no tapes involved. Everything was digital. And the darn thing fit in the palm of your hand.

I just...I mean...if you're old enough to remember it, you know what I'm talking about. Suddenly, the future was here. You could carry around hundreds of songs. And nowadays it's well into the thousands.

Amazing.

So while the Keurig and the iPod are both life-changing inventions for me, if you ask which one is better, I'm going with the iPod. Every time.

Seriously, I can listen to Iron Maiden AND Air Supply back to back with just a couple of screen swipes? Yeah, I'm buying into that.

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.