Lessons from pandemic on how we define ourselves

It was maybe Day 1 or Day 2 of the shelter-in-place order. Having worked eight hours at my kitchen-table desk, gone on two walks and paced around the house several times, I created a 9-hole putt-putt golf course, using plastic cups as holes.

Finally, I walked into the office, where Mrs. Brad was calmly, silently working on a crafts project.

"I don't know how you introverts do this!" I shouted.

A month later, it's easier to understand. That clarity comes with a deeper understanding that most of us aren't extremes. We aren't necessarily far right or far left. We aren't necessarily savers or spenders. We aren't necessarily creative or practical. We aren't necessarily givers or takers.

And we're not necessarily extreme introverts or extroverts. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. That's one of the personal lessons of this pandemic. We're flexible.

Remember the outset? That's when introverts had a field day, posting on social media how they've been preparing their whole life for this (an aside: isn't posting on social media about how introverted you are a very non-introvert thing to do? Wouldn't a true introvert have no interest in letting other people know about them?).

Then time passed.

Some self-identified introverts needed social interaction. Some self-identified extroverts discovered they were OK by themselves.

Here's what we should have discovered: We like to put others in a box, then insist that we're the outliers. It's easier for me to categorize others by painting them black and white. They're conservative. They're shy. They hate change. They are artistic.

However, we all know that we're a little different. We can't be put in a box. We're more nuanced. We think we're the only  ones.

I am not saying that introverts aren't different from extroverts. It's easier for me to be in public, it's easier for me to be around people. I draw energy from others, while introverts (such as Mrs. Brad) have energy drained from them by being around others. But I'm not 100 percent extrovert. Mrs. Brad isn't 100 percent introvert. We're both – like you and everyone you know – somewhere in the middle.

Sheltering in place for the past six weeks revealed many things. Myriad political and sociological fissures have been exposed, perhaps the subject of another column.

But we've  learned that our personalities are more flexible than thought. If you felt like it would be paradise to be locked away, maybe you now know you need people. If you felt like you need to be around people and active all the time, maybe you've learned that you can handle a lockdown.

I want this to end. I want it to end for health and economic reasons. I want it to end for practical reasons (I need to get my car smogged! I want grocery stores to be fully stocked!). I want it to end for personal reasons (there's only so many times you can play the same 9-hole putting course).

But I hope when it ends, we realize we're more flexible than we thought. We're more complex than we thought.

It's not a introvert/extrovert dichotomy.

Maybe if we understand that, we'll realize it's also not a liberal/conservative or saver/spender or artistic/practical dichotomy. We can find middle ground and quit painting others in black and white.

A guy can hope.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

When PE teachers had a twisted version of 'Fight Club'

I love my father-in-law. He's 84 and living in Oregon. He's an outstanding grandfather to my sons.

Before that, he was a really great dad to Mrs. Brad, who grew up knowing she was loved by him and who shares warm memories from her childhood with him.

Before that, he was the husband of my mother-in-law, to whom he has been married more than 60 years.

Somewhere in the middle, he was a longtime high school football coach and athletic director, a public figure in my hometown, which was both a blessing and a hurdle when I began my sports writing career.

Before coaching football, though, he was a junior high physical education teacher, which is the point of this column. Last week, I shared memories of my junior  high teacher Mr. B, who oversaw a bizarre game of dodgeball, involving fully grown ninth graders firing balls at wispy seventh-graders in a war simulation.

My father-in-law tells me of an even more harrowing situation a half-generation earlier.-

He taught junior high PE when the town's only junior high gym was in the basement of the aging high school building, so there was already some built-in horror movie elements.

His story involves how teachers handled on-campus fights in those days. If boys started fighting, the solution was to break them up . . . kind of. The two fighters would wait until their PE class, when they'd be given oversized boxing gloves and told to fight while surrounded by their peers. Whichever boy first stopped throwing punches would be punished, the boy who kept throwing haymakers would escape punishment.

That was the only rule: If you kept throwing punches and your opponent quit, you would escape punishment. The other guy would likely have to grab his ankles and get smacked with a yardstick (my memory of school punishment).

I guess the teachers thought this would get out the aggression. Maybe it did. But maybe it rewarded  maniacs.

Anyway, my father-in-law described the typical scene for such fights (which apparently happened frequently): Thirty or 40 junior high boys would gather in the basement gym, surrounding the unfortunate pair who got in a scrap. The PE teacher would tell the two kids to start fighting, punches would fly and the mob would start chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" while pounding on the walls.

Draconian enough? How about this: The walls were covered with asbestos, the flame-fighting material that was later determined to cause cancer.

So two sweaty seventh-graders would exchange roundhouse punches while wearing oversized gloves as their classmates urged them to fight, pounding the walls and creating a haze of asebestos.

That was junior high PE in the 1960s. That's the generation of men who were then sent to fight in Vietnam.

What's the point? Well, for one thing, it proves that teachers in that era – and perhaps all adults – were lunatics, at least in my hometown. But there's another point.

I'd ask younger people to have some grace for the old man whose opinions drive you crazy or who can't figure out how to operate a smartphone or who rails against social media. It's possible that your dad or grandpa or neighbor isn't just a silly old man.

It's possible he has brain damage from a school-sanctioned brawl held 50 years ago in a cloud of asbestos.

He's not a crazy old man, he's a heroic survivor.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Surviving junior high PE nightmare gives confidence

Confidence in my ability to survive a global pandemic comes largely from history: I survived junior high.

Junior high school – now called middle school – is a battlefield. There's no other time in your life when you're more insecure, awkward and exposed to ridicule.

In my day, physical education classes were probably the worst. Junior high PE classes in the 1970s seem like they were led by characters from "The Tiger King."

The strangest PE class at my junior high were led by a PE and history teacher who I'll simply call "Mr. B." (Partly for anonymity, partly because his last name had a series of vowels that always made it tough for me to spell.)

Mr. B was passionate. Mr. B was intense. Mr. B loved war. In my ninth-grade history class, Mr. B had us watch the "Why We Fight" propaganda films from World War II. He talked incessantly of war. If a student dropped a pencil, Mr. B would throw himself on the pencil and pretend it was a grenade. It was amusing the first time, but got increasingly strange. The guy cared about teaching, though.

Anyway, I managed to avoid his PE class. The stories were legendary – they were like the classes the rest of us took, but crazier.

It's no surprise that Mr. B enjoyed having students (our classes were just boys) play "war," which was just dodgeball with a more violent name. But Mr. B didn't follow the normal pattern of splitting students into two groups, who threw balls at each other from opposite sides of a line. In the traditional version, if you hit someone, they come to your team. If they catch your throw, you go to their team. You play until everyone's on one side.

Mr. B had students play like they were in a war.

He would have the seventh-graders (many of whom weighed 65 pounds and still watched "Sesame Street") belly crawl across the gym floor while the ninth-graders (in my memory, most had mustaches, drove to school and worked 12-hour shifts at the local mills to support their wives and families) fired volleyballs at them.

Hard. In my memory, most ninth-graders could throw a volleyball in excess of 100 mph.

When a seventh-grader was hit, he had to yell "medic!" The previously eliminated seventh-graders would sprint out and try to drag him to safety under a hail of volleyballs from the ninth graders (assuming they weren't taking a cigarette break).

I don't know the purpose of Mr. B's plan, other than to give the ninth graders an outlet for aggression and to teach the seventh-graders their spot in the pecking order.

Here's the thing: While that seems insane in retrospect (since I never had Mr. B as a PE teacher, I don't know whether the ninth graders ever were targets, or it was just 55 minutes of firing volleyballs at little boys), it didn't seem weird at the time. It seemed like junior high.

The ninth graders at my school had their own lawn (you'd get punched if you accidentally wandered onto it). The teachers – when they weren't busy crowding into their staff room to smoke and complain about tenure – were just making sure none of us wandered off where we could do damage to the neighboring homes.

The fact that my peers survived junior high – the social part was just as terrible – makes me confident in this: We will somehow survive a global pandemic.

And if one of us gets knocked down, we can look for a bunch of seventh-graders to run out and drag us to safety under a hail of volleyballs. We will survive.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Puzzles both good business and good practice in pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to a number of businesses – restaurants, retail stores, hospitality, airlines and more The cruise industry may never recover.

Unsurprisingly, there are a few winners (businesswise. Presumably, no one wanted this to happen): Streaming TV services, teleconferencing companies, toilet paper companies, disinfectant producers.

And one more: Those who make puzzles.

Jigsaw puzzles. Sudoku. Crossword puzzles. Heck, had Winston Churchill made his famous description of Russia in 2020 – "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" – we'd be online looking for how to find the riddle/mystery/enigma.

According to the Wall Street Journal (on the list of America's top five newspapers, along with The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Daily Republic), "puzzles" was the seventh-most-searched item on Amazon March 24 – the most recent date for which there was data. No. 7. For perspective, three weeks earlier, puzzles ranked 1,435th on Amazon's list.

Yes, we want puzzles.

Further information from the Wall Street Journal (I have it ranked in a tie with the Daily Republic as the best newspaper, but it lost in the first tie-breaker: Number of weekly Wade brothers columns) is that Ravensburger, the largest seller of jigsaw puzzles in the world, has seen its sales jump to nearly four times what they were a year ago.

When we're locked down, we watch TV. And eat. And look for puzzles.

I'm included in that.

I already did a few puzzles for show (no one watches. It's my private show). I can stumble through a Sudoku. I can't do crossword puzzles (don't those people know that there are multiple words that fit their definitions?). I am solid with word searches.

But since the shelter-in-place order took effect, I've done puzzles regularly. I do the newspaper Sudoku and other puzzles every evening (I work during the day, so I save them, like a dessert). Mrs. Brad bought me a puzzle book that even includes logic games (I am surprisingly solid on them).

Here's the thing, which I presume is true for nearly everyone: I now think I'm good at them. I consider myself an elite Sudoku solver (although the difficult ones throw me. I just shout that they made a mistake and move on). I have developed a technique to speed up my word-search efforts. I even try the Jumble puzzle occasionally and do all right.

Mrs. Brad and I haven't broken out a jigsaw puzzle yet, but that's coming. And assuming it's like other puzzles, I will soon (like you) think I'm really good at it.

In a time of lockdown, we look for things to keep our edge. Puzzles not only keep us busy, but allow us to compete, even if only against ourselves.

I, for one, am grateful for puzzles. Whether they're on a phone (not a real puzzle, but OK) or on paper (the old-school, true way to do it), they keep our minds sharp and help us pass time.

In conclusion, here are two puzzles: Guess how many times I used the term "puzzle(s)" in this column (including the two times in this sentence)? The answer is at the end.

Oh, one more thing: I've hidden several words in this column, mostly requiring you to search and combine consecutive parts of two different words. See how many of the following words you can find: Cast, chip, dean, dens, done, ewe,  hand, hen, less, noon, pour, rear, sand, sieve, Siam, stint, tall, tar, therein, ton.

The word "puzzle(s)" (including this one) was used 23 times (once in the headline).

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

SPORTS STUFF WE LOVE tournament

FINALS
Wiffle Ball (5) vs. Men's downhill at the Olympics (5)

SEMIFINALS
Tiger Woods in contention at a major (13) vs. Wiffle ball (5)
Men's downhill at the Olympics (5) vs. Underhanded free throws (4)

QUARTERFINALS
Tiger Woods in contention at a major (13) vs. ABA's red, white and blue ball (2)
Men's downhill at the Olympics (5) vs. Wide World of Sports intro (2)
Wiffle ball (5) vs. Baseball doubleheaders (7)
Underhanded free throws (4) vs. Olympics opening ceremonies (3)

THIRD-ROUND MATCHUPS
Snow football (1) vs. Tiger Woods in contention at a major (13)
Charging the mound (1) vs. Men's downhill at the Olympics (5)
Keith Olbermann-Dan Patrick (3) vs. ABA's red, white and blue ball (2)
Take me out to the ballgame (11) vs. Wide World of Sports intro (2)
John Madden-Pat Summerall (1) vs. Wiffle ball (5)
Submariner pitchers (16) vs. Underhanded free throws (4)
First-round knockouts (6) vs. Baseball doubleheaders (7)
Olympics opening ceremonies (3) vs. Knuckleball pitchers (2)


SECOND-ROUND MATCHUPS
Tiger Woods in contention at a major (13) vs. Keith Jackson (12)
Slap shot from the blue line (12) vs. Men's downhill at the Olympics (5)
Snow football (1) vs. Squeeze plays (8)
Charging the mound (1) vs. Curry flurry (8)
Non-catchers catching (10) vs. ABA's red, white and blue ball (2)
Monday Night Football on ABC (10) vs. Wide World of Sports Intro (2)
Keith Olbermann-Dan Patrick (3) vs. Offensive linemen catch passes (6)
Short dunkers (14) vs. Take me out to the ballgame (11)
Madison Bumgarner in 2014 (4) vs. Wiffle ball (5)
Submariner pitchers (16) vs. Picking up the 7-10 split (8)
John Madden-Pat Summerall (1) vs. Crazy football formations (8)
Underhanded free throws (4) vs. The autumn wind is a Raider (5)
Baseball doubleheaders (7) vs. Mike Krukow-Duane Kuiper (2)
Fab Five shorts (7) vs. Knuckleball pitchers (2)
Manute Bol shooting 3s (3) vs. First-round knockouts (6)
Olympics opening ceremonies (3) vs. Acapulco cliff divers (11)

FIRST-ROUND MATCHUPS
Keith Olbermann-Dan Patrick on SportsCenter (3) vs. Harlem Globetrotters (14)
Superstars competition (6) vs. Singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch (11)
Fab Five shorts (7) vs. Roundball Rock NBA intro (10)
Crazy football formations (8) vs. Hail Mary passes (9)
Baseball doubleheaders (7) vs. Flea flickers (10)
Squeeze plays (8) vs. Jason "White Chocolate" Williams (9)
12-5 March Madness matchups (12) vs. Men's downhill at the Olympics (5)
"Brian's Song" (1) vs. Submarine pitchers (16)
Manute Bol shooting 3s (3) vs. Olympic curling (14)
Run-and-shoot offense (4) vs. Tiger Woods in contention at a major (13)
Charging the mound (1) vs. Borg-McEnroe (16)
Paul Pierce poops himself in a game (6) vs. Acapulco cliff divers (11)
First-round knockouts (6) vs. Left-handed basketball players (11)
Soccer chants (7) vs. Non-catchers having to catch (10)
Great pinch-hitters (7) vs. ABC's Monday Night Football (10)
Picking up a 7-10 split (8) vs. College football overtime rules (9)
Madison Bumgarner in 2014 (4) vs. Using five infielders in baseball (13)
Snow football games (1) vs. Ultimate frisbee (16)
Wild World of Sports intro (2) vs. 100-meter dash in the Olympics (15)
Underhanded free throws (4) vs. "The Battle of the Sexes" (13)
Duane Kuiper-Mike Krukow (2) vs. NASCAR fights in the pits (15)
Whitney Houston's national anthem (5) vs. Keith Jackson (12)
San Diego Chicken (4) vs. Slap shot from the blue line (13)
Olympics opening ceremonies (3) vs. Baseball switch hitters (14)
Wiffle ball (5) vs. Late 1990s NBA draft fashion (12)
The ABA's red, white and blue ball (2) vs. Left-handed quarterbacks (15)
Curry flurry (8) vs. Night tennis matches at the U.S. Open (9)
"The autumn wind is a raider" (5) vs. Chain nets in basketball (12)
John Madden-Pat Sumerall (1) vs. Quarterbacks who are better runners than passers (16)
Offensive linemen catching passes (6) vs. "One Shining Moment" at end of NCAA tournament (11)
Extended extra-inning baseball games (3) vs. Short guys who dunk (14)
Knuckleball pitchers (2) vs. Seattle Supersonics (15)

Candidates

John Madden and Pat Summerall
Left-handed quarterbacks
Quarterbacks who run well, but can't pass
Snow football games
Crazy college football offensive formations
Straight on football kickers
"Coffin-corner" punts
College football overtime rules
Offensive linemen catching passes
Baseball switch-hitters
Extreme extra-inning games
Non-catchers having to catch
Squeeze plays
Having five infielders late in a game
Great pinch-hitters
Knuckleball pitchers
Left-handed point guards
Short players who dunk
Manute Bol shooting 3-pointers
Larry Johnson-era UNLV teams
The Fab Five's baggy shorts
The red, white and blue ball from the ABA
Triple plays
Charging the mound
Jason "White Chocolate" Williams
March Madness 12 vs. 5 matchups
When Paul Pierce pooped himself
Monday Night Football on ABC
The run-and-shoot offense
Flea-flicker plays
Tiger Woods in contention on Sunday at a major
NASCAR drivers fighting in the pits
Borg vs. McEnroe
The 100-meter dash final at the Olympics
The men's downhill at the Winter Olympics
Hagler vs. Hearns
Singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch
Underhanded free throws
Kuiper and Krukow
Steph Curry flurry
Bumgarner in Game 7 of 2014
Brian's Song
Hail Mary passes
Whitney Houston's national anthem
Night tennis at U.S. Open
Football safeties
Keith Jackson
Harlem Globetrotters
Superstars competition
Acapulco cliff diving
Submarine pitchers
Doc Ellis' no-hitter on acid
Late 1990s NBA draft fashion
Slap shots from the blue line
San Diego chicken
Roundball Rock intro for NBA games
Baseball infield dirt during NFL games
Bowling on TV
Jose Canseco having ball bounce off his head, over fence
Goalies scoring goals
Wiffle ball
First-round knockouts
Soccer chants
Olberman-Patrick on SportsCenter
Seattle Supersonics
"One Shining Moment" at end of NCAA tourney
"Fleet football" rules on the playground
Chain nets on basketball hoops
Unofficial disc golf courses
Olympics opening ceremonies
Olympic marathon to close the Games
Wide World of Sports intro
Battle of the Sexes
Baseball doubleheaders
The skeleton
7-10 split
Olympic curling
Ultimate frisbee