War Stories
War Stories Become Prologue
By Callie Oettinger
Published: February 6, 2012
It was 1961 and Dwight Eisenhower was still going back to that game in 1912—West Point v. Carlisle.
West Point and Carlisle were winning teams. One featured two future generals—Eisenhower and Omar Bradley—and the other featured all-around athlete and gold-medal-winning Olympian Jim Thorpe and the now-legendary Coach Pop Warner.
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Paul’s All Is Lost Moment
By Steven Pressfield | Published: February 8, 2012
My friend Paul is writing a pilot. He’s never done a piece of writing this serious before. The work is totally on spec.
Paul's All Is Lost Moment was a lot like Rocky's
Paul has a full-time business and has to do his writing at odd hours. A couple of weeks ago he had a crisis that made him almost suicidal. When I describe it to you, you’ll say, “Man, have I been there!”
A script for a TV pilot is about fifty-five pages long. Paul was on Page 52. He went home after work, sat down at his laptop and opened up the script to (blank) page 53. But first he decided, just for fun, to skim over pages 1 to 52.
By the time he was done, he was in despair. I saw him the next morning.
“What a blistering, unconscionable piece of crap! Who am I kidding giving birth to this abortion, or even deluding myself that I am, or might someday become, a writer? This worthless, steaming turd that I’ve been busting my ass over for … “
Paul was distraught. Inconsolable. I had to walk him home just to make sure he didn’t do something desperate.
Seventy-two hours later, I saw Paul again.
“I’m on page 62,” he said. His aspect and demeanor had totally changed. He was a new man. “I finished the f*@ker,” he said.
“And did the pages miraculously get better when you looked at them again?”
“Hey, I know I’m an idiot … “
We started talking about the scene in the first Rocky, where Sylvester Stallone, on the night before the big fight, gets up out of bed and goes down, alone, to the arena. He sees the giant billboards with pictures of the champ, Apollo Creed—and one huge placard with his own image. His face falls. His shoulders slump. The promoter is the only person in the auditorium. “What are you doing here, Rocky? Go home and get some sleep.”
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The Difference Between Pain and Injury
By Shawn Coyne | Published: February 3, 2012
So I’m at the health club the other day. And like most health clubs, there is a ceaseless barrage of aural and visual input.
Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots. Is it "pain" or injury?
Grunts reminiscent of a maternity ward come from a beer bellied guy who wants everyone to know that he’s just bench pressed 112.5 pounds. A personal trainer checking his cell phone, halfheartedly beseeches for “just one more” Russian tea kettle swing from an elderly lady wearing a leotard circa 1973. The screams and strained cheerfulness all awash in the pulse pounding club music pouring out of the gym’s suspended speaker pods.
But what really catch my attention—despite the fact that I have my own pre-programmed playlist streaming into my cerebral cortex from my own personal listening device—are two 42 inch plasma televisions above my head. One is ten feet to the right of me and the other about three feet to the left. The one directly in front of me is running a new daytime show called The Daily Chew, which from what I can tell is an hour long of carefully orchestrated food pornography. Lots of sizzling meats and sugar coated confections, followed by ecstatic expressions from the show’s five hosts as they sample the in studio prepared fare.
I’m not a foodie, so it is ESPN2 to the left and CNN to the right that distracts me from the horrors of maintaining an elevated aerobic heart rate for forty five minutes. ESPN2 is running a story about the condition of the New England Patriots star tight end, Rob Gronkowski. “Gronk” is the perfectly sculpted protoplasmic beast who broke a number of NFL receiving records this season. But in the AFC Championship game against the Baltimore Ravens, he “sprained” his ankle and had to be helped off the field.
While I pant, the network keeps running the slow motion injury footage. It’s gruesome. Not on the level of Lawrence Taylor’s tackle of Joe Theismann on Monday Night football in January 2008, but at least on a par with Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s experience in Cleveland this season, which effectively knocked the black and gold out of the Super Bowl hunt. Calling the collapse of Gronk’s lower tibia and at least a rubber band stretch of his posterior tibial tendon an “ankle sprain” is like saying Donald Trump has a slightly receding hairline. After three replays and three winces—one view never seems to be enough, two is too voyeuristic and three somewhat shameful—I shift my eyes to the CNN portal.
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Posted in What It Takes | 11 Comments
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