​Do alligators play golf? I don’t know. If you can answer that question, please let me know. Ian Poulter, who’s a pro on the men’s tour, would also appreciate any information you have.
 
Several weeks back, he was playing in South Carolina. The tournament is known for having alligators on the course. Sometimes they sun themselves on the grass. Sometimes the camera catches them meandering around in the water.
 
On this day, Poulter hit his ball into the water, so he took a drop nearby. An alligator came over to the edge of the water line to watch. Here’s where we’d like to get some reptile information. What the heck was the gator thinking?
 
Did he want a piece of Poulter’s leg? Was he salivating, thinking to himself, “Mmmmmm, I’ve never tasted a blonde-haired Englishman with a dry wit before. He’s probably got a sharp bouquet.”
 
“No,” you say? The alligator isn’t that smart?
 
Well, how the heck do we know? How the heck do we know anything about animals? We presume because we use tools and can write that somehow we’re smarter or know more than other species. I’m not so sure when I watch these thousands of videos online that demonstrate animals helping each other out when they get in a tight jam, like that one where the cat jumps down into a garbage dump to pull out a terrorized dog that can’t get up the side of the pit to safety.
 
Alligators may just enjoy golf. We don’t know. That big boy could have been waiting for Poulter’s annual visit to South Carolina, thinking to himself, “I hope that skinny guy who wears the bright clothes hits one close to me this weekend. I love his backswing. And he can feather a deuce in there.”
 
Can alligators smell? I don’t know. Maybe he enjoys Poulter’s cologne. It could be he smelled good, so he didn’t want to leave his post.
 
Regardless of all this conjecturing, if you get a chance, go on YouTube and watch the video. It’s darn amusing. There’s some conversation about what to do (What would you do? Would you hit the ball with a gator a few feet away, eyeballing your left calf? I DON’T THINK SO!). The caddy and Poulter go back and forth. The announcer throws a few funny phrases in there.

They spank the ground with a club to get him to move. Nothing. Finally, the caddy charges at him, swinging the club wildly, and the gator splashes off into deeper water.
 
There, he circled and continued to watch the play. The whole thing was funny and disconcerting at the same time.
 
I have to believe the gator has either developed a sense that humans are interesting, white balls are fun to watch, or golf is his favorite sport. He’s bored floating around in the water all day, chowing on frogs or fish or whatever it is that gators find in the waterways. When he’s done, he’s got to figure out what to do with his spare time.

What better way to kill the Saturday and Sunday afternoons they relaxing and watching some golf? And he doesn’t have to turn on the TV. He gets a front row seat.  Hmmmm, sounds great.
 
Alligators are probably ahead of us on the evolutionary scale. They’ve figured out how to get into a golf tournament for free and grab an awesome seat on the course, right next to the pros. Too bad they don’t know how to scream “YOU DA MAN!,” because that would complete their day.

​Lebron James keeps moving on in the NBA playoffs. Someday he won’t. But right now he keeps upping his game, getting the job done in all phases, and his Cleveland Cavaliers team rallies behind him in their collective pursuit of greatness. 
 
He came into the league right out of high school. He was a phenom, but you couldn’t classify him as “great” yet. Those early years he proved a lot and honed his skills. He got better. The Cavs went to the championship. They didn’t win the trophy. 
 
Moving to the Miami Heat, he got his first championship rings and then he returned home to raise the city of Cleveland to new sports heights, going to the championship in 2015 where they lost in the finals, then winning it in 2016. 
 
Somehow, James keeps getting better.  How does he do it? 
 
If you’ve watched him, you know he has a body that is almost beyond belief, muscled out, tall, built like he could take anybody out on the football field, fast, and he has the ability to sky. Seemingly, he does it all. But that still doesn’t make him great. 
 
The sign of greatness is staying fresh and relevant. You don’t just win the big one once.  You keep heading back. You find new ways to develop and refine what you do. 
 
You see this in writers, movie producers and successful CEO’s. The term “reinvent yourself” is a cliché, but to stay on top of your “A” game year after year requires reinvention. 
 
This year, I read something about Lebron and his off-season workouts. He is 6’8” and played last year at 270 lbs. This year, he is reported to be down to 250 lbs, perhaps a bit more. He is faster, quicker (two different things) and able to accomplish more acrobatic moves on the court because of it. He is greater than last year. 
 
He stayed fresh and relevant. He knew if he wanted the Cavs to get back to the championship this year, he had to refine his game somehow. He prepared himself and acted. The results show. 
 
Think about Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Nolan Ryan. What did they do in their respective sports?  Over the years, they stayed fresh and relevant. Hence, greatness. 
 
The sign of long-term greatness in almost any creative endeavor means hitting new criteria and improving. Woody Allen, Stephen King, The Beatles, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Ted Williams. There’s a list for you. 
 
How about Steve Martin, David Bowie, Steven Spielberg, The Rolling Stones? Do they ring your bell? 
 
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele started their comedy show “Key and Peele” back in 2012. They are tremendously talented and the show was off-the-charts funny, charting new ground on race-based humor. I couldn’t get enough of it. 
 
The next year they were decent. The following year I stopped watching. Not funny anymore. I hated to turn them off, but their stuff was repetitive, boring and not worth watching to me. 
 
Now, Peele recently came out with a spoof horror movie, “Get Out,” which in an offbeat way introduces some fresh and relevant thematic material. I loved it. It was a different movie, and kept me engaged the full length.  
 
I don’t know if you could call it a “great” movie, but it was very good. If he can keep it up, maintain fresh and relevant material for years, he will ascend the ladder of comedic movie greatness. Like so many other things, time will tell. 
 
Keep it fresh. Stay on top of things. Be relevant. Pull that off in your field, and you get the “Greatness” mantle.

​This event happened a couple of weeks back. I wrote it down as something funny and embarrassing, then set it aside. The idea had to percolate to see whether my embarrassment would stand the test of time or the humorous side would win out. I’m going with the humor. So here it is.
 
After swimming at my workout facility on early Sunday morning, I sat in the whirlpool, went in the sauna, then finished my sweating routine by heading into the steam room. It was empty.
 
I have a stretching series of exercises to work through while in the steam room. Some are specifically for my feet and Achilles, as well as my upper back and shoulders to help with good posture. It’s relaxing. Afterwards, I’m ready to face the day with a more positive attitude.
 
That Sunday, I felt some unexpected air rumblings in my gut. After flexing my stomach muscles through several sets of the exercises, it became apparent that the air was going to have to work its way out of my body. I didn’t care. There was no one in the room with me.
 
A sudden expansion pushed the gas and I unleashed a fuselage in three monumental stages, brappa brappa brappa, pause, toot, toot, toot, slight pause, then multiple honks before it was finally finished. I sighed in satisfaction. Man, it felt good!
 
I continued stretching. A few minutes later, a residual explosion occurred. I got up, faced the far corner to do some leg stretches and saw that someone has been in the room the whole time. The steam had obscured his presence. He’d been silent the entire time I was making a sound spectacle.
 
My faced turned into a ripe tomato, I’m sure, as a I apologized, “I am SO sorry. I had no idea you were in here.”
 
Through the haze, you could see a gigantic smile on this guy’s face, and I could only imagine how amused he must have been by the loudest and longest public fart in the history of the world, rivaling the burp of Will Ferrell in the movie “Elf” after he chugs a 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola, then burps voluminously for 18-consecutive seconds, then turns to his brother and says, “DID YOU HEAR THAT!?!?!?” Uh, nope.
 
I cry laughing every year watching that scene. The guy in the steam room will hopefully feel the same way about my incident in the years ahead.
 
After apologizing, I said to him, “Man, you’re going to have a funny story to tell your friends today: ‘You won’t believe what I heard this morning’.” Then he’ll regale them with how he tried not to laugh out loud as my mortar shots reverberated off the walls.

We all get embarrassed. I can remember the public explosions of two close friends, that probably rival mine, but not for sustained resonance. I think mine took the trophy.

The point is though that we all sometimes just lose it, and that’s part of the humanity we all bring to the world. We aren’t machines. None of us is ever going to be perfect. Sometimes the unexpected comes out of our bodies. It can be amazing or embarrassing. Hopefully the former far more frequently then the latter.
 
Still, we have to accept the latter. Mine could have been prevented if I’d seen the guy in the corner of the room when I first sat down and relaxed.

But, that would have spoiled the fun, and he would never have that hilarious story to tell. So I reckon it all works out in the long run, and as my grandmother used to tell my dad, “Better to have an empty house than a bad tenant.”Sage words, indeed.

​There are no shortcuts. Some people think you can find one in your career or a new road to get to work, or developing a skill to the level where you’re considered an expert, but it ain’t gonna happen folks. Give it up.
 
Our dad was a funny man some times. He was an engineer by trade. He looked at the world in a linear fashion: x+y=z, or x, then y, then z. There was a logic to the world. Arithmetic made sense. Algorithms solved problems.

He applied this to driving. Sometimes we would come home from college or visit him and my mom once we were out working full-time ourselves, and I can often remember his excitement that he’d found a shortcut to the golf course or the supermarket.
 
“If we turn here, this cuts off seven seconds on the trip,” he’d say ecstatically. Now, I guess seven seconds a day added up over the course of the year (hmmm, use that math now) is 49 seconds a week or about 2,600 seconds a year. Divide by 60 seconds (to get minutes) and you’ve saved about 43 minutes in your life.  That might be significant, but I’d argue it’s not. In his mind it was a shortcut. He’d found an efficiency. But I’m not sure it really worked realistically in the grand scheme of things.
 
I think that applies to many situations where we think we can get away with something by finding a shortcut. Frequently, I look for alternative roads, for example, when my regular route is congested. We lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area for 12 years, notorious for maniacal traffic and drivers, so it was imperative to always have a backup plan. That meant finding faster ways through back roads or using tollways.
 
What happened though (because I would time the alternatives) was that no matter what I chose to do, the amount of time to get somewhere seemed pretty darn close regardless. Take the toll road and there’d be an accident. Get off the toll road because it was backed up for six miles and you’d get stuck at 14 consecutive stoplights while going down side streets. You couldn’t win. No shortcuts.
 
You go one way and there’s construction. You go another way and there’s an accident.
 
I was driving to a high school basketball game recently. On the way there, I took the back roads. I wasn’t in a hurry. There were lots of stop signs. It was the most direct route. It took 38 minutes.

Coming back, I chose the Interstate, which took me south past where we live by about 4-5 miles, then you have to make those 4-5 miles back up. So it’s about 8-10 extra miles altogether.
 
I’m thinking it would be faster because it seemed like every other crossroad on the way out to the game there was a stop sign, and I was going 40-45 mph. So the highway speed and no slowdowns would get me home faster. Not. Of course not. No shortcuts.

My mind predicted it would be 4-5 minutes faster driving home. As I pulled into the driveway, it was almost to the minute the exact same time it took me to drive to the game.
 
There’s no question you can find efficiencies. Our dad, using his engineer mind, would shave 12 seconds off a route here, and 16 seconds off a route there. It made him proud.
 
It can add up.  But don’t bank your mental health on it. Find alternatives when the GPS or Google is showing a red line of blocked traffic for 3-4 miles (if you can). Otherwise stick to your game plan and find some good music to kill the time.