​If you are like most modern first world humans, at some point you’ve misplaced your cell phone and achieved a level of paranoia when you can’t find it in a reasonable time period. Several weeks back, I reached a near manic level going through every option imaginable to find mine.
 
Here’s what happened. Obviously, number one, I tried to find my phone because I wanted to use it. This began the usual innocuous and successful search.

Where did I last remember having it? Where did I put it?
 
Thus began the exploratory process leading to exploding blood pressure levels and sweat trickling down my armpits. Secondly, I absolutely knew it was in the house because I remembered where I used it.

Third step was to begin looking at that location – the couch. Check the table, behind and under the cushions, underneath the couch if it fell on the ground. Nope.
 
Okay, where did I stroll in the house after that? Bedroom?  Perhaps. Check there, move the bed sheets, get down on knees and look underneath. Then, “oh yeah, maybe I went to the bathroom and laid it on the sink.” Check there. Negatory.
 
Step four, always look in my workspace, where I often place and forget it before wandering off. I go downstairs and move all my papers, foraging underneath and any open spaces, as well as underneath the table and in the chair (where it could fall or slip out of the pocket). Unsuccessful.
 
This led to step five, go to the easy chair where I watch TV and multiple crevices invite your phone to slide from your pocket as you lean back, and then fall deep down inside the seams. I stuck my hands in every conceivable crack, moved the couch out from its normal position, picking up the 19 stray M&Ms. Nothing.
 
I’m getting anxious. I know it’s in the house.

But, still, I go to step six, which is the car, where again, it easily slides from the pants pockets and deposits next to the driver’s seat. Extensive rummaging there reveals nothing.
 
Ah yes, why not call the cell? I have it on silent, that’s why. What a dummy. There’s got to be a workaround on that. My wife is not available. I text our kids.
 
I reach our younger daughter first. We talk it through as sweat trickles down my forehead after more than 30 minutes of manic meandering. How can you make the phone ring when the silencer is on?
 
She, like most of her generation, has the answer, figuring out the next steps and giving me a call. I hear the sound upstairs in the bedroom. Hmmmmmmmmm?
 
My jeans are hanging on my closet door. For some totally unexplainable reason, that afternoon I’d decided to change pants – which I never do – and left the phone in the pants’ pocket of the ones I changed out of.  Whew. Blood pressure de-escalates. I feel stupid. Usually it’s me finding stuff for other people. Now I’m the scatterbrained one.
 
Even when you retrace your steps, look in all the usual places, drive your brain into inconceivable (sanity-wise) scenarios, it doesn’t appear. Even with logic prevailing – “it absolutely has to be in the house” – your disbelieving reality mindset takes over and panic creeps in. I’m not sure we can ever stop that.
 
So, keep an eye on your cell phone. Commit to memory when you place it outside your normal parameters. I guess that’s my big advice. But, still, that’s predicated on you thinking about where you place it when you put it down, which is hard to do because the cell phone as become so routine in our life. So, I guess my other piece of advice is to keep the ringer on. That’s doable. But, when it rings it might interrupt your nap.

​With winter here in Wisconsin, preparations for the onslaught began recently. That included chopping wood to occasionally fuel a fire for household warmth. I recommend chopping for all.
 
Our son Kirby, who frequently is home for Thanksgiving and the Christmas season, enjoys doing the honors. Splitting logs is a visceral thing.

You center it on a huge stump. Bring the axe back. Hammer it home. The resounding THOCK sound as the sharp blade contacts the carbon-based former tree resonates up through your body. You feel it, like an immersion of power, success, and release.
 
If you chop well, you split the logs in one hit. Though this is not a goal, when you accomplish a split on the first try, it’s a magnificent feeling. Kind of the like opposite of bowling when the split makes you feel like you didn’t get perfect contact.
 
Yes, that’s the feel – perfection. You can’t beat it. You may start whistling a tune. Coming from Kirby, that wouldn’t be surprising.
 
I’ve chopped wood for many years. I took an internship in Florida back when I was a youngster to work for a woman promoting her alternative economy public television show. While staying at her house, she introduced to the joys of wood chopping.

She didn’t split logs. Instead, she kept an axe stuck in a huge tree stump in her backyard. When stressed, she went outside and slammed the stump for 15-20 minutes. Coming inside, she felt better, relaxed, as if her worries were left behind.
 
Splitting logs does this for you – releases endomorphins. You feel better.
 
This type of exercise could be put to good use in our violent society, and as an anger management tool. You may have read up on anger management rooms that have been around for years where anyone can come in, pay a fee, get a sledgehammer, then destroy various objects – television sets, microwaves (things that go crash or boom), chairs, tables -- for a period of time, say half an hour (you don’t need much). The idea is to get the bad juices out of your body by destroying inanimate objects.
 
Slamming objects with your total body/mind immersion gets your anger out. These anger management rooms have figured out a way to monetize the release of your anger.

Chopping wood does the same thing, is free, and you actually do something good for society by splitting logs to provide fuel. It’s available to almost anyone if you purchase an axe and find some local wood you can bring to your yard to annihilate.
 
Years ago I read a book, “Chop Wood, Carry Water.” It was about Zen. The book covered a number of things in our daily lives that we do that can capture a oneness of feeling, helping you relax and be more in-tune with the world. Chopping wood was one of those things the authors said helped you achieve a more Zen-like state.
 
I believe it. I’ve seen the results for myself. Kirby looks forward to the exercise to get his chops in.
 
Pick up an axe this holiday season. Become one with the world. You’ll feel better.

​This past weekend, I had several college buddies visit and we went to the University of Illinois football game against Wisconsin in Madison. We had a great time despite losing the game.
 
After returning from the game, I noticed how quickly my mind had to shift from the excitement of the game and socializing with friends back to the focus required for daily responsibilities. This transition wasn't always seamless, but it made me reflect on how mental flexibility is essential not only in sports but in everyday life as well.
 
Rooting for the Illinois team can be hard. After decades of mediocrity and below-mediocrity, we’ve seen signs of light the past three years. That is good, but also brings increased expectations with it. You believe improvement will continue.
 
Improvement implies many things. One major component is the ability to learn from mistakes, to take lessons, defeat and failure and build on it so you don’t lose in the same way down the road.
 
To do so requires a mindset of determining want went wrong, identifying what should be different, then getting your brain to switch gears. You must think, absorb, contemplate and execute.
 
In the football game this past Saturday, it seemed to the four of us old men that the Illinois football team wasn’t doing that very well. Their play patterned repetitiously. They did the same things without gaining additional yardage on offense and failed to stop Wisconsin by trying different things on defense. The coaches and players didn’t shift gears.

Daily I play Connections, a game designed for you to find four categories of four to associate 16 words given to you in the puzzle. This is a game that forces you to switch gears.
 
When you are stymied, if you continue attacking it in a patterned way, you frequently fail. Somehow you must get outside the box. The question is: how do you do that?
 
For Connections, and other situations where you must shift to succeed, I’ve found some helpful tactics. One, for example, in the case of Connections, is to step back and look at alternative meanings for the words. This is where the game often stumps you.

They set up the categories to get you thinking about a TV show or types of hats or ways to cross a body of water. Those could be the early connections you see and think are evident.

After stumbling multiple times, if you don’t switch gears, you’re stuck and will fail. Maybe, instead of the three connections noted in the above paragraph, you instead need to think of definitions for laziness or types of makeup or facial features.

The point is you must group the words differently, find a different connection. You won’t solve it otherwise.
 
Whether playing Connections or football, the concept comes into play. When blocked, step back. Imagine something new. Go against the grain. Take a chance.
 
If you keep slamming your head against the wall, you get nowhere and frustration grows, which also serves to block your ability to solve problems. Taking risks is part of the solution.

When you step outside your normal framework of thinking, you encounter new terrain. That may scare or irritate you, a reason you don’t typically go that way.
 
It’s situations like the football game where one type of play gets blocked over and over or in Connections where you can’t figure out the thread to tie the words together that you become forced to adapt. My two cents is: switch gears earlier, before you are forced to.
 
Don’t wait until the final quarter of the football game to shake off your game plan and introduce new plays or tactics. Don’t wait in Connections until you’ve used all your choices to consider alternative categories.
Break out. Get ahead of the ball.

​For those of you who follow this column, you might remember previous entries on El Klutzo, a stumbling, bumbling quality in our family handed down by our dad, Herm, and inherited by myself and my two brothers. In short, El Klutzo refers to our ability to bungle, bang, slip, twist, fall, slam, trip in ways seemingly impossible to duplicate if you tried your best.
 
All three of us demonstrate master skill at El Klutzo. It rears its head when unexpected, which is probably a major reason for its occurrence: not paying attention.
 
Recently, with my wife out of town, I assumed full control of our animal household. That includes a senile dog that can’t hear or see anymore, two new kittens and two aging cats, one which must be administered a needle injection twice a day for diabetes.
 
That’s a lot when the two of us both are home, and my wife administers most of those additional necessary actions when she is here. In her absence, I fully take over.
 
As part of her reminder to me, one chore was to ensure the cat litter is kept clean. To prep you, understand that one of these new kittens is a Maine Coon cat. For the unenlightened,  this is a cat that will grow to huge proportions.

To give you a sense of scale, when he plays with the other kitten (more or less the same age), he (Magneto) dwarfs the smaller guy (Xavier). Magneto will leap from the couch, bound towards Xavier and pounce on him, completely engulfing Xavier with his wiry body. Xavier cries uncle, but Magneto ignores him.
 
The consumption of food by both kittens are titanic. They chow and chow and chow, then meow for more.

This results in more visits to the litter box. Suffice to say, Magneto is magnificent in the size and bulk he deposits on a more than one-a-day routine. He piles it in. Xavier drops in a few of his own, as do our two mature cats.
 
When my wife headed out, she mentioned I should shovel the litter boxes daily so as not to have to completely empty the litter box as frequently. Good advice. Makes sense.
 
Not with El Klutzo! Nope.
 
To shovel the logs out of the litter box, we have a plastic spatula-like device that allows the litter to sift through back into the box while keeping the turds on top for you to dump in the toilet and flush down. This worked well. I’m feeling pretty good, humming some J. Geils Band tune to myself, “Pack Fair and Square.” You should listen to it.
 
We have two litter boxes. I move from litter box one to litter box two, prepared to dominate.
 
That, of course, is when El Klutzo rears its head unexpectedly. I scoop up multiple Lincoln logs, head to our toilet, push the lid up and lift the hand shovel of excrement to drop it in, when the toilet seat, rather than staying put, drops back down, hits the tip of the hand shovel, causing the entire mess to flip in the air, onto the toilet seat, behind the back of the seat, and on the ground, pebbles and cat refuse combined. New curse words ensued (always a component of El Klutzo events).
 
None of the expected deposit made it into the bowl. In fact, not only was the entire mess scattered, but by getting behind the seat and under the seat on the rim, it was not only a pain to clean up, but also extremely difficult.
 
El Klutzo has no cure. I can only advise you to be careful when depositing cat litter in the toilet bowl because you never know, the toilet bowl may have a notion of its own.

​Weird things happen in life. When events line up unexpectedly, you sometimes just shake your head and go, “How the heck did that happen?”
 
We all experience these moments. They are the times, for example, where you show up at Chicago Midway airport and walk from your gate to find your mom heading towards you (not knowing she is flying, nor she knowing you are passing through) and you stop in front of her, “Mom, is that you?”
 
And she responds, “David? David Simon? What are you doing here?” That happened to me.
 
The following incident is not quite at that level. Still. There was a strange alignment recently in my life that actually got me to text my wife while she was traveling so we could share a laugh.

It went like this: we walk our dog Pepper consistently at a local forested area. Parking at that spot has become rutted due to rain/snow and the turf. It is mostly dirt, so it becomes deeper as precipitation sits in puddles and cars gouge out mud.
 
This is a bit inconvenient and tends towards the 4-5 holes getting steep enough over time that the bottom carriage of your vehicle scrapes as your tires move through the ruts. To solve the problem (or, more accurately, to briefly alleviate it since time and weather recreate the holes), I have taken to buying bags of pond pebbles (decent-sized rocks) and dumping them to fill the water-filled chasms.
 
I feel righteous. Solving a problem. It never holds though.
 
As the holes have re-expanded recently and I’d begun musing yet again about purchasing the bags of rocks, we encountered another guy walking his dog. We chatted about the issue and he said he’d just called the local park district to get the problem fixed, but no one had showed up to do the job. He joined our frustration.
No help came. I made the decision to buy six more bags of pond pebbles one morning at our local hardware store, and headed off to the park.
 
As I closed in on the area, I saw orange construction cones popping out to the main road, and thought, “Huh, what the heck? Is the park closed?”
 
Getting nearer, I’ll be damned if the local maintenance guys aren’t in the middle of filling in the holes, packing it down, grading it. It’s all nicely fixed as I pull up, and the two guys wave me away so they can finish job.

Here I am, with six bags of pond pebbles ready to do my thing. What now?
 
I drove past, turned around, and thought, “What the heck were the odds on this? Me buying the rocks, driving there and finding these two guys doing the job at the EXACT MOMENT when I show up?”  Weird, strange, synchronicity when stuff like this happens to you.
 
I’m sure you’ve had similar moments in life. We all have them.
 
The big remaining question is what to do with the rocks sitting in the back of my car. My wife figures we can do some erosion control behind our house. I hope the village maintenance crew doesn’t show up right as we start to dump the rocks. Imagine that.

​Having a near death experience changes you. If you reach a certain age, you’ve probably had something occur in your life that brought you closer to your maker, causing you to think differently in terms of how you approach living.

While IMO I didn’t have a near death experience the past four weeks, I did have something bad enough occur to my body that others in my family felt I might not stay around if I didn’t get things taken care of medically. So, I did. Two visits to urgent care. One followup visit to a surgeon

Without going into too much detail, I had a spider bite that inflated and caused significant pain. After three days, I visited urgent care and got dosed with an antibiotic and steroid. A week later, the doctor cut the inflammation open, drained it and put me on a more targeted antibiotic. One week after that, I went to a surgeon who opened me up again and further drained liquid by swabbing out the bacterial contamination. I’m healing, down to a scab.

I see things differently today than I did four weeks ago. More appreciative of the people in my sphere, thankful I’ve been given time to do more good in the world (hopefully my version of “good” makes sense to others). I’m taking things a bit slower. Listening more. Savoring my food taste by taste. Trying some new experiences.

In the past, I’ve had more near death experiences, and similar reactions have occurred and shaped my views on how to live and serve. And marvel at medical science. Without it, I likely would have died at age 14, when I had an appendicitis attack. Even back then, I remember thinking that if I had been born 50 years earlier, that 14 would have likely been my last birthday. Heavy thoughts for a burgeoning adolescent.

Living in the Dallas Fort-Worth metro area for 12 years, I remember driving home after work one day. I was at a stop light. It turned green. I waited to move. I don’t know why. A semi was stopped coming from my left, but the lizard in the back of my brain said not to go into the intersection yet. Sure enough, a car hidden behind the semi blasted from behind it through their red light, easily going 45-50 mph. It would have nailed my driver side at full blast if I’d accelerated like normal. Toast.

In the ensuing years, I’ve thought of the incident many times. I’m blessed I wasn’t hit, maimed or killed. 

Several years later, while being treated for peripheral neuropathy in my feet through an IV drip, I received contaminated medicine. I did not know that at the time.

I came home, and wracking seizures hit me, and I couldn’t get warm in the 103-degree DFW heat, throwing on a winter jacket, hat and several comforters while shaking uncontrollably. I took four Advil, then another four every 5 hours or so, thinking I had a sudden bad case of the flu, walking around ghost-white and everyone asking me what was wrong. “Ah, got a bad case of the flu.”

Until I got a call two days later from the CDC, asking my name, confirming who I was and them telling me to get IMMEDIATELY to the local hospital because of two other people having the IV drip from the batch they used on me, one was dead and the other was on life support. I hit the hospital, they did all the tests, and miraculously, somehow, I was on the mend and my body had dominated the contamination. I went back for a followup a week later and the doctor just shook his head at my recovery. “You have the strongest immune system I’ve ever seen,” I remember him saying.

Ever thankful again, I moved on, this event shaping my more spontaneous, exploratory, curious way of moving through this world. Life can be brutal. Life can easily be taken from you with no warning. Stay vigilant. Seize the moment.

Days, weeks, months, years can turn bad, like with the spider bite putting me in a pain vice grip. If you are graced to come through these types of experiences, you contemplate what’s important, why you live the way you do and what’s really valuable. You ponder this more with age, and say to yourself when you see someone really struggling (physically, mentally, psychically, financially), “There I go but for the grace of god.”

​There are levels of exhaustion where you can catalogue how tired you feel while continuing to function reasonably well throughout the day. Then, if it gets worse, you have days where you are toast – burned out, unable to move.
 
I bring this up because of friends who have become grandparents. It’s a common refrain in discussions with them.

Multiple friends and relatives in my age bracket (more or less) are helping to watch their grandkids, either one or two days a week. That seems to be the norm.
 
They love the job. They wouldn’t give it up for anything. But, they’re exhausted when each baby/child-watching day is done.

It’s understandable. As one put it, “God gave us the energy to have and raise kids when we were much younger, not after the age of 60.”  So true.
 
With age, the ability to bend over, pick a kid up, crawl around the floor, stay alert for hours on end becomes a chore, regardless of how much you love your grandchild. You wear out.

After hearing over and over the refrain of “how tired I am when I get home,” I posed a question to them: “What are your levels of exhaustion?” Quite intriguing hearing back. Funny, and they paint a realistic picture. Here’s one scale:
 
1)Could do it full time
2)Could easily do it another three days
3)No problem with another day
4)One full day is good enough and I’m tired
5)About halfway through the morning, I’m thinking of Happy Hour
6)By mid-afternoon, I’m trying to devise a game they can play by themselves for the rest of the day
7)Wondering how long we can play hide-and-seek before I pass out, or they can do it by themselves for the rest of the day
8)Put on the longest acceptable movie our daughter and son-in-law permit and take my nap
9)Glad I don’t have kids at our age
10)Tell my wife I’m not feeling well and retire to the guest bedroom at 1 p.m.
If you care for grandkid(s), you can relate to the scale above. You probably have a creative few of your own that you could easily add to the list.
 
Your level of tiredness depends on many things. Are you watching one kid or two (or more)? What ages are the kids? As they develop, you must grow yourself in terms of figuring out ways to keep them busy and engaged. That, in and of itself, adds challenges to your grandparent kid-watching agenda.
 
Here’s another short rating scale I received from my inquiry:
 
1)Mildly tired
2)Need a longer nap
3)Mindless
4)Exhausted
5)Collapsing
Notice the “napping” need. You wear out and want to crash. “Please let me close my eyes for a few minutes, Lord.” It’s a simple and fair prayer.
 
The problem would be that you wouldn’t just nap for 12 minutes. You’d crash, lights out, into dreams that you’d have to swim out of to return to consciousness. And then, you’d have to hop to, and get right back into the fray.
 
Every person I queried LOVES watching their grandkids. They would never give it up. They want to help their kids in any way possible. Maybe we need to invent a position where we hire someone to watch the grandparents so they can get some timeouts during a stressful day. There could be a niche there for the opportunistic entrepreneur.

This could be one of those sappy columns. Be prepared.
 
This past weekend, my wife and I attended the wedding of the brother of our son-in-law. Joyous times. Also, this past weekend, a big name in the basketball officiating community (not someone I know personally, but someone I know well through his talented work for college basketball officials) passed away suddenly. This gave me pause.
 
I wrote a few things down that came to my mind: heart, soul, mind. Life is crucially about these three things.
 
When we have a major impact item occur in our lives, we (at least I do) think a bit differently about the world in which we live. I step back, contemplate, embrace the joy, wallow a bit in the misery.
 
It makes me think: what’s important? What are we made of?
 
After jotting down those three words, I thought a lot about them. We’ve been given something inside that drive us – the heart.
 
You hear the phrase “they have a lot of heart,” and the meaning is deep. It’s something inside you that drives you to care, to do good things, to move on from the bad and seek what’s next in life.
 
“Mind” is deeper, because it delves into more areas. Critical thinking, for example, and how much you apply this in your life. How do you learn? How do you use your knowledge and experience?

The mind drives you. You speculate. You desire. You think. You consider. You mull options.
 
As you go through the mind process (over and over and over every day), there are big and small decisions to weigh where you must operate effectively to address life hurdles. Master the mind – know how and why you think what you do in this world – and your behavior will be more reasoned and consistent. You’ll make good decisions and minimize those bad ones. And hopefully put yourself in positions throughout life that make more sense rather than less sense.
 
Yeah, we get thrown curve balls. But even that spinner can be addressed well by the mind because you’ve prepared. You have the mental framework to adjust accurately. The mind is thoughtfulness, logic, problem solving.
 
Finally, there’s the “soul.” Written and talked about in different ways by different religions and in different ways of life.
 
It’s that energy inside you, perhaps your aura, that comes out. It’s you at your purist sense. Fundamentally, what type of human being are you? What is your soul like? What are you made of? Where does your soul go when you pass?
 
Recently, we spread the ashes of my father-in-law with most of our immediate family attending. It was a somber occasion. Looking around, I thought how all of us grieve and handle those types of moments in different ways. We’re affected in the heart, mind and soul.
 
Those are times we pause and ponder. What’s important in our lives? Are there adjustments should we make?
 
This past week I saw a T-shirt at the workout facility that read, “Make Adjustments, Not Excuses.” It’s a great saying, and relevant to the heart, soul and mind. Make adjustments. Use your mind, think it through. Lead from the heart. Share your soul.

​You probably know someone like this in your life. This is the person who knows best, the individual who can “top” anything you say with something better.
 
We’ll coin this person a “topper.” Because, no matter what you say, they’ll top you.
 
That phrase came to me during a workout session recently from one of my great idea sources. During weekly conversations, he regularly comes up with thoughts, ideas, concepts, situations that I steal and use for this column. He’s a great guy. He shares openly. He dropped the “topper” phrase on me during one of those morning stretching sessions and I thought, “Hmmmm, have to write this one down and explore it a bit.”
 
Let’s say you’re going out to dinner and looking for an Indian restaurant. You’ve heard good things about a local place, the Clay Plot. You mention this to the topper in passing.
 
“Oh no, you should go to the Indian Palace, not the Clay Pot. The Indian Palace has the best food, great spices and a wonderful variety. I’d never go to the Clay Pot,” the topper replies.
 
Now, though the paragraph above is invented, it is also instructive because the topper doesn’t solely offer information or an opinion. That would be okay. We can all use additional information and most of us will listen to an opinion.
 
No, the thing about a topper is that they have to demonstrate how their place is better than your place. As if they need to be number one regarding KNOWING what makes the best Indian restaurant when we all have different barometers for measuring.
 
Another good example has to do with vacationing. Let’s say you enjoy going to the beach and you have a favorite idyllic location based on your personal desires.
 
You’re talking with the topper, “We’re heading to the shore next weekend in Delaware. We’ve been there several times and love it.”
 
The topper replies, “There’s a much better location if you head down to the beach in Maryland. It’s not that far and you’d like the boardwalk. And they have the best ice cream place and cotton candy.”
 
All that is well and good. Nice to hear. Thank you. The topper has once again topped you and let you know how your choice just doesn’t match up.
 
They know better ways to travel, books to read, TV shows, movies.  And don’t get me started on cooking. Yeeeeeeeesh.
 
“That’s how you cook your spaghetti!!??!!,” the topper says, aghast. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”

And they go on to explain in detail how to best boil the noodles, how long to simmer the sauce, what to sautee first and all the ingredients that you left out which would make the dish the best spaghetti ever.
 
“Well, topper, I don’t really care about making my spaghetti to your specifications. Mine tastes pretty darn good and people seem to love it. So,there, take that.”
 
The thing is, we never seem to say that to the topper. We swallow, roll our eyes, say to ourselves, “Here we go again,” and listen politely to hear how their way is the best way.

My workout buddy and I wondered how much the toppers know about the way we feel about them, whether they know a term has been coined just for them and it’s not a positive.

A lot has been written this past week on the bad behavior of U.S. fans at last week’s Ryder Cup. Here’s a different observation on what occurred.
 
If you watched the first two days, you saw the U.S. get waxed. Fans were jerks, jeering the Europeans and cheering when they hit a poor shot.
 
Focusing on the negative, the Europeans thrived off the goading U.S. fans. They stepped up. They played great.

Conversely, the U.S. players were not invigorated by the poor sportsmanship. They didn’t have much energy.
 
Sunday, what happened? U.S. fans focused on cheering for their team. Though not perfect, for the most part, the stood up for their team and focused on positivity.
 
And, what was the result? Instead of folding, the U.S. almost staged one of the greatest comebacks in golf history.
 
What does this say? I’m not going to argue the change in the direction of the fans focus from negative to positive (for the most part) improved the outcome, but I will argue it contributed to the U.S. resurgence on Sunday.
 
Here’s why. Over and over and over and over again, I see in sports where fans target sports officials (referee and umpires) with their ire. They finger point. They assess blame. “They blew that call and that’s why we lost.”
 
As a basketball referee myself, I see this syndrome constantly. A coach berates you. His team plays with a nasty edge. The players take on the personality of the coach.
 
One of our enforcement tools is a technical foul. When you hit the coach with a deserved technical foul for his verbal harassment, ALMOST ALWAYS their teams starts to play better.
 
Here’s one example (I could insert a multitude of examples, but this will suffice) from basketball games I’ve officiated in recent seasons. There was a 15-year-old male coaching a fifth grade girls team. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he thought he did.
 
The girls must have thought he did, too, because as he began to mouth off in the first half, they played worse and worse, taking actions against the other team (causing us to call even more fouls on them) as their coach yelled at us. Enough. I gave him a technical foul. Things calmed down.

Early in the second half, he went off on my partner. No brainer for me. I assessed another technical foul and tossed him from the gym, then went over to the parents and suggested one of them needed to coach. A woman came over.

She supported the girls, used an encouraging tone of voice. Holy cow, the girls responded. They handled the ball better, made better decisions, closed the gap a bit in a game where they were decisively the inferior team. They improved.
 
I’ve seen this happen again and again on the basketball court. When you hit a coach with a tech for their out-of-control behavior, they start to coach rather than blame the officials for the bad play of their team. Players respond to the change. Momentum swings
 
Many U.S. fans at the Ryder Cup need to understand this (and perhaps a segment of US society as well). Quit being nasty jerks. If you cheer, if you act in a positive manner, people respond, teams respond. You get the desired result. Attacking others doesn’t get you where you want to go. Our country can use that reminder.