​When it comes down to it, all of us are free agents. We’re free to lead the lives we want (under certain societal constraints), pursue the careers we want. Limitations occur for many reasons. I support open opportunities for people to make the most of their talents financially in a lawful manner.
 
With that being said, I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated and saddened by the way NIL money is affecting big-time college sports, in particular, basketball. As a long-time avid fan of Division I college basketball, and the men’s team at the University of Illinois, which I attended, it is becoming increasingly difficult to support the team.
 
Why? It’s a simple equation to me. As a fan, you want to know and root for the players. How do you get to know the players and develop your personal support for them and their unique styles of play? By seeing them play over a period of time, typically (in bygone years) for 3-4 years.
 
You see them develop over those years. A player might get hurt, but overcomes that in following seasons and your fondness for their grit grows. Some guy on the bench his freshman and sophomore year stays with it and breaks out for his junior and senior seasons. You get to cheer that player on.
 
With NIL money influencing big-time college athletics more and more, those days have vanished. Poof! The senior who stays with Illinois basketball for four years is going to be a huge outlier in the years ahead.
 
I liken this free agency movement (which the athletes certainly have every right to pursue) to free agency in baseball when it started getting out-of-hand in the 1980s. Players jumped around more and more and I found it difficult to cheer for my favorite team. I didn’t know the players. Year-to-year, rosters were beginning to have turnovers of 10-15 players. How can you keep up with that?

As a fan, you can’t. You can’t process all the names. You can’t build your account of caring. So, you stop caring. You don’t invest emotional energy in the team.
 
I remember how much that bothered me as slowly I stopped watching major league baseball, checking out statistics, seeing who was leading in the standings. I didn’t know the players, so it meant nothing.
 
That same situation is now enveloping college athletics at power schools. Using the University of Illinois basketball team as an example, since this past season ended, the team lost four players to the transfer portal, and they have brought in five new players. As I write this, those changes aren’t necessarily done.
 
What does that mean for the fan? You have to process out four names you potentially cared about and rooted for and wanted to see how they got better over the years, and direct your emotional energy towards the five new players, learn about them, and figure out if you give a sh……  That’s nine individuals swirling around your brain cells. Too much on a year-to-year basis.
 
I don’t think I’m unusual in my views about where this is headed. When the typical college athlete chose a university and stayed for four years, this mental processing was much easier, and fans cared because the players stayed long enough for you to really see their personalities on the court.
 
I don’t have a clear solution for this. I wish I did. There needs to be some form of commitment signed that has penalties when the commitment is broken. Maybe players are only allowed to transfer once in their college careers rather than multiple times. We will see what happens in the years ahead. We’ll see how the fans feel. Does attendance sag?
 
Sadly, it seems like large sums of money are infecting another institution to the detriment of those of us on the sidelines.

​There’s that cliché you’ve probably heard at some point in your life about how bad things come in three’s. You get a flat tire on the way to work. The dog vomits on your newly installed carpet. Then you forget the meeting with your boss to discuss your promotion, and instead go out for a long lunch, turn off your phone and don’t get back to them until late in the day, and when you walk into their office, they say, “Who are you?”
 
Bad stuff. Supposedly it’s done after three. Why that number was chosen, who knows. Bad things come in three’s seems more realistic than bad things come in five’s or bad things come in sixes. Maybe humans can’t handle the larger numbers so we like to imagine negatives will end after a short spurt. God forbid if bad things came in nine’s or ten’s. We probably would never get out of bed.
 
To combat that negative syndrome, maybe good things come in three’s, too. You string together three in a row and you feel pretty good. It’s like things actually seem they are going your way.
 
Last week, I strung together three minor positives. 1) The last time I’d taken the dogs for a walk on one of our park paths, I brought along a small electric hand saw and container of oil to grease the chain before mowing down the invasive buckthorn overwhelming the path in multiple spots. Yanking the limbs out, at some point I jostled my pocket that held the tiny bottle and lost it. After looking and looking, back and forth, up and down the path, I gave up on finding it. I felt bad because clearing the buckthorn is good for the forest diversity, and now I went and lost a plastic bottle of oil, leaving it on the forest floor – not a good eco thing. Then next time I went down the path, there was the bottle staring at me on the left side. One positive.
 
2) Our dog Thor is getting near the end of his life, with tumors throughout his body, particularly his lungs, so we have him on the steroid Prednisone to shrink the tumors and hopefully extend his happy life a bit. He struggles to breathe, pants repeatedly, and you often wonder if he’s going to make it through the next walk. This same day, soon after the bottle was found, Thor bounded through the woods, exploring, smiling, wagging his tail, having a wonderful dog day. Positive two.
 
3) Continuing on that walk, recent rains had flooded the path and my wife and I have had to thread through sections of buckthorn, tree stumps, muck and other obstacles to reconnect with the path where we typically turn to head back to the trailhead. It’s a minor inconvenience, but the flooding had caused this issue for close to two weeks and it was getting a bit irritating. Positive number three was the river flooding finally receding (and no heavy mud on the path) and the walk could continue more easily.
 
Three positives in a row. I felt great. There were all small victories, no doubt. My day moved forward with lightness and a rising sense of optimism that all was right in my small world, at least until the next three positives strung along.

​ 
It’s amazing what a smiling face can do for others. Ludvig Aberg demonstrated this over the weekend in the Masters golf tournament.
 
One of my pet peeves with pro golfers is how standardized and stoic they are. Like a molding press has created them with a certain look, similar clothes and a way of carrying themselves on the course. One of the things they don’t seem to do much is smile or show emotion.
 
Years ago, pro golf was loaded with personalities that stood out. From Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez and many others, if you were a fan, you could find someone to attach yourself to. The current crop of professional golfers lacks this luster.
 
The game suffers for it. Fans like myself have a hard time identifying and rooting for someone who doesn’t appear human. When a player keeps the same expression on his face for most of a tournament, you start to wonder if it’s an android playing and not a human.

It’s why this past weekend was refreshing to see Ludvig’s smiling face cropping up on the leaderboard as the Masters played out. He joked with his caddy. He spontaneously broke into smiles hole after hole. He interacted with the fans. He showed us who he is.
 
I think there’s a deeper issue with the sport/business of golf, and it derives from the drive to be the best and seek perfection. Perfection is unattainable and the title of “best” only goes to one person for each tournament out of 150 or so players who enter to compete. Which means 149 disappointed individuals each week.

That mantle of “being number one” or only feeling like you succeeded if you win the tournament is hugely destructive. It’s a very American thing. It creates pressure. It destroys you if you don’t meet that standard.
 
Interestingly enough, if you look at measures of happiness, Scandinavian countries like Ludvig’s Sweden rank the highest in the world for “happiness,” while the United States ranks 23rd. When you constantly push to reach or be at the top of the heap, it’s hard to relax and enjoy yourself. That’s a very U.S. mentality.
 
This comes across when the golf announcers criticize the players WHO ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD, when you hear them say things like, “That wasn’t his best effort” when someone like Rory McIlroy hits a snaking 49-foot putt that razors the edge of the cup and nestles two-and-a-half feet past the hole.  “Yes, Mr. Announcer, it was an extraordinary phenomenal putt, but the ball just didn’t happen to go in the hole.” Give the player some credit for his talent.

In that environment, it can be hard to smile. I get that. I also think smiling is a good thing and relaxes you, and makes you feel good. If the pros would do that more often, perhaps they’d play better.
 
There’s an entire industry surrounding ways to “get yourself to the top,” find your inner talent, become number one in some field or industry. We are sold that bill of goods repeatedly, and I would argue there are a large number of disenchanted people because of it.
 
If I were a pro golfer, I’d feel great finishing 10th in a tournament. At the Texas Valero Open last week, 10th place took home $223,000, and that is not a high paying tournament. That should make you feel good. And, make you smile.
 
Ludvig Aberg just finished second in the Masters. He smiles not because of the money, but because that’s who he is, comfortable in his skin and doing something he wants to be doing. It shows on the TV screen. Hopefully he influences many other golfers in the coming years. He’s gained me as a fan.

Angry people get less miles per gallon (MPG) on their vehicles. Think about it.
 
Recently I was talking with a good friend of mine who works for Subaru and extolling how I got 31 MPG on my Crosstrek. That is a high end for the car.

He remarked on how I must drive conservatively. He was impressed that I got that many miles per gallon.

Then he said something to the effect of, “Angry people get fewer MPG.” We both laughed. I knew he was right and he knew what he was talking about.

Angry people drive too fast. They accelerate rapidly, stomping the pedal. They blow by people on roads when they don’t need to, when they could hold space and distance behind the car in front of them, and then casually move ahead when a safe opportunity presents itself.


But, no, that is not how they drive or live. Instead, the days and driving time are marred by a jarring sense of having to get ahead, of speeding, of arriving first, like it is their personal badge of honor.

I’m often struck by watching cars zoom past me on the interstate, weaving in and out of traffic, while I keep my cruise control at seven miles per hour (MPH) over the speed limit. That’s breaking the law, but in a seemingly accepted manner on most highways.

That’s not good enough for the angry speedster though. He comes FLYING up behind you as you see him looming in your rearview mirror and decide safely to pull to the right so he (and it is ALMOST ALWAYS a “he”) blast by while practicing for the Indianapolis 500. Once he passes, you marvel at his ability to zig and zag past others, and that there’s never a state patrol car right when you wish there was one to teach him a lesson.
 
The lesson would be to slow down, and not endanger others. At the same time, he might come to understand that letting go of anger improves his MPG.
 
Doubtfully that would be the case because I don’t think people like that are self-aware. The very fact of their angry driving proves it. They only care about themselves, where they are headed, and seemingly doing so in the fastest way possible, even though if you plod along, you often find yourself catching up to these maniacs when you exit and pause at a stoplight. “Hey buddy, good to see you got two miles ahead of me on the interstate so I could catch up to you here now that we’ve exited.”
 
Angry driving means you stop and start erratically, lowering the MPG. If they would ease into stoplights and coast down hills, letting momentum help the engine, they might find their gasoline bills decreasing on a monthly basis.

That’s unlikely to happy because the angry driver, quite frankly, is angry.  He doesn’t want to listen to others. He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t consider those around him. He is selfish and dangerous.
 
You may know someone like this. You may recognize how hard it is to get that person to see their behavior for what it is. If you’re very lucky, you may get him to slow down. Don’t count on it, so keep pulling over when you see him coming in the rearview mirror.