The paradox of courage

Courage: the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear; bravery.

By Justin Broglio

There are a lot of famous quotes documented on the topic of courage. A good majority on the physical kind that arises from the fight-or-flight response in our brains, and a whole lot more said about the moral kind that materializes in our choices and our actions in the face of whatever life throws at us.

This week a mess of those quotes have been flying around social media, spouted on every major news outlet and sports blogs in the country and turned in memes that will both make you tear up a little and more likely—depending on who’s in your timeline—want to throw your iPad across the room.

So…what more can I add?

How about some context.

First, let me clarify that this isn’t going to be about Jenner’s beauty and how I wish more than anything she would (and let’s hope she will) use this moment and her influence on society to say that discussing whether or not she is “f@ckable” is not OK. It’s not OK in the bar, it’s not OK amongst the bros, and as John Stewart explains so well—it’s one of the core issues keeping us in the cave. And it makes me so angry I can’t keep from writing about it.

Caitlyn Jenner* (born William Bruce Jenner, October 28, 1949) is at her core an athlete—and a damn good one at that. After winning the Olympic Gold Medal in the 1976 decathlon, she was for four years, unofficially, the “world’s greatest athlete.”

During the height of the tensions between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, Jenner united a nation and inspired a generation—as coy as it sounds, it’s true. Her performance in the 1976 Olympics and the resulting wave of patriotism that spread across the country has been compared to the surge seen after the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team’s victory in 1980.

More importantly, as so well explained by ESPN’s senior writer Jim Caple, Jenner’s victory and what happened afterward left a mark on the sports world, the advertising world and athletes across the country.

Internally, only a handful of athletes in history know what she went through during that time. I can only imagine it was a whirlwind of emotions including pride, passion, exhilaration, gratefulness, relief, energy, thrill, joy, fear, confidence and ten others I’m forgetting.

But I have a theory—and I may be way out on a limb—but I think that there probably wasn’t a whole lot of talk about Jenner’s courage.

Don’t get me wrong here—obviously it took some courage to walk out on the field, take her position on the starting line, and run like she had never run before against the best in the world.

That’s different.

This week and the weeks leading up to it have been a whole hell of a lot different.

It takes courage—the real kind from way deep down in the depths of your soul—to do what Jenner has done.

It takes courage to challenge the norm and accept the onslaught of opinions on your personal choice.

It takes courage to sit down with your wife of 23 years, the people you love, and the people who you care about and tell them what’s going on.

It takes courage to change.

So…that’s why ESPN is giving her the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.

It has nothing to do with whether or not Jenner is more courageous than the veterans who have keep our way of life secure for centuries. And the people who have jumped onto this junk wagon are afraid and now unfollowed. Thanks Nick Martin.

And the award has nothing to do with her courage while waiting in the blocks. She has been down that path already and she had her turn.

It is about her life and her influence transcending sports and I for one think she damn well deserves it.

*DPB chooses to honor Caitlyn’s preferred pronoun. She put a great deal of though and effort in requesting that media get it right and respect her—so we will.

Justin Broglio is former President of the Sierra Avalanche Center. He is a father, a husband, a backcountry skier and communications officer for the DRI in Reno. He has never completed a decathlon.

He may be suspended from the NFL but he still shows up on a Wheaties box

Wheaties features a convicted child-abuser on latest box.

By Andrew Pridgen

There is plenty of scary business going on at the grocery store. That new green-labeled cola (Coke Life!) with a main ingredient called Stevia which sounds like a week-one vote-off on RuPaul’s Drag Race but is actually an extract from a South American plant from the Asteraceae family. Even though it’s not straight sugar or straight acesulfame-K and aspartame (Diet Coke), at the very least rainforests are being plowed under to grow it.

There’s the curdled masses in yoga pants who’s either not age-appropriate (too young or too old) or streamlined enough to create an effect other than bulging where they should cling and clinging where they should bulge. Not everyone look airbrushed and glossy like on the checkout rack, but sometimes it’s OK to go out in public dressed for an occasion other than binge-watching Facts of Life and taking down Chips Ahoy by the sleeve.

There’s all the stuff in the middle aisles of the store: stoner pizza and guys with tufts of hair sprouting from their tank tops grasping the thin cotton straps like ivy.

There’s the elderly woman who is pushing her cart like an Egyptian slave, cataracts causing the chip aisle to be mistaken for the adult undergarment section. Somehow she makes it to the check-out with nine items, all for her cat, or is it cat food she’s eating? And the folks look away, pretending to busy themselves with whatever Kardashian it says is pregnant and getting dumped this week.

Read more The NFL’s suspension of Adrian Peterson was never about doing the right thing

There is something a bit off about the grocery store. This transient place where everything one could ever want in all the history of human time: strawberries the size of a baby’s fist, chicken breasts bigger than a country fair watermelon and more french bread than all of Provence consumed last year—is available, taken for granted, really. Yet for all the advances in food engineering, packaging and eating trends—we seem so much less healthy for it.

We repeat our actions there, the same track around the store: pharmacy ->alcohol->meat->cheese->bread->lettuce->fruit->gum->swipe->forget our reusable bags->ask for paper in shame. We act surprised as the total ticks over $100 for what was supposed to a quick-in to pick up a couple of things, this zombie walk for sustenance that is obligatory if not an exercise in being wasteful. When I grew up we ate three things: 1) Five different versions of a casserole featuring either ground beef or pork chops, canned corn or canned tomatoes and cream of mushroom or cream of tomato soup. 2) bananas or apples and 3) Grape Nuts or Wheaties.

In an effort to streamline back to the basics of shopping (minus the pork chops), I’ve started to peruse the cereal aisle. Cereal has a renewing quality. It reminds me of the start to a day and of being small at the start of life again. I still look lustfully at the colorful, 3-D-looking boxes of Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch. Were I to select one, I’m sure a siren would sound throughout the store and my mother would burst from behind an end-cap of Lays chips and drag me out by my ear. She was the sugar cereal Gestapo.

This particular morning on a run for milk, coffee and bananas, decided I’d grab for the Wheaties. My son is old enough to start taking bites of that milky fibery cardboardy stuff and it was better time to pass on the tradition that will one day, if he eats ‘em up and trains hard, end with him as the 8th man on his JV basketball team.

Here’s where the passage of this morning tradition it gets complicated. This is the current star of the Wheaties box:

That’s right, Adrian Peterson.

All Day shows up with a tagline that says, “Determined Spirit”. I have no idea what that means other than it might reference his lawyers’ dedication to keeping him out from behind bars. In case the General Mills folks need a refresher, this is the last 15 months in the life of the face of your brand:

• September 12, 2014: Peterson was indicted on child abuse charges, and subsequently deactivated from playing.
• September 17, 2014: Peterson was placed on the NFL’s Exempt/Commissioner’s Permission list, which required Peterson remained “away from team activities.”
• After accepting a plea deal in early November, which Peterson admitted to beating his child with a switch that resulted in, among other injuries, tearing the child’s scrotum, the NFL suspended the Minnesota Vikings’ running back for the remainder of the season with no pay.
• February 26, 2015: Peterson was reinstated to play after the NFL Players Association won its appeal on Peterson’s behalf.
• March 21, 2015: Adrian Peterson rides into his 30th birthday party atop a Camel.
• March 30, 2015: The Minnesota Vikings have not reinstated Peterson. Rumors in the wake of league meetings are that a “quiet” deal to send him to Dallas in exchange for draft picks will ensue.

April 4, 2015: I spot Adrian Peterson on a Wheaties box in a Southern California Vons, but decide I won’t be introducing my son to the cereal until they come up with a more suitable theme, like maybe a Bruce Jenner before-and-after tribute box: A cereal for kids which has been marketed for almost a century with a role model on the box…and that current role model is a convicted child abuser (!!!).

To me, Wheaties represents a kind of soggy rite of passage that is way more part of this complete breakfast than the one with the Leprechaun on it. Maybe General Mills has just given up. Maybe putting Peterson on the box is simply admitting the face outside the box just as bad as the product in it.

After all, breakfast these days is about good carbs (fruit, oats, yogurt), protein (eggs, nuts, whey) and natural fats (avocado, eggs again, butter) — not about the soggy mush that you can dry out and use to create one scary-ass Freddy mask with your friends.

So go ahead kids, order up an omelette and go tell your mamma, what child abusers eat.