Writing Boots

I and some pals from the Professional Speechwriters Association were quoted in an Atlantic piece on commencement speeches titled, “The Best Graduation Speech Is One Nobody Remembers.” I’m not pleased with the piece, starting with its clickbait headline.

Mine is the oldest story in the world: In an approximately hourlong interview with the author, Ian Bogost, I expressed three decades of hard-won philosophy on speeches, commencement and otherwise. He got all that out of me because he seemed genuinely curious, and receptive to a complex view of the psychologically and socially subtle art of oral rhetoric. Which probably didn’t fit into his word count or his need for a provocative, singular thrust. So he cherrypicked quotes that fit, and juxtaposed them with his words, that I would never say. And we get passages like this …

A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.

Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions …

The interview was over a month ago, so I don’t remember everything I said. I can’t list contrary points I made that Bogost failed to insert. But I’m pretty sure I did tell him what I often say: that when I was young, I thought speeches were generally boring old things for boring old people. And that it was years into my adulthood when I slowly came to understand how and why speeches work singularly on an audience, emotionally—even spiritually. And that even a speaker who is not providing new intellectual insight—as commencement speakers rarely are—can galvanize a community in a meaningful and lasting way if they say the words the audience wants, needs, craves to hear. 

So, pretty much the opposite of what Bogost ended up writing.

I’d say I’m sadder and wiser as a result. But if I know myself—and my unjustified but unshakeable faith in my ability to get across nuanced views so powerfully that writers will be compelled to include them in magazine and newspaper articles—probably just sadder.

I wrote my book Soccer Dad to give other parents a helpful tour of the winding and rocky youth sports road our family took from kiddie soccer all the way through our daughter’s Division I soccer career. The story of our trip, I hoped, would serve as a guide to your trip.

Well: Yes, but.

Yes:

Just a few weeks after the book’s launch, I’m getting emotional Instagram messages from strangers on their kids’ soccer sidelines, telling me, “I got it this afternoon and have devoured it. Shed tears—laughter and frustration.” 

And, “I read it in a week while sitting in my car at my kids’ practices, sandwiched between back-to-back weekends traveling from Rhode Island to New York and New Jersey for league games. I’ve recommended your book to all the soccer moms and dads.” 

Just as meaningfully, a normally reserved former college teammate of my daughter’s texted, “Finally got to crack open the book today and couldn’t put it down. Told [my daughter] it felt like the best invasion of privacy I could’ve imagined. So cool to see how her and my experiences were so similar but took place hundreds of miles away. I’m really glad you wrote it. It’s going to help so many people.”

Those are exactly the kinds of reactions I’d hoped for, from people who were learning from the book, or relating to it, or both.

But:

I’m getting reactions I didn’t expect, from readers of Soccer Dad who are unfamiliar with the youth sports world that all of us have inhabited and for all our objections and concerns, have gotten used to and come to see as normal, more or less.

People on the outside get mad and upset, reading Soccer Dad. 

One reader described her shock at learning about the “profit- and glory-focused, sometimes bizarre, world of competitive youth sports.” She continued, “I had little idea about that world, and am glad to have had no part in it.”

She described our story as “a roller coaster of dreams pursued; joy attained, lost, regained; lifelong friendships born; self-esteem built, self-esteem crushed (by brutal coaches); and tons of money spent. I literally had to take a breather after reading it.”

Wow, right? To me, the value of our family’s story isn’t that it’s truly remarkable, or that our daughter’s coaches were particularly brutal or that we spent any more money or had more ups and downs than anyone else we traveled with. It’s that, in most ways, ours was typical of a serious trip through youth sports. 

“I hated so much of what she went through,” wrote another reader from outside the youth sports experience, about my daughter. “It was poignant yet traumatizing.”

People on the outside see youth soccer as dangerous and unhealthy for kids—the way I once saw youth ballet.

My younger sister was in ballet when we were young—wound up dancing professionally. That world was so all-consuming, so expensive, so physically and emotionally brutal and so dominated by crazy adults that I steered my young daughter away from it—and anything I considered related to it, like gymnastics—with passion and force.

Instead, I blithely introduced her into what my wife and I thought were far less obsessive and more sensible activities, like tee ball and kiddie soccer. And soon, as a non-sports-oriented reader interpreted it in a review on Amazon, we were “drawn reluctantly and incrementally into the cutthroat world of youth sports—a closed, ask-no-questions society in which the seemingly well-intentioned attention and concern of coaches and experts in your child’s well-being inevitably take a backseat to their own marginal financial interests and the ego gratification that comes with winning at all costs.”

Damn, that sounds bad! And yet, I do see what that reader is saying. I can see this world from his point of view, and I can’t tell him he’s wrong.

Another reader actually compared soccer to her own youth ballet career: “I am neither a parent, nor a big sports person, but this book took me into a world of parenting and sports that reminded me much of my days as a serious ballet dancer—the hours of practice, the pressure of leveling up, the parents who devoted all their free time to driving, and coaching, and paying for the best training available.”

However sick they think the youth sports society is, these outsiders think more communication is the cure.

“No two soccer dads, or moms, or players, or coaches can read this book and not be forced into a more honest conversation about what’s going on,” one reader wrote, in another Amazon review. He called for all involved to “do a better job limiting the risks and reaping the rewards of the opportunities offered when kids play ball.”

I’ve already seen evidence that reader is right about the book forcing conversation. My daughter’s college coach had a strong reaction to his portrayal in my book—one that inspired him to propose that he and I and my daughter go on a podcast together and talk it all through in hopes such a dialogue could help coaches and parents and the players they wish to better support. And so we will.

All of which brings me back to my original purpose in writing Soccer Dad: I wanted to give parents—and coaches and kids—a single common story to refer to, not just for themselves, but for one another. A shared frame of reference for navigating this exciting but troubled terrain less as bewildered and lonely individuals, but as more of a team, with a common goal: our children’s happiness, after all.

The Chicago marketing agency Leff Communications put out a video last week in which production editor Morgan Strunsky urged people not to let “flagxiety”—the fear of having your writing flagged as AI-generated—stop them from using em dashes in their writing.

Hear—hear!

But anyone who’s worried their writing will be flagged as AI-written should have been worried for years that their writing was being dismissed quietly for its lack of style and unique point of view and original ideas.

Which is a lot of people, in the period since it became a professional requirement for every white-collar worker bee to purport to offer consistent “thought leadership” on LinkedIn.

When I came into the communication business three decades ago, there were trade publications whose editors and columnists did the thinking for the profession. We published letters to the editor from practitioners who objected or amplified those ideas.

When the Internet came in, another relative handful of new voices came in, some of them speaking loudly and well on online forums and with their own blogs. But those folks were always outliers, and there was absolutely zero pressure for every working communicator to be a talking head, too—and in some cases, there was pressure against it.

Not that those were the good old days.

But great writers and iconic thinkers are rare, in any profession, in any society. And if my LinkedIn contacts are now using AI to compose their important-sounding drivel, they don’t have to worry about being “flagged” by me, because I probably stopped eating their prose porridge years ago—after the first or second serving.