On Heroes - Part One (A Short One)
Why Tom Cruise Being a Weirdo Doesn’t Make Me Not Want to Sprint Like That at 60
In the 2018 film Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt sprints across London in pursuit of a mustachioed Henry Cavill. In an unbroken shot near the end of the chase, Cruise crosses the River Thames on top of the Blackfriars Railway Bridge. It’s the sort of scene that reminds you that Tom Cruise is, if nothing else—and he’s quite a lot else—a terrific location scout.
When the scene was filmed in January 2018, Cruise was 55 years old and six weeks into healing an ankle he’d broken filming a building jump stunt. A few years later, he’s still running, driving motorbikes off cliffs, parachuting, and generally doing a whole lot of things that probably come with a surgeon general’s warning.
In the fall of 2020, I was playing softball in Central Park. More than once, my left knee “froze” on me, leaving me gingerly jogging around the bases and after balls in the outfield (luckily, in rec league softball, knee pain and the inability to actually sprint are only mild disadvantages). The other knee didn’t feel great either. I was 30 years old. More on that later.
Oh, Jack
I’m writing this a bit late on a Thursday. Our son, Jack, usually goes to bed around seven (okay, we put him to bed—he’s not quite at the handling that himself stage). It usually comes as a relief—time to make dinner and maybe watch a show or get back to work. And then, a couple of hours go by and we miss him. He’s a good sleeper, but from time to time he wakes up crying for a binky or a bottle or maybe something else (his vocabulary is limited, so whatever he might need, he’s probably getting a binky or a bottle). As long as we aren’t already asleep, it’s almost always welcome when he wakes—another chance to hang out. It’s funny how much you can miss him after just a couple of hours apart, especially given how nice it is when he goes to sleep in the first place.
I’ll be 51 when Jack graduates from high school. We plan to have more kids. I don’t know how old I’ll be when they graduate, but I’m guessing older than 51.
I care deeply about how I age.
Back to Mr. Cruise
Tom Cruise is arguably the biggest movie star of the past 40 years. He is also, quite famously, a Scientologist. I’m not usually one to cast all that many stones at small religions or their followers, but the Scientology organization and its leader, David Miscavige, have been accused of facilitating a laundry list of things we can safely put in the “very bad” category, including human trafficking, child sex abuse, slavery, and harassment of journalists (admittedly the least serious part of that list). Miscavige and Cruise are close friends—Miscavige was Cruise’s best man at his wedding to Katie Holmes.
It’s all kinds of weird, and maybe a lot of kinds of just plain old bad.
But man, I want to age like Tom Cruise.
There’s a Line (I’m Not Claiming to Know What It Is), But Heroes Don’t Need to Be Perfect
In 1993, Nike produced a commercial in which NBA superstar Charles Barkley said, “I am not a role model. I am not paid to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
I hope to high heaven that dunking isn’t a prerequisite to raising a child—I’m 5’9”, and, no matter how Cruisely I age, I don’t think my vertical leap is going to increase the…foot and a half?...that I would need to dunk comfortably. My wife and I also don’t plan to co-parent with Charles Barkley (although, honestly, that sounds fun).
But, that aside, I think Sir Charles misses two points: for one, if you’re in the public eye like that as an athlete, actor, or maybe even politician, you’re going to be a role model for many kind of no matter what—the question is just whether you’ll be a good one; and, for two, a black and white approach to role models is inevitably going to rule out a lot of good along with the bad. As a player, Barkley may have been a limited purpose role model, but if you wanted a reminder to go hard into the paint or fight for rebounds despite being undersized, he was the exact right guy to watch.
Today, my knees feel good. That fall of 2020, I began rehabbing them seriously (thank you to Ben Patrick and Marcus Filly-–@kneesovertoesguy and @marcusfilly on Instagram, respectively—for the exercises). Tom Cruise was and is only part of what keeps me focused on physical goals, but, for better or worse, he’s part of it. If I can run like that at 60, I’ll be ecstatic, and I think my kids will be too.
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We are all human. I think we tend to think of people on a black and white binary—good, bad. You’re a single point moving along an axis in one dimension, where good actions move you to the right and bad to the left, and, if you’re far enough to the right, you’re a good person. Or, maybe, our actions are weighed, and if the good outweighs the bad, again, you’re a good person.
I don’t think that’s right—life is far more complicated, more multidimensional, than that. Say, for example, that you drive on a Saturday morning to do community service. You so brighten the days of those working alongside you that you end up written into no fewer than six wills.
But, on the way there, you knock over three mailboxes and hit and run someone’s now-former pet pigeon. You aren’t a good person because of the community service or a bad person because of the property damage and bird murder—if anything, you’re both. It’s all a matter of perspective. To use the baby/bathwater analogy, some people will get the baby; others might get mostly bathwater.
Point being, life isn’t that long. If someone or something inspires you to be better, take what is good and leave what isn’t. I don’t watch Mission: Impossible or Top Gun: Maverick and think “you know, I think it might be time to look into the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard”; I also don’t think all that hard about getting a parachute and a motorcycle license and locating the nearest cliff.
But I do think about what I need to do now so that I can move like that at 60.
Today’s Random Fact (My Favorite Piece of Baseball Trivia)
In baseball, it is comparatively rare for a player to have both the power to regularly hit home runs and the speed and judgment to regularly steal bases. In the history of the sport, only five players have ever hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in the same season: Jose Canseco (1988), Barry Bonds (1996), Alex Rodriguez (1998), Alfonso Soriano (2006), and Ronald Acuna Jr., who last year became the first player to ever hit 40 homers (41) and steal 70 (73) bases in a single season as part of his unanimous NL MVP-winning campaign.
Only 46 of the over 23,000 players in major league history have even joined the 30-30 club, and only fourteen more than once. The record for number of seasons in the 30-30 club?
Five.
How many five-timers are there?
Two, separated by exactly one generation:
Bobby and Barry Bonds.
Today’s Random Recommendation
The KQED channel on YouTube publishes a new recipe video every week from 88-year-old Jacques Pepin. Most are under six minutes long, and he usually makes something using a few scattered ingredients from his fridge, freezer, or pantry, almost as if he forgets the film crew is coming and has to improvise. I started watching cooking videos during law school—Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, and then Jacques and Julia Child. The fact that the internet contains hundreds of hours of Jacques Pepin is reason enough to save it.
To the point of today’s newsletter, Chef Pepin wouldn’t need to be perfect to be worth admiring and learning from, but he pretty much is anyway. A GQ correspondent wrote an article in 2015 entitled “The Chef Who Saved My Life”. It’s long but worth reading: https://www.gq.com/story/food-and-life
Subscriber Update
We have crossed the threshold to 113—TRIPLE DIGITS!!! Perhaps more impressive for temperature and fastballs than subscribers, but nonetheless, quite exciting. It is not lost on me that about 15 of you joined shortly after I posted a photo of Jack to Instagram.
In terms of next steps, I would again appreciate you all sharing with all of your social media followers, coworkers, students, enemies, and so forth. If you’re a university president, for example, perhaps you could force all incoming students and their parents to subscribe. Just an idea.