Freshman, Snowboards, and That One Girl Tina Dixon.

I had always been artistically inclined but never thought myself the “artsy” type. I still don’t. But as a kid with no direction, and even less confidence, I started college as an art major thinking it was the only area where I possessed potential. The University in its wisdom paired freshman from the same majors into the same dorm rooms and so I found myself assigned as a roommate to an actual art major.

He was good. He could draw, drew on everything, and he was a little more in line with what some might assume an art major might be, at least more so than me. He played guitar, wasn’t much of a fan of anything established or authoritarian, and also, he liked to snowboard.

I’m going to start over in describing my roommate, and say that rather than him being what one might assume of an art major, he was absolutely what one might assume of a snowboarder.

And I liked him.

He taught me how to play a mildly inappropriate Green Day song on his guitar, we traded off attending and taking notes in biology class, and the two of us watched the Beavis and Butthead marathon while everyone else was studying for finals. I had at this time never attempted snowboarding, though living where I did it, was a normal thing to do. I had been too busy concentrating on things like football, the establishment, and submitting to authority. He didn’t mind so much. We had the whole art major thing in common, and he wasn’t ever a real chatty guy in the first place so lack of common snow sports wasn’t really a thing.

But he hung out with this girl…

This girl was friendly enough, pretty enough, but above all else she was a perpetually positive person who appeared to operate on the principle that everyone everywhere should learn how to board. If I recall correctly she wasn’t an actual expert, my memory tells me she wasn’t even all that experienced, but she rode, he rode, and she wanted to ride more and “so should you” was her mantra.

As an 18 year old I tended to assume there were types of people, and I wasn’t, so I existed in a perpetual state of not belonging. Normally this meant that if you were a snowboarder, and I was not, that you would do your thing and I would watch longingly from the sidelines contemplating my own awkward existence. But this girl who hung out with my roommate didn’t see people like that and without making me feel less-than, got to work trying to convince me to snowboard. I mostly wanted to play rugby, but on one day a group of guys I knew from high school came upon a set of free lift tickets and in contemplating whether or not I should take advantage, and weighing out the pros of a free pass and familiar faces compared to the cons of having to pay money to rent equipment, this girl stepped in and sealed the deal. She offered to loan me a pair of goggles, or gloves, or something I cannot recall exactly, but whatever bit it was, was enough to convince me to give it a try.

I was horrible. But everyone is horrible their first time snowboarding and somehow I still enjoyed it.

Then I left school. After one semester, or rather we were on quarters back then, so after one quarter with my snowboarding roommate, I left for a 2 year Mormon mission in Atlanta, and I didn’t keep in contact with anyone.

But I remembered.

When I returned to school all the faces were different but the mountains and the snow were still there. I was a little older, much more mature, but definitely still lacked direction, so I went back to the last thing I remembered liking.

I went snowboarding.

A lot.

I was never, nor will ever, be a physical risk taker and things like half pipes, rails, and cliffs never appealed to me but there is something magical about drifting through powder under the tram at Snowbird that just sort of shuts down your mind and carries you away into a blissful “now” unlike nearly anything else I have ever experienced. I was in love. I went with friends, I went by myself, I went almost every day save Sundays from the first day the resorts opened till that last day in May when the snow turned to rocks.

But then I moved down South where it wasn’t the same and I drifted into other things. It has been years since I’ve been on a lift and the last time I pulled out my goggles the foam fell apart. It was as if the dry dusty foam was my youth crumbling in my hands. I felt old.

Then I turned on the Winter Olympics to watch Shaun White win the gold and there was that snowboarder girl interviewing the half pipe champ of the world!

It was Tina Dixon.

I always knew her name but apparently didn’t pay enough attention or watch the right shows between then and now to know that that girl who was so positive and enthusiastic all those years ago wasn’t all talk or fluff or sparkle without substance but was a real life dream chaser. All of those great things about her back then, were really who she was, and if the television is telling the truth (of course it is) that is who she still is.

What we Can, and Cannot, Tell from the Olympics

It was exciting to watch a racially divers group of American women win Gold. I loved the visual illustrating the strength that can come from a unity of diversity. But, I think it is worth taking some time to really consider what this victory tells us, and what it does not.

First, it definitely displays that America does NOT look like just one color of person. The United States is a racially diverse country. I love this. I love this in theory and in those moments where it appears we are coexisting in some sort of harmony, I love it in reality. Those moments and instances do happen and they are worth appreciating.

But those aren’t the only moment and they aren’t the whole reality.

Remember Jesse Owens? That was way back in 1936 that the United States showed Hitler that his Aryan ideal was in fact inferior. Now keep in mind that once Jesse went home he had to sit at the back of the bus, enter through the back of a restaurant, and he better be really careful if he had any intentions of trying to vote. But he did win America a gold medal.

Then there was Duke Kahanamoku who won gold even further back in 1912. The USA has been winning athletic gold with a diverse population of athletes for more than a century but life is more than sprints and flips. Life, and society, are complicated.

Society is also not on a continual march forward toward utopia. This is illustrated by the fact that Jackie Robinson was in fact NOT the first African-American to play pro baseball in the USA. That honor belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker who played in 1883. We think it was Jackie because we conveniently forgot that back in Moses’s day we (America) reacted to people like Moses playing, and winning, pro baseball by banning all black people from the majors.

You see, things were getting better before they got worse. History is not a straight line.

I do not point this out to illustrate how horrible we Americans are, but rather to caution us against looking to integrative success and then assuming that we are on a natural progression toward improvement. Improvement only happens through intentional sustained efforts. Things can just as easily get worse as they can get better.

And let us keep in mind that we Americans are not the only ones.

France. France is decidedly old world European with everything that moniker connotes. This is the French Olympic rugby team.

And the Australian.

And South Africa.

Oh wait but then there is Fiji. Fiji, who has before yesterday never won an Olympic gold medal, crushed England, the country that invented rugby, with a decidedly non-diverse team.

Not only were/are they not diverse, but they won with what may be one of the smallest populations pools in the world from which to draw. Fiji, a group of tiny islands ravaged by the world’s worst cyclone, struggling financially, stepped onto the world stage and won with one of the most beautiful games of rugby 7s I have ever seen.

Shall we then assume that Fiji’s lack of racial diversity is superior to the efforts South Africa has made to unify?

No.

Because diversity is never the whole, or only, story.

So let us appreciate the American women’s gymnastics victory for what it is. It was wonderful. I love what it looked like, I love the potential and promise it illustrates.

But it is a snap shot-not a panorama.

Oh, yes… and this. Simone Manuel. Congratulations Simone.

Missionary Misadventures: Olympics

The ’96 Olympics in Atlanta brought out crowds like we had never seen and we had to capitalize. We called our display “Big True”, an 8 foot tall display of Arnold Friberg’s illustrations of the Book of Mormon. We set up this wall of images and used it to strike up conversations with the crowds of revelers. We thought it a great tool.

A Black man wearing a tunic and kufi walked by, paused, and then began looking closely at each individual image. He stood back a moment, then turned and looked me in the eyes.

“Excuse me, but where are all the Black people? How do you have images of hundreds of biblical people and not one Black person?”

Every one of the other missionaries took a big step backwards. They all looked down at their feet. No one was prepared, nor wanted, to field this question or deal with this man. A crowd of Judases.

He was looking right at me. He wasn’t smiling. Why me? Judases.

“Um… Well… You see these are images from the book of Mormon which happened thousands of years ago in the ancient Americas. It’s the story of two groups of people, one brown and one white. The two groups found it hard to get along. Eventually the brown folks killed off all the white ones, because the white people were wicked, leaving only the ancestors of the American Indians. The Black people didn’t show up till a couple thousand years later when the Europeans brought them over against their will.”

My companions looked at me in terror. The man looked at me, back at the images, then smiled and asked, “How much to buy one of those books?”

The other missionaries told me it was the worst answer they had ever heard.
I’m not convinced it wasn’t the best answer I had ever given.

A Tip of the Hat to Civil Standard

It is the perfect sport logo. Jim Thorpe wore it on his chest in 1912 when he was crowned the greatest athlete in the world. The American rugby team wore it when they won the Olympic gold medal in 1924. They could walk out of those old photos into today and still look perfect. It is timeless, graphically pleasing, and meaningful. Despite all that, it is surprisingly hard to find. 

That isn’t to say it isn’t out there, but it is rarely just IT. Modern designers love nothing more than to ruin a good thing by trying to put a modern twist on things. “Oh look at that! Its perfect. Let’s change it.”

Then that one day Huckberry sent me an email and I discovered Civil Standard.

There it was. Just the patch. Simple. I could do whatever I wanted. Better yet, one of what I wanted was already there. Just a navy blue cap with the patch front and center. My purchase completed, I spent a little while longer clicking around the site. They have a manifesto. Who doesn’t love a manifesto?

Talking to the founder of Civil Standard, Trevor Henry, you find a guy geeking out over graphic design and personal relationships to geographic identity. He is exactly the kind of guy you would think would have a manifesto on his entrepreneurial website. He has a bachelor’s in anthropology/econ from Miami of Ohio, then got an MBA from Northwestern… but then at the heart of it he just really loves the city of St. Louis flag. Its where he’s from sure, but ya know, it just looks great.

St. Louis isn’t my favorite, South Carolina’s is better, but that wasn’t why I was there. I came for the imperialist shield of the United States. No, I’m not a fan of annexing islands all Teddy Roosevelt, but I am a fan of that design. It looks great on the bow of a ship in the white fleet, on the chest of Jim Thorpe, and now it looks great on my hat.

Item number one on my Christmas list is checked off!