Thursday, December 16, 2010

Contact Debacle

Now with the Ireland trip done, I would like to add the funniest and best stories I’ve had in coaching. Again, this is more so I have a record of all the ridiculous things that happen, but if you read them you will probably be entertained. I figured I’d go reverse chronological order, since the most recent ones are freshest in my mind.

Sat. Dec 11, 2010
After a full day of watching pretty good high school basketball games my eyes are tired and it is time to take out the contacts. I’ve recently changed to the type of cleaner that requires the little cylindrical container and the potent solution. What makes it potent is that once your contacts are immersed they are unwearable for four hours. This seems like superfluous information, but just wait. So, I take my contacts out and put them in the container. I then grab my glasses case and open it to find no glasses. I think I would have noticed this walking into the gym, but I was on my stupid cell phone. Somehow I did not notice the difference in weight or the lack of any rattle from within the case. Now I am presented with the dilemma of it being 9:15 at night, two hours away from home and unwearable contacts for the next four hours. At this point I figure I will use water to clean the contacts and hope they will not burn my eyes like a hot poker from a fire. I now have to traverse from the hospitality room to the restroom. For those who do not know I am a 7.0 contact strength. These means I cannot make out a face from more than 10 inches. Thankfully I am at a gym where I know no one so I don’t have to have that awkward, “Hi Coach Haggerty,” while I think who the heck is talking to me. So I rinse and clean and rinse and clean and put a contact in my left eye. All good for maybe one second and then it feels as if someone lit a charcoal fire in my face. I feel like the poor girl from Amazing Race who took a watermelon to the face. I highly recommend viewing that.



With Plan A an unmistakable disaster I go out to the car (in 30 degree weather) to see if the glasses are hiding in there, even though I know they are not. On the way out I bump into a coach who claims he works out all the best players in Atlanta and lucky enough for me one of them came walking up. He was player of the year in a great region last year. So I shake his hand and blindly stare at him thinking this kid could have three eyes and a Mohawk two feet tall and I will never know. I depart and there is a small set of steps I don’t even see and almost tumble to my death. Glasses are not in the car, so now I wait another 45 minutes and thankfully the soaking of the contacts makes them wearable. But they are blurry and I need to peal them off my eye and kind of rub them around the side of my eye to build up the natural contact solution – tears. Luckily the girls game took so long I missed none of the game I came to see. I also learned a lesson in coaching (other than always be sure you have your glasses). I learned never to schedule an opponent you will have later for a scrimmage. Miller Grove beat Columbia by 40 in a scrimmage just three weeks ago. So Miller Grove came in thinking what a joke and Columbia came in determined to not get embarrassed. Well, Columbia wins by four. And thankfully I was able to watch it happen and even more importantly drive two hours home.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Thoughts on my travels

Now more than a year removed from my extravaganza of a trip I am still so thankful I was able to do it. How many people are afforded the opportunity to spend a full five weeks in a foreign country. I guess plenty of our servicemen do, but at least the Irish never shot at me.

I used to hear pro athletes at their retirement press conferences remark, “I owe so much to basketball and want to help give back.” I always thought what the heck are they talking about. Basketball is a game. How can you owe it something. Well this trip helped me understand. If not for basketball I wouldn’t have had the chance to visit a new and exciting place and at the same time make money. Basketball also helped me to travel in a manner way better than most tourists. I stayed with families, befriended Irish people and really learned about the culture. Not that it’s very different from here, but it is different. The biggest difference is that you feel so safe over there. There aren’t bad neighborhoods or trailer parks or even guns. There are some slightly run down areas, but at no point do you ever feel in danger.

Another difference is how nothing gets done in the mornings. I do feel that here we are too preoccupied with the early morning. It’s not healthy to be up at 5am when the sun doesn’t come up until 7am. Over there, they take it to the other extreme and cities are ghost towns until 10am. Another thing is the Irish term Fáilte. It means more than just welcome. It means welcome to the point that you feel totally comfortable and at ease. The Irish are perhaps the most hospitable people on earth. It took me a while to realize this though. Here is something I wrote when I first got there that I did not put on the blog.

I just feel so out of place. I miss America. No matter where I go in America, I feel at home. Here, it feels very different. I feel out of place, because I am out of place. I dress differently, I speak differently and I live differently. That shouldn’t keep me from enjoying myself, but it does make me uncomfortable most of the time.

I didn’t include it in the blog because by the end of the trip it was a ridiculous thought. Yes, I was out of place, my accent, clothes and haircut all made me different. But no one thought ill of me for it. I never even got the feel that I was being judged for being an “outsider” once I was over the initial worries of being in a new place. In the end it was a great experience. It was liberating to go a month without a cell phone. It was great to roam around a country without anything but bus fare and a rain jacket. It was thrilling to climb the same mountain as St. Patrick and to drink myself silly in Pubs. It was fantastic for my whole family to come over and to see where my ancestors lived many centuries ago. It was great to fall in love with another culture and at the same time love your own even more. I couldn’t live without college football and college basketball. I couldn’t live without hanging out at the pool in the summer or celebrating the fourth of July. So I loved my trip for what I learned and the experiences I will remember for all my life.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

1st Full Day BACK IN THE USA

12:30 am VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS!!

I meet J and we have the following interaction
Me: You're not really wearing that are you?
J: Wearing what?
Me: The man purse. You actually gonna wear that or are you just screwin with me?
J: It's where I keep all my things. I get a lot of compliments on this. Plus it's not a purse, it's called a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.
Me: So does Joy Behar.

Anyway, here is the reason we are here. I may have forgotten to mention that during my trip Jason has been wearing me down via email about how much of a sure bet the Bucs under for season total of wins will be. It is sitting at 7 and that means they need to win at least 7 games to push (you don’t lose) and actually go 8-8 for us to lose the bet. Since last season, which ended with a four game losing streak implosion, here is what has happened:
1. Highly successful Super Bowl winning coach Jon Gruden fired and replaced by a thirty year old with zero experience
2. Arguably the best defensive coordinator of last decade Monte Kiffin leaves to coach at Univ. of Tennessee with his son.
3. GM Bruce Allen fired and replaced by a thirty year old with zero experience (see a trend)
4. Future Hall of famer Derrick Brooks and quiet leader Warrick Dunn are released
5. Decent veteran starting QB Jeff Garcia fired, to be replaced by Byron Leftwich and a cast of other bad QBs including rookie Josh Freeman who couldn’t even win in college
6. Solid players Cato June, Joey Galloway and Ike Hilliard also released
7. Schedule is brutal including just about every division winner from the year before.

With all of this in mind I have agreed to bet $5000. WOW!! I know, I would never do something like that if we weren’t positive on winning. So from NYC I am flying to Vegas to make the bet. I ING’d a check to J and he has way to much on his person.

1:00 am J decides to gamble. Me, I am willing to gamble $5000 on the Bucs, but nothing at the tables. Besides, my high roller friend keeps the drinks coming so why risk it. J goes up early!!

2:00 am J is up. We are having a great time. We are the tables next to the Pussy Cat Dolls, so life is good.

3:00 am J is now on a downward spiral which ends with a comped meal. Gotta love Vegas. Thank you sir for losing hundreds of your hard earned dollars, but please allow us to give you a “free” meal. In J’s defense his ridiculously nice hotel rooms have been comped since like ‘06.

4:00 am Luckily I slept the entire flight, because it is LATE at night and am now sitting opposite of J scarfing down more food than I have ever seen him eat. He had a lot of red bull and vodkas and has been up since 6am east coast time. So between his meal and his dessert, he passes out at the table. So I quietly eat his entire banana split. It was so unbelievably good.

1:00 pm After sleeping in forever, we now bounce from casino to casino to find the best deal for our bet. Plus we have to split up our bets since most casinos won’t let you bet more than $2000 on one wager. I think they figure you might know something if you are willing to gamble that much. They are correct.

4:00 pm Now on a plane back to Tampa. My tour of the homeland is complete. It was amazing.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Day 36 (7th day of Haggerty Clan)

7:00 am Getting up early for the plane flight. The Haggertys, other than myself, are flying out of Shannon. I then have to drive all the way to Dublin (2 hours). But the idea of driving and navigating in Dublin scares the crap out of me. I don’t like driving in these small towns on these tiny roads, so know we are talking small roads in a busy city. I drop off the Haggertys and Kelly Haggerty cannot, I repeat CANNOT, find the plane tickets. We search everywhere. The girls even start blaming the men, who are adamant that they of course were never put in charge of something so important. We search every bag except for Kelly’s since she is CERTAIN it is not in there. Eventually we do search her bag and the tickets are right there. Tragedy averted and I head on to Dublin.
8:00 am I now embark for Dublin. It is interesting driving on the Irish version of Interstates. They are still mostly just two lane roads, but you can drive really fast. I don’t of course.
10:00 am I get into Dublin and remember the semifinals of the Gaelic football championship are taking place at the famous Croke Park stadium. So there are cars and people everywhere. I do a little driving around Dublin just to get a feel for it since I have plenty of time before my flight. It looks like a pretty neat town. I’ve heard it is extremely international, but looked very Irish since the only ones out were the ones heading to the Gaelic game.
11:00 am I now head to the airport. There is so much construction, it takes forever to get to the rental place. Then the rental guy informs me it will cost me a ton to give the car back with an empty tank. So I decide to use my trusty paper map to find the gas station. Well the paper map doesn’t account for ANY of the construction. It literally takes me an hour to go the half mile to get gas. I took EXACTLY FIVE laps around the airport and on all five laps I was within a hundred feet of the gas station, but either blocked by construction or a one way road.
12:00 pm So now I went from being way early to cutting it very close, especially since the shuttle guy takes forever to get us to the airport. To take the edge off and since I never check a bag I decide to finish off the remaining Jameson we have. I take some leftover coke and pour about four shots worth of Jameson in.
12:45 pm Sipping on my “coke” and watching the Dublin vs. Kerry Gaelic game. Dublin gets thrashed from the start much to the chagrin of most of the viewers at the Dublin Airport. It was 21-3 at half. And it is harder to make up points in Gaelic than it is in football so this is a pretty insurmountable lead.
1:45 pm I decide to buy some duty free Jameson, because well, I don’t need to explain myself, I just wanted some and it was cheap. Now I turn in my remaining 80 euros for approximately $5 American. All right, I got a little bit better rate than that, but not much.
2:45 pm IRISH TIME Thanks to my “Coke” my ride home was really, really uneventful. I slept like a baby.
5:15 NYC TIME BACK IN THE USA!!!
9:00 pm NYC time. Getting on plane for Vegas, Baby Vegas.
11:55 pm VEGAS TIME. Yes I am now on my 9th time zone of the day. Since it’s almost midnight, I’ll continue the Vegas part of the trip tomorrow, including why I am in Vegas!!

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Day 35 (6th Day of Haggerty Clan)

9:00 am Today we have decided to drive the Ring of Kerry. It is a long drive around County Kerry. It normally is an amazing trip, but sadly our weather was not spectacular. We didn’t have quite the visibility you would like, but bad visibility in Ireland is still prettier than most places on earth. It’s funny, but you are told to do it counter-clockwise, so that you avoid following behind slow tour buses. That is good advice, but it does mean that every 15 minutes you are dodging buses coming at you, since like I mentioned roads can barely hold two cars, let alone a bus and a car.
1:00 pm Since we needed to use the facilities and we wanted to see a real Irish golf course, we decided to pull off and find a bathroom in the club house. We perused the prices and it wasn’t cheap. If it wasn’t so cold and rainy it probably would have been worth it, but I didn’t feel like spending my hard earned Euros to walk in the wetness.
6:00 pm We decided to get a bite at a nice pub. We get to watch the semifinal Gaelic Football match between Kerry and Cork. Kerry is always dominant at Gaelic for some reason. Their dominance continues as they make it to the finals.
8:00 pm Drive back to the room. Not a lot of funny stuff happened today since we were mostly driving and due to the weather it wasn’t near as pretty as some things we had already seen, but it was amazing. So sad that the trip is coming to an end but I also am ready to get home.