Feldman's Faves: July 2, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope you all had a wonderful Canada Day Long Weekend and were able to spend it with the important people in your lives.

I was pleased to see that Bronny James - for some reason - got drafted by the Lakers last week….

To my fellow Team Wilpers’ riders, I finally got around to doing his most recent TWO HOUR Power Zone Endurance Class, which was fantastic. He makes it go by really quickly and it really isn’t too painful at all for those of you considering it.

Good that I did it given that I just returned from Paris and I think there may be butter and chocolate permanently flowing in my bloodstream as a result. I’ve never felt better in my life….

This week’s theme can loosely be described as being sports related.

THE CLASS  –  A MEMOIR OF A PLACE, A TIME AND US  By Ken Dryden - A few years ago (during the Covid era) me and some of my high school friends organized and impromptu high school reunion on ZOOM.  While I admit that I have been in touch with a large number of those people (and knew exactly what was going on with their lives) it was those people that I hadn’t seen since high school (even though they weren’t my closest friends) that I was most interested in seeing. Like every high school class there are those people that you expected to conquer to world and did and those you expected to do so and didn’t.  There are also those for whom there were very little expectations for a strong future and they have punched well above their weight during their lives (so far).  I learned about these people’s families, their children, their successes and their failures.  We even lost a few classmates over the years. This reunion was one of the highlights of that last few years for me. What I loved the most is that everyone had the maturity to be honest about sharing their lives and it was one of the most profound and interesting experiences of my life.  At the time, I thought to myself, what a cool idea it would be to write about everyone in my class and see how life happened.  Well, now that Ken Dryden has written The Class I think I should try to find a new idea. His approach to his class, the “brain class” that we was in during high school is simply fascinating.  As one reviewer notes, “Have you ever wondered about your elementary and high school classmates? Whatever happened to what’s-her-name, what’s-his-name or (nowadays) what’s-their-name? Surely, he ended up in jail; she always wanted to be a nurse. Hm. Ken Dryden satisfied this probably universal and natural curiosity with his latest (ninth) book, The Class: A Memoir of a Place, A Time, And Us. In January 2020 he began interviewing as many of his 34 high school classmates as he could find. They were members of the “Selected Class,” the best and the brightest of Etobicoke Collegiate Institute between 1960 and 1965. Some called them, not always charitably, the Brain Class. Dryden as a non-fiction writer has always been interested in history. He writes about present-day people and events but always within their contexts — thus the importance of “Place” and “Time” in his subtitle. His most famous book, the bestseller and widely praised The Game(1983), provides a history of the way hockey came to be the game it is. As a Vézina winner - voted best goalie in the NHL — on a Montreal Canadiens team that won six Stanley Cups, Dryden is well-respected as an author on hockey topics. But he’s not just remembered as an ex-hockey player and as a writer he’s not been restricted to just that field. Two early books, The Moved and The Shaken: The Story of One Man’s Life (1993) and In School: Our Kids, Our Teachers, Our Classrooms (1995) point the way to The Class. The former is a story about the life of “an average Joe” from school to late middle age; the latter about the importance of education to Canadian society.  The Class, he confesses at the outset, has been on his mind for 30 years, putting it right back alongside these two books. He also references Michael Apted’s Updocumentary series as an influence. The Class is divided into eight sections, each devoted to a different era of Canadian history — from “The Early Years” (post-war 1940s and 50s) to the time of “The Big Changes” (1980s) to “Getting to Here” (retirements and deaths in the 21st century). His history is mainly generalizations spiced with pertinent, brief stories about events in the lives of relevant classmates to illustrate each era. Dryden seems to have strong observational powers and an astonishing memory. His introductory characterizations are brilliantly precise, if not models of good sentence variety. Peggy Clark, for instance, “was this fun, tidy little person who took up no more space than she needed. She wasn’t much over five feet tall, probably weighed a hundred pounds. She had short hair. She liked to talk and laugh, but not too loud or too much. She was eager without being annoying, upbeat without being exhausting, nice but not teeth-achingly so, capable and competent without being anal.” Such thumbnail sketches bring everyone to life. Not every student gets equal coverage. Dryden is carefully complimentary to them all (it’s like a hagiography with no mention anywhere at all of acne, sex, drugs, illicit love affairs or even teenage hijinks), but some of their life stories merit a mere page or two. Those classmates whose lives are more varied and richly dramatic get as many as 10 or 12 pages. Dryden recounts moments from his own life to cap off each era. He tries to be modest, spending a few scanty paragraphs on such things as his Canadiens career and his Liberal Party years. But he’s a man of varied and interesting accomplishments, so he invariably tops almost all of the others — though some of their lives are more dramatic.  The Class is like an anthropology text — an insider writing about a tribe of white, suburban Baby Boomers during an important era of Canadian history. It’s contemplative, thoughtful and revealing, probably best appreciated by other Boomers or their kids.”  BTW, I will not tell you how people thought I would turn out way back then……Here’s a good review from The Literary Review of Canada –https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2023/11/ken-and-company/

Masters of Scale - Caitlin Clark and the new WNBA, w/Commissioner Cathy Engelbert – I am so pleased to see female athletes finally getting the recognition they deserve. The PWHL has been a major success, but women’s basketball is really have a moment that I think could be the start of something really big. And the world has Caitlin Clark mainly to thank. Even better, the “Magic/Bird” style rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese seems to be continuing beyond college and into the league, which is so great for the sport.  Cathy Engelbert leads the WNBA and is doing all she can to take full advantage of this opportunity as she discusses in this PODCAST. It is a classic business case where smart people understand market dynamics and do whatever they can to capitalize on an opportunity (including the effort to bring a team to Toronto, which should be awesome).  Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “We’ve reached a radical inflection point in the growth of women’s sports, particularly the WNBA. As college stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese enter the league, fans are clamoring for tickets and on social media, generating unprecedented excitement and business potential. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert joins Rapid Response host Bob Safian to share how she plans to capitalize on this newfound buzz, and how NIL deals have transformed the business of sports for players and owners alike. Plus, Engelbert peels back the curtain on how she led the league through the Brittney Griner crisis and the tumult of COVID.”  https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/masters-of-scale/id1227971746?i=1000654782931

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation. And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon