In Defense of Authenticity

In this day and age of plastic surgery and PhotoShop, we’ve grown accustomed to being confronted by scenes of apparent perfection: the too-tight pull of septuagenarian skin over cheekbones; the flawless pose of Paltrow in her Tod's raiments; the oddly full heads of hair adorning pates of grandfathers everywhere. We look upon these scenes with the studied eyes of skeptics and know to take them with grains –dumptrucks –of salt.

“It’s not real,” we say to ourselves. “Not really real.” And we feel better. But what is “real” these days? Aren’t those cheekbones and mops of hair real, even if they don’t look it? Do we actually mean to say they’re not natural? But again, what is “natural”? Perhaps what we mean to say is that they’re not genuine (origin: Latin for birth, race, stock). Gosh darnit, those people were not born into this world with those features. They’re not authentic.

And it is this fundamental question of the slippage of authenticity that keeps me awake at night. Most of us can recognize a surgically-enhanced visage when we see it. But what about the better disguised cases of inauthenticity? What about the folks who received envelope after envelope of consistently sparkling quarterly returns from Bernie Madoff? What about the baseball fans who watched home run after home run soar off the bat of Alex Rodriguez? Or what about the millions of Americans tuning in to the inauguration of our current President who found themselves awed by the virtuosity of Yo Yo Ma & Co. performing so beautifully in such frigid temperatures? Did these people know they were viewing something that was neither real, nor genuine, nor authentic? Did they care?

I would wager that the folks invested in Madoff’s vehicles cared. And if the judgment that’s been passed on Mark McGwire’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame is any indicator of the public’s distaste for the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport, I would posit that fans care about seeing a clean ballgame, too. While we could impugn the media for making a mountain out of a molehill of soaped-up cello strings and gutted pianos, learning that the musicians (but not Aretha!) at the inauguration were “fakin’ it” did diminish my previously unfettered appreciation for that event.

The crime perpetrated by these people –if that’s not too strong a charge –does not lie in their instincts to please, to thrill and to entertain. Those are admirable aims. Rather, the transgression lies in their intent to deceive their audiences, to pass off the inauthentic as real. Just as the airbrushed images of willowy models plastered on glossy magazine covers have saddled a generation of women with skewed perceptions of beauty, so do doctored returns, doctored athletes and doctored instruments do a terrible disservice to a public’s standards of achievement and our ongoing attempts to get our bearings in a rapidly changing world.

So it was with great surprise that I catalogued the following experience weekend before last. My husband and I were seated in the stands of the Reggie Lewis Center in West Roxbury, MA, soaking up the track and field action of Reebok’s annual Boston Indoor Games. In addition to the cohort of recent Olympians performing, the crowd was also being treated to three record-breaking attempts: one by 10k Olympic bronze medalist and MA native Shalane Flanagan who was gunning for the US Indoor 5k mark; and two by pole vaulters: Jenn Stuczynski, the Olympic silver medalist who was aiming for the US Indoor mark held by compatriot Stacy Dragila; and Aussie Steve Hooker, the Olympic gold medalist who was chasing Sergey Bubka’s long-standing World Indoor mark. Hooker fell just short, but thrilled the capacity crowd in his attempts. Flanagan, however, got hers; as did Stuczynski, who then went on to take a shot at the Indoor World Record height.

What was most startling, however, was a nearly inconspicuous moment that transpired in the interstice between Stuczynski’s successful American record jump and her first attempt at a World Record height. Nearly all other track action had come to a halt as the bar was verified and reset for her first World Record attempt. As Stuczynski shouldered her pole and squared her shoulders to the bar, drew a deep breath and relaxed in the final seconds before initiating her approach down the runway, a sudden cacophony erupted just to our right.

Now granted my husband and I were seated across the arena from the pole vault pit, and chances are only a small fraction of the assembled crowd was subjected to the aural interruption. But what we heard was this: sportscasters Lewis Johnson and Larry Rawson –nestled atop the adjacent broadcasting tower like fledglings in an aerie –were enthusiastically calling Stuczynski’s jump of five minutes earlier as if it were happening in real-time.

“Here she goes, folks, taking off down the runway…”
Real-time Stuczynski was motionless.

“She’s got great speed. And there’s the plant. Can she do it?”
Real-time Stuczynski palmed her pole a final time.

“And she’s over! She’s clear! Jenn Stuczynski has just set a new American record in the pole vault, ladies and gentlemen!”
Real-time Stuczynski, who had been the American record holder for at least five minutes, rolled her neck left and right and began her sprint to the bar.

Never mind the bizarrely disjointed experience those of us fans had as our eyes and ears delivered radically differing versions of the reality at-hand. But is calling a single pole vault jump too complex a job to be done in real-time? Must the commentators use a tape delay to get it right (and they did sound awfully convincing)? What was so wrong with the first call, the real call?

Ordinarily it seems that the higher the stakes, the greater the probability of dissemblance. A multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Baseball’s highest-paid star. The inauguration of the country’s first African-American President. But a track and field call for ESPN2?

Et tu, Brute? Could track and field, in its hunt for a slice of our sport-crazed public’s attention, really have stooped to this level? And if this is happening in the small fry sport of track and field (don’t get me wrong: I’m as ardent a track fan as you’ll find anywhere), then where isn’t it happening? And what, if anything, can and should we do about it?

Call me naïve. Call me old-fashioned. But I think this trend continues at our collective peril. Yes, I live my professional life at the nexus of sport and youth development, where I’ve come to place the highest of premiums on authenticity (a mentor who tries to “fake it” with the kids not only won’t gain any traction, she’ll be ridiculed and rendered ineffective faster than a suburban kid can say “phat”), but what sort of a message does it send our children when we make it clear that it’s prohibitive to make a mistake, to appear less than flawless, to be decidedly unsuperlative? I’ll tell you: it’s emphatically the wrong message.

Kids need to witness failure –and the graceful management thereof –as much as they need to witness excellence. Not only that: they need to witness imperfection in those they admire most: Moms, Dads, teachers and coaches, and arm’s length idols and role models, too. I’m not advocating for mediocrity; I’m pushing for candor and transparency, for authenticity in word and deed.

If the barrier for entry into any new activity is too high (who hasn’t heard a child opt out by moaning: “I’ll never be good enough”?), ambition will languish. If we set false ceilings of expectations, confidence will fade. Some kids are born with fistfuls of talent and those outliers will undoubtedly rise to the top of their chosen fields. Others look to their environment for clues and cues to determine which path they’re best suited to pursue; they scan the searchable world (an ever-expanding realm in this day and age) and measure themselves against the images they find there.

“Which am I?” they ask themselves in a more mature version of square-peg-square-hole. “The investor? The ballplayer? The cellist?” And when the examples furnished them are not authentic representations but artificially distorted images, flawed only in their flawlessness like a reverse funhouse mirror that polishes and perfects rather than perverts, then we’ve failed our children. We’ve deprived them of the ability to get their proper bearings, to gather information and to make educated decisions based on their findings.

So, because I’m a Red Sox fan, I’ll end on this note: some say the media’s treatment of A-Rod has been too harsh. I disagree. Rodriguez is paid –and paid handsomely –to ply his trade in the baseball arena. Yes, to entertain, but also to represent the sport at its most virtuosic. So when he uses performance-enhancing drugs to inflate artificially his already impressive talent, thus distorting the public’s sense of baseball at its best, well then he deserves whatever name-calling befalls him. The New York Post ran the headline, “A-Roid.” And that was his hometown paper! What will we have waiting for him when he first takes the field at Fenway this season? Something befitting his proper place in sport history: A-Fraud.