Doug Glanville Explains Tiger's Stripes

Strangely, I became a fan of former-Cub Doug Glanville while he was playing in Philadelphia and not Chicago.

For a few summers in high school my friends and I would regularly take games in from the center field seats. With our sophomoric maturity at its peek, we relentlessly heckled the visiting team’s center fielder.

Most players ignored us, but some shot us looks of disbelief and disapproval, which sadly brought us joy. Others however, like Glanville, acknowledged the hazing and even played back.

Glanville’s specialty was flashing us his bright smile and then fake throwing the baseball our way after catching a third out of an inning, and we loved him for it!

Now a regular contributor to the New York Times, Glanville wrote an interesting piece about the luxuries of being a pro athlete and how the behavior and downfall of Tiger Woods came to be.

Below I’ve pasted a few clips from the article. You can read the piece in its entirety here.

• Apparently, I had skipped a few of the steps to social acceptance, and before I knew it, “unapproachable” and “woman” were no longer being used in the same sentence.

• It was like a kid finding Batman’s belt in the lost and found. No point in giving it back until you’ve tried all your new powers.

• As you climb the baseball ladder, your social confidence explodes. You receive the sort of attention you never did as an acne-ridden honors student. Quite frankly, it is addictive, and when you are in it, there seems to be no end in sight.

• In an athlete’s environment, money can be its own pollutant; you can become desensitized to the significance of what it can buy.