1972 dreams of UCLA fulfilled almost fifty years later

December 2019. No, I did not attend UCLA, for any degree. I developed a fascination with UCLA back in the late 1960's from the appearances of their football team on tv each November, culminating with a preliminary interest to apply in 1974 to UCLA for their doctoral program in business.

In between, in October 1972, while studying in Binghamton during a dreary fall in my senior year, I took some time from my studies to articulate a dream with a journal entry disguised as a bad attempt at writing a fantasy while alleviating the tedium of mid-autumn at Harpur College.

In four years at Binghamton in fall I would assemble an intramural football team -- M*A*S*H -- in an effort to extend my interest in football as a participant sport. By that fall, our third year together, we had a bang up team, with Craig Medwick, Walter Hill, Marty Pomerantz, Bob Gould, Gary Levine, Bob Traub, Gary Greenberg, Peter Roach, and a few more of my friends. I organized, captained and coached the team. I played middle linebacker in a 2-3-2 alignment in this touch precursor to the flag football they play today at Binghamton. That year we lost in the semi-finals to a team that we led at halftime, only to see the momentum and the lead change when our opponents were able to have one of the referee's replaced with one they favored, a clear mistake but a sign of the times.

To console myself and to leverage my fascination with UCLA, I wrote a short story where I was a transfer from Binghamton to UCLA after having won a lot of games at Binghamton, only to have the school close the football program in a budget cutback. To say that the writing was sophomoric as fair and probably realistic given my lack of experience in wiring such fiction, my unwillingness to draft and edit text, and my just eighteen months past my sophomore year.

It was fun, no matter how silly and banal it reads today. I tried to capture what I imagined life would be like as a quarterback at UCLA, back when they regularly fielded a very competitive team. Gary Beban had been a star UCLA quarterback about ten years earlier, and I probably used him as a model for the physical specimen of a UCLA quarterback who was not that tall, fast or string-armed but who was able to win.

I located the story in a recent review of my journals. I found another, similar story. In this case, I was a quarterback and still at Binghamton, only this time we were playing in the Sun Bowl. Perhaps reflecting the mood and/or cynicism of those upperclassman years, or maybe it was my desire to be melodramatic, but in this story I led a second half turnaround that culminated with a winning touchdown accompanied by a crushing tackle that hospitalized me. To be even more melodramatic and unwilling to leave it at a fantasy triumph, I wrote4 a very brief conclusion .... where a few days later I died from my injury.

To be fair, this story had more to do with a fantasy girlfriend I included, a co-ed with no interest in football beyond a fascination with me. I think that at that time my ideal 'love' was one of almost worship by a beautiful girl reciprocated by the big man on campus. I still had a lot to learn.

At the same time I was a recovering chemistry major, trying desperately to assemble a business major from my general education courses, a full load of business courses, and some generous substitutions provided by my doppelgänger advisor, Mickey Kavanagh who, along with Jack Duffy, became my inspiration for completing a doctorate after jumping into the young MBA program at Binghamton.

As for fall 1972, it was a time to realize my mistaken ambitions in chemistry, my relatively lax approach to my studies, my need to cram in additional courses in my last two semesters, and to accept my shortcomings by convincing myself that a teaching assistantship in the MBA program for fall 1973 would be the complete solution to resolve my mistakes and shortcomings. I went on to graduate school more as a concession than as an ambition, more interested in extending the idyllic life I had created at Harpur/SUNY Binghamton.

If there is a lesson here, it may be a big one, a big life lesson: You don't have to have a burning passion or a lofty goal to succeed in life. Persistence is more important, resilience too. The ability to learn from mistakes helps a lot, even if it can lead to making more mistakes in the short run. Sometimes two wrongs can help you get it right -- eventually.

Do I have regrets? Sure. It is easy to speculate as to how life would have changed dramatically with even some minor changes in my actions or decisions, and even more dramatically with some different 'big' decisions, yet I prefer to reflect on the good fortune, the great experiences, the wonderful people, and even the serendipity of a life fully lived.

Amen. There is joy in all of this.