I'm just checking in from Minnesota. Wanted to see how everyone's doing this summer.
So far, mine's been great. Minnesota is beautiful and quaint in the way only the Midwest can be, from gas stations that sell racks of pipe tobacco, to the government-owned pub.
The work I'm doing and people I'm interacting with make me feel like I'm not in real life. The camp owner, who's opened this place since 1980, used to work for the Rangers and last for the Penguins. Last week, he brought in his Stanley Cup Ring from 2009 to show campers and staff. His two sons are a scout for a west-coast NHL team and a player agent respectively. His daughter-in-law, my boss, basically runs the camp as well as the PR/Charity-lives of three NHL-ers. Her office is all-at-once the shipment-center for player merchandise, meeting-place for camp-counselors, and play-stall for her three-year-old daughter.
When you think of the glitz and glamour of these professional major-league athletes, their Las Vegas paprazzi photos, and the millions of dollars they make (granted, they're not the NBA, but still), it's incredible to think that none of it is being managed in the shiny sky-scrapers of New York City or Los Angeles. Instead, it's all run out of little wood cabins in middle-of-nowhere, MN (population less than 2000).
If you want to check out some of the photos from camp, here they are. Part of my job is to photograph/film campers, so there are a lot of work-out shots, but hopefully a few fun, goofy ones too (particularly with the Russians, they're hilarious).
There is only one NHL-er (I won't post his pic here, but you can find it in that album) at the camp right now, and he's already treated the camp staff on a Saturday night out when we ran into him (at Zorbaz, where pizza is apparently Mexican food, and it's the only place within 50 miles that people of ALL ages get wasted together). Most of the pro's will start coming mid-July, so hopefully I'll have more exciting updates then.
When I say that I don't feel like I'm in real life right now, I don't just mean that I'm all the sudden within a couple of degrees of separation from people I see on TV. That's part of it of course. Sitting in on a two-hour conference call with a professional athlete and his family, and having access to their personal information, is surreal and surprising. I'm shocked but also honored that my boss trusts her two spazzy interns (who basically twitter-stalked their way to this job) with such confidential information. Moreover, I feel odd peering behind the curtains. Here in Nisswa, people have so many inter-personal connections with professional and NCAA athletes, that they don't think twice about it. But where I come from, or more specifically, the culture and environment that I grew up in, one that is sheltered in academics, white-collared jobs, top-tier education, and polite conversation, this place is a whole different world. Physical exertion is more than just healthy activity or bread-earning work, but both process and achievement. I have entered one extreme of society (let's be honest, we white-collar $100K+ salaried workers are in the 10% if not 1% of American income), to another niche of extreme society. The end-product, the entertainment of the sports industry, may be a luxury; top-tier athletes may be paid an exorbitant amount of money; but the work to get them there, and the businesses that support them, are anything but.
The stories these people tell are so clearly of one very unbalanced but vivdly exciting world. In one, my boss cuts off Wayne F'ing Gretzky in the bathroom line of some hockey charity event. He comes up to her husband, the player agent, and jokingly demands to meet "the only person in the establishment who does not know who I am". In another, a coach retells the tragic events of his brother's college roommate and linemate, who was going to be called up by the Anaheim Ducks. He took his visor off his minor-league team helmet to put on his NHL team helmet. That night, in the last game he was to play in before his major-league debut, he got high-sticked in the eye. Never skated again. One coach has six daughters, each of whose name starts with "Br-". He teasingly asks his daughters to use hyphenated last names when they get married, because he has no sons to carry on the family name. They chat about the up-coming CBA-negotiations and the UFA market. Casually, not with the heated passion of fans, but with a matter-of-fact, almost grim, realization that they, those on the cusps of the billion-dollar business, but paid only pennies, their lives will be the most impacted by labor movements and player/team strife.
But maybe their lives won't be changed at all. These are the folks that have lived and breathed the sport their entire lives. They work 10-month contracts at schools, at arenas, and come back to camp in the summer; the same camp that they probably attended when they were 10 years old; the same camp they got their first job in scrubbing dishes in the kitchen; the same camp that provided them the connections and taught them the know-how around the hockey world.
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